Slowing Down To Do Better Work

When my childhood friend Dominic made a heroic decision to try organic farming after a layoff, just a year after Nan and I moved to the country, I paid close attention. He stayed at it for the better part of a decade, using antique equipment. His experience taught me a few things that I have brought to my own gardening and tending rural land. 

Of all I learned, one lesson stands out most, a principle I call “slowing down to do better work.” I wish that Dom and I had read Wendell Berry’s essays sooner. Berry’s thinking about local culture, agrarianism, and the proper use of tolls would have saved us time and money while adding pleasure and better stewardship of the land. The scale of Berry’s economic model maps well onto my personal belief that Distributism can replace corporate capitalism in a time of declining human population.

First, though, some specifics before thinking big and long-term. Central Virginians, save during drought, must mow grass close to the house weekly all Spring, Summer, and most of the Fall. Fields get fewer mowings. Dominic noticed how the old-timers near him in Hanover County would mow their fields slowly with the throttles set high. This burns more fuel but means cleaner cuts when creeping over the fields at the pace of a slow walk. We have here the antithesis of “mow blow and go” suburban lawn “care,” nearly always farmed out to a company these days. I see the kids who do this on zero-turn mowers that race over a yard. I suppose the homeowners are too busy after work to tend the yard, off playing golf or chauffeuring the kids (who would be better off in a neighborhood pickup game) to kid-sports events.

Many suburban lawns are often a toxic nightmare, anyhow, so let’s move on to something sane. Most of us are not Berry with his horse-drawn equipment yet the same philosophy can guide our work. For the rural mower who aims to protect and improve the topsoil, the slow-speed, high-rpm method means that grass and weeds are cut cleanly, not torn by the blades (assuming the blades are sharp). Yes, it takes longer but when I gathered and stacked the hay, I found it clean and superior to what I had formerly done in haste. The hay goes to our garden or chicken run, where the birds scratch it around and eat the seeds.

Berry writes about this philosophy of farm work in his essay “Horse Drawn Tools and The Doctrine of Labor Saving.” He decided to forego the purchase of a used 8N Ford tractor and mow with a team of horses and an International horse-drawn mower. He found that his equipment made better hay than did his neighbors’ tractors. His story will perplex those farmers who consider even the 8N a bare-bones machine as outmoded as a horse and best seen in a museum. I can attest that my own 1952 8N is a bulletproof, simple machine that has needed nothing in the 20 years it has been in the family, beyond fluid changes, fuel, two tire tubes, some paint, and a few sets of spark plugs. I learned to plow and mow on the machine and it still does useful chores, including cutting where we gather hay to stack in our barn after it cures.

While I have no plans to farm with horses—we raise chickens, not row-crops—some of Berry’s ideas have influenced me deeply. We looked at expensive hay-baling gear for small square bales. For now, it saves us money to buy straw and store just enough hay that we can manage raking, tedding, and transporting manually; we might get a dry stack the size of an SUV on a good year and need 30 square bales of straw as well.

I contrast this to what our Deere dealer talks about: air-conditioned cabs, round bales so huge we would need hay spears and plastic wrappers to move and season them. No thanks. The last thing we want is more complexity and more unsustainable materials on the farm or going to the landfill. Speed breeds those things, and Berry rightly sees the debt-trap they set for a small farm. 

Some expenses are inevitable, of course. When Dominic was still farming, I encouraged him to find one reliable modern diesel tractor in place of his handful of sometimes unreliable gas-powered antiques. But even with new or nearly new equipment, a farmer should start small. A dealer often tries to sell “just in case” power and attachments. They can be added later. I did recently spend $500 to set our utility tractor and implements up with Deere’s iMatch hitch, so I can hook up the rotary mower in a minute, then drop it to get a different implement. As I age and have arthritis in my left hip, such accommodations have proven to be a godsend.

