Cold Pastoral

By Paul Gray

FIRST PERSON RURAL by Noel Perrin David R. Godine; 124 pages; $7.95

People who grow their own anything are usually good for about seven minutes of conversation before they suffer an attack of smugness. Apparently their listeners are required to feel inferior because they do not render their own lard or weave their own shirts. Author Noel Perrin, who putters at Vermont farming when he is not teaching English at Dartmouth or writing graceful scholarly books (Dr. Bawdier's Legacy), deserves a longer hearing. True, Perrin sometimes sounds like a country snob who would be horrified if the supermarket patrons he patronizes actually swarmed to New England in search of the rustic bargains he eulogizes. But even while baiting the slickers, he is consistently entertaining.

The 20 pieces reprinted here, mostly from Vermont Life, Country Journal and The New Yorker, range from meditations on the metaphysics of farming to shopping guides on the purchase of chainsaws and pickup trucks. Taken together, they sketch the education of a greenhorn who was "once a New Yorker, now a peasant" in the rigors of owning and running his own farm. Perrin recalls the winter morning he awoke to find the temperature outside--26DEGF., his house at 37DEG and falling, his oil tank empty. He recounts his early, inept attempts to fence off land from deer, other predators and the forest-making impulse that still thrives in the stony New England soil.

Such detailed anecdotes keep Perrin from falling victim to his "Wooden Bucket Principle": "By this I mean a tendency to imagine almost anything in the country as simpler and more primitive and kind of nicer than it really is."

Still, some of it is simpler and nicer, and these aspects are generously extolled.

The new farmer makes cutting up fence posts and driving them into the ground sound like fun. Similarly, he stresses the serendipitous surprises that rural life can offer. Cursing himself for overcooking a batch of sap, Perrin discovers that ruined syrup can still be turned into first-rate maple candy.

He is also willing to allow some modern conveniences into his Eden. When his wife makes butter, she uses a blender in stead of a churn. "If I were to move to an old-fashioned farm," Perrin writes, "and could bring just one piece of modern machinery with me, I wouldn't hesitate a second. I'd bring my chainsaw. It's noisy, it's dangerous, it pollutes the air--and I love it."

Returning to the land and living off it is a stubborn American dream. It persists even though small farmers are leaving in droves. Without being maudlin about it, Perrin laments their passing and the dis appearance of a way of life that knit hard ships and satisfactions together. He never pretends that part-time farming is the same as the real thing. But by clearing fields and keeping boundaries intact, he at least stages a holding action against total loss. And telling others how he has done it preserves that hold.

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