A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

I was upside down in a pile of dogs, all howling over the roar of the engine, when I heard the pilot scream, "There's too much weight in the tail! Throw the dogs forward or we're going down!"

I was still wearing my full winter gear, which included a down parka, and the dogs bit me and the pilot and ripped my parka so that soon the plane was filled with small white feathers and flying dogs and swear words and blood.

Only Gary Paulsen. He's to wild winter tales what Adrian Tchaikovsky is to bugs.

The true stories behind his books are much more OTT than the books themselves. I hate to doubt a person's word just because their stories seem unlikely considering how much hard-to-believe stuff has actually happened to me, but I can't help wondering if Paulsen just heard some stories and then said he saw them happen. Specifically, the plane he witnessed crashing in the ocean when he was a child on the boat that went to rescue the survivors, only to witness them all get eaten by sharks a la Quint's story from Jaws. ("The sailors were literally pulling people out of sharks' mouths." REALLY?) Or the kid he saw get killed by a deer he was feeding in front of a "Don't Feed The Deer" sign. I 100% believe the dog-and-plane story though.

Be that as it may, this book is pure distilled essence of Paulsen: nature and its dangers and beauty and grossness and violence, hunting and survival and life and death. And flying dogs.

By the author of Hatchet and about a bazillion other wildernessy books.

I read it while staying in a cabin in Mariposa which was heated by a woodburning stove. Since I was alone except for my cats and a truly astonishing number of bugs, I lit the fires myself. This was a new experience as normally I stay in my parents' house and Dad has charge of their stove. (My parents plus nine relatives were all staying in the main house. The cabin is about a 6 minute walk or 1 minute drive down a steep grade, and used to belong to their caretaker. He once opened the window and saw a bear staring back at him.)

Due to a combination of my lack of fire-starting experience and a shortage of kindling other than paper (the logs stayed dry in their shed but most of the kindling got left outside and rained on - the rain is also what caused the bugs to seek dryer homes), I frequently needed to make multiple tries before the fire took. It was a very pleasant, meditative, connect-with-your-ancestors activity, as was staring into the resulting fire. Since the cabin lacked internet, cell phone service, and TV, my activities while inside were limited to reading, writing, playing with my cats, and studying the behavior of fire. It was very satisfying.

To bring this back to the book in question, the other reason my stay was relaxing was that the way I was providing for myself was by writing, and that was the only paying work I did. My only chores were caring for my cats, sweeping the floor, my own laundry, dealing with the bugs, and pitching in a bit with cooking and dishwashing at the main house. I had modern conveniences like a propane lighter, and the logs were already cut. I was experiencing the idealized vacation version of country life, not the version where your survival depends on the work you put into your surroundings.

Clabbered Dirt, Sweet Grass is a lyrical account of the work of a Minnesota farm, arranged by seasons, at some unspecified point in the past; based on Paulsen’s age, I would guess the 1950s. Paulsen’s emphasis is on the unrelenting, backbreaking ceaselessness of the labor, and on how it gives the workers a sense of purpose and connection to the natural world. It’s all about the men’s work, though Paulsen does periodically note what the women are doing and that they’re working as hard as the men but at different tasks. But they seem to lead very separate lives.

It’s written in a very rhythmic, poetic style, which gives it a cyclical, almost Biblical feeling: “to every season…” Though nostalgic, it doesn’t portray the old times as a golden age. The book is interspersed with regular mentions, not detailed but horrifying, of farm accidents, often befalling very young children. The work that gives lives meaning is also necessary for survival, and doesn’t allow for enough rest to prevent accidents due to exhaustion, or to keep an eye on children to make sure they don’t fall into the machinery.

It’s very atmospheric, needless to say. It also has the implicit tension that most of this sort of book has, in which the entire book is an elegy for a way of life that has now mostly passed, by one of the people who didn’t go on to live it. Paulsen became a writer, not a farmer. The people in the book may hate certain tasks or long for more sleep, but nobody ever says they want something different out of life, some other meaning and purpose, or a job that doesn’t require eighteen-hour workdays or risk the lives of their children. And yet some of them must have, because not everyone got forced out of farming. Some people saw a chance to get out and jumped at it.

The book’s introduction is about Paulsen’s encounter with an old farmer mourning his inability to pass on his farm to his children, as his son is dead and his daughter doesn’t want to get married. It doesn’t say whether the daughter can’t keep it up by herself or doesn’t want it and that’s why she won’t marry or whether she does want it but her father won’t give it to her unless she has a husband. The same social forces that made it possible for the people who wanted to get off the farm to do so also often made it impossible for the people who wanted to keep things the way they were. Paulsen’s book gives the old farmer’s point of view on the work; the daughter’s is unspoken.

Clabbered Dirt, Sweet Grass