Letters from a Conservative Farmer — The Old Red Mill

Jigs Gardner

Jigs Gardner writes on literature from the Adirondacks, where he may be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

I have before me a cookbook, The View from Grandma’s Kitchen, given to us by Vesta Kempton. Since it has a 1978 copyright, and we moved to Canada from Vermont in 1971, Vesta must have mailed it to us. Her inscription, “Lest we forget our mill,” is a testimony to her regard for us and our friendship over the years. The book features a drawing of the mill, a description of cider pressing, and a recipe for making one of its most unusual products, boiled cider, of which Jim and Vesta Kempton were once the only producers in Vermont.

Circumstances led us to meeting them during the 1960s when we were running a small private school for boys who couldn’t be educated in regular schools (don’t ask; just accept it as a given). We had five boys who lived with us in addition to our four children. We had driven about the countryside for several days, gathering apples. There were a number of empty farms in the area, and it was surprising how many apple trees were left to drop their fruit in the grass. We soon gathered a truck full of apples, far too many to be processed in our small hand press, so I set forth one morning heading south where I knew there were commercial presses. I stopped at a few beside the road, but they were no more than larger versions of my own hand-operated mill.

In South Northfield, I came to the Old Red Mill. There was a stand beside the road that sold cider and apples and, down by the creek, perhaps 30 yards away, was the mill. There I met Jim Kempton, ready to do business. I had to carry the bags of apples up a short steep stairway to a small room with an opening in its floor, into which I poured the apples until Jim closed the opening with a sliding door. The apples fell through a chipper onto a rack covered by a nylon cloth. Jim folded the ends of the cloth over the apples, put another cloth-covered rack on top of it and reopened the sliding door.

This procedure continued until Jim had a sufficient stack of chopped apples (about 10 bushels of apples), then he began pressing the racks upward, pressing out the juice. It took about one bushel to make three to four gallons of cider. When that was done and he had pressed the last bit of juice, he released the pressure, lowered the stack of pressed apples, and then shook the pressed apples, or pomace, out the window into the stream. When I was present, I shook the pressed apples into boxes and carried them home to feed the pigs.

The whole procedure was such a happy arrangement for both of us that I often went there whether or not I had apples. We helped him gather and press apples and we ate at each other’s houses. Just before we left for Canada, we drove down to say goodbye and found Jim and Vesta desperately trying to press apples and at the same time boil down cider to make the rich syrupy boiled cider that they sold to manufacturers of mincemeat. Of course, we had to pitch in. All the children and students helped with the pressing while I boiled the cider to make the syrup. The whole enterprise was a fitting farewell.

The Old Red Mill, I later learned, had a long history. The water-powered mill, which drew power from the Sunny Brook that borders the property, was built in 1898 at a time when there was a well-established water power industry in Northfield. It was used as grist mill and feed store. In the 1930s, a water-powered cider press was added to the original building. By the mid 1940s the mill was shut down until Jim and Vesta bought it at an auction in 1944. They operated it as a grist mill and also made shingles until sometime in the 1940s, when demand declined. They were still producing cider and boiled cider when we met them. As I calculate, they probably retired a few years before the cookbook was published in the late 1970s.

The line drawing in the cookbook is a faithful rendition of the Old Red Mill as I recall it: a simple one-and-a-half-story clapboard structure with a distinctive cupola-like tower projecting from the south gable end. The stand was to one side and featured baskets of apples, jars of syrup, and pumpkins in season. It is no longer operated as a mill, but the building still stands.

Boiled cider is now widely available, sometimes even mixed with maple syrup. If you get yourself some, try this boiled cider pie.

Boiled Cider Pie

1 cup boiled cider syrup (if you can’t find it or want to make your own, boil down 4 cups fresh cider in a heavy saucepan until you have a cup of syrup)

3 eggs, separated

1½ tablespoons flour

2 tablespoons melted butter

1 cup sugar

1 cup milk

1 pastry shell

Combine cider, egg yolks, sugar, milk, flour, and melted butter. Fold in beaten egg whites. Roll out chilled pie dough, enough for a bottom crust. Bake at 450 degrees F. for 10 minutes, then at 325 degrees F. for 30 minutes.

Adapted from The View from Grandma’s Kitchen, Janet Beyer, Phyllis Higgins, 1978.   *

Letters From a Conservative Farmer — A New Series

Jigs Gardner

Jigs Gardner writes on literature from the Adirondacks, where he may be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Some readers may remember National Review back in the days when William Buckley edited it. Its composition was markedly different from what it is today — all politics all the time. Buckley had room for a cookery column by Nika Hazelton, a countryside column by Bill Rickenbacker, and other excursions outside the realm of politics, because he believed that being conservative meant much more than a mere political allegiance. A conservative should be interested in as much of life as he can apprehend.

These letters, unpretentious essays, are offered in that spirit. They also have a didactic purpose, because I fear that conservatives are not as well informed about what goes on in the countryside these days, ignorant of the forces that are seeking to mold the countryside to their designs.

We have been farmers (of a sort, as you shall learn) since 1962, first in Vermont, then for thirty years on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia, and now in the Champlain Valley in New York. These essays are based on our experiences of the last forty-eight years, as well as some earlier ones of mine.

A Country Adolescence

(I learn a conservative moral lesson and unconsciously assimilate a conservative ideal.)

When I was in my fourteenth year, in the spring of 1947, we moved to a small saltbox house in what was then rolling farm country in central New Jersey, to an area called Waln’s Mill, and there I lived, when I was not away at school, for nearly the whole of the next four years.

The house, humble, homely, comfortable, shaded by tall tulip trees and white oaks, seemed to grow naturally out of the small clearing backed by dark woods, halfway up a hill that rose gradually from the creek bottom. In the front, across the dirt road that ran below a bank, the land fell away, on one hand opening a vista of swampy meadows sweeping down to the great trees bordering the creek, and above us, of hayfields stretching up the hillside, of hedgerows and distant woods. Right down the middle of the view was a farm lane that began across from our house, winding its way between the fields to disappear around a far bend.

At first, just being in the countryside filled my days and my imagination: A screech owl in the woods behind the house, swimming in the muddy creek, a marsh hawk gliding back and forth just over the meadows, stepping on what appeared to be a dry hard cow pie, a huge snapping turtle in the creek bank mud, vultures soaring in the summer sky; wild strawberries so plentiful in the roadside grass that we made jam and even ice cream, the smell of country rain, dewy cobwebs in the grass, hiding under the bridge from Jerry, the runaway bull.

Lanes, woods roads, chance forest openings have always been temptations to me, as if I had an obligation to explore them, to see where they ended up. And there was the farm lane right in front of me, dusty, still under the summer sky, latent with purpose and movement, quickened for a few minutes each day with the passage of Mr. Crow’s old black Ford pickup. Going away from me, the truck got smaller and smaller, emerged from a dip where a stream ran, passed the weathered empty tenant house (latent itself with its missing life, still under a shadowy elm, its rhubarb patch struggling in a sea of witch grass) and then around the bend, glimpsed once more through a gap in the honeysuckle that swarmed over the fences, leaving at last a drifting dust cloud and the final dying noise. But I did not follow it to its end, not yet, not then, perhaps because I knew there was a farm at the end of it, source of the cows pasturing in the meadows, cause of the haying in the hillside fields, the farm that finally became for me the image, the definition of farming, a symbol that derived some of its great power from the ignorance of the city boy who conceived it. I would not casually stroll up the lane into the field of force generated by that symbol.

