It is eight in the morning on the last day of the world. We are standing, six of us, alongside the county road that cuts across Wendell Berry’s farm in the small Kentucky town of Port Royal. To our right, the Kentucky River has retreated back inside its banks after a tempestuous spring. In the lower pasture, a single llama guards Wendell’s sheep against coyotes. Up on the hill to our left stands the Berrys’ traditional white farmhouse as well as several busily occupied martin houses. The birds are what bring us here each May, but radio preacher Harold Camping’s doomsday prediction that the world will end tomorrow, May 21, has lent today a kind of cosmic, I mean comic, significance.
“Well,” Wendell says, wearing khaki work pants and a team sweatshirt from one of his granddaughters’ high schools, “if this is our last day, we might as well have as much fun as we can.”
“No better place to do that,” says botanist Bill Martin, and we all nod our agreement. Besides Bill, our coterie includes wildlife biologists John Cox and Joe Guthrie, me, Wendell, and his retired neighbor Harold Tipton. Wendell, Bill, and Harold are of one generation; John, Joe, and I are of another. Some semblance of this group has been congregating here for the past ten years. The official nature of our business is to count and identify birds—migratory warblers and summer residents. But our pursuits might better be described in terms of what Wendell calls a “scientific quest for conversation.” As much as anything, we come to hear and tell stories.
Wendell has been telling the story of this land for five decades. A few hundred yards upstream from where we have gathered stands his writing studio, an approximately twelve-by-sixteen-foot room that overlooks the river and was the subject of a defining early essay, “The Long-Legged House.” Sitting atop long stilts, the “camp,” as Wendell calls the studio, slightly resembles a great blue heron standing silently on the riverbank. It has no electricity, but natural light flows in through a large window, over a long desk where Wendell has written more than fifty books of poetry, fiction. and nonfiction and in the process has become known as the country’s leading writer on the subjects of conservation and land stewardship. “It is a room as timely as the body,” Wendell wrote in a recent poem,
As frail, to shelter love’s eternal work
Always unfinished, here at water’s edge,
The work of beauty, faith, and gratitude
Eternally alive in time.
In tumultuous and uncertain times, it is worth being reminded that these fine things—beauty, faith, gratitude—still lurk eternally beneath history’s dark veneer and that an artist working alone in a room beside a river may catch a glimpse of them and render them into a lyric poem, a short story, or an essay.
Because of that work, President Obama awarded Wendell the 2010 National Humanities Medal at a White House ceremony. As he was presenting the award, the president told Wendell that reading his poetry had helped improve his own writing. It is an impressive remark, given that Obama is one of the best writers, along with Jefferson, Lincoln, and Grant, that we’ve ever had as president.
Perhaps because the camp hovers just beneath the canopy of riverbank trees, the avian world has long been a source and subject of Wendell’s poetry. In one poem he writes of seeing a yellow-throated warbler on the railing of his camp porch: “My mind became beautiful/by the sight of him.” In Wendell’s long series of Sabbath Poems, written on Sunday walks around the farm, birds hover like the constantly circling martins in his front yard:
It is the Sabbath of the birds
that so moves me. They belong
in their ever-returning song, in their flight,
in their faith in the upholding air,
to the Original World. They are above us
and yet of us, for those who fly
fall, like those who walk.
The “fall” Wendell writes of here is the fall into death, not the fall of man. Indeed, one of the theologies behind the Sabbath Poems is that we still belong to the Original World, if we could only see it that way. But our deeply divided minds have set us off from the natural world and have led us to build all matter of industrial and technological barriers between the two. Standing in contrast to that attitude, and to the attitudes of mainstream Christianity, Wendell long ago called himself a “forest Christian”—one who finds his religion here in this unroofed church, here in “the whole Creation.” Thus the poem “Wild Geese” ends with these chthonic lines:
And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye
clear. What we need is here.
Such a sentiment points us to a place—spiritually, psychologically, geographically—to begin thinking about how the root of the word ethic (the Greek ethos) means “dwelling place.” As both Ralph Waldo Emerson and Martin Heidegger noted in their respective treatises on poetry, the job of the modern poet is to call us back into that experience of ethical, meaningful dwelling. “My purpose,” wrote Wendell, “is a language that can make us whole.” The opposite of wholeness is separation, which Martin Luther King Jr. once called our most modern and most troublesome sin. And in many ways, we still remain very estranged from our native landscapes, our neighbors, our government, and the sources of our most basic needs. Emerson wrote that the poet’s task is to “re-attach things to nature and the whole.” In Emerson’s time, Walt Whitman most successfully forged these associations; in contemporary America, our greatest poet of reattachment is Wendell Berry. His purpose is a language that can make us whole as a land community, a human community, and as the community of organisms that we sometimes call the self.
