The Rake Magazine

Year: 2004

  • The Ribbon Runs Dry

    One recent afternoon, I tried dialing up Fred Hribar, my old typewriter repairman. I got a busy signal, which I hoped for Fred’s sake was as promising as it was anachronistic. When I eventually managed to get him on the line I said, “How’s business?”

    “There ain’t none,” Fred said with a chuckle. You won’t find a more cheerful bunch of fatalists than the typewriter repairmen of the Twin Cities. Assuming, that is, that you could actually find a bunch of typewriter repairmen in the Twin Cities. (Maybe, in fact, bunch isn’t quite the right word; handful would perhaps be more like it, allowing for the loss of a finger or two to shop accidents.)

    “Everything’s pretty much died,” admitted Hribar, who has been servicing typewriters since 1961. “I’m one of the last dogs left—Friendly Freddie the Freeloader—and these days I’m more or less just putzing around the house. Stuff now is made to be obsolete; if it breaks down you just pitch it in the dumpster.” Hribar is sixty-nine, and he can remember when things were different. For decades he owned Gittins Typewriter on Chicago Avenue, and he was an authorized Brother technician, doing a quarter of a million dollars a year in sales and service.

    “I remember when the old IBM Selectric ball machine first came along, people thought that was the greatest thing in the world,” Hribar told me. “Then the daisy wheel models hit the streets and pretty much killed off the ball machines. Once computers became affordable, typewriter sales went to hell and the service followed. It got so bad that I rented out my building on Chicago—it’s a gun shop now.” Today he works out of his house in Hopkins.

    I hauled a portable Brother manual typewriter around with me for twenty years; it’s a beautiful little turquoise-enameled tank with a pop-off top, and the thing still works like a charm. Whenever I needed a new ribbon or a cleaning, Fred was my man. He can still spit out my machine’s specs off the top of his head. “Oh, hell yes, that thing’ll last forever,” he said. “Takes a T-5 ribbon, still being made by General Ribbon out of California.” I kvetched that since I started working mostly on computers eight years ago I’ve gone through three different machines. “That’s the story of the world,” he said with a shrug. “Everything’s changing all the time, and things go to hell in a hurry. So much of the stuff that’s out there now costs so much to fix that it’s cheaper to just go buy a new machine.”

    Hribar said, “If I make $100 a month I’m doing pretty good. It’s a dying racket, and I guess I’m dying right along with it. You watch it all disappear and there’s not a whole lot you can do about it. I live with reality, and I deal with it. What the hell, I’ll go fishing. And if I could find a rich woman to support me in my old age, I’d be doing just fine for myself.”

    Things aren’t quite so dire at Vale Typewriter, Inc., in Richfield, where owner Mark Soderbeck still keeps regular hours. Vale’s been in business since 1956, and Soderbeck has owned the place for twenty-eight years. On the afternoon I stopped by, Soderbeck was hanging around the backroom, shooting the breeze with Ted Schroeder, a retired typewriter tech who was with Royal and Metro Sales for forty-two years. It was immediately apparent that Soderbeck and Schroeder had spent more than a few hours telling old war stories and commiserating over beers. They recalled the days when there were upward of twenty-five different repair shops in the Twin Cities, and the state vocational schools (and Stillwater State Prison) offered programs for aspiring repairmen. A behemoth like IBM employed more than a hundred repair techs in the metro area alone, and Royal had twenty-two working out of its shop in Minneapolis. Today there are only two typewriter manufacturers left in the world, and most of the old fraternity of repairmen have died or retired.

    As office machinery evolved over the years, and electric typewriters gave way to electronic models with computerized components, Soderbeck took classes to stay abreast of changes in the industry. Though he now also services printers, fax machines, and copiers (and makes office calls), typewriter sales and repairs still account for seventy percent of his business. “Things just sort of keep plugging along,” Soderbeck said. “I’ll see quite a few of what I call heirloom machines, things people just want to restore. And I still pretty regularly sell manual typewriters to young people who apparently want to be writers and think it’ll give them some kind of edge. The old manuals just don’t break down. There are also still some things that are just plain easier to do with a typewriter—envelopes, labels, carbon copies where you need that impact; it’s quicker to roll something like that into a typewriter and bang it out. I suppose as soon as the government comes up with forms that you can fill out online, that’ll be the demise of the typewriter business.” Schroeder listened to this prediction, chuckled, and nodded his head in agreement. “Oh yeah,” he said. “We’re a dying breed. Ten years from now there won’t be any of us left.”—Brad Zellar

  • Notorious G.K.C.

