Sam Smith - As I reached the mid-teens, my parents were reading Malabar Farm by Louis Bromfield, in which Bromfield described his experiments in organic agriculture. Some years before Silent Spring, long before the word ecology was in general use, my parents became organic farmers. And I, while initially skeptical of some of the principles that underlay the effort, was more than willing to earn money and escape the regimentation at home by working all day on their farm.
There was a dearth of information in those days for those of organic inclination. The university agricultural schools -- heavy into teaching farmers the virtue of pesticides and huge expenditures on the tractors and equipment manufactured by academia's benefactors -- thought little of the idea.
My mother, who operated on reading, instinct faith and a lifetime interest in conservation, and my father, who was convinced that he could come up with a better way of doing anything, slowly and methodically began to create their Maine farm.
According to my father's analysis, farming and conservation were interlocked. If you couldn't save the farms, you couldn't save the land. Further, he figured that Maine, with its rocky soil and short growing season, was best suited for grazing cattle.
Key to the operation was getting the cattle over the winter. This led to a variety of silage experiments. I spent some of one summer driving a tractor back and forth over a 50-foot long, 40 foot wide, 15 foot high box built of railroad ties, compacting the silage underneath. It was called a trench silo even though it wasn't really in a trench. The first summer my wife Kathy came to Maine, she was taken immediately to view my father's latest silos, which were now huge mounds of hay covered with black plastic. The air was sucked out of these mounds by one of my mother's vacuum cleaners. The vacuum cleaner didn't survive the summer and the silos lasted not much longer.
Sometimes even worse happened. One summer, Kathy and I arrived for a vacation to find my mother, then a widow, in a small frenzy. Fourteen of her cows had died that morning. There was no explanation, although there was an immediate suspicion that planes from the Brunswick Naval Air Station had dumped something on the land. The next morning, my family, including our two small sons, were dispatched to the animal morgue at the University of Maine in Orono with cow parts in a picnic cooler and samples of their feed. We arrived before breakfast and in our search for the right office ended up in a room occupied primarily by a large table on which lay a dead and partially deconstructed horse. I moved quickly and queasily on, but my sons lingered, eyes unblinking, thinking whatever thoughts the young have when they first see death up close.
The cause, the university reported some days later, was, Sudax, an experimental feed the farm was using. Sudax, which is basically corn without the cob, is rich in nutrients. But little known at the time, it can -- under extremely moist conditions -- generate arsenic. This, in the wake of an extremely wet few weeks, is what it had done.
My father reasoned that he would save on fencing if feed was brought to the cattle rather than letting them forage all the time. He called it cafeteria feeding. When he read that there was a new machine that would store hay in great round bails and eventually replace the tedious cubes, he brought the first one to Maine.
Slowly, my father developed a macro-economics and macro-politics that connected his efforts to the solution of the whole world's food supply. He would discourse on agricultural matters to overnight guests who showed up during a summer and he would drag them on field trips. Many a lawyer, politician, accountant or church organist learned more about farming than they ever imagined they wanted to know.
My father was a lawyer, but from the end of the war on, only practiced law as a one-man public interest litigant. In 1960, two years before the publication of Silent Spring he decided to sue the Central Maine Power Company.
CMP not only provided most of the power in Maine, it enjoyed much of the political power as well. But my parents were trying to run an organic beef farm and CMP had come right through their property spraying the vegetation around the power lines with pesticides. My father was incensed.
I was home in Philadelphia the evening that my father tried to find a Maine lawyer to take the case. He started with the most famous and was shunted over the course of the evening to five others. Each declined to get involved; for each was on retainer to CMP.
Somewhat in desperation, my father turned to the Freeport town lawyer, Paul Powers, whose stock in trade was land sales and wills. Together they forced an agreement from CMP four years later in which the company promised not to spray anyone's property anywhere in the state if they were not agreeable. The Brunswick Times Record ran an editorial stressing the environmental significance to the state; it was headlined "Mr. Smith and You." And CMP paid my father $1,000 for his troubles. Paul Powers told me several times that it was the most important case of his career, eclipsing, presumably, even the DWI case in which his client was found passed out in a car with the motor running in the middle of the main intersection in Yarmouth. Powers got the case dismissed by getting the police officer to admit that no one had been operating the vehicle, so no one could have been operating it under the influence.
I had little to do with such matters, which was fine by me. I got to fill a big cooler with ice and juice made from Zarex syrup and head for the farm. There I would mount the big green John Deere tractor and pull whatever was behind it in great loops around hundreds of acres of fields. One day my tow was a manure spreader, another day a hay rake, or a wagon.
As the day warmed up, I would take off my shirt and adjust my baseball cap and try to be as cool and imperturbable as Clyde Johnson, my usual adult partner in the fields, who wore the same T-shirt and hat every day and drove his tractor standing up with a pipe that never left his mouth, which didn't matter because he never said much.
Both my parents would die in Maine. My 25-year-old nephew was killed in an accident four miles up the road. David DeGrandpre, my partner in the chase to a farm dream, had fallen to his death from a mile the other way. And yet it remained all right and still beautiful.
And so when I left Maine at the end of summer, I did what I had done each year before. I went to the shore and for a long, long time stared out at Bustins, Moshiers, Eagle, Jewell, Chebeague, Whaleboat and Lower Goose islands and the ledge where the seals rested at low tide. I tried to fix in my mind on every pixel of what I saw, to keep and to hold until I could come back again next summer.
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