Letters from a Conservative Farmer: Versed in Country Things, Part 3 — Disturbing Revelations

Jigs Gardner

The late Jigs Gardner was an associate editor of The St. Croix Review. Jigs Gardner wrote from the Adirondacks. These early essays, some of which were written decades ago, are of timeless quality.

Most of our lives had been spent in the company of people against a background of the ebb and flow of other people. We do not realize how lights, vehicles, sounds of people, attenuate the impact of nature, which in our new life was massive. Now our only neighbor was cranky Otis. Seldom seen, cars on our road were very rare, and days and days went by without the sight of a person except the mail driver. The expected arrival of a guest filled us with anticipation, the visit itself was a time of intense excitement, and when departure time came we were wretched, feeling as if a piece of ourselves were being torn away, leaving us desperately lonely. I remember those feelings very well, and given our circumstances and expectations, I can understand and even sympathize with them, but they tell us how immature we still were. (In the perspective of our much more isolated life in Nova Scotia ten years later, our Vermont experience seems like Broadway). We had guests perhaps once a month, and how strenuously we entertained them! I seemed to be seized by a determined enthusiasm to show off the woods, the fields, the hills, the views. As soon as they arrived we would tramp for miles on the old trails and logging roads, talking, arguing, exchanging news, and telling stories, laughing and joking, returning to the warm room in the welcoming house for tea and cookies and more boisterous conversation.

Guests were not our only visitors; sometimes strangers dropped in. Thus appeared one late fall day Ernie and Martha Moore as I was working a little way down the road, cutting up the dead stub of an old maple that had blown over in a storm the night before. A red-faced, heavyset man called out from a station wagon in a commanding voice, “Hey! That’s one of my trees you’re cutting!”

Before I could think of what to say, he laughed. “That’s O.K. Help yourself. Living at Corbin’s? Your wife at home?” He said something to the woman at the wheel. Stepping out of the car, he said, “Here, I’ll give you a hand,” reaching in back to get an axe.

Ernie introduced himself and showed me the axe while his wife drove up to our place. He kept the axe as I had never seen one kept: The handle was well rubbed with linseed oil and the gleaming poll was enclosed in a leather shield. He examined my axe critically. “Too rounded at the corners, reduces your cutting edge. And there’s too much metal back of the edge; you have to take that down.” Hanging his jacket on a sapling, he went to work, and it was a pleasure to watch him as he handily split out long chunks with a few quick strokes. Ten minutes was enough. “I’m out of shape. Haven’t done this in years.”

Not wanting him to watch me clumsily continue the job, I handed him his jacket and we walked up to the house, where we found his wife drinking coffee and talking to Jo Ann. A small, sharp-eyed woman who spoke decisively, she was describing, with great vehemence, how frightful the winters were on the hillside.

“Oh, they weren’t so bad,” Ernie interrupted, booming out a series of anecdotes about horrific snowstorms, huge drifts, and Siberian temperatures, stories whose point always turned out to be Ernie’s prowess and ingenuity. Martha cut him short by asking us about the Corbins. We told her the little we knew, but this was another opportunity for Ernie, who began telling stories ostensibly about Corbin but really about himself. I stopped him this time, asking how he came to own the land the old maple stood on.

Martha replied, with a wave of her hand toward the window, “We own everything.”

And so it was, or had been. At one time they had owned the entire gorge and hillside down almost to the highway, how many acres I cannot even guess. Even then they had not parted with much of it, just Otis’s twenty acres and Corbin’s one hundred. How they acquired it made a curious story. During the war, Ernie, then in the Navy, wrote to Martha that now was the time to take steps to realize their dream of living on a farm in Vermont. Martha, who had emigrated as a young girl with her family from Germany after World War I, and who was a shrewd, tightfisted woman, a true peasant in her attitude to landed property, traveled to northern Vermont and bought the land from three or four owners who still lived there. Soon after the war they settled into a farmhouse halfway down the hill, a plateau before the land plunged downhill again. How much farming they did I never asked, but from background details in Ernie’s anecdotes, I gathered they did some.

We walked down to see them one day during the week they were there, and Ernie took me into the woods to show off the work he had done there, cutting out dead trees, thinning small evergreens, stacking limbs for rabbit habitat. Back at the house, he opened a cabinet in the cellar and pointed to a few jars of preserves. Taking one out, he read the label. “‘Pumpkin 1952’! Still as good as ever, I bet!” Beaming proudly and a little wistfully on the dusty jar, he was momentarily a touching figure.

From the bitterness in her voice when Martha talked about life there, I could easily imagine how desolate the life must have seemed to her and how determinedly she must have fought with Ernie to escape from it. Over the years I met other older people who had moved to Vermont, like the Moores, to pursue the pastoral dream, but every one had jumped ship. Very few modern people were suited for it, certainly not the Moores. They say (like so many), and think they mean, that they yearn for a life of repose, sharing a vine-covered cottage with their mates far from the madding crowd, but in fact even a hint of such a life frightens them. I cannot reckon up the number of visitors to our farm in Nova Scotia who noted the “peace and quiet,” declared how much they wanted to come and stay in our log cabins, and then fled down the lane as fast as the potholes would let them, never to be seen again. There is a false heartiness about them that cannot conceal an inkling of dread. Most modern people abhor silence, tranquility, solitude.

The gregarious Moores were perfectly suited for the life they had chosen after the Vermont fiasco: Running a tavern on Long Island. Ernie’s blustering hail-fellow manner and Martha’s shrewdness fit very well in that picture. Nevertheless, there was about them just a touch, not of sadness, but of the bafflement of those who, happily enmeshed in the busy toils of some humdrum existence, once had dreams, even if they were the wrong ones.

Then there were Ralph Corbin’s friends who wanted his new address. That accounted for the first two or three, but then oddities began to appear, people who approached the house in an uncertain, wandering way, looking around vaguely. I could never find out what they wanted. Address? They had it. Buy the printing press? Oh, is that for sale? No, they didn’t think they wanted it. How about the farm? They looked around and then shook their heads. Well, what can I do for you? That they could not answer. They were very similar: dull, drippy, indistinct. If I asked them about themselves, no sparks were kindled and they had little to say. If they said anything, it was about the Corbins, and their tone told me that they, especially Ralph, were something special in their lives, and their works and ways were not those of lesser mortals. Where was Barbie’s herb patch? Did I do my laundry in the pond? That’s what they did. Ralph kept a goat (looking askance as Aster). Ralph thought it cruel to work a horse. Ralph never kept pigs; he was very gentle and didn’t believe in killing.

I didn’t take offense, because the remarks weren’t delivered aggressively, but sort of dribbled out as they stood on the porch looking around aimlessly. They had nothing against me, except that I was not Ralph Corbin, who was evidently a mythic personage who meant something to them, probably in connection with “The Simple Life” (they mentioned his booklet). But we were living in the master’s house where all his miracles were wrought, and our daily life there was beginning to cast doubt. How come, if he lived there through the winter, he didn’t have a woodshed? And the cellar had not been set up to store all that wonderful harvest from the garden he bragged about — anything down there, as we belatedly discovered, would freeze. And the garden was tiny. Finally, the laundry in the pond. Sparing Jo Ann and forgoing the poetry, I had tried to scrub a sheet there, but it was too shallow and dirty, and I had to do it all over again in the sink. We weren’t sure Corbin was all he was cracked up to be — and yet, there was the booklet and there were the disciples. Finally, there we were, working like hell just to maintain any life at all, never mind a Simple one, and Corbin’s believers were reproaching us in the name of the master’s principles. It was a puzzle to us. We had no idea that it would be a theme we would live with for many years.

A countryman walked into the dooryard late one afternoon as I was splitting wood. Nice horse, he said, nodding at Ginger tethered nearby. His light blue eyes were the brightest I’d ever seen, he had a bristly reddish moustache, and his flat denim cap was cocked jauntily over one ear. Would I come with the horse and help pull his truck out of the ditch? I was thrilled that anyone should think I knew enough to go round pulling trucks out of ditches with a horse! As we headed for the barn to get the harness we passed my great pile of firewood, a jumble of long crooked limbs and short logs difficult for a novice like me to estimate, but I knew it was a lot, maybe five or six or seven or even ten cords. I asked the stranger, who glanced appraisingly at the pile. Two cords at the outside, he said, and we passed on. I know we must have gotten the harness and put it on the horse, but I was in such a state of stunned amazement, reeling from the collapse of the happy delusion that the winter’s wood supply was in the bag, that I hardly knew what I was doing until I found myself walking along the road beside Ginger and the stranger. The pickup was in the ditch all right, but the situation wasn’t too bad, and knowing what I do today, I think we could have gotten it out. Then, of course, I knew nothing, and the stranger, who was rather halfhearted about the job, soon gave it up. The sun had just set, and as we walked back all the last leaves in the wood beside the road glowed for a few moments with faded shades of orange that slowly and then suddenly lost all color to dusk. How cozy the house looked with the lamps lit, as we drew near! I felt bad about not pulling the truck out, felt I had let down the stranger, so I invited him in for a bottle of home brew. Well, he said, in a ruminative way, “I don’t mind if I do.”

“Fred Brown,” he said to Jo Ann, raising his cap.

“From Toonerville. Don’t you know Toonerville? The little boys here waiting for the school bus in the morning can see the settlement just down the highway, can’t they?”

. . . he said, smiling at the children playing marbles on the rug. We carried on a curiously tentative conversation as Jo Ann worked on supper, and the children played quietly, because he didn’t seem to be quite present; he was perched on the arm of a chair near the door as if ready to be off in a moment, as if he were not committed to the situation, and he spoke absently, inattentively. Even the mandatory catechism — Where did we come from? What did we do? — lacked the usual edge of insistent curiosity. Never one to be circumspect, I told the truth quite frankly. To most tight-lipped country people, where candor is unknown, our story sounded so absurd that it was immediately suspect, our naive openness regarded narrowly as the deepest duplicitous guile. It was hardly better if I were believed; then we were dismissed as lunatics. What Fred thought I never knew; in all the years of our acquaintance he seemed to take us pretty much as he found us. His account of himself was the usual potpourri of rural jobs: logging, farm work, pulp-cutting, a stint at the Fairbanks Morse mill in St. Johnsbury, selling firewood, and so on. That was fine beer, he said, so I got him another one.

Chore time came and I went out to the stable with milk pail and lantern, leaving Fred perched on the chair arm, staring into his glass. When I returned fifteen minutes later, he was just as I left him. Stay for supper, we said, but at that he roused himself. No, no, he had to get home. Thanks for everything, and he was gone.

Of course, as the reader will have guessed but I didn’t know for a long time, Fred had a skinful. If I had given him another beer, he might have fallen on his face. He, and nearly every other member of his clan in Toonerville, populated exclusively by Browns, was an alcoholic. He and some of his relatives were later to play a large role in our life.

And what of Otis? Aside from the comfort of his light across the gorge in the evenings, we saw very little of him — but we heard him. He had a horse I never saw, although the name was in my ears enough.

“Whoa, Tony, whoa! Tony stop, stop! Oh, Tony, why’d you go and do that?”

These litanies of grief, and the poor man never sounded angry, only sadly put upon, floated across the gorge from the spruce woods below his house where he was trying to skid some logs. It would not have been easy in any case, due to the steep terrain, and perhaps Otis wasn’t a very good horseman, but I know that Tony was real trouble because he had a maddening habit common among work-shy horses: He was forever backing up. As soon as Otis hitched him to a log, Tony would start backward, entangling his legs in the chain and whiffletree, screwing everything up. Once, when Tony managed to skid some logs up to the house, he then backed over them, wrapped the chain around his legs and fell sideways into a double set of spike tooth harrows leaning against a fence, immediately enmeshing harness, whiffletree, and skid chain in the harrows. Otis had to cut the harness off to free the damned horse. Working in the woods, listening to the woeful shouts from across the gorge, I was thankful that Tony didn’t belong to me, because however ignorant or unskilled Otis might be, I was worse — I knew nothing. But Ginger was perfect, doing whatever I asked of her without balking, patient of my ineptitude, never giving me even a reproachful look.

One day I fell in the stable, bruising my shin badly, and before I realized what was going on the bruise was infected and I was in bed with a fever and a hugely swollen leg. Jo Ann had to push me in the wheelbarrow to the stable to milk. We got a message to Willie via the mail driver, and he kindly picked me up to take me to his doctor in Barre. I told him as we were driving along how vital my health was because now I was the family’s only resource. Nothing — no person, no institution — stood between us and the vicissitudes of life. I was absolutely independent, with Jo Ann and the children depending wholly on me.

In those days there was a stretch of highway between Marshfield and Plainfield where the road ran along and down the curving face of a long hill. In the center of the view, standing amidst a tangle of brush, was a shell of a derelict brick house, roof, doors, windows gone, so that you looked down inside it while winding down the hill. I stared at it as I listened to Willie, who spoke with the happily interested air of one who has been stimulated to a related thought. He had never been independent, he said cheerfully: his mother had paid for the herd of cows, for the new well, for the Volkswagen for his wife. Of course, she insisted on being fair, spending an equal amount on his sister, which accounted for her Volkswagen, as well as much else. He rattled on about his mother’s money while I stared at the shell of the house, my insides feeling just as hollow.

I had looked upon Willie and the Woodwrights as, in some sort, models. They led lives that seemed ideal to me, combining old-fashioned farm work with tastes and interests I associated with the educated life, and I had stupidly thought those leisurely lives were made possible by the milk check, and that Jo Ann and I could learn to do something similar. But if I had thought about it, if I had remembered the farmers I had worked for, I would have known that they worked long and hard for a small living, and they certainly didn’t lead beautiful lives as my Vermont friends did. I didn’t mind their independent incomes, and in fact would have welcomed one myself; it was the sudden exposure of an illusion that was so shocking, an illusion that I, with some implicit cooperation from Willie, had naively created.

The immediate effect was to deepen our sense of isolation. Just as we had spun away from the academic world, from so many of the ideas and attitudes we had once shared, now we were discovering that we did not belong to the world of those we had considered our new mentors. There had already been signs of that, an accumulation of observations that now, in the light of Willie’s revelation, came together in what we thought of as the Staged Life, or Country Fakery, most obviously in the case of the Woodwrights. People with less sense and taste would have made much of their handsome place, would have spoiled it by thrusting it at visitors, but they behaved as if their surroundings were commonplace, just as they themselves were unpretentious and down to earth. Nevertheless, they were on view, and they subtly (and I suppose unconsciously) made sure the visitors saw all the Exhibits. How could I fault them for liking to be admired? But what was bogus about the scene was that the Woodwrights allowed their visitors to cast them as stars in a morality play called Beautiful Simple Country Life (BSCL), a play that works only if there is tacit cooperation between actors and audience: both have prescribed roles, specific tasks and lines and gestures which mesh in a shallow fictionalization of the lives of the stars. The audience, poised in worshipful wonder, asks BSCL questions:

“And you raise all your food yourselves right here?”

