When Land Is History
Click to enlarge.
This winter I watched a new owner of the farm parcel next to mine bring in enormous Caterpillar equipment and land-levelers. He ripped out every living tree and bush. He changed the very contours of the land, flattening even the once rolling hills. Within days, arose a postmodern almond orchard of some 40 acres.
I say postmodern because the new creation is beyond modern. High-density-planted new trees are genetically designed to grow on these sandy soils. The drip system is computerized and injects precise amounts of fertilizers, while not wasting a drop of precious well water. An ancestral pond and its overflow basin have now shrunk to about an acre. The result is that the almond trees — not more than six months old — are growing so rapidly that they appear as if they were supernatural and in their second or third leaf. It is agribusiness development such as this that explains why California farmland is the most productive in the world.
I characterized this land as “adjacent,” but that is a euphemism for “once mine.” To make a proverbially long story short, I once owned the parcel, along with my own present 40 acres. It was the corner of a larger 135-acre surrounding family farm of about 140-years continual duration. The parcel in question was lost during the last decade in a convoluted inter-family sale/dispute/misunderstanding that led to a series of outside speculators buying, selling, and losing the land, as the economy boomed and busted. Finally, the parcel ended up in bankruptcy court this January–hence the new buyer and the new orchard.
If one believes that no one really owns the enduring land, then perhaps it is best that after a near decade of neglect the ground is now a productive farm again. Under new auspices, it will help feed the hungry of China and India as California’s current export boom continues.
Yet as I watched the machines eat up the earth, I thought that I might offer a fast-forwarded 140-year history of that piece of ground. The admittedly trivial story is known to almost no other living person (other than my twin brother), but adduced through autopsy of some 58 years of my life and augmented by remembrances of near-constant editorializing from my grandfather (1890-1976) and mother (1922-1989).
Both lived in my present house and told me about the original settler, Lucy Anna Davis, my great-great grandmother, who bought the pristine land from the railroad in or near 1870. In other words, what follows is the history of this land from its first contact with so-called civilization to the present — a memory that spans well over half the life of the United States. Here it goes:
0-1870
From natural histories of central California, we read that such open ground for millennia before the arrival of settlers and the railroad in California was uninhabited and dry — crisscrossed only occasionally by native Americans on their way to Tulare Lake, and later a few early explorers. Now and then one still finds in the vicinity an odd, tiny piece of ground never farmed that lies awkwardly between two vineyards. From such feral examples, one can fathom what these forty acres were like before the Europeans arrived — squirrels, hawks, coyotes, tumble weeds, puncture vines, thistle, sand burr, etc.
1870-1900
I was told that my ancestors — who came to California on the newly completed transcontinental railroad — picked out such sandy ground because the pond on it was artesian. The water table was less than 20 feet — making hand-powered pumps of the age feasible. Before the advent of electrical turbines, a high-water table meant easy access to water and the possibility of farming some gardens and thus survival — before even the gravity-fed canals from the Sierra were built by the local farmers (ca. the 1880s-1890s).
Until 1981, the original homestead and temporary shack of my great-great-grandmother rested on a hill above the pond. They built it from local cottonwood and camped out for the first decade in it: about 400 square feet, the walls hewn from rough planks, dirt floor, hand-cut bark shingles, tin-can lids nailed over knot-holes, the inside wallpapered by 19th-century newspapers, a rusted hand pump in the kitchen. Those who huddled in it apparently suffered things like malaria and typhus; at least I gathered that by stories of relief when such diseases disappeared in the early twentieth century in these parts.
I regret that we did not restore the shack. In 1982, it sort of finally collapsed on its own after 110 years. We salvaged some of the wood. My great-grandfather planted the first crop on the ground in its history — apricots and some Muscat vines. His mother brought a walnut seedling from Missouri that grew to enormous proportions before collapsing in 1985 after a century. In these stories of the early family, the Civil War loomed large: the Davises were Missouri Unionists and strong Northern pro-Lincoln Democrats escaping postwar score-settling — a point of contention when my grandfather married my grandmother, a Johnston whose family were Southern cattlemen that had fled postwar Alabama to New Mexico and to California — and were looked upon by the Davises with suspicion.
1900-1920
My grandfather told me as a little boy that his father kept them going by selling dried apricots, Muscat raisins, and some white peaches. As a kid, I remember uncovering abandoned primitive iron tracks where iron carts had been pushed into the nearly collapsed drying shed. Before tractors, half the land was open pasture, to feed the horses who pulled the disc and harrow — both still rusting outside my barn — to work the other half of vineyards and orchards.
In my earliest childhood, I could still see on this corner of the farm traces of the early 20th century — a single surviving sixty-year-old apricot tree, and an even older Hale peach tree, the remnants of my great-grandfather’s efforts to turn some of the ground into orchards. After a rain, we periodically would find in the dirt alleyways dozens of square nails, and horseshoes. There was an old family dump by the pond (cleaned up by us in 1980) where you could uncover turn-of-the-century medicine bottles, ancient machines, and everything from homeopathic books to “Keep Cool With Coolidge” rusted signs.
Rees Davis, my grandfather, also told me that even in his teens (ca. 1905) the poor sandy ground was once quite rich, due to aboriginal stands of natural lupin that over the eons had fixed nitrogen in the soil. But as the 20th century wore on, the parcel became known as the “Sand Hill” — a curse to irrigate, given its sandy porousness, poor nutrients, and hilly terrain. What had originally lured in the family off the railroad was lost to memory; certainly what was once rich in 1870 by 1920 was dry and substandard soil.
My grandfather was a modernist who, in the big house nearby, put in running water, electricity, and indoor toilets; and talked about them as if the World War I era was a golden age. Prices spiked at $300 a ton and most of the sheds and buildings went up between 1917-1922. To work the parcel in 1920 was to look forward to unending prosperity. My grandfather also reminded me once that all the grand rural Victorian two-story farmhouses of the area went up during the boom times of World War I — and many of them mysteriously burned down (for the insurance) in the Depression that followed.
1920-1940
In the good times, my grandfather drilled a well replete with a turbine pump, put in concrete pipelines, enjoyed canal water from the local irrigation district’s new ditches, and thus was able to plant much of the 40 acres into vines (Muscats mostly, with some Currants and sultanas, and a few acres of the wondrous new creation [“Thompsons”] of the brilliant viticulturist William Thompson) and a three-acre plum orchard.
There was always about a 20-foot variance in elevation across the rolling parcel. Rees “leveled it with pipeline,” as he put it. In a sense, that investment in miles of underground concrete pipes right before the Depression was foolish — given that even prewar scrapers could have moved earth enough to level the parcel and made flood irrigation possible across the entire expanse.
But my grandfather liked the contours and the 50-year constancy of his land. I suppose he thought that with a latticework of 10-inch subterranean concrete pipes, tall standpipes and vents, and elaborate terraces, he could irrigate about 20 tiny 2-acre parcels and preserve the character of the land. He did — but spent more time on the 40 acres than he did with his other level, rich loam 95 acres, producing for his extra work no more than half the production per acre gained elsewhere.
