Welcome to West of 98! If you are new here, read more about my Substack here.

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Author’s note: welcome back! If you aren’t new here, you know I took a bit of a sabbatical from my regular writing. I also took a breather from much of my social media and started to reconsider my relationship with it. More on that in the future.

As I get back into the swing of writing, I wanted to re-share last year’s Memorial Day essay. This year, I was pleased to turn over Stamford’s Decoration Day ceremony to VFW Post #9179 as its leadership works hard to revive the post’s calendar of activities. Before attending their commemoration ceremony, my family and I made our own family Decoration Day journey and I’m looking forward to writing about that and sharing it here very soon. If there’s something on your mind or if there’s something you’d like me to write about in the weeks to come, I would love to hear from you!

Words have meaning. As I get older, I think more about my word choice in particular circumstances, even when it’s something that I might have said all my life. I feel this way about the idea of “celebrating” Memorial Day. I’ll be honest, the word “celebrate” has a connotation better suited to July 4th, Christmas, and a few other holidays than it does for a day established to honor our war dead. This is not to say that we cannot have a good time on Memorial Day. We can. But ultimately, we should not forget the reason that the holiday exists, and if words matter, I prefer “honor” or “recognize” more than “celebrate.”

Last year, we embarked on a new Memorial Day tradition here in Stamford, honoring our local war dead with a Decoration Day ceremony. I wrote about that day and some of its origins and I have previously written about the early history of Memorial Day. There is no singular origin of the holiday, which coalesced from several antecedent observances. One important origin lies with the Grand Army of the Republic, a fraternal organization of Union veterans of the American Civil War. The organization’s leader John A. Logan issued a proclamation titled General Order No. 11 establishing a formal observance on May 30, 1868. This year, at Stamford’s second-annual Decoration Day ceremony, I read aloud that order as a prelude to reciting the roll call of 45 men from Stamford who gave their lives during World War I, World War II, Korea, and Vietnam.

Below, I have reprinted General Order No. 11 in its entirety. Logan speaks of the importance of keeping alive the memory of the sacrifice by those who gave their life in the name of freedom. He made this appeal only a few years after the American Civil War concluded, when those bloody memories were still fresh on the minds of many. I imagine that he was also speaking to future generations who would be required to work harder to preserve and honor those memories. I write this newsletter just over 160 years after General Lee surrendered to General Grant. Today, that war is five or more generations removed from the present day. Even our 20th century wars recede a little farther into the past every day. May we honor the sacrifice of those who lost their lives and keep their memories so long as the light and warmth of life remain to us.

General Orders No. 11
Headquarters, Grand Army of the Republic
Washington, DC, May 5, 1868

I. The 30th day of May, 1868, is designated for the purpose of strewing with flowers, or otherwise decorating, the grave of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion, and whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village, hamlet, and churchyard in the land. In this observance, no form or ceremony is prescribed, but posts and comrades will, in their own way, arrange such fitting services and testimonials of respect as circumstances may permit.

We are organized, comrades, as our regulations tell us, for the purpose, among other things, “of preserving and strengthening those kind and fraternal feelings which have bound together the soldiers, sailors, and marines, who united to suppress the late rebellion.” What can aid more to assure this result than by cherishing tenderly the memory of our heroic dead, who made their breasts a barricade between our country and its foes? Their soldier lives were the reveille of freedom to a race in chains, and their deaths the tattoo of rebellious tyranny in arms. We should guard their graves with sacred vigilance. All that the consecrated wealth and taste of the nation can add, to their adornment and security, is but a fitting tribute to the memory of her slain defenders. Let no wanton foot tread rudely on such hallowed grounds. Let pleasant paths invite the coming and going of reverent visitors and fond mourners. Let no vandalism of avarice or neglect, no ravages of time, testify to the present or to the coming generations that we have forgotten, as a people, the cost of a free and undivided Republic.

If other eyes grow dull and other hands slack, and other hearts cold in the solemn trust, ours shall keep it well, as long as the light and warmth of life remain to us.

Let us, then, at the time appointed, gather around their sacred remains, and garland the passionless mounds above them with choicest flowers of springtime; let us raise above them the dear old flag they saved from dishonor; let us, in this solemn presence, renew our pledges to aid and assist those whom they have left among us, as sacred charges upon the nation’s gratitude,—the soldier’s and sailor’s widow and orphan.

II. It is the purpose of the Commander-in-Chief to inaugurate this observance, with the hope it will be kept up from year to year, while a survivor of the war remains to honor the memory of his departed comrades. He earnestly desires the public press to call attention to this order, and lend its friendly aid in bringing it to the notice of comrades in all parts of the country, in time for simultaneous compliance therewith.

III. Department commanders will use every effort to make this order effective.

By order of:
JOHN A. LOGAN
Commander-in-Chief.

N.P. CHIPMAN
Adjutant-General.

James Decker is the Mayor of Stamford, Texas and the creator of the West of 98 website and the “Rural Church and State” and “West of 98” podcasts. Contact James and subscribe to these essays at westof98.substack.com and subscribe to him wherever podcasts are found. Check out the West of 98 Bookstore with book lists for essential reads here.

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I continue to pick up new clicks and new subscribers from my letter to new Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins, so if you are new to this Substack, welcome! Historically, I write on or near Texas Independence Day about that topic, but this year, it’s less of a recitation of history and more of a reflection on my life and a changing Texas. Is there something you’d like me to write about or address in a future essay? Let me know!

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There’s a certain cultural pride that comes with being a Texan. I’m not telling you anything that you don’t already know, whether you are a Texan or you have merely encountered Texans in the wild. I’m writing this on March 2, 2025, Texas Independence Day. 189 years ago today, 60 men affixed their names to a document that declared Texas’s independence from Mexico. I have written about this momentous occasion in the past, from what the Declaration itself meant to the powerful inspiration of flawed heroes. Today, I am taking a slightly different turn.

Pride in place is important to me. I suspect that is obvious whether you are a new reader or you’ve been around a while. My pride in place extends from the global—in my appreciation for stewarding the entirety of Creation—down to the very local, such that I identify myself on social media as a “Stamford, Texas propagandist,” which is both accurate and perhaps an understatement. Over the last few years, though, I have considered the distinctions that come with that type of pride, in particular the difference between patriotism and nationalism. These words are interconnected and the differences might often seem blurry at first impression, but they are very, very different.

In his 2022 book, “The Need to Be Whole,” Wendell Berry tackled the distinction between patriotism and nationalism at some length. Berry quotes author and historian John Lukacs, who distinguished patriotism as defensive and nationalism as aggressive. Lukacs wrote, “patriotism is rooted to the land, to a particular country, while nationalism is connected to the myth of a people…”1 Lukacs wrote that patriotism was not a substitute for religion, but nationalism often is, as “it may fill the emotional—at least superficially spiritual—needs of people.” In a sense, patriotism is based on the real and nationalism is based on the abstract. Why does that matter, you ask? Isn’t it good for people to have strong feelings associated with their place, no matter how they are rooted?

It depends, I guess you could say. Patriotism is typically viewed more favorably than pure nationalism. Patriotism is hardly without flaws, and an obsessed patriotism can become dangerous if not channeled properly, but patriotism’s inherent connection to place is a healthy tether. Patriotism without that tether is not actually patriotism. It is nationalism. There are plenty of outlets on the internet and in history books where you can read about the dangers of unbridled nationalism, so I won’t spend my time there today. Instead, I am thinking of the anodyne version, which is a hollow, jingoistic fervor that elicits exuberance without any real meaning behind it, cheering on something for the mere sake of its existence. Alas, so much Texas pride can devolve from a healthy, rooted patriotism into hollow, meaningless jingoism. I have engaged in it myself. I’ve shouted at people on the internet about the moral superiority of Texas chili (among other things) and what has it gained, really? Other than reinforcing the notion that Texas cultural “pride” is better described as “arrogance”? I’d say not much.

Arguably the most famous description of Texas and her peoples comes from someone decidedly not a Texan, the great Californian John Steinbeck. In “Travels With Charley: In Search of America,” Steinbeck famously described the Lone Star State:

Texas is a state of mind. Texas is an obsession. Above all, Texas is a nation in every sense of the word.2

This quote appears all over the internet. It has been used by politicians and Texas marketers. I feel certain that more than a handful of Texans have gotten it tattooed on their body.3 It is a quote that I dearly love myself. But it exemplifies the distinction of patriotism and nationalism. A place-rooted Texan feels that statement to their bones and channels it into how they view their community, their neighbors, and every aspect of their life as a Texan. But without that rootedness, merely reciting that quote to boast about Texas for its own sake is a very hollow celebration. Texas is not an obsession because it is an obsession. Texas is an obsession because of the people and places that make it special.

Texas is rapidly changing and growing. Your mileage may vary as to whether that is good or bad. Truthfully, it is a little of both and the balance of the two depends on your perspective. The state population has grown by double digit percentages in every census conducted in Texas since the first one in 1850. The population neared 30 million in the 2020 Census and has since crossed over that threshold. The population of Texas is now over 80% urban. The state has the second largest urban population (trailing only California), but it also has the largest rural population by a significant margin. Five of the twelve largest cities in America are in Texas. These cities and their sprawling suburbs are the center of Texas culture, politics, and power, whether rural denizens such as myself like it or not. In 1968, Larry McMurtry wrote a book called “In a Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas,” and he described Texas as:

“at that stage of metamorphosis when it is most fertile with conflict, when rural and soil traditions are competing most desperately with urban traditions—competing for the allegiance of the young. The city will win, of course, but its victory won’t be cheap—the country traditions were very strong. As the cowboys gradually leave the range and learn to accommodate themselves to the suburbs, defeats that are tragic in quality must occur and may be recorded.”

If I may extend McMurtry’s illustration, the cowboy leaving the range for the suburb is the moment where the line between patriotism and nationalism gets blurry, and thus, the danger sets in. No longer defined by his place, which was often a place unique to his life or generationally important to his people, he has been cast into a new place. New places take time to build roots, assuming the new places are conducive to roots (in some cases, thanks to “upward mobility,” they are not).

A decade after McMurtry published that fine book, the great country songwriter Ed Bruce wrote a tune called “The Last Cowboy Song.” He made it a hit in his own name with a guest appearance from Willie Nelson and then it became part of a legendary album by Willie, Waylon Jennings, Johnny Cash, and Kris Kristofferson, billing themselves The Highwaymen. It is a beautiful but depressing song. Bruce tells of the cowboy straddling McMurtry’s line between range and suburb, but the range is fading away:

He rides a feed lot, clerks in a market

On weekends sellin' tobacco and beer

And his dreams of tomorrow, surrounded by fences

But he'll dream tonight of when fences weren't here.

The cowboy in that song is struggling to hold on to a world where his love is connected to a real place. As Bruce recites in the final, spoken-word verse (or Johnny Cash in the version recorded by The Highwaymen), the Chisholm Trail has been paved over with concrete and the trail drive replaced by fifty-foot cattle trucks. The cowboy life was then (and is now) something of an abstract notion to too many people who care about it.

My ancestors have been in Texas a long time. We have not been here as long as some, but we’ve been here longer than most. My great-great-grandfather Thomas Decker arrived in Haskell County from Arkansas in 1906. Another great-great-grandfather, “Uncle Mike” Perry moved to Haskell County in 1889, but he was born in Panola County, Texas in 1856 and his own father J.W. Perry came to Texas from Alabama sometime shortly before that. Not all of my family has had a love for genealogy and family history. There can be burdens associated with family histories. Some of my ancestors held the view that what you do with your own name is more important to your life than what was bequeathed to you in that name, for good or bad. That opinion has a good point, but I have found value in the heritage while also striving to make my own mark on the family legacy.

My last grandparent passed away in the spring of 2024. Nanette Perry was my maternal grandmother. She had a deep love for genealogy herself and she catalogued the family trees for her family and my grandfather Don Perry’s family many years ago. Genealogy research was about 95% of her motivation for learning to use the internet. I found her work to be extremely interesting and I talked with her about it at length on more than a few occasions. After my grandmother passed, my mother found a box that my grandmother had intended as a gift to me, but it was never given for some unknown reason that is now lost to the ages. It was a compilation of genealogy and family history for my father’s family, every branch of it, from my generation all the way back to the 17th century in England and Germany. It was an extraordinary, shocking gift. It is something that deserves more writing in the future, but I have resisted the urge to fully dive into each and every page, lest I disappear from society for six months. All of the people who comprised both sides of my family converged in Haskell and Knox Counties in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The Adams, Decker, Perry, and Weaver families shaped me through my parents and grandparents, but so did the many generations before that: people named Sargent, Throneberry, Dinsmore, Stewart, and so many more.

As I reflect on Texas Independence Day, I am less concerned with Texas jingoism than I used to be. There are many beautiful things about Texas that I love, but my youthful exuberance has been replaced by some modicum of wisdom. I am wary of the hollow celebration of Texas for its own sake, which often gets mixed up into a brand of Yee Haw Politics performed by politicians (or aspiring ones) who are just a little too eager to prove that they’re as big a Texan as you are.

My passion for Texas is a patriotism rooted in place. I love it for the people, the passions, and the dreams that led my own people to these Rolling Plains as sharecroppers, ranchers, bakers, carpenters, school teachers, and more. I am here because they came here, stayed here, and rooted themselves here. No one in my family had lived in Stamford until 1986, when my parents received an opportunity to move 37 miles south from Munday. They launched the next chapter of our family’s life in Texas. Today, Lauren and I are writing our own chapter with our children. It will go into the long line of history in my family, to say nothing of her own.

Being a rural Texan in 2025 is ever more peculiar. McMurtry was right in 1968. The city won. The cowboy departed the range for the suburbs and others followed, often as a matter of economic necessity. Few have returned, at least not permanently. Texas is now a very urban state, but it still clings to its rural roots. We see it in music, food, sport, attire, interior design, vehicle selection, and more. And that’s fine. I hope that a few will search for the meaning behind those roots and seek life in authentic rural places. Some have. Many more would like to. I choose not to call rural Texans a “dying breed,” even if that might be the easiest turn of phrase, because that suggests a sort of determinism that rural Texas must eventually fade away. I refuse to accept that. Texas may grow more urban and its metropolitan areas may sprawl even farther afield, but rural Texas will not die anytime soon.

Rural Texas and its people will persevere on. This is the Texas that I love. This is the Texas that my people settled and in which they sunk their roots for good, bad, bountiful crops, dust storms and droughts, and more. This Texas—a pride rooted in land and in place—is the Texas that I celebrate today on Texas Independence Day. It is the Texas that I fight for each and every day.

James Decker is the Mayor of Stamford, Texas and the creator of the West of 98 website and the “Rural Church and State” and “West of 98” podcasts. Contact James and subscribe to these essays at westof98.substack.com and subscribe to him wherever podcasts are found. Check out the West of 98 Bookstore with book lists for essential reads here.

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Welcome to West of 98! In addition to my essays, I write a mid-month newsletter called The Prairie Panicle. It summarizes my writing over the previous month and offers additional reading/listening/watching recommendations that strike my mood in the moment. All my writing is free, but you can subscribe here at West of 98 or make a one-time contribution at Buy Me A Coffee.

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I’m writing this newsletter on Presidents Day. Now, I’m a stickler for good grammar and punctuation. Incorrect apostrophe usage ranks at the top of my personal frustrations on grammar and punctuation. I was not about to write the name of this holiday without double-checking the manner in which it is properly styled, with or without an apostrophe. Well, surprise! There’s no single grammar authority on the matter. The federal government is wholly unhelpful: the federal holiday is still officially named Washington’s Birthday. So, Presidents Day, President’s Day, or Presidents’ Day? It can be all the above, depending on what style guide you read or the state where you reside. This level of grammar anarchy is intolerable. We are living in a society, people! Although, looking around at the crumbling and/or incompetent institutions of our society, I should not be surprised that we can’t address this matter properly.

What I’ve Written

I am embarrassed that I’ve not written any new original essays since the last Panicle. I promised last time that an important original essay was coming and I hope to have it finished soon. It is a personal family story and it has taken a new and unexpected twist even since I started writing. Hang in with me, friends and readers.