“You use horses for everything?”

“You grind your flour in that little mill by hand?”

The stars maintain the play by telling the audience what it wants to hear: To tell the truth — We haven’t ground flour in that thing for years; we buy it at the supermarket — rings down the curtain and sends the audience home disgruntled. A successful production rewards everyone: The stars get admiration, and the audience is also gratified because, by showing their appreciation of the BSCL they show their sensitivity and intelligence, their superiority to the putative materialism of the majority culture. I was aware of this because we had been exposed to it on a small scale, by a few visitors. How well I knew that moment when a question was asked and I looked at the expectant face radiant with the faith, and knew that by a small lie I could make everyone a little happier. Everyone but ourselves. The phoniness was too palpable, and we resented being reduced to absurd clichés, so it was relatively easy for us to refuse the gambit. Our gradual comprehension of the phenomenon, in itself an education, helped to develop our thinking in other ways and directions. Very early in our new life we were offered the choice of honesty or falsity, and of maturity or self-indulgence. What we would have chosen in our former life I cannot say, but I know that our slowly growing sense of what life required of us on the hill determined our decision.

Another, more immediate, fact that drove us apart from Willie and his friends was our sudden poverty, and it wasn’t the “voluntary poverty” Corbin smugly prattled on about. We had really fallen out of our class, and we were an embarrassment. One evening Willie stopped in and presented us with some meat he had bought at the store. The chief thing I recall — the lamps were lit, and I can see him coming through the doorway, smiling nervously, and holding out the package — was our unease, Willie’s and mine. I was as inept at receiving charity as he was at giving it. Some people are instinctively graceful about it, making charity seem quite natural, but for most of us it must be a learned skill. Neither Willie nor I had it then, and the moment’s awkwardness was deepened because not long ago we had been colleagues, equals, good friends.

Then there was the garden incident. A visitor was up, and we drove over to Willie’s. We were standing near his garden, and as I glanced at it my heart leapt with acquisitiveness. I remarked that he had left a lot of vegetables.

“We got what we wanted. You know how in the spring you’re all fired up to plant a lot, but come harvest time you don’t really want all that stuff.”

I could see beets, carrots, a couple of pumpkins, old lettuce, corn stalks, a burst cabbage. For a long moment I felt wolfish, not metaphorically but actually, like a lean hungry creature that would brush Willie aside to fall on the garden with a fierce rapacity, scooping up the tattered spoils to throw them in the car and speed off. I had to turn my back to continue the conversation undistracted. I could not have asked Willie for what he wasted, it would have been too much, too raw. I was still able to preserve the decencies between us, but I knew we were different now, our situations had changed, and henceforth we would see each other in new, ambiguous ways.

Unsettling revelations, startling shifts in perspective, these were the headline events in our life, but our ordinary existence, the unspectacular but deeply satisfying routine of our daily work went on, the ground base as it were, while the year deepened into late fall: Taking care of the children, felling trees, splitting wood, making meals, milking the cow, feeding the animals.

In the beginning of November, Otis broke his arm working in the woods and, impatient with the healing, decided to spend the rest of the winter at the Veteran’s hospital in White River Junction. So, Tony was sold, the old green pickup disappeared from the roads, the only light on the dark hillside went out, and after all Otis’s bluster about whether we could take it, we were left to endure the gathering winter alone.

The days were always cold now, and the wind drove before it rain mixed with sleet, no weather for a failing horse like Ginger to be out in, even if there were any nourishment in the dead frosted grass. Shivering in her stable, she grew thinner day by day. I chopped hay and mixed it with grain and apple pomace, but it wasn’t enough. Willie was expecting word from me to send her to slaughter, but we put it off, not because I was working her, but because we hated to give up on the patient, gentle horse. At last, when we saw that she was only wasting away, I sent a note to Willie and two men came with an open trailer hauled behind a pickup. Now she balked for the first time, now she had to be blindfolded and pushed and pulled onto the trailer. When the driver paid me, he said, shaking his head, that it was as if she knew where she was going. But as I watched Ginger huddled in the wind, flurries of snow catching in her mane, I knew she was only regretting the meager protection of her stable; she could know no more.

But I did. As I write, I am looking at a shapshot taken in September: the grass is lush, the maple in front of the house spreads its thickly leaved crown against the sky, and in the middle-distance Jo Ann is standing beside Ginger, holding Nell and Curdie on the horse’s back, while Jesse is patting her nose and Seth stands aside, watching and smiling.

So ended the autumn, the end of the beginning of our new life.

Next Time: The Test of Winter.     *

Letters from a Conservative Farmer: The Simple Life, Continued

Jigs Gardner

The late Jigs Gardner was an associate editor of The St. Croix Review. Jigs Gardner wrote from the Adirondacks. These early essays, some of which were written decades ago, are of timeless quality.

Part Two

For the next few days the men (there were five of us) took axes and crosscut saws and swede saws to the woods to cut firewood. Men (that is, men not used to the job) love to play at woods work, and not the least enjoyable part was creating at mealtimes what we thought was the atmosphere of an old lumber camp, bragging of our exploits, kidding one another, and putting away heaps of food. Oddly, there was no woodshed, no place to store firewood at all, so we quickly threw up a lean-to outside the back door. Then there was the problem of getting the wood to it. The woods weren’t far from the house, but the distance was too great to carry it. We dragged some of the smaller stuff in and stacked the rest beside the logging road. Before long I’d have to find a way to haul it.

Willie offered to sell us one of his horses, Ginger, a sweet-tempered Morgan who had had her molars pulled a couple of years before, so that now she could eat only short grass. Fine on summer pasture, she could make it through winter only on special feed like alfalfa pellets. I knew this, but I did not know it in any real way; I had not yet learned the obduracy of material fact. I was heedless of the specific material limitations of the things that now made up my world. I thought about it for a while, but recognizing that I knew less about horses than I did about cows, I finally turned Willie down. But he understood my need — moving that firewood — better than I did, and he returned at the end of the week with Ginger in a truck.

“Keep her as long as you need her and then I’ll sell her to the Minks. The dealer offered me twenty-five dollars, so I’ve got to get that.”

Willie also sold us our last animal acquisition, a pig. Walt, one of our friends, had driven me over to the Woodwrights to see about buying a stove, and on our way out of the lane we met Willie, who had a honey of a deal for me: Friends of his, who had to return to Boston for the winter, asked Willie to sell the two pigs they had rashly bought back in June. He offered me both for twenty-five dollars, a great buy that even I could recognize — but I didn’t want two pigs and I didn’t want to spend more money. Eventually, he talked me into taking one for ten dollars. He pointed up the road: Just take the next right; it’s the only house on the road, and the pigs are in a pen behind the barn.

When we walked around the corner of the barn, there was a pig all right, an underfed shoat, fifty or sixty pounds, but he wasn’t in the pen, he was standing outside, watching us warily, ears and tail erect, his tight little body tensely poised. It is easy to say that today I would know what to do, I would know the artful ways to trick the pig back into his pen, or failing that, I would know how to capture a loose pig. Lord knows I’ve done it often enough. Today, however, is not yesterday, so what we did was to approach the pig directly, uttering insincere endearments in enticing tones — “Here piggie piggie, nice little piggie” — and the pig shot away into the bushes. All those years have passed, and I can still see his bottom vanishing into a clump of goldenrod. There follows in my memory a blur of thickets of greenery streaked with the scampering figure of the pig. The blur finally slows, stops, and I see the pig, tensely poised, watching us warily from the far end of a glade. Walt and I, scratched, sweaty, panting, exhausted, stare back for some moments before turning away in disgust.

The pig was captured next day after Willie helped us organize a roundup with all our manpower. The animal roster was now complete: Aster the cow, Ginger the mare, twelve hens and a rooster, and Clay the pig, named after a megalomaniacal former colleague because of the way he ran around the pen, trying to gobble up everything in sight. These were not just things, simple additions to our property, but as with everything else we put our hand to in those two years, in order to use them we had to master them, which meant learning and resolution. For the moment, Ginger and Aster were either in the pasture or staked out on tethers around the barn and yard, eating the lush grass thriving in all the rain we were getting. There was plenty of old hay in the mow for winter, plus some I had cut raggedly with a scythe. Some of that would be chopped for Ginger, I thought. Both the cow and horse required a grain supplement, and the hens and pig would have an all-grain diet, plus the tiny amount of table scraps that escaped from our kitchen. I figured I could just about afford the grain, but Clay would stretch the budget, so it would be wise to find something else to feed him. It was Otis who gave us an idea when he warned us about Mrs. B. She had dropped in a couple of times and shared meals with us, and he had seen her jeep in the yard.

“She does that to everyone, heh heh. If you don’t put a stop to it, she’ll be here every day, heh heh.”

I told him about her attempt on Mrs. Allen’s garden, and he questioned me closely about the details. Foiling Mrs. B. was evidently a rare feat, and I had the feeling that we went up in his estimation. Despite all her talk, that was all the “gardening” she actually did, he said, going around after the summer people left to scavenge their gardens.

Walt and I drove out the next day to cruise the back roads, but there weren’t many summer places locally, and the jeep tracks and general devastation told us that Mrs. B. had preceded us. At least we got corn stalks. Venturing farther took us beyond her range, and then we filled the trunk, as well as the back seat, with beets, carrots, parsnips, lettuce, beans, huge yellow cucumbers, and zucchini, burst cabbages, turnips, even some winter squash and pumpkins. Everything except the root crops was frosted and nibbled on, but chopped and mixed with grain, it was relished by Clay.

Whenever I recall that time, a sunny warmish week at the end of September, this scene arises in my mind: the pale light of autumn slants across the white clapboards of a shuttered, silent house; a flock of starlings flies up, wings whirring as they wheel over the garden; a rank growth of weeds gone to seed stands pale and withered, drily rustling when we push them aside. As we intently gather our harvest into grain bags, the thin chirping of crickets, the most evocative noise of autumn, sounds insistently all around us, unheeded except in memory.

After that, Walt and Mary, the last of the Labor Day crew, went home and I spent my days cutting firewood and hauling it home with Ginger and the wagon. Looking back, I can see that the three main drawbacks were my ignorance, my physical weakness, and my inadequate resolution, by which I mean that I had yet to learn that to succeed in an enterprise, I must dedicate myself to it, heart and soul. I thought I was serious, and I was by my lights — they just weren’t good enough then. My tools were swede saws, a four-foot bull saw (or one-man crosscut), several six-foot crosscuts for visitors, a six-pound splitting maul, steel wedges, two single-bitted axes, and a handsome double-bitted axe given me by Stoney, a former student, an axe that had been forged for him at the Spiller foundry in Maine, the finest tool I have ever owned. By what was for me an amazing act of forethought, I had asked a friend, back in the summer, to teach me how to sharpen everything. I had no quarrel with the tools; it was the man behind them who didn’t come up to the mark. Felling and cutting up big hardwood trees by hand is tremendously strenuous work requiring strength, knowledge, and skill, none of which I had, although I soon learned the basic knowledge from Kephart’s old Camping and Woodcraft. Knowledge, however, is not enough; you must put it into practice. It took a long time, years really, to build up skills like the coordination of eye and arm which makes every blow of the axe tell, or like the ability to judge instantly and unconsciously the amount of strength to put into each act, or like the discipline of muscles which concentrates and economizes strength. Of course, I improved. By Christmas I didn’t have to rest every few minutes, and I had finally mastered the undercut, the notch that determines where the tree will fall. My notches at first were really only ragged bites at the bark, and I hacked all around the tree like a beaver — and no tree fell on me. There were other miracles. Because of my lousy notches, the trees fell all over the place, often into neighboring trees, with the daunting result that I sometimes had as many as five trees lodged at once in different parts of the woods. Ever the optimist, I hoped that they would fall down during the night. When that didn’t happen, I would climb the lodged tree and hack away at the limbs to free it. If that failed, I would fell the tree it was lodged in in my usual felicitous fashion while standing under the leaning tree. There were some exciting moments, but I was nimble and was never caught. The tree down and limbed, I would saw it into lengths, eight feet for small trees that I could lift, shorter and shorter for bigger and bigger ones, splitting the largest blocks on the spot. It takes much experience to know just where to strike a block to split it, especially if it’s any length. I could, often did, bury as many as four wedges in a log with no effect, driving them steadily into the bowels of the wood, hoping desperately that the block would suddenly split open and all the wedges would tumble out at my feet.

Today, thinking about what I did in the woods that fall, and knowing all that I have learned about logging in the intervening years, it amazes me not only that I was not killed, not even hurt, but that I got any wood out at all.

I hope I have made the physical exigencies of the task and its achievement clear, but there was something more important involved, a mental change that governed not only the work in the woods, but all aspects of this new life. At the beginning of this section I said my resolution was inadequate, but gradually, even then, it was changing. I was becoming responsible, conscientious, and dependable. I had been a good teacher, but in some ways, I had been slack and irresponsible, almost adolescent. Evidently my temperament needed physical testing, and that in a dire situation, to bring out whatever good qualities were in me. With only shadowy hints of what was happening, I was discovering myself. What Jo Ann was doing is another story.

I do not know how other writers approach the task of writing about their wives; not many do, I suppose. The only one who comes readily to mind is Hemingway, and he lied about them all. It is very difficult for me. As I write this, we have been married for nearly fifty-seven years, and I think I know her better than I have ever known anyone, but it is love that creates the difficulty. For instance, I can write about my parents and I think the portraits would be honest. But they are long dead and I never loved them as I love Jo Ann. What holds me back is the fear that I might miss some of the truth, that unwittingly I will do her an injustice, that the reader will get the wrong impression. Well, I shall tell the story as it happened and trust that her character will appear in her actions.

