Greetings Friends and Neighbors,
The Meadow beyond the house window blushes to whites and yellows, purples and reds—Bedstraw, Daisy, Vetch, Buttercup, Red Clover, Milkweed. Rising above the rest, the whimsical flowers stalks of Reed’s Canary Grass bow and bend in step with a steady North breeze. This riot of life, cut and dried, baled and stacked in the hayloft of the old barn, will sustain the Cows and Sheep—and thereby the Humans—through the Winter. Miraculous. In the corner of the Meadow, above the house, grow the tentative beginnings of a garden. The first round of transplants struggled mightily in the depleted Soil there, so we’ve begun re-planting into holes filled with shovelfuls of compost from the fifty-year-old pile of cow manure behind the barn.
The barn sports a working manure trolley, a system that pre-dated mechanized gutter cleaners. I have seen pieces of track hanging in several old barns but never before have I found a trolley in working order. The pan on this one is rusted out, which we will repair before Winter comes. If you haven’t seen a manure trolley, picture a 50-gallon drum cut in half the long way, open-side up, suspended from a track mounted to the ceiling by a geared chain which allows you to raise and lower it by hand. Lowered, one can easily shovel manure from the concrete gutter behind the cows. Once full, you need only to raise the pan and give it a push. The track runs out the East end of the barn through a specially designed door, at which point the track becomes a cable tensioned to a steel beam about thirty yards from the barn. Once the trolley—carrying its heavy, sloppy load—reaches the end of the line the force of impact trips a lever and it dumps. In this spot today the ground rises to a chest-high pile, and the Grass and Nettles growing on that pile stretch skyward with remarkable vigor. This is the compost that we shovel into the old, still-serviceable Farm wheelbarrow and roll down the path to the house garden. And with some luck, a good amount of pleading, a few songs of thanks, and some well-timed watering, this fifty-year-old compost may just nudge these new transplants skyward as well. And by this mysterious alchemy the sauerkraut crock and the root cellar could be provisioned. And the Humans sustained. The generosity of those who came before shines bright here.
Imagine you are sitting in the international departure lounge, on route to a techno-utopian future. The surroundings are short on aesthetic or cultural appeal, but, luckily you’ve got a handheld device to transport your attention elsewhere while you wait. You’re an average modern North American, in other words. That doesn’t make you a bad person, simply one born into a time and place where the future is the obvious direction of travel, the only way out of the mess that seems to be getting messier by the hour. The boarding pass in your hand says “Anywhere But Here.” Wendell Berry describes the situation thusly:
And so we have made of the future, not a coming time, but a limitless vacuity in which we elaborate our fears and fantasies, to which we defer payment of our perhaps unpayable ecological debts, and where we store our most lethal and enduring “wastes.” (The Art of Loading Brush, 2017)
An abandoned farm like this one might just tap you on the shoulder and gently turn your gaze around and down, toward a specific patch of ground, where real people have attempted to live and even to live well. Despite a decades-long break in lived continuity here at Goose Landing, the ways in which those specific people lived in this specific place left enduring traces and tracks—clues to a mostly-forgotten time. And a pile of compost and a working manure trolley. I am ever-grateful for the reminder from a wise teacher that, grammatically speaking, the opposite of remember is not “to forget.” The consequence of forgetting upon the culture—the conversation between humans and the places from which they draw their lives—is more accurately described by the word dismemberment. Take a look around the departure lounge—or at the newsfeed flashing on the screens hanging from the ceiling—and you will notice signs of dismemberment everywhere.
When I first stepped foot on this abandoned Farm last Summer—ducking under the chain across the driveway at sunrise—I parted the tangle of vines obscuring the back entrance to the old barn and wrestled the door open. I’ve since cut back the brush, and the Cows walk through this same door each morning. Stepping inside the barn last summer, I entered another time. On a stool in the manger just to my right I found two small yellow slips of paper, their faded ink just barely legible. Artificial insemination records, or breeding slips. One Guernsey Cow bred on July 23rd, 1966. The other slip records a second breeding of the same Cow twenty-one days later, on August 11th. The farmer’s name: Giles Schermerhorn. This must have been the last year the family milked cows here, and from the looks of the barn those slips had been sitting in that spot since that day. I have since learned that Giles and his wife Caroline Adgate Schermerhorn died in the seventies and left the Farm to their two sons, Henry and Adgate. Neither son lived at home at that point, but Henry returned form his job as a forest ranger in Oregon for a couple of months each Summer to care for the place. Upon retirement, he moved back here to live out his final years, until he died in the house in 2004. Unmarried with no children, Henry left the Farm to his brother Adgate’s sons, John and Jan Schermerhorn. No humans lived here from Henry’s death in 2004 until eleven weeks ago. All of this is what I mean by a decades-long break in lived continuity.
