November’s poem

“The Nomad Harvesters,” by Marie De L. Welch:

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The nomads had been the followers of flocks and herds,

Or the wilder men, the hunters, the raiders.

The harvesters had been the men of homes.

But ours is a land of nomad harvesters.

They till no ground, take no rest, are homed nowhere.

Travel with the warmth, rest in the warmth never;

Pick lettuce in the green season in the flats by the sea.

Lean, follow the ripening, homeless, send the harvest home;

Pick cherries in the amber vallies in tenderest summer.

Rest nowhere, share in no harvest;

Pick grapes in the red vineyards in the low blue hills.

Camp in the ditches at the end of beauty.

They are a great band, they move in thousands;

Move and pause and move on.

They turn to the ripening, follow the peaks of seasons,

Gather the fruit and leave it and move on.

Ours is a land of nomad harvesters,

Men of no root, no ground, no house, no rest;

They follow the ripening, gather the ripeness,

Rest never, ripen never,

Move and pause and move on.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

I came by this in Carey McWilliams’s book, Factories in the Field: The Story of Migratory Farm Labor in California.

A typical October

Classic fall weather again – on the whole, a good thing. Leaves have been coming down in earnest and the lawn is thick with them. We don’t own a rake. I’ve read that it’s OK to mow over the dead leaves so as to “mulch” them, and that’s what I’ve been doing. The grass grows so slowly now that I keep telling myself, “One last mowing for the season”; and then, after one or two weeks, I mow again.

And now, my reading report.

(1) Patrick Allitt’s I’m the Teacher, You’re the Student: A Semester in the University Classroom describes several tantalizing U.S. history books, a few of which I’ve acquired. The golden discovery has been California: The Great Exception – the assigned text Allitt’s students loathed the most – written for that state’s centennial by Carey McWilliams, with lovely phrasing, apt detail, and shrewd analysis. Even in 1950, California’s growth was cause for wonderment. A boom in mining led to booms in farming, oil drilling, manufacturing, what have you. The mining boom was relatively egalitarian: claim sizes were restricted, and individual miners could prosper without capital. Then, the wealth gained by mining in California funded the mining elsewhere in the Far West, but this was company mining, adhering to other methods and rules. That’s what I’ve read so far. Agriculture, etc., will be discussed later. Allitt told his students to read the chapters about rivers and irrigation – the subject matter of Chinatown. They were bored to tears. I already look forward to reading McWilliams’s Factories in the Field: The Story of Migratory Farm Labor in California and North from Mexico: The Spanish-Speaking People of the United States.

(2) I liked Allitt well enough that I’ve begun another of his books: The Conservatives: Ideas & Personalities throughout American History.

(3) Also: Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy, which I read so long ago I hardly remember it. I’m not even sure I read all of it before.

(4) Some Gothic things for the fall:

• Agatha Christie, Endless Night (excellent, just excellent)
• Hilary Mantel, Fludd
• Ghost stories by Edith Wharton and M.R. James

(5) The Masters, the fifth and most famous book in C.P. Snow’s Strangers and Brothers series. It’s about the politics of an unnamed Cambridge college. Sure enough, it’s good; it might be THE ONE in the series to read, if that’s all you have time for; but it’s no better than the others.