Hi-Ho the Derry-o

Appeared in Pioneer Press newspapers
October 21, 2010

It all begins when the farmer takes a wife.  So it was for my colleague in the dell, and so it was for me.

            I was a relatively happy slacker, a few months out of college and no closer to a job when, very irresponsibly, indeed, I asked Lis to marry me.  And, just as crazily, she said, “Yes.”

So the slacker took a job.

But hardly in the dell.  Our first move was to New York, miles and years and lives from here, when the farm was unimagined – and when, as a die-hard city rat (self-styled), I’d have scoffed at such a suggestion.  Lis longed to have a car when we lived in New York, in order to escape it now and again; my view was, “Where would you want to go? – we’re already in New York.”

And then the slacker took a child.  We’d always agreed we’d go where one of our families was at baby time.  Lis is from Concord, Mass., I’m from here (Glenview, originally).  And here there was a job and a house, and my parents who had only one kid, versus the five siblings Lis has ringed around Boston. So, with Aly, our first, on her way, Chicago it was.

Domesticity, then, has driven my major decisions – all of which have been far removed from my original expectations.  I told myself I’d marry late, if ever; I’d always live in Chicago; then I’d never leave New York; then I was home to stay in Glenview.  I no longer expect to ever be right about such things or even try to predict what might be next.

            And is there any environment more emblematic of domesticity than a farm?  The farmer takes a wife. The wife takes a child.  And on, and on, creating an expanding circle of relation and interdependence, a hopefully peaceable kingdom.

I love our farm and am always happy when I’m there (well, when I’m not in despair over a broke-down tractor, or  barn door I can’t budge, or some other act of fix-itivity beyond my ken).  But is there any possibility that I’d be in such a place on my own?  Not bloody likely.  As a guy alone, I would, undoubtedly, occupy a simple man cave, Oscar Madison style.

But Lis loves this place in a way that’s so irresistible that I can’t help but share it, even when oppressed by all of its demands.  She loves riding the tractor, helping with the endless chores, gazing across the fields, just breathing the air.

            Concord is a historic town that keeps it agricultural roots well watered.  And it’s spacious, zoning keeping the buildings low and well spread to retain its character. Consequently, she’s never been entirely comfortable in the places we’ve lived before – certainly not in cheek-by-jowl Brooklyn, and not even in pleasantly suburban Glenview.

            But Old Mill Creek feels just like home to her because of the openness, the history (relatively young though it is compared to Concord), the horseyness, the beauty of the place, all of which fit her like a well-worn and -loved glove

And that makes it home to me.  This farm would be inconceivable without Lis. She’s its heart.   And, after places chosen for different necessities – work, family -- this is the place we chose together, for us.

She always said she’d follow me anywhere.  And she has.  But, at the same time, I’ve been following her -- all the way home.

Happy Birthday, Girl!

Ganging Agley

Appeared in Pioneer Press newspapers

September 30, 2010

Poetry being an even more romantically non-remunerative endeavor than farming, Robert Burns, the Scots national poet, had to supplement his versifying by working the land, earning him the sobriquet of “The Ploughman Poet.”  I’m not much of either of those things, but I had a highly Burnsian experience the other day.

Our north and east fields hadn’t been cut all season.  We didn’t have the equipment, and our focus has been on getting the house built.  So, the fields were about up to my neck.  But I was told that they wouldn’t grow in right next year if I didn’t get them cut this, so I went at it. 

I borrowed a beauty of a John Deere 4320 (almost sounds like I know what I’m talking about, doesn’t it)?  It’s a nice, big hunk of tractor.  Ron, my Deere guy (yes, I now have a Deere guy) showed me what I needed to know to get going – and so I did.

And it was kind of a blast.  It went through that high growth like it was nothing at all. And, as I cruised along, I noticed a field mouse, running on ahead of me, doing everything he could to get out of my way. I’d see him dashing through the leavings in the last row I’d cut, rising over the top and diving back under, reminding me of the pair of cheetahs I’d seen bring down a gazelle in the Serengeti – just a rustling in the tall grass till they resurfaced like a wave over the crest of the savannah and brought down their kill.

