“Once you have lived on the land, been a partner with its moods, secrets, seasons, you cannot leave. The living land remembers, touching you in unguarded moments, saying, ‘I am here. You are part of me.’”
So begins Ben Logan’s The Land Remembers. This memoir of a boyhood on a southwestern Wisconsin farm will always be at the top of my list of favorite rural Wisconsin books.
Ben Logan was the youngest of four boys born to a Norwegian immigrant father and schoolteacher mother. The family farm sat atop a ridge in the un-glaciated corner of the state. There they raised dairy cows, pigs, and chickens, and crops including corn, oats, alfalfa, and tobacco. Logan’s book is divided appropriately into sections by season, each section containing chapters of the various chores and events that marked the rhythm of the year. The reminiscences are nostalgic to be sure, but there is a recurring theme that can be read as cautionary: that the land does not so much belong to us, as we belong to it.
This may be an increasingly difficult idea for people to comprehend, as food production becomes daily more distant to most of us. Logan reminds us of a time when seed was carefully chosen, livestock was carefully tended, and when crops were rotated and soils were rested and rejuvenated – and when the family’s livelihood depended on it. These were days when it was unusual enough to acquire commodities from off the farm that they would be preceded with the adjective “store-bought.” The farm and its land existed in a cycle; it provided nourishment and in turn needed to be nourished.
Still, The Land Remembers was not written as a commentary, but as a recollection of the author’s treasured boyhood memories of his family and their deep and abiding connection to place. As a memoir it is poignant, and it also presents a portrait of a way of life that has become a memory to some, and unknown altogether to others.
First published in 1975, The Land Remembers has now been printed in eight editions. After a brief period out-of-print, it was re-released in 2006 with a new afterword from the author. Our friends Caroline Beckett and Frank Sandner at Itchy Cat Press have done a great service in bringing this book back into print. This is one Wisconsin book that should always be in print, we hope that it is available on the shelves here for many years to come.
