New York: North Point Press, 2004
208 pages, $20.00
Grieving a Way of Life
Loss. Transition. If they’re difficult experiences to write about, they’re also not easy reading. This book reflects on the author’s experience grieving a way of life once vital, now ended. Loved and lost. For Jane Brox, a writer living in Wiscasset, it is the change and diminishment not only of her family’s farm in Massachusetts where she grew up among three generations, but the loss of an American way of life — the identity that could be the very backbone of this country as well as a once traditional way of growing food — that is disappearing.
Brox’s book is set in New England, notably Massachusetts mill towns and farmland, the island of Nantucket, and the quarries of Cape Ann. Brox’s grandparents had immigrated to Massachusetts from Lebanon and Italy, and settled in Dracut, outside of Lawrence. While many immigrants stayed near the concentration of mills along the Merrimack River and found work there, some, like her father’s family, sought to reconnect with a rural setting and an agrarian livelihood. Their farm was where Brox, like her father, grew up, leaving to attend Colby College in Maine. Confronted with a personal sense of loss as the land’s future becomes unclear, she seeks to give it a context, asking what that transition is like on a larger scale. To answer that, Brox undertakes research, thoroughly and relentlessly probing her subject. Woven into the book’s personal musings is rich commentary from primary sources providing historical background and context. She considers how settlement of this country spread from its New England roots. Arriving here as colonizers, Europeans brought with them a new concept of relationship to the land. Their owning and cultivating of it differed sharply from the Native Americans’; theirs was to be what defined how the emerging nation was developed. Brox sees some irony: land holdings that were once successful multi-generational family farms are becoming relics, rendered economically unviable unless given cachet from tourism or scenic value; yet their original cultivation was seminal to how this country grew. Writing about the unclear future of the family’s land, she says, “We have tentative discussions about how we might go about preserving the farm for the long future. We each have our own idea of what its future should be, just as we each have our own memories of it. To be responsible for so much land and yet to be separated from the work of the land itself is its own weight: the farm in our minds is growing more distant and abstracted. We are…no longer tied to the place in fact, only in memory… Sometimes I imagine this place will become a somewhere as clear and clean as the salt marshes. Removed from the human press of time, it will empty itself of memory, tracing itself back before our incursions on the land, and all the decisions, all the weight of human desires that were once imposed on it: the accumulation of judgments, the calculations, the care and the exploitations, attempts, histories, and abandonments.”
The book is not light reading, but it is richly rewarding. I found myself lingering over each sentence, first processing the carefully wrought images and factual information, and then rereading to savor its crafting — the poetic phrasing, word choice, syntax. It reminded me of author Terry Tempest Williams (Refuge, Leap), and I was not surprised to read later in an interview that Brox too admires her work.
Clearing Land follows Here and Nowhere Else: Late Seasons of a Farm and Its Family (1995) and Five Thousand Days Like This One: An American Family History (1999). The three have come to be referred to as the “American Farm Trilogy.” Over these volumes, Brox revisits the past with insistence and repetition. There is a scrutinizing and questioning of components, outcomes — as if in an effort to deter defeat. The Boston Globe review of Brox’s book referred to “a melancholy sprung not only from loss but from impotence before the essential mutability of all things and the transience of understanding.” After finishing the book, I appreciated how successfully Brox has limned a difficult “place,” one landmarked with loss, lament, disempowerment and disillusion — but also with significant triumphs- and survival.
Tina Cohen writes from Amherst MA and Vinalhaven.