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| Wendell Berry (photo by Guy Mendes) |
Either shortly before or after encountering A Place on Earth, Berry’s influential
non-fiction book The Unsettling of
America (1st 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.
