(Bowden, West Virginia) After 9 miles of switchbacks in the Allegheny Mountains, the road stops at Jenningston Farm.
In this forest cul-de-sac, Marsha Waibright presented me with a choice.
“You can drive half an hour into the Valley of Canaan or I can make you supper.” »
The kitchen was already invaded by the aroma of home cooking, and when we discover this cocoon at the end of the road, we don’t want to leave. I didn’t hesitate for a second: I’m eating here.
“I have groundhog and chicken from the farm. »
Tell me about local, organic and sustainable food.
“I braise it to tenderize it and I finish it in the oven, for consistency,” Marsha explains to me.
The flesh is dark, delicate, compares favorably with chicken. If it weren’t for the shape and the small bones, it could look like chicken thighs.
“We have always eaten marmot in the region. Ideally, they should be hunted at one year old. When you’re younger, there’s not enough meat, and when you’re older, it’s tough. In addition to eating the vegetables, they make holes everywhere and we don’t want people to get hurt. I always have some in the freezer. »
PHOTO YVES BOISVERT, THE PRESS
Collin, Anna and Marsha Waibright
The conversation shifted from groundhog hunting to gun control.
“I am not against control, I am against the same rules everywhere. In Chicago, they have different problems than West Virginia,” this certified weapons instructor told me.
This rural state has the most permissive rules in this area, which is not so surprising when you know that the largest city in the state (Charleston, the capital) has barely 50,000 inhabitants. Hunting is as much a way of life as it is a leisure activity.
“I teach safety with all kinds of weapons. My husband has an AR-15 [arme de style militaire].
—What do you do with that?
— It’s very practical for the coyote. »
I asked some very urban questions like:
“Why are you shooting coyotes?”
– For what ? Come on, I’ll show you why. »
She shows me on her iPhone a veal carcass on which there is less meat left than on the bones of my marmot. And a dead coyote quite plump in the box of his pickup.
Collin, 24, the eldest of this family of three children, prefers to hunt with Fiona, a red-tailed hawk. He is one of 35 registered falconers in the state.
PHOTO YVES BOISVERT, THE PRESS
Collin Waibright and Fiona, his red-tailed hawk.
“I visited a fair when I was 12, saw a falconer doing a demonstration, and decided to do that, but you had to be at least 14, and supervised by a mentor. » Two years later, he already knew everything about this age-old profession.
He has five birds of prey in his care, some of which were accident survivors. He shows me his new recruit, Fiona, a juvenile captured last fall. “You see a buzzard on a pole, you put a cage on the ground with a mouse, and it gets stuck. You need a permit to do this. »
In the fall, young buzzards have already been kicked out of the nest and learned to hunt.
Then it’s a matter of feeding the animal with rat pieces. Collin weighs Fiona every day; She must have enough energy to molt, but not too much weight, otherwise she risks becoming jaded and refusing to hunt in the fall.
The falconer gives demonstrations in schools and homes for the elderly, but he mainly waits for the gray squirrel hunting season.
“Redheads are too agile and intelligent. Also tell yourself that a squirrel that survived in the forest until fall is one of the brightest. It’s not easy to catch. »
Fiona captures the squirrel and brings it back to her master in exchange for a piece of rat.
“It’s a lot of work, skinning a squirrel, she prefers ready-to-eat food.
—And what do you do with the squirrel?
— Well, I’ll eat it, let’s see, it’s delicious! »
When he was little and his parents took him to a restaurant, when the tastes were a little exotic, they made him believe it was squirrel.
I turn to Marsha.
“OK, the groundhog, the squirrel, is this a folkloric set-up for a city tourist, all that?
– No way ! We have always hunted and eaten squirrels. My grandfather told my father to hunt it with a .22 so as not to damage the head. He had the heads reserved for eating the brains. That, on the other hand, I don’t do…
— Collin, you’re a very popular guy in Montreal, would you like to come and spend a few days? »
In this unsuspected place is buried a part of the history of this state so independent that it separated from the Virginia of the rich planters in the middle of the Civil War to join the Union, and that Senator Joe Manchin no longer knows whether he is a Democrat, Republican, or neither.
One day, while digging in the dirt on the Waibright farm, a pig brought out a shiny object. It was an aluminum token: “Good for a pint of milk.”
PHOTO YVES BOISVERT, THE PRESS
Workers were paid with tokens redeemable at the Jennings brothers’ company store.
Because this large field that spreads out before our eyes is not that of an old farm. It was a village of 500 inhabitants. A “company town”, owned by two lumber merchants, the Jennings brothers. They had left Pennsylvania after razing a piece of forest, and had found this one.
A logging concession, a river, a sawmill, a railroad, a few hundred wooden houses for the workers, and a store owned by the Jennings, of course, where the workers were obliged to obtain supplies. We have seen this model of “development” and exploitation in Quebec too.
PHOTO YVES BOISVERT, THE PRESS
One of the Waibrights’ cats gazes out over what was once Jenningston.
Except that in this remote corner of the Appalachians, once the two hills were razed, the village was abandoned, the railway left, there was nothing left to do here, apart from poor subsistence agriculture. Everything was abandoned.
A hundred years later, a superb forest has reclaimed its rights on the two hills, and unless you dig for the old foundations, you could swear that this isolated farm has been here for 200 years.
PHOTO YVES BOISVERT, THE PRESS
Of the hundreds of houses in Jenningston, only the Jennings house remains.
Only one house remains, that of the Jennings, where the Waibrights, an old family from the region, live. They were home-schooled and make a living from their small farm: a few animals, a few vegetables, traditional trades classes, firearms classes, rooms to rent.
Here, surrounded by these green mountains, we are wary of Washington politicians, modern life and coyotes. We breathe fresh air. We read the Bible. We swim in the Laurel River. We still know the ancestral art of cooking marmot and squirrel. And we don’t care what you think about it.