Where the Deer and the Antelope Play: The Pastoral Observations of One Ignorant American Who Loves to Walk Outside

by Nick Offerman

As it turns out, that was just the appetizer to a much meatier main course, because that 1995 play in Chicago was also the juncture at my life in which somebody first gave me some Wendell Berry stories. That “somebody” was Leo Burmester, a dearly departed, larger-than-life Kentucky actor who was also in the show and could apparently smell the hay on me, or at least a waft of manure, and, recognizing a kindred spirit, he changed my life with his gesture.

Agrarianism promotes an egalitarian agriculture based on morally sound land use. Slow down, please, and read that last sentence again. Have you ever read a sentence even half that boring?

“And so I go to the woods. As I go in under the trees, dependably, almost at once, and by nothing I do, things fall into place. I enter an order that does not exist outside, in the human spaces. I feel my life take its place among the lives—the trees, the annual plants, the animals and birds, the living of all these and the dead—that go and have gone to make the life of the earth. “I am less important than I thought, the human race is less important than I thought. I rejoice in that. My mind loses its urgings, senses its nature, and is free.” Wendell Berry, A Native Hill (1969).

A man on foot, on horseback or on a bicycle will see more, feel more, enjoy more in one mile than the motorized tourists can in a hundred miles. —EDWARD ABBEY, Desert Solitaire

When I thought about it, I realized that we modern Americans would be hard-pressed to come up with a single scenario in which we treated the Indigenous peoples with anything remotely resembling fairness.

As Wendell Berry says, “Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.”

You rarely see messaging encouraging one to sit still, breathe, and please don’t think about buying anything at all.

But I also feel like we can encourage one another to invest in human beings instead of billionaire yachts that remain docked and shockingly expensive hot rods that nobody gets to drive.