By 1940 the Sand Hill was sui generis — one of last few parcels that had escaped the modernization brought on by the land-leveling caterpillar. Its vineyards survived even the Depression. With pond, its terraced hills, tree-lined alleyways, cottonwood banks, and fauna, the 40 acres was not unlike what we now see in Napa Valley or, for that matter, Tuscany or in the Peloponnese.
Visitors often wondered at the beautiful corner of the farm that lost us money and thought land that was profitable elsewhere on the farm nondescript and boring. I have pictures of the Depression-era farmhouse — 27 once moved into my present house. Cousins, uncles, and lost souls would write my grandmother the dates when they would arrive at the Selma train station; she would take the truck and pick them up; and they would cram into the smokehouse, shed, barn, and various lean-tos, working for their keep. Under FDR, Thompson “worthless” raisins were bought by the government for $30 a ton, dipped in newly legal surplus cheap grape brandy, and sold off as cattle-feed.
1940-1960
Over the next 20 years, the vineyards were improved, often by tearing out the old vine varieties and replanting with Thompson seedless on “wild root” rootstocks, which allowed the vines to survive the scorching soil temperatures and nematodes. I remember playing almost every day on the parcel; in the 1950s it was quite safe to let 6-year olds roam on their own. The pond and lagoon still brought in all sorts of wildlife, from turtles to great-horned owls. My siblings and I built a crude baseball field (backstop, fence, benches) out of scrap lumber on the 2-acre flood plain, and the hills allowed us to hide in the vineyards. Of course, the 40 acres still remained a nightmare to farm — the north and south rows that fit the contour of the land made raisin drying almost impossible by shading the grape trays on the ground, but ensured the exposed crop while on the vine burned up in hot spells.
Around 1960, my grandfather used all his profits to replace the enormous Consolidated Irrigation District open ditch laterals that passed through the 40 acres with huge 48-inch underground pipelines. The result was far greater efficiency (no more washouts and no more bridges needed to cross from one side of the parcel to the other), but also the end of perch and pollywogs that came down from the Sierra, flowing across the farm, and sometimes into the overflow gate to the pond. I remember these years as a sort of Golden Age — no locks on any of the doors, our three families as work crews picking grapes together, and communal gatherings to watch television on Saturday nights. There was no notion of saleable or non-saleable parts of the farm; it was just there, all to keep whole, improve, and pass on.
Click to enlarge.
1960-1980
I spent much of my later youth in the now-aged and obsolete vineyards that should have been pulled given the damage from nematodes, age, and poor soils. The canes were so scrawny that we children could prune and tie them as well as the adults who worked the bushy verdant vines on the good soil. The pond and its overflow basin had shrunk to about 4 acres, but in good wet years were always an oasis of wildlife — herons, hawks, turtles, coyotes, kit foxes, and weasels. We had an old boat and often fished for perch before the water dried up in August.
The ancient Thompson vineyards received a reprieve in the boom years of the late 1970s when even its paltry ton-and-a-half-acre production made money. My dad and us salvaged the century-old apricot shed and rebuilt it into a resin dehydrator that saved two crops in the early 1980s. (I came home at 26 with a PhD in classics from Stanford and immediately received a very different appreciation on mastering the art of Greek composition: my father met me in the driveway, with “So are you done up there?” I nodded, “I think so.” He: “Well, good, then, why not get up on that roof and put on some new shingles?” And that was that.
1981-2004
The parcel enjoyed a short-lived renaissance under my siblings’ and my own stewardship. In 1979, we put in ourselves a sophisticated (for that time at least) drip system that superseded surface irrigation, with its wasted water, washouts from gopher holes, and poor production. Suddenly the vines received as much water as laser-leveled flood vineyards. But that investment was short-lived: raisins crashed from $1400 a ton in 1982 to $440 in 1983 — and the ancient vineyard was through.
We replanted — but in a novel scheme. If the sand made soil temperatures rise, the smaller crop canopies allowed more sunlight and heat, and the result was that any crop planted there — if it survived — would produce smaller but far earlier crops than elsewhere. And so for 15 years, this ground became our farmers’ market salvation: tiny plots of Asian pears; quince; Calimyrna figs; Fuyu persimmons; Black Beaut plums; Santa Rosa plums; foothill pomegranates; guava; almost any variety that was tasty and could pass muster from savvy open-market shoppers. By 1984, each week we were selling the organic produce at markets in Santa Cruz, Monterey, San Luis Obispo, Carmel, Palo Alto, and San Francisco. The ancient ground that had endangered my family’s 135 operation in years past now for a brief time saved it.
2005-2012
In Fields Without Dreams and The Land Was Everything, I wrote about the impending end of the farm — children growing up and moving away; too little land for too many cash-strapped owners; too much romance in lieu of hard-headed reality; too many liberal arts degrees and too few agribusiness BAs; and too many huge horizontally operated corporate farms that could produce, pack, ship and market produce more cheaply.
Still, this winter, I regretted not buying back the family parcel. But I now rent out my own 40 acres, and the idea of living alone on 80 acres in the Road Warrior zone, near sixty, seemed a bit much. But mostly by 2012 I did not have the $300,000 needed or the foreclosure sale — and surely not the $200,000 or more to redevelop and to replant the ground in almonds or a canopied, machine-harvested vineyard.
I wish the new owner well — a successful farmer and entrepreneur, and hard-working second-generation Punjabi American, who farms well over 500 acres. I think, given his expertise, capital, and contemporary high technology, that he will make the tiny 40 acres far more productive than did any in my own 140-year line — and without the daily remembrances of those long gone, the burdens of hundreds of voices in your head still of those who once lived and walked that land over the last century and a half.
Victor this is the most wonderful tribute to ancestors I could imagine. You have no idea how lucky you were to grow up in that environment.
Heartbreaking, but I loved your conclusion. Time does move on, it seems.
We had to let go of the family ranch in the 1980′s. It had been in the family for generations. But, by the time we sold it was a second home to all involved though still a working enterprise. So many lessons learned and so many skills that my children will never know and never learn.
You will regret letting it go…but sometimes there is no choice.
You have my deepest sympathy.
VDH,
I’ve long admired your work and enjoy your memories of the farm and personalities that sustained the Davis and Hanson families for the last 140 years. I understand now where the honesty and integrity that suffuses your writing comes from. Keep up the good work, old friend!
My ancestors settled in central Texas at about the same time as your’s did in California. They too tilled the soil and raised cattle for well into the 1970′s when a shortage of qualified heirs resulted in most of it being sold off. The ranch and farmland last tended by my Grandfather now looks almost park-like after being purchased by a millionaire CEO who now lives on the land. Victor’s poignant story of his ancestor’s (and his) stewardship of the land is a wonderful story.
In Minnesota we say ‘farmers are gamblers’. Reading your history, California farmers are gamblers too. Always betting on the weather and betting on market prices and betting on their own health and safety.
