The thought had occured to me that we are fast losing a vital species in America, one that those of us who are my age (30-ish) and older will remember well if we grew up in the country, and one which we will sorely miss if it is allowed to go to it's demise.

I refer to the ol' country gentleman or lady. You know the ones, he always in a fedora from the depression, she in a nice printed housedress with a real, honest to goodness functional apron permenantly ensconsed around her waist. These were the gentlemen gathered around the pot bellied stove at the country store after church (and the requisite "company dinner", of course), and the ladies who had gorgeous tea cup and pot sets and embroidered tableclothes even for weekdays. Suits and dresses at church were always neat and bright, but never ostentatious or attention getting (except maybe for those hats!). Folks who knew how the crick changed it's course every year after the rains, who know where all of the old favorite berry patches were, where all the best whittling wood was found, how to keep a pocket knife sharp and how to use it. Womenfolk who would stop by (in their aprons) to help you snap beans and chat. Of course there was always one guy who never wore anything but overalls (with no shirt, even in winter), but he did lend color to the show, did he not?

These ol' timey country folk are dying out, and their presumed replacements all moved to the city when they were young, bought condos and SUVs, and raised Gen X'ers, forgoing the required life's training in the field that is neccessary to the passing of the torch. The numbers of country gentle folk are dwindling rapidly!!!! Something had to be done!!!!

But Soni, you ask, what can we do? Well, if you're here, chances are you are already unknowingly enrolled in our covert train and release program. This kind of program has long been effective in the lower orders of the animal realm, witness the success of the Ca. condor, or the northern bears. Quietly, we have been worming our way into the brains of susceptible folks, people with a bitterness toward the spectre of a life on a cube farm. Slowly, subtley, we infiltrated your minds with visions of wide open country spaces and home canned foods that you can just remember from way back, and built on from there. Once the hopefuls were weeded out from the dabblers, we began an intensive training session, flooding the media market with "country" style crafts, shows, food, skill programs (a la the Woodwright's Shop, and Almanac Gardener). From there, we barraged the subject group with junk mail from such esoteric sources as the DR Trimmer Co. and the Vermont Country Store, hoping that image saturation would "kick over" the desire to flee the city into a self-sustaining life choice. And then, when our subject group seemed ready to go, we pulled out the big one, the final do or die, yea or nea test - Y2K!

We hoped that the threat of impending doom, with a quantifyable deadline and an apocolyptic overtone (our field anthropologists worked years on that alone, getting just the right tone and just the right pacing), would result in our captive trained flock of future country folk stock taking wing, as it were, and entering their new environment willingly and wholeheartedly. IT WORKED!!!!!!!!!

Beyond our wildest dreams, folks in the thousands poured out of the cities at a dead run, snapping up "hobby farms" and "homesteads" (actually, carefully prepared habitat preserves optimally spaced and located for maximum countrywide establishment of a viable breeding population) as fast as the banks could close. The media were fed carefully timed pieces on the neccessary skills and equipment that would be needed in the event of worldwide chaos, and the new "homesteaders", through their filtered media feeds, learned what they needed to know to survive in the wild on their own. As a supplement, various magazine, this one included, were promoted to serve as an ongoing link to the training and resourses need to thrive, now that our "hatchlings" were on their own. There's even been some sign of viable offspring born in the wild, a sure sign of reestablishment success!

Of course, there were a few failures, some obviously house-pet quality yuppies who overdid it on the first go and got in over their heads, but they were soon reintegrated with their old, captive flocks and are doing well, although some required therepy to fully recover from their stressful experience. A few, regrettably, have not recovered and still believe themselves to be real country folk, although their Ralph Lauren plumage gives them away to the rest of the flock, who sadly seem uninterested in bonding with them in meaningful ways. Hopefully, these few misfits will find each other and live out what little of a happy life that they can.

I hope you all enjoy your new lives and I hope to be joining you soon, as a field researcher must (of course) maintain close ties with their subject group, even to the point of becoming one with them, a la Jane Fossey. See ya in the jungle!

-- Soni (thomkilroy@hotmail.com), December 21, 2000