For today’s birding, we load into Wendell’s pickup and drive a few miles to Harold’s farm. A green heron is wading in the creek that runs alongside the road. John and Joe, who are the group’s best birders, identify the songs of thrashers, kingbirds, and water thrushes as we pass through these lower reaches. Then Wendell’s reluctant truck climbs a nearly washed-out road until we pull into a field in front of a log cabin, hewed out of large oak logs in the 1800s. Wendell’s wife, Tanya, and Harold’s wife, Edna, have sent along lunch for us. Harold stows our provisions inside the cabin, and the six of us, each armed with a pair of binoculars, set off through high grass and occasional ironweed. Phoebes, towhees, and prairie warblers are singing in the trees at the edge of this meadow. Joe records their names in a small notebook. Having no destination, only this will to wander, we move slowly. “To come in among these trees you must leave behind/the six days’ world,” wrote Wendell in a Sabbath Poem, and we have done just that. What’s more, Wendell announces that in response to our culture of instant messaging, he has just founded a new cause, the Slow Communication Movement. Certainly we embody that spirit today, and it feels good. It is a more leisurely, more deliberate form of communication, and it isn’t limited to 140 characters.
At seventy-seven, Wendell is unapologetically out of fashion, though there really never was a time when this wasn’t true. His friend, writer Ed McClanahan, tells the story that years ago, when Wendell’s agent called excitedly to say that Robert Redford was giving as Christmas presents copies of Wendell’s landmark book The Unsettling of America, Wendell turned to Tanya and said, “Queeny, who the hell is Robert Redman?” He famously doesn’t own a computer and has written all of his books in longhand.
And yet, after the economic collapse of 2008, Rob Dreher of the Dallas Morning News wrote a long column arguing that, in such a moment of crisis, it was finally time we listened to, of all people, Wendell Berry. It was Wendell, he argued, who “stood steadfastly for fidelity to family and community, self-sufficiency, localism, conservation and, above all, learning to get by decently within natural limits”—in other words, all the things that could have staved off a financial crisis driven by rapaciousness and centralized power. The point here is that progress doesn’t move inexorably in one direction, toward a technological future, and it doesn’t always look like progress. In an age of toxic agribusiness and climate crisis, it might look more like a family farm powered by sunlight.
We stop at a lone honey locust standing in the middle of the field, and Wendell calls our attention to its mildly fragrant catkins. Bill holds up a small magnifying glass to the tiny flowers. Such is the nature of this outing—trying to pay attention to the things most of us ignore or simply don’t take the time to notice in our daily comings and goings. We must aspire to “the brotherhood of eye and leaf,” as Wendell wrote in another poem. To see the natural world, after all, either through a magnifying glass or a poem, is the first step toward wanting to preserve it. John points to a song in the crown of the tree and says, “Flycatcher.” Joe writes that down.
We walk on, past a thicket where two male indigo buntings, flashing like the bluest shards of stained glass, duel over a female hidden in the brush. Then we stop to watch an orchard oriole (much rarer than the Baltimore variety) perched above the swirling buntings. Wendell is speculating on the brain of a bird, on what a bird can know. “It has the intelligence to adjust its archetype to its place,” he finally decides.
“You mean its environment,” says Bill.
“I don’t use that word,” Wendell replies. “It’s an abstraction. It separates the organism from its place, and there is no such place.”
“Well what do you say then?” demands Bill, who like to needle Wendell.
“I name an actual place. I say Harold Tipton’s farm.”
It was in fact this attention to the particular that prompted our first walkabout. Eight years ago, Dave Maehr, my colleague at the University of Kentucky, suggested to Wendell that he should catalog all the migratory songbirds that passed through his farm each spring. Wendell liked the idea very much, and we spent the first few years walking those wooded slopes and fields, set only a few miles from where Wendell was born in 1934.
