CHAPTER 1
BOY ON THE FARM
It was late summer in 1955, when the corn tassels have stoppedbeing erect and the impregnated ears are heavy with milk. I hadrecently graduated from seminary in new Jersey, and this visit to theMidwest of my youth was a kind of home-coming. Our automobilehad threaded its way on paved and graveled roads through alabyrinth of these cornfields, crossing the state line from Hardwickin southwest Minnesota into northwest Iowa. Aunt Tillie and UncleDatus were happy to hear the crunch on gravel as my parents' carturned into their driveway. We came to their farm near Boyden inorder to enjoy Sunday dinner with them: stuffed chicken with allthe trimmings and lemon meringue pie for dessert.
Their only daughter, Marilyn, now in her twenties, was offliving her own life. However, I still felt her presence everywhere onthe farmstead. In the parlor stood the baby grand piano to whichher mother used to press her, pouting, to play a piece for us afterdinner was completed and the dishes were washed and dried. It waslike a scene from a Jane Austin novel—a command performancefollowed by polite applause.
As a child Marilyn had been an adventurous daredevil. Once sheled my brothers and me up the hayloft ladder, which was attachedto one side of a chute in the middle of the barn's interior. It ledupward into the hay floor above. She challenged us to jump to thefarmyard outside from the small door opening outward from thehayloft floor. When we declined, she leaped, Icarus-like, with armsextended, hitting the ground with skeleton shaken but bones intact.She ran to the house, weeping. Her mother's first words were "Whopushed you?"
Can electricity travel up a poured stream of water? Marilyndared us to find out by peeing on the horizontal electric fence eightinches from the ground in the barnyard. The wire was meant toshock the pigs into knowing the boundary of their territory. It wasvery effective, and was supported by insulators nailed to woodenslats extending parallel to the ground from fenceposts. We boys werereluctant, knowing the sharp jolt delivered to your forefinger andthumb if you touched the fence with only a thin blade of greengrass. She boldly lifted her skirt (most girls didn't wear jeans then)and squatted to settle the experiment, but we were still afraid to try.
When my little brother nelson was visiting her for a week,they went to the middle of a cornfield, pushing the leaves asidewith upraised arms as they leapt from row to row. There theypulled down a large number of green cornstalks in order to builda substantial teepee as a base for playing hide and seek. When herfrugal father discovered the clearing, he was furious. Now, yearslater, he was able to look back and guffaw about it.
It was surely more than a whim which provoked me, afterdinner, to excuse myself and drive alone the five miles towardnearby Matlock. There I wanted to view the little house on theIowa prairie where I was born and had spent the first nine yearsof childhood during the Great Depression. Doesn't nearly everyonewant to go back to visit that first home which dwells in the mist ofmemory where it all began, for better or worse? Do we also hopethat such a pilgrimage will help us in our desire to come home tothe self?
As I approached the small house on the right of the gravel road,my initial feelings were nostalgia tinged with disappointment. It waslike looking at an old photograph in sepia. Clearly, the house andbuildings had been abandoned for fifteen years since the originalfarm of 160 acres was made part of a larger operation sometimeafter we moved away in early l940. The roof of the front porchfacing the road, supported by wooden posts, was sagging. Tall weedsand grass grown to seed had taken over the lawn. There were noflocks of pigeons alighting on the barn roof, or barn swallowsswooping down to taunt the cats.
Everything had become strangely smaller. The distance from thehouse eastward to the barn, which to a child had seemed immense,was no more than 40 yards. As children we had believed the talesabout pioneers being lost in a blizzard as they headed to the barn,lantern in hand, to tend their animals. The prudent ones connectedhouse and barn with a rope, we were told, so that in a whiteoutone could navigate with numb fingers. But surely no one couldlose their way on this short trek, no matter how blinding the snowstorm. Looking at the barn, I remembered the small wind turbinemy father once placed at the peak to generate electricity for thebatteries in the basement of the house which powered the radio.
Seeing the barn also ignited another memory of my cousinMarilyn's urge to fly. During haying, Uncle Datus had come tohelp my father at our farm near Matlock. The large hinged haydoor under the roof beam had been lowered so that slings of haycould be lifted from the hayrack by ropes attached to pulleys.A series of pulleys led to a small opening at the base of the barn.There the thick rope was attached to a "doubletree," so the Belgianscould pull the hay upward to the roofbeam and into the hayloft.Cousin Marilyn, who was three or four years old, announced thatshe wanted to fly out of that large upper door. The bottom ofthe opening was now level with the hay in the loft. We brothersencouraged her to begin at the back of the hayloft, where wewere sitting on fragrant piles of dry alfalfa. Her intent was to runtoward the opening and leap, beating her arms ever faster as she ran.Flap, flap, flap, flap, whee! My father and Uncle Datus looked upin disbelief as she plummeted to the ground below, her print dressrising to the level of her whirligig arms as she fell. This time she lostconsciousness and came awake only as her father turned into theirdriveway at the Boyden farm five miles away. Fortunately, she wasagain unharmed.
