Ain’t What It’s Cracked Up to Be

Here’s looking at you, E!

Ah, the weekend. It passed in a miasma (damn, I didn’t even know I knew that word) of rural tomfoolery. I cut firewood, cleaned up the last of the summer fencing, hauled a load of wood shavings for bedding, and then offloaded them one shovelful at a time, hoed out the basement, stacked lumber, started putting the tire chains on the tractor, realized I need to drive the beast a few miles on paved road in the coming days, and thus spent the next 30 minutes undoing the previous 30 minutes worth of work. Of course there were chores, and there was a road trip with the boys up to Island Pond to visit Trapper Bill’s, where the fellas pawed through the boxes of trapping supplies strewn across Bill’s basement. “I get all these traps and all you get is a couple pieces of paper,” is what Rye said to Bill as he handed over his hard-won loot. The boy is developing a keen sense of humor. Must get it from Penny.

Both evenings this weekend I was in bed by 9; both mornings, up by 5. Ok, so maybe 5:15, but in any event, the laborious and miasmic (it just gets better and better) nature of the past couple days got me pondering about how darned complicated the simple life can be and what, precisely, draws me to this life. Some of this ponderin’ was, I suspect, provoked by an email I received on Friday from a fellow named Michael. I, like many men, feel the strong draw to a simpler life… I feel a strong need to take part in a resurgence of manliness and do my part to provide some insight into what being a man is all about. The latter references his blog, which I haven’t read in much detail but looks interesting, particularly to one as deficient in manliness as myself.

Anyhow, like I said, Michael’s note got me thinking, first about what a ludicrous misnomer the “simple life” really is. You want simple? Go down to the store and buy a gallon of milk. Get yourself one of them central heating systems. Get a good job with more pay. It’s color-by-numbers simple, it’s all laid out for you. The path is well-trod, and the plans are readily available.

(By the by, no offense, Michael: I fully understand what you mean when you speak of a simpler life. You are merely using the common shorthand for the sort of hand-to-mouth, land-based existence we’ve chosen)

Here’s what’s not simple: Hand milking in an open-sided barn on a 10-below zero morning. Not simple: Felling trees, hauling them to the landing, bucking them up, splitting the rounds, stacking them in the shed, feeding the fire. Or tending the gardens, amending the soil, bringing in the harvest. Or raising the pig, slitting the throat, separating flesh from bone, grinding the meat, making sausage.

It’s funny, I think, how we’ve managed to get it all backwards. The so-called simple life is not rewarding because it’s simple; it’s rewarding precisely because it’s complex. To slit the pig’s throat is to bring yourself in some strange way closer to the animal and nearer to the shifting emotions burning through you as you watch the blood pooling on the ground. To bring in the crops, all those bushels of potatoes and carrots and beets and onions, all those quarts of berries, all those half-gallon jars of syrup, is in some way to be held in the palm of nature. These acts do not simplify your relationships to the creatures and the land. They complicate these relationships. They imbue these relationships with nuance and meaning. They call you out of bed at 5:00 on a Sunday morning because you can feel that sweet urgency in your bones, an almost magnetic pull to the work and the tangled web of sorrow and joy and triumph and defeat and frustration and laughter and tears the work entails.

To Michael and anyone else drawn to this life, I say this: Do not resist. It is an awesome thing, full of opportunities to glean insight regarding your manliness or (I suspect, though am eminently unqualified to say with any certainty) womanliness, or even childliness.

Just don’t come to it expecting simple, because if you do, you’ll be profoundly disappointed. But that’s alright, because I got a secret for ya: Simple ain’t what it’s cracked up to be.