Coop_ A Year Of Poultry, Pigs, And Parenting Part 12

We have not made any final decision. For a while we attended services at the local Unitarian Universalist church. Then we went to several Quaker services. Currently we are attending Mennonite services held in a Jewish temple. We have felt warmly welcomed in all three settings, but neither Anneliese nor I have been able to settle. I bring with me my prejudice against anything more organized than a camp meeting, whereas Anneliese-with her background in Lutheranism, Catholicism, and shamanism-finds herself longing for more ceremony. None of this is made easier by the fact that we have friends and acquaintances in all three congregations, and there is the usual polite desire to keep everyone happy.

A couple of times already when I have been behind on some deadline or another, I have stayed home while Anneliese and the girls go to church, and this shames me. When I was a child, Sunday was a day of rest. The Ten Commandments, you know. No matter how far behind he might have been, no matter how much hay was down with rain threatening, Dad saw to only those ch.o.r.es required for the comfort of the animals, went to church, and took the rest of the day off. One year when incessant rain was blackening the mown hay in the fields a rare sunny Sunday dawned, and Elder John took counsel after the morning meeting to see if he could justify baling hay that afternoon. With forage desperately short and more rain coming, it would have been wasteful to let it lie, and so they baled, but I remember thinking it was a momentous decision. Issues of G.o.d and faith aside, I am thinking my little girls should come to see Sunday as a day apart. As a day to set all worldly business aside and abide in ceremony. I will never cut it as a Quaker-I cannot find it in me to renounce all violence, not with two daughters under my protection-but I do love their silent hour, which in my case invariably evolved into a self-scouring meditation on the idea that the busy life is not the full life.

For better or worse, I have to play it straight with the kids. When Amy was four she woke up three nights in a row screaming that monkeys were flying in her window. That third evening she was being watched by a babysitter, and the following morning Amy said the babysitter told her Jesus would make the monkeys go away. That night the monkeys were back. How do you finesse that one?

Despite the depth of my parents' faith, they never oversold the church. Two years ago I asked Dad about the origins of the Truth. "The workers will tell you it comes directly from G.o.d," he said. "Actually it came from Scotland. Sometime around 1900." After a lifetime of watching him walk so faithfully, the honesty of his answer floored me. Later Mom confided that after years of being a.s.sured by the workers that the Truth could be traced straight to the twelve apostles, the discovery that the sect was actually the offshoot of a group formed in 1897 by an itinerant Scottish evangelist named William Irvine did indeed leave them feeling deeply betrayed, but the one issue that nearly drove them out was their refusal to condemn people of other faiths. "We did not, do not, and will not," says Dad, before going on to list friends, neighbors and acquaintances whose spirit he admires. When Mom and Dad were confronted by a worker over their dissent, Dad invited the man to throw them out. It didn't happen.

I have only recently (and mainly because I am now responsible for two children) begun discussing many of these issues with my parents. My hesitancy is rooted mainly in simple respect. Having watched how my parents have lived their lives, I have no appet.i.te for spiritual fencing matches. And although I doubt that I could, I have no interest in derailing gentle people. I do not discount Romans 14:13: "Let us not therefore judge one another any more: but judge this rather, that no man put a stumbling block or an occasion to fall in his brother's way." The lapsed believer does not shed the vestiges of doctrine.

But I'm glad we're talking. During one recent exchange I said Mom and Dad's refusal to condemn "outsiders" (Dad avoids the term, saying it has a ring of arrogance) made them to some extent skeptics within their own church. No, Dad said. Mother and I have misgivings about the church misgivings about the church. We have no skepticism skepticism about G.o.d and His Son. And it struck me then that if none of us followed our parents in the church, perhaps it is because they refused to follow it blindly themselves. Their actions signaled to us that as important as it was to live in "the Truth," it was more important to live truth about G.o.d and His Son. And it struck me then that if none of us followed our parents in the church, perhaps it is because they refused to follow it blindly themselves. Their actions signaled to us that as important as it was to live in "the Truth," it was more important to live truthfully. Before their children above all.

