A DIY cure for academe
Remaking my place in the world
Previously in The Recovering Academic I explained how gardening is one of many rituals that help me heal the brain reward system that got fouled up by academe, and why growing my own food feels more like a spiritual practice than a hobby. Today’s essay picks up where these left off.
Nearly two months ago I set the first post for my garden fence. Just yesterday I finished filling the raised beds with a mix of soil and compost, and today I’ll plant next year’s garlic, which will make the garden real. As I settle in for the winter and begin stockpiling seed catalogs, I’ve been thinking about Wendell Berry’s essay “A Good Scythe,” in which he recalls mowing a steep hillside on his Kentucky farm first with a gas-powered weed whacker and then with an old-fashioned grass scythe.
Berry came to mind during my project because I made the contrary choice to dig all of the post holes by hand. There were other power tools involved — an angle grinder, a table saw, and a cordless drill — so I was motivated more by convenience than by pride. I was no John Henry racing against a steam drill. Even so, the contrast between my tools allowed me to test Berry’s hypothesis that, when it makes good sense to do so, it is possible to turn back the clock.
I built my fence slowly and largely without help, which allowed me to have a conversation with a place that I’m still learning to embrace as home. The project reminded me of a magnet that my mother stuck to our fridge years ago that said “Love is a decision” but could just as easily have said “Home is a decision.” Home is the theme of my first book, which ends with a garden and a wedding. And home has been a core subject of this series as I’ve traced our geographical move, as well as my exit from academe.
I built my fence to last, and as a person still in transition I find myself hoping that its durability might rub off on me.
I first learned the pleasure of pioneer tools in Idaho, where I ran a wilderness trails crew for three golden summers. Wilderness regulations prohibit the use of power equipment for cultural reasons, and I taught my crew how to clear trees from the trail with a crosscut saw, wedge, and double-bitted axe. A chainsaw could have done in ten minutes what it often took us an hour to finish, but I enjoyed the scritch of the crosscut blade and the whunk of the axe.
Berry writes of his scythe that it allowed him to look around while he worked, whereas the power mower demanded that his attention be “clenched to it.” A handheld sickle is lightweight and quiet, and work is a pleasure when you can smell grass rather than fumes and hear chickadees over the swish of the blade. By contrast, the snarl of an engine drowns out all else and often requires muffling the world even further with protective earplugs.
I chose a post hole digger over a power auger for less lofty reasons than these. The one-man auger at the rental shop required a towing hitch that our cars do not have, and the two-person digger would have limited the work to a weekend, when I might have cajoled one of my in-laws to help. A handheld digger and rock bar allowed me to chip away at the project throughout the week, which meant completing it sooner even if it took more total time. Old Man Winter waited nearby like an editor with a hard deadline that he refused to share until it was near. So I found comfort in my piecemeal progress each day.
Working by hand also leaves room for learning on the job. I’d never run a plumb line before or learned how to brace posts while pouring concrete. I made mistakes at every stage, but because I was moving slowly I had time to adjust. A power tool brings with it the perils of haste. What is done quickly — especially by a rube like me — often has to be redone. I didn’t want to drill 19 post holes only to discover an error in measurement or design after I’d returned the machine.
John Hefner, of Bryans Mill, Texas, patented the post hole digger in 1909. The one I bought from Lowe’s hadn’t changed much in the past hundred years, except for the fiberglass handles. It is not as elegant a tool as Berry’s scythe, but it performed its function reliably for the duration of my project and sits against the garage wall ready to be of further use to me or to a friend.
Digging post holes is hard work, and I’m sure more people have cursed Hefner’s invention than not. I am probably the first person who has used a post hole digger and then thought it interesting enough to write about. This essay would make zero sense to my great-great grandfather, George Boomer, who homesteaded in North Dakota and passed his common horse sense along to his only child, Roy Boomer, who saved himself the trouble of post hole digging by going to college and then running a John Deere dealership in a town called Killdeer. To that generation, success meant being wealthy enough that you could hire someone else to dig those holes.
George Allen Boomer would have snorted if he knew that I thought about fitness while building my fence. I tell myself that I bring a blue-collar ethic to my running and weightlifting, but the whole notion of exercise for its own sake is bourgeois. The people I grew up with were fit because they worked. You didn’t go hiking for cardio in Troy, Montana, you did it to hunt elk or to carry your limit of cutthroat trout back from a mountain lake. Running for sports made sense, because you were getting ready to dominate a neighboring town. And no one questioned my cousin’s “jogging” when he was training for boot camp at Parris Island. But it’s fair to say that none of my working-class relatives would be caught dead in cycling shorts.
So I often feel like an imposter while working out. What am I doing in the upper middle class? And I felt foolish when I caught myself thinking about how the rock bar and two-handled scoop hit my core and legs as well as my shoulders. But even Wendell Berry admits that “simple bodily weariness … can in itself be one of the pleasures of work.” One of the expressions of privilege is exerting myself physically at whatever intensity I choose. And so the story of my rustic fence might be as much about what separates me from my roots as it is about preserving the tradition of husbandry that fed and clothed many Boomers and Doležals.
One thing I love about gardening is that it builds community. It’s not just giving away all the extra zucchini, it’s talking about soil types and last average frost dates and sharing tools when you have them. I was fortunate to borrow some gear from family here, and many friends gave encouragement and suggestions as I tracked my progress on Facebook. An old Forest Service crew mate gave good advice about using blocks to keep my rails steady as I toenailed them to the posts. A college friend introduced me to the “scab board,” which screws into the rail and can then be clamped to a post to make sure everything stays flush.