We lived in that countryside, but we were not of it; we didn’t make our living there, we were only onlookers. On summer evenings we sat on the lawn to watch Mr. Crow’s farmhands drive the slowly moving herd out to pasture after milking; on fine afternoons, while the men were haying in the field across the road, we played badminton; awakened at dawn by the clang of milk cans being loaded onto the truck at the end of the lane, we turned over and gratefully went back to sleep. It was I who established a connection, however tenuous, with the countryside, and it came about because, in our area where small-scale general farming prevailed, where farms did a little of everything — raised grain, shipped milk, raised poultry, sold piglets, vegetables, eggs, honey, and fruit, grew tomatoes on contract for canneries, and so on — Mr. Crow’s regime belonged to the 19th century, maybe even the 18th. He milked twenty or so Jerseys, but the stock was poor and inbred ( Jerry being the only sire), the hayfields were not regularly plowed and fertilized, and the pastures were largely wasteland. He lived in a handsome, rambling farmhouse built in the early 1700s with his farmhands, two or three elderly men like himself who did what had to be done to maintain the farm from day to day and little else. On dark winter days when sleet beat against the windows, they lay on the hearth before the wide fireplace, drinking cider from the barrel in the cellar and spitting tobacco juice into the flames. These men, in fact, were really much more than farmhands; they were countrymen of a type now vanished, sturdy, self-reliant men who could turn a skillful hand to any country task — axmen who could fell a tree and hew it into beams to build a barn; honey-gatherers who calmly hived swarms of wild bees, husbandmen who could train a green horse to plow; slaughterers and butchers; tool makers and menders; veterinarians who could heal wounds and deliver difficult calves; weather prophets; hunters who knew how to set snares and where pheasants nested. Much of their time was spent hunting, fishing, and trapping, and we would often see one or another, tall gaunt men in rough clothing, crossing the meadow toward the creek with a long fishing rod, or passing along the hedgerows, rifle in hand.

On a still August evening one of the hands, out hunting woodchucks, a tall shambling man, stepped across the road from the hayfield to chat with us as we sat on the grass watching the dusk come up out of the meadows. I sat to one side watching him — he introduced himself as Bub Archer — fascinated by his strangeness, his difference from anyone I knew. His face was rough, weathered, deeply tanned, slab-sided with a prominent Roman nose, and he chewed tobacco! I actually saw the plug in his cheek, and now and then he turned and spat behind him. He told stories about his many hunting adventures, and Mother remarked that he must’ve begun at an early age.

“Oh, I was a little smaller than the shaver here, maybe I was eight or nine,” he said, smiling at me.

I blushed and looked away; I knew I was small for my age.

Bub turned up the next evening with a joint of cooked woodchuck, wrapped in a bit of waxed paper, and nothing would do but we must try it. I remember him standing tall under the low, sloping kitchen ceiling, laughing, showing his tobacco-stained teeth, as we gingerly tasted the meat. It was, just as Bub had said, rather like pot roast.

So I became a hunter. Not because of the meat, you understand — that was just a pretext. It was the figure of Bub Archer, my Deerslayer, that inspired my adolescent imagination, and although I spoke to him only two or three times after that, I needed only that meeting to send me forth to the woods and fields with my Model 68 Winchester single shot .22, morning and evening, wearing cut-off dungarees and a pair of moccasins, hunting knife at my belt. In those four summers I killed only one woodchuck, soon after I began, but I persisted because it was more than a material quest, and like all such enterprises, something of a mystery, at least to me. Of course, there was the fantasy of the hunt and the woodsman in the primeval wilderness, and there was the wonderfully keen pleasure of solitary observation, all my senses alert, alive to everything around me, but I also think that this satisfied, for the time being, a wish to make some connection with the countryside.

By next summer, Mr. Crow’s leisurely regime was gone — he had sold the farm to a young couple, the Davises, and the farming pace picked up. There were more cows, the fields were plowed and planted, and there was an air of bustle about the place. We began buying our milk there — ten cents for a two-quart jar of Jersey milk with thick gobs of cream floating in it. And for me, the agricultural era was about to begin.

One muggy afternoon when thunderheads loomed on the horizon, Bob Davis drove into our yard, anxious for help with the hay harvest. Apprehensive as I was, fearful of the farm and of my own ignorance and inexperience, how could I refuse? For the next couple of hours I staggered alongside a flatbed truck, heaving up hay bales. When it was all safely mowed away and Dot Davis brought pitchers of milk and big platters of sandwiches out to the barn floor, I fell on the food voraciously, shaking with hunger and fatigue. I had never done any real work in my life. Walking down the once-forbidding lane, jingling 70 cents in my pocket (35 cents an hour), I sensed the significance of the experience and I felt the beginning of pride.

Bob had regular hands, but during that summer and the next two I was often hired for specific jobs, like handling bags of grain on the combine, or picking tomatoes, or pulling tassels from hybrid corn. I was not paid much, but I knew I wasn’t worth much, something brought home to me when I worked alongside Dean, a local boy my age, another temporary hand. He was slightly built, but having been raised to it he knew how to do a job of work. When we picked tomatoes, Dean, despite my best efforts, always finished his row first, well ahead. We were not really competing; Dean was just doing his job as he always did, moving right along at a steady clip without pause or wasted motion. It seems odd that I was no more than mildly chagrined by his obvious superiority, but there were special reasons for my lack of rancor. For one thing, Dean was a fine boy, quiet, polite, modest, friendly, trustworthy. For a wonder, he never scorned my poor efforts nor flaunted his ability, as other boys would’ve done. For another, although I wanted to have some relation to the rural scene in which Dean so admirably fitted, the wish was not deep; I knew I was an outsider, that I belonged to another scene, that in the fall I would return to boarding school, and eventually I might go on to college, moving into a world where I could not foresee that my ability to pick tomatoes or buck bales would matter at all.

My favorite job was combining. Bob drove the tractor, while I stood, swaying on a platform in back of the combine, bagging the grain as it came down a pipe. Combining took forever. Often we would be at it all day, even till dusk. I loved it, riding around and around the field, out in the sun, like the grain handler of the world. Sometimes when we worked late, folks from our house would drive out to the field with bottles of cold beer, and we would all sit on the flatbed truck and drink beer and laugh and talk, and in the dusk we could feel the coolness coming up from the creek bottom.

Bob grew tomatoes on contract for a cannery in Trenton, and I would go with him when he took in a load. The day before, several of us would load the ’38 Chevy flatbed with a great pyramidal pile of baskets of tomatoes. At three o’clock the next morning the truck would slowly grind along the lane, lights on in the misty pre-dawn darkness, and I would run across the lawn, jump down the bank, and scramble into the cab. He left so early in order to get a good place in the line, but there was always a long line ahead of us. Sometimes it was midnight before we were unloaded. We spent the day napping, chatting with other farmers in line, talking about all kinds of things, smelling the pervasive odor of canning tomatoes. It was, more often than not, a dull way to spend a day, and I was not paid for it either; I was just along to keep Bob company. But only once did I miss, and after the truck had left me behind, just waking, I jumped on my bike and pedaled the fourteen miles to Trenton. Why did I go?

Like all thoughtful, serious men, Bob had a strong, subtle sense of humor, and I suppose I looked on our relationship as all larks, although I respected and admired him, without consciously thinking about it, for depths that at 14 and 15 and 16 I could only sense, not know, not name. But they came to the surface for a moment during my last summer there, just before I turned 17. I had taken advantage of the cannery trips to ogle the girls we saw on the streets, remarking coarsely on their charms to Bob. The last time I did this, and you’ll understand in a moment why it was the last time, Bob, who always spoke deliberately in a voice that was not deep but which seemed to come from far inside him, quietly rebuked my coarseness and then went on to ask if I did not intend to preserve my virginity until marriage? That had been his sexual code, he said.

The effect was devastating. At once I felt very small, very callow. What made such a great impression was his depth contrasted to my shallowness. When he spoke gravely, as he did then, I felt the words as natural growths, consequences that flowed inevitably from an extraordinary breadth of character imbued with experience, knowledge, and wisdom; they were not words of the moment off the top of his head, conventional clichés. Bob was the first person to address me on such a level with such piercing conviction, and the impact was terrific. And there was more, something moving in the way he spoke to me. I think Bob was really shy, not given to glib expressions of his moral sentiments, so it cost him something to overcome his reticence to speak across the gap that separates all of us from each other, and I felt that in the delicacy with which he spoke.

