This is one of the most beautiful farms on one of the most beautiful roads on one of the most beautiful hills in the county where i live. My friend Cathy Stewart and I went up there to try and capture the feel of this very rich landscape. Once again, I was a bit surprised at the depth and field of color reflected in my new Achromat lens. I took about a dozen photos an they all were way out of focus or place, the lens decided it liked this angle, i just touched the shutter.
I was driving around my county, Washington County this afternoon with my friend Cathy Stewart and we passed Blacksmith Antiques, in Coila, a beautiful and spooky place crammed with a million old things. Brian La Brake presided from his post in a corner over this sea of bottles, posters, jewelry, tables, stones, dolls, lamps, and all kinds of glass.
Brian’s father was a geologist who taught him to collect stones and other small objects, and he sure took that to heart. it’s an enchanting place, I bought Maria a beautiful stone, an old heart necklace and a small antique doll. I don’t know why I bought the antique doll, except it was old and cheap.
Coming around the corner i saw Brian sitting in a corner of his barn, his head barely visible from the clutter. He said sure, I was welcome to take his photo. National Geographic once came to take it also, he said. I enjoyed this portrait.
I was driving by the Reafield Farm a few miles away from my farm and was taking pictures when Neal Raefield of Raefield Farm pulled over in his cart to see what I was doing there. I was prepared to explain, but it was not necessary.
“Hey Jon,” he said, “hey, Neal,” I said. I have been driving around farms taking photos for a very long time, and most of the farmers know by now, even if they wouldn’t dream of reading my books or blog. They say they don’t have time, and I believe them.
In more than ten years of driving around farms, no farmer has ever told me to leave, refused permission, or even asked me why I was taking photos, although some were carrying rifles, in case I was an assessor or greedy realtor. Neal Raefield is, to me, one of the best of this breed, came over to say hello. Like so many farmers, he just had his second knee replacement. He has 250 cows and is slowing down a bit, but still working at a pace that would kill man men his age, including me.
He was surprised when I asked permission to do his portrait, but he shrugged and agreed. I think the word has gotten around. This crazy man is driving around with a camera, but he will not hurt you.
Raefield is an impressive man, honest, open, hard-working and, I suspect pretty tough. Running a farm with 250 cows is not simple, and the Raefield farm is one of the most respected and well known dairy farms in my county. I was glad to see him, although he recognized me before I recognized him.
My relationship with farmers is curious, i am not a farmer, but a writer with a farm, and I could not last a week as a farmer, nor would I want to. It is killing and often thankless work. Farmers feed the world but most people, especially in America, have no idea what it takes to produce that food and don’t really care. The supermarket shelves are always full.
I am thinking more and more that I lived on farms or was a farmer in my other lives, I just feel connected to farms and farmers. I do not romanticize them or anybody else, but they are unlike anybody else that I know.
To live on a hillside and use it for a lifetime gives the annual job of work a past and a future. To live on a hill or hillisde and use it without diminishing its fertility or wasting it by erosion or depleting it for greed requires conscious intention and information and good and hard work.
The farmer I know loves animals and understands them well, he loves his land, his family, his life. He lives a hard life free of the corporate yoke, he is nobody’s slave, he is forever broke, and there is nothing new on his farm, in his house or barns. Ever. He hoped his children would stay and work with him on the farm, but they are gone and his days are numbered. Bankers circle him like crowds over roadkill. Bill collectors are rarely seen, the farmer takes out big loans he may never repay, but does not use credit cards for anything.
Men like Neal Raefield and Ed Gulley humble me, because no writer works half as hard any farmer, and few people know as much about animals as they do, or how to fix as many things as they can. When I think of men like Neal Raefield – his wife Carol loves dogs, especially border collies, I think of Wendell Berry and his powerful writing about the death of the agrarian world and the plight of the small family farm.
But it seems their time of tilling the earth is coming to a close, there is no one anything like them coming up to replace them.
“People are joined to the land by work,” Berry writes. “Land, work, people and community are all comprehended in the idea of culture. These connections cannot be understood or described by information. We can understand them only after we acknowledge that they should be harmonious – that a culture must be either shapely and saving or shapeless and destructive. To presume to describe land, work, people and community by information, by quantities, seems invariably to throw them into competition with on another. Work is then understood to exploit the land, the people to exploit their work, the community to exploit its people. And then instead of land, work, people and community, we have the industrial categories of resources, labor, management, consumers, and government.”
“We have,” writes Berry in The Art Of The Commonplace, exchanged harmony for an interminable fuss, and the work of culture for the timed and harried labor of an industrial economy.”
That is the story of the family farm, and the work that is replacing it.
I am humbled that the farmers I meet trust me, talk to me, let me take their photos. I understand – and so do they – that I am not without purpose, I am seeking to record a dying world, a world that has lived in harmony with work, people, culture, land and community for many, many years and is vanishing now.
It is being devoured by an incompetent and indifferent government, remote and data-sucking economists, and by a giant agribusiness that requires vast amounts of land, resources and animals to operate and sustain its costs, and does not live in harmony with anyone or any things.
I doubt I will live to see the last of these men and women who have been synonymous with family, animals, food and nature. And community. But I will come close. So many of the farms I have photographed are gone. Neal Raefield’s generation is moving on, selling out, dying off.
Change is the common faith and experience of the world, and we will all move along and die. But I am grateful to have met and known men and women like the Raefields, and looked onto this elegiac and vanishing world.
Every morning, Fanny and Gus find a moment to touch noses, something I have not ever seen any of my dogs do with a donkey. Most days, Gus also gives Fanny a lick on her nose. Lulu does not touch noses with Gus. These two have struck up a friendship, they are completely at ease with one another, and donkeys do not always love dogs.
Gus is just at ease here now, I did not know what to expect when we got a small dog, but it sure wasn’t that the dog would kiss one of our donkeys on the nose each morning.
I think there is nothing more beautiful in all of the animal world than the eyes of a donkey. They are soft and soulful and sometimes, mournful. I’ve been living around Fanny and Lulu for more than a decade now, and I never stop loving their eyes, they are deeply spiritual and wise to me, unlike any other animal I know of.
