I am not sure I like this, this new computer. Last week, my Old Faithful bought the farm and now I am on my wife’s laptop which is not like mine at all. I have to look at a lot of keys, because some things like “delete” are way up on the board, and the board itself is positioned wrong. It hurts my wrists, and the typing is slow. Sure, it isn’t like I’m in a North Korean prison camp, but it annoys.
Being a writer, at least for me, is a contradiction. I need my regular schedule just so or I won’t write at all, but I need different experiences to write new and interesting stuff. Always a tug, always a contradiction. Some people, however, have work that provides an even flow of action and thought. Some people actually do the work that their grandfather’s did, who did the same as theirs, and so on for a thousand years, and only have to perfect what was perfected long ago. Some people, then, are like the author of the latest book I am reading, The Shepherd’s Life, by James Rebanks.
I love it. He starts with a word that might be used only in his area, the Lakes District of northern England made famous by William Wordsworth: heft. It is used explicitly for sheep – to be ‘hefted’ means to have become a part of the land, used to and absolutely united with a specific parcel. This sense is passed on from ewe to lamb and has been for hundreds of years in the District, but the author means it not only for sheep but for their human caretakers as well. As much as a writer that he is, he also has continued his family tradition, and expects his children to do so as well. When young, he, along with his fellow farmer kids, despised school, for teaching him (them) things and social ways irrelevant to his chosen path. To his teachers, the Lake District is for tourists and poets; to his teachers, the people on it and their way of life is almost inconsequential. They tried to get the kids out of this backward lifestyle, to join in the rush to success in the cities of the lowlands. They didn’t understand. The world doesn’t understand. He and all his kin have been and are hefted to the land and they want no other place or way of life. It is everything: work, morality, friends, family, worldview and, yes, freedom. Not freedom from the land, but freedom on the land to succeed or fail with the energy and knowledge that is put into play. For the author, there is no better way.
I do not live that lifestyle, but I understand. When they began development of my home territory years ago when I was in my 20’s, I was brokenhearted. I had known all the fields, the swamps, where the cattails grew and the skunk cabbage, where the owls nested, where all the strange things that called in the night were. My family was new to the area, but most had been there since the 1600’s. They farmed the land as their grandfathers had done and so on, and I had learned their appreciation of the land and the work. We had a hobby farm – one that we did not depend on for a living - with all the animals, the gardens, the haying, all the things of the real farmers. We helped bring in the hay of our neighbors before a storm, and we watched the weather and the animals as if it had meant something. Without knowing, this familiarity went deep – so deep, that when it all changed forever, it was a pain worse than losing young love. The farmers themselves could no longer compete against the big spreads to the west, and they first got other jobs, then sold large chunks of family land to developers. Many became millionaires, but I do not believe anyone was, or thought they would be, any happier. It was a tragic necessity, and I think most understood it as such. We had been hefted to the land, and that bond, along with the pain of separation, would never go away.
It must be like true love, this hefting, for I have never gotten it again anywhere else. We have lived for 18 years now in southern Wisconsin in farm country, and we have a large haying field and a large garden and have raised dozens of chickens, but it is not the same. We do not know where the old spring was, or if we do, the stories behind it do not have the same emotional impact. We do not know where all the animals live, for we cannot walk on everyone’s property as I had done in the old place, but if we could, it would still not be the same. Some things, once you lose them, can never be replaced.
It is the story of much of America, and now much of the world. Most of us are not hefted to the land, or to the clan, or to a way of life. We are freer in some sense, but freer in a bleak landscape that does not speak to us as landscapes once did. Our values can then shift, bureaucrats who do not know the land can tell us what to do with it, and can tell us how to live. We do not understand those who are hefted, and are always trying, like the teachers of our author, to make them join the club, to be rich and “go somewhere.” Except we no longer know where we are going.
And yes, it goes into religion, too. There is a reason that the South in our country is more religious than the rest, and also more rigid: just a generation or so ago, almost all Southerners were connected to the family plot and to the relatives living nearby. It is going now, too, as the whole country becomes itinerant and displaced and …..more free and open-minded. And richer. And, oddly, less secure.
We can list plus and minuses to this issue, but I will only say that there was a sense of belonging in being hefted that cannot be replaced. Perhaps in becoming more footloose and culturally mobile we might become closer to a greater, universal truth. Perhaps we might begin to see all our fellow humans as brothers, as Jesus himself had wanted. But if you once knew, you know the price and what is lost. It is no small thing. FK
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