His father was a country lawyer who helped start the Burley Tobacco Growers Cooperative Association during the Depression—an act that was instrumental in keeping small farmers on their land. In 1958 Wendell went off to Stanford to study writing with Wallace Stegner. Then in 1962 he accepted a teaching position at New York University. After a few years in the city, he was ready to come home, back to Henry County. Friends in New York advised him against it; they said returning to Kentucky would be literary suicide. “But I never doubted that the world was more important to me than the literary world,” Wendell wrote in his early essay “A Native Hill,” and so he and Tanya bought Lanes Landing Farm in 1965. Wendell worked the farm with draft horses, raising cattle, and later Cheviot sheep.
Back in Kentucky, Wendell wrote, “I began to see, however dimly, that one of my ambitions, perhaps my governing ambition, was to belong fully to this place, to belong as the thrushes and the herons and the muskrats belong, to be altogether at home here.” One way we humans have found to belong to a place is to tell the story of that place: the story of both its inhabitation and its preservation. Indeed, to walk these woods and fields with Wendell is to traverse an intensely storied landscape. The oral tradition overlays this ground like a richly textured matting of fallen leaves. When we walk this land with Wendell, I often think of the Australian aboriginals who compel themselves to sing their native landscape as they pass through it. The Australian natives have to sing that land, call it again and again into existence, into the present. Those song lines are not so different from Wendell’s stories or poems, which have risen up from his own native ground.
One year, as we passed through an abandoned barn, Wendell told us about two brothers who many years ago took over an adjacent family farm after their parents died. They stopped by this barn early one evening when Wendell was about to head up to the house to eat, so he invited them to join him.
“No, Wendell, we already had our dinner,” one of the brothers said. “We have to eat early since we don’t have enough food for a hungry man.”
“Jesus,” David said laughing, “where did they get stuff like that.”
“It was native intelligence,” Wendell replied. “They were men who had never been exposed to radio or TV or the language of the mass media. So they spoke their own kind of poetry.”
That year, at the peak of the neotropical warbler migration, we counted more than one hundred different birds. Each year Dave Maehr would type up the list and send a copy to Wendell, who in turn encouraged Dave to take up a more activist stance toward irresponsible logging practices in Kentucky. Dave responded and in doing so made some enemies within his own forestry department at UK. As a wildlife biologist, he studied large mammals, or “charismatic megafauna,” of which Dave was certainly one demonstrative example. He was brash and voluble and generally considered the country’s leading expert on the Florida panther. I could tell that Wendell found him to be very good company.
I too found Dave and Wendell and John and Joe and Harold and Bill to be very good company. They were all men who spend much of their time, both at work and at leisure, outdoors, by choice. In that, they represent a kind of American male who is disappearing. These were all independent thinkers, family men, stand-up guys. Their company felt genuine, unforced, natural. They knew the names of things, real things, like shumard oaks and bottlebrush grass. They could reattach names to things and in doing so bring themselves closer to the elemental world, make it seem a more inhabitable place. No one carried a cell phone, and no one was in a hurry to be any other place but where we were. No one talked about what he was feeling, but I think we all had an unspoken feeling of attachment to one another.
Then, one Sunday morning a month after our fourth excursion to Wendell’s, I picked up the Lexington paper to read that Dave was dead. He had been down in Florida, conducting an aerial survey of black bears, when his single-engine plane stalled, then nose-dived, killing Dave and his pilot instantly. As with most sudden deaths, I couldn’t quite register what I was reading, couldn’t square it with my subjective reality, where Dave was still in the world. We were all stunned, and John, his student and best friend, certainly took it the hardest. A few months later, Wendell wrote me a letter suggesting that we could best honor Dave’s memory by continuing our annual avian rite of spring and that we should give it a name: the Dave Maehr Memorial Bird Walk.
So here we are, this time up at Harold’s farm, honoring Dave with our peripatetic ritual of walking the fields and forests of central Kentucky. It reminded me of another passage from one of Wendell’s poems:
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.
This seems to me the fundamental premise undergirding all of Wendell’s work—that the natural world is sacred, not a “resource” to be desecrated by the extractive industries that fuel our entire economy. For more than forty years, Wendell has been telling Americans than we cannot survive the economist’s dream of infinite economic growth on a finite planet. And certainly some have listened. The Unsettling of America redirected the way we think about food and agriculture in this country to the point that the farmer’s market is currently the fastest growing part of the American food economy. But obviously not enough people have listened, and so Wendell keeps writing his jeremiads against industrial hooliganism and keeps writing poems that accomplish what philosopher Martin Heidegger called the role of poetry—to praise the whole in the midst of the unholy. I’ve often thought that Wendell’s version of the whole and the holy can be found in this distilled, four-line Sabbath Poem:
The incarnate Word is with us,
is still speaking, is present
always, yet leaves no sign
but everything that is.
