Agrarianism and the Good Society: Land, Culture, Conflict, and Hope

3. The Education of Ada

It is early one morning, August 1864, in the mountains of western North Carolina. Ada Monroe has risen and sits on her house porch. The life she has known has wound down and come to a halt. Kinless and nearly friendless, alone and immobile, she has no idea what to do. The solace she gains from books and art is not enough to sustain her. Though Ada does not realize it, the next twenty-four hours will set her on a new course. She will begin life again, in a world badly torn by war. Her central possession is a three-hundred-acre hilly farm inherited from her recently deceased father. Farming is alien to Ada, and she knows little about practical living. But the farm provides a place to begin. And so, slowly, she moves, awakening to the land and shaping a new life. Ada Monroe’s journey is recounted in Charles Frazier’s agrarian novel, Cold Mountain, published in 1997 to public and critical acclaim. Frazier has a sensitive eye for people, culture, and land. In his narrative he exposes and probes the challenges we face in living with nature and one another. Frazier’s work raises a possibility similar to the one posed by Aldo Leopold in his final wilderness essay . When a culture stumbles and falls, is it possible to turn to land to start again? Can we begin with land and craft ways of living that are better suited to place and more likely to endure? Leopold turned to wilderness to begin that search. Frazier proposes beginning nearby, on a subsistence farm carved from the woods. Can such a farm, Frazier implicitly asks, provide a new cultural beginning in a THE EDUCATION OF ADA 3  47 The Education of Ada time of war? And can such a land-based culture really succeed, given our passions and weaknesses as people? Like Leopold, Frazier offers only fragments of answers. But they are sturdy fragments, valuable in thinking about the course ahead. Ada’s twenty-four-hour descent and resurrection begin, appropriately , in hunger. From her porch she surveys the nearby garden, overrun by weeds that she can neither identify nor fight. Remembering her hen’s practice of hiding in nearby boxwoods, she folds her skirt tightly and works her way on hands and knees into them, searching for eggs. Inside the shrubs she finds “a hollow place . . . like a tiny room.” There she pauses to consider her life. She has returned to the womb and is ready for rebirth. Raised in the high culture of Charleston, South Carolina, by her minister father, Ada spent timing learning French and Latin, the piano, and landscape sketching. She is unusually well read, and her many opinions are colored by her late father’s transcendentalism . But Ada is “frighteningly ill-prepared” in the skills of daily living, and she knows it. Resting in her small place, she wonders whether her upbringing could have been any less practical. She admits —echoing Thoreau and his bean field—that she could hardly weed a row of bean plants without mutilating them. Her urban culture has become largely useless to her, and by steps she puts it behind: her dresses get dirtier, her hair hangs loose, her piano grows quiet. Finally, pushed out of the shrubs by nature (an aggressive rooster) rather than by choice, Ada returns to the house. There she gains her first inkling of direction by glancing up from a grim novel and onto the looming shape of Cold Mountain. There is a solidity to it, a comfort. After a failed effort to bake bread, she leaves the house and enters the weedy, little-used lane. Her new life has started. Her first act is to approach an unfamiliar plant. When a blossom snaps apart at her touch, she gives the plant a name— snapweed. She has begun to take charge of Eden. Ada’s path leads her to a nearby farmstead, the home of Esco and Sally Swanger. They are successful farmers, so self-sufficient that they possess a water well despite an abundance of local streams. Their discipline is apparent in a clean-swept yard kept free of ornamental bushes and flowerbeds. For Ada and for us, the Swangers 48 Agrarianism and the Good Society offer a vision of relating to land and neighbors. Frazier invites us to assess it. In mid-afternoon Ada departs the Swanger...