Incapacitated by a bad flu bug, trying to not think about sheep, I rented a German-made documentary called The Saltmen of Tibet. It was a slow, panoramic depiction of the dwindling way of life of nomads who make an annual pilgrimage to brackish lakes to collect the salt which is their currency. Four men are chosen each year to take between a hundred and two hundred pony-sized yaks on the trek, which takes a month each way.
The journey is both practical and spiritual; the lakes are sacred ground, and the men propitiate the goddess of the lake by prayers, rituals, and careful behavior—arguing, or even farting, near the lake can offend the goddess. As they made their unhurried way across the vast treeless landscape, I thought about what we have lost, now that we have successfully divided livelihood from land, and spirituality from daily life.
My eighteenth summer, I lived on an anomalous farm in Nova Scotia, owned by a couple of overeducated U.S. expats who had decided to go “back to the land” twenty years before anybody else thought of it. As I remember, they bought wheat flour, sugar, molasses, coffee, salt, and a few other things, in bulk. The rest of their food, they grew. That summer, they sold weaner pigs, blue potatoes, wool, apples, and calves. They had five children. I churned their 200 pounds of summer butter for them, tried to train their filly, baked their weekly bread, picked peas, slopped the pigs, but I think I was mostly in the way. Last I heard, all the four sons had become aeronautical engineers in the United States—the original vocation of their father. Not one was a farmer.
Family farming is dying for the same reason that people don't write with pens made from the feathers of crows: there's a much easier way to get the same result. Easier, because someone else does it for you, far, far away, with enormous machines. I said the same result , but of course, it is not the same. It fills the same need, but driving your petroleum car to buy a petroleum bag of disposable petroleum ballpoints filled with petroleum ink is not the same as walking out to your hayfield, shooting a crow out of the sky, plucking his primary feathers, and shaping the tips with your pocket knife. In fact they could hardly be more different, in their effects upon the world, their effects upon the writer, and the line they make upon the page.
Everything we do now is broken into pieces. Land is either for building houses and businesses on, or for recreation. Wilderness is prized and fought for. But farming is a strangely dreamy concept to most. What do farmers do? We hardly know. For real farming, living from your land, as opposed to corporate agribusiness farming, is foreign to us. Our activities are divided in the same way: that which we do to make money, and that which we spend money on to soothe the abradedness resulting from our money-making activities. Exactly why and how we have created this way of life is a very, very long discussion, but I would like to make one point: although it appears that we are offered an infinity of choices, one option is not made available, and that is to refuse to participate.
My anomalous farm of thirty years ago was made by a pair of the most stubborn people I have ever met. They did not take a newspaper, watch television, send their children to public school, or participate in any civic activities more peripheral than a livestock auction. They got up before dawn, worked all day, and went to bed after supper. It was a romantic idea which isolated them from everyone they naturally belonged to. Nor were they particularly chummy with the elderly pensioners living for the day of the week the state liquor store was open, who made up the bulk of those natives who hadn't fled for the cities and left their little farms to return to forest.
Even more extreme: try to imagine living like a shepherd. You might take a sack of flour with you, and a frying pan. You would mostly eat sheep. Credit cards and cell phones would have no meaning. You would begin to think like a sheep: the changing quality of the grass, an approaching storm, a distant howl. The rhythm of your life would slow down to breathing. There would be more than enough time for everything. It would be enormously lonely. Your friends would be dogs.
To live in such a way that our life made one whole: how unimaginable that is for us now. How much we would have to sacrifice for it. What is whole, what is holy? When I was younger, I used to think it was beauty. Now, I am more inclined to think it is kindness. In either case, we are not headed in that direction.