Letters from a Conservative Farmer:

Versed in Country Things — Complexities

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.

On a bright February morning Fred drove in the yard, bringing with him Hank, Eldon, and Miff, Hank’s brother, all crammed into the pickup, to enlist my aid in his latest deal. Elias Turgeon had had woodland he owned near the bottom of the hill, cruised by the country forester, marking trees to be felled, and now he had induced Fred to do the work, paying him by the thousand feet of logs and cord of pulpwood, the job to be finished by the end of May. Fred rattled off the details with practiced ease; this wasn’t the first, nor the tenth time he had recited them. Warming up, he couldn’t stay in his chair; the subject required expansive gestures in the middle of the room, where now he spread his arms wide and declared, “It’s all gravy, Jigs, all gravy!” This was his crew — a showman’s sweep of the arm introduced the unholy three seated side by side on the couch — all it needed was a good man to stack the pulp — the other arm pointed to me — at seven dollars a cord, “All gravy!”

Whenever Fred invoked gravy, my heart sank. I knew that if Turgeon, a shrewd farmer, had any quantity of saleable wood to be cut, he would have sold it to a regular logger for stumpage; most of what the forester had marked would be small thinnings and dead stubs. And a deadline, too! I looked at the crew, which was looking a bit sheepish. They didn’t seem to share Fred’s enthusiasm, nor to give hearty credence to the “gravy line.” They had heard it all too many times, they had been stung before by Fred’s schemes (I recalled how disgruntled Eldon had been after the hay deal). But there are men like that — I have known them in other times and places — men like Fred, enthusiasts of the improbable, and men like Miff and Hank and Eldon, who resignedly sign on once more and shove off, with a feeble cheer, in the leaky boat. I knew that no one, and that included Fred, would ever see any gravy on that job, and I knew it as infallibly as I have ever known anything. Of course, I didn’t say that; I explained that my inexperience would hold them up, that I was too green to be of any help. Fred was disappointed, his spirits easily cast down by rejection. I assured him several times that the job sounded great and was obviously chock full of gravy, and he went away mollified.

Well, I said to Jo Ann, that’s one fiasco I avoided. I spoke too soon.

Thinking about Fred and his offer awakened me to the significance of my relations with these men, and to other relations in our life. We had less and less to do with Willie and people of his class and more to do with Toonervillians. We had shifted our social base somewhat, and our social life would never again be as it had been. Our middleclass ties were not severed and never would be, but they were attenuated. Although we would be in and out of middle-class situations over the next several years, we continued to farm (if that’s not too hifalutin a name for it), and we were regarded with puzzlement and some distrust, as people who disconcertingly did not quite fit into expected categories. We were obviously educated, cultured, competent people, but our ideas and opinions, insofar as others knew them, were at odds with theirs, and we lived such a strange life (we kept a cow in our garage at one time), doing things no respectable people did. We would never be fully at home again in the middle-class milieu. Not that we joined the rural proletariat. We certainly drew closer to the Toonervillians, but again there was a gap. Our education and culture, and all the interests and behavior engendered thereby, made them uneasy, a little apprehensive, just as our middle-class acquaintances were put off by the earthy aspects of our life. Of the totality of our life and thought, only fractions were shared by either group, a situation that made for some loneliness, but it broadened our perspective and freed us (to some extent) from the narrowness of a single-class viewpoint.

That our state was ambiguous and that I, at least, was confused by it, was vividly, appallingly demonstrated one day late in the winter. Thinking to impress a visiting Tweedy student with my tough guy bootlegger role, we got in his car and took a couple of jugs of cider to Toonerville. Fred wasn’t home, so we drove on to Hank’s place, a once-imposing Victorian house with a wide porch around two sides and elaborate gingerbread ornament. Only fragments remained; most of the intricate woodwork, along with some of the porch, had gone into the stove. The windows were broken, covered with cardboard or stuffed with rags; the whole house, long unpainted and with clapboards missing here and there, was a sagging ruin. Fred had complained to me once of Hank’s improvidence: a water pipe froze, and since he was too lazy to thaw it, everything froze and cracked, and now there was no running water at all in the house.

I should say a word here about Hank and Miff. The former I saw sober only once, the opening day of the deer season, when Fred’s father banned alcohol from the clan so they wouldn’t shoot one another. Hank was stupid, maudlin, obsequious, and nasty. Miff was altogether different, quiet, sad-looking, with a wry sense of humor. He didn’t drink nearly as much as his brother. They were beside the house, desultorily splitting wood. Oh yes, Hank would gladly buy cider, and he went inside for the money, while we kidded around with Miff. Hank came to the doorway, holding out the bills, but when I reached for them he retreated, luring me into the house. “Come on and see the missus.” I knew she was an invalid with some form of arthritis, but the one time I had seen her, in a car with Hank, she had looked blooming, with a round full face and a rosy complexion. Somewhat uneasily, I stepped after Hank. The door led directly into a large room and sudden darkness: the broken windows were covered over, and the only light came from the open door. Charitable people gave the family old clothes, had been doing so for years, and this was the warehouse as well as the dump for their own cast-offs, a mass of boxes, bags, heaps of old clothes, dirty, moldy, rank with filth, mixed in with junk — worn tires, a wheel rim, a baby carriage crushed flat — and piled so high, right up to the ceiling, that only a narrow passage led through the room, straight to a grimy kitchen range, its top covered by tottering piles of dishes so encrusted with the remnants of old meals that they could not have been washed in what? weeks? months? Understand that our progress was not slow, we did not dawdle to gaze around, and in fact I tried, after the third step, not to see anything.

