RIVER CITY JOURNAL: RURAL HILLS AREN'T END OF THE EARTH

Whenever tragedy occurs in the

Ozarks, too much is made of how

remote those hills and valleys

are. Must be sinister, right?

The big news in my favorite hometown newspaper this week is the apparent murder of a Florida teen-ager at a church academy for troubled youths in the eastern part of my home county not too far from where I grew up. Not many details have been reported about the academy or its operations, because its owners have been tight-lipped from the start and certainly aren't going to start blabbing now, not with reporters and sheriff's deputies snooping all over the place.

A curious thing about most of the big-city reporting of the young man's death is how the academy's location is described. To hear the Post-Dispatch tell it, the academy was purposely placed in an isolated backwater. This is journalism code for right-wing religious fanatics with shady undertones. Look at the reporting on the various militia groups. Look at what's happening in Montana. According to the news media, if you don't live in a city or at least a stone's throw from a mall, you must be part of some nut-case clan.

There was a time when Ozarks denizens really were cut off from most of the world in very practical ways. Electricity didn't arrive until the 1950s. Toilets were in the orchard instead of off the hall. Drinking water came from wells, cisterns and springs. Highways were few and far between. So, yes, you could say the hills of Missouri were remote and peopled with isolated hillbillies.

It wasn't all that long ago that news reached the folks on Greenwood Valley or Kelo Valley much like it must have for the previous 200 years: word of mouth. My mother tells the story of a relative who had one of the first automobiles on Brushy Creek and was gone on a trip for a month. When he got back, all the relatives and neighbors gathered to hear about the traveling adventures. When everyone assembled the relative announced he had been "all the way to Shannon County." He had gone a whopping two counties away, driving mostly on dry creek beds or old logging trails.

I can remember standing on the playground of Shady Nook School in the early 1950s trying to hit a softball pitched by Betty Brown, who had a mean arm. A roar in the sky brought the game to a halt. A convoy of jet fighters passed overhead. It was the first time any of us had seen a jet, much less a flock of them. I doubt that any of us knew there was a war in Korea until some older brothers were sent there.

Those seeking refuge from the law had plenty of places to hide in those Ozarks hills. Most of the natives could navigate through the brush and over creeks in the dark, having learned the terrain following coon dogs or looking for deer. Any outsider looking to dodge the law, however, would probably have wandered lost and disoriented until he starved to death. Not exactly an enticement for low-life types.

No, most of the folks in those hills were law-abiding, even if the law sometimes was as crude as a Mason jar of home brew. Cross one of those folks and he might burn down your barn. Mess with his daughter and he might burn down your house. Mess with his coon dogs and he might shoot you. No one tried to stop you from doing any of those things, but you had to be ready to pay the consequences. Justice was especially simple in those parts.

Anyone trying to hide a covert activity in the hills would stick out like a sore thumb. The locals all know what's what. The only ones who are clueless are members of the state and federal constabulary. Outsiders, mostly. Never been around more trees than Forest Park. This is the category into which you can put most big-time media types trying to justify getting lost on a paved county road while looking for a sensational story but only finding taciturn academy operators who didn't cotton to publicity before the murder, so why in God's name would they start now?

There are sensational stories to be told, stories of parents in tar-papered shacks back in the hills who kept their children's noses to the grindstone and encouraged them to work and study hard. Many of those children grew up to be doctors and lawyers and teachers and business owners. Oh, sure, there are few hustlers and murderers too, but they never had any gumption anyway. Everyone knew who they were and knew they would never amount to anything good. No news there.

~R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.