In the meantime, I want to share a couple of Presidents Day essays I’ve written in the past. My thoughts in these essays still hold true. Presidential leadership is a hot topic and I’ll be blunt: I think that most of the men who have held the office since Theodore Roosevelt have debased it or contributed to its straying from the original vision for the office that the Founders intended.

In 2022, I looked at what makes a “good” President. A good one doesn’t need a particular look or skill as an orator. Good Presidents have been dashing or brilliant speakers. They’ve also been the exact opposite.

In 2024, I wrote a series of essays based on Thomas Jefferson’s vision of America as a land of small farmers and other independent yeomen. As part of that series, I wrote about the presidential view of agriculture and rural America throughout our nation’s history.

Online Reading

On the note of my ongoing struggle to write regularly, yesterday I read a stunning tweet.1 I don’t know the identity of the author and had never seen the account before, but it said:

“If you have an intense soul, you need to pour that intensity into your hobbies/art. That energy needs to go somewhere or it'll swallow you. Your depth must have a purpose. Create your own worlds, that you & other like minded people can escape into. You have a super power. USE IT.”

I’ve been dealing with some writer’s block and some stresses/increasing obligations in life (family, law practice, serving as Mayor as Google is building a new campus right outside of town). Some of these matters have started to crowd out my writing time. I’ve been too willing to acquiesce and let it happen, feeling too tired in the evening or early morning to pick up a pen and yellow pad. Yet, I don’t feel any better as a result of letting the writing go on hiatus. Yesterday, I read this tweet and it punched me square in the face. This is why I don’t feel any better. My energy, my ideas, all the things I feel—about rural revitalization, local economies, agriculture policy, grasslands, books, culture, and more—need to go somewhere or it’ll swallow me for not getting it out onto a page. I once read an interview with Larry McMurtry (for the life of me, I cannot find it again) where he advocated writing 750 words each day without fail. I need to listen to his advice. He knew.

Anyway, thanks for coming to my impromptu “Dear Diary” session here in the middle of my Substack.

As for other online readings:

I love many things written at Plough, as my longtime readers know. This is no exception: The Sword and the Cross: A Latin American theologian pushes back against revolutionaries who say Christ’s tactics have failed.” Here is a brilliant and powerful line:

In the desert, Christ discovered an eternal and awesome truth: the means determine the ends. A cause can be as noble and great as you want, but if you use means that do not correspond to it, it simply will elude your grasp.

That’s a good reminder to recommend my friend ’s Substack “Taking Off and Landing: Explorations in the Moral Life.” Myles is a brilliant writer and scholar on the topic of Christian non-violence, among other things, and he’s currently away from his usual gig at Abilene Christian University working for a semester in Leipzig, Germany. He’s writing about that experience at his Substack and it’s worth reading.

Book Recommendation

I learned about author Hampton Sides from my friend interviewing him at the Mountain & Prairie podcast years ago. I love every one of his books that I’ve read (“Blood and Thunder,” “In the Kingdom of Ice,” and “Hellhound On His Trail”). I recommend his work to anyone who likes factual but gripping narrative history.

I got his newest book for Christmas, titled “The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook” and I just finished it after a couple of weeks. It’s a big book that is worth every page. Cook is a fascinating character. I distinctly remember reading a children’s biography about him in my youth, and he became my favorite explorer because we shared a first name, but his depth goes far beyond that. Many of his contemporary explorers were essentially pirates with the protection of the national flag. Cook was not perfect, but he was different. Science and cultural anthropology were more important to him than mere plunder. Cook’s work revolutionized the European understanding of places he visited, with correct mapping, with new discoveries of land, and by disproving half-baked theories and poorly-sourced maps.

To be clear, Cook’s voyages did great harm to many cultures, as did any voyager on first contact. Yet, unlike many contemporaries, he seemed self-aware as to the perils of that first contact. He tried to limit the damage, and be cognizant of the consequences, even if he failed at those limits. If the Age of Exploration interests you even a bit, this book is a good one.

Wendell Berry Read of the Month

“What Are People For?” is a famed Berry essay and there’s a great essay collection published under the same name. It’s a group of short essays on diverse topics (including lesser-known ones and ones penned about specific writer friends like Wallace Stegner and Edward Abbey). I’m a big fan. It’s an accessible place to read a lot of different Berry writing.

West of 98 Store

I continue to generate some nice commissions at Bookshop.org, thanks to my West of 98 readers who choose to purchase books through my storefront. Any purchase at Bookshop supports independent bookstores instead of the Amazon leviathan, but if you purchase through my West of 98 bookstore. I receive a small commission that goes towards this humble project.

James Decker is the Mayor of Stamford, Texas and the creator of the West of 98 website and the Rural Church and State and West of 98 podcasts. Contact James and subscribe to these essays at westof98.substack.com and subscribe to him wherever podcasts are found.

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Welcome to West of 98! In addition to my essays, I write a mid-month newsletter called The Prairie Panicle. It summarizes my writing over the previous month and offers additional reading/listening/watching recommendations that strike my mood in the moment. All my writing is free, but you can subscribe here at West of 98 or make a one-time contribution at Buy Me A Coffee.

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New Year, Dr. King, and More

It’s the first Prairie Panicle of 2026! In so many ways, flipping the calendar from December to January is just that, rather than a revelatory change. Winter has finally arrived in Stamford, with the first true and prolonged cold temperatures. I occasionally remind myself that despite the romance of a wintry Christmas, actual “winter” is much more at home in January and February around these parts. This is historically a dry season, but the lack of moisture is troubling to our wheat fields and the hopes of a good start on subsurface moisture for cotton fields and summer grazing. Yet, as a friend wryly observed last week, we’re still one day closer to the next rain.

Several times in the life of the West of 98 project, I’ve written essays on Martin Luther King Jr. Day that are centered around Dr. King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” I place that letter in the pantheon of the greatest American works of political and civic writing. This year, rather than attempt to rehash some of my previous thoughts, I’m using the timing of my Prairie Panicle newsletter to share with my readers my collected writing on this topic, to peruse as part of your holiday or as you may desire to read them in the future.

From 2021: “Better” considered the notion of being the thermostat that changes society around you.

From 2022: “More Convenient Seasons” was actually an improved version of one of my earliest such essays, dating to 2018, centered around the idea of not waiting for the “right time” to do good work.

From 2023: “The Nonsense of Inevitability” took aim at the flawed idea that societal progress inevitability comes with time, and not with the hard work of caring people.

From 2025: “Sharpening History’s Edges” discussed the peril of celebrating history and important figures by softening and ignoring the uncomfortable aspects of the story.

What I’ve Written

Stay tuned later this week for an important original essay. It’s taken me a few weeks to write, for reasons that will become apparent when it is published, but I look forward to sharing this with my readers.

This was a republished essay from 2024, but it concerns the importance of celebrating meaningfully on important holidays, rather than attempting to “perform” to meet some societal standard. It’s a topic near and dear to me.

I launched my kayak at first light on January 1 to start the calendar year off in a hopeful manner. I wrote about that experience, the struggle of early mornings, and the imagery of a rising sun.

Online Reading

Denmark is experimenting with red streetlights, as it is believed that this color will have less impact on wildlife than the historically orange and yellow hues. It’s an interesting idea and I want to see more places (especially here in Texas) experiment too, as suburban sprawl and new development further encroaches on natural ecosystems.

“The Matrix, MAGA, and the Southern Tradition” is a good read about the intersection of current technological and political forces and it draws a through line from Paul Kingsnorth’s “Against the Machine” (covered here recently) to the Southern Agrarians’ famed “I’ll Take My Stand” essays that were published before World War 2. Today’s struggles with social media and artificial intelligence, as “new” as they may feel, are a continuation of forces that have sought to reshape society for a long time.

How many of you have heard of the 1962 “Adaptive Program for Agriculture”? Not many, I suppose. More formally, it’s titled “An Adaptive Program for Agriculture: A Statement on National Policy by the Research and Policy Committee for Economic Development.” Sounds thrilling! Yet, this document is extraordinarily important to the post-war history of rural America and not in a good way. The brilliant John Kemp (more on him below), recently shared about this project in a podcast episode and paraphrasing, described it as follows:

The report found part of the trouble in managing the country was that the rural population was too independent. It was financially independent, it was heavily armed, and it could overthrow the government if it wanted to. It said that we don’t have effective control of our food supply to make it cheap and inexpensive for the long term, because of their independence. And so, if our country wants to maintain a cheap food supply for the long term, the authors saw two pathways. The first was to institute supply controls similar to the Canadian system. The second was to deplete the economic and financial success of the rural communities and bring them under control through financial management. They chose the second path.

Yikes. It’s worth reading more. I’ll be writing about this in the near future. Rural America did not decline as an inevitability. Rather, it came as the result of deliberate policy decisions by the leaders of our country.

Book Recommendation

Christmas provided quite a haul of new books, so I’ll be recommending from the stack over the months to come. First up is “The One-Straw Revolution,” written in 1975 by Japanese farmer Masanobu Fukuoka and viewed as one of the foundational texts of regenerative agriculture and raising food in harmony with nature. Some call it “Zen and the Art of Farming.” I’m excited to progress through this one.

Wendell Berry Read of the Month

I have been recommending Wendell Berry reads in this space for almost a year. Unconsciously I suppose, since it’s a baseline of my Wendell Berry universe, I’ve not actually recommended “Jayber Crow” as the read of the month. Read it in 2026, if you have not done so yet. The audiobook is narrated beautifully as well.

It will change your life and break your brain. You’ll never look at the world the same way again.

Listen/Watch Recs

John Kempf, mentioned above in the Online Reads section, is one of the most brilliant agronomists working today. His Regenerative Agriculture podcast dives deep into his ideas and those of the farmers and ranchers he works with. Kempf prioritizes soil health and biological health in a manner that drastically reduces input costs and improves soil and community. Even if you are not a farmer, John Kempf is an inspiring human.

West of 98 Store

I continue to generate some nice commissions at Bookshop.org, thanks to my West of 98 readers who choose to purchase books through my storefront. Any purchase at Bookshop supports independent bookstores instead of the Amazon leviathan, but if you purchase through my West of 98 bookstore. I receive a small commission that goes towards this humble project.

James Decker is the Mayor of Stamford, Texas and the creator of the West of 98 website and the Rural Church and State and West of 98 podcasts. Contact James and subscribe to these essays at westof98.substack.com and subscribe to him wherever podcasts are found.

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Early in the novel “Lonesome Dove,” it is revealed that Captain Woodrow F. Call is not a morning person.1

Larry McMurtry surely wrote this as a comedic character twist, because this runs counter to everything else that you know about Captain Call in the book and its prequels and sequel. Call is a humorless stickler. He’s uninterested in fun (his compatriot Augustus McCrae observes “you hate money more than you hate fun, if that’s even possible”). His work ethic makes the Puritans look a tad lazy. He profiles as the typical early riser who self-righteously judges anyone who might be caught burning daylight. And yet, he isn’t. It galls him that his fun-loving, unserious compatriot Captain McCrae is his early morning opposite:

“To Call’s regret he had never been able to come awake easily. His joints felt like they were filled with glue, and it was an irritation to see Augustus sitting on the black kettle looking as fresh as if he’d slept all night, when in fact he had probably played poker till one or two o’clock. Getting up early and feeling awake was the one skill he had never truly perfected—he got up, of course, but it never felt natural.”2

I was thinking about Captain Call and Captain McCrae this morning as I launched my kayak in the dark morning of New Year’s Day.3 I think that I am slightly more pleasant than Captain Call, but his mental struggle with early mornings is relatable. I, too, would prefer to rise ultra early and then joyously sit by a Dutch oven, cooking biscuits and reading the Good Book like Captain McCrae (a quote worth sharing: “he was not overly religious, but he did consider himself a fair prophet and liked to study the styles of his predecessors”).4

My granddad was an extraordinarily early riser, even in his latter days. He spent many years as a delivery man which required such hours (you can read more about that in my essay “The Table”), but he also went to bed extraordinarily early. Occasionally, when he would brag about awakening at 3 AM, my dad would remind him that it is a lot easier to get up at 3 AM when you went to bed at 6 PM.

Over the last few years of my early Sunday morning kayaking trips, I have reckoned with my feelings on the early morning struggle. It can be a stronger challenge when the trip is optional. Unlike my granddad rising at 3 AM to go meet the Mrs. Baird’s delivery truck, I don’t HAVE to get out of bed. I COULD sleep an hour longer on Sunday morning. What are you thinking, you idiot? These are just some of the thoughts that run through my head very early on Sunday mornings, when the sky is dark and most of the town is silent. When I push through the mental battle, it is always worth it. I remind myself thusly as I sit on my kayak, thankful that I won the battle with my brain, knowing full well that I will forget that joy and fight it all over again the next time.

Come early morning, night does not simply turn to day. There is a significant liminal space between the two, occupied by the twilight. It begins at what is officially termed “astronomical twilight,” the point at which just enough sunlight appears to obscure the faintest stars in the night sky. It works its way into “nautical twilight,” the period in which sailors can navigate with the horizon and other visible reference points. That gives way to “civil twilight,” when street lights and other artificial forms of illumination are no longer necessary. That concludes with the actual sunrise, when the sun finally erupts over the horizon in all its glory and it becomes day. This journey between night and day takes around an hour and a half, and it is a glorious journey.

If you follow me on social media, you know that I like to post pictures of the early morning sun from my Sunday morning kayaking trips. The pictures are usually accompanied by a thought on my mind or a philosophical quote from something that I am reading. These pictures are pulled almost entirely from the liminal space of twilight, because I’ve discovered something fascinating—the actual sunrise itself is the least interesting point in the journey between night and day. It ends the journey and officially opens the daytime, but the phases of twilight—especially the late stage of nautical twilight and the early stage of civil twilight—usually provide the most complex, brilliant, and unpredictable colors and scenery. When people speak of the beauty of a sunrise, they’re usually talking about what they see in those periods before the sun finally crosses the horizon.

There’s something metaphorical about the journey of the rising sun. It is fitting for the nature of life that the sun does not simply flip from night to day in a matter of seconds. It is a journey. It takes time. It makes us wait for the full beauty to arise. There is art in every second of it—different, unpredictable, varied based on the angle from which you view it. I do not believe that any of that is an accident or a coincidence.

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New Year’s Day might be a day to sleep in. If you had the opportunity and took it, especially with small children, I commend you for doing so. I was awakened early this morning with the thought that I could not and would not allow myself to miss the first journey of night to day in the new year. I stepped out of the house as astronomical twilight was wrapping up and I embarked onto the water to enjoy a clear-skied, orange-hued nautical and civil twilight before the sun launched into the sky for the first time of 2026.

There is much symbolism in the rising sun. It has been used throughout world history to symbolize new beginnings and new hope. It is no mere coincidence that the women set out for the tomb at sunrise on Sunday morning to discover the news of Christ’s resurrection. Japan adopted the symbolism of the rising sun in its earliest days as a nation (centuries before it would become infamous in World War 2). And indeed, the Japanese word for Japan itself (pronounced “Nihon” or “Nippon”) has a literal translation to “origin of the Sun.”

Closer to home, those of us with FFA roots know that the rising sun is prominent in the backdrop of the FFA emblem and serves as the symbol of the president in FFA ceremonies. The official FFA opening ceremonies describe the rising sun meaningfully: “the rising sun is the token of a new era in agriculture. If we will follow the leadership of our president, we shall be led out of the darkness of selfishness and into the glorious sunlight of brotherhood and cooperation.”5

2025 was a hard year for many people that I know. People suffered loss, experienced new challenges, or had life take twists that were not on the agenda. It challenged me too. The world was brutal in 2025 on several levels. Without question, I want to be a better spouse, parent, friend, gardener, mayor, lawyer, and human in 2026. That was on my mind as 2025 wrapped up. There was only one place to embrace that intention and bring 2026 to a hopeful start: by pushing through the mental blocks, dragging myself out of bed, and stepping into the year’s first rising sun.

Happy New Year, friends and readers. If 2025 was a dark year for you, I hope that the journey from the dark to the light leads you into new and unexpected beauty. Regardless of how your 2025 might’ve gone, the rising sun of 2026 brings the glorious sunlight of a new year. Let us strive to make it a good one.

