About six months ago, the Bedlam Corners General Store suffered an awful fire. Since then, some generous volunteers have patched up the roof as best they can and cleaned out what they could. But the restoration seems stalled, nobody has heard much of anything from anybody, and nobody has been seen around the store for weeks. I can’t imagine a store like this boarded up for months in Manhattan or New Jersey or a suburb of Boston.

Yesterday, Jeff, a bright and interesting man who works at Agway, asked if I might be interested in speaking at the Washington County Fair this year (where I usually go to take photos). I thought about it for awhile and said that I’d like to speak about a writer’s evolving understanding of rural life in the dozen years that he (me) has been living here. In recent years, it has occurred to me that as I look at the photos I take, more and more of them suggest that I am living in a museum, rather than a self-sustaining, growing place.

I believe rural life is being destroyed by the industrial-urban economic and corporate system that has taken over America – it’s health care, media, elected representatives, courts. Farmers are going bankrupt while their sons and daughters are forced off the land and into the cities, where they are trapped mostly in poor-paying, dead end jobs that make them miserable. Meanwhile, people drive to supermarkets to buy processed foods imported from Mexico and Chile and kept “fresh” and colorful by chemicals.

Schools here are emptying out, farms being abandoned, post offices and churches closing. The people who do move here want no part of local life. Their kids do not go to schools, and they do not sign up to coach or contribute to the local community, other hiring people to take care of their properties. There is no work here, and no one seems to be working to bring any here. We do not have broadband or cable, even access to the Internet becomes an integral part of our economical and cultural lives.

Ironically, the farmers getting whacked seem docile, even apathetic about their plight. The idea of organizing to fight these system seems bizarre to them. In my photographs, I see more and more that I am taking photos of a beautiful but dying place. There are few new things in my photos. On the Fourth of July, I dedicate myself to capturing these images faithfully and recording them – dying farms, collapsing barns, rural landscapes.

There is nothing more American than rural life, and my wish on this holiday is that Americans remember that and that we work to preserve this culture of values, family and freedom.