Rural Delivery

So much has changed in the past few years, economically and socially and technologically, that almost everything we once took for granted and assumed would always be the same has been utterly transformed and made unrecognizable.

Rotary dial telephones. The milk man.The price of gas.

Isn’t there a speed limit on change? Hasn’t some law of physics been broken?

Things have changed so much that it is difficult to recall, or even imagine, what small farm life was really like a half-century ago in rural America. Did families really live on small acreages and support themselves by working the land? Did they really milk cows by hand and gather eggs from the henhouse and butcher their own meat?

At a museum display of 19th century clothing, I once overheard a woman questioning the authenticity of a colorful gown. “They didn’t have gowns like that!” she exclaimed. “Look at the colors!”

To prove her point, she gestured to a black-and-white photo of women from the period. No colors. In her mind, colored textiles were a modern invention.

Similarly, a recently published family farm story penned by Wisconsin author Jerry Apps must be identified as a work of fiction. In a Pickle takes place in 1955 and its main character is a young farmer and manager of a local pickle salting station, Andy Meyer, who is pitched into conflict with a multinational corporation determined to force the small acreage farms that supply its pickles to expand and modernize or get out of farming.

Pickles were a vital cash crop for Midwest farmsteads of a half century ago. Cultivated and harvested by hand, a couple acres of cucumbers were a lucrative cash crop during hard times. Farmers hauled their cucumbers to the local pickle factory and were paid for them right on the spot with no waiting.

“Most farm products required a wait before the money came in,” Apps explains. “Even selling milk required a two-week wait for a milk check. But not cucumbers. During those long, dreadful, and often fearful Depression years, thousands of farmers in central Wisconsin had turned to growing cucumbers.”

A native of rural Wisconsin, Apps managed a cucumber salting station in the 1950s and has a personal history with small-town farmers and strong-arm corporations. He learned first-hand how modernization can disrupt the traditional order of things and the people who have learned to depend on that tradition.

Through Andy Meyers, you can hear the author’s lament for his quondam profession:

“You don’t take care of land by plowing 50-acre fields, by growing 30 acres of cucumbers, by pouring tons of fertilizer on the fields, by trying to farm a thousand acres.”

Reading academic histories or pouring over statistics that document the profound changes that have occurred in rural America over the last few decades doesn’t show the flushed faces or the sweating brows or the tearful goodbyes of real people in real places.

In a Pickle effectively colorizes an otherwise black-and-white image of a small Midwestern community in the midst of a transformation, but you have to wonder: “Was it ever really like that, or did the author just make it up?”

_______ by Michael Hofferber
Copyright © 2008 Outrider. All rights reserved.

We are left with the question of what it meant to us to have that farm in the family over the years, considering the effort it has taken to keep it. The answer, of course, is that it meant a great deal, for as surely as we shaped the farm, it shaped us. It is not enough to simply say that we loved it; it gave us the landscape of our minds. In this part of the world, where ownership of land is paramount, this  farm has been a source of pride and stability from the very beginning.

Margaret Jones Bolsterli
During Wind and Rain
The Jones Family Farm in the Arkansas Delta 1848-2006

Once upon a time a group of cattlemen shared a common field of grass on which they would graze their herds.

All was well until one rancher decided to increase his herd to boost his profit at market.

Consequently, his herd consumes more of the common pasture. He benefits individually but the collective bears the weight of the disadvantage (less grass for the other herds).

The other ranchers observe this and rationally conclude that the only sensible course for them is to add more animals to their herds as well.

Therein lies the tragedy of the commons. Each rancher is locked into a social and economic system that compels him to increase his herd without limit — in an environment that is limited.

Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.

The common good of the pasture is inevitably ruined and of no good to any of the ranchers.

Source: Garrett Hardin, Science, 162(1968):1243-1248

Fastened to our refrigerator door with a cow-shaped magnet is a fading piece of print clipped from some newspaper or almanac long ago. The clipping has outlived at least three refrigerators and survived several moves, traveling with us like some heirloom we dare not misplace.