Yet I waited 14 years to upgrade the tractor, after 600 hours of service. We might all apply Berry’s philosophy that way. It works off the farm too. We are today using AI to enable us to do more work in a shorter span of time, but what gets lost in all that haste? How much poorly-conceived “good enough” work, like poorly-mowed fields, gets completed as a result? Berry states that instead of building good soil, hasty farmers impoverish the land. With generative AI and other purportedly labor-saving technology, what are we doing to improve our minds and spirits? What are we doing to make our clients’ lives and our work better?

The next time you are asked to hurry a job, reply that you want to do good work.

When drafting this post, I wrote it first by hand. Checking Duck Duck Go, I verified the location of an e-text of Berry’s collection of selected essays The World-Destroying Fire, then used that e-text to help me find and annotate passages in my paper copy. No contradiction here at all. Using the technologies of print and Internet together led me to work methodically and do better work. If you want to see what Berry advises, you can find the essays here.

I turned off the AI assistant too.

What a Working Dog Taught Me

I'm not a firm believer in the afterlife as it was taught me to me as a child. I don't imagine Heavenly choirs, white robes, harps, and sandals. I'm not fond of sandals, anyhow, unless they are of the closed-toe fisherman sort.

When a pet passes, I hear stories on social media of a Rainbow Bridge out of Norse myth. Not my people or myth. I imagine something rural and slightly Middle Eastern. They'd still be wood to chop, meals to cook, chores to do, but no ticks or Copperheads (or if there were, they'd be chill and we'd all get along).

I've a vision of me arriving, in hiking boots, in the hereafter. Before an emotional reunion with my nearest and dearest who have made the journey before me, a guide would greet me. It would be my great grandfather I'd never met, Assad Nasser. I've done a lot of research and found that he lived in Hatay, in what is now Southeastern Turkey. He was nicknamed Assad, or "lion," after he and his Anatolian working dog, Arbede, meaning something like "brawl," "ruckus," "tumult," or even "work" in Turkish, killed a Caspian Tiger.  Both dog and man nearly died in the fight, but they saved their flock of sheep, on which the big cat had been preying. 

Back to the afterlife: I imagine Arbede running along the road ahead of Assad to check out the stranger, then guide me, as many stories are shared, to the place where my loved ones await my coming. Those loved ones would include all the pets that have shared their lives with me, except one.  

My livestock dog Swede would be with Arbede, to run up as I recall him running to sniff me cautiously. He'd not jump and love me to death, because for dogs like Swede, life was about loyalty and hard work, 24/7. He seemed to count the chickens in our flock, and he'd fret when something was amiss. I called him "The Worrier King," after a Warren Zevon song.

To see Swede run was a marvel. These large dogs lope but are graceful, the movements reminding me of a horse crossing a pasture. And at 150 pounds, Swede could have made a decent miniature pony. His shoulder came to my hip.

Living without Swede will be difficult. He slowed down mightily a year ago, at age 10. When his rear legs began to go a month ago, we knew it was time. One morning he bolted out of the dog shelter to romp with our new dog, Bessie. For once they didn't growl or snap. They wrestled and ran and played. It was a last gift from Swede to us. His limp increased after that final burst of working-dog fun.

The vet was lovely and Swede is now buried beside our first livestock dog, an Anatolian/Pyrenees mix named Vela. I was closer to Vela, who (100 pounds and all) climbed into my lap when I first met her. Her love for me was total and fierce. With Swede it was different. He loved and protected us, would reluctantly lick my nose, usually after a treat and calling him Arbede, but his purpose in life was to patrol our perimeter to protect our chickens. I got told he was an "Anatolian Mountain Dog," perhaps the same huge breed as Arbede. As you can see, Vela loved Swede too, right after me.

These large breeds are, first and foremost, workers not pets. On an earlier visit, our vet said "Swede is a dog's dog." He loved the outdoors and, like me, hated hot weather. Yet Swede never, in his 9 years on our farm, set foot in a building. He would sit down and not budge if we approached a door. He'd sniff around in our barn run-ins but they don't have doors. Show Swede a door, and he'd freeze solid.