Some years ago, one of my sisters surprised me by asking if was Bob Davis who had inspired me to become a farmer. I had not thought of the Davises for years, and now, thinking back, I could say with surety that farming never entered my head as a possible occupation then. Statesman, General, Actor, Lawyer, Author, Senator, yes, but Farmer? Any form of manual labor (I did not know then how much intellectual labor farming demanded), beyond a teenager’s summer job, was not part of my world. It was not that I thought I was too good for it, but simply that in my class and situation only certain occupations were even conceivable. Besides, there had been other, much more recent influences, farmers I had worked for in New England. Thinking about them, recalling how and why I had respected and admired them, I realized they were of the same species as Bob: grave, humorous, sage men of great integrity, whose lives seemed to me a credit to humanity. Yet they were unheroic, unsung, ordinary men of what was quickly becoming an antique rural world, citizens of the Republic. General farmers all, they provided me with a pattern of farming as well as behavior and character.

I knew none of this at the time, and I gave up that life without a qualm. In the last year I lived in New Jersey, before I went away to college, I was hardly ever at Waln’s Mill. Living in the northern part of the state, I worked as a golf course greens keeper that summer, and spent my evenings playing miniature golf with my dopey girlfriend. Meanwhile, the fireflies were thick in the creek bottom, there were oats to be combined and hay to be made, a marsh hawk hunted the meadows, and the boy with the .22 was missing from the hedgerows and fields. I shake my head when I think of it, but it had to be done, I had to turn away from that life to seek what I thought was my fortune in what I thought was the world, and it was fitting that I should do it lightly, without a backward glance. I had to go away to come back — not to the same place, I mean. I never returned to New Jersey, but I did become a pokey general farmer and more than half a century after I first met Bob Davis, I realize that I have been trying unconsciously (and with indifferent success) to model my character on his.

Nevertheless, it would be nice to go back to that one rural place. I put down my pen and daydream that some of the family still live at Waln’s Mill. What I’d really like, I guess, is that it should be the summer of 1950 again, and I can feel the rhythm of the combine, chaff flies up golden in the sun, and I can hear Bob say, as I climb into the old truck at 3 a.m., “Well, well, and how’s Jigsy this morning?”     *

“Liberty must at all hazards be supported.” —John Adams

Versed in Country Things — Spring and Summer

Jigs Gardner

Jigs Gardner is an Associate Editor of the St. Croix Review. Jigs Gardner writes on literature from the Adirondacks where he may be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. This essay is republished from 2006 about a time many years ago when Jigs and Jo Ann were working a farm in Vermont.

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 fourteen. I could see that Eldon was proud of it and pleased with my praise. He was in his thirties, 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 “ten 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 ten 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 ten 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 downcountry 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 ten 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 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 hundred and fifty 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, “Snow bird, snow bird.”

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 life.

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 middleclass 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 thirteen. 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 ninety-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 awhile. 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 unfocussed. 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 fox holes 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.     *

Writers for Conservatives, 3: Scott Nearing on “Living the Good Life.”

Jigs Gardner

Jigs Gardner is an associate editor of The St. Croix Review. Jigs Gardner writes on literature from the Adirondacks, where he may be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. The editor has chosen to republish this essay after 14 years because of its continuing relevance today in light of the Green New Deal.

Instead of describing a first rate writer who has enhanced culture, I am going to devote this third essay in the series to a man who wrote over 50 books and innumerable articles but was a mediocre writer; a man to whose home thousands of admirers traveled to express their admiration — but he was a thoroughly bad person; a man whose death, in his 101st year, was solemnly recorded on the front page of The New York Times, yet he was an ardent hard-line Communist who worked all his life against his country. It sounds like a strange subject, but I hope it will shed light on matters that are presently very dark in conservative minds.

Scott Nearing (1883-1983) achieved some éclat on the left when he was fired from a university teaching job during World War I for advocating pacifism, but despite his earnest efforts during the rest of his life that was as much recognition as he would ever wring from the comrades. Monthly Review, the ostensibly socialist (but actually Communist fellow traveling) magazine, acquired his newsletter, World Events, and as part of the deal Nearing had a column with the same name in MR. At one point when the editors solicited readers’ views, they learned that “World Events” was the magazine’s most unpopular feature. Why was such a stalwart comrade so disliked? One major factor was his rigid, outspoken Stalinism. He was a Stalinist almost before Stalin was, in 1925, and after his hero died he transferred his allegiance to Chairman Mao, and when the Great Helmsman was gathered to his fathers, Nearing’s last messiah was Enver Hoxha, the Albanian tyrant. He believed and regurgitated every Communist lie and line. This could only be discomfiting to lefties, who prefer the softly-softly approach on the principle that more flies are caught with honey than vinegar. When he was challenged, in a public debate, on the subject of the Soviet slave labor camps, he coolly defended them on the ground that the inmates were thereby saved from the evils of drink, gambling, whoring, and all the other manifold sins lurking in capitalist societies. You can imagine how lefties liked hearing that. Almost as important, he was unbearably self-righteous. In fact, not to put too fine a point on it, he and his second wife Helen were absolutely repellent. If you have any sensitivity to language, it is impossible to read anything by them without sensing the presence of mean, smug, sanctimonious, humorless bastards. I shall insert quotations from interviews with the Nearings or from their book, Living the Good Life, to give the reader the flavor of his precious pair.

“He cited Elbert Hubbard’s . . . objective: ‘Do the best you can in the place you are and be kind.’ And Helen Nearing said, ‘I think Scott’s done that in his life, plus.” —Hartford Courant, June 7, 1981

But finally, in the ’60s, the Nearings found their audience, and within a decade Scott was a venerated Wise Man in the mainstream press. This astonishing development came about in this wise: in the 1930s the Nearings moved to Vermont to live the “Simple Life,” but here we must pause to dispel the fog of myth surrounding those words. While it is possible to live a simple life in the country — I’ve been doing it for more than 40 years — very few people have ever done it from choice because you have to enjoy hard labor, few conveniences, and a low income. The capitalized Simple Life, however, is a different breed of cat entirely. Its essence is phoniness. Everything about it is a pose. The main pretense is that one’s income is solely derived from one’s labor, usually the sale of farm products, but in fact there’s always a trust fund or something similar in the background. There follows the pose that one is not materialistic, that one’s life is more elevated, more spiritual, closer to Nature than the lives of all the rest of us Yahoos grubbing greedily in Consumerland. Simple Lifers are always very vain, and the point of their poses is that it empowers them to flaunt their supposed superiority.

“Instead of the hectic mad rush of busyness we intended a quiet pace, with time to wonder, ponder, and observe. We hoped to replace worry, fear and hate with serenity, purpose and at-one-ness.” — Living the Good Life

“Hence, we fenced, irrigated, terraced, planned, constructed, marking ourselves as odd, queer, over-ambitious and perhaps even a trifle un-neighborly by setting up standards of performance which were far removed from those accepted and followed by the neighborhood.” —Living the Good Life

It was perfect for the Nearings. They collected around themselves a few followers, pretended that their maple sugar business was their “cash crop,” and Scott continued to produce his simple-minded Commie books and articles. In the mid 1950s they wrote together a book about their Simple Life, Living the Good Life, but it had only a modest sale among the nut cutlet and hand-woven place mat crowd until the mid ’60s when the hippy homesteader phenomenon erupted, and then it became the Sacred Book for the movement. There were very good reasons for this. For one thing, the book contains no useful information about how to life simply and self-reliantly in the countryside. Other authors often make the mistake of thinking such instruction is what its readers want, but in fact, the better the information, the less popular the book. Nothing destroys the romance of the Simple Life like realism about practical matters. It is much more profitable to hymn the praises of Simple Living in such a way that the readers feel they are a select band of initiates superior to decadent conventional society.