People like Obama don’t appreciate farmers. They think farming is romantic oneness with nature.
All farmers are gamblers. From season to season it is boom and bust. The reality of it is, we are (98% of us in the US) seperated from that existance, to our physical benifit, but our spiritual loss.
“‘No, no, we will never sell the land.’”
“‘It is the end of the family when they begin to sell the land,’” he said brokenly. “‘Out of the land we came and into it we must go. And if you hold your land you can live; no one can rob you of land.’”
“And the old man let his scanty tears dry upon his cheeks and they made salty stains there. And he stooped and took up a handful of the soil and he held it and he muttered, “‘If you sell the land, it is the end.’”
Pearl Buck ~ The Good Earth
What a wonderful story, thank you. There are still family farms and ranches here in SW Oklahoma,but they are slowly getting broken up and I feel a little saddness every time I see that happen.
– movie in there somewhere
Sound like the lost paradise
There is a certain sweetness to be found in those who alternately tend and battle against the ground that can be found nowhere else except in every agrarian culture. This sweetness unites the rice farmer in Viet Nam with the wheat grower in our own plains. We have uniformly sweat and bled on that piece of ground by which we have been owned.
Mine was cattle, but the ground was everything, followed closely by the weather. In my present pursuit of building, it is still the same. The ground and the elements are my source and my competitor. Very few can understand it these days, the desire to be with it, in it, to rule or to be ruled by it.
This earth is the truest part of our history. It mixes with our very essence. We can try to leave it, but it never leaves us, and one day it takes us back.
The Japanese are not the only people to revere their ancestors,
and remind themselves of past sacrifice when facing the future.
After my Ph.D. I almost immediately returned to the farm and bought an old 48′ Ford 8N and a 37′ Case VA as I had known on our family farm in the 1940s high desert. Following a satisfactory “city” career I still love my small few acres of ground, pasture and a few head of cattle and holding on to the best of my life and history. Not many of us left. You wrote my story too. Many thanks.
Fascinating history…any link between your family and the Mussel Slough tragedy?
Yeah, everybody’s having a good time and Steve has to bring up The Mussel Slough tragedy. There goes Steve and his anti-railroad Mussel Slough Tragedy obsession! What, another Mussel Slough thread?
Just kidding. I looked it up on Wikipedia, it was ugly and fascinating. Not exactly “SHANE,” none of those involved sounded completely innocent, but Walter Crow seemed like a real charming character.
Victor,
You bring tears to my eyes. My passage and times mirror your own–academia with an initial start at CSU Northridge, followed by several other institutions, and then an abandonment of that path for 20 years on the plains of Colorado and a marginal cow/calf operation combined with employment by an East Bay software developer to keep body and soul together. You are a marvelous classicist and historian and a guiding light for this conservative. I thank you; for your insight, and your love of the land (which I share). You are a poet without equal. I echo the plaudits above and hope, someday, to do an NR Cruise with the opportunity to meet you face to face and a chance to express my gratitude.
Such a lovely, bittersweet story. I feel you working your sorrow out in your writings. You are quite blessed to have a “home place,” so many of our ancestors did not quit wandering after they lost theirs post-Civil War.
Somehow, this feels like a reflection of the sorrow that many of us feel for our homeland. As our nation changes into something we don’t recognize, in your stories we relive the glory days, the days not filed with money but with soul and character and family.
God bless you Mr. Hanson. You bless us every time you write.
Thanks for telling us your family history. It resonates with many of us who were raised close to the land. Farming and ranching are the backbone of our country. Yes, factory farming and post modern farming practices are more efficient, but the labor of love that went into family farms spawned the kind of spirit and courage that helped this country to become a great nation. Too bad we are losing that as the family farms and ranches give way.
I still own about five acres of the several thousand acres that came into my family’s possession in the 1795 Creek Cession lottery in Georgia. The happiest day of my young life was in 1962 when after great wailing and knashing of teeth, the family decided to give up farming and subdivide the place to build houses for the Yankee plant managers then moving to the industrializing South. When we did that I could stop being a poor ignorant “farm boy” and actually have some decent clothes and the “things” that those living on the wage economy took for granted.
I can do nostalgia about the world of Southern subsistance agriculture almost as well as the Nashville Agrarians, but farming commodities is a rich man’s game, not a subsistance farmer’s. If I could stand living in The South, I could build my villa rustica there and take the hillside below where my parents and grandparents house stood before I tore it down and grow superbly cultivated and even better marketed muscadine grapes and sell my special vintage to the tourists in Savannah, but I know better. Farming sucks the life out of you; let the industrialists do it and write about the nostalgia.
“Farming sucks the life out of you…”
Oh phooey, Art. No more and probably much less than city life and office employment sucks the life out of you. I wouldn’t exchange my background which involves everything from buckin’ bales to shoveling manure to docking lambs to building pole barns and running an agri-business for higher wages and life in traffic jams and a view of the neighbors back deck and having my kids grow up at the mall if you could give it to me. I can’t think of one of my many farmer friends who wouldn’t agree with my sentiments. I consider it a blessing to have lived my entire life in rural America among those who make their living from the soil. You generalize badly.
The best way to make a small fortune in farming is to start with a large one! My experience is with the Southern single-family subsistence farm, the one-horse or two-horse or later small, usually used, tractor. It would keep a roof over your head, food in your belly, albeit rough food usually, and clothes on your back, though not very stylish ones. Whether your back to school clothes were homemade or store bought depended on the price of cotton and whether it rained much in August and early September, hurricane season in The South. Whether there were presents at Christmas depended on whether or not there was a thunderstorm with hail over the long summer and what the price of tobacco was in the Fall. The one to two hundred acre “family farm” simply would not generate enough income to live in the consumer economy that began to develop after WWI and reached full development by the ’50s. You had to take on more and more land by lease or purchase, buy more equipment, hire more labor, and incur more and more debt. Run bills and loans to buy seed and fertilizer were a horrible risk since “the place” was usually the security for the loans. A farmer was one bad crop away from being a sharecropper or tenant farmer. We had ours set up so that the family home and its immediate surroundings was a separate parcel from the lands we actually farmed, so we never mortgaged it. As far as I know the piece I still have has never had a mortgage on it but once in the almost 220 years it’s been in the family, and that was long after we’d quit farming and my dad, still lost in the early 20th Century, was trying to make a go of it as a smalltown merchant in competition with WalMart et al. He managed to keep his store going until the day he went to the hospital never to return in ’97, though he kept it going at an ever-declining standard of living. I paid off that mortgage long after he was gone, sold off what I could of his merchandise, gave the rest away, and just rented out the building. I’d really like to just sell it all. I tried to give it to my sister but she won’t take on the costs. I’m tired of paying ever-increasing taxes for services for people who won’t work and for schools the bulk of whose students don’t want to be there and refuse to learn anything.
