My Unexpected Vacation Day

Orchard road

[In China] I took deep interest … in the farming problems of our neighbors, the difficulties of raising crops…. I watched the turn of seasons and was anxious with the farmers when there was no rain and yearned with them in their prayer processions and was grateful when sometimes the rain did fall.

 

-      Pearl S. Buck, My Several Worlds: A Personal Record

 

Up North, when days finally grow long and bright again, the question asked between people meeting for the first time in this new year is always the same: “How was your winter?” 

My answer this year: “In retrospect, it went fast.” 

I admit that individual days sometimes felt long, and yet, each week, as I looked back on it, seemed to have flown by. Spring’s arrival, however, seemed reluctant as back and forth it went, a yo-yo season, giving us hope only to dash our optimism the following day. Yet difficult as were those days of March and April, they were cold spring days, January now only a memory.

 

Cherry blossom was unspectacular this year in my immediate neighborhood. We had ice and rain and wind, and though trees bloomed, I missed the usual rolling acres of brilliantly white flowering trees in the spring sun. Either I missed it, or the wind and rain tore the blossoms untimely from the boughs. If I'm correct about there having been a shorter flowering time, will it affect the harvest? Farmers need a lot of faith to keep going, it seems.

 

Annuals to add POP to perennial borders

One of the garden centers where I buy flowering annuals changed hands this past year, and when I asked one of the new owners how things were going he remarked—this was last Sunday morning—that people were biding their time, reluctant to plant with the weather as cool as it still was. I had risked bean seeds, and they came up, but then a chilly morning nipped part of a row. I filled in the row with new seeds. Does that take faith? I don’t know that I'm brimming with faith, but I plant and hope for the best and am delighted (by what seems a miracle!) when seedlings emerge from the soil.

 

Now—suddenly, it seems!—it is June, and there are no more slow days. Between sunrise and sunset we have more than 15 hours, so the days are long, but each one speeds by. As illustration and evidence, I offer below images of trees leafing out in late May. First, a roadside woods at that all-too-brief impressionist stage, the spring day when I always long for a ‘pause’ button so as to drink my greedy fill of this delicate, tender, fleeting time that is gone too soon. Then, our Leelanau woods only two days later. The first green of spring: Now you see it, now you don’t!

One spring day --

Two days later --

And THEN!  It's a jungle!

My personal and business life take on the speed of the season, which is why my recent trip to Kalamazoo was only an overnight turnaround. I could stay there for a month and still not have enough time with family and friends, but too much awaits my attention at home, so home I came the next day to tend to it all: planning for bookstore events with book orders and publicity, and planning for summer visitors to my home (and for my own stolen moments of leisure) by getting yard and gardens in shape for the season. Marilyn Zimmerman's book launch is next week!!!

Mark your calendar for June 10, Dog Ears Books, 5-7 p.m.!
 

In the midst of all this, the disappearance of my billfold, holding driver’s license and credit cards, was a minor crisis. Did I leave it somewhere? Drop it somewhere? Was it in the house “in plain sight” and I just couldn’t see it? Over and over I mentally retraced my steps ... called places I’d been on Friday and Saturday ... looked and looked and looked ... through every bag, under car seats, at home and in my shop. It is so maddeningly tedious, having to give over mental energy to such a boring, repetitive task, don’t you find? 

 

But on Monday morning my car had to go in for a brake job in Leland, and since I could make no progress on the search while the car was in the garage, I put the whole problem on the back burner, walking from Van's garage down Main Street to Trish’s Dishes to get a coffee to go, encountering a couple of friends along the way, and then making my leisurely way back to the river to find a perch on the dock of a shanty belonging to friends there in Fishtown. I'd texted Charlie that I would be there but hadn't had a reply, so I just made myself at home, as the Artist did so many times over the years.

Looking lake ward

A glorious morning! The sun was shining, and the breeze was alive with that wonderfully familiar, fresh-fishy aroma of the river. Men were at work on the dock opposite, where a few early morning tourists strolled. Passengers gathered to board the Mishe-Mokwa for a day trip to South Manitou Island. Gulls flew overhead, and song sparrows sang. Now and then a duck paddled about near the pilings. 

