On the left, brush hogger and legend Ted Emerson’s tractor is stuck – way stuck – in the marshy part of our Southern pasture. On the right, his son Ted Jr attached long heavy duty chains to Ted’s tractor and pulled him out of the much. This is a cherished ritual on our farm once a year. Read more.
This big men in trucks and on tractors are fearless, they know they can re-arrange the very earth if they need to do what they need to do.
Ted Emerson is one of the big men in trucks who live in the country, he is a legendary brush hogger, he rides his tractor like a cowboy once rode a horse, performing all sorts of brave and impossible tasks. He has absolute confidence in himself and his work, and he and I have the kind of ritualistic and trusting relationship that makes me so happy to live where I live.
Everybody has a Ted Emerson story, he brush hogs hundreds of farms and properties. Brush hogging – think of it as a big circular mower that cuts brush and small trees – involves pulling a tough rotary mower that leaves the grass to grow but chews up weeds, brush an other obstacles to healthy pastures and proper grazing. He gets his blue tractor into places no one thinks is possible, and he does so with joy and a ready smile.
Brush hogging a pasture is essential if you want to grass to survive and the pasture not to be overrun with brush and junk trees.
I think Ted is the brush hogger to the stars, country style. There is nobody better. He now has an impressive fleet of tractors and trucks.
On my farm, we have a marshy stretch of wetlands alongside the farmhouse, nobody will drive a truck or a tractor anywhere near it. The fertilizer company wouldn’t even let their truck enter the farm when they saw the marsh. Everybody does not include Ted. Every year I remind him not to go into the marshy part of the pasture, every year he smiles and completely ignores me, and every year he gets stuck in one of the deepest parts of the marsh.
His son Ted Jr. is prepared for this, he knows when he comes here he will probably have to come and help pull him out.
It works this way. When the weeds and brush are too high, I call Ted and leave a message on his machine. He never answers or replies. One afternoon, weeks later, I hear the dogs bark and there is a a rumble, and a familiar blue tractor in the pasture. Ted knows animals well, he opens the pasture gate, drives in, closes it, brush hogs and then leaves. It takes him a couple of hours.
Most years, I never see him. If I run into him, it would be at the Bog having a hamburger. We catch up.
Weeks after that, I get a ridiculously low bill and send it back with a payment I think is fair. We never discuss money.
And every year, as faithfully as the Summer Solstice, Ted gets stuck in the marsh and has to get his son Ted Jr. to help pull him out. It’s no big deal, it’s annual and predictable. I have never been able to unravel the mystery of Ted Emerson. Why does he drive into the marsh every year?
When I ask him why he went into the marsh, he just smiles and shrugs. “I thought I could go it,” he said, and this year, he almost did do it. He brush hogged 98 per cent of the marsh before going a bit too far in and getting stuck. Here is a photo today.
Why does he do that?, I asked his son Ted Jr., a big and genial man and a brush hogger also. (His son Garrett rides along in the tractor, one day he will be a brush hogger too I imagine. Sometimes Garrett rides in Ted’s tractor.)
Ted Jr. smiled. “He thinks he can do it,” he says. “He always thinks he can do it.” I think of those old John Wayne movies when I think of Ted. If the head guy says the cows will make it to Montana, then by gum, they will make it to Montana.
Yesterday, when Ted came, I cautioned him once more not to go into the marsh, the animals don’t graze there and there is no need to cut the marsh grass. I know he will go into the marsh, and so does he. He smiles and nods.
I went out to take a photo of him in the back pasture, and was amazed seeing him back his tractor right into dense and boggy brush and come right out again.
We never say goodbye to Ted, he just leaves when he is done.
We went out to shop and go to the movies and when we came back, Ted was gone, his blue tractor was up over the rim into the marshy mud.
The thing is, Ted is a man who loves his work and is fearless and confident about it. People who love their work are sacred to me, they can, in fact, accomplish almost anything.
