The Half That Really Matters

Stalking the wild woods nettle

Late yesterday afternoon, the boys and I climbed into the cab of Melvin’s big New Holland tractor and gathered bales while he tended to evening milking. Melvin hays a number of small parcels on this hill, and to wrap the bales they must be congregated in a centralized location. This location just happens to be at roughly the end of our driveway.

The boys do not miss a chance to ride in Melvin’s tractor, and I understand why. It’s an amazing piece of power and ingenuity; at 100 or so horsepower, it’s pretty small and relatively basic by the standards of modern farm tractors, but compared to our relic, it’s a dangblam Cadillac. There is something inherently fantastical about plucking 1000-pound round bales off the field with no more than a flick of the wrist and a squeeze of the button that operates the clamshell bale grabber, to stack them two and even three high atop the wagon until the poor things looks as if it’s about to fold in on itself. Then the boys, uncharacteristically eager to help in any way possible, stumbling over themselves to hitch the wagon to the drawbar, and finally, pulling the whole heaping mass – 12,000 pounds or more – to the bale wrapper, unloading, and doing it all over again. And the whole while, 107.1 Frank FM thumping from the stereo (Remember “Twilight Zone” by Golden Earring? Yeah, I’d forgotten it, too, but darned if I didn’t know every freakin’ word).

Anyway. You can see how it’s not the worst way to pass a couple hours on a Sunday afternoon.

And that was good, because earlier in the day, I’d made the mistake of checking on my reader reviews on Amazon. Well, now. I kinda figured $AVED would be one of those love it/hate it sort of books, but still and all I wasn’t quite prepared for the distaste it seems to have left in some people’s mouths and minds. “A very dangerous and subversive book,” wrote one reader. “One of the few books I took pride in burning in my wood stove.” Another wrote: “… as I went through the book I began to count how many pages I had left to slog through before I could liberate myself from his trite musings.” You can read more of the blood-letting here.

Naturally, this threw me a bit. I’m only human, after all. I never expect everybody to love or even like anything I write, but I wasn’t quite prepared for this level of rancor toward and simple distaste for my work. What’s more, I’d just finished up a series of by far the best-attended and liveliest readings I’ve experienced, and had recently received a number of emails and even a couple hand written notes (!!) from folks who hadn’t seen fit to burn the book, or even felt as if it were a slog. Why, I was starting to get the impression that some people had actually liked it.

To be honest, I think the negative reader reviews, while somewhat painful, are healthy for me, if only because they remind me that my life is in part defined by a strange duality. There is my life on this little hill, carried out amongst my family, friend, neighbors, animals, and nature, all of this far outside the public eye but for what I choose to share here, which of course is only a fraction. In this life, no one judges my work except for the people I am closest to (and perhaps our animals: Who knows what they might be thinking?), and because they love or at least like me, they generally cut me some slack. I remember the time I mowed a crop of hay for Melvin, and I was nervous because it was the first time mowing with his equipment, and being distracted by my nerves and not yet experienced enough to have these things be ingrained in the fibers of my being, I mowed the whole damn field counter clockwise, which meant I was driving over the standing hay. And second cut, no less. Melvin just shrugged and grinned. “No big deal,” he said.

And then there is my life that is very much in the public eye. That is the nature of my paying work: I write so that others will read what I write (that’s not the only reason, of course, but if I’m going to get paid, I damn well better hope others read what I write). And with that comes the vulnerability of exposing myself to the judgement of people who don’t love, like, or even know me, and are therefore disinclined to cut me any slack. I don’t bemoan or begrudge this; it is an essential facet of my job. Nor do I think these people are wrong: If someone says that $AVED is trite or subversive, or just downright boring, then it is. And if someone writes to me saying it has radically changed their outlook on life for the better? Well, that’s true, too. As I’ve mentioned before, there is room for more than one truth in this world.

Where does all this leave me? I’d be lying if I said I don’t want people to like my books or anything else I write. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t discouraged by those negative reviews. But last night, as the boys and I chatted and sang as we worked to gather Melvin’s hay,  I was again struck by how the things that feel most important to me, that feel as if they feed some deep, interior part of me that cannot be fed otherwise, have nothing to do with the part of my life that is visible to the broader world. Unlike the portion of my life that exists in the public realm, these things are free of ego and acknowledgement, and remembering this, I felt instantly grateful that so many of my days are filled with the quiet rewards inherent to doing and being solely for the sake of doing and being and for the gentle, unheralded satisfaction of an essential task completed.