For Wendell, the present is always a window into the eternal moment of the Original World. The natural world is an immanent scripture; how could it not be?
Our meanderings take us down an old logging road shaded by shumard oak and ash trees—“a timbered choir,” as Wendell once wrote. Bill is telling a joke that involves farm boys and amorous sheep. When he gets to the punch line, Wendell’s laughter crescendos all around us, and I remember something the poet Jane Kenyon once said—that Wendell laughing is “the best noise in the world.”
That might come as a surprise to readers of Wendell’s polemical tracts, where humor is seldom on display. But Wendell, better than any activist I know, seems to balance his justified sense of outrage at the industrial economy with the pleasure that he takes in the natural world he is fighting to preserve, and in the stories that perpetuate the human comedy.
The first year I came along on the walk, I felt anxious because I wasn’t nearly as good a birder as Wendell and the others. We were crossing a stream on Wendell’s farm when he suddenly turned to me, pointed skyward, and said, “You hear that, Erik?”
“Uh, well, I’m not sure, uh . . . what is it?”
“That’s the hairy-chested nut scratcher!” he said, then slapped his thigh in a burst of laughter.
Now we dip farther down into an older forest, walking among spleenwort ferns and may apples. The birds have grown quieter as the morning stretches out, and Wendell has turned his attention from the sky to the ground. He bends down, brushes away some leaf cover, and starts digging with one hand. “Look how rich this soil is,” he remarks, then glances up as the rest of us watch him dig. “The way these old abused hills have been reforested is inexhaustibly interesting to me.”
The trees and the ferns and the wildflowers have formed a reciprocal community here on this hillside, based on natural laws that Wendell calls “mutualistic.” Nothing lives here in isolation.
“That’s the problem with modern science,” Wendell begins, rising up. “It isolates a problem and offers an isolated solution. To the problem of depleted soil it offers nitrogen fertilizer. And the problem with that is a huge dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico because of all that nitrogen runoff.”
Conversely, the solution to that botched solution is to better observe the workings of the natural world, to understand nature as measure. For that reason, Wendell often points to the visionary experiments of his friend Wes Jackson, who at the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, is creating a new kind of perennial agriculture that mimics the workings of the midwestern prairie—that holds soil in place and needs no chemical fertilizers or pesticides.
“Look at all this,” Wendell says, standing and gesturing to the trees. “This isn’t wild. This is domestic. What’s wild is what’s out of control. That’s what we mean by wild. And we are the ones that are out of control. We are the ones creating that dead zone.”
Wendell probably knows he is preaching to the converted, but he also probably knows that one reason we come down each spring is to hear what’s on his mind. Of course, because of such talk, critics have often dismissed Wendell’s writing as “naive” or “unrealistic.” He knows this well enough and has a ready reply for defenders of the status quo: The word inevitable is for cowards.
It is nearing noon and Joe’s list has reached almost sixty. We start back toward the cabin, where Harold, a relentlessly generous man, soon has a pot of barbecue simmering. We heap portions of it onto sandwiches, then take our seats around a table in the center of the cabin’s one room.
The barbecue is delicious, the company fine, the weather perfect. All of this seems to inspire Wendell to reveal his plans to found another subversive cabal: the Society for the Preservation of Tangibility. The tangible—that which has actual form and substance. In a culture of avatars, electronic friends, and financial “products” that have no basis in reality, such a fundamentally human society sounds attractive indeed.
We all immediately ask if we can join. “Anyone can join,” Wendell replies. “There are no dues, no meetings, no fund drives, no newsletter.” There is only a state of mind, a desire to preserve what’s authentic, what holds substance, what aspires to the whole.
The possibility that a broken world can be made whole seems to be what calls Wendell down to his riverside desk every day. “A man cannot despair,” he once wrote, “if he can imagine a better life, and if he can enact something of its possibility.” To imagine—it is perhaps the most powerful moral force we possess because it maps a future that is worth finding. It has been Wendell’s life’s work.
Outside the cabin door, a Carolina wren starts to sing.