One thing I’ve learned through my saga research is that early Iceland was a place without towns as we know them; the land was instead dominated by individual farmsteads, along with temporary assembly places where the people from those farms regularly gathered.
Among other things, this meant that hospitality became hugely important. If you were traveling, you couldn’t make for a town and use money to buy food and lodgings at the local inn. You had to instead ask food and shelter of a farmer in the vicinity, and your life might well depend on the goodwill of his granting it to you. Good thing that in most cases he would, maybe because he knew that he might be relying on you in turn some day. Hospitality wasn’t just a matter of politeness and good manners; it was a matter of survival.
So I was fascinated to hear coffeeem tell me a couple days ago that the rules of hospitality were much the same among the ranchers of the Southwestern United States in the 19th and early 20th centuries. If someone came across the desert to your ranch seeking food and shelter–even if he were an outlaw, even if you didn’t much like him–you gave it to him. You knew that if you didn’t, they might well die out there, and you’d be the one who killed them. Arizona and New Mexico did have towns at the time, and in those towns people didn’t understand why a rancher would shelter people so indiscriminately; but the ranchers, on their isolated holdings, understood what they were doing quite well.
It’s fascinating to me to think about how in edge environments you can’t forget that you need other human beings to survive–that you rely on each other. Near the edge, survival is an iffy matter even with others; alone, it’s nearly impossible.
I remember a friend, who grew up in rural Arizona half a century ago, describing with outrage to me one day how a modern service station along some interstate wanted to charge them for water. When he was a child, my friend said, you never denied anyone water. It was a criminal thing, an unforgivable thing. Only the lowest of people would do such a thing. In other words, that idea was still there: there were certain things–things crucial to survival–that you never denied your fellow human beings.
In towns and cities, we can forget. But take the towns and cities out of easy reach, and everything changes. On the edges, people know. We human beings may not always like each other, but we do always need each other.