Fairfield

Sickles and Sheaves — Farming, Faith, and the Frye (Part 8)

This blog post is part of a series I (Richard) am writing about my past life experiences that helped develop a love and appreciation for agricultural heritage in general and landrace grains in particular. The series is called "Sickles and Sheaves - Farming, Faith, and the Frye" and you can view the other parts of this blog series here.


Some of our local church traditions that were observed seasonally contrasted with some enduring aspects of agrarian folklore. We gleaned some of this from Norwegian farmer elders on Mother’s Sunwold side of the family who lived in the Palouse “upper country” environs of Fairfield, Waverly, and Oakesdale. I could grasp the significance of planting field potatoes on Good Friday, but among many members our grandparents’ generation the seeding of grain crops took place during a waxing moon, harvesting commenced when it waned, and in some cases women were not allowed out-of-doors during the combine’s first pass around a field of grain. Still in my day harvest concluded with spirited shouting and the ceremonial threshing of the straw fedoras worn by many of our fathers. Delving into the medieval European folk traditions occasioned by this study provides some explanation for why such traditions persisted through the years of my 1960s youth amidst harvest truck radios blaring rock music and news of Vietnam and moon landings.

Through verse by an accomplished local poet, Harry Helm (1906-1987), claimed as kin through some vague ancestral connection, we also knew poetic expressions about the beauty of area landscapes. Harry’s grandparents, John and Mary (Kleweno) Helm, had been among the first group of Volga German immigrants to settle in the 1880s in Palouse Hills not far from our country home. In a bucolic setting along the Palouse River, some half-dozen immigrant families established an Old World peasant commune using methods suggesting medieval origins—long, narrow Langstreifen fields (akin to English furlongs) in three-crop rotations (Dreifelderwirtschaft), Almenden commons for grazing and gardens, grain harvest with sickle and scythe, and “hoof-tread” threshing using horses led around a circle of piled stalks. Harry had grown up hearing stories about these ancient ways, and his reflective eye wove heritage and horizon into such poems as “Endicott Wheat Field” (1962):

Grandpa said:

The grass was like Europe’s grass,

Soft and waving like a sea.

It hissed and whispered like a friend

In well-known German words to me.

The hills were like German hills,

Green plumed against a feckless sky.

And I went riding bunchgrass trails,

Where the prairie chicken fly.

Clear waters tumbled through the trees

In every golden, sun-swept vale.

While flowers tipped their hats to me,

As they touched my prancing pinto’s tail.       

 

The Helm family’s aesthetic influence was prominently evident in the life and art of Robert R. Helm (1943-2008), great-grandson of John and Mary Helm. His mysterious, exquisite painted and collaged arrangements of landscape, rocks, and architectural fragments meticulously crafted oil on cherry, birch, and pine masterpieces reflected his relationship with heritage, terrain, and imagination. Though Helm’s style is sometimes associated with Surrealism and Luminism, its distinct physicality makes it more akin to that of a medieval artisan using unique combinations of format, composition, and color that explore meaning, reality and memory. Characterized variously as “icons of stillness” and “neo-trecento renditions of rural America,” Helm’s dreamy, rustic creations led to global recognition with his works exhibited in Paris and Berlin, and in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian, Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Louvre Gallery in Venice, California.

Although works by Helm evoke timeless themes of natural beauty and isolation, he drew inspiration from frequent travels along the Washington-Idaho rural borderlands between the Coeur d’Alene Valley and Palouse Hills where stories of his pathfinder ancestors were often retold in my visits with community elders. Oil on panel works like Spring Thaw (1985) and September Burn (1991) are notable for the placid depictions of hills, as well as for the artist’s meticulously crafted hardwood frames. “The Palouse has nurtured and reinforced his formal, psychological and metaphysical vision of life and its meaning;” writes Marti Mayo, director of the University of Houston’s Blaffer Gallery, which hosted a one-man exhibition of Helm’s art in 1994. Northwest author William Kittredge offers further commentary on how place shaped Helm’s art, just as it has power to influence others who take time to know a landscape relationally:

Go back to a place, Helm knows, and purely physical memories of who you were when you were there before may begin to echo in your body. You may remember exactly how things first felt and something of how it felt to be the person you used to be.

