Around the bend, on a strip of country road that wends its way through fields Van Gogh could have painted, what with their bread-loaf bales of hay and hues that practically shimmer under the noonday sun, take a left at Sugar Hill Lane. Down at the fork, pull up the gravel drive to the place where the sassafras grows and the 200-year-old oak spreads its gnarled arms.
There, inside by the wood stove, looking down the sugar maple bluffs onto the Mackinaw River and beyond, Terra Brockman types.
She writes, every Thursday, often late into the night, of the doings at her brother Henry’s organic farm just up the road.
The farm is where 18 acres are planted in an alphabet of vegetables from around the world, and from which some 800 Chicago-area families, and 100 more from Bloomington, Ill., are fed, most of them through Henry’s stand at the Evanston Farmers Market.
Brockman’s Food & Farm Notes, tapped out under the stars and the moon in Congerville, a no-traffic-light, no-stop-sign burg between Peoria and Bloomington in the hilly Mackinaw River Valley, is, for many, an indispensable dispatch that is but one of a bumper crop of farm writings sprouting up around the country.
Printed out on photocopy machines, or clicked to computer screens far, far away, these letters from the farms bring a taste of bucolia into a world that has traded farm dirt under the nails for $45 French manicures, a world that’s truly hungry for the agrarian rhythms and universal truths found in the ancient equation of sowing, weeding, watering, waiting, worrying and, God and weather willing, harvest time.
“I get it on my BlackBerry when I’m riding in on the train on my way to work. It’s a very stress-relieving thing,” says Tom Swann, a self-proclaimed “Wall Street type” from Wilmette who has been clicking into Brockman ever since she made the switch from a swatch of photocopied newsletters dangling from a clipboard in her brother’s tents at the Evanston Farmers Market to e-mail about five years ago. “I’m thinking I’ve got this stock that’s blowing up, and she lulls me with her poetry and stories from the farm.”
Indeed, Terra Brockman is not just spitting out a grocery list of what’s coming to the Saturday morning market; she is by turns farm writer, poet, philosopher and darned good cook. When she’s not typing Farm Notes into the night, she works the farm, writes for Oxford University Press among others, and is executive director of The Land Connection, an educational not-for-profit that is saving farmland, training new farmers and linking local farm foods to the folks hungry to eat them.
“I certainly don’t sit down to write a sermon,” said Brockman, 47, one of six children who grew up on her family farm, with her genetics-professor father and her nurse mother, just across the creek from where her younger brother, Henry, now farms.
“There’s a lot of wisdom in the land. I feel like it’s not me writing. I almost feel like I’m just trying to speak for something that doesn’t have a chance to speak for itself.”
She writes of Henry nearly chopping off a finger whacking the stem from a head of broccoli but carrying on with the harvesting, the afflicted digit wrapped, makeshift, in a Kotex pad, the only bandage their sister, Beth, a veterinarian, happened to have in the glove compartment of her truck. Of Henry walking back and forth through the fields in the dark of night, moving irrigation hoses to keep tomatoes from dehydrating during a faith-testing drought. She writes of a hen that dies, reminding her of a feathered Ophelia floating away in a little River Styx. And, lyrically, she writes of the sex life of corn.
E.B. White and geotropism
She peppers her writing with literary references to Pablo Neruda, John Milton and E.B. White, to name but three. Ever the scientist’s daughter, she laces her prose with biogenetics and thermodynamics, and unspools lucid explanations of how something called geotropism accounts for the fact that roots are hellbent on heading straight down.
She leaves you jaw-dropped with a sentence such as this, in a discourse on the lack of rain: “You have to at some level become a good Buddhist and accept the suffering with equanimity.” And then she moves on merrily to a recipe for onion, raisin and garlic compote.
Come Friday morning, some 150 miles away, city and suburban folk alike, crank up their BlackBerries, their laptops and their PCs, and take in one deep, long breath of Brockman’s country air.
Liz Sarnik of Rogers Park saves Food & Farm Notes for Friday night when she’s finally home from work. “I look forward to it coming every week. I print it out, I sit down with my dinner. I can’t wait to just sit with it and read it. It’s pure pleasure. It’s the simpleness of nature, really.”
Anastasia Glapa, who works for a construction company in downtown Chicago, savors Brockman’s e-mail like a grande latte cappuccino in the middle of a harried Friday at the office. Why? “Because it keeps us in touch with the land instead of the skyscrapers we live in. Because I’m a human being, I’m not a machine.”
