Great Possessions: An Amish Farmer's Journal by David Kline

On May 9, 2002, I made my first purchase from Amazon, and it was David Kline's Great Possessions; however, I did not know it was David Kline's Great Possessions. Friends on a listserv were talking about how great Wendell Berry's books were, so I decided to buy one. A search for Wendell Berry on Amazon turned up Great Possessions. I want to say that it was the only result of the search, but how could that have been? Maybe Amazon wasn't selling books from his publisher at the time. Maybe it was just the cheapest result. That might well have been it. I see I only paid $4.94.

Needless to stay, I was pretty unhappy when I started reading the book and realized that the author wasn't Berry, who wrote only the two-page foreword, but someone I'd never heard of before, and yet it was a fortuitous mistake. It's a wonderful book. I remember writing at the time that reading Great Possessions was like having a friend walking you around his property and showing you all the things he loved. I didn't, however, get very far into the book. I don't know why, but I always meant to get back to it.

Great Possessions is a collection of essays from Family Life, an Amish magazine. Because of this, the chapters are fairly short, and it is a good book to read in spare moments. Despite this fact, I did not read it in spare moments, because once I started reading, I didn't want to stop.

Kline has lived on, and farmed his property all of his life. He knows it in a very deep way. It isn't just the amount of time he has lived there, but the way he lives there. And he is so observant. I know less per square foot about the 1/6 acre that I lived on for 24 years than he knows about any square inch of his farm. This really makes me want to go outside and learn more about the 10 acres we have now, but, of course, I'm not going to do it until it gets a bit cooler.

The essays cover many different kinds of plants and animals that live on the farm, but the greatest portion of the books is devoted to birds: large and small birds, land and shore birds. It's amazing to me the 100s of different species that his family spots every year. Off the top of my head, I can only think of 18 that I see around here. Of course, I probably have several species of sparrows, but I can't tell them apart.

It's rather ironic that this book written by a man who uses very little modern technology in his life constantly sent me to my phone or Kindle. I had to find out, "What does a red-eyed vireo look like? A cecropia moth? A serviceberry tree? (Gorgeous. The next tree I plant will be one of these.) What does an eastern bluebird sound like? There were times when it took me ten minutes to read one page because I was looking up so many things.

I learned a lot of interesting things while reading the book, but I am only going to mention three. One is that the horned lark builds a little patio of pebbles on one side of its nest. (It is permissible to share the photo below for non-commercial purpose. I don't really understand how it works, so I put the we address in the rollover.)

Photo credit: Amy Evenstad

The second is that some birds, one being the American Golden-Plover, migrate to South America. I find this rather wonderful to think about. In the fall, the plover leaves the wintery arctic, where it breeds, flies through the fall, and the perpetual summer of the tropic, and reaches South America in their spring, and stays through the southern summer. If a human made this trip, he would have to take a huge wardrobe.

And third, many hawks migrating from the north follow the Appalachian mountains. There are a few spots, including Hawk Mountain in Pennsylvania, and Hawk Ridge Nature Reserve in Duluth, MN,where the flyway narrows due to the physical characteristics of the land, and so hundreds of thousands of hawks are funneled through these small areas. There are times when you can see more than 10,000 in a day.

Most of the essays are beautiful, or informative, and mostly upbeat, but the essay titled Farewell to the Giants made me tear up a bit. Kline tells of making a visit with his son to an old-growth woodland that abutted their property, and which was soon to be logged by new owners.

Arising from our cushiony bed of moss, we walked through the woods to look and admire for the last time. We paused beneath red and white oaks and poplars towering sixty feet to their first limbs. Their branches, joining high overhead, gave the impression of a green-and-gold cathedral ceiling supported by massive wooden columns. In autumns past, like my older brothers before me, I would often take a morning off on the pretense of hunting for squirrels to come here and revel in this grandeur--an experience both humbling and exhilarating.

The description reminds of Mallorn trees in Lothlórien (Lord of the Rings). It's not so much a physical resemblance, as the feeling that it evokes. 

There are some chapters near the end that are instructive and are giving me ideas. One is called Planting for Wildlife and one is Winter Bird Feeding. I tried some summer bird feeding this year with absolutely no success, but maybe I'll do better in the winter. I want to make a bird list. And I need a pair of binoculars. I am definitely keeping this book.

AMDG