ON LIVING IN THE COUNTRY
“Why risk with men your hard won gold?
Buy grain and sow—your Brother Dust
Will pay you back a hundred fold—
The earth commits no breach of trust.”
_Hindu Proverb, Translated by Arthur Guiterman_.
It is astonishing how many people there are in cities and towns who
have a secret longing to get back into quiet country places, to own a
bit of the soil of the earth, and to cultivate it. To some it appears
as a troublesome malady only in spring and will be relieved by a whirl
or two in country roads, by a glimpse of the hills, or a day by the
sea; but to others the homesickness is deeper seated and will be
quieted by no hasty visits. These must actually go home.
I have had, in recent years, many letters from friends asking about
life in the country, but the longer I remain here, the more I know
about it, the less able I am to answer them—at least briefly. It is as
though one should come and ask: “Is love worth trying?” or, “How about
religion?” For country life is to each human being a fresh, strange,
original adventure. We enjoy it, or we do not enjoy it, or more
probably, we do both. It is packed and crowded with the zest of
adventure, or it is dull and miserable. We may, if we are skilled
enough, make our whole living from the land, or only a part of it, or
we may find in a few cherished acres the inspiration and power for
other work, whatever it may be. There is many a man whose strength is
renewed like that of the wrestler of Irassa, every time his feet touch
the earth.
Of all places in the world where life can be lived to its fullest and
freest, where it can be met in its greatest variety and beauty, I am
convinced that there is none to equal the open country, or the country
town. For all country people in these days may have the city—some city
or town not too far away: but there are millions of men and women in
America who have no country and no sense of the country. What do they
not lose out of life!
I know well the disadvantages charged against country life at its
worst. At its worst there are long hours and much lonely labour and an
income pitifully small. Drudgery, yes, especially for the women, and
loneliness. But where is there not drudgery when men are poor—where
life is at its worst? I have never seen drudgery in the country
comparable for a moment to the dreary and lonely drudgery of city
tenements, city mills, factories, and sweat shops. And in recent years
both the drudgery and loneliness of country life have been disappearing
before the motor and trolley car, the telephone, the rural post, the
gasoline engine. I have seen a machine plant as many potatoes in one
day as a man, at hand work, could have planted in a week. While there
is, indeed, real drudgery in the country, much that is looked upon as
drudgery by people who long for easy ways and a soft life, is only
good, honest, wholesome hard work—the kind of work that makes for fiber
in a man or in a nation, the kind that most city life in no wise
provides.
There are a thousand nuisances and annoyances that men must meet who
come face to face with nature itself. You have set out your upper acres
to peach trees: and the deer come down from the hills at night and
strip the young foliage; or the field mice in winter, working under the
snow, girdle and kill them. The season brings too much rain and the
potatoes rot in the ground, the crows steal the corn, the bees swarm
when no out is watching, the cow smothers her calf, the hens’ eggs
prove infertile, and a storm in a day ravages a crop that has been
growing all summer. A constant warfare with insects and blights and
fungi—a real, bitter warfare, which can cease neither summer nor
winter!
It is something to meet, year after year, the quiet implacability of
the land. While it is patient, it never waits long for you. There is a
chosen time for planting, a time for cultivating, a time for
harvesting. You accept the gauge thrown down—well and good, you shall
have a chance to fight! You do not accept it? There is no complaint.
The land cheerfully springs up to wild yellow mustard and dandelion and
pig-weed—and will be productive and beautiful in spite of you.
Nor can you enter upon the full satisfaction of cultivating even a
small piece of land at second hand. To be accepted as One Who Belongs,
there must be sweat and weariness.