    Far be it from me to question the wisdom of Mother Angelica, but why does her Eternal Word Television Network exile its hottest property to the small-screen Aleutians of Saturday afternoon? With a roster of repeats and retreads trying to fill up a twenty-four-hour cable schedule, EWTN leaves only disoccupied weekenders to savor G.K. Chesterton: The Apostle of Common Sense, the best literary television show nobody’s ever seen and an undiscovered gem of the Twin Cities.

    If it’s been awhile since you thought about Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936), the English essayist, novelist, playwright, hagiographer, Catholic apologist, and journalist, then the Bloomington-based American Chesterton Society is here to set you straight. Chesterton, says ACS president and Apostle host Dale Ahlquist, was the greatest writer of the twentieth century. “He said something about everything,” Ahlquist asserts. “And he said it better than anybody else.”

    Or, at least, he said it more paradoxically than anybody else. In one hundred nonfiction books, five novels, five plays, more than four thousand newspaper columns, and, most famous, his popular “Father Brown” mysteries, Chesterton was the Prince of Paradox, a master of phrases and imagery that turn arguments inside out and ideas upside down. Some examples:

    The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.

    A citizen can hardly distinguish between a tax
    and a fine, except that the fine is generally
    much lighter.

    The weakness of all Utopias is this, that they take the greatest difficulty of man and assume it to be overcome, and then give an elaborate account of the overcoming of the smaller ones. They first assume that no man will want more than his share, and then are very ingenious in explaining whether his share will be delivered by motor-car or balloon.
    There is nothing that fails like success.

    The one genuinely dangerous and immoral way of drinking wine is to drink it as a medicine.

    We feel it is epical when man with one wild arrow strikes a distant bird. Is it not also epical when man with one wild [train] engine strikes a distant station?

    Chestertonian paradoxes serve various purposes: to cut through received ideas, to render an opponent’s argument absurd, to follow reason to its logical end. But taken together, they place Chesterton among the revolutionaries of modern literature. His best novel, 1908’s The Man Who Was Thursday, a philosophical mystery about undercover policemen tracking anarchists, is a proto-surrealist work of non-sequitur images, shifting ideas, hints of divinity, and dream logic. In his nonfiction Chesterton was at once plain and absurd (“One elephant having a trunk was odd: all elephants having trunks looked like a plot”). The cliché of modern criminal fiction, that cop and crook are mirror images, owes something to Father Brown, whose central sleuthing device is a conviction that he is no better than the criminal he catches. Jorge Luis Borges claimed Chesterton as an influence. Franz Kafka was a fan. In leading their respective countries’ revolutions, Michael Collins and Mohandas Gandhi drew on lessons from The Napoleon of Notting Hill, Chesterton’s libertarian fantasia of a self-selected premodern community battling a total world government.

    So why isn’t G.K. Chesterton better known? To the folks at the American Chesterton Society, it’s a scandal, with possibly anti-religious overtones, that Chesterton (a staunch defender of Catholic authority and a late-life convert to the Roman church) is no longer taught in schools while his secular and atheist interlocutors George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells are held up as literary giants. “The world finds it much more convenient to ignore him rather than to engage with him in argument,” says Ahlquist, “because to argue with Chesterton is to lose.”

    To keep that argument alive, the Chesterton Society hits the public with Gilbert magazine, a schedule of symposia and lecture tours (Ahlquist promotes Chesterton as a full-time job), book sales, and the Apostle TV show.

    The Apostle of Common Sense is appealing in large part because of its not-ready-for-prime-time format and style. From a set at EWTN’s Alabama studios decorated as a gentleman’s study with first editions, comfy leather chairs, Chesterton memorabilia, and a fireplace, Ahlquist delivers the good news in a leisurely, anti-televisual manner; he has the quiet confidence of a man assured that error must ultimately yield to truth. Direct quotations from the author are delivered by Normandale College professor John “Chuck” Chalberg, dressed as Chesterton on a stage set done up as a foggy London street. In an episode devoted to the question “What’s the one Chesterton book I should read?,” Ahlquist commits the classic salesman’s gaffe of not knowing when to stop. He recommends four categories—the Elementary Chesterton, the Indispensable Chesterton, the Fundamental Chesterton, and the Necessary Chesterton—and each category contains four or more books! This is full Chesterton immersion, powered by the host’s infectious enthusiasm for his subject; you’d have to be a pretty jaded viewer not to feel some urge to hang with Dale Ahlquist in his study, exchanging Chestertonisms far into the evening.