 

It was very near here, just south of the river mouth, that the Artist spent a night on the beach long ago and wandered into town the next morning to the Bluebird, where Grandma Telgard said immediately to a member of her kitchen staff, “This boy needs a cup of coffee!” That was years before we met, but in later years together we spent many, many hours in, around, and near Fishtown, only a pleasant walk from our old Leland home.

Back to the present. Now, in 2025, for weeks and weeks I have been carrying my sketchbook with me everywhere I’ve gone, along with a set of drawing pens sent to me by a friend for my birthday. The last serious sketches made in the book were from 2015. A whole decade ago! How is that possible? Finally, there on the dock, I took out sketchbook and pens and applied myself to the scene. The results were laughable, but results didn’t matter. I was there and nowhere else, practicing drawing as meditation. Perfectly content.

Life proceeds at a different pace on the river, I remembered then, whether one is working or relaxing. 

“I beg your pardon,” said the Mole, pulling himself together with an effort. “You must think me very rude; but all this is so new to me. So—this—is—a—River!”

 

“The River,” corrected the Rat.

 

“And you really live by the river? What a jolly life!”

 

“By it and with it and on it and in it,” said the Rat. “It’s brother and sister to me, and aunts, and company and food and drink, and (naturally) washing. It’s my world, and I don’t want any other. What it hasn’t got is not worth having, and what it doesn’t know is not worth knowing.” 

 

-      Kenneth Grahame, Wind in the Willows

 

Illustration of Rat and Mole by E. H. Shepard

Since I’d seen no car, I thought Charlie and Sandy must be away, but it turned out that Sandy was home, and after a while she joined me outside on the dock with her own coffee mug, and the two of us caught up on each other’s lives in leisurely fashion. I showed her my sketchbook, and she showed me her tiny portable watercolor kit, small enough to fit in a handbag, and after a couple of hours we walked up to Main Street and over to the Cove, a restaurant on the north side of the river, to meet her visiting grandson and his wife and their almost-three-year-old son for lunch. 

 

I’d told Sandy about my missing billfold but was feeling no stress or panic. It would show up, or it wouldn’t. I had put a hold on the credit cards the day before, and although replacing cards and driver’s license would not be much fun, it was just one of those things. One foot in front of the other. Deal with it. That's life. 

Am I calmer because I’ve learned not to panic? Or is it simply a lessening of energy that comes with age? Or am I become so calm, so unlike my younger self, because after losing the love of my life nothing else that happens to me feels all that difficult? Maybe all are partial explanations.

 

Later, back home, I dared to plant seeds for tender annuals and vegetables. Launched tennis balls through the air for Sunny Juliet. Searched one more time through my car for the missing billfold and contemplated necessary next steps if it didn’t turn up. But the day was too beautiful for worry. I’d mowed grass on Sunday, and my yard, fresh and green, was orderly and inviting as I puttered about the perennial borders, grateful for my Michigan country life.

Sunny likes Michigan, too.

And the icing on the cake was that I found my billfold in the grass, right there at home! Now I don’t have to think about that any more! 

 

But have I been stingy with pictures of Sunny in this post? How about a recent scene at the dog park, Sunny and friends, with all dogs in happy motion. There! Satisfied?

Dogs having fun!

Book Review +Trip Down Memory Lane + Love Letter: NORTHERN HARVEST

Northern Michigan cherry orchard, spring

Northern Harvest: Twenty Michigan Women

       In Food and Farming

by Emita Brady Hill

Detroit: Wayne State University Press (A Painted Turtle Book), 2020

Paper, 327pp w/ index, $24.99

Warning: This book is not a love story! It is 20 love stories, all told in the words of northern Michigan women involved in one way or another (some in multiple ways) with growing, preparing, selling, and/or writing about local food. Emita Hill had the genius to collect and edit these oral histories, and her daughter, Madeleine Hill Vedel, to whom the book is dedicated, took many of the portraits that introduce each section. 

