There was a famous imprisoned writer – maybe Dostoevsky in the labor camps, or Frankl in the concentration camps, or Solzhenitsyn in the gulag – who in order to conserve paper wrote across and over the page three times, letter atop letter, word over word, sentence on sentence.
We now know that the Renaissance masters painted over their previous works to save on expensive canvas or rare oils or to cover up failed attempts.
Today on the Flute Reed River Farm, you may find two recent clearings in the adult poplars with wood stacks at the edges. Clearings with young pear and apple trees caged against the deer, and pin and black cherries, volunteer elderberries, chokecherries and juneberries. Beyond in the open woods ankle or knee-high red and white pines, spruce and tamarack.
There is a path beaten along the creek and paths leading up to the landing where you see a new outhouse (which leans a half inch over seven feet) and dog dens and chicken coop.
You might say that the ersatz farmer loves to try growing trees and loves to dig, but his bird dogs run the show and the northwoods advance on him at an accelerating rate.
Back at the philosophy department in my university days, in Aesthetics (the theory of beauty and art) I heard it suggested by someone who probably never had a farm that, “The landscape of any farm is the farmer’s self-portrait.” I thought about the very small studio apartment I was renting, and my father’s hobby farm, and my mother’s and grandmothers’ neat bourgeois homes, and concluded, ‘Yes, this is empirically true.’
But the landscape of the current Flute Reed Farm is not the only portrait painted on it. The land reveals more.
The old couple before me had made the place livable, a summer-long getaway, homey, quaint and comfortable. Nicely painted in and out. Arranged and kept up.
He practiced handiwork here and had firewood stacks and a shed full of tools. She practiced cabin-making. Inside were dried cereals and pastas in labeled plastic jars, a dog bowl and hand-made wooden bedframe with comfortable queen-sized mattress.
Look more closely and another portrait appears.
Originally this was part of the Johnson’s family stead, and originally this tiny cabin was the Johnson’s chicken coop. Out along the county road you may find a decorative flower-bed fence, commonly white with arches and now rusted and mangled, buried under roots of seventy-year-old spruce and fir.
There, too, mostly buried under dirt and duff is an iron horse-drawn plow. Walk the property edge and you might trip over single-strands of barbed-wire fence, now showing, now going under the roots and buried. Down the slope into the bottoms on the second shelf up from the creek you find an iron horse-drawn tiller, now under a copse of mature aspen. Nearby a graveyard of very basic, very leather children’s shoes from a century ago. Many children grew into and out of these shoes.
The land abides, like vellum, like parchment, like canvas. And the landscapes are painted and re-painted, and one’s portrait is painted upon the past, and others. This one is worked by a writer, and he is free.
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