    Is Chesterton really underappreciated? I’m not so sure. He’s never gone out of print. He’s received accolades from such leading lights as W.H. Auden, Ernest Hemingway, Gabriel Garcia Márquez, Kingsley Amis, and Anthony Burgess. San Francisco-based Ignatius Press is currently working on the thirty-sixth volume of a Complete Works. He’s the subject of two magazines. (Hardcore Chestertonians can supplement the populist Gilbert with Seton Hall University’s more scholarly Chesterton Review.) Chesterton himself showed up as a character in Neil Gaiman’s legendary Sandman comics in the early 1990s. The columnist George Will quotes him regularly. He has fifty-nine entries in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. Then there’s The Apostle of Common Sense: Neither Shaw nor Wells is the subject of a weekly television series—even Bill Shakespeare doesn’t have one. In terms of literary reputation, Chesterton seems to occupy the catbird seat: He’s still read, still admired, still adored by a devoted fan base, but he’s not so prominent that his deficiencies as a writer and philosopher come up for regular review.

    Still, if you’re convinced your guy is the greatest writer of the last century, any neglect will seem like an insult. “I do really feel that part of it is a conspiracy,” Ahlquist says. “The leading thinkers in our colleges and universities don’t want the kind of thinking Chesterton represents.” One Chesterton Society member, a Lawrence University student named Christopher Chan, did his senior thesis in the form of a five hundred-page novel and lecture demonstrating Chesterton’s superiority to such modernist luminaries as Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, and James Joyce.

    My own Chesterton fandom could be called “enthusiastic but qualified.” His fictional characters are as perfunctorily differentiated as chess pieces, and his dialogue tends to consist of a declaration followed by a rebuttal. He rarely uses one word where fifty will do, with the result that beautifully turned epigrams often mutate into page-gobbling digressions. Even if you have an appetite for verbal paradox, Chesterton can be wearying when he (frequently) paradoxes on autopilot. And his consistent distaste for any character of Semitic origin creeps out even broad-minded readers.

    A deeper question is whether Chesterton belongs more to theology or to secular literature—and even there, his output is too exhaustive for easy handling. “More perhaps than with any other writer,” says Neil Gaiman, a lifelong fan, “you have to read Chesterton critically; you have to find diamonds in the chaff. That’s part
    of what makes him wonderful; he was larger than life in every way. But one of the results is that he wrote too much.”

    In the process, he produced something to attract and repel everybody. Social conservatives who love his anti-progressive zingers have little time for his anti-imperialism and contempt for the wealthy. Libertarians attracted to his small-government, pub-based localism balk at “distributism,” Chesterton’s effort to overlay a feudal economy on a private-property society. Even science- fiction fans who grok works like Thursday and Notting Hill can’t abide his lofty (and, frankly, often ignorant) dismissals of science and technical progress. “The Man Who Was Thursday would make a great movie,” says Gaiman. “But again, he’s so big: Are you selling him to Pynchon fans? They might like him. To science-fiction fans, who also might be interested? To Christians, who might appreciate this idea that God is large enough to contain the devil within himself?”

    “Big” and “large” are favorite terms when Chesterton is discussed. He offers such heavy doses of charm and self-deprecation, such a generous helping of mental energy and comical phrasing, that it’s easy to see why the Society’s nearly three thousand members and subscribers love to spend time with his six-foot-four, three-hundred-pound ghost. And, ironically, the multi-volume syllabus Dale Ahlquist suggests is inviting because of its breadth, the serendipitous pleasure of dipping at random into the ocean of Chestertonia.

    The Apostle of Common Sense has just begun its third season, with a slightly expanded format and a troupe of actors performing scenes from the author’s work. “Chesterton himself said that every great writer will go into a period of eclipse after his death; and if he comes back it will be for the right reasons,” says Ahlquist. “Now people are rediscovering him, as a universal writer. The more I read Chesterton the more I’m confirmed that he’s one of the most complete thinkers who ever put pen to paper. I feel lucky to be the one trying to promote him.”