But this project also reminded me of how far I have yet to go in building a network of friends in a new place. The plan I adapted from Michelle and Steph at Sunny Side Design called for lots of cattle panels, which are typically sold in 16-foot lengths. The farming stores here don’t deliver them, which left me in a pickle. A friend from Iowa explained that you could bend a few wire panels to fit inside the bed of a pickup. But I needed 20 panels, which could only be transported safely on a flatbed. Even a neighbor’s horse trailer wasn’t long enough to carry them safely.
If I’d been building my fence in Montana, at least a dozen cousins or friends could have loaned me the right kind of rig. But there was no way around it: the only solution was to rent a UHaul truck. Sometimes you can turn back the clock, and sometimes you have to bow to the contemporary marketplace.
The fence slowly grew as September gave way to October. I was sorry to see our Maximillion sunflowers fade, but the oaks and dogwoods soon burst into autumnal flame. After marveling at the pastels and spires in Prague this summer, I remembered that there is nothing more beautiful on this planet than an American forest. And that the Appalachian corridor, which runs through Pennsylvania, is among the most stunning of these.
Working slowly allowed me to follow the sun’s path. Even this late in the year, it warmed my face by mid-morning and baked the field throughout the afternoon. Whatever mistakes I might have made with posts and rails, I’d chosen the location well. By this time next year, I imagined, the Sungold vines would stand at least eight feet tall and the butternut squash would lie plump with summer sun.
I spent too much time on a ladder while finishing the second row of fence panels, and I wasn’t yet halfway around the perimeter when a bad case of sesamoiditis flared up in one toe. Happily, my father-in-law came back from traveling abroad and helped me down the home stretch. I’m indebted to him for the gate design and to my daughter Tula, who returned home from school just in time to screw in the latch. A few days later, I even caught a deer snooping around the edges and felt a flash of glee. I’ve always sympathized more with Mr. McGregor than with Peter Rabbit, I’m afraid.
Selway woke up one afternoon at daycare complaining of a sore throat, which meant he got a few stay-at-home days while we waited for COVID test results. I’m glad I got to share this stage of the job with my best buddy. He turned out to be exactly the right size for measuring post holes for the raised bed frames. If his pants disappeared, the hole was deep enough. When I first mowed the garden patch, Selway was heartbroken to learn that I wasn’t building him a football field. So I was happy to hear him say, while he took a snack break and looked around, “Thanks for building this garden, Daddy.” I hope he keeps feeling that way.
We moved here in early December last year, and the temperatures stayed comfortably in the forties through early January. So I thought I had until Thanksgiving to fill the bed frames with soil. But the weather turned quickly, and I found myself hauling wheelbarrow loads through the snow. When I bundled up the next day to plant garlic in another squall, my daughter Linden left her snack on the counter and came out to help. We worked quickly, covered the bed with burlap, and slipped back inside.
I thought about it later, how different it was from my own experience with gardening as a child. It is difficult to know how to teach my children the value of work. There is a kind of discipline to be learned through involuntary chores, but I prefer the invitation rather than the demand. I joked with friends that Linden’s choice showed that I was doing something right as a father. But really it had little to do with me. All I did was slip into my coat. The decision to join me was hers alone.
In five years, I doubt that I’ll remember the whine of the angle grinder, the smell of sulphur, or the sparks arcing over the driveway while I cut the wire panels. The table saw will gather dust under my work table until someone else needs it. The saw served its purpose with precision and speed, but all I thought about while using it was the deadly blade.
But I’ll remember how it felt to be digging post holes in the early morning, my boots wet with dew, how quickly my back dampened with sweat when the sun broke through the trees. I’ll remember the heft of the rock bar, the chunk of the post hole digger in the loosened clay, and the smell of the cedar posts as I wrestled them into place. But perhaps the biggest difference between my hand tools and the power equipment was that my children kept their distance from the saw and the grinder. When I turned off the engines, they came back to me.
It’s possible to romanticize labor too much. Miles Coverdale, the narrator of The Blithedale Romance, finds farming uninspiring when he joins a utopian community that Hawthorne models after the real Brook Farm. Coverdale complains:
The clods of earth, which we so constantly belabored and turned over and over, were never etherealized into thought. Our thoughts, on the contrary, were fast becoming cloddish. Our labor symbolized nothing, and left us mentally sluggish in the dusk of the evening. Intellectual activity is incompatible with any large amount of bodily exercise.
It’s true that fatigue makes it difficult to sustain complicated thoughts. But that can also be the point of working outdoors. There was a lot I did not think about while building my fence. I did not recall the ghastly faculty meetings that prompted me to leave academe, or how personally I took the news that my full professorship would be replaced by a contingent position, or how final it felt, like a death, when I walked out of my office on the last day. Physical labor can be the antidote to such grief.
But it’s also true that when the work is done and you’ve had time to rest, you can see more meaning in your efforts than a few lowly clods. As William Carlos Williams reminds us, there are “no ideas but in things.” My garden fence is more than a barrier to keep out the deer. It is a touchstone for memory, a sanctuary where I intend to grow delicious and lovely things. The fence also represents a decision, which might just as well be a prayer: Let this be my home. Let this be the place I will stay.
It seems that we walk similar paths. Blue collar from Maine, not Idaho. I too teach in Iowa. I also returned to my roots and started furniture-making, gardening, landscaping, and built a fence this summer. I also find the hard work invigorating, as my middle class neighbors cannot understand why I'd cut firewood entirely by hand as they watch for hours in amazement like I'm a zoo animal.
Some advice. What do you plan to do to keep bunnies out of the garden? Standard cattle panel openings are too large and let small ones through. Over here, I long 1' high strips of rabbit fence and used exterior ties to hold it in place.
What a beautiful setting for your garden. I built my garden w posts and fence in a similar fashion and my satisfaction was immense. Really love that Berry was your companion- as much as your son.