Gumption (17 page)

By the way, Laura Dunn’s documentary is called
Forty Panes
, and I came on as a coproducer, which is a fancy way of saying I did a bunch of cheerleading and a bit of fund-raising. It’s a very moving film about my favorite subject, upon which she did one hell of a nice job while managing five boys with her husband, Jef.

Wendell and Tanya and I spoke at length about one of his themes that drives me with constancy, that of “good work.” One aspect of this topic that I often regurgitate is his dislike for a society that celebrates the notion of “Thank God it’s Friday!” Taking this position, people are necessarily saying that they despise five of every seven days of their lives. He said he first noticed it when he was teaching college, that people would answer the question “How are you doing?” with “Well, pretty good, for a Monday.” This exposed a joylessness that filled Mr. Berry with concern. “It’s a great harbinger of what’s to come. If you don’t like the classes about what you’re going to do, you’re not going to like going to do it.”

“More importantly,” he said, “the collegiate system and the importance that’s placed upon it has demeaned and is doing away with the trades.” This is a topic of his that has always gotten me fired up. When I was in high school in the eighties, only the underachievers and burnouts were relegated to the area vocational school. It was considered a substantial demotion in life, brought on only by poor grades or
attitude. “John, I don’t think you have what it takes to get through trigonometry. How about we make a welder out of you?”

I was going to be headed to college because I was not planning to work in a field so low as mechanics or clothing fabrication or (forfend!) woodworking. I even worked at a couple of trades, namely, house framing and blacktopping, in order to earn money for my college education. Only later as a penniless actor would I recall the robust wages I earned at those “low” jobs, while all around me friends with degrees in everything from business to political science were earning the minimum wage as depressed baristas.

A main focus of this indecency, in Mr. Berry’s view, is what this attitude has done to the small farmer. A particularly insidious American dream is being whispered into the ears of our young people as soon as they can hear a television set, that things will be better for them someplace else. It also feeds our conditioning as consumers, that we’ll be happier if we can just get that new car, home, swimming pool, or wife. I was lucky to grow up in a household where that message was refuted, despite our youthful desires to honor it. The reason his writing struck me so profoundly and stays with me, unflagging, is because it’s precisely what my admirable, wholesome parents taught me, just in an extremely well-written package.

Mr. Berry also had some welcome things to say about limitations. He mentioned an Amish neighbor who lived by an excellent rule: He refuses to harness a beast after supper. This regulates how much acreage he is able to farm and thereby puts a comfortable limit on himself and his family and his animals. In direct contrast to this, we were driving a couple of towns over and we had to clear well off the road
while a veritable parade of John Deere combines, tractors, and wagons paraded past, looking sincerely like something out of a frightening science fiction film. These machines were the size of buildings. Wendell shook his head and said, “That’s just no way to farm.”

I know just what he’s getting at, and yet I think we both feel for these “small” farmers who have fallen victim to a system by which they can never seem to get out in front of the corporate interests; those who sell them their seed, dominate the market, and approve them for million-dollar loans that they’ll never be able to pay off. We continued driving up a lane through the woods to a venerable, solitary wooden structure. He said, “I thought you might like to see this.” He thought right.

In his old barn, we guessed at the probable history of the used timbers, based upon the mortises, or “joint-holes,” located in peculiar places. Wendell had a solid theory that the structural upright posts had once housed a pulley wheel, based upon the remaining joinery. In the main bay of the barn sat some disused antique tobacco equipment, including a little two-horse riding cultivator. It was a steel V with the bottom of the V pointing forward, like a skein of geese. Beneath the frame were small trowel-shaped plowing shoes, which had adjustable fixtures for angle and depth and such, with a seat on the point of the V for the driver. He said it was a McCormick-Deering, “and you’d do eight rows. There’s about a thousand ways you could adjust these things to get the furrows turned just right. They would do what the old people called ‘pretty work.’ They’d say, ‘That’s pretty work.’”

