“My grandmother was a witch…”

It would get everyone’s attention, for sure.  After a beat filled with lots of blinking eyes, I’d explain that my grandmother knew how to dowse for water with the forked limb of a peach tree, and when I was seven or eight years old I’d asked her one day when she was burning trash in the rusty barrel behind her house how she did it, and she said, by way of explanation, “I’m a witch.  Didn’t you know that?”

After she put it like that, I noticed things about her that, to my young and fertile imagination, seemed like total witchcraft:  How her flowers and vegetables grew to enormous sizes–chrysanthemums like volleyballs and corn on the cob as long as your forearm.  How she would talk to her animals, her hens and her cats, and how they’d talk back.  And how the same voice that could chat with cats could throw off the pitch of an entire congregation singing a hymn in church on Sunday.

I’d tell the audience that I had come to believe that what my grandmother knew was just a tiny part of a whole body of folkways and connections to the Earth that must have, at one time, been whole.  I suggested that centuries of science, rationality and organized religion had shattered and scattered this body of knowledge to the ends of the earth, but that it still existed, as little slivers and remnants, like what my grandmother knew.

I said that what I thought would happen is that the people who are the keepers of these little pieces would be able to use the internet to find one another, and re-connect what they know, and reassemble those slivers in beautiful new ways, and that maybe these new ways would be what saves the planet.

I’d get nothing from the audience.  Blank looks.  Crickets.  Maybe one older woman in the audience nodded in understanding, but that was about it.

And then someone  else on the panel would say something like, “I think e-tail is going to be driver for growth in the tech sector in the foreseeable future…” and you could almost hear the audience sigh with relief as the talk got back to terra cognita.

Today, when I get asked to speak about social media, I will sometimes tell this same story, about My Grandmother the Witch.

Today, almost everyone in the audience nods in understanding.

Next chance you get, plant a peach tree or something.  We’re going to need it.

When I’d bring this up in conversation with my fellow dotcommers, people would stare at me like I’d just said I expected beanie-copters to be making a big comeback soon. Douse? How un-real. How un-important. Nobody lives on the land any more.

We walk on dead skin through insulated, ventilated, carpeted chambers, through grottos of polished glass and granite, into cocoons of silicon and fiberglas and stainless steel, and we are seldom in actual physical contact with the Earth, the very entity that sustains us. That is simply the way the game of life is played, and how most people choose to behave in order to derive productivity and wealth from it.

Today, quite suddenly, we have the ability to change the way the game is played, and Wild Blue Communications is one of the agents of this change. By offering high speed satellite internet to rural areas in 48 states, Wild Blue makes it possible for people who live remotely to participate in the Networked World. Think of it! Instead of your only real estate choice being a starter condo owned by an absentee landlord in a crappy part of a big city, it’s conceivable that you can own 10 acres — or 40 or 200! — with a stand-alone home and several out-buildings in an area where your rooster is your alarm clock. Yes, no longer is the country lifestyle the domain of the lonely and longing Barbara Kingsolver heroine. Tom and Huck and Becky, meet Tai and Erica and Kuldip. Those of you who choose to bake bread and can beets while the CAD models for your Chinese theme park project download (Wild Blue delivers 1.5 Mbps downstream, 256 Kbps upstream) may now choose to do so. Yes, the small family farm is coming back, thanks to Wild Blue. And this time, most of the manure is virtual.

Wild Blue, based outside Denver in Greenwood Village, Colorado, is a partnership of Liberty Media (33%), IntelSat (30%), the National Rural Telecommunications Cooperative (16%) and other other, smaller investors like EchoStar, Bell Canada and Kleiner-Perkins. The company launched its first satellite in 2005 and today is busy building out its network to reach everyone who wants to tame a horse during the day and Ruby on Rails at night.