I was raised in a city, Jo Ann grew up in the up-and-coming suburbs of Brookline and Newton, but we also had significant experiences in the countryside, Jo Ann in an old-fashioned camp in Maine (simple wooden cabins with orange crates for storing clothes, swimming in a cold lake before breakfast, hiking to pick raspberries along dusty roads, playing Indians around a campfire on Sunday nights), while my teenage summers were spent working on a farm. Those experiences made lasting impressions. In graduate school (we were married while still in college) we had our first vegetable garden, and I began making jam from wild fruits. I could lay it to parsimony because we had very little money, and the babies were arriving thick and fast (we had our first three in just as many years), but I doubt if we saved much by our early efforts at self-reliance. I think we just liked doing it, searching for wild fruits and learning how to use them, and of course we ate better, which was always a consideration. Right after our marriage Jo Ann had learned to bake bread, and by the time we moved to Vermont I was growing and preserving vegetables, keeping hens, making lots of jams and jellies, learning about wild mushrooms, and making soap and wine and beer. Jo Ann was busy with the children, but she had to deal with what I produced, and, with the aid of the Fannie Farmer cookbook, she raised herself from a state of blank ignorance to a point where she rivaled my mother — a statement not many men will make. She would be grievously tested here during our first experience in self-reliance.

At this time in our life — circumstances would change — she was not directly concerned with the animals (although she was always better at handling them than I, because she has a calmer personality) but sometimes she had to take a hand. There was the spectacular afternoon when Aster escaped from the pasture, Ginger broke her tether, and Clay managed to climb out of his pen. I was off somewhere (she says that’s when these affairs always happen), and when I returned, Jo Ann had quietly caught the wanderers and returned them to their proper places. She wasn’t required to help me outdoors much, but when she did she was indispensable.

As I was writing this, I asked her what she thought of the experience when we began it, and she said she “liked the challenge.” I think that could stand as a central motif in both our lives.

She, too, was discovering herself, learning that she had deep inner resources she never knew she had, discovering a basic toughness that brought her through many hard times. It wasn’t the life she would have chosen for herself. But she followed it because that’s where the love of her life led. She never could have endured, however, if she, too, had not been attracted to becoming self-reliant. As she said, she “liked the challenge.”

As the fall days grew shorter, the practicalities of our situation pressed upon us. Would I be able to cut enough firewood? Would we have enough food? How long would our money last? Would we be able to learn the myriad skills we were beginning to see were necessary for this life? Would we make it through the winter? What would we do if we couldn’t? These constant worries, never spoken, affected our behavior in ways we did not at first recognize. I remember coming down from the woods one afternoon to find Jo Ann sweeping up broken glass: she had dropped another lamp chimney, the third in a week. Such chimneys, especially for the odd lamps Corbin had, were hard to find, so some annoyance on my part would be understandable, but I was enraged, and I accused her of trying to undermine all my efforts. At the end of my tirade she said, trying to explain her recent uncharacteristic clumsiness, that she had been made nervous by my dense gloom: I hardly spoke to her or the children. My rage collapsed; I had not realized any of this, what I felt or how I was acting. The understanding was a great relief — but the worries remained.

In the next issue: “Disturbing Revelations.”     *

Letters from a Conservative Farmer: Versed in Country Things – Invitation to the Simple Life

Jigs Gardner

The late Jigs Gardner was an associate editor of The St. Croix Review. Jigs Gardner wrote from the Adirondacks. These early essays, some of which were written decades ago, are of timeless quality.

Part One

In December 1961 my teaching contract was not renewed, which meant that in six months I would be without a job and salary, and since I had a family to support, I began looking for another job. The possibilities were uninteresting, and my heart really wasn’t in it. I liked teaching, but I was increasingly irked by the academic milieu, and the prospect of a lowly job (I would never be more than an instructor) in a second-rate college was not alluring. We had a friend in northern Vermont, now a farmer but once a colleague at another college, who, having often urged me to quit teaching and move north, was full of schemes for us to make a go of it there. We had been impressed, on our visits, by the pastoralism still predominant there in the neat small villages in the narrow valleys. Willie’s farmhouse was on a gravel road back in the hills bordered by stone walls and shadowed by majestic elms. Broad fields rose gradually beyond the orchard to a wooded ridge. A team of horses, a small herd of Jersey cows, a flock of hens, and two pigs filled in the bucolic picture. His sister Ann Woodwright, married to a local farmer, had a farm a couple of miles along the road, an esthetic blockbuster. The small house, snugly built long ago of squared timbers, wainscoted and plastered within, blended country plainness with restrained sophistication. The white walls were stenciled with a few pale red and blue flower designs; the polished black cast iron range gleamed darkly (there was a sleek modern kitchen around the corner); in the big bedroom upstairs Bible verses celebrating marriage were stenciled in a continuous dark blue line along the wall above the baseboard, around and over the door and windows; there were small touches of color and decoration here and there (but never too many) that charmed the eye. The milk from their small herd of Jerseys was sold to the creamery in the village; they employed a hired man; Bob Woodwright tapped a sugarbush and sold excellent syrup; much of the work was done with horses; they were building a handsome new barn. Furthermore, all these people read books and magazines, listened to (and made) music, were informed about public matters, and could spend time to sit over a cup of tea and talk to a visitor. In short, everything said, “This is a Beautiful Life.”

As winter gave way to spring and the job offers didn’t improve, Willie’s urgings were more and more tempting, so I wrote and asked him to look into places to rent. One weekend in May, we went north to see what he had found. This was long before the Vermont boom, so there were plenty of country places — house, barn, fields, woods — standing empty, renting for twenty to thirty dollars a month, livable places where a few animals could be kept, just what we were looking for. Of the several houses we looked at that day, nearly all were possible, but the last one had the near-perfection of the Woodwright place.

On a remote narrow road that clung to the edge of a steep hillside, it was an old story-and-a-half farmhouse vertically sheathed in silvery-gray barn boards. The bank of windows across the front looked out across the hillside and valley below to a range of hills. The owner, Ralph Corbin, had left suddenly the fall before to take a job overseas, and everything had been left as if he had just stepped out. We peered through the windows into a book-lined study and then into the main room: barn boards covered two walls and a third was papered with topographical maps of the region. The furniture was sturdy, simple, good-looking. A tiny kitchen area with woodstove, sink, shelves, and counter occupied a corner with a pantry next to it. One door led into a bedroom, another to a study and to bedrooms upstairs. The former kitchen wing was now the mudroom and storage area, and beyond it a large room had been added to house a print shop with a foot treadle press, stacks of paper, fonts of type, and other implements of the printing trade. A mudroom is a large vestibule where outdoor gear, like boots, are kept.

The barn was perfect for us: a small stable set up for one cow and some hens with ample room beyond it for a horse or pig. The stone foundation walls of a much larger barn were visible, sheltering the garden area and plantings of rhubarb, red currants, perennial herbs, and old-fashioned tall hollyhocks. There was a small fenced pasture on the hill behind the house, a large hayfield, a nearby brook, and a wood beside and above the house. Water flowed by gravity from a spring a half mile away in woods beyond the hayfield, piped directly to the kitchen sink with secondary lines to the stable, and to a small brick box built on the edge of a hollowed-out ledge, a tiny pond beside the house. The box served as a refrigerator, a miniature spring house, there being no electricity. There was a privy (regular seat, two windows, cement catchment areas with cleanout door) attached to the barn, and finally, pretty flower gardens along the front of the house. I will have some hard things to say about Corbin before I’m done, but I must say that he and his wife had an eye for beautiful simplicity that made living there, despite our trials, an enduring pleasure. It was already rented for the summer, so we leased it, beginning September first, for two years for $270.

The most important thing, what became a key to another world, was revealed in the print shop when Willie picked up a thin booklet and handed it to me. “Corbin wrote this; you might find it useful.” It was called “Towards Simple Living.” The name will probably alert most of my readers, but it meant nothing to us; we were complete innocents. We were attracted to Corbin’s place, and we wanted to get away from academic life, and that was all that was in our heads. We weren’t accustomed to looking ahead, we weren’t careerists, we weren’t even prudent. To say that we were unworldly is the understatement of the year; we were better described as anti-worldly. We had no idea what we were doing or where we were going. You would think that a booklet describing a way of life based on this house would be a powerful influence on our lives, and it was and it wasn’t, as I shall explain in a moment. First let me describe the booklet.

It introduced us to a concept, a way of thinking and acting, an informal movement and a collection of individuals — all wholly bogus — that would shadow our lives as a sort of parallel universe hovering over us, a veil obscuring to onlookers our real lives, even today. Corbin made all the claims I would later recognize as hallmarks of the genre: That by living the Simple Life he avoided the harassing complications and rampant materialism of modern life; freed from the drudgery of earning money, he had time to cultivate the higher aspects of life; by foregoing what the world was pleased to call riches, he acquired spiritual riches, and so on. For example, when his wife scrubbed sheets in the tiny pond beside the house, Ralph sat under an apple tree and read poetry to her, surely a much more edifying, more spiritual act than driving to a laundromat in town. The tone was smug, condescending, even contemptuous. In time, in a couple of years, I would realize that Corbin was a bush league Scott Nearing, but then I knew nothing.

You would think, given our ignorance, that we would be easily duped, but we were saved by an education that trained us to think critically about the printed word, and we found the tone off-putting, and all the simpering about the virtues of his life made us uneasy. We came away as agnostics, neither believing nor disbelieving, but we were interested and curious, wondering if our move might have more meaning that we thought.

I have said that we were innocent and imprudent; that, too, is another understatement, but its full meaning will come out in our story. It is enough now to tell you that I was about to turn 29, Jo Ann was 27, and we had four children, Seth, Jesse, Nell, and Curdie, aged from 7 to 2. Our assets were a cow, a dozen hens, the produce from our summer’s garden, and $300.

On Saturday evening of the Labor Day weekend in 1962, we drove north in a truck, three or four cars accompanying us, from Massachusetts to Corbin’s place. Our companions were former students and friends come to help us get started, and the trip was regarded as a gay lark. One of the group slipped ahead and lit the lamps, so when we arrived and walked into the house, into the warm yellow light cast by the oil lamps, it was as if we were being welcomed to a new life already prepared for us.

Breakfast was barely over next morning when the cow, brought from the Woodwrights, arrived in a truck, and I, sensing that my friends expected me to demonstrate my farmerhood, casually led the cow up to the pasture behind the house. Standing there for a moment, looking down on the farm, watching smoke rise from the chimney, I did feel like Farmer Jigs surveying his domain. As I started back, an old green pickup drove into the yard.

When I got down to the house, the driver, a dirty, strongly-built man who looked 45 or so, but was in his late 30s, with tiny, almost slanted eyes and closely cropped hair, was grinning at some joke evidently not shared by the others, who were watching him with unsmiling faces.

“I was just asking whether they thought you’d last the winter, heh heh.”

I was to know Phil Otis for nine years, and I doubt if I heard him make more than half a dozen straight statements; everything was couched in mocking negatives pointed by the “heh heh” that was more a dying wheeze than a chuckle. I became so used to his manner that I hardly noticed it, but he certainly did his best that morning to deflate our spirits.

“I spilled a quart of milk on the running board last Christmas and it stayed frozen there till May, heh heh.”

He delivered these happy gems like a morbid standup comic, one line after another, until I managed to interrupt the gloomy flow to find out that he lived in the dark house we could see on the other side of the steep gorge that split the hill, directly opposite us but somewhat lower, across half a mile of space. I asked him, thinking of his dire predictions, if he had painted it black to absorb this sun’s heat.

“There’s damned little heat for it to absorb. That’s tarpaper sheathing; it isn’t finished yet, heh heh,” he said shortly, as if he were put out by the question. As he got back in his truck he said, “Corbin never stayed the winter, you know, heh heh.”

I dismissed that as more of his dismalness, because I was sure Corbin said he lived there year ’round.

We were unloading our household goods when another pickup appeared bearing a ruddy-faced farmer, Elias Turgeon, a school board member there to discuss the enrollment of our two boys in the first and second grades of the village school. They would have to walk eastward down the hill a mile and a half to the highway to meet the bus; the other way, up and over the hill westward to the village, was two and a half miles and a bus couldn’t drive up the hill in winter because of wind and ice. Before he left, he told us some of the history of the Corbin place where his family, the last people to really farm it, lived in the 1930s.

We finished unloading the truck just as another visitor came, a woman driving an old jeep with a heap of baskets in the back. She was small, with graying hair pulled back into an untidy bun, wearing khaki pants and a faded flannel shirt. Where were we from? What were we doing? What were our plans? There was no finesse in her approach; she just cornered me on the porch and interrogated me in a strong Brooklyn accent. Her attention was distracted, however, by the sight through a window of the table set for lunch. When the food began to be laid out, her questions became so perfunctory and she paid so little attention to my answers that I invited her in for lunch.

I must have known her full name once, but all I can recall is “Mrs. B.,” the name by which everyone knew her. She said she had a summer place down on the highway where she stayed from May to November, when her husband came to fetch her home. It was hard to pry that much out of her; she was as secretive as she was nosy. She ate a lot, but made it seem much less by the way she picked at her food, asking questions all the time. Was the food organic? Munch munch. Did we read Organic Gardening? Munch munch. Did we know about the happy Hunzas? It was impossible to kid her. She was humorless, pursuing her whacky queries in a loud, edgy voice, ignoring our little jokes.

At the end of the meal, still reaching for any tidbits in sight, she announced that she had come to harvest the garden planted there by the woman who had lived here in the summer, implying by a muttered jumble of words that Mrs. Allen had promised it to her. This was delivered as she was going out the door, and she moved so fast that she was gathering her baskets at the jeep before I could catch up with her.

“Mrs. Allen left this note for me,” I said holding it out.

“I don’t have my glasses,” she said over her shoulder.

I went ahead, blocking her way. “It says she’s coming by next Saturday to pick the garden, and she asks me to keep an eye on it.”

Mrs. B. peered to either side, estimating her chances, but finally she turned, said something about a “misunderstanding,” climbed back into her jeep, and drove off. I was amused. As I finally learned nearly two years later (and it was Jo Ann who had to teach me) it was a mistake to treat her as a joke; miserly greed is heartless.

The task of milking the cow loomed at the end of the day. Although I had worked on farms for years, and I knew the theory, I had never done it. Nor did I have the muscle. My forearms would get so tired that I could use only one hand at a time, frequently changing, and it was a couple of months before I could milk with both hands simultaneously. That evening I took more than an hour. Luckily, Aster (all the Woodwright’s cows had picturesque names — it was part of the scene) was an old, in fact very old, cow who didn’t take offence at my manhandling of her teats as a younger cow would. Done, I thought at last, turning her back into the pasture. But I had doubts, so I went after her and milked her right there in the pasture. Eventually satisfied, I started for the house, but again assailed by doubts, I turned back. Even Aster had her limits, and when she saw me coming she fled right out of the pasture — not difficult, since the fence was a ruin. Our friends caught her and held her on the front lawn for the third milking. I’ll spare you the details of two more assaults on the poor cow, once back in the stable and once tied to the pasture fence, but I secured all her milk.

