No matter what I do, this picture will not orient properly.
We followed the road, US 421, which was narrower, with more twists and turns, than any other federal highway I had ever seen, more a byway than highway. We followed a creekbed and got off the rolling hills into relatively flat country. We were in northern Kentucky, and it was beginning to look, as it geologically well should, like southern Ohio. It was farmland: trees were the exception rather than the rule, and unless they were along creekbeds, they generally all looked planted.
We made the right turn, as instructed, and came to a small town called New Castle, the town before Port Royal. As we were going up the hill to the intersection – the town was pretty much just a cluster of businesses at an intersection – Catherine said, “Hey there’s the Berry Center. Do you want to stop?”
“Hell yes!” I pulled right over and parked on the empty street in front of an antiques shop.
“You don’t want to head straight for Port Royal? It’s getting late.”
“No, let’s check this out.” If we hadn’t taken this road – not the road we had intended – we never would have come through New Castle and never seen this. I take all such things as providential – or at least interesting. We got out of the car – me moving gingerly, back smarting – and crossed the street to the Center.
Catherine in front of the Berry Center.
The Center was located in a large, fine, old brick house, the sort which might have once belonged to the principal man of the town but which would find few takers today: too big a house, too close to the road, on too little land, in a tiny town with too few amenities. It had a lovely sign: the center had chosen as its logo a fine woodcut of a window standing out of doors, part of no wall, staring into a fine landscape; before the window was an open book. It was a rich symbol: nature, contemplation, literature, beauty. It was also difficult to see at thirty miles an hour. I was glad Catherine had seen it, as I would have driven on by.
We walked in to find two middle-aged women speaking with each other. It was clear that the day’s work was done and they were just about to head out, and they were lingering over the day’s final conversation. I plunged in with my typical awkward honesty: we were looking for Wendell Berry. We had brought him gifts – maple sugar and maple syrup. Yes, we knew he wasn’t at the Center, we presumed he’d be at home. No, we hadn’t told him we were coming. We had just hopped in the car and gone.
“Well hello I’m Mary Berry,” one of the women said, sticking out her hand.
“Mary Berry? As in Wendell Berry?”
“I’m his daughter.”
That fact – along with what seemed her very robust character – determined most of what was to follow. I could sense that she was protective of her father. She could have given us his number, or called him to see if we could come over, but I could tell she didn’t want to, and so I didn’t ask. “Listen,” she said, “I’m not going to encourage anybody to just drop in on my father, I want to make that clear.”
After some small talk, I learned that her daughter was a Latin teacher in Louisville. We spoke about the excellent University of Kentucky Latin program.
“Well how about that UK doing something right,” she said, with a deadpan that did not quite disguise the bitterness.
Wendell Berry’s disagreements with the University of Kentucky are worth pondering (an excellent place to begin is here). Berry has log opposed mountaintop removal mining in the Appalachians, which has proven to be an efficient way of extracting coal; for Berry the destruction of entire landscapes is not justified by such technical considerations. Much of America’s electrical power is produced by burning coal – thirty-seven percent, by current US Department of Energy estimates – and so to a great extent all of us electricity users (and all of us on computers are) – are implicated in this process. Berry wrote an interesting article “Why I am Not Buying A Computer,” which I think puts the conflict into an extreme and hence highly visible form. It is easy to facilely declare one’s opposition to mountaintop removal mining; but how many people are willing to give up a computer, or cut their electricity usage by seventy percent (the amount of electricity coming from fossil fuels) in order to live by their stated principles?
Many people do not know where their comforts come from. I remember a geology professor of mine telling a story about prospecting in the West for a mining company. He came across a pair of mountain bikers, one of whom, when they found out was he was doing – prospecting in their beautiful mountains to see if a mine should be placed there – said: “I’m against mining.” He responded: “Where do you think the metal for that bike came from?”
Of course there is middle ground, and that is the work of the Berry Center: to discover a lifestyle of use without abuse. For Berry this is represented by family farming and the intimacy of small-town living; but it is hard to see how the larger industries – cars, computers, telecommunications, energy – could be integrated into such a vision. They rely on a kind of complexity which no family business could ever achieve.
These thoughts were in the background – not quite expressed – of our conversation there in that house. Ms. Berry excused herself, “Some of us have husbands,” she said. Her colleague, the archivist Michelle, spoke with us a little longer about some of the things they were trying to do at the Berry Center. They were trying to bring the small economy back. They were going to open a bookshop in the beautiful log cabin next door. New Castle was at the center of a farming region, but you could not purchase any local produce there. All crops and livestock had to go great distances to large corporations to be “processed” before being sold back to the area. She said they were working on setting up a locally or cooperatively owned vegetable rendering facility, and a slaughterhouse as well. I encouraged her, noting how many more restaurants, for instance, in New York and the Hudson Valley were dealing directly with farmers. How farmers’ markets and CSAs were still very small players in American agriculture, but their share was growing rather than diminishing. And how such jobs gave able-bodied young people in places like the Hudson Valley enjoyable, healthy jobs. The pay was terrible, of course, but there was something in it that was lacking elsewhere – real joy and real connection.
But there was also a tinge of despair in the room. Michelle said, “We’re trying. But we don’t have much here. There’s not much here in town. We have a good antiques shop across the street, please take a look there [it was already closed]. We have a greasy spoon around the corner, that’s our one restaurant [it was also closed – closed at 3 p.m.]. People go long distances to do their shopping, and when things are like that, it’s hard to build community. But we know that none of this is going to work without rebuilding communities.”
Berry has called this process – of rural communities utterly dependent on distant corporations, distant “market” forces, and distant businesses, with the resultant disintegration of the fabric of rural life – the “unsettling of America.” It was much on my mind when I considered my Mississippi River trip too – I knew its small towns were suffering – many in fact were just about gone – while the river had become a highway for international cargo transport, and massive, multinational industry.
As we went back to our car, Catherine said, “I guess it was all right that we just stopped by. It seemed like maybe they don’t have that much to do there.”
“I think they’re like all other good people,” I said. “There’s so much to do, they don’t know where to start.”
Mary Berry had offered to take our maple gifts to her father, but we opted to continue on our journey to Port Royal. Maybe we’d find his house. Maybe we’d see him by chance. And if we did, our gifts would be in hand.
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