The other day I was digging with Dick in a ditch that is to run down
through the orchard and connect finally with the land drain we put in
four years ago. We laid the tile just in the gravel below the silt,
about two feet deep, covering the openings with tar paper and then
throwing in gravel. It was a bright, cool afternoon. In the field below
a ploughman was at work: I could see the furrows of the dark earth
glisten as he turned it over. The grass in the meadow was a full rich
green, the new chickens were active in their yards, running to the
cluck of the hens, already the leaves of the orchard trees showed
green. And as I worked there with Dick I had the curious deep feeling
of coming somehow into a new and more intimate possession of my own
land. For titles do not really pass with signatures and red seals, nor
with money changing from one hand to another, but for true possession
one must work and serve according to the most ancient law. There is no
mitigation and no haggling of price. Those who think they can win the
greatest joys of country life on any easier terms are mistaken.
But if one has drained his land, and ploughed it, and fertilized it,
and planted it and harvested it—even though it be only a few acres— how
he comes to know and to love every rod of it. He knows the wet spots,
and the stony spots, and the warmest and most fertile spots —until his
acres have all the qualities of a personality, whose every
characteristic he knows. It is so also that he comes to know his horses
and cattle and pigs and hens. It is a fine thing, on a warm day in
early spring, to bring out the bee-hives and let the bees have their
first flight in the sunshine. What cleanly folk they are! And later to
see them coming in yellow all over with pollen from the willows! It is
a fine thing to watch the cherries and plum trees come into blossom,
with us about the first of May, while all the remainder of the orchard
seems still sleeping. It is a fine thing to see the cattle turned for
the first time in spring into the green meadows. It is a fine thing—one
of the finest of all—to see and smell the rain in a corn-field after
weeks of drought. How it comes softly out of gray skies, the first
drops throwing up spatters of dust and losing themselves in the dry
soil. Then the clouds sweep forward up the valley, darkening the
meadows and blotting out the hills, and then there is the whispering of
the rain as it first sweeps across the corn-field. At once what a stir
of life! What rustling of the long green leaves. What joyful shaking
and swaying of the tassels! And have you watched how eagerly the
grooved leaves catch the early drops, and, lest there be too little
rain after all, conduct them jealously down the stalks where they will
soonest reach the thirsty roots? What a fine thing is this to see!
One who thus takes part in the whole process of the year comes soon to
have an indescribable affection for his land, his garden, his animals.
There are thoughts of his in every tree: memories in every fence
corner. Just now, the fourth of June, I walked down past my blackberry
patch, now come gorgeously into full white bloom—and heavy with
fragrance. I set out these plants with my own hands, I have fed them,
cultivated them, mulched them, pruned them, trellised them, and helped
every year to pick the berries. How could they be otherwise than full
of associations! They bear a fruit more beautiful than can be found in
any catalogue: and stranger and wilder than in any learned botany book!
Why, one who comes thus to love a bit of countryside may enjoy it all
the year round. When he awakens in the middle of a long winter night he
may send his mind out to the snowy fields—I’ve done it a thousand
times!—and visit each part in turn, stroll through the orchard and pay
his respects to each tree—in a small orchard one comes to know
familiarly every tree as he knows his friends—stop at the strawberry
bed, consider the grape trellises, feel himself opening the door of the
warm, dark stable and listening to the welcoming whicker of his horses,
or visiting his cows, his pigs, his sheep, his hens, or so many of them
as he may have.
So much of the best in the world seems to have come fragrant out of
fields, gardens, and hillsides. So many truths spoken by the Master
Poet come to us exhaling the odours of the open country. His stories
were so often of sowers, husbandmen, herdsmen: his similes and
illustrations so often dealt with the common and familiar beauty of the
fields. “Consider the lilies how they grow.” It was on a hillside that
he preached his greatest Sermon, and when in the last agony he sought a
place to meet his God, where did he go but to a garden? A carpenter you
say? Yes, but of this one may be sure: there were gardens and fields
all about: he knew gardens, and cattle, and the simple processes of the
land: he must have worked in a garden and loved it well.