James Decker is the Mayor of Stamford, Texas and the creator of the West of 98 website and the Rural Church and State and West of 98 podcasts. Contact James and subscribe to these essays at westof98.substack.com and subscribe to him wherever podcasts are found. Check out the West of 98 Bookstore with book lists for essential reads here.

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Thanks for reading West of 98! These essays appear weekly-ish on my Substack and in your email inbox. All my writing is free, but you can subscribe here at West of 98 or make a one-time contribution at Buy Me A Coffee. Once a month, I write “The Prairie Panicle” to summarize my recommendations for books, good essays, podcasts, and more. You can also learn also more about this work and read some of my top essays by clicking on the “About” page.

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I wrote this essay shortly before Christmas Day in 2024. Today, on Christmas Eve 2025, I want to share these feelings anew with you, my readers. I am thankful for each and every one of you and I wish you and yours a meaningful Christmas season, in whatever way is best suited for you in the current season of life that you may be in.

In the early years of West of 98 on Substack, I wrote several essays sharing my complicated feelings on the Christmas season. This is something that has weighed on me through adulthood.

Christmas can be a beautiful season in so many ways. It can be filled with hope, joy, and special memories. It can also be extremely difficult. It is a season that places importance on family—gathering together, spending time with one another, sharing meals and gifts, and the like—but family time does not guarantee happiness for everyone. In many cases, it does exactly the opposite. Some of our friends and neighbors are lonely. Some are struggling with grief from the loss of a loved one. It may be their first Christmas without that person or their fifteenth, but each year is a struggle. Other folks may have a difficult or nonexistent relationship with family, so there is no “happy family gathering.”

The commercialization of Christmas frustrates me deeply for this very reason. The innate and flawed human aspects of a holiday are difficult enough to work through. Then, we are expected to perform within rituals that seem to move on their own volition at this stage of society. Gifts, decorations, responding with the appropriate level of jolliness when we hear Christmas music…it is all thrust on us regardless of whatever else life throws our way. We have to perform or people will be disappointed!

This topic has been covered by countless pastors, writers, sociologists, and other commentators. None of them address it as well as Merle Haggard did in 1973 when he wrote “If We Make It Through December.” Great songwriters have a knack for adopting the point of view of their song’s protagonist. They make you feel it through their words and music, even if your life is far removed from that in the song. Merle was one of the greatest in any genre for that very reason (this is also why “Okie from Muskogee” evokes such intense emotion, but that’s a conversation for another day).1 His narrator has just been laid off from a factory job and his Christmas season is now filled with dread. His prospects are grim and he can only think about the consequences of the societal pressures on what constitutes an “appropriate” Christmas for his family:

“I don’t mean to hate December

It’s meant to be the happy time of year

And my little girl don’t understand

Why daddy can’t afford no Christmas here.”

Why? Does the narrator love his daughter any less if he cannot afford Christmas gifts? Of course not. A parent who cares about their family in the manner expressed in that song has a deep, abiding love for family whether the Christmas bill is 15 cents or $15 million. But society tells us otherwise. In the “Christmas Party” episode of The Office, Michael Scott describes the value of gift-giving thusly:

Presents are the best way to show someone how much you care. It’s like this tangible thing that you can point to and say, “Hey, man, I love you this many dollars worth.”

Now, that’s a man justifying the purchase of a $400 video iPod for a Secret Santa gift swap with a $20 spending limit, but it’s a sharp cultural commentary as well. If you pay enough attention to Christmas advertising campaigns, you know that Michael Scott is saying what advertisers want us to believe. If Merle Haggard’s narrator couldn’t afford suitable Christmas gifts for his daughter, then he must not love her enough. That was the expectation and pressure that he felt.

I doubt my readers are shocked to learn that Wendell Berry is unimpressed with this societal pressure on the value of gifts at Christmas time. In an interview that appears in the book “Conversations with Wendell Berry,” the great Kentucky sage says:

“People who love each other need to have something they can do for each other, and it will need to be something necessary, not something frivolous, You can’t carry out a relationship on the basis of Christmas and anniversary and birthday presents. It won’t work.

You have to be doing something that you need help with, and your wife needs to be doing something that she needs help with. You do needful, useful things for each other, and that seems to me to be the way that a union is made...You’re being made a partner by your partner’s needs and the things that you're required to do to help...Love is not just a feeling; it’s a practice, something you practice whether you feel like it or not.”

Berry speaks of gift-giving primarily within the context of a marriage, but the undercurrent applies to all human relationships. A healthy relationship cannot be built on mere transactions. Strong relationships enhance each life that is a party to the relationship, whether those enhancements have a monetary value or not.

The protagonist of Merle Haggard’s song did not love his wife or daughter any less because he could not point to a gift and say “I love you this many dollars worth.” His love is expressed by his undying hope to give them a better life in a warmer season, in California, anytime after December.

As Christmas draws near, I want to encourage each of you. Some of you may be praying that if you can make it through December you’ll be fine. Some of you may be struggling with grief, loneliness, or other pressure. Some of you may be living the dream and spending untold sums of money on Christmas gifts. But in reality, our ability to “perform” this Christmas does not define you. Love is not measured in dollar values, no matter what Michael Scott thinks, and no matter how much or how little we spend. There is no “right” way to celebrate Christmas, other than to love people where and how we can and remember the message of hope that underscores the Christmas story itself. Love is defined through practice. Love is defined by enhancing the lives of the people that we love, however we do that. And that, my friends, is a beautiful way to celebrate this Christmas season.

James Decker is the Mayor of Stamford, Texas and the creator of the West of 98 website and the Rural Church and State and West of 98 podcasts. Contact James and subscribe to these essays at westof98.substack.com and subscribe to him wherever podcasts are found. Check out the West of 98 Bookstore with book lists for essential reads here.

Welcome to West of 98! In addition to my essays, I write a mid-month newsletter called The Prairie Panicle. It summarizes my writing over the previous month and offers additional reading/listening/watching recommendations that strike my mood in the moment. All my writing is free, but you can subscribe here at West of 98 or make a one-time contribution at Buy Me A Coffee.

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The Solstice

I am publishing this late on the evening of December 20, 2025. The night of December 20 and the morning of December 21 is the winter solstice, the point at which the Northern Hemisphere is the farthest away from the Sun. It is the shortest day and the longest night of the year. It marks an end and a beginning—the end of one season and the start of another. Immediately after the solstice, the days grow incrementally longer and the nights gradually shorten.

The shortening days and lengthening nights can mess with us. In a modern world where we do not live seasonally like our ancestors, this plays havoc with our daily routines and schedules. Even in a relatively southern location like Stamford, it is often dark before we get home in the evenings on a weekday. I do not envy my friends in northern latitudes, where our sunset tonight at 5:36 pm is but a wistful dream at this time of year.

This affects our minds and our bodies. I sometimes long for a world where we can live more seasonally. Adopting a pre-modern lifestyle would be very difficult, if not impossible, but we can still find ways to adapt. I hope that in 2026, many of us are able to do that. I firmly believe that living within some seasonal rhythms would be healthy and fulfilling.

What I’ve Written

It was a slow writing month, but I published one of my favorite and most popular essays that I’ve ever written, about the 50th anniversary of the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald. I managed to surprise a few people who never expected me to publish 1700 words on the most famous of Great Lakes shipwrecks. It can be said that I contain multitudes. If you have not read this essay, I encourage you to do so. It explains my ongoing fascination with the good ship’s demise.

On the topic of the aforementioned solstice, I’ll recommend an essay that I previously published, written in the early morning hours of Christmas Eve two years ago, atop my kayak. It reflects on the solstice, the darkness, and the value of darkness amidst light and of fast amidst feast. It references the brilliant ’s Christmas Eve essay “Atheists in Space, or: Why the Future is Religious.” It is one of my favorite of Kingsnorth’s writings and I commend it to you for your own Christmas reading.

Online Reading

Over at Front Porch Republic, Elizabeth Stice looks at 90s rom-com “You’ve Got Mail” with a bit of an agrarian eye: “You Think This Machine’s Your Friend, But It’s Not.” Apologies to my friends who enjoy this movie, but sometimes time brings us some fresh and needed wisdom on things that we thought we knew.

Speaking of 90s movies: Lauren and I recently watched “The Mighty Ducks” on a Friday night before our local year-end soccer tournament the next day. I’ve watched plenty of movies that did not hold up well from my childhood to today, but I am pleased to report: Gordon Bombay and the Ducks are just as good now as they were when I was 8 years old.

My English friend recently published “Discovering Old Churches” at Hearth & Field, and like all of Hadden’s writing, it is magnificent.

A local friend sent me this and I found it interesting: “The Data Center Water Crisis Isn’t Real.” I need to study on it more before I decide the extent to which that I agree, but the author makes a glaring and important point: all human activities create a water footprint, so it is incomplete and misleading to analyze the water use of a data center without the context of the rest of our water footprint.

This emphasizes a point that I have long argued on environmental topics in general. Many agricultural interest groups are reluctant to acknowledge that agricultural practices DO have an environmental impact, as if admitting the obvious would be a concession against environmental activists. Yet, everything we do has an environmental impact. We shouldn’t pretend otherwise. The conversation should be about how we prioritize our activities so that our environmental impact and occurs in the service of things that truly matter to a healthy and meaningful life.

Book Recommendation

“How It Went” is a collection of thirteen newly-written short stories released by Wendell Berry in 2022. I had inadvertently failed to purchase it, so I remedied that before I start in on “Marce Catlett.” It further adds to the joy and intrigue of the Port William universe, with farmer-writer Andy Catlett (a fictional stand-in for Berry himself) sharing some stories from his own life and recollecting some stories that were passed down to him from generations prior.

Wendell Berry Read of the Month

Just as I was getting ready to finish this newsletter, the good folks at Plough published “Six New Poems By Wendell Berry”, which was a shoo-in for inclusion. You might say that the timing is…poetic. /rimshot

It is a good introduction to Berry’s poetry, as each of the poems is quite short. The introduction by Plough poetry editor Jane Clark Scharl is beautiful in itself:

The word “verse” has an agricultural past: it comes from the Latin word for “furrowing” or “turning up the soil.” Language, then, is a field ready for the plow; a poem is the careful turning up of that field. A poem must break up the dry outer crush of assumptions to expose the fertile soil underneath.

Listen/Watch Recs

Last time in the Panicle, I shared a conversation that I recorded on Youtube with my friend Preston Cox about data centers and new economic opportunities in Stamford. Since then, we formally announced that Google has approached the City of Stamford to purchase water for non-cooling usage at their planned data centers north of our community. I recorded a solo video on Facebook outlining the proposal, the opportunities to the City, and how our leaders are viewing this unique situation in our community’s history.

You can view it here.

My pal Nate over at declared it “Beef Week” shortly before Thanksgiving, as he recorded a series of interviews about cattle markets, the beef industry, and rural economies. He’s published three (so far) and they are fantastic. I cannot recommend these conversations any more highly:

Mike Callicrate on Breaking the Beef Cartel, Monopoly Power, and Maker-Owned Markets

Basel Musharbash on Antitrust Law, Beef Politics, and Actually Using Government Power

Jason Mauck on Rural Revival and the USDA

West of 98 Store

I continue to generate some nice commissions at Bookshop.org, thanks to my West of 98 readers who choose to purchase books through my storefront. Any purchase at Bookshop supports independent bookstores instead of the Amazon leviathan, but if you purchase through my West of 98 bookstore. I receive a small commission that goes towards this humble project.

James Decker is the Mayor of Stamford, Texas and the creator of the West of 98 website and the Rural Church and State and West of 98 podcasts. Contact James and subscribe to these essays at westof98.substack.com and subscribe to him wherever podcasts are found.

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The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down, they say, of the big lake they called “Gitche Gumee.”

A couple of years ago, there was an internet gag (call it a meme, I suppose) about men thinking about the Roman Empire. It went viral on Tiktok with women asking the men in their lives how often they thought about that topic. Evidently, a lot of men give serious and frequent thought to the Roman Empire. I can’t say that I identified with it. I am something of a history lover, but I’m not sure the Roman Empire cracks even the top 25 of history topics that interest me.

On the other hand, I spend a lot of time thinking about the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.

A lot.

I spend more time thinking about it than I should or that makes sense, especially for someone who lives approximately 1,500 miles away from where the Great Lakes freighter went down in a storm 50 years ago last week.

Why? That is a good question. My wife would probably like to know the answer herself.

I can’t really explain why. I just do.

Maybe it is because it is such a stunning story. The SS Edmund Fitzgerald was a massive and celebrated freighter. It was over 700 feet long and it hauled over 25 tons of iron ore in a single load. For 17 years, beginning with its maiden voyage in 1958, it hauled over 700 loads of ore from the Iron Range of Minnesota to ironworks at Great Lakes ports in Ohio and Michigan. It repeatedly set Great Lakes hauling records and then broke its own records.

And then, one day, for mysterious and shocking reasons, the Edmund Fitzgerald was no more. Maybe that is the reason why.

The Edmund Fitzgerald left Superior, Wisconsin on November 9, 1975, amidst calm and ordinary November weather. But late that night, the gales of November came early. Edmund Fitzgerald and another ship, the Arthur M. Anderson, met an ugly winter storm on Lake Superior that they would battle through the day on November 10. The Anderson lost sight of the Edmund Fitzgerald that afternoon, due to the blinding snow, but they remained in radio contact. The Fitzgerald radioed late in the afternoon that it was taking on water and had suffered damage. At 7:10 p.m. that night, the Fitzgerald radioed the Anderson for the last time. Captain Ernest McSorley reported “we are holding our own.” The ship was never heard from again. Ten minutes later, it disappeared from the Anderson’s radar.

Many theories have been offered (more than I can recount in this space), but no one knows exactly what caused the Edmund Fitzgerald to sink. It just did, with 29 brave mariners on board. Maybe that is part of the reason for my fascination. These were all ordinary working men, from small and mid-sized Great Lakes towns and cities plying their trade on the waters, raising families and doing hard, good work that was vital to their towns, their regions, and their nation.

Maybe it’s the Great Lakes themselves. To call Gitche Gumee, better known to Americans as Lake Superior, a “big lake” would be an understatement. Superior is not just big. It is the biggest lake in the world by surface area and the third-largest in the world by the volume of water that it holds. To put it in perspective, the City of Stamford constructed Lake Stamford in 1953. It spans 5,000 acres and holds about 50,000 acre feet of water. It is a nice-sized lake that provides an ample water supply for Stamford and recreation for visitors from across West Texas. The largest lake in Texas is Toledo Bend Reservoir. It is massive. It covers 186,000 acres and holds 4.5 million acre-feet of water on the Texas-Louisiana border. But then there’s Lake Superior. Unlike every lake in Texas (except for Caddo Lake), Superior is naturally formed. Superior spans 20 MILLION acres and holds 9.8 BILLION acre-feet of water. The Great Lakes are simply on a different level than every other lake in America, whether natural or man-made.

Maybe it is the Great Lakes weather. We in West Texas are no strangers to rough, wild, and unpredictable weather, from tornadoes to giant hail to brutal wind to blizzards to raining mud, so a calm November day turning into a vicious snowstorm with hurricane force winds overnight? I get it. Sort of. Beyond my comprehension is the effect of that weather onto a giant body of water. Late in the afternoon of November 10, the Anderson recorded sustained winds of 67 mph, gusts up to 86 mph, and constant 25 foot waves, with rogue waves exceeding 35 feet in height. There are theories that the Edmund Fitzgerald might have experienced waves taller than 50 feet at the moment of its destruction. Curiously, for reasons of science that are not fully explainable by me, salt water actually inhibits the formation of waves, so ocean waves are smoother and more consistent in size and frequency, while waves on a body of fresh water can become taller and more unpredictable. It is stunning to consider the ferocity of such a storm and such waves on a body of water, strong enough to wreck a 700 foot freighter loaded with 26,000 tons of iron ore.

