Farmer Mike

Acrylic washes on paper by Phillip Hoyle
after a Navajo petroglyph design

As a child I listened again and again to the story of the country mouse and the city mouse on the 78rpm recording Mom bought us kids. Neither city nor country mouse understood how the other could bear to live where it did. I dubbed myself a city mouse; actually I preferred the designation city slicker. Even though I’d had early childhood fantasies of farming with my grandpa, by high school I knew better about myself. I liked country scenes but not country life. I couldn’t imagine farming as a vocation; my early-formed citified sense of myself was too strong. I didn’t even want to live in the country, let alone farm the fields. I needed something else for myself, something visionary, urban, and arty.

In adult life I enjoyed living in ever-larger cities until we ended up in Mid-Missouri, a young family with two children living outside the city limits. The town wasn’t all that large (under forty thousand) and the country seemed lonely and deserted to me. Even though I was astounded with the views of ridges and hollows swathed in morning mists, sunrises and settings of amazing hues, and an abundance of multi-shaded green grasses and trees, I was nervous the whole time we lived out there. I locked doors and wondered who had just driven by on the road and why. My country-reared wife thought it was funny given that all the years we lived in cities I had rarely locked doors. I just felt uneasy in the country, like if I needed help, no one would hear my cries. And yard work seemed too much like farm work for the lawn was way too large.

As a parent I wanted the best for my kids; wanted them to have full, wonderful lives. I didn’t push them towards anything particular, but I did harbor distrust of some lifestyles and occupations. My daughter seemed to like living in Missouri. She has lived there most of her life and—like her dad—seems to prefer living right in town, close to work, close to schools, close to the library, close to her friends, and close to neighbors. My son Mike has lived most of his adult life between Colorado and Missouri. Well, listen, I’ll tell his story from my parental point-of-view.

The artist and musician emerged early in my son Mike’s life. He had a beautiful singing voice, loved to dance, and drew and painted with exceptional talent for a youngster. I was pleased he might become an artist, something my father had cautioned against. I could easily imagine a life in the arts as being a fine choice for my son.

But Mike liked outdoors activities as well as music and art. Unlike his sister and his parents, Mike became a country mouse. I wasn’t surprised. I’d known for years the little boy who adored his farmer grandpa Vance, who was even built and looked like him. I’d known the kid who backpacked, canoed, and explored caves. I’d known the teenager who in his old Chevy van went off to the farm to help his uncle plant corn and then returned for the harvest. I’d known the young man who later returned to the farm with his growing family to work for his uncle. I’d known the young man who moved to a commune where he raised organic carrots to sell in the commune store. Of course, he did lots more there: taught art in the commune school, fixed things around the place’s several houses, but he also repaired fences, helped with livestock, planted, weeded, and harvested. You know, farm stuff. Still, I’d persisted in thinking of Mike as a husband and dad, an artist and musician, and of course, my son.

After a year at the commune the family returned to Missouri where they lived in the country adjacent to a national forest. There they raised chickens and goats and a garden. Michael found a job at a native plants nursery some thirty miles away, down near Brazito. There he kept machines running, helped harvest prairies, sorted seed, assisted customers, and eventually planted and transplanted the great variety of flora, and coordinated the work of the other employees. His family moved into town to cut down on the commute. Then, about four years ago, the firm’s beautifully-illustrated, full-color catalog listed my son as the nursery’s Farm Manager. Heather, his wife, told me Mike was terribly embarrassed. She was proud of him and entertained by his modesty. I still enjoyed his music making and his painting, still thought of him in those terms. 

Last fall Mike told me that the past couple of years he’d been taking trailer loads of native plants and seed to a farmers market in St. Louis. Then he and his family started searching for a country house to buy. With the generous help of a family friend, they bought one on twenty acres—a steal of a deal—and prepared to move back to the country.

I planned a trip to celebrate the graduation ceremony of two grandsons. During the last phone call before I left on my trip, Mike told me how busy he was and how elated he felt living again in the country. I looked forward to seeing their farmhouse, barn, orchard, and pasture.

