Sacred Stupidity

If death has a way of concentrating the mind, grief has a way of scattering it.  Thinking about one’s own death may usefully illuminate what one does or should really care about, and, in its way, grief can do the same.  The difference is that grief makes a mess of caring because what one really cares about tends to be just what one cannot have:  the dead, alive again, and life, as it was and now will never be again.  And, since you can’t get what you really want, what’s left is to figure out what comes next, what can possibly come next.  Grief’s confusion and dislocation explain why the bereaved are regularly counseled not to make any significant decisions too quickly.  Unable to have what you desire, so the reasoning goes, you may end up reaching for odd or unhappy ways to patch the gap between what you really want and what you can actually have.  Put plainly, grief can make us stupid.  This explains how I became a “farmer.”

When my grandfather died, my husband and I took on the family farm.  We are both professors, him of history and me of philosophy, at a university some 400 miles west.  We continue still in these professions, not least because they financially support the farm.  I never overestimated, I hope, any power that philosophy may lend to other life activities or, at any rate, I never thought its skills transferrable to farming.  Nor have they been, except to make me more alert than might be usual to my own confusions and upheavals.  If grief may make one stupid, perhaps philosophy has helped me see it, provisioning a bent of mind to recognize the follies I commit.  I like to think this promises some way forward, some way to sacralize the stupid, to make it yield to explanation when it will not yield to wisdom:  If stupid I will be, then I can at least trace out its sources for what enrichments of stupidity they might bring.  There might be hope in this, but as with grief itself, I find that stupid has its stages and mine have not reached bottom yet.  The earliest days we held the farm foretold more to come but are enough to here relate and find the flavor, I expect.

***

My people have been farmers for several generations, our family’s homeplace a few hundred acres of pasture and woods in the southern Missouri Ozarks.  The year my grandfather Lynn died, 2013, was the farm’s one-hundredth year, Lynn’s own parents having acquired the land in 1913.  My great-grandparents Will and Della lived and died upon the place, rearing three children and burying some more.  Their eldest, my grandfather, raised his own three children, including my mother, there.  I did not grow up on the farm, as my mother was pulled away by marriage to my father, a man neither made for nor inclined to farming.  Perhaps that explains why I only belatedly understood that the farm might not outlast my grandparents.  I had always spent bits of my summers and holidays there, but I had never done the work its lasting had required.  For me, the farm had simply been one of life’s few stable givens, a still point in whatever flux and flow time and experience otherwise bring.  This was, I think, the fundamental stupid on which most other of my stupid sat.

Family farms in the Ozarks rarely last a century, a fact sometimes told boastingly upon the ones that do.  These have signs the state of Missouri will award upon request, signs proclaiming the place a “Century Farm,” the status given farms when a family has managed, against the odds, to hold it long enough to qualify.  Far more common are farms that, however long they managed in the end, the families that held them finally lost.

The region around our farm is a lacework of gravel roads that trace through hill country, and what happens when families like ours just can’t keep it all going is told everywhere upon these roads.  Abandoned farmhouses sit in fields given over to elaborate beef cattle operations held by wealthy ranchers who buy up old places when a family can no longer keep them.  In these places, the fencing is bright and taut, well maintained but by people who live elsewhere.  The tarpaper and rock homes that once sheltered families working the land become just bits of a landscape, too much trouble to tear down when the elements will eventually do the work for you.  Some old homeplaces don’t even have the care of wealthy ranchers but instead sit nested in trees that have come up since the families left, the houses now effectively forested.  Bereft of the people who kept the houses whole, they become home to all manner of wildlife, though given the area, some also come to host meth cookers.  But the most haunted examples, I find, are the old family farms where no house at all still sits.  On spring’s arrival they emerge like ghosts across the landscape, as vast armies of yellow daffodils arise to tell of what once was.  The daffodils stand in fragile, temporary signal, their patterns marking out where a house once stood – now lining a path where no path sits or surrounding where a porch once stood.  The daffodils stubbornly outlast the ones who planted them and abide as the only sign of what was once a homeplace. 

