1) I had a farm in Kentucky

I have to tell you about this farm.  One hundred acres, shaped like a slice of pie, with the point to the northeast and two fencelines running straight downhill to the Kentucky River.  The crust of the pie slice is a half-mile of river frontage, mostly with a steep bank.  Across the river is a sheer, wooded bluff with no floodplain, just rocky cliffs diving straight into the river, relieved only by one creek coming out of a steep-sided hollow.  No one overlooks my Kentucky River farm, and the nearest neighbors, save Roy Thompson, are a mile away, up or down the river. A private spot, made to order for a hermit like me.     The terrain is pretty rough.  From the long-vacant tenant house at the high point of the farm and the tip of the pie slice, the landscape drops in elevation irregularly, with humps and pocket watersheds, in open, depleted-looking pasture and woods.  The closer to the river, the more lush and the bigger the trees, until on the river bank itself there are huge tulip poplars, oaks and black walnuts.  Further uphill, on the other side of the two bottomland fields the woods are less dramatic, but still impressive, with eastern red cedar and other conifers, hickory, ash, oak, maple.   Toward the river the watercourses are gullied where thunderstorm events carved them out.  There are three of these cutbank gullies on the land, with sandy outwashes into the river.  Further inland and rising, the gullies become charming creeks in the spring.  The rest of the year they are just damp.  The only  surface water on the farm is the overflow from the spring house, below the main dwelling. The creek banks and low spots on the land are the most interesting places on the farm, and the half-mile of riverbank is the most interesting of all. Many trees on this edge of the land are larger than I can put my arms around.  The woods are special, moreso than the more open and dryer scrub-pasture, with its briers and broomsedge.      In addition to the houses--the vacant and dilapidated tenant house and the serviceable  two bedroom house we rented—there was a 100 foot long tobacco barn, a rundown garage with no doors, a couple of more or less intact outbuildings.  At the high side of one of the bottomland fields was a large open fronted sheet metal shed for hay storage.  With the exception of the first year we were there, the fields were not cultivated.  This was not a bad thing, for the dozens of bags of Muriate of Potash abandoned in the hay shed were evidence that the 25 acres of bottom land fields had been pushed to the limit of production, corn and oats, I would think, chemically fertilized and depleted of organic matter.  They needed a rest, and if the woods encroached on my watch, then that was not such a bad thing either. The tobacco barn we rented out to neighboring growers for the fall and winter curing and stripping season.  In September suddenly there would appear tractors pulling flat bed trailers piled high with wilted tobacco plants skewered on 5-foot-long hickory sticks, sharpened at one end and thrust through the base of the plant, which had been cut off close to the ground.  The crews would drive to the barn, which was constructed on a completely open plan, with a bay down the middle for the wagons to drive through.  On either side and going all the way up to the ridgepole, 30 feet off the ground, were wooden rails, making a giant jungle gym spaced just far apart enough to support a tobacco stick with its hanging plants.  Starting at the top the harvesters hung the tobacco, still green and moist from the field, each stick separated by a foot or so to allow for air circulation.  Within days the barn was full and the atmosphere around it was fragrant with curing tobacco.      Much later, in the winter, smaller crews, often a neighboring farmer and his wife, would come to the barn, stoke up the stove in the stripping room [this is the same room I used to shelter baby chicks and their moms in the spring], and take down the hanging curtains of now cured plants.  They stripped the leaves from the stalks, graded, and bound into “hands”, consisting of a pound or so of leaves, all of a specified quality, from the broad, thick ones found at the bottom of the plant to the narrower, more spindly ones near the flower head.      There was no thought in those days before the brouhaha about smoking and the killer weed tobacco, that there was anything disreputable about growing tobacco for the market.  Indeed, for many of my neighbors, the tobacco crop represented their entire cash income for the year, and considering the work involved in growing harvesting, curing, stripping, grading, transporting, and selling it…little enough income.   *   *   *     This was the domain I was called upon to steward, with nothing to go on but dim memories of the farms I visited in childhood.  I was not up to the task.     Mostly I walked.  