When we tried the milk the next morning we were disappointed: it had a slightly dirty taste, not sour, but just not the wholesome flavor of fresh milk. Well, we said, that’s our luck — some cows taste better than others. When Willie came by that morning to see how we were doing and learned about the milk, he reached for a cup off the shelf, took my arm, and headed for the pasture.

“There’s nothing wrong with Aster’s milk. I’ll show you.”

He held her collar and told me to milk a little into the cup. Fortunately, he was on the other side, so he couldn’t see me straining. My performance in the stable that morning was an improvement, but it was still an alarming sight.

“What in hell are you doing?” he asked impatiently.

“All done,” I said, struggling to my feet.

“Why’s your face so red?”

“Sunburn.”

He took a sip and handed the cup back. “Nothing wrong with that.”

I tried it and it tasted fine.

“Let’s see your milk pail.”

The dented old galvanized bucket was clean enough; I had scrubbed it meticulously before I used it, but as Willie pointed out, it had seams and there would always be dirt in seams no matter how hard I scrubbed — we needed a seamless bucket. Which is how our porcelainized diaper pail, cover and all, became our primary milk bucket, remaining so for over 30 years. We had no trouble with the milk after that.

Next installment: the “Simple Life” continued.     *

Waiting for the ’60s

Jigs Gardner

The late Jigs Gardner was an associate editor of the St. Croix Review. Jigs Gardner wrote from the Adirondacks. These early essays, some of which were written decades ago, are of timeless quality.

To return to America after spending 30 years in another country is to experience, I learned, the Rip Van Winkle effect: those who have stayed put have become accustomed to changes that accumulate incrementally over the years, changes that, to Rip, are dramatic and startling. It may be that such a viewpoint can alert us to the significance of things whose familiarity has dulled our perceptions.

I went to a meeting of the Men’s Monthly Reading Club with high hopes and some doubts. Would it be a genuine literary, even intellectual evening, something I hadn’t enjoyed since I left the academic groves in 1962? I was only slightly acquainted with the members, but I knew they belonged to that wave of people who have moved to the countryside over the last several years, men in their 40s and 50s who seem to be semi-employed (or semi-retired), or who have fluff jobs with government agencies, well-off people who do not make their living by physical labor. I suppose “yuppies” would be the term. For the last 40 years I have been a farmer, most of that time on a remote farm on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia, working with loggers, fishermen, and other farmers, men of substance in their own sphere. But they were not literary or intellectual, and when we moved back to the U.S. in 2001, I hoped to meet men who were, but I was disappointed. Friendly and charming as the yuppies were, they seemed shallow, hollow, their conversation nothing more than politically correct received attitudes. I was being unfair, I thought; I had spent very little time in their company, I hardly knew them, and besides, surely members of a reading club had to have literary interests.

The meeting was at Mike’s, and he led off with a “funny” New Yorker story, embarrassingly bad, which made him laugh so much someone else had to finish reading it. Everyone agreed it was hilarious. I kept my own counsel and told myself to be patient; this was just the beginning. Charlie read passages from a ’60s book about house-building — profound insights into the Zen of a two-by-four, and bits from Thoreau. Charlie said how basic, how elemental building was, and Bruce said it expressed one’s self, and Mike said one discovered one’s self. Bruce read an incomprehensible manifesto (I think) by an architect, which he couldn’t explain. That fell flat. The next reading, a diatribe against religion from an old Whole Earth Catalog, touched the chords of memory: How it awakened nostalgia for the heady days of the ’60s when they were in their teens, probably envious onlookers, a time that still speaks to them, as they fondly recalled, of excitement, of freedom, of experiment and open horizons. So, this is what my big intellectual night out comes down to, I thought disgustedly. As I listened sourly to another trite New Yorker story, my patience snapped.

“It’s a cliché from beginning to end. By the third sentence you know everything that’s going to be said, everything that’s going to happen,” I snarled.

The protests that followed their shocked silence were muted but insistent and I, thinking we were finally having a literary argument, robustly replied until I realized they were tying to make me understand (without quite saying so) that criticism was never to be voiced. Well, you can hardly have a collective wallow in ’60s nostalgia with a carping critic in your midst.

I had no intention of going to another meeting, but they were stuck for a place to hold it and I felt I owed them something for the original invitation, so they met in our kitchen. I opened with a reading of the concluding pages of Roger Kimball’s “Architecture and Ideology” from the December New Criterion, thinking such a fine piece of writing would impress everyone, especially Charlie and Bruce, the architects. The argument, its opinions and judgments, seemed so unexceptionable that I never gave a thought to its impact on the club members.

Big mistake. I had not taken these men seriously, I had not thought about the implications of their attitudes revealed at the last meeting. Kimball condemned the absurdities of two faddish architects, in the process enunciating a humanistic standard, a double sin: he expressed a judgment, and it wasn’t politically correct. Of course, that wasn’t the way Charlie and Bruce put it. What they said, and they said it vehemently, was that no ideas, no matter how absurd they might seem to Roger Kimball and me, should be condemned. In effect, the concept of a critical standard was itself anathema. So criticism was allowed — but only of criticism and the critical spirit. As the evening wore on, I thought of the work I could be doing, and I swore this would be my last meeting. My hopeful expectations had been foolish; men like this were never literary or intellectual, they always picked up their opinions and attitudes (they can hardly be called ideas) from right-thinking middlebrow sources, but in the past their views, I recalled, were not so uniform. Their conformity, the like of which I’ve never seen before, really struck me. Their ’60s nostalgia was telling too — all their well-worn thoughts were minted then. I had the eerie feeling that I was on a dusty stage set, listening to speeches from a play closed long ago.

How apposite that image would prove to be at the next meeting, to which I went eagerly after Mike told me a publisher would be there (I would impress him with my reading and then he’d ask if I had any more like that at home, and then . . . he turned out to be an editor of children’s books.) I was surprised to see Father Miller (“Just call me Bob”), the recently retired pastor of the Episcopal Church, and I wondered what he would read. Mike read another drearily “funny” New Yorker story, but the general quality of the readings seemed better, although certain ’60s themes — the evils of capitalism, environmental disaster, consumerism — made their appearance. Then Father Miller took the floor.

“As some of you know, I just got back yesterday from Washington where I participated in the gigantic anti-war rally.”

“Good for you!”

“Terrific!”

“Way to go!”

“Now I want to read an editorial from The New York Times that gets it just right.”

The editorial predictably praised the rally, but Father Miller was most pleased by its assertion that the crowd represented “mainstream” America, and he kept reverting to that conceit. His listeners nodded vigorously; it was very important for them to think they were representative of American society, but I wondered at their credulity when the only speakers Father Miller could recall were those famously mainstream figures, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. I don’t suppose they realize what a small percentage of the local population they represent, nor do they know how disliked and resented they are by the country people. Then Father Miller made a snide remark about President Bush, and that was the signal for what I can only describe as a general frenzy as everyone loudly added their near-hysterical denunciations. Listening, what I heard was a yearning for the glory days of the past, but their words had the studied quality, combined with bizarre deviations of an imperfectly remembered script: the media are in a conspiracy to keep the truth from us by playing down the anti-war rallies; the media are controlled by three or four people (nods, dark looks, murmurs); where’s Teddy Kennedy now, this should be his moment.

These men have never recovered from the ’60s, which is why their thoughts are so childish — if their rallies don’t garner as much attention as those of the ’60s, there must be a media conspiracy — and they are desperately conformist because they sense their sudden vulnerability. Bush was despised as the antithesis of their beau ideal Bill Clinton; now he is hated as the architect of the patriotic, militant response to terrorism. They greatly fear the ’60s aren’t coming, and they are right — they died on 9/11.

Meanwhile, Mike announced that he’s getting a teepee, and he thinks it will be big enough for club meetings.     *

“’Tis the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death.” —Thomas Paine     *

The Diogenes Club

Jigs Gardner

The late Jigs Gardner was an Associate Editor of the St. Croix Review. Jigs Gardner wrote from the Adirondacks. These early essays, some of which were written decades ago, are of timeless quality. This essay was written in 2005, during the second presidential administration of George W. Bush.

Back in the summer of 2003 I still had occasional contacts with the yuppies. Mark asked if I’d heard about the meeting set for later in the month when plans for “a sort of political group, the Diogenes Club,” would be concerted. “There’ll be music and maybe poetry readings, drinks, just an informal affair.” I asked about the name. “Well, we’re looking for an honest man to back for the election, one who hasn’t already sold out.” That last remark sold me; I had to go.

Mark, however, drew back. “Oh, but you’re a conservative.” I smiled. “So what? I’m still interested. . . . But why don’t you work with the Democratic Committee in town?” He waved his hand in dismissal. “Oh, they’ll be following the party line and we want to make an independent choice.” We talked about the various Democratic contenders, and then the conversation drifted to other things, but when we parted I reminded him to let me know when the meeting would be.

I heard no more, and I forgot about it until a couple of months afterward, when I noticed, in a poster advertising a pro-Palestinian speaker at a local library, these words: “Sponsored by the Diogenes Club.” Later, there were the same words on an announcement of an antiwar rally. Recalling the conversation, turning it over in my mind, I saw much that illuminated yuppie thinking. Readers will have noted already the hypocrisy of the club’s name: If you’re seeking truth you don’t confine your search to only one political persuasion; being conservative does not preclude knowledge of the truth. But there is more than hypocritical partisanship here, more that bears on the question, for example, of liberal media bias. That charge, whose validity was so obvious in the recent presidential campaign, is always denied, with varying degrees of sincerity, by the culprits because, I think, the charge is poorly stated and quite misses the real enormity of what’s going on. I had a discussion with a lefty minister a couple of years ago that is pertinent. He had been trying for some time to convince me that modern agriculture was a Bad Thing, and on this occasion produced an article from The New York Times, but I stopped him, saying that the paper’s point of view compromised anything it would publish on farming. “In fact,” I said, “I could easily write the article without even seeing it.” He was taken aback, speechless for some moments, until he blurted out that The Times “didn’t publish lies.” I explained that that wasn’t the issue, that The Times, like every other publication, had a point of view which influenced the way it perceived and reported things, and that no point of view had a lock on truth. He could not take it in. Everyone he knew read the paper, everyone relied on it to publish the Truth (I heard the capital in his voice), so who was I to challenge it? It took some time to get him to admit that publications, like people, have differing points of view, but that was as far as he would go. The argument, however, was revealing (to me at least). Media types laugh off the liberal bias charge because they genuinely believe they’re publishing truth; anything to the contrary must be fabricated by villains who, deep down, know the truth (how could anyone not know it since it’s so obvious?) but for partisan reasons won’t admit it.

Mark’s statement that they were looking for a man “who hasn’t already sold out” was ignorant, because it showed a complete lack of understanding of politics, and self-righteous, because the words imply superiority to the political process. Politics (to state the obvious) in a democracy is the way different points of view are represented and reconciled, and no one can be a player unless he has “sold out” in the sense that a politician always represents a point of view, often more than one when different issues are considered. If he did not already appear to be sympathetic to certain points of view he would not be nominated or even considered for nomination. To Mark, “selling out” means representing points of view Mark doesn’t like. To think like that and to be so blind, is childish.

Whence this infantilism? These men were mesmerized by the ’60s (roughly the decade 1965-75) when they were in their teens, and they like to think, as they utter the old clichés and pantomime the creaky routines, they are reenacting these stirring times. But as Karl Marx pointed out, when history repeats itself it does so as comedy, as farce. To understand why these successful, affluent men in their 50s are so childish, we must examine the ’60s. It has always seemed to me that analyses of the period have been weak because they have not sufficiently considered its origins. I think it can be traced ultimately to the Romantic revolt of the late 18th century against Enlightenment rationalism, but for our purposes we need not go back that far; it will do to glance at the period just before World War I, when so many young artists and writers were bewitched by radical attitudes (not systematic ideas), which were reflected in their work on into the ’20s and ’30s. When I was in college in the early ’50s much of the modern literature taught then was marked by cynicism about middle-class values and about America in general. No professor (in the English Department at any rate) disagreed with the indictment; in fact, I think they took some pleasure in jolting the “bourgeois” certitudes of their students. Understand me: these were not the radical professors of a later time; thoroughly bourgeois themselves, their classroom poses were little more than a way of asserting their superiority to their students and to boobs outside the privileged academic groves. But the poses had consequences, not so much for the students, not then, but for themselves and the institutions in which they worked. When, a decade or so later, radicalism erupted among students and there were sit-ins and takeovers and whatnot, the faculties and administrators were, almost without exception, unable to cope. Not only had the students thrown in their faces the lessons they themselves (half seriously) taught, but their belief in their institutions and in America itself had been so hollowed out by decades of cynicism that they were incapable of mounting the sort of defense the moment required, a defense that would have been convincing only from men who were intellectually and morally sure of the bona fides of their institutions and their country. The result, as we all know, was the capitulation of the academy and its subsequent corruption and decline, at least so far as the Humanities are concerned. I am interested, however, in another aspect of the situation: the disappearance of adults.

A friend, recalling his college years in the ’50s, said that although he didn’t like some of his professors and thought a few incompetent, he respected them as adults. When he read critical comments on his papers, he was ashamed and took the lessons to heart. But in the ’60s adults in that sense were in short supply or wholly absent. We can see this phenomenon at large if we recall the general response at the time, reflected in the media. How many times were we exhorted to listen to “the kids” who were “trying to tell us something.” How many times were we told this was the brightest generation of students ever. So there was no one around, no one who would command respect to tell the ’60s people they were ignorant and childish. They and their acolytes have gone on, have grown up (without maturing) into middle-aged men still thinking as they did when they were adolescents. Not all of them, of course; experience has wised up many, but I think it fair to say that much of a generation of a certain class of men were permanently infantilized by the failure of an earlier generation to be adults in a time of testing.