I walked to the open space where my brothers and I usedto play ball at the edge of the grove or shelter belt north of thehouse, near the small chicken coop. In those days, we used abroken pitchfork handle for a bat. That ball field, littered with deadbranches, was barely larger than the house, a two-story dwellingwhich was at most 25 feet by 30 feet.
Just north of the grove stood the traditional windmill whichsymbolizes the romance of the rural. I remembered my fatherrushing out during a thunderstorm to pull the long wooden leverwhich forced the vane to be parallel to the plane of the wheel offins so that it would not spin out of control in the fierce wind, andfelt my sense of relief when he came back to the house, drenchedand disheveled.
Turning from the windmill, I retraced my steps past the chickencoop and back to the house. It was covered by loose and greyingclapboards. As I approached the door facing the farmyard, I carefullyclimbed the three rotting steps. The door was locked. Frustrated, Iwalked to the left a few steps and peered through the dining roomwindow, hands cupped around my eyes. There, across the room,were the bannistered steps leading upstairs. I was taken back to aChristmas morning when I was three years old and to my earliestmemory of my father. My brothers and I had run down the stairsto claim the single present waiting for each under the colorfullydecorated tree whose fragrance filled the room.
My gift was a team of cast iron horses about four inches high,which could be unhooked from a little farm grain wagon, also ofcast iron. Although there were harnesses imprinted on the horses,I wanted to fashion real ones of string. When my father saw myfumbling, he took me on his lap in his armchair. Together we madethe collar, the traces and the breeches that encircle the horses'haunches. That was the only time I can remember his touching orholding me with affection. Perhaps it was the miniature horses thatdrew his attention. He loved his horses. I have vivid memories of hisstroking the necks of his team of Belgians, although I never saw himhug or even touch my mother.
I turned from the window toward the rusted woven wire fencethat still encircled the lawn. Such a narrow space of lawn betweenthe house and driveway! There stood the maple tree to which ourneighbors, who lived a mile to the west, would tie their retardeddaughter with a thin strand of rope when they came to visit. Shewould sit on the ground in her dirty dress, making guttural soundswhile she contentedly tore a Sears Roebuck catalogue into smallpieces. It wasn't that they didn't love her. Rather, they loved her somuch that they could not entrust her to a state institution. I recalledalso that it was on this same south side of the house that my wildand exuberant cousin, Marilyn, caught up to me and brought a toyhoe down upon my skull so that the blood ran through my hair anddown my neck. She was probably four years old then, and I was five.Her anger had been provoked by my teasing her about something.
One can still see a few examples of these diminutivefarmhouses in the Midwest, built in an era preceding the wave ofrural prosperity following the Depression. After that came a newgeneration of modern farm homes, and another after that.
Apparently childhood memories, and memory in general, candeceive us and seem to distort things. We remember especiallyevents that are colored by emotion. But such memories are as realas the objective world is now. They are the way back to what painedand delighted us; to what formed us. If my parents are alive, myrelation to them is surely no more significant than the myriad ofmemories of them after they have died that influence me in all myrelationships and actions. That deep well of images and feelings hasan immensity and reality all its own.
This attempt at an autobiography will draw on many memories.It is a challenge to weave them into a coherent pattern. One wayto bring unity is to read it as a story about getting a second chance.It traces the progress of a shy Midwest farm boy clad in bibbeddenim overalls and a straw hat laboring in the fields and hayloft inthe years during and immediately after the Great Depression. Hewas born into humble circumstances and a somewhat dysfunctionalfamily. A promising career as a clergyman begins with success butends, after ten years, in disullusionment. A move from new Jerseyto rural Vermont brings a second opportunity for vocational successand personal fulfillment. This story about rural life and childhoodwounds also moves through a midlife journey toward psychologicaland spiritual wholeness which may offer encouragement to others.Because of that healing, the last third of my life as a professor ofphilosophy, active retiree, contented husband, father of stalwart sonsand lover of land, trees and all things wild, has been the best.
Unlike most Americans today, my roots can be traced almostentirely to one nationality and culture—Dutch Calvinists whoemigrated to the U.S. in the second half of the l9th Century. Unlikethe earlier Pilgrims, they came here not only to seek a better life,but to escape liberal influences which threatened their sense ofbeing a holy people who must preserve a strict morality and areligion that was obedient to the principles of John Calvin andthe Bible. From Geneva, Switzerland, where Calvin presided overa theocracy in the l7th Century, Calvinism spread to other places.They including Scotland, where it became the Presbyterian Church,and Holland, where it was known as the Reformed Church.Immigrants brought both denominations in various forms to thenew World.