Go back enough times and your sense of yourself in that place may begin to stack up before you in layers. It’s a way to recall your story of yourself through the years of change and to relearn the reasons for your work and the consequences. It is a way to keep reinventing your knowledge of who you are and how you are trying to make your work matter in the world.

Sickles and Sheaves — Farming, Faith, and the Frye (Part 7)

This blog post is part of a series I (Richard) am writing about my past life experiences that helped develop a love and appreciation for agricultural heritage in general and landrace grains in particular. The series is called "Sickles and Sheaves - Farming, Faith, and the Frye" and you can view the other parts of this blog series here.


Our high school English teacher, Louise Braun, was a woman of prodigious intellect with expectations that students read and appreciate Shakespeare and Robert Frost with the same enthusiasm shown for sporting events. A native of tiny Viola in the Idaho-Washington Palouse borderlands, Mrs. Braun guided us on uncharted literary journeys across time and place with the peculiar incentive—highly controversial among faculty and parents, that once a week we could spend class time reading Farm Journal, Time Magazine, Field & Stream, or any other periodical of our own choosing. “Reading is the main thing,” she would say in the context of expanding young minds. In response to adolescent complaint that poetic expression in our anthology of world literature seemed as foreign as many authors, Mrs. Braun confided that poetry was commonly composed for spirited oral delivery. Soon afterward local farmer Leonard Jones arrived as a guest speaker but had undergone a stunning transformation on the school stage into Leonard Jones, country bard. “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,” he thundered in the first dramatic recitation by an adult that I had ever heard. His delivery of “The Road Less Traveled” was made even more memorable in the knowledge that Mr. Jones was one of us, and obviously and unashamedly relished the written and spoken word. Soon Mrs. Braun had us wondering about just what Frost’s “long scythe” was “whispering to the ground” (from “Mowing”), and if “The Need of Being Versed in Country Things” might mean that mature thinking could question some assumed claims of science and religion.

FFA advisor Dan Birdsell introduced us to Demeter and the classical symbolism of ancient farm tools by having us memorize the organization’s opening ritual. As youth we may not always have understood the meaning behind these emblems, but we came to know spring from fall barley, sickles from scythes, and that a bushel of wheat weighed about sixty pounds. Mr. Birdsell also arranged to have us periodically attend local Grange meetings in the neighboring hamlet of Winona for extracurricular practice in parliamentary procedure. Members met monthly for rural fellowship and to promote agrarian interests in state and national politics, and raised the roof with the Patrons of Husbandry unofficial anthem, Knowles Shaw and George Minor’s familiar hymn “Bringing in the Sheaves” (“Waiting for the harvest, and the time of reaping….”). The organization’s official songbook, The Patron (1925), contained numerous selections commemorating the significance of field labors:

 

 “Harvest Song”

 “Grain that was in verdure waving,

Weareth now a hue of gold,

And the yellow heads are bending,

With the fruitage they hold.

That the ripened fruit be gathered,

Speed the sickle to and fro;

For the countless hosts of kernels,

Snowy loaves ere long will show.”

 “Soon from out the noisy thresher,

There shall golden streams be pour’d,

That the farmer’s heart will gladden,

And shall bring his just reward.

Smiles the land today with plenty,

Plenty for the needy throng;

Let all classes and conditions,

Join to swell the harvest song.”

 

“The Gleaner”

“When the earth is crowned with fatness,

And the yellow harvest yields

To the sickle of the reaper,

Toiling in the sunny fields;

Mark the glad, contented gleaner,

Gather one by one her store—

Ev’ry act of cheerful labor

Makes her richer than before.”

“Golden treasures, thickly scattered,

Strew the world’s surface o’er;

Man is but a humble gleaner,

Finding knowledge, seeking more.

Step by step he plods his way,

One by one his blessings rise;

He who binds his store together,

He alone is truly wise.”