Although we still live in a world created by the ’60s, the rise of conservatism and the shrinkage of liberal hegemony shook the confidence of yuppies even before 9/11 — hence the extreme conformity, something that astonished me when I returned to the U.S. in the summer of 2001 after living 30 years in Canada. Not only did they share a unanimous opinion on every imaginable issue, but they shunned anyone suspected of different views. Shortly after a yuppie noticed a picture of President Bush on our kitchen wall, one of her friends, a regular buyer of our farm products, stopped in to buy some bacon, and while I sliced it, making small talk, I saw she was very nervous. After she had hurried out the door, my wife wondered why the woman was so scared. Well, it might have been anything, but since she never came here again, I’m pretty sure it was a case of that feeling liberals claim when they say they’re “frightened” of President Bush, or of the “religious right.” If you do not subscribe wholly to their point of view, you are not just someone with whom they disagree, you are a beast, a troglodyte poised to do some hideous but unspecified crime. This conformity, clinging ever more closely to like-minded comrades while nervously shunning perceived opponents, has intensified since 9/11, and the recent election shows the workings of the Diogenes Club and its thinking. The same arrogant assumption of the monopoly of truth and its corollary that anyone with a different point of view had to be a villain or a benighted fool was a major factor in the defeat of the Democrats, not only because it got people’s backs up, but because it prevented Democrats from taking the President and his supporters seriously, prevented them from seeing that his point of view was substantive and that it was shared to a significant degree by a majority of Americans. If you think your opponent is a liar and a fool, there’s no need to engage his ideas. Politics then becomes nothing more than a Michael Moore orgy of vilification, shadow boxing in the dark while your opponent walks off with the prize. Belief systems in decline always face this problem: quiet self-confidence gives way to bluster; opponents amiably dismissed become hated and feared bogeymen; insufficiently warm comrades are seen as traitors (so the media was accused of conservative bias); and, finally, circulating lies in the cause of truth, as Dan Rather did, becomes a righteous duty.

As if this were not enough, a significant portion of the Democratic Party, like the denizens of the Diogenes Club, were fatally afflicted by the ’60s, rendered forever childish in their public judgments, so the prospects for renewal and revival, which are dependent on relentlessly honest self-criticism, itself a function of maturity, look bleak.     *

“It is hostile to a democratic system to involve the judiciary in the politics of the people.” — Felix Frankfurter

Letters from a Conservative Farmer — Significant Knowledge

Jigs Gardner

The late Jigs Gardner was an Associate Editor of the St. Croix Review. Jigs Gardner wrote from the Adirondacks. These early essays, some of which were written decades ago, are of timeless quality.

[Written soon after it happened, in the late 1980s]

Imagine the scene: I am shoveling shavings into the team wagon, stooping over in my patched overalls and faded flannel shirt to scrape the barn floor clean, now and then climbing into the wagon to tread down the mounting heap. The sleek young man who owns the new barn, the new tractor, the new hydraulic log loader, the new portable saw mill, the used planer (only 10,000 dollars) that made the shavings — the young man who owns all these sophisticated machines and who is something of a hippie, belated celebrant of the ’60s — nods at my horses and says:

“Pretty soon we’ll all be using ’em,” adding the explanation, “Global Warming.”

“Oh, baloney!” I answer forcefully, continuing to shovel.

He looks reproach; I have failed to play my part. He moves away to the back of the barn to admire his expensive machinery while I finish cleaning up the shavings.

It is a scene rich in irony, and I think of that as I sit atop the load, driving the team homeward, but what really strikes me is the young man’s ignorance, something he shares with other Greens. They appear to know nothing, literally nothing, about their situation in this material world, where we are all wholly dependent on an unfathomably complex, pervasive structure composed of things and thoughts, matter and spirit, called “civilization,” as old as the first tool-using man, as new as a hydraulic log loader. As individuals we choose or reject bits and pieces of that structure (most of it becomes part of our lives without our conscious knowledge) but in the history of the species, such choices are meaninglessly trivial. We create, maintain, and add to the structure, and it sustains and carries forward the life of the group. It is not possible for an individual or a group to dismantle a significant portion of it. Were that to be tried, our lives would be catastrophically disordered and impoverished. Quite innocent of the ramifications of civilization, innocent even of the incredible implications of what he is saying, the young man fatuously predicts the resurgence of horsepower.

The obvious ironies — that an affluent owner of sophisticated machinery should condescend to remark my use of horses as a prophetic gesture; that I, to all appearances a rare specimen of the nearly extinct race of hippie-homesteaders, should be granted Green approval by a veritable apotheosis of inappropriate technology — are not the cream of the jest by any means. There is a deeper irony: my wife and I, who have been living the much-touted simple life for so many years, are ardent champions of everything Greens deplore, preaching the virtues of capitalism, technology, nuclear power, and so on. Our life has taught us, by the kind of hard experience unknown to any Green, the importance of the forces of development in the modern world. When you cut 25 cords of firewood by hand, you appreciate a chainsaw; when a cow is down with milk fever, you are thankful for up-to-date medical research; when you own woodland, the knowledge of contemporary forestry is a boon. And we know that behind those specific things is the structure of civilization, that neither the saw nor the medicine nor the forestry are isolated entities, that they are fruits of human reason and imagination impelled and energized by a dynamic civilization.

We, too, once were Greens, but knowledge, along with the realism of our life, cured us.

The specific incident grew out of a conflict over the use of herbicides in the forests. We had always supported the Greens in their continuing battles with the local pulp mill over forestry practices, but on this occasion I noticed in one of the group’s mailings a citation of a study that had long been discredited. I was uneasy. What did I really know about the herbicide? Or even about forestry? Beyond the glib slogans of the Greens what did I know? That was the beginning of the end of my Greenism, a point of view so ignorant and irrational that it can only thrive in a closed atmosphere of cocksure ignorance.

So, I began my search for knowledge, and that led me to the forest ranger for our area. How many books and technical articles Mike brought me to study over the next years, how many miles of highway and dirt road and logging trail I traveled in his company, I cannot guess, but it added up to a lot of knowledge, scientific and technical. As I thought about the kind of knowledge Mike had, and the kind I had, I began to see a hitherto unobserved distinction: I shared with the Greens class status (middle and upper middle) and a similar education (college, major in the humanities or social sciences). I like to think that when I went to college 60 years ago, liberal arts education was a discipline of the mind, a training in mental rigor and clarity, but we know that today it is little more than a prolonged exposure to fashionable attitudes. Mike the forest ranger, however, came out of the working class/technician tradition; he had a good high school education plus a one-year course in forestry school. Furthermore, there has been a parallel divergence in the fields of technical and liberal arts education, because knowledge in practical areas has burgeoned. To understand forestry work today requires a mastery of technical detail almost unimaginable a generation ago. As liberal arts education has become ever more nebulous, forestry (or agriculture or mining, etc.) studies have become more rigorous and complex. It is not surprising, then, that Greens should have fanciful notions about how to manage endeavors like forestry, nor is it remarkable that middle-class people in general, those who do not do the technical work of the world, should be taken in so easily by their absurd claims.

Mike’s knowledge was a revelation, and I stress it here because I don’t think it is widely recognized: we do not realize the knowledge and competence that the farmer, the forester, the fisherman, et al., in their millions must have for society to function as smoothly as it does. We are all familiar with the form of knowledge that lies behind this: theoretical science. We know that in highly complex affairs we require expert guidance from people who have worked long and hard to acquire and develop knowledge about matter that is so abstruse that it must be translated for us. We value science and, despite some ambivalence, we trust scientists. But we don’t know enough about, we don’t appreciate enough about, the knowledge of the people who do the work of the world.

I have put so much emphasis on this issue because when I saw how knowledge functioned in forestry, I remembered an obvious truth that had been suppressed, even denied, during my Green years: all civilization is ultimately based on our control and manipulation of nature. The story of mankind’s ascent from the cave dwellers can be told in terms of that growing mastery. Of course, nature is so vast and so complex that whatever control we achieve is always partial and tenuous. Wishing always to improve our lives — making them longer, healthier and freer, less burdened by labor — we must ever work for the knowledge that will extend our control, although that is not quite the right word. The more we study crops and their pests — for instance, the more refined our methods become for promoting the crops and diminishing the pests — our intervention becomes more selective and effective. Instead of control, it should be more precisely defined as a growing ability to use nature for our own ends. Perhaps the best way to put it is to say that in struggling against entropy, against the natural tendency to let things slide, in struggling for a more orderly, more productive world, we strive against nature, but in the tactics, the details of how we go about it, we can only work with nature.

When Greens demand that we remake our societies “in harmony with nature,” they reveal their ignorance; everything we do is in harmony with nature — how could it be otherwise? What they want is the abandonment of sophisticated knowledge in favor of primitive forms.

The wealth created in the West since the end of World War II made us care about clean air and water, and it also gave us the means to fulfill such desires. Knowledge, wealth, and improved practices go hand in hand. Actual improvements in the environment are solely due to growing affluence. Greens, however, believe that wealth is the problem, not the solution. They say that we must lower consumption, dismantle modern industry, and retard technological development. In other words, it is only by reversing the tide of knowledge, it is only by becoming poorer that we can live environmentally pure lives!

And that’s why the sleek young man with the expensive machinery could feel enlightened when he told me everyone would be using workhorses soon.     *

Letters From a Conservative Farmer — A Country Adolescence

Jigs Gardner

Jigs Gardner writes on literature from the Adirondacks, where he may be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Some readers may remember National Review back in the days when William Buckley edited it. Its composition was markedly different from what it is today — all politics, all the time. Buckley had room for a cookery column by Nika Hazelton, a countryside column by Bill Rickenbacker, and other excursions outside the realm of politics, because he believed that being conservative meant much more than a mere political allegiance. A conservative should be interested in as much of life as he can apprehend.

These letters, unpretentious essays, are offered in that spirit. They also have a didactic purpose, because I fear that conservatives are not as well informed about what goes on in the countryside these days, ignorant of the forces that are seeking to mold the countryside to their designs.

We have been farmers (of a sort, as you shall learn) since 1962, first in Vermont, then for thirty years on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia, and now in the Champlain Valley in New York. These essays are based on our experiences of the last forty-eight years, as well as some earlier ones of mine.

A Country Adolescence

(I learn a conservative moral lesson and unconsciously assimilate a conservative ideal.)

When I was in my fourteenth year, in the spring of 1947, we moved to a small saltbox house in what was then rolling farm country in central New Jersey, to an area called Waln’s Mill, and there I lived, when I was not away at school, for nearly the whole of the next four years.

The house, humble, homely, comfortable, shaded by tall tulip trees and white oaks, seemed to grow naturally out of the small clearing backed by dark woods, halfway up a hill that rose gradually from the creek bottom. In the front, across the dirt road that ran below a bank, the land fell away, on one hand opening a vista of swampy meadows sweeping down to the great trees bordering the creek, and above us, of hayfields stretching up the hillside, of hedgerows and distant woods. Right down the middle of the view was a farm lane that began across from our house, winding its way between the fields to disappear around a far bend.

At first, just being in the countryside filled my days and my imagination: A screech owl in the woods behind the house; swimming in the muddy creek; a marsh hawk gliding back and forth just over the meadows; stepping on what appeared to be a dry hard cow pie; a huge snapping turtle in the creek bank mud; vultures soaring in the summer sky; wild strawberries so plentiful in the roadside grass that we made jam and even ice cream; the smell of country rain; dewy cobwebs in the grass; hiding under the bridge from Jerry, the runaway bull.

Lanes, woods roads, chance forest openings have always been temptations to me, as if I had an obligation to explore them, to see where they ended up. And there was the farm lane right in front of me, dusty, still under the summer sky, latent with purpose and movement, quickened for a few minutes each day with the passage of Mr. Crow’s old black Ford pickup. Going away from me, the truck got smaller and smaller, emerged from a dip where a stream ran, passed the weathered empty tenant house (latent itself with its missing life, still under a shadowy elm, its rhubarb patch struggling in a sea of witch grass) and then around the bend, glimpsed once more through a gap in the honeysuckle that swarmed over the fences, leaving at last a drifting dust cloud and the final dying noise. But I did not follow it to its end, not yet, not then, perhaps because I knew there was a farm at the end of it, the source of the cows pasturing in the meadows. Because of the haying in the hillside fields, the farm finally became for me the image of, the definition of farming, a symbol that derived some of its great power from the ignorance of the city boy who conceived it. I would not casually stroll up the lane into the field of force generated by that symbol.

We lived in that countryside, but we were not of it; we didn’t make our living there, we were only onlookers. On summer evenings we sat on the lawn to watch Mr. Crow’s farmhands drive the slowly moving herd out to pasture after milking; on fine afternoons, while the men were haying in the field across the road, we played badminton; awakened at dawn by the clang of milk cans being loaded onto the truck at the end of the lane, we turned over and gratefully went back to sleep. It was I who established a connection, however tenuous, with the countryside. It came about because, in our area where small-scale general farming prevailed, farms did a little of everything: Raised grain; shipped milk; raised poultry; sold piglets, vegetables, eggs, honey, and fruit; grew tomatoes on contract for canneries; and so on. Mr. Crow’s regime belonged to the 19th century, maybe even the 18th. He milked twenty or so Jerseys, but the stock was poor and inbred (Jerry being the only sire), the hayfields were not regularly plowed and fertilized, and the pastures were largely wasteland. He lived in a handsome, rambling farmhouse built in the early 1700s, with his farmhands, two or three elderly men like himself who did what had to be done to maintain the farm from day to day, and little else. On dark winter days when sleet beat against the windows, they lay on the hearth before the wide fireplace, drinking cider from the barrel in the cellar and spitting tobacco juice into the flames. These men, in fact, were really much more than farmhands; they were countrymen of a type now vanished, sturdy, self-reliant men who could turn a skillful hand to any country task: Axmen who could fell a tree and hew it into beams to build a barn; honey-gatherers who calmly hived swarms of wild bees; husbandmen who could train a green horse to plow; slaughterers and butchers; tool makers and menders; veterinarians who could heal wounds and deliver difficult calves; weather prophets; hunters who knew how to set snares and where pheasants nested. Much of their time was spent hunting, fishing, and trapping, and we would often see one or another — tall gaunt men in rough clothing, crossing the meadow toward the creek with a long fishing rod, or passing along the hedgerows, rifle in hand.

