Tag Archives: Work

Meaningful Work

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Bush-hogging the hill pasture in preparation for winter, I came across a large buck with an impressive antler spread. He leapt in front of the tractor, then bounded over a fence into a neighbor’s field, which, unbeknownst to him, was a no-kill farm, a safe zone where he could, if he only stayed put, live out his entire life without danger. I then watched him run across the field and jump another fence, and he was gone. Another circuit around the hill and I saw a couple of trucks pull up at the farm. I headed down and greeted the men arriving to cut down four massive trees alongside our drive.

The trees, one white and three red oaks, needed to be felled expertly to avoid nearby power lines and a neighbor’s house. The men had to climb 60 feet and, from an eagle’s perch, drop the limbs. Once the upper limbs were cut, they laid the trunks across the drive and cut them into 10-foot-long sawlogs. Ultimately, the largest logs will be milled into lumber, the crowns mulched, the limbs cut into firewood, the stumps drilled and plugged with oyster mushroom spawn. Logging 007

Dancing high above the ground with running chainsaws is dangerous work, but it was done with real purpose, joy, and competence, something that seems at odds with the lethargy of many young men I encounter. It’s a lethargy that seems endemic: man-boys extending their adolescence well into adulthood, living at home, gliding into their thirties without experiencing responsibility.

Not so long ago 80 percent of American high schools offered vocational training. But in just a 20-year span those totals were reversed, including at our own rural school. Now boys (and girls, too) enter biological adulthood without getting any practical schooling in crafts that formerly allowed them to earn a living and, more importantly, self-respect. The fallout from this lack of preparation for honorable and satisfying work: Young men like my neighbor who drive 40 miles to Knoxville to work in a call center, selling jewelry to elderly women.

For reasons not fully understood, we continue to entertain the idea that all youth are destined for college. Without any statistical evidence, I’d still hazard a guess that the average electrician, plumber, or surveyor out-earns a significant portion of college grads.

My gut feeling that self-worth comes from tangible outcomes, whether raising livestock, felling trees, or wiring a barn, is backed up by personal experience — my own father’s landscape, for example, where a lifetime as a construction engineer allows him daily to see the evidence of an industrious life.

Matthew Crawford echoes the same sentiment in his insightful book Shop Class as Soulcraft:  “The satisfaction of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence has been known to make a man quiet and easy. He can simply point: the building stands, the car now runs, the lights are on. Boasting is what a boy does, because he has no real effect on the world.”

Should the young men fed into our current system, one that devalues particular competence and focused physical activity, descend into a lifetime of malaise and meaningless boasting, it will not come as a surprise. Nor will there be any surprise should those rural young men who find employment in crafts, trades, or farming have a stronger sense of purpose and self-worth.

As the day ended, the cutting crew got in their pickups. They grinned, waved, and drove away. Another job well done but without ceremony.

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Reading this weekend: Marcus Terentius Varro’s, On Agriculture.

 

Small Town Resilience

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Last week a colleague spent three hours advancing 15 miles in the cancerous landscape of Atlanta.

Around the same time, I was commuting in central Missouri down a two-lane highway through a largely depopulated land of corn and beef cattle ornamented with the occasional red-brick one-room schoolhouse sitting in a grove of trees. The schoolhouses, long empty, were universally well kept, no broken windows, grass mowed—buildings cared for symbolic of the hope or expectation that they might once again serve a purpose.

The housing stock was older, yet well cared for and solid. But it was a lonely landscape of older couples and few children. I drove past the occasional activity of men in distant fields loading hay onto trailers using tractors built to accomplish much, the work done with such little effort as would have stunned even their grandfathers. Little effort and fewer people, freeing up the children and grandchildren to follow the classic road to town and city, a well-worn path since the ancient world, but one accelerated by our fossil-fueled innovations.