This afternoon, Ted Jr., wife and kids arrived in various trucks and tractors for their rescue mission. It is no big deal for them. Soon, both tractors were mired in the mud, and Ted came over to ask me if I had a long, heavy-duty chain. Hmmmm, no, I said, not imagining what such a thing would be or why I would have one.
But I called my friend Jack Macmillan, a big man in a truck himself.
Sure, he said, I have three heavy duty chains. I went over and got them and Ted Jr. and Ted hooked them to their tractors and Ted was pulled out. He never stopped smiling and laughing, and pointed out that even though he got stuck at the end, he did brush hog the pasture and the marsh.
The two tractors rode out of the pasture behind one another, each one shedding mud and trust, two proud mechanical stallions who had accomplished their mission.
And it was true. Ted has brush hogged the marsh. Let Ted be Ted.
Next year I will tell Ted not to go into the marshy part of the pasture and he will smile and laugh. Maybe I’ll get some heavy duty chains. We exchanged hugs all around and I asked Ted if I could take a portrait of him for my portrait show.
Sure, he said, laughing, why not.
Chloe loves her fly mask, we didn’t quite realize how annoyed she was by the big horseflies. She ambles over to the gate, whinnies to us, tries to lure a cookie out of us, waits for me or Maria to come and talk to her or rub her nose. Chloe has settled in beautiful on our farm, and she is growing on me by the day.
We have three cords of wood to stack, Tyler Lindenholl, fresh from a wrestling championship in upstate New York, came over to begin stacking the wood in the shed. It was a hot and sunny day, he doesn’t seem to feel it. It’s great having Tyler back in our lives, he works hard and eagerly and without complaint.
It’s a lot of wood.
He’s like family.
I have a bicycle in the garage that i’ve not ridden in several years, I just am not drawn to biking. Tyler asked if he could buy it, but I wasn’t comfortable with the idea of selling it to him, as I don’t use it. I told him to take it, we’d work something out down the road. But I don’t really want anything for it, and he will use it well.
I’d like to put a portrait of Tyler in my portrait show.
“…I felt like laughing, drinking the rusty water from the faucet and urinating. I stood for a while by the sink staring, as if seeking the means to fulfill all these three needs simultaneously. Then I went over to the window, opened it, and looked out into the wet street, its black windows, flat roofs, the glowing sky, without a moon, without stars, opaque and stagnant like some global cover. I leaned out as far as I could, deeply inhaled the fumes of the city, and proclaimed to myself and to the powers of the night:
I am lost in America, lost forever.” – Isaac Bashevis Singer, Lost In America.
Sometimes, lately, I feel lost in America, perhaps a bit overwhelmed by it, its vastness, complexity, quarrelsomeness, anger and fear.
This election has gone on for too long, is too intense and angry, costs too much money, and is divisive and uninspriring. The more I pay attention to it, the more disturbing it is. I have to deal with that, not just complain about it.
America such a big and complicated place, democracy is sometimes so loud, frustrating and vulgar. Lately I have had the feeling so many others have of not recognizing the country I used to feel has so many shared and common values and truths.
Sometimes, I even feel fearful in America, a completely new experience for me. Like the descendants of so many outsiders and immigrants, I come from people who came here to feel safe, and have always felt safe. I don’t wish to carry it too far, but I don’t always feel safe anymore.
We can’t even agree any more to make it more difficult for madmen to slaughter innocent children in their classroom, we are unique to the world in that way.
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So how do I deal with this? How do I feel about it? Like Singer, the great Nobel Laureate refugee from Poland, do I throw open the windows, lead out the window and shout to the powers of the night that I am lost here, lost in America?
Not yet. I don’t wish to join the growing armies of the angry, the outraged, the members of Victim Nation, the cowards on Facebook and Twitter, the legions of the Left and the Right. I’d like to be something else, someone else, do something else. We have always been a quarrelsome people, divided in many ways, from the very beginning.
Often much more than this, more violently than this.