On a still August evening one of the hands, out hunting woodchucks, a tall shambling man, stepped across the road from the hayfield to chat with us as we sat on the grass watching the dusk come up out of the meadows. I sat to one side watching him — he introduced himself as Bub Archer — fascinated by his strangeness, his difference from anyone I knew. His face was rough, weathered, deeply tanned, slab-sided with a prominent Roman nose, and he chewed tobacco! I actually saw the plug in his cheek, and now and then he turned and spat behind him. He told stories about his many hunting adventures, and Mother remarked that he must’ve begun at an early age.

“Oh, I was a little smaller than the shaver here, maybe I was eight or nine,” he said, smiling at me.

I blushed and looked away; I knew I was small for my age.

Bub turned up the next evening with a joint of cooked woodchuck, wrapped in a bit of waxed paper, and nothing would do but we must try it. I remember him standing tall under the low, sloping kitchen ceiling, laughing, showing his tobacco-stained teeth, as we gingerly tasted the meat. It was, just as Bub had said, rather like pot roast.

So, I became a hunter. Not because of the meat, you understand — that was just a pretext. It was the figure of Bub Archer, my Deerslayer, that inspired my adolescent imagination, and although I spoke to him only two or three times after that, I needed only that meeting to send me forth to the woods and fields with my Model 68 Winchester single shot .22, morning and evening, wearing cut-off dungarees and a pair of moccasins, hunting knife at my belt. In those four summers I killed only one woodchuck, soon after I began, but I persisted because it was more than a material quest, and like all such enterprises, something of a mystery, at least to me. Of course, there was the fantasy of the hunt and the woodsman in the primeval wilderness, and there was the wonderfully keen pleasure of solitary observation, all my senses alert, alive to everything around me, but I also think that this satisfied, for the time being, a wish to make some connection with the countryside.

By next summer, Mr. Crow’s leisurely regime was gone — he had sold the farm to a young couple, the Davises, and the farming pace picked up. There were more cows, the fields were plowed and planted, and there was an air of bustle about the place. We began buying our milk there — ten cents for a two-quart jar of Jersey milk with thick gobs of cream floating in it. And for me, the agricultural era was about to begin.

One muggy afternoon when thunderheads loomed on the horizon, Bob Davis drove into our yard, anxious for help with the hay harvest. Apprehensive as I was, fearful of the farm and of my own ignorance and inexperience, how could I refuse? For the next couple of hours I staggered alongside a flatbed truck, heaving up hay bales. When it was all safely mowed away and Dot Davis brought pitchers of milk and big platters of sandwiches out to the barn floor, I fell on the food voraciously, shaking with hunger and fatigue. I had never done any real work in my life. Walking down the once-forbidding lane, jingling 70 cents in my pocket (35 cents an hour), I sensed the significance of the experience and I felt the beginning of pride.

Bob had regular hands, but during that summer and the next two I was often hired for specific jobs, like handling bags of grain on the combine, or picking tomatoes, or pulling tassels from hybrid corn. I was not paid much, but I knew I wasn’t worth much, something brought home to me when I worked alongside Dean, a local boy my age, another temporary hand. He was slightly built, but having been raised to it he knew how to do a job of work. When we picked tomatoes, Dean, despite my best efforts, always finished his row first, well ahead. We were not really competing; Dean was just doing his job as he always did, moving right along at a steady clip without pause or wasted motion. It seems odd that I was no more than mildly chagrined by his obvious superiority, but there were special reasons for my lack of rancor. For one thing, Dean was a fine boy, quiet, polite, modest, friendly, trustworthy. For a wonder, he never scorned my poor efforts nor flaunted his ability, as other boys would’ve done. For another, although I wanted to have some relation to the rural scene in which Dean so admirably fitted, the wish was not deep; I knew I was an outsider, that I belonged to another scene, that in the fall I would return to boarding school, and eventually I might go on to college, moving into a world where I could not foresee that my ability to pick tomatoes or buck bales would matter at all.

My favorite job was combining. Bob drove the tractor, while I stood, swaying on a platform in back of the combine, bagging the grain as it came down a pipe. Combining took forever. Often, we would be at it all day, even till dusk. I loved it, riding around and around the field, out in the sun, like the grain handler of the world. Sometimes when we worked late, folks from our house would drive out to the field with bottles of cold beer, and we would all sit on the flatbed truck and drink beer and laugh and talk, and in the dusk we could feel the coolness coming up from the creek bottom.

Bob grew tomatoes on contract for a cannery in Trenton, and I would go with him when he took in a load. The day before, several of us would load the ’38 Chevy flatbed with a great pyramidal pile of baskets of tomatoes. At three o’clock the next morning the truck would slowly grind along the lane, lights on in the misty pre-dawn darkness, and I would run across the lawn, jump down the bank, and scramble into the cab. He left so early in order to get a good place in the line, but there was always a long line ahead of us. Sometimes it was midnight before we were unloaded. We spent the day napping, chatting with other farmers in line, talking about all kinds of things, smelling the pervasive odor of canning tomatoes. It was, more often than not, a dull way to spend a day, and I was not paid for it either; I was just along to keep Bob company. But only once did I miss, and after the truck had left me behind, just waking, I jumped on my bike and pedaled the fourteen miles to Trenton. Why did I go?

Like all thoughtful, serious men, Bob had a strong, subtle sense of humor, and I suppose I looked on our relationship as all larks, although I respected and admired him, without consciously thinking about it, for depths that at 14 and 15 and 16 I could only sense, not know, not name. But they came to the surface for a moment during my last summer there, just before I turned 17. I had taken advantage of the cannery trips to ogle the girls we saw on the streets, remarking coarsely on their charms to Bob. The last time I did this, and you’ll understand in a moment why it was the last time, Bob, who always spoke deliberately in a voice that was not deep, but which seemed to come from far inside him, quietly rebuked my coarseness and then went on to ask if I did not intend to preserve my virginity until marriage? That had been his sexual code, he said.

The effect was devastating. At once I felt very small, very callow. What made such a great impression was his depth contrasted to my shallowness. When he spoke gravely, as he did then, I felt the words as natural growths, consequences that flowed inevitably from an extraordinary breadth of character imbued with experience, knowledge, and wisdom; they were not words of the moment off the top of his head, conventional clichés. Bob was the first person to address me on such a level with such piercing conviction, and the impact was terrific. And there was more, something moving in the way he spoke to me. I think Bob was really shy, not given to glib expressions of his moral sentiments, so it cost him something to overcome his reticence to speak across the gap that separates all of us from each other, and I felt that in the delicacy with which he spoke.

Some years ago, one of my sisters surprised me by asking if was Bob Davis who had inspired me to become a farmer. I had not thought of the Davises for years, and now, thinking back, I could say with surety that farming never entered my head as a possible occupation then. Statesman, general, actor, lawyer, author, senator, yes, but farmer? Any form of manual labor (I did not know then how much intellectual labor farming demanded) beyond a teenager’s summer job was not part of my world. It was not that I thought I was too good for it, but simply that in my class and situation only certain occupations were even conceivable. Besides, there had been other, much more recent influences, farmers I had worked for in New England. Thinking about them, recalling how and why I had respected and admired them, I realized they were of the same species as Bob: grave, humorous, sage men of great integrity, whose lives seemed to me a credit to humanity. Yet they were unheroic, unsung, ordinary men of what was quickly becoming an antique rural world, citizens of the Republic. General farmers all, they provided me with a pattern of farming as well as behavior and character.

I knew none of this at the time, and I gave up that life without a qualm. In the last year I lived in New Jersey, before I went away to college, I was hardly ever at Waln’s Mill. Living in the northern part of the state, I worked as a golf course greens keeper that summer, and spent my evenings playing miniature golf with my dopey girlfriend. Meanwhile, the fireflies were thick in the creek bottom, there were oats to be combined and hay to be made, a marsh hawk hunted the meadows, and the boy with the .22 was missing from the hedgerows and fields. I shake my head when I think of it, but it had to be done; I had to turn away from that life to seek what I thought was my fortune in what I thought was the world, and it was fitting that I should do it lightly, without a backward glance. I had to go away to come back — not to the same place, I mean. I never returned to New Jersey, but I did become a pokey general farmer and more than half a century after I first met Bob Davis, I realize that I have been trying unconsciously (and with indifferent success) to model my character on his.

Nevertheless, it would be nice to go back to that one rural place. I put down my pen and daydream that some of the family still live at Waln’s Mill. What I’d really like, I guess, is that it should be the summer of 1950 again, and I can feel the rhythm of the combine, chaff flies up golden in the sun, and I can hear Bob say, as I climb into the old truck at 3 a.m., “Well, well, and how’s Jigsy this morning?”

“Liberty must at all hazards be supported” —John Adams.   *

Letters from a Conservative Farmer — The Old Red Mill

Jigs Gardner

Jigs Gardner writes on literature from the Adirondacks, where he may be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

I have before me a cookbook, The View from Grandma’s Kitchen, given to us by Vesta Kempton. Since it has a 1978 copyright, and we moved to Canada from Vermont in 1971, Vesta must have mailed it to us. Her inscription, “Lest we forget our mill,” is a testimony to her regard for us and our friendship over the years. The book features a drawing of the mill, a description of cider pressing, and a recipe for making one of its most unusual products, boiled cider, of which Jim and Vesta Kempton were once the only producers in Vermont.

Circumstances led us to meeting them during the 1960s when we were running a small private school for boys who couldn’t be educated in regular schools (don’t ask; just accept it as a given). We had five boys who lived with us in addition to our four children. We had driven about the countryside for several days, gathering apples. There were a number of empty farms in the area, and it was surprising how many apple trees were left to drop their fruit in the grass. We soon gathered a truck full of apples, far too many to be processed in our small hand press, so I set forth one morning heading south where I knew there were commercial presses. I stopped at a few beside the road, but they were no more than larger versions of my own hand-operated mill.

In South Northfield, I came to the Old Red Mill. There was a stand beside the road that sold cider and apples and, down by the creek, perhaps 30 yards away, was the mill. There I met Jim Kempton, ready to do business. I had to carry the bags of apples up a short steep stairway to a small room with an opening in its floor, into which I poured the apples until Jim closed the opening with a sliding door. The apples fell through a chipper onto a rack covered by a nylon cloth. Jim folded the ends of the cloth over the apples, put another cloth-covered rack on top of it and reopened the sliding door.

This procedure continued until Jim had a sufficient stack of chopped apples (about 10 bushels of apples), then he began pressing the racks upward, pressing out the juice. It took about one bushel to make three to four gallons of cider. When that was done and he had pressed the last bit of juice, he released the pressure, lowered the stack of pressed apples, and then shook the pressed apples, or pomace, out the window into the stream. When I was present, I shook the pressed apples into boxes and carried them home to feed the pigs.

The whole procedure was such a happy arrangement for both of us that I often went there whether or not I had apples. We helped him gather and press apples and we ate at each other’s houses. Just before we left for Canada, we drove down to say goodbye and found Jim and Vesta desperately trying to press apples and at the same time boil down cider to make the rich syrupy boiled cider that they sold to manufacturers of mincemeat. Of course, we had to pitch in. All the children and students helped with the pressing while I boiled the cider to make the syrup. The whole enterprise was a fitting farewell.

The Old Red Mill, I later learned, had a long history. The water-powered mill, which drew power from the Sunny Brook that borders the property, was built in 1898 at a time when there was a well-established water power industry in Northfield. It was used as grist mill and feed store. In the 1930s, a water-powered cider press was added to the original building. By the mid 1940s the mill was shut down until Jim and Vesta bought it at an auction in 1944. They operated it as a grist mill and also made shingles until sometime in the 1940s, when demand declined. They were still producing cider and boiled cider when we met them. As I calculate, they probably retired a few years before the cookbook was published in the late 1970s.

The line drawing in the cookbook is a faithful rendition of the Old Red Mill as I recall it: a simple one-and-a-half-story clapboard structure with a distinctive cupola-like tower projecting from the south gable end. The stand was to one side and featured baskets of apples, jars of syrup, and pumpkins in season. It is no longer operated as a mill, but the building still stands.

Boiled cider is now widely available, sometimes even mixed with maple syrup. If you get yourself some, try this boiled cider pie.

Boiled Cider Pie

1 cup boiled cider syrup (if you can’t find it or want to make your own, boil down 4 cups fresh cider in a heavy saucepan until you have a cup of syrup)

3 eggs, separated

1½ tablespoons flour

2 tablespoons melted butter

1 cup sugar

1 cup milk

1 pastry shell

Combine cider, egg yolks, sugar, milk, flour, and melted butter. Fold in beaten egg whites. Roll out chilled pie dough, enough for a bottom crust. Bake at 450 degrees F. for 10 minutes, then at 325 degrees F. for 30 minutes.

Adapted from The View from Grandma’s Kitchen, Janet Beyer, Phyllis Higgins, 1978.   *

Letters From a Conservative Farmer — A New Series

Jigs Gardner

Jigs Gardner writes on literature from the Adirondacks, where he may be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Some readers may remember National Review back in the days when William Buckley edited it. Its composition was markedly different from what it is today — all politics all the time. Buckley had room for a cookery column by Nika Hazelton, a countryside column by Bill Rickenbacker, and other excursions outside the realm of politics, because he believed that being conservative meant much more than a mere political allegiance. A conservative should be interested in as much of life as he can apprehend.

These letters, unpretentious essays, are offered in that spirit. They also have a didactic purpose, because I fear that conservatives are not as well informed about what goes on in the countryside these days, ignorant of the forces that are seeking to mold the countryside to their designs.

We have been farmers (of a sort, as you shall learn) since 1962, first in Vermont, then for thirty years on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia, and now in the Champlain Valley in New York. These essays are based on our experiences of the last forty-eight years, as well as some earlier ones of mine.

A Country Adolescence

(I learn a conservative moral lesson and unconsciously assimilate a conservative ideal.)

When I was in my fourteenth year, in the spring of 1947, we moved to a small saltbox house in what was then rolling farm country in central New Jersey, to an area called Waln’s Mill, and there I lived, when I was not away at school, for nearly the whole of the next four years.

The house, humble, homely, comfortable, shaded by tall tulip trees and white oaks, seemed to grow naturally out of the small clearing backed by dark woods, halfway up a hill that rose gradually from the creek bottom. In the front, across the dirt road that ran below a bank, the land fell away, on one hand opening a vista of swampy meadows sweeping down to the great trees bordering the creek, and above us, of hayfields stretching up the hillside, of hedgerows and distant woods. Right down the middle of the view was a farm lane that began across from our house, winding its way between the fields to disappear around a far bend.

