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Thoreau, Minks, and Muskrats

When I first read Walden for a book report in the eighth grade, the famous quote “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” stuck with me. I knew quiet desperation. It seemed like Thoreau’s words captured everything my thirteen-year-old self knew and feared.

I had Thoreau confused with James Thurber when I started reading. Walden was hard going for a kid caught in a pre-adolescent Heinlein reading spree, but Thoreau captured me. My father had spent the preceding summer in a state mental hospital fighting off suicidal depression. His return to the farm a few weeks before I turned thirteen caught in my throat. Walden helped me get it down, although some spots in my gullet are still raw.

Thoreau talked about problems I could understand. I don’t now remember reading these lines when I was thirteen, but I know I understood Thoreau when he wrote “From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats.”

I knew minks and muskrats. Three mink farms were within 3 miles of our farm and I had seen the sleek brown streaks of escaped minks roaming the woods and fields. My father trapped muskrats in the crick to the north of the farm when he was a kid. I set Dad’s collection of traps a few times. The only thing I ever caught was a hapless field mouse that I skinned and whose hide I salted but never got around to tanning. I saw several muskrat lodges along the crick, but the rats were elusive and fugitive minks were too smart to be trappable.

But oh how I envied those minks and muskrats! Like the lilies of the field, they never spun, toiled, or knew clutching desperation.

Since the eighth grade, I’ve read Walden several times. Thoreau is not as easy for me to take now. From years as a corporate wonk and manager, I tend to dismiss anyone who chokes on decisions that must be made, right or wrong even though I frequently choke myself. Sometimes I feel an evasive strain in Thoreau’s words, but he is so eloquent, so logical, I can’t dismiss him. Instead, I listen and realize he often says the things that I wish I had said myself.

I conclude that I may be a whiner myself. Well.

A decade or so ago, my wife made me a lavish Christmas gift of a complete reprint of the 1906 edition of Thoreau’s journals in 14 volumes. I’ve made it a practice each morning to read an entry from the journal from some year corresponding to the current day. I often lose control and read much more than a single day’s entry. I jump around between years. And I neglect the practice for weeks on end, but eventually I come back.

There is a new edition of the journals now which is said to be much better edited than the one I have. I’m a Thoreau reader, not a scholar, so I don’t know, but I have gained a lot from my old reprint. I read Thoreau’s journal in the dim hours before sunrise when I am still muddled with sleep and building my resources for the moment when Albert, the border collie who owns me, drags me out to walk in any kind of weather with complete disregard for my state– or lack of state– of mind.

I am an early riser, but not a lark, I need a few hours to take a run at the day before my thoughts clear and flow freely. Fortunately for my weak mental state, Thoreau tends to be candid rather than persuasive in his journal. When he is persuasive, he is usually showing off how he could be persuasive if he were convinced of the truth of his assertions. His tentative stand is protection in weak moments from the strength of Thoreau’s intellect. Without it, I am afraid I would be futilely at his bidding, setting up a riderless underground railroad or some other half-baked version of a 19th Century project in the 21st Century.

The journals are not polished like Walden, but they are a textbook for finding brave minks and muskrats.

These are my thought today on Thoreau. I would love to hear other people’s impressions of Thoreau if they care to share a comment.

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Visiting the Ocean Beaches

Rebecca and I went to Moclips on the Pacific Ocean side of the Olympic Peninsula last weekend. I enjoy the ocean beaches but my parents and grandparents, who lived on the same farm we do, never showed any interest in the ocean. Bellingham Bay and Georgia Straits were enough for them. FoggyBeach

They may have been too busy. City dwellers may fantasize that farming is a relaxed, low-pressure life, but that is not the way I saw it. On a small farm, especially a dairy farm, it’s up at dawn and work until after dark, seven days a week, three hundred sixty five days a year. And the work fills every available minute. When my father took a day off, he had to choose which jobs that had to be done would go undone and he had to cope with the risk that something serious would go wrong in his absence. He often envied neighbors who he saw leaving for work in town when he was shoveling manure after morning milking. And we would see those same neighbors coming home while he was getting ready for evening milking.

A psychiatrist once told me that in Whatcom County, his most severely depressed patients were dairy farmers and he considered dairy farming, especially small family operations, to be a psychologically dangerous, even life-threatening, occupation. The rate of accidental death among owner-operator farmers is high, and from talking with his patients, he wondered how many of those accidents were actually suicides.

That view seems extreme to me but there is an element of truth. A farmer is at the mercy of the commodities markets, the banks, the weather, the health of his herd, and a thousand other things over which he has only minimal control. The work itself is often mind-numbingly boring and physically taxing. Every dairy farmer lives with the look, smell and even taste of bovine feces. By 50 all farmers have some form of arthritis and carpal tunnel is rampant. Most are injured often enough and severely enough to have missing or non-functioning body parts. Among my father’s farming friends, I remember three suicides, and that seems like a lot to me, because I can’t think of a single suicide among my friends.Pig barn
On the other hand, given all the drawbacks, there are some who like it. I think my Dad genuinely enjoyed working with the cows, and sometimes, even I have to agree with him: shoveling manure is unpleasant in a way that is preferable to the tone of some corporate meetings, and a mouthful of a manure dipped cow tail tastes better than what left in the pit of your stomach when you lay off a good employee because corporate mandated a ten per cent reduction in force. There is good and bad in everything.

I saw the Pacific Ocean for the first time after I had seen the Atlantic. Only after I had gone to college on the shore of Lake Michigan and seen the Atlantic from New York and Boston, and only at Rebecca’s urging, did I ever go to see the Pacific. Since then, I still wait for my fill of the wide Pacific Ocean beaches of the Washington and Oregon coasts. My ancestors carefully kept woodlots and windbreaks all around the farm yard, so I have always lived in a clearing in the woods. A hundred yards in any direction and its a wall of trees. The ocean is a new world to me. Bursting out from the firs and cedars of the coastal forests, I see those wide wide breakers rolling that wash away my sopping cow tails and corporate meetings, and I could stay there forever, out of places and times and watching the waves.