Deer Season, Among Books

Another morning through the windshield

 

Oh, baby, it’s cold out there!

 

Donuts are disappearing earlier in the morning, and you are apt to hear gunshots as soon as the sun is up. It’s firearm deer season! Time to keep your dog leashed and to wear some blaze orange yourself. Question: Why is it called blaze orange? Why not just orange? Anyone know?

Field corn harvest is underway in Leelanau Township. Many trees have been wind-stripped of their leaves by now, but you can go over to Karen Casebeer’s blog to see the remaining rich browns of oak leaves, and I’ll give my own pitch here for beech leaves, which also hang on after maples and other trees are bare. Sometimes leaves on very young beeches stay attached all winter long, thinning as the season wears on.

 

This is not a podcast.

 

This is not my bookstore.
It's a photo (of my bookstore).

Someone who still reads bound books printed on paper, still handwrites letters to friends and family, does not have TV, has never had a dishwasher (and feels no need for one) – it should not surprise you that such a person is not sufficiently up-to-date to produce a podcast, but you don’t need to see me, anyway. Or, should you want to see me, you are welcome to visit my bookstore. I’m presently here five days a week and plan to be here four days a week through the long, cold northern Michigan winter. Otherwise, what I have to share in a public forum I will share on this old-fashioned platform.

 

Isn’t it frightening how quickly our innovative, cutting-edge modes of communication become old-fashioned? Blogs are not yet completely obsolete, however, and I’m comfortable here. Web + log = blog, a kind of ship’s log that has no need of an ocean, a diary of sorts that anyone may read. Quite public enough for me.

 

 

This is not a Substack.

 

That’s where the action is these days: Substack. Professional writers, professional journalists, counselors, historians, and other professionals of every stripe can all be found on Substack. Friends have suggested I jump on board, but I am content to keep my amateur status. Should I ever write a book, I’ll do what I can to see that it sells, but in the ephemeral world of the blogosphere I don’t ask anyone to subscribe and pay. My paid gig is that of bookseller.

 

 

Writing Letters: Not a Paid Gig, Either

 

My family has always been a family of letter-writers. Back in the days when telephone calls were divided into “local” and “long distance,” frugality dictated written correspondence, except for holidays and birth and death announcements. “Getting the mail” is still, for me, an errand brimming with possibility, and I take pleasure also in popping a stamped envelope into the mail slot, addressed to a friend or a sister, anticipating the recipient’s surprise and delight. 

Love this postmark! Love USPS!

[Note to self: Write more notes and letters soon! You are falling behind!] 

 

My posts here on this blog are a form of letters, too, stuffed into metaphorical bottles and thrown out onto a metaphorical sea, not addressed to any one particular person but intended for anyone who finds them interesting enough to read.

 

 

Old Friends and New

 

More than once here, I have mourned the passing of old friends, and today I want to make clear that my sadness over those losses is no reflection on newer friends! “No one replaces anyone else,” a dear old friend remarked years ago, and I have never forgotten her words. No one can ever take the place she filled in my life and still holds in my heart, but my new friends have found their own places. The silver and the gold....

 

Not the morning I expected

 

On Monday, my day to accomplish tasks and errands that don’t fit in with days I’m at my bookshop, the weather was cold, the sky grey. On Sunday, the strong, bitter wind had made it difficult for me to stay as long at the dog park as Sunny wanted to stay, but she deserved some fun, so I stuck it out. Now on Monday morning my first task of the day was to load snow tires into the back of my car so I could take them to the garage and have them mounted for the season ahead. Then, what would I do with myself while the car was up on the hoist? Van’s Garage opens at 8 a.m., but the library in Leland doesn’t open until 10. Trish’s Dishes was the answer to my dilemma, and I was the first customer in the day, six minutes after they opened at 8:30.

Good coffee. Warm, quiet atmosphere. Delicious breakfast burrito filled with vegetables and melting cheese, with a couple slices of melon on the side. My own little table up in the front corner, where I could look out and remember when my friend Ellen had her garden business and she and I planted daylilies in front of what was then her husband Bob Pisor’s Stone House Bread. Book to read, Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel, by Rebecca Goldstein, not a book that would be everyone’s cup of tea but one I was finding delightful. A morning I had been dreading unexpectedly delivered bliss!