At first, just being in the countryside filled my days and my imagination: A screech owl in the woods behind the house, swimming in the muddy creek, a marsh hawk gliding back and forth just over the meadows, stepping on what appeared to be a dry hard cow pie, a huge snapping turtle in the creek bank mud, vultures soaring in the summer sky; wild strawberries so plentiful in the roadside grass that we made jam and even ice cream, the smell of country rain, dewy cobwebs in the grass, hiding under the bridge from Jerry, the runaway bull.

Lanes, woods roads, chance forest openings have always been temptations to me, as if I had an obligation to explore them, to see where they ended up. And there was the farm lane right in front of me, dusty, still under the summer sky, latent with purpose and movement, quickened for a few minutes each day with the passage of Mr. Crow’s old black Ford pickup. Going away from me, the truck got smaller and smaller, emerged from a dip where a stream ran, passed the weathered empty tenant house (latent itself with its missing life, still under a shadowy elm, its rhubarb patch struggling in a sea of witch grass) and then around the bend, glimpsed once more through a gap in the honeysuckle that swarmed over the fences, leaving at last a drifting dust cloud and the final dying noise. But I did not follow it to its end, not yet, not then, perhaps because I knew there was a farm at the end of it, source of the cows pasturing in the meadows, cause of the haying in the hillside fields, the farm that finally became for me the image, the definition of farming, a symbol that derived some of its great power from the ignorance of the city boy who conceived it. I would not casually stroll up the lane into the field of force generated by that symbol.

We lived in that countryside, but we were not of it; we didn’t make our living there, we were only onlookers. On summer evenings we sat on the lawn to watch Mr. Crow’s farmhands drive the slowly moving herd out to pasture after milking; on fine afternoons, while the men were haying in the field across the road, we played badminton; awakened at dawn by the clang of milk cans being loaded onto the truck at the end of the lane, we turned over and gratefully went back to sleep. It was I who established a connection, however tenuous, with the countryside, and it came about because, in our area where small-scale general farming prevailed, where farms did a little of everything — raised grain, shipped milk, raised poultry, sold piglets, vegetables, eggs, honey, and fruit, grew tomatoes on contract for canneries, and so on — Mr. Crow’s regime belonged to the 19th century, maybe even the 18th. He milked twenty or so Jerseys, but the stock was poor and inbred ( Jerry being the only sire), the hayfields were not regularly plowed and fertilized, and the pastures were largely wasteland. He lived in a handsome, rambling farmhouse built in the early 1700s with his farmhands, two or three elderly men like himself who did what had to be done to maintain the farm from day to day and little else. On dark winter days when sleet beat against the windows, they lay on the hearth before the wide fireplace, drinking cider from the barrel in the cellar and spitting tobacco juice into the flames. These men, in fact, were really much more than farmhands; they were countrymen of a type now vanished, sturdy, self-reliant men who could turn a skillful hand to any country task — axmen who could fell a tree and hew it into beams to build a barn; honey-gatherers who calmly hived swarms of wild bees, husbandmen who could train a green horse to plow; slaughterers and butchers; tool makers and menders; veterinarians who could heal wounds and deliver difficult calves; weather prophets; hunters who knew how to set snares and where pheasants nested. Much of their time was spent hunting, fishing, and trapping, and we would often see one or another, tall gaunt men in rough clothing, crossing the meadow toward the creek with a long fishing rod, or passing along the hedgerows, rifle in hand.

On a still August evening one of the hands, out hunting woodchucks, a tall shambling man, stepped across the road from the hayfield to chat with us as we sat on the grass watching the dusk come up out of the meadows. I sat to one side watching him — he introduced himself as Bub Archer — fascinated by his strangeness, his difference from anyone I knew. His face was rough, weathered, deeply tanned, slab-sided with a prominent Roman nose, and he chewed tobacco! I actually saw the plug in his cheek, and now and then he turned and spat behind him. He told stories about his many hunting adventures, and Mother remarked that he must’ve begun at an early age.

“Oh, I was a little smaller than the shaver here, maybe I was eight or nine,” he said, smiling at me.

I blushed and looked away; I knew I was small for my age.

Bub turned up the next evening with a joint of cooked woodchuck, wrapped in a bit of waxed paper, and nothing would do but we must try it. I remember him standing tall under the low, sloping kitchen ceiling, laughing, showing his tobacco-stained teeth, as we gingerly tasted the meat. It was, just as Bub had said, rather like pot roast.

So I became a hunter. Not because of the meat, you understand — that was just a pretext. It was the figure of Bub Archer, my Deerslayer, that inspired my adolescent imagination, and although I spoke to him only two or three times after that, I needed only that meeting to send me forth to the woods and fields with my Model 68 Winchester single shot .22, morning and evening, wearing cut-off dungarees and a pair of moccasins, hunting knife at my belt. In those four summers I killed only one woodchuck, soon after I began, but I persisted because it was more than a material quest, and like all such enterprises, something of a mystery, at least to me. Of course, there was the fantasy of the hunt and the woodsman in the primeval wilderness, and there was the wonderfully keen pleasure of solitary observation, all my senses alert, alive to everything around me, but I also think that this satisfied, for the time being, a wish to make some connection with the countryside.

By next summer, Mr. Crow’s leisurely regime was gone — he had sold the farm to a young couple, the Davises, and the farming pace picked up. There were more cows, the fields were plowed and planted, and there was an air of bustle about the place. We began buying our milk there — ten cents for a two-quart jar of Jersey milk with thick gobs of cream floating in it. And for me, the agricultural era was about to begin.

One muggy afternoon when thunderheads loomed on the horizon, Bob Davis drove into our yard, anxious for help with the hay harvest. Apprehensive as I was, fearful of the farm and of my own ignorance and inexperience, how could I refuse? For the next couple of hours I staggered alongside a flatbed truck, heaving up hay bales. When it was all safely mowed away and Dot Davis brought pitchers of milk and big platters of sandwiches out to the barn floor, I fell on the food voraciously, shaking with hunger and fatigue. I had never done any real work in my life. Walking down the once-forbidding lane, jingling 70 cents in my pocket (35 cents an hour), I sensed the significance of the experience and I felt the beginning of pride.

Bob had regular hands, but during that summer and the next two I was often hired for specific jobs, like handling bags of grain on the combine, or picking tomatoes, or pulling tassels from hybrid corn. I was not paid much, but I knew I wasn’t worth much, something brought home to me when I worked alongside Dean, a local boy my age, another temporary hand. He was slightly built, but having been raised to it he knew how to do a job of work. When we picked tomatoes, Dean, despite my best efforts, always finished his row first, well ahead. We were not really competing; Dean was just doing his job as he always did, moving right along at a steady clip without pause or wasted motion. It seems odd that I was no more than mildly chagrined by his obvious superiority, but there were special reasons for my lack of rancor. For one thing, Dean was a fine boy, quiet, polite, modest, friendly, trustworthy. For a wonder, he never scorned my poor efforts nor flaunted his ability, as other boys would’ve done. For another, although I wanted to have some relation to the rural scene in which Dean so admirably fitted, the wish was not deep; I knew I was an outsider, that I belonged to another scene, that in the fall I would return to boarding school, and eventually I might go on to college, moving into a world where I could not foresee that my ability to pick tomatoes or buck bales would matter at all.

My favorite job was combining. Bob drove the tractor, while I stood, swaying on a platform in back of the combine, bagging the grain as it came down a pipe. Combining took forever. Often we would be at it all day, even till dusk. I loved it, riding around and around the field, out in the sun, like the grain handler of the world. Sometimes when we worked late, folks from our house would drive out to the field with bottles of cold beer, and we would all sit on the flatbed truck and drink beer and laugh and talk, and in the dusk we could feel the coolness coming up from the creek bottom.

Bob grew tomatoes on contract for a cannery in Trenton, and I would go with him when he took in a load. The day before, several of us would load the ’38 Chevy flatbed with a great pyramidal pile of baskets of tomatoes. At three o’clock the next morning the truck would slowly grind along the lane, lights on in the misty pre-dawn darkness, and I would run across the lawn, jump down the bank, and scramble into the cab. He left so early in order to get a good place in the line, but there was always a long line ahead of us. Sometimes it was midnight before we were unloaded. We spent the day napping, chatting with other farmers in line, talking about all kinds of things, smelling the pervasive odor of canning tomatoes. It was, more often than not, a dull way to spend a day, and I was not paid for it either; I was just along to keep Bob company. But only once did I miss, and after the truck had left me behind, just waking, I jumped on my bike and pedaled the fourteen miles to Trenton. Why did I go?

Like all thoughtful, serious men, Bob had a strong, subtle sense of humor, and I suppose I looked on our relationship as all larks, although I respected and admired him, without consciously thinking about it, for depths that at 14 and 15 and 16 I could only sense, not know, not name. But they came to the surface for a moment during my last summer there, just before I turned 17. I had taken advantage of the cannery trips to ogle the girls we saw on the streets, remarking coarsely on their charms to Bob. The last time I did this, and you’ll understand in a moment why it was the last time, Bob, who always spoke deliberately in a voice that was not deep but which seemed to come from far inside him, quietly rebuked my coarseness and then went on to ask if I did not intend to preserve my virginity until marriage? That had been his sexual code, he said.

The effect was devastating. At once I felt very small, very callow. What made such a great impression was his depth contrasted to my shallowness. When he spoke gravely, as he did then, I felt the words as natural growths, consequences that flowed inevitably from an extraordinary breadth of character imbued with experience, knowledge, and wisdom; they were not words of the moment off the top of his head, conventional clichés. Bob was the first person to address me on such a level with such piercing conviction, and the impact was terrific. And there was more, something moving in the way he spoke to me. I think Bob was really shy, not given to glib expressions of his moral sentiments, so it cost him something to overcome his reticence to speak across the gap that separates all of us from each other, and I felt that in the delicacy with which he spoke.

Some years ago, one of my sisters surprised me by asking if was Bob Davis who had inspired me to become a farmer. I had not thought of the Davises for years, and now, thinking back, I could say with surety that farming never entered my head as a possible occupation then. Statesman, General, Actor, Lawyer, Author, Senator, yes, but Farmer? Any form of manual labor (I did not know then how much intellectual labor farming demanded), beyond a teenager’s summer job, was not part of my world. It was not that I thought I was too good for it, but simply that in my class and situation only certain occupations were even conceivable. Besides, there had been other, much more recent influences, farmers I had worked for in New England. Thinking about them, recalling how and why I had respected and admired them, I realized they were of the same species as Bob: grave, humorous, sage men of great integrity, whose lives seemed to me a credit to humanity. Yet they were unheroic, unsung, ordinary men of what was quickly becoming an antique rural world, citizens of the Republic. General farmers all, they provided me with a pattern of farming as well as behavior and character.

I knew none of this at the time, and I gave up that life without a qualm. In the last year I lived in New Jersey, before I went away to college, I was hardly ever at Waln’s Mill. Living in the northern part of the state, I worked as a golf course greens keeper that summer, and spent my evenings playing miniature golf with my dopey girlfriend. Meanwhile, the fireflies were thick in the creek bottom, there were oats to be combined and hay to be made, a marsh hawk hunted the meadows, and the boy with the .22 was missing from the hedgerows and fields. I shake my head when I think of it, but it had to be done, I had to turn away from that life to seek what I thought was my fortune in what I thought was the world, and it was fitting that I should do it lightly, without a backward glance. I had to go away to come back — not to the same place, I mean. I never returned to New Jersey, but I did become a pokey general farmer and more than half a century after I first met Bob Davis, I realize that I have been trying unconsciously (and with indifferent success) to model my character on his.

Nevertheless, it would be nice to go back to that one rural place. I put down my pen and daydream that some of the family still live at Waln’s Mill. What I’d really like, I guess, is that it should be the summer of 1950 again, and I can feel the rhythm of the combine, chaff flies up golden in the sun, and I can hear Bob say, as I climb into the old truck at 3 a.m., “Well, well, and how’s Jigsy this morning?”     *

“Liberty must at all hazards be supported.” —John Adams

Versed in Country Things — Spring and Summer

Jigs Gardner

Jigs Gardner is an Associate Editor of the St. Croix Review. Jigs Gardner writes on literature from the Adirondacks where he may be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. This essay is republished from 2006 about a time many years ago when Jigs and Jo Ann were working a farm in Vermont.

There is a special quality about spring in northern New England that makes me value it more than springs I have known in both warmer and cooler climes. Farther south, the season lacks impact; the transition from mild winter seems effortless, almost commonplace, while much farther north there is no spring at all, only a dreary, sodden, shivering interval between snow and haying time. But on our hillside spring was a signal event, a deliverance that seemed almost miraculous after the long, dark, cold months of winter, when the frozen silence gave way to sound, movement, light, color, warmth. Spring’s career, from its first signs in mid-April to the end of May, when maple leaves are the size of a mouse’s ear, moved and exhilarated us, and not solely because of the contrast with winter. Its essence was a paradoxical fusion of power and fragility, of swelling force and tenuous delicacy. Looking out our front windows at the woods falling away from us steeply down the hillside, we saw, against the bare gray crowns of beech and maple, and deep green almost black spruce, we saw at first a slight green, yellow-green lighter than chartreuse, the beginning of the leafing-out of the poplars, tall and slender, scattered by twos and threes on the lower reaches of the hill. A haze about the branches, then patches of color, then a growing mass, retarded or quickened by the weather, precarious, tender, but with the strength of a flame burning across the hillside. It was all like that, light colors, evanescent, tentative, every advance stealthy, moving so slowly that each moment was savored, but not so slowly (as farther north) as to be imperceptible. Beneath all phenomena, cold days as well as warm, cautious tendrils and subdued hues, there throbbed the current of life, the driving force of spring.

Corbin’s [the former owner of the farmstead] tiny garden, which I easily spaded up while the children extracted the roots of weeds, was just below the old barn site, and having absorbed the stable drainage for decades, the soil was deep and dark. But that was only a small part of the southward-sloping land, protected on the north by the stone wall of the terrace on which the barn was built. The rest, untouched for years, was heavy sod stiff with clumps of orchard grass. It would have to be plowed, along with a potato plot out in the Big Meadow.

