Best Person Rural

by Noel Perrin

  Eventually we did get it all baled, and there was a lot. Nearly five hundred bales. Of course I figure it cost me about two-fifty a bale for rained-on hay in a year when one could easily buy bright hay for one-fifty a bale. I had been trying to farm too well.

  You can say that’s just me. A competent farmer (with lots of equipment) would have managed better. So he would have. But, then, few newcomers are competent farmers in the first few years. Besides, I have more examples that are not personal.

  A friend of mine – pretty good farmer, too – has a sideline of making cider. The farm he inherited had about a hundred old apple trees, most of them not worth saving, he decided. So he pulled out about seventy of them and planted new classy stock from a nursery. Most of them died, being specialized, delicate, high-yield creatures, much like pedigreed sheep, and beyond his skill to care for. Meanwhile, the thirty surviving oldsters, helped by a good pruning, went right on yielding quite a lot of apples. They weren’t big, and they weren’t beautiful, but they made wonderful cider. Not so with the culls he was getting from a nearby big and beautiful orchard while waiting for his trees to grow. He got a lot of juice out of them, but not much flavor. If he could resurrect the seventy tough old trees, he’d do it.

  Well, maybe he wasn’t smart, either, so here’s another example, one that doesn’t involve anyone I know. This is just about a dairy farmer I’ve heard of, who upgraded his herd of milkers.

  Most dairy farmers in America now keep Holsteins. There are still Jerseys and Guernseys and milking shorthorns around, but Holsteins are the norm, for the simple reason that they are enormous cows with enormous udders that give enormous amounts of milk. There is, however, a price to pay for all this enormousness, and I don’t just mean their enormous appetites.

  Anyone who has seen a Holstein milker (many people haven’t, because once grown, Holsteins are often confined in a barn for life) – any such person knows that here is an animal that has been bred into distortion. A Holstein cow is basically a support system for an udder. So much so that the biggest and “best” Holsteins walk rather the way camp followers used to when they were smuggling whisky to the troops during the Civil War. Which is how? Well, those were the days when dresses reached the ground. Men, even military police, knew it was highly improper to lift anyone’s skirt. So the camp follower would put a pair of suspenders on under her dress – and from them she would suspend a five-gallon can of whisky, which hung between her legs. Naturally this gave her a somewhat waddling walk. That’s more or less how Holstein cows look, once they have made bag.

  An udder that big is, of course, in a constant state of tension. Most Holsteins are perpetually on the verge of getting mastitis, alias inflammation of the breast, which is one reason there are antibiotics in most cattle feed. Some of them have to wear a sort of horrible parody of a bra called a Tamm udder support. It fastens with a lot of straps across the cow’s back. You can get your cow one for about fifty-five dollars.

  The farmer I read about already had Holsteins. He just wanted ones with extra-big udders, which would yield an extra thousand or two pounds of milk a year. So he did a bit of genetic engineering. That is, he bought semen from a bull whose get were guaranteed to be even more distorted than most Holsteins.

  Result: his next crop of heifers looked as if they were carrying six gallons of whisky between their legs. Or maybe eight. Too much, anyway, for flesh to take the strain. The result was the bovine equivalent of a hernia. It’s called a prolapsed udder, and what happens is that the udder droops until it drags on the ground. Not all his new heifers had their udders tear loose – if I remember correctly, it was no more than one in four or five. But it was enough so that he’d have been further ahead if he’d farmed a little worse. Further ahead economically, I mean. With heroic restraint, I’m not even raising any of the moral questions I see involved here.

  Well, it’s human to make mistakes, and maybe that was just a dumb dairy farmer I read about. So for my last example, I’m going to use a case that doesn’t involve people at all. It involves forage.

  Corn, hay, and oats are the classic forage crops in this country, but there are many, many others. Millet, for example, and mangelwurzels, the giant beets that figure as a comic effect in the novels of P. G. Wodehouse. In the last generation, sudan grass and several kinds of sorghum have become increasingly popular forages with American farmers. They’re often served as a kind of salad (the technical name is green-chop) to animals that aren’t allowed out in the fields – milking Holsteins, say, or beef cattle in that special western hell known as the feedlot.

  Guess what. If you grow sudan grass or sorghum and are content with a reasonable yield, you can give it freely to cattle. But if you really put the fertilizer to it, you will poison the cows. What happens is that the prussic acid always present in sudan grass and sorghum shoots up to toxic levels the minute you try for maximum production.

  I think sudan grass and sorghum are trying to tell us something.

  [1982]

  Nuclear Disobedience

  THIS ESSAY IS going to be a little bit embarrassing in its present company, like a Jehovah’s Witness who has strayed into an Episcopal picnic. He will preach. The Episcopalians may like what the fellow says, but he’s too earnest for them: he keeps waving his arms and making the same point over and over, long after the entire audience has grasped it, committed it to memory, and possibly tried repeating it backwards in rhymed couplets. If only he’d sit down and eat a deviled egg, and stop all that shouting, they could get on with the day’s activities.