“. . . where could outcasts from a dying society live frugally and decently, and at the same time have sufficient leisure and energy to assist in the speedy liquidation of the disintegrating society and to help replace it with a more workable social system?” —Living the Good Life

“. . . it was a way of preserving self-respect and of demonstrating to the few who were willing to observe, listen, and participate, that life in a dying acquisitive society can be individually and socially purposeful, creative, constructive and deeply rewarding.” —Living the Good Life

Nearing was a master of sly intimidation:

“It would have been quite possible to live in the Vermont hills as one did in the suburbs of New York or Boston, by going frequently to market in nearby towns, buying to meet all one’s needs in the shops, using fruits and vegetables loaded with poisonous sprays and dusts and far removed from their production source, plus the processed and canned output of the food industry. Such a procedure was followed by several families in the valley, as long as they could afford it. Meanwhile they paid the usual price in lowered vitality and ill health.” —Living the Good Life

The seeming target here are his neighbors, but since the reader has committed the same sins (as who hasn’t?) he is implicated, but precisely because it is by indirection, the reader can escape censure, assuage his guilt by lining up with Nearing, joining him in condemnation of his neighbors.

He worked his greatest appeal by self-serving attitudinizing:

“The foods we chose to live on were those that had the simplest, closest, and most natural relationship to the soil.”

“Raised bread we never baked and seldom bought. We got the same or better nourishment (and far cheaper) from the whole seed grain unprocessed.”

“We often had a one-day exclusive apple diet to revivify and cleanse the system.”

“Most of them were in for a shock. No coffee, no cereal, no bacon, no eggs, no toast, no pancakes, or maple syrup. Just apples, and sunflower seeds, and a black molasses drink. Such a fare sent many a traveler on his way soon enough.” — Living the Good Life

This works by endowing what one would think of as neutral acts with a strongly moralistic tone, so the believer can think he’s superior because he doesn’t eat “raised bread,” or because he’s a vegetarian, or just because he lives in the country, and so on and on.

Finally, there was an identity of temperament between Nearing and the famously indulged baby boomers who became ’60s People and at last Yuppies, a tendency to sanctimony and self-righteousness; no one ever accused them of humility or modesty. Naturally they were drawn to Nearing — they recognized a blood brother.

He and his wife were written about, photographed, and interviewed hundreds of times in all kinds of publications, not just countercultural country magazines but also the conventional middlebrow press (The New York Times, People), and every piece was gushingly reverential. Ads appeared in hippy homesteader rags “Leaving for Nearings on 25th. Have room for 2.” There was a time when money could be made by arranging tours and chartering busses.

For his old tiny audience he kept up the Stalinist ranting, but for the new multitudes he obscured his views, sensing that reporters would happily cooperate with his subterfuge in that blend of ignorance, sentimentality, and liberal irresolution characteristic of journalists when the subject of Communism is broached. All the ghastly realities of Communism were blinked away so as not to dispel the warm glow emanating from the presence of such a venerable Wise Man, a living legend embodying rustic myths at their rosiest as well as uncompromising, unconventional radicalism, a double whammy, each one composed of layer upon layer of sentimental, vicious lies. History and myth, class and character met in the figure of one extraordinary crackpot.

“Nearing said that as one goes from one republic to another inside the USSR, one finds ‘quite different points of view, except that in Russia generally people are collectivist and outside of Russia generally people are individualists.’”

“Scott Nearing has been to Russia 9 times since the revolution of 1917, and the changes there, he says, ‘are fantastic.’ Changes in dress, conduct, transportation. ‘You mention it . . . they’re still making changes.’ —Hartford Courant

I would not be surprised to learn that most if not all of the foregoing is news, and outlandish news at that, to readers who may be thinking it’s past and done, quite irrelevant to today’s concerns. I suspect that the shenanigans of the ’60s were so alien and absurd that conservatives dismissed them without much analysis. And some ignorance is due to lack of strong cultural awareness. But the ’60s, even as they are expiring, still animate yuppies, as in their vanity causes like Greenism (the believer is morally superior to the rest of us Nature destroyers) which conservatives have yet to understand. The National Review recently praised (with a few caveats) a book celebrating “countercultural conservatives” who eat “organic” food, embrace Greenism and home schooling, are wary of capitalism, and are repelled by consumerism. Sound familiar? Not to the reviewer, who obviously knows nothing of the cultural history I’ve been recounting. His strictures are no more than a feeble defense of mainstream conservatism. For instance, when the author claims that capitalism destroys the environment, all the reviewer can say is that “the environmental record of heavily regulated economies isn’t better” Ye Gods! Doesn’t he know anything about the devastation in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe? What’s really wrong with the book is that every one of its claims is false and pernicious because the author’s reasoning, his way of judging truth, has been corrupted at the root by the central motive of yuppieism, self-regard. Like the Nearings, like their earlier avatars the ’60s People, everything yuppies do or say is calculated to inflate their self-esteem, to puff up their egos. When a yuppie scorns materialism what he sees in his mind is images of fat slobby proles prowling Walmart aisles contrasted with a vision of himself, trim in his jogging outfit, selecting tasteful items in a classy Vermont boutique. So it goes with all the author’s causes. “Organic” foods, as study after study has shown, are no different from food produced without that imprimatur; if their consumption didn’t make yuppies feel superior (as Nearing did with his whole grain bread), their sales would be negligible. Home schooling, a good idea when it’s real, has become another casualty of yuppie smugness. Instead of actually teaching their children, they get together with other yuppies to conduct content-less classes a couple of times a week. The point is to inculcate yuppie values, and most of the teaching is “enriching” activities akin to what used to be called field trips. They learn nothing except to regard themselves as superior to kids who attend the local schools.

Another ominous sign is the author’s praise of Wendell Berry, a figure similar in significant ways to Scott Nearing. I should explain that most of the hippy homesteader magazines of the ’60s and ’70s, small country monthlies for the most part which were essentially harmless (I wrote for several), died when their readers left their yurts in the woods, but some survived to become today radically reactionary rags, filled with paeans of praise for “organic” farming and the rest of the causes, and hysterically vicious denunciations of modern agriculture, capitalism, and U.S. foreign policy. Berry, posed in the mainstream press as a folksy countryman (remember Nearing) concerned with the “excesses” of modern farming (a phony subject lately fashionable among ignoramuses), and he is one of the loudest voices in this reactionary chorus.

The point of this essay has been to show how analysis of prose and the ideas it embodies can shed light on current issues. The Nearings sleep in Abraham’s bosom and the so-called back to the land movement (phony from the start) they supposedly inspired is long gone, but the vanity, the desperate need to constantly assert one’s superiority to other Americans, a cardinal motive in the lives of the Nearings and their followers, so obvious once we look closely at the prose, continues to animate yuppies (Jonah Goldberg, in an article subsequent to the review mentioned above, correctly identifies the countercultural conservative cause as “narcissism”). Think, for instance, of the insufferable smugness of National Public Radio. That’s why it is impossible to argue reasonably with them about their causes. The impulses behind their attachments are irrational, and fewer motives are stronger than self-regard.

The essays in this series serve these purposes: to inform conservatives about writers and books that will give them pleasure; to broaden and deepen the culture of conservatives by acquainting them with diverse points of view largely undefiled by contemporary decadence; to demonstrate, by literary analysis, how to read more carefully. Here the first two purposes have been set aside, but I think I have demonstrated the value of literary analysis. You will not soon forget the obnoxiousness of the Nearings, nor, I hope, what it tells us about yuppies and their causes.     *

Letters from a Conservative Farmer: Negative Elements

Jigs Gardner

Jigs Gardner is an associate editor of The St. Croix Review. Jigs Gardner writes on literature from the Adirondacks, where he may be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

This happened years ago when we lived in Cape Breton. A car drove in the lane and a young couple got out, Helga and David, who had read some of my essays in a country magazine, and wanted to meet me. I’m always pleased on such occasions, but I must admit they’re pretty rare. It was about lunchtime, so we invited them in.

