I picked up this gem
by Michael Perry eight years after its publication. Maybe I just wasn’t paying attention—I don’t
know how I missed this book for so long.
Not only is it a first-rate and compelling book, but I feel like Perry
is speaking directly to me. Needless to
say, his other books are now on my reading list. When I first cracked open the
cover, I was expecting a story about chickens.
That’s not what it’s about. To be sure, chickens are minor characters in
this book, but it’s a memoir—so it’s really about Michael Perry. Perry tells us the story of his first year in
an old house on a Wisconsin acreage with his new wife and daughter, with
frequent flashbacks to his childhood on a Wisconsin dairy farm amidst an
“obscure fundamentalist Christian sect”.
Along the way he discourses on home birth, milking cows, slaughtering
pigs, building a chicken coop, and even blowing one’s nose using a technique he
calls the “farmer snort”. And
ultimately, perhaps he offers us his perspective how one should live one’s life.
After the dairy
farm/fundamentalist childhood, Michael Perry worked on a Wyoming ranch in order
to generate the necessary funds to attend nursing school. Currently, in addition to maintaining his
acreage and writing, he’s the host of Wisconsin Public Radio’s “Tent Show
Radio”, a variety show broadcast live
each week from the Lake Superior Big Top Chautauqua in Bayfield, Wisconsin. On his website, he describes himself as a “New York
Times bestselling author,
humorist, singer/songwriter, [and] intermittent pig farmer.” His is obviously a focused and interesting life worthy
of inspection. Serendipitously, he is the
sort of person that notices and reflects on the minutiae that each day
offers—thus is an interested and thoughtful observer of his own interesting
life. And that seems like the perfect
formula for a successful memoirist.
It makes sense that
I would relate to this book. Like Perry,
I grew up on a midwestern farm and understand innately the demands farm life
makes on a farmer and his entire family.
Perry’s father started his adult life as a scientist in the Twin Cities,
then in a strange twist, morphed into a Wisconsin dairy farmer. Perry writes, “I first perceived my father as
a farmer the night he drove home with a giant lactating Holstein tethered to
the bumper of his Ford Falcon. There was
no cart, just a rope. And Dad motoring
real slow… We went to fetch the cow after supper, from a farm some three miles
distant. Owning neither truck nor
trailer suitable for transporting the beast, Dad chose the Falcon—a station
wagon model with a nifty roll-up window and a naughtily noisy Hollywood
muffler…. The cow stubbed along reluctantly at first, all straight-necked and
flat eared, but eventually she calmed and found her road gear. For the balance of the journey she shambled
along easy, following her nose through a faint blue haze. That Falcon burned a little oil.
“One does not become
a farmer simply by taking possession of a milk cow, but it does drag you in
that direction. The night Dad tied that
Holstein to the Falcon, he tied an anchor to his ankle. From that day forward, he would find his way
to the barn a minimum of twice a day, every
day, morning and night, seven days a week, with no break, year after year after
year. Whenever we went to Christmas
dinner, or visiting of a Sunday afternoon, Dad kept shooting looks at the
clock. Sometime around 4:00 p.m., he’d
say, ‘Weeelll, I s’pose them cows ain’t gonna milk themselves,’ and we headed
home.”
I naturally connect
with Perry’s childhood memories, since I too am the son of a dairy farmer. And just like Perry, I left home for the city
where I pursued city-type stuff, then, like Perry, I eventually moved back to
the country to raise my family, and discovered that pursuing all that city-type
stuff, attempting to maintain an acreage, and raising a family all at the same
time requires more than the 24 hours that each day gives us.
This book begins
with Perry moving to a derelict acreage with his new wife, Anneliese, and
Anneliese’s six-year-old daughter, Amy.
They have big plans. There’s going to be a big pile of split wood to
heat the house, a vast garden, and pigs, and chickens. Plus, he’s going to build a coop for those
chickens from scratch. But here’s the
reality: Michael Perry is a radio host,
traveling lecturer, and writer, and not
a full-time farmer. One lesson life has
taught me is that how much time you spend on anything affects how much time you have left to spend on anything
else. Perry occupies the entire timeline
of this book learning that lesson over and over. Instead of using an automatic splitter and the
help of a few neighbors to get his wood split (his wife’s suggestion) he goes
it alone and by hand. “I want to split
wood by hand for the same reason I want to have pigs and chickens. You want to eat meat, you raise an animal and
kill it, or at the very least steal its eggs.
You want to stay warm, you knock the wood into little chunks… You take
that ax in hand and it frees your mind… I am regularly dramatic with my wife
about accumulated pending deadlines and backlogs and time spent on the road,
only to have her look out the window and see me there chopping when I should be
typing. In proposing the firewood bee,
she is being eminently sensible. And
that is where we part company. If she
brings it up again, I shall tell her I am freeing my mind.”
When he eventually
gets chickens, it seems obvious to me that he hasn’t completely thought out the
logistics of caring for the birds. The
coop of the book title exists only in his mind when the chickens show up, an
elaborate vision based on a historic archive of poultry housing he found on the
web. The fits and starts involved in
getting an actual coop built form chunks of narrative that occur sporadically
throughout the remainder of the book.
And so it goes. Perry spends most of his time pursuing his
real paying job while Anneliese and Amy do much of the farmwork. Or the farmwork simply doesn’t get done. And then Anneliese gets pregnant, stops
sleeping, and becomes just sort of worn out.
And being possessed of the same tenacious impracticality as her husband,
she decides on a home birth. Perry is
not on board with “the idea of delivering babies old-style if it is simply in
service to some whole-grain earth mother sensibility picked up during a women’s
studies course in Colorado. As a former fundamentalist gone agnostic, I tend to
dig in my heels at the first whiff of evangelism, whether it be deployed in the
service of salvation, Girl Power, or the curative wonders of organic
yams.” But a home birth it is. Marriage is about compromise. He gets solo hand wood-splitting—she gets a
home birth.
Michael Perry is a
compelling story teller, and this entire book is infused with humor. But between the lines lurks a disheartening
message that resonates with me: Life is finite and you can’t do everything. I moved to my acreage and spent most of my
life thinking wistfully of the things I could be doing on that acreage if I
only had time. I built my first coop and
got my first chickens only after I retired.
Michael Perry is bound and determined to have it both ways, and is
lurching forward with his pigs and chickens and garden and hay-making and wood
splitting while maintaining a full-time career.
It’s a juggling act, and it is clear from his narrative that he knows
that it’s a juggling act. I can’t wait
to delve into the next memoir to find out how it all worked out.
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