  As it happens, I am an Episcopalian myself, and very fond of picnics. Normally I would sympathize with the other essays and be on their side against this one. Even as it is, I won’t blame them much if they crowd back along the page and glower. But for once I am constrained to play the sweating Witness.

  What I have to witness is the familiar fact that the United States possesses weapons which are too powerful for it to control, and which may at any time destroy us and the world, without anyone’s ever quite having meant to. We all know about our danger, and just as soon as our government and the Russian government (and, of course, the Chinese, French, and British governments) reach an agreement to disarm, we will all breathe a huge sigh of relief and maybe give up smoking. So we weren’t to be extinguished after all.

  Meanwhile, progress toward such an agreement is imperceptible, and the danger increases. What does any man do to avert it? Well, some write letters to newspapers, and some distribute leaflets. Some go to see their congressman, and urge that the United States should renounce its nuclear bombs now, whether Russia does or not. (The congressman, if he is typical, explains that this would be bad politics.) A few daring ones sail their boats into the test areas or picket missile bases, and they are ignored or quietly put in jail. Most of us wait with a mixture of hope and resignation for our government to do something, and pray that extinction doesn’t come first. And while we wait, we help to increase the danger. As Air Force officers, we fly live bombs over the Arctic, and sometimes over the towns where our children lie sleeping. As physicists we design new and worse weapons. As technicians we build them. As administrators we plan them. As taxpayers we pay for them. And we don’t know what else we can do. For surely if there were anything, our government would tell us, or the people would rise with a thunderous voice and tell the government.

  The worst of it is that those of us who write the letters and plead with the congressmen actually have a feeling of virtue. We tell ourselves that we are doing all a single man can do, and if we die in a nuclear blast it won’t be our fault. Some of us think in our heart of hearts that whatever happens to the others, we won’t die in one – it would be too unfair. At the last minute, we secretly feel, some god will step out of the machine and rescue those of us who protested. Or at least one ought to.

  Henry Thoreau, from whose essay “Civil Disobedience” I take my text, has something to say about this feeling. He was talking, a hundred and twelve years
ago, about those Americans who knew in their souls that slavery was wrong and who wished to see it ended. “They hesitate and they regret,” says Thoreau, “and sometimes they petition; but they do nothing in earnest and with effect. They will wait, well disposed, for others to remedy the evil, that they may no longer have it to regret. At most, they give only a cheap vote, and a feeble countenance and God-speed, to the right, as it goes by them.” Such as these, says Thoreau, “command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt.” So much for our sense of virtue in that we wrote a letter or signed a petition. Men of flesh have to take stronger action than that.

  There’s another problem, of course, and Thoreau deals with that, too. It is hard for a single person to take much action, in a country like the United States. Solitary action seems undemocratic. As Thoreau puts it, “Men, generally, under such a government as this, think that they ought to wait until they have persuaded the majority….” If a minority of us know that we must renounce nuclear weapons here and now, while we still can, and the majority hasn’t realized it yet, then our job is to educate and persuade the majority. And how are we to do it, except with letters and petitions and television shows, and other harmless expressions of opinion?

  On all expedient matters, Thoreau would agree with this view, and so must any good citizen. On matters of total conscience, such as slavery and the use of radiation, another and a harder rule applies. In matters of total conscience, men sometimes have to disobey the government and the half-felt will of the majority. Indeed, the disobedience of conscientious men may provide the only means through which the majority can find its true will. The thunderous voice of the people has its origin in the stubborn throats of just such men. Silence them, and there is no check left on government but the opinion poll, which is no check at all. Thoreau puts the case more succinctly. In matters of total conscience, he says, “Any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one already.” As this special kind of majority, it is his plain duty to act.

  What this means in the United States now, it seems to me, is that those who care whether humanity survives must begin to risk something more than their signatures on a petition. Those of us who fly live bombs could always try refusing. Those of us who build them could look for other work. Those of us who are reservists in the armed forces – and I am one myself – could serve notice that we will not fight in a nuclear war. (That very few of us would have a chance to fight – our chief role, like that of other people, being to perish – is for the moment beside the question. So is the fact that we seem just as likely to end our species in a peaceful accident as in war.) Those of us who finance this petard with which we are to hoist ourselves could even try not paying our taxes. It would be interesting to see what happened if two or three hundred thousand of us did refuse to pay next year.

  There would be a special rightness in Americans doing these things. As much as anyone, we are responsible for letting the weapon out of control in the first place. Our technology and our genius built it; our money paid for it. We were the ones who took an atomic bomb which, in order to serve warning on Japan, we could perhaps have dropped in the open sea off Yokohama or into one of the great inland forests, and released its radiation onto a city full of human beings. Three days later, while the Japanese were deciding whether or not to surrender, we repeated the act on another city. Japanese are still dying of leukemia as a result. There is a chance that for the rest of history some Japanese babies will be monstrously mutated as a result. We did that.