 

The Vienna Circle, of which Gödel was one of the youngest members, invited Ludwig Wittgenstein to join them, but he kept his distance. Probably just as well. Members of the circle never grasped the significance in incompleteness that Gödel himself saw there, and Wittgenstein was similarly misunderstood. In question for both were the limits of language and whether or not those limits are also the limits of human knowledge. Goldstein contrasts the two misunderstood geniuses, Wittgenstein the dramatically tormented and Gödel the silent, reticent sufferer, and the two men live in her pages. 

 

Bliss! Except for the empty tables, I might have been back in the Daily Grind coffeehouse in Urbana, Illinois, but besides the lack of other intently studious customers there was also the happy circumstance that I didn’t have to take notes and could simply enjoy my reading. I almost laughed out loud over Goldstein’s description of the way the Vienna Circle members, “sworn enemies of cognitive bewitchment,” worshipped Wittgenstein. I had a little taste of that in graduate school. A Wittgenstein study group (at the home of one of the professors) was practically a cult gathering, where LW’s texts were the sacred scripture, never challenged, although at times a member of the congregation would admit to being “puzzled” by a particular passage. ("Puzzlement" was permitted.) Following discussion, an acolyte served tea. All very formal and esoteric and refined and oh, so English! No, I was much more comfortable and much happier with my book and breakfast burrito and coffee, all by myself, a philosophe fauve, as my friend Annie once termed the two of us, both by that time far from the halls of academe....

 

After a heavenly two hours with my book, walking back to retrieve my car I encountered the only fly in the morning’s ointment, because what is more maddening than the roar of a leaf-blower? The roar of three leaf-blowers!!! Soon back in my car, however, armed against the future with snow tires, with beautiful guitar music playing as I drove toward home, I was eager to share a joyful time with Sunny Juliet by taking her to the dog park for the second day in a row, where I was glad to find the wind not quite as horrifically strong and cold as it had been the day before. 

"Wanna play?"

"Yes!"

 

More of the blaze orange story.

 

Its other name is “safety orange,” and the point is to make oneself (or one’s dog) highly visible against a brown leaf background or snow or blue sky, which we had pretty much already figured out, right? The other advantage of orange for hunters is that it’s not a color deer can see. They see blue and green, but orange to them just looks brown or grey. Okay, that makes sense, too. 

 

Here's another factoid new to me: “Caltrans orange” (no apostrophe, for some reason) is the name for the color as given by the California Department of Transportation for their construction zones and equipment. It’s easier to see in rain or fog than other colors, apparently. 

 

An article in the Paris Review, sharing from a book by David Scott Kastan and Stephen Farthing, On Color, gives more background, not on the blaze designation but on orange itself as a color term. Before the fruit came to Europe in the 17^th century, Europeans used yellow-red as the color term. In the 1960s people started calling it hunter orange, thanks to an article in Field & Stream. 

What color would you call this?

Safety orange, hunter orange, Caltrans orange, OSHA orange, the color is government regulated, but nothing I’ve turned up explains why we so often call it blaze orange. Anyone want to hazard a guess?

Safety first!

Book Review: MOON OF THE CRUSTED SNOW

Snow was falling in Northport on Thursday afternoon, sometimes blowing horizontally down Waukazoo Street, with the temperature hovering right around the freezing mark when one of my customers arrived to pick up her special order. The book she had ordered sounded so intriguing that I’d ordered a second copy, and later that afternoon I began reading. 

The central character, Evan Whitesky, up in northern Ontario, is on the trail of a moose.

He had been out since early morning and had been tracking this particular bull since around noon. The fall hunt was drawing to a close, and he still wanted to put more food away. Food from the South was expensive and never so good, or as satisfying, as the meat he could bring in himself.  

