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Clear Springs: A Memoir

It was a good year for my father-in-law. In 1935, he finally saved up enough money to buy 93 acres of land located at the edge of the Saginaw Valley, near the middle of the mitten that is the lower peninsula of Michigan. It was an important accomplishment for a man of 27, especially during those middle years of the Great Depression. His purchase placed him among the ranks of the approximately 7 million American farmers who were struggling to make a living on the land.

Prudently, he didn't quit his "day job," and it would be nearly a decade before he had enough money to complete the building of a house on the roughly rectangular tract of land that covered about an eighth of a section. He farmed the land evenings and weekends and vacations for more than 30 years before retiring to full-time farming. During those years, he planted, harrowed, mowed and harvested corn, wheat and hay, and carried every sort of fruit and vegetable that Michigan soil would grow into the house in its season, for eating and for putting up for the coming winter. Sixty years after my father-in-law bought this land, my 18-month-old son, Brendan, and I came to visit him in the last fall he would live on his farm.

It was high autumn and the woods were a glory of reds and a yellow so pure it made my heart ache. Every morning and every evening, the calls of Canada geese wafted in through the open living room window. Wasps and bees buzzed in fallen apples in the orchard. The last of the petunias shed a sweet fragrance over the flowerbed at the south side of the house that he built with his own hands nearly 50 years before.

During the day, Brendan and I roamed the yard where Dad had planted many kinds of trees over the years. I couldn’t name them all, but we both delighted in the shape of their leaves and trunks and the wonderful things they produced for a small boy to throw. At night I lay beside Brendan, waiting for him to fall asleep. One night, I watched as a beetle marched along the edge of the ceiling, flew into the night light and then onto the bed. The bedroom window was open to the cool evening air, and the last crickets of the season chirped in the grass. Brendan’s face was a rosy pink in the half-light of the bedroom, and his eyes were shut when I glanced through the screen of his portable crib.

"What’s that, what’s that?" he murmured as he fell into sleep.

Soon his breath sounded slow and regular. There was a hushed peace in the room and the house and outside in the night. It surprised me how quickly the life of a working farm had ebbed into silence. I found myself listening for the crunch of the horses eating melon and squash rinds beyond the pasture fence at the back of the house, but the horses had long since been buried at the edge of the woods. Pudge, the heifer which ran away so many times that she had to be locked into the barn permanently, was only a memory; the hay rake sat idle in the shed north of the barn, and the raspberries and grape vines grew up untended. In the quiet of the night, the bustle of the farm’s past seemed far away, but during the daytime I roamed the fields and woods where the past lived behind a thin veil of time. I took great pleasure in conjuring it up, even though it was as hard to hold as quicksilver.

The life of the farm, as I knew it, began with my father-in-law. Other people farmed the land before him, but I knew only fragments of their stories. Dad was born Albert Augustine Moore, the next to the last child in a large Irish-German Catholic family, on a small farm carved out of sandy land at the edge of the Saginaw Valley, very similar to the one he would buy nearly three decades later. The first lumber was exported from the Saginaw Valley in 1847, and by the late 19th century hundreds of logging camps dotted the valley. Less than a generation after the last logging camp was dismantled, men turned to farming.

The quarter of a section that Dad’s parents claimed was marginal farmland at best, but they eked out a living with hand tools and horses and the labor of a large family. No one truly went without, but food was not plentiful. In the winter months, Dad and his brothers and sisters sat around the table in the kitchen and sorted navy beans. The white ones were to sell, the black ones were for the pigs and the brown ones were to eat. Eating was a pleasure that was particularly inviting for a hungry boy. A special treat was to get a potato and take it with you skating on the muck bog.

"We never had boot skates," Dad remembered. "No, we had skates we fastened to our shoes." He would strap those skates onto his feet, put the potato and an empty can in his pocket and skate away into the muck bog with his brothers and sisters. There they would build a fire and cook their potatoes.

I tell these stories not so much out of nostalgia but because it is important to understand how difficult it was to make a living farming. It was so difficult, in fact, that after 1935 the total number of American farms declined by one million every decade. Dad recognized the difficulty, but he took up farming all the same, combining job and farm income to minimize the economic risks.

At the time he bought it, his farm was an average size for that part of the country. About 20 acres out of the 93 were deemed suitable for growing crops. The rest of the place had thin sandy soil. Here is where he chose to plant trees.

