Death of the Dream: Farmhouses in the Heartland (Minnesota)

Rating:
Summary: Poignancy and truth mix well
Review: How alive they were in their picture. Death of the Dream frontispieces its title page with a photo taken when the houses it chronicles were as alive as the faces in the picture. It is well-preserved, showing a family of eight seated at a linen-covered table (lace or embroidery beyond either their means or self-identity), half-curtains on the window above, one man the only person to gaze into the camera (the patriarch, surely, though he looks middle-aged); the others in reflective downward gaze as though having just returned from a burial. Women, their hair up in buns or braids, wearing dresses collared to the neckline, skirts to the floor. Above them a framed family photo and clock on the wall (catalog-bought, no doubt, whose ornate carving seems incongruous given the tablecloth). Only cups and saucers are on the table; it must have been tea time. The tiny symbols of the good life in those days are not many, but abundant-the pitcher of milk and honey in a jar, lamp in the center, side dishes, salt, the pooch snoozing contentedly under the table.

It is the beauteous young woman on the left who most grabs the eye-not for her looks but because the picture was taken c. 1890 and her grandchildren's grandchildren's children are among us, perhaps looking at this book. What would she tell them? That a pretty summer sky of peach-hued clouds is also a sky of no law and no mercy? She knew this, said it in the avoidance of her gaze. Prosperity teetered alone on the last edges of the day, and one day during her lifetime the remnants of economy shifted irrevocably out from under the livelihood of the faces in that photo, as it did thousands of others too. The family farm is a factory farm now.

Leaving behind . . . what? The fears of the landholding life, the women alone pushing the pram, the humdrums of the hearth, the half a loaf uneaten, the missing shingles on the roof, the walls that need paint, the averted eyes of the friends at church, the grief recurring in husband-is-gone dreams. Then or now?

All in a picture.

Good, solid, uneventful countryside faces, as plain and hardworking as their shoes. Not the setpiece farms of TV and movies, but of gardens and furrows and drudgework and rain, lived in a prosperity affording perhaps but one portrait in a lifetime. Lives not of comforts or goods or openings at theater, but of the sun and the wind and the dusk and the summer, the indomitable spirit of the Plains, and the immense span of years that was their being then, and will be until the last house in this book is no long evident a house.

Somewhere along the way from that picture to this book, the Plow That Broke The Plains was broken by those plains.

William Gabler is as good a tale-teller as he is a photographer, and his text is so informative one can read it several times and still notice things anew. His pictures have an overlit quality that does not come across as overexposure (he's too accomplished a photographer for that) but as his wish to wring the last of the light out of a darkened dream. His pictures are so much more than "pictures." Only in ink upon paper do we see these old buildings defecting remnant by remnant into the wither of time. On the paper of our minds, thanks to Mr. Gabler, we see so much more. He has captured the dismemberment of a culture, the culture of the standalone farming family who fed a country from an annual turn of sod under the annual turn of sky.

Simple, seemingly, his photos, seeing that which is invisible but there. That one over there, atop the low roll of hill, there lived Widow X or Widower Y, seeing their lives through to the end on the soil where their lives were made, wresting from the earth each year's glean not of wheat by the bushel but carrots and radishes and plums by the basket. We see them mirrored in Mr. Gabler's houses, their forlornity, stature much shorter than it once was, back unbent but a hand that trembles. Not a bitter harvest by any reckoning, but an ever-harsher one, yes, that.

Once they were content. Once they were spiritually strong, for the vastness of nature under the unceasing sky informed the upright steeple on the horizon where God really lived. But now not. It's self-evident from the fact that these pictures, these houses, exist. Not dying, but dwindling. Losing their rooflines and paint as a dowager loses her strands of hair. Metaphors not of decay but of deconstruction, yielding back to nature the cellulose and pigment and glass and iron which nature once bestowed. We see in them not old wood and window, but ourselves. The economy these plains and these people made possible ran away from them, off to the cities, just as it is running away from us, content under our G

Our selves are in Mr. Gabler's pictures, for these empty husks of house are where the culture of consumption is taking us. Not unto death as these provisioners of the past were taken, but into discard, our lives a blister-pak on the trash of the used; all to a failure to partner with the God our souls and religions say we have but our horizons do not confirm. How we wish, like the farmers who built these houses, to elope off with Destiny the Giver, not the Taker, of life's things.

Their goods may not have been great. They were.

Rating:
Summary: Death of the Dream: Farmhouses in the Heartland
Review: Published by Afton Historical Society Press, Afton, Minnesota, Death of the Dream is beautifully illustrated with photos of old Heartland balloon frame farmhouses, mostly from Cottonwood County, Minnesota. Bill Gabler, the author and photographer, tells in great detail the history of these simple, frame structures that were the predominant style of homes in early farming communities in the Heartland. Gabler is an excellent story-teller and photographer. Through his photos and narrative, he also chronicles the lives of the farm families who built and lived in these simple, unpretentious farm homes. By telling of the disappearance of these farmhouses in the Heartland, Gabler also tells the story of the disappearing family farms. This is an excellent historical accounting of an aspect of Americana that is fast disappearing. The book has also been made into a public television (KTCA-TV St. Paul, Minnesota) documentary by the same title.

The only fault I found with the book is that individual people and their personal stories are absent from both the photos and the history. The documentary, however, includes both of these.