While we were fixing lunch they told us they had moved from British Columbia to Halifax a few months ago to look into farming possibilities. They wanted to find out if it were feasible to live in the countryside and 1) avoid becoming “petty bourgeois,” and 2) “be socially active with other progressives.” I realized then that we were just another stop on their list of “progressive elements.” I was not as appalled as you might think. I had listened to plenty of nonsense like that back in the ’60s when I had been involved in lefty politics in Vermont — but this was the 1990s and Cape Breton, and it was so absurd that it was laughable. But Helga and David were not the kind of people to be jollied along. They were determined and serious, a grim, very grim pair.

They had been taking short courses (introductions to their subjects, not intended for regular students) at Nova Scotia Agricultural College, where one of our daughters graduated, so we were not surprised by his denunciation of the aimless life of the students there. I remarked that what they objected to was, in fact, the life of the rural working class. Given the situation in the poor and backward Maritime provinces, there was nothing surprising about it.

Helga jumped in, claiming that in British Columbia the local papers printed articles and letters protesting American foreign policy, promoting organic gardening and so on, while the Halifax papers were all about things like Billy Graham’s latest crusade. Yes, the Nova Scotia situation looked unpromising, but there were positive elements everywhere if you looked hard enough. I saw that it was useless arguing with them; they didn’t listen — these were obviously old pros.

Then David mentioned, as a positive element, the fisherman’s strike the previous year, and I remarked, with obvious disgust, that their union was led by a Communist. Now there were many things to say about that strike, but the leader’s politics was not the most important thing, and I realized as I said it, that I was testing David, but I did not ruffle his old pro feathers. “So what’s wrong with that?” he said.

Before I could answer, he went on to discuss a book about the strike, one of the worst books I have ever read about a labor struggle, the sort of account in which the workers are romantically sentimentalized, everyone else is villainously sentimentalized, and the whole point is the glorification of the author. Helga remarked, “Of course, the author is a bourgeois journalist, but in its sympathy for the workers it strikes a positive note.”

Sentimentality about the working class is a way of lying. It is practiced by those who regard workers as someone else, a group of people distant from themselves. The social realist shares with everyone the godhead of essential humanity. The sentimentalist denies change to those below him on the social ladder, hence must lie about them: to tell the truth about them and then to deny the chances of change would be too black indeed. The sentimentalist must have a pretty world around him in which to exercise his superiority. When the sentimentalist observes the working class (always from a distance), he comes away more convinced than ever, that “they” are fine where they are and he’s fine where he is, which is what really matters.

Beneath the sticky surface of every sentimentalist there is a hard-hearted mean-spirited son of a bitch.

I thought these things as David spoke, and when I glanced up he said, with a condescending smile, “Don’t internalize your feelings, articulate them.” I turned a thoughtful countenance upon him and said, “There’s nothing to say.” He was taken aback. I suppose he thought I would argue lefty politics with him.

They left soon afterwards, and Helga said bitterly as she passed me, “We thought you were progressives!”     *

Writers for Conservatives, 77: Thomas Sowell

Jigs Gardner

Jigs Gardner is an associate editor of The St. Croix Review. Jigs Gardner writes on literature from the Adirondacks, where he may be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

This essay is about a book by Thomas Sowell, Black Rednecks and White Liberals, published in 2005. Those familiar with Sowell’s work will see it as another one of his brilliant expositions on topics that explain social phenomena widely misunderstood by conventional wisdom, especially by those whose interests are invested in the misunderstandings. Sowell is an unsparing foe of conventional wisdom. As he says in the Preface:

“The purpose of this book is to expose some of the more blatant misconceptions poisoning race relations in our time.”

The book is divided into six parts, the first five dealing with specific cases or issues, the last examining the general phenomenon that fosters the misconceptions. The first is the title essay, and if the reader has read an essay in this series I wrote some years ago — about a book by D. H. Fisher called Albion’s Seed — he will understand the “redneck” phenomenon: The bulk of 18th century immigrants from the backlands of Britain, Scotland, and Ulster, areas constantly exposed to destabilizing fighting and quarreling that made these immigrants proud, touchy, unsocial, and so undesirable that they were quickly shunted from their port of debarkation, Philadelphia, westward and southward into the Southern backlands. They were not the Tidewater Southerners, the plantation owners.

Prior to 1900, most northern Negroes were descended from those who had been freed prior to the Civil War. They were used to the norms of white society, acculturated we would say, but when Southerners began moving northwards in significant numbers, the redneck culture they embodied quickly alienated Northern whites as well as blacks, reinforcing segregation. Ironically, it has been white liberals, starting in the ’60s, who have promoted a “black identity” built around a redneck culture. Sowell covers the whole gamut of disastrous ideas and policies that have followed, blaming Negro shortcomings on white culture.

Once we grasp the point about the prevalence of redneck culture and its terrible drawbacks in the present, we can see clearly the ramifications of current liberal policies. By enunciating the subject of redneck culture Sowell has made plain the true dimensions of our social/racial problems.

The next section, “Are Jews Generic?” is about what Sowell calls “middleman minorities,” the roles they play in societies and the persecutions they endure. Since they have been “the intermediaries between producers and consumers, whether in the role of retailers or moneylenders,” the dangers in such situations are easily imagined. What’s so interesting is the ways these minorities succeed, often beginning with nothing. The essential point is their difference from the surrounding culture, making them seem “clannish,” a quality held against them. But they must be clannish: they “cannot afford to have their children carry the values of the society around them.” Sowell shows how the peddlers carried goods from wholesalers into the hinterlands, eventually saving enough to become a town shopkeeper. When we lived on Cape Breton Island we knew a prosperous storekeeper who had started out as a peddler, and we also knew a woman who, as a little girl had known him as a peddler and had been fascinated by the goods he carried in his 75-pound pack.

Sowell enumerates the resentments inspired by the successes of these minorities, and he points out that the more they are needed, the more they are resented. The history of these societies, especially the attitudes of the surrounding societies and their treatment of the minorities, is an ugly story.

In the next section, “The Real History of Slavery,” Sowell exposes the instrumental use of slavery in the claim that slavery grew out of racism. As he points out, “People were enslaved because they were vulnerable, not because of how they looked.” Slavery existed for thousands of years before the first Africans were brought to the Western Hemisphere. “It was not until the late 18th century that there was even an intellectual movement for the abolition of slavery . . . essentially, European imperialism ended slavery” because only then were Western powers strong enough to enforce their will.

Speaking of modern complaints about the past — e.g. “Why didn’t the Founding Fathers abolish slavery?” — Sowell makes the excellent point: “Moral principles cannot be separated from their consequences in a given context.” Today we look back at the era of the Civil War and Reconstruction with regret that the relations between blacks and whites took a century to straighten out. What Sowell does is to explain much of it. Once we see that racism was the result of slavery, not the other way around, we begin to think clearly about the issues.

The next section, “Germans and History,” examines German history to see whether the Nazi regime (1933-45), specifically the Holocaust, was an inevitable consequence of the German character we can discern in the history of Germans. Since the nation was created only in 1871, Sowell closely examines the history of German settlements all over the world, and while he finds certain salient traits, Nazism is not one of them. It should be noted, however, that German obedience certainly facilitated the success of Nazism. I am thinking of the way Hitler altered the military oath of allegiance from the State to a personal oath to himself as the Fuhrer. As we know, that was a serious constraint on the officers who later considered overthrowing him.

The next section, “Black Education: Achievements, Myths, Tragedies,” begins with a description of Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C., an all-black school that produced excellent graduates until it was wrecked in the 1950s to comply with desegregation. As Sowell points out, Dunbar was not an elite school. It took the students who applied from all over the city, but what made it so special, so unlike the typical ghetto school it eventually became, was the aspirations of the parents and staff, with their discipline and high standards. He also discusses other outstanding schools, all ignored by the loud-mouthed advocates of “diversity.”

