On Remaking Private Life–At School
(Yours Truly, back to the camera, holding a level in his outdoor classroom. Photo by M. Nolan.)
Rock Island, IL
I would not speak ill of those whose interests tend toward rewriting policy or restructuring political parties or redrawing the lines of political alliance. I readily allow that we need such men and women interested in these pressing concerns, and I myself have an interest in them. If such people are right-headed, I say let them do their work. I will give them my pennies as well as my pen.
And let those who would fix banking fix it. If they are willing to work to scale and against abstraction, if they oppose a widening gap between the rich and the poor, if they know something about the real as opposed to the symbolic wealth of the world, they can count on my slender help.
But my own interests tend toward remaking private life, and it is about such remaking that I wish to say a word or two.
For my concern with “mere” private renewal I catch a ration of grief from my peers, most of whom favor Big Policy Changes that make no demands on individual behavior. I especially catch grief from a special kind of undergraduate realist hardened by vast extensive experience.
I, by contrast, am a deluded tilter at windmills.
But I once played Don Quixote in Man of La Mancha. I am comfortable in the role. I am willing to march into hell for a heavenly cause. I would be peaceful and calm when I’m laid to my rest.
By “remaking private life” I mean many things, among them getting from A to B by means of the foot—and I don’t mean the foot pressed against an accelerator pedal. By “remaking private life” I mean knowing where you are and who’s around you. I mean being a good neighbor.
But I also mean knowing something about your food. I mean being involved in the productive side of the food economy. I mean–for now–worrying not so much about the extent of that involvement as about the involvement itself. The extent is something we will have to face soon enough; for now let the involvement itself concern us. Mayhap it will prepare us for a hungrier day.
A couple of years ago a colleague of mine and I tried to get permission to till an empty lot on campus and put in a vegetable garden. There was a city-owned lot next to this one, also unused, and partially sloped. Our idea was that the college would acquire the city lot, which it could get for $5; we would garden the flat areas of both lots and put the sloped areas in fruit trees.
It turned out that we got permission late last spring to till the college lot but that the best we could do was lease the city lot for a dollar. A student of ours took out the lease and gardened that lot himself. We put our own lot in vegetables—too late in the season—and ended up having a pretty good year of it considering that everything was done on a shoestring: no money, no help, no equipment. One unpaid student volunteer did most of the work; a few others helped here and there. Plus we had a local farmer willing to lend a hand. (In the slide-show linked below you’ll see him holding a small dog.)
This past fall my colleague and I scared up some scratch to build a storage shed on the property. We took our classes down to the garden plot on the weekends and showed them how to square up a building. We built the shed on skids just in case we got in trouble for building it (I didn’t ask permission from anyone): worse case scenario, I could hook it up to a tractor and drag it to the adjacent lot. Other students built bat houses; some put in an herb garden near the faculty dining room; one guy put in a live red-raspberry hedge along the street-side of the garden to keep the frat-boys out; another made an important contact with the city, which promised us a meter for the nearby hydrant should we need water the following summer. (I had been hauling water in 55 gallon drums in the back of my ’83 Dodge pick-up.)
All of that and more—it was a inauspicious beginning, to say the least—culminated this past weekend in a first annual planting day down at the garden. Ten or more professors, at least seventy-five students, and zero administrators showed up to help. Two weeks prior to this an army of students had put in twenty-two fruit trees on the sloped areas. In one Saturday we tilled, cleared, and planted a half-acre garden, cleared the land of scrub trees and brush (in the slide-show you’ll see me dropping a Tree of Paradise), and prepared the lower garden for the warm-weather vegetables, which will go in soon. We mulched the raspberry shoots and fruit trees; we put in black raspberries and gooseberries, and, to boot, we had a grand time in the sun. My son even caught and measured a couple of snakes.
The director of dining services, who has worked indefatigably to get local foods into our cafeterias and who has been a very important ally in the cause (you’ll see a not unportly fellow in the slide show), provided a lunch of pulled barbeque–almost all his meats are local–and potato salad (we put in several rows of potatoes to replenish his supply). One of his head staffers is a very knowledgeable farmer. She oversaw almost all the planting.
The student turn-out was not only tremendous; it was infectious. This is just the sort of involvement needed to secure the necessary momentum for future years. A year or two of this sort of excitement, and we’ll have the local-food culture that every college and university needs if it wants to be involved in the remaking not only of public but also of private life.
There is no way to predict how much any of this will stick. But my guess is that many of our students, having seen the joys of being involved in food production, will take with them a degree of involvement that will prepare them for the extent of involvement that reality will require of them when the lifeblood of the industrial food system dries up or becomes prohibitively expensive. And, at a time when colleges and universities are the obvious cause of many of our problems, I’m pleased as a college professor to be involved in what appears to me to be a solution to a problem.
