Sun golds ripening
Having been here on the farm for two months, I have started to settle in and take the time to think about things I rarely thought about before. Nothing captures this change more than enjoying the fruits of labor. The obvious example was Sunday’s harvest of sun gold tomatoes with Peter, Julie, and Matthew (who is home with us for August.) Seeing the ten tomatoes on a vine growing and ripening in succession with the ones closest to the stem turning gold first while the others down the line wait for their turn to absorb the nutrients and be ready for our pint containers. You want to pick them in an upward motion allowing the attached stem to stay connected to the harvested fruit, this increases their shelf life. Watching the crate fill up with pint and quart containers is very satisfying, as is munching on those sweet morsels, but I’ve been feeling equal satisfaction turning garden rows overtaken by invasive weeds in this ridiculously wet summer into a place where the things we want to be growing have the chance to do so. Mucking the chicken barn makes me weirdly happy—shoveling up the chicken shit and soiled hay, depositing it on the compost pile, then laying a fresh bale on the floor and in the laying boxes for these reliable producers of morning breakfast. The same is true of spending an hour pulling wild grapevines out of overtaken trees or bushes and finding a young maple more beautifully shaped than I expected. Then there are the ten barns, and the pleasure of bringing sufficient order to corners of barns still full of ancient pieces of wood and equipment. The previous farmers were resourceful, never throwing out anything that still had potential utility and like them I struggle with getting rid of any piece of wood that is hand hewn, has the patina of years or the authenticity of draft horse gnawing.
The tomato-pickers
You get the point, after a lifetime of working on projects that took one, two, even ten years, there is a newfound thrill seeing the fruit of my labor every single day. And the pleasure of being physically tired at the end of the day leading to a night of sound sleep, life rhythms have certainly changed. These simple pleasures got me thinking about a pastoral lit class I took in college where we read 20th century works like Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, and Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac (books I am sure will come up in future blogs), but part of the course was devoted to the creation of the agrarian myth and the idea that the essence of virtue flowed from the self-sufficiency of working your own plot of land. This myth, which flowered in the later part of the 18th century just when our farm was first planted, was in many ways central to the formation of American society and its values. Thomas Jefferson wrote often about yeoman farmers, living independent lives on small family farms, calling them “the most precious part of the state.” “Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens. They are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous, and they are tied to their country and wedded to its liberty and interests by the most lasting bonds.” –Thomas Jefferson to John Jay, 1785. (This whole set of ideas, of course, elides the reality that in many parts of the country the laborers that made farms prosperous were in bondage and hardly independent citizens.) And I started rereading another book from that course, Hector St. John de Creveceur’s Letters from an American Farmer, a very influential book in the late 1700’s where he praised America for having no history of feudalism, no monarch or aristocracy, a society centered on the ethics of the land and the people who worked it, calling America the “most perfect society now existing in the world.” Ben Franklin, hardly a man given to manual labor, wrote “the only honest way” for a nation to prosper is when “man receives a real increase of the seed thrown into the ground, a kind of continuous miracle….a reward for his innocent life and virtuous industry.”
The glories of Post and beam
Photo by Ivan Arreguin Toft
Having shaped some of the Constitutional debates and much discussed in elite circles, the agrarian myth became part of the popular psyche and political folklore in the early 19th century when it seemed there was nothing more compelling than having been raised on a farm, or in a log cabin. To this day political candidates tout their agrarian roots, real or imagined. This nationalist ideology made the farmer a symbol of the new nation and it got me wondering what the farmers who were turning this land into a farm in the late 18th century thought of these romanticized ideas. When I think of all they had to do in a day, a week, a year, it is hard to imagine they spent much time thinking about their role as national symbols, the yeoman farmer. Self-sufficiency was all they probably strove for given that there likely was not much of a local market for what they were growing in this sparsely populated region where a good portion of the people living here were doing the same thing. Even though they were only six miles from Hudson, and the Hudson River offered potential access from there to NYC, it is hard to imagine there were many roads through the forests in this newly settled area.
I bet there were many more people living in cities like NYC, Philly or D.C. thinking about the virtues of the yeoman farmer than the actual farmers who had a lot else on their mind. But I am sure that at the end of a day of plowing or harvesting or barn raising, those farmers had moments of pleasure looking out on the fruit of the day’s labor. They looked across these same fields, and while their labor was different than mine, I bet that we had the same feeling at the end of the day.