Though curled at the edges and smeared a bit, the words are still legible:

• When the first leaves of the lilac appear… plant peas, potatoes, lettuce, radishes and the like. 
• When the first lilac blossoms appear… plant beets, carrots, kohlrabi and other cole crops. 
• When lilac blossoms reach full bloom… plant beans, corn, cucumbers and squashes. 
• When the lilac blossoms fade and fall… the danger of frost is probably past and it’s time to set out tomatoes, peppers and other warm-weather crops.

These tips, which have served as our planting calendar for many years, come from phenology, the study of biological phenomena and their happy coincidences. Farmers and gardeners have been noticing and recording phenological relationships as folklore for ages, like the date that migrating birds return, the first flower dates for plants, and the date on which a lake freezes in the autumn or opens in the spring. Phenological records can provide valuable insights about the natural world. If recorded carefully and consistently, they can have scientific value for understanding the interactions between organisms and their environment and for assessing the impacts of climate change.

I keep a file marked “Phenology” in which I collect aphorisms the way some folks collect stamps. Some are pieces of poetry or proverbs. Others are more like rules of thumb. Here’s a few examples:

• When oak leaves are the size of a mouse’s ear… set out tomato, eggplant and pepper plants
• When new oak leaves are the size of a squirrel’s ear… look for morels.
• When forsythia blooms, prune roses
• A wet, cold May? A barn full of hay.
• If owls screech in foul weather, it will turn to fair.
• Fish spawn when dogwood is in bloom.
• Catch your fish when rain is in sight.
• Rains are very near when toadstools suddenly appear.
• The danger of frost is past when white clover blooms.
• A swarm of bees in May is worth a load of hay.

These may seem like superstitions, but there’s a lot of scientifically verifiable information backing up our folklore. Phenology is one of the cornerstones of Integrated Pest Management, for example, which employs “plant phenology indicators” in timing applications of various agents to control insects and disease. In the field, it’s much easier to notice that the forsythia is blooming than it is to calculate “growing degree days.”

In my own garden, it might be more scientific to use a soil thermometer and meteorological forecasts before setting out tomatoes, but lilac blossoms are more elegant.

Every day for three years I joined millions of people on a mass migration between home and work in the crowded urban corridor between the suburbs of New Jersey and the skyscrapers of midtown Manhattan.

My wife was in graduate school at Rutgers University and I was working in an office halfway up the Empire State Building. My memories of those years are a succession of bus rides, train trips, taxi fares and street scenes; the smell of stale smoke, urine, fried meat and diesel exhaust is imprinted in every reflection.

Between the tunnels that fed us into the thick of midtown and the snarl of traffic circles, train stations and Turnpike toll booths that marked a steady succession of townships and cities, was a shock of open space: marshes, weeds, boggy dumps, mud flats, tall grasses and protruding boulders.

Like most other commuters, I presume, I looked out the window and thought “wasteland.” Undoubtedly despoiled with toxins and polluted beyond repair, it was obviously a place without worth or it would have long since been developed.

Almost a dozen years later, I realized I missed something. New Jersey nature writer John Quinn produced a convincing study of the Hackensack Meadowlands showing that despite its poor reputation, the area supports a vital ecosystem of birds and fishes and lush plant life far more extensive than anyone would imagine.

Ducks of many species migrate through the Meadowlands; some even reside there. Striped bass are common in these waters, though folks are warned against catching them for the frying pan. Several species of frogs survive in the brackish waters and peregrine falcons have been nesting on factory smokestacks.

Titled Fields of Sun and Grass, Quinn’s skteches and observations of the Meadowlands reveal a rural place not far removed from the urban congestion of Times Square. At one point, he climbs a graffiti-decorated rocky outcrop called Snake Hill that overlooks forests of chimneys and standpipes, marshy flatlands, and a convoluted tangle of roadways branching off the steady stream of the New Jersey Turnpike that fades into a horizon of hazy buildings.