Because of their example, I am slowly turning the corner on why even some skeptics stick with church. "Men are better than their theology," said Emerson, and while I can't see going back, I will be perfectly happy-perhaps even relieved-if my girls become Quakers or Catholics or sister workers-as long as they treat themselves and others with care.

Amy still asks me for stories from my childhood. She's done it often enough now that it sometimes it takes me a while to generate one she hasn't heard before. There is the sensation of opening a dented recipe box to riffle through dog-eared index cards. But I dredge one up every time, because I know the inexorable hour approaches when the star power of the yammering bald guy will wane and sputter to nothing. Tonight when she asks, we are tooling down the darkened highway in our dilapidated fambulance, so I tell her about the time our second secondhand Volkswagen bus broke down on a winter night when we were on our way home from gospel meeting, leaving our double-digit family with no ride but the farm pickup. The next time we went to church Mom, Dad, and the toddlers crammed into the truck cab while the rest of us wrapped ourselves in sleeping bags and rode in the back. Dad bolted plywood sheeting over the bed to shelter us from the wind. Unable to sit upright beneath the plywood, we lined the crawl s.p.a.ce with old couch cushions and lay on our backs, making a game of trying to judge our progress by tracking the turns, imagining our bodies as needles spinning on a compa.s.s.

"Tell me another another story from your childhood," she says when I finish. So I tell her about the little boy who fell asleep in church on Sunday, and she giggles. Surely she is filing a few index cards of her own. One day she will draw one composed on this night, about her benignly freakish parents and how they dragged her around in a tatterdemalion van that smelled of pig feed and home-brewed goat cheese. And then she begins to sing: story from your childhood," she says when I finish. So I tell her about the little boy who fell asleep in church on Sunday, and she giggles. Surely she is filing a few index cards of her own. One day she will draw one composed on this night, about her benignly freakish parents and how they dragged her around in a tatterdemalion van that smelled of pig feed and home-brewed goat cheese. And then she begins to sing: O Lord, prepare me to be a sanctuary, pure and holy, tried and true... O Lord, prepare me to be a sanctuary, pure and holy, tried and true... It is a song her mother taught her, and her voice hangs in the air with the purity of starlight. It is a song her mother taught her, and her voice hangs in the air with the purity of starlight.

Terry arrives before dawn, and like thieves we load the chickens into his trailer. They are thickly feathered and hefty in my hands and armpit warm where my thumbs stick beneath their wings. Because we make our raid early we don't meet much resistance, and when we pull a tarp over the trailer only a few disgruntled clucks seep through the canvas. Terry tells me the Amish family will be expecting me at five that evening, and then he drives off, the trailer lights stoplight red in the dark yard. I should be butchering those chickens, I think, one last time, then I console myself with the knowledge that Amy, Anneliese, and I have been butchering our own deer on the kitchen table for three years now, and then I review the mental jumble of other things I can do today other than pluck and gut seventeen chickens, and I think, Well, OK. Well, OK.

It's cold, gray, and windy when I drive into the Amish family's yard ten hours later. As I turn around and back up to the trailer where it is parked beside the house, several straw-hatted heads pop out of the woodshed. Young boys at work. When I have some trouble adjusting the hitch, one of the boys scurries away to a shed and returns with a wrench and hands it to me silently, but then when I still struggle they jump in to help manfully, the way young boys do when they want to demonstrate their abilities. Finally the cup clunks in place over the ball and I lock the hitch in place, then let myself into what I a.s.sume was the garage before these carless folk moved in. Now it is a large room jammed with countertops on sawhorses, galvanized tubs of water, coolers, tubs of chicken feathers, and some fourteen pint-sized chicken pluckers-barefoot children in long dresses and overalls, working beside several adult women and teenage girls. When I walk in, the smallest children draw toward the women and look furtively from behind their skirts. There is only one man-Levi-and he greets me with a smile. "We are almost finished," he says. Some of the coolers are already packed, so I begin loading them. The women are still bagging chickens-long gone are the stolid white-feathered beasts of the morning, replaced by pale yellow carca.s.ses, headless with naked pointy wings and their drumsticks neatly trussed. In one galvanized tank the carca.s.ses float in the water like giant waxy bobbing apples.

