Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, March 9, 1993 TAG: 9303090098
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: SETH WILLIAMSON SPECIAL TO THE ROANOKE TIMES & WORLD-NEWS
DATELINE: WILLIS LENGTH: Long
RENAISSANCE MAN
"You want too much," said the exasperated real estate agent. "God didn't make anything like this, and if he did nobody would sell it!"But it turned out that God did make what Jan Oosting was looking for - and it was Floyd County. The musician, craftsman and carpenter has been living on a homestead a few miles west of Willis since 1981.
Oosting, 54, said he got the testy response in 1978 from a real estate salesman to whom he and his wife, Shirley, had submitted a two-page, 28-point list of what they wanted in a parcel of land.
The pair was fleeing a life of urban professionalism on Long Island, where Oosting taught high-school science and his wife practiced psychology.
Deciding they'd had enough of city life, they "got out a world atlas and started looking," recalled Oosting. "We considered Australia and New Zealand, but they've got immigration restrictions and I didn't want to live in a society that is racist by law.
"We thought about the Pacific Northwest and the coast of Maine. And we devoted one entire summer to looking here on the East Coast. We'd take three or four days at a campsite and go out radially, looking for farmland and unimproved land."
Oosting (whose name is pronounced YON OH-steeng) said one thing they didn't want was to wind up amid wealthy gentleman farmers. Recalling one spot where the land agent proudly pointed out his neighbors would be doctors and lawyers, Oosting said, "We didn't want to live with people like that."
His neighbors in Floyd are the kind of mountain people he came to know as a child in North Carolina, where his adoptive father was a professor of botany at Duke University. Among his many accomplishments, Oosting has taught a field course in Appalachian studies at Virginia Tech, and he takes a keen delight in the folk wisdom of Southern mountaineers.
Even in a county that's one of the most culturally diverse in Virginia, Oosting stands out.
Literally.
The bearded, bear-like musician is 6-foot-5 and weighs in the neighborhood of 300 pounds.
But his polymath's assortment of talents is more remarkable than his size. He has built most of his new house by hand, and he builds and sells meticulously crafted, old-fashioned children's toys.
He's a member of the International Workers of the World, a legendary radical labor organization known earlier in this century as the "Wobblies," and describes his politics as "anarchist" and "working for the good of the common person."
A member of a nonpastored Quaker meeting, Oosting says his religious life is focused on "spirituality, not to be confused with religiosity." No fan of conventional organized religion, he says dogma "is a refuge for people who want somebody else to do their thinking for them."
Oosting is an accomplished pianist as well as folk musician. On one recent day the manuscript of Bach's "Goldberg Variations" was set up for practice at his bedroom keyboard - and bluesman Robert Johnson was ready to go on his CD player.
Heritage Records of Galax has asked Oosting to record an album of shape-note gospel songs, a project that will take him into the studio this summer. He is also producing a cassette of songs to use with the flat-foot dancing dolls he sells at craft shows, and two cassette albums of Wobbly labor-organizing songs are in the works.
Professional musician Bob Avery-Grubel of Floyd County says of Oosting, "He's one of the more talented people I've ever met. In the world of music he's mastered as many instruments as many folks could master in many lives. He's a good carpenter, too, a hell of a carpenter."
Another Floyd County friend is public radio announcer and producer Jon Ratner, who describes Oosting as "the king of the green-box raiders."
Oosting, says Ratner, is "a true Renaissance man. I don't know an instrument he can't play. And he's developed an alternative lifestyle in that old-fashioned sense of trying to live in harmony with his environment."
"King of the green-box raiders, that's the title I like best," said Oosting, who has scrounged most of the materials for his new home from unorthodox sources. Reusing cast-off building materials, says Oosting, is a part of his personal philosophy.
"I live pretty much according to the dicta of the American transcendentalists, particularly Emerson and Thoreau. I espouse simplicity, I espouse walking lightly and leaving as few footprints as you can, and giving more than you take," Oosting said.
You could add "amateur diplomat" to Jan Oosting's list of job titles. Floyd County, notable for its tossed salad of inhabitants, is home to longtime Scots-Irish "been-here" families; a wide variety of "come-heres," including a sizable counterculture community; and professionals and blue-collar laborers who work in Roanoke or the New River Valley.
The diverse mix has made for some social friction, but Oosting moves comfortably in all camps. As soon as he arrived in Floyd, Oosting says, "I acted as a go-between among all these groups. We figured that would be our social service: to unite all these disparate groups."
The musician underwent a time of testing beginning in October 1991, when his wife, Shirley, lost a lengthy battle with cancer.
"She was really the only person whose company I craved," said Oosting, who vanished from Floyd society for a time. "I holed up on top of the mountain or I went visiting children."
Oosting has no shortage of offspring, with five of his own, two from a previous marriage by Shirley, plus what he describes as "eight off-the-books adopted kids." The latter group includes three Chinese children and one Indian boy. The 15 children are scattered over the United States, and Oosting was away from Floyd County for months as he recovered from his loss, visiting most of them in turn.
It's been only within the last year that Oosting has re-emerged into Floyd society and begun performing again. He has occupied himself with working on his house, which he expects to finish within two years.
And he reads. "A lot of technical stuff on carpentry and cabinet-making. And when I really feel like reading I go through all of Thoreau and Emerson over and over and over again; it makes me feel good and wiggly and it's my Linus blanket," Oosting said.
It's been more than a decade since Oosting faced a classroom full of high school kids, but at age 54 he has advice for any youngster who cares to listen:
"Most of the choices that people make are bad ones because they choose a career based on the money it will bring," Oosting said.
"Find out what you're not good at and eschew it dearly. Don't do what makes you unhappy, because life's too short anyway."