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The Year of the Chicken Coop
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06/29/09 05:56 AM ET
"This has been the year of the chicken coop," I’ve been told at my rural hardware store across the river in Vermont. Everybody’s coming in for supplies to build chicken coops. Some are from the city and there have been an increased number of elegant Porsches and the new BMWs around town, coming in to buy chicken wire and two-by-fours. A new wave, perhaps of city folk going rural, as characteristically happens up here every 20 years or so.
And there are chickens everywhere. The Murray-McMurray mail-order kind which arrive peeping at the local post office and are the first delights of city people going rural. The starter package should include Noel Perrin’s First Person Rural, then you trade the Porsche for an old pick up truck and learn to run a chain saw without cutting your foot off. Once you’ve tasted your own home-grown eggs you’ll never go back to the store bought kind. People are getting self sufficient again. Saving money as well and not spending.
This could well be a symptom of the declining economy. But this is year two of the return and the economic turndown only snapped into place last September. Last spring the retailers sold out of wood stoves and the gardening shops sold out on seed potatoes and onions in the first few days. So people started preparing for the turndown six months before it turned. Potatoes and onions; the most fundamental symbolism of basic food stuff, which with a gun and a few carrots, could provide you with squirrel stew all through the winter. Or chicken stew or moose stew.
Speaking of which, they are selling out on guns as well.
"I’ve been in this for a long time, and I can’t say I’ve seen it as much across the board like now," Wayne Barros of Barrows Point Trading Post told Chris Fleisher of the Valley News. "On handguns and ammo, not even close." This in a temperate New Hampshire town on the border of pacifist Vermont where you rarely ever see a gun in public.
“It’s because of Obama,” Ernest Welch, co-owner of Welch’s Gun and Gift Shop told Fleisher. “He’s going to take the guns away.”
It is indeed a phenomenon that is happening in heartland states across the country to a greater degree than it is up here.
But that doesn’t account for the squirrel soup. Why have people been buying up potato and onion stocks from a year before when it seemed likely that Senator Clinton might be president or John McCain and Obama was just a twinkle in Oprah’s eye?
The death of Michael Jackson marks the end of an era. As the death of John Lennon marked the end of an era. As the death of Elvis marked the end of an era. America is at the turning. The Obama administration is a historic preservation league for ideas whose time has come and gone in the 1970s, the 1920s and even the 1840s. But beneath the adoring headlines of journalists embedded in the Oval Office, we are beginning to undergo a fundamental change of American temperament. And no one is paying attention.
Visit Mr. Quigley's website at http://quigleyblog.blogspot.com.
And there are chickens everywhere. The Murray-McMurray mail-order kind which arrive peeping at the local post office and are the first delights of city people going rural. The starter package should include Noel Perrin’s First Person Rural, then you trade the Porsche for an old pick up truck and learn to run a chain saw without cutting your foot off. Once you’ve tasted your own home-grown eggs you’ll never go back to the store bought kind. People are getting self sufficient again. Saving money as well and not spending.
This could well be a symptom of the declining economy. But this is year two of the return and the economic turndown only snapped into place last September. Last spring the retailers sold out of wood stoves and the gardening shops sold out on seed potatoes and onions in the first few days. So people started preparing for the turndown six months before it turned. Potatoes and onions; the most fundamental symbolism of basic food stuff, which with a gun and a few carrots, could provide you with squirrel stew all through the winter. Or chicken stew or moose stew.
Speaking of which, they are selling out on guns as well.
"I’ve been in this for a long time, and I can’t say I’ve seen it as much across the board like now," Wayne Barros of Barrows Point Trading Post told Chris Fleisher of the Valley News. "On handguns and ammo, not even close." This in a temperate New Hampshire town on the border of pacifist Vermont where you rarely ever see a gun in public.
“It’s because of Obama,” Ernest Welch, co-owner of Welch’s Gun and Gift Shop told Fleisher. “He’s going to take the guns away.”
It is indeed a phenomenon that is happening in heartland states across the country to a greater degree than it is up here.
But that doesn’t account for the squirrel soup. Why have people been buying up potato and onion stocks from a year before when it seemed likely that Senator Clinton might be president or John McCain and Obama was just a twinkle in Oprah’s eye?
The death of Michael Jackson marks the end of an era. As the death of John Lennon marked the end of an era. As the death of Elvis marked the end of an era. America is at the turning. The Obama administration is a historic preservation league for ideas whose time has come and gone in the 1970s, the 1920s and even the 1840s. But beneath the adoring headlines of journalists embedded in the Oval Office, we are beginning to undergo a fundamental change of American temperament. And no one is paying attention.
Visit Mr. Quigley's website at http://quigleyblog.blogspot.com.
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