I had always found a wild melancholy beauty in the wrecks of farms that populate the region.  The philosopher in me could find in them something of the all-too-human and sublime.  Human beings are hopeful, tragic sorts of things.  They work and build, struggle and strive, yet nature will assert herself.  For when we stop our work, she comes in force to reclaim quickly what was hers.  A house stout built by eager hands will yield, as all things must, before the onslaught of untended time.  In this way, those abandoned farms always registered with me as kin to cherry blossoms, symbolic testament to transience.  What humans build will bloom then fade and at last vanish, and something of the fineness of it all comes from the fact its fineness cannot last.  But then I discovered that the pleasingly melancholy aesthetics of decay are only lovely at a distance.  Transience can be exquisite, but only when it is that of others.  When it’s your own, it’s mostly just a horror. 

Of all my grandparents left behind, the farm was root to every branch, our family’s history worked into the ground itself.  The cistern of my great-great grandmother’s house, all that’s left of her own homeplace, lays hidden under brush along one hillside.  Virginia Creeper my great-grandmother Della planted still climbed the barn walls.  The bent tree where my grandfather sat as a boy to fish stood yet along the creek.  The ruins of a cabin my uncle built when he was young were nestled on a wooded hill.  My mind could readily make recitations such as this, rehearsals of the place and all it so distinctly held.  But then, I would imagine, such recitations too are but the standard way.  Out among the ghostly daffodils are stories just like this – those flowers signal places someone counted specially theirs and believed to be exceptions to the common doom.  

***

My grandfather’s will left the farm entire to his three children, Bob, Don, and my mother, the eldest, Kay.  The siblings identified what bits of land that they could stand to keep, each with a house where they could live in their retirements:  Bob already had a house upon the farm, my mother would live in the old farmhouse, and Don would build a place along some woods.  They each would keep some small acreage too, but none could keep the farm entire.  The heart of it, more than a couple hundred acres, would go to auction, and without that heart, the rest was bound to follow.  The houses would be kept by those within them, but once encircled round by farmland held by others, those houses too could not last long.  A monied rancher would first surround then surely swallow all, and my mother’s generation would likely be our last upon that place.  That’s when we, my husband and I, decided that the stupidity induced by grief would not be shuffled off but parceled out, just like our brand new second mortgage, across what years remain to us.  We bought the farm.  We lodged our fates inside its history, though its history was, just then, a tale of some decline.

Over its century, the farm had included pigs, chickens, and goats, but its most successful years, my grandfather’s prime working years, were devoted to dairy cattle, Holsteins whose gentle nature could lull one into the complacent belief that cattle are inherently docile and tamely compliant.  My grandfather died at 95 but had retired some ten years earlier.  The years that followed his retreat from the day-to-day workings of the farm were its most troubled, but the seeds of the farm’s decline were planted earlier still.  A family dairy needs both many hands and income to sustain them all, a fragile balance that for our family tipped, then tipped again.

In the farm’s best years, my grandfather and my uncles worked the place together.  They never made a lot of course, but then they couldn’t make enough.  Milk prices cratered in the 1980s.  Then the hay barn burned, along with all that would have fed the stock through winter, and the balance then first tipped.  Since the farm could not sustain them all, Don and his family left to seek work elsewhere.  The farm would then be worked by Grandpa and Bob, two carrying on as three once did.  When Grandpa at last retired under the combined pressures of aging and arthritis, the balance tipped again, leaving only one to carry on as two had, and this, finally, culminated in the end of the dairy.  

In the half dozen years or so before my grandfather’s death, Bob earned income by leasing pasture to a wealthy rancher whose rent cows – this is what we called them – were a trial upon the land.  These were no mild mannered Holsteins accustomed to the daily interactions of milking, but beef cattle that, for want of human contact, were by unpredictable turns spooky and aggressive.  With the pastures unmanaged and the rancher inattentive, the rent cows overgrazed the land and when they had done their worst on one field, would crash through weak fencing in search of another.  During these years, Bob also secured income by selling off equipment idled when the dairy stopped.  The milk tank went, as did, finally, any bits of metal he could scare up to sell for scrap.  Bob tried, in short, to keep things going in the ways he found to hand, but eventually this amounted to little more than trying to turn whatever could be turned into money sufficient for bare living.  The frustrations and sorrows of this explain why, upon my grandfather’s death, Bob himself wanted none of the farm but his own house and a small patch of pasture.  