“Will you get goats?” I asked.

Michael said, “Probably not.”

I saw the beautiful old house when I went there for the graduation party. Two evenings later I returned and Mike gave me the grand tour. Walking past the garden, he realized no one had gathered the asparagus that morning. After we took a nice basketful back to the kitchen, we put the chickens and ducks into the hen house. In the corral I met the new cow and her calf. By then it was pretty dark; we returned to the house.

The next morning we went back outdoors and walked the pastures. Mike had rented part of his land to a neighbor for a bean field. Mike wanted it farmed for a couple of years to get rid of all the European grasses. His plan is then to seed it in native plants to return it to its old state. He can make more money by harvesting it as native prairie. In fact, he could make a lot more money off it and graze the cow there as well. When we stopped by the corral, Mike showed me his new tractor pointing out its advantages and disadvantages. He spoke of it like my Denver friends talk about their new cars—with pride and great satisfaction although, also like them, saying he paid more than he’d intended.

When we walked through the orchard of pears and apples, peaches and plums, something in his information and in his enthusiasm brought into focus what I’d been hearing for years. Mike was becoming a farmer—a real one who loved to plant and harvest, to feed himself and others with the fruit of his labor, to become the husbandman of his own Garden of Eden, and to drive his tractor. He had his own acreage, his own place, an image that had also surfaced at times over the years. This man, who as a child had wanted his parents buried so he would have a place to visit them, now had the place, a farm where he could feel secure on the face of the huge and abundant earth and eventually spread his parents’ ashes. The farmer in him was now connected to the soil.

Heather told me how they had felt so wrought up at the realization they were becoming landowners, something they had never really dreamed. Their conceptual solace came in the notion that they were now caretakers of a bit of the earth put in trust to them. And they are both caretakers: she of the animals, he of the land and plants. With this in mind, they’ve become farmers as well as musicians, dancers, painters, and writers. Now I am a farmer’s dad.

I talked again with Mike on the phone the other day. He told me more about the farm, about pears, nectarines, plums, apples, and peaches. He mentioned several goats and bees too. The garden is producing. They haven’t been able to sell much yet, but thankfully, there is no waste. With five people and all the animals, everything gets eaten. Mike now farms four days at the nursery and three days at home. Heather cares for the cow that produces milk for the table and for making butter and cheese. The orchard is ready to burst even though it is just a fraction of what it had been years ago. The bees are making honey. The hens and ducks are about ready to start laying eggs. And to my deep joy and his, farmer Mike, my son, continues to paint and to play his guitar, sometimes even to his goats.

Denver, 2011

Reflection

Photo from summer Scout camp one year. I took the
picture with my Brownie camera.

     I am sick of the first person singular, not of myself, but rather of writing about myself. Employing first person leaves me feeling like I have not heeded the advice of my teachers who found its over-use distasteful, but for the past eight years I have written almost everything in the ego person. I have become the only theme of my writing. Whatever the topic, I write about myself. My writing reminds me of a friend who authored a book about her grandmother but admitted that the real subject of the book was herself. I have tired of my self-focus but cannot seem to break the habit. Second person becomes tedious and nonsensical; third seems inaccessible. I seem stuck with myself.

     I wonder if I am trying to get over an episode of arrested development characterized by too many years of setting aside my own needs, even needs for personal recognition and acceptance. Now, in early old age, I may be striving to solve a dilemma of my personality hoping to complete some task of my maturing process. I hope I’m in some kind of developmental phase, something I will grow out of as I resolve its crisis. I’ve grown weary of writing “I” even while I recognize its economy and probable necessity.

     I re-read Conrad Richter’s novel The Light in the Forest. The story describes a white teen raised from early childhood by American Indians. He is reunited with his white family whom he has never known but is unable to adjust. Running away, he rejoins his tribe only to discover he doesn’t fit there either. He is an adolescent caught between two worlds. It seems to me that I am writing about a similar kind of situation in my own life, but one that started before my teen years and persists to this day.

