17 minute read
Feature: The Virtues of Dirty Work
Story and Photos by Joshua Brown
Professor Mark Usher finds insight about many of today’s predicaments by following the roots of relatively modern ideas deep into the rich soil of Greek and Roman antiquity.
Mark Usher, the Lyman-Roberts Professor of Classical Languages and Literature, stands in ankle-deep mud wielding a flame-thrower. He turns the blazing propane toward the ground and burns a hole through a black sheet of plastic that stretches across a pasture on his farm in Shoreham, Vt. Then he stomps on the hole to smother the smoke and picks up a square-ended spade. He digs through the hole and pulls out a grapefruit-sized lump of dripping grass roots and soil. Holding it up with two hands, under a wash of warm October sunshine, he continues talking. “The etymology of ‘humility’ comes from the Latin humus, ‘of the soil’,” he says. “Being close to the earth is part and parcel of what it means to be humble.”
He tosses the soil aside and picks up a willow sapling that he and his wife, Caroline Usher, started in a mason jar. He eases the tree out and snugs its root ball into the hole. “And when you spend years taking care
of land and animals, that's a humbling experience, because you realize how much of it is out of your control,” he says, sidestepping to pick up the next sapling in a double line of willow-filled plastic buckets. Behind his back, Usher’s dopey Highland bull, Hamish, looks over a wire fence, as if he can almost understand what we’re talking about.
It's a Friday morning and Usher is planting a 200-foot hedge to subdivide this wet pasture on the edge of 100 acres that he and Caroline reclaimed from overgrown weeds–and have been tending for nearly 25 years. They call their farm Works & Days, after a poem of the same name by the Greek poet and shepherd Hesiod. “It’s a very early agricultural poem, in dactylic hexameter, the same meter as the Iliad and Odyssey. It's a landmark of western literature,” Usher explains, holding his muddy hands up toward the sky—and then he laughs ruefully, “but that doesn't help at all, because nobody's ever heard of it.”
Usher’s book, How to be a Farmer: An Ancient Guide to Life on the Land, goes some distance in recovering Hesiod’s nearly 3000-year-old poem for today’s reader. “Wickedness is easy to get hold of,” reads Usher’s translation. “But in front of Excellence, the immortal gods have placed the sweat of your brow.” Farther into the book—and from 800 years later—Usher presents a portion of an essay, “Why Farming Is the Best Job for a Philosopher,” by a Stoic, Musonius Rufus, who taught in Rome during the reign of the emperor Nero. “The most pleasing aspect of all farm work is that it affords the mind more time to think,” Musonius claims. “How could planting not be a noble endeavor?”
As he works, he’s talking about one of his heroes, John Ruskin, a nineteenth century art critic and reformer, who wrote ‘…the workman ought often to be thinking, and the thinker often to be working.’
Today, it’s certainly a wet endeavor, as Usher’s rubber boots sink deeper into the grassy ditch and he moves methodically along the row, pulling out the next sapling and plunging his hands into the saturated soil. As he works, he’s talking to me about one of his heroes, John Ruskin, a nineteenth century art critic and reformer, who wrote “… the workman ought often to be thinking, and the thinker often to be working.” Usher finds insight about many of today’s predicaments—from unsustainable land use to social alienation—by following the roots of relatively modern ideas, like Ruskin’s, deep into the rich soil of Greek and Roman antiquity. For example, Hesiod may have been the first writer to uphold the dignity of manual labor, and Musonius Rufus was just one of many ancient thinkers who argued for the virtue of blending agricultural work with intellectual pursuit to build a considered, happy life. More than 2000 years later, Ruskin wrote: “the mass of society is made up of morbid thinkers and miserable workers. Now it is only by labour that thought can be made healthy, and only by thought that labour can be made happy, and the two cannot be separated with impunity.” The Ushers frame the website for Works & Days Farm, and their related business, Caroline & Co. Flowers, with this passage.
