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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Harlan Hubbard - painter, writer, agrarian homesteader
  • Date: Thu, 26 Feb 2009 18:46:43 -0700




Harlan Hubbard - painter, writer, agrarian homesteader
by Gene Logsdon
Published Feb 25 2009 by OrganicToBe.org
http://organictobe.org/index.php/2009/02/25/harlan-hubbard-painter-writer-ag
rarian-homesteader/

I found Harland Hubbard in an article in the National Geographic in the
early 1960s. He and his wife, Anna, were what was called at that time
modern homesteaders who had first become well-known for building their own
shantyboat and floating down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to bayou
country, a trip that lasted over a year. Now they lived on the banks of the
Ohio in a house they had built themselves, mostly out of lumber cut from
their own woodland or snagged as it floated by on the river. They did not
have electricity. They cut their own wood for fuel. They raised all their
food, or caught it from the river, or traded for it with neighbors. The
only steady income they had was rent from a house Harlan had built in town
in younger years. Their life was both rigorous and elegant. Harlan made
some money from his paintings and his books. The couple provided their own
entertainment: nature watching, reading, and music.

For a while, I talked about living the same way, causing Carol’s parents
some consternation. In their first years of marriage, they had lived much
like the Hubbards but viewed with alarm the idea that their daughter and
grandchildren might have to do likewise. I was reminded, more than once,
that, unlike the Hubbards, I had children to raise. So I went to
Philadelphia, accepted the manacles of financial security, and forgot about
the Hubbards.

Fourteen years later, Wendell Berry introduced me to the Hubbards. They
lived only a few miles from his farm. Wendell and I were both writing for
the Rodale Press, whose publications were seeing a dramatic rise in
circulation. This was the golden age of Organic Gardening magazine.
Literally millions of people were subscribing to it because they had gotten
the audacious notion that they wanted more control over their lives. The
magazine was suggesting ways to gain that control. Like the Hubbards, these
readers thought that they wanted to go where they could own a little land
free and clear, live more healthfully, more at nature’s pace than the
nine-to-five regime, produce their own food, do for themselves what they
had been paying others to do for them, and make enough money at some small
business or craft to get by. In other words, they were motivated by the
same kind of idealism that had influenced the early pioneers. They were
agrarians. They found in the publications of the Rodale Press the kind of
information they were looking for.

It was in this heady atmosphere of hope that, at Wendell’s suggestion, I
was assigned to write an article about Harlan and Anna Hubbard. I
remembered them from the National Geographic article and accepted the
assignment eagerly.

It was impossible to drive to the Hubbards’ house, near Milton, Kentucky.
There was no road to it. I either had to walk for more than a mile through
the woods or had to boat over the Ohio from the Indiana side. Tanya Berry
was my guide—I doubt that I could have found the house on my own. We
walked through real Daniel Boone-type country with only a rough old lane to
follow. Finally, we could see the river through the trees. We came to a
little barn-like structure, Harlan’s studio and workshop, and then
followed a path to the house. My heart was pounding. I had read Harlan
Hubbard’s books, Payne Hollow and Shantyboat, as one would read about a
pleasant dream fulfilled: two people who had managed to shuck the
captivating technological inanities of our time in favor of life on their
own terms. But, ever cynical, I feared that there would be a wide gap
between the books and the reality. I feared that, instead of self-reliant
homesteaders, I would find two darlings of the richer classes playing a
game or, even worse, two visionaries living in squalor and disarray.

What I found was order and discipline, and the reward of order and
discipline, just as Harlan’s books portrayed: an easy grace and serenity
of life that was not at all easy or simple to achieve. “I really
wouldn’t know what to do with electricity,” Anna answered my first
question. “I’ve learned how to manage without it. I don’t need it. I
even doubt it would make my life any easier.”

The Hubbards were a good example of what contrary Organic Gardening readers
wanted to know about. The couple cooked with wood heat, washed clothes by
hand on a scrub board (both helping), raised and preserved all their own
food, had no indoor bathroom, no television, radio, or telephone. But,
though living what seemed to be a circumscribed life, they possessed a rare
combination of vigorous intellectual creativity and skilled, practical
know-how: they were people who could think with their hands as well as with
their minds and who therefore lived a philosophy rooted in the solid earth,
not one flying in the winds of the briefcase world. The Hubbards did not
say: Here is what should be done. Rather, they said: Here is what we do.

