To Commit is to Dig In
By Buffy Hastings
Meet Fred!
Our house is built around a boulder. The previous owners called it “Fred” and so we do as well. Fred is not small, not by any means, and it is easy to see why the house was built around it instead of moving Fred to make the house linear. Fred has been there for 220 million years.
Hickory Seedlings.
In our laundry room my youngest daughter and I have a flat of hickory seedlings going. We saved the seed last fall, wintered them in a mason jar in the fridge and planted them out this spring.
They’re almost ready for transplanting now, three or more leaves on the seedlings. They won’t bear any nuts until they are forty years old and they’ll live to be three hundred.
When my family and I farmed in Solebury I had a different sense of land, of time. The land, the farm, made us farm. The space of the fields, the pastures, the way the springs lay near the cottage, had me thinking of time but in its relation to work. It was remarkable to see the stone barn and to think of all the work that it took to fell the trees, haul the logs, square them, raise them. All that stone dug up and hauled and laid. Backbreaking and extraordinary and done with hand tools and animal power. But here, on Sourland Mountain, with Fred right outside our window and knowing we’re living on the spot where Africa and North America pulled away from each other, our sense of time and place has changed. What’s our lifespan against Fred’s? By the time those hickories are in their adolescence I’ll be dead. And as the land dictates its use, not humans dictating the land’s use, we find ourselves thinking about small mountain homesteads, the diversified economies they contain---food crops, a woodshop, a smithy. No longer tenant farmers we’ve felt a sense of commitment to the place that lacked from the farm. The mountain homestead implies a working-with, a digging in. It’s us and the mountain. The key word being and. It is an interesting word ‘commitment’; it originally came from the Latin committere which meant “to unite, connect or entrust.” It wasn’t until the 18th century that we began thinking of the word as meaning a pledge, an engagement, a promise, an obligation. But what is a promise without connection? And what is obligation without unity? To plant a hickory seedling in your yard, knowing full well you’ll never see the tree in its maturity is to commit yourself to the place, to engage with its history by adding to its future. It is to say that you’ll care for that tree for your lifespan and hopefully impart a sense of culture enough to your children that they will care for that same tree through theirs. And then their children…
Certified Sourland Habitat Sign.
You give yourself over to the place and watch it and listen and the place changes you. You hope not to change it but to work with it, to commit to it. We’re caretakers on the Mountain, it will outlast us all. We don’t own the land the house is on, we’ve just committed ourselves to watching after it. The property is now a Certified Sourland Habitat and we’re excited to get those hickories in the ground. I like spending a morning on my hands and knees on the mountain cutting and swabbing multiflora rose. Where that dies is where the hickories will go. Or maybe the smithy. Who knows? But I know that the rock around us is ancient beyond ancient and given the right commitment the forest will become that once again.