When he bought the land, it held several hundred red pine stumps, the skeletons of an earlier forest, but few living trees. A maple stood at the northeastern edge of the property, an elm close to the road, and an ash or two and a hemlock struggled to grow in the pasture. The people who had farmed it before hadn’t seen much use for trees. Dad quickly went to work to remedy that. That he became a man who planted trees seemed only natural for a boy who had grown up in the shadow of one of the biggest clear-cuts in North American history.

"I planted the first tree on the bare hill that didn’t have any trees but pine stumps," he told me one night. "I planted 15,000 little trees before I was done. I always liked trees. Always liked trees," he said and fell silent.

I smiled at the picture he painted of a man shoving tree roots into damp soil in the cool of the morning. Dad was not alone in this task. It was the late 1930s and early ’40s and, in the recent memory of the dust bowl, farmers had come to realize planting trees was a good thing.

By the time I arrived on the scene more than 30 years after he planted the first tree, the pines were firmly established as the heart of the land. Around this heart were the other parts of the farm, each with its own particularly determined purpose. The orchard, workshop, large garden and the field where Dad alternatively grew corn, wheat or alfalfa lay north of the barn. South of the barn was the new farmhouse that Dad built, the pasture, the asparagus patch, rows of raspberries, currants and grapes, and the field where sweet corn grew.

West of the barn, and slightly north, sat the aging farmhouse where my husband and I spent the first summer of our married life. No one had lived in it since my husband’s grandmother moved to the newer farmhouse with his parents 12 years earlier. No humans, that is, because we discovered a healthy population of mice, spiders and carpenter ants. Hop vines shaded the west and south sides of the house, growing up in a thicket of green that reached the peak of the roof. I planted sweet peas, and in the dew-covered mornings I picked bouquets and held them to my nose, inhaling the flowers’ sweet spiciness before putting them into a vase and setting them on the worn Formica table that graced our kitchen.

We raised a large garden that summer and wandered the woods and fields together picking blueberries and mushrooms. One afternoon we made love on an island in the marsh that ran behind Dad’s land, lying down in the grass beside the delicate imprint of deer hoofs. I like to think that no one was ever so happy on that land as we were that honeymoon summer. And maybe it was true, unencumbered as we were by children or debts or work or the other burdens of middle-aged adults.

To the east of the barn stood the pines and a mixed woods of poplar and birch that had grown up under its own direction, where morels and bittersweet were picked in their season and lady’s slipper orchids were admired as they sprang from the leaf mold in the first days of spring. Dead trees were culled for firewood from the poplar woods, and deer were shot in the pines during hunting season, the men hiding in blinds placed in the nestling branches of the trees. At the far northeastern edge of the farm was the huckleberry swamp.

Dad owned two tractors, a chainsaw and a wide assortment of hand tools for any task that he might want to lay his hand to: knives, scythes, saws, corn cutters, hoes, shovels, wood-working tools and a hay knife for cutting hay out of a mow in case you had to put it in the barn loose if you couldn’t get anyone to come bail it.

Most times, Big Louie came from down the road with the mechanical hay bailer to bail the alfalfa that Dad grew to feed the beef cattle and horses. I don’t think Dad was ever happier than when he was directing the crew who came to lend a hand on hay bailing day. Some summers I helped out. Usually my place was in the mow beside my husband and his brother. When a load of hay arrived, the wagon crew threw it up to us, and we stacked it into neat rows. It was hot dirty work. We wore long-sleeved shirts to protect us, but the hay scratched anyway and by the end of the day bits of it clung to the sweat on our necks and wrists and ankles.

Once all the hay was in the mow, we went up to the house where a large supper awaited: dishes of mashed potatoes, platters of sweet corn, fried chicken, fresh tomatoes, cucumbers, freshly baked bread and two kinds of fruit pie for dessert. I wondered if Dad thought about those days as he sat in his recliner chair, never to put his hand to such work again. In his prime, he worked with a physical intensity that is hard to evoke in today’s increasingly virtual world. Even though he held down a full-time job for most of his adult life, he was no more able to live in the country and not farm than he was able to fly to the moon. If you lived in the country you farmed, case closed. One afternoon, Brendan and I were walking under the large spruce that grows just outside the kitchen window. The sun shone on something glinting in the grass and I stooped to pick up a piece of coal, evidence of the coal chute that had once been there. As I turned the coal over in my hand, I imagined it burning blue in the house’s furnace. Dad’s life seemed that way, I thought, the engine powering the farm for more than half a century. Already it had slowed with age. Soon it would stop. That was a thought I shied away from as I put the coal in my pocket.

One morning, Dad asked if I’d seen the old Radio Flyer wagon out in the garage. I hadn’t, I told him.

