A Life Instead of Merely a Living (and Number Three)

Caught!

Penny and the boys are out the door on their way to a four-day wilderness skills/craft retreat, unadvisedly leaving me in charge of, well, everything. The boys prepared small baggies of roasted grasshoppers for exchange at Saturday evening’s trade blanket; they drizzled them with tamari before roasting and then sprinkled salt on top, the result being that this morning I uncovered numerous grasshopper legs that somehow became embedded in the salt jar. Precisely how such a thing could occur escapes my current grasp of logic and reason, but of course the same could be said of many of the things that happen around here.

Ah, well. This is the life I have chosen, and if it happens to include grasshopper legs in the salt jar, so be it. It is a price I can afford to pay.

Having the place to myself, and having no shortage of tasks calling my name, I will stop there and leave you with a wonderful passage from a book I’m reading: The Earth is Enough, by the late Harry Middleton. It’s about his experiences living and fishing as a teen with his uncle and grandfather in the Ozarks. Find it. Read it. Your life will be better for it.

The land the old men worked, this land they had lived on for more than seventy years, had little to recommend it. Judged by the standards of modern agriculture, it was at best hardscrabble in character, a commercial disaster. Only the immense vegetable garden defied the laws of farm commerce and made the old men a handsome profit. Indeed, the garden’s fecundity mocked the rest of the farm’s herculean poverty. Rocky and feckless and only slightly more agreeable to commercial agriculture than 10,000 acres of concrete, the land yielded little that anyone but the old men considered important or of value. From it they harvested solitude, contentment, peace of mind, a way of life instead of merely a living. Which is the way they wanted it. The land was theirs, free and clear, and they had evidently made a decision decades before to keep it the way it was, to work with it rather than against it. A decision for trout and quail instead of beans. It seemed to them the world had too many beans and too few trout and wild turkeys. Their life in the mountains became a compromise, a balance of giving and taking…

… Although the old me warned me that a life devoted to the land brought heartache and ruination, although they chided me for taking what they considered an unhealthy interest in their lives and especially the natural world, once exposed to such a life, there was never really any serious hope of recovery, thank God. And the poverty didn’t seem all that bad; if it kept so much from their reach, they did not seem to mind. Indeed, they wanted it that way; doing without was the coin that had bought them the life in the hills beyond the backyard. Money, even in modest amounts, would have meant complications, and complications were something the old men had had enough of and didn’t want any more of. Complications took time, and time, they knew, was running out. They wanted only the solitude the land freely gave. The solitude of Starlight Creek soothed them; it was not a self-imposed prison but a natural sanctuary, real and boundless along the shadowy banks of the swift-moving creek.

Now that, my friends, is good writin’.

Number Three: Stay home