     I enjoyed Richter’s story, and although I liked the idea of being raised by native folk, I wasn’t the rough and ready type. For me, the skills of forest survival, which had been fostered in me by Boy Scouts of America ideology—preparedness and self-sufficiency with an overlay of Indian images—held their appeal due solely to the Indian theme. I didn’t seem the typical Scout. I sang in choirs at church and school, made costumes, and hung art in my room. I did hunt rabbits with my rifle and camped out in a pup tent with my friends. I went to Scout camp and earned merit badges in pioneering, swimming, and hiking. I knew knots, could fashion a shelter, learned how to protect myself in harsh weather, and could identify beneficial and noxious plants. But I knew I would never live like an Indian in the wild. I liked my room, books, piano, school, friends, family, and church much more than Scouts. Still, because of the Indian images, I stayed in Scouts and continued to dream.

     I realized limitations of my strength. I could tie a knot but not very tightly. I could jump but refused when the gang dared me to jump off the garage roof. I could play basketball but not sink many goals. I knew many skills; often I could not do them well. Skinny, sunny, weak, witty—I was an artist. When it came to Indians, their art, crafts, dance, and music were my deep interests, not living out in the rain. I loved Indians but didn’t know any of them. I lived Indian in my imagination, and some Native American ideals influenced my values for people, fostering an acceptance of difference and a taste for the exotic. There were Indians living along the creek of my imagination, a constant flowing and sometimes flooding of images and thoughts. I lived among them with a sense of difference and reserve.

     Why this interest in Native Americans? Why not some other group of people such as knights in shining armor, soldiers fighting wars, or baseball heroes? Some of my interest surely stemmed from their having gone missing from one of my favorite places on earth, my grandparents’ farm. A treasure of arrow points and hide scrapers, corn grinders and flint knives stimulated my curiosity. And, as my oldest sister put it, “Mom pounded into my memory the fact that an Indian ceremonial ground existed just across the creek from the farm.” It was as if I lived in an Indian presence, but their presence was unseen.

     “The Indians” were a group whose current reality was first revealed to me when my mother was faced with a pile of outgrown clothing. She declared, “We’ll send them to the Indians.” The items were shipped to a mission outreach supported by her women’s circle at the church. These poor Native recipients of white castoffs became more real to me when Bob took his son and me to powwows. Bob introduced us to Indians who were living a life rich with socials, dances, markets, and laughter whatever clothing they were wearing. He taught us how to perform dance steps and soon we were dancing with Indians at Wamego, Wichita, Ponca City, and other White towns with Red names. We visited Indian City USA in Anadarko, were entertained in the home of an ancient Iowa-tribe woman near Hiawatha, and conversed with a Pottawatomie man on his reservation farm near Mayetta. But we had no Indian guests in our home. None came to our church. I didn’t know any in our city.

     I look back into those childhood and adolescent years, now assessing my interests from an adult point of view that suggests the images of Indians were especially meaningful to me as a developing homosexual person. Jamake Highwater’s book, Sexuality and Transgression, a queer theory study arising from Native American experience, helped me understand at least one important perspective of my development: the Indian represented my difference. Although I was unaware of the connection, the Natives kept living in my mind into my adulthood. During my undergraduate years, when I thought I had left the topic behind, I still treasured two suitcases filled with costumes I had made. In my mid-twenties, I discovered the literature of sexuality and threw myself into its mastery. At the same time, I found books by Native authors, gaining new and sometimes surprising images of Indians from their own testimony and perspective. In my late twenties I started reading several gay authors, whose books intrigued me with accounts of homosexual life. Some of the experiences described seemed attractive yet somehow impure. I persisted following the work Native writers, who for me represented a more pure type of difference although it too was often marred by alcohol and drugs, paralleling much of the gay experience about which I read.

     To my childhood imagination, Indian difference and independence, as interpreted by many nineteenth and twentieth century writers, had reflected my conflict as the only boy raised among many sisters. To my adult mind, Native minority symbolized my being somewhat gay among straight others. As an emerging gay man, I clearly resonated to the Native American commitment to arts, to their inability to become White, and to their choices to keep their traditional ideals and values. Their manipulation by others who assumed they knew best seemed similar to what I observed in church and state attempts to define and regulate gay life. These images kept me reading Indian literature while I forged a bisexual and then gay identity.