"Too bad," he said. "Patrick loved that wagon. Why don’t you go up to the hardware store and see if you can find Brendan one of those red wagons?"

The hardware store indeed had such a wagon, and when we brought it back to the farm I would pull Brendan in it when his short legs tired on our walks spent in the sweetness of the season. We bumped over the field to the barn, where I imagined that I could still detect the green scent of hay. A few barn cats hid in the half-light, and in the evening we took them scraps from the table. Brendan squealed with delight as they crept out of the shadows to eat.

Even though Dad was no longer by my side on these walks or in truth pacing far ahead as he so often was, I heard his voice inside my head.

"There," I heard him say, "there is the place where I planted the first white pine. There on that little hill." Turning, I saw the pines standing tall, reaching for the sky — row upon row of trees. Coming back through the field that was now farmed by someone else, I saw in my mind’s eye the sweet corn that stood head high the summer my husband and I were married. I saw my father-in-law gently pull back the husk from an ear, checking to see if the corn was ripe. I blinked back tears because Brendan will never eat this corn. He will never sit at the gray enamel table in the kitchen, sweating in the heat while his grandmother lifts the corn from the boiling water with tongs and places it on his plate. Brendan has come too late for this. He cannot know what he is missing, but I do. That I missed it so terribly surprised me, although it shouldn’t have. Because we had another companion on these walks: the boy who is now my husband.

It was easy for me to picture him running through the fields and woods, growing from boy to man, at ease with the world. I suspect that everyone has an image in their mind of what an ideal childhood is, and this is mine: a child growing up at the nexus of family and place, linked to the past by the strong cord of previous generations. As I walked through the woods and fields of my husband’s childhood that autumn, I understood perhaps for the first time the consequences of choices we had made long ago in the boundless optimism of youth, when making choices never meant giving things up, only reaching with open hands to have it all. Now, I saw that we would have to reinvent our family in a new place, among new people. Even though I understood this with my mind, my heart wished fiercely for a return to that time when Dad’s farm was full of the voices of family and work.

"There’s a sense of loss in America today, a feeling of disconnectedness," Bobbie Ann Mason writes in Clear Springs: A Memoir. "We’re no longer quite sure who we are and how we got here."

This is not a concern unique to 21st century Americans. Such dislocations have been a central part of North American life since families first emigrated to this continent. Historian Lillian Schlissel documented how 19th century men tied "the lives of their family to the kite strings of history," as they set out on the Oregon Trail. Sometimes it seems as if our small family is cast adrift on the currents of space and time, but the palimpsest of shared memories inscribed on Dad’s farm reeled me in during those autumn walks.

Not long after we returned home that fall, Dad moved in with his daughter Colleen. He had simply become too frail to live alone. The following spring, we received an urgent phone call from Colleen.

"I don’t think he’ll last the week," she said.

We made the eight-hour drive to her house, the fear of Dad’s death riding with us. When we arrived, he had rallied but was thinner and frailer than ever. That week brought sunny days and cool nights, perfect weather for making maple syrup.

"Sap must be running," Dad said.

Somehow, despite the handicap of spending much of his time lying in bed looking out of the window, Dad kept his fingers on the pulse of the land. Long after he was able to walk, he sent bulletins from the Sasse Road front relaying news of the comings and goings of animals and birds and the harvesting of all manner of crops and fruits. One letter told about how the corn was curling on the sandy ground from heat and lack of rain, and how Canada geese were seen eating the tame blueberries he had planted in the field south of his house.

And so, as he lay in bed, we tapped trees, collected the sap, boiled it down in the sap house and finished it on the stove of his empty house, filling the air with the sticky fragrance of syrup. When we gave him a taste of the finished product, he pronounced it fine.

This crisis passed and was followed by another as spring led into summer again. It seemed as if every day would be Dad’s last, but something kept him alive. The last time we saw my father-in-law was a clear day in August. After holding his thin body close, I held back my tears until I was out of sight. Every parting now could well be the last. This one indeed was, but we didn’t know it then. After saying goodbye, we drove away between fields of corn and soybeans to take up our lives in a place far away from Michigan. I remembered a photograph I had taken many years ago, the first time my husband and I went away. In the picture, Dad sits inside the front seat of the new truck that he helped us buy and that was already loaded down with our belongings. I can’t help but think now of Wilbur’s sadness in Charlotte’s Web the day the young spiderlings ballooned off into the world.

"Cries of ‘Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye!’ came weakly to Wilbur’s ears," E.B. White wrote in his classic children’s book. "He couldn’t bear to watch any more."

