...Now the light falls
Across the open field, 1eaving the deep lane
Shuttered with branches, dark in the afternoon,
Where you lean against a bank while a van passes,
And the deep lane insists on the direction
Into the village, in the electric heat
Hypnotised...T. S. Eliot, "East Coker"
When I was a child in the 1940's, the term the old people used for a narrow road was a 'lane'. Some routes in the country were called roads like the Plank Road and the Telegraph Road, and generally roads were wider and were paved. The wider width of the paved roads was denoted by referring to them as "two lane" roads thus preserving the older term in the newer form. Most of the other roads were narrower and, in those days in the Virginia countryside, were unpaved; if they were paved the paving was of the tar-and-gravel sort, not hot-mix asphalt. Many of the unpaved roads were called lanes. Lanes were roads with a double corridor of trees along them. Some of them wound along for miles between farms while others were shorter leading from the road "out front" up to the farm house set on the hill back from the road. I remember being a little fearful sometimes toward dusk as we drove to my grandparents' house because the lane to their house seemed like a darkening tunnel. In the heat of summer, these lanes were always cooler because of the thick canopy of trees over them. This canopy bordered the the lanes even in the "open" countryside so that often you could not see directly into the fields from the lane. Some of the oldest lanes had worn well below the surface of the surrounding fields and had large trees in their edges. Occasionally, the lane was interrupted by a turn out so that access could be made to the fields, and from time to time there were wider places where cars-or wagons-could pull aside to allow another to pass. In the winter, the banked edges of the lanes protected the road from wind-driven snow.
This border of the lanes contained many types of trees-oaks, hickories, maple, sweetgum, elm-below which was a middle story of dogwood, sourwood, sasafras, and sometimes chinquapin. The understory closed the edge and the line of sight to the fields with briar, honeysuckle, sumac, blackberry, old rose, and many shrubs and weeds. There were also cedars, young and old, in the edges and occasional mulberry trees. Probably no other thirty foot wide strip could be found that contained the diversity of fauna and flora contained in and along these lanes. The lanes were the richest corridors of birds I have ever known. Sparrows, robins, cardinals, wrens, blackbirds, thrashers, thrushes, mockingbirds, jays, tits, woodpeckers abounded. If the lane were walked on the outside, on the field edge instead of in the lane itself, quail and rabbits could be encountered.
Although roads are always intrusions in the original wilderness, the lanes created a derivative ecosystem that arose in the wake of felling the forests and clearing the land. Lanes are then entirely artificial, but in this artificiality was a fortuitous circumstance. Lanes evolved in conjunction with the clearing of the land and the erection of fences as edges doubly defined by their inner boundary as the edge of a road and by their outer margin as the edge of a field. The lanes thus generated four miles of edge for each linear mile of passage. In time as weeds grew and birds nested, trees grew or sprouted along the lanes. The lanes became wind shelters as well as barriers to erosion, and a cycle of growth and enrichment began that would persist until the days of convict road crews and bushhogs. No richer environment existed anywhere for the small animals-from the shrews, mice, hoppers, beetles, and snakes at the bottom to the large and small birds, to the groundhogs, rabbits, and skunks, to the hawks and foxes that worked the outer edges of the lanes. My earliest lessons in wildlife observation took place along these lanes, and I now see that the root of my sense of wildlife ecology also began there. Today the lanes are mostly gone.
The lane at Garner's Ford on the Elk River is perhaps 150 years old-if I judge correctly from a 36" Chestnut Oak I found growing in its edge. The lane may be older than that because settlers were already establishing mills on the streams and creeks around this area by about 1820, and before the lane ever started to form, the fields had to be cleared and the road defined between them. The great oak had come later when a row or hedge had already begun to form and offered shelter to the sprouting plant from browsing cattle or sheep. Although the lane runs straight down the hill for more than a half mile, the tree, brush, grass, and root array keeps it from eroding. Mudholes will form in the lane, but with its canopy, banked edges, and crosslaid roots, the lane is a self-protecting whole. Rain and wash as well as wind and drought are part of its life. It works as it is supposed to, even as an artificial intrusion upon the land. The fifteen inches of rain that fell on the winter solstice did not erode the lane, while nearby paved roads were washed away and gullies were cut fifteen feet deep in some places. And of all the places along the river, it changed least; in fact, it did not change at all. At the foot of the lane at Carson's camp the flood damage is obvious; it can be directly pointed to in the washed away cabin, broken trees, and trash and leaf deposits. In the lane, however, it would be hard to infer that any major weather event had occurred. Today I counted more than two dozen species of trees in this lane. The canopy, limbs, trunks, and roots of these trees hold the lane together and shelter road, soil, banks, plants and animals from the direct impact of rain drops. The lane holds together and grows. It does not erode. It protects itself but it also protects the land around it by acting as a windbreak and erosion barrier.
The farmers could learn a lot from the old lanes. In this season of now six months of storm after storm, of low pressure areas, "upper air disturbances," stalled coldfronts, and cloudbursts that have flooded the lake time after time and produced scouring surges in the streams and Elk river, most of the problem of water quality in the lake and the river derives not from the volume of water but from the silt. The rivers and streams can handle the rain. What is killing the river is not the weather but the farmers. With each storm-with each storm-the streams run red with ruin and thousands of tons of silt and gravel are washed into the ditches, then into streams and the lake and river. Tonight as I write 5" of rain has fallen between here and Chattanooga, 51/2" fell at Tims Ford Dam. Last Tuesday a single storm produced 4" here, the week before 31/2". Because it has been a wet spring, many farmers have been late making their hay or plowing. Most of these heavy rains have fallen on raw, newly plowed fields. But the flelds are plowed to the edges of the ditches, and with the least rain the ditches run red.