Every day almost I walked, first with Tippy, a nondescript mongrel we inherited, then with Ol’ Bob, a German Shorthaired Pointer given to me by a friend.  Down along the river we walked and we’d sit there on the bank, letting the river take our thoughts away on the current.  My dad had taught me about that, sitting on the bank of  the Ohio. Up into the higher ground the dog and I walked, looking at stuff, inspecting, making our marks on our territory.      I looked, but I didn’t see.  The maxim is that the farmer’s footsteps are the best fertilizer,  that knowing attention and observation of what’s needed are the prerequisites for stewardship.  These didn’t apply in my case.  I wasn’t a bad farmer…I was no kind of farmer at all.  I did no harm, most of the time, but I didn’t do any good either.  Mainly the farm was an unwinding place for me, a place to be, not a place to do.  My work was elsewhere at the time, at school and then for the State of Kentucky.  The farm was a place to retreat from the world. I had 50 of these signs printed in black and red on white sheet steel, 16”x24”, unmistakable assertions of ownership and territorial rights.  This was within a week after I confronted a shotgun-toting gent breaking out of the riverbank brush and trees into the open bottomland field, deep in MY property.  We had words with each other, no-nonsense words but civil enough, I thought, ending with him heading south, down river toward my fence line, shotgun shouldered.  I watched him go, letting my blood pressure and heart rate ease, a trickle of sweat running down my ribs under my shirt.  I’m not good when it comes to confrontations.  As the intruder entered the strip of woods at the fence line, without turning to see if I was there, he let off a shot, echoed immediately by the cliff on the other side of the river.  My anger and resentment soared and my resolution to post the land, simmering for a while, grew urgent and puissant.     The fellow at the sign shop was impressed enough with the wording on my proposed signs to offer me an extra 10 of them in exchange for the rights to print up another batch of them to sell ready made.     I hung them on fences, nailed them to scantlings in turn nailed to big trees…every 500 feet or so along the property lines, including the unfenced riverbank.  In places where visibility was limited by brush and undergrowth I put them closer together.  Never again would anyone be able to claim they’d inadvertently crossed onto private land.  It was the work of a couple of days and I completed the job by screwing the last sign to the metal gate that closed our yard fence at the end of the gravel track through Roy Thompson’s pasture.     Bird Watts would have taught me a thing or three about stewardship if I’d been listening.   This old boy showed up at the house yard one Saturday morning, leaning heavily on his tobacco stick cane, shiny with the use of years and worn down at the business end.  Bird was tall and skinny, bent and old and—I blush to admit it—no more welcome than I had to make him.  I wasn’t happy to be spending more than a few minutes with this neighbor from the next farm over.  Up against my callow post-adolescent self-importance and ignorance, Bird’s country manners and country dress, his self-effacement and patent need to talk and find out something about “The Doctor,” as I’d come to be known in the neighborhood, failed utterly to make an impression.  [The distinction between studying to be a doctor of psychology and being a doctor was lost on the folks hereabouts.]     I knew the last portion of the road to my farm, from the mailboxes onward to the fork in Roy’s pasture, was known as Watt’s Ferry road.  What stories Bird could have told me about the days when his—what? grandfather, great-grandfather?—ferried folks over to the mouth of that unknown creek [Bird would have known the name] on the other side.  Did they take teams and wagons or just foot passengers?  Bird could have told me too about floods and crop failures and the days when fields of hemp [for sailcloth and rope and cordage during the Civil and the World Wars]  were grown in these bottoms.  He’d have had stories about droughts and crop failures and hard times.  Now, I am close in age to Bird at that time, and I have a deep remorse that I didn’t ask to hear Bird’s stories, that I didn’t beg the man to share his life’s memories and all he’d been told as a boy and all he’d learned as a man.  I should have sat at his feet as long as he would allow and walked with him back home.  Even when he offered me a bandana full of sassafras root he’d dug so as not to show up at a neighbor’s empty handed, my self as I was then discounted this inconvenient visitor, disregarded and diminished him.  I can see and feel that puerile twenty-something’s impatience and fatuous self importance and reflect on how things might have been different in my own farming education if I’d treated Bird as respectfully as he deserved.  