We never lived in Michigan again.

Dad died in his 89th year on a warm day in June after eating a popsicle. Several weeks after his death, a package arrived in the mail addressed to Brendan. Inside was a selection of Dad’s worn hats: baseball caps with emblems emblazoned on them for tractors and fertilizer. Brendan pulled the hats out of the box one after the other, trying them on for size. His head and a good part of his face disappeared under the hats’ brims.

"These are from my Little Grandpa," Brendan declared loudly. "I miss him," he said and began to cry loudly.

My husband and I also have mementos from the farm, things we chose when Dad asked us what we would like to have after he was gone. Three quilts, a set of china, a set of silverware, three Copenhagen Christmas plates, assorted farm and woodworking tools, and a wind chime made of bamboo and cedar are most of what we chose. The wind chime now hangs near the front porch of our house. When the wind blows it makes a soft clatter that I find pleasant. The sound calls up my father-in-law and his farm. That place may be hundreds of miles from where we now make our home, but people are so eager to hold onto the ones they love that even a wind chime may serve as the touchstone for memory.

My husband’s oldest brother now owns Dad’s land, but he has no children and I can’t see beyond his lifetime to imagine what will happen next. Even though the land is little changed, the rural community of which it was once a part is now largely gone, replaced by suburban sprawl and larger farms. In the early years of our marriage, we used to go for walks around the section. Past the end of Dad’s land and past the huckleberry swamp stood the Old Horden place. The people who had lived there, cousins of my husband’s mother, had long since gone away to Detroit or another city to find work. We dug sassafras root and picked lilacs in the shadow of the log cabin they left behind, pausing to listen to birdsong or to notice the tracks of whitetail deer cut into the sandy soil. Today, a half-dozen suburban homes occupy the 80 acres of their old farm.

One summer day when it was so hot and humid that sweat plastered our T-shirts to our skin and rolled in rivulets down our faces, we took down a barn on land condemned for industrial development in another part of the section. Inside, under layers of well-rotted manure, we found the skeleton of a sheep. Family farms are not unlike that sheep skeleton, I think, buried under the robust layers of modern life, pushed to the margins by suburban sprawl. Economists say it is all for the best. Small farms can’t compete and should, rightfully, make way for those that can. But farms are more than businesses. The intangible aspects of farm life cannot be measured against an economic bottom line. Anyone who stood on a summer evening and watched my father-in-law walk his land would understand this. As shadows reached lengthening fingers from the nearby woods and deer nibbled alfalfa shoots at the edge of the hayfield, Dad would walk slowly through his fields checking the growth of corn, monitoring the health of the garden, breathing in the coolness of summer dusk. Somewhere a whippoorwill would start up and he would head back to the house, satisfied.

In those golden evenings that seemed to stretch unendingly, I could never have imagined that something so full of life was so fragile. Yet — even though we couldn’t see it at the time as we gathered around the kitchen table — the small American family farm was as ephemeral as the wind chime that hangs from my front porch. Our family’s story of coming to terms with its loss is one that was repeated again and again across the American Midwest in the last years of the 20th century. Waves of bankruptcies sent farm families to cities and suburbs. Today, only 5 million Americans are left on family farms, less than 2 percent of the total population.

Part of me wishes it were otherwise, that I could walk out my back door into the fragrance of pine woods and pasture, and that our family could live amid the layered interweaving of family and place that were found on that 93 acres of land. This despite the hard fact that even if we had inherited the land, we would have been extremely unlikely to make a living on it — not without backbreaking work and (as one recent book suggests) anxiety levels unacceptable to families in other professions. Instead, we have settled in a modest home in a medium-size Midwestern city, making the best family that we can with what we have at hand. Most of the time I am happy with our choice, but sometimes I yearn for what is gone. If numbers mean anything, I am not alone in that yearning.

Even as the number of farmers continues to diminish, the number of American gardeners and genealogists has grown by leaps and bounds. The urge to grow things and to seek a connection with the past is simply too strong to be contained. Today, when for the first time in American history the majority of Americans live in the suburbs, I like to imagine that millions of suburbanites are planting gardens. On a summer’s evening, they will be lingering in the dusk in back yards and on decks across the country — watering plants, picking tomatoes and watching the shadows lengthen. Many of them may remember visits to the farms of grandparents. Some few may even have lived on a farm themselves. A bird is singing somewhere, maybe a robin, maybe a wren, maybe a whippoorwill. The smell of newly mown grass hangs in the air.

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