Most would, however, want to “get real” when it comes to dirt and work. We do not generally hoe beans in order to hear the brown thrasher, or to exhume a spotted salamander as an end in itself. Thoreau gets real by giving an exact economic enumeration of his work. He itemizes monetary costs and profits, in which overall bean-patch costs added up in his accounting to $14.72 and 1/2 cent, with a profit of $8.71 and 1/2 cent.
To our minds now, old Henry pretty much worked that summer in his two-and-a-half-acre bean patch for nothing. The garden patch that Lynn and I worked on sporadically our first summer, making a garden from what was before only a brushy rock-filled field, allows for some comparisons. We saw no passenger pigeons but we got pleasures from our garden similar to what Henry got from his. Plus, we enjoy companionship, which old Henry did not appear to pursue. So for us it was a win-win situation with the dirt, in more ways than two. But I also suspect our dirt will before the start of winter become a winning economic proposition as well. And so was Henry’s, despite what he may have implied, and we inferred.
Our dirt patch is sixteen hundred square feet (0.037 acres); his was about 70 times larger. He spent $3.12 on seed, and we spent $94. Thus, overall, in terms of our money, he paid about 30 times less overall, but on a per-acre basis, in dollar amount, he paid 2,100 times less. Take outside labor: his “ploughing/harrowing/farrowing” cost him $7.50. (This amount irked him, because in Walden, he added a comment—“Too much”—for emphasis next to it.) How much is his “Too much”? Lynn and I paid our neighbor, Mike Pratt, $150 to harrow our plot (from brush and rock-cobbled soil), which, as already mentioned, is 70 times smaller than Henry’s. But Henry did not pay 70 times more. Instead, he paid 20 times less overall, which comes to 1,400 times less per unit acre than we paid. Similarly, our total pecuniary costs were 1,960 times more than his, prorated per acre. My point: inflation since the time of Thoreau’s bean patch (of 175 years ago) has reduced the worth of a dollar about 2,000 times from what it used to be. Thus, Thoreau’s seemingly trivial profit of $8.71 and a half cent is actually a hefty $17,430, in terms of the dollar now. (His seeming pettiness, accounting to the last half cent, is thus more like figuring to within ten dollars now.)
How many young people today could earn $17,000 in a summer by working forenoons in a bean field, and having the rest of the day off for “other affairs”? None! But it was not the amount of money Thoreau made from his bean field that he rhapsodized about. It was the ancillary “profit.” Now we are hard put to get a fraction of the pecuniary profit he earned, and if we do it is usually at the cost of the other satisfactions that a country life close to the dirt provides, and that we now all too commonly lack. Thoreau derided husbandry as he saw it then as pursued with “irreverent haste and heedlessness . . . [with] our object being to have large farms and large crops merely.” His conclusion that “I will not plant beans and corn with so much industry another summer” suggests he felt that even his “industry” was already too much.
Turn now to the other Henry, a Maine writer a century later, near the arguable beginning of industrial agriculture. In his book Northern Farm, Henry Beston reminds us that “the shadow of any man is but for a time cast upon the grass of any field. What remains is the earth, the mother of life.” And he concludes, “When farming becomes purely utilitarian, something perishes . . . sometimes it is the human beings who practice this economy, and oftenest of all it is a destruction of both land and man.”
As a fellow human—united with the two earlier Henrys not by artificial or perceived boundaries but by our universal bonds to the soil, the link that connects all of Life—I grow beans for more than utilitarian purposes. Our farming may be token, but like the blades of grass that first sparked my interest in living things, the activity is a visceral and sometimes an ecstatic reminder of the context of our relationship to the earth and other organisms.
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About the Author
BERND HEINRICH is an acclaimed scientist and the author of numerous books, including Winter World, Mind of the Raven, Why We Run, and The Homing Instinct. Among Heinrich’s many honors is the 2013 PEN New England Award in nonfiction for Life Everlasting.
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One Wild Bird at a Time Page 20