If I had approached the Hubbard homestead from the river landing, which was
the way the Hubbards first came to Payne Hollow in the 1950s, I would,
during high water, have set foot on land at the gate of the lower gardens.
This plot Harlan reserved for the late garden, planted after the spring
flood danger had passed. To the left, on a higher shelf, lay the early
garden. In early April, peas and other vegetables were already up. The
gooseberry patch on one side was leafing out; rhubarb and comfrey flanked
the other side. Anna had already cut some for the table. Next to the
rhubarb grew a patch of daylilies. “New daylily shoots are delicious,”
Harlan said. “There is plenty to eat, even this early in the year.” He
gestured toward the larkspur-purpled hillsides. He dug a Jerusalem
artichoke and cut off a slice to show how crisp and sweet it was before
warm weather caused it to start growing fast. “Later on, we’ll gather
nettles,” he said. “Cream of nettles soup is a favorite of mine.”

A raspberry patch grew below the early garden, the brambles tied to a
trellis of discarded water pipe that Harlan had found. Blackberries he
gathered from his sixty acres of woods. “The wild ones are much tastier
than tame blackberries,” he said. Elderberries came from the woods too.
Anna used them with rhubarb, the blandness of the berries offsetting the
tartness of the rhubarb. “Gooseberries and rhubarb are great together for
the same reason,” said Harlan.

Nothing was wasted on the Hubbard homestead. The gardens were totally
organic. Every scrap of waste, manure from their goats and from the privy
compost, legumes, green manures, all were returned to the soil, more boon
than bother. “The goats relish a patch of weeds as much as any pasture.
Weeds make satisfactory hay too.” In front of the goat barn, Harlan had
sunk into the ground two fifty-five-gallon drums fitted out with slanted
tops and screened side portals to keep out water and mice but still allow
for some circulation of air. Here they stored potatoes, beets and other
root vegetables for winter use.

Directly up from the gardens, just above the high-water mark of the record
1937 flood, a mark that is kept sacred all along the river, stood the house
and, next to it, beside Harlan’s studio and workshop, a shed full of
kindling. Harlan called this shed his bank. “If I can’t always keep a
supply of wood sawed and split from the woods for day to day use, I’ve
got this wood for backup.”

There was a wren’s nest in the privy. I sat there on the toilet staring
eye to eye with the mother bird—a little disconcerting for both of us, I
think. There was no odor, even of ammonia, coming from the excrement below
the toilet seat. A pipe under the seat vented odors through the wall, and
all one had to do, between uses, was keep the tight-fitting cover on the
toilet hole. “Flushing” amounted to dropping a scoopful of ashes from a
bucket down the hole. Twice a week, Harlan lifted the tub below the toilet
onto his wheelbarrow and hauled it to the compost heap in the woods. The
pile kept moving as he used finished compost from one end while adding new
manure to the other. Before he replaced the tub under the toilet, he added
a layer of finished compost in it. “Bacteria will begin the composting
process quicker than would otherwise be the case.”

The house was a study in artful craftsmanship. Every stone, every log,
every rough-sawn board was fitted in place one at a time—the materials
dictating the form of the house almost as much as the form dictated the
materials. “The reason the ceiling joists are sapling sycamore is because
those were the straightest logs in the woods,” said Harlan. Part of the
wall was paneled with rough-sawn walnut, and, when he ran out of walnut,
Harlan did the rest in cherry. The circular saw marks remained in the wood
rather than having been planed away, the overall textural effect
unexpectedly pleasing to the eye. Between the two layers of rough-sawn
boards that made up the walls, the Hubbards used construction paper for
insulation. Wide sycamore boards covered the floor. Sycamore grain did not
raise much or splinter easily, and sycamores can grow to enormous size,
easily living for three hundred years. Humans have actually lived in huge,
hollow sycamores, the perfect transubstantiation of silviculture into art.

The house was small, modeled on the shantyboat of earlier days. Beds folded
up behind shelves, stair steps opened to reveal storage chests, chairs
fitted over each other like nesting boxes so that they could be stacked out
of the way between meals; even the sink slid back into the wall like a
drawer.

The woodstove cuddled up beside the fireplace, and both were used for food
preparation, to heat water, and of course to warm the room. In the cellar,
Harlan had also installed a homemade furnace with a flat top so that it
could double as a shelf. Beside the furnace rows of other shelves groaned
with jars of food that Anna had put up. In a cool corner, the fresh goat
milk sat in jars in a shallow pan of cool water with a moist cloth over the
jars. “The milk will stay cool for several days this way,” said Anna.
“With daily milking we have no problem keeping fresh sweet milk on
hand.” Surplus milk they made into cheese and yogurt.

