Our country home is adjacent to dairy and maple-tree-product farms. Traveling up the dirt road to our land for a stay of a couple of summer days or weeks, we would on occasion pass the local farmer at work in his fields. We would howdy, he on his John Deere, cutting or plowing or trenching or winnowing or baling, I in my Subaru station wagon crammed with kids, Coleman stove, ice chest and lanterns, sleeping bags, boxes of food, and fishing gear. The farmer looked rather picturesque to me, doing farmer things in the fields near our own place. I do not know what I looked like to the farmer. I knew his father and his grandfather in much the same way. That image of him served as a perfect icon for our country vacation. This is as much of the farmer and farming that I knew for almost thirty years. It was, however, sufficient for me to believe that I knew this man on the tractor and what he did. I saw his cows in the fields. I saw his barns and silos. I saw his children and dog. On occasion I smelled the freshly manured cornfields. That is what I knew of country life, of farming.
This last year, frankly prompted by the writing of this book, it became increasingly clear to me that I actually knew next to nothing about country life, or about farming, or about this man. As I was trying myself to draw closer to Nature, it also became clear that my neighbor, the tenth or more generation to run the family farm, was a great deal closer to Nature than I was, and knew things that it would be good for me to know. I decided to volunteer my services to work on his farm for a couple of weeks, doing whatever was needed. When I tested this notion out with several friends, they all said the farmer would never go for the idea, too much risk of my getting injured and his being liable. When I asked the farmer, he said “Fine.”
I got up when he did: 5:30 a.m., helped with the morning chores of milking and feeding and mucking the milking parlor, spreading sawdust in the stalls and alley when milking was done, had breakfast around nine, back to work fixing fences or bringing in the maple-sap apparatus, sawing wood, delivering or gathering bales of hay, then lunch around one or two. After lunch, more things to do: set fence, load and unload logs, fix stuff, move stuff, lift stuff, dig, carry, feed, clean, shovel, cut. A coffee break sometime in the late afternoon, then evening chores around six or seven of bringing the cows in, opening and closing gates, feeding the yearlings, feeding the new-borns, running the conveyers from the silos to the mixing bin to the feeding troughs, feeding the milking herd, then cleaning the stalls for the lame ones, and cleaning the milking parlor when all the milking was over, spreading a new dusting of sawdust over the stalls and alleyway.
I left at this point to go back to my place at about eight or nine, to shower, make and eat dinner, and flop into bed. The farmer and his wife still had lots more to do around the farm as well as tend to their three school-aged children and household chores. We did this seven days a week. I did this for two weeks. They have been doing this for over twenty years.
What did I learn? What did Claude Levi-Strauss or Margaret Mead or Oscar Lewis learn when they entered the life of the people they sought to understand? That these people have an intact, whole, viable life that is different from the one I have. The farmer on his John Deere whom I saw from the window of my Subaru lived within a society that was different from the society I lived within. We looked the same, spoke the same words, knew of each other, shared in fact many values, beliefs, activities, styles of doing things, dispositions, but we had different life experiences, and from these, we each constructed distinctive webs of life. I learned that when he said the word milk, as in “Please pass the milk,” it meant something quite more and different from when I said “Please pass the milk.”
What did I learn about drawing closer to Nature? The first thing to emerge that I learned, I had no intention to learn, nor was it learnable. I learned to love these people, this family. I came indeed to learn something about what farmers know about Nature, given their special relation to Nature. I did learn something about that, but I was first taken by the tender and playful and respectful and intelligent and loving contact that was the constant of their days. In the midst of milking or sawing or whatever they were engaged in doing, there was always time to stop to talk, help a neighbor, play with a child, have a bite to eat, take a snooze, drink some coffee with the children or their parents (who also lived on the farm) or their cousins or nephews, sisters, brothers, or friends who might show up. Smart people. Decent people. Busting their chops three hundred and sixty-five days a year, fourteen to eighteen hours a day. Doing the ten thousand things a farm requires and doing each one of them thoroughly yet lightly, with expertise and high finish. (Too costly and dangerous otherwise.)
