A google search for “shitkicker” will take you down a road to rock bands maybe in British Columbia, or Australia, even Northern California. You can also find songs with the term in the lyrics. It is a rich and lively word.
When I was growing up in Indiana the term was kicked around in a casual manner meaning not much. It took my going to seminary to really get to the heart of the word. A dictionary definition goes like this: an unsophisticated or oafish person, especially one from a rural area.
A deeper look at the term comes from Tex Sample. Sample is a specialist in church and society, a storyteller, author, and the Robert B. and Kathleen Rogers Professor Emeritus of Church and Society at the St. Paul School of Theology, a United Methodist seminary in Kansas City, Missouri, where he taught from 1967 until 1999. Sample has published over a dozen books with down home titles like Hard Living People and Mainstream Christians, Working Class Rage, and White Soul: Country Music, the Church and Working Americans. In one of my seminary courses I read a book by Sample and learned of his use of “shitkickers”. I liked it. It felt close to home. I thought he was talkin’ bout me. You know — rural, unsophisticated and a bit oafish.
I come from a shitkicking culture. No, not stupid, not unaware, just real downhome people. The image that comes to mind is a few guys standing around an old car with the hood raised, each with a can of beer, in an hour-long discussion about the carburetor. When I was sitting in a truck stop eating biscuits and gravy, watching truckers plug the pinball machines, with Patsy Cline or Hank Williams coming out of the jukebox. Those are my people. That is me. I left my people, and I think I left myself wondering what is a carburetor.
I marched off to the Army, a trip that didn’t work out well, (Read Reluctant Soldier Boy in Substack archive). It took me seven years to do four years of college. I spent most of my time reading bulletin boards and playing table tennis/ping-pong. Thirty years later I found myself in seminary reading Tex Sample, the champion of the commoner, and getting a fix on my shitkicking culture.
There are times I have regretted the route I have taken from Noble County, Indiana to the many addresses since those days. I had the opportunity to return to Noble County for several years due to my mother’s dementia. I walked the county roads, lining the map with colored ink to mark the roads completed. On those walks I felt something, barely describable, an emotional movement deep in my being. Those back roads were my roads, my place to be, where the deer, the rabbits, and the robins, greeted me. I sobbed. The Army, college, sports aspirations, and travel had taken me away from my people, my home. I was a shitkicker come home.
What if I had stayed there? What if I had become a cabinetmaker or carpenter? Didn’t happen. Okay. I am more content than I have ever been. So all is well. But I still wonder about the path not taken.
On walking with robins:
Snow Robins
Came early again only to be fooled
Hungry birds, life is never what you expect
Anxious friends on the edge of spring.
Friends leading walker down a snowy road
Staying close, hopping ahead, expecting life
Heartening walker on the edge of life.
Beautiful! I like the poem a lot. It looks okay in print.