The last section, “History v. Visions,” explains the basic issue that divides Sowell and the point of view he is criticizing, which prefers to blame external causation for problems rather than internal ones which can be solved by the people concerned. Although Sowell always backs up his arguments with specific examples, this section is really a summation of his arguments, a fitting conclusion of this inspiring book, which I cannot recommend highly enough.     *

Letters from a Conservative Farmer: A Bizarre Episode

Jigs Gardner

Jigs Gardner is an associate editor of The St. Croix Review. Jigs Gardner writes on literature from the Adirondacks, where he may be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

It could be said (and has been) that our life since 1962, when I left the teaching profession, has been one long bizarre episode, but what I’m writing about now is one of those strange affairs that I seemed to blunder into much too often and recall now with a mixture of wonder, amusement, and self-reproach, for as usual it was my own stupidity and recklessness that got us into these messes. What I’m about to describe is our brief employment as teachers in the fall of 1965 at a prep school in the Berkshires, an area where there were then more than twenty such schools. The Berkshires had been a summer resort from the late 19th century into the 1920s, and large estates, much too expensive to maintain in contemporary society, were snapped up by institutions at bargain prices. Some were reputable, some were on the level of Lee Academy (a throwback to Dotheboys Hall), and one or two were worse. Readers of Nicholas Nickleby will recall that one of Dickens’ targets in that novel was the infamous Yorkshire schools, really places of incarceration, where parents with some money could stash children who inconvenienced them. Run by the brutal Wackford Squeers and his harridan wife, the school’s teaching was bad, the food inadequate, and the routine tyrannous. Lee Academy was not quite so bad as Dotheboys Hall, but it had all the essentials.

Occupying perhaps ten acres at the edge of the town of Lee, it was clearly an estate that had not quite come off. The best feature was the approach through stone pillars, winding up a hill between an avenue of maples, to the main building, Mandalay Hall, a mock Tudor affair, timber and stucco, with small-paned casement windows. It was a sound, commodious place, the best thing there. There was nothing else except a one-storey stone building some distance away, now a dorm, with a scruffy field for athletics. Whether the original owners ran out of money or lost interest, the rest of the grounds were a mess: grown-over excavations and heaps and hummocks, the whole area conveying a sense of aimless degradation.

If you were a parent sounding out Lee Academy, Mandalay Hall would impress you, and you would have to be persistently curious to see that there was really nothing beyond it, but if a parent got as far as the Hall, he was not really curious, and only a few parents were sincerely interested in the education of their sons. Some were naive and unsophisticated and easily duped, but the majority were looking for a place that seemed, on not too close inspection, to be classy (it was a private school, wasn’t it?) where they could dump their offspring and forget about them.

I was hired in September just before school opened (which tells you there was something desperate about it — and about me, too) by the headmaster, Matt Merrit, a failed stock broker in his early 40s, a big bluff Irishman who, after teaching at a prep school for a year or two, had just landed this job. He was a blusterer, loudly self-confident. His second in command, Joe Degrace, was a grizzled veteran of many prep schools with a mordant sense of humor. Although I was obviously a suspect commodity, I looked good, amazingly good, in that milieu, with what must have seemed golden credentials: an AB from a well-known classy college, a Master’s degree, good notices from three colleges where I’d taught. And how I looked the part, with a tweed jacket (leather patches!), gray flannels, and WASPy good looks! In fact, we proved to be a godsend — for a while.

We were summoned to a reception at Merrit’s house to meet the other teachers and Mr. Feltman, the owner, for this was strictly a private business. Merrit lived in a decaying country mansion some miles from Lee, where he and his wife, a rather ravaged beauty, tried to put up a good front. At one point I had to go upstairs to the bathroom, and there was almost no furniture, no rugs, and the walls were scabrous with damp. What they had was used for display downstairs. Matt’s sour mother lived with them, and from her imperious manner I suspected that she was the main source of funds. I felt the tension of uneasiness in the house. When Feltman entered, the manner of it put the seal on the evening. He was not only tall, over six feet, but he was big, and his petite wife was just over five feet. They had worked out a routine in which they came through the door with Mrs. Feltman carrying him on her back, a surefire gag good for laughs and applause.

Since Feltman was the Academy’s demiurge, he must be understood. Although it was said that he started the school so his son (a dunce) could graduate from it, it was a money-making business for him. He told me, in the early days when he was courting me, as it were, that with 300 students he could clear $100,000, but he couldn’t have been making very much then because there were only about 50 or 60 students. He had to have more bodies, and until my advent briefly suggested other means, he got them by press-gang methods. As a professional accountant, he was well acquainted with shady businesses, bankruptcy swindles, and dodgy characters, and he exploited to the hilt the opportunity they presented. When a prep school failed, Feltman was there to pick up the pieces, chiefly the students, who would arrive at Lee in a bewildered bunch. A frequent ploy was to rescue young criminals (whose parents had enough money) from jail sentences by appearing at court and presenting Lee as a reforming alternative. The maintenance man, a bankrupt he had some hold over, was a spy for him on the campus.

All of those things could be described as the sharp practices of an unscrupulous businessman, but what really animated him was the need to humiliate people, to make those subject to his will cringe and crawl. He was not happy unless he could make his creatures unhappy, unless he could set them at each others’ throats. A small example: our dorm, a house on a street that backed onto the campus, housed most of the seniors, us, and Fred Dotolo, a young teacher. We had a sort of friendly fraternity there. I organized a Shakespeare club that met once a week to read the plays aloud. Feltman, through his spies, was well aware of this, and one day when he heard a boy called Dotolo “Fred” (boys were always supposed to say ‘Mr.’), he ordered Merrit to move Dotolo out at once. For Feltman, the situation was ideal: we were all losers (except Jo Ann, who couldn’t be a loser anywhere) from Merrit on down, or we wouldn’t be there, and Lee was so obviously the end of the line — lose your job here, and where could you go? Into the Army, that’s where. Half the teachers were eligible for the draft. He could do as he wished with us, because he thought no one dared quit. I think he was the deepest dyed villain I’ve ever known.

Jo Ann, who had never done any teaching, was hired to teach remedial reading, something she knew absolutely nothing about, but she resolutely began studying. She was very discouraged. The books were dreadful, full of pompous jargon, empty of meaning. But one of her finest qualities is good sense, undaunted by superficial complexity, so when she chanced on a book about phonics that was clear, concise, and reasonable, she adopted that method and it worked well. Some of her students were 18 or 19, and their reading and writing skills were rudimentary. It was a formidable challenge, but as with any challenge in her life with me (there have been plenty), she rose to it. And the knowledge she was gaining would be a great factor in our future.

Although the boys were certainly a mixed lot, we got along well, partly because they could see we were working very hard to teach them (a rare experience), and partly because we were banded together against Feltman. For instance, on Parents Day a sumptuous meal was served to the guests, and a large centerpiece of fruit, with a pineapple on top, was laid out in an adjoining room. Boys from our dorm stole most of it and we had a feast (including the pineapple) together.

On fine Saturday afternoons we would take boys, along with our young children, on hikes in a nearby state forest, and there’s a sad story in connection with that. A few days after school began, a new boy with his father turned up. The boy was tall and shy and soft spoken, the father dapper and glib. He would be back, oh yes, he would visit, not right away, he was busy now, but he would be back, the boy could count on that. He couldn’t get away fast enough, and the boy was very sad. At the Saturday noon meal when I announced a hike, that boy always told me how sorry he was he couldn’t go, he loved hiking, but his father might come . . . the boy never hiked with us and his father never appeared.