Families who have traditionally lived on small farms don’t necessarily do it because they like the work. The work is a pain in the patoot. No, the big reason families live on small farms is because of the lifestyle. The freedom. The space. The potential do do exactly what they want with a nice big chunk of land. I have always suspected that many small farmers are secret artists, for whom the land is a canvas, and the life they and their families etch onto it, their art. Wild Blue, the only provider of its kind, makes it more possible than it has been in a long time for a modern family to etch a life in the Earthly medium.

David Leonard, Wild Blue’s CEO, estimates that “there are currently ten to fifteen million U. S. households in areas where there are fewer than 100 homes per square mile,” and identifies this demo as Wild Blue’s market. “I don’t think there’s a massive social migration back to the land, but there’s definitely a niche in the population that wants to do that, and wants more space,” he says. Leonard says that Wild Blue, whose subscriber base grew 38% in 2007, will generate $40 million in cash flow this year and will be at an annual run rate of $80 million by December. That’s the short term. Longer term, he sees the company adding to its reach with $350 million in addition capital investment over the next three years.

For those of you who might want to weigh playing the small family farm game, here is a check list of PROS and CONS of life in the country provided as a public service by someone who lived it for eighteen years:

PROS: Your own archery or skeet shooting range. Your own golf hole, or your own croquet court where players must wear all white and drink gin rickeys when they play. All the gardening you can eat, and then some. Horses. Trees you know by name. A barn with a carpentry shop and an art studio and a recording studio and a basketball hoop and a skateboard ramp and chickens. Room for dogs and children to romp. Physical labor. Pick up trucks and tractors, and stuff you can hook to them and pull around. Your very own pitchfork, and more cool tools to bludgeon, probe, slice, carve, plane, whip, knife, nail, hammer and chop than you’d see in three Saw movies. Small bridges over meandering creeks. Snakes, crawdads, beavers, foxes, wild turkeys, deer and many other exotic creatures in close proximity. Wild blackberries. Owls and other birds, singing away all day. Your own lake, that you can name yourself, where you can fish for fish you eat for dinner that night. Four wheelers and dirt bikes and your own track that you build yourself. A cow you can milk yourself and her cute calf that you give a cute name, like Tuffy. The only one running around like a chicken with its head cut off is the chicken with its head cut off. Big bonfires. Quiet. Storms. Sunsets. Stars.

CONS: Many things on a farm can cost you a finger, or worse. Some really spooky sounds come from the woods at night. Horseflies. The poisons are not under lock and key. Traveling anywhere by air takes at least all day. Someone has to gut and scale the fish you catch in your lake if you want to eat them for dinner and it’s not going to be you. Chronically dirty fingernails. Worms and bugs and spiders and mice and ticks and mites and chiggers and other exotic creatures in close, sometimes intimate, proximity. Gravel roads send vehicles straight to hell. People who visit you from the city will constantly ask, “What’s that smell?” when you can’t smell anything out of the ordinary. Many of the neighbor kids will own shotguns. That cute calf, Tuffy, will grow into a 1200 pound steer and someone will buy him and eat him, and you will have to explain it to a child who will cry about it. One day you discover your barn on fire, and you see a car parked on a hill two miles away, and you know whoever is sitting in that car started the fire. You never find out who it is. You and your family will soon flee to the comfort and safety of the big city.

For sure, this move is not for everyone. It is, after all, the boonies we are talking about, and you will, by definition, become a hick when you move to French Lick. But anyone who has spent significant time living on the land, even those of us who were held hostage there (call it the Stockyard Syndrome), will tell you that what you gain from the experience outweighs what you think you are missing.

In the Networked World, we all have the potential to reassemble splinters of history and knowledge into productive new forms. Maybe it’s not dousing we’re doing, maybe we’re not using the forked limb of a peach tree to do it, maybe what we feel tugging at us is not water. But if we make the inquiry, if we listen well…we will feel…we will find what is concealed from us…and whatever it is that we find will offer fresh sustenance to us and our communities.