All of which put me in mind of Rabbie Burns and, probably, his best-known poem, “To A Mouse,” in which he disturbs said rodent’s nest in his role as ploughman, sending his poet side into some lyrical, fellow-travelers-to-the-grave stuff.  The poem contains perhaps his most quoted line, “The best-laid schemes of mice and men oft go awry,” or, as it’s rendered in his Scots’ pidgin, “aft gang agley.”

In any case, I was glad he got away.

I’d quickly knocked off the first half of the north field when Lis arrived with our neighbor, Marie. So, I turned off the Deere and clambered down to chat a bit.

It had occurred to me that Ron hadn’t shown me how to refuel the beast – presumably because it was too simple and self evident to bother with.  But, making my way around the tractor, it was not all that simple.  Nor self evident.

I asked the ladies for their thoughts.  Lis isn’t experienced with tractors – but, again, how hard can it be?  And Marie, who used to spend six hours a week cutting around her big, beautiful place, does know a thing or two.  So, we looked it over. 

We found one orange cap clearly marked “Oil”.  So, not there.  And we found another, smallish cap marked with an icon of a kind of tank containing a droplet. So, could be that.  There was a dip stick in the neighborhood, so it occurred to me that it might be oil.  But we just couldn’t find anything else that looked like a gas tank – a feature that is wonderfully obvious on my smaller Deere mower.  So, the panel concluded this must be it.  Marie did ask if this big rig might take diesel.  But Ron hadn’t mentioned it.  There was no operator’s manual.  And my smaller machine took regular gas.  So we went with that.

And it ran just fine.  I finished the north field and rode down to the east one, along the creek. And I’d happily knocked off about half of it -- wondering all the way why I was getting a flashing exclamation point on the dash, along with a message reading “Lo Fuel” -- which was crazy, because, after careful deliberation, I’d just filled the tank, right? – when it briefly sputtered and stopped flat.

Could it already be out of gas?  Well, maybe it just burns that much.  It did say “Lo Fuel”.  So, I added some more.  And nothing.

So, I looked around.  And it was then that I figured out how to open the little plastic hatch thing, up in front of the steering wheel, that I couldn’t get open before.  But that couldn’t matter, right, because who’d put the gas tank there . . . on top . . . with no words or symbol to indicate it’s there?  Well, turns out John Deere would.

Sure enough, when I flipped that hatch open, there was an obvious gas cap.  With the word “Diesel” on it.  Yeah, I’d filled the oil tank with gas.

So, I called Ron, and he talked me through it.  Drain the oil/gas mixture – about 16 quarts’ worth.  Put back that much just-plain-oil.  And fill the right tank with the right fuel. Check, check, and check.  And nuthin’.  Just that sad, sad sound of an engine not starting.

But I’m a farmer now – resourceful and undaunted. And embarrassed.  I would get this thing to work!  Unless I didn’t.

And, ultimately, after toying with me some more, it did start up. And I finished the field and got it back into the barn.

But not until I’d spent a couple of grim hours, stranded in that half-cut field, reflecting on – and loudly cursing – my cruel fate. And that’s when Burns and his mouse came back to me.  My day had ganged seriously agley.  But, in the end, it proved to be a good one.  I’d been neither helpless nor hopeless.  Some of my instincts had been on target – if not quite sufficiently.  I’d asked the right questions – though I’d answered them wrongly.  I’d learned a few things.  And both the mouse and I lived to tell the tale.

Bypass Coronary

Appeared in Pioneer Press newspapers

September 19, 2010

The message from El Capitan was urgent.  There was a public meeting taking place, and I had to be there.  El Cap is a lifelong local and knows what gives in our new area.  In fact, some 25 years ago his parents tried to buy the place we’re now laboring on, so, when he speaks of municipal matters, I pay attention.

            The meeting in question was to review the Route 45 Bypass project and the options under consideration by the appropriate powers.  Our place is about three-tenths of a mile from Route 45, and the famed “Millburn Strangler” – a traffic choke point in the middle of the Millburn Historic District.  I’m told that the back-ups are ugly at rush hours, though I’ve never experienced the phenomenon, myself.

            We were aware of the long planning and debate over the bypass when we bought our place.  We’d been assured that it would go to the west of 45; we’re to the east, so we largely put it out of our minds.