Zachary Michael Jack is a fourth-generation farmer’s son, a writer and a scholar who has spent his lifetime pondering why the farm resonates so deeply in our souls, and why it is such fertile turf for great writing.
Now an assistant professor of English at North Central College in Naperville, and the editor of “Black Earth and Ivory Tower” (University of South Carolina Press, $24.95 paper), the collected reflections of 30 contemporary farmer-writer-teachers, Jack unfurled a mini-lecture on the great American tradition of farm writing.
It is a lineage that begins even before Thomas Jefferson, the farmer-philosopher-president and one of a handful of founding fathers who claimed farming as his occupational passion.
In fact, farm writing goes back to ancient Greece and Rome, with Hesiod, Virgil and Pliny the Elder all weighing in on organic matters. Hesiod the Greek’s great poem “Works and Days” doles out agricultural advice aplenty, albeit wisdom of the 8th Century B.C., and is considered an essential of classical studies.
“That’s really where it all begins, the idea that the yeoman life is the good life, and that it begets ideas, thought, contemplation,” Jack said recently from his family’s 500-acre, corn-and-soybean farm just outside Mechanicsville, Iowa. He drew a straight line from Hesiod to Jefferson to poet and essayist Wendell Berry to the farmer writers he unearthed for his book. He is not surprised by the resurgence in writings from the farm, nor by the clamoring of city folk for a deep drink of farm tales.
Agrarian longings
“Most of us are not more than two or three generations removed from the farm life,” he said. “I think in our heart’s deep core we long for the rhythms of that life. It’s almost like an occupational ghost that haunts many families, particularly in the Midwest because they grew up spending weekends on their grandparents’ farm or hearing stories.”
Smearing a glob of goat cheese on a chunk of peasant sourdough ripped from the loaf, Brockman chews heartily on why her farm notes–and the notes of farmers typing and tilling all across the country–mean so much to so many.
“When your life is surrounded by manmade things, your house and your apartment and your car and your sidewalk and your cubicle, it’s all hard and cold and impenetrable and unyielding,” she began. “It’s gone so far in that direction, but I think people still have something deep inside them, because we’re all animals; it’s something primordial inside. They still remember blue skies and tall trees.
“So I bring them back. When I write about that field, it’s all soft and mushy and changeable. They’re sitting in their cubicle and they open my e-mail, they breathe in a little bit of country air. I bring them soft light and fresh air and bright stars. They look forward to that. They tell me every Saturday morning.”
That’s when the city and suburban folk troop into Henry’s six green tents on the asphalt lot that otherwise serves as a car park for a chain hotel in downtown Evanston.
Because they’ve inhaled the late-night dispatch of Food & Farm Notes, they rush in like family and old friends. There is a hug for Terra. Questions posed to Henry. Is his finger healed? You know a Kotex is not a sterile bandage, one stern nurse reprimands. No wonder poor Henry looks so worn and tired. He has been up into the night watering the growing things.
And because Henry’s big sister can harvest one mean swatch of poetry and prose, wisdom and pure delight, the farm in Congerville doesn’t seem 158 miles away. More like just a ways up the road.
– – –
Literary-minded farmers find time for the plow and the (writing) pen
Notes from the farm are cropping up all over.
Erin Barnett, director of Local Harvest, a Web site that maintains a nationwide directory of small farms, farmers markets and other local food sources, based in Santa Cruz, Calif., says she doesn’t know of any small direct-market farm, known as a CSA or community supported agriculture, that doesn’t make it a practice to send out some writing with each week’s box of fruits and vegetables. With CSAs riding the cresting wave of folks hungry to reconnect to their food source, Local Harvest estimates that there are some 2,000 such farms in the United States.
In Illinois, the largest CSA, Angelic Organics, with 1,350 shareholders of the 100-acre vegetable farm in Caledonia, near the Wisconsin border, has been churning out farm notes since 1992. The star attraction, Farmer John (a.k.a. John Peterson, 57, a maverick third-generation farmer), has used his typewriter to torpedo his way to fame around the globe.
A cookbook, an award-winning PBS documentary, a soon-to-be-released autobiography and a collection of farm stories all bear his byline. He is the rare farmer-writer whose work, once confined to a page or two tucked in with the tomatoes, has leapfrogged outside the inner circle of his shareholder readers.