In some way that I can no longer recall, I learned that a man named Eldon, who lived a few miles away on a road as remote as ours, might do the plowing. Somehow I also knew that he was a “little simple,” which could mean anything, and could certainly be applied to myself. So, on a cool gray morning in the first week of May I set off with Seth and Jesse, back on their old school bus route, down the steep hill to the highway, a rollicking trip, scattering the gravel as we ran. After the bus came, I walked along the road past Toonerville, a settlement off the road, a few houses in a field, and then I crossed the highway and turned onto the road to Eldon’s, so little traveled that it was spared the muddy ruts of the season. After more than a mile I came to fields, then a barn, and finally a small, unpainted farmhouse, its warped clapboards weathered to shades of gray. When I turned the corner of the house, there was Eldon tinkering with his tractor, one of those small Fords so popular after the war. After the usual wary greetings and formulaic remarks about the weather, we admired the tractor, a model I knew from my first farm job in New Jersey when I was fourteen. I could see that Eldon was proud of it and pleased with my praise. He was in his thirties, tall and gangling with long arms and large hard hands, a chin receding into a prominent Adam’s apple, pale blue eyes behind rimless glasses, and thick brown hair recently trimmed by the bowl and scissors method. His face and hands looked raw, roughened and chapped by weather, but the general effect was softened by his ready, shy smile, the only visible sign, I suppose, of his simplicity. I may say here that Eldon’s limited intelligence was never a problem in any of my dealings with him over the years — he worked for me, I worked for him, and we both worked together for a local farmer — but his speech, ah, that was another story. Perhaps because he lived in a remote area where he saw few people, he had an extremely thick Vermont accent, the strongest I ever heard. Being practically toothless didn’t help his articulation. And he spoke in short, rapid phrases, so if you weren’t on the qui vive and missed the first words, you were lost, just getting up to speed as the last garbled sounds flashed by. I might understand half of what he said. I was always a little uneasy when I said “yes” to anything; to what was I assenting? Usually I said only “Arr” in a noncommittal, sagacious manner and hoped for the best.

He took fright when I told him what I wanted, shying away, rolling his eyes. It wasn’t much, I said, pacing off an area, plus a potato patch. He mulled it over, looking down at his boots. He said something I couldn’t make out, but the way he said it led me to venture “ten dollars.” Now he scratched his jaw. Then he fired off something else in which I made out “potatoes,” so that must be about the patch out in the field, maybe whether it was included in the ten dollars. “Yes,” I said firmly. He smiled and nodded decisively. He’d be by at the end of the week if it didn’t rain.

If you have never done it, you can have no idea how difficult it can be to do really fine plowing. I didn’t know myself until I began doing it with a team in the 1970s. Assuming the plow is basically all right, the most crucial aspect is the setting, the adjustment of the depth and angle of the plow so that it always turns the sod over evenly at the correct angle. Nothing in farming can be so heartbreaking as bad plowing, especially if you’ve tried everything to make it right, and nothing can be so satisfying when it goes well. Small as the job was, Eldon took some thorough hours over it, positioning the plow precisely for each furrow, anxiously watching the ribbon of dark sod emerging behind the moldboard, turning the tractor carefully in the confined space. The potato patch went faster because the soil was lighter and there was plenty of turning space. Just as conscientious about discing, he went over the ground again and again until it was a fine tilth. I helped him load the plow on top of the disc when he was done, and then I counted ten one dollar bills into his hand. Folding them meticulously, he tucked them into one of those little snap purses that country people of both sexes used to carry. That was a lot to pay in 1963 for a job like that, but he had to travel eight miles all told and he put in five hours of first-rate work. I was well pleased and told him so. Settling himself in the tractor seat, Eldon smiled at me and repeated that rushing jumble of sounds with “potatoes’ in it that he had uttered when we struck the bargain. I caught more this time but not enough. I cupped my hand to my ear. Again, I said. “And once more?” Which is how I learned that I had agreed to go to his place on the morrow to help him plant potatoes. Concealing my astonishment, I acted as if it were an understood thing. Oh yes, yes, of course, see you tomorrow morning. I felt like an ass.

Willie turned up in the evening and we went out to look at the job. The garden was a fine sight, but the potato patch, lying out in the wide expanse of the Big Meadow, surrounded by last year’s weeds, everything dull and grayish in the twilight, the potato patch was startling, a sudden dark wantonness, inviting, suggestive, rich with promise. We walked around the edges, careful not to trample the fine soil; we kicked gingerly at the dirt, we crumbled it in our hands. Willie was impressed. He asked me what I paid, and when I told him he was sharply annoyed. It was greenhorn idiots from downcountry like me, lavishly throwing money around, who drove up local labor costs and made life difficult for real farmers like Willie who were trying to make a living here. Now Eldon and people like him would expect ten dollar bills to be showered on them every time they lifted a finger, etc., etc. By the time he was done exposing the consequences of my feckless behavior I was sheepish, nearly as disgusted with myself as Willie was. Those with more sense than I about worldly matters, and that’s practically the entire human race, always make me feel like a fool. Thank God I hadn’t told him about the potato planting.

The next day, sunny and warm, I walked down the hill and went along to Eldon’s. We sat on the porch steps, a bag of potatoes between us, two empty bushel baskets at our feet, and cut potatoes into pieces, each one with a couple of eyes. It is hard to believe — or at least it was to me — how large a part potatoes play in the diets of old-fashioned country folk. Fred Brown, telling me once of the calamity when his family home burned down, especially bemoaned the loss of their entire potato supply, which seemed odd to me, until he added that it was a hundred and fifty bushels.

Eldon’s mother (a fine lady with all her wits about her) had tied some doughnuts to strings suspended from the porch eaves, and chickadees came and went, hanging upside-down, pecking energetically. Eldon talked to them in a crooning voice, “Snow bird, snow bird.”

We planted in a field that sloped down to the road across from the house, shadowed by bare-branched apple trees along one edge, working steadily up one row and down another, Eldon dropping the potatoes while I followed, pressing them into the soil with my boot, hoeing dirt over them. It was one of those satisfying tasks completed in one movement — when we were done, we were done. The straight rows, evenly spaced along the rising ground, dimpled with the small hills I had made, came as close as reality ever can to the ideal lines of a Grant Wood pastoral scene, and Eldon and I stood in the dust of the road and looked on our work with great contentment. Walking homeward, I thought I might not be such a fool after all.

The half-mile of road from our house out to the road that ran over the hill to the village was impassable from mid-April into May, so bad that the mail driver couldn’t make it in his jeep and we had to put up our mailbox at the end of the road. Even in May, after traffic was resumed, there remained some danger spots, traps for the unwary, and several cars got stuck. Two were memorable. The children had made themselves a playhouse in the woods where they had tea parties (a place they recalled, with great nostalgia, for years), and one Saturday afternoon they came running to report a car stuck in the road with a man asleep in it! And so it was — but he was dead drunk. I got the car out and left it parked farther on, beyond any mud holes. The driver never stirred, but he revived by the end of the afternoon, because I saw the car go rattling by the house and down the hill. Who he was I had no idea, but it was another one of those seemingly trivial encounters with someone, like Otis and Mrs. B, who would later play a significant part in our life.

I was working in the garden one afternoon a few days after the plowing when an old acquaintance appeared. He was a traveling salesman, and since he was in the area he thought he’d pay us a call — but his car was stuck down the road. I told him to visit with Jo Ann while I dug out the car. Two hours later I gave up and went home to milk Aster. At least he had towing insurance so he could get the garageman in town to pull him out in the morning, and he had planned to spend the night with us anyway. After a delicious spring supper of dandelion salad — dandelion greens wilted in a pan with chopped boiled eggs, bacon, and potatoes — and after we put the children to bed, Jo Ann and Jack and I walked up to the farm at the top of the hill, where Jack made his arrangement with the garageman over the phone and also called his wife. He had been very anxious about the call, insisting that she’d be distraught if she didn’t hear from him. What he actually said, and he said it many times, was that she’d “go ape.” Now, I thought, as we strolled homeward in the deepening dusk, anxieties are soothed and all will be well. The air was cool, but not too cold to silence the tree frogs, the only sound in the stillness that enveloped the hillside. It was a lovely time for a leisurely walk. But Jack was uneasy. The darkness and silence, which he remarked several times, bothered him so much that he made it seem not merely unusual but amazing and unnatural, perhaps even frightening. We stopped beside the car while Jack touched it here and there, caressing it I might say, and I assured him again and again that the road was rarely used. I didn’t tell him (I wouldn’t be so cruel) that virtually its only patrons were drunks on the way to and from Toonerville. We put out safety reflectors and went back to the house. My plan was to sedate Jack with home brew, and I did my best, but he kept rising from his chair to peer out the windows at the darkness, averring that he couldn’t get over it, that his wife wouldn’t believe him, and so on. Next morning he could hardly sit still enough to eat breakfast, and he was out of the house, pacing up and down the road, a full hour before the tow truck came.

Poor Jack, we said to ourselves as we waved goodbye. How his visit revealed the gap between our present life and the middleclass ways of our old friends! For every daffy sentimentalist who went gaga over our Beautiful Simple Country Life there must be many more who, if they could but catch a glimpse of it, would be as appalled as Jack. And how insensibly we had come to accept this life! A year ago, we, too, would have been intimidated by the absence of bustling human activity, and now we were taken aback by Jack’s reaction, and contemptuous, too: his visit made us smug. We weren’t in love with a car; we didn’t need the comfort of the surrounding herd. This sanctimonious theme runs through all Simple Living books, including Walden, and I can only say that despite the insights given us unwittingly by Willie and the Woodwrights, despite our growing skepticism about the Simple Life, we were still dupes of the myth and the attitudes it engenders. Granted Jack’s foolishness — that didn’t make us morally superior.

I don’t suppose it will be a surprise to my readers to learn that my ignorance about Aster was not confined to the technique of milking. I knew she was not a youngster but her age meant nothing to me even when, as I eventually learned, she was at least thirteen. Cows that old are often hard to breed. They come in heat all right, and they can be inseminated, but they don’t settle (i.e., conceive). Bob Woodwright had paid the breeding fee of three dollars, for which I got two more tries. The long-suffering inseminator came out five times, and on the last occasion in April he said firmly that he wouldn’t come again until we had the vet examine her. But she fooled us; that time she settled. We could look forward to a calf next February.

We took down the sap buckets, pulled the taps, scrubbed everything, boiled the taps in soapy water, dried everything in the sun and stored it all in the barn. The fireplace materials I stacked in the woods for next year. In mid-May I finally hooked up the water to the sink in the house. On May 25 two things told me summer was at hand: we saw Otis’s truck parked at his place, and there was enough grass to put Aster out on a tether.

Although there were still frosts in early June, the garden was planted and thriving in rich soil sheltered by the barn terrace wall. The loamy soil warmed up rapidly, encouraging quick growth from the start, important in the ninety-day season of northern Vermont. I’ve never seen a better garden spot, with handy small conveniences: a shed beside the garden for tools, a cold frame, and attached to the print shop, a tiny greenhouse about five feet square. Kneeling by the door in the shop wall, I could reach in to cultivate my flats of seedlings, started in the house. Heated only by the sun, sufficient in such a small structure, it was covered by a blanket at night, and there I produced healthy, stocky plants that transplanted with no setbacks.

Thinking it would be a treat for the children, I built bunks along one wall in the hayloft, lined them with grain bags stuffed with hay, and there they slept all summer.

After the Christmas jam sale, my next pathetic money-making scheme was to advertise on a bulletin board at Tweedy my services as a tutor for the summer, but the only taker was a former student of mine, Paul Farrar, a frequent weekend visitor during the year. When he drove up in his station wagon in late June, he had with him another student, Morris, known as Momo, a scholarship boy who had ingratiated himself with his rich classmates at Tweedy by playing a variety of knowing roles novel in that preppy milieu — the cool, streetwise guy from New York, the inside dopester, the sardonic comedian. There was an initial pretense that he would be a student on the same footing as Paul, but it soon became clear that he had no money and was only looking for a place to sponge for awhile. We were a little taken aback, but after all he could work for his room and board as Paul was doing and forego the tutoring.

Unfortunately, the Simple Life was only one of my stupidities, and not the worst, either. I discovered in Corbin’s study a miscellaneous collection of the writings of Marx, Engels, Trotsky, Lenin, and a hodgepodge of Lefty periodical literature of the 1930s. It would be nice now to claim that I was corrupted by books, but it was not so — I was already a Lefty of sorts, very unfocussed. What Corbin’s library did was to accelerate and concentrate my development. At that time the very faintest hints of radicalism were just being whispered at Tweedy, and Paul, along with a few others, was infected. We thought of ourselves as anti-Communists, Marxists of the pre-1917 variety, and we read the then scanty Lefty press with what we imagined to be a knowledgeable eye, eagerly following news of the just emerging New Left.

The morning after the boys arrived I took Momo on a tour of the farm, winding up at the top of the Big Meadow, where we stood for a moment, surveying the panorama. Knowing what I’ve just told you, you will understand why I was not flabbergasted, not so flabbergasted as you might have been in June 1963, when Momo announced out of the corner of his mouth that it would be a good place for guerilla training. I have to admit, though, that I was a little startled.

“Guerilla training?”

“Yeah. I know some of the top cats in Progressive Labor who’d really dig this joint for maneuvers.”

Only of course he didn’t say “Progressive Labor,” he said “PL,” and of course I understood him. That he knew some of the top cats was a revelation. I might have accepted that and even the possibility of digging fox holes in the garden (If I could swallow Marx, why balk at that?), but Momo’s demeanor during this small scene was too palpably phony: peering warily over the topography, piggy eyes narrowed, jaw set grimly, General Patton surveying the Siegfried Line. He had been flexing his poses for an undiscerning audience of college boys, hence a tendency to over-act. So, instead of resting content with his performance on the hilltop, he staged another, even stagier routine as we were walking back through the woods. Frowning, biting his lip, and staring down at the ground, he told me about his “dilemma”: should he, or should he not, come the imminent revolution, shoot his parents, who were, as he finely phrased it, “petty bourgeois to their fingertips”? I tried to dodge the subject by saying that it was a delicate personal matter, but he was having none of that.

“It’s not personal,’” he pointed out sternly, “It’s a matter of revolutionary justice!”

This haunted Momo for several days, or rather, it haunted us as Momo thoughtfully placed himself in our line of vision, scratching his head, chewing his fingernails, furrowing his brow, staring out the window. The Yiddish theater, reborn in northern Vermont. Finally Jo Ann sensibly told him to go ahead and shoot the old folks and stop agonizing about it. That produced massive sulks, a regular reaction whenever he suspected we weren’t taking his ridiculous routines seriously. Thus we learned, for the sake of peace, to keep our smart aleck remarks to ourselves.     *