Much of the work of subsistence the two homesteaders did together.
“Harlan always helps with the canning and the laundry, which makes those
chores much easier,” said Anna. “When I can goat meat and soup bone
stock, he always cuts the meat off the bones, and that’s the hardest part
of the job.”

Harlan’s first task in the morning before going to the barn was to set
his breakfast food mixture of ground wheat and soybeans over the fire in
the cast iron Dutch oven converted into a double boiler. “It is ready in
an hour but can sit there simmering all day,” says Anna. “You don’t
have to bother with it much.”

In the summer, Harlan’s main work was the garden and other
food-production chores. The trotline in the river had to be tended, the
fish removed, the hooks rebaited. Fish were a principal source of protein
for the Hubbards. In the winter, there was wood to cut and split, all done
with hand tools. “Last winter, with the terribly cold weather, I had to
keep at it pretty constantly,” Harlan said.

The Hubbards even made some of their own garments. Anna darned warm long
socks and mittens to wear inside leather chopper’s mitts. These mitts
Harland made himself out of scraps of leather. He also made sandals. His
favorite winter garment was a goatskin vest made from a skin that he had
tanned.

The river, always there on the edge of the mind, like a loved one to the
lover, gave them more than just fish. “You never know what is going to
float up next,” Harlan said, “and it is fun to see what you can
scrounge.” A good portion of the wood that they burned, or that had found
its way into their buildings, came from the river. More steel barrels
floated by than Harlan could use. But the best prize so far was a huge roll
of paper, so tightly wound that water had not soaked into it except at the
edges. The Hubbards had used the paper for years, for everything from
stationary to shelf covers. With some gaily colored nylon strand from a
flotsam rope, Harlan fashioned curtain shades from strips of paper that
resembled bamboo blinds and were every bit as attractive.

The Hubbards preferred hand labor over motors. Once, Harlan installed a
gasoline-powered pump to lift water from the cistern to a tank farther up
the hill so that, following gravity, the water could flow into the house.
“I got rid of it,” he said. (He mentioned the motor in Payne Hollow,
written three years earlier, but not that he quit using it). “The motor
was noisy. Too jarring. Totally out of place here. I found my peace of mind
shattered because I was worrying about the motor. I found that I could
carry the water by hand to the tank with just a few minutes’ work every
day.” He fashioned a wooden yoke like the pioneers had used to fit over
his shoulders. With a bucket hung from each end of the yoke, filled from a
dip bucket lowered into the cistern, he methodically walked the water to
the tank.

Watching him dip and carry the water, I was struck by the economy of motion
and energy he put into the task. I noticed the same smooth flow of muscle
motion when he hoed, when he cranked the handle of the grain mill, when he
pushed the wheelbarrow. There were no hard, jerky movements, no flailing
away needlessly. His strong, supple body moved in cadence with the laws of
leverage and of gravity. His hoe sank into the rich organic soil as if
drawn down by some unseen force in the ground. He seemed only to rock
backward as the hoe sank, his weight pulling it toward him, turning over
crumbly dirt as fast as any garden tiller could. He in fact disdained
mechanical tillers. Grinding meal, his body seemed to coil and then uncoil
around the crank like a spring while the meal streamed steadily from the
burrs. It occurred to me that herein lay the secret of enjoying physical
work. Knowing how to use the laws of gravity and leverage, and being in
condition. Mastery brought not dull strain but the same satisfaction that a
ballplayer derives from a perfect hook slide into second base.

The Hubbards exhibited none of the reluctance toward hard manual toil that
so many writers perceive hanging over agrarian life. Toil they accepted as
the reward of the body’s natural grace and desire for exercise. They
never forced their bodies to compete with machines. Manual labor became
art.

As Harlan cranked away, grinding his breakfast wheat, I questioned him
sharply about this. “Physical labor is not of itself repugnant,” he
said. “Too much physical labor is repugnant. A moderate amount is fun.
That’s why people who think they have escaped hard labor turn to jogging
or some such waste of energy that is actually more tedious than farmwork. I
think also that doing hard physical labor for someone else does become
tedious. Doing the bidding of someone else is distasteful, whether the work
is physically straining or not. The body wants to work but not as someone
else’s slave. My work is pleasant and satisfying.”

He stated his work philosophy more gracefully in Payne Hollow.

