On an old farm in Scotland, species loneliness, and Avery Library
By Isabel Norman
John wanted to smoke. So naturally, he carved his own pipe, began to grow his own tobacco, and chose a corner of the kitchen to hang long twirling garlands of gradually drying leaves. It was his first year at it, and the leaves were only meant to take a week to reach a rich, crackly brown, like they did in old tobacco sheds in the American South. But in Scotland, with its “constant feckin’ rain,” it was taking interminably longer. John was dismayed—but he was considering experimenting with some oven drying.
I encountered John’s can-do, dry-your-own-tobacco spirit while working on a Scottish farm on a school break. In the southwest knob of Scotland, Eleanor and John kept a small farm and homestead with a vegetable garden, sheep, cows, and chickens. At the center of it all was a sprawling old house with stacks of books and rainboots and a couple of cats slinking around by the warm kitchen stove. Only the kitchen and bedrooms were heated. The previous winter, in a thunderous windstorm, the limb of an oak had crashed through the window in the entryway. Now, in March, a biting spring wind stole around the boarded-up window and skittered stray papers off the desk. We all walked about bundled in lumpy wool sweaters and clutching hot cups of tea. It was the warmest cold place I’ve ever been.
Each morning, I fed the sheep first. An armful of sweet-smelling hay for the lambs in the courtyard; four wheelbarrows worth for their moms in the field; one full, long trip out to the tups in the far pasture. It was always brisk, but I would work up a nice heat pushing the wheelbarrow up the hill, moving methodically, tossing the hay into their feeders. Next, the three cows and then the chickens, letting them out of their coop for the day and cradling their two or three eggs back into the kitchen, a simple, daily miracle. In the quiet, cold morning, each of my footsteps was sacred.
In the silence and clarity, I began to notice. It wasn’t much. First, it was the snowdrops, those first blooms of spring, pure white and humble and dripping with dew in the morning. Then, the red kite winging flatly across an empty sky, and the shadow of the barn owl roosting in a barn eave after nightfall. It was cutting back the winter-boldened bramble snaking through the branches of a weary pear tree, and standing beneath that low tree, cocooned by its branches. Tadpoles in the puddles. Bottlefeeding a sick lamb. Sitting quietly at sunset and hearing the ricocheting, joyous bird song. Continuously and closely, I was surrounded by other forms of life.
Eleanor has two sons, ages five and nine, who are growing up in this interwoven world. They tumble through the woods, naming each plant and bird call. Some of their dearest neighbors are the snowdrops and red kites, the elusive barn owl, the transforming tadpoles. They can identify the trees and flowers around them as easily as they can their friends—maybe the distinction begins to blur. Watching them, in their ease with the natural world, it troubled me to think of those of us whose ingrained childhood landscapes are concrete and steel.
I have written this while sitting in Avery, watching the trees through the window as they flutter in the wind, their leaves turning yellow. I can walk through Central Park and see autumn in its full glory now, and sometimes catch a bird call over the white noise of traffic and chatter. There are ducks in the pond. But there is a distinct difference, something vague and ineffable in the vein of agency. It’s difficult to connect to other life when it is so mediated by human interference and development.
Southwest Scotland is certainly not wild, and a farm even less so. But the other lives there, in plants and animals, have a distinct place in the system. They are not relegated to decoration or manmade falsity. As full and acting members of the ecosystem, they have a wholeness, a full beinghood. They are genuinely, unironically, one’s friends and neighbors.
In Robin Wall Kimmerer’s essential book Braiding Sweetgrass, she proposes the concept of species loneliness, defined as “a deep, unnamed sadness stemming from estrangement from the rest of Creation, from the loss of relationship.” For myself, growing up in suburbia and now living in Manhattan, I was only reminded of a sense of species loneliness once I experienced its natural opposite. Only when I lived immersed with other beings did I realize all I had been missing. Part of the simple wonder of spending that week on a farm was a sense of reconnection with the rest of Creation.
When I told Eleanor I thought I wanted to work in environmental law, she asked, “For the money? The success?” She had studied art as an undergrad and lived in London, at the center of it all. Moving to rural Scotland was an act of consciously choosing a slow path of life—she hadn’t even owned a phone until a few years ago, in case her sons’ school needed to call her while she was out working in the garden. My own sense of ambition and hustle was quietly challenged. If I valued living close to the Earth, was simply doing so enough? Or was it worth it to pursue an intense career attempting to help others live closer to the Earth, even if that could put me out of touch with the life around me?
I did not leave with clear answers, but I did come to a new appreciation of living slowly, boringly, and wholly with the land around me. For how can people understand the beauty and importance of the more-than-human world if they are continually divorced from it? So much of our world, even John’s home-grown tobacco, was once a being. Everything is tied back to the land. But it is easier to know this if the line is direct.
Even while studying environmental biology, I fear a growing distance between myself and that same more-than-humanness. But for now, to keep it alive, I write and remember: the humble snowdrops, the long garlands of tobacco in the kitchen, the still-warm eggs fresh from the hens. For now, I will sit and watch the trees in Avery, and try to remember the crystal, glassy birdsong at dusk.
Isabel worked at this farm in Scotland through the work-exchange program WWOOF, which stands for Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms.
