I’d like to start this entry with the first and last stanzas of a poem that I happened to read just before boarding a bus to take me north from London to Scotland. It seemed to describe me in some uncanny way; I felt like I had written the poem but was reading it for the first time, and though it was actually composed by John Keats, I was reading
A Song About Myself.
I.
There was a naughty boy,
A naughty boy was he,
He would not stop at home,
He could not quiet be-
He took
In his knapsack
A book
Full of vowels
And a shirt
With some towels,
A slight cap
For night cap,
A hair brush,
Comb ditto,
New stockings
For old ones
Would split O!
This knapsack
Tight at's back
He rivetted close
And followed his nose
To the north,
To the north,
And follow'd his nose
To the north.
IV.
There was a naughty boy,
And a naughty boy was he,
He ran away to Scotland
The people for to see-
There he found
That the ground
Was as hard,
That a yard
Was as long,
That a song
Was as merry,
That a cherry
Was as red,
That lead
Was as weighty,
That fourscore
Was as eighty,
That a door
Was as wooden
As in England-
So he stood in his shoes
And he wonder'd,
He wonder'd,
He stood in his
Shoes and he wonder'd.
I arrived in Inverness after riding on the bus all night, and after checking in to a hostel I decided to take a walk around the city, following my nose. I was on this wandering walk when whimsy had her way with me, pulling me into a bookstore. As I browsed the shelf a book called
Land of the Living caught my eye. It was the first book I pulled off of the shelf, and the cover showed a picture of a tractor under the subtitle,
Christian Reflections on the Countryside. Interesting, thought I. Closer inspection revealed that the author, one Ivor MacDonald, had worked as an agricultural extension agent. Even more interesting. I kept reading the back cover and learned that the author lived on the Isle of Skye, roughly a mere 100 miles from Findhorn, with his wife and children, and he was the minister of a rural church. Ruminating on the nature of chance, fortune, providence, and dumb luck, I bought the book.
After reading most of the book while at Findhorn, I emailed Reverend MacDonald to let him know that I was in the Highlands of Scotland enjoying his book, and, if it was his pleasure, I would like to come for a visit. He consented, and I arrived in the town Portree the following Sunday night, just in time to hear Rev. MacDonald as a guest preacher at one of the churches there. After the service he introduced himself as Ivor and then promptly introduced me to an older fellow in the congregation named Andy. Andy was a sheep and cattle farmer and the three of us talked for a little while about what farming was like these days in Skye. The main thing that Andy and Ivor had to say—and I was to hear this often over the next few weeks—was that good prices were scarce and the hoops that the government made you jump through were abundant. But we’ll get back to that.
After Andy went home I sat in a pew chatting with Ivor about his book and about what the heck I was doing traveling the world. When we finished he have me some names of other people I could meet on Skye and invited me to come later that week and lend a hand on his croft and then have dinner with his family. I happily agreed, and as we parted, I was only left to wonder what is a croft.
I had never heard of a croft before I came to Scotland, but as heard the word crop up again and again I gained a sense that I should figure out what it is. But one thing I have learned on this trip is that learning along the way is a lot different then learning in the classroom. There is no telling me the whole story from beginning to end while pointing out the important bits; I get to/have to shuffle through the word to find the bits of the story, try to figure the beginning from the end and the cause from the effect, and weigh the importance of each bit. What’s more, and now forgive me for getting a little ahead of myself, another thing I have learned from chasing the meaning of the croft is that sometimes to see a thing most clearly you cannot just look directly at it; sometimes a thing in and of itself is best understood as in between what it was and what it is becoming. So since this blog, whatever it is, is not just about me imparting what I have learned but perhaps more so about telling you what I am doing, I will try to introduce you to crofting as I learned about it.
I spent the next ten days on the Isle of Skye visiting a handful of farms and getting to know the farmers and their families. I also talked to an insurance agent of the National Farmer’s Union, a government official responsible for subsidy payments to farmers and crofters, a couple from Canada who had just bought one of the pubs in Portree, among other interesting people here and there. Maybe this was cheating, but I also spent a little time in the local library reading local poetry and history.