     Friendships helped change me even more. I loved an Indian man. We became friends through a common project and hung out together. He knew I was homosexual and would occasionally hold me. He didn’t kiss me, though, as he did his cousin (a fact that irked me). He loved me but didn’t want a sexual relationship. He was Indian but not gay. He was no idealized person, just a guy of average intelligence, conflicted over culture, religion, hopes, and desires. He was rather burned out from the drugs and alcohol of his past, in chronic physical pain due to an accident, and not very successful in relationships, but he was lovely in spirit and, mostly, he was accepting of me. I felt kinship. I felt love. Still, I realized the huge gap that separated us.

     A few years later, after I had left my mainly straight life, I met a queer Indian. This man’s lovely Mississippi accent melted my heart. His attractive body presented itself to me openly, invitingly. His religion, though, a central motivation in his life, became a barrier between us. I respected his spiritual search for its earnestness; his need to regain a Native grasp of divine realities made sense to me. But I realized its focus didn’t jive well with my own spirituality. I admired his commitment and his body. We had fun and still greet one another warmly.

     Indians in my imagination and experience have helped me understand and embrace my own gay life. I, who am living in relationship to my traditional family with ex-wife, kids and grandkids and to my life with another man, find a sense of kinship with Natives who have long bridged two cultures. Like Laguna poet Leslie Marmon Silko’s lost boy in “Story from Bear Country,” I had wandered among the bear people, had seen their beauty and already had started to become one of them. My bear people were the Indians of my imagination, a transformation of my sexual drives into fantasies of life in the wild, away from the stultifying influences of “normalcy,” and in an arts-centered and homosexual world. Indians—read gays—have long lived on the creek of my imagination, in both my earlier and present life. They symbolize a kind of individualization for which I have striven and a call for the perseverance, creativity, and fortitude required for my full development into a mature gay man. Perhaps someday I will understand this experience well enough to describe it in the third person, but not yet.

Denver, 2004

This mixed media painting depicts a deer hoof print. Still
when I look at it, I tend to see two people in conversation.
Acrylic washes, oil pastel, and Prisma color on paper.
Phillip Hoyle

Dancing with Indians

     At a park in Wamego, Kansas, the old park with the Dutch windmill, I became a Pottawatomie Indian. Bob Waters, a friend of my dad and grandpa, had taken his red-headed son and blond-headed me to an Indian dance slated to be held in honor of the town’s anniversary. He sought permission for us boys to costume and join in the dancing. We were invited in and with deep joy danced war dances and round dances alongside Indian women and men. With the rest of the crowd, we sat on benches to watch several Pottawatomie dances we didn’t know. Then the announcer called for an adoption dance and signaled the two of us to join them.

     As I recall it, the dance was a follow-the-leader affair, kind of like a snake dance. I carefully emulated the leader’s movements: stepping in time with him and the drum, turning my body left and right like his, stopping when he stopped, and dancing when he danced. The experience was more than doing steps learned from a book written by a White man. Here I learned movements of hips and arms, the position of the body, the interaction of dancer with dancer. I was encouraged by the approving nods of the Indian folk with whom I was dancing. I was thrilled to be learning a new Indian dance, but truthfully, I don’t recall at the time feeling anything related to being adopted.

     Later, as we drove west along US 24, back to our homes in Junction City, Bob reprimanded us boys for dancing the adoption dance. “It’s not appropriate to join a tribal ceremony,” he preached. “You didn’t even know the dance.”

     “But they asked us to,” we protested in whining junior high and grade school voices.

     “Okay, that’s fine,” Bob conceded, “as long as they invited you.”

