Trees, Why Do you Wait?: America's Changing Rural Culture

by Richard Critchfield

Richard Critchfield, author of the best-selling books Villages and An American Looks at Britain , examines the inescapable link between the decline of America's rural roots and the decay of our cities. Trees, Why Do You Wait? is a moving oral history chronicling the changes taking place in rural America. Through it, we meet real people of the heartland and feel the suffering and the strength in their relationship to the land.

Genres: Nonfiction

286 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1991

About the author

Richard Critchfield was raised in Fargo, North Dakota. He graduated from the University of Washington in 1953 with a degree in Far Eastern studies and then served in the army in Korea. He received a master's degree from the Columbia School of Journalism in 1957. He taught journalism in India for two years before becoming a foreign correspondent for the Washington Star, most notably in Vietnam from 1964 to 1967. He later turned to writing books, focusing on the changing lives of rural people around the world.

Reviews

[Marne Wilson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Author Richard Critchfield, a freelance journalist who was one of the first recipients of a MacArthur genius grant, turned his attention to the 80's farm crisis in this work and made an impassioned plea for America to save its family farms. As source material, he interviewed residents of two contrasting towns: a North Dakota farming community that he calls Prairie (which happens to be the town where both Critchfield and I were born) and an Iowa commuter community that he calls Crow Creek (which happens to be the town where Critchfield spent his childhood summers).

First, some personal observations. I was in high school during the time that Critchfield was doing his research for this work, so I can fill in some of the details on how it came about. He had written an earlier memoir (Those Days) that mentioned his father's very brief medical career in our town, and the townsfolk were so tickled by this that they often invited him to community celebrations, etc. It must have seemed only natural to him to combine business with pleasure by doing research for his next book during those visits, and since farming was the only thing anybody could talk about in those days (or probably still today), the topic must have selected itself. Thanks to his very evocative physical descriptions and his only half-hearted attempts to fictionalize the names, I can identify almost all the figures he interviewed for the Prairie section, and the book was extremely interesting and nostalgic to me for that reason alone.

The Crow Creek section is much shorter and seems tacked on almost as an afterthought, but it was useful enough for me, because it enabled me to evaluate his writing when I wasn't so personally connected to the subject matter. I feel that I know the residents of Crow Creek almost as well as the residents of Prairie, so he definitely is good at sketching the portrait of a community, but I did catch a number of conclusions he drew that didn't seem to follow from the interviews as presented. I felt that he was massaging his data to fit his hypothesis instead of the other way around.

That hypothesis, simply stated, is that it is necessary to save the family farm because it is the last remaining cultural underpinning of America. With thirty years of hindsight, and with knowledge that he lacked of the things that really went on in our seemingly idyllic town, I think his hypothesis is rubbish. For instance, he makes much of the problem of latchkey children in Crow Creek. He's correct in identifying the source of the immediate problem, that with both mothers and fathers working in the city, there's no one to watch the children in the afternoon when they come off the school bus. He's also correct that this problem doesn't occur that much on farms, as usually one parent or the other will be home in the afternoon, and there's always a long list of chores for kids of all ages to work on. However, he's wrong in the assumption that latchkey children were always going to be a problem in more urban American communities. One barely hears about them today, but it's not because parents have all moved to farms! It's because the generation that grew up as latchkey children decided they would never do that to their own children and adjusted their lifestyles and priorities accordingly (and also because a whole host of after-school programs were eventually created to solve this problem).

There certainly is an argument to be made for the necessity of American farmers, but I don't think Critchfield is making it here. (I personally would start with the issue of food security.) Still, if you want to read a loving portrait of a couple of rural American communities circa 1990, there could be few better books to turn to than this one.