The little boys hustle to help me tote the coolers, cl.u.s.tering busily, heaving and ho'ing in a further attempt to prove their mettle. By the time we get the coolers in the trailer, the women are bagging the last of the chickens. Levi and I review the handwritten bill and tally, and as I write the check the little girls in bonnets peer up silently from behind Mom, and then I am back in the car and away.

Back home after supper and with the baby asleep in bed Anneliese and I get out our vacuum sealer and start sealing pieces and double-bagging whole birds. The carca.s.ses are huge-a couple of them top eight pounds on the kitchen scale. When we feel we have enough whole birds bagged, we clear the kitchen island, round up knives and cutting boards, and start chopping the remaining birds into pieces, removing the drumsticks and wings, fileting the b.r.e.a.s.t.s, saving the backs for stock. Amy is already up past her bedtime but she is so eager to help, we tell her she can stay up thirty more minutes. She tucks in happily, sawing away at wings and thighs and helping push the b.u.t.ton that runs the vacuum sealer. When the half hour is over she slumps a little but we hold the line, following her upstairs to tuck her in and kiss her and thank her for helping.

Then it is just Anneliese and me at the island, cutting and talking and sealing. I have a chance to look at her in the light and consider us together, and there is much in the year that has gone off the rails or been pushed aside or lost in the hurry, but here we are, putting up stores for the winter. When the last bird is chopped apart and sealed, we carry the cardboard boxes of meat to the chest freezer in the garage. The freezer is already filled with bacon and pork chops and pork roasts and a pair of hams the size of a tortoise. Now as we work shoulder to shoulder finding s.p.a.ces for all the chicken, it feels good, like we are yoked together not just in workaday dray but in fulfilled purpose. When the last bird is stashed, we step back and look at the freezer, lid up and full to the rim with meat-every bit of it raised within a hundred-yard radius. Standing there beside my wife, both of us in tattered flannel shirts and grubby jeans, tired and our noses wet with cold, I pull her close and for a long moment we just stare at the freezer, and later we both agree it was one of the most oddly happy moments of our marriage since the exchange of vows, because we did this together together.

Nearly every evening around suppertime I am reminded that John Menard is worth $7.3 billion and I am not. The evidence comes hissing from the clouds in the form of one or the other of Mr. Menard's Cessna Citation Bravo jets returning the managerial troops from their business at the mult.i.tudinous home improvement stores, lumberyards, and distribution centers he owns all across the land. Last I checked, a used used Cessna Citation Bravo will run you well north of seven figures. Rather than be disturbed by the jets (in fact the fleet docks at an airport eleven miles distant, and although we're frequently in the flight path, the craft are still at a relatively un.o.btrusive alt.i.tude), I find them a fine source of existential calibration. I pause in what I am doing, tip my head back, watch them slice the sky like barracudas on the wing as I ponder current rates of exchange, and then I ask myself: "So, Mike-how'd Cessna Citation Bravo will run you well north of seven figures. Rather than be disturbed by the jets (in fact the fleet docks at an airport eleven miles distant, and although we're frequently in the flight path, the craft are still at a relatively un.o.btrusive alt.i.tude), I find them a fine source of existential calibration. I pause in what I am doing, tip my head back, watch them slice the sky like barracudas on the wing as I ponder current rates of exchange, and then I ask myself: "So, Mike-how'd you you do today?" do today?"

In taking my measure in this manner I am following in the footsteps of my father, who has a long tradition of fruitlessly competing against Great Men of Industry. For a while it was J. Paul Getty, and lately he says he's closely shadowing Warren Buffett, but back in the 1970s it was shipping magnate Daniel Ludwig. "Gotta go catch Daniel Ludwig," Dad would say as he pushed away from the dinner table for yet another round of ch.o.r.es. At the time, Ludwig was considered the richest man in the world. Dad p.r.o.nounced his last name "Lewd-vig," which always tickled us kids. When one of our milk cows gave birth to a scrawny bull calf, Dad named him Daniel Ludwig and announced that this was the calf that would finally let us get ahead. Given the price of bull calves, this would have been a joke in any case, but in an ironic twist not only did Daniel Ludwig the calf fail to thrive, he failed weirdly, remaining skinny and rickety and sprouting patches of creepily silky hair. By the time Dad shipped him, he had gained almost no weight but had grown a pair of gnarled mutant horns.

