A Place on Earth: An Appreciation

Wendell Berry (photo by Guy Mendes)

Some books speak directly to my heart, and find a permanent home there. I don’t recall precisely when I first read Wendell Berry’s novel A Place on Earth (1^st edition 1967), but it immediately took root in my heart. I must have encountered this book in the mid- to late-1980s, a time when I was living and working in St. Paul, and actively seeking my own place on Earth. Berry’s loving yet clear-eyed descriptions of a way of life deeply rooted in a particular place, in a particular way of being in community, intimately connected to the rhythms of nature, spoke to a deep longing in me for a more authentic way of living than the conventional American Dream I saw being sold as the ticket to the good life.

Either shortly before or after encountering A Place on Earth, Berry’s influential non-fiction book The Unsettling of America (1^st edition 1977) had a similarly profound impact on me. I purchased a new (2015) edition of The Unsettling of America recently, and look forward to re-reading it closely. In an afterword included in this edition, Berry writing in the 1990s says:

“In The Unsettling of America I argue that industrial agriculture and the assumptions on which it rests are wrong, root and branch; I argue that this kind of agriculture grows out of the worst of human history and the worst of human nature. From my own point of view, the happiest fate of my labors would have been disproof. I would have been much relieved if somebody had proved me wrong, or if events had shown that I need not have worried. For this book certainly was written out of worry. It was written, in fact, out of the belief that we were living under the rule of an ideology that was destroying our land, our communities, and our culture—as we still are.”

Both books, in their own ways, are reflections of Berry’s fierce commitment to a way of life that is nurturing and sustainable rather than exploitive. His explicit and implicit criticisms of the contemporary (and historical) American drive to dominate nature in a relentless and uncritical devotion to growth, consumption, and profit, are deeply countercultural, and are unflinching critiques of our entire society, not just our agricultural practices. In A Place on Earth, set in 1944 and 1945 as World War II winds down, Berry lovingly creates a fictional community that is, I’m sure, an honest literary counterpart, with human warts and wrinkles included, of the community of his youth. While it is a community where the best farmers attempt to undo the damage unthinking predecessors have done to the land, and where hard work mindfully done is its own reward, it is also a place touched by family discord, untimely deaths, alcoholism, and suicide.

What I realized only upon re-reading A Place on Earth recently is that it is the second of eight novels (and 51 short stories), all centered on the fictional community of Port William, Kentucky. This lifelong literary project comprises the entire body of Berry’s fiction. (He has also published several collections of poetry and numerous non-fiction works.) I read the novel Jayber Crow (2000) perhaps five or 10 years ago, and, after re-reading A Place on Earth, felt compelled to dive more deeply into Port William, and followed with A World Lost (1996) and Hannah Coulter (2004). In all of these novels Berry writes out of an obvious love and deep concern for connection to the land, and commitment to family and community. These four novels span the years 1944 to 2001, and can be read in any order. Jayber Crow, A World Lost, and Hannah Coulter flesh out the Port William that I first came to know in A Place on Earth. A World Lost is a tale of violence and loss (of the protagonist’s murdered uncle), told in the voice of Andy Catlett, who was clearly Berry’s fictional alter ego (both born in 1934; both the son of a lawyer and farmer). I found Hannah Coulter, a reflection by the titular character, looking back from her old age in 2001 on a lifetime of change in her family, the community, and on the land, to be particularly moving.

Berry was born and raised in the part of Kentucky where these novels are set, and has lived virtually his entire life in the same area, with the exception of a year at Stanford studying under Wallace Stegner (along with Edward Abbey and other literary luminaries) in a seminar, a year as a Guggenheim Fellow in Italy and France, and three years teaching at New York University. He has lived and farmed since 1965 on the western bank of the Kentucky River near its confluence with the Ohio River.

In the 1980s, when I encountered Berry’s writing, while most of my contemporary young middle-class, well-educated Americans were embarking on careers for themselves, I found myself dreaming of a life in the country, making a living by the sweat of my brow, so started saving money with the goal of making that life possible. I also honed my organic gardening skills in the large backyard garden in the home that my wife Anne and I owned in St. Paul at the time, with the intention of becoming an organic market gardener. By 1989, when we had our first child, we were actively looking at rural properties near our hometown of Northfield. After looking at many properties, we made an offer on a beautiful 54-acre bit of heaven-on-earth with woodlands and tillable acreage, and a tumble-down 1890 farmhouse at the end of a quarter-mile-long driveway off Farmer Trail, but the deal fell through when we were unable to borrow the funds needed to renovate the farmhouse. Shortly thereafter, we found a classic dairy farm near Circle and Fox Lakes, about 12 miles southwest of town. The 1925 farmhouse, dairy barn, outbuildings, and 10 acres were on offer, and we became proud rural landowners on September 1, 1990, with 19-month-old Maia in tow.