I try to conceive a life of more leisure, a condition which men have ever
been trying to achieve by various means—by forcing slaves or captives in
war to do their menial work, or by letting it devolve upon womenfolk, or by
hiring servants and nowadays by innumerable machines and gadgets. This last
solution allows everyone to play the master, but it is well known that
machines are on the way to become masters of man.

…We… get all our living by as direct means as possible, that we may be
self-sufficient and avoid contributing to the ruthless mechanical system
that is destroying the earth.

In this endeavor, no sacrifice is called for, no struggle or effort of
will. Such a way is natural. Rather than hardship, it brings peace and
inner rewards beyond measure.

One of the main rewards that Harlan and Anna’s lifestyle brought them was
more time to spend at pursuits other than livelihood work, the kind of time
that all of us were supposed to be trying frantically to find. Seemingly
out of place in the small house stood a grand piano, which Anna played
often. Harlan accompanied her on the violin. Both read much and widely,
often aloud to each other in German and French as well as English. Once a
month they rowed across the river to Madison, Indiana, for the few
essentials that they could not produce themselves and to exchange books at
the library. Nature-watching, especially bird-watching, was an amusement
always available just by looking out the window.

Dining at the Hubbards was an elegant affair despite the lack of electrical
refrigeration and other modern amenities. The dinner that Anna served
started out with a salad of sliced, fresh Jerusalem artichokes, fresh
violets, including the blossoms, parsley, new Bibb lettuce from the cold
frame, comfrey, plus several other greens that I did not recognize, all
sprinkled over with crumbled black walnut meats. The soup was from stock
canned three years previously. It possessed superb flavor. The main dish
was smoked goat meat, shredded and creamed, flanked by asparagus. The
heavy, moist homemade bread consisted of whole wheat flour and soybean
flour in equal portions. We drank goat’s milk as sweet as any milk I had
ever tasted, and later, herb tea. Anna made tea from comfrey, spice bush,
stinging nettle, sassafras, pennyroyal, and parsley.

A constant stream of visitors arrived at their solitary home. In fact, the
Hubbards often wished they were not so popular. “People seem to think we
have nothing to do,” Harlan said wryly. But he turned no one away.
“We’re not here to put on a show,” he said, “but if we can
demonstrate how our way of life is practically attainable, we feel it will
be worth the effort.”

All this work and play took place as a background to Harlan’s writing and
painting. While he was grinding wheat and we were alone in his workshop, I
asked him why he didn’t write a book telling people in minute detail how
he and Anna managed their daily lives. He smiled. “Most people don’t
really want to know that much detail about anything. What I would write
would be too tedious for them. No publisher would publish it.” He turned
the crank on the grinder a few more times, then stopped and stared out the
window. “It would be like trying to teach someone how to paint a picture.
There are certain obvious things that might be pointed out, but you can’t
teach someone to be an artist. It is something that can’t be taught.”

A few more cranks, and the last of the wheat spilled out as flour into a
bowl. “Teaching is overemphasized in our society,” he continued.
“Learning is the thing. Teaching doesn’t automatically result in
learning. Learning requires love and desire, and when you have that,
anything and everybody is a teacher.”

“Would you say that your whole life here is a work of art?”

“I see it that way. I am doing art whether I am chopping wood or painting
a picture or writing a book or making a pair of sandals.”

“Can you imagine living this way without painting or writing?”

He looked at me curiously. “I never asked myself that. I just sort of
always wanted to paint and write, just like I always wanted to canoe the
river or have a garden. I used to think there was a kind of pride involved,
that I wanted to paint something others would appreciate. I like it when
someone buys a painting. The money can be useful, but, more than that,
it’s a way you know the person really likes the painting.”

He paused again, then asked, shyly: “Would you like to see some
paintings?”

“Oh yes.” I had refrained from asking, not wanting to cross what might
be a fine line of privacy.

We went into the studio. There were no paintings hanging up—there was
hardly enough space to allow that. Most of the wall space was taken up by
the north window. But there were canvases, or, rather, masonites, leaning
against the wall. Harlan turned them one at a time to my gaze. They were
mostly paintings of steamboats. I had not been prepared for that. To my
mind steamboats were alien to his life. Why steamboats? I wondered.

He proceeded to tell me. Payne Hollow, this very place where he lived, had
once been a regular steamboat packet stop. The whole farming country along
the river for miles and miles depended as much on small steamboats and the
river for transportation and trade as it did on horses and roads! “Farm
families often built their own little boats the same as they would build
wagons,” Harlan pointed out matter-of-factly. “Wives would go down to
the landing and take a boat to town about like taking a taxi today. The
packets responded to every hail from shore.” He smiled. “A favorite
story is that a farmer once hailed a steamboat to get change for a
fifty-cent piece.”