In ’97 we had our 30th HS Graduation Class Reunion; there were five or six of the 128 class members still living in the town or its immediate environs, most of those remaining there with hereditary wealth or position. When they built all those “farm to market” roads in the ’50s, it wasn’t just the produce that went down those roads. In Georgia and the Southeast, your first born son, your good-looking daughter, and all your money was going to Atlanta, and they probably weren’t coming back. There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of counties in the US with smaller populations today than they had in 1900. I’ve driven across the Country several times in the almost 40 years I’ve been in Alaska; rural America gets more and more empty every time. I don’t really think that’s a good thing but that’s the way it is.
Practically every small town in the Country has early to middle 20th Century storefronts boarded up or turned into government offices. The lovely old neo-classical “Citizens Bank” building in my hometown is now the city hall. The banks once owned and run by local people of wealth and position are all gone and replaced by chain banks run by some guy wearing a polyester tie who just can’t wait to get promoted out of that podunk town. Likewise all the once-local merchants have been replaced by the WalMart SuperCenter and a few chain drugs stores and such. The only growth “industries” in the town are government, nursing homes, and funeral parlors. The real cost of this is that in rural America, the only “local leaders” any more are politicians and lawyers, often one and the same. There are very, very few locally-owned businesses and the person running a business for wages has very different interests from the person who needs a community to grow and develop in order to increase his own well-being. I visit family there from time to time and even though my income would go a lot further there, I’ll never go back and for the same reason I and many others left in the first place; I just can’t get the things I want and now am accustomed to having there. Scarlett O’Hara had it right a long time ago: “I’ll never be poor again.”
Oh, and as an aside, some of my peers have come back to live there now that they’ve made some money somewhere and have retired. They’re a pestilence there; they demand all sorts of services and amenities that they’re accustomed to and the little remaining tax base there simply cannot support what they want, so the little town is bedevilled by a group of aging malcontents.
Well then, let’s leave it at “farming in the rural, red-clay, small acreage South sucks the life out of you”. When Jimmy Carter imposed the grain embargo against the Soviets it sucked the life quite literally out of a couple of our local farmers and bankrupted many of the over-extended. For others it simply meant a delay in plans to buy a winter home in Florida. I come from an area in the upper-Midwest where farming still produces solid families and economically solvent small towns and I sure don’t feel that farming is any more or less stressful than most any other occupation. Are local merchants being displaced by the big-box stores? You bet. But that kind of economic shock is nothing compared to what is coming with a re-elected Obama that will suck the life out of every hard-working American. Upon that I believe we can agree.
Just want you to know that yours are among the comments I always most enjoy reading! Thank you.
“….If I could stand living in The South, ….”
WHAT?!
The people are great, but the climate is inhospitable.
I beg to differ. As a Connecticut Yankee who moved to north Georgia almost 20 years ago, I find the climate far, far better than Connecticut and the rest of New England. A few weeks in the fall around Columbus Day when the trees are at their brightest is the best time to be up north, but aside from that, I’ll take the South any day for many reasons.
And as far as the summer humidity is concerned, isn’t that why God gave us air conditioning? :-)
You can have the North.
My mother’s family (second cousins now) have owned the same family farm in Ontario since 1820. My mother grew up on the farm but moved to western New York when she became a nurse so I got the urban experience. There’s been something so stable and grounded about her family amidst the often turmoil we’ve seen in the USA in my life.
I hope those almond prices hold up.
Change itself is the only thing that never changes.
A lot of the farms and woodlands around here have gone the same way: too many family members and too little land to divide amongst them. Very often it does end up in bitter and lengthy court battle that see the families broken up and the only one turning a profit the lawyers. Others are still hanging in there even though prices are down and expenses are rising fast.
What a pleasure to read. Thank you.
I read “Works and Days” every time there is a new post, and I enjoy VDH’s insights into politics and history. But I particularly enjoy posts where he shares the joys and sorrows of owning a fading family farm because he expresses so well the thoughts and emotions that go along with generational transitions from Ag to, well, something else. He often says as much in a paragraph as many have written in volumes about the “Family Farm”.. I am about the same age and am going through the same slow-motion dismemberment of our once thriving family farm in Iowa. 265 acres that prospered in the 50’s and 60’s supported 3 families, slowly has been sold off, subdivided and split between family members. Luckily, some of us have good ”town jobs” and can afford to keep our 60 to 90 acre hobby farms. If you are of similar ag backgrounds, read VDH’s “The Land was Everything” ; but read it by yourself if you don’t want other family members to see you cry.
I daily drive down the back roads around Selma CA to get to my studio there. I will never see the landscape the same after reading that.
Just a short note: My mother stemmed (1898) from Chowchilla in, I believe, Madera county. In the 1940s-1950s I made the long, long trip from San Diego (our 1939 Chev continually boiling over) to Chowchilla, Fresno and thereabouts. I really loved the land and the towns. My relatives had three farms round about Chowchilla, now all bought up by gigantic cooperatives (probably supported with Fed. monies). I thank you for your thoughts and reflections. It brings back days long gone, alas.
Everywhere in central CA, the day of the subsistence farmer is now gone, deep into shadow. So you move on: Big Ag, illegals-with-welfare-credit-cards and friends-of-the-snail-darter inherit the earth — for now. But you know how well they will do; and the memories and the family record never die; and the land doesn’t disappear.
If your family wants it, there’ll be chances aplenty ahead. Living well has always been the best revenge and it still is. Hell, forget the central and imperial valleys, downtown Santa Cruz/Monterey will be on special quite soon.
Where have all the optimists gone?
The sport of rodeo was started by a British turned Californian man named Harry Rowell. The story of the Rowell Ranch is much like Victor’s story, but with an even sadder ending. Anyone interested check out
http://theharryrowellfamily.org
More unfortunate is the fact that the surrounding cities/counties never mention the true story of the Rowell Ranch in Castro Valley, California. This site however, tell the true sad story.
I have been a City office worker for going on 30 years. I have always dreamed of living on a farm and being close to the earth. Alas, that is not going to happen. many writers here have noted that it is becoming a Large Agri-Business dominated by huge operations. We have lost alot of what has made us great. They say farmers/ranchers are “land rich” and “cash poor”.. That is why the inheritance tax helps break up farms and ranches. When the patriarch passes away, the inheritance tax kicks in and to pay it, farms need to be sold.It goes to large operations. very sad.
Victor, we are similar in age (1955 for me) and I thank you for the education you have shared with us all the last decade, for me at least, and you’re poignant stories of the dustbowl, and the victories, you and your ancestors scratched out of Mother Earth. God Bless you.
Perhaps the Punjabi American who now owns the land is starting his own family’s multigenerational story. And perhaps the leveling of the land and introduction of new agricultural techniques is the modern version of the water upgrades made by your own ancestors. I see a uniquely American story here, of evolution and adaptation that keeps us all well fed and relatively prosperous. Does our collective future not lie in these modern agricultural adaptations, and do not the old family farms still remaining represent something akin to the Civil War reenacters? We should never completely lose touch with our agricultural heritage, but I believe we should also celebrate those who continue to work hard to feed us all. In my frequent drives through the California Central Valley and up the 101 through the Salinas area, I always marvel at both the traditional farm operations and the large corporate farms alike. All of us who eat food every day are in deep debt to all of the farmers.
