Without farmers, farmland returns to the wild
To live in a town that still counts thousands of undeveloped acres among its assets is to live with a lot of talk about land use, development, and saving open space. When such talk comes up I always think about what a nebulous term “open space” really is, one ready to be filled with a hundred dreaming gazes, allowing some with a scientific bent to imagine the preservation of greenways and diverse habitats–places unentered by humans–while others hope for room to walk and bike away from the noise of the world. And if you live in an old farming community as I do–the new houses are built on old fields; cellar holes, stone walls, and lilac bushes ghost the woods–whatever else open space may mean, most folks imagine saving the patchwork fields of the remaining farms.
But farming is a dynamic between humans and nature–nature pruned and weeded and narrowed to our desires–and it follows its own particular course. Without men and women to cultivate the land, a farm eventually becomes a place gone just as wild as all the other abandoned work places we now live among: the former granite pits on Cape Ann filling with quiet fresh water, the timberlands of the North Country grown back into spruce forests where hikers stumble on the sleepers of old railroad beds.
The farm in New England, being as old as our culture here, has a longer history than the timberlands and quarries, and its disappearance from the landscape has been a gradual one. Even Thoreau saw it slipping away in his time, as young men of the East began to head west and young women took up work in the textile mills. “None of the farmer’s sons are willing to be farmers,” he wrote, “and the apple trees are decayed and the cellar holes are more numerous than the houses, and the rails are covered with lichens, and the old maids wish to sell out and move into the village, and have waited twenty years in vain for this purpose.”
The decline Thoreau saw in the 19th century accelerated all through the 20th, in part because there continued to be more and other choices for the young, in part because the stony and inconsistent acid soils weren’t made for the scale that farming was growing into. Even so, in the course of their decline, New England’s farms have become all the more intimate to the eye. The hundred-year-old photograph of my own family’s farm in the lower Merrimack Valley shows a place almost unrecognizably broad and wide, thrown open to the sky, for beyond the buildings is a treeless expanse of pasture, meadow, and field, as our farm then adjoined the open land of the next, and the farms stretched endlessly down the road. Now that the rough pastures of my ancestor’s dairy farm have returned to woodland and there’s a white pine backdrop to our cultivated land, which is set out in row crops and fruit trees, the place feels enclosed and self-enfolding, as distinct from the wilderness beyond as it is from the suburban tracts and industrial parks at its borders.
Intimate yes, but also concentrated, intensified, and gazed upon by those who are not of the place. A century ago, farm life was self-reliant, inward, isolated, the tasks inside and out being constant and endless. What milk and apples my ancestors and their neighbors had to sell they’d take to the cities, so theirs was a world not often witnessed by outsiders. We now live in the age of the automobile and the suburb. The world comes to the farm and doesn’t every farmer know it, appealing to our democratic wishes for choice and more choice, offering, in addition to the old standards of corn, tomatoes, and beans, bedding plants, hanging plants, baby spinach, water spinach, four kinds of eggplant, and half a dozen varieties of hot peppers. A roadside stand can seem more like a bazaar than a farm, with extended seasons and jams and honeys and salad dressings lined up for resale. There are choices for the upscale market, choices for the new immigrants in the area, hayrides and pumpkin painting for those who treat the visit as an experience as much as a shopping trip–a sure sign that the farm is a separate world.
Farms may be set aside and saved as open space, but there’s no preserving the farmers to tend to them. The disinterest Thoreau saw in his lifetime has deepened in ours, and the few who are interested in working the land can hardly afford its price today. So I imagine, decades down the road, such places may be close kin to Rievaulx Abbey in Yorkshire, England, its ruins standing long beyond the age of belief it thrived in, snow spitting through the gothic arches, horses grazing among a fine white dusting that has settled on the ground and the stumps of columns that once supported the nave. “I have always thought Rievaulx Abbey, a most impressive monument,” the modern sculptor Henry Moore said, “more sculpture than architecture. When it is no longer usable, architecture inevitably becomes aesthetically like sculpture.” And who, having seen Moore’s finest bronze and stone works, which have captured the particular weight of the 20th century, isn’t grateful for his refusal to be elegiac, grateful for his eye that sees, according to its time, the bumps and hollows, the play of light and shadow on the last standing wall of an eclipsed Cistercian world?
Farmland without a context, without an agrarian world to sustain it, will change in its own way, and our gaze will adjust to meet the change, making of it what we can, even if it’s a world apart from what it had once been. I think it may be happening even now. At least I feel it on our own farm. My father, the last real farmer in the family, has been dead nearly six years now, and though the orchards he planted have been pruned and sprayed and harvested every year since, it feels to me that the land has already begun to return to the wild. The buildings erected on surrounding land, the loss of predators, and the lack of hunting have made deer and coyotes more apparent here. Perhaps I only notice the wildness because of my father’s death. All I know is that in the small hours, after the last of the long-haul trucks with their freights of paint, chairs, stoves, air conditioners, and paving stones have rolled onto the interstate, and the road has quieted down for the night, the wildness sometimes becomes audible. I hear the coyotes’ erratic baying over their kill. I hear the horned owls calling to each other in the dark, soft at first, each hoot distinct, then growing nearer and nearer as the calls strengthen until they quicken and overlap, responsive only to one another, out there beyond the reach of our will.
Jane Brox’s most recent book, Five Thousand Days Like This One, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She lives in Dracut.