At the stove we turned right, following another tunnel to a door that opened into what had originally been a parlor and was now the master bedroom. At the other end of the large room were three bay windows miraculously intact; before them was a small table and two rickety, wired-together straight chairs; just inside the door against the left wall was a camp bed, with another farther along in an alcove. The incredible, overpowering feature was against the wall on the right: a single bed raised on a foot-high dais, and everything about it — the framework, the sheets, the pillow, the blankets — was immaculate, absolutely spotless, bright, shining. Hank’s wife lay in the bed, her rosy face turned to the wall. Stunned by the passage through the “kitchen,” this completed my stupefaction.

Hank said in his wheedling voice, “Here’s Mr. Gardner to see you, honey.”

I mumbled greetings. Her face remained obdurately turned to the wall.

“She’s got a little mad on at me,” he said, gingerly sitting on one of the chairs. The student sat on a box near the door. Miff invited me to join him on his camp bed. Aside from the dais, the rest of the room was clean in the sense that there was no litter, no piles of garbage, but nothing less than a fire would ever rid its gray splintered floorboards, its cracked plaster walls, and its greasy wainscoting of the dirt of decades. Still reeling, blinking at the vision of the bright bed, my brain and will suspended, not knowing where to look in the awkward silence, I imitated Miff and stared down at the ornate grill in the floor at our feet. Inanely, I asked him what it was.

“Register for a hot air furnace. Don’t work no more. . . . At night you can watch the rats runnin around,” he answered in a low tone. Not low enough. Hank immediately took fire.

“Oh, my brother’s too good for his present quarters! Payin nothin, doin nothin, eatin my grub, drinkin my liquor, but he don’t like the commodations. He was glad to crawl in here from that trailer, but now he’s too good for us. Listen, Gardner: I seen the time when I got down on my knees and begged his highness here for money for a drink an he wouldn’t give me a dime, not a goddamned dime! No, no, he was too good for that. He didn’t drink, he wouldn’t touch the stuff. Oh no, liquor was bad an I shouldn’t drink it, an he pushed me out the door!”

Bent over the register, I glanced furtively at Miff. His eyes were shut tight.

“You never knew him when he was a farmer, did you Gardner? Yes, him, he owned the home place free and clear, paid off the mortgage, had a fine herd o’ Jerseys with pretty names, too good for his brother he was in them days. But somethin happened to goody goody Milford an he took to the bottle jes like his no-good brother, an he’d lie on the floor dead drunk, and the cows wasn’t milked, an they wasn’t fed, an . . .”

“Stop!” I cried, unwilling to hear what had happened to the innocent animals. In the sudden silence I could feel my normal functions returning; the shout had shaken me awake. A sense of horror; revulsion, and indignation rose in my throat.

“Why do you live like this? Why don’t you clean up the place? You could do it, you’re able, you . . .”

But he was having none of that.

“Who do you think you are, Gardner, comin in here an tellin me what to do? A lotta people wonder about you, what you’re doin up there on the hill. Who are you? Where do you come from? Whaddaya do for a livin?”

He had struck at my weakest point. What account could I give of myself — even to myself? Defensively, I started to say I had been a teacher, but then I saw what no one else in the room could see, Hank’s three children running towards the house. “Here come your kids, and we have to go.” I was out of the room, through the dark passage, and rushing into the fresh air and sunlight in seconds.

What the student thought, I never knew. I was in a rage of shame, and it was weeks before I could think of the episode with any degree of calm, years before I would remember it without an inward cringe. Recalling it now, writing it out like this gives me a new distance, so while I duly shake my head over my inadequacies — to put it charitably — I am no longer so concerned with myself, with my stupidity and weakness of character, with the confusion of class attitudes. I leave those judgments to the reader; the scene needs no gloss from me. But now it seems to me to spring to life, like a little play, and the complexities and ambiguities stand out as the very stuff of dramatic action. Nearly 50 years have passed, but as I write these words, the curtain rises, I can hear Hank’s voice, I can see Miff’s profile, and in the background, dominating the scene, there is the immaculate bed, there is the woman with her face turned to the wall.     *

Versed in Country Things — Spring and Summer

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.

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 14. I could see that Eldon was proud of it and pleased with my praise. He was in his 30s, 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 “10 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 10 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 10 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 down country 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 10-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 that 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 150 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, “Snowbird, snowbird.”

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 lives.

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 middle class 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 13. 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 90-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 a while. 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 unfocused. 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 foxholes 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.     *

Versed in Country Things — the Test of Winter, Part II

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.