- Waubgeshig Rice, Moon of the Crusted Snow

Evan takes pride in providing for his partner and their two young children. An accomplished hunter and fisherman, he has put away enough protein for the winter to have plenty to share with his parents, and when Evan joins his father in cleaning a hide, the two men envision future moccasins. The Whitesky family is better prepared than some others on the reserve for life without hydro power.

A missing satellite signal brings the first hardship: no morning television for the children and no Internet signal for their elders. Electric power lasts a little longer before it too goes out, but people on the remote, isolated reserve have experienced power outages before and know how to cope until the electricity comes back on. They remind each other that the old ones in times past lived without electric lights and television. When there is no signal for their cell phones, some still have landlines — until these, too, fall dead.

It is the beginning of winter, so the Council needs to plan for the future as well as for the immediate situation. Without regular deliveries of fuel and food from the South, they have enough diesel to run a generator until late February, if everyone cooperates in conserving energy, and with foresight they have stockpiled a cache of canned foods for just this sort of emergency, but surviving the immediate emergency is only the first step, and the future is unclear.

Three more cold nights passed. The generator power would only last so long. The chief called another emergency meeting at the band office…. There was still no communication with anyone in the outside world.

The world of the novel is circumscribed from the outset. Its remote backstory is one of displacement — from the Great Lakes region to the south, the people had been forced to the harsher north — the nearer backstory one of dependence on regular deliveries of groceries and fuel. But that was then, and this is now, and the demands of now throw the people back on traditional ways of life and traditional values that some have been practicing all along and others need to learn.

Peshawbestown dancers in Northport

Evan has been going to school, informally, with his elders: learning the people’s language, he and Nicole are teaching it to their children, and, somewhat awkwardly, using the native words he knows interspersed with English, he speaks traditional prayers on the appropriate occasions. His parents’ knowledge of old ways is augmented by stories and lessons given him by the band’s oldest member, a woman in her late eighties. He hunts and shares with those in need, and he is learning to pray.

Aileen brought the flickering orange light under the carefully piled sage in the shell, and the medicine caught fire. She let it burn for a few seconds before blowing it out. Thick grey smoke billowed from the shell….

One-way “contact” with the outside world comes only three times in the novel, in quietly escalating pitch. First, a homecoming: Two young members of the band arrive on snowmobiles, having fled the chaos of the town below, which is also without power or grid infrastructure and where people are panicking and growing violent. Next, an intruder: A large, dangerous-looking white man, Justin Scott, has followed the trail of the returning young men and requests asylum, promising to pull his weight on the hunt. Finally, a while later, four more white refugees turn up and are taken in, nominally by the band, more immediately by Scott. What will the presence of these outsiders, especially the frightening and mysterious Scott, mean in this tight-knit community?

Words and phrases of Anishinaabemowin are a natural fit in Rice’s characters’ speech and are generally translated immediately, so a reader unfamiliar with the language can understand and perhaps learn a little along the way. Dreams are handled naturally, as well, either told by one dreamer to another character or presented without transition but also without confusion. When the legendary windigo enters the story, it does so naturally and quietly at first, without undue drama and literary special effects, so that we are gradually prepared for its full-blown presence.

Waubgeshig Rice’s Moon of the Crusted Snow, like Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel, imagines a world suddenly bereft of electricity, electronic and digital devices, and energy systems we take for granted in our daily lives, but the imagined worlds of the two novels are very different. In the Mandel novel, we roam cities and countryside with groups of wandering Shakespearean players, a “family” brought together by interest and necessity rather than inheritance, and in the end the world as we know it is restored. The people in Rice’s world, many of them related to each other by blood, remain in place. We follow their lives in that place through the first hard winter and leave them in the spring following their second winter, the latter — and the longer-term future — left to our imaginations. 

Both novels, you might say, are stories of post-apocalyptic survival, but Rice’s character Aileen dismisses the apocalyptic notion. She has heard of the notion from young people but puts no credence in it.

“Yes, apocalypse! What a silly word. I can tell you there’s no word like that in Ojibwe. Well, I never heard a word like that from my elders, anyway. 

Evan nodded, giving the elder his full attention. 