Usher steps delicately over a high strand of barbed wire that stretches along a homemade stave fence and returns to his tractor. He’s finished planting trees and it’s time for lunch. He and Caroline hope to eventually use some of these willows for making structures in their garden—“cloches and obelisks,” he says, “and perhaps we’ll sell some as stock.” But that will depend on the weather, the health of the trees, and the wiles of Nature. “The more you know, the more you don't know,” he says. “That's truer now for me than it ever was. It's not a question of deep knowing and conviction, but it's just there’s a lot that I don't know.”
Which might give the rest of us mortals some sense of comfort, since one can productively ask what Mark Usher doesn’t know. A named professorship in classics is only the top line in his signature. His
primary academic home at UVM is the Department of Geography and Geosciences, but he’s also faculty in the Environmental Program and the Food Systems Graduate Program, plus he’s an affiliate in UVM’s Gund Institute for Environment. He has many academic publications to his credit and recently was scholar-in-residence at Iméra, the French Institute for Advanced Study in Marseille. Yes, he knows French as well as German and, of course, ancient Greek and Latin. He’s published eight books for adults (with another in press at Princeton University Press)—including Plato’s Pigs, an exploration of ancient ideas about sustainability and how modern systems science has laddered up from the Greeks. He’s also written three illustrated books for children, including Diogenes, the story of a famed Cynic philosopher—cast as a dog. He’s assembled a booklength poem mash-up of famous lines from Donne, Shakespeare, Whitman, Dickinson, and other greats, “to form a new, organic and itself poetic whole,” he writes. Along the way, he’s written other poems, taken on translations—and composed the libretto for an opera, Neron Kaisar, in ancient Greek, Latin, and English, selections of which were performed by a chorus with harp and piano at the famed Jacqueline du Pré Music Hall at Oxford University.
This distinguished career began as a timber-frame carpenter. “I never intended to go to college,” he says. “I planned to build houses by day and read Nietzsche in the back of a VW van the rest of the time.” Born in Germany, when his father was in the U.S. military, Usher grew up in rural Maine, and then returned to Germany after finishing high school to apprentice as a carpenter. He worked there for three years and played in a band—where he met his future wife, Caroline, who is of British origin, at a music show. They were married in 1986 at age 20. “I thought I was marrying the next Bono,” she says, with a wry smile, over a steaming bowl of borscht made from their own beef. “Local cabbage too,” says Mark, “meaning from our backyard.”
“It was only after a freak accident in which I lost an eye that I decided to go to university,” he says. “With only one eye, walking on roofs and climbing ladders was not so easy.” The couple moved to Vermont, where Mark enrolled at UVM and continued to do carpentry to pay the bills. Three years later, in 1992, he graduated summa cum laude in Greek and Latin. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago and returned to Vermont as a faculty member in 2000.
“We’ve always been a little bit radical. I think I was the only person in Chicago to subscribe to Backwoods Home magazine,” Caroline says. “It was always our dream to have a farm.” So they bought ten acres near Route 22A in Shoreham, in the southwest corner of Addison County. “We started small, with a couple of sheep,” Caroline recalls. They built their own house, sheds, gardens. “No mortgage, no trust fund,” Mark says. “All sweat equity, free and clear.” Over the years, they built up a flock of 100 Dorset ewes, and have modest commercial success selling whole lambs into the Boston and New York markets for Orthodox Easter. Intensive rotational grazing has greatly improved their pastures. “Grass may be our best crop,” Mark says. “We homeschooled our kids for educational reasons,” says Caroline—three sons, now grown and successful. They produce maple syrup, cut logs from their forest, sell eggs from their chickens and meat from their cattle. They keep two curious donkeys and have a gorgeous, casually geometric garden—from which Caroline assembles bouquets to sell at a nearby farmer’s market.
How do two people do so much? “I love to work; it’s my livelihood and recreation and exercise. It’s not compartmentalized,” Mark says. “My day is not nine to five, it’s five to nine, but why not?” The sun is warm, his cattle are meandering over the grass, and farmer-philosopher Mark Usher does, in fact, have sweat on his brow. “Ultimately, I believe, farming is a state of mind,” he writes at the conclusion of Plato’s Pigs, “and it is well worth the trouble to cultivate that.”