The first farmer I visited was a fellow named Peter. At lunch one day after a morning of repairing fences, he described to me what life was like growing up on a croft. Each croft had 100 to 200 sheep, one or two milking cows, and maybe a few more beef cows. Everybody grew potatoes, turnips, and a grain they called corn but was more like oats. The used stones and stacks of cut bushes as drying racks for the cut vegetables (it rained at least a sprinkle every day during my time on Skye), and salted everything to keep the mice off and for the health of the cows. Peter noted the irony as we ate corned beef from Argentina on our sandwiches. Sure of the answer but curious of the response, I asked Peter is any crofters kept a couple milk cows any more. No, he smiled, it’s just easier to drive to the supermarket than to get up before the sun and try to hunch under the cows while the midges swarm around you.
When I first arrived at Peter’s the day before, his two grown sons who farmed with him introduced me to the impressive operation. With a mix of enthusiasm and pride that you might call gusto, they explained to me a variety of details about the farm, from the breed of cattle (Limousine, and their size fit their name) to why the dog was licking the mower (they had slathered all the machinery with vegetable oil to prevent rust). They showed me how almost everything—from the cattle-holding pen, the feed pit, the lamb shed, the grain wagon, the way they spread lime on the fields to improve grazing—had been custom made or fit by their father. Here inventive innovation reigned under the authority of ingenuity. But I wondered, who was the mother of this ingenuity? Peter’s sons made two comments that provided some clue as to why they were so keen to show me their father’s innovations. This first clue was that, like Andy, they noted with uncharacteristic drear that product prices had not risen substantially in the last twenty years, but the cost of everything else, especially fuel, had. I would call this the spirit of necessity, the well-known mother of invention. The other thing they mentioned, which was a little more subtle and said in the context of defending their father and his success against perceived resentment from neighbors, was that he was just trying to make a better life for his sons. I believe this spirit was the source of both Peter’s ingenuity and his sons’ pride in their father’s farm.
The spirit of expansion, the stepsister of ingenuity, also impressed me as I got to know Peter’s farm. I learned that his acreage was comprised of a fair number of crofts that he had acquired over the years, along with a corresponding proportion of access rights to neighboring common grazing areas. The sons told me that there were a few other farms on the island that had more sheep and others that had more cows, but that nobody else had that many sheep and that many cows.
It seemed that in many ways this farm had outgrown the island and the crofting system. They were raising enough stock that it was more profitable for them to pay the hefty transport costs to bring the animals off the island to more lucrative meat auctions. At one time this would not have been feasible because all the flocks were mixed in the common grazing area and only separated according to their owner when they were all brought in on the local market day. However, in recent years the township that Peter was a part of had decided to divide up the and fence-off the common grazing area. As I understood it, this move to private fencing was not at Peter’s initiative, but it was to his advantage, given the location of the parcel of land he obtained and because he could now, with his flock separated by fences, bring his animals from the hillside into market (using dogs and all-terrain vehicles) on different days than his neighbors with smaller flocks.
Not all of Peter’s neighbors with still keep stock, and he rents land from some of these people. Sometimes he rents it at market price and sometimes his neighbors only charge him a nominal fee; they simply want to see the land being put to use. Others in the township decide not to have any stock in their plots. One day as we drove back from the machine sheds to the house for lunch, Peter’s boys showed me the visible difference along the fence line between the plots the neighbors let them graze on, and other plots that neighbors refused to rent. The reversion of these ungrazed fields to bracken and briar was brazenly stark, and I could sense the resentment in the air at the sight of good grazing land going to waste.
Several days later I visited another farm. After getting off the bus in the one-street town at the telephone booth (there was no bus stop), I picked a direction to start walking and soon found a couple of gentlemen standing and talking out in the rain. I inquired as to their well-being and location of Donald John’s farm. They respectively replied that things were well and that I needed to walk back in the direction I had come from, and then turn left up the hill at the old church. I thanked them and complied. On my way up the hill, a pickup truck stopped beside me. As I opened the passenger door, the driver asked me if I was looking for Donald John. My “yessir” was followed promptly by a smiling “you found him.”
I was happy to again comply with the hand gesture bade me climb into the pickup (an apt name for the vehicle, given my involvement with it), and Donald John steered it back down the hill that I had been climbing; he had to finish putting a load of hay that had arrived that morning back into the shed before it soaked up too much of the persistent precipitation. Thinking myself already familiar with the oscillating struggle of the windshield wipers against the recurring raindrops, I tried instead to familiarize myself with Donald John and his occupation.
“How long have you been farming?”
“Been involved with it somehow since I was knee-high to a grasshopper.”
“How have things changed since then?”
“Costs have gone up and profits have gone down.”