  That the Japanese would almost certainly have loosed radiation on our cities in 1945, if they had had the bombs, is no counterargument. We are the ones who did do it, and in consequence we have a little more atomic responsibility than anyone else. Decent Germans must feel a special concern for Israel because of the Jews Germany slaughtered, and decent Israelis must be concerned for Palestine Arabs because of the land Israel has taken. Decent Americans must feel that concern for the whole human race, insofar as we have threatened its health and its survival with our free use of radiation. Possibly we had to do what we did in 1945. Possibly we have to be the ones to stop now. Even self-interest suggests that. After all, anyone who believes the Japanese would have used nuclear weapons on us in 1945, supposing they’d had them, must believe that some day the English, the French, the Russians, the Cubans, our surviving Indians will use them on us. Anyone who believes that and who does not push in earnest and with effect toward disarmament is a fool.

  One more point needs to be brought up, and I want to beat the reader to it. The point is simply whether all this talk about extinction unless the world gives up nuclear weapons isn’t rather alarmist. After all, we Episcopalians have been going on our picnics for years, and we haven’t been washed out yet. People have always been claiming that the world was about to come to an end, unless this or that was done, and they have been wrong every single time. Our government assures us they are wrong this time – and would probably add that those who refuse to fly live bombs or pay their taxes will most assuredly go to jail.

  I like to imagine a council of Blackfoot Indians about the year 1800. They are discussing a rumor that white men are slowly moving west, and that they have with them a terrible new weapon that shoots fire. Certain alarmists on the council predict disaster.

  “Pooh,” answer the rest. “People said that when the bow-and-arrow was invented. Remember when those other white men came up from Mexico on horses? We had never seen horses, and you hysterical types were running around moaning that all was lost. Remember, we told you we’d get our own horses and restore the balance of power? Well, didn’t we? Don’t be so excitable. You’ll be predicting the end of buffalo next.”

  Ask the surviving Blackfoot Indians whether or not their world came to an end.

  I also like to imagine an informal conclave of Neanderthal hunters about the year 74,000 B.C. They are discussing a new kind of flint spear used by the Cro-Magnons in the most recent fight. Certain alarmists among the hunters predict disaster.

  “Pooh,” answer the rest. “People said that when the throwing stick was invented. We’ll get our own flint spears and restore the balance of power. Too dangerous? You’d rather make a treaty? Listen, we’d rather run a little risk than make a treaty with those damn Cro-Magnons. What do you want to do, compromise the Neanderthal way of life? You’ll be predicting the end of mammoths next.”

  As the Neanderthals were entirely wiped out (“Evidence from Krapina in Croatia,” wrote Professor Hooton of Harvard, “indicates in no uncertain terms that the Neanderthaloids in this region were eaten by their more highly evolved successors”) … since Neanderthals are extinct, it is difficult to question them. But ask their ghosts whether or not their world came to an end.

  The only difference now is that with radiation we can all die together, instead of some doing the wiping out and some the surviving. Or even if there should be survivors of the nuclear war or the nuclear mistake, what guarantee has anyone that America will be cast in the role of the Cro-Magnons?

  It is very easy to assume that government – ours, the Russian, the World Court, any government – must be right. Government represents legitimacy, tradition, law and order, the sanction of things as they are. These are things to be respected. And yet hear Thoreau once more. “A common and natural result of an undue respect for law is, that you may see a file of soldiers, colonel, captain, corporal, privates, powder-monkeys and all, marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, ay, against their common sense and consciences, which makes it very steep marching indeed.”

  It would be nice to hear that those against whom we march were abandoning nuclear weapons of their own accord, without waiting for us. But suppose they don’t? Suppose they need the example of the United States, which our government, busy marching over hill and dale, seems unable to give them.

  If a few of us who know the peril do not step out of that file, even if it means losing our corporal’s stripes, who will
there be to head off the column from the cliff?

  [1961]

  Postscript, 1983. The little essay you’ve just read is a genuine antique. I wrote it twenty-two years ago. It originally appeared as the final piece of my long-ago, long-forgotten first book. I haven’t changed a word.

  The terrifying thing is how timely it remains. Only two details are dated. No one is sailing into nuclear test areas these days, since the tests are all underground now. That’s a gain for protestors, since there is less radioactive fallout. It’s also a gain for the government, since an underground test is harder to protest, and also less conspicuous than devastating Bikini or Eniwetok, and hence less likely to alarm people. And the list of nuclear powers now goes well beyond the United States, Russia, England, France, and China. India, Israel, probably Pakistan, probably South Africa have come crashing into the club. There may be still more with a bomb or two.

  Otherwise, things remain very much as they were in 1961. Politicians, ours and theirs, are still saying the same things. Eternally aimed nuclear weapons still point to Moscow and Washington, and probably hundreds or even thousands of other places as well. The danger of nuclear war has slowly but steadily risen, along with the number of weapons and powers. All of that is depressing.

  And yet there is good news, too. World opinion is much more mobilized than it was in 1961. Back then, there was really no chance that people who understood the dangers could turn the course of things. There were too few of them, and they were too disorganized. Now there is a chance.

  I can illustrate the change from my own life. Back in 1961, the only thing I could think to do for the sake of peace (besides write the essay) was to go on a “peace walk,” one of the first ever held at Dartmouth College