We'll manage, poorly, without Swede. An adopted purebred Akbash "White Head" Anatolian named Bessie joined our pack last year, to keep our middle dog, an Italian Maremmano-Abruzzese Sheepdog Mix named Esra, company. Esra is submissive but a good guardian. Bessie looks to be the next Vela, a demanding drama queen. That said, she appears to worship the ground I walk on. That can be a burden. I think I preferred Swede's brotherly companionship. Don't tell Bessie.

As Americans are wont to do with so many other things, we infantalize our animals. I detest the term "fur baby" and get grumpy when people use it. I think of our animal companions as just that: they journey with us. My mom insisted that they have souls, no matter while a nun had just told me. What mom said about nuns generally, and that one nun in particular, cannot be typed here.

The only pity is that animals don't share our entire journey. I feel that way about humans I meet when traveling, people I know that I'd like to see the rest of my life. But then, after a day or a week, they are gone.

Maybe life is not, sorry Americans, about working until you drop at something you hate, then wanting to have endless fun in a childish and noisy way (water parks! cruise ships! Yuck). Instead, what if meaning and happiness can be found quietly in one's work, so work does not seem a chore but as natural as breathing? That is what Swede, Vela, and our other livestock dogs have taught me. There's a grace to be found in meaningful work, as compared to mindless leisure.

That picture is a favorite. When I posted it to Facebook, my former student Griffin said "Incarnation of Tenderness comforts Incarnation of Melancholy." Yes. Swede never stopping thinking about his next chore. A week before his passing, he made his usual round, slowly, counting chickens, at sunset. He vanished, very slowly, beyond the brow of the hill in his run just as the sun went down.

It brought me to tears. 

On his last day in this world, I sat with Swede in his giant dog shelter and talked to him while he ate his favorite treats. Swede and I shared his last breaths, later. But before the vet arrived, I told him to greet my ancestors, including Arbede, in that undiscovered country we'll one day find. 

If I get there before you, you'll find the firewood stacked, a humidor of cigars nearby, and the martini shaker ready. Swede will be on the front porch with me, waiting for your visit. 

Delayed Gratification and Wasted Money

I hate gambling. I think it preys upon the poor and the impulsive. It reveals a deeper problem.

When I saw a young man in the convenience store putting dollar after dollar into the "skills game" machine, I tried not to wince. No, it's a gambling machine, not a skills machine. That would be the arcade games I played, for a few bucks in quarters, 40  years ago. 

This was not just a few minutes of harmless fun. He was playing to win, round after game. 

The House always wins, kid. You can read about the state legislature's latest bill on this subject, if you wish. 

I try to avoid the political here, but it saddens me to see what I regard as a urban problem flower out here, where lots of folks still work with their hands or work the land. 

The fellow punching buttons on the "skill game" was strong-looking, the sort I'd pay 20 bucks an hour in cash for manual labor, plus feed him lunch and give him gas money. My late father-in-law would have said "I'll find him work to do." I have 300' feet of fence to put in and last weekend, I was lucky to get a former neighbor to help me pound in 30 T-posts. Yet I cannot find folks I trust to pay to do that. One lad who came out--in shorts and tennis shoes--lasted one whole day and never returned. I'm three times his age and wore him out.

We are picky about who we invite onto our land. We don't trust day-laborers unless we know them already. It's a sad reality of a time when too many people lead precarious lives, make bad choices, and have substance-abuse issues. Trust must be earned, not assumed.

In any case, at the store I wanted to tell the young man "put 50 bucks down at Charles Schwab and get a share of Tractor Supply. In six or seven years it will be worth 100 dollars."

He'd think I came from Mars. His addiction to that one-armed bandit shows that he's not one to wait for returns. I may be too cruel. Perhaps he's living like so many Americans, from paycheck to paycheck.

That said, American life exists now in the age of instant gratification. It's changed the labor market since COVID.