    I don’t think that promotion will lead to Chesterton’s displacing Shaw, Wells, or Joyce in whatever “the canon” is these days. Nor, for fear of enraging the ghosts of James Branch Cabell, Joseph Hergesheimer, and Jerome Weidman, do I claim that he is the twentieth century’s most forgotten popular writer. But I suspect the Chestertonians are right about something. What keeps me coming back to Chesterton is his tendency, even at his most witty or lighthearted or smugly pontifical, to court a sense of cosmic dread and despair. I suspect he writes so frequently about tradition and sanity because he has an oversize horror of their opposites. In the following passage from his great 1908 apologia, Orthodoxy, you get a forecast of the infinite-but-bounded universes Borge and Kafka would write about a few years later:

    The grandeur or infinity of the…cosmos added nothing to it. It was like telling a prisoner in Reading gaol that he would be glad to hear the gaol now covered half the country. The warden would have nothing to show the man except more and more long corridors of stone lit by ghastly lights and empty of all that is human. So these expanders of the universe had nothing to show us except more and more infinite corridors of space lit by ghastly suns and empty of all that is divine.

    Maybe Chesterton’s real reputational counterpart is another prolific, demotic, roughly contemporary writer with glaring weaknesses and superhuman strengths, one who was also deeply skeptical of the Enlightenment, and who also can be described as “wildly popular” and “sorely neglected” at the same time. If G.K. Chesterton was the twentieth century’s Gallant, H.P. Lovecraft was its Goofus. Chesterton imagined a God large enough to contain the devil; Lovecraft imagined a devil large enough to contain God. Read a sample of their works together—say, Chesterton’s story “The Angry Street” and Lovecraft’s similar “The Music of Erich Zann”—and you’ll see how the one’s witty rationality and the other’s howling madness go together like sweet and sour. You don’t have to believe in the God of Roman Catholicism to dig Chesterton any more than you need to believe in Cthulhu to appreciate Lovecraft. But when the two are working their magic, both ideas seem completely plausible.

  • Foot in Mouth

    We were surprised when organizers of the Twin Cities Marathon decided last spring that they would henceforth allow only Americans to win our race. This, of course, instantly got up the dander of non-runners, liberals, and non-running liberals throughout the area. Within days of the announcement, the Minneapolis City Council was looking into ways to “punish” Twin Cities Marathon, Inc. Among people who run only once every four years, it looked like discrimination. And so it was.

    To be fair, though, the problem depended entirely on your point of view. City boosters who think of our marathon as a great preening moment—the same people who repeat the unsourced compliment that ours is “the most beautiful urban marathon in America”—understandably believe that our footrace should reflect our values: racial diversity, inclusivity, doughnut holes at all water stops, and so on. But to serious American marathoners, it is a salve to the national ego to win in our own backyard now and again. The Kenyans and Russians can stay at home and dominate their own marathons, thank you very much.

    This is not strictly a local attitude. There are more than three hundred marathons each year in the U.S., and aliens have worn out their welcome at nearly every one of them. For native joggers, winning is not everything—losing is. An American has not won any of our three biggest marathons in two decades. Roberto Salazar won the New York City Marathon in 1983. Greg Meyer won Chicago in 1982 and Boston in 1983. And that was our last hurrah, at least among the marathons that matter.

    See, there’s the rub: We desperately want the Twin Cities Marathon to matter. We want a unique selling point. Boston, New York, and Chicago are the granddaddies of all marathons, and they hardly need to distinguish themselves. Each admits fields in excess of thirty thousand runners. By contrast, we cap ours at ten thousand, we tell ourselves we are beautiful, and we try to keep foreigners out.

    Still, in our own way, we’re just following the cues of the Big Leagues. New York, Chicago, and Boston have all trotted out proposals intended to give a second wind to American pride. Last year, New York introduced the Salazar Award to the top-finishing Americans. Chicago’s plan to double the purse for American winners had the interesting effect of causing a top Kenyan runner to apply for and gain citizenship and continue winning. (If he’s going to be a millionaire, he may as well be an American.)

    It is admirable that Twin Cities Marathon organizers softened their position. Competitive runners can certainly use every boost they can get in terms of reputation, since they are the fitness world’s cock-of-the-walk. Following the aspersions of the Minneapolis City Council, TCM directors decided to offer a general purse for all runners, regardless of which godless country they might come from, and a separate purse for top American finishers.

