Wild Card Quilt: Taking a Chance on Home

Wild Card Quilt is a follow-up to Ecology of a Cracker Childhood in which the author builds on prior relationships and revisits childhood from the perspective of an adult. She honors her parents without agreeing with them and is apparently honored and respected in return. Some old disagreements persist! While raising her son as single parent she lives a life of simplicity. Home she finds has values differing from those she has developed. Her love and appreciation for the vanishing habitats of south Georgia propel her to activism. Her deep seated need to write forms new diverse relationships. Enjoying things she loves leads to romance and fulfillment in an unexpected place. Come stroll the long leaf pine forest with Janisse Ray.

"Somebody, I thought, has to fight to protect the ravaged places. If a place loses the ones who care, the ones who can make a difference, what kind of doom does that spell? If the Southerners who love the wild leave the South, well, what happens then?" --Janisse Ray, in Wild Card Quilt Sadly, the answer to Janisse Ray's earnest question can be seen all over, and not just in the South. Too often, "what happens" is rampant, fragmented, inadequately planned development, communities without community, places devoid of a sense of place. Her new book Wild Card Quilt chronicles her return to homeplace Baxley, Georgia, to reestablish family connections and create a sustainable life for herself and her son Silas. Her "experiment in rural community" is largely successful. That it is so is due to Ray herself. A less outgoing, less imaginative, less self-sufficient person would likely find a hamlet like Baxley too isolated, its often-parochial attitudes suffocating. Indeed, Ray does battle feelings of loneliness and futility, and these she shares eloquently. But more often she is hopeful, ardently forging associations with people who share her ideals, creating friendships that restore her sense of purpose and connectedness. She joins with other Baxley residents to save their small school, participates in the creation of a watchdog organization to protect the Altamaha River, advocates for the preservation of Moody Swamp, an ancient, old-growth forest of cypress and longleaf pine, and joins with several other aspiring authors to form a writers' group. In all her endeavors, Ray adopts a stalwart but cooperative stance with those she seeks to persuade. She is nonjudgmental, preferring to inspire and connect, rather than to scold. This is an approach we should emulate in our own efforts to promote habitat conservation and restoration. However convinced we are of our own rectitude, we must not alienate people by being ideologically rigid or unnecessarily confrontational. Central to the book is the notion that building human connections is not only important for our emotional health as individuals, but that these ties strengthen our communities and make them better, stronger, more pleasant places to live. The bonds we form in working on community projects helps us individually, as well as helping society collectively. I know this has been true for me, as I count as invaluable the opportunities for fellowship provided by my volunteer activities. The gravity of these themes is lightened by Ray's obvious joy in life's simple pleasures, in the earth's natural beauty and wild creatures, and in her sweet and entertaining descriptions of the ways and characters of Baxley, like her chain-smoking, church-going Uncle Percy, and the stubbornly self-reliant photographer E.D. McCool, who lives in a bus and tootles around town on a riding lawnmower. She relates her experiences at a pork cook-off, a syrup-boiling, the local Martin Luther King Parade, and a night-time

I read the book straight through after getting it. But did not read it in the same order of the chapters. It is written like a quilt allowing you to read what you want, randomly as you would look at a quilt's intricate details. Yet no matter how read, you end up with a larger perspective and pattern that gives you much greater meaning and understanding. It is nice for Janisse to allow the reader the freedom of finding ones own perspective and interests when reading the book. It also makes sharing the experience of the book with friend and family easier.My friend read the chapter of the writing group, right after coming from her own writing group. In a stone faced way she put the book down after reading the chapter, and burst out laughing. There was a part I read about Janisse's father and her in a big fight that made me cry at a moment in the interchange.It would make good reading for someone contemplating going home to a rural community, or for someone who never dreamed of doing so. It is a poetic story of family and home and geography.Janisse weaves very different personal yet universal experiences with family and friends, rural community, and natural and cultural landscapes into a geographic quilt, giving an emergent property of perspective, that is difficult to see without being layed out in full view like a picture - and with the benefit of context in time and space and emotion.There are many reasons that a person goes back to their origins. Janisse goes back much like a wild animal that has been expatriated from a geographic area. She comes back to rediscover the origins if birth, and fill to fill gaps left in her imagination and community. What is nice is that she finds a niche with intelligence, and sensitivity to community and region. I can imagine native species like panther and wolves having a more difficult time rediscovering their original landscapes, even though they might play an equal or more important role. Reintroducing fire to the pineland landscpae is also difficult, but necessary.Janisse comes back as quite as she can, and slowly finds a role. Not a dominant role but one which fills a gap. She is more like the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker than a panther or wolve or fire, being sensitive and fragile; and having an infinity for home and old growth and wild romote places. At the same time providing intelligence and energy that those in the rural communities and cities can benefit from. Rural communities in the south need natives, especially those that can fill important roles. Too many rural areas export not only there natural resources, but also their most valuable human resources. They become vulnerable to exotics who completely transform and exploit the community without consideration of the integrity of local community or ecology and its needs. They come without understanding place. Much of what remains is remanents of a highly exploited cultural and ecological resources.What is nice is that, like the coming home of an Ivory Bill

Beautifully written book that appeals to a wide range of people--so it would be a great gift for Father's Day or for anyone's birthday. I laughed out loud many times.

Janisse Ray is passionate about the environment, most specifically that part of it in southeast Georgia. Her environment is mostly the natural world--the longleaf pine forest (the remnants thereof), the Altamaha River--but also the human world in the small town of Baxley, her family farmstead, her father's junkyard. She left these surroundings to go to college, first in north Georgia and then in Montana. She "took a chance on home" (the book's subtitle) when she returned to Baxley with her young son, determined to make a life for them both. She demonstrates that ability to observe, think, and then put into words those observations and thoughts is a far greater treasure than glitz and glamour.