     Due to Bob’s questioning, I started to wonder if I really was adopted by this tribe that had been relocated to Kansas a few years before my forebears imigrated there from Europe. Even though at the time I didn’t make anything of it, from then on I felt welcome when visiting on the Pottawatomie Reservation or dancing with various other Native groups in Wichita, Horton, Pawnee, or Ponca City. I enjoyed the hospitality of these Native folk, learned some of their traditions, copied their costumes, listened to their jokes, and ate their fry bread. Eventually I read Helen Hunt’s 1881 book, A Century of Dishonor, her stinging critique of US government treaty breaking and underhanded misuse of tribal goodwill and ignorance, and pledged myself never to take advantage of Indians for my own gain and their loss. I was serious in my resolve even if the Pottawatomi’s gesture of adoption was only a simple kindness to children or a goodwill symbol between the Native and White communities. Whatever happened there was fine with me, for in my mind I did become an adopted child of the tribe. From then on, their interest was my interest.


Denver, 2008

Native American dancers, photo I took when a boy.

As a junior high student I met a number of older Native American men with whom I danced as in the story above. These particular men pictured here were participants in a Kickapoo powwow at the Armory in Horton, Kansas. I took their picture with my Brownie camera, very interested in their costumes. Although the Kickapoo tribe was Eastern woodland in descent, these costumes show plains influence. I recall studying the black beaded vest that I used as a kind of pattern for a similar vest I made and beaded. 
I no longer remember which man is which but wrote on the back of the snapshot the following names: George Allen, Hamilton, and Sacqua. I was aware of and appreciative of their kindness toward me.

Indians on the Creek

Warrior from a Kansas petroglyph
Acrylic washes on paper by Phillip Hoyle

     By the time I started visiting the farm, its former Native American residents were a dim memory already generations old. I doubt my grandfather ever saw Indians there although his parents certainly did. They had arrived in the late 1860’s from Germany and Sweden eager to homestead in the fertile Clarks Creek valley. The Kansa Indians, the immediate former inhabitants, had lived until 1873 on a reservation a few miles away, just over the divide, on the headwaters of the Neosho River. Soon after my forebears’ arrival, the U.S. Government re-negotiated treaties with the Kansa tribe and accomplished their removal to Indian Territory far to the south. Seventy-five years later, when I went to my grandparents’ farm, the Kansa were only references in a few stories.

     The Indians left behind marks of their residency: arrowheads, knife points, grist mills, and corn grinders. These materials were a meager reminder of a rich tribal experience, but they were adequate to set my mind afire with imagined campsites, farming, ceremonies, and warriors. The place seemed alive with their lore and legends. I thought, “Isn’t it possible a lone Indian might still linger in the woods across the creek?” It seemed so to me, a kid who could imagine himself living away from his irritating sisters and sensible parents, enjoying the country solitude. Accompanied by my dog, I too could live by my wits, reaping the land’s bounty of rabbits, fish, and grapes. And, “If I were an Indian, I’d know a lot more. I could do it.” It seemed possible.

     A few years after my grandpa’s death, I spent several weekends camping at the creek with my Boy Scout troop. We set up our tents in a tree-sheltered area with the creek on three sides, just across the stream from the place that Grandpa claimed was an ancient ceremonial ground. During our campouts, I kept my eyes open for relics of the Indian past but didn’t find even one arrow point. Still, I wondered if an Indian family had camped in the same place and if their kids had smoked grape vines on the sly like we did. One fall afternoon we collected dried corn from the field above our campsite and that evening parched it over a small fire. Had a Native cook done the same years before? We studied the stars that guided the Indians across the plains at night, camped by the same creek, and probably dove into the same swimming hole. To my junior-high fancy, we seemed to share a lot.