I really do not wish the Punjabi ill. But your story, Dr. Hansen, has awakened strong feelings in me about who we are and who we are becoming. The Punjai cannot go to Gettysburg and know that the blood of his ancestors is in the ground there. The blood of his ancestors is somewhere else. He probably came here for the same reasons that mine did, but when he came here the country was already established and built, and it was estalished with certain revolutionary ideas in mind that are still not understood in most of the rest of the world, and those ideas had been paid for: in the starvation years at Jamestown, at Valley Forge, and Trenton and Kings Mountain, at Shiloh and Antietam. The wagons had crossed the Prairies and the last spike had already been driven. What does he know of that, is it just a story like many others? There will never be another chance to build an America, ours was the one and only time in all the millenia of human history. “For oursevles and our posterity.” We are overwhelmed, and they don’t understand. We are losing it. It is passing.
Oh what bull$hit Bigfoot. Punjabi, Swede or Irishman, Catholic, Jew or Sikh they all came here for the same reasons. The came for the freedoms and opportunities this country gave us. They only thing we ask is that they remember and respect the sacrifice of those that came before us. Your blood isn’t any more red, white and blue than anyone else’s.
but bill, there’s a problem: they don’t remember, don’t respect it, don’t care. They are entitled.
Nice write up. Memories are what we have.
Doug Santo
Pasadena, CA
Worked on farms and ranches in Nebraska until age 21. LIved on a family farm and unfortunately when my dad was killed in a farm accident at 13 I didn’t have the wherewithal to keep it going. Wish I could have. But in the end I’ve lived in cities and other countries, traveled extensively and as I look around at city folk and still try to understand them I have come to a conclusion. Bless them but they can’t help themselves you see there’s the Larsky Theory “The further humans are removed from the land and nature, the less they understand it.” And that I believe.
Bless VDH for once again hitting a mark close and dear to me.
Bittersweet, VDH.
I can’t help but think that there are analogies to what is happening to our country.
You and I born in the precise same year, have seen America in transition. I tended to like her advancements for the most part. I now see her being brutalized by radical extreme leftists who don’t like her very much. Who are not proud of her, don’t harbor any affinity for her.
We lived in an America once, where both sides of the political aisle came from an initial position of love for this land of ours. For love of mankind, humility to a higher power.
No longer. We blame mankind, in essence passing judgment as if leftist man IS the highest power.
I’m glad you have your memories, VDH. Hold onto them tightly. What we pass along to our descendants is likely to be a horror.
What a story? What a memory you have?
Seedless Thompson raisins are the remnants of my sweet tooth habit, having long ago dropped any sugar; sans regular fruit.
Every time I eat them, I’ll think of you.
Why, when loading up on some at the local bulk food bin, and even older fart than me, a stranger, burdened me with his own youthful memory—he’d worked laying grapes out to dry way back when.
I wasn’t alert enough at the time to ask him the question that came later—what ever happened to all those raisins? Follow THEIR “dream”, as they moved from farm to store to home kitchen to stomach to —-
Time keeps on slippin’ into the future.
This land is my land, this land is your land, —
What IS land, anyway?
in the 1950s it was quite safe to let 6-year olds roam on their own
It’s just as safe today as in the 1950s to let 6-year olds roam on their own. Specifically, see chapter 4.
Not in the generally blue collar with some lower-echelon white-collar neighborhood where I was six. The houses were small but tidy. We waved to the neighbor moms as we dashed by their kitchen windows. They smiled and waved back.
I had occasion to visit three years ago. It was a mess, the many of lawns left to grow unkempt, some of the windows boarded up. I seriously doubt that the moms–were there any at home during the day except for the welfare recipients?–were looking after the neighbors’ children. None of which, by the way, were outside, and it was summer time. Cars filled the curb sides. A bus line now runs down the street, which is no arterial.
If you know of a place (especially in California) that is not as opulent as, say, Bel Aire that is as safe for rambling children today as it was in the 1950s, count yourself unusually lucky.
Great writing. One thing though, tumble weed is not native to North America. It was inadvertently imported from Asia in the late 1800s.
My Russian wife claims it was from Russia.
That’s plausible. Super-computer maker Control Data Corp. had a “Russian thistle pin” as an award for innovative ideas. The accompanying story was that William Norris (CEO and one of the 6 founders) experienced a tough winter on the Minnesota farm as a boy. They ran out of hay, so he tried feeding the cattle thistles, and it worked, the thistle contained enough protein and other nutrients for them to get through the winter.
Thank You.
We were down the road from your farm just west of Goshen. A dairy farm I helped on during the summers when school let out in Compton, CA. Holsteins, Guernseys and Jerseys and alfalfa kept us busy from sunup to sundown. Two Portugese families lived free on the property helping with the milking. I still remember bringing the cows in for morning milking as the sun rose over Mt. Whitney and the Sierras. It finally became necessary to lease the herd and facilities to a conglomerate who brought their own trucks and personnel in. Buried my Uncle’s ashes under his favorite tree beside a canal with a great view all around.
Owners change but the land remains. No more getting off the Southern Pacific Daylight at Tulare Station and riding in the back of the pickup to the farm. Hanford is hanging in there with the town square but is fraying at the edges. Some talk about the high speed rail boondoggle in the area but nothing for certain. I still scan the horizon wherever I am checking for smoke or a tractor stopped too long for no reason and miss helping bring a neighbors crop in if he is laid up. The ladies would set up a buffet for us on saw horses and plywood to keep us fed. The old days are better learned and remembered. Our day in the sun has probably passed but the lessons learned and the history lived remain. Not a bad legacy.
I didn’t think of it till this morning, but I wrote a book about pretty much VDH’s thoughts and recollections. If you liked this article, you might be intrigued by “This Never Happened.” The first 15% is downloadable for free. Strictly digital in all formats. Might be worth a look.
http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/81753
We so take for granted the plenty available to us in our food stores, and discount the genius it takes to feed 340,000,000 people such that our wise leaders scare threaten and scare us concerning obesity.
The last lines from the last paragraph “without the daily remembrances of those long gone, the burdens of hundreds of voices in your head still of those who once lived and walked that land” struck a cord.
I sometimes wonder if the American propensity for innovation comes in part from the lack of a “personal history”. We change things round, because there is no sense of “this has been in the Family since before the Roman’s left.” We paint over the marks on the bedroom door, knock out walls, and put in a garden – totally unconcerned that “that’s where Missy played with the kitten when she was 10″ – ten, twenty, forty years ago.
Hmmm, sociologically, are we all “orphans”?