But I didn’t, and he left after a little while saying “Y’all come and see us over home…”  I did accept the sassafras root and did actually sample the tea, which was pleasant enough.  This was the first Spring we were on the land, 1965, and I was just 23, if that’s an excuse.     Most of my waking hours were spent commuting and at the University, later at work.  What I had during my five years there was weekends on the farm. Vacations I went elsewhere, often to New Mexico.  As always, I walked, but there were certain things—guy things—I did do. Fencing.  Cutting some firewood. Trying to hold back the Osage orange hedge.  I had to have a tractor.  Not that I did much with it beyond mowing rough edges around the house and, once attempting to plow, but I had to have it.  Those adventures hanging on to Uncle Elmer’s tractor seat were well engraved in memory and I knew that I needed a tractor if I was going to be a farmer.      I kept an eye out for a cheap used tractor, and pretty soon struck a deal with a guy who ran a Standard Oil station just outside Frankfort.  He sold me a pre-war Farmall, with big rear tires and small front ones.  No battery.  It started with a crank and some mumbo jumbo.  No hydraulics.  Exhaust pressure got shunted from the manifold to a large cylinder just at your left knee, and pushed a piston and connecting arm lever at the back of the machine, to lift your implement.  Theoretically.  It was an ingenious apparatus, one I’ve never seen or heard of since, but the tractor never ran well enough while I had it that the back pressure didn’t threaten to shut it down when I lifted the plow.  Nevermind.  For the occasional mowing I had to do, or pulling up a fence post, that $400 Farmall was about as much as I needed.      I cranked it and cussed it and filled up the tires with a hand pump, probably about the same as any farmer would, but it didn’t make me a farmer to have a tractor.     WALNUT TREES.  I mentioned the black walnut trees that graced the river bank.  The lumber from these magnificent trees was and is much prized for furniture, gunstocks, and when a trunk is reasonably straight and more than eight feet from ground to first limb it’s a veneer log to be shipped to Germany where  precision milling equipment was in place to shave micro-thin veneer—thin as a magazine page—miles of it, like paper towels coming off a roll.       Toward the end of my time on the farm, with a marriage breaking down and my wanderlust beginning to assert, I confess I eyed those trees with dollar signs in my mind.  The proceeds from selling those veneer logs would help pay the mortgage down and make the whole situation more escapable.  I shudder to admit my greed and self-centeredness, but there it is.  Now, however, three or four years into my lame stewardship of the land, Nature stirred conscience in me and, while guilt and remorse were close to the surface, a plan for redemption came to me.  For every tree I allowed to be cut down, profiting from the demise of an older, weightier, altogether more honorable and wiser creature than myself, I would plant 20 seedlings of the same.  If I succumb to greed, I can at least make a stab at replacing the trees I have destroyed.  No telling how many of those trees survived, but I spent most of my spare time that last spring on the river bank digging holes for black walnut seedlings I acquired from the Kentucky Department of Fish & Wildlife.  Thirty five years later, I think about those hundreds of seedlings…saplings…trees.  Hardwood nut trees grow slowly. Those planted 8 or 10 years ago at Aurora Farm are now head high, and almost as broad as they are tall, beautifully shaped, stable and well supported by sturdy root systems.  In Kentucky, the natural habitat of these trees, on and near a river bank with unlimited water, the Landscape Angels helped just the right number of those seedlings I started to survive and thrive.  At 35 years their trunks could be nearing eight inches in diameter at breast height and their crowns shading an area big enough for a picnic.     THE OTHER THING, besides a tractor, that made a farm a farm in my mind, even then, was animals.  I was on the right track, but maybe a little askew in my reasoning.  For the first few months of our stay on the farm, while we were still renting, the owner kept a small herd of beef cattle on the place.  These animals, all steers of about the same age as far as I could tell interest me not at all.  If there had been cows and birthings and calves and bulls, that would have been a different thing.  When we bought the property the following year, the beef went away.  I realize now that the dilapidated fencing on this farm would have cost more than the grazing on worn-out hill pasture was worth.     At some point a couple of horses came to us, kept there as a favor to a friend.   A white mare, and a chestnut stallion [later a gelding].  I rode on occasion with the friend, but it’s not my thing.  