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Book Review Farm wife's book folksy, funny, bristly City folks have ridiculously little idea of what farm life is like. They feel sorry for kids who grow up a long way from culture and comfort. They accuse farmers of polluting the soil, air and water. They have no idea of the work and care that go into the first-line production of steaks and loaves of bread. Pity such folks. Maybe this will show them what real life is like. Maybe it will show them that we farm and ranch people are just as good as they are, and sometimes, in fact, a little better. Those ideas must have been the motivation behind this collection of 41 extremely first-hand newspaper columns about the life of a farm wife in dry plains country. In this case, the country is in southeastern Colorado, but the experiences, and even more, the defensive, humorous, often hyperbolic tone of the writing could just as well have originated in rural Texas or Kansas or anywhere on the Great Plains. None of it could have originated, though, with anyone but a woman who had lived there and done that, "that" meaning wrestling long hours with hostile machinery, pulling goat babies by hand out of the birth canal, running outside and with soaked delight ditching the stables and sheds when a big rain finally comes. Lynn Allen's detailed accounts make all her experiences real and most of them funny, with an occasional poignant one about a farmer having to sell out or, in the last column of the book, a rancher who expects to be evicted from his ancestral land to make room for an Army artillery range. "The military I served will come and escort me out of my home and off my land at gun point," the old farmer says. He reflects for a moment and then adds this: "I don't think I'll go." He means it, his wife says to the writer. "He's 74 years old, and this ranch has been his whole life. He's never wanted anything else. … Our family vacations were to bull sales or to look at a bunch of registered cattle. Where would he go? What would he do?" That column concentrates the tone of apartness, of bitterness over not being considered or understood by the urban world, that emerges frequently in this collection, even sometimes in the mainly funny pieces about the writer's troubles making a tractor or some other piece of machinery work right. Some of the columns have the writer arguing with outsiders who, unfortunately, come off as mere patsies, too stupid and insensitive for complete credibility. Those columns are essentially editorials. The details of some of Lynn Allen's fights with machines also seem sometimes a little too numerous and particular to be convincing. Convincingness, even so, is on balance one of the virtues of this collection. No question, "Life Out Here" is the real thing. Even the style has a rough-handed quality at times, with mistakes in English usage and spelling that the farm and ranch settings don't quite excuse. But they're not as jarring here as the similar mistakes you find these days in the writing of English professors. They almost fit. And for people who never have the chance to grease a swather, Lynn Allen's experience makes a fair substitute: "The header drive shafts had to be moved several times before everything lined up. All that digging around out of sight in old grease and dirt resulted in black hand prints not just on the header, but on my jeans. I also had a big smudge across my cheek and around one eye where the gnats were biting. "The zirk down next to the wheel refused grease. Not just once, but repeatedly. I couldn't actually see it refusing grease, but I could feel it every time it squished up around my fingers. I shook it off in disgust and a blob landed on my glasses. I scrubbed it off with the shoulder of my shirt." Writing like that comes from experiencing, observing and remembering. It also comes from having a sense of humor. The result is a book that farm and ranch people will relish and that city folks, at least those who also have a sense of humor, can learn from and enjoy. The illustrations by Sandy Campion add pleasant touches. Because this is a self-published book (a reflection, probably, of the fact that most publishers live in cities), it may not be available in stores. The publisher-writer can be reached online at: lynnallen@centurytel.net Donald Mace Williams: Lives in Canyon and is the author of the Depression-era Texas novel "Black Tuesday's Child." E-mail
comments about this story Posted: June 19, 2008
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