‘Bingo Night’ As Warm As It’S Sad
“Bingo Night at the Fire Hall: The case for cows, orchards, bake sales & fairs” By Barbara Holland (Harcourt Brace, 210 pp., $22)
Perhaps it’s the title. Or perhaps it’s simple joy in discovering true rural life stills exist somewhere out there in the America of themed cul-de-sacs and strip malls. Or it could be both of these and Barbara Holland’s straightforward and accessible writing style that makes “Bingo Night at the Fire Hall” such a delightful read.
At mid-life, Holland moved her life from a Philadelphia apartment to a summer cabin in the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia that she inherited when her mother died.
Then she set about making herself a new life, turning the cabin into a year-round residence, clearing brush, becoming content when snowstorms close the only road off her mountain.
If Holland were less honest in the telling of her story, the book would just take its place among all of the others that attempt to seduce the reader with tales of simple and bucolic country living.
She moved to save money, to change a life she felt was going nowhere, and to see if she was tough enough to pull it off. And she takes the reader along for the journey.
Along the way, we get to see this woman when she’s overwhelmed with the physical work and baffled by the realities of rural life. And she lets us sit back with her and enjoy evenings spent on the porch watching the moonrise and deer browse through the yard.
Of course, the almost insurmountable barrier for most folks out in rural America is making a living. Holland, too, struggles with the money issue and manages to squeeze a subsistence income from writing obituaries for the local newspaper a couple of days a week and working at odd jobs.
Mostly, she just observes. And she shares these sometimes wry, sometimes biting observations, soon realizing that she gets to only taste the rural life some of us thought had already been improved into obsolescence. For within the space of her first half-dozen years living in a clearing on a mountainside, the suburbs of Washington, D.C., grew her way, and life changed.
“The new people complain, the people in the new housing developments on the eastern edge of the county. They form citizens’ associations for the sole purpose of complaining, and each group spawns task forces and ad hoc committees. They complain about each other’s lawns and Christmas decorations, and control them through subcommittees, passing laws against nonconformity. They confront the board of supervisors and write furiously to the newspaper about snakes, snow removal, intersections, police protection, and the insufferable racket of a farmer’s corn dryer running through the night at harvesttime. They complain about our famous local turkey buzzards that might well swoop down and carry off their children and about raccoons that might well be rabid.
“Because they commute, unencumbered driving is their most basic civil right; they demand new laws banishing farm machinery from the public roads.”
Along with these observations, however, Holland offers up generous helpings of the image so many who have jumped onto the wagon bound for the simple life long for:
“Here still are the rounded pastures for growing meat and milk, fields for growing corn and timothy and soybeans, with barns and silos for storing them. Orchards on a hillside, so the spring frosts can slide down away from their blossoms. Patches of forest for stovewood. Sturdy houses with red tin roofs for families, plain on the farms and dwarfed by barns, gingerbreaded in the towns, all with porches from before the days of air conditioning. Houses innocent of architects and unwarped by ready-made parts, built by carpenters and stonemasons with an organic rightness the race seems to have forgotten, each window the perfect size and shape, each house unique but obviously kin to the others. …
“Six years ago, when I first moved here, nothing was out of place. I drove all over the western valley and saw nothing to outrage the eye. It helped soothe the strangeness of being here.”
Every autumn, the agricultural areas at the edge of many cities stage harvest fests, and thousands of us flock to the farmettes to gather apples, Halloween pumpkins, cider and a squash or two. It allows us a glimpse of that simple life Barbara Holland thought she had found: a place where folks live closer to the seasonal changes. But often, it’s a only tarted-up version of that life - the bucolic aspects are trotted out for us to see, and we can somehow forget it’s really a pretty illusion.
The life Holland writes about in “Bingo Night at the Fire Hall” is the real thing. It’s a heartwarming book, but it’s also sad. For in the end, Holland can only sit back on her porch and watch the suburbs march slowly but constantly toward her, and she isn’t sure there’s another place left to move to.