My friends who run a local Chinese place are closing shop after this week; they can no longer find any help to provide table service and they are worn out. The husband runs the kitchen alone; the wife runs the bar and their daughter handles the take-out orders. Their son runs errands. I hear from lots of restaurant owners the same complaint: no one wants to work their hours at any hourly rate and it's hard to pay a living wage on restaurant margins.  I don't mind the mandatory service fees I'm seeing on checks now, either.

Of course more folks may soon be on the job market. Our server at a pub in Williamsburg, VA had a career as a graphic designer until AI replaced her; she's the second designer I've met who had to leave the field.

In such an economy, setting money aside to get us through old age is a tall order, especially in a culture that discouraged thrift. I sound like an old fart, but I feel that there's something to the idea that social media and what Sherry Turkle calls "always-on, always-on-you" technology have made us a nation of emulators, who want to party like influencers and live like high-rollers. We were already consumers. Now, in short, we want all that stuff and that lifestyle without waiting to earn it.

I prefer what we Lebanese-Americans refer to as our "side hustles." We make a bit of money here, a bit more there, and sock it away. If there's hope, and I think there is, it comes those like a recent student who, at 21 years old, puts $25 dollars away monthly in a mutual fund. She knows what it will be worth in 40 years. The son of the Chinese restaurant owners wants to become a mechanic. He knows it will pay well and provide a lifelong career, and he loves cars as much as I do.

I wish there were more like them. I would wager--yes, wager--that they'd let me hire them to hang fence on T-posts any day of the week, even if they lacked the stamina to pound those posts into the ground.

 That's reason to hope. As Spring unfolds here, and chores get done, I'll keep hoping for other changes on the wind.

Creative commons image courtesy of Pennlive. 

Fiddly Hobbies in Crazy Times

I have this rage for order. It is an impossible ask of the universe, even on a farm. Especially on a farm where in a month, the weeds will erupt and I cannot find any young folks with lives uncomplicated enough to come help with projects that need doing first. I cannot get help, even when I offer to pay them far more than minimum wage.

Now we have 300’ of wire fencing to install, all by our arthritic selves. Yet I feel a strange sense of optimism.

How did that happen? I am a pessimist to the core. A change of outlook started with a big problem that I solved by fixing something little. After a frustrating year off the road, my wife’s 1968 pickup will roll again. I had sheared a bolt’s head off when putting on a valve-cover and new gasket. For a few months, I pretty much threw in the towel. The truck also needed a heater core, a surprisingly difficult task on those vehicles, as compared to many newer pickups. 

More towels almost got tossed.

So I went in the house and built airplane models. I fixed a few things in the shop. I organized spare parts and tossed a lot of junk out.

Fiddly, yes, but confidence-building exercises. Then I read about how to drill out a broken-off bolt and how to rethread a hole to set a new bolt. Then I read about how to remove a Chevy heater core without removing the truck’s fender or hood (a job requiring two strong sets of arms). Then I invented a technique not found on YouTube but based on a tip there.

Soon enough, all by myself and with only a few curses and skinned knuckles, I had a heater core and valve cover that did not leak. When the other cover seeped oil, I fixed it in minutes and did not shear off another bolt. Then I fixed up a drag-harrow whose many parts have stymied me for a while. It worked beautifully to prepare a field for seeding.

“Not through our walking, but through our stumbling is the world saved,” a Yoga teacher once said, at the end of a challenging class. Add “fiddling” to her maxim.

Start fiddling. The world is in a bad place, and we will need to do some fixing as soon as the know-nothing who is breaking things goes away.

Thinking Little With Wendell Berry

Last year, I picked up my first volume of Wendell Berry's essays. I'd read some of his poetry, but until recently, not the prose.

