Northern Farm

Henry Beston delivers a prescient message in this 1948 naturalist's memoir, Northern Farm. Within the exquisite pastoral prose detailing the ebb and flow of a simple life on a farm in northern Maine over the course of a year, there is a cautionary message reminding us that "we have a duty to the earth" and that to be human we must stay connected to the natural world. Beston famously eschewed industrialization and believed that left unchecked it would break our ties to the natural world and leave man "soulless."

"It is enough to say that prophets of expediency who are careless of the means they use and who work outside the human and moral values, have never been able to build anything humanly worthwhile."

Beston was an environmentalist show more before most people understood the impacts of "progress," and along with his earlier work, "The Outermost House," "Northern Farm" delivers a timely and important message for all. show less

Nothing could be as good as "The Outermost House." But Beston turns his eyes, ears, mind, and heart to his beloved Chimney Farm in the Maine woods. He takes us through a year, from glassy blue snow shadows, to the pond ice groaning as it begins to loosen, through that first spring-ish day when a window can be opened, letting in "a few flies who look in need of kind words and vitamins." A hot summer, the young farming men stripped to the waist and crusted with hayseeds and sweat. Then the autumn, and the ritual of "housing up," where spare rooms are closed and used to store apples and potatoes, the summer kitchen gear relocated back into the winter kitchen and the woodstove is set back in its hearth to warm the reduced living quarters. show more It's intimate, with the details of observation only Beston can see and put into words: the soft pat of huge snowflakes on the windows, how to remove a dire ink stain from a handwoven tablecloth, how neighbor children are dispersed to other people's houses to do their homework by lamplight and occupy the house while the owners are gathered for a social evening. A lovely portrait of a home, a landscape, and a community, if perhaps without the broader scope of ocean, climate, and the earth as a whole he shows us from the cape. show less

Beston is such a beautiful writer. I was struck by how much of his commentary on moving away from being part of nature, written in 1948, are so relevant today just by substituting technology for industry. His descriptions of the weather moving across the landscape are magical.