On the morning of January twenty-first, during a blizzard that had begun the day before, the water froze. We had had trouble with it as early as November, when the plastic pipe coming up from the cellar had frozen, so we had learned to leave the water running in one side of the double sink. A guest was doing the dishes, and he turned off the water for fifteen or twenty minutes, with the result that it froze in the cellar and farther back underground. It must have been partially frozen for some time. We immediately snowshoed across the Big Meadow to the woods on the other side, where we were able to open the water pipe at a joint where it crossed a stream. The water was running freely there, so we decided to dig a trench through the snow from there to the house (about two-hundred and fifty yards), line it with hay, and bury in it another line of hose. Struggling in the storm, we managed to do it, but the hose froze. We kept the water running in the first hundred feet of hose, and the rest we took up and brought to the house, a tangle under our feet in the room, to thaw. For the time being, we melted snow, hardly sufficient for us and wholly inadequate for the cow. It takes a lot of snow to make a little water.

After the guests left we had a day’s respite from the stormy weather, and I went at it again, working desperately to get the hoses connected and buried. I did not know that a still clear day at that season would be intensely cold, with an even colder night to follow. By the time the system was all hooked up, darkness had fallen and the lamps were lit. Standing at the sink, watching a feeble trickle of water drip from the faucet, I held the lamp up to the window to read the thermometer outside. I stared: Thirty-seven below, as cold as I ever saw it in nine years in Vermont. Then the water stopped running.

I went to the shop in the barn the next morning to build a sled with a box on it to hold a twenty-gallon galvanized garbage can, and as amateur carpenters will often do, I made it heavier than it had to be, but I could pull it — just. At least it would be empty going uphill. Dragging the sled to the end of the hose where the water was still running, I filled the can. Turning back, I inched across the Big Meadow on my snowshoes, leaning forward into the tow rope, staring down at the track in front of me, stopping every few minutes to hang limply over the sled, trying to get some strength and breath back. Finally, I passed the pasture fence corner, then I was on the downhill behind the barn, then I passed the barn, and at last I reached the porch where I collapsed, panting and trembling. When I could stand up, I carried the water in buckets into the house where I poured them into the garbage can beside the kitchen counter. We stood around it, looking at the clear cold water, a cheering sight. I took a long rest before I went back and did it again, this time filling a tub in the stable.

The job was so taxing that I didn’t know if I could keep it up, but I was tougher than I thought. I went through that routine every second day, sometimes making three trips, and it was the best thing I did that winter, physically, because it built up my muscles for the tasks to come, mentally, because it forced me to fight actively against winter’s forces. I hauled water for two months, and within a couple of weeks it was no longer a hardship. By the end of February, as the sun climbed perceptibly higher, I would sit on my snowshoes on the south side of the sled, sheltered from the wind, and soak up the sun, feeling its warmth as I waited for the can to fill.

Back in November, the first time the water froze in the cellar, Jo Ann had declared that she could endure every deprivation but she couldn’t get along without water. The January freeze was like a fated blow held back for two months, hoarded by the gods of Simple Living to break her spirit. The gods mistook their woman. Jo Ann melted snow and hoped for the best. Even if all my efforts had failed, she would have found a way. Just as she performed extraordinary feats of skill and ingenuity in the kitchen every day, feeding us well from a larder that was always low. As I mentioned earlier, the cellar wasn’t insulated in any way against the cold, something I failed to discover until too late, when what looked like a wall was revealed to be nothing more substantial than some old feed bags hung across a gaping hole. Our home-canned vegetables were in the pantry, but carrots, beets, cabbages, and potatoes were stored down cellar in barrels and nail kegs, and by December everything was frozen. Jo Ann salvaged nearly all of it, finding fresh ways to serve what by Spring was desperate stuff to work with. She baked wonderful bread and cake and cookies, and we always had eggs and just enough milk and butter. My mother used to say that it was easy to be a good cook with the best ingredients; that winter I learned that to do well with next to nothing is to be a master.

Toward the end of March in northern Vermont, when the snow still lies deep on the land, when the earliest daffodils cannot even be imagined, when the only prospect is a month more of winter, then the northward-creeping sun gives us those bright days, just above freezing, that combine with cold nights to pull the sap up the trunks of sugar maples. Then is the time to shake off the staleness of winter lethargy, to step out purposefully into the wind and weather, to go forth into the sugar bush with brace and bit and a pail full of taps, to make snowshoe tracks from tree to tree, to watch the first drops of clear sap drip from the taps. Then pity those who must wear winter out to its drudging end without the solace of a sugar bush, where sugaring time is a spring before spring, its sweetest boon!

My first sugaring experience came about the year before in Tweedyville, just by chance. In the hardware store one day with a local friend, I noticed a tray of shining metal things on the counter and asked him what they were. Maple sugar taps, he said, going on to tell me how his father had sugared during the war years, making syrup for the family. You know me well enough by now to guess how that caught my attention, so when he ended by saying that his father still had the equipment in his barn, you know the deed was practically done. We went at once to see his father, just up the road from our house, and he kindly gave me twenty-five wooden buckets, a bunch of taps, and a twenty-gallon galvanized tub for boiling. Then he guided me to a maple grove in the nearby woods, showed me how to tap out, and gave me a few simple instructions. That very day I hung the buckets and tasted the first drops of the faintly sweet watery sap.