     My imagination was fueled by my reading of Conrad Richter’s The Light in the Forest in which, Johnny, an Anglo boy was reared from early childhood by Indians. His return to the white world as a teenager left him longing for his former life among the Delawares, yet when he tried to return to it, realities of race and family intervened. The young man was left without a sure home among either people. I really wanted to experience Richter’s scenes of this sixteen-year-old boy and his Indian cousin living alone in the wilderness. No tribal or personal history dampened their weeks of utter delight in the bounty and beauty of the woodlands along the river and in one another. The young man’s life, caught as it was between tribal and white societies, matched some feelings I had as a teenager straddling my idealistic imagination and the reality of carrying out groceries at the store. Although, normally I attended classes at school, sang in the church choir, and lived at home, I longed for an existence in the woods along the creek, an Indian reality of my imagination. The Boy Scout outings at least got me into the woods and to the old campsite. But too soon, Sunday afternoon would arrive and we would pack up our damp tents, sooty gear, and mud-splattered clothes. Life resumed when we got back to town. There, alone in my room, images of the creek loomed as I recalled other passages from Richter’s tale or descriptions from James Fenimore Cooper about the tall grass prairies and the adventures of old Leather Stocking. I wanted an adventure.

     I imagined that one of the warriors who showed up at my great-grandparents’ homestead would scratch on my tent wall some weekend and invite me to follow him on his journey. I pictured him as a muscular, lean man, walking before me in buckskin moccasins and leggings, a blanket draped across his shoulders. His head was nearly without hair except for an old-style scalplock pulled back into a single braid. Beads strung on leather thongs hung from his pierced ears and swayed with the easy rhythm of his gait. He turned his dark eyes toward me and simply nodded, indicating that we should cross the creek and enter the primal arena of the crescent moon with its traditional rituals and mythical stories.

     He told me how his ancestors received the corn they planted in this valley. A warrior found red, blue, and white kernels of something that looked valuable to him. He hid them in a mound of dirt and some weeks later came back to see if they were still there. Instead, he discovered a cluster of green stalks growing atop the mound, and on each stalk, ears of fruit in the three colors. He took one ear of each color for himself and shared the rest with the people of his tribe. The next spring, they planted the kernels in mounds as had the warrior, and at summer’s end, harvested a multi-colored crop of the life-sustaining gift of the Waconda. As my Indian teacher knelt by a small fire, I noted his strong legs and the red wool of his breechcloth. The blanket dropped from his shoulder as he handed me some corn. I studied the tattoos on his shoulders as I ate the food. I didn’t understand the meanings of the designs, but they helped him appear fierce. I enjoyed the corn, which tasted better than what we scouts had parched, and I knew I had found what I wanted: a life that would take me far from the city, back in time to a carefree existence, and into a friendship with this wild man who seemed so beautiful. Then I recalled the stories of the devastation met by the very Indian people who formerly lived on this creek and realized I preferred to experience this idyllic existence as only an exercise of my imagination.

* * * * *

     Mother told me that friends used to kid my great grandfather, saying the reason he immigrated to the United States was because he didn’t want to march the goose-step in the Kaiser’s army. For whatever reasons, surely including a hope for adventure, he and other settlers moved to Kansas, a move that represented homes lost and found. As immigrants, they replaced Native Americans and re-lived the experience of barely making a living from the corn and other plants they harvested and the meat they took from herds they found or raised. Their life was always a challenge, with a few fat years and many lean ones. Although my relatives were pleased to be farming, they worked endlessly and didn’t even get to go on month-long buffalo hunts like the Kansa Indians. They had to stay home to milk cows and gather eggs daily. Still, the land sustained their lives on the creek, and they, too, thanked their maker for the gift of corn.

     Although the farm was homesteaded in the late 1860’s by my ancestors, it had already been a farm for hundreds of years. It remains a farm. As an adult, I cannot imagine living there, either in the woods or in a house, but I still feel a strong emotional connection to the place, to its traditions of farming and family rearing, and to its power to evoke memories of the past and to bring a sense of reality to the present.

Denver, 2002

Photo by my dad

As a young child I loved being at the farm with its old buildings, animals, crops, hills, paths, ravine, and creek. I loved being there with my grandparents the times I got to stay over and once when I spent more than a week alone with them. I liked when our family went out there for dinner or holidays as in this summer picture in summer when the wagon was being outfitted to serve as a hay wagon. Pictured here are my two older sisters and me probably watching barn swallows make their arced swoops hunting bugs in the sky of the barn yard. Simple pleasures.