The only teachers we socialized with were Fred Dotolo and Bob Watt, a young man I hired to teach English. Also Ed Logan — at first; I’ll tell you about him in a moment. Of the others I cannot honestly say that they would have seemed reputable under normal circumstances, but certainly the pressurized atmosphere Feltman maintained distorted their behavior, giving it an hysterical quality. We never knew what was going to happen next — a shout, a slap, running feet — as we taught our classes in Mandalay Hall. Rosiello, for instance, was a very excitable young man lacking intelligence and self-control, always having trouble with his students — shouting matches, threats of violence, general pandemonium — and he quarreled with other teachers. The Gold Dust Twins, two smiley young men who lived in the main dorm, taught something and also managed the meager athletic activities, were Feltman spies, always hovering ingratiatingly about, hoping to pick up seditious remarks. Nygaard, a grim, reserved math teacher in his 40s with a spectacularly unattractive wife, taught in the room next to mine, and since these were once bedrooms, there were closets. I kept the book supply in mine, and evidently Nygaard kept his cough medicine in his, because after he told the class that he had to take some, I would hear gurgling sounds on the other side of the wall. In fact he was hitting the sauce, and by the end of the morning his eyes would be glassy and his footwork edgy. One day he staged a drunken rage about something in front of Mandalay Hall, and was dragged away by DeGrace, who passed it off as a fit of indigestion.

Ed Logan, without doubt the prize of the collection, can be viewed in many lights, and I’ll simply tell the tale without judgment. He was in his 40s, and I liked him because he had a dry sense of humor and he was worldly, as the others certainly weren’t. I think he was drawn to me because I would listen to him with some sympathy, realizing right away that he was fragile — when he told me that an “international gang” was after him. He had taught before (Latin and modern languages), and with the small income from a trust fund sometimes he traveled in cheap places, like Portugal. Until the gang got after him, of course. He was broke, waiting for the first paycheck, so he could buy some shirts. Meanwhile, he managed by pinning shirt cuffs inside his jacket sleeves, while his snap-on tie was worn on a sort of dickey, a facsimile of a shirt front. He showed me the shirts he bought because he wasn’t sure of them — what did I think? Fine, Ed, fine. But he exchanged them. What did I think of these? Fine, Ed, fine. Back they went. And so on for several days — God knows what they thought in the store — until he finally settled on the first ones.

His womanizing was on small scale, at first. One afternoon Jo Ann and I were walking with him along Lee’s main street when he suddenly vanished. We looked everywhere, but we didn’t see him until suppertime. A woman had passed us in the street and Logan had turned and pursued her on the instant. As time went on, however, his compulsions became monstrous. One Saturday afternoon when we were out hiking, Logan went up and down the street ringing doorbells, propositioning every woman who came to the door. Someone called the cops, but he managed to elude them. Merritt and DeGrace were terrified of what he would do on Parents Day.

In the early days before he took my measure, Feltman sent me to Boston to a presentation, a sales pitch for an English program that was very stupid, not worth the huge price the outfit would charge to implement it, and so I reported to Feltman, but it made me think, and led to some interesting consequences. I don’t remember how often Feltman came up from New Jersey where his home and business were, but it was too often for the rest of us. Of course, his spies reported regularly. In October he initiated a series of meetings (I think there were three or four) at which teachers would discuss together the grades of students and their problems, ostensibly to help the students, but it was really a way for Feltman to put more pressure on us. The English grades were most important because it was the one subject every boy took, and our reports were the backbone of the meetings. Now one of Feltman’s methods of putting on pressure (and saving money) was to cut down on the food, and the situation in October was so bad that we were eating catsup on bread — until the cook rationed both. So the next time one of these meetings came up, Jo Ann and I and Watt went on strike, spending the afternoon in the Lenox library. Without our reports, the meeting folded. The food supply increased.

Some of the pressure, of course, was inherent in the work. I took teaching very seriously, and to help those poorly educated boys I had to work very hard with them, in and out of class, when I met with each boy to discuss his written work. I was so tired that sometimes I’d catch myself falling asleep in class. Restraint weakened and tempers flared. Merrit took to knocking boys around, Rosiello claimed a student tried to stab him, he and Logan were feuding. Logan was more and more paranoid, and his humor was extinguished. Every evening he would come to our apartment to tell me his troubles, how this or that one was after him, and I would patiently try to dispel his delusions. Fat chance. Here’s a characteristic story: one day he was called out of his classroom. A teacher often places his watch on the table to remind himself of the time, and as Logan turned to go to the door, he put his watch in the textbook and closed it. Coming back after a few minutes and not seeing his watch, he began an inquisition: Who stole it? After many bitter words had passed, he opened the book and saw the watch. What did he say? “All right you bastards — who put it here?”

By the time of Parents Day I had worked out a plan for special accelerated classes for boys going on to college — I would handle the English and Nygaard the math — which I presented in a speech after the banquet. There were some naive parents there who actually believed in the Academy, and they were enthusiastic, even though it would be an extra charge. Now Feltman would be able to attract students for academic reasons, instead of scouring courtrooms.

Another one of these stupid meetings came up, and this time it was apparent that Feltman meant to get rid of Logan, because as soon as he read one of his reports, Feltman and Merrit attacked it, until Logan was nearly in tears. He was ordered to rewrite them. Afterwards, I helped him do them over again. Of course it didn’t matter what he wrote; they were going to scourge him. Poor Ed! In his final paranoid turn, he decided that my help had betrayed him, and he left Lee thinking I was a member of the “gang,” too.

We didn’t last much longer. Our youngest, Curdie, was suffering bouts of tonsillitis, so we were keeping her in bed and bringing food to her — until the cook told Jo Ann that Feltman had forbidden it. No matter what value we may have been to the school, we were not subservient, and Feltman couldn’t abide that. We left the next day.

A month later we started the Vermont Tutoring School, the program based on what we, especially Jo Ann, had learned at Lee. Although we never made much money, we earned enough to buy a farm in Nova Scotia, where we moved in 1971. So we owe something to our bizarre episode after all.

One final note: the saddest of the boys banished to the Academy was Milner, one of those awkward angular boys with two left feet and a quaky voice and an innocent heart who’s always stumbling into trouble and being disciplined. I can still hear Merrit yelling at Milner to “pick ’em up and put ’em down!” as the poor boy ran punishment laps around the track. He had been there since the school started and was never allowed to go home. A year or two after we left I’m happy to report that he burned down a new building on the campus.     *

Writers for Conservatives, 74: The First Western

Jigs Gardner

Jigs Gardner is an associate editor of The St. Croix Review. Jigs Gardner writes on literature from the Adirondacks, where he may be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

The Virginian, by Owen Wister, is generally regarded as the first Western. There had been Western stories before, most notably Ned Buntline’s dime novels, but those were largely sub-literate and Wister was a fine writer. The Virginian had the classic combination of the strong silent hero in a lengthy competition with an obvious villain, finally ending in a shootout on a town’s main street. Of course, there is a spirited girl to be won, too. What is so interesting about the book (I have read it four times) is its wide range of subjects and superb writing. The Western aspect of the story is always present, even if only in the background, but foreground is often taken up with subjects that seem only tangentially related to the Western theme, until we realize that Wister is painting the broadest possible Western scene.

In the beginning, the narrator gets off a train in Montana at a small town, Medicine Bow, where his host has declared he will meet him, but instead he has sent one of his ranch hands, the Virginian, and here we see Wister’s skill and sensitivity in the way he manages the relations between the two men. The speaker, an educated Easterner quite unused to the West (he will be known for a long time as “the tenderfoot”), tries to be familiar with the Virginian but soon seeing that such forwardness is unwelcome, subsides into a passive role, guided by the Virginian. They eat in the town and plan to sleep there, and that leads to a comic adventure started by the Virginian, in which we gain some insight into the complexity of the Virginian’s character. In any ordinary Western such a maneuver would be highly unlikely. Even to suggest such complexity in a Western hero is unusual. To see it through the eyes of an innocent newcomer is a masterly stroke.

Although much of the book is written in the third person, much is conveyed in the first person by the tenderfoot who makes periodic visits to the West. The first person narration is tricky, requiring strict discipline on the writer’s part, because there is a temptation to express one’s own thoughts in the words of the fictional speaker, always betrayed by smugness. (Louis L’Amour was especially fond of the practice, as in his dreadful Sackett series). Wister handles it very well, never stepping out of the tenderfoot role.