I stopped for the night in Boonville, Missouri, on the banks of the Missouri River. Boonville is not a prosperous town. Its trail of empty strip mall architecture dribbles from the outer fringe of the town’s core to the interstate, signaling a raising of the drawbridge, a calculated retreat against a yet unacknowledged enemy. But the core is still vibrant with neighborhoods, small-town hardware and furniture stores, plumbing and electrical businesses, an elegant restored hotel, a diner, and a bar and grill.vfiles38877

That evening I walked from the old hotel to the bar and grill, a place called Maggie’s, for dinner. The Midwest small-town bar and grill is unique. It is the genuine third place Ray Oldenburg spoke about. Warm and friendly, with people of all ages and classes: farmers, workers and professionals, town and country, producer and consumer. These gathering spots are spread across the agricultural heartland. They are the glue to the community, providing face-to-face time between neighbors. Time not gained in a traffic jam.

I am not naively asserting a rural idyll, without strife, tension, unemployment, severed families and the ills of too much idle time. Yet the small town is fundamentally more resilient, resilient because of its smallness and its proximity to productive land. Rural communities, with their face-to-face interactions, have provided the template for human existence for the past thousands of years.

Communities within a megacity are a mere echo of that life. They can nourish and sustain in the ascendancy, but their larger host survives only as wealth is pumped in from the outside world. When the pump is turned off, the decline is inevitable and rapid. Consider Rome, from a city of a million to a village of thousands in the space of mere generations. Or the specter of Detroit, reduced by half in one generation.

Perhaps these Boonvilles, these freshly painted one-room schoolhouses, these Midwestern pubs are the starter-cultures for the wort, the yeast for the fermentation required to restart the small farm, small-town life, a way to redirect the human trajectory from the cancerous growth to the healthy organism, from the complex to the comprehensible?

The cities like Atlanta in our landscape offer nothing but a promise of continued sprawl, congestion, and three hours and 15 miles stalled in the present. And if history is the judge, they offer us nothing in their inevitable decline.

For all the problems in that rural Missouri landscape, it is still one of latent hope. The problems it faces are fundamentally local and scalable. And if the survival of our future allowed bets, mine would be on the Boonvilles and rural counties in this land.

 

The Kelly Pear

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Kelly Pear: this is the most prolific fruit tree in our orchard. It reliably produces 4-5 bushels of fruit a year. I bought this tree from an old orchardist in Ball Camp, GA some sixteen years ago. He specialized in old Southern varieties of apples and pears. I’ve not found any other reference to this variety. It never achieves a softness that would be good for eating fresh. But it cooks well and makes a nice perry.

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Reading this weekend: Pawpaw: in search of America’s forgotten fruit, by Andrew Moore.

The Blood on My Hands

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I laid out my shotguns and deer rifle on a folding table outside the kitchen window. With fall around the corner, it was time to clean and oil the guns. It’s a methodical process that is satisfying to undertake on objects that are a beautiful marriage of design and utility. Using a kit made for the purpose, I rammed the cleaning rods through the barrels, oiled the working parts, and rubbed the wood stocks till they shone. I finished just as guests arrived for dinner, returning the guns to the cabinet as they walked up the drive.Guns 002

Growing up in Louisiana I, alongside my father and brother, hunted and fished year round. It was a rare week that did not find me crouching in a duck blind, running trot lines, crabbing, or catching crawfish. Game, fresh- and saltwater fish, shrimp, and oysters easily provided five dinner meals out of seven for our household. Staying up late at night cleaning and gutting fish, setting the alarm every two hours to run the trot-line, waking up at 3 a.m. to get to the duck blind or be on the open gulf by sunrise, all were part of the landscape of my childhood.

Mine was the hunting and fishing of providence, not of the trophy hunter. It was the experience of a profoundly masculine world. From the catching, shooting, and cleaning to, in many cases, the cooking, it was a culture of men putting food on the table for their families. It wasn’t needed in the middle class home of my father—he certainly could have provided all of our meat needs from the grocery store—but it was a lifestyle I shared with most of my friends growing up.

There was always an exhilaration in making a good shot or setting the hook on a large fish. It provided, and still does, a sense of accomplishment that is part evolutionary and large part tribal. The camaraderie of men in camp, the solitude of the hunt, being on the water by myself, or with my father, the rituals of killing and of eating, each shaped who I am as a person.