On better days when we hustled right till dark and got the last cornfield cultivated or one more load of hay in the mow before the thunderstorms. .h.i.t, Dad would dismount the tractor or tamp the final bale down, then stand in his baggy overalls and cracked leather boots, and happily declare, "Now we're catchin' Daniel Lewd-vig Lewd-vig!" The grin on his face was a wide-open acknowledgment that it wasn't ever going to happen.

During the summer I promised Amy we would pitch a tent and sleep outside one night. Now we're getting frost and I'm about to go on a book tour and play some band dates, and the sleep-out is not going to happen. I love life behind the wheel; the road is filled with friendly faces, and the events support our little family. And while many of my friends, relatives, and neighbors are being deployed into harm's way again and again, I am driving my Chevy to a nice bookstore in Oskaloosa. But what I suspected at the beginning of this year is true: if a man is away from home nigh unto one hundred days in a year, he will wind up doing things in pa.s.sing. And you can't farm in pa.s.sing in pa.s.sing. You can't be a good husband in pa.s.sing. in pa.s.sing. You certainly can't be a good dad You certainly can't be a good dad in pa.s.sing in pa.s.sing. On my desk is a list Amy scrawled in pencil the day we planned our campout: FOOd. watr.teacamPStoveFlansh lightsleeping bag Many nights after milking, Dad played softball in the cow pasture with us. We used milk replacer bags for bases and rotated available kids in from the outfield to take their turns at bat. When Dad batted, John and I ran back to stand against the woven wire fence, but it rarely did any good, as Dad would snap the bat around and drive the ball high into the white pines, where it would tumble down in increments, clunking off the big limbs and snapping twigs. We played right through dusk and into the dark, until the ball was just a gray smudge and the dew was fallen. Some nights he took a few of us fishing in the canoe. I can remember him paddling back across Ba.s.s Lake in the dark, the smell of the warm water, the sound of the Hula Popper smacking the lily pads. Years later Mom told me that many of those nights he couldn't feel the paddle in his hands, his carpal tunnel was so bad. He would be up half the night in pain, with the next day due to start before the sun. By the time the last cow was milked the following evening, he must have been aching for sleep. And yet he made time for us. "If you tell your child you're going to build a treehouse, build it," says the writer Jim Harrison, "or you'll live forever in modest infamy." Amy's camping list is in clear view on my desk and will remain until she and I spend a night in that tent.

I am on the road, half a state away with my usual trunk full of books. My cell phone rings. It is Amy, her voice br.i.m.m.i.n.g with excitement. "Guess what I am holding! Right in my hand!" I play naive. "A toad?" "No! I just got it! It's still warm." I hesitate, generating the next wisecrack, and she can't wait any longer. "An egg!" "No way!" I say. "No! Really! It's still warm! It's brown!" "Well, that's wonderful, Amy." And it is. The egg cupped in my little girl's hand is the tangible result of conversations held clear back before Anneliese and I were married. And the eager pride in Amy's voice reminds me of what Anneliese often stresses-that we are doing these things as a family. Even if I did spend the night in a Super 8 beside the interstate.

Home again, and Jane and I are going walkabout. I have her rigged on my shoulders in the backpack. Distributed throughout the aluminum frame and snugged straps, her weight dissipates to nothing. After all, she weighs little more than a good-sized chicken. As we step into the yard, I twist my neck to get a look at her face and find her looking out over the valley below. Her eyes are wide and steady beneath the brim of her floppy cap. How far out of infancy do we lose this gaze, with its utter absence of expectation or prejudice? What is it like to simply see see what is before you, without the skew of context? what is before you, without the skew of context?

