The Land, the People
- Jan 28, 2018
- 3 min read
★★★★☆
Back in 2012, my wife, Megan, and I were making plans to move from downtown Kansas City to the country, 45 minutes east. We were starting a winery with some partners, and were planning to build an off-the-grid house on the far side of one of the 75-acre property’s four lakes. Buying some land and getting off the grid had been our plan for some years—we’d even tried to make that a reality in our urban home before giving up due to prohibitive city codes—and though the winery wasn’t an original part of that plan, at the time it made a lot of sense. Over the next few years everything fell apart, we never built the house, and last May we finally got out of the winery business.
For inspiration, my parents gifted me all three of noted Hoosier farmwife, newspaper columnist, and author Rachel Peden’s books, then in new editions published by my alma mater, Indiana University. Peden wrote about rural community, about life on the farm, about the land and her deep connection to it. I never got around to reading any of the books before we moved to the country, and once there, between the full-time job I still had in the city, the commute, and the hours put into building a new business, I had little time for reading. It wasn’t until we’d moved out of the winery and into a house “in town,” and when we knew it was the beginning of the end, that I finally read Rural Free: A Farmwife’s Almanac of Country Living. My review of that book can be found elsewhere on Goodreads, but I will mention that it took me three-and-a-half months to get through it. Now I know why people read more than one book at a time.
So, it was with some reservation that I pulled Rachel Peden’s second book off the shelf. Where Rural Free was nothing more than a collection of farm-life observations completely lacking in narrative momentum—that she had a Muncie Star column titled “The Almanac of Poor Richard’s Wife” should tell you a lot—The Land, the People, I am pleased to say, for the most part, does not suffer similarly.
In her introduction, Peden states, “I wanted the land to be the main character, and to write about the family farm, its change, survival, character, and of people’s love of the land and need of it as a basic human hunger.” Divided into four chapters, Peden recounts stories about her father, father-in-law, an elderly farmer neighbor, and her own farm with her husband, Richard. While she doesn’t necessarily succeed in making the land the main character, she does paint it vividly, and elevates the importance of place as Steinbeck did in Cannery Row or Camus did with the town of Oran in The Plague. The book is strongest in the chapter “High Gap Is the Lord’s,” about her father, an orchardist, whose land is now part of Indiana’s Morgan-Monroe State Forest, and who’s narrative centers around reminiscences she and her sister have on a visit there to find the old landmarks; and in “Wide and Starry Sky,” in which the trials and tribulations of several generations of Peden farmers are recounted, and whose claim to fame, if it’s right to call it that, is that their land became part of Indiana’s first state park, McCormick’s Creek. The book’s final chapter, “The Fulness of Maple Grove,” is less successful. Here Peden sets out to chronicle her own family’s farm, but can’t help from too frequently interjecting unconnected observations as if they were too good to waste, or wait for. Fortunately, things never quite devolve into Rural Free territory, and The Land, the People, comes together in the end, a perfect mixture of sadness and hope, cautious optimism, and an abiding trust in the land.
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