The sudden departure of his genial, almost jovial demeanor as he shared this reality gave me pause. As we drove down the familiar and friendly road, I watched Donald John drive. As the miles passed, and the clouds gave respite from the sun. (Oh, how that austere orb somehow benefits all! By its power the pickup rolls and by its light keeps to the road!) But the horizon deepens it hue, and the advent of some coming storm sharpened his focus on the demands of keeping course as challenges came. The adventurous aspect of his soul was even somewhat eager for this forthcoming test of dexterity and, depending on the sort of service that the solemn assembly on the horizon hoped to hold, tenacity. The healthy and powerful firstborn sons of the storm arrived, those globular drops, a catapulted announcement: battle had commenced. He clicked the wipers on and then quickly increased their speed; this deflecting defense allowed his only offense: to drive faster. The initial onslaught slowed and he relieved the combating blades into a more deliberate pace, meditating briefly on the benefit of a periodic downpour to sweep the murky and musty into the clear and clean. As if precisely roused into enmity by just such thoughts, the soldiers of the sky renewed their inimical march. The first wave was indeed a harbinger of a nefarious, multifarious infantry, as the first-flung fruits of catapults often are. This advance, steadily increasing in intensity, demanded acceleration of the wipers, his lone weapon. Their insistent swish punctuated the swift openings of the aperture through which he peered, serious and squinting, resolved to remain on the road. He even increased speed, despite the danger, eager now to be through with this risky engagement. Soon, though, the cavalry arrived, big walloping drops thundering beside the rushing and steady stream of foot soldiers. They succeeded in advancing on the gaps of vision the wipers strained to sustain. He clicked quickly to spur and bolster the beleaguered defense. Bump! A rapid glance through the malicious mist along with the tilt of the truck told him that a tire was off the road. He reduced speed and righted the course. True malaise begins to seep into his spirit and starts to worm its way into his confidence that he had chosen the right road. He grabbed the knob to call on the wipers to increase speed once more, but, oh! no twist or wrangle could effect a more rapid rate from these tireless warriors. They already toiled at the acme of their ability. What now? He could not stop and could not see what lay ahead. He was at the mercy of a seemingly merciless storm, which raged on to spite his best and sincere efforts. Surely the road now was cheerless; how could it have wanted him to continue, in view of these bitter gifts? It was only the familiar feel of the pavement passing underneath that told him he was still on the road. Never before this did he know the meaning of
now faith is being sure of what you hope for and certain of what you do not see, but he questioned whether faith is at its deepest or shallowest when he questioned it even as he leaned on it.
This drive, of course, is not actually the one that Donald John and I took in his pickup. (We just went a quarter mile down to the hay shed). But this is the picture I got from our conversation (like the cereal boxes, I enlarged the picture to show texture). Donald John had chosen the lonely road of farming since he was knee-high to a grasshopper. Since then, the challenges of rising costs and stale returns have been the ever-increasing rainfall. The mechanical and chemical efforts to increase production in order to stave off these challenges have been the windshield wipers. And it has been difficult to get a good look at the future and whether the weather will clear up for farmers; visibility is poor.
At present, the rain shows few signs of abating, and farmers are pressed to expand their acreage, increase their efficiency and overall productivity, and to take advantage of every scheme procured by the powers-that-be, if they are to stay on the road and to provide for their family. How many of Donald John’s neighbors, finding themselves in the roadside ditch of bankruptcy, have turned around and left this lonely road in search of other routes? Donald John told me that he and Peter were among the very few on the island that still farmed full-time. It seems that the Isle of Skye was a microcosm of the UK in this regard; I read in Rev. MacDonald’s book that there is less than a third of the number of farm workers today than there were just after WWII. He also mentions the United States, where there were 6.5 million farms in 1935 but as of 1997 there were only 2 million, and 163,000 of those were large industrial farms that accounted for 61% of the national production.
Dismal, eh? But my day was not finished. I still had another farm to visit. I caught the bus going back towards Portree but got off half way there at Broadford, where I hoped to catch another bus down another wing of the island, where the farmer I hoped to visit was. After ten minutes of puzzling over the incomprehensible (or at least incomprehensive) schedules posted at the Broadford stop, a bus arrived. The driver told me he was going in my direction, so I boarded. I talked with him as we drove and learned what the schedule wouldn’t tell me: this was only one of two buses per week that goes down to this part of the island. When I realized the good chance or design beyond me that got me on this bus, I was reminded of finding the book in Inverness that brought me to Skye in the first place. The driver dropped me off at the farm gate, and I took my increasingly soggy self up the lane. After wandering past a few buildings that looked farmish, hearing a dog bark from within one of the buildings, and not seeing a soul, I decided to peek into a machine shed with a large sliding door already open by a few inches. I saw a light on in a small office in the corner of the shed, and it was in this office that I found Iain, sitting surrounded by old supply company calendars on the wall, bits of farm machinery parts under the motley selection of seats, and various ceramic mugs scattered about the crannies of the room. Each mug, with its uniform stains and unique slogans, offered its deference the teapot on a crude pedestal in one corner of the room; over the next couple of hours we each drank three or four cups of tea.