Painting steamboats, Harlan was painting his place! Steamboats had once
been part of the agrarian lifestyle along navigable rivers. I was reminded
of the Wyeth family’s island sheep off the coast of Maine grazing on
seaweed. Steamboat farmers and sheep grazing the ocean floor! This deep
kind of knowledge was at the basis of real art. I had a hunch that Jamie
Wyeth lovingly painted those island sheep (Portrait of a Lady [1968])
knowing that the sheep were partial to seaweed. I had a similar hunch that
Harlan lovingly painted steamboats knowing that there had been a time when
a packet had stopped at Payne Hollow to give a farmer change for fifty
cents.

It was not until some years later that I had a chance to see a good
selection of Harlan’s paintings, at Hanover College, and then I was
embarrassed, remembering how ignorant I had been when I visited Payne
Hollow. I did not yet know about his early (1930-40) landscapes of Kentucky
hill farms, like Campbell County Hill Farm (1933), which captivated me.
Those landscapes seem to have sprung onto the canvas suddenly, ingenuously,
like the way a morel mushroom seems suddenly to appear on the forest floor
where the hunter has just looked seconds earlier. I thought the farm scenes
looked exactly the way they would look to someone who saw them every day
without actually looking at them, the way a child living there would see
them. In his journals, Harlan talked about the paintings in somewhat the
same way. While possessing a certain stylistic or impressionistic
character, the paintings looked real and fresh, with people at work or
passing through the scenes almost incidentally. They were everyday kind of
paintings, the kind of everydayness that a person loves in an old shoe that
fits comfortably, the kind of everydayness that only intimate knowledge can
convey. Harlan once described the effect he was trying to achieve in one of
his journal entries: “I am concerned with two aspects—one a
representation of what I see, working in three dimensions, in light and air
molding with my hands, almost, a bit of the earth’s surface. The other is
abstract, a pattern of color and line, whose relation to the pictorial I am
not sure of. Above these two, making a trinity, is the guiding force: in me
perhaps a love of what I see, and what I feel when observing the
landscape.”

Since Harlan was equally adept at both writing and painting, I asked him
how the two kinds of art were different and how they were alike. He
didn’t answer right away. But finally: “The mental state I suppose is
the same for all art, at least when you start out. There’s a sort of
sudden coming together of idea and object, of mind and matter. Then, as the
work enfolds, there is the same problem in both painting and writing—what
to leave in or leave out. It took me a long time to write Payne Hollow. It
wasn’t like journal entries, which don’t have to be organized and
integrated. I often wrote something and then discarded it. That is true in
a painting too. The artist is always playing the part of a little god,
creating his own world almost. For me, I like to paint sort of quickly,
that is, without too much thinking. Thinking can wreck it. But at some
point writing becomes a very intellectual activity. Demands a lot of
thinking. With painting, well, you have brushes, and colors, and shapes,
and the light. Painting is more physical.”

“I guess you could hardly paint a comma and hang it on the wall,” I
said. He smiled an nodded.

I remembered a whimsical little poem Harlan had written, a bit of verse
about himself at work building a boat and what it might sound like to
anyone hearing him from afar:

That pounding seems to come from Payne Hollow
Some think to themselves—
that nail went wrong,
He hit the wood that time.

I found my mind looping back to my conversations with Andrew Wyeth and
Wendell Berry—Andy’s insistence on not letting the paint hide the real
thing and Wendell’s emphasis on intimate knowledge at the root of art.
Only people who knew the intimate details of what they were writing about
or reading about—in this case a carpenter at work—could write such
perfectly appropriate lines:

that nail went wrong,
He hit the wood that time.

~
See also HarlanHubbard.com
~~
Gene and Carol Logsdon have a small-scale experimental farm in Wyandot
County, Ohio.
Gene is author of The Mother of All Arts: Agrarianism and the Creative
Impulse (Culture of the Land),
The Last of the Husbandmen: A Novel of Farming Life, and All Flesh Is
Grass: Pleasures & Promises Of Pasture Farming
Excerpted from The Mother of All Arts
OrganicToBe.org | OrganicToGo.com
Gene’s Posts
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Editorial Notes ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I've wanted to learn more about the extraordinary Hubbards. Wendell Berry
has written about them in Harlan Hubbard: Life and Work. Their homestead
was also featured in the science fiction novel by Judith Moffett: Time,
Like an Ever-rolling Stream. -BA






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