There’s a great confrontation scene when Trampas, dealing cards, says to the Virginian “Your bet, you son of a bitch.” At once the Virginian puts his pistol on the table and says gently, “When you call me that, smile.” Trampas says nothing, essentially backing down, and life goes on in the saloon, leading Wister, as he looks at the men, to voice his deep feelings about the West. Speaking of the men in the saloon:

“Something about them, and the idea of them, smote my American heart. . . . In their flesh our natural passions ran tumultuous, but often in their spirit sat hidden a true nobility, and often beneath its unexpected shining their figures took a heroic stature.”

That’s a major underlying theme of the book, and of any worthy Western.

When they get to the Sunk Creek ranch, the Virginian is delegated to watch over him (he’s always getting lost), not really the most welcome duty, but in this way their acquaintance grows. Meanwhile, the Virginian, coming upon a stage stuck precariously in a river crossing, rescues Miss Molly Wood, the woman hired to teach the Bear Creek school, and sets her on land, keeping her handkerchief in the confusion. Their first meeting, it has a lasting effect on both.

Attention shifts to the Virginian, who has taken two trainloads of cattle to Chicago, and is returning on the train with the crew. The narrator joins him along the way and witnesses the triumph of the Virginian when he manages to best his men (who, rather than returning to the ranch, want to go to a gold rush town), by telling the tallest, most elaborate and funniest of tall tales, beautifully related by the narrator.

Molly, on a horseback ride, discovers the Virginian lying on the ground, wounded by Indians, and with much difficulty she gets him to her cabin, where, with Mrs. Taylor and the doctor, she ministers to his needs. He is a long time recovering his strength, and at one point he receives the long-delayed letter she had written him before he was wounded, refusing his courtship. He determines to give her up, but she won’t let him now, so they are secretly engaged.

Meanwhile the narrative continues. The Virginian is sent to deal with an epidemic of cattle rustling, which results in the lynching of two men, one being the Virginian’s old friend Steve, prominent in that first meeting at Medicine Bow. The Virginian is very upset, and it hangs over him as he and the narrator leave the area. They come upon a track, one horse and two men. They are part of the rustler gang, Trampas and Shorty, and to facilitate his getaway on the horse, Trampas shoots Shorty and rides away.

The final confrontation scene between Trampas and the Virginian is excellently managed. Molly and the Virginian are riding to the town where they will be married when Trampas passes them, and when they reach town, three of his friends warn him. They go to a saloon for a farewell drink and Trampas enters, slanders the Virginian and warns him to be out of town by sundown. The Virginian must face the threat, he cannot run away even as Molly swears she will forsake him. He goes out and of course wins the battle, but Wister again proves his power: here is the whole description:

A wind seemed to blow his sleeve off his arm, and he replied to it, and saw Trampas pitch forward. He saw Trampas raise his aim from the ground and fall again, and lie there this time, still. A little smoke was rising from the pistol on the ground, and he looked at his own, and saw the smoke rising upward

out of it.

“I expect that’s all,” he said aloud.

He returns to the hotel, tells Molly he has killed Trampas (thinking she has renounced him), and she embraces him, saying “Thank God!”

The tension has been maintained to the end. There’s a lot more in the book I haven’t discussed, and I leave you to it.     *

Letters from a Conservative Farmer: A Government Favor (for Once)

Jigs Gardner

Jigs Gardner is an associate editor of The St. Croix Review. Jigs Gardner writes on literature from the Adirondacks, where he may be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

When we moved to Cape Breton in 1971 it was economically depressed, and it only got worse over the years. The federal government proposed various money-making schemes to put us on our feet, and I heard their proponents on the radio proclaim that if we did this (or that) we would see the end of welfare expenditure on the island. I actually heard that with these two little ears. Now I could tell you all about those schemes, what happened and how they came to naught, and depending on how I told them, the stories would be funny or sad, but I’d rather tell you about a plan that failed, but became a wonderful gift to us.

People whose land ran down to the water often had oyster leases, but we knew a place where there were no leases, and probing the shallow water with garden rakes, we got quite a few large oysters (a shell on my desk is seven inches long). There was an oysterman down at the end of the lake who made a desultory living, but there wasn’t much interest in oysters in the early ’70s. Then the government decided we should all become oyster entrepreneurs.

Like most government schemes, it seemed logical. Rafts consisting of 12-foot spruce saplings laid a foot apart across a metal frame resting on four foam-filled plastic floats, with coated wires suspended from the saplings, scallop shells a foot apart on the wires, would be anchored in the lake to catch oyster spat as it settled on the shells, and in three years the larvae would grow into salable oysters. Cape Bretoners had a jolly time in the preliminary stage that winter and spring, because all the unemployed, men and women, were well paid to construct the rafts. By June they were afloat, anchored about the lake.

There were several fallacies behind the project, but its doom was simple and obvious: to make it succeed required canny management, work which would not be remunerated until the oysters were sold. Simply anchoring a raft in the lake was not enough. It would have to be moved, first to a place where there would be plentiful spat, then to an area rich in nutrients, and sometimes it would have to be anchored near where a freshwater stream flowed into the lake, to flush off weeds growing on the oysters. Not a lot of work, but it had to be done, it had to be done right, and it wasn’t what people on the dole wanted to do.

Some people did their best, but at the end of three years the oysters were disappointingly small (as any oysterman could have told them at the start), and they had difficulty separating them from the scallop shells. Then catastrophe: the government wanted $5,000 for each raft! At once all interest was extinguished, no one would even look at a raft, and the government was stuck with hundreds of them moored around the lakeshores. A couple of years passed, until the rich summer people with yachts complained about impediments to navigation, so then the government hired a launch to haul all the rafts to remote places around the lake. There was a labyrinth of coves and uninhabited islands a mile or two from our farm, and a lot of rafts were anchored there.

Regarding the whole thing as a fiasco, I doubt if I would ever have recognized my great opportunity if I hadn’t met a neighbor at the shore unloading oysters from his skiff. Where’d he get them? “Off’n them rafts,” pointing across the cove. That afternoon found me paddling our canoe down another more remote cove. Tying up at a raft, I knelt on the poles, holding my breath, and hauled up a wire to see scallop shells crowded with oysters. By then, they been growing for seven or eight years, and it took only ten minutes to fill a bushel. There was an unexpected bonus: mussels clung to the floats, and I got those, too. Half an hour after landing at the raft, I was paddling home with two bushels of oysters and a big bucket of mussels.

I made that trip several times over the next few years. Late in the fall, I’d put a bushel or two down in the cold cellar, covered with wet seaweed, and we’d have oysters into the winter. But eventually the bonanza played out and the rafts finally sank to the bottom. I shall long remember those years as the only time in my life I’ve had enough oysters!     *

My Harvey Weinstein Moment

Jigs Gardner

Jigs Gardner is an associate editor of The St. Croix Review. Jigs Gardner writes on literature from the Adirondacks, where he may be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

There was a time, as a senior in high school, when my career might’ve taken a turn toward fame and fortune, but alas! It was not to be. I was the ordinary horny 17-year-old, not very bold, in fact, not bold at all, but with a jaunty façade. One morning as classes were changing, I walked into the room where my history class was to be held, and in the crush of students leaving and students arriving, I found myself next to Faye Stein, a very attractive girl. We smiled and nodded, and I saw that she was wearing a tight blouse that seemed to thrust her classic bust toward me. Without a thought in my head I reached out and cupped one of those beautiful breasts in my hand. Faye reacted instantly, slapping my face so hard I was staggered. The whole thing was over in an instant, and I don’t think anyone noticed, but in that moment the career that might have been vanished. Had Faye equivocated, I might have gone on to fame and fortune, Hollywood, the Senate, who knows what heights I might have scaled.     *