“Sitting there in the November sun, assailed by the noise of a hundred thousand machines, the collective voices of perhaps a million people and a half a billion birds, I found my convictions as a naturalist challenged by the overwhelming visual and auditory assault,” Quinn reports. “I saw and heard this exultation not as a craven offense against nature but rather as a spectacular confirmation of it.”

The Meadowlands is a toxic place, defiled by some of the worst byproducts of 20th century society, and yet it lives and thrives and, in some places, is being restored. It demonstrates how nature incorporates the works of man, however complex and intrusive, and pursues its own agenda.

I once believed that what we call “rural” and what we know as “urban” could be clearly separated. Now I’m not so certain. Even small towns are sporting espresso bars these days and the most remote ranch may be linked via the Internet to daily trading on Wall Street.

Meanwhile, there are crops being grown on rooftops in every major city and more urban dwellers are taking an interest in being frugal and self-reliant. And, as Quinn demonstrates, there remain pockets of open space near the most densely populated cities where a person can stretch out and, for a few moments at least, feel what it’s like to be in the country.

_______ by Michael Hofferber
Copyright © 1998 Outrider. All rights reserved.

Early on any given spring morning somewhere between the Dakotas and the eastern flanks of the Cascades or the Sierras, where the sagebrush grows high and thick far from highways and houses and oil wells, there will be a clearing where a group of large chicken-like birds with long pointed tails and feathered legs will start to sing and dance.

Their music, made with air sacs in their puffed up chests, sounds something like the hollow sound made when you purse your mouth and slap your cheeks or the noise made by a loudly burbling water cooler.

Their dance isn’t much more than a brief strut: a couple quick-steps, wings raised and lowered, tail feathers displayed like a peacock’s. Each dance lasts but a few seconds, but the audience of female sage grouse watch with rapt attention, judging each performer with an inscrutable ranking system that produces a single winner — an American Idol, if you will.

The champion (the “master cock”) will mate with most of the judges. The runners-up will watch and wait for another year.

People are not invited to these competitions, but with some planning and a little luck it is possible to spy on the dancing sage grouse from a distance at a few well-known “leks” across the country. Leks are the ballroom floor for the sage grouse dances. They are usually open areas adjacent to stands of tall and dense sagebrush. The best known leks have been used by grouse for decades; others may only last a year or two. In any given year at any lek, the grouse may or may not show up.

To catch a performance, you must arrive well before dawn and wait, keeping very quiet, for several hours. Viewing locations have been established at the Millican Lekking Site 20 miles east of Bend, Oregon (during the month of April only) and the Gunnison Sage-Grouse Lek in southwestern Colorado.

“Bring a scope to accommodate your distance from the birds,” advises Hugh Kingery in the guidebook “Birding Colorado” (Falcon, 2007), where directions to the Gunnison site are published. “We also recommend that you skip morning coffee because of the strict stay-in-your-car or stay-in-the-blind rules.”

Sage grouse are extremely shy about their mating ritual. Any disturbance — barking dogs, slamming doors, cries of children — may cause them to abandon a lek altogether and even give up on breeding for a season. For a species with limited habitat and declining populations, this is a serious matter.

Hens usually stay at leks for two to three days for mating, then they seek out a dense patch of sage, thick and tall enough to protect the nest and the eggs from predators like eagles, hawks, coyotes, foxes, badgers and raccoons. The eggs usually hatch about 37 days after being laid.

In those eggs, and the ritual dancing that engenders them, lies the promise of another generation of one of the West’s oldest inhabitants. They herald the arrival of spring on the western plains, as they have for thousands of years.

• Environmental Sound Portrait: Sage Grouse Lek
• Outgoing

Snow conceals, but it can also betray.

Consider the tracks of mice, or wolves, or wolverine — so rarely seen. But here in the frozen dawn the secrets of their passage are plain to see, recorded like marks on a blank page.