“The world isn’t ending,” she went on. “Our world isn’t ending. It already ended. It ended when the Zhaagnaash came into our original home down south on that bay and took it from us. That was our world. When the Zhaagnaash cut down all the trees and fished all the fish and forced us out of there, that’s when our world ended. They made us come all the way up here. This is not our homeland! But we had to adapt and luckily we already knew how to hunt and live on the land. We learned to live here.” 

We’ve always survived, and we always will, Aileen tells Evan. 

An Indigenous People’s History of the United States presents the past of the North American continent from a perspective not taught in schools with curricula set in place by whites, and Moon of the Crusted Snow presents a possible future from a non-white point of view — one possible non-white point of view, of course. That Rice’s compelling story is told in beautiful language with sympathetic characters in a setting not difficult to imagine as the first real snow blows into northern Michigan seared it into my brain, and I recommend it for your winter reading, wherever you live and whatever your ethnic background or connection to the virtual world.

Our reading world is enriched as more voices come to be heard in fiction from different cultural, ethnic, and historical perspectives. 

“What It Is Ain’t Exactly Clear”

What is "It"? Weather? Learning? History? Class?

Weather and Stuff Like That

It was winter in Leelanau County, and then it was spring, unexpectedly and alarmingly early. The air was balmy, daffodils pushed up eagerly on Waukazoo Street, and ticks—ugh!—awoke from their hibernal slumbers. One of them found Sarah, and an assistant at the veterinary clinic said four other pet owners had called about ticks on their dogs already. Freedom from ticks is one of winter’s blessings, and the return of spring, while thrilling, also brings back dread and worry in the form of ticks.

But outraged winter roared back, with fierce winds and nearly a foot of snow (to bury the ticks—yea!) and temperatures plunging down to the single digits overnight (so cold--boo!). The old folk saying, “It’s an ill wind that blows nobody good,” encapsulates the same truth as my philosophy of life in a nutshell: Everything is a double-edged sword, all blessing mixed, fortune a matter of perspective.

Well, then the sun came out again as the mercury rose once more, and those heavy snowdrifts melted so fast they seemed to be saying with a laugh, “We’re sorry! Bad joke!”

But official spring is still two weeks off, and this is Michigan. Anything could happen.

Intellectual Cross-Pollination

My first semester of college (never mind how long ago) was an exciting time, and as I thought this morning about books I’ve been reading the past couple of weeks, I was reminded of that thrilling earlier period of my life. Can I possibly reconstruct my class schedule? Rhetoric (a required freshman class); Voice and Articulation (for my speech and theatre major); an introductory class in Psychology; Botany (big mistake: I’d been aiming for horticulture but didn’t realize the difference; wanted to work with plants, not microscopes); University Choir—but choir was only one credit, so I’m still missing something big, because I carried 19.5 credits that semester.

But of the classes I’ve remembered, what unites them? Not obvious, is it? Voice and Choir seem to go together, and Psychology might well work along with Rhetoric.... All these years later, the web of connections that I felt then, every day, has fallen into dust. All I can say is that all the learning, so much, was coming at me so fast, that it seemed to feed together like one big class.

Oh, here’s one connection I just remembered. A certain school of thought believed emotions were causative and produced actions, while another argued that actions, based on judgments, themselves produced emotions! For example, I run away, and the running produces fear; the faster I run, the more afraid I become. That theory from psychology had clear and obvious potential for the stage and was itself, to one hearing it for the first time, excitingly new and strange and wonderful.

How I managed to bring botanical insights into anything else back then, I cannot say now. Perhaps the connections I made were metaphorical. I’ve been known to do that sort of thing, once typing a book-length manuscript on welding, written by an engineer, and finding in it nothing but poetry about the successes and failures of love!

And So, About My Recent Reading

This winter/spring, it has been Nancy Isenberg’s startling new perspective on American history that set the stage for cross-pollinating streams of book-induced thought, streams first beginning to interweave when, not yet at the end of her book, I began reading the new John James Audubon, by Gregory Nobles. Here are a few ways Isenberg’s focus on class in America transferred, for me, to the story of Audubon in America.

