You Can Go Home Again

Will lead with quotes from Wendell Berry, Scott Russell Sanders, and perhaps Wes Jackson. "I grew up on a farm in the 30s and 40s, in the embrace of an agrarian society that was closer to the latter 19th century than to the world I would have to cope with in the latter 20th, condemning me to march out-of-step all the days of my adult life. I belonged to the last generation of that old rural society that dominated America's value system until about 1955. I witnessed the dying down days of a farming culture that had really not changed much since the invention of the scythe, the reaping hook, and the three divine persons in one God. To accentuate the sense of loss and death that my accident of birth thrust upon me, I spent 10 years in Catholic seminaries where I witnessed the last days of the old monastic lifestyle too. Until I was 24, my life was in a time warp." (Gene Logsdon, from the Preface). Here is a book for everyone who has dreamed about going back to the land to live a simpler more meaningful life. Gene Logsdon's story embodies both the frustrations and longing so many of us feel as we search for our essential selves and a happy harmonious economic existence. The measure of his courage - and contrariness - is that he has been successful. In "You Can Go Home Again", he tells us what motivated him and what success has meant. For Logsdon "home" is a not an escape from the world, but the establishment of a pattern of homes, all working together to produce a home-based economy as a bulwark of stability under the larger economy gone crazy with paper money. Home for Logsdon is a local community tied to other local communities. "If the whole county were covered with fresh snow and all the tracks of my wanderings over it were imprinted on it, almost every section of land in any of the 13 townships would show my trail. In some places, my crisscrossing footsteps would be so numerous as to pack the snow solid. The 800 miles of roadways in the county I had also travelled many times. Along every trail and every road were places where little events important to me had happened...This was home, and it was so vast and deep and high and wide that I could never tire of it." But Logsdon's philosophy is mostly between the lines. What he writes about are the sad, funny, and sometimes harrowing adventures of those who live seemingly humdrum lives: understanding creeks, shepherding sheep; coping with blizzards; winning softball tournaments; losing sanity at rock concerts; hiding in haystacks; enjoying Christmas; surviving a buggy ride; overcoming grief, not to mention absentminded professors, dictatorial editors, and fervid priests; and why maybe we should go to church in our underwear. What transpires is a lovely picture of a very American life.