You can read how the hare bounded from the forest cover, paused briefly to listen and stare intently (at what?),  then was off again. And you can follow the tracks of a lone elk that staggered back and forth across the hillside, searching some  remembered comfort before collapsing beneath the weight of hunger or disease, or both.

The ways of man, too, are easy to chart on this white blanket: the parallel lines of a skier, the wide cut of a snowmobile, the tread-marked furrows of a vehicle that slid off course and had to be excavated from the roadside (all is quiet now, but in the brown creases the groaning echoes and the smell of diesel lingers).

Footprints, as well, are captured in this white frame. I remember the prints leading away from my home in the early hours well before sunrise and how I followed them with a flashlight down the street to my empty wallet, new fallen in the snow, and further on to a dumpster in which my camera bag, emptied too, had been tossed.

The tracks went on into a parking lot where the chaos of traffic and the kerfuffle of other lives obscured the path of their escape.

Perhaps this explains why an unbroken spread of snow that coats the valley floor to a depth of several feet, that climbs halfway up the tallest pines and buries the smaller shrubs and saplings, obscuring rocks and roads and fencelines and  even the river’s flow, is such a welcome sight. How it comforts and inspires!

In the sparkling brilliance of a midsummer sun, is this not the beau ideal of virtue? Of purity? Of peace and justice?

Isn’t this the higher purpose to which we aspire, a place of beauty and sweetness and exhilirating perfection unblemished by the tracks of misery and starvation, of mistakes and struggles, of thievery and loss?

Isn’t this why we welcome the snow that makes it all right again?

Men come tamely home at night only from the next field or street, where their household echoes haunt, and their life pines because it breathes its own breath over again; their shadows, morning and evening, reach farther than their daily steps. We should come home from far, from adventures, and perils, and discoveries every day, with new experience and character.

Henry David Thoreau

Walden

As the temperatures drop, wildlife begin to prepare for the hardships of winter. Assisting wild animals with food and shelter will not  only help them survive the season, but will also bring colorful and entertaining visitors to your yard.

Bird feeders are a popular way to attract and support wildlife. During the winter, birds will become dependent upon a feeder as a source of food. Once you begin using a bird feeder, be sure to keep it full, especially during heavy snow cover. If this source suddenly becomes unavailable, birds expend valuable energy trying to find natural food sources.

To prevent the spread of disease, clean your bird feeders thoroughly and regularly. Remove organic debris, food, and bird droppings, wash the feeder with hot soapy water, and rinse it well.

Providing a variety of foliage is another way to help wildlife survive the winter. Different animals use different environments for shelter, so layering your landscape by providing plants at varying heights can attract and provide shelter for a wide variety of wildlife. For example, squirrels are comfortable in tall trees, while rabbits prefer cover under shrubs and in tall grasses. Leaving ground cover in place, such as fallen branches or leaf piles, may also be beneficial to some species of birds and small mammals.  These “shelters” offer valuable nesting and foraging areas that are otherwise buried under snow in the winter months.

Some animals may attempt to take advantage of your hospitality by entering your home or eating your garbage. To prevent unwanted guests, winterize your home by repairing torn screens, placing mesh or screen over the chimney and window wells, and sealing other entryways that allow access to your home or garage. Keep food items and garbage in animal-proof containers so it does not lure animals. Avoid leaving food outside for your pets, as contact with wild animals may spread disease to your pets.

Source:  University of Illinois College of Veterinary Medicine

Jody Hudson writes:

Do you know why more and more farms are growing houses, stores and filling stations instead of cows, corn and potatoes? Do you know where the farmers went? Well, my father and I are farmers that left the farm. Most of our neighbors have too. Most of us still live in the area; we just don’t farm any more.

Few people understand the farming they espouse as so charming and worthy. It was long hours, hard work and little or no pay. Most farmers had less money at the end of the year, after expenses, than those who clerked in stores. Some years the earnings were less than costs, too many years in fact where even the best farmers lost money and had to sell land to survive.

Real Estate Information and Essays by Jody Hudson