How much of a solution? It is hard to say. But in one year’s time we have been asked to help several local churches and neighborhoods and immigrant groups start their own community gardens. Most of these groups are gardening of necessity. They are poor. They need food. Involvement has already given way to extent. It is not difficult to imagine a future in which their members lead rather than follow.
I wrote in a previous piece that I have been making preparations for a future in which such disciplines as my own will be an unaffordable luxury in most liberal-arts colleges. May no fate willfully misunderstand me: I’m not hoping for the early advent of that future. I would like to continue to teach Coleridge. But not only Coleridge. Cabbage too.
The time is coming when we are going to have to take more responsibility for feeding ourselves. Full responsibility? I didn’t say that. I said more responsibility. Considerably more. We are going to have to realize that there is something wrong with getting energy from food that we expend no energy to get. When we shorten the distance between production and consumption, when we put more rather than fewer hands to work on the land, the land will suffer fewer of the abuses it currently suffers. When it suffers fewer abuses, its ability to sustain those involved in both public and private renewal will increase significantly. My hope is that those interested in public renewal will understand this. But I doubt they will until they actually get involved in private renewal.
That is why—not to speak ill of anyone else—I am interested in what is small and local. It is why I am interested in the renewal of private life.
To see pictures of our planting day, click here. The slide show is a nice option.
This is very neat, this article. Even better is your garden project.
I spent two months working on a bio-dynamic, organic family farm in Germany this past fall. It was unbelievable hard work. Between the old couple and myself we tended a dozen cows, thirty sheep, four goats, dozens of fruit trees, and a very large garden (tons of lettuces, tons of flowers that they sell at market, turnips, onions, beets, radishes, etc.) I worked 10-12 hours a day. They worked even longer.
It convinced me that (1) I am unwilling to become a full-time farmer and thus could not really be an agrarian because it would be quite hypocritical but (2) I want a hobby farm, and I want to grow some of my own food.
This is very fine piece, Dr. Peters. I shall print the article and distribute it to several of my professors, who, I think, would be sympathetic. I hope to see more posts with similar themes and concerns over the summer months. I’m hoping to grow and raise much of my own food this year and it is always helpful to have some encouragement and confirmation that such a project has merit.
I’m counting down the days to the end of the semester, so I can begin cultivating a large garden on my grandparent’s old and overgrown farm. The 120 acre property sits in an ancient valley of New York State’s Southern Tier. The farmhouse, I am told, was built before the Civil War. The soil is poor, flat land is minimal amidst these foothills of the Alleghany Mountains. There are no more horses, cows or chickens. As a boy, I remember a sugar shack in on the hillside but I can no longer find its remains. A large red barn is still standing, intact and in good condition–too many old barns can be seen collapsed and rotting along the country roads of Cattaraugus County, NY. A small wooden milk house, painted white, is upright and sturdy as well. However, the turnout shed for the many horses my family kept is sagging and looks as if it could fall any day now. The last horse left the pasture 18 years ago.
Along with the vegetable garden, I hope to build a chicken coop and raise heritage breed chickens. Chanteclers seem like the logical choice, as I understand they were bred to survive and produce eggs even throughout the long, freezing winters of Quebec: raising Rabbits, heritage ducks and turkey’s are also a possibility. If I can add some berries and fruit trees, I should have the foundation of a, partly, self-reliant homestead.
This is a hope-giving project.
People can graduate college today, even in the sciences, without a clear grasp of human basics like food cultivation and preparation. (Other neglected basics: marriage preparation, first aid, and child/elder care)
While these would have once been learned in the natural course of life, many otherwise very smart people need remedial instruction.
This was great – the pictures are wonderful – happy, productive people.
Goodness me – could this be – the way one builds community?
I agree completely that it is the transformation of private life which will express itself eventually in the transformation of public life. Change the world by starting with your world – and watch it spread.
Congratulations – great accomplishment.
To Dr. Peters, sorry, but I cannot agree with your augury of an inauspicious beginning. On the contrary, that Northern Flicker is a great auspice! God bless your fine work at the college, in the garden, and here on FPR. You give me hope.
The sixth picture shows an amazingly huge tree – is that a cottonwood? It looks like it’s been there for a HUNdert-n-FITty years.
Kubota tractors are an occasion for sin – that L3400 is bigger than my BX1850. Be careful, or you’ll soon be lusting after one yourself.
To Mr. Cooney, if you want eggs, you should look into Heritage Khaki Campbell ducks. Nineteen K.C. ducklings arrived at our house this morning, and we look forward to rebuilding our flock. Before being wiped out by a spree-killing weasel that squeezed right through the chicken wire, our flock of a dozen males and females gave us several mouthwatering eggs daily, with hardly a pause for Minnesota’s long freezing winter. Cold hardy, and as egg-yielding as the best chickens, the Khaki Campbell duck!
Yours Truly,
Peter Nelson
Thank you for the advice, Mr. Nelson. I shall look into it.
