Ridge Stories Page 12

Henry David Thoreau once proclaimed, “We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us,” asserting that progress is sometimes an illusion, that for every one of mankind’s steps forward, another step is taken back. No doubt he’d shake his head at the improvements in road and utility high-line maintenance if he traveled to Pleasant Ridge. Roadsides have been cleared of brush and trees and the banks graded flat. With these improvements, not only can farmers work their fields almost to the shoulders of the highways, but even more important, the roads themselves are less likely to be covered with snowdrifts, and tree limbs will no longer fall across power lines.

  Maybe Thoreau would remember the hickories that grew along the road both to the east and to the west of our farm buildings on the ridge, some of them producing huge nuts free for our gathering. Perhaps he’d recall the wild blackberries, asparagus, mushrooms, and wildflowers that once grew there.

  But people on the ridge no longer have to worry about being snowbound, as we were in the winter of 1958–59 when we received record snowfalls with high winds. The year before, when I was an eighth grader, my reading class had been led line by line over a period of weeks, it seemed, through John Greenleaf Whittier’s famous poem Snow-Bound. The following year, we were living it.

  Early in the winter, the snowplows had no problem keeping up, and the piles of snow mounded atop the natural banks of the road were impressive. But as the storms kept coming, the banks grew even higher, until at the top of the hill between the farm buildings of Ed Jansen and Otto Fry, the plows could no longer break their way through.

  The truck that picked up our milk couldn’t navigate the snow, and my father, faced with the dilemma of full cans and no milk pick up, could either start dumping milk or try to take it to the cheese factory himself. He loaded the full cans of milk onto the bed of his empty manure spreader (those were the days when milk inspection was a far more casual activity), threw a scoop shovel in with them, and headed down County D, hoping to make it through the two miles of snowdrifts to Highway 80, which as a major thoroughfare would certainly be plowed.

  At Barney Mick’s farm, he stopped to enlist Barney’s assistance and haul his milk as well, and off they went, down the Mick Hill, past the Rose’s flats, around the corner of Buck Creek School toward the intersection of 80 by the Buck Creek gas station.

  This latest snowstorm was technically a blizzard, but Ithaca High School, where I was enrolled as a freshman, had been late calling in the buses to take us home. Although the lumbering yellow vehicles could muscle their way through the deep snow in the valley, the ridge was another matter. The driver let me off at the Johnson farm, the last stop in upper Little Willow before ascending the hill to Pleasant Ridge. Verne was my father’s first cousin, Dorothy was my mother’s best friend, and she immediately called to let Ma know that I was safe and would stay at the Johnsons until the roads were cleared.

  Becoming snowbound in a blizzard today is serious business, as the storms are usually accompanied by a power outage that means no source of heat, and even if a family has stockpiles of food, they have no way to cook it. When Ralph Waldo Emerson speaks of self-reliance, many modern folks don’t fully grasp what he’s talking about.

  But being stranded at the Johnson farm was like looking at the illustrations of Whittier’s famous poem. A handpump in the kitchen provided fresh water from the spring that flowed past the outhouse down to the milk house to cool the milk and serve as another refrigerator during the summer. Because the large dining room was heated by a big square woodburning space heater, in winter it doubled as a family room.

  In the fall, Verne Johnson shot and cleaned squirrels that Dorothy chicken-fried. In the spring, maple sap in a cake pan atop the woodstove evaporated to maple sugar. In the summer, the men folk would take a bar of soap and towels for bathing in the creek.

  While I was snowbound, I hoped that the snow would never melt.

  Dorothy had an old manual typewriter that fascinated me. Next year, as a sophomore, I planned to take typing, because I hoped to be a writer. And although I had no understanding of the touch method, I thought I could get a head start by hunting and pecking.

  Because school was canceled and the snow was too deep to play outside, my cousin Don and I reached the point where we entertained ourselves by roughhousing. Dorothy eventually lost her patience. She stood with her hands at her waist peering over the top of her glasses at me. “I think it’s about time for you to go home,” she said, and I felt chastened.