Born in 1935 on a 160 acre farm on a South Dakota prairie, I am reminded of the hard work that my father had to do to support his wife and four little sons. I remember the horses that pulled the haywagons, the shocks (grain that was bundled by twine) that were thrown into thrashing machines by neighbors that joined together for the harvest. I remember the meal of fried chicken and mashed potatoes that was always served to the hungry harvesters.
I remember the Saturday night bath that we took (whether we needed it or not), all using the same water that had heated on the cookstove late in the day. I remember the windmill destroyed by a cyclone, causing panic that we had no water for the horses and cows. I remember eating pheasants shot outside our kitchen door (they were less costly than chicken).
I remember a happy childhood followed by college and success. I wish I could do it all over again.
Thanks for the memories.
Thanks for sharing that, because now we all know that history.
Very intereting that the pancake flat San Joaquin once had 20 ft. elevation differences within a 40 acre parcel.
Computer based, precision farming leads to greater effeciency. Tissue analysis tells the grower what the plant needs. Israeli or California made drip system deliver water and fertilizer right to the tree or vine.
Ironic that Vic’s organic produce ends up in the Bay Area Farmers Markets where the socially conscious fund his lifestle. They think they are funding the small farmer, and they are. This small farmer just happens to defend Western Civilization for a living.
Bittersweet regarding the Sikh farmer. Vic’s loss is the Sikh’s gain. I guess farmers have a deeper attachment to the land because they invest so much into it. But America just keeps on churning. Ethnic neighborhoods have a 50 year run, and a different ethnicity moves in to make their run.
.I understand your grief, and sympathize.
BUT
You sold the land, it is no longer yours.
Get over it
“I wish the new owner well — a successful farmer and entrepreneur…”
Sounds like he’s getting over it just fine. But I’m sure having your sympathy and advice is just as valuable to him as to the rest of us commenters.
You must be fun at a dinnner party.
Enjoyed your story
No longer ranching. As early settlers, the family Arvin ranch became a city, developed streets, avenues, highways, built canals, dug wells, built houses, mansions. The ranch fed the army during world war II, planted cotton, clothed the arm forces, beat back Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, developed the arts, built a university encouraged congressmen, empowered governors, fought valley fevers. My ancestors on the Spanish side arrived before California became a state but on the paternal side Robert Stockton fought and established the Presidio in LA.
The Stockton Villa established in 1887 is now a Mexican/American neighborhood: Mendoza,Gutierrez, Rodrigas. The Celtic side of our family is becoming outnumbered.
Dr. Hanson;
Even though, I grew up across ‘the Pond’ and behind the Iron Curtain, your reminiscing struck a deep cord in me also. Our ancestors during the Middle Ages were serfs. My paternal great grandparents owned a two-acre orchard and garden w/ a big country home on it in S Bohemia. During the ’50s, our neighbor was one the very last farmers/ranchers on a big spread (cattle, horses, sheep, grains, pasture & alfalfa) during the ‘Dark Ages’ of collectivization & displacement. A drought-horse’s pan-size hoof grazed my tiny three-year-old chest while waddling between the long swooshing tail and the hay wagon. A bit later, I played w/ their daughters, almost drowned under the dung heap & chased the sheep. As a ten years old, I helped loading the hay wagon w/ a curved fork (no bales then), cutting the grain w/ a scythe, bundling the sheaves into shocks, taking a nap inside. Afterwards munching on great grandma’s rolled apple strudel or plum pie w/ fresh goat milk. In the meantime, my parents moved to Prague & hell begun; persecution, food lines, starvation, beating in school
(as a son of the enemy of state). However, just as you, I shall cherish my memories of Paradise lost for eternity. BTW, today is the 44th anniversary of the Soviet invasion, which squashed the blue Prague Spring. By a strange twist of fate, that event had thrust me on a long & winding road across many countries landing me under the Rockies. Thank you for the silky braid of memories across the deep waters of time filled w/ the fragrance of freshly plowed soil and the exulting thrills of the skylark hanging under the sun. For me, it paints the essence of Liberty. From a proud, grateful and un-hyphenated American.
Robert.
That was beautiful. I suspect, so too – are you.
At least the land is still growing something. I work in Orem, Utah, which was once dominated by fruit orchards. When leaving work every day, I used to get a great view of a peach orchard on the other side of the road from the parking lot, the shadows of the trees shading the land in neat rows against the orange glow of sunset.
That orchard is gone. In its place is “Orchard Estates” — yet another tract of nondescript multi-family housing. It will never again nurture fruit trees. Commercial and residential development have permanently altered the character of the town.
At least your successor can start the multi-generational story anew.
Tell him about the history of your family on that land, and it can be part of his history, too. Not the same memories, of course, nor the same farming techniques, but still an unbroken line of hard-working tenants, dedicated to pulling their living out of that soil.
I really enjoyed the story about the land and the deep ties that grow to attach. Sad, bittersweet, but important and human. Thanks.
Thank you so much for writing that. Your story was so heartfelt and I was moved by it.
Congratulations M. Hansen, a charming post. My grandmother was the child of a dry wheat farmer in Montana, it was a desperate and ultimately disastrous effort to earn a quarter section in the middle of no where. I have no sympathy for big Ag, but a world of respect for the small farmers who’s lives are increasingly difficult.
Well, good, then, why not get up on that roof and put on some new shingles?” And that was that. Your dad was one of the classics (pun intended).
I grew up in the suburbs in Rhode Island. Drove to the midwest in the summer of 1980 and could not believe how big the farms were. Moved to Minnesota for 8 years and still could not believe how big the farms were; I also learned how hard farmers work. I just was in eastern Kansas (my wife is from Lenexa) for a wedding and once again was overwhelmed with the wide-open heartland (my wife loves the open spaces). I was also knocked over by the trees in Muir Woods as I could not see their tops.
So, I sit in heavily forested Attleboro, MA enjoying the article, the comments and the people who made them. Mr. Davis, feel free to stop by if you are ever in the area as you are invited to share dinner with my family.
Lovely
Fantastic.
Thank you for this accounting. I have helped put in irrigation with the new micro emitters etc. Fascinating technology.
I wonder where VDH lives now. I think still on this farm but his stake in it is diminishing as he gets older and his valley becomes more a “Road Warrior” territory. I won’t repeat his accounts from previous columns but his valley is becoming “No Country for Old Men” of the Euro-American kind unless you have extended family that has stayed there to produce on and defend their claim. Which is not VDH’s situation
Wonderful piece. For some reason it triggered my recollection of a great and endearing little film from 1985 -”The Trip To Bountiful.” Anyone else see that?
MIster H, Like you, I watched it decades ago, and like you, was touched by its poignancy. Geraldine Page’s portrayal of an old woman struggling to return to her vanished hometown of Bountiful is one of the most moving performances I’ve seen.
When I was growing up in the ’60′s, my Mom kept a huge box of Sun-Maid raisins in the cupboard.
Perhaps some were from your farm.
I’d like to think so.