We begin on the easy path-a mown strip leading to the ridge past the old circular steel corncrib behind the granary. The crib stands empty beneath its rust-streaked galvanized cap, the iron mesh twined around the south side with a few stray ivy runners. For years it has done little more than sift the wind. At sundown it silhouettes against the sky like some ghostly aviary.

The leaves are well-turned and beginning to fall. Pale brown swatches of ripening corn stripe the far hillside, and crimson swatches of sumac fill the swales like coals banked against winter. The clouds are wispy in a pale blue sky, and the air is just crisp enough that you can imagine the smell of burning leaves despite the clear air. On the unpastured hillsides the tall gra.s.s is gone lank and set to fade.

We move off the path and ease downhill into the waist-high gra.s.ses. A few weeks ago and I would be stirring up a steady click and whir of fleeing insects-now there is just the occasional gra.s.shopper and a smattering of small ground moths. With each step I'm knocking loose seeds and husks-several of them find their way into my socks. This is an interesting corner of the farm-old overgrown gra.s.sland pasture rounding off and rolling steeply into patchwork groves. They shelter a valley where centuries of spring runoff have cut two sharp draws that converge to run in a single ravine westward. The bottomland trees are gnarled and fat, and twisted in mysterious ways, and they grow overlooking sharp banks and sinuous trenches. One is so unusually configured with fat low-hanging limbs and knotholes that Amy has dubbed it her Magic Tree.

Here in the old pasture, there are a few young pine trees-all under six feet and planted by my mother-in-law and the owners previous to her-but mostly the open s.p.a.ce is being taken over by box elders. Right at the tree line I come to the old barbed-wire fence. Much of it is still in decent shape-the galvanized wire loose from the posts here and there, and crushed by fallen trees in a couple of spots, but it hasn't gone rusty, and it wouldn't take much fixing. Anneliese and I have talked of grazing sheep out here, or getting some beef cows. Fixing this old fence and putting up new is on our wish list for next year. I follow the fence line for a while and find a couple of spots where the wire has been swallowed by the trees, grown deep inside the wood, and it hits me how much easier it is to speak of fixing fence than it actually will be to accomplish the task. I wonder too about clearing all those box elders, and if we'll have to fence the pine seedlings in if we hope for them to survive the cattle.

I cross the fence and go into the trees now, careful to hold the branches clear as I push through. Only ten feet into the canopy the feel of the place changes. Out in the field there was a sense of sweep and contour-in here with nothing but leaf sc.r.a.p covering the ground between the big-trunked trees, I get that secret hideout feeling, the same little tingle low in the gut that I got when Ricky and I would hide out in the canary gra.s.s along Beaver Creek Road. Down here among the big trees with the sky closed mostly out, things are a gray shade of brown, so when I spot a cl.u.s.ter of brilliant red berries it is like a gift, and I stop to study them, kneeling down and tipping forward so that Jane might see. I talk to her quietly, reveling in the joy of being out on the skin of this rough earth, heads in the cool atmosphere of infinity, and yet able to speak so quietly and be heard. Jane wraps both little fists around the aluminum frame and amuses herself by chewing the nylon. I hike back out into the open and upward, and when I reach the ridge she is still champing happily away. I can see her chubby little arm hanging over the edge of the pack, bouncing in time to the pace we are keeping. I put my hand back over my shoulder, palm up. I see the little hand reaching now, slowly, until she lays her teensy paw in mine, then clasps her fingers around my thumb, and I look to the blue sky and think a silent Thank you Thank you.

Anneliese and Amy have gone to the neighbors to get a pickup load of straw for mulch, and I get a little zoom as I always do when I see my wife driving the pickup truck. She sets to digging potatoes in the garden, and I head for the office. Amy is unloading the straw, and Jane is happily struggling to all fours in the garden dirt as the chickens scratch and peck around her. Maple leaves are petaling down, and Jane smashes one in her fist, then shoves it in her mouth. Anneliese is beautiful with a touch of color in her cheekbones, but she also looks tired. I like to make jokes and goof on my own incompetence, but the truth is, this year has stretched my wife beyond anything that is fair. I must find a better way to navigate. As much as I love the animals, I know where my bread and b.u.t.ter lies, and future adjustments may have to take that into consideration. All those times I told smart-aleck stories about farming, while back home my wife fed the pigs. Even more humiliating, next week a man will bring a load of firewood-all my selfish solo chopping, and still I didn't split enough for winter.