When we took on the farm, we knew it needed some attention.  The purchase finalized in spring, so we continued with our classes and laid plans in leisure for when summer would release us to that work.  The rent cows were gone so we hoped the pastures would recover, but we would surely need to patch some fences, maybe clear what brush had grown where none should be.  Chores like these, and others we might find, could come as we learned the lay of things and planned what we might do.  This is how we thought, before we found the great and gaping space between what one expects and what one finds.  That space would swallow us entire our first summer owning the farm.

***

In 2013, the entire county was under siege by musk thistle, an aggressive invasive species that destroys field fescue, the stuff for hay and grazing, and that left unchecked diabolically reproduces itself at a rate that beggars belief.  At its worst, musk thistle stalks grow to seven or eight feet in height and in dense clusters that utterly overwhelm any undergrowing grass.  The plant’s initial blooms emerge as balls of beautifully delicate and thready purple.  But from purple, the threads pale into white and, just like dandelion heads, each thread bears a seed all too ready to cast off into the world to produce another thistle.  Each thistle plant, I learned, can produce up to 20,000 seeds and thus each represents the threat of 20,000 more.  This malevolent talent for reproduction explains why the EPA considers farms with uncontained thistle a hazard worthy of steep fines.

While every farm in our area had some thistle to contend with that summer, ours was utterly conquered and consumed, the fields impassable even for walking unless one wanted to scythe a way through dense thickets grown higher than oneself.  Years of rent cows overgrazing unmanaged pastures had created the perfect conditions to make ours a farm where naught would grow but thistle, a place of utter pestilence.  I remember acutely when I first took in the landscape.  My memory has fixed that moment not because I found the horror that I ought have felt, but because I didn’t.  That bit of my stupidity now staggers me but then I only vaguely thought the unbroken sea of purple stretched before me somewhat pretty.  Even in this folly, I did also have the sense to think: I don’t remember the farm ever looking quite like this before. In hindsight, it is likely a mercy that I failed to see the menace all at once and came instead to understand it slowly.  Some things it’s best not to know until you’re in them and the chance for flight has passed.

The EPA did not come calling, but the neighbors surely did.  Because this is the Ozarks, none were angry or too frank.  Instead they worked on us through indirection, come with congratulations that we kept the farm, felicitations always followed by a pregnant pause then talk of thistle.  For of course our thistle would not long be ours alone:  Once its purple turned to white, the wind would gift our seed to all our neighbors.  These conversations found their natural end because we were soon no longer free to talk.  Within days, we had a tractor and bushhog, along with the years of payments they required.  From idle reveries about future plans, we swiftly settled on the only plan:  cut down all the thistle.

Between the two of us, Garret and I kept the tractor mowing through all daylight hours for days that seemed unending.  Words between us thinned to what would fit while trading shifts, the tractor left to idle while one climbed down and one climbed up.  The work was slow, as if we cut each field by inches.  So dense was all the thistle, we could only creep along, for one could neither cut well nor spy a blade-fouling rock at any rate of speed.  But in this way we managed for awhile, laying flat the acres inch by steady inch, till even this, our “plan,” would also founder.  The dust and fluff kicked up by all our mowing made a misery throughout, but Garret soon enough was plainly ill with it, ravaged by a sinus infection that left him feverish and felled.  So I was left to soldier on alone.  In my cutting without respite, I too developed something like a fever, though mine was of another order, as if a madness has set in.  

A special form of insensibility can be achieved when one is trapped within a task impossible and repetitive, or so it was for me.  I would think that I should think, there upon the tractor.  Aware I was no farmer, I could at least stay a philosopher.  But what thoughts might come were mostly plain and where they weren’t, they were defeated.  To lay flat the thistle was to see what it concealed.  Thorn trees grew in clusters of fresh menace.  Barbed wire fencing stretched slack and sloppy where it was not breached and broken.  Fenceposts hand made from oak sometimes dangled in the wire, unmoored from the ground in which they ought to stand, hanging useless like mere ornaments.  