The American farmer has lost his native sense of soil. And in doing so he has ceased to be a farmer. While he loved the soil, he was a farmer and adversity and calamity only made him a victim-someone deserving sympathy and the immediate aid of neighbors to put things right again. When he ceased to love the soil itself for the life it holds, he ceased to be a farmer. He became a miner or industrialist and joined the ranks of spoilers, wasters, and polluters. Now he is not victim but culprit. He has become the enemy. A man who bulldozes every fencerow on his place, who obliterates without trace the lanes that guard his fields, who scrapes the earth down to mineral along his road, tills straight downhill and does not contour or berm or leave grass in his runoff channels, who plants edge to edge, and when he plants puts in a government supported cash crop is not a farmer. He is a fool. Between the farmers, the politicians and bureaucrats, and the experts our land has been overrun by an army of fools. Add to them the fifth column of bankers, brokers, and developers and the land does not have a chance. I am not a farmer but I know this: no man can be a farmer and throw his land in the ditch.
One day as Bob Benson and I drove along looking at the effects of the heavy rains on fields and on the lake, I said to him, "Wouldn't you have thought that the combination of farm pride, American know-how, and traditional frugality, along with Christian piety and biblical stewardship-all of them things familiar to Southern farmers-that all of these taken together would have produced a sense of natural stewardship of the land?" Benson said, "No. It's a fallen world." Perhaps I have not been willing to accept the universality of the biblical indictment. Naively, I had thought that America might be going to hell, but that farmers still stood for the good things, that of all people left, they alone would understand the maxim, "Waste not, want not." I think I have been trying to understand contemporary farmers on the basis of nostalgia: I had viewed them because of their age, because of their ownership of farms, as I had viewed farms and farmers in my childhood. But that was a different world.
It wasn't that long ago, but we plowed with mules more often than we did with a tractor. We still used oil lamps and an icebox. We did not use bulldozers or bush-hogs or chain saws. Winter wood was cut with axe and crosscut saw. Tall grass and weeds we cut with sickle and scythe. I now realize that what guided us was the need not to waste; then I just believed my grandfathers: "Waste not; want not." "Everything will come in [i.e., should not be thrown away but will be useful again] in seven years." And the grandmother who said in simple declaration, "Waste is a sin." We kept a nail bucket. Any bent nail and all nails out of old planks went into the nail bucket. When you needed a nail, you got a nail out of the nail bucket and hammered it straight on the anvil. We weeded and picked by hand. Neither the guts nor the manure of animals was thrown away. We didn't clear our fence-rows or level our lanes-and the creek didn't run muddy. It is not that way anymore. I had attributed to the farmers natural wisdom and piety. I now realize that I know more than these farmers do. They know a new and different kind of farming. A farming of cash flows, hundred weights, pre-emergence herbicides, antifungal baths, air-conditioned tractors, bar-code ear tags, fat-to-lean ratio feeding schedules, futures trading, toll free numbers, brokerage fees, and most of all, ruined land. These farmers have performed the ultimate futures trading: they have committed to produce at a later date and cannot answer the call. They have traded their own futures, not just grain futures, and they are bankrupt. Aldo Leopold saw where such farms were headed fifty years ago when he observed: "... rivers washing our futures into the sea."
These new farmers trouble me. They are older; their wisdom should flow to me. They should be my teachers. They are rural. I am city. Their life is of the soil. It is authentic. Mine is derivative. And now I am saddened and angered. I cannot go home again. The home in the land I knew is far away and long ago. It is past. It does not survive on the farms, only in my memories. The world is upside down. The ruinage of modernity has taken the farms and the farmers too. Where is natural wisdom if not in the soil, if not in the farmers' life? Where are our teachers if not the people of the land? Where is our hope if not in the land itself? The land is lost and we are lost with it. I would have said to my children and my students, "See, here is wisdom. Look to the land. Now look there; that is folly. Shun the streets." The streets perhaps have always been folly, but now folly claims the land as well, and the strong brown god of river carries away soil and men alike.
"Do not let me hear
Of the wisdom of old men," Eliot said,
"...but rather of their folly,
Their fear of fear, their fear of possession,
Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.
The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless."
Perhaps it is, after all, as simple as that. We have lost desperately and need the wisdom of humility. There is no wisdom in knowledge or experience, and no science, no ecology, can hope to exceed pride. The only wisdom is the capacity not ours to receive by being ourselves transformed the gift given. Only humility senses deeper than knowledge the gift is never our own to claim or hold. The land is never ours. It was bought with prices that our contracts cannot measure. Nor can we devolve it. The land owns itself. What we pass on is our pride or the gift of others. The land is not an environment nor a problem needing to be solved. The land needs from us only humility before the gift of the past, past carried in the soil where the land's own memory is perpertually entwined with the inheritance of those before us. In the soil of graves, man and land make perfect ecologic community, one nurturing the other in covenants of rain, decay, and growth. The soil bears our fathers and mothers to us in never completed gift, ever renewed, through us to children of children. With humility the land could be endless and from grimpen and wood and field there would arise the music of the weak pipe and the little drum, and dancers in the lane,
"Lifting heavy feet in clumsy shoes,
Earth feet, loam feet, lifted in country mirth
Mirth of those long since under the earth
Nourishing the corn..."