Iain greeted me warmly and we quickly fell into a conversation that spanned a considerable breadth of topics, each punctuated by his frequent jowl-shaking chuckles as repeatedly warned me that we must not get too cynical. This jolly, grandfatherly man, who has seen the price of a lamb fall from nearly a week’s wages to a mere fraction of a day’s labor, shared with me his view of the Isle of Skye. This view was rooted in experience of the past, perceptive of trends shaping the future, optimistic because of his nature, and tempered by the realism that seems to be found in most hard-working people. In short, you might say he imparted some of his wisdom on me. Consider what follows my humble attempt to pass a bit of it along, though I’m afraid it may be a bit like asking you to appreciate the taste of cold mountain spring water after it has been carried in a dusty sponge for some days; some will have evaporated and what remains will of course taste of the sponge. Nevertheless, I’ll render his words here, however roughly:
…When I was young and working on the farm we used to get together once or twice a week down in Elgol (the nearest town, down at the tip of the wing). We would walk there – four miles for me, more or less for others –after dinner, gather at somebody’s house to socialize, and walk back late under the light of the moon, if there was any. Then hardly anybody had a car; nowadays almost all of them take the driver’s test and get one as soon as they are old enough. But even though we all have cars now it seems like folks get together less often. I’m sure a lot of it is because of the television; it entertains us instead of us entertaining each other. It’s different with kids too. Even my kids used to spend almost all their time outdoors playing with each other, always building a raft for the stream or something other. Now they’re all indoors by themselves with their computers and Star Wars and all that…
…There for a while most of the young people were leaving the island after finishing high school, going to live in Glasgow and the such. But now many of them are coming back to raise their families here. And just by people being here, it ‘s turning the wheel forward, creating jobs and opportunities…
…Thee are also a lot of people moving on to the island from elsewhere, mostly Southern England. I like to cal them the “good-lifers”. Some of them stay, but a lot of them leave after two or three rounds with the Skye winters…
…People who come here to visit often don’t understand the way of life here. Sometimes I’ll meet tourists out walling and they’ll think it’s strange that I stop what I’m doing to have a chat with them. I can’t take my holidays [what we call vacations in the States] in the city because after a few days I need a break from it. Everybody is always in a hurry everywhere. Who knows where they are all in such a hurry to. I’ve never been to London myself, never needed to or wanted to…
…Tim was when every body did crofting because you had to survive. Now people are choosing to croft because they like the way of life…
…The good-lifers, most of them, are rootless. I don’t mean that in a bad way; it’s just different than us indigenous people here. They good-lifers might move every three or five years. It’s different for me, and many others on Skye. I know that generations of my forbearers lived on this same land …
[I, that humble sponge, might interject briefly here, only to say that during the course of our conversation Iain presented me with a photocopied excerpt of ten pages from some book unknown to me. These pages, never mind their origin, contained a precise history of his clan and this land they lived on. Accounts of the origin of the name of the family directly followed accounts of the names of the flora and fauna found on that wing of the island. His genealogy was to be found on the same page as the geography and geology of the land on which he lived. Indeed, it was a severe understatement when he identified himself and his family as different than the rootless people: his family identity is intrinsically linked to the character of the land that has held his family for over 650 years. But enough of my musings, back to way Iain had to say, and please remember this is not a sustained narrative, but the disordered drops that dripped when I gave my brain a good squeeze]
…Remember that even when prices were better most crofters didn’t make their whole living on it. But even my farm here used to support 12 workers most of the year ‘round. Now it’s just me and occasional help I get. The John Muir Trust is the owner of the land, and our arrangement is a bit different from the crofts, which are legally protected holdings. IN my case, either the Trust or I can, with fair warning, terminate the contract at any time. Now, because their goal is mainly to take the land back in time to more trees and such, they’ve given me incentives to reduce my flock from about 1000 head down to 400. But I wonder how far back in time they want to take the land; it used to be all covered in ice! I wonder if they are all that interested in keeping people on the land at all. Sometimes I wonder the same thing about the government too. They have all these schemes, and put all this money into helping us, but the paperwork is so complicated that a lot of us have a hard time keeping up, especially the old farmers (Ha! Look at me, calling others the older farmers). But I know one fellow who lost 6,000 pounds [almost $12,000 US] just for putting a check mark in the wrong box on some form. And most of the money the government puts into these schemes goes into managing the schemes instead of to the farmers…