My circuits of the fields took on a leaden rhythm.  My sight could find nowhere to light where there was naught to do.  I felt to doomed to make a never-ending journey of the place, laying waste to thistle just to see more waste I could not fix.  One day I almost mowed a fawn newly birthed.  It struggled to its feet just in time to dodge the blade.  At least, I dully thought, I have not mowed down that fawn.  Soon after this, I took to singing hymns of consolation at a shout.  By then I knew no sound of mine would ever rise above the wails of all my cutting – the deep roar of tractor engine and slapping cracks of blade on thistle drown out all – and so I turned to sacrilege because I might as well.  “Some bright morning when this life is o’er, I’ll fly away,” I would shriek and call.  I doubted any morning could be bright since all mornings started but more cutting.  Still, here was a truth worth keeping:  I will at least one day be dead.  Hallelujah by and by.  

And then I found one last rent cow.

Early on taking the farm, we had ended the lease arrangement with the rancher whose cows had eaten the place bare.  When he collected his stock, however, there was apparently one heifer he could not catch.  So he just left her there, professing a vague plan to Bob to hire cowboys who might have more success in corralling her into a trailer.  As with his cattle more generally, he was unconcerned about this last straggler, so she had been out among the thistle, starving and alone for weeks that then grew into months.  

Cattle are of course herd animals and not meant to live alone, much less to live upon land where grazing is scarce and the combined effects of starvation and loneliness work upon the bovine mind to ill effect.  Half mad in conditions not made for her sort, she had developed into the worst a cow can be, a thing of sadness hardened into unreasoning desperation.  She and I developed a relationship.  I tried several times to drive her forward toward the barn, toward an enclosure where I could keep and feed her, and our encounters made us both the worse for wear.  She would sometimes flee me, sometimes charge me, but nothing I did could draw her in where I could keep her penned so her owner could be forced to come collect her.  

As the cow and I would career about the fields, her in panicked flight and me in clumsy pursuit, we made a fitting pair, two females of their species clinging to a world demonstrably not fitted to their own best interests.  We’d crash through thistle and broken fencing, both rendered stupid in grief at losing the protection of their herd.  She wanted her cows, I wanted… well, I wanted all of it and all of them, the farm as was and in hands beyond my stupid, stupid own.  Neither of us could have what we wanted, but at least for a time we had each other.  We could not help ourselves but we could be and were sorry things together in all our fruitless, futile longing. 

***

That poor rent cow was eventually caught but it did take cowboys on horseback to do it.  By the time they came, her deterioration was such that she would go from field to trailer to slaughter.  I have at least enjoyed a better fate than this.

The thistle did at last get cut, or at least we managed the disaster.  Some of it turned white before we got it, and some of it evaded us – in fencerows, creekside, and along our ponds, the places a brushhog cannot reach.  But we held it back enough that fescue came along.  By now we have new rent cows and these are far better than our last, a neighbor’s herd.  He cares for his and thus also for what is ours, since ours is where they eat.  Here could then commence a tale of triumph, of salvation in the end.  But that’s just not the way of things.  

We kept the farm in buying it, but still I struggle even now, and likely ever will, to know just what we did or what it means.  The thing we bought and hold is not the thing that I remember.  The farm that worked on me through childhood, a still point set apart from all that moved and bent, was never really such a thing.  It had in fact been shifting all the while and the shifts that told on it were all stages of a steep decline.  This is the sort of thing you notice when something you love becomes your own to hold and to keep fast.  What we kept was a thing in downward motion.  As it accelerated at speed, we set our sorry selves between it and some final crashing end.  It’s better now, but we are aging fast and what comes next is never clear.  We make no plans, since plans will only go amiss. 

The semester is soon ending and we will head east to work the place.  The news we hear this year from home is all of thistle making a return.

April 2019