    The Twin Cities Marathon does have a unique selling point, as it turns out. We have been designated the site for the USA Track & Field National Championship for the next two years, and we have hosted the National Master’s Championship for the last fourteen. There was logic behind efforts to institutionalize a policy of exclusion.

    But one should be careful not to break what isn’t fixed. The relatively modest size and location of the Twin Cities Marathon has itself guaranteed a cup of hope to patriots and xenophobes. The truth is, not many foreigners come here, so our odds are good. In fact, a natural-born American won in 2002. (Eddy Hellebuyck, last year’s winner, has American citizenship, but is Belgian by birth.) He was Dan Browne, a Californian, who handily beat dozens of foreigners. But we’ll be keeping an eye on him and his kind. If too many Californians win our race, we can always limit the field to non-Californian Americans.

  • Political play by play

    I was doing the announcing for my daughter’s soccer game last night when this came into the pressbox over the AP wire.

    AP: September 30, 2004, 20:40 EDT

    In the big Kerry-Bush debate, at half time it’s all knotted up at 2-2.

    Bush started the scoring with a stubborn dash into enemy territory, carrying the ball all by himself and finishing with a hard, jet-powered landing in the goal area and an exclamation of “Mission Accomplished.” Since neither Bush, nor any of the rest of his team of Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rove or Wolfowitz, though has actually ever played soccer themselves, they left the actual shooting of the ball to some part time, underpaid temporary strikers on leave from their usual jobs and families.

    Kerry, while disappointed with the early Bush lead, remarked, “Well, I voted for him to have the ball, but I didn’t think he’d actually shoot.”

    But Kerry soon countered with two goals of his own. The first came on a brilliant run from side to side the length of the field, made even more remarkable by the fact that, instead of wearing soccer boots, he was sporting some sort of beach sandals that seemed to make this flapping noise as he sprinted upfield. The din proved a distraction to everyone but Rove, who attempted to derail the onrushing Kerry with his patented “Swift Boat” slide tackle from behind, but the alert spectators recognized the foul and howled derision until the debate moderator pulled out his yellow card.

    Kerry’s second score was a routine header off a corner kick, after which he remarked, “I’ve got this big noggin, I may as well use it for something other than thinking. After all, that strategy has worked well for my opponent for the past four years.”

    Bush, not to be outdone, responded with a late first half goal of his own. After promising to “go nuke-u-lar” on his rival, he delivered the tying goal by a classic deception move. After a clever feint that faked out an entire nation when he seemed to be attacking the other team’s main striker, Osama “Bend it Like” Bin Laden, he abruptly changed direction and led a relentless assault on Saddam Hussein, manager of a team which had actually retired from the premier division after 1991.

    We’ll update you on further developments after this game.

  • The Man & The Woman on The Hill

    A red sun is setting over the lake, its hue cast through the shutters of a rustic living room where a small television atop a white wicker stand is tuned to a Twins game. “Get some hits, damn it,” seethes the increasingly agitated sports agent on the wicker couch. “Crying shame.” The agent glares at a listless Twins hitter, stands abruptly in anger, and steps out to tend to his steaks on the outdoor grill. His son—the other lawyer in the room—remains on the couch reading the New Republic, shaking his head in parallel disgust.

    For six innings, Brad Radke, the Minnesota Twins’ ace starting pitcher for most of the past decade, has pitched a masterful game, giving up just six hits, no walks, and one run. “He’s pitching a Van Gogh,” his agent, Ron Simon, says as he stomps back into the room. “And they aren’t doing a thing to help him.” It’s true: Despite the ace’s ace start, Twins batters are getting smoked by a twenty-year-old fastball phenom in just his second major league start. Simon takes a seat on the couch and grabs a handful of jalapeño-flavored potato chips. “Drives me crazy.” Radke goes to the mound, and Simon leans forward, chomping angrily. “Upper right corner,” he demands with a clap of his hands. “Change-up.” He takes a swig from a bottle of James Page and then quietly, gently confides, “I love watching him. Especially when things are going well.”

    Truth is, things are going very well for Brad Radke. At age thirty-one, he is the finest pitcher—and the finest player—employed by the Twins in a decade. His ability to throw a ninety mph baseball sixty feet, six inches, and have it strike exactly where he wants it, is feared, admired, and very well-compensated. Four years ago, Radke signed the largest contract in Twins history. However, unlike Kevin Garnet, a celebrity athlete recognizable on the basis of his silhouette alone, the Twins’s highest-paid player is a low-key, shy, and even anonymous presence in Minnesota. Yet as the 2004 baseball season comes to an end, Brad Radke’s profile is about to rise. The Twins, on the verge of another division title race, will depend on him as never before to be their clutch big-game pitcher. As a sideshow, the team will also deal with the fact that Radke’s contract expires at the end of the season.

