Patrick Laurie - Galloway

Life in a Vanishing Landscape

Patrick Laurie

With an Introduction by Nick Offerman

COUNTERPOINT

Berkeley, California

For my parents

Blows the wind to-day, and the sun and the rain are flying,

Blows the wind on the moors to-day and now,

Where about the graves of the martyrs the whaups are crying,

My heart remembers how!

Grey recumbent tombs of the dead in desert places,

Standing stones on the vacant wine-red moor,

Hills of sheep, and the howes of the silent vanished races,

And winds, austere and pure!

Be it granted me to behold you again in dying,

Hills of home! And to hear again the call;

Hear about the graves of the martyrs the peewees crying;

And hear no more at all.

Robert Louis Stevenson

Vailima, Samoa (1894)

[All the ancient wisdom] tells us that work is necessary to us, as much a part of our condition as mortality; that good work is our salvation and our joy; that shoddy or dishonest or self-serving work is our curse and our doom. We have tried to escape the sweat and sorrow promised in Genesisonly to find that, in order to do so, we must forswear love and excellence, health and joy.

Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America

The greatest compliment that one can receive from my dad goes like this: he will be describing a person to me, and he will remark with some severity, he or she (here he levels his gaze at me) is a worker. What this means is that Dad has witnessed this person working hard at a given task, often a thankless one, with determination and competence, or if not competence, then at least a clear pursuit of it. His worker is the opposite of a shirker. She or he is a person who never seeks a way around or out of the required work, but understands instead that the only proper path to getting a job done is through it. The worker can be seen rolling up their sleeves and employing his or her acumen, such as it is, to determine the optimal pace at which a given chore may be accomplished, and then proceeding to defeat the challenge at hand utilizing the appropriate quantity of hustle. My dad bestows this high estimation upon them to acknowledge the responsibility they display in their efforts. Engaging in good work is an act of affectiontoward loved ones, toward the self, and even toward the landscape and her ingredients, as this conscientious work honors the materials at hand. Thus the sweat and sorrow of honest labor arrive hand in hand with health and joy, love and excellence.

My devotion to great agrarian writing led me to discover (on Twitter) and subsequently befriend another agrarian-minded farmer in Englands Lake District, fell shepherd James Rebanks. James, who is pursuing the ideals of sustainable agriculture while rewilding portions of his farmland, also happens to be a successful author of books in this genre. For reasons that I am still ferreting out, I happen to be besotted with the subject matter of traditional agriculture and any related application of human ingenuity that involves working with our wits and our muscles, and I guess most important, our hearts. In this age of all-powerful consumerism, climate crisis, and the continued pillaging of our planets resources, the stripe of ecologically sound labor lionized by these writers represents a true north star to fans of common sense. Thanks to them and their devotion to an agriculture that seeks to collaborate with Mother Nature instead of dominating her, we are reminded in what direction we should aim our hope. This work strives to identify and subsequently begin to heal the wounds we have inflicted over the last century upon our soil, air, and water, while yet producing healthy meat, dairy, grain, and produce. Its an awfully tall order, and success will take us many, many years of radical work, but when its done right, this good work is an absolute comfort and joy to countenance. To that end, I have had the pleasure of visiting James and his family in the very northwest corner of England a handful of times over the last couple years.

Just north of the border, in the southwest of Scotland, there is a comely county (or unitary council area) called Galloway whose gently undulating terrain slopes south to the Solway Firth, a thirty-eight-mile inlet of the Irish Sea. From lunchtime on, the sun gleams off the water in the distance, lending a tragically beautiful mood to the setting, as though one is likely to run into Olivia Colman and David Tennant out on a chilly Broadchurch investigation. On February 5, 2019, James treated me to a bit of a tour of this region as part of my ongoing ad hoc education in the local Galloway cattle breeds. He suggested we stop near Dalbeattie and meet Patrick Laurie, another young writer having a go at an old, traditional family farm (or else another young, traditional farmer taking a swing at writing a book). The rugged and haunting landscape was punctuated by the modest hues of winter gorse and heather, lending a tweedy feel to the hills. We bypassed the occasional gargantuan, glacially deposited granite boulder until we came to the general area that had been specified by Patrick, but we blindly tooled right on past his address. His driveway, like his centuries-old buildings, blended seamlessly into the extremely bucolic setting. Luckily, Patrick had been tracking our progress across the landscape from his farm, and he quickly set us right via cell phone.

We pulled up to the farmstead and found it simultaneously bleak and charming, like an amazing place to shoot a seventies rock album cover but maybe not the most comfortable place to spend a blustery winter. The stone house and outbuildings were all situated around a central, squarish courtyard, with a couple of incredible-looking enormous pigs (an old-fashioned native breed called Oxford Sandy and Black) and the stiff body of a dead fox that Patrick had shot the day before our visit. I was absolutely transfixed as he showed us around the place, introducing us to those pigs, his trusty dog, and finally his pride and joy: a small herd of fifteen Riggit Galloway cows.

Riggits are an ancient breed of cattle, native to southwestern Scotland, that come in all sorts of woolly color combinations between black, dun, and red, either solid or mixed palatably with cream. They are prized for their ability to graze on rough forage and then transform those thistles into high-quality meat. Patrick seemed like he could even be related to his Riggits, as both exhibited a quiet, rugged charisma that revealed itself as they approached the fence that stood between us. Their coats were handsomely abstractthey looked not so much like calico as like someone had splashed a bucket of complementary color across their base coats: black splattered on white, white splotched onto red, and so forth. Much like Patrick, these stoic characters stood with confidence, exuding a certain dependability in their lack of complaint. I have also seen him methodically chew with apparent satisfaction.

Patrick is what I would call a sturdy and steadfast fellow, with a ruddy complexion of his own that flushes pleasurably at the drop of a hat. In the short time Ive known him, I have seen his red cheeks signify cold weather, passionate emotion, hard work, and the pleasing warmth of beer and mirth in the basement of a Glasgow theater. From the first sighting of Patrick, its clear that he is no stranger to arduous labor, and the same can be said of his wife, Tina. She displays the stoic, smiling support of so many farm spouses I have had the pleasure of knowing, whether lugging buckets of grain out to the cattle or hauling a tray of brownie from the oven to feed us lads. Farm families have a refreshing honesty when one visits their location because the evidence of their labor is all around them. The care (or lack thereof) with which they keep their animals, their gardens, and their buildings is immediately apparent. In the midst of the ample evidence of clear organization in their dooryard, Patrick and Tina were quick to point out the couple of minor messes that were next on their itinerary. Their wellies (galoshes) and the canvas and wool flannel of their garments had been visibly hard used. Everything about them and their commercially modest but bucolically wealthy farmstead told the observer that, by god, they were rolling up their sleeves and giving it a go.