            Exactly who it was who gave us this assurance, I’m no longer sure.  It may have been the folks we bought from.  If so, it was not merely a matter of salesmanship on their part; our neighbors, Kevin and Marie, long-time residents of the area, confirm that since the beginning of the planning process – some 20 years or so – the plan had been for the bypass to go west, through the more settled Lindenhurst, and that some land had even been purchased for the purpose.

            However, some of the folks who live on that side of 45 insist they’d never been warned when they bought their houses; and others grant that it was mentioned, but that they’d been assured that it would never happen.

            But it looks like it will, in fact, happen, one way or another. And Capitan was exercised because it looked a whole lot like it was going to happen to us.  Perusing the Web site dedicated to the project, I found a map showing the nine proposed routes for the bypass under consideration.  I was particularly intrigued by the one that went directly through our barn.

While convenient, this was not so much what we were looking for when we moved to the country.

So, I sped to the meeting – over the precise roads in question, making good time, with no traffic back-up. The good news:  of the nine original possible routes, only three were still on the table – and none of them turned my house into a toll booth.

Also pretty good news – from our perspective/side of the road -- is that two of the three remaining approaches place the bypass on the west side of 45, in accordance with what we’re told was the original plan.  But one option would go east of 45, not too near our place, but not only lopping off a piece of our neighbors’ beautiful spread, but also cutting through land that’s part of the Historic District.

Now, I hate to get all NIMBY.  I’m public-spirited, and want to work with my neighbors to find the best solution to shared problems.  But the very reason we made this MBY was for its beautiful, semi-rural character.  It’s extremely unique.  Although located just a couple miles from

Grand Avenue

, featuring not just Gurnee Mills but virtually every national sprawl-denizen business you could think of, it feels like it’s a hundred miles in the country.

To get to Old Mill Creek you turn off Grand, pass through a half-mile of regular suburbia, a half-mile of horsey suburbia, and then you’re in beautiful open country. This combination, of rural peace, space, and beauty, with high proximity to – well, maybe not quite civilization, but, at least, the modern world -- is very appealing, and hard to beat.  It would just be a terrible pity to lose this unique character to more asphalt for the sake of two pinch-points a day.

But, such is politics, right? It’s the balancing of needs and interests. Sometimes, it actually produces the best outcome.  So, time to get involved, I guess.

It seems this move is making not only a real neighbor out of me, but a citizen, as well.  Of course, these things do go together pretty naturally -- but it's still a change for me after being a passive suburbanite in a more developed place where things just seemed to get done.  Here civic decisions seem more immediate, real, and made by people.

Citizenship can be damned inconvenient.  But it’s a lot better than the alternatives.

This (Really) Old House



The "Jake" Strang House, 1880 (left).  Photo:  Craig Bender






 Appeared in Pioneer Press newspapers
September 2, 2010

Well, it took a while – and a whole lot of complaining -- to get construction off the ground (a particularly inapt phrase, wouldn’t you say?), but now that it’s rolling under the energetic aegis of Jefferson, our dynamo builder, we’re making up for lost time.

            In the proverbial jiffy, the old addition was off, returning the house to its original form – well, original plus a big, green tarp where there used to be a brick wall.  Now there’s a great big hole, filled with beautiful cee-ment, and we can see the shape of the rooms to come in the new addition.  It’s all getting pretty real.

            Which would make this an opportune time to tell you the tale of the house itself.

            On the Illinois Register of Historic Places it’s listed as the “Jake” Strang House, a home-spun combination of Federal, Italianate, and Greek Revival styles popular at the time.  It was built by John “Jake” Strang with money made in the California Gold Rush.  As the story has it, he couldn’t get hold of enough bricks to complete the house before winter came on in 1856, so he closed up the one-storey section that had been erected, and added the two-storey section the following year. 

As a result, for many years the house had two front doors.  Over time the original entry, in the one-storey section, gave way to French doors, which were subsequently mooted by tall bushes grown in front of them.  Part of our project is restoring them to use.

