I was stopped short by this quote in a recent New York Times piece, “A Cattle Ranch is Doing What the Ivy League Can’t,” by Michal Leibowitz.
“Rebecca McMillin-Hastings, who graduated last year, described the process of cleaning an infected wound on the flank of a dairy cow named Euclid: ‘You just kind of have to get your soap in your water and, just like, push on the wound. And it really hurts her.’ She described throwing her entire body weight against the animal, knowing that she was hurting her, feeling that she was hurting her, but also knowing that it had to be done.”
She is quoting a student at Deep Springs College describing what it feels like to treat an infected wound on a dairy cow. Her article explores how a few schools, like Deep River, have ditched modernity, with all its yuppie conceits and abstract theories, returning instead to a tradition in which students found fulfillment through purposeful daily action. In this case, the school is based on the principle that the college is sustained by the students’ own labor.
Before the transition to the rat race of modern life, as philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre has written, “it was ‘easy and right’ to understand ‘work as part of the sustaining of the community of the household and of the wider forms of community which the household in turn sustains,’” Leibowitz quotes in her piece.
Reading Leibowitz’s essay awakened bodily memories. I’d been there before. It took me back to the late 1960s and early 1970s, when life in our country, as it is now, was spinning out of control.
Back then, we had Nixon’s corrupt imperial presidency thumbing its nose at the will of the people and the war in Vietnam dragged on endlessly, culminating when Nixon widened the war into Cambodia. Students peacefully protesting this escalation were gunned down at Kent State by the National Guard.
Today, we are again enduring a series of forever wars, culminating in our war with Iran, with Cuba next on the docket. As usual, Trump, contemptuous of the people’s needs, is focused on building monuments to himself and enriching his family’s fortune through personal corruption — his net worth is estimated to have increased by $3 billion during his second term alone.
The final straw came last week when Trump demanded that Congress grant him and his family a blanket pardon not only for any IRS crimes and corruption already committed but also for any they might commit in the future.
When I was young, Kent State and Cambodia were the final straw: our brains exploded. It was time to get off the bus. Seeking sanity, I dropped out of college that week and fled to the country. I wasn’t alone: millions of my generation did the same, as the Utne Reader has noted: “That decade, as many as a million young Americans uprooted themselves, almost en masse, abandoning their urban and suburban backgrounds in favor of a life in the countryside.”
I think we have once again reached that point.
Students at Deep River College crave an authentic life, not just smoke-and-mirrors hype for a rat race they can’t win. Like us back then, they are willing to forgo material goods in exchange for living in a hands-on community in sync with the natural world.
It worked for me.
My mind floated free as my hands grew calloused from earning a living by building stonewalls, constructing our home with my own two hands, and keeping warm by the wood I cut. My family was in direct contact with real life, raising chickens, ducks, geese and pigs. When the pigs were slaughtered, we cut up the meat. The chickens gave us eggs until a hen grew old and stopped laying. Then I took an axe and cut her head off, and she became chicken soup.
Living in harmony with the seasons, we felt fulfilled by what we created with our own hands in a supportive, close-knit community of like-minded individuals, with special thanks to the old Yankee farmers, tradespeople, and artisans who showed us the ropes.
I think returning to the land is an ancestral urge built into us, activated when society goes haywire, much like salmon are programmed to return to the river of their birth. Maybe Deep River College is on the cutting edge of the next exodus, this time saying no to the dithering meritocracy and the titans of AI.
Jean Stimmell, retired stone mason and psychotherapist, lives in Northwood and blogs at jstim.substack.com.