...
Two weeks later, around a long table in a seminar room on the west side of Old Mill, Mark Usher has switched out his dirty Carhartts for a stylish brown jacket—and is telling seven graduate students about my recent visit to his farm. “I was planting a willow hedge in the far field, and we were blissfully talking about Wendell Berry, and you name it. I told Josh about all the sheep we had roaming safely in the upper field—but we didn't go to visit them and I'm glad,” Usher says with a faint smile and shake of the head. “I discovered, the next day, that we had a coyote attack and lost eleven ewes. Taylor Swift had her Eras Tour. That would've been the Carnage Tour. There are carcasses all over the field.”
This course—based on Usher’s most recent book, How to Care about Animals: An Ancient Guide to Creatures Great and Small—is called How to Think about Animals. Evidently, Usher brings his thinking straight from the farm to the classroom. “A coyote has to eat and is just doing its thing,” Usher says, tipping his head one direction. “I lost some good sheep,” he says, tipping it the other way, “but we’ve been planning to replace some of our Dorsets with a new South African hair breed, so we’ll just get a few more than we planned and write off the dead ones as a loss on my taxes.”
“Did you pay the coyotes?” one of the students asks.
Soon, the class is talking about their assignment for this week: exploring the forbidding philosophical concept of Umwelt. An (obviously) German expression, developed by biologist Jakob von Uexküll in the 1920s, it might be roughly described as the bubble of experience that an organism lives within. A person sees a tick sucking their leg, its tiny legs flailing about, red and bloated and disgusting. The tick can’t see, it has no photoreceptors. It can’t taste or smell. It can’t hear you say “ick, where are the tweezers?” But it can wait years, without eating, for a mammal to pass by. Its Umwelt is radically different, a perceptual universe composed of vibrations on the grass, airborne chemicals like butyric acid coming off an animal’s body, skin temperature and, who knows, maybe some dim sense that it is a good and joyful thing to eat blood, lay eggs, and die. “There is no one world; space and time is unique to each species based on its senses, Uexküll claimed. Only three stimuli affect a tick,” Usher says. “That's its life. Every organism tells a similar story.”
Next, the students begin discussing Thomas Nagel’s famous 1974 essay that poses the provoking question: what is it like to be a bat? Nagel’s provocative answer: we can’t know (unless you’ve got the ability to chase moths through the air using echolocation). Bat sonar is clearly a form of perception, but it is not like any sense humans possess, Nagel wrote, so there is no reason to suppose that it is subjectively like anything we can imagine. But we can still know that there is something it’s like to be a bat. “There are facts in the world about which we will never have certain knowledge—that we will never have subjective experience of—but we can know they’re facts,” says Usher. “Don’t misunderstand me; I’m not a theist,” he says, “but that’s the best argument for the existence of God I know of. We can know about something that we can't know.”
And—Usher wants his students to understand—this kind of radical logic about paradoxes does not begin in the last few centuries of philosophy. “How many of you have heard of Heraclitus?” he asks. There is some mumbling and one student says, “I feel like I said the name differently in my head,” as everyone laughs. “He's like the Nietzsche of the fifth century B.C.E.—famous for one-liners that were very dense and pithy and could be taken many different ways,” Usher says. “Heraclitus said, of a circle, ‘beginning is shared with end.’ Beginning and end: they're antonyms, they're opposites, right? But no matter where you stand on the circumference of a circle, they're shared.” Then he pauses and lets this idea sink in.
...
Mark Usher’s brow is sweating again. It’s midNovember, very warm, and he’s trying to coax five Dorper sheep out of the back of his pickup truck. He and Caroline just purchased them from their neighbor, Jean Audet, and would like to get them onto pasture. The sheep think it might be nice to just stay in the truck. With a practiced lunge, Usher reaches over the tailgate and firmly grabs one by a back leg and sets it running across the grass. Soon the new mini-flock is wandering in a tight pack, keeping their distance from the other sheep, like college first-years looking for the dining hall. Mark and Caroline stand in the shade, and I have no doubt that what I interpret as beams of happiness in their eyes is exactly that.