That first fall and winter I worked on the house, installed a woodstove that was to be our primary heating source, cut  and split firewood, and made plans for the next year’s market garden. Anne was teaching in Rosemount at the time. I was working two ten hour days a week at my previously full-time energy auditing job in St. Paul, and having a grand time with toddler Maia on the farm on the days when I was home. The property had about two acres of tillable land that had been planted in alfalfa for a number of years. As soon as the ground could be worked in the spring, I tilled up about a half-acre, and planted a broad range of vegetables and herbs both for our own use and storage, and for sale at the Northfield farmers market. That spring of 1991, with the help of my father and father-in-law, we planted 500 black walnut and bur oak trees to begin reforesting part of the property.

In some ways, this early time on our farm was idyllic. The first night we slept in our farmhouse, a great horned owl serenaded us from a tree outside our bedroom window. A wetland just to the east of our farmhouse was alive with birdsong, morning and evening, spring through fall. I had many beautiful walks with young Maia in a backpack on our land, and on the nearby gravel roads. Bringing home a Christmas tree from a conifer planting on adjacent land, tromping through the deep snow with the tree in tow, is a cherished memory. Our dear friends Andy and Lizabeth came down from St. Paul to visit us several times with their son Ben, Maia’s age. From late spring through late fall we harvested huge quantities of high-quality organically grown veggies, ate all we could, shared the abundance with family and friends, sold what we could at the farmers market, and stored potatoes, onions, and winter squash in the farmhouse’s ample root cellar.

However, not all was as envisioned. While we did connect with another young couple with similar back-to-the-land ideals who lived a few miles away, we had no nearby neighbors, and Anne, in particular, felt extremely isolated with the farm being 12 miles from town. There were no realistic prospects for creating community in the area. The Community Supported Agriculture movement had not quite yet hit the Northfield area (the first CSA in the area, Big Woods Farm, was established in 1992), and it was not obvious when or if it would be possible for me to make anything like a living on the farm.

The constellation of these and other factors led us to decide to sell and move back to live in St. Paul, and I started graduate school in Minneapolis at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs the fall of 1992. Before long, I found myself on the career environmental policy path, doing work as a bureaucrat in state government in St. Paul. When I quickly learned that even a lowly environmental policy wonk would have the essence of his work output determined by, and intellectually undermined by, the political orientation of an agency head, I found this to be a soul-crushingly unsatisfying, short and straight path to a deep depression. I realized that this was not the path for me, and, with Anne’s blessings, chucked the job to become a stay-at-home dad and move back to Northfield, in town.

That move took place the summer of 1993. Almost 25 years later, still living in the old house we moved into that summer, though my heart still constricts with sometimes-painful memories of the path not taken whenever I ride my bike down Farmer Trail or past the old farmhouse southwest of Circle Lake, I feel like I have nonetheless found my place on Earth.

I may not be living on the land, but I have family and community that I care about deeply in Northfield. I am doing meaningful work that benefits humanity, and my backyard garden has produced abundantly these past 24 years (more abundantly some years than others; 2018 will be The Year of the Garden!). I have cut firewood in beautiful area woodlands, and hand-split it to provide heat for our home for many years, though my aging lower back begins to protest at that process. I have come to a deep and intimate sense of connection to the streams, farmland, woodlands and quiet gravel roads of this place on Earth with which I spend as much time as possible in communion. All these years after first reading A Place on Earth, it still speaks to my heart. In re-reading the book, I grieve a bit for my younger, more idealistic self that first read and was inspired by Berry, but take some solace in recognizing that I still have good work to do here on my place on Earth.

I also look forward to reading Berry’s other four novels and 51 short stories about his beloved place on Earth in the hope of gaining a deeper appreciation of what it means to connect with the land and its people. We live in a time where the news daily brings us incontrovertible evidence that our society is seriously dysfunctional, and that the path that we are collectively traveling is unhealthy, deeply damaging to people, communities, and the natural world. Perhaps we would all be wise to reflect upon the good life, based on intimate, long-term connections to the land and stable communities, that Wendell Berry has envisioned, lived, and written about for the past 60 years.

Reflections on a Barbarian

There is perhaps no author who elicits more mixed feelings from me than Edward Abbey (1927-1989). Abbey’s best-known works, both fiction (e.g. The Monkey Wrench Gang) and non-fiction (e.g. Desert Solitaire), earned him a deserved reputation as an intellectual godfather of the radical environmental movement. I read much of his fiction and non-fiction when I was in my twenties, between the late ‘70s and late ‘80s, and was greatly influenced and moved by his beautiful descriptions of the desert, canyon, mesa, plateau, and mountain country of the American Southwest, exuberantly passionate descriptions of a life fully lived, and fierce defense of preserving wilderness in its raw, unspoiled state. However, even then, 30 and more years ago, I was troubled by his obnoxious self-assurance, bald misanthropy, love of guns, sometimes racist language and (seemingly) views, and his apparent sexism. Concerning race and gender, his written views were complicated but his language was frequently blunt and offensive, even by the standards of the time. In short, while Ed was a fascinating thinker and fantastic writer, he was also an asshole, at least as viewed only through his writing.