You’re out in the back 40 with your family days into pulling mustard weed by hand to salvage an alfalfa crop so you don’t go under. A youthful concern that if you already live in the middle of nowhere, where would you go? Your whole world has been within your horizons: the butte, the spillway, canal line, and the basin. The seasons here are life. Hot and dusty is the still air where you stand but beyond as far as the eye can see lies the winds of the edge of the world as a sea where dragons snarl on ancient mariner maps and Sir Francis Drake awaits me with adventure. But if I can no longer smell the difference in soil, the morning mist by the postbox, or the roses at the back gate that orient my world now, will my heart forever be under sail?
Is social mobility electing a new people more than immigration, Mr. Hanson? At what rate, I wonder? In the absence of Affirmative Action Pigford cash or honey SBA loans for immigrants, like those from Punjabi, of course, as displaced farmers move farther away taking their children and pattern of reinforcing work ethic and summer or harvest FHA skilled youth workers, while feeder towns are filled to no vacancy and bankrupted meeting the open borders, human rights of illegal aliens.
FeFe.
Who are you?
I thought that all the appropriate and worthy commentary had been entered here and therefore would quietly stand aside . . . but this . . your poetry . . .
v d hanson’s story of the family farm in california is priceless americana. I had no idea of what is involved in farming, land management, timing, water conservation, labor, and marketing.
The lessons on character development make valuable reading, and explain why Jefferson cared so much about the yeoman farmer.
Beautiful and sad.
Thanks!
Thanks for the posting this Dr. Hanson. Your story is similiar thoughout rural America and hits very close to home to many of us. My uncles still run the family farm thats been in the family name for over 170 years. If it wasn’t for their wives working off the farm, they simply wouldn’t make it.
I spent my summers as a child there, when the grandparents were alive, in the 70′s and wouldn’t trade those memories, or lessons learned, for anything. Being a family man now, I can see that growing-up in rural America was a blessing despite the hardships and lack of opportunity. Most of the men of my grandfather’s generation were vets of the S. Pacific, European or Korean theaters. Humble, hard working, church going and who participated in the community (volunteer Fire Dept., Lions, VFW, Rotary Club, Knights of columbus, etc..). They were roll models as what men should be… at least that was the impression left on me.
Unfotunately, as other posters noted, those communities are gone or dying. Most of us left and will not return, but occassionally I do hear of former residents who do come back after many years. Usually with their own families with the intention of giving their children the same happy childhood they experienced.
Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt.
Many of us expressed the wish that VDH would write a memoir, after his column occasioned by Gore Vidal’s death. Looks like he’s beginning to do so…
Thank you for this, Prof. Hanson.
Priceless was VDH’s account of Gore Vidal and other luminaries lecturing in small town California. His father and family hosting (no hotel) via the local state college the lecturer, driving him around and pick up and deliver at the airport.
Awesome history. We have similar stories in Fallbrook… grapes, then avacados, then expensive water so back to grapes and now the cherimoya… The land changes, the people change, and the environment changes.
Returning from Stanford at 26, roughly 1980… could have bought the Palo Alto Eichler for 150k, bought stock in the Apple IPO at $22/share, invested the rest in Vanguard Index funds and never even soiled your hands let alone shingling roof’s. Doesn’t seem fair. You would be comfortably relaxing in your lush Los Altos Hills garden these days while the undocumented workers pruned the roses and the boutique fruit trees.
I would venture to guess the rest of the family doesn’t have these ties to the land. Time marches on, nothing stays the same. As they say, tradition is the millstone around the neck of progress. The same story plays out in the lives of many of us in myriad different ways just as it did our ancestors. Bottom line, it’s just a piece of dirt. Otherwise the ancestors would no doubt be proud of the legacy they left in their children. No doubt they would be appalled at what it has become. We can’t even begin to comprehend the hardships some of our ancestors endured. Lest we forget Lucy left a different life behind to seek something better. So might we.
“Bottom line, it’s just a piece of dirt”
That is a cruel and stupid remark. I improve my soil every year. I am a suburban “farmer” with 30 fruit trees on my property. Every year is devoted to improving the soil and the trees. I have never called my soil dirt. I have neighbors who have done much better jobs than I have. They started with average soil that is now black humus in the first 6-12 inches. They did this by hard labor and bringing in wood chips from the tree trimming crews to compost down into black humus
Bottom line here is —>>> Thanks Victor Hansen for another very good post from you the citizen-farmer that Thomas Jefferson revered.
Dear Victor,
You are a son of the same pioneers as I: the hardy people who settled bare land with thin pocketbooks and nothing but gumption and ambition for their progeny. The difference is that my specific ancestors were in the Oklahoma Land Run, the Oklahoma Lottery. Others followed: the bridge builders, the hardware store owners, the bank and hospital founders.
You tell the story of these story of these hardscrabble people with poetic toughness that does them credit. Thank you. Frances
When I saw the title I knew it was going to be something special. I was not disappointed. A story told eloquently , it is a tribute to all the family farms in this country.
Mr. Hanson, thank you so much for all of your articles, this one especially. And thank you readers for all for your poignant comments. In today’s troubled times it is refreshing to see so many good hearted and like minded people still exist. I enjoyed reading your comments almost as much as Mr. Hanson’s.
Jay
I wonder what the land’s true owners–the Native Americans who were slaughtered without mercy by Mr. Hanson’s ancestors would think about his artcle. I wonder what Mr. Hanson thinks about the Auschwitz his land actually was.
Did you even read the article?
Hanson detailed when his family first arrived (by rail, in 1870). If there had been ongoing wars to wrest control of the land from the Indians (who fought back, let’s admit, and presented an obstacle to “control of the land,” to put it mildly–does that really remind you of Auschwitz?), somehow I think that would have figured in what Hanson told us. Sounds like this parcel of land was for sale without any of that–in other words, California was already in many respects quite civilized, if not cultivated, then.
Aren’t you people tired of pretending, yet, that fighting for control of land (as Indians did to each other, after all) is somehow some special vice of Western civilization? How silly (and ignorant).
“I wonder what Mr. Hanson thinks about the Auschwitz his land actually was.”
You’re disgusting.
Dr. Hanson, thank you for teaching me, in ways no others could. I am grateful, and maybe I can use some of these lessons with my own small family. I’d like my son to grow up with at least a portion of that type of childhood you described. As well as the lessons in wisdom, hard work, and decency.
The only Indians I knew about were on the coast around the mission settlements and up in the delta area. The ones I recall reading about passed through the desert of the San Joaquin on their way from the coast to the Sierras probably wonder why white settlers were setting up homes in the hog wallows the area is known for. I am certain that Mr. Hanson has dealt with folks like you while teaching history to social apologists who think texting is work.
I will compliment you on your unintended ability to contrast in stark terms the difference between hard work for it’s own sake and expressing an opinion with as much depth as our seasonal farm pond. We fed more than one family and provided farm gas to those who ran out of fuel. Had there been any Indians around we would have invited them to the potlucks the Churches ran back then. Try that these days and some bureaucrat would let the Indians starve and the Church would be fined for providing sustenance to those in need without a permit. And that, my good Yobbin, is the society and culture you are bringing down on yourself. I pity your ignorant existence.