For a sense of perspective, the oldest existing structure in Lake County is the Casper Ott Cabin in Deerfield, dating to 1837.  The County was incorporated in 1839, as a break-away from McHenry County.  And the town of Millburn – then the local metropolis, since incorporated into Old Mill Creek, but represented by the well-preserved Millburn Historic District -- was settled in 1843.

So, it’s a pretty damn old house.  Abe Lincoln was still a Springfield lawyer when Jake put it up. And, as the local laird at the time, he built it to last.  The walls are made of double brick from the old Lake Villa Brick Yard; the foundation’s made of two-foot-thick local field stone, surrounding a dirt-floored basement that looks and feels like a stop on the Underground Railroad (which was, actually, active in the neighborhood at the time).

And every one of those original bricks, as well as every pane of wavy, original glass (of which there are still many) are sacred in the eyes of the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency, with whom we’re working to preserve the historic character of the house, while bringing some things up to date and adding on the new wing. So, while we thought we could replace the old windows with new, energy-efficient ones, we’ll be adding new, hand-milled storms and screens, instead; and Jefferson has worked some magic to remove 150 years’ worth of paint and return them to operability.

Both sections of the house originally had flat roofs.  As you might imagine, that didn’t work so well.  Over time, gabled roofs were built over the flat ones.  This enclosure created the attic (presently a mud wasp habitat), which, for some large number of years, has been accessible only through what used to be used an exterior window, turned into an idiosyncratic “door” when it was closed in.

            For all this history, however, we’re only the house’s fifth owners.  Jake enjoyed it for almost 40 years, until his death in 1895.  It then passed to his daughter, Jessie. Beatrice Anderson, whose praises are still sung in the neighborhood, owned it for the longest time, from 1920 till the 1980s.  It was she who put the house on the Illinois and National registers, with the help of the Historic Millburn Association.  It was then owned for about 25 years by members of the Bonner family, which shares roots in the county as old and deep as the Strangs, as demonstrated by the Lake County Forest Preserve’s Bonner Heritage Farm property in Lindenhurst.  In fact, the original carpentry work in the house was done for Jake Strang by one of the ancestors of the folks from whom we bought the house.

            And so it comes down to us.  A new chapter in a long legacy that we love.  And we couldn’t choose a more wonderful place to go broke in.

Ob-La-di, Ob-la-da, Nature Wins

Appeared in Pioneer Press newspapers

August 19, 2010

I am far from a global climate change denier.  The scientific consensus is clear.  I just can’t worry about it much. 

As R.E.M. reassured us, lo, these many years ago, though it may be the end of the world as we know it, we can still feel fine. Because, really, the only thing in jeopardy is the world as we know it – not the world as living, growing, evolving entity.  We can do enough damage to take some other innocent life forms with us.  But the harm we’ll do will be primarily to ourselves. The underlying planet will be just fine over the long term of geological time. 

This is the conclusion I’ve been led to by my so-far brief stint as a farm owner.  My evidence:

·        Exhibit A:  Our first agricultural act on the property, as chronicled in these pages some time ago, was the creation of a transplant bed to house some specimens we wished to save from the coming construction that would destroy all in its path. We tended the bed closely for a couple of weeks, then got distracted by one thing or another for the next couple. 

I assumed the weeds would have gotten somewhat ahead of us in the brief interval since last having at them, so, when I returned to the patch, I brought a particularly apt implement with me to tackle them.  And I put it away, unused.  Because, not only had the little bed become completely overgrown with whopping, great invaders of every variety, but we could scarcely even find the bed at all, so complete was the jungle-like overgrowth in just a couple weeks’ time.

·        Exhibit B:  Craig, the superb landscape designer we’re working with, noted that the English Ivy adorning the north side of the house (as opposed to the Boston Ivy on the south side) is a slow grower.  Typically, perhaps.  But not here, at the House That Nature Ate.

Last fall, when we began visiting and bought the house, a moderate amount of the stuff climbed the structure in a picturesque way.  Come the warm weather, the vines had absolutely consumed the place – to the extent, in fact, that we had a couple of good foot-or-two strands growing inside the house, in Babylonian splendor.  They found their way through the window frames and, deciding they didn’t like being out in the sun all day, chose to grow indoors.  It was probably by a similar mechanism that the first land creature crawled out of the sea.