Perhaps it is counterintuitive, but killing another living creature can teach a person a lot about nature. Putting that act of killing in its “proper place” reminds us of where we came from and where we belong. And remembering our place in a natural order may be the best way to save this planet.

A detractor could argue against the killing, the male role in that culture, and I would listen and perhaps agree in part. But my defense is simple and straightforward: I prefer to be the one with blood on his hands. I believe it is a stance that makes me more, not less, sensitive to the value of life. It is the same reason I butcher poultry and livestock. It seems more honest.

Some may be shaking their heads right now. But as we collectively pile into our cars, while away our hours shopping, allow our kids to grow up without seeing the light of day as they game their way into perpetual adolescence, move from air-conditioned office to air-conditioned vehicle to air-conditioned home, with all that those actions entail to the planet, we might ask ourselves a hard question: who are we kidding?

Whether vegetarian or meat eater, just because we do not pull the trigger or set the hook, we are all culpable in the killing that our lifestyle requires.

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Reading this weekend: The Art of Stillness: adventures in going nowhere by Pico Iyer. And, Journey of  the Universe by Swimme and Tucker.

Harvest Season

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If there is a single harvest season, this is it. Exceptionally heavy rains in July have rejuvenated the pastures and put the garden on a course of steroids. The corn in neighboring fields seems to double in height weekly. Harvest time adds just one more layer of work to a busy diverse small farm.

On Saturday we had a father-son drive from an hour away to buy Sussex chicks. Our Speckled Sussex hens are likely to go broody anytime of the year but winter. And although we really shouldn’t be surprised after all this time, we’re still stopped in our tracks to see a hen walk from an outbuilding, chicks tumbling around her feet. Many weeks we have an ad out to sell chicks, pullets or cockerels. Both the birth and the selling of the chicks is a type of harvest.

Wendell Berry remarked that his dad’s farm advice was, “Sell something every week.” It’s a reminder that the farm constantly needs to be generating some income. Balancing the outgoing with the incoming is always a struggle. Our farm has its conventional income—selling meat from our hogs, cattle and sheep—and its self-sufficiency “income”—gardening, orchards, small fruits, poultry, firewood and lumber, and foraging and hunting.

It is a point of pride that we haven’t bought meat at a grocery store in 16 years. Providing for ourselves adds joy and confidence in ways that are hard to measure. Providing for customers is a way to pay the bills and to feel valued for the life we live. Don’t under estimate that latter, for without the steady stream of people raving about our pork, beef or mutton, the soul of the farm would drift away into a purgatory.

Throughout July, we have been selling lambs as breeding stock and marketing mutton; foraging wild mushrooms; harvesting tomatoes, eggplant, garlic, onions, and peppers; canning produce and cutting hay for the winter; and selling the odd batch of chicks.

We spent part of yesterday, the second time this season, canning tomatoes. Forty pints is the minimum to get us through winter. We have 36 on the shelves now and can easily double that amount in the next couple of weeks.

That is if one wants to avoid the shame of purchasing at the grocery store what could have provided by one’s own efforts. There is a point each winter when the hens fail to provide. That’s when I find myself in the grocery, skulking around like a man buying pornography, with a dozen eggs clutched close at hand. That perceived shame is the special preserve of the small farm.

Harvest continued today with honey from the hives, a small amount for our own use, about 30 pounds. That may seem like a lot, but between making mead and using honey for most of our sugar needs, it seems to disappear fast.Honey 3 001

We still call these months the harvest season. But if I approached the term with the right mindset, I would say that “harvest season” is really 12 months long. Even in the deep of winter, the land and the farm provide. Cutting and storing firewood, hammering plugs of oyster mushrooms into stumps, bringing in armloads of turnip greens on a cold December day—all are acts as surely a part of harvest as the plucking and eating of a ripe tomato in July.

Regardless of the “when,” a careful harvest, with work and planning, is renewable, an object lesson in resource use we would all be wise to learn and relearn.

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Reading this weekend: Peter May’s The Blackhouse and Todd Openheimer’s The Flickering Mind.