I’m sorry. I would have looked forward to buying VDH-branded produce.
Dear Victor
The wistfulness of this article touched me deeply and I thought I would pen a reply that shows you how these themes run through other corners of the Western World as well.
Our family farm in New Zealand is the result of almost unimaginable sweat, toil and careful decisions by my parents. Our history dates back only to 1946, so keeping the faith of generations probably played less of a role than a simple love of the land and the life, as well as the bitter memories of emerging from school into the teeth of The Slump, followed by the years of WWII. I am certain that, after five years of keeping her hopes alive on scraps of mail from my father, as he fought through the desert sands of Libya and Egypt against the Nazi’s and then through near starvation in POW camps, my mother and he saw our bush-clad farm as peace, safety and comfort beyond imagining.
Their years through the late 1940′s now sound more like the Wild West, with herds of cows unleashed through the bush in winter to forage and be rounded up on horseback in summer. But the 1950′s saw the ever-increasing use of machinery and my father had no nostalgia in dumping the horse-drawn plough for a new Ferguson 24 tractor, nor my mother in replacing the wood-burning stove with an electric cooker! The fact that all these improvements also very slowly turned their farming lives into more of a regulated life is simply the irony of progress.
My experiences were only a little different from yours, coming in the late 60′s and 1970′s with dry stock pasture farming of sheep and a pure-bred herd of Angus cattle. I was more of a machinery lad than my father and spent hundreds of hours, from the age of thirteen, sitting on tractors, mainly in hayfields. Of all the farming we did – shearing, branding, drenching, driving herds of sheep and cattle along dusty summer roads between our “top farm” in the hills ten miles away, to our home farm, feeding out hay to the cattle from the back of the Land Rover in hard, cold Winter gales and rain – it was haymaking that remains the best memory. My work was hardly ever “back-breaking”, with machinery to help load even the hay bales – though I have earlier memories of the local men throwing such bales up great heights onto the back of a truck and then repeating that process in the hay barn, a process aided into the night by my father’s pre-war knowledge of how to fire up a kerosene lantern where power did not run. The sweet smell of newly mown hayfields at dusk was beyond compare and I was ever eager to take over from dad and “endure” hours on the MF135 tractor with the howling turbines of our Fahr mower or the thump of the IH440 hay baler behind me.
In fact one of the first times I cottoned on to you was when you wrote some line about a farmer sitting on his Massey Ferguson saying “Osama bin Laden is no damn good”. I laughed out loud: you had touched my soul! It could have been a scene with my Dad describing some global ratbag of earlier days, or perhaps me?
Like you and other commentators here, I left the farm at eighteen to attend university and my IT degree led me away to the outside world for good, even to America. By a stroke of good fortune my parents retired in the same year, and rather than sell the farm they converted it into a dairy unit, sub-contracting to a herd owner and splitting the profits. It meant they could stay on the land to the day they died.
I’ve held on to the place, and may be able to do so for another decade. As with you, the voices and images of the past remain with me: I can picture almost every square inch in my minds eye, for almost every nook and cranny is a memory as much as a physical thing. I feel I must be faithful to those who sacrificed so much, but I know I’m being irrational. It becomes slightly less of an economic unit each year and although that is the same story my parents faced from day one I now cannot see any other type of farming to which I can change as they did to arrest the march of progress. Dairy farming is still a family concern in NZ (just), but the move to large agribusiness is accelerating here as well.
Several years ago I was able to commit this – my personal, trivial story – into a history book that was published for the seventy fifth anniversary of our district, along with the other farming families. I bought a copy for each of my children, so there will be some pale record for them when they hit their own middle years and wish to touch their roots. There is no way they will be able to afford to enter farming now, and in any case, they belong to the city. I’ve tried to keep some connection between the land and their souls, and a decade of summer holidays at the farm created their own, sweet memories, but the lack of an internet connection is the driver now for the oldest not to come and the same will soon be true for the younger ones.
Soon it will just be me, those pictures in my mind – and those voices! Speak, Memory!
Been to New Zealand. Once. Loved it. What you described with the history book will be cherished by your children. Maybe not right away, but later. As they say in NZ, “good on ya.”
A poingant and noble tale Prof. Hanson. You will always be the yeoman Hoplite of the San Joaquin to your fans.
Tom; Thanks for reminding me of the perfume of new mown hay and the perils of hay hooks on tender legs. Massey Feguson, Case, Diamond Reo, International Harvester and all the old names most of which are gone. I guess it was inevitable that we would follow them into the sunset. Even the morals, values and ethics of the time seem to be slipping away. Although they are universal, whether machinery or intrinsic human ideals, they cross the land like a dust devil touching down then disappearing. What was it that Ulysses Mother said? …and the soul flits away as if it were a dream.”
A Punjab? Alexander the Great turns halfway in his grave and sniffs superciliously.
Consider getting into the armed-drone manufacturing business. No doubt they’d provide great security for those areas where there’s no place to hide from their gaze (all of Central California, pretty much.) In the future, I expect to read “When Mexican thieves are history,” by Mercenary Captain V.D. Hanson in the coming years (“As I remote-piloted my Raytheon XM-25 toward the fleeing pickup truck, I could not help but reflect on whether an anonymous Mexican thief’s life was too high a price to pay for the ten thousand dollars worth of tools in the back. Then I saw the pieces of the old baseball diamond, and stopped asking questions till the man was buried, his truck stripped of all but the bare essentials. The trophy yard would grow larger this night.”)
I love the words of Dr. Hanson. His life and outlook in one with such an intellect gives us some hope that honorable, reality based life can persist even in the presence of the current Liberal insanity.
My GrGrGr Grandparents with seven daughters and a son made their covered wagon way to South Eastern Iowa in 1847, settling at $1.25 an acre 4 miles North of Kalona on the rolling hillsides, there. With that many daughters there were soon a plethora of names in the family and today it is not uncommon to find when meeting someone in the area that they are a relative. They sent many sons to the Civil War; among which 3 were wounded and 1 was killed. They were farmers in the beginning but many were forced out by the farm depression at the end of WWI and and then later by the relentless Great Depression. After graduating from college in 1956 I went to California, but I still go back to visit my sister and old friends from time to time, and when I do, I make it a point to go over to their ground , visit the cemetery where my GrGrGr Grandparents and many of the family since are buried, the letters on the old limestone markers are gradually fading. The amount the fading has occurred during my memory reminds me how old I am getting. There used to be a small neat church across the road, but that has been moved into town to the Heritage Village. Until a few years ago, I could stand on the cemetery hill and look down the road the half mile to the house where my mother had been born, now 105 years ago; but that was replaced about 10 years back by a modern, single story. In the Spring and early summer the hills are a rolling tapestry of every color of green with your vision reaching over a whole township, and under a cloudy sky with the sun’s glare blocked the colors are so saturated and beautiful they make you sob.
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