The backbeat of this year-and it's laid in there deep, you have to listen for it-is that I am trying to do too much, and I'm not the one paying for it. I haven't cooked a meal with my wife in months. The pantry is full with home canning, and I spent maybe four hours in the garden. The division of labor has become nigh unto no division at all. When my dad was milking all those cows, I still used to see him grab a broom and sweep the kitchen now and then. Lately Anneliese has been doing work as a freelance translator, and when I see her dressed up and leaving the house in a professional capacity I am simultaneously proud and ashamed that I may be depriving her of more of that. In short, I want to be a better husband and a better father, and the most meaningful progress in that direction requires me to do one simple thing: Be There; or better yet, Be Here.

This morning when I go out to feed the chickens, my boots leave a swipe of tracks through the frost. Soon I'll have to rig a deal to keep the chickens' water from freezing, and hang a lightbulb on a timer for the worst winter nights. The coop is still unpainted, and I have yet to nail up the trim boards Mills cut to fit the eaves. The structure itself is sitting solid, but just as Buffalo and I placed it, it remains tipped a good bit off plumb. One local wag refers to it as the Leaning Tower of Poultry. When I pull the door open-the door it took me six tries to get right on Mills's scorching blacktop that day-there are the six multicolored ladies, beadily blinking and ready for the day. I scoop fresh feed into a feeder fashioned from two sc.r.a.ps of plywood tacked in a vee between a pair of one-by-four boards (a rare carpentry triumph-I found the instructions in a library book) and replenish their water. While the chickens dip and peck I raid the nesting boxes. Dad built the boxes one day when I was feeling especially behind, and then he and Amy hung them.

There are three eggs this morning, two of them warm. Likely there will be one or two more by the afternoon, as lately we've been nearing consistently peak production. I drop one of the miniature doors open and the surviving Barred Rock pokes her head out first. When I look back just before going into the house, three of the hens are out, tilting their heads curiously at the frost.

And then it's out of the cold air and into the warm air of the kitchen, and the sound of bacon in the pan. I sure liked having those pigs around, but Bob the One-Eyed Beagle and his crew cure that bacon slow and smoke it with real wood, and at first whiff all residual reservations vaporize. Anneliese is frying potatoes and onions in a cast iron pan. I dice up some tomatoes and garlic, and while they saute I whip the eggs for scrambling. Amy is setting the table, and Jane is burbling in her baby seat. The ceiling fan in the living room is pushing the heat from the woodstove back to the floor and into the kitchen. We sit down in our small circle for a breakfast in which everything but the salt, pepper, and olive oil came to the table by our own hand. Here we are in the slantways house, the fire warm, our plates full, our chickens tiptoeing from their crooked coop out there on the hill.

EPILOGUE.

Before our family grew large, my brother John and I shared the north bedroom of the farmhouse. The town road ran north-south past the garden, and at night the headlights of southbound cars pushed through the windows and slid across the plaster. A shifting rectangle of light would appear on the wall beyond the foot of my bed, pa.s.s slowly to the right, then bend around the corner and work back toward the head end, all the while growing narrower and narrower until the rectangle squeezed to nothing and the room was dark again. Traffic was rare back then, and the slippery patch of light always got you wondering where people were going. my brother John and I shared the north bedroom of the farmhouse. The town road ran north-south past the garden, and at night the headlights of southbound cars pushed through the windows and slid across the plaster. A shifting rectangle of light would appear on the wall beyond the foot of my bed, pa.s.s slowly to the right, then bend around the corner and work back toward the head end, all the while growing narrower and narrower until the rectangle squeezed to nothing and the room was dark again. Traffic was rare back then, and the slippery patch of light always got you wondering where people were going.

Every night, Dad would climb the bare wooden stairs with his Bible in hand. He'd seat himself on the edge of the bed and read a chapter aloud. I can still recall his weight on the mattress, the way it drew me toward him. He'd leaf a bit to find his place, the parchment pages all whisper and crinkle. There were a lot of books in our house. None of them sounded like that book.