A country life rather spoils one for the so-called luxuries. A farmer
or gardener may indeed have a small cash income, but at least he eats
at the first table. He may have the sweetest of the milk, there are
thousands, perhaps millions, of men and women in America who have never
in their lives tasted really sweet milk and the freshest of eggs, and
the ripest of fruit. One does not know how good strawberries or
raspberries are when picked before breakfast and eaten with the dew
still on them. And while he must work and sweat for what he gets, he
may have all these things in almost unmeasured abundance, and without a
thought of what they cost. A man from the country is often made
uncomfortable, upon visiting the city, to find two cans of sweet corn
served for twenty or thirty cents, or a dish of raspberries at
twenty-five or forty—and neither, even at their best, equal in quality
to those he may have fresh from the garden every day. One need say this
in no boastful spirit, but as a simple statement of the fact: for
fruits sent to the city are nearly always picked before they are fully
ripe—and lose that last perfection of flavour which the sun and the
open air impart: and both fruits and vegetables, as well as milk and
eggs, suffer more than most people think from handling and shipment.
These things can be set down as one of the make-weights against the
familiar presentation of the farmer’s life as a hard one.
One of the greatest curses of mill or factory work and with much city
work of all kinds, is its interminable monotony: the same process
repeated hour after hour and day after day. In the country there is
indeed monotonous work but rarely monotony. No task continues very
long: everything changes infinitely with the seasons. Processes are not
repetitive but creative. Nature hates monotony, is ever changing and
restless, brings up a storm to drive the haymakers from their hurried
work in the fields, sends rain to stop the ploughing, or a frost to
hurry the apple harvest. Everything is full of adventure and
vicissitude! A man who has been a farmer for two hours at the mowing
must suddenly turn blacksmith when his machine breaks down and tinker
with wrench and hammer; and later in the day he becomes dairyman,
farrier, harness-maker, merchant. No kind of wheat but is grist to his
mill, no knowledge that he cannot use! And who is freer to be a citizen
than he: freer to take his part in town meeting and serve his state in
some one of the innumerable small offices which form the solid blocks
of organization beneath our commonwealth.
I thought last fall that corn-husking came as near being monotonous
work, as any I had ever done in the country. I presume in the great
corn-fields of the West, where the husking goes on for weeks at a time,
it probably does grow really monotonous. But I soon found that there
was a curious counter-reward attending even a process as repetitive as
this.
I remember one afternoon in particular. It was brisk and cool with
ragged clouds like flung pennants in a poverty-stricken sky, and the
hills were a hazy brown, rather sad to see, and in one of the apple
trees at the edge of the meadow the crows were holding their mournful
autumn parliament.
At such work as this one’s mind often drops asleep, or at least goes
dreaming, except for the narrow margin of awareness required for the
simple processes of the hands. Its orders have indeed been given: you
must kneel here, pull aside the stalks one by one, rip down the husks,
and twist off the ear—and there is the pile for the stripped stalks,
and here the basket for the gathered corn, and these processes
infinitely repeated.
While all this is going on, the mind itself wanders off to its own far
sweet pastures, upon its own dear adventures—or rests, or plays. It is
in these times that most of the airy flying things of this beautiful
world come home to us—things that heavy-footed reason never quite
overtakes, nor stodgy knowledge ever knows. I think sometimes (as
Sterne says) we thus intercept thoughts never intended for us at all,
or uncover strange primitive memories of older times than these—racial
memories.
At any rate, the hours pass and suddenly the mind comes home again, it
comes home from its wanderings refreshed, stimulated, happy. And
nowhere, whether in cities, or travelling in trains, or sailing upon
the sea, have I so often felt this curious enrichment as I have upon
this hillside, working alone in field, or garden, or orchard, It seems
to come up out of the soil, or respond to the touch of growing things.
What makes any work interesting is the fact that one can make
experiments, try new things, develop specialties and _grow_. And where
can he do this with such success as on the land and in direct contact
with nature. The possibilities are here infinite new machinery,
spraying, seed testing, fertilizers, experimentation with new
varieties. A thousand and one methods, all creative, which may be tried
out in that great essential struggle of the farmer or gardener to
command all the forces of nature.
