Mapping the Farm

The Chronicle of a Family

By John Hildebrand
Vintage, $13

ISBN 0679750339

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Review by Alden Mudge

At the outset of John Hildebrand's graceful narrative about his wife's family farm near Rochester, Minnesota, Hildebrand's father-in-law lies in a hospital bed, and the concerned family gathers to figure out how to keep the farm operating. The 240-acre farm has been in family hands for more than 100 years, but none of Ed and Frances O'Neill's eight children now farms for a living. Suburban subdivisions have sprouted along the farm's boundaries, an interstate has lopped off access to river land, and technology and the market's invisible hand have made the economics of such small-scale farming shaky at best. This is, in other words, a fairly familiar story of contemporary American rural life.

In Hildebrand's hands, however, this story is transformed from the merely familiar to the emblematic. "Land itself can never be lost, only transformed," he writes, "what is slipping away, day by day, is the meaning that connects us to it." In a series of beautifully rendered "overlays," as he calls them, Hildebrand gives us both the personal connections of four generations of O'Neills to this particular acreage in Minnesota and a vivid portrait of agrarian history and the meaning of independent, family farmers to the American experiment.

Mapping the Farm loosely follows the seasonal cycle of work on the O'Neill farm. So we find Hildebrand mending fences ("When son-in-laws get itchy to drive your tractors," he writes with typical self-deprecating humor, "you put them to work repairing fences because it's nearly impossible to wreck a post-hole digger") and meditating on Thoreau and the nature of work. ("Every schoolboy knows that the worst way to make a living is by physical labor. Leisure has been turned into an industry even Thoreau would find unrecognizable, and the places we hold in highest regard are the scenes of our vacations, not our workaday lives. This public affection for wilderness often seems a way of pretending not to notice the wholesale destruction of our cities and countryside.") He writes eloquently about, among other things, haying, attending the 4-H livestock judging at the county fair, deer hunting, and sitting with his father-in-law at the year-end cattle auction. ("The mood is social but no less serious than you'd expect from a group of small-time gamblers who've convened to bet the farm.")

At the same time Hildebrand moves easily through O'Neill family history and the history of agriculture in the Midwest, describing, for example, the struggles and determination of Irish-born dairy farmer, William O'Neill, who first settled on the Minnesota farm in 1880, and his widow, Catherine, who made a go of the farm by exertion of will and anger.

Hildebrand finds an interconnectedness in all these seemingly disparate threads, and he accomplishes this with remarkable economy, in clear and evocative prose. At just over 240 pages, Mapping the Farm is a wonderfully rich and rewarding book about a vanishing way of life.

©1996, ProMotion, inc.

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