  The next day, the plows managed to finish clearing all the places where the roads on the ridge had been drifted shut, and I returned to my ordinary life at home.

  Henry David Thoreau maintained that technological advances sometimes make our lives more complicated, not better. As I look across the ridge now where fence rows have for the most part gone away, I nod in agreement. The number of small farmers has dwindled, giving way to large corporate operations. Cattle are generally kept in feedlots rather than in pastures, and subsequently, good neighbors have nothing to do with good fences.

  “We don’t have neighbors anymore,” one housewife whose farmer husband now owns a thousand acres lamented. “I seldom see anyone!”

  Students nowadays are rarely asked to read Snow-Bound, and if they do, the life described in the poem seems as remote and exotic to them as does that in The Arabian Nights.

  Mixed Nuts

  My farmer parents were not convinced that I really needed the engineer boots I so desperately wanted when I was in eighth grade. They couldn’t understand that a ninety-pound boy who was five feet tall required something to jump start his manhood, a little instant height and kick-ass attitude, a little On the Road, even if it was gravel in rural Willow Township.

  With the resourcefulness that came down to me by way of generations of subsistence farmers, I took matters into my own hands. That fall, I picked up hickory nuts, nearly every day after school and on weekend afternoons, in all kinds of weather. (Well, sometimes when it was drizzling a bit.) I had my mother place an ad for me in the Richland Center Shopping News. “Hickory nuts for sale,” it read, along with our phone number.

  I laid newspapers over the linoleum on the floor of my room and spread my growing inventory of hickory nuts to dry, waiting for the phone to ring. And it did. My mother took orders, and when my folks drove into town on Saturdays to buy groceries and grind grist at the feed mill, they took me along to deliver hickory nuts.

  When I had saved enough to buy the engineer boots, they fit perfectly, and while I still wasn’t the tallest kid in the school, I felt the biggest. Ours was a hardscrabble farm, and rather than selfishly begging my parents to change their minds, I had been self-reliant and could wear my boots proudly.

  My decision to pick up hickory nuts as a moneymaker emerged logically from the hickory nut culture around me. Hickories flourished in the pastures of our farm and on the banks along the road by our house. And my family had picked up hickory nuts for generations.

  Gathering hickory nuts, like hunting morel mushrooms and picking wild blackberries, established our identity as a people, separating us from the Chicago city slicker who moved his family to the farm up the road to the east of us. He bragged to us that he had pecan trees growing in his woods and that he and his family had picked up a wagonload that he would sell for a small fortune.

  We gently explained he had picked up bitternuts that, unfortunately, were inedible, not pecans, which grew only in the South. Bitternut trees look like smooth-bark hickories, and the nuts, like smooth hickory nuts. I grew up immediately knowing the difference between those varieties of nuts, just as at a glance I could distinguish between a cow and a bull.

  My mother had a special stone for cracking hickory nuts, one that had been handed down through the family. It was round, about the diameter of a saucer and the fatness of a thick book, a dull black in color, with an indentation in the center for cradling the nut. I asked my father about the provenance of the stone. He didn’t know, just that his mother had had it as
long as he could remember. My mother had a ball-peen hammer dedicated to the task.

  My father would sometimes crack nuts for my mother, but she would pick the nuts out of their shells, an excellent job for a fidgety person who liked to have something to do while sitting. When I was a teenager, I’d pick nuts out for her while I watched television, motivated by the thought of eating the pecan pies she would make substituting hickory nuts; the chocolate chip cookies with, naturally, hickory nuts; the chocolate layer cakes topped with chopped hickory nuts; and the fudge and the brownies—all with hickory nuts.

  For Thanksgiving, my wife, Lu, and I often make a hickory nut pie in memory of my mother and black walnut bread in memory of my mother-in-law.

