This week a young woman from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, volunteered to come and work on our farm. It was part of her summer course requirements, to gain some real world experience with various livestock. In addition to helping Cindy castrate pigs, she got hands-on involvement with worming a lamb, shoveling manure, setting up electric fencing, and assessing the health of one of the beehives.

Suggested readings

Her presence here brought to my mind the only other vet I know who attended vet school in Scotland, James Herriot — the vet whose memory often prompts a joke that everything I know about veterinary skills I learned from him. Cindy and I both loved the Herriot books and British television series, a fond look at the Yorkshire Dales in the inter-war years of the 1930s.

The stories revolve around a bright-eyed new veterinarian, Herriot, who joins the village practice of the irascible and eccentric Siegfried Farnon. The practice is rounded out later by Sigfried’s mischievous younger brother, Tristan. One of the recurring threads of the series is Siegfried’s penchant for leaving tools behind on farm visits. In our own life, when either Cindy or I am about to leave, say, a pair of fence pliers on a fence post, we look at the other, point to our eyes and then to the tool and, channeling Siegfried as he lectures James Herriot, mouth the words, “I’m visualizing where they are. That is why I never lose anything.”

The vet student’s visit and the Herriot connection had me thinking back to our decision to move to the country, and wondering about the various influences that prompted our relocation 16 years ago. Each of us likes to think we are the agent of our own life, operating independently of cultural currents. But we also all know this to be untrue.

Cindy and I lived in and restored an early 20^th century Victorian house in Knoxville before our exodus from the city. We really had not paid attention to the literature of farming, had no heightened awareness of the local food movement, had never heard of Joel Salatin and had only a passing knowledge of Wendell Berry, put in a poorly thought out and maintained summer garden each year. Still, one day, I said more or less out of the blue, “Hey, let’s find some land.” 

For many Sundays we simply got in the car and drove, usually up Washington Pike, into the wilder country of Grainger and Union counties, areas that have a fair amount in common with the topography of Herriot’s vet practice. We developed a penchant for abandoning friends at parties and making early departures from dinners to go to the library or bookstore to look at farming books.

One memorable night we left a party late and drove in a snowstorm to see a farm for sale in the north end of Grainger County, a full hour on winding two-lane roads, with only an occasional farmhouse or small town to give evidence of settlement. Around midnight the storm passed and the sky cleared. A full moon illuminated the scene as we walked the snow-covered pastures of the old farm.

Another drive, around a bend in the road near House Mountain, we stopped and helped a farmer get a bull calf back inside a pasture as the mother anxiously paced the fence line bawling.

Over these drives we discussed what type of farm we wanted, what kind of life we wanted. It didn’t take many midnight outings in the snow and stops to help a farmer before we determined that this life was the one we wanted to live each day. And although I may not always be able to find those misplaced pliers, the life I visualized 16 years ago is exactly the one I found and still live today.

Follow