Just got the page proofs. Serious proofreading comes next. Kind of numb, but also happy. These are stories that deserved to be set down and, hopefully, they will be remembered.
I think now, looking back on a little book that’s almost done, that they have an unintended educational value, too. There’s so much petulance and selfishness adulterating our national character today–our polity, especially.
Much of this book is a mirror-reversal of that: it’s instead about civic duty, about sacrifice, about generosity–“the better angels of our nature,” as Lincoln put it so vividly. World War II was, after all, just as the Civil War had been, a war where the survival of democracy was at stake.
I think that’s why I need to write another book. Had it not been for a bureaucracy as prosaic as the Soil Conservation Service, Corbett Canyon would today be a desert. One of the fundamental values of the Second New Deal was the belief that we had an obligation to generations not yet born. Those generations are today walking to school on sidewalks that are stamped “WPA 1940” below hillsides that support grazing cattle only because CCC kids built check dams there in 1937.
Democracy works. It takes courage to nurture it, though, and compromise to sustain it, and we need those qualities now every bit as much as we need rain.
A Work in Progress 
Hi Jim, There are three links to my family on this one blog page – First, I grew up on my family’s farm on Corbett Canyon. Second, I now work for the Natural Resources Conservation Service (originally Soil Conservation Service) as a soil scientist. NRCS truly is one of the “good” agents of bureaucracy. My Uncles Manual and Frank Gularte are in your book; Frank and his wife Sally on the cover. The photo on the page above was provided by my sister, Diane Gularte. She is going through boxes and boxes of photos belonging to my aunts and uncles. Thank you so much for this book. a second book on the agriculture on AG valley would be a fantastic.
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