Maybe it is because of THAT. The Edmund Fitzgerald is not like other famous shipwrecks. Its demise did not come from hubris or recklessness. This was not the Titanic, with boasts of unsinkability, racing through an ice field to set speed records, making ill-fated decisions that would cost 1,500 lives, for reasons known only to Captain Smith and Bruce Ismay. It did not come from the perils of war or conquest. It was not the unfortunate Lusitania, torpedoed by a German U-boat in the early years of a world war. It was not like any number of treasure-laden pirate ships or Spanish galleons that landed at the bottom of the Caribbean Sea headed to or from dubious missions. Captain Ernest McSorley was an experienced and well-regarded Great Lakes captain, known for his great skill in rough weather. Sometimes, the great skill, care, and engineering brilliance of man is still no match for the ferocity of nature.

Or, maybe, it is because of Gordon Lightfoot, who captured The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald so well in arguably the greatest story song ever written (as a sidebar, compiling a list of the greatest story songs is a necessary future essay topic, so if you are still reading this far, please send me your suggestions). The song is brilliant. It is 6-1/2 minutes long. There’s no chorus. There’s no hook or instrumental solo. It is structured into a series of two-line stanzas. Nothing about it is designed to be a radio hit. It was a massive hit anyway. It is a folk song written about nature, place, and 20th century life in America. It is beautiful, tragic, and powerful.

The wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald would not be such a famous event if not for Gordon Lightfoot’s songwriting. Lightfoot read an article about it in Newsweek magazine only a few weeks after the shipwreck and he was appalled to learn that it had not received more news coverage, so he set out to write a song about it and give it a place in history and in hearts and minds that it deserved. What came next (not just the song as a hit) is remarkable.

There have been over 10,000 shipwrecks on the Great Lakes in the past 300 years. Tens of thousands of people have died on military ships, freighters, and recreational boats. Author John U. Bacon details that there were over 6,000 commercial shipwrecks alone on the Great Lakes from 1875 to the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald in 1975. The shocking loss of such a celebrated and successful freighter altered the course of Great Lakes shipping forever. Government regulators and the shipping industry alike changed their practices and procedures. It worked. Since November 10, 1975, there have been zero commercial shipwrecks on the Great Lakes. None.

There is a stanza in the song that haunts me every time I hear it:

Does anyone know where the love of God goes

when the waves turn the minutes to hours?

That is a philosophical rumination which has no good answer here on Earth, but the lack of a good answer cannot stop you from thinking about it at length. There is a reason why songwriting is such a brilliant skill. Gordon Lightfoot captures perfectly the inexplicability of tragedy and the unstoppable forces of nature.

Why did I write this? I really do not know. I am a curious person, perhaps to my own peril, and the story of the Edmund Fitzgerald evokes my curiosity more than most stories. I’ve needed to get off my chest for a while my fascination with this topic. There seemed to be no better time than the 50th anniversary of the wreck.

The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald is a quintessential story of local culture. It tells the tale of a people—the men and women of Great Lakes freighters—who have hauled bulk goods to and fro for the better part of 200 years, helping to keep America running. We all benefit from their work, which is always hard, and is often dangerous and miserable, even when the ships reach their destination safely. We need more folk songs and stories like theirs, telling the stories of local culture in song, literature, and film. We need not a tragedy to inspire the storytelling either. We simply need to log and pass on the folklore of our own local cultures.

The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down of the big lake they call “Gitche Gumee”…let the legends live on of our places as well.

For audio and video accompaniment:

The original Gordon Lightfoot version of The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald can be found here.

One of the great bands of our day, Turnpike Troubadours, covered the song at a live show in Cleveland right before the 50th anniversary and a fan caught it on video.

Texas musician and history buff Brian Burns covered the song on his 2004 album “Heavy Weather” and he ended his version by listing the name and rank of each of the men lost in the wreck. A YouTuber took Burns’s version and added pictures of each of the men in the tribute.

James Decker is the Mayor of Stamford, Texas and the creator of the West of 98 website and the Rural Church and State and West of 98 podcasts. Contact James and subscribe to these essays at westof98.substack.com and subscribe to him wherever podcasts are found. Check out the West of 98 Bookstore with book lists for essential reads here.

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Welcome to West of 98! In addition to my weekly essays, I write a mid-month newsletter called The Prairie Panicle. It summarizes my writing over the previous month and offers additional reading/listening/watching recommendations that strike my mood in the moment.

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Note to my Readers

I’ve spent the last eight years writing these essays on a weekly basis, starting on Facebook and then continuing for the last five years on Substack. As you’ve noticed, my weekly rhythm has slacked a bit recently. I’ve been in a creative dry spell, combined with some writer’s block for the essays that I have in planning, and life has just been…a lot. The life of a lawyer who simultaneously volunteers as a small-town mayor can be exhausting at times, particularly as some new and cautiously exciting times are dawning in Stamford (more on that below), and while also not trying to sacrifice family time with children.

I think most folks certainly understand and I am grateful for your patience. I am excited for at least a half dozen essays that I am presently writing. I hope to get the words on paper and then the screen soon for you to enjoy them. I have one to publish later this week that will be of a surprising theme (that’s the only hint for now). As always, thank you for your support, be it by subscribing, sharing, supporting with a paid subscription/one-time donation, or just through your encouragement. I don’t take any of it lightly.

What I’ve Written

Like I said, it was a slow month. I re-published a prior essay about our family’s decision to serve hot dogs in our front yard on Halloween night to trick or treaters. We did that again this year. Trick-or-treating was fraught with some peril and disagreement locally, due to Halloween’s falling on a Friday night. It happened to be the Friday night of the last home football game, in which senior football players, cheerleaders, and band members were honored. A high school football game in a town like Stamford occupies more than just the players, coaches, and parents—a veritable army of community volunteers, school employees, dedicated fans and more would’ve had to bow out of trick-or-treating on Friday night.

As such, I issued a community call to trick-or-treat on Saturday night instead. Not everyone agreed. Some folks were busy on Saturday, so they trick-or-treated or handed out candy on Friday night, which was great. A few kids went both nights, which was even better! Saturday night was a raucous affair in our front yard and we served about 425 hot dogs, in addition to candy and fruit cups. Trick-or-treating culture is alive and well in Stamford and it matters, because it’s the sign of true community. People walking neighborhoods together, going door-to-door even to houses they don’t know because they feel comfortable, families hanging out in my yard for 20 minutes with their friends as they eat hot dogs…it’s something to cherish.

On another note, last Saturday night, I was the keynote speaker at the Chamber of Commerce banquet in Wellington, Texas. It was a speech that I was pleased to write and even more pleased to be invited to give and as soon as I can edit it down a bit, I’ll be publishing it here at West of 98.

Online Reading

Google is coming. This not a drill or a pipe dream. Google is building data centers near Stamford. This has been something of an open secret locally for some time, but it is now “official.” Last Friday, I trekked to Midlothian, Texas (just south of Dallas-Fort Worth, for non-Texans), which is the site of an existing Google data center, to represent the City of Stamford as the Google CEO and the Governor of Texas announced Google’s massive new investment into Texas. There’s more on this below and much more to come later on my part.

Our Congressman is retiring. I share this because Congressman Arrington’s tenure representing the people of Stamford and West Texas overlaps with a formative period in my family. When he came to town in the fall of 2015 campaigning for the job, I was only engaged. Lauren and I got married in February of 2016, he advanced to the runoff in early March, and Lauren promptly went to work on his campaign. She worked tirelessly for the first three months of our marriage, driving Jodey around, setting up meetings, and campaigning throughout rural communities, helping secure the rural vote that put him over the top and got him elected. She then worked for him as a district representative focused on agricultural issues for over two years, until she was offered the job running the Rolling Plains Cotton Growers, a regional organization of farmers that offered more flexibility for a new mom. I haven’t agreed with all of Jodey’s decisions, but he always listened to me and heard me out when we agreed or disagreed. He’ll always be my friend and I am thankful for his service over the last decade.

Stamford has a history of strong relationships with its Congressman (headlined by 26 years of representation by Stamford native Charlie Stenholm) and we will work to meet with all the candidates to replace Chairman Arrington, see who is the best fit for the future of rural Texas, and work to turn out the vote accordingly. If you are reading this elsewhere, don’t be afraid to call your Congressman or get involved with their office or campaign. They might not always listen, but they also just might.

Book Recommendation

My friend has a new collection of poetry coming out in January. It’s poetry about his place—the Panhandle of West Texas—and it’s titled “Call Out Coyote.” It is available for pre-order and I encourage you to go support an independent writer and poet. He hails from Umbarger, Texas but now lives in the Umbarger suburb of Amarillo. He is talented but also a genuinely good human. We need to support more of those.

Wendell Berry Read of the Month

I’ve recommended it before, but Wendell Berry’s “The Idea of a Local Economy” is on the forefront of my mind. It it mentally challenging to navigate a world of local economic growth fueled by data centers through the prism of an agrarian mind (inspired in part by a Kentucky poet and writer who refuses to purchase a computer). Yet, I think it is a proper perspective for my place and I will not relent. Here’s a snippet:

“So far as I can see, the idea of a local economy rests upon only two principles: neighborhood and subsistence. In a viable neighborhood, neighbors ask themselves what they can do or provide for one another, and they find answers that they and their place can afford. This, and nothing else, is the practice of neighborhood. This practice must be, in part, charitable, but it must also be economic, and the economic part must be equitable; there is a significant charity in just prices.”

Listen/Watch Recs

On that note of data centers, over the past few months, we’ve had lots of commentary, questions, rumors, and other excitement around town as people consider the unknown. I sat down with my longtime friend Preston Cox to discuss those issues, answer questions, and address how the City of Stamford and community leaders are navigating the concerns and the opportunities that lie ahead. It should be a worthwhile conversation even if you aren’t from Stamford. And yes, before you ask, my blazer is absolutely suede. It’s a 1970s piece from my late grandfather’s closet that he appears to have purchased at Malouf’s in Lubbock. I wear it as often as possible.

West of 98 Store

I have recently picked up some great commissions at Bookshop.org, thanks to my generous West of 98 readers. Any purchase at Bookshop supports independent bookstores instead of the Amazon leviathan, but if you purchase through my West of 98 bookstore. I receive a small commission that goes towards this humble project.

James Decker is the Mayor of Stamford, Texas and the creator of the West of 98 website and the Rural Church and State and West of 98 podcasts. Contact James and subscribe to these essays at westof98.substack.com and subscribe to him wherever podcasts are found.

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I love hot dogs. All hot dogs, to be exact. Give me a high-quality bun with an all-beef frank and fancy garnishments. Give me a cheap frank on a piece of white bread with a convenience store mustard packet. If you give me a hot dog, I am going to eat it and love it. This year at the Splash Day opening for the Stamford City Pool, the Grand Theatre sold hot dogs. I didn’t even try to keep count of my consumption. I just wrote a donation check that would allow me to participate in my very own all-you-can-eat buffet.1 If you ask my favorite hot dog, I’ll tell you that it's the last one I ate.

Wait, sorry. This was not intended to be an essay purely about hot dogs. I digress.

But you know who else likes hot dogs (albeit not quite as much as me)? Basically everyone.

Back on Halloween in 2022, I decided to sit on my front porch and hand out candy, rather than sit inside and wait for visitors to knock on the door. It created an enormous increase in traffic. Trick-or-treaters were more likely to stop at a house when someone sat on the front porch welcoming them with a bowl of candy.

That experience made me consider how to improve on it for 2023. I turned to the trusty hot dog. Last year, we bought about 200 hot dogs and buns. I set up my grill and a fire pit in the front yard and I started cooking away in the late afternoon. The results were…incredible. I lost about five hot dogs in the fire and I donated those burned specimens to the bottomless appetite of a trusty dog who stood around offering to assist in that very capacity. The other 195 hot dogs fed Stamfordites of every age. Children, from toddlers to middle schoolers, were thrilled to get a hot dog. They ate them in my yard. They ate them walking down the street. They took them home for supper. Teenagers stopped by specifically because they heard hot dogs were being served. Parents seemed relieved that their children might eat something with more sustenance than candy and they absolutely grabbed their own hot dog when I encouraged it. I didn’t have to tell most of them twice. Everyone loves hot dogs!

I am on record as a huge fan of trick-or-treating. I know people have mixed feelings about Halloween and that’s fine. But you know what is objectively awesome? A community where children can walk safely through the neighborhoods, where families feel comfortable taking their children to the homes of strangers, and where adults are eager to pass out goodies from their front door. That is the norm in Stamford. We should not take that for granted, because it is very special. Not every place has it. A friend of mine recently wrote on Twitter2 that door-to-door trick-or-treating is “one of the last remaining artifacts of a high-trust and safe community.” That line made me think.

Building and maintaining a high-trust and safe community is something worthwhile. It is work worth doing, to steal a phrase from Theodore Roosevelt. That work is even more essential in a world that seems ever-more untrustworthy, unsafe, and chaotic. I don’t care if it happens on Halloween night or a random Tuesday in March. We need a little more of that spirit.

This year, I will buy 300 hot dogs. At least. I would like to eat a few of them myself and I didn’t get any last year! I have heard that a neighbor is plotting to offer something complementary at his house. I hope others around town are thinking about unique offerings of their own. That is why I am publishing this essay earlier in October, to help ignite ideas from my readers inside and outside of Stamford. If you want to offer something unique at your house on Halloween, this is the endorsement you’re waiting for.

Last year, it was fast and furious. I gave away almost 200 hot dogs in less than two hours. At one point, there were at least 20 kids lined up at my grill waiting on a hot dog. Afterwards, I was exhausted in the best and most satisfying fashion. I am enthused to see what transpires this year. There will be many hot dogs. There will be other fun goodies, both at my house and elsewhere in town. And most importantly, there will be community.

James Decker is the Mayor of Stamford, Texas and the creator of the West of 98 website and the “Rural Church and State” and “West of 98” podcasts. Contact James and subscribe to these essays at westof98.substack.com and subscribe to him wherever podcasts are found. Check out the West of 98 Bookstore with book lists for essential reads here.

Welcome to West of 98! In addition to my weekly essays, I write a mid-month newsletter called The Prairie Panicle. It summarizes my writing over the previous month and offers additional reading/listening/watching recommendations that strike my mood in the moment.

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Book Recommendation

My book recommendation takes center stage this month. Late September saw the release of Paul Kingsnorth’s highly anticipated new book, “Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity.” I am still working my way through it, but it is extraordinary.

Kingsnorth has been writing about “The Machine” for several years, primarily at his “Abbey of Misrule” Substack. It’s an idea that we all understand, even if we don’t realize it. We’re all being ever-more subjected to coercive and oppressive technologies, fueled by government and business. It’s making our lives and the world around us worse and all of us more dependent on the technology and its consequences. Kingsnorth writes about the creation of this mess, how and why we’re all caught in its grip, and how we live an ordered meaningful life in its midst.

What I’ve Written

It was another slow month of original writing, as I work on some larger projects and deal with the generalities of my life right now. I started off by re-publishing last year’s popular “A Restatement,” which laid out the creation of West of 98 and the influences on my life and worldview that have led me to this place:

That was a precursor to the beginning of a new series that will recur from time to time, writing in depth about those specific influences. Of course, that starts with Wendell Berry and my reading recommendations for his work. Part 1 discusses my recommendation for a top work of fiction and non-fiction, along with my favorite essay. Part 2 will discuss more of the individual works in each category.

Online Reading

Alvaro Bedaya recently served at the Federal Trade Commission and his new essay “How I Became a Populist” outlines his view as to why the great divide in America is not right/left, Republican/Democrat, ethnicity, or any other standard division, but is instead the moneyed power at the top of society vs the rest of us. I would agree and, so would Paul Kingsnorth, because this is effectively an extension of his idea of The Machine.

I regularly recommend in this space and this month is no exception. “Jesus died for those we call our enemies” is exactly as important and as uncomfortable as the title suggests it.

Wendell Berry Read of the Month

This is a rare moment when I’m recommending a Wendell Berry work that I have not yet read myself! “Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story” is Berry’s new novel, released earlier this month. I’ll be reading it as soon as I finish the new Kingsnorth. The reviews I’ve read are excellent, but also sobering in the realization that this may be the last Port William novel. I intend to savor this fully and I hope other Berry readers do as well. There’s an undertone about the consolidation of agricultural markets in the book that is, well, relevant.