I found a kindred tractorpunk, even if Berry and his son work their land with animals. I'll point you to one essay in particular, "Think Little," that can be found free of charge at the Web site for the Wendell Berry Center. In particular I want to note a couple of his premises, ones that could be adapted to a Distributist lifestyle even in a big city:

• "The Confucian Great Digest says that the 'chief way for the production of wealth' (and he is talking about real goods, not money) is 'that the producers be many and that the mere consumers be few…. ' ”  To me this means that in a Distributist economy, rather than a Corporatist or Socialist one, we all are makers. We trade, barter, and yes, pay in currency when we must. Above all, we avoid credit.
• "Our model citizen is a sophisticate who before puberty understands how to produce a baby, but who at the age of thirty will not know how to produce a potato." Stunningly true, even if I struggle to grow white potatoes still. Barbara Dalmrosch said something similar in her wonderful book The Garden Primer: we can make change happen by growing just one thing we like to eat. That could be the potted basil on your apartment balcony. Start little, think little, but imagine big as you influence others.
• "[T]he remedies are not always obvious, though they certainly will always be difficult. They require a new kind of life-harder, more laborious, poorer in luxuries and gadgets, but also, I am certain, richer in meaning and more abundant in real pleasure. To have a healthy environment we will all have to give up things we like; we may even have to give up things we have come to think of as necessities." It's a small task to learn to repair or hold on to common items; I just refurbished my old phone rather than give into Verizon's seductive texts (now blocked) to upgrade it (at more than $250 per month).  A $20 case, some hours removing photos and apps so I could update the OS, and now I have a phone that will last me a few more years without incurring more e-waste or personal bills.
• "Odd as I am sure it will appear to some, I can think of no better form of personal involvement in the cure of the environment than that of gardening. A person who is growing a garden, if he is growing it organically, is improving a piece of the world." Not odd at all, and certainly less odd than when Berry wrote the essay. Most folks I know keep some kind of garden now, often with local varieties of plants and some food crops. 

I've gotten too critical of urban and suburban life at times. I still could never imagine living in suburbia, though I know some suburbanites who are minimalists and avoid the rat-races of conspicuous consumption and look-just-like-the-Joneses conformity. Moreover, the 'burbs of the 2020s are not those of the 1950s or 70s. You'll find local markets and businesses aplenty, from a halal grocer I frequent next to my locally-owned Yoga studio, to a locally-run bakery or three. I have found cobblers who still fix shoes, tailors who mend clothing, a great local bar, and places that repair small electronics or engines. 

 I'll end with Berry's prescription for change:

"We are going to have to gather up the fragments of knowledge and responsibility that we have parceled out to the bureaus and the corporations and the specialists, and we are going to have to put those fragments back together again in our own minds and in our families and households and neighborhoods. We need better government, no doubt about it. But we also need better minds, better friendships, better marriages, better communities. We need persons and households that do not have to wait upon organizations, but can make necessary changes in themselves, on their own."

Can we do this? We have to. The philosophy should appeal to Libertarians of the earth-loving rather than broligarch sort, too. 

You may, like me, have already started. I'll be at a Board of Supervisors meeting next week to mention the economic madness of building soon-to-fail giant data centers in our county. We are involved in a law suit against this plan, a concept voted down by supervisors in the counties north and east of us. If we don't try, we lose by default. Yet if we lose, we keep trying. Onward.

 

The Last X You Will Ever Buy

Sobering, isn't it? At age 65, I confront a strangely comforting dilemma: Many of the thing I buy or do will outlive me. That Deodar Cedar in between us and the road? It will be big when I'm in my 80s, but if climate-change and future residents allow, it will still be growing bigger in the 22nd Century.

If my tree-planting is for the next generation, as well as an "up yours" to the greedy idiocy of denying human-driven climate change, then buying things that last a long time constitutes a statement about economics and frugality. 

Every time we acquire a vehicle, and I'm addicted to clean used vehicles, I say "this one will be here when I ain't." And now when a tool wears out, I start shopping for something that will be in my estate sale. I've written here about the wisdom of getting only vehicles that are friendly for DIY work. That philosophy applies to many things, big and small.