There are facts in the world about which we will never have certain knowledge—that we will never have subjective experience of–but we can know they're facts....I'm not a theist, but that's the best argument for the existence of God I know of. We can know about something that we can't know.
“That everything is interconnected is no quaint sentiment or source of spiritual solace. It is, rather, practically speaking, a terrifying prospect,” Usher writes in the conclusion of Plato’s Pigs. These sheep will soon be lambing in the depths of winter. Some of the newborns are likely to die, perhaps abandoned and frozen to the ground or cannibalized by their mothers, who sometimes chew off their ears and tails. Others will be slaughtered and turned into lamb chops. “We’re all implicated in the messy cycles of life and death: To live I must take life,” Usher writes, echoing Albert Schweitzer. “To get milk to drink, for example, or to make cheese to eat, offspring must be produced, the males shipped off to be slaughtered for meat. I continue to be astonished by how many cheeseeating, milk-drinking vegetarians are unaware of this fact of life.” Beginning and end are the same place.
Usher subscribes to the ethical precept of “do no harm,” realizing that he stands far off from realizing it. “Many of my neighbors live much closer to the earth than I do,” he says, and two of his guiding lights from an earlier generation, the original back-to-the-landers, Helen and Scott Nearing, subsisted entirely on plants, mostly raw vegetables, and considered animal farming a form of slavery. “That is an extreme view given the long evolutionary history of human beings’ interactions with animals,” Usher notes. “On the other hand, it is entirely true that domesticated livestock exist and are raised only to be killed for food.” He and Caroline are acutely aware, that “on our farm,” he writes, “we live by contradiction every day.” They built their own home with their hands—using industrial plywood that likely was produced in China. They grow grass and sheep to strengthen the regional food system—using a tractor and chainsaw that burn planet-heating fossil fuels. “Can we live off the land?” Usher asks. “No, but not many small farmers can,” he says. The Ushers gross about $12,000 a year from their farm and are grateful for Mark’s professor’s salary. “We are keeping the land open for agricultural use and derive tax and lifestyle benefits for our work,” he writes. Their goal is not purity. “We’re imperfect, but diligent,” Mark says.
“I call it semi-sustainable,” says Caroline.
“We know we have an impact. Everyone takes from the earth,” Mark says. “So, we work hard to pay some of it back. It’s a kind of gratitude.” Usher is also grateful for those friends and neighbors who make his community and help him solve problems. Like his auto mechanic Stephen Tier, whom he writes about—and gives copies of his books to. “Pure genius,” Usher says. “You should call him.”
So I did call Stephen, and we got to chatting about Usher’s succession of VW diesel cars, some of which themselves are nearly objects of antiquity. Usher appreciates Tier’s uncanny ability to repair the complex system that is a 25-year-old diesel with 400,000 miles on it—“it’s easily on par intellectually with the ability to solve multivariable equations,” Usher says. For his part, Tier told me a funny story about how he carefully repaired one of the Ushers’ cars, then blew its engine test driving it. “Threw a rod,” he explains. So he just pulled another engine out an older VW that Usher had given him and dropped it in to replace the ruined one. “It has a new rocker panel and another engine in it,” Tier explains. “I’ve replaced a lot of parts.” I tell him that the car makes Mark think of a story from the first century A.D.: Plutarch’s puzzle of the ship of Theseus, which, after hundreds of years of maintenance, has every part replaced—raising the question of whether it remains the same ship.
“Is it the same car?” Tier says, “That's the $350 question. Well, yes and no, right? Yes and no.” Then he laughs and pauses. “I got to say, sometimes I wish I thought like Mark, but I'm glad, maybe, at times, that I don't. Still, we both like getting our hands dirty and trying to fix things.”
