“I believe also that the narrow life I led during my childhood and youth has increased many times my appreciation of the world that has unfolded for me during the ensuing years. In the quiet of the hills, far from the noise and the rush of cities, I learned to look at common place things large and small and see whatever was special about them. And because people were scarce, everyone I saw was important—I had to know about them and get acquainted with them. Once those interests became fixed, life could never thereafter become tiresome and stale to me.” 

— John Quincy Wolf

They say the best thing to grow around here is rocks. Travelers only have to look at the merge crown of any river bluff to see how thin the soil is. Europeans cast off common futures to the east and passed through a veil of hills and rivers into isolated life on hard land. The Ozarks, as it was purged of society’s security, required dependence on one’s spirit and on neighbors’ trust. The first cabin was eked out along with the family’s year of corn. After a few years of good health, that cabin became the barn and some concession to new things was let into the new house. The veil shifted slowly as commodities trickled in. Then that house was small, too cold, or it burned and there was no way to build another like it. Availability again met knowledge taken into the place and experience brought from the land, and a new house was made again. Soon advancement swelled; its fingers tore the veil and rushed in drowning trust and human spirit. Then receding, taking some neighbors with it, leaving the land raw with its structures bent. The ragged vail no longer keeps hands taking from the land, but some who can still cover themselves watch the ruins and keep each other’s trust. It is the dignity of these ruins we look to and the trust among neighbors we carry on.