Last week, the first circular saw I'd every owned, a basic Skil purchased in the early 1990s for under $50, gave up the ghost. I could have ordered a new trigger (the motor works still) but stands far from my late father-in-law's Porter-Cable belt sander, a Gibraltar-like device that commands reverence and weighs about 40 pounds. I got a new trigger for that one. It should last another 40 years. The Skil is a cheap tool that lasted a long time because I am careful with my tools, cleaning them and never, ever loaning a tool or vehicle to anyone unless I use it for the borrower.

The saw's replacement is a DeWalt saw. Instead of an $80 Skil, I spent another $100 and got a saw that rips paneling like a hot knife though butter. The handle fits my big hands well, and the trigger design is sure and solid. These features matter after you work with a saw for a few hours.

I really like the DeWalt's corded tools, but I've sworn off the cordless ones because the company changes battery designs regularly and I had to find third-party batteries from China (when I can in these crazy times) to keep a set of 2008 tools running. 

Planned obsolescence violates every fiber of my being.There was a time when a good tool meant a lifetime investment; that's the case for the sander I noted, as well as some of the shop tools we own. My Bosch Miter-box and Delta table saws should survive me (I bought the latter from an estate, in fact). I attended a farm show where a craftsman used a spoke-shave from the middle of the 18th Century; George III was boss here when that tool was made. He told me it would go to a child with an interest in woodworking, as it has been passed down for over 250 years.

I just wonder: if we thought of purchasing as much as possible items that would outlast us, how much healing would that do for the environment? Moreover, how much would it rebuke the purveyors of cheaply made, disposable goods? We would have to save up for a quality item. Wendell Berry made that this sort of durability and longevity tests for a sustainable economy.

When the current stupid era ends with an inevitable economic crash, I wonder if we might return to the Distributist principles of localism, frugality, and durability.

I'll be cutting boards and waiting to see. 

 

Old School Tools: Percolator Perfection!

Unlike me, my late father-in-law was not picky about coffee. Yet when I perked some for him using a stovetop peculator, he ordered one himself from The Vermont Country Store. I'd ruined him on weak and tepid Mr. Coffee, forever.

I inherited his pot, and I have my original too. It's time I got those old pots out more often. I tend to use them when we have company. And when I smell that coffee, good things happen to my mood. My mom used an electric peculator, and I liked that coffee a lot too, partly from the smell of brewing and also from memories.  Mom's coffee maker had no off switch; you leave an electric or stovetop on too long, and you can smell the ruination. You only do that once.

On some dreadful days, my parents and I would brew coffee and enjoy it in dainty stoneware cups and saucers around the kitchen table. It was a rare moment when my dad's guard was down and we could talk about serious things. When mom was in the hospital once, I showed dad how to make coffee (he got very good at it, too). I also recall that after dad passed, mom and I would fire up the peculator and share a few cups. This ritual eased, for a little while, her grief.

But it also united us around a favorite beverage. Mom hated coffee machines for producing weak brew. So do I. So did my sadly departed friend Steve Gott. For him, old-school percolation was the only way to make coffee.

Today we have wasteful coffee-pod coffee going to our landfills, whereas I have been composting my Melita filters and coffee, from a plastic cone I've had since the early 1980s. But the peculator! It's even less wasteful; it has a metal basket where I dump my grounds into the compost bin.

 Now, with only one coffee drinker in our house, I think smaller. This means that I have a Goldilocks dilemma.

My favorite pot is made for a LOT of coffee. My other peculator is a cafetera from Madrid; it reverses the process by pushing the boiling water up, under pressure, from the bottom of the pot. It makes a superb brew. I bought it in 2002, to replace one I'd lost in the late 80s. Sadly, it makes one tiny cup. I need two cups every morning.

Now I need a coffee maker that is JUST right. As for the design? Those stovetop and electric percolators, like safety razors or car controls from before about 2005, perfected a technology that has only gone downhill with each "innovation" since. I'd claim that everything afterwards just tries to empty our wallets. 

I'm not talking about a cappuccino machine; that's another form of perfection. I lack counter space for that, alas.