The book is organized into six sections: 

I.         Two Orchards and a CSA

II.       Coffee, Tea, and Chocolate

III.     Pastry and Cheese

IV.     Chefs and Restaurants

V.       Writers and Teachers

VI.     Two Homesteads

It will not take readers long to discover, however, that there is much overlap in the backgrounds, interests, and passions of the women in the various stories. Many, though not all, are first-generation Americans (at least one an immigrant herself) who grew up in urban immigrant communities where food held families and neighborhoods together. Another related thread running through many of the stories is travel, with women exploring world food at all ages of their lives, in various ways, from Peace Corps work to cooking classes with famous chefs. A third commonality shared by almost all is education. Whether educated through on-the-job training, self-taught by trial and error, having studied under experts and/or at colleges and universities – also, teaching at every level imaginable -- these are women passionate about learning.

Before I get too far into my raving about this fascinating collection, though – and I’m so glad to see something like this in print! – I should acknowledge that I have known many of the subjects for years. For example, I met Anne and John Hoyt back when their Leelanau Cheese was still a dream: now, like my Dog Ears Books, their business has been around for over a quarter of a century. Julia Brabanec and Susan Odom are neighbors of ours -- at least, as country people measure neighborhoods. Barb Tholin’s son and one of our grandsons were kindergarden friends back in St. Paul, Minnesota. And so on.

Other of the women I have met only casually, and two or three not at all. Yet, I should add, because part of the joy and great privilege of having a bookstore is meeting in person people whose stories, true or fictional, I have loved between the covers of books. Emita Hill and I met for the first time only in 2019, after all. But right away, when she described her book to me and said that Wayne State University Press was the publisher, I was ready to buy it sight-unseen.

-- Fast forward to spring of 2020, this strange spring of COVID-19, which finds me sheltering in place in southeast Arizona, where my husband (the Artist) and I came for the winter, as we have done three or four times previously. I’ve had Northern Harvest on my to-read stack for several weeks and have picked it up many times to read a few pages. A couple of times I read paragraphs or whole pages aloud to the Artist. But I have been rationing my reading of this book, careful not to read too fast, since our return to Michigan and the re-opening of my bookstore are as uncertain for me as the future is for everyone these days, making these visits with friends back home no insignificant part of my current pleasure in the book. But enough about me. I want and need to tell you about the book itself.

First, the stories in Northern Harvest are not just about people I know and places I love, nor will they be only that for other readers. This is important: they are also stories about the growth and convergence of several social movements in the United States in recent decades and the roles played by women in the realization and coming together of those movements. The particularity and specificity of the northern Michigan setting authenticates the larger social picture, since every large social picture happens first to individuals at a local level.

Let’s begin at the beginning. Cheryl Kobernik and her husband are farmers who grow cherries organically. Cheryl comes from a background in sociology and counseling but says of her Up North life,

Not growing up in agriculture, it’s an honor to be accepted into the agrarian community. I know there are good people everywhere, but … I have never met people with such integrity in my life.

Although Jenny Tutlis, of Meadowlark CSA, and Julia Brabanec, organic apple grower for decades in Leelanau County with her late husband, John, started out life in art and drama, respectively, both take pride in years of growing healthy food for local markets. Says Julia,

This was our life, and we loved it. We worked very hard, and in later years when we would think back and talk about all that we did, we would say, “How on earth did we ever do that?” 

Julia and John began their farming life in late middle age, and part of “that” was planting over a thousand trees by hand and pruning those trees year after year. Jenny came from a different beginning, inspired by stints in the Peace Corps and time at Innisfree Village, a community in Virginia. 

It may have been inevitable that certain words and scenes would jump out at me from each story, especially at this time in the world’s history. When Anne Hoyt, for instance, talks about the crucial importance of hygiene in cheese-making, she mentions training workers in her business on cleaning and sanitizing:

From silly things, from handwashing. You would think – everybody thinks they know how to wash their hands, but they actually don’t. It’s understanding what’s dirty and what’s clean.

Today, in the spring of coronavirus, the “Wash your hands” mantra on everyone’s lips, with all of us told to sing “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” or “Happy Birthday to You” as we scrub, I think of Anne as being years ahead of that learning curve – although ‘curve’ is another word that has new and vivid connotations at the moment….

Anne’s story, however, is in for the most part a happy one, that of a dream come through -- by dint of very hard work, of course, which is what it takes for most of us to make our dreams come true and keep them alive. 

