Rake in the Field

During my college years I took a six month break and traveled to North Ireland. My family had moved to a farm outside of Belfast in the 17th century and then traveled to America in the 19th century. I went back to understand this heritage.

I soon left Northern Ireland to spend most of my time down south, in Ireland. First to Dublin, but then to the far reaches of Donegal, that one region of Ulster the unionists did not want. A poor, rugged place.

It was there I lived for two months, in a small, thatched roof cottage with no water or electricity. A place warmed by a peat fire maintained in an open hearth. A place of deep quiet.

The cottage was in a valley. Only one farmer continued to work the land there, John Gallagher. An old man who farmed without any machines – just as his father had done. He farmed alone, with his wife, as his sons had abandoned that life for the city.

Each day I would walk down the lane to John's farm and head out to the fields to work from him. To learn from him.

By hand he cut his hay. By hand it was turned, each day, in the field until it was dry. And so it was that I raked the fields with him, with an old wooden rake, talking to him.

He lived his life in that one valley. The furthest he had traveled from it was a journey that took him six miles away. That valley was his home, it was all he knew.

I once asked him how long the farm had been in his family. He gazed off to the hills for a moment, then replied, "Well, I remember my granddaddy." And then he returned to his work.

At Yale I was surrounded by some of best and the brightest intellectuals. But it was from John that I learned to drink from a wellspring of wisdom.

He possessed a remarkable, indeed, profound understand of life. An understanding that came from being at one with the Land and listening to it. A wisdom that had to be felt – from which a deeper truth might be revealed.

⇒ L/land Relations