I’m too narrow in the hips, unpadded and hernia-prone to sit a horse comfortably.  The horses were there only a year or so.  The same friend also brought a pony, her childhood pony, now more than 20 years old.  Trigger was there still when I left and presumably died alone.  Another twinge of remorse.     And a goat.  Annie the goat, source of my career-long aversion to any species of critter that is more agile than I, more single-minded, and smarter too.  Annie was occasionally made unwelcome with a 2x4 when she became obstreperous, especially in the yard when my long-suffering wife was trying to get from the house to her car.  Finally Annie ran away, seeking her fortune.  A few months later when we had pretty much figured she was long gone or long dead or both, a sheriff’s deputy drove up to the gate.  He had in his hand the brass collar tag that identified Annie and gave our location.      “Seems like this goat of yours,” he told me, “is romping through people’s gardens in Versailles [the county seat].  “She’s not by herself…she’s got other goats with her.  Somebody got close enough to her to grab her collar and pulled this tag off…but she gave ‘em the slip.”  I told the deputy to shoot to kill if he had to.      Much more memorable and manageable were the Banties, my game hens.  On nice Saturday morning this fellow showed up at our gate—something of an event there at the end of the road—and showed me in the back of his pickup a mighty fighting rooster, a gamecock of high color and a higher attitude. This guy [the rooster] stood tall and strutted boldly considering he was a captive. Once my visitor was assured of my interest he donned a pair of heavy gloves and took the cock into his arms, holding tightly to his feet and the spurs on his shanks.  He spoke to the bird, who looked half again as large out in the open and lifted him up.  A cry resounded, a rich, far reaching COCKADOODLE—DOOOOOO, as piercing as it was loud.  A lofty and majestic sound that thrilled me to the heart.           Here was the deal.  I’m not sure I ever knew this man’s name, for what he was doing—raising and fighting game cocks—was plainly illegal.  In order to keep the lowest possible profile with his neighbors, this fellow, Rooster Man I’ll call him, needed to spread out his collections of promising cocks over as broad an area as possible.  Rooster Man sought out isolated homesteads like mine in this and surrounding counties to board out his cocks, scattering them over quite a stretch of country.  No particular care was required of the landowner holding the role of foster chickenkeeper, for these game cocks were hardy and tough in the extreme, able to live without artificial shelter or feeding.  They were smart and tough enough to survive predators [hawks, bobcats, coyotes, men with guns]—or else they weren’t.  And if they weren’t, good riddance.  The out-placement of these fighting birds was also a process of natural selection.     In return for my agreement to participate in this marginally illegal and dubious scheme Rooster Man offered a couple of dozen game hens, full grown and laying eggs.  He must have had a mighty flock of them at home, selecting by criteria only he knew the best of the best roosters and breeding them back to the home flock, because he had no qualms about handing off 25 of them to me.  These were Banties, prolific layers of small and well-hidden eggs, prone to roost in trees and to feed off the land, though a little cracked corn scattered on the barn floor at night would bring them in for a bit of protection.  My own little flock, Rooster Man told me, would tend to keep the lone cock ranging in my woods and pastures reasonably close, for these guys are as lustful as they are wild and I could be certain of baby chicks before long.  Which was true.  In fact, everything he told me was true.     Every few months Rooster Man would show up with another game cock in the back of his truck.  He would encourage that one to crow and when he did, the farmed-out rooster in my woods would answer.  That was how Rooster Man brought them in to have a look at them.  Sometimes he’d be satisfied just to hear the distant cockadoodle, know that his unnamed contender was out there and more or less intact; sometimes he’d bring him right in to the truck to assess his aggressiveness, admire his plumage, offer some fond comment.  On a couple of occasions Rooster Man took “my” cock away and left another.  He never told me where or when he fought these birds and I frankly didn’t care.  For me it was enough to know that a semi-tamed, highly-trained, and highly-evolved creature was out there, free.     The hens were fun.  In spring, when they were setting clutches of eggs and caring for batches of chicks I confined them as best I could to the stripping room in the barn where they and the little ones were protected somewhat.  The rest of the year they and their little ones had the run of the place, though they stayed pretty close to the barn and corn crib and the surround brush and woods.  