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..

Backlands: Only oldtimers know the word and its meaning - an area not easily accessible but settled, near other places not in the back, places that are easily reached, in touch with things, up to the minute. A backlands is backward, rustic, mossbacked. Those who live there seldom use the word; it is their more fortunate neighbors who say it, and when they do they smile.

There is, in the middle of Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia, a large body of water, an arm of the Atlantic, called Bras d'Or Lake, and in its southwest quarter a peninsula juts into the lake, shaped like a fruit suspended from a thin stem, a neck of land seven or eight miles long, roughly three miles wide. Gravel roads wander along both shores, and halfway along one a narrow track turns inland to wind its way through the middle of the neck, serving the area called the Backlands from the beginning because it was landlocked, cut off from the lake by the farms on both shores at a time when access to the water was vital to rural Cape Bretoners as their highway, their source of fish, their livelihood. Until the 1950s steamers regularly plied the lake, and much of the commerce and ordinary transactions of the day moved by water. Farmers shipped milk on the morning boat, mail was carried, goods were shipped to market. Every farmer on the water set his herring and cod nets in season. As if being landlocked were not enough of a drawback, the lay of the land was daunting: a long narrow stream valley that quickly rose on either hand to wooded hills, rough irregular terrain honeycombed with the steep sink holes caused by the underlying strata of gypsum. There wasn't much flat land, too much of it was bog, and the woods were hard to get at.

The hardships of rural life on Cape Breton in the 19th and even in the 20th centuries are almost impossible for modern people to grasp. Every member of the large families labored from before dawn to well after dark, trying to wrest a scant living from poor soil, working in the woods by lantern light on winter mornings, setting nets under the ice on stormy winter days, trudging miles through snow to the store to get a bit of tea and tobacco, weaving rough blankets on a loom all day in an unheated room, threshing oats with a flail on the barn floor late into the cold winter nights.

By 1890, at the height of whatever agricultural prosperity Cape Breton was destined to know, there were ten small subsistence farms in the Backlands, farms which fed and largely clothed those who labored on them but produced little else: some cream was shipped, eggs and butter were traded at the store, a steer or a couple of lambs were sold to pay the taxes. Meager though the harvests were they required everyone's unceasing labor. It was a life sustainable only so long as there were no better prospects within reach, and by the end of the century those prospects, thanks to steamships and railways, were getting closer. Sons were leaving to work in the new steel mill in Sydney, the island's only city, or they took ship to go to Boston for factory work, and their sisters joined them to become maids, nurses, seamstresses. As soon as this exodus began - and bear in mind that these sons and daughters would be the most resourceful, the ones with most initiative - the little farms were doomed.

Doomed. Every day is a struggle to overcome entropy, to shore up order against the relentless tide of Nature's chaos, and in nothing is this so clear as farming. The hurried mower leaves the back swathe beside the wood and alder sprouts and spruce seedlings, wild raspberries and ferns fray the edges of the plotted land, manure is not hauled to the farthest field and clover and timothy go down before goldenrod, ragwort, and thistle; the unpruned trees yield only crabbed and scabby fruit. Every acre must be managed or it goes back to the wild. The poorest places, like the Backlands, were stricken at once. The children grew up and left, the old people died, and life dwindled year by year. It was like a country band: a couple of fiddlers, a horn player, a guitar or two, an accordion, an upright piano, perhaps a mouth organ. The tunes sounded up and down the narrow valley, echoing back from the hills, and if you were not listening carefully you missed the moment when one of the players dropped out, and then another; after all, the music continued, the dance went on. One after the other players vanished from the stage until only thin notes of a single fiddle could just be heard, fading and swelling on the fitful winds.

In 1971, wholly ignorant of all that, we bought the last farm recognizable as a farm off a side road in the heart of the Backlands. Working early and late, reconstructing fences, felling trees for lumber, rebuilding the barn, planting gardens, haying, cutting firewood, it was at least a year before we realized what we were up against. We had not had to build barns to withstand one hundred miles per hour winds, nor had we plowed fields of sour cold clay where topsoil was no more than a dark smear at grass roots; we had not lived through long dark damp winters so fatal to livestock; we had never lived in such a wild place where owls, ravens, weasels, foxes, hawks, mink, eagles, and bobcats rioted and feasted on our flocks. We had been spoiled by Vermont; now we would be put through a far harder school.

Growing in a marginal environment is wholly unlike farming and gardening elsewhere. Weeds, adapted to a low fertility regime, grow much faster than cultivars, which give much but require much. There is hardly any spring in Cape Breton; the cold clay soil barely warms til late June; it can't be worked when wet and breaks hoes when it's dry; it tenaciously shelters weed roots and drains very poorly. Pests and diseases find a happy home in marginal environments, fostering slugs and blights, and cutworms, hornworm, earworms, and fungi in their thousands and tens of thousands. It took tons and tons of manure, lime, and eelgrass to rejuvenate the fields, but in 1976 our hay had the highest protein content of any tested in the Province.

And without quite realizing it at first, we were turning an abandoned property into a beautiful farm. The gardens, grown for use - Jo Ann developed an herb business and we sold plants - as well as beauty, were photographed for national magazines, and thanks to the hard lessons she learned there, Jo Ann became a garden writer. But we failed to reverse the local fortunes: the few people here when we came left, and except for our place, the Backlands was empty. Insensibly, we became part of its history, the Last Stand.

The experienced eye could still discern the outlines of a field here and there, but alder and spruce and poplar were taking over, obscuring boundaries and edges, obliterating the labor of generations. The road was hardly maintained anymore. Beaver dams flooded it, trees met overhead, and roadside bushes brushed the rare intrepid car. There were two eagle nests in the valley, wildcats were seen in the road, great horned owls called back and forth from the dark woodlands. Hunters and trappers will keep coming to the Backlands, but soon the last vestiges of settled life would disappear.

Because we finally had to admit, in our late 60s, that we were no longer capable of making the hay, just the two of us and the horses. We had to sell the farm. It was a melancholy prospect. In thrall to the past from my earliest years, it led me blindly down ever-narrowing byways to this end, and I myself became part of the past, a relic and compendium of obsolete skills and antiquated notions. In another way though, it was not sad at all. I knew that the beautiful farm would quickly fall to ruin after we left, would never be farmed again, but nevertheless, we made it, we created it ourselves from very unpromising material. It was, I must insist, a work of art, and it will be remembered, if only in these words.

There is a moving poem by Robert Frost, "The Need of Being Versed in Country Things," about the ruins of a burned out farm, the memories evoked by the scene, and the way the natural world encroaches on the site. The poem emphasizes the indifference of Nature to human loss and the poignancy of the poet's knowledge of it, but it also implies the healing quality of that indifference, as well as the power of the artistic vision that has made a beautiful work of art of an abandoned farm. It is too long to quote in its entirety, but here are the last two stanzas about birds nesting there:

Yet for them the lilac renewed its leaf,

And the aged elm, though touched with fire;

And the dry pump flung up an awkward arm;

And the fence post carried a strand of wire.

For them there was really nothing sad.

But though they rejoiced in the nest they kept,

One had to be versed in country things

Not to believe the phoebes wept.

I would not compare myself with the poet or his achievement, but there is an analogy, however humble. With the aid of my beloved wife and children, I, too, made something beautiful from an abandoned farm. *