First, there was the whole big question of what constituted science and who would be counted as a scientist. British and European intellectuals in general looked down on early pioneering knowledge efforts in the New World. The European establishment, proud of its focus on ideas and theory, denigrated American practicality. Americans, they thought, could never set aside questions of economic gain, and so the more abstract questions of science, abstractions that Europeans built into entire systems of thought, fell by the wayside. For their part, the Americans, insistent as they were on their intellectual independence, never felt their scientific reputations secure until they had been recognized in Europe.

Europeans, then, backed by tradition and the leisure of old money, held themselves the “pure” scientists. Americans (Audubon was but one example), scrabbling for financial gain and intellectual recognition, were suspect by comparison.

(I find it sadly ironic today that the nineteenth-century American insistence on facts, experiment, and observation over abstract theory seems to have been given up in today’s United States. At least, that is so in our politics, and one wonders about science. Look around. Controversies and divisions in twenty-first century America are all too often fueled entirely by ideology--backed by money, seen as the ideological measuring stick--, and in that, it seems, we have become European—gone back to the Old World way of thinking—I believe, to our peril.)

One nineteenth-century transatlantic argument in natural history was between Buffon in France and Wilson in America and concerned the mutability of species over time. Evolution and its direction.

Buffon did not visit the New World but advanced a theory, nevertheless, that species degenerated in the American climate. Alexander Wilson (against whom Audubon continued to compete long after Wilson’s death) argued that Buffon’s theory flew in the face of facts, and even Thomas Jefferson got into that fray! Here I couldn’t help making the connection between what Buffon saw as “degeneracy” in America and the class distinctions and characterizations of “degeneracy” Americans themselves made against different groups in their own country, so carefully laid out in Isenberg’s history.

Well, that was the theory/fact divide. On a much lower plane was the distinction made in nineteenth-century America between “gentlemen sportsmen” and “pot hunters,” a class distinction if ever there was one.

As Audubon himself might kill thousands of birds in scientific pursuit, so the killing of birds for “sport” was judged pure and unobjectionable, regardless of the enormity of any particular slaughter—and slaughter it frequently was, with no limits to the killing established by law or admitted according to need. Birds were simply moving targets, and the greater the number killed, the more glory to the “sportsman” who brought them down.

But a “pot hunter”? One who killed to feed himself and his family? To market the meat for gain, as a livelihood? Anathema! Motive, you see, was the dividing line, not numbers of birds killed; male bonding a gentlemanly motive for killing, making a living by killing beneath contempt.

Audubon the American woodsman occupied a strange, anomalous position in the class history of the United States. When he traveled downriver by flatboat, paying his fare by shooting birds and game to provision passengers and crew, the term “pot hunter” clearly applied to him, and all his life, from one line of business to another, providing for his family was of paramount concern. On the other hand, both as an artist and as a scientist, he found doors open to him that would have been closed to others of his social rank—even if, in the best American upstart tradition, he did have to push some of those doors open himself.

Making Me Think

“Not our kind” (or "not our class, dear") is the vaguely worded, classically voiced objection signaling the speaker’s belief in his or her superiority. I started to type the phrase in quotes and missed a key the first time around: “not our kin” is the way it came out on the screen. There you are, I thought. Who will we count as part of the “family of man”?

From Isenberg and Nobles, I turned to the fiction of Charlotte Brontë, re-reading Jane Eyre to prepare myself for Sarah Shoemaker’s new novel, Mr. Rochester, which I am now about halfway through, and again and again, in both, class distinctions come to the fore. But those observations can wait for another day.

For now I only observe that the collecting of books is traditionally a leisure class pursuit, while the selling of them locates one clearly “in trade.” It is in this that I am perhaps most stubbornly American: I have always been proud of making my way in the world. Whether cleaning cabins, picking apples, or typing manuscripts, I've never been ashamed of working for a living. And bookselling has given me much more: through my bookstore, I've grown a life.

