COLUMN: Growing a new crop of redneck

If a green thumb is supposed to be a symbol of a talent for growing things, I must have a black thumb.

No matter how hard I try, I can’t get plants to grow. It’s not for lack of trying either. By all accounts, I should be a great farmer. It’s in my genes.

Growing up, my parents delighted in torturing me and my siblings. I think they must have taken pages out of “Mein Kampf” and mixed them with “The Farmer’s Almanac” and the “Communist Manifesto” to come up with a new method of raising children.

The concept was simple: Rule with an iron fist, make your children believe they are part of the proletariat whose survival is based on how much they work-those who do not work shall not eat-and get back to living off Mother Earth. No, my parents weren’t some strange breed of hippies. I think this was all a byproduct of my father’s love for reading and my mother being the daughter of an Idahoan farmer.

To carry out their ideas, my parents insisted on preparing, growing and harvesting a garden in our backyard. Cute right? Every person in Cache Valley should be doing this, right? I grew up in the middle of Orem, Family City USA-really, that’s what the city calls itself.

The home I grew up in is located on a decent-sized lot which I’m confident is perched right on top of the Orem bench. If you go out my front or back door, you roll down the hill. The garden patch we cultivated (yes, sadly I know these farm terms) was maybe 8 feet wide by 50 or 60 feet long. To a child, that’s practically the length of the football field.

Every spring as part of Family Home Evening, my parents began the six-month-long concentration camp of horror. Wow, that sounds like a bad reality TV show on FOX. I think Ryan Seacrest could even host it, but it might mess up his pressed sweater vest.

Anyway, my parents would get all us kids out to plant a garden. To make a long story short, every couple of weeks weeds would pop up in the garden and I’d have to slave away weeding the garden. I was told it built character, and it did, if you mean I understand what makes some people snap in homicidal rage.

Try as I might, by harvest, all the vegetables I really wanted to grow would fail, and all the gross ones would survive. I felt it was all my fault. It’s just that black thumb of mine.

I think it’s because of my lack of talent that I’ve never been fully accepted by extended family. You see, I come from a long line of farmers and rednecks, depending on which side of the family you’re talking about.

As I said earlier, my mother is the daughter of an Idahoan farmer. She’s lived in the city now for more years than she has in Idaho and has realized the error of her ways and speaks like a regular human being again. But, it seems to be only a temporary fix, because whenever all her siblings get together, that unmistakable Idahoan dialect comes through.

For those of you who’ve never been exposed to this, it’s highly amusing. A typical conversation at family gatherings goes something like this:

“So, didja hear ’bout that light them city folkses are puttin’ in yonder down the road?”

“Yessa, them city folkses make me so madified. I wish they’d go drown themselves in the crick by the elem tree. Hey, toss me a Pepsi willya?”

The sad thing is this conversation goes on for hours about a stupid traffic light, while they down a 24-pack of Pepsi. I’ve never figured out why, but Pepsi is the official drink of Idaho. I’m not sure they know there’s no alcohol in it, but they act about the same regardless.

When I get around them, they stare at me like I’m some sort of communist they need to eradicate. They mock how I wear clean jeans that aren’t so tight they make you sterile, and how I wear some of those “newfangled tennis shoes” and not cowboy boots. I try to pull out my pocketknife and wear plaid around them, but it doesn’t seem to help. No matter how hard I try, until I can get past my black thumb, I’ll never be accepted.

The other side of my family is entertaining too. While my dad’s immediate family aren’t rednecks, if you go back about a generation or two, it’s teeming with the most outrageous rednecks you could ever meet.

To try to understand them better, I started reading through some of the family history about them. I wish I hadn’t. These people are rednecks through and through and lived in Oklahoma, Arkansas and Missouri. They were great farmers to be sure, but that’s about all they had going for them.

These ancestors would have made great guests on the “Jerry Springer Show” and could have appeared on such juicy episodes as “Surprise, your pa is your baby’s pa too,” or “Coming face to face with your 12th ex-spouse,” or “Keepin’ it in the family, the art of inbreeding.”

While I have no aspirations to marry my cousins or to get another wife, I sure wish I could have had some of their farming genius passed on to me. About the only thing I successfully grow is facial hair, and trust me, there’s no nutritional value in that.

So, even though my dreams of being a farmer will never materialize, at least I can rest assured that the generations of inbreeding have passed down a few interesting traits, like having an inexplicable understanding of NASCAR and an intense urge to wear a polo tie.

Seth Hawkins is a senior majoring in public relations. Suggestions on how to properly deep fat fry a hamburger can be sent to him at seth.h@aggiemail.usu.edu (he lost the family recipe).