He read the chapters in sequence, one per night. He read steadily, with neither adornment nor portent. Just the way, as a matter of fact, that he lived. At the end of the chapter, he rose, tweaked our covers, bid us good night, and left the room. He'd snap the light switch on his way out the door, and start in on a hymn. It is one of the bedrock memories of my childhood, him singing as his footsteps receded down the hall. I can picture his toed-out gait, accentuated by the Li'l Abner curl of his leather work boots. He sang the way he read, purely and plainly, although he had a tendency to hold back on a syllable now and then and drop it behind the beat, just a dab of jazz. His voice echoed up the stairwell until he was downstairs and the verse was done. Shortly we would hear the lullaby murmur of our parents in conversation, and the clink of a spoon on a bowl as Dad had his bedtime cereal or a dish of ice cream.

How warm we were in our beds, watching the light slip silent around the room until it shrank into darkness and we went heavy-lidded to sleep.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.

First and foremost, to my parents-anything decent is because of them, anything else is not their fault. parents-anything decent is because of them, anything else is not their fault.

Gene Logsdon, Ben Logan, and Jerry Apps-country chroniclers long before I tossed my first forkful.

John and Julie-ever since we got out of prison, things have been going great. Mills (redneck doula and amateur body piercer), Billy and Margie (Knuckles, R.I.P.), Buffalo (Gosh, I hope it's sunny for the next thirty years), Racy's and the Racy's crew for low lighting, late hours, drop-shipping, and a tab (and a special h.e.l.lo to Mister Happy for making me appear to be Miss Congeniality by comparison. Are those beans dolphin-safe?). Karen Rose for math. Krister for the usual rescues. Matt Marion for work and cat stories.

Robert Gough, from whose book my cutover synopsis was drawn. Wisconsin Historical Society, the curators of www.monarchrange.com, and Mary Beth Jacobson at the Dodge County Historical Museum.

Our Colorado family. ALR (giving public radio some low end). McDowells-indulging me now for decades.

Alison for the start, Jennifer for the finish (are we there yet?), Jeanette Perez, Rachel Elinsky, Jason Sack. Lisa, Tina, and now Elizabeth. Scranton (books in boxes!). Mags everytime.

Frank for both confirming and kicking the compa.s.s, plus the barber chair is back back!

Blakeley-from Blue Hills to booking, what a road.

Alissa for handling it.

Everyone on the road and at the readings. My friend Ben.

Men's Health, No Depression No Depression, Wisconsin People & Ideas, Hope, Encyclopedia of the Midwest Wisconsin People & Ideas, Hope, Encyclopedia of the Midwest, Backpacker Magazine Backpacker Magazine, Farm Life Farm Life, the anthology Seasons on the Farm Seasons on the Farm (in particular Lee Klancher and Amy Glaser), Wisconsin Public Television (specifically Banjo Boy and the Vet's Girl) and the Fond du Lac Public Library for publishing essays or producing projects from which some of the material for this book was drawn. (in particular Lee Klancher and Amy Glaser), Wisconsin Public Television (specifically Banjo Boy and the Vet's Girl) and the Fond du Lac Public Library for publishing essays or producing projects from which some of the material for this book was drawn.

Our new Fall Creek neighbors. We're lucky to be here.

Donna for finding these acres.

n.o.bbern, the only place I'll ever be from. See you at the All-School Reunion. Here's yer chicken.

If I missed you, knock firmly, step clear, and keep your hands in sight.... I'll be right down, but not right out.

And in ways the world will and will not know, I love and thank the shaman girl, Snorticus the horse girl, and She Who is Still Emerging (but is so far trending LOUD).

About the Author.

MICHAEL PERRY is a contributing editor to is a contributing editor to Men's Health Men's Health, and his work has appeared in numerous publications, including Esquire Esquire, the New York Times Magazine New York Times Magazine, Salon Salon, and the Utne Reader Utne Reader. He lives in northern Wisconsin with his family.

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