Ghosts at Moonrise

It’s been a homestead weekend on the farm — rendering fatback into lard, salting down pork bellies for bacon, harvesting crabapples and then making rosemary-crabapple jelly, all capped by watching a magnificent full moon rise over the hill pasture.

As I watch the moon emerge, I glimpse the shard of a boyhood memory. Sitting on the bank of Contraband Bayou, a mile back through the dark woods of the old Barbe property, I am 10 years old, and fishing for alligator gar around midnight, the light of another full moon laying out a path across the sluggish water.

The years between 8 and 12 are the best for boys. It’s a time when they are no longer kids (at least in their own eyes) and before the awkward teenage years of figuring out how to fit in. When they are just old enough to be gone all day during the summer and often out at night without occasioning a search party. When parents, glad to be shed of them, give them greater latitude to roam, and when any hints of what adulthood might entail are only lightning strikes over the horizon.

That the character of a boy’s life depends on the locale and time frame as much as on his parents and family, I am fully aware. It also depends on his reading habits. For there is a vast literature for boys (or there was, before literary sanitizers came into general use) to guide him in the spirit of adventure.

That literature, as much as the era and place, steered the ways in which I lived my youth. Days spent building forts, riding bikes across town on quiet streets, exploring the length and breadth of the bayou in a beat-up jon boat, running trotlines all night or fishing for bass all day. Alas, guided by such books, filching my father’s pipe tobacco and, from an old pipe found in a ditch, smoking it with my friends until the tears ran down our faces.

Tom Sawyer (he of the pipe instruction, among other wholesome activities) and other boyhood literary heroes loomed large in my imagination. Theirs were the templates for a well-lived life. I read scores of books during those years, and of them, five were my bibles: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Twain), Rascal: A Memoir of a Better Era (North), Ice Falcon (Ritchie), Rifles for Watie (Keith), and My Side of the Mountain (George).

How to survive being lost in a cave and then attend your own funeral. Build a canvas canoe in your own living room. Befriend a raccoon. Stow away with Vikings and explore medieval Iceland. Serve on both sides in the Civil War. Fall in love with a Cherokee girl. Run away from the city and live in the Catskills. All the life lessons I imagined I needed were found in those pages.

Indeed, each has shaped me in ways that I cannot fully touch, conjuring the ghost of memory, of innocence, of adventure, of a boy. One that even now I glimpse from time to time, usually, often, in the light of a full moon rising over the farm.

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Reading this past week: Three John Sandford mysteries, Holy Ghost, Bloody Genius, Neon Prey

Don’t Come Back In Until Dinner

I grew up in a household with strict rules. Foremost among them: Get out of the house. When not in school we were expected to be outside. We spent our days doing chores and fishing, looking for pirate treasure along Contraband Bayou or building forts, swimming in ponds or going to the library. Whether on bikes or on the bayou, that landscape was full of kids. On days spent inside because of rain we would play board games or read, watching TV was off limits.

Today, where our farm is located, in East Tennessee, the countryside is mostly empty. You see the occasional activity outdoors, usually men on tractors. But only once in sixteen years have I seen a kid cross the seventy acres of our farm. Never have I had to yell at a kid for building a fort on our land. No kid has ever darkened the door to ask permission to hunt rabbit or squirrel, or fish in our ponds.

Our companions in this landscape

Our companions in this landscape

There are homes nearby where I have never observed a person outside. Cars appear and disappear in the driveways. But the owners are not once glimpsed. I’ve cut a hay field; long hours, three days in a row and never spotted a person outside a neighbor’s house. A house, I add, that often had four cars in the drive.

While baling that hay on the final day, I saw one of the cars start up and move down the driveway. It drove the 150 feet to the mailbox. A youthful arm extended out of the driver’s window and collected the mail. The car reversed back up to the house.

It would be tempting to ridicule the generation of kids who spend their lives in darkened rooms, zombied in screen-time with their gadgets. But their parents, who by example, are equally to blame. With all of the challenges we face to our civilization and planet, it seems somehow dishonorable to while away one’s life in such an unproductive manner.

That the rural landscape is empty in the very place where hands and eyes are needed is troubling. Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson refer to the benefit of “eyes to acres”. They mean that the understanding and the correction of problems in our landscape begin by an intimate daily familiarity.

In a way, it seems like a modern day Highland clearance; where blame rests partly with forces that have devalued the local in favor of the global, removing those eyes-to-acres. But it is a blame shared by us for our willing collusion in that withdrawal, as passive consumers of this life.

Understanding our land begins with engagement, even if it is just a kid rambling along on an idle afternoon across a pasture and a wooded hill.

Maybe our inner mom needs to say, “Get out of the house! Don’t come back in until dinner.”

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Postscript: Hopefully the weather is finally breaking towards spring. Our final crop of lambs are being born, we have piglets to castrate and potatoes to plant. So the navel gazing tone to this blog should return to more mundane topics of the farm in the coming weeks…or not.

The Romance of a Canebrake

A canebrake loomed large in my imagination as a kid. In the books I read, my forbearers would hack their way through canebrakes for days, endure snakes, elusive and hostile Indians, finally emerging into a river valley of rich and rolling pastures, where they would settle. Images of heroic Scotch-Irish explorers, pioneers and dashing pirates peopled all kid’s literature in those increasingly remote days (of my childhood).

I’d head off as a kid to the Barbe Property, a wild wood and swamp at the end of Holly Hill Rd., with my machete, and hack my way through the undergrowth. Since my machete was a wooden stick I really just sort of mashed my way through the undergrowth. Only to emerge out on the bayou staring at petrochemical plants across the ship channel. But, as a kid, I was never disappointed. There was mystery here, layers of history and days to explore.

Those woods were rich with romance and history. Contraband Bayou, where Jean Lafitte roamed and reportedly buried his treasure, served as a border to the east and north. One summer we discovered a rotting hulk of a shrimp boat and whiled away a week or two navigating it over the Spanish Main in pursuit of loot and captives.

The ability to create play and not have it manufactured and its loss must have an impact on our culture. Perhaps it is to the good, shove a game-boy in their hands, teach them to find entertainment only in what you provide and you produce a new generation of compliant consumer citizens. But, I digress.

Mr. Kyle and I stood in the remains of an old canebrake off of Johnson Valley (around the corner from Possum Trot). It measured thirty yards across wedged up against a creek. As we cut beanpoles for our gardens a history of sorts was in the air. Here, my English friend Phil and his wife, Malley had helped me cut beanpoles three years ago during their visit. Cindy and I had joined Mr. Kyle six years ago cutting poles in this stand that continually replenished itself. Mr. Kyle had cut beanpoles here for 60 plus years and residents of the valley had been cutting from this patch for the past two hundred years.

We had driven down Johnson Valley and turned into a drive. Asking the permission of the owner before driving down an access lane along the creek bottom. Mr. Kyle had lived in the house on the property with his family from 1941-47. He named off the dozen or so families that had owned that small farm over the years as we bumped along the lane.
We cut down our poles tied them together, left my images of pioneers and pirates there among the cane, and headed back to the farm.

Today the Barbe Property has been cleared and turned into a super Wal-Mart or a Target, a housing development, and a casino. And, I have to wonder, do kid’s still see Lafitte’s lanterns swing in the fog as his treasure is buried? I hope so.