Circle M Farm

People often ask me how it happened that we uprooted our city family and came to be market farming in rural southwest Wisconsin. The answer, plain and simple, is – books are to blame.

Three particular authors are at fault, actually: James Herriott, Wendell Berry and Gene Logsdon. And since behind every good read is an excellent recommendation, the true blame should perhaps be placed on a beloved friend and former Chicago housemate, Jon, who got us started on Herriott’s veterinary stories in a most unusual way.

He read them out loud. With different voices for each character. And a fondness and energy for the people and animals that matched the author’s own.

Jon moved into our bustling, crowded boardinghouse in 1999. Our four kids were all between three and nine years old, so he missed potty training, which was lucky for him since we shared two tiny bathrooms with him and another boarder. But his arrival coincided with perhaps the loudest period of their childhood. Our flat then was the scene of endless improvised plays; swordfights both make-believe and real; Ibizia-style techno-raves complete with strobe lights and dancing on tables; and the ubiquitous bickering of siblings born less than two years apart. The only time they were quiet was when they were sleeping or listening to Jon read.

The ritual began with Jon, often looking very much the part in a buttoned shirt and sweater vest, emerging from his basement room, book in one hand and wine in another, gathering us all into a rapt audience with the words, “Shall we have a Reading?” Settled into a still circle on floor, laps and couches, we’d be gently drawn into Herriott’s 1940’s and 50’s world of rural veterinary practice in Yorkshire, England.

I’ve been a pathologically voracious reader for as long as I can remember. As a young child, I hauled books up into trees so I couldn’t be disturbed. When I had a houseful of small children, I stashed books in the bathroom so I’d have some time alone to read. And even now, when I’ve started a book that’s engaging, I’m snippy with everyone and everything until I’m able to finish. I have, unfortunately, passed this trait on to my 14-year-old daughter, Maggie, who hides in her room, curled up in a papasan chair, for the duration of a book. Then she emerges in a funk, depressed at the lack of dragons, magic and mystery she encounters on the outside. “I’m not reading any more Fantasy,” she’s resolved more than once. “It’s too horrible to have no wings, no powers, and to be too old to get a letter from Hogwarts.”

Fantasy and Historical Fiction were my childhood genres of choice, and though I had certainly heard of him, I’d somehow never read James Herriott. Perhaps that’s why I didn’t grow up wanting a horse, as so many girls do, dreaming of life on a farm. Since I moved here, I can’t tell you how many woman friends have said to me, “You are living my dream!”

My enthusiasm for reading made me want to be a writer, and I dreamed of life in a big city where stories would be abundant. So as a teenager, I left suburban Pennsylvania for urban Chicago, and there I lived and worked for 20 years, less at writing than at other things. And there, in a cramped apartment living room, I met Dr. Herriott and the cast of characters that would eventually woo us to this rural adventure.

The falling in love was gradual, though Herriott had help from my husband, Shannon, who’s roots in rural Missouri had always been tugging him back to the country. “Well, are you ready to go yet?” he’d asked me every few years since we married in 1988. Maggie was the first smitten – “I want to be a vet,” she’d sigh after a Reading. “Why can’t we have a dog?” she’d whine. She loved the small animals. The boys, Eli and Jake, loved Siegfried and Tristan, perhaps most for the animation Jon put into their performances, and relished the gruesome accounts of calves delivered and rumens un-torsioned. Emma loved the deliciously loony Madame Pumphrey and her portly Pekinese, Tricki Wu. Shannon loved that the house was quiet for an hour during a chapter. But I – I loved the Land.

I think the Land held Herriott in thrall, too, though his stories, of necessity, hung on the characters. Himself an admitted city transplant, Herriott often, and somewhat apologetically, paused in his narratives to stand and admire the beauty of the Yorkshire Dales, his adopted homeland. A rapt gratefulness for the embrace of the Dales is the very thread that ties together his five books of memoirs, charmingly titled from a 19th century children’s poem. In the first book, “All Creatures Great and Small,” he writes of his arrival in Darrowby:

“The formless heights were resolving into high, grassy hills and wide valleys. In the valley bottoms, rivers twisted among the trees and solid greystone farmhouses lay among islands of cultivated land which pushed bright green promontories up the hillsides into the dark tide of heather which lapped from the summits.”

And thus the green hills, rock walls and weathered wood stalls got under my skin while Jon read.

Of his own volition, or more likely under the influence of a higher power, Jon recommended Wendell Berry to me in 2004. My kids had grown up some during the years Jon had lived with and read to us, and I now had time to read to myself. I checked out “The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture,” from the Sulzer Regional Branch of the Chicago Public Library, and took it on a camping trip to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Having sprinted through the essays, at points holding my breath and in tears, I chanced to find “The Gift of Good Land; Further Essays Cultural and Agricultural” during a frantic search in a tiny UP village library. I noticed the intro to one of the Berry books was authored by Gene Logsdon, and soon I was back in the stacks, grabbing up “The Contrary Farmer.”

Here were two writers, one more as poet and the other more as practitioner, translating love of the Land into a theology and a recipe for global and personal wholeness. I was blindsided by the eloquence and clarity of their arguments and plunged into a full-on longing for home. Berry had found his in Kentucky, Logsdon in Ohio. A year later we’d found ours in Blanchardville, Wisconsin, population 806.

Here, among the animals and their muck, I’ve found my stories. And here, in the gorgeous Driftless Region of Wisconsin, a gently rolling topography untouched by ancient glaciers that smoothed most of the state into ideal row-crop condition, I’ve found my Land. Too steep for modern tractors, this hill country still supports many small family farms cultivated by sturdy old Farmalls and narrow-fronted vintage John Deeres. Contour strips and square-patch plots blanket the slopes and valleys in multi-hued quilts of diverse grains and forages. I’m neighbor to dozens of people like myself – homesteaders, organic market growers, prairie restorers, new niche farmers – and hundreds of families who’ve been milking here for generations. Among us we’ve got more than enough stories for a lifetime of writing, and between us a fierce determination to steward this place well.

“My Valley”
Artist Peg Cullen, my good friend and neighbor, painted this scene of the Land we so cherish.

Jon still lives in Chicago, with his wife, Ann, also a dear friend to us, and adorable baby Lucy, soon to be joined by a sister. Lucy has a favorite stuffed animal we’ve given her that resembles our Piggy Lou. We delight in their visits to the farm, during which Jon is still pressed into Reading service. He is also still introducing me to great writers on rural life and sustainable agriculture. Next on my Recommended-by-Jon List, “Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations” by David Montgomery.