Listen/Watch Recs

I’ve previously shared about Jody Slaughter’s good work with the WTX Podcast, which chock full of interesting stories from the history of West Texas. His new episode, “Texas Tech: The College West Texas Built,” is superb. It tells the story of the founding of Texas Tech, which is really a tale about the people of West Texas organizing to control their own future, instead of being set adrift on the whims of people in Austin, Dallas, and Houston. Boy if that isn’t relatable in the Year of Our Lord 2025…

There’s scandal, backstabbing, political infighting, a barnstorming tour to every town vying for the college, talk of West Texas secession(!), and organization of the once-powerful West Texas Chamber of Commerce. Bring THAT back, Stamford headquarters and all. Even if you’re not a Red Raider, this is a fun listen.

My friend ’s new Mountain & Prairie podcast is a big one. I’ve been a listener since the earliest days (and an early guest!) and I’ve long awaited the moment when he’d get to interview the great Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard. It’s a great conversation about Yvon’s life experiences, constantly reinventing Patagonia’s work, and the depth of his passion for fly fishing, which is a topic that interests me in great detail. As a side note, I cannot more highly recommend Chouinard’s memoir/business book “Let My People Go Surfing.”

Also, I can now say that Yvon Chouinard, Nick Offerman, and I have all been on the same podcast.

West of 98 Store

I have recently picked up some great commissions at Bookshop.org, thanks to my generous West of 98 readers. Any purchase at Bookshop supports independent bookstores instead of the Amazon leviathan, but if you purchase through my West of 98 bookstore. I receive a small commission that goes towards this humble project.

James Decker is the Mayor of Stamford, Texas and the creator of the West of 98 website and the Rural Church and State and West of 98 podcasts. Contact James and subscribe to these essays at westof98.substack.com and subscribe to him wherever podcasts are found.

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I don’t rightly recall the first time I heard Wendell Berry’s name.

I was a voracious (and obnoxious) reader in my youth, but I did not grow up reading his work. My world of literature was then very Texas-centric, probably to a fault. I might’ve heard his name before, but I distinctly remember learning about Wendell Berry after reading John Graves’s “Goodbye to a River” in my early 20s. I looked online to learn more about Graves, his life story, and his other writings. I read an article that described Graves as Texas’s closest answer to Wendell Berry. So, naturally, I inquired a little more to understand that analogy. I consider “Goodbye to a River” one of the most important books I’ve ever read, because it opened the channels of my mind to place-based writing that would help shape my own passions in the years to come. In a way, “Goodbye to a River” also led me to Wendell Berry, because that description caused me to wonder who this Berry guy was. I looked him up and I found out that he was a writer, poet, and farmer in Kentucky. He sounded interesting, but the path of inquiry ended there for the time being.

Several years later, my longtime friend Matthew Luensmann sent me a copy of Berry’s book “The Unsettling of America.” The gift came unexpectedly and he included a note that he thought I might enjoy it. I found the book interesting, but it was one of those “not just yet” moments in life. Little did I know what would come in the future.

Fast forward a few more years. I became friends via Twitter with a fellow from Lubbock named Jay Leeson. Jay had launched a radio show and then a podcast that he devoted to what he called “prairie populism.” Jay loved rural communities and he used his wit, his skills as a writer and a speaker, and his influence to advocate for rural Texas and its people. Jay periodically referenced Wendell Berry on Twitter and over the airwaves. He most frequently referred to a book called “Jayber Crow,” which I had not heard of at the time. Jay had studied at Asbury Seminary, the great Methodist seminary in Kentucky, and during that sojourn he actually met Mr. Berry and corresponded with him. I am not sure if Jay directly instructed me to read “Jayber Crow” or if the recommendation just seeped into my bloodstream, but either way, it worked. After reading “Jayber Crow,” I returned to “The Unsettling of America.” It was now the right time. Jay passed away just over two years ago, but my life and my work as an advocate for Stamford and places like it would not be the same if it wasn’t for Matthew Luensmann sending me that book years ago and Jay Leeson preaching about Wendell Berry and “Jayber Crow.”

This essay launches a periodic series that will detail the biggest influences on my life and my worldview, how they shaped me, and why I find them so important. Hopefully, it encourages some of my readers to read some of my influences or it helps my readers to consider their own similarly-powerful influences. This series can be viewed as a continuation of my essay “A Restatement,” in which I set forth the principles behind West of 98 and its creation. In that essay, I described Berry’s impact on my life as follows:

“In Berry, I found a wise elder who believed in the potential of rural America in the same manner that I did. He was uninterested in political partisanship or economic trends. He did not find rural America’s salvation in carving it into sprawling suburbs and exurbs. He took accurate and deeply uncomfortable positions, like identifying the relationship between rural America and the rest of our country as that of an exploited colony and a ruthless colonizer. He centered decades of writing around the idea of man’s duty to love God and Creation and to love our neighbor. He avowed that we pursued this calling by loving our place, stewarding our land, and living in community with one another.”

Periodically, friends and online acquaintances will ask me for recommendations on where to start reading Wendell Berry. I give those recommendations out in text messages, social media direct messages, and in person. Finally, those recommendations will have a permanent and public home right here at West of 98. You can also listen to a podcast discussion that I did with my friend Dan Stewart on this topic back in 2024.

To any aspiring Wendell Berry reader, I recommend three starting points, one in fiction, one in non-fiction, and one essay. Each of these recommendations is a work of supreme quality in its own right, but these are also good jumping-off points that will help a person better understand the Wendell Berry collection as they continue forward.

Before we hit the book recommendations, I’ll point you to several essays that I’ve written about Berry’s influence on my own life: “An Ode to Wendell,” “Plant Sequoias,” and “91.”

Fiction: “Jayber Crow”

I have warned more than one person that “Jayber Crow” will break your brain. Once you read it, especially if you have any sort of agricultural or rural background, you will likely never view the world the same way again.

Berry’s first novel was published in 1960, fully 40 years before “Jayber Crow” was released in 2000. Each Berry novel and short story is set in Port William, a fictional community based on Berry’s home of Port Royal, Kentucky. Many characters in the Port William universe are based on real people that Berry knew, while others are loose composites or are entirely fictional. In the earlier Port William fiction, the town barber Jayber Crow is an auxiliary character. A few conversations take place in his barber shop and he is present in several stories, but only in his eponymous novel does he take the lead role. Berry ties together the decades of Port William stories through a central observer. Crow comes to Port William as a young man, shaped and scarred by his experiences as a child and into adulthood. He learns to live within a community and he sees that community, flawed and imperfect, at the peak of its prosperity. He then witnesses its slow decline as outside forces begin to undermine the community’s cohesion and pull its people away.

Through the eyes of Jayber Crow, Wendell Berry tells the story of 20th century rural America and how it changed from post-war industrialization and the “get big or get out” ideas espoused in American agriculture policy. He shares how it changed both the place and the people, often in a manner that they didn’t realize until it was too late. It is an extraordinary work, relatable to many of us who grew up in small towns. Characters will remind us of people that we know. The story of Port William mirrors so many other rural communities. Older folks will have witnessed a similar local arc, while younger ones like myself look at our local history and see the parallels.

Berry uses fiction to explore the same ideas as his non-fiction, but fiction is such a powerful tool because it often reaches people differently than non-fiction. Or, it reaches others who might never pick up an essay about agriculture policy. I have several pastor friends who found their way to Wendell Berry because “Jayber Crow” was required reading in a seminary course.

I have previously written several times about how “Jayber Crow” has influenced my life, specific experiences, and my vision for Stamford: “Membership in Real Life,” “On Jayber Crow,” “Thy Will Be Done,” and “Jayber Crow’s Vision.”

Non-fiction: “The Unsettling of America”

I consider “The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture” to be something of a non-fiction companion to “Jayber Crow.” Reading both books makes the other richer and more insightful. Berry published this work in 1977 after almost two decades of essays, fiction, and poetry. It vaulted him to the center of the rural criticism of modern agriculture policy. Many of his subsequent works have built off the ideas set forth in this book.

To say that “The Unsettling of America” was a heterodox book in 1977 would be an understatement. Berry wrote this book in the mid-1970s, amidst Earl Butz’s thunderous and bullying tenure as Secretary of Agriculture. Butz sought to transform American agriculture away from small, diversified farms focused on local and regional economies into a new, large-scale business model centered around technology, efficiency, and the global trade of cheap commodities. Berry’s warnings in the book are dire. He promises that industrial-scale monoculture-obsessed agriculture polices will lead to the impending destruction of rural communities, environmental degradation, and negative impacts on American health. It is jarring to read the book a half-century later and see how many of his warnings proved accurate.

It takes a bold person to look at the entirety of a government policy and assert “this is all wrong and it will end badly.” Berry did just that in “The Unsettling.” It either leads to one’s ideas being consigned to the dustbin of history (the “victors write the history,” and such) or to ultimate vindication many years later. Many more people agree with Berry now than in 1977, but five decades later, reckoning with the damage of which he warned is a much larger quandary than it was before.

There is a sequence in the book in which Berry muses about the Soviet Union forcibly rounding up the peasants of Eastern Bloc countries at gunpoint and shipping them to the cities to work in factories. He uncomfortably points out that the United States was doing the same thing with its post-WW2 agriculture policies, driving farmers and young people out of the rural places and into the cities with policy decisions, while pretending that the choices were voluntary. Yikes.

Essay: “The Work of Local Culture”

If someone wants to read a single essay to get acquainted with Berry rather than a full book, I point them to “The Work of Local Culture.” This essay is freely available online and has appeared in several collections of essays as well. It outlines Berry’s view of local culture as essential to the prosperity and survival of a place. The essay opens with a beautiful analogy of local culture as a bucket hanging on a fencepost, gathering leaves, moss, spiderwebs, and other organic matter, in which the elements slowly but inevitably shape it all into a rich soil.

It is an essay about neighboring and trust. It is an essay about the perils to a local place when people’s minds, money, and energy are spent on national culture and national economy rather than with their friends and when good conversation between neighbors is replaced by the homogeneity of a television screen. This essay was written a half decade before “the internet” was a well-known topic, yet its lessons and concerns are more applicable to social media than even television.

I have said that this essay might be more important to my own work as a town mayor and community leader than any other individual essay that Berry has written. This essay has impressed on me the essential element of building, sustaining, and maintaining local culture and that, in the absence of it, all other community-building work is fleeting and futile. There is a line here that I read, recite, and think about weekly:

“I know that one resurrected rural community would be more convincing and more encouraging than all the government and university programs of the last fifty years, and I think that it could be the beginning of the renewal of our country…”

I’ve referenced this essay in a few essays of my own: “Soil of Local Culture,” “Wendell Berry at the Matched Horse Races,” “Rebuilding Local Culture,” and “Do the Tools Control Us?”

Next week, I’ll continue with part two of this essay. In the meantime, if you’re looking for a book recommendation for some of Berry’s great essays, let me point you to “The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry.” It’s a “greatest hits” collection of sorts with some of Berry’s best essays selected by the great Irish agrarian writer Paul Kingsnorth. Let me also plug the audiobook versions of Berry’s books. Nick Offerman (Ron Swanson on “Parks & Recreation”) narrates most of the works of non-fiction, including both “The Unsettling of America” and “The World Ending Fire”. He does an excellent job with it, bolstered by own status as a true fan of Mr. Berry’s work. Offerman does not, however, narrate any Berry fiction, on the basis that Mr. Berry has insisted that a Kentucky accent is required to appropriately tell the story of Port William. The fiction narrators do an exemplary job in that respect.

I’ve recently had several readers share with me book recommendations of their own, based on my writing about books. If you have something that you think I should read, based on what you’ve read of my writing, please let me know in the comments or send me an email!

“I’d had the idea, once, that if I could get the chance before I died I would read all the good books there were. Now I began to see that I wasn’t apt to make it. This disappointed me, for I really wanted to read them all.”

― Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow

Thanks for reading.

James Decker is the Mayor of Stamford, Texas and the creator of the West of 98 website and the Rural Church and State and West of 98 podcasts. Contact James and subscribe to these essays at westof98.substack.com and subscribe to him wherever podcasts are found. Check out the West of 98 Bookstore with book lists for essential reads here.

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Almost seven years ago, in November of 2017, I began writing weekly essays about community revitalization and associated topics. I soon named this series “West of 98.” In November of 2020, I transferred that project from a series of Facebook posts to a Substack website and newsletter. This project has grown in a slow and steady fashion ever since, but in the last two months, my readership has increased significantly. I will credit my recent essays about Wendell Berry’s 90th birthday and about rural mental health. This merits a re-introduction of this project to my readers new and old and a fresh restatement of the principles behind the title “West of 98.” In a legendary scene in “The Office,” Michael Scott asked his nemesis Toby, “why are you the way that you are?” Today, I am here to answer that question about myself.

In 1931, legendary historian Walter Prescott Webb defined the 98th Meridian as the approximate beginning of the Great Plains. This north-south line runs just west of Fort Worth, Texas and a few counties east of my home here in Stamford. Prescott identified this as the point where rainfall becomes scarcer and more irregular. West of this line, farming and grazing practices of the eastern United States, largely imported from Europe, could not be applied with the same outcomes. For man to survive west of the 98th Meridian, man could not merely “tame” the land with agriculture. People and agriculture alike would be required to adapt to the place. As a people’s agriculture goes, so goes its culture. An arrogant people would be ruined on the Great Plains and do their fair share of damage to the land itself1, but a properly adapted people would shape their land management practices, their culture, their institutions, and their very lives to thrive in harmony with this harsh and brilliant land.

Read my monthly reading recommendations, book selections, and more at The Prairie Panicle.

Ever since I was old enough to think about my “future,” I aspired towards a future life in Stamford. Its heritage, the opportunities I was afforded in this community, and above all, the people, dramatically shaped my young life and worldview. In college, I felt an unshakeable pull towards a certain piece of Scripture. In Luke 12:48, we are told that from those who are given much, much will be expected. This verse was a clear signal and direction of my life’s path and purpose. I knew I had to give to the place and the people who gave so much to me. As I moved through college and law school, this goal met some surprise and skepticism. The message was not always outright, but it was certainly implied: “WHY are you going back to Stamford?”

I grew up under no misconceptions about the decline of Stamford and rural America in general. I could read a population trend. I saw the vacant buildings. I knew our school had dropped a classification over the prior decades. I heard stories of the scores of businesses that once thrived but existed no longer. Yet, I was not prepared for how this influenced those who questioned my return. To some, small town life was a purely foreign concept. Choosing that path simply did not compute. To others, it seemed as if I was voluntarily climbing back on to a sinking ship. Why would I do that when I had received an education and safety awaited me in the lifeboats of so many booming suburbs and metropolitan areas?

Luke 12:48 and Stamford beckoned anyway. One need only view my teenage haircuts to confirm that I was never one to chase a trend. Not only did I personally aspire to live in Stamford, I believed that Stamford and places like it still held great promise, despite the larger trends. As I looked across the landscape of American real estate development, I saw subdivisions and suburbs galore oriented around ideas like “small town atmosphere” and “welcoming community.” I saw developers constructing new faux town squares in the 21st century to replicate the likes of the downtown square laid out by the Stamford Townsite Company in 1899. Humans wanted what places like Stamford could offer, even as decades of economic “progress” pushed them farther away.

I was never much of a political partisan. I was raised to vote for a person before a party. Rural politics, for reasons that correspond with the nature of life on the Great Plains, rarely fit neatly within national party affiliations. The “conservative Democrat” was long powerful in rural politics, but before I even registered to vote, that particular dinosaur was all but extinct and effectively despised by both major political parties. Cable news and social media were the gasoline that fueled a partisan wildfire in the 2000s and 2010s that made the discourse more toxic and unproductive. I grew ever more disgusted. During the middle of the 2010s, I all but retreated from it entirely. I began to read deeply an author whose name I knew but I had read only lightly until that point.

His name was Wendell Berry.