    A ruthless competitor on the field, away from it, Brad Radke is a soft-spoken and retiring husband and father of two sons.

    His wife, Heather, is a successful businesswoman in her own right. She already spends most of the year near her family in Tampa, Florida—a town, she will have noticed, with its own Major League baseball team. Though deeply supportive of her husband’s career, Heather is quite open about the stresses it can put on a family. As she and Brad prepare to decide whether they will remain in Minnesota, it is those concerns, as well as the baseball and salary issues, that will carry the discussion.

    “They’re gonna relieve him,” sighs Simon as Radke finishes the seventh. “No runs, they’ve gotta do it.” Disgusted, Simon returns to the steaks on his grill. Meanwhile, the camera slowly follows Radke from the mound into the dugout as the score at the bottom of the screen is momentarily pinned on his chest. His head is down, his lips are tight and angry. He walks in short, petulant steps, his wiry body strung tight with competition and frustration. This is a man who makes a living by throwing very hard things very fast at other people.

    At 7:20 on a Wednesday night, halfway through the first inning, Heather Radke and her two boys—eight-year-old Kasey and four-year-old Ryan—arrive at their seats behind home plate at the Metrodome, in the section informally designated for wives. She wears a black coat over a white blouse and black skirt. The boys wear warm-up suits, carry baseball gloves, and clearly want to be somewhere else, even if it is their father who is standing on the mound, throwing strikes. “They ask me, ‘Why do we have to watch it up here when it’s on TV downstairs [in the Twins’ family lounge]?’” she says in her South Florida lilt. “And I tell them, ‘Baseball’s not forever.’” Hers is a modest presence, the only suggestion of baseball-wife status being a diamond tennis bracelet that hangs loosely from her wrist as she hands money to the hot dog and Cracker Jack vendors. “After the second inning, I’ll take them down to the family lounge.”

    Heather Radke attends most Twins home games. “Brad goes to the park at one, so by seven I’m ready to get out.” As she watches, she tenses, and her hands are clasped tightly. Strikeouts and pop flies result in short, polite applause; hits, hit batters, and home runs result in sighs. Her approach to the game is more nerves than emotion, except when she sees Brad in danger. Late in the game, when he rushes home to make a defensive play against a runner, she grabs my arm in alarm and exclaims, “They almost hit him in the head!”

    The pitcher doesn’t seem to share his wife’s concern. He returns from home plate with a glare at the first baseman—a glare meant to acknowledge the superb role that the first baseman just played. Later, when the first baseman makes a phenomenal out, Radke gives him another steely gaze, this time accompanied by a harsh nod. And when the catcher makes an athletic stolen-base put-out at second, Radke gives the young player a glare, a nod, and a stab of his index finger.

    “That’s always been the question,” explains Heather. “How to put together the Brad on the field with the Brad at home.” As she fiddles with her tennis bracelet, Heather relates how, after Brad was injured in a game two years ago, she rushed to the locker room only to find him “in game mode, with that fire in his eyes.” Her eyes go wide and she gives a slight shake of the head. “That was weird. I don’t see that very often.”

    The yellow Cape Cod-style house sits on a narrow gravel road that runs a hundred feet off the Lake Minnetonka shoreline. Parked in the driveway is a black Ford Expedition with Florida plates. Through the home’s front windows it is possible to see a sunken living room, overstuffed couches, and a breathtaking panorama of the lake glowing in the early afternoon.

    A soft presence passes in silhouette and the door opens. Just over six feet, slight, in sweats and a T-shirt, he is a boyishly handsome young man with a shy smile. “I’m Brad,” he drawls, extending a very soft handshake. “C’mon in.” His face is unshaved, his hair is wet. His walk is a slow, lazy shuffle, his bare feet barely rising from the floor. He runs his right hand through his hair, and the sleeve of his shirt falls to his shoulder revealing the rest of his lithe pitching arm. Walking beside him is blond-haired Kasey.