Other Northern Harvest stories more often tell of career paths revealed only after a winding trail had been blazed. Carol Worsley of a B&B called Thyme Inn in Glen Arbor says of the cooking classes she teaches, “It certainly wasn’t my plan. I never had a plan.” 

(Sorry. I don't have any photos of sheep!)

Barb Tholin’s original plan, after apprenticing at a Vermont farm affiliated with Sterling College and earning a bachelor’s degree in agronomy, was eventually to have her own farm. A sheep farm, she decided at one point (like Bathsheba Everdene in Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd, you must pardon me for thinking). Instead Barb went from working in a macrobiotic restaurant in Chicago for “a couple of years” to managing the produce department at a food co-op in St. Paul, Minnesota, for 19 years, and finally founding the magazine Edible Grande Traverse, which she continues to edit today as partner with her former husband, who manages the advertising accounts. 

Madagascar Vanilla Rooibos

The women who work in and/or have their own businesses in catering, restaurants, and non-farm food production-- developing and perfecting recipes and products, marketing and filling orders, pleasing customers -- fill me with awe. Angela Macke’s story of her Light of Day tea impressed me so deeply that I put the book down, got right online, and ordered tea from her then and there! (Delicious Michigan came to me in the mail!) Angela studied and practiced nursing and traveled extensively before the family settled down near Traverse City, and her herbal teas are the result of 

… not exactly by trial and error, but it was just doing my research first, and then making up a small batch … and tasting it, and paying attention to the effect on my own body.

She worked with food labs at Cornell University and the University of Nebraska, and her tea farm, which she did not initially think of as a “business,” is now the only certified and Demeter Biodynamic tea farm in North America. Still, in order to farm and produce her teas so that they meet her personal high standards, Macke works 80-90 hours a week from April to November.

Mimi Wheeler, born in Denmark, founded Grocer’s Daughter Chocolate in the village of Empire and operated it for a decade before she retired and sold the business to Jody Dotson Hayden and her husband, who continue the business today. Mimi’s working life began in social work, fueled by a passion for social justice. Coming to the U.S., she worked in community mental health and school counseling, but the dream of having her own business – something related to food – was always in the background. 

Since I had made chocolate desserts, made souffles, cakes, truffles for a number of occasions over many years and had gotten a lot of praise for this, it dawned on me that chocolate was what I had to start doing as a new career. 

Grocer’s Daughter Chocolate put the village of Empire on the national food map. Appropriately, social justice was a concern shared by the people who took over the business when Mimi decided to retire and focus on her grandchildren. Jody Hayden and her former husband, Chris Streeter, were founders of Higher Grounds Trading Company, a coffee company devoted to paying farmers, in places like Chiapas, a fair price for their crop. Chris continues to run Higher Grounds, and when Jody and her present husband, a Traverse City native from a cherry orchard family, bought Grocer’s Daughter in 2012 they continued in the spirit of the founder, sourcing local dairy products, honey, maple syrup, cherries, and blueberries.

We could make more money if we sourced everything more cheaply. And that’s what a lot of chocolate companies do. But our first ingredient isn’t sugar … we do chocolate first and foremost and then we add really great ingredients to that.

Supporting local community – that is another important belief and practice in the lives of these northern Michigan women.

Who works harder than a chef, pastry or other? Susie McConnell worked in various nodes of the food network the women in Northern Harvest represent. With a start at the Leland Lodge and Sugarloaf, she went on to work at Hattie’s Restaurant in Suttons Bay, for Carol Worsley at Thyme Inn in Glen Arbor, for Martha Ryan at Martha’s Leelanau Table in Suttons Bay, and finally three years with Angela Macke’s Light of Tea tea farm, learning about biodynamic agriculture, before retiring to her own home and garden and kitchen.

Farm market shoppers in line for 9 Bean Rows bread

Then there is the farm-to-table group: Jennifer Blakeslee at Cooks’ House in Traverse City; Jennifer Welty of 9 Bean Rows Bakery (that deservedly famous sea salt fennel bread!); Martha Ryan of Martha’s Leelanau Table in Suttons Bay; Amanda Danielson of Trattoria Stella in Traverse City; and Donna Folgarelli, known far and wide for her family business in Traverse City, Folgarelli’s Market and Wine Shop. As I was reading the stories in this book, just when I thought I’d read about the hardest-working woman in the food world, I would turn to the next and find another. This is certainly not a world for high-maintenance princesses who need to be coddled!