I worked on the farm in the beginning of April, and there were still several feet of snow on the ground. Toward the second week the weather turned warm, and the snow began to melt. During the course of the year, out of a herd of some one hundred and twenty-five cows, a tenth might ordinarily die or be sold off, being replaced by an equal number of newborns. During the winter, if a calf or cow dies, the ground is too frozen to bury it in, and so on this farm it is placed within a great pile of snow until such time as the snow melts, the ground thaws, and it can be buried.
Such a time happened that April. Working with a giant tractor with a bucket loader up front, we went over to the mound of snow where three cows and four calves were buried. Over five months of placing the animals and dumping more snow in this huge mound, it was not clear just where they were. The farmer took his time, taking just a bit of snow away until he came to an animal. Carefully, as if he were working a hand scoop instead of a cubic yard bucket on the end of a ten-foot boom, he gradually released the animal from its temporary bed and placed it on the tines of a forklift. Going slowly, we drove the animal over to a nearby field for permanent burial. Upon arrival at the place, the animal was gently let down. With a backhoe, the farmer then dug a burial pit for all seven animals. Finished, it was about twelve by twelve and ten feet deep. Then, working the forklift, he hoisted the animal up, brought her to the edge of the grave, and slowly lowered her in. Tipping the tines, she slipped off easily and lay on the ground. He went back for the other cows and calves, doing the same thing for each. When he lowered each animal into the grave, he made sure that one did not lie on top of another: each rested on its own ground. When all were interred, he went back to his bucket loader and took a scoop of dirt and, lowering the boom until it was just above the animals, tipped the bucket as you would tip a spoonful of sugar, and covered the animals. He covered them with earth, layer by layer, until there was five or six feet of earth over them. Then, using the bucket as a plow, he covered the remaining depression and smoothed over the mound, and we left. He buries his dead like this every spring and a half dozen other times a year.
A few weeks later, I passed a herd of cows in a field and, as was my habit, noted what a pretty scene I had come upon: cows grazing in the foreground, a farm and fields in the midground, and the gentle curves of pale blue hills giving over finally to a pink sunset. How picturesque. The picture was abruptly shattered, however, when I recognized one of those cows in the scene as a cow I had fed and led and cleaned and milked. That wasn’t “a cow,” that was Beth!
Having spent just two weeks leading the cows in from the pasture, setting out fences for the new season, finding a just-born calf in the just-thawed pasture, with mom and surrogate moms hovering about, lifting the calf through mud and snow drifts, carrying her to the barn nuzzled by overprotective mom and surrogate moms, bringing her to the calf hutches, teaching her how to take the nipple of the bottle filled with still-warm milk, carrying the eighty pounds of milk for the calves a hundred yards at seven a.m. and again at seven p.m. through snow and muck, finding a day-old calf dead in her stall, selling off a lame cow that we couldn’t get healthy again, feeding the milking herd hay from the loft, silage from the several silos and protein pellets from buckets, cleaning out their water bowls and getting the water to flow in them and not all over the stalls and alleyway, scraping the stalls during milking every few minutes so the farmer wouldn’t kneel in crap when cleaning the udders and attaching and unattaching the milking machines, having torrents of pee splash up on me, having loose crap splash up on me, walking in inches of manure in the feeding pens, bringing the herd in from the holding pen to the milking parlor, getting them settled in their stalls, fastening them into the stalls, unfastening them again when milking is done, having one or two cows crush my hand or arm or leg against a post or something, herding them out again to the feeding shed, running the feed conveyer, bringing in special pails of feed for lame ones in special stalls, fogging my glasses with cow breath, cows pushing me aside in the feeding shed or knocking over fences we just put up, conducting a final mucking of all the stalls and alleyway and dusting the entire milking parlor with sawdust— having, I say, spent two weeks at this and completing the morning with a bowl of cereal soaked in their still-warm milk, the pretty picture of cows in the field shattered, and Beth appeared, so did Betty and Babs and Bubu and Dude and Dixon and Dotty, and Deb. And I wondered how they were doing.
Excerpted from Drawing Closer to Nature: Making Art in Dialogue with the Natural World with the permission of the author.
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