I was quite taken with that. These days, who among us can say with any regularity, “That’s pretty work”? The fact that most of what
we do in modern America doesn’t fall into that category is precisely what he’s driving at in his writing. You know who does get to say it? The kids who went to vocational school. The welder, the seamstress, the cobbler, the potter. Those who work with their hands. Those who work in jobs in the only category that is so devalued that most schools in the country have fully cut their shop and home economics programs. Creating a deficiency even more elemental, our kids are no longer being taught to write in cursive. This seems so shortsighted and flatly idiotic to those of us not in love with our pocket televisions. We are being trained into a complete homogeny, and we’re all just going along with it. Tanya asked me especially to point up the folly in the exclusion of this most basic life skill.

This general state of affairs was getting me down until I began touring the country as a humorist and talking about the imperative value of pursuits like knitting and boatbuilding, and I began to meet young people everywhere who were curious and excited about working with their hands. I am also encouraged by the growing locavore movement, in which small, local farm operations are being sustained by the increasing awareness of the importance of locally sourced agriculture.

At Wendell Berry’s table, I said as much, that I considered myself a bit of a Michael Pollan optimist, a word choice for which I was immediately taken to task. “The programs of optimism and pessimism are cop-outs because you’re taking the responsibility off of yourself to keep trying.” Soundly admonished, I could only nod in agreement with his truth. He meant that in either case, you were excusing
yourself from responsibility in a given situation, as in: “Well, I think everything will turn out well, so let’s go watch TV,” or “Nothing is possibly going to turn out well, so let’s go watch TV.” He also told a story about a recent community victory of which they’d been a part at the courthouse, fighting an unsavory land developer. “Usually you go in there not expecting to win, but sometimes you get a little surprise. Now, if you’re an optimist, you never get a little surprise.”

He said that instead of subscribing to optimism, he understands that he’s
hopeful
because he knows the right work to do and he’s going to do it. He went on: “I want to deal with people who are at work because they see the real reasons to be at work. That’s what I call hope if they can keep going. But I keep telling young people if you get into this with the idea that you’re going to win, you’re not going to last. The reason to get into it is because it’s right, and because it’s interesting work to do, and because you’re enjoying it. If you’re not having any fun you better quit right now.”

And his opinions aren’t always popular, either. Wendell Berry is hard-core. In 1987,
Harper’s Magazine
published an essay of his entitled “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer.” In it, Mr. Berry neatly lists the very sensible and practical reasons that he prefers to write with a pencil or pen, and then have his work typed and edited by his wife, Tanya.
Harper’s
then printed a handful of letters in response to the essay, in which the writers snidely criticized Mr. Berry’s position on a few counts, including some very mean comments about his “use” of Tanya. Allowing Berry to then respond to his detractors provided one of the most entertaining, and again, fairly presented,
comprehensive literary drubbings I have seen. It was so enjoyable that Mike Schur, my dear friend and creator of
Parks and Recreation
, was inspired to write his lengthy senior term paper about Wendell Berry and the argument back in 1993.

In fact, knowing this about Mike, I might even go so far as to theorize that some vestiges of Wendell Berry remained with him in so meaningful enough a way as to contribute to the overall stance of my taciturn character, Ron Swanson. Consider this statement from Berry’s computer essay: “A number of people, by now, have told me that I could greatly improve things by buying a computer. My answer is that I am not going to do it. I have several reasons, and they are good ones.” If that’s not Swansonian dialogue, then I don’t know what I’m about, son.

We were talking about good work. The method of unheated debate by which Mr. Berry makes complete jackasses out of Bradley C. Johnson and James Rhoads and Nathaniel S. Borenstein is unyielding. Their insulting comments prompted Wendell Berry to call them “audacious and irresponsible gossips,” which is merely his opening salvo. He then lays them out, one by one, standing firmly on the moral high ground because he speaks factually. The man does his homework and then brings simple facts to bear objectively upon his topic. It’s quite clear that he’s pissed, but it’s amazing how he trounces their sneering opinions without ever once having to pay deference to his emotions. This is a type of good work.