  She grew up a black walnut girl, not far from Belmont, the site of Wisconsin’s first territorial capital. Her mother, too, cracked nuts, but following a different family tradition. My mother-in-law used a standard claw hammer to smash her black walnuts on a slotted iron weight from an old platform farm scale. My wife remembers pieces of the shells whizzing around the kitchen like shrapnel. The cookies and cakes, nut breads, and bars of her childhood were enhanced with the pungent flavor of those walnuts gathered on the family farm. She would say the nuts have more character than mild-tasting hickories.

  Lu and I met in college, and although we had grown up only seventy-five miles from each other, we learned that our respective nut cultures were different, and the nuts became emblems of our blended families. I enjoy black walnuts, as I loved my mother-in-law, but I knew that she could never replace my own mother or the hickory nuts she used when she baked. And my wife, not surprisingly, felt the same way about my mother and the black walnuts that were an integral part of her own mother’s baking.

  While my mother never baked with black walnuts, and my wife’s never used hickory nuts, our own family now uses both, but with the sense of passing time. Lu’s childhood farm has new owners; likewise, the hickory pasture land on my boyhood farm has been sold, and the nut trees along the road have long since been cut in the interest of power lines and snow removal.

  While pecans and English walnuts are readily available in grocery stores, hickory nuts and black walnuts must be purchased online for prices akin to French truffles. Thankfully, a few years ago we purchased a second home in Platteville to spend winters. To our delight, we have a mature black walnut tree in our back lawn and hickory nut trees bordering a university parking lot across the street from us.

  Our childhood culinary memories have now happily merged in a marriage that has combined our families’ folk-baking traditions.

  Within Walking Distance

  Because a horse or a child could walk only so far, our rural landscape had been dotted with cheese factories, grade schools, and churches.

  When I was a kid, the cheese factory across the road from Otto Fry’s house was still standing but had been repurposed as a shed for young cattle. Although the one next to Fry’s farm had gone out of business, factories at Rockbridge and Loyd, both relatively short drives from our farm, were still operating, as were others farther afield.

  During my boyhood, the milk truck would make daily morning rounds to pick up cans of milk and haul them to the cheese factories, but earlier generations were responsible for transporting the milk themselves. This chore required hitching Dick and Ned to the wagon and hauling the cans from the previous night’s milking (cooled in a tank of well water) along with the morning milk to the factory where it would soon become cheese.

  When my uncle was in his nineties, he recalled that farmers would not only drop off their milk but also dip into the vats of whey, a by-product of cheese making, to haul home as food for their pigs. My late mother used to tell the story of her father stopping on his way back from the factory to pick wild roses for his young wife.

  For those who were not traveling with literal horsepower, stiles had been constructed for taking shortcuts across neighbors’ property. Stiles were a quaint phenomenon, looking much like permanent wooden stepladders but with steps on both sides. Fences could be scaled without the construction of stiles, but if someone climbed a woven wire fence, stepping between the wires, the fence would soon sag. And if someone crawled between tautly stretched barbed wires, clothing, or worse yet, skin, might be snagged.

  A couple of stiles remained on our land when I was young, one in our night pasture for crossing the fence that served as a boundary between our farm and that of Frank Brewer. Rather than following the road to the upper Buck Creek School, my father and uncle could shortcut down the valley, cross the stile, and make the trek to school in less time.

  Another stile crossed the line fence in our pig lot that marked the border between our farm and Everett Gray’s for shortcutting to the Pleasant Ridge School, the one I attended as a boy. But by the time I was a teenager, the stiles had decayed, disappearing into the past.

  My mother often told the story of cutting through a woods with her brother on their way to school as first graders. One overcast day in the woods, they heard someone calling to them, “Who? Who?” My Uncle Maynard, who was the older of the two, dutifully answered, “It’s only Maynard and Esther Buckta,” not realizing that he was providing that information to an owl.