…Most of the health restrictions because of hand, foot, and mouth disease are overwhelming and costly. But we are happy to ship in lots of cheap beef from Argentina and Brazil, where in many places the disease in endemic…
…Another factor is the grocery stores. They really force us into lower prices. You know a lot of times when you see the 2 for the price of 1 deals, it’s not just a sale they are doing. They just tell the farmer that they are doing a promotion and require him to give them twice as much product for the same price. I was once visiting a friend and saw a huge pile of carrots sitting in his shed. They were good, healthy looking carrots, just sitting there. I asked him why the were just sitting there, and he told me the grocery store rejected them because they were the wrong size, by less than an inch, most of them. The grocery store claim that they had to put on these size restrictions because it is what the consumer demands. Well I’m sure if you went up to any consumer in that store they wouldn’t care that much what size their carrots were…
After we had talked our way through several cups of tea he took me outside and showed me one of his farm buildings. He told me that this building used to be a church. It was built around 1845. It used to be so popular that people would come in boats from nearby small islands and walk several miles over land to get there on Sundays. The building, which seemed to me to be a pretty good size, was not big enough to hold the crowds, so they had to build balconies in it. These days, instead of people, it holds farm equipment for Iain.
One other thing that Iain said that stuck with me even though I don’t remember how it connected with everything else in our conversation was concerning the war in Iraq. He said, as Christians we have to remember that every civilian Iraqi that dies is just as valuable to our heavenly father as those soldiers that die in service. Last number I heard was that over 700,000 Iraqis, civilians and soldiers, have died in the war. Sobering thoughts.
The next day I went to visit the croft of Rev. MacDonald. I helped him round up his 20 or so sheep, with the help of his somewhat inept sheepdog Jack. There was one sheep in particular that he knew needed a certain treatment called, if I remember correctly, dagging. But it is difficult to bring in just one sheep that you want, and he had a certain medicine that it was about time to give all of them any way. After about half an hour of Rev. MacDonald, Jack and I running around, we had gotten all the sheep into the pen, except for one, and Rev. MacDonald said he had a sense that she was the one he especially needed to treat. By this point Jack was pretty tired and proving remarkably ineffective. The sheep was exhausted from all this running around too, and half-crazed—probably because she was the only sheep left being chased by this strange trio. Once we had her cornered, on the opposite side of the field as the pen, but then she leapt at the fence to try to escape us. I winced when she was clothes-lined as her neck met the wire, but by some sideways summersault contortion ended up on the other side, having gone through a gap in the fence no bigger than a basketball. Rev MacDonald promptly swung himself over the fence, grabbed the sheep, and lifted her back into the pasture. He retained his grip on the nape of her neck and tried to lead her toward the pen, but the sheep was unwilling to walk alongside her shepherd. Faced with the alternative of trying to chase this sheep across the pasture into the pen with nothing but the help of a tuckered out dog and a novice like me, Rev. MacDonald handed me his staff and opted to hoist the whole sheep into his arms. He proceeded to carry the terror-stricken sheep across the length of the pasture.
Now that we were inside the pen, each sheep struggled to squirm away while Rev. MacDonald squirted the medicine into her mouth. When he came to the sheep he had carried he also gave it the treatment I mentioned before: dagging. To dag a sheep you simply lift the tail of the squirming sheep and use a pair of shears to cut away the clumps of wool that have become, to put it mildly, soiled. (These clumps were the dags.) This sheep again tried to escape Rev. MacDonald’s firm but beneficent hold; she had little idea that without this treatment she ran a pretty healthy (unhealthy) risk of maggot infestation.
