Two Heroes, and the Horses We Used to Farm With

At the end of August we lost two people who shaped how I think about my work: Dolly Parton, and six days later, Wendell Berry.

Dolly Parton

Growing up in Boston, Massachusetts, Dolly Parton was a figure of popular culture to me, a few songs on the radio. It was not until I discovered songwriting, and began to understand how conflicted and gender biased the music and performance industry was, that I found her as a hero for women and for independent artists.

She continues to inspire me. Not only through her songwriting and performance, but through the love she brought to the community around her, channeling fame and popularity into opportunity, especially for young women and girls.

If you have never explored her life, the podcast series Dolly Parton's America is worth your time.

Wendell Berry

I met Wendell Berry in the winter of 2014, on a horse logging trip to Virginia with my friend Chad. Chad is a member of a horse logging organization down there, which Wendell knew well and came to visit.

I had studied him as an author in school, and found his novels and poetry again as an aspiring young farmer. And there I was, a farm owner, shaking his hand. His height and his firm handshake are what I remember most.

That night he spoke at a local high school and told a story about the frustrations of trying to start a stubborn chainsaw. The punchline was a subtle innuendo about kneeling there with the thing between his legs, yanking on the pull cord, getting nowhere. I cannot do it justice in writing, but I remember the raucous laughter in that auditorium, and how this beautiful poet conjured it out of an image of himself failing at something ordinary.

The Horses

Berry farmed behind draft horses for most of his life. When we started this farm in 2013, so did we.

Working a team was one of my favorite things in the world. It is what drew me to follow Chad to Virginia in the first place, and it was the foundation of our farm for the first few years. Chad still breeds Suffolk horses and still uses a team for his logging work here in the Adirondacks.

Our horses, like those on most farms, have been replaced by a diesel tractor. We use it to move chicken coops, haul feed to the pigs, and move hay bales for the cows. It is the right tool for the scale we work at now, and I do not regret the decision.

But I still dream sometimes about the feel of leather reins in my hands, and the sweet, tangy smell of horse sweat mixed with fresh cut hay. Mowing hay with a team was some of my favorite work I have ever done.

Berry wrote a poem called "Horses" about exactly this: learning to drive a team as a boy, watching the tractors arrive, and finding his way back to a pair of mares years later. He ends it with a line I think about often, that "A dance is what this plodding is."

I am glad I got to shake his hand.