  For some reason, Evangelical United Brethren churches proliferated in our area, the nearest one visible from our kitchen window. But another was located down the road at Buck Creek, the same clergyman doing double duty for both churches. Ironically, they were not far apart and each had a tiny congregation, but communities were reluctant to relinquish either their one-room schools or their little churches.

  When I was a member of the Pleasant Ridge Youth Fellowship, we would travel to revival-type assemblies of young people hosted by different EUB churches. In retrospect, I wonder what missionary activity initiated the founding of those churches, all only a stone’s throw from one another, within a comfortable walking distance both for children and for horses.

  Soon after I graduated from high school, the EUBs were swallowed up in an ecclesiastic merger with the Methodists, and their list of forbidden social sins was somewhat abridged under that umbrella.

  Both the church and the school are closed, and fewer farm homes dot the ridge, the distances between them far greater. Nowadays, people drive for transportation and then walk for the sole purpose of using their legs. I remember when farmers would laugh at the idea of walking for exercise.

  A few years ago, a physician who lives in a house on upper Buck Creek asked if I minded that he sometimes hiked across the land I own. Of course I told him he was welcome to walk through my woods.

  His request made me think of the walking trails that crisscross the English countryside, traditional paths that I have walked, and sometimes run, during my visits. On trips through rural Ireland, I have noticed people walking along roads on errands, carrying cloth shopping bags.

  While mega-farm operations have replaced many of the small family farms of my youth, more small organic farms, community-supported agriculture operations, little goat milk cheese factories, and other micro-agricultural businesses have been appearing on the Wisconsin landscape.

  Maybe the day will return when life on the ridge will once again be within walking distance.

  The Good Life

  “He doesn’t know what a briefcase is!” one of my city cousins laughed, feigning incredulity at my ignorance.

  I was irritated, of course, because I didn’t know what an attaché was either. But I knew the difference between a cow and a bull, or a woven wire and an electric fence, or poison ivy and milkweed, unlike my city cousins who were babes in the woods, quite literally.

  “That’s a bull,” I’d say, pointing to one of our cows who had a residual aluminum weening ring, minus the barbs, still in her nose. My city cousins would flee in terror, not knowing the difference between a cow’s udder and a bull’s scrotum.

  Every fence was potentially electric in their eyes. After having been tricked into touching one that was electric, they wouldn’t to
uch any fence, even if it was made of chicken wire. They never seemed to understand the function of a porcelain insulator. And because their mothers had cautioned them about the dangers of poison ivy, they tried to avoid brushing against anything green.

  The city cousins were good for laughs. I enjoyed horrifying them by stepping barefoot into a fresh warm cow pie, telling them how good it felt oozing between my toes. In my defense, it was nothing more than chewed grass mixed with digestive juices. And truth be told, it did feel good on summer feet that seldom saw shoes unless we were going into town.

  My city cousins, on the other hand, were forbidden to go barefoot by their mothers, because who knew what terrible diseases they might contract, and certainly they faced the danger of stepping on rusty nails or shards of broken glass, not to mention the fearful menace of snake bite.

  One time, I challenged an older city cousin to a foot race on the gravel drive across the road between the barn and the house. He was shod, and I was barefoot. You can guess who won.

  My mother’s city siblings and their families enjoyed visiting the farm during the summer, sometimes for a week-long stay. The cousins liked playing in the fresh air and open country, and the vacation was affordable for aunts and uncles because food was free for the harvesting on a farm, and beds could be shared. If the visiting adults decided to enjoy a side trip without their children, they knew their kids would be no trouble, as they were always playing outside.

  Now I laugh as I remember these battles between city and country mice, but the adventures of the city farmers in the 1950s who struggled to make a living by milking cows and working the land are less amusing. Those workers who had tired of the rat race in the city, of traffic and of unreasonable bosses, were eager to embrace the good life. How smart did you have to be to run a farm? they might have wondered. You’d have fresh air, wholesome food, healthy exercise—all free for the taking, practically.