·        And, finally, Exhibit C – the electrical box.  As you probably know already, the metal box that contains your electrical service is quite solid.  It probably has a front door that closes and a little latch to open it.  They border on being hermetically sealed.  Nonetheless, the one in our barn had a mouse nest in it. How they had gotten in was not entirely clear.  The options were few and unpromising – spaces unimaginably small and tight that they managed to make their way through, nonetheless, in search of home.  And, of course, once they did, they destroyed the modern technology they’d turned into a dormitory.

So, although the making of our tiny works – even just a house like ours -- often feels like it, their destruction needn’t be a centuries-long process, like the jungle swallowing Angkor Wat.  It happens with surprising speed.

            So, we can oil up the oceans, and smoke up the skies. We shouldn’t of course, but we seem incapable of helping – that is, restraining -- ourselves. It might make it terrible for some period of time – long by our measures, short by the planet’s.  And then it’ll be fine again.  Maybe better.  As the chaos theorist played by Jeff Goldblum in “Jurassic Park” put it, “Life finds a way.” 

Farming, you see, is a highly philosophical experience. 

Ob-la-di. Ob-la-da.

Appraising the Appraisers

Photo:  Craig Bender

Appeared in Pioneer Press newspapers
August 5, 2010

Hallelujah, the house is a shambles!

            The kitchen is all torn out.  The old addition (from the ‘30s, when the house was only 80 years old) is ready to come down. The back door is gone, so are the windows.  The rest of the house has been sealed up.  And there’s a beautiful dumpster brimming in the back yard.

            So, the commencing has finally commenced.

            What brought about this happy change in our stalled building process?  Like Lincoln, who went through one commanding general after another until he finally found, in Grant, one willing to fight, we needed the right personnel.

            The problem was Appraiser A, the accursed.  It was he who ground things to a halt, just when we were about to start on time, when his appraisal of the property’s future, post-enhancement value came in meaningfully lower than the total of what we’d bought it for plus what we were ready to invest.  Even though the bank wanted to give us what we needed, their tightened, post-bubble rules locked them into a percentage of one guy’s opinion, and, as the banker ruefully told us, “The appraisers are the kings today.”

            As far as we can tell, this regal exercise of power consisted of counting bedrooms and bathrooms, and waiting for the computer to spit out the nearest comparable sales – nearest in mileage, that is, not in actual similarity of the properties.

            This led to a financing death spiral:  modify the plan to fit the now formulaically lowered budget -- e.g., drop a bathroom to get the cost to the right level -- only to have the appraisal then shrink in parallel, because now you have fewer bathrooms.  The lines converge somewhere around just bringing in Molly Maids, instead.

            The outlook wasn’t brilliant.  Until, that is, we were rescued by virtuous Appraiser B, blessings be upon him. Appraiser B who, looking at the same property as his colleague, envisioned a higher value for our scaled-down Plan B than Appraiser A came up with for the expanded Plan A.

            Appraiser B, of course, is a saint and a hero and will go down in our family lore.  We view his judgment as the correct one, of course.  We feel he took his job seriously and did it right, identifying actually comparable comparables – which, admittedly, isn’t easy with an unusual property like this one.  But he took the time to think about the assignment, to make the effort to find legitimate comparators, and used the imagination to envision what we’re aiming to build.

            And our lives changed overnight.

            That sounds like quite an exaggeration.  It ain’t.  Thanks to the difference of one guy’s opinion over another’s, we went from the prospect of leveraging every asset we own (and then some), to being merely way over our heads – a situation with which we’re well acquainted and have grown quite comfortable over the years. 

We lost more than two prime months of the building season to this farce.  We no longer have a hope of being in our new home for Christmas.  But we won’t have to scuttle the project and lick our wounds, either.

            So, thanks to Appraiser B, we’ll be executing Plan B, with Banker B.  Poor Banker A had to watch the business walk away and use our case to pitch for a reconsideration of his bank’s now strangulating rules.

            All because of one guy’s opinion. 

The appraisers were given all this power to correct the previous imbalance in the system – only to create another.  It raises the Socratic question, “Who will guard the guards themselves” (better known these days in its graphic-novel translation, “Who will watch the Watchmen?”) -- those given the role of protecting the city, if they, themselves, go astray?