In the “Chefs and Restaurateurs” section, Martha Ryan is the woman I know best, but I learned much I hadn’t known before about her. I knew the Leland School and Stonehouse Bread Café parts of her story but not that she was from Kalamazoo or that she lived in ethnic neighborhoods in Cleveland, Ohio, or that she attended Michigan State University. And how had I never heard of her 11-week backpacking trip through France, Spain, England, and Ireland, with special focus on France? If Martha and I ever have time in our busy northern Michigan lives to talk about that trip, I’d love to hear more! 

(And, by the way, as an example of how incestuously entwined northern Michigan lives are – in a good way! – Martha’s Leelanau Table has its home in “the red house” on St. Joseph Street in Suttons Bay, which is owned by and was completely remodeled under the direction of architect Judy Balas, wife of the very Bruce who has been my part-time bookstore volunteer [“bookstore angel”] at Dog Ears Books for – how many years now? Maybe two decades? Is that possible?)

Rose Hollander

In the “Writers and Teachers” section, in addition to Barb Tholin and Carol Worsley, you’ll find Patty LaNoue Stearns, Nancy Krcek Allen, and Rose Hollander, and here again a northern Michigan web of many strands connects us all. I first met Patty when I was working part-time for Arbutus Press, publisher of The Cherry Home Companion. I took prepaid advance orders for that book, and we had a fun and successful book signing. Rose Hollander’s late husband, Stu, was our family attorney for years. And one winter Rose and Newbery winner children’s author-illustrator Lynne Rae Perkins hosted a dinner party in their Suttons Bay homes for local booksellers and librarians -- dinner chez Rose, followed by a group walk down dark, silent, snow-muffled streets to Lynne Rae’s house for dessert and a visit to her studio. Memorable evening! 

I loved reading this statement by Patty LaNoue Stearns: “I was a terrible high school student.” I am always amazed by adolescents who have a clear idea of what they want to do in later life. Those of us who stumble into our calling, as Stearns did with journalism, are more the norm, I believe – or the lucky ones. 

And I am eager to try out Nancy Allen’s Thai Coconut Curry Base – because what I neglected to mention earlier, in my excitement, is that each story in the book begins with a photograph and short bio and ends with a recipe. 

CSA field

The final two chapters (in “Two Homesteads: Preserve the Past and Celebrate the Future”) bring us back to farms, which is where we began. Susan Odom’s introduction to 19th-century growing, cooking, and living came with her job as an interpreter at Greenfield Village. Similarly, Emily Umbarger learned old ways when she and her grandmother began as volunteer gardeners at historic Fort Michilimackinac. Odom now makes her home and her living at Hillside Homestead in Leelanau County, Umbarger with her husband and sons at Hearth and Harvest Homestead outside Interlochen. In both these women’s lives, education continues as a passion alongside farming. Says Odom,

I am re-creating the sort of little nineteenth-century farm and trying to do things the way they used to be done on a small scale. I think I’m particularly good at explaining that to [Farm Stay] guests and visitors. … There is limited use for that in life. Being a good interpreter. In museums, yes, but sadly the thing is that nobody ever makes much money in museums. So I’m right at home on a farm because you don’t make much money on a farm either. 

At the time of her interview, Emily Umbarger was working for pay as a counselor at Interlochen Arts Academy and also working as a volunteer in a not-yet-funded program at Interlochen to grow food for its kitchen and compost as much as possible, involving students in the entire process. She was also pretty much running the family farm business, since her husband’s job had necessitated a move to the night shift. In her oral history, Emily said she doesn’t think about the number of tasks she faces each day but rather... 

“What are the cool things that I can do [today] with my kids? What are the cool things that I can do with my husband? That we can do as a family? And how is that going to enrich our life?”

She also notes, “The heart of the educator in me is always at work, even with my own kids.”