Danielle Maestretti, librarian at the Utne Reader in Minneapolis, a bimonthly magazine that reprints an eclectic collection of articles from a vast catalog of alternative media, said her publication has some 40 farm-related periodicals in its data bank, ranging from humble two-page, typed newsletters to glossy, upscale farm slicks.
–Barbara Mahany
– – –
Musing on meaning of life amid the beans
If you’re hungry for a morsel of delicious farm writing, sit back and savor this from Terra Brockman. Brockman whets appetites via e-mail every week in Farm News & Notes, the dirt-under-the-nails dispatch from her brother Henry’s organic farm in downstate Congerville.
– – –
Farm Notes: Bean by Bean
Henry has a number of different bean patches in the field (to confound insects and deer, and to take advantage of microclimates). I was in the far patch, near Walnut Creek, and took one end of the daunting 200-foot row of haricots verts, while farmhand Matt took the other end and we began the slow crawl to meet in the middle.
Haricots verts are masters of disguise. Unlike the yellow wax or royal burgundy beans, they are nearly indistinguishable–in color, size and shape–from the stems of the bean plant. They also tend to hide down near the base of the plant, hugging the stem and the earth, resisting the searching hand and the easy pluck from plant to basket.
Which was just as well, because after this wet week, some beans near the soil were starting to soften. Every once in a while you see the white cotton fuzz of mold beginning. Those beans you toss aside, along with those that have more than a touch of rust, or more than one or two nibbles by a bean beetle.
All these less-than-perfect beans get tossed into the neighboring bed, recently tilled under and seeded with cover crops, on its way already to a long winter’s rest. The good beans go into the half-bushel basket that you move, half-foot by lurching half-foot, down the row.
A dozen or so feet into the row, you realize there are 400 half-feet in a 200-foot row, and that you are spending maybe 5 minutes picking the beans from every six inches of row. You do the math, and feel the chill air slip down the hillside and around your ankles. Preferring a warm bed to midnight bean-picking, you start plucking smarter.
You concentrate on the way the beans arrange themselves, and the way your fingers can grab the greatest number in one motion from bush to basket. You listen to the evening calls of the birds, the beginning of the insects chorus, muted by coolness, and you notice the first goose-bumps rise up on your arms.
At some point, the Zen of repetition takes over, the efficient pathways establishing themselves in your brain and down your arm to your fingertips.
Time slips by and then Matt, who seemed an eternity away at the other end of the row, is suddenly within talking distance, and then touching distance.
You slowly unbend your body–ankles, knees, vertebrae, neck, head. Bipedal once again, you notice the perfect half-moon halfway up sky. The evening softens, deepens, brings perspective. You are a dot on the horizon, a small part of something much bigger, much longer than one human life.
Standing on the earth, you know that you are a part of the same something that everything came from, and to which you and everything will return, and from which you can never be separated.
You take up a handful of soil and hold a miracle–the possibility of life, the product of death. You balance the bushel basket of beans on your head and walk–half-weary, half triumphant–to the end of the row where the pickup is waiting.
A job well-done. Bean by bean.
– – –
Italian flat beans with sweet onion and ham
Preparation time: 25 minutes
Cooking time: 12 minutes
Yield: 6 servings
This recipe from Joel Smith, co-leader of Slow Food Chicago, was featured in a recent Food & Farm Notes.
1 pound Italian flat beans, trimmed
1 tablespoon plus 1 teaspoon extra virgin olive oil
1 tablespoon unsalted butter
1 slice (about 1/4-inch-thick) honey- or maple-glazed ham, cut into half-inch pieces
2 tablespoons diced white onion
1 clove garlic, coarsely chopped
1 teaspoon maple syrup
1. Cover the beans with water in a medium saucepan; heat to a boil over medium high heat. Cook until beans are just tender and bright green, about 3 to 4 minutes. Drain; set aside.
2. Meanwhile, heat 1 tablespoon of the oil and the butter in a large skillet over medium heat; stir in ham. Cook, stirring occasionally, until ham just begins to slightly crisp; stir in onion and garlic. Cook, stirring, until the onion just begins to soften, about 2 minutes. (Do not let garlic brown.) Stir in a thin stream of syrup, stirring until well combined. Add the beans; toss ingredients together. Cook 1 minute; salt and pepper to taste.
3. To serve hot or at room temperature, drizzle with remaining 1 teaspoon of the oil
———-
bmahany@tribune.com
Subscriptions to Food & Farm Notes are free via e-mail. Contact Terra Brockman at info@thelandconnection.org or call 847-570-0701.