Students were interested, and we’d go up every afternoon when the sap was running, collect it in a garbage can, and haul it in a student’s station wagon to our house, where we’d boil it down over an open fire in the backyard, roasting hot dogs, making a party of it. There was one flaw. My friend’s father did not teach me the crucial point in the process, how to tell when the syrup was done, probably because, like every backyard sugar maker I’ve ever met, he didn’t know it. We simply boiled the sap until it seemed like syrup, thus producing a thin pre-syrup with a mildly maple flavor, the sort of wretched stuff most amateurs make. Of course, we thought it was terrific and we proudly gave it to all our friends, who probably poured it down the sink, remarking that it was another of my harebrained follies. Well, no harm was done, not then; that would come a year later.

As with the slaughter of the pig, I prepared for sugaring by studying a government pamphlet, but with this difference: About the pig I knew nothing and knew it, so I submitted myself to the instructions unquestioningly. In this case I thought I knew all about it — hadn’t I acquitted myself superbly a year ago? I did not deliberately ignore all the directions, because I was trying to adapt them to my rough circumstances. The operations described in the pamphlet took place in a modern sugarhouse using the relatively sophisticated technology of the day, so it was not easy to recognize which information was relevant and translatable into my primitive situation. My previous experience made me complacent in a way I never was in regard to the pig.

Willie came over to help me tap out, and between us we hung ninety-eight buckets, a motley collection of wooden buckets, rusty sap buckets, and number ten cans from the Tweedy Student Union kitchen. There was much snow that year — more than twelve feet had fallen, and there was four feet on the level then — which eased our labor because all obstructions and inequalities in the ground were buried beneath our gliding snowshoes. In the stillness we could hear the steady tap-tap as the first drops fell into the empty buckets. Chickadees were singing “Spring soon, spring soon,” the sun sparkled on the snow, and by the end of the morning our faces were flushed with the first sunburn of the season. Willie lent me a yoke, a simple device of thin ash strips and leather straps that moved the weight of laden buckets from the arms to the shoulders and back. It was so useful that I made one for myself, which I still use, and later made them for the children, too, for use in later sugaring operations.

Jo Ann made a special lunch in appreciation for Willie’s help, a meal that featured Clay’s cured and smoked shoulder ham. As we sat down, Willie had the gall to ask Jo Ann why she didn’t “help out in the woods.” His sister always helped Bob tap out.

“She has much more important things to do in the house,” I quickly answered, “like this lunch.”

I was surprised when she thanked me later; she had shown no sign, but she was annoyed by Willie’s remark; as she pointed out, Ann could work in the woods because she had a hired girl. It was another demonstration of his insensitivity to material differences and their consequences, and also of the gulf between us. In later years, when the children were grown up and gone, then Jo Ann would assume, in addition to household tasks, such as the baking, and preparing meals from scratch, and all the preserving work in the barn, in the fields, and in the woods, far beyond what Ann Woodwright had ever done in her Simple Living life.

Next morning, I made the fireplace, clearing an area in the middle of the woods eight feet on a side right down to the ground. I cut six hardwood poles three inches in diameter and ten feet long that I formed into tripods tied together at the top with baling twine. Then I laid a slightly stouter pole, eight feet long, across their tops. For boiling, I had two oblong twenty-gallon galvanized tubs with handles at their end, and these I suspended from the horizontal pole with logging chains, adjusting them until they were level about thirty inches from the ground. By enclosing the space under the tubs on three sides with scraps of metal roofing shored up with stones and a few cinder blocks, I had a fireplace. Two garbage cans were my storage tanks.

Sap runs in fits and starts, depending on weather and temperature. We had a short run right away, accumulating forty gallons of sap, but it was stopped by a cold north wind for several days, so I cut wood while I waited. When the next run began, I filled the tubs, lit the fire, and went my sap-gathering round, a much more difficult task than I had expected because the woods were not maintained for sugaring: There were no paths to the trees, nor were spaces cleared around each tree. It had been a sugar bush once, probably as late as the 1930s, as I could tell from old tap holes in some big dying maples I felled for firewood, and there was the ruin of an old sugarhouse just below the road. Now, wearing snowshoes and with a wide yoke on my shoulders, carrying two five-gallon buckets, it was a hard struggle to get around. Think of me, snagged in brush, caught by a limb, trying to turn in a narrow space, falling down, spilling the buckets, getting soaked. As the warming weather began to melt the snow; not only did obstacles appear, but I sank more deeply, the snowshoes would catch on something, and down I would go. Collecting all the sap could take as much as two exhausting hours, and if it hadn’t been for the toughening exercise of hauling water, I don’t think I could have done it.

I boiled constantly for five days during that run, and well into the night. After the children had been put to bed I would set off, on snowshoes if necessary, but if the day had been warmish and the night were cold enough, the surface would freeze so hard that I could step briskly along the rough icy snow in moccasins, following my nose uphill toward the mingled smells of wood smoke and boiling sap. Pulling aside the fire door to uncover a glowing bed of coals, I would pile on the wood until the fire was roaring and the sap was boiling. From time to time I would skim the foam with a skimmer I made from screening stretched over a forked branch. I sat on an upturned bucket and smoked my pipe, staring into the flames or watching the play of light and shadow on the surrounding trees. I could look across the gorge towards Otis’s empty house or down towards the valley, and all I saw was darkness. And from there, how would my fire show up? What would a benighted traveler see? A wavering spark in the woods? But there were no such travelers, and I was alone in all that darkness, a silent watcher by my fire. I might stay an hour, and then I would load the fire and close the doors, fill the pans with sap and turn homewards, following the path, looking up at the stars in the strip of sky above the wood’s road.