History always comforts me. This is not the first time a demagogue has risen up to unleash the winds of fear and hatred. Or the first time madmen slaughtered innocent men, women and children in the name of faith. It was very often worse than this. We did not invent cruelty or division or paralysis.
These are not the worst of times, they are just human times. In history, there is nothing new, just new minds of memory and comprehension.
We are not pillage foreign villages and stealing humans as slaves, we are not burning witches alive, we are not dropping by the millions from dread and known diseases, the world is not filled with war all over, we do not toss female children over the cliff so that we can have sons, we do not prohibit our wives and partners from owning property or voting. We do not see our children die from the common cold.
A philosopher wrote 1,000 years ago, that there has always been one story in the world: the rich screwing the poor, and the poor rising up in anger from time to time.
From the beginning, men and women have struggled to figure out the necessarily evil that is government. We are still struggling to figure it out.
Sitting in a movie theater watching Ghostbusters, I thought all this ghosts zipping around spewing bile reminded me of our political leaders, all of this awful green stuff coming out of their mouths. In our political system, we ask the children to cover their eyes and ears when our leaders come on the tube.
On the left, there is this feeling that if the other side wins, all we be lost. On the right, there is the same feeling. The country cannot win, either way. We have forgotten the common ground we used to share, arguing only about what divides us.
What can I do? Not that. I decline the labels people wish to put on me. I resist the importuning of people who would wish me to hate those who disagree with me, and consider them the enemy. That is what labels do, they shrink our minds and reason.
I try to stand in the shoes of other people, and try to see what they see. There are two or more ways of looking at everything.
I am self-aware about the number of horrific images and arguments my psyche can absorb and be healthy. If I look at the news, and these days I do, it is once or twice a day. I watch few videos. I do not argue my beliefs with others, or insist that they submit to mine. I do not quarrel on Facebook.
Dialogue begins with respect and empathy. And with a commitment to knowing where I stand.
H.L. Mencken, my faithful guide to democracy, which he considered to be the best among poor options for governing, defined society as a conflict between the superior man and woman and the mob. His portrait of the mob-man was an ideal monster, a creature governed only by emotions, not reason.
His ideas were written more than a half-century ago, they comforted people then, they comfort me now, and help me understand the America I am living in. Stay calm, he told his readers. Democracy is an ugly mess, but it is the best ugly mess yet devised for keeping people from killing one another.
Demagogues and “mob men” are an inevitable by-product of democracy he wrote, they have great power to frighten, but no brains to govern.
Of the mob-man, he wrote:
“Whenever he is confronted by a choice between two ideas, the one sound and the other not, he chooses, almost infallibly, and by a sort of pathological compulsion, the one that is not. Behind all the great tyrants and butchers of history he has marched with loud hosannas, but his hand is eternally against those who week to liberate the spirit of the race…In two thousands years he has moved an inch: from the sports of the arena to the lynching party…What is worth knowing he doesn’t want to know what he knows is not true. The cardinal articles of his credo are the inventions of mountebanks; his heroes are mainly scoundrels.”
The minds of demagogues who flourish in democratic states, Mencken wrote, are stocked with fear. They are professors of mob psychology, fear is the foundation and cornerstone of their ideology. Politics under democracy consists almost wholly of the discovery, chase and scotching of bugaboos.
Sometimes, like the great writer Singer, who mourned for the loss of his rich cultural world in Poland, taken by the Nazi’s, I feel lost in America also. It seems too big and angry for me, I feel like a flea in a hurricane, trying just to get out of the wind.
But this is where my life is, and I love the dream and promise of America, I have lived it, it saved my family’s very existence. So I will hold my ground, keep my perspective, keep my sense of humor. In my mind I peer out of my own window, looking out into the hills, the stars in the sky, breathing in the rich smells of the night, singing with the foxes and coyotes and owls to the moon. I proclaim to myself and to the powers of the night:
I am sometimes lost in America, but I will swim in my dreams, and I will be safe again and I will be free.