In the system we’ve set up today, who will appraise the appraisers?

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

Appeared in Pioneer Press newspapers

July 22, 2010

I’m a notoriously bad neighbor. 

Well, I hope not actually a bad one.  I don’t think anyone’s ever found it particularly difficult to live near me.  There are no shots fired on my property, no domestic brawls; the property is maintained at least adequately.

            And “notoriously” is probably an overstatement, as well.  It’s not as if word of my breathtakingly un-neighborly actions spread across the countryside.  But, over the years, I’ve made my desire to be left alone fairly clear, both in conversation and in print. 

In truth, I’ve been essentially a non-neighbor.  My desire, outside of work, is to be in my home with my family, sometimes my friends – the people I wish to see, and don’t as much as I’d like.  A former neighbor used to intercept me regularly on the seemingly long walk from the garage to the house – which made our eventual move into a home with a connected garage one of the happiest occasions of my life.

I’m willing – more than willing: happy – to be a good nearby person.  If you’re in need, I’m there to help.  And I hope I’m not actually unfriendly; just not out-goingly friendly.  But I’ve just never been the guy to come to the block party and get to know everyone. 

Now, I’m not saying this is a great way to be. At all. But I’ve accepted that it’s the way I am – though with occasional urges to fight my nature in the name of what strikes me as better policy and behavior.

The last time we moved – the time I swore I’d never move again – I’d actually resolved to do a better job and to be a more engaged neighbor.  But I didn’t quite get around to mentioning it to anyone else.  So, when Lis made the first contact with the family across the street, she laughingly dismissed their suggestion that we get together, on the grounds that I just didn’t do that.  This was not an insurmountable obstacle, of course.  I could have enacted my new policy.  But, while I groused about it a bit, I took the opportunity to hide behind the wall she’d erected on my behalf.

So, it was with no little surprise – or mockery – that my kids saw me heading to the Fourth of July picnic in our new town. 

We’d chosen this locality substantially because it fulfilled my long-held dream of not seeing neighbors (we can, actually – but just barely, with acres between us, and not at all when the trees are in leaf). But there it was, a note from next door, inviting us to come on over, then proceed to the village get-together.

It was a pregnant moment.  I could reverse the long – admittedly bad, but comfortable – habit of many years by making a small effort; or I could lapse back into curmudgeonly hermitage.  And, there, I made a fateful choice:  to try to be a normal, decent person.

And we had a great time.

The neighbors were lovely and welcoming and interesting and cool.  The same went for the other friends from the area they’d invited, who couldn’t have been nicer and easier.

And the town celebration made for one of the best 4ths we’ve ever had.  Old Mill Creek has a wonderful tradition:  the village president generously welcomes the town to his place.  Everyone brings a dish.  There was an excellent jazz combo, good fireworks.

But the thing that made it extraordinary – for me; though otherwise completely normal – was thoroughly enjoying neighborliness with my, you know, neighbors.  We met a good few (not that there are an awful lot to meet; a subject of conversation was the census and speculation as to what it would come up with for the village this time – there being general agreement that the last count of roughly 250 was wildly inflated).

And this was clearly a factor – the sense of real community created by the special circumstances of this unusual little place.  Our “next-door” neighbors noted that they hadn’t seen most of the folks at the party for the last year.  So coming together, in a celebration of       place and community, in an area where it’s easy not to see much of anyone, takes on a kind of meaning I’d been unfamiliar with as a city dweller and suburbanite. It had more the feeling of a large family reunion than of a small civic gathering.

I’d never felt that just happening to live in the same area meant much.  But of course it does.  What could be more fundamentally decent than knowing the people who, by whatever grace, happen to be set down beside you?  I want to say “especially in a place like this” – which would get me off the hook for my history of humbugging elsewhere – but, no.  I always knew better.  I’m just glad to have come to a place that can make it clear enough for even me to see. 

Ironically – and, therefore, inevitably – I moved where I’d never have to see my neighbors, only to learn how to actually be one. Sometimes it’s wonderful to be wrong. And, to my old neighbors: sorry I missed you.