Every day I gathered sap, much or little, adding it to the storage cans, eventually to the boiling tubs, gradually concentrating it into syrup. At the start of the season, when the sap is most sugary, the ratio of sap to sugar can be as high as twenty-five to one, falling later to forty to one or higher. When I had boiled down two-hundred gallons, therefore, I might have as much as six or seven gallons of syrup. A cold snap brought the run to an end when I had put that much sap into the pans, so I directed all my efforts to reducing the last forty gallons. The year before, you will recall, I had unknowingly failed to boil it down to real syrup. Now, thanks to the pamphlet, I knew there was a specific point of concentration I had to reach, and there were ways to know when that point was reached. An experienced sugar maker knows by the look of the syrup as it is poured from a ladle, but for the rest of us the surest way is to use a hydrometer to measure its specific gravity. That I didn’t have, but a thermometer can be used: When the temperature is seven degrees above boiling point, adjusted for altitude above sea level, the syrup is made. So, I boiled and boiled, and when the magic moment came, Jo Ann and I poured off the syrup, not so easy as it sounds. The fire had to be kept high right to the end, then the hot, cumbersome tubs had to be lifted quickly, one at a time from the blazing fire and held firmly as the contents were carefully poured off. I carried the buckets down to the house at once in order to strain it while it was still hot. The strainer, a long cone of sheeting, was already set up in the mud room, and when I poured in, the syrup there was revealed, with no possibility of evasion, the full consequences of my lighthearted ignorance: The stuff was so thick with dirt it would not strain. Of course, there was bound to be some dirt from the open fire, but because my past “success” had led me to ignore the pamphlet’s insistence on thorough cleanliness, lots of avoidable debris had gotten into the syrup, and all I had to show for my hard labor was some nasty black gunk! If I had really boiled the syrup down last year, I would have had the same result.

I studied the pamphlet again, and the next day I went back to the fireplace, rehung the tubs, packed them with snow, started the fire, and melted snow until I had two tubs of scalding water. In the meantime, I slogged around the woods retrieving all the buckets. Everything — buckets, tubs, utensils — was remorselessly scrubbed and the buckets were replaced on the trees. I had a few covers, necessary for keeping out twigs, bark, snow, rain, and now I made more from anything I could find. Finally, I tightened up the fireplace to reduce the sparks and ash flying up into the tubs.

During the next sap run I went through the same routine as before, taking care to exclude all visible dirt, and when we poured it off we strained it right there in the woods, warily and anxiously. In a moment, golden brown syrup poured in a thick stream from the strainer, and we knew we had finally done the job right. It was, to be sure, Grade B, but making a better grade over an open fire is probably impossible. Ignoramuses often claim that Grade B is tastier, but they are confusing crude strength with the delicate essence of maple flavor that only the fancy grade has. In all the years we sugared in Vermont, I made a few small improvements in technique and equipment, and eventually we hung three hundred buckets, but the operation remained essentially as I have described it.

We never had an adequate wood supply that winter, and I regularly went to the woods to cut more. The woodshed was never absolutely bare, but it was always a reproach to me. Once in late winter Willie and his sister kindly brought us some blocks cut from a dead elm stub beside the road, at a time when our supply was especially low, and we were very grateful. Ann wanted to see Aster (she had been Ann’s first cow), and when I took her to the stable, I could tell from her dismayed expression, although she said nothing, that something was wrong. Cows, when they lie down in a stable, will sometimes get manure on their hip, where it dries and cakes. With my usual ignorance and carelessness, I had thought nothing of it, but I guessed that this was what distressed Ann. From then on, Aster (and all our succeeding cows) was always kept curried and clean.

One morning on my way up to the woods, passing a south-facing bank in an open place fully exposed to the sun, I saw earth again, not the frozen surface I had uncovered when I shoveled away the snow for the fireplace, but damp brown soil, gray pebbles, tan roots, beige leaves, brownish-gray twigs, and yellowing stems, a collection brought to light gradually, steadily, irresistibly by the force of the sun alone. Kneeling, I peered closely at the assemblage, tentatively touching the cold, rough, smooth, damp surfaces, pressing my face close, smelling its earthiness.

I snowshoed across the Big Meadow a few days later, paying out lengths of hose behind me, heading for the place where I filled the garbage can. When I made the connection, we had water to the house. Not in the house, but running night and day into a tub by the side of the porch. On a couple of cold nights after that it froze, but the sun, warming the dark hose where it lay atop the snow, thawed it without my bothering.

By the end of April, sugaring was over. Early one morning, Nell and I were up at the top of the woods, collecting buckets and pulling taps, when we heard raucous cries. Looking down through the woods, down into the wide gorge, we saw below us a flock in the V formation of thirty or so Snow Geese, white with black primaries, flying up the gorge. I had never looked down on a flock of geese before. Onward they flew, rising, the dark spruce woods of the gorge their background, coming level with us, then soaring over the hill beyond our sight. Spring was coming.     *

Letters from a Conservative Farmer: Versed in Country Things — the Test of Winter

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.