In Berry, I found a wise elder who believed in the potential of rural America in the same manner that I did. He was uninterested in political partisanship or economic trends. He did not find rural America’s salvation in carving it into sprawling suburbs and exurbs. He took accurate and deeply uncomfortable positions, like identifying the relationship between rural America and the rest of our country as that of an exploited colony and a ruthless colonizer. He centered decades of writing around the idea of man’s duty to love God and Creation and to love our neighbor. He avowed that we pursued this calling by loving our place, stewarding our land, and living in community with one another. My lifelong vision of revitalizing Stamford was set into overdrive.

My study of Berry’s ideas led me to other brilliant thinkers. I already knew some of them, but others were fresh to my mind. There were the ecologists. Aldo Leopold spoke of a land ethic and a human responsibility to care for natural resources regardless of religious view. Allan Savory revolutionized viewing ecosystems holistically and considering man’s impact on each piece of that system. There were authors like Wallace Stegner and Larry McMurtry who shaped my historical view of the West and its settlement, for good and bad. Then came the famous but radical Christians like Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton. Day devoted herself to a life of poverty in service of the least of these, utterly disregarding the reliability of government or big business in favor of Christian charity. Merton wrote from his Kentucky hermitage to deepen man’s spiritual connection with God. I read John Graves’ “Goodbye to a River” and other works before I even knew Berry’s name, but returning to them, I found an even keener sense of place than before. Then, I discovered Paul Kingsnorth, a former radical activist who was a prominent author and leader in leftist environmental movements. He journeyed through atheism, Buddhism, and the Wiccan priesthood before he was dramatically pulled into Orthodox Christianity and a new life of homesteading in Ireland. There, he writes about finding true purpose in life amidst man’s quest to replace nature and faith with technology and modernity, a peril he has dubbed “The Machine.” Each of these people, and many others, have deeply influenced “West of 98” and my own mind.

This journey dismantled my views on rural America, shook out the cobwebs and ill-fitting pieces, and rebuilt them with a more vigorous and assertive spirit. It removed my interest in mainstream conversations about faith and politics in a period when those conversations took on a tone that was unhelpful to my happiness and to my work on the future of rural America. I have no interest in culture wars or red team/blue team nonsense. Yet, I am extraordinarily more secure in my beliefs and in my passion for rural America. At a time of intense polarization and anger, I feel more serene and peaceful than ever. Our life west of the 98th Meridian will not succeed if our leaders do not focus on the issues that truly matter to our life in this unique place.

That, my friends, is why West of 98 exists. I am thankful that my mind has been shaped to care about the causes and issues that matter to us, regardless of the national discourse. This is the work that matters to me. I believe that work starts with Wendell Berry’s precepts of following the Greatest Commandments. Loving God and loving neighbor requires something deeper than the typical politician talking about it. It requires a focus on place and community and a fidelity to both. For many reasons, we have disconnected ourselves from both place and community over time. You can blame technology. You can blame government policy. You can blame mainstream culture and entertainment. You can blame the Industrial Revolution. You can blame simple human nature. In each case, you would be correct, but complaining about it merely delays the inevitable and important work to come.

By restoring a connection and love for our individual place and community, we restore vital connections that have frayed in modern society and left us in a precarious state. It restores our ability to provide our people with the fundamental economic provision of food, clothing, and shelter,2 instead of depending on distant factories, mega-corporations, and fragile supply chains. It prepares us to better withstand natural and man-made disasters and to keep our people safe if help never arrives. It restores a sense of purpose in our lives, both individually and collectively. It improves our mental and physical health. As we restore and repair these connections, we impact the world at large and encourage others to follow suit.

I turned 40 earlier this year. I will admit that I haven’t always “fit in.” I was a nerdy kid who aspired to become more athletic but was wholly unable to do so. I had unique hobbies as a child that occupied my brain in necessary ways. The same has carried through to adulthood. I have struggled with wanting to fully express myself while simultaneously valuing the opinions of others whom I respect but who might not always understand me. I have long known that I was destined to live in rural America, even when people told me I was crazy.

Today, I care much less about fitting in. I think a lack of conformity is necessary for this work, although I am still learning the mental peace associated with reducing my “people pleaser” tendencies. Each of these writers who influenced me were not conformists either. Many of them have been considered deeply controversial at some point in time. They often struggled for acceptance, even from people who once embraced them before their life’s calling made them more difficult to understand. Their failure to conform did not make them any less impactful. It probably made them more impactful. I know that Stamford and similar places will not thrive if our leaders are concerned about popularity at higher levels of politics or if they confine their concerns to the arbitrary boundaries of conventional politics, economics, faith, and culture. This work requires us to focus on the actual needs of place and community.

I want life to be a little better beyond the 98th Meridian. I want our people and places to thrive. I want our communities to uplift their people, no matter their background, their last name, or what they look like. I want us to live with the harmony required by our unique land and its brilliant harshness, even if it requires differences from life “back East.” I want our places to be those that others wish to be part of. These notions sound simple, but in the 21st century, they are radical. They run contrary to the trends of our society and The Machine in practically every way.

To my readers old and new, welcome to a growing and invigorated West of 98. Conformity is unnecessary. Love for place and community is essential.

James Decker is the Mayor of Stamford, Texas and the creator of the West of 98 website and the “Rural Church and State” and “West of 98” podcasts. Contact James and subscribe to these essays at westof98.substack.com and subscribe to him wherever podcasts are found. Check out the West of 98 Bookstore with book lists for essential reads here.

Welcome to West of 98! In addition to my weekly essays, I write a mid-month newsletter called The Prairie Panicle. It summarizes my writing over the previous month and offers additional reading/listening/watching recommendations that strike my mood in the moment.

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It turned in to an unintentionally quiet month here at West of 98. Life got in the way, and then I hit a mental wall on a few writing topics. Having a good idea for an essay and turning that idea into a coherent and impactful essay can be two very different things. In the early days of this project, I had a tendency to just slap down words on the screen weekly, regardless of the quality. It’s not the best tactic, although I did survive that era. Today, I have a larger audience and I understand that my words carry an impact with them. That doesn’t mean I censor myself on awkward topics (just read my Twitter feed to see that I am incapable of that), but it does mean that I want to be proud of the words that I do write on topics that matter. On that note, good stuff is coming soon!

In a place like Stamford, we are in the aggravating and unpredictable phase between summer and fall. We’ve had the “false fall” where the weather turned cool for a week before heating back up. We’re now in the days that require a jacket or long sleeves in the morning and A/C in the afternoon. This shall pass. When October is pleasant in the Rolling Plains in West Texas, I’m not sure there is a better season around.

What I’ve Written

“Education and Work” covered just that, with a Labor Day essay about local schools and good work being essential elements in the ecology of a community.

In “Loved and Needed 2025,” I republished an essay from 2024 about suicide prevention, mental health, and uplifting one another:

Online Reading

Interesting things are afoot out here west of 98 Meridian. Our abundance of land and lower-cost electricity has made our region attractive to large tech corporations seeking to build new data centers. Reasonable people have valid concerns about the nationwide boom in data centers, from land use to water consumption to wariness of the artificial intelligence that is fueling many new data centers. Not all those concerns apply to the projects coming to our area, but as a community leader, I view these opportunities with a sharp lens. Our communities have been starved for good jobs and significant outside investment for many years (I wrote about that in early August), so we should be careful to not just jump at the first opportunity that pops up. However, with good leadership, this has the real potential to re-industrialize many rural towns that lost their industrial jobs over the post-war decades as a result of suburban expansion, globalization, and NAFTA.

I plan to write at length about that re-industrialization in an upcoming essay, but the first and most important step taken in Stamford is to attract private investment in new housing. Our local government cannot afford to (and should not) build houses with taxpayer money, but we have hundreds of vacant lots that were foreclosed for property taxes over the taxes and we are opening up bids to re-sell these properties for new housing. We made that announcement this week and the good folks at KTXS in Abilene were kind enough to do a story on the news last night about it.

I randomly ran across “Ever A Bridegroom” this week, an essay written by the late great Larry McMurtry for the Texas Observer in the 1980s about Texas literature and, well, if you know McMurtry’s view of Texas literature, it’s just as witty and acerbic as you might expect.

Over at Plough, “The Absolute Absurdity of a Christian Nation” asks “what would it look like if a country made Jesus’ teachings its constitution?”

Joel Salatin recently gave a speech he dubbed the “Food Emancipation Proclamation.” That title immediately catches my eye, given the orator. You can watch the speech or read a transcript here:

Malone News

Homesteading: The Food Emancipation Proclamation

Joel Salatin’s incredible speech at the Brownstone Conference, held at Polyface Farms in Virginia this weekend, can be watched below…

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9 months ago · 261 likes · 45 comments · Robert W Malone MD, MS

Book Recommendation

When I set out to read “The Time It Never Rained” and “The Good Old Boys” in recent months, it was inevitable that I would dive in to some of Elmer Kelton’s other greatest hits.

“The Smiling Country” is the sequel to The Good Old Boys, which finds Hewey Calloway four years older and not four years wiser, but quickly forced to confront his own mortality.

“The Day the Cowboys Quit” is quite a different story, loosely based on the real-life Canadian River Cowboy Strike of 1883. It’s a cowboy story, but also one of power imbalances between employer and employee, a changing frontier, and men of an adventurous spirit who learn they do not always control their own destiny.

Wendell Berry Read of the Month

I just re-read “That Distant Land” for participation in a Wendell Berry book club that a friend invited me to join. This is one of my top Berry recommendations for his fiction. It’s a compilation of short stories, ordered chronologically from the late 19th century to the 1980s so that the reader can journey through the generations of Port William characters. It contains one of my favorite Berry short stories, “Watch With Me,” the parable-esque tale of farmer Ptolemy (Tol) Proudfoot) journeying on foot for two days to follow a mentally unstable neighbor and keep him from potentially harming himself or someone else. It also contains “The Wild Birds” and “Fidelity,” two of Berry’s most famous short stories stories in which lawyer Wheeler Catlett is a key protagonist. Neither takes place in a courtroom, but both show Catlett as the epitome of a country lawyer, representing and advising his friends and neighbors when they need his wisdom the most.

Listen/Watch Recs

Dan Flores has written some spectacular books about the West, like “Coyote America” and “American Serengeti” but he recently launched something equally spectacular, a new podcast called “The American West.” It’s published in partnership with MeatEater and Flores details some fascinating stories of the American West, from prehistory to the United States’s westward expansion. Each episode includes a monologue by Flores and then a discussion with Steven Rinella and Randall Williams, which is often full of interesting details that didn’t make the main story. If you enjoy American history, you’ll love this podcast.

West of 98 Store

I have recently picked up some great commissions at Bookshop.org, thanks to my generous West of 98 readers. Any purchase at Bookshop supports independent bookstores instead of the Amazon leviathan, but if you purchase through my West of 98 bookstore. I receive a small commission that goes towards this humble project.

James Decker is the Mayor of Stamford, Texas and the creator of the West of 98 website and the Rural Church and State and West of 98 podcasts. Contact James and subscribe to these essays at westof98.substack.com and subscribe to him wherever podcasts are found.

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I am publishing this on Wednesday, September 10, 2025, which is World Suicide Prevention Day. Last year, I wrote the following essay on this day. I have talked about mental health many times in this space, but this particular essay and another one that it spawned a few weeks later (“Leading From the Front”) reached some of my readers in a powerful and unanticipated manner. That meant a lot to me.

I think it warrants republication for a couple of reasons. First of all, I have many more readers than I did a year ago from some new audiences that I have reached with my other writing. Moreover, the themes expressed in this essay are perhaps even more important to reiterate today. Our world remains deeply troubled. There is enormous pressure placed on each of us from every direction, both as individuals and within our families. We are force-fed a never-ending stream of negativity, tragedy, and outrage. It is all but impossible to avoid unless you log off completely and throw your tv out the window (not bad ideas, to be clear).

So, no matter how you might be challenged right now, or how weary you might be of your own struggles or the world at large, I see you. I pray that you are able to meet those challenges and overcome that weariness in a manner that keeps you safe and healthy. If you need help, I pray that you are able to find it. I pray that each of us will be a true friend and neighbor to all those around us, that gives the struggling person the confidence to reach out to us or confide in us.

We never know how living as a true friend and neighbor will impact a person’s life. It might even save it.

As always, thank you for reading and supporting West of 98. There are many ways to support this project, but I’ll save the self-promotion for next week.

I don’t think I have ever *wanted* to sit down and write an essay about suicide and mental health awareness. Frankly, it would be concerning to me if I did relish the topic. Alas, it has been a while since I wrote one of these essays. Something has been nagging at me for days that this had to be this week’s topic, regardless of my other pending writing ideas.

Maybe it is because today (I’m writing this on September 10) is World Suicide Prevention Day and the month of September is National Suicide Prevention Month. These events were created to raise awareness on the topic of suicide prevention and to provide information and outlets for help for those in need.

Maybe it is because it seems like the world is spinning faster and faster these days. We are constantly hit with a firehose of information about the news, about the world around us, about everyone that we’ve ever met that has a social media account. Trapped in a cycle of checking, scrolling, re-checking, and scrolling some more, we see it all whether it is healthy for our brains or not. We see how friends and casual acquaintances appear to be doing perfectly awesome with nary a care in the world. We “follow” celebrities who have it even better. We see how other friends and acquaintances are struggling and we feel sadness or empathy. We read about the latest natural disaster or other catastrophe that sweeps across some far-off land and snuffs out far too many lives far too soon and that upsets us.

Maybe it is the crush of expectations, demands, bills, and more. The rent is too high. Interest on a mortgage is too high. Utilities are too high. Groceries are too high. The only things that don’t seem to be skyrocketing upward are wages and our quantity of free time. Legendary songwriter James McMurtry wrote a song in the early 2000s called “We Can’t Make It Here” that is something of a protest against everything wrong in America: economic globalization, hollowing out of rural and industrial communities, maltreatment of veterans, drug addiction, the struggles of single mothers, and more. I am working on a full essay devoted to just that song, because I listened to it a few weeks ago and it rang truer now than it did when it was first released. I’m not going to say that life is “harder” now than it was in prior generations, because in many ways it is not, but McMurtry outlines why it is hard in a very different way now. Talk to any working person who is trying to make ends meet and do everything that needs to be done, especially a single parent.

Maybe it is the utter feeling I have that self-interested politicians and bureaucrats care less and less about individual places and communities. We are told to put our faith in the tribe of a red team or a blue team, but neither of those teams gives a darn whether our communities live or die. They just do not. But if you could give them a donation before you die out, they would appreciate that. They need it to save the world from the other team.

Maybe I’ve seen more people this year discussing National Suicide Prevention Month and I feel heartened by the awareness and the willingness to discuss it and I want to lend my voice to that topic as part of the rising tide.

Maybe I have just talked to too many people over the years who have really struggled with their mental health for some or all the reasons above or for their own individual reasons. Despair is a lonely, miserable, and difficult place to be. Despair comes from a lot of places. Sometimes it is the chemical makeup of our own brain. Sometimes it comes from the external struggles in our life, like some of the things I just mentioned. Sometimes it is a combination of factors. Regardless, it is a bad place. It causes us to make rash and often unhealthy decisions. It leads to substance abuse and addiction, taking a coping outlet too far until it becomes a problem itself. At its worst, despair leads you to believe there is no solution but to exit the stage altogether. That’s when you start down the path of suicidal ideation, imagining and contemplating the topic. Some reach that point and pull back or seek help. Others continue down the dark road until they are unable to pull out. Our world has lost far too many people of all stripes—youth, parents, farmers, business owners, artists, old, young, and more—to the scourge of suicide because they could not pull back and were unable to seek help or felt helpless to do so.

Dadgummit, friends. There are a whole lot of things in life that drag us down and make us feel like the weight of the world rests exactly right on top of our shoulders. If you are feeling that way, I see you. I am here for you. Sometimes, life can suck or feel way too hard. Those are acceptable feelings. But today, I ask you not to despair. Do not go down that dark path of despair and all that it might lead to. Reach out to someone. Ask for help if you can. The world is a better place because you are in it, even if you don’t feel like that. People love you and admire you, even if you do not realize it. You are loved and needed.