Because there are farmers, and many of them, who do not experiment and
do not grow, but make their occupation a veritable black drudgery, this
is no reason for painting a sombre-hued picture of country life. Any
calling, the law, the ministry, the medical profession, can be blasted
by fixing one’s eyes only upon its ugliest aspects. And farming, at its
best, has become a highly scientific, extraordinarily absorbing, and
when all is said, a profitable, profession. Neighbours of mine have
developed systems of overhead irrigation to make rain when there is no
rain, and have covered whole fields with cloth canopies to increase the
warmth and to protect the crops from wind and hail, and by the analysis
of the soil and exact methods of feeding it with fertilizers, have come
as near a complete command of nature as any farmers in the world. What
independent, resourceful men they are! And many of them have also grown
rich in money. It is not what nature does with a man that matters but
what he does with nature.
Nor is it necessary in these days for the farmer or the country dweller
to be uncultivated or uninterested in what are often called, with no
very clear definition, the “finer things of life.” Many educated men
are now on the farms and have their books and magazines, and their
music and lectures and dramas not too far off in the towns. A great
change in this respect has come over American country life in twenty
years. The real hardships of pioneering have passed away, and with good
roads and machinery, and telephones, and newspapers every day by rural
post, the farmer may maintain as close a touch with the best things the
world has to offer as any man. And if he really have such broader
interests the winter furnishes him time and leisure that no other class
of people can command.
I do not know, truly, what we are here for upon this wonderful and
beautiful earth, this incalculably interesting earth, unless it is to
crowd into a few short years—when all is said, terribly short
years!—every possible fine experience and adventure: unless it is to
live our lives to the uttermost: unless it is to seize upon every fresh
impression, develop every latent capacity: to grow as much as ever we
have it in our power to grow. What else can there be? If there is no
life beyond this one, we have lived _here_ to the uttermost. We’ve had
what we’ve had! But if there is more life, and still more life, beyond
this one, and above and under this one, and around and through this
one, we shall be well prepared for that, whatever it may be.
The real advantages of country life have come to be a strong lure to
many people in towns and cities: but no one should attempt to “go back
to the land” with the idea that it is an easy way to escape the real
problems and difficulties of life. The fact is, there is no escape. The
problems and the difficulties must be boldly met whether in city or
country. Farming in these days is not “easy living,” but a highly
skilled profession, requiring much knowledge, and actual manual labour
and plenty of it. So many come to the country too light-heartedly, buy
too much land, attempt unfamiliar crops, expect to hire the work
done—and soon find themselves facing discouragement and failure. Any
city man who would venture on this new way of life should try it first
for a year or so before he commits himself—try himself out against the
actual problems. Or, by moving to the country, still within reach of
his accustomed work, he can have a garden or even a small farm to
experiment with. The shorter work-day has made this possible for a
multitude of wage-workers, and I know many instances in which life
because of this opportunity to get to the soil has become a very
different and much finer thing for them.
It is easy also for many men who are engaged in professional work to
live where they can get their hands into the soil for part of the time
at least: and this may be made as real an experience as far as it goes
as though they owned wider acres and devoted their whole time to the
work.
A man who thus faces the problem squarely will soon see whether country
life is the thing for him; if he finds it truly so, he can be as nearly
assured of “living happily ever after” as any one outside of a
story-book can ever be. Out of it all is likely to come some of the
greatest rewards that men can know, a robust body, a healthy appetite,
a serene and cheerful spirit!
And finally there is one advantage not so easy to express. Long ago I
read a story of Tolstoi’s called “The Candle”—how a peasant Russian
forced to plough on Easter Day lighted a candle to his Lord and kept it
burning on his plough as he worked through the sacred day. When I see a
man ploughing in his fields I often think of Tolstoi’s peasant, and
wonder if this is not as true a way as any of worshipping God. I wonder
if any one truly worships God who sets about it with deliberation, or
knows quite why he does it.
“My doctrine shall drop as the rain, my speech shall distil as the dew,
as the small rain upon the tender herb, and as showers upon the grass.”
THE END