Looking back over my forty-five-year career with animals like pigs and cows and horses, I think it very unwise for anyone to undertake their care who has not been raised to it from his earliest years, because only then will he have imprinted in his brain (and deeper than that) the precautionary attitudes that will keep him from making dreadful mistakes that often bring harm to his animals. Once you are as old as I was (twenty-nine) it’s too late, then wariness is no more than muttered admonitions when they must be instinctive, not thought over but acted upon unconsciously and instantly. So, on a warmish afternoon in late November with a bit of sun, when the snow was then enough for patches of grass to show here and there, I turned Aster into the pasture behind the house at noon, thinking she’d like a break from the stable, a sentimental thought. It is an axiom that I eventually learned that you never turn an animal into a pasture without first thinking about the fencing, running over it in your mind, probing for weak spots, but then I didn’t give a thought to the leaning posts and sagging wires in front of me. I went into the house, ate lunch, did some reading, and then turned to churning butter. I forgot all about Aster. Even when the sky darkened and snow began I didn’t think of her. It was only when the boys came home from school late in the afternoon that I remembered. “Oh boys, bring in the cow, will you? She’s in the pasture.”

When they came running back to tell me she was gone, my heart sank, not because I realized how stupid I had been, but because I hardly knew what to do, never having faced such a situation. The three of us ran out to search the pasture until we found her tracks heading right through the broken fence and up into the darkening woods. A grim prospect. Running back to the stable, I got the lantern and, leaving Jesse to go back to the house, Seth and I set off, following the tracks up through the woods, down through a brushy meadow, and out into the road. She was headed away from home, over the hill toward the village. Snowflakes hissed against the lantern. We had not gone far when a pickup truck, coming towards us, stopped.

“Your cow’s over to my barn. C’mon.”

We climbed in, he turned the truck, and we started over the hill. I did not know him, nor where his farm was, and I had trouble understanding him, but I made out something about it being a bad day to leave a cow out.

I lied from shame. “I just let her out to get some exercise, and before I knew it, she was gone.”

We had driven over the hill and started down the other side before he spoke again. It sounded like a question. “What?” This time I heard the syllables clearly but couldn’t make sense of them. It sounded like “Wutchee-buln.” I just nodded, said “Yep,” and hoped for the best. He said nothing. We drove a long way down the hill toward the village, then along a side road before we stopped at a large barn beside the road. There were lights in the stable and we could hear what sounded like a lot of cows. The farmer led us around the corner of the barn and there was Aster, tied to the wheel of a manure spreader.

“Got a rope?”

“A rope?” I stared stupidly at him.

He untied the rope from the wheel and handed the end to me. “Y’can have that; it ain’t but a piece.”

I started to thank him, but I was yanked away in an instant as Aster tore off around the barn. As I was dragged along, I heard the farmer yell, “Hang on there!” and I thought I heard him laugh. When I got back to where I had started, the farmer was gone but Seth was waiting with the lantern. As we walked beside the barn, we could hear the clatter of milking machines and the sound of voices. I was relieved when we got on the road. We had not gone far when Aster tried to go back, and it was all I could do to turn her. Then she wouldn’t go at all. Seth twisted her tail, I tugged on the rope, and finally we got her moving, very reluctantly, in the right direction. It was not until we turned the corner into the main road that she gave up the struggle and walked willingly along with us. “Why did she do that?” I wondered.

“Maybe she’s lonely,” Seth said. I thought about that. I had bought her out of a herd. Would she miss her stable mates? I knew nothing.

Now our way was all uphill, a steep climb for half a mile. The wind was in our faces, and snow blew down our necks as we bent our heads and plodded on. The snowfall thinned and then stopped just as we reached the top and started down the other side. I was tired, and I didn’t like to think about Seth, only seven years old, who had walked a mile and a half home from school to start with. The syllables I hadn’t comprehended — “wutchee-buln” — kept sounding in my head until I began to form them with my lips, whispering them at first, finally chanting them aloud to entertain Seth, until the two of us were shouting “wutchee-buln” at the top of our voices.

“That’s it! That’s it! That’s what he said; “What’s she, bullin?” I stopped in the road and laughed, pleased that I had solved the puzzle. But what did it mean? It didn’t take long to figure it out. Holding the lantern close, I could plainly see some clear mucus under Aster’s tail.

“Well, Seth, you were right: Aster was lonely. She’s in heat, which means she didn’t settle when she was bred, so she’s not going to have a calf next spring. Now we’ll have to see about getting her bred again.” That was a great disappointment. We had all been looking forward to our first calf.

As we turned into the side road leading to our house, the sky was suddenly, brilliantly clear. “Look at the stars!” I cried. They brightly studded the black sky. We walked on within our small circle of yellow lantern light, looking up at the stars. Aster stared ahead, her brown eyes gleaming darkly in the swaying circle of light. The Pleiades was in the center of the view, and I pointed it out to Seth and told him the story. The idea of stars having names and stories was a strange novelty, and he wanted to see Orion, but I told him he hadn’t risen yet; I would take him out after supper and he could see the constellation then. The last quarter mile seemed very long as we trudged on in silence, the only sounds our muffled steps and Aster’s breathing.