Dozens were lost to predators, but there was always a new generations coming and these birds were a feature of the place as long as I was there.  At one point in the spring chick rearing season I visited them in the stripping room and found there a rather large bull snake, with several suspicious bulges in his tummy.  This guy was 4 or 5 feet long and way broader than he should have been  In fact he was so bulgy that he couldn’t really move, even when I bent down to see.  He waited for me to walk to the house and come back with my shotgun.  After I blew off his head I opened him up there they were lined up inside, a half a dozen or more week-old baby chicks.  The dust from the shotgun blast was still settling when I carried the snake outside and flung his carcass and those of the babies into the woods.     At the tenant house at the top of the farm there was a dug well with a concrete apron at ground level and a hinged metal hatch covering the opening. Except for a few yard trees and spring flowers coming up from bulbs under the broken windows of the  house, this was a barren place and I didn’t spend a lot of time there.  But occasionally I would lift that well cover and peer down inside. Maybe 20 feet below, if the sun was right, I could see the surface of the water and though I don’t remember ever dipping any out with a string and a cup, I’m sure it’s good water, even now.      During one of these desultory inspections I caught sight of a black widow spider, just under the hatch, as surprised, I suppose, as I was.  She wasn’t “lurking” there; she wasn’t “in ambush” under the well head.  She was just living there.  Now, in age, I would thank her for the privilege of meeting her and leave her alone.  Then, in youth, I hatched a plan.  Going into the abandoned house, I went to a closet where I knew there were some more or less intact canning jars.  I found one with a lid and screw ring, went back out to the well head and captured ma spider in the jar, with some strands of web.     I took her home to the garage and set her up in an aquarium with a screen top, little sticks in there for her webwork and a steady diet of flies and moths and such.  Ma spider stayed, making herself at home and mighty aloof, I thought, when I would come to say hello.  In early summer she quite rapidly built egg cases, all of tan colored silk and the size and shape of my little finger tip.  Presumably she filled these cases, three of them, with eggs, for in a couple of weeks spiderlings by the dozens, by the hundreds, emerged.  They were barely visible at first.  Ma didn’t seem to have much truck with them, having done her part.  I was curious how she was going to feed them, but that apparently wasn’t on the agenda.  As I watched over a period of days, no more than a couple of weeks, the little guys and gals got bigger and bigger, and fewer and fewer.  Natural selection in action, they were eating each other and may the best few survive out of the hundreds hatched.  Presumably by the end of the process the last one or two of them would figure out there is other food on the planet besides siblings, and maybe at that point Ma spider begins to take an interest and teach her adolescent offspring about webs, and prey…wrapping it up and sucking it dry. *   *   *     There’s not been a lot about gardening because I wasn’t into it then.  I do remember one season of a marginally productive salad patch, and some flowers in the front yard, but the passion for growing things didn’t hit me until later.  Now the restlessness was upon me and the need to escape.     What did I take away from this unnamed farm in Kentucky?  What lessons penetrated?      If I had been a different sort of person, schooled more in tradition and love of land, I might today be contemplating my own buriel in the plot just across the driveway from the house.  Up against the Osage orange hedge there was a setting of unreadable gravestones, not quite regularly spaced, as if the ground had shifted.  If I had invented myself differently, had I rooted myself on the farm and learned the lessons there for me, I might be scoping out a plot in that tiny graveyard  for myself.  I could have made a living on that farm and stayed, but I didn’t and I am who I am for all that. I did come to understand that Stewardship is not the same as ownership.  In fact, ownership is not necessary to stewardship and can even interfere.  I learned much later that I could be a good steward… And I learned that Well-founded intentions, enthusiastically pursued, will be blessed, and will redeem a lot of blunders.  I’m thinking of those Saturday mornings on the riverbank dragging behind me a damp burlap-wrapped bundle of black walnut seedlings, learning to find the soft, open spots away from competitor trees.  Those couple of hundred trees I set in there 25 years ago allowed me to exit with some grace and ease.  However many remain, they will outlast me.