In the Sands, the Dust, the Snows, and the Mud of Time

[A] track is a temporary thing. Unless the mud goes suddenly hard and turns gradually to stone, tracks do not last. They fade, and as they dry, the wind sweeps them relentlessly level to ease its way across the ground. Tracks exist at the interface where the sky drags along the surface of the earth. They exist for a relatively brief time in a narrow level near the surface of the ground where the wind and weather move across, changing the temperature and building information into the track. Nature conspires to steal even the traces of passage. Most tracks made in the world go under unseen. I try to follow every one I can.
- The Tracker: The true story of Tom Brown, Jr., as told to William Jon Watkins.

One of the many glories of an unpaved road is the way it holds tracks. On our morning walks, Sarah sniffs the grass and weeds at the side of the road: that’s her morning newspaper, her nose telling her who’s been where and what's gone on. While she uses her nose, I depend on my eyes to note the patterns made by a tractor, trails of another, earlier walker, the narrow, winding path of a snail, tiny bird footprints, a place where a deer leaped or stepped daintily across the road or where a coyote trotted or strolled, or the surprise evidence that sandhill cranes have been in the neighborhood. 

Until the rains come, that is, washing the slate clean until the next round of news is printed.

Noting tracks, following trails gives me an anticipation for winter and reminds me of the year I spent an hour a week just sitting outdoors, being in one place.

The more we learned to let our attention wander and come to rest on the thing at hand just often enough to catch the disturbances, the better we became as trackers and as observers of the woods.

I was reading those words one morning out on the front porch, before sunrise, with many different messages coming to me through the window – tapping of a woodpecker, crow’s call, screech of jay, rustle of linden leaves, my attention wandering easily and seamlessly from the words on the page to the outdoor sounds and back again.

Our intrepid Ulysses reading group will be getting together next week to discuss Hemingway’s Nick Adams Stories and to propose our next reading adventure. Now that summer is over, we will probably return to “challenging” books, books for which we feel the need of “a support group,” as one member called it when we first came together to read James Joyce. But first we’ll be talking about Hemingway, and I’m still sorting through my responses on that score. Never mind separating the man from the myth – it’s separating the writer from the myth that concerns me.

A recent New York Times “Bookends” piece asked, “Do We Mistake Inaccessibility for Brilliance?” In other words, if a book is very, very long and difficult to read, do we think it must be a work of genius? Hemingway does not force us to that question, especially with his short stories. His style can hardly be called convoluted.

Out through the front of the tent he watched the glow of the fire when the night wind blew on it. It was a quiet night. The swamp was perfectly quiet. Nick stretched under the blanket comfortably. A mosquito hummed close to his ear. Nick sat up and lit a match. The mosquito was on the canvas, over his head. Nick moved the match quickly up to it. The mosquito made a satisfactory hiss in the flame. The match went out. Nick lay down again under the blankets. He turned on his side and shut his eyes. He was sleepy. He felt sleep coming. He curled up under the blanket and went to sleep.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Nick Adams Stories

Does the simplicity of Hemingway’s style mark it as as a work of genius? Did he, as has often been said, as he himself seems to have claimed, give us a new way to see the world?

In a way, it seems, every writer with a voice of his or her own cannot help giving a new way to see the world, for despite our commonalities and connections and dependencies, despite the cultural grids through which we perceive, each of us must perceive the world for ourselves. I cannot see through your eyes or hear through your ears: what world do I have to offer except the one my own eyes and ears, my own hands and feet and nose and mouth and skin and muscles give me?

So that can’t be the question. The question has to be, instead: Do I see the world differently for having read Hemingway? Do you? Or can any of us only read his work through the myth of Hemingway the writer? 

I’ll leave the questions there for today, but please feel welcome to leave your two cents' worth. It's a quiet, rainy Friday. Sarah and I are at the bookstore. What are you doing with this only September 18, 2015, of your life?