Be well, friends. Love one another. Love yourself, too. It is hard, nay, impossible to love others in a difficult world if you do not love yourself. Life is hard and the world can be a mean and ugly place. We need to uplift one another at every chance. Rural communities are too small to survive without our love for one another. Check on a friend. Send an acquaintance a random text or social media message to wish them a good day. Buy somebody a drink. Commit a random act of kindness. People need to know they are loved.

Note to my readers: if you are struggling, please seek help. If you do not have a safe outlet for help, then call or text 988 or visit the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988lifeline.org. Trained counselors are available 24 hours per day to help.

James Decker is the Mayor of Stamford, Texas and the creator of the West of 98 website and the Rural Church and State and West of 98 podcasts. Contact James and subscribe to these essays at westof98.substack.com and subscribe wherever podcasts are found. Check out the West of 98 Bookstore with book lists for essential reads here.

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I’ve been trying for about two weeks to pen some new thoughts arising out of the first day of school in our communities, but life’s necessary obligations and a strong case of writer’s block had other plans for me. As August winnowed away and Labor Day grew near, I resolved to tackle two inextricably connected topics: education and work.

What is the purpose of school?

I am reminded of the time many years ago that I attended a town hall meeting about a proposed school bond. When the floor was opened for public comment, one gentleman rose to speak and opened with the memorable line, “now, I’m not for or against school…”

At this juncture, I should probably state that I am for school. Mostly. I am for education and the schools that serve their communities to the best and fullest of their abilities and resources. Now, the manner in which our overlords at higher levels of government attempt to thrust upon us their strictures for “education” regardless of community need? That’s where I become something of a rebellious sort, which is the point of today’s writing.

Wendell Berry is more than a bit of a rebel on the matter of education, once describing schools as a combination of “babysitting, job training, and incarceration.”1 Now this is not the mere grumbling of a man who is against school. Far from it. Berry’s vision of a proper education is beautiful, as one that “enables young people to put their lives in order, which means knowing what things are more important than other things; it means putting first things first.”2 He writes that “its proper use is to enable citizens to live lives that are economically, politically, socially, and culturally responsible.”3 and that education should make “responsible heirs and members of human culture…good work and good citizenship are the inevitable by-product of the making of a good—that is a fully developed—human being.4

It is a powerful vision, albeit an idealistic one. So long as education funding is determined by politicians and philanthropists, the idealism of education will be interrupted by the agendas and hobby horses of the funders. This is not a new problem. In 1902, John D. Rockefeller initially donated $1 million to an organization called the General Education Board (much more financial support would follow) and the GEB would transform education in America by standardizing teaching models and outcomes. Now, this is not inherently bad and the GEB did some good things, but standardization of educational standards is one of those things best left in moderation. If my “anything in moderation” position sounds distinctly Methodist in its flavor, well, you guessed me correctly. Standardization for noble purposes is a good thing. Standardization to the nth degree, though, becomes industrialization. There’s a reason why people (Wendell Berry included) use the phrase “industrial education model” as an epithet.

An industrial system (no matter the application) utilizes repetitive processes to transform a raw material into something finished, with an emphasis on efficiency and uniformity. Whether it’s automobiles, beef, or students, an industrial system seeks to produce them all the same. Berry writes that “the thing made by education now is not a fully developed human being; it is a specialist, a careerist, a graduate. In industrial education, the thing finally made is of no concern to the makers.”5

Rockefeller saw that as a positive. He is reputed to have said about education, “I don’t want a nation of thinkers, I want a nation of workers.” It is a tad dark to consider the world’s richest man donating millions of dollars with the intention of using public education to create an army of worker drones. My limited research did not find a sourced citation for that quote. That could mean that it was legitimate and just never written on paper or that it is entirely apocryphal. I have read Ron Chernow’s excellent and exhaustive “Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.,” a book which gave me more respect and more disdain for the man. I can state that nothing about Rockefeller’s life makes me think he would have objected to that quote.

Which brings me to Labor Day.

Labor Day is no mere excuse for a day off between Independence Day and Thanksgiving. Labor Day was established as a federal holiday in 1894, arising out of the chaotic era after the American Civil War when labor began to organize itself to seek better working conditions and wages in an escalating struggle between labor and capital. Wealth concentration was rising. A small number of extraordinarily powerful magnates had an outsized influence on economics and politicians. New technologies were displacing workers and rapidly changing the nature of work. Sound relatable?

The discourse around education cannot be extracted from the discourse around labor and work, particularly when our nation’s education system was built to churn out workers more than it was built to educate responsible heirs and members of human culture. So what happens when that same nation begins to deprioritize workers? Now, one can make the argument that our nation has long devalued work and that it suffers from the same symptoms that date to Adam and Eve’s ejection from Eden for choosing knowledge over work themselves. In fact, I discussed all that at length on Labor Day last year.

Yet, deprioritizing workers is escalating. “Artificial Intelligence” is all the rage and it seems that government and business are striving to inject automated computer processes, “machine learning,” and whatever else you call it into every facet of their activities. Of course, the idea is not to free up the worker from drudgery. The goal is to replace the worker. One needs only to listen to a few speeches or interviews from the most powerful voices in Silicon Valley to see what the intentions actually are. Where does that leave the worker? The tech overlords don’t see that it’s really their problem.

It was on Labor Day 1903 when Theodore Roosevelt gave a magnificent speech at the New York State Fair and issued his iconic proclamation than “far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.”6 In the same speech, Roosevelt advocated for the increase in prosperity of the wage worker and the tiller of the soil as essential to the prosperity of society at large. Work matters. Work is valuable. Work is essential to the prosperity of all.

So what do we do in a 21st century America where state and federal policymakers have built education around training workers and the most powerful men in the economy may or may not care if workers have anything meaningful to do?

As always, it begins locally. Lest anyone question whether Wendell Berry values the work of teachers, he writes:

“Like a good farmer, a good teacher is the trustee of a vital and delicate organism: the life of a mind in his community. The standard of his discipline is his community’s health and intelligence and coherence and endurance. This is a high calling, deserving of a life’s work.”7

Education should be, ultimately, a local-centered project. I wrote last year about the peril of educational systems in a society that viewed rural places as archaic. It educates students in a standardized, industrial manner to inevitably learn that they should leave those archaic rural places and never return. There is an alternative. So long as local schools are dependent on state and federal funding, there is a measure of reliance on state and federal systems that must be dealt with. But there is much that a local community can do even with those limitations. Wendell Berry uses his own rural Henry County, Kentucky as an example for much of his writing. There he has lamented the dangers of schools and churches that are staffed by people who are not from there, who flavored all their teaching and preaching with a reflection on the rest of the world being better than that small place, encouraging their students and congregants to leave as soon as possible, and then quickly leaving themselves.

The inverse is a community in which leaders—both homegrown leaders and the transplants who set down roots—advocate and educate a community’s younger generations that it IS a good place to be from, to grow up in, and ultimately to plant your own roots and leave your own mark upon. In so many ways, sincere community pride is essential to the project. Leaders who do not believe in a community themselves will not convince anyone else. A community whose leaders are pollyannaish about its challenges and shortcomings will not fool shrewd young minds. But a community where people care, show that they care in both word and deed, and are honest about the work to be done? You can build from that.

I think about our own Stamford Independent School District which has, in recent years, emphasized hiring homegrown teachers. These teachers can return to the same halls that they walked and classrooms where they once studied, educating successive generations of students and providing a healthy and relatable model of success for younger students on an everyday basis. It is something to build from. I think about Jones College, a community college in rural Mississippi which has established the Napier School of Design and Building Arts, a program of technical training to educate craftsmen and artisans. The name arises from a partnership with Erin and Ben Napier, stars of HGTV’s “Home Town” who have revitalized their hometown of Laurel, Mississippi and who have lent their time, talent, and treasure to this partnership to help expand and prioritize the building trades as a viable and prosperous career path in rural Mississippi.

Education and work must both be prioritized if a society—locally, regionally, statewide, or nationally—is to survive and thrive. But they should not be prioritized for their mere existence alone. Life is too short to be educated as a mere worker drone and then be sent off to work in drudgery only until a machine is sent to replace us. Local communities should do everything within their power to orient local education as part of the community ecology, in which good teachers are revered and shape young minds to become responsible heirs and members of human culture, and so that they may join the community ecology themselves, as meaningful members of the place and its economy, contributing with their own opportunity to work hard at work worth doing.

James Decker is the Mayor of Stamford, Texas and the creator of the West of 98 website and the Rural Church and State and West of 98 podcasts. Contact James and subscribe to these essays at westof98.substack.com and subscribe to him wherever podcasts are found. Check out the West of 98 Bookstore with book lists for essential reads here.

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Welcome to West of 98! In addition to my weekly essays, I write a mid-month newsletter called The Prairie Panicle. It summarizes my writing over the previous month and offers additional reading/listening/watching recommendations that strike my mood in the moment.

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School started this week in Stamford and many other towns. It started the week before in quite a few other places. As I’ve written before, the first day of school is New Year’s Day for a community in many ways, bringing big changes and new enthusiasm. I’ve got an essay coming up on schools and local communities, but in the meantime, I hope everyone in your community—students, teachers, administrators, and support staff—has a great start to the new year!

What I’ve Written

I kicked off the month of writing with a reflection on an important tradition at the Texas Cowboy Reunion here in Stamford, some of my memories surrounding that event and men who shaped it, and the devastating flooding that happened elsewhere in Texas at the same time:

I finally listened to the advice of some smart people and launched a paid option here at West of 98. It is completely voluntary and everything I write remains free to read, but this offers a new avenue for readers to show their support. Learn more here:

New investment is coming to Stamford and places like it. It is a bit jarring, given decades of economic decline, but it’s also an essential part of our early prosperity. It will be essential to a prosperous future, if community leaders manage circumstances wisely:

Wendell Berry turned 91 last week, so I wrote about aging, living life well, and one of his short stories that illustrates that powerfully:

Online Reading

My friend has a beautiful gift for tackling some of our most uncomfortable and important topics. His brand new essay does that very thing:

Over the Field

Where Do Farmers Get Their Food From?

“When the self-sufficient economy of all ages in our history was broken by the imposition of a purely urban one upon it, the ludicrous situation was reached of the farm having no organic relation with the farm house…

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10 months ago · 26 likes · 2 comments · Hadden Turner

I was elated when I learned my friend launched a Substack. Carley is part of the brain trust behind Hotel Turkey, which has made Turkey, Texas a year-round destination for live music, good food, and a unique spirit of community. She commenced her writing with a topic near and dear to the season in West Texas, harvesting prickly pears:

Carley’s Substack

Prickly Pears are a son of a bitch.

I am typing this with magenta stained hands and in a perplexed state as to how something that I love so much and have convinced other people to love so much can be such a fucking bitch…

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10 months ago · Carley duMenil

When sends me a New York Times link about the glory of “Road House,” it’s a guarantee that I’m going to share it in this space: “Road House” Still Reigns as the Best Bad Movie. It is a great read, although I think the headline writers made a mistake with “best bad movie” and actually intended to say “best movie ever made.”

Book Recommendation

The peril and joy of rereading books is that it spawns other necessary rereads. When I recently picked up “The Time It Never Rained”, it was practically a guarantee that I’d have to find “The Good Old Boys” on my shelf too. It’s perhaps Elmer Kelton’s most beloved novel, for good reason. Hewey Calloway is a highly-regarded cowboy. He’s pushing forty and refuses to settle down, which is a source of both admiration and exasperation among the people who love him. It’s also 1906 and the world is changing, with life, traditions, and careers rapidly being upended by new machines. (Relatable?) It is a joy to read, so do yourself the favor if you never have.

Wendell Berry Read of the Month

MANY TIMES, AFTER I have finished a lecture on the decline of American farming and rural life, someone in the audience has asked, “What can city people do?”

“Eat responsibly,” I have usually answered.

“The Pleasures of Eating” is an acclaimed Berry essay that helped connect him to the local food/slow food/whatever you might call it movement. It’s worth reading, as a reminder that food truly should be a pleasure and that how and what we eat matters far beyond the reach of our kitchen.

Listen/Watch Recs

My friend Jody Slaughter decided somebody should start a West Texas history podcast, so a little while back he blessed the world with “WTX: A History of West Texas”. It is high time that he got a recommendation in the space. The podcast kicks off with Judge Roy Bean and bootlegger king/liquor store magnate Pinkie Roden and it grows from there. The stories are good, the storytelling is better, and the passion for our beloved place is top-notch.

He also sent me this incredible picture of the tour bus for the West Texas Gypsies, the official band of the West Texas Chamber of Commerce, a famed regional organization that was headquartered in Stamford for many years and eventually killed after state government absorbed it. Maybe it’s time that we started it again.

West of 98 Store

I have recently picked up some great commissions at Bookshop.org, thanks to my generous West of 98 readers. Any purchase at Bookshop supports independent bookstores instead of the Amazon leviathan, but if you purchase through my West of 98 bookstore. I receive a small commission that goes towards this humble project.

James Decker is the Mayor of Stamford, Texas and the creator of the West of 98 website and the Rural Church and State and West of 98 podcasts. Contact James and subscribe to these essays at westof98.substack.com and subscribe to him wherever podcasts are found.

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What is old age?

Recently, I heard the theory that “old age” was 10 years older than your current age. There seems to be some truth to that. Today, at age 41, certain ages seem significantly more youthful to me than they did when I was much younger. Looking back to childhood, I think about some teachers who seemed “old” at the time. Turns out, they really weren’t, particularly since I know them today. Given how many years ago they taught me, and considering that they aren’t THAT old today, they definitely weren’t “old” back then. But I digress.

There are a few clichés that would handwave away the meaningfulness of aging. “Age is just a number” and “you’re only as old as you feel” are a few of those turns of phrase. Those statements can be true and they reflect the idea that age need not be a limitation to vigor in life. But taken too literally, they can devalue the wisdom and experience that comes with a life well lived.

I think about that a lot more with my own aging. All of us can think about how we wished we had done better in our twenties or our thirties, whatever “better” might be for our own particular lives. Given that time travel seems to be relatively unlikely, it is futile to wish that we could go back to our younger years to do them over. But in truth, we only think about how we could have done them better with the experience that comes from the life lived since those days. We can look today upon our bad decisions, missed opportunities, and wasted time at age 25, but we do so with the vision of hindsight and life experience. No matter how much wiser we could have been at age 25, we simply could not have gathered all the knowledge and wisdom at that time that we have gathered today. And so, regrets about days gone by are a fool’s errand. There’s a saying that the best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago and the second best time to plant a tree is today. That’s how I feel about living life. The best time to live it wisely and to the fullest was when we were younger, but the second best time is right now.

Which brings me to Wendell Berry.

I am writing this on August 5, 2025, which is the occasion of Mr. Berry’s 91sth birthday. I’ve written on this occasion the last two years (“An Ode to Wendell” and “Plant Sequoias”) and last year’s essay remains my most-read piece of writing on the internet, outside my letter earlier this year to the Secretary of Agriculture. I have shared how and why this wise poet and author from Port Royal, Kentucky has shaped my own writing (and I included more of that in “Restatement” last fall). I am far from the only one. It’s been 65 years since his first work, the novel “Nathan Coulter,” was first published and countless writers, farmers, policymakers, and activists have been influenced by Berry’s fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. It was recently announced that Berry’s newest full-length novel “Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story” will be released in October 2025. Of course, I have already pre-ordered it and you should too. This will be the seventh work published by Mr. Berry since his 85th birthday! Not bad for a fellow who still does not own or use a computer.

