I remember the blooming orchard and the endless acres. I remember the plump carrots and enough hay to bury a village. I remember the maple grove being a place of abundance and the creek down the dirt road never being short of fish.
On the long days, the days when I'm waiting for a final stroke of the clock, I remember all those things as clearly as a summer afternoon.
When college, with its accompanying concrete and cacophony, bears down with the unforgiving tension of finals, it's easy to think of the food of my younger days.
My home is still where it was when I left. On a dirt road a mile west of Highway 97, you'll find the farm I grew up on. Whenever I'm back home, I make sure to eat well and eat often, feasting on the products that sprang from the land my family tended. Now, as my penultimate semester of college comes to its end, I'm looking back to the north, hoping to find the reassurance in food that came with growing up in Athens, Wisconsin.
It's a long road back home, rolling north on Interstate 39 until it runs out and Highway 51 keeps going. The roadside submits panoramas of the black earth of Dane County, with all the corn stalks reaching for the sun and hours to go before I'm home. South of Plover, potatoes and soybeans blanket the willing terrain. The state flattens out and the trip is changing from relaxed to anticipatory.
When the car heads west, the produce morphs again, replacing some fields of grass with shaded hillsides of ginseng. Marathon County, my county, boasts the most ginseng production of any place in the world and I've always seen it as a comforting part of the background. There was a summer when I knelt down in the ginseng fields for a few weeks, pulling the weeds and working my way into my area's cash crop.
Then the road pulls north again, with soaring oaks to my left and grazing sheep on the right. It's a few miles from home now, and I know almost every farm all around me, glad that most of them are still operating under the care of families.
When I pass through my hometown, the farmer's mill remains a block off the main street, operating as a focal point in what is still a farm town. The final stretch brings me home to the comfortable memories of a past, and maybe even a future, tied to the fortunes of the good earth.
I make no apologies for being a farmboy. Though it's been over seven years since I milked a cow, I still prefer to think of my father's farm as the primary architect of my identity. Though it's bittersweet now, without morning and evening chores to frame my day, the connection to the farm remains, stubborn as only a farmer can be.
Had the road home taken a different twist, I could have passed by Van der Geest Dairy, the largest in the state. It has over 5,000 animals under its poorly ventilated roofs and a team of underpaid laborers who work what amounts to factory labor, but staring at udders all day. It is a place of lagoons of manure and faceless animals, too many to name and never enough to turn the desired profits.
I rarely take that way home, preferring to pass by farms where food and living operate in tandem. The farms I know have all made a way to eat and a way of life. It saddens me to think the next generation of farms may only be a way of business.
For three generations, my family has made its living with the clay-filled ground and winters above the 45th parallel. There is something frightening in thinking that the ground cannot support another generation.
Of course, I believe it can. On Saturdays I have wandered around Capitol Square, looking at the successes that are measured one pint, pound or stalk at a time. There are farmers out there and they are not only surviving, but thriving. The promises that used to lure immigrants to America, those of quality land and independent living beneath the stars, are still available.
Then again, I cannot wander from vendor to vendor all day. I cannot convince myself that being a Farmers' Market shopper will redeem me as my father's land is rented to the highest bidder. The bit of comfort that I get from walking out of Mifflin Street Co-op with a handful of groceries will not last if my farm town becomes a commuter's village.
So I go back home, hoping that its apple cider and maple syrup will hold me over until next spring, when the garden finds the sky again.
These years have put me on hold, wishing for an excuse to be back where I grew up and to harvest the fruits and vegetables that spring from the land my family claims as its own.
Now, as winter stretches itself over our acres, the freezing temperatures remind me of the root cellar that holds a season's worth of canned goods. My mom tells me that it used to always be full, not half-filled like I see it. However, I remember canning beans and tomatoes, knowing I'd be sent to the cellar to bring some up for cooking eventually.
It was a long weekend at home this past Thanksgiving, one that gave me pause and forced me to gaze out at the open spaces that my family owned. The land, it seemed, would stay with the Schultz name, as my brother, his girlfriend, my parents and I discussed transferring it from the older generation to the younger.
Though we may not become dairy farmers, we would set aside fields for raspberries and strawberries, with a few grazing animals and some chickens in the barn. We drew out a plan that looked ahead and kept our land as our own for the years to come.
Though our plan is neither complete nor detailed, it gave me the hope that the years to come will mean I won't have to simply remember the orchard, the maple grove and, most importantly, the land. I can go back to it, which is what I've always hoped to do.
Ben Schultz is a fifth-year student majoring in English and history. He can be reached at