In 1993 Wendell Berry published an essay entitled “Christianity and the Survival of Creation” in which he begins by stating that a pulpit “is always a forcible reminder to [him] that [he is] an essayist, and in
many ways a dissenter.” I find that this proclamation brings me comfort, because he’s telling us that his own opinions are drawn from a well-considered personal assessment of the accepted wisdom. I am comforted that a person with the horse sense of Wendell Berry is keeping an eye on things and reporting back to us that many aspects of modern society are in serious need of rethinking. That essay, for example, is a terribly satisfying dressing-down of contemporary “big” Christianity, specifically in its tacit support of the industrial economy, which translates to a failure in honoring as God’s holy creation every last bit of the natural world, even the “biting and dangerous beasts.”

The sound comeuppance with which he slaps ecologically ignorant Christians about the face would also make Rocky Balboa quiver in his fancy tall boxing shoes. One of the main reasons that I am so passionate about Wendell Berry’s writing is because I very strongly agree with a great many of his stances, but he is able to couch them so damn much better than I ever could. Besides his smarts and his talent and his particular combination of timing and terroir and perspective, I also believe that his thoughts are so well articulated, thanks to his understanding of pace. He has written in more than one place of the severe disadvantages brought about by our accelerated modern living.

Time was; a body either walked to town or rode at the speed of a horse. At that pace, one would have the opportunity to soak in the details all around, with all the senses coming into play. You could see past your neighbors’ house into the garden and discern that they were still having worm trouble with their tomatoes. That time has long since passed, and now we travel at the speed of the automobile, hermetically sealed off from the smells and the sounds of the neighborhood, zipping
along too quickly to take in much beyond the mailboxes. I am postulating that, by willfully keeping his boat pulled over in the slack water of progress, Mr. Berry has also given himself the gift of time to think things through properly and completely, in a way that the vast majority of us would find incomprehensible. The advantage he has culled by figuratively “refusing to harness a beast after supper”? That is a type of good work.

We were talking about good work. In the Christianity essay, he also tells us, “If we understand that no artist—no maker—can work except by reworking the works of Creation, then we see that by our work, by the way we practice our arts, we reveal what we think of the works of God. . . . These questions cannot be answered by thinking, but only by doing.”

In his excellent book
Why We Make Things and Why It Matters
, Peter Korn makes a similarly philosophical argument for handcrafting items such as furniture. “Prior to the Industrial Revolution, virtually every object had been produced ‘by hand.’ Subsequent to it, making things by hand became a potentially subversive act—something one did in opposition to prevailing societal norms.” Korn’s thoughtful book makes a persuasive case for the ways in which we choose to make items with our hands: “The [handmade] desk is at odds with our society’s rampant consumerism. It speaks of durability at a time when most goods are disposable.” Then: “Furniture, after all, is more than an object of contemplation; it is a prescription for the life to be lived around it.” That is certainly a type of good work.

Mr. Berry’s essay “Life Is a Miracle” is rife with assertions culminating in a wary defense of the mysteries of art and of life itself. A
favorite passage goes like this: “Good artists are people who can stick things together so that they stay stuck. They know how to gather things into formal arrangements that are intelligible, memorable, and lasting. Good forms confer good health upon the things that they gather together. Farms, families, and communities are forms of art just as are poems, paintings, and symphonies. None of these things would exist if we did not make them. We can make them either well or poorly; this choice is another thing we make.”

However, despite the beauty of his words, his life, and his career, I believe that he would want me to urge you to refrain from running out and trying to start a farm of your own. As he put it, “For God’s sake, people who know
how
to farm are failing.” I used to get down on myself because the schedules in my household aren’t conducive to raising even a garden, let alone a crop of more significance. We work on the road for many months out of the year, and so I could pay someone to tend my garden, but that would feel a bit too “gentleman farmer” to me. What I have realized, however, is that there is no need to be so literal with my pursuit of a Berry-infused lifestyle. I must simply look around for the patch of fecund ground that will accept my turnips (a euphemism) and grow the produce of affection where I may.