I include this slightly sordid episode in my story of my time on Skye for several reasons. First, I have very little experience with the care of livestock, so I was quite intrigued to learn a bit about how to keep sheep (and thought you might be as well). The second reason is because of the significance of the shepherd/sheep relationship in Christianity. My afternoon in the pasture with the pastor shed some new light what the psalmist may have had in mind when he or she penned, “The Lord is my shepherd.” Surely the psalmist had some experience with what a shepherd’s care of sheep actually entails, and surely the psalmist knew that sheep are prone to struggle against their shepherd’s wishes. Prior to this day, I had none of this knowledge, especially about how much sheep are afraid of humans. But even though it does seem to be an indispensable part of the story, this whole a-sheep-doesn’t-know-what’s-good-for-it-but-the-shepherd-sure-does (which, for some, may smell a bit old-fashioned, unenlightened, or at least a little too pat) was not really what captured my attention so much. I was more caught up in observing what a good shepherd – which I’m assuming Rev. MacDonald is – does in response to stubborn and wool-for-brains sheep. A good shepherd goes out of his way (over a fence, in Rev. MacDonald’s case) to rescue the single rebel who, for whatever sheepish and/or impish inchoate notions, decides to attempt escape by making the uncomfortable jump through a fence. A good shepherd could just let that one sheep go and concentrate on the rest, but instead patiently pursues the sheep and even, in some cases, will carry the sheep to where it needs to be. A good shepherd takes care of all the sheep, and gives special treatment to those sheep who need it. A good shepherd is willing to get her hands dirty to clean up the mess the sheep have made.
Depending on your point of view, you could either say that a shepherd is a likely figure for a pastoral people to use to describe their conception of God, or you may say that God created the relationship between people and sheep for the express purpose of revealing his (or her, again depending on your point of view) character to people. Or you might say both are true. Whatever its provenance, the pastoral poem we call Psalm 23 – along with a host of other biblical literature from parable to prophesy that call on the shepherd/sheep metaphor – has shaped how centuries of Christians and Jews think about and relate to their God. So even if the whole shepherd and sheep paradigm was God’s idea to start with, it would still be safe to say that sheep have shaped—or at least had some part in shaping— any number of Christian ideas, including the picture of God as the shepherd who gets his hands dirty to heal his sheep, and the view of people as needy sheep in need of a savior-shepherd. Not an inconsiderable sphere of influence for a flock of fuzzy nibblers.
(To give credit where it's due, the psalms come from the Hebrew Bible, but I'm not prepared to say much about the place of the shepherd/sheep metaphor in Judaism.)
All these ruminations (I know sheep aren’t supposed to ruminate, but the psalm doesn’t read “The Lord is my cowboy”) seemed worth remark because my primary idea heading into this whole project was to wrap my mind around a few ways religion influences our agriculture. Seeing a shepherd in action prompted me to ask the question the other way around: how does agriculture influence religion?
I thought about that question on the bus ride back to London the next day, along with the same question I encountered early on Skye. What is the croft? I’m not sure what you think a croft is after reading this; I’m still not sure myself what it is, even after spending almost two weeks on an island covered with them. I can say that the croft is a roughly ten-acre patch of land held in perpetuity by the renters, and clusters of crofts form neighborhoods along valley floors, with a common grazing area on the hillside. And, at the risk of romanticizing it, I can also say that a croft represents much more than that. The croft is a piece of history, a living relic of yesteryear’s agrarian community. The croft is a piece of art, a living reflection of the struggles small farmers face today. The croft is also a piece of prophecy, a living hope that the ever-surging seas of trade and industry will not sweep away people who have deep roots in the land.
Though my florid prose may not suggest so, there is much of this story still untold here, though I am neither able nor qualified to tell it. The whole story of the croft involves—among many other essentials I hardly understand—the Scottish clan system, the Highland Clearances, and globalization. After visiting this island where waterfalls and rainbows abound, cliffs rise out of the sea, strange rocky protrusions plunge skywards, and sheep graze everywhere, I only know that this story exists, having now heard a verse of it. This verse tells of the people Iain called the “good-lifers” who are keeping crofts just as holiday homes; it tells of Donald John’s struggles to get the hay in before the rain and to keep the farm afloat; it tells of how Peter’s neighborhood decided to fence the common grazing area; it tells that the croft as many have known it is passing away. There is a sadness in this, as when anything cherished is changing form. But there is another quality beside the sadness here, something akin to beauty, though I wouldn’t give it that name. Iain seemed to have some sense of this quality when he described, with a smile, people who grew up on the Skye returning from the city to raise their children here. This quality is expressed in another verse where I encountered the croft, and since he portrays it best, I’ll again leave it to Keats to tell the story. This is his
Ode to Autumn:
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the mossed cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o'erbrimmed their clammy cells.
Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reaped furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers;
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cider-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.
Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too, -
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing, and now with treble soft
The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.