Because, for all these women, it is never just about making enough money to pay the bills. It’s about love and respect for earth’s bounty, providing healthy food grown in a sustainable manner, community building and support, stewardship of natural resources, a passion for learning and the fearless daring to make mistakes, educating all ages for a healthy future -- and plenty of uncomplaining, unremitting elbow grease. 

I make no apology for the very personal nature of this post. These are women from my home, and I share their beliefs and principles. And while far from northern Michigan at present, I do believe that "we are -- truly -- all in this together,” wherever we are. 

Author Emita Hill holds a doctorate in Romance Languages and Literature from Harvard University. Her previous work includes Bronx Faces and Voices (2014), oral histories of sixteen men and women who rebuilt community after suffering crime and blight. Dr. Hill divides her time between New York City and northern Michigan.

Northern Harvest: Twenty Michigan Women in Food and Farming offers delightful stories, hope for the future, and is a most timely contribution to the literature and history of a beautiful region of our country.

Back to -- the World?

Back on home ground

Although I took two books along on our four-day, post-Labor Day getaway, one kept me occupied during my few hours of vacation reading, and it was only back home again that I turned to the second, another book set in France, this one stories by the poet W. S. Merwin of the countryside in which he lived for many years. He called it The Lost Upland. I'm now over halfway through the three long stories in that book.

I first thought of titling this post “Back to Reality,” then argued with myself over the tentative choice. After all, even the one September we spent a couple of nights of Mackinac Island, a place the Artist maintained was “not the real world,” my take on it was that people live there, work and raise families there, and that makes it as much “the real world” as anywhere else, even if the island economy is based on tourism. And the Lake Huron shore towns and cities do not begin to match Mackinac Island for quaintness or isolation, so we were only away, briefly, from our own responsibilities and schedules.

Vacation from reality? I was the one, not the territory we visited, taking as much of a break from present-day American life as possible. By seeking out with him my husband’s departed forebears in cemeteries and museums and churches, plunging into the area history of shipping and lumbering and early farming, and pausing to linger over long-abandoned rural sites where only the mice and bees are busy these quiet fall days, I picked up books, postcards, ephemera — but never a newspaper. When the Artist turned on television news at night in a motel room, my earplugs let me roam ancient peasant roads with Alain-Fournier’s fictional characters. I had a little bookselling talk here and there when meeting colleagues in the field, and that was fine. I really did not want to hear a word about what was happening in Washington, D.C. Time enough for that when we resumed our normal lives.

Then the Artist picked up a newspaper, and the world intruded. But it was not the outside world! It was conflict and hostility within the very territory that had been absorbing our attention and screening out, for me, angry political voices elsewhere! And here’s that little story.

One of the small towns we had planned to seek out was Posen, where the Artist’s mother, at the age of 17, had once had a memorable and amusing date in Posen. It was a story she loved to tell. So we wanted to visit the town and also look up her brother’s Lutheran church, his first church when he finished seminary. Posen had had its annual Potato Festival the week before, and I was somewhat disappointed that we couldn’t have experienced that — until we read the newspaper account.

Apparently one political party had more or less hijacked the Potato Festival Parade and turned it into a partisan political rally, and the other political party naturally and vociferously objected, but what was done was done. Small towns don’t get too much smaller than Posen. Still, differences of opinion don’t need a large population, and a week after the festival sore feelings still rankled and would not easily be laid to rest. 

Oh, brother! Now I was glad we had missed the festival! The story even took away a little of my jones to venture away from the shore in search of the little town, but we went ahead and found it. The church turned out to be on the edge of Metz, three or four miles away, a town so much smaller than Posen that it seems to contain not a single going business concern, its claim to fame still the fire that destroyed it in 1908. We took a few photographs at the church and went on our way. It was a grey, overcast, drizzly day, and I imagined the few remaining residents of Posen and Metz, indoors in their houses, whether raucously celebrating victory or stewing resentfully over indignities, still consumed with their little country farm-festival-turned-political-conflict. In its small way, the story struck me as tragic. I saw my country torn apart in the Sixties, and it is painful to see battle lines drawn again between groups of Americans.