A very early strain of Dutch came to the new World in amovement we associate with Henry Hudson, who explored theHudson river in new York in the l7th Century. Many towns, citiesand streams in the Hudson Valley and new Jersey have names thatreflect this first wave of Dutch settlement in the new world. Fishkill(fish creek), where I had my first parish and where BrinkerhoffMansion was located, are good examples.
The much more conservative l9th Century Dutch immigrantswho came here 200 years later went mostly to the Midwest. Theywere clannish, and formed enclaves of Dutch Calvinist culture inplaces like Sioux County, Iowa (where I was born); Plankinton,South Dakota; Pella, Iowa; and Grand Rapids and Holland,Michigan. When I read the history of The Netherlands, which hasa rich heritage of trade, the arts, toleration and attempts to protecther Jews from Hitler as it had offered them refuge from the SpanishInquisition, I am proud of my Dutch ancestry. In my personaldevelopment, however, I increasingly defined myself in oppositionto the strain of Midwest Calvinism into which I was born. Thephilosopher Nietzsche finally helped me to articulate, when I wasin my thirties, why I found that culture to be so stultifying andlife-denying. "Back to the body," cried Nietzsche "Back to theearth!" In recent years I have come to realize that much, though notall, of that rigid Dutch Calvinism has softened and adapted to newtimes.
I was born on October l0, l930 at 3:30 A.M., the second of fivechildren, to Michael Vos and Anna Faye Aardema. My father's realname was Mitchell, but for reasons unknown, he was always knownas Michael. His father's parents were second generation immigrants.Peter Vos, his father, was born in 1871 and his mother, Nellie VanWyke, in 1878. Their parents came to the U.S. from Gelderland, aprovince in the east Netherlands.
The parents of my mother came directly from Friesland, aprovince in the North Netherlands. My grandfather CharlesAardema was born in 1862 and died in at age 74. His wife,Emma Jansma, was born in 1865 and died at age 71. One of herdaughters-in-law rembered her as being quiet and "a little moody."She loved to bake, especially ginger cookies, and kept a neat home.They both died of cancer in 1936 within three months of oneanother.
Charles and Emma emigrated to Sioux County, Iowa,shortly after she was a bride at 18 years of age. We tend to thinkof immigrants then as fleeing poverty and political or religiousoppression. That was not the case with Emma, according to theirfavorite grandson Harold, who, although stricken with polio in hisyouth and confined to a wheelchair, published The Doon Pressfor several decades. The homey weekly catered to the interests ofthe surrounding Dutch communities. In his editor's column, "InkSpots," Harold once described his grandparnts and the homesicknessof his newly-married grandmother Emma for her little village ofAchlumi in Friesland.
"She missed the rows of little brick houses with red clay tiledroofs, the winding country roads through green pastures an the bluecanals. She missed the old stone church with green lichen growingon the north side and the vines festooning the whole rear wall, andand the graveyard around the church, a sad reminder of familiesof bygone days. She missed the Friesian sky, so often marked withscudding white clouds like so many sail boats. She missed the smellof sweet earth and salty sea. She missed the distant smell of greengrass and cow dung. She missed family and friends she would neveragain see. Grandma Emma was a quiet, inward person, somewhataloof, with just a touch of class and propriety. Grandpa Charley insharp contrast was a bit noisy, outgoing with a touch of buffooneryand his very own brand of humor." (Quoted by permission of theDoon Press).
My father, born in 1898 was the second eldest of twelvechildren, of whom only three were boys. Mother was the youngestof eleven, four of whom were girls. Her year of birth was 1902.The Voses were, on the whole, assertive and confident, while theAardemas were more self-effacing. Perhaps it was because theywere first generation immigrants, and quite poor. My motherused to repeat a saying which revealed the inferiority felt by morerecent immigrants: "The Irish and the Dutch, they can't be much."While the Voses were farmers, the Aardemas, after an attempt atfarming, made various building materials produced from cement.Located in Doon, Iowa, it was a dusty business. Two of mymother's brothers died prematurely from silicosis aggravated bysmoking.
My grandparents and their children were quite prolific. While Ihave lost touch with most of them and many are deceased, I had 52first cousins on the Vos side of the family and 25 from the Aardemas.How many Americans today can claim 77 first cousins?
Because my mother's immigrant parents spoke mostly FriesianDutch, a distinct dialect, her English was salted with Friesian andDutch phrases. When my parents swore, they almost always did it inDutch. They did not think they were fooling God; only shieldingtheir children from hearing what was forbidden to us. We were notfooled. Some of mother's Friesian and Dutch phrases were quaintand colorful. When my little brother or sister dirtied a diaper, shesaid in Dutch that the baby had "oliekoek in de broek" (oil cake inthe pants).