Two Poets of the Earth

David wondered aloud if Jim Harrison and Wendell Berry knew each other, and my initial response was that they would have little in common. Harrison, former long-time Leelanau County resident, has always been given to excessive eating and drinking and to recounting wildness and excess in his novels, whereas Berry’s novels, with their noble and dignified rural characters, seem to come to us from another age. Harrison has lived in several different parts of the United States (Michigan, New York, Arizona, Montana), while Berry is rooted in Kentucky farmland and his small local community. But both men write poetry that tugs at readers’ hearts because it so clearly comes directly out of the poets’ deepest feelings.

Here is a poem from the new Wendell Berry collection:

“A Standing Ground”   

      Flew fro the prees, and dwelle with sothfastnesse; 

     Suffyce unto thy thyng, though hit be smal . . .* 

However just and anxious I have been, 

I will stop and step back 

from the crowd of those who may agree 

with what I say, and be apart. 

There is no earthly promise of life or peace 

but where the roots branch and weave 

their patient silent passages in the dark; 

uprooted, I have been furious without an aim. 

I am not bound for any public place, 

but for ground of my own 

where I have planted vines and orchard trees, 

and in the heat of the day climbed up 

Into the healing shadow of the woods. 

Better than any argument is to rise at dawn 

and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup.

And here, from Harrison’s Songs of Unreason (2011), is one of his:

“Our Anniversary”  

I want to go back to that wretched old farm 

on a cold November morning eating herring 

on the oil tablecloth at daylight, the hard butter 

in slivers and chunks on rye bread, gold-colored 

homemade butter. Fill the woodbox, Jimmy. 

Clots of cream in the coffee, hiss and crackle 

of woodstove. Outside it’s been the hardest freeze 

yet but the heels still break through into the earth. 

A winter farm is dead and you want to head for the woods. 

In the barn the smell of manure and still-green hay 

hit the nose with the milk in the metal pails. 

Grandpa is on the last of seven cows, 

tugging their dicklike udders, a squirt in the mouth 

for the barn cat. My girlfriend loves another 

and at twelve it’s as if all the trees have died. 

Sixty years later seven hummingbirds at the feeder, 

miniature cows in their stanchions sipping liquid sugar, 

we are fifty years together. There are still trees.

Berry, a farmer who comes from farmers, and Harrison, his whole life shaped by camping, fishing, and hunting, both have knowledge and love of nature that only comes from years outdoors. Living in the country, close to the earth, they have first-hand experience with hard physical labor and its satisfactions. Each continues in a long marriage to his first, original, and only wife. Nature, labor, and marriage, then, provide solid ground, fertile soil from which to bring forth poems.

*From Chaucer’s “The Flower and the Leaf”

Forest, Farm and Wildlife, From the Perspective of 100 Years Ago (More or Less)

The forest is as beautiful as it is useful. The old fairy tales which spoke of it as a terrible place are wrong. No one can really know the forest without feeling the gentle influence of one of the kindliest and strongest parts of nature. From every point of view it is one of the most helpful friends of man. Perhaps no other natural agent has done so much for the human race and has been so recklessly used and so little understood.

- A Primer of Forestry, Part I—The Forest, by Gifford Pinchot (1900)

The grasses are of great importance in our agriculture.... A feature of the grasses which makes them valuable pasture plants is the location of the growing point of the leaf. This is near the base, so that the tip may be grazed or clipped off several times and the leaf still continue to grow. The forage grasses add variety to the rotation, supplying crops which may be used as meadows or pastures, or short-season crops such as millet, which may be used to occupy the land when an earlier-planted crop fails. The perennial varieties add a mass of vegetable matter to the soil. They thus improve its physical condition and their decay increases the yield of annual crops which follow. They also form a cover which prevents the loss of fertility by washing and other means of erosion.

- Field Crops (revised), by A. D. Wilson & C. W. Warburton (1912, 1918, 1923)

I have twenty-seven guns—and I have used them all. I stand condemned as having done more than my share toward extermination. But that does not lessen the fact that I have learned, and in learning I have come to believe that if boys and girls and men and women could be brought into the homes and lives of wild birds and animals as their homes are made and their lives are lived we would all understand at last that wherever a heart beats it is very much like our own in the final analysis of things.

- James Oliver Curwood, in his preface to Baree, Son of Kazan (orig. pub.1917)