As I milked, sitting on the stool with the lantern on the floor throwing a warm, mellow light around the stable — on the looming cow, the whitewashed walls, the chickens on the roost, the yellow straw on the floor — as I gazed around at all these now familiar things, unknown three months ago, I told myself that I should be content: I had brought the cow home and all was well. But I knew that I had been unbelievably stupid and negligent. Of course, I had known of my ignorance from the beginning, but vaguely, even flatteringly, because I could see how I had learned one thing after another: How to milk a cow and churn butter, how to fell a tree, how to feed a pig, and so many other things. Now, however, my easy optimism about my capacities was disturbed. I hung up the milking stool and bent to pick up the lantern. In the act, looking down at the warm circle of light at my feet, I was aware, suddenly, of the stars above the cow, above the hayloft, the barn roof, over the hill, millions and millions of miles above the earth, whirling and burning in the night of space colder and darker than any northern winter night could be, with their human names and human stories.

There was no one to tell me how to slaughter a pig (Willie had his done for him), so I wrote to the Government Printing Office to ask if there were a publication that would tell me how to slaughter and process one pig, in other words, not a large-scale commercial operation. I promptly received a booklet, Slaughtering, Cutting, and Processing Pork on the Farm. That was just what I wanted, and it cost only twenty cents. The cover is long gone. Years ago, I made another from the heavy stock used for file folders, and that’s worn and greasy, the title nearly effaced. As I turn its tattered, stained pages, I am reminded of that seamanship book cherished by the Russian trader in The Heart of Darkness, the book of which the narrator says,

You could see there a singleness of intention, an honest concern for the right way of going to work, which made these humble pages . . . luminous with another than a professional light.

This is the epigraph:

Success in preparing meat depends on strict attention to the methods used. None of the details of these methods is difficult, but all are important.

And it is absolutely true, as is everything else in the booklet. It is a masterpiece of practical truth presented simply and directly. But there is something else going on here, as the copious illustrations reveal. The man in most of the photos in the first section, the one on slaughtering, is a paragon of neatness and cleanliness. Hair carefully combed, spotless work clothes unrumpled, everything about him shipshape, he epitomized not merely the firm, unruffled efficiency of the whole operation, but also the Platonic essence of the booklet, which represents in its pages the Type of pig slaughtering, the Ideal towards which we can and should strive, but which we can only approximate, as I know too well. Over the last nearly fifty years that I have slaughtered pigs, my own and others, with somewhere around one-hundred and fifty individuals, I can find no one, when I search the images in my memory, who is not dirty and disheveled, splashed with water and blood, stuck all over with bits of pig hair, and if, as is almost always the case, we’ve been heating the water by burning tires, smeared with soot, too. But I did not know that yet — those slaughterings lay in the future. Right now, in mid-December, Clay’s food supply was about exhausted: All the beets and carrots and turnips and cabbages scavenged from gardens, all the apple pomace, all the boxes of stale cornflakes sent up by a grocer friend in Tweedyville, all the few bags of feed we had bought, everything Clay had ingested, and now I must kill him and make him into ham, bacon, chops, spareribs, sausage, and lard.

We had a reunion of some of the friends who had helped us move in September, Walt and Mary and two or three others, and the night before the job I wrote an abstract of the slaughtering and butchering sections of the booklet. Sitting at the table by the lamp, so intent on the task that I was oblivious to the festive goings on about me, I wrote a precis of each step on little pieces of paper that I could carry in my pocket next day, testimony to my anxiety as well as to the value of book learning: Without any experience (I had never killed any farm animal, not even a chicken) I was able to read a description of the technique, understand it well enough to make an abstract, and finally reduce that to notes of instruction. When Jo Ann and I did the job on Cape Breton years later — slaughtering, removing the hair, gutting, splitting the carcass — it took about an hour, and next day, having hung the carcass overnight to cool, I would butcher it alone in another hour. That day four of us took the whole day to do the job.

My only blunder occurred at the start when I failed to stun Clay with the .22. It is never easy to hit the precise spot between and above the eyes, and I was so nervous I’m surprised I didn’t shoot one of the helpers. There was nothing for it but to catch him and hold him down while I stuck the knife in to sever the carotid artery. It was ten below and getting colder all the time so it took forever to get the water hot enough to remove the hair. Unfamiliarity with what we were doing was the main problem. It is one thing to make an abstract of words on paper, but quite another to make one’s muscles work quickly and deftly in obedience to those words. Book learning is brought to completion by experience. And I was such a perfectionist, determined to follow the directions exactly, to produce a sleek, clean carcass like the one in the booklet! It was, I think, the best pig job I ever did. But picture me standing in the snow, peering at those little slips of paper, trying to decide if Step Twenty-Nine is done properly so we can move on to Step Thirty! Because it was so cold — twenty-five below by the end of the afternoon — the carcass was firm enough to butcher in the mudroom after lunch. While we were cutting up the carcass, Jo Ann and Mary were rendering the suet into lard and cracklings, that wonderful byproduct hitherto unknown to us. We even ground the sausage then, and I would have mixed the cure for bacons and hams, too, but the simple calculations eluded my tired mind. Working the entire day in extreme cold while concentrating intently on a strange task would be tiring enough, but there was something else, as I eventually learned from other slaughtering jobs: The killing of an animal is never a trivial act, and it sends a shock all though your mind and body.

