Eighty Acres: Elegy for a Family Farm PDF
Preview Eighty Acres: Elegy for a Family Farm
Page i Eighty Acres Page ii OTHER VOLUMES IN THE CONCORD LIBRARY SERIES EDITOR: JOHN ELDER Tarka the Otter Henry Williamson The Insect World of J. Henri Fabre Edwin Way Teale, editor A Land Jacquetta Hawkes Page iii Eighty Acres Elegy for a Family Farm Ronald Jager With a Foreward by Donald Hall Page iv Disclaimer: Some images in the original version of this book are not available for inclusion in the netLibrary eBook. Beacon Press 25 Beacon Street Boston, Massachusetts 021082800 Beacon Press books are published under the auspices of the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations. © 1990 by Ronald Jager Foreword © 1990 by Beacon Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 97 96 8 7 6 5 Text design by Christine Leonard Raquepaw Library of Congress CataloginginPublication Data Jager, Ronald. Eighty acres : elegy for a family farm / Ronald Jager. p. cm. ISBN 0807070440 (cloth) ISBN 0807070459 (paper) 1. Farm life—Michigan—Missaukee County. 2. Missaukee County (Mich.)—Social life and customs. 3. Jager, Ronald— Childhood and youth. 4. Missaukee County (Mich.)—Biogra phy. I. Title. II. Title: 80 acres. F572.M65J34 1990 977.4'66'009734—dc20 9052583 CIP Page v To the memory of Jess Jager (1901–1987) and Kate Schepers Jager (1902–1983) And for my wife, Grace, who first suggested it and always encouraged it and finally named it Page vii Contents Foreword by Donald Hall ix Preface xiii 1 1 Landscape for Figures 2 9 Following Furrows 3 19 Figures on a Landscape 4 29 Fragments from the Chevrolet Era 5 39 Songs of Innocence, Songs of Experience 6 46 Enlarging the Family 7 54 Pollywogs and Apples 8 65 The Hoekzemas are Coming 9 73 GoodBye to Cream of Wheat and All That 10 82 Dividing Turf and Multiplying Hobbies 11 95 McBain, the Smallest City 12 105 Life with Livestock 13 117 War News 14 131 Matters of Taste, Matters of Fact 15 142 In Pursuit of Huckleberry Pie 16 153 What We Know of the Sparrow and the Crow 17 162 And Don't Lick the Hoarfrost Off the Pump Handle 18 169 Boys' Best Friends 19 177 Handwork: The Prose and Poetry of It 20 189 Working with Horses: Hay and Harrow 21 200 The Long Arm of John Calvin 22 211 High School: Mainly Extracurricular 23 221 Potatoes by the Book 24 230 Sports Afield 25 239 Rites of Deer Hunting 26 246 To the Original Calling, Farewell Page ix Foreword There is something appealing about a miniature universe. I think of the landscapes people assemble to run model trains through, where the scale of locomotive and car permits a cosmos: tiny roads with tiny barriers that rise and fall, little houses with doors that open and lights that go on and off, mirrorfragments for ponds, small pupils carrying microscopic lunchbags into infinitesimal schoolhouses. Some books provide this Terrarium Effect, not because they are small, but because the scale and distance of retrospect combine to make an angle of vision: the wrong end of the telescope. In Eighty Acres, the boundaries of 257 pages imagine a system, and Ronald Jager makes—by memory, by judgment, and by good sentences—a performable world. As we read this book, we run trains through it. The author lives in the town of Washington, New Hampshire, and has earlier written philosophy; he was a professor of philosophy at Yale, best known for work on Bertrand Russell. After quitting academia in his forties, he wrote (in collaboration with his wife) histories of his state and his town. Now, in Eighty Acres, he has returned to an earlier landscape, telling us about growing up as a farm boy in western Michigan. When I read Ronald Jager, I become aware of strange overlaps and oppositions—in his experience and in mine—which add curiosity to pleasure as I read. While Jager as a child hayed and picked berries in western Michigan, I did the same (a more elderly child) on a New Hampshire farm. But I lived this life—horse and buggy, antique farm implements—only in July and August, for when summer ended I returned to suburban Connecticut. Ronald Jager's early life was integral; mine was bifurcated into summer and winter, country and suburb, old time and Page x new. My suburb thrived outside New Haven, where Jager later taught at Yale, but by the time Ronald Jager arrived in Connecticut I had departed from New England—to spend seventeen years in the State of Michigan. My Michigan was academic Ann Arbor—where (among others) I taught the children of Dutch farmers, mostly transfers from Calvin College. By 1990, both of us have the good luck to live in New Hampshire writing books. Until Jager went to Calvin College, he expected to become a farmer like his father; he had no thought of professorships or philosophical doctorates. While Eighty Acres recounts only his early life, of course the man in his fifties writes about one world through the spyglass of another. Jager tells his rural childhood with warmth and intimacy, with an affectionate irony—and from long retrospect. Jager is separated from his childhood not only by decades. Although his prose never makes academic noises, his rural childhood sees itself through the spectacles of a man who has survived graduate study at Harvard and teaching at Yale. The separateness of culture is inevitable; and after all, if Jager had remained to farm his land, he would have found exile willynilly. The machines and banks of agribusiness would have altered his farm—and his mind—as much as reading Kant did. The reader profits: for exiles write the best books about home. Without separation, there is no vacancy to fill; we make wealth out of poverty; we rush to fill what history has emptied. But I want to ask: Why must we write about lost worlds? Nostalgia is the word by which people dismiss recollections or praises of times gone by. Heaven knows, we may grant that nostalgia is frequently a device for idiots and salesmen. Looking at television ads for GM, for sweet wine, for insurance, for hardware stores, and for beer, one might understand that United States was a rural country. The semismart response to dumb nostalgia is to dismiss all recollection as equally contemptible. But no two things are ever quite the same. There is nostalgia and nostalgia—and nostalgia. If I caesar all nostalgia into three parts, it is to toss two parts into the Page xi town dump. First, I toss out the manipulation of stereotypes to sell products; second, I toss the merely universal result of aging, our sentimental equation whereby I get feebler every day translates into The world gets worse every day. This second, personal, and unhistorical nostalgia is universal; smart folks must remain alert not to succumb to it. But the past (by the magic of tautology) is no longer present. Useful nostalgia acknowledges the pastness of the past, its irrecoverability, and attempts preservation (not quite restitution or reconstitution) by images that conserve. Such an exercise is indeed conservative, but it does not imply political conservatism. (Usually preservation is anathema to political conservatives who are radicals of Modernity and Progress: archons of agribusiness, Attilas of development.) Our reminiscence helps us remind ourselves—lest we inhabit a shallow present—that things really disappear. What's gone is gone, all right; by memory we keep its ghost around, not merely to look at but also to think with. The past criticizes the present; this criticism may help to construct a future. If we don't keep the past around—in museums and theme parks, in poems and stories—we can't use it. Some people have suggested that, if disappearances are perpetual, maybe they are always the same. The implication has its truth: I love a passage found in Eastman's 1900 History of Andover, New Hampshire, where an old man laments the passing of the teams of horses that used to haul freight, O teamsters of yore, along the turnpikes of olden time. The old fellow allows as how your Modern Inventions, like railroad trains, are mighty and utilitarian, all right all right . . . but oh, how he regrets those beautiful teams of horses! I try to remember his elegy whenever I weep to regret 1943, huge freight trains rolling with war material north to Canadian ports, a hundred cars long, O cabooses of yore; whenever I ululate over the ghost trains that never roll on the grownover track unblowing their rusted whistles. Yes: men and women die, buildings rot or burn; especially tech
Description:The list of books you might like