Congratulations, Mr. Peters! What a wonderful accomplishment! I could not agree more that private renewal is a neccessary first step toward public renewal. I hope to see more articles like this one.
Thanks to everyone for the kind words.
Mr. Nelson, it is indeed a Cottonwood–and a big one at that. And let me just say that it takes a man to drive a Kubota in John Deere country. The tractor belongs to farmer Jim, our local ally. He runs his diesels on converted cooking oil harvested from our kitchens. We also compost our table scraps at his farm.
I must admit that there are mornings when getting out of bed almost seems like a good idea.
Jason,
This is good stuff. Horse country is even tougher than John Deere country. The problem with the whole enterprise you bring up is that it depends so much on a few key idealists, and most of them, unlike you, will have very little staying power. Trust me, as they say, I know, having been through it for fifty years or so. Hawthorne discovered that shoveling shit is not conducive to good paragraphs. Frost found out that to write his real poetry he had to go to England and then make deals with lots of colleges and writing workshops, and he was much more devoted to the land and to doing food than any academic I have known. How many families contribute to farmer Jim’s compost pile? It would take more than a village to produce enough to be useful. A Mennonite friend who worked in our library some years back had a wonderful organic farm on the edge of town. He said to anyone who would listen, it takes three to five years to get just leaf mold enough to help on a one acre plot. I can tell you compost stories that will curl your Levis. I don’t mean to be contrary here. I just don’t want this to turn into a site that romanticizes what is unbelievably hard work, and isn’t all that satisfying unless you have already so committed yourself to God’s created order that the other stuff can be put in the delete file. Now, having put this downer in, let me say that I’m on YOUR SIDE!
I have to agree with Dr. Willson. The size of the compost pile the farmers I worked for used was massive and included a winter’s worth of manure from a dozen cows, and that was simply for a one-and-a-half acre plot for vegetables and flowers on already excellent soil. The two of them worked 12-14 hours daily, had the free (minus room/board) labor of a dozen people like myself every year, and the support of their local village and community… and still they existed on the brink of bankruptcy constantly.
John Willson: I believe that when Prof. Peters says, “We also compost our table scraps at his farm,” by “we” he means the whole Augustana College dining service. Serving hundreds of meals (or maybe a few thousand?) daily, they would, I suppose, generate a considerable pile of compostable scraps for local farmers.
This whole post, and particularly its mention of the good efforts of the head of the college’s dining services, interested me considerably not only because I routinely rejoice in learning about institutions doing the right thing in this way, but also because my daughter is seriously considering attending Augustana in the fall. She and I have visited campus three times, and yet we had not learned this good news about efforts towards sustainability in the dining services and support of local farmers in the Farm to Fork program. I was pleased to find out about all this on the college’s web site: http://www.augustana.edu/x10370.xml (*After* all those visits, upon reading this post. Yes, I should have investigated the issue before. This stuff matters, too, when considering colleges.)
(Note to dining services director: get Admissions to include more info about your sustainability programs in their materials for prospective students. They sure are on top of marketing every other aspect of Augustana; this aspect needs more publicity.)
So, three cheers to you, Prof. Peters, for this excellent gardening project, and to your colleagues and students who are contributing in their various ways. My daughter has yet to decide where she’s going in the fall, but if I were enrolling at Augustana, volunteering to work in this garden would be on my to-do list for freshman orientation days.
Anybody who romanticizes the rural arts has never climbed up the insides of a heifer carcass to arm scrape the viscera while butchering (ergonomically suited to the 8-14 age group) or cleaned horse paddocks in the March Thaw.
But they aint enjoyed the unique satisfactions then neither.
Who was romanticizing anything? Dr. Peters’ work seems directed at introducing students to the pains and rewards of physical work; and the possibility, due to fault lines in our economy, that many Americans will need to grow some of their own food. His essay was not some nostalgic pastoral, longing for the days of shepherds and flute playing fairies.
If my comments about planning to homestead sound romantic, I would say that I’ve forked enough horse manure, thrown and stacked enough hay bales, mended enough fences, and seen enough of a Holstein’s back end, to know that A) farm work is hard, and B) I love working on and being around farms.
Is farming compatible with intellectual life? Yes and no. I wouldn’t suggest that scholars/poets ought to be farmers; however, there are plenty of examples where the two vocations have been reconciled harmoniously. Wendell Berry, Louis Bromfield, John Graves are just a few examples of excellent literary men who are or were real farmers.
Christian monks, essential in cultivating and handing down our intellectual inheritance, combined a life of prayer with farm work and scholarship. I recall a passage in Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain that praises “active contemplation,” where one’s meditation and thinking is actually deepened through physical work. Chilton Williamson once wrote that it is through work, not mysticism—and he meant work directly connected with the natural world—that we are closest to full participation in God’s creation. I would suggest that some kind of physical work connected to creation—farming, ranching, gardening, logging, animal husbandry, there are others, I’m sure—is necessary for the good life.
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