Abbey clearly relished his image as something of a barbarian, and likely intentionally exaggerated some of his views and made them inflammatory as intellectual sport. He once stated that “I write in a deliberately provocative and outrageous manner because I like to startle people. I hope to wake up people. I have no desire to simply soothe or please. I would rather risk making people angry than putting them to sleep. And I try to write in a style that’s entertaining as well as provocative. It’s hard for me to stay serious for more than half a page at a time.”[i]

Friends and I recently started a new book club, focusing on nature- and adventure-oriented writing, and we selected Desert Solitaire as our first month’s book, partially because of its focus on the part of the Southwest affected by the Trump Administration’s drastic reductions in the size of the Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears National Monuments. I thus recently reread Desert Solitaire and found it just as enjoyable and provocative, and composed in as distinct and unique a voice, as the first time I read it so many years ago. His descriptions of his experiences in (then) Arches National Monument, a float trip down the Colorado River through Glen Canyon shortly before it was to be flooded and irrevocably altered by the Glen Canyon Dam, and perambulations in the environs of Arches are those of a man who knows these areas intimately and loves them deeply. His language is vivid and often hilarious, and his thinking clear and unfettered by convention. His savagely critical and trenchant view of what he called Industrial Tourism (the “development” of national parks and other wild areas by building paved  roads, campgrounds for motorhomes, and other “amenities”) was completely in keeping with my own views (which were reinforced and probably initially formed partly by reading Abbey lo these many years ago). Fifty years ago, when Desert Solitaire was published, these views were hardly mainstream, even among those sympathetic to traditional conservation efforts. Keep the wild wild!

After rereading Desert Solitaire, Abbey’s breakout first non-fiction work, I decided to reread one of his last novels, the semi-autobiographical The Fool’s Progress: An Honest Novel. Abbey’s protagonist in the novel, Henry Holyoak Lightcap, seems like a pretty faithful self-portrait of Abbey himself. (A digression: If Abbey was half the lusty womanizer that Henry was, he must have been pretty hard to take. While I mostly loved the novel, I found myself wearying of his descriptions of his tingling groin and massive manhood. In actual fact, Abbey was married five times, fathering five children—ironic for a man who kvetched at length about overpopulation and the overbreeding immigrants and poor—compared to the three wives and one child for the fictional Henry…)

Henry comes by many of his irascible ways and opinions naturally through his father, Joe, who was eulogized at his funeral in the novel by Henry in a way that I imagine Abbey would perhaps see himself: “My father was a vain stubborn self-centered stiff-necked poker-playing whiskey-drinking gun-toting old son of a—gun. ….He never gave his wife the kind of home she wanted or the kind of life she deserved. He was cantankerous, ornery, short-tempered and contentious—probably the most contentious man that ever lived in Shawnee County. He was so contentious he never even realized how contentious he was. He had strong opinions on everything and a neighborly view on almost nothing. He was a hard man to get along with. But I’ll say this for him: he was honest. He never cheated anyone. He was gentle with children and animals. He always spoke his mind. And he was a true independent. Independent, like we say, as a hog on ice.”

Henry also has this to say about his own prodigious reading and what it provided him: “He remembered best not the development of character or the unraveling of plot or the structure of an argument—philosophy is an art form, not a science—but simply the character of the author’s mind. That part remained and by that standard alone he finally judged his author and either threw the book aside or read it through and searched out more by the same writer.” I guess I have much the same approach to reading, and the fact that I read many of Abbey’s books through and searched out more says a lot about the character of his mind and the quality of his writing, the occasionally offensive rants notwithstanding. In fact, I find myself wanting to seek out the rest of his canon which I have not yet read.

Abbey includes this half-hearted mea culpa for his prickly, often offensive style in the introduction to Desert Solitaire: “Certain faults will be obvious to the general reader of course, and for these I wish to apologize. I quite agree that much of the book will seem coarse, rude, bad-tempered, violently prejudiced, unconstructive—even frankly antisocial in its point of view. Serious critics, serious librarians, serious associate professors of English will if they read this work dislike it intensely; at least I hope so. To others I can only say that if the book has virtues they cannot be disentangled from the faults; that there is a way of being wrong which is also sometimes necessarily right.”

Ed Abbey is someone with whom I would have loved to spend an evening around a desert campfire, drinking and philosophizing, or a day floating down the Colorado River, or scrambling through canyon country. Had I been able to do so, I might have a better sense of whether or not this man who described undeniable problems with overpopulation, illegal immigration, poverty among the Navajo, and welfare dependence in offensively racist language and terms was really a racist. I might have a better sense of whether this man who loved to describe his serial womanizing was simply a man who loved women too much, or whether he was really a grotesquely sexist pig. Based on his writing, he certainly comes across as a racist and sexist asshole. Maybe that is his “way of being wrong which is also sometimes necessarily right.” I can’t help feeling, though, that his immense literary talents could have been even more broadly effective, and resonated with a broader segment of the population, had he been less of a seemingly racist, sexist guy.

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[i] Trimble, Stephen, ed. (1995). “Introduction.” Words from the Land: Encounters with Natural History Writing. University of Nevada Press, p. 27.