Walt and Mary stayed on into January, after everyone else went home for Christmas, helping to give us another lesson in the arts of the Simple Life when, going upstairs one night in the dark, Mary tripped and crashed into the stovepipe, which ran from the kitchen range across the living room ceiling and up into the bedroom above, where it finally entered the chimney. I was sitting at the table, reading; in an instant, even as the lengths of pipe were tumbling about me, the page darkened, covered with a film of soot. The air was filled with a fine black dust. I picked up a piece of pipe and looked inside — it was stiff with soot, almost entirely closed. Now I knew why we were having so much trouble with the smoky range. What a horror faced us next morning! The entire room, the most important one in the house, was covered in soot, whose chief characteristic, from the point of view of cleaning it up, is its greasiness. No casual dusting works; that just smears it. Everything must be thoroughly cleaned. It took us all day. After that, when I cleaned the chimney every month I also took down all the stovepipe and cleaned that, too.

Now the snow was over a foot deep, and since the road up and over the hill from the village was only plowed as far as our place, the boys could no longer make the trek down the hill to the bus. The school board’s decision was for the boys to walk two and a half miles over the hill to the village, a route already ruled out for a bus as being too dangerous in winter. After a brief struggle, the board relented to the extent that a smaller bus now going partway up the hill, would continue to the top but no farther, three quarters of a mile from Corbin’s, and there the boys would meet it until spring, when we would revert to the initial arrangement. The board was determined not to send a bus to our door. We did not know it, but our children were the only ones in town who did any walking at all.

For years I had been making all our jams and jellies, jar after jar of wild grape, apple, chokecherry, elderberry, raspberry, blackberry, cranberry, red currant, strawberry, mint, enough to give plenty to our friends, and now I conceived what I thought was a brilliant idea: I would suggest to our friends that they buy those wonderful preserves as Christmas gifts for their friends. A friend who had a home printing press made up postcards with our price list, and early in November I mailed them to twenty-five people. What was the result? One couple, needy graduate students, ordered two jars, and another couple generously ordered jam for a number of friends. I must have expected more than that, but probably not much more, because I remember clearly how pleased I was as I wrapped and addressed the packages. What was disappointing was the lack of response, the utter silence from twenty-three out of twenty-five. In time I realized that the jelly card, seemingly so insignificant, had been that last straw and I was never going to hear from most of my friends again. There had been indications for some time that they were not pleased with our move, as a few had not been shy about telling us, but this was too much, a brazen act of effrontery, trying to exploit my friends for money. Keep in mind that this was some years before the pose of the Simple Life, first enacted by the herd of hippie homesteaders, would be applauded by all right-thinking citizens.

With our academic friends, things were a little less straightforward. From the beginning, from the previous spring when our plans became known, I was made to feel, not that I was doing something stupid (a wholly justified criticism), but that it was momentous: “You’re quitting Civilization,” “You can’t run away from Life,” and there was a resentful tone to their accusations, as if I were challenging them in some way. It took a long time and many ruminative sessions on the milking stool before I put enough distance between myself and my old life, with all its mental habits and associations, to enable me to understand their reaction. Most of the instructors (and a good many of the higher-ups) at a pretentious second-rate college like Tweedy were insecure toadies, men who could actually and unashamedly say, “Wait until I get tenure, then I’ll take off the mask.” They might be pleasant, sometimes even intelligent, but they were fearful conformists of shallow culture and narrow interests. I am not sure of the exact notion that formed in their minds when I said we were going to live on a small farm on a remote hillside in northern Vermont, but I think they imagined that I was escaping the clutches of their world to do something that, despite its drawbacks (no New York Times on Sundays, no endless coffee drinking in the Student Union), was mythically masculine, earthy, and independent. Their resentment had its source in a sort of sneaking envy. They hoped that I would fail, that the whole thing would turn out to be a humiliating fiasco, proving to their relief and satisfaction that the choices they had made, the demeaning expedients of the careers they were anxiously pursuing were indeed good and just and correct. The jelly cards, evidence of my degradation, were their vindication. I had dropped out of their caste, and now out of their class — and good riddance. From a worldly point of view, they were quite right, and I say that without sarcasm.

But let us not end this Christmas account on such a solemn note. With my propensity for tactlessness, my talent for simultaneously amusing myself and offending everyone else, there was the matter of the greeting cards. A former student, knowing my wayward sense of humor, had sent me a magazine devoted to photos of effete-looking young men in studied poses wearing suntan oil and jock straps: “Mark and Peter take time out to folic at the beach.” Mark was also selling greeting cards featuring pictures of himself in various attitudes, and I, having thoughtfully selected my favorite, squandered a few of our dwindling dollars on a couple of dozen. Mark, simpering suggestively, is pictured leaping gracefully out of a large gift box, his outstretched arms holding a banner that doubles as a fig leaf and a proclamation: “Seasons’s Greetings!” Mark’s appearance among the Christmas mail of my friends must have been the QED of my erratic course, an appalling example of bad taste at a time when shame, if nothing else, should have dictated a mien of sobriety and humility.     *

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.     *