How many of us reach for our phones as soon as we wake up? Bleary-eyed, groggy, we go straight to the messages and emails and tweets and videos with auto-generated captions that accumulated overnight. So begins our day of words.
That this deluge of the world’s troubles—there’s the news cycle, but also pings from the boss and updates in the family group chat—comes in the form of text is emblematic of our frantic digital existence. Constant prattle. Our lives seem perpetually filtered through chatter.
Too many days, I’m no different. I grab my phone when I wake up, too. But our family recently purchased a farm, and increasingly my days spent grazing livestock have gotten me thinking not just of moving beyond news and politics, but words as well. Suffice it to say, this is an odd experience for a writer.
The task for all writers is essentially the same: converting clear thinking into clear prose. Thus many of us, whether for practice or just out of subconscious habit, have a robust inner monologue of complete sentences. I’ve written a lot about the outdoors, and when you canoe a long river or climb a mountain and know you have to write a book about it afterwards, you spend much of the adventure in your own head, thinking of the perfect phrase to describe every tree and brook. Are those hills like a green rumpled carpet? A blanket on an unmade bed? You’ve read them all before.
This writerly urge to narrate our lives is common to most of us. Whether you post on Facebook or X or Instagram or scribble in your journal at night, this veneer of words overlays so much human action. We tell stories to make sense of the world and our own lives, it’s true. But lately I don’t need a theory of everything; I need to raise chickens, and words only get in the way.
Our farm is in upstate New York, where the Adirondacks, Green Mountains, Lake Champlain, and Hudson River all come together. It is not a homestead or a vacation cabin, it’s a working farm. We sell pasture-raised chicken and lamb and have ordered a few hundred trees so we can plant an orchard. Our valley is beautiful in a way I can’t put into words, but, more importantly, haven’t tried.
Farming often feels separate from words, almost preverbal. This is certainly not to say it is mindless. Anything but. It is geometric, intuitive, and sensory more than anything. When I need to figure out how a weasel got into the chicken brooder, I don’t translate the problem into words first. I convert unarticulated thought into action directly. This mental work is exhausting. How do you know if a lamb is sick? How do you know if the pasture is overgrazed? You know. That’s what our neighbors say. You can just tell.
In this way, farming seems to be a little like cooking. Few writers have the real gift to communicate the interior life of physicality. Among his many other skills, Anthony Bourdain had this ability to find fresh words for the unsaid. I’ve yet to achieve this breakthrough; I’m still a line cook busy filling orders. How long do you whip egg whites or caramelize onions? Until they are done. Want to frustrate a chef? Ask them to put “done” into words.
This isn’t flow, though flow is part of it, if you’re lucky. Flow is about working instinctively, so you lose track of time, and there is a bit of that. You can get lost fitting hay bales just so, like a physical game of Tetris. But the unworded work I mean is more in the moment, and aware.
It’s also not about learning new terms, a normal part of entering any new field. Like any profession, farming has a lingo, and you can pick it up without too much trouble; before long you’ll be searching the paper classifieds for second-cut small squares like an old hand. And the species names for all the plants in the pasture, plantains and vetch and chicory and red clover, soon come too.
The words are like any other job. It’s the wordless parts that throw me. My old barn from the 1850s is ventilated to keep hay dry and has chutes to clean manure and guides to move animals in and out. Centuries of knowledge are contained in the frame of the barn, wordlessly. The loft was designed and laid out to make my work easier, if I can only figure out how.
Show, don’t tell. That old writer’s saw. Except, you know, in real life.
I’m farming with my son and he takes more naturally to wordlessness than I do. A serious athlete who played hockey in college, he is used to knowing things by doing them. As the writer, I’m the one disconcerted by the inability to describe, exactly, what this new thing I’m doing is with any sort of specificity. Being with him is a relief; a day without translation, just action.
My ignorance is breathtaking. But I feel it rather than think it. Normally, in our knowledge economy, ignorance means not being conversant with things like treasury yields or cell-phone network protocols. My ignorance is a little less articulable. More like, given the state of our pastures and the rain so far this year and the amount of forage and the condition of the animals and the hay in the loft, what’s the best way to keep these ewes fit all winter so we get healthy lambs come April? And the answer is, once you’ve done it, you look at the depth of the grass and the density of the weeds and whether they’ve gone to seed and the swell of back fat along the spine of the sheep and you know. But I don’t know yet.
And that’s only part of the question anyway, much less the answer. You also need to consider your stewardship of the land and soil health and habitat and a changing climate, not to mention markets and the sustainability of the entire enterprise and who is going to buy your chicken anyway. I’m also sure there are parts of the question I haven’t even learned yet.
I recognize the irony here. Bringing all these words into a wordless space. I’m doing the narrating right now. Mea culpa. All I can say is that I’m learning, and aspiring, and in the mornings now, as much as I can, I leave my phone on the table and go put on coffee and feed chickens instead. Free of the news, free of words. Working quietly. It’s not all idyll. But it is satisfying.