One of my favorite Wendell Berry writings is a short story called “Fidelity.” It appears in a few collections of short stories, including one by that very name. I read it in a larger collection called “That Distant Land,” which I would recommend immensely to anyone who seeks to explore Berry’s fictional universe of Port William in depth. “Fidelity” is one of the more modern stories in that collection and it takes place in the second half of the 20th century. I won’t spoil it, because it truly is a remarkable bit of writing with some twists and turns that you would not expect from a short story that centers around some farmers and small town lawyers. But in essence, the short story is about the culmination of living well, aging, and ultimately, dying well. Death is the most inevitable but most easily avoided of topics in our lives. Few of us are eager to make it part of our casual conversations. Wendell Berry has never shied away from it, because he wisely places death within its rightful place of the cycle of life, for plants, animals, and humans alike. Death breeds life, from the dead leaves that turn to rich soil, which then grows the grass that gives up its life cycle to feed the livestock who are then slaughtered to feed humans, who are then returned to the earth at the end of their own life cycle. “Fidelity” grapples with the end of life for the beloved and once-powerful character Burley Coulter, a lovable and deeply flawed farmer, hunter, and raconteur of Port William. Burley is a veteran of World War I, along with countless all-night hunting trips with his hounds, rowdy bouts with a whisky bottle, and brutally hard work in the tobacco fields (only when necessary, of course) and he is now an old man in failing health. He has lived well and his people seek to ensure that his life ends equally well, which runs them afoul of the authorities of modern society. It’s a beautiful tale. I would be glad to send you a copy of it.

Wendell Berry was a younger man when he wrote “Fidelity,” but he was still older than most and he was much older then than I am today. As I have gotten older, I have come to value the art of living well more than I did when I was younger. I have been shaped by the experiences of other people, for good and bad, and by my own experiences as well. After law school and into the early part of my lawyer career, I drank two to three Dr Peppers a day. It was not an addiction so much as it was a choice. I enjoyed them. They tasted good. Dr Pepper became something of an inextricable part of my persona, such that people would regularly tag me in humorous social media posts about excessive Dr Pepper consumption. In early 2020, I concluded that I really needed to slow down my consumption. I was not having any health issues associated with it, but I did have a few that ran in my family and I concluded that it would not hurt if I simply did not consume those excessive amounts of sugary drinks. So, I just stopped. I went months without drinking a Dr Pepper. After about a year, the pent-up sugar fat began to burn off, especially in my face. People started to notice. I received questions from people about the weight I was dropping, some of which were enthusiastic (assuming I had been working out) and others of which were of well-meaning concern, wanting to make sure I was okay. I responded to many, “I literally just stopped drinking Dr Pepper” and I was met with surprise that I actually did such a thing and that it had such an impact. Ultimately, I dropped probably 20 pounds simply from that one change. It was good for me. I felt the benefits of it. I am glad I did it. Nowadays, I will drink one or two Dr Peppers or Mountain Dews1 a month, but I could not imagine returning to my earlier consumption. I try to spend more time gardening and less time sitting on the couch watching tv, although a challenging day at the law office can be a powerful de-motivator to simply sit and do nothing for an evening. I am no Burley Coulter, outworking all the other tobacco farmers when necessary and outplaying all the carousers when desired, but I am living well more than I used to.

I would be lying if I said Wendell Berry’s own life was not a direct impact on me in that way. He has lived without cell phone, television, and computer and has done just fine without them. I have all three. I use all three of them each day more than I want. I derive much less pleasure out of them than I used to. It is not lost on me that the Berry family worked hard on their farm and in their garden, raising much of their own food, and doing much of their own work with horses and mules rather than tractors, and he worked hard and well in such a way that allowed him to continuing doing so well into his 80s, long after most have called it a career doing much less physical forms of labor. He wrote hard around his hard physical labor and he continues to write hard well into his 10th decade of life. Wendell Berry’s life is not for everyone, because we are all uniquely talented in our own ways. We should live to be ourselves, not merely pattern ourselves after someone else.

But without question, Wendell Berry is an inspiration. He makes me strive to write harder and live better myself so that when I celebrate my own 91st birthday a half-century from now, I am making a fraction of the impact on the world that he is and living just as well with my family and friends as he does.

In 2002, George Strait released a single off his album “The Road Less Traveled” which was written by talented songwriters Tony Martin2, Mark Nesler, and Tom Shapiro. The chorus gave the song its title: “there’s a difference in living and living well.”

May we all remember that. The best time to start living well was twenty years ago, but the second best time to start living well is today.

James Decker is the Mayor of Stamford, Texas and the creator of the West of 98 website and the Rural Church and State and West of 98 podcasts. Contact James and subscribe to these essays at westof98.substack.com and subscribe to him wherever podcasts are found. Check out the West of 98 Bookstore with book lists for essential reads here.

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What does it take to revitalize a rural community for the long haul? I’m not talking about a quick flash in the pan that generates some good publicity but no lasting results. I do not mean an economic development project that brings a few jobs but has a hollow positive impact. No, I am talking about the transformation that turns the tide on decades of rural decline. It would seemingly reverse the gravitational pull of 75 years of economic globalization by returning good jobs and prosperity back to the local community instead of drawing them away. This is the change that passionate local leaders are striving to achieve. It is the change that brings a struggling rural place back to life from the brink of slow extinction.

I am not here to answer this question by announcing some sort of magic bullet solution. If it was that easy, someone smarter than me would have figured it out by now. But a few recent local developments have caused me to ponder this question on a deeper level.

When I think about what really made our communities thrive in their earliest days, I think about the outside investment that swarmed into the place. Now, “outside” investment is perhaps a superfluous term when the town did not previously exist, but the point remains. People and corporations from elsewhere saw the potential in a place and they invested their capital to bring it to life. In a place like Stamford, the early investment usually came from ranchers and railroad men. Those investors rarely lived nearby and often were from “back East.” Aspiring businessmen small and large followed suit to invest in the frontier towns.

R.L. Penick is often billed as the “Father of Stamford” and rightly so. Penick was raised in Kentucky and established himself as a merchant in the new frontier town of Anson, Texas in 1884 at the age of 21. When the Texas Central Railroad extended its line northwest from Albany to a new town north of Anson, Penick moved 15 miles to the north in early 1900, establishing one of the first business houses in the new town called Stamford. That business became an iconic early institution. Penick would soon build the largest building on the downtown square, a three-store affair housing a massive mercantile business. It still stands today as the largest building downtown and it long sat dormant before recently seeing new life breathed into it. Penick would serve as Mayor of Stamford on three separate occasions. He would be the first President of Stamford’s Rotary Club. He would be elected the first President of the Texas Cowboy Reunion Old Timers Association.

There are other stories. My law office is housed in one of Stamford’s most unique architectural masterpieces, a Spanish Colonial Revival design built by the West Texas Utilities Co. in 1927. WTU had been formed in the early 20th century from the merger of Abilene Power and Light with several other utility concerns. This Abilene-based company became a regional powerhouse and it saw the potential promise of early Stamford. WTU’s early reputation was that when it extended its electric utility to a town, it would build a local headquarters with the intention of having the finest office in that town. In Stamford, they did just that.

There are many other stories like those of Penick and WTU. I know of many. There are far more that I do not know. Each of them is essential to the history that led Stamford from a mere sign along a new railroad in 1899 that read “This is Stamford” to a town that peaked in population at 5,819 in the 1950 Census.

In the early days of Stamford’s prosperity, that new investment begat more investment. Other regional and national businesses located here, from small department store chains to grocery warehouses and shipping companies who used Stamford’s railroads as a hub to serve communities across the Rolling Plains. Small businesses and aspiring entrepreneurs (before that was even a word) followed the lead of Penick and settled here: lawyers, dentists, shopkeepers, oil wildcatters, and more. To some degree, the investment by larger businesses signaled to newer upstarts that the town was a good investment.

After World War II ended and the industrialization and mechanization of agriculture moved in to high gear, rural communities became less of a sound investment. Larger companies turned their attention to the new suburbs. They slowly withdrew their rural investment or maintained it without expanding. This did not necessarily cause small businesses to sprint for the exits, but over the years, rural communities simply became less attractive. Fewer aspiring entrepreneurs moved out into the small towns. Some business owners came home from the war and never reopened in a small town. Other business owners kept going, but when they retired, they were simply not replaced. It was death by a thousand cuts of economic disinvestment. A wave of “economic development” popped up in the 1980s and 1990s with mixed results. It was often fueled by state leaders who promised jobs and new business to rural towns when, in reality, those leaders were simply pushing into rural communities the sort of new facilities that larger cities did not want in their backyard.

So what happens when that all starts to change? After years of disinvestment and abandonment of rural America, what happens when bigger businesses suddenly start to believe in our place for their own business interests?

I’m asking myself that question right now. The Rolling Plains of Texas have seen a wave of “renewable energy” investment in the last 25 years that appears to be accelerating. Wind energy and solar energy facilities were built and now more of each are following. The resulting cheap electricity and ample transmission lines are attracting battery storage facilities and data centers. I am going to reserve my full opinion on these particular business developments. They deserve the full treatment and not an aside in an essay for which they are not the main topic, but suffice to say that my views are complex and thought out over a period of years.

Stamford has had a Walmart for 35 years. About a decade ago, Walmart doubled down on their investment in Stamford, building a much larger new Supercenter just north of their original digs. Tractor Supply came to town and set up shop in the old Walmart property. Now, a decade later, Walmart just expanded their local investment, commencing a major remodel of the interior of their store. Back up the street, across from the Tractor Supply, O’Reilly Auto Parts is coming to town and nearing completion of a brand new store. Meanwhile, our local Sonic has been closed for several weeks as the property receives a total remodel and renovation. It reopens on the morning that I publish this essay, which is good, because local patrons may or may not be circling the Sonic daily hoping for signs that their Diet Dr Pepper or Cherry Limeade is available. I will not name any names so as to protect the addicted.

There is something interesting about these three projects happening at once. A major national retailer is reaffirming its investment in our community. A regional franchisee of a national chain is investing significantly in their local location. A new national retailer has chosen to make its own new investment into Stamford. Each of these businesses made their decision independently, based on their analysis of their market conditions, without a dime of incentives from our local government. They all, more or less simultaneously, decided that now is the right time to invest in Stamford.

For a community starved for outside investment in recent decades, like virtually every other rural community in America, this can be jarring and even provoke outright skepticism. I have had a few people ask me *why* a large national chain like O’Reilly would choose to invest in Stamford. It is telling of our circumstances and our recent local history that we are perplexed by this new investment. Others have fairly expressed concern about how O’Reilly in particular will affect competitive local businesses that are well-established and locally owned.

I know that none of our rural communities will survive without outside investment. They simply won’t. Even at our most prosperous, rural communities relied on a strong mix of local business and outside business to succeed. Decades later, when so much of our local resources—human, natural, and financial—have been extracted to the cities, we simply cannot rely on local investment alone. Pinning our survival on local money would be more doomed than the proverbial rearrangement of deck chairs on the Titanic. There’s simply not enough people or money to spread around to replace the decades of disinvestment and extraction.

I also know that shopping is a choice and a responsibility. We are all guilty of making decisions that undermine the local economy. “It’s cheaper on Amazon” or “I can get it quicker in [insert the name of your nearest big city]” are reasonable decisions made by well-meaning humans but they all have a cost on our local economy. As I have written in this space on several occasions, shopping with a local small business keeps 68% of your dollar in town. Shopping local with a large chain retailer keeps 48% of your dollar locally. Shopping online or out of town returns exactly 0% of your money to town. Shopping local with a business of any size is always better than not shopping local. Locally-owned businesses and chain stores can and do co-exist in local communities, but it is important for local shoppers to make decisions that benefit the local community.

There is no magic bullet to rural revitalization, but getting new people and businesses to invest in our community is essential. It is innate to the history of our communities and it is crucial to our future. Men like R.L. Penick and businesses like WTU were once “outsiders” in Stamford. Once they made important local investments that changed the community, they made themselves a significant piece of our local history. They helped lead our place to prosperity. Over a century later, as we attempt to lead rural communities back to prosperity, we must identify businesses both large and small that believe in the future of our community. We must attract others to invest, from both inside and outside our towns. If our only investment comes from the outside, we must ask ourselves why our own people do not believe in our future. We must give them a reason to believe as well. By inspiring belief and investment from both inside and outside, we can tap into our community’s heritage and we can provide it with a new and lasting energy for generations to come.

James Decker is the Mayor of Stamford, Texas and the creator of the West of 98 website and the Rural Church and State and West of 98 podcasts. Contact James and subscribe to these essays at westof98.substack.com and subscribe to him wherever podcasts are found. Check out the West of 98 Bookstore with book lists for essential reads here.

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Dear readers,

I come to you with an announcement! After several years of prodding by trustworthy voices and a surprising number of you who made a voluntary pledge with your subscription, I am adding a paid subscription option to West of 98! But, let me state right out front:

This is VOLUNTARY. If you want to continue reading my regular writing here at West of 98, you don’t need to do anything! Just keep reading, like and comment, and share with your friends, so more people learn about my work.

So why is it voluntary?

I’ve struggled with the idea of paid subscriptions for a while. I subscribe to several Substack authors who do powerful work behind a paywall as part of a writing career. I gladly support them. My situation is different. A portion of my writing is inspired by my public service as an elected local town mayor. I will not let my ideas for our local community be paywalled from anyone who wants to read them. Moreover, I hope that my ideas help inspire other people with even better ideas in other towns. I want my words to be as accessible as possible.

But, with that said, writing is one of my truest passions in life. I aspire to spend more time writing about the things that I care about deeply: rural communities, agriculture, rebuilding local food systems, restoring the American prairies, and more. I want to write books and be paid to write for publications large and small. Life is too short for all of us to waste our time thinking we’ll explore our passion “one day.” I cannot achieve those goals without committing myself towards them.

If a few people are willing to pay to support my writing, then I think I need to be willing to accept their generosity. Those dollars will help me commit more time and energy to my ultimate goals.

What are my options?

You can subscribe here at Substack in the link below (which also appears at the bottom of the email. If you are a free subscriber and wish to convert to a paid subscription, you can also click that subscribe link. It should allow you to change your subscription level. If it doesn’t, or if you need help, please email me. You can

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You can subscribe monthly for the low price of $5.00. In addition to all my writing, you’ll get occasional access to polls for future writing topics and advance looks at a future writing project in the works (a rural historical fiction). You’ll also get snail mail! I’ll write all of my subscribers a handwritten letter, at least quarterly, on my trademark yellow pad stationary. Annual subscriptions are $50.00 per year, with the same offerings but at a discounted price for a full year’s payment.

There’s also a “Patron of the Prairie” with a suggested price of $200 for a year, or the option to fill in the number you’d like to contribute. This is for people who truly want to go the extra mile. For anyone who is so generous, you’ll get the same offerings as a regular supporter, plus some future group chats, video updates, and my undying appreciation for helping kickstart this project at such a high level.

What if I want to support but I’m not ready to subscribe?

Well, well, well, I’m glad you asked! “Buy Me a Coffee” is a great website that allows you to support creative work on a one-time or recurring basis. You can even name your own price. I won’t use all this money to buy coffee, but some of it will buy coffee. Some of it will buy Allsup’s burritos for my children and other family necessaries. You can chip in at https://coff.ee/westof98.

What if I just want to buy books?

There’s an option for that, too! I have a Bookshop.org storefront at shttps://bookshop.org/shop/westof98. You can buy books that I recommend in my shop or you can click through my storefront and buy your own books at Bookshop. When you purchase, I get a small referral fee. Bookshop also supports independent bookstores as they toil away in an Amazon World, so it’s a double win. If you have a book in mind and want me to send you my affiliate code on Bookshop, I’d be glad to do that too!

Are you crazy, James?

Probably, yes. That’s nothing new. My friend changed his life when he committed full time to his podcast project at Mountain & Prairie. His example and his advice have been priceless to me over the last few years. I’ve been thinking about this for a while and this morning, as I was getting ready for church, I listened to one of Ed’s recent episodes where he referenced that decision to truly pursue the work that he loved the most. It could not have been a more timely message to get me off high center and bring this to life. So, today’s the day!

Thank you, West of 98 readers. I’ve been writing on Substack for almost five years and this project continues to grow in a steady fashion. This next step will allow me to take my work, this Substack, and my passion for writing to the next level. Follow along, won’t you?

James Decker is the Mayor of Stamford, Texas and the creator of the West of 98 website and the Rural Church and State and West of 98 podcasts. Contact James and subscribe to these essays at westof98.substack.com and subscribe to him wherever podcasts are found. Check out the West of 98 Bookstore with book lists for essential reads here.

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