Change of scene: I keep in touch with my Arizona ghost town neighbors by text, e-mail, and Facebook, and the most recent thread of conversation among us was not about hummingbirds or rain but about giant agribusiness livestock confinement facilities in the Sulphur Springs Valley and consequent severe drops in the water table. The basic story wasn’t news to me. All of us have seen those confined cattle on the Kansas Settlement Road, and falling water table and failed wells have been in Cochise County news for years. The link one neighbor sent, however, moves the story from “same old” to brink of catastrophe. I watched that news story all the way through, and it's a heart-breaker.

I find it bitterly ironic that traditional ranchers who chafed at any kind of government regulation, who wanted no one telling them how many cows they could run or how much water they could use, may soon be put out of business by corporate giants who saw an opening and grabbed it. No limit to numbers of animals? Good, we can cram in thousands on a few acres! All the water we can pump? Great, we’ll put down wells as deep as two Empire State Buildings! Your little 200-foot well on your little forty acres has run dry, and you can’t afford a new well? Sorry! This is how free enterprise works!

Another change of scene: I’m not on vacation now and am looking reality in its sometimes smug, too often self-satisfied face again (politics, stripping of environmental protections, etc.), but when I wake up at three in the morning I still turn to something other than news, which brings me back to W. S. Merwin and The Lost Upland. As I was reading there in the quiet, peaceful dark, thoughts of my own emerged, sparked by the book. European countries, I was thinking, have never had what they could mistake as limitless frontiers. Farmers there have always had to take care of the land they had. The countries themselves are small. Their limits, I was thinking, have been their salvation.

And then I reached a series of episodes in the story Merwin called “Shepherds.” Yes, the relentless engine of change was already bulldozing its way into southwest rural France, in the form of multi-story confinement sheep facilities. Certain local factions considered the confinement “cruel,” but that was “a minor argument about the new ‘industrial’ barns,” one dismissed as “sentimental.” Inevitable pollution could not be so easily brushed aside. 

The statistics differed depending on who supplied them, but they agreed that many thousands of sheep, over a period of months until they attained the desired weight, would eat, evacuate, and eventually bleed, and that the results would have to be removed continuously. And for this, the developers maintained, they must have water. It must come in clean, which was not difficult along the valley with its small clear crayfish streams winding through woods. On the downstream side of the new barns the current would emerge full of the warm contents of bowels, bladders, and veins of lambs and sheep fattened on chemically souped-up feed.  

- W. S. Merwin, The Lost Upland

But there was no stopping the engine. Those pushing for “progress” wanted municipal slaughterhouses in nearby towns closed, as their businesses would be vertically integrated and process animals from conception to the market. Historic old roads and bridges would need to be destroyed to make way for wide, modern truck routes. A web of connections linked the “modern farmers,” as they saw themselves, to governmental officials and large chain grocery stores. Eventually even the conservative peasants were carried along by the tide of “progress.”

They moved reluctantly, helplessly, resentfully into debt and the use of unknown forces that they had been told were bettering them and that they knew were taking them over and would obliterate them.

Nevertheless, those who could afford to do so took to keeping two separate flocks of sheep, a commercial flock raised on chemicals and inside buildings, and a smaller flock raised the old way, pastured, for family consumption and for sale to discriminating restaurateurs. Merwin says nothing about fresh water for the flocks moved from pasture to pasture. In what sense was the upland “lost”? It still sounds quite charming in this lithub piece, though clearly no longer affordable to a college student putting himself through school by waiting tables and saving money by wearing secondhand clothes.

I tried this morning to work Esau into the American story of polluted and lost natural resources, but it felt like too far a stretch. It does seem to me, though, that Americans think of freedom not only as a birthright and an absolute but also in pragmatic terms, as a means to increased wealth. Thus in our greedy determination to have no limits whatsoever on our freedom and property rights, we too easily forget that natural resources are themselves limited, that the earth is finite. I suppose a southeastern Arizona homesteader could haul water for household use and maybe even to support a couple of feeder cattle for home consumption, but for how long? And where will future pottage come from when the resources bought by the birthright are gone? 

Pragmatism is not pragmatism when it doesn't work. And there is no "getting away." We are still here, and we still have to live together, one way or another. Or go extinct. For now I continue with the Merwin book, even as I can no longer consider it escape reading.