Mid-April. I’ve been living at the Farm for a few brief but intense weeks. Lambing season has come and gone. Topsy and her sister Tigger—two Jersey Cows brought over from Vermont—are due to come into heat so I inquire about local breeding service. It turns out that the larger breeding company recently decided to stop servicing small farms off the main route. So my neighbors at the Creamery have begun to breed their own Cows, but a few months in they have struggled to get cows pregnant. Ashlee suggests I try an older man named Kevin, who breeds for that larger company but loves the small farms. Kevin answers the phone when I call and generously offers to come breed Topsy and Tigger after his normal work day. Wet April Snow greases the drive on the day Kevin pulls into the Farm. He is clearly taken by this place in the same way I was when I first saw it. “Wow, this is quite something,” he says as I show him around. Kevin has visited more barns than almost anyone, and he’s never seen a working manure trolley either. I show him the two yellow breeding slips. He strains his eyes to read the fading ink, trying to make out the letters of the breeder’s looping signature. “Gary Long,” Kevin exclaims. “That’s who taught me how to breed cows. Gary is still alive, lives nearby. Do you want me to try to put you in touch with him?” You can probably guess what I said. And you can be sure that I will write to tell you of the conversation I have with Gary once I pay him a visit.
Two months go by. Summer approaches. The hayloft of the old barn fills slowly with bales of fragrant hay. The final field, the one blushing with colorful wildflowers, lays mown and raked into rows beyond the window where I write. Morning’s first light ignites the dawn chorus, and they embroider the place once again with song. I am fairly sure it’s not the future they’re singing for. The haying effort this Spring has brought something disturbing into view. Since that Guernsey Cow bred in August of 1966 left the Farm, the fields have been cut each year and sold for feed or bedding. It is entirely possible that was the last year any manure was put back on these fields. The old compost pile behind the barn remembers a time when people understood themselves to be responsible for maintaining the fecundity of their own home place, drawing little from elsewhere. In very practical terms, all of the hay cut from the fields was turned into manure and urine by the Cows and Sheep who lived and died here, and given back to the fields by the Humans who lived and died here. The manure trolley greased the wheels of this arrangement. Wendell distinguishes this work of provisioning from living for the future.
Provision is the sum of our ways of securing from the earth our food, clothing and shelter—and of taking proper care of the sources of these things in nature and in human culture….I don’t believe we can escape the necessity of provision and providing. Except for that, I think we need to restrain and reduce our presumptions upon the future, which, in our age of industrial technologies, are producing grotesque and dangerous results. (The Art of Loading Brush, 2017)
This Farm’s allotment of fertility now festers in rank piles behind horse stables around the North Country. The hay purchase agreement didn’t require the buyers to cart their barn scrapings back to the farm growing the hay, and the consequence of this taking over the years has been carved into the land here. Cleaning out this barn back in March we came across a written record of the bales drawn from the different fields in 1995. That was about halfway between the year the Cows left and this day. Looking at the note again now, the field names and bale counts mean a lot more to me now than they did a few months ago. This place used to grow a lot of grass. From the field called “Long Meadow,” they brought in 264 bales from the first cutting in 1995. This year: thirty-eight. Take that in for a moment. And then circle back to the words remember, forget and dismember. The ordinary people who purchased the hay from these fields over the past fifty years didn’t mean this place any harm. Once they had paid for the bales, however, they had no lasting obligation to this Farm and its slowly diminishing capacity to sustain life. Obligation points in the direction of what I mean by the word remember. Freedom from obligation is what I mean by forgetting. And thirty-eight bales from a field that used to yield 265 is what I mean by dismembered. The soils haven’t forgotten their end of the Old Covenant, and their undefended generosity whispers a heartbreaking reminder to anyone within earshot. And this morning that whisper joins with the pulsing chorus of birdsong, nearing full volume as the day’s golden light stretches across the meadow where hay dries in rows. If you listen closely, you might just begin to make out the song of the place. Another name for the Old Covenant: Mutual Sustenance.
We seem to have forgotten that there might be, or that there ever were, mutually sustaining relationships between humans and their home places in the world of Nature. We seem to have no idea that the absence of such relationships, almost everywhere in our country and the world, might be the cause of our trouble. Our trouble nonetheless exists, is severe, and is getting worse. Instead of settled husbanders of cherished home places, we have become the willing parasites of any and every place, destroying the source and substance of our lives, as parasites invariably do. (The Art of Loading Brush, 2017)
It's time to head back out to the field, to bring the Cows and their hungry Calves into the barn. The hay will be ready to bale this afternoon, and so there will be preparations for that work. I am deeply honored to remember and to write down these stories, and to imagine that a few of you will take the time to read them. May that they carry a whisper of the Old Covenant with them, even the cadence of gratefulness and of thanksgiving.
Many blessings to you.
With care, Adam
Wow, that last hay cutting was only about 15% of the first. That’s really eye opening. All that fertility exported elsewhere. And I’m trying to imagine what compost that old must look like, I’m thinking proper dark and beautifully crumbly?? So thankful to read through this.
Thanks so much for sharing your thoughts and words, the images have been planted into me this morning and I’ll carry with me the manure trolley and the hay fields throughout my day 💕 Who knows how that cross-fertilization of imaginings will manifest itself?