    Heather approaches from the hallway in black sweats and bare feet. “Brad, why don’t you sit over there,” she suggests, gesturing toward the dining room, with its massive wooden table set beneath a swirling baroque ceiling and an ornate iron chandelier. Doing as he’s told, Brad comfortably slouches into a chair at the head of the table and props a knee up on the edge. Heather gets some bottles of Dasani from the pantry adjacent to the dining room, stops in the kitchen for some large goblets, and places them on the table. She is just a shade over five feet tall, but I would not describe her as small; she moves with a sureness that is big. When she sits, she leans forward, elbows on the table, her chin propped, monitoring the bashful, brief glances that her husband gives me.

    “My dad played college ball in Bemidji and Mankato State,” Brad explains. “I was born in Eau Claire.” The family moved to Florida when Brad was one. “When I was two, three, my dad says I was throwing things. Rocks.” There’s a pause, a shrug. “I guess I just liked to throw things.” When he was old enough to pitch, his father—a schoolteacher—coached him, suggesting an unusual wind-up that emulated the high leg kick of Hall of Fame pitcher Jim Palmer. As for further instruction, Radke shrugs. “Just throw strikes.”

    At Jesuit High School in Tampa, Radke could not only throw strikes, but he could throw them at “ninety, ninety-one miles per hour.” Naturally, pro scouts were aroused by heat like that. But there was another factor: Radke had the uncanny ability to locate the ball wherever he wanted it. “People always ask me where I get that from,” he says with a shake of the head. “I don’t know. It’s just what I do.” Radke is unfailingly modest and terse about his skills, but it’s not just politeness. He wears his talent with a quiet confidence that precludes questioning it. When pressed to define what makes him successful, he is more inclined to credit factors like “the zone” than his years of practice and training. So, for example, when discussing what went into a win-streak, he explains, “When you’re in the zone, you just see things better.”

    Heather, a Tampa native, was a friend of Brad’s older sister, and she recalls herself “and a lot of pretty girls” being around the Radke household while he was in high school. Two years older, she didn’t initially see herself as a potential girlfriend. But as time passed, the attraction grew. “I was so outgoing,” she explains, looking directly at her husband.

    “And I liked his passiveness.”

    The ace remains impassive at this revelation.

    They started dating on the assumption that the relationship would continue while Brad was pitching at the University of South Florida. But in June 1991, he was drafted by the Twins and so began a four-year minor league career that went from Florida to Wisconsin, back to Florida, and then Nashville. “We took it day by day,” Heather recalls of their early relationship. “It was the only thing I could do. I didn’t really aspire to become a baseball wife.” Early on, there wasn’t much reason to believe in a future. For example, during his summer playing in Kenosha, Wisconsin, Heather saw him only once, despite the $500 phone bills. “Sure, I would’ve liked to have seen him more,” she admits. “But from the beginning, I always thought that baseball should come first.”

    Brad seems a bit embarrassed by Heather’s revelation of self-sacrifice, but he acknowledges that baseball had to be the priority if he was going to make it to the big leagues. “Yeah, I’m not gonna lie,” he concedes. “But I’m not saying she was a distraction. I just didn’t think I was gonna make the team.”

    “That’s not true,” Heather retorts. “You always told me you’d make it.”

    Brad smiles bashfully. “But I didn’t think that way. I really couldn’t think like that.”

    Heather persists, recalling a trip the pair took to Wrigley Field in Chicago during a break in the Kenosha season. “I remember standing outside of the stadium and asking, ‘Will you make it?’” she says, turning to her husband. “And you said, ‘Yes.’”

    Brad, still smiling, looks down at the table. “I don’t remember that.”

    In 1993 Radke was promoted to the Twins’ minor league team in Nashville, and Heather went with him. They were engaged shortly thereafter and married in 1994. “We weren’t stressed, but we were strapped,” Heather recalls. “We ate a lot of mac and cheese,” Brad adds. While Brad played, Heather worked in the fragrance department at Dillard’s department store, where she made more money than he did. Alone much of the time, she became close to the group of wives and girlfriends surrounding the Nashville team. “When the guys were gone, we’d go to the movies, do other things.”

    Brad helpfully adds, “They had their hen parties, that’s for sure.”

    Meanwhile, Brad was beginning to show the stuff that would get him promoted to the major leagues. In the middle of the 1994 season, he pitched three consecutive complete games while allowing a mere 1.69 walks per nine innings for the entire season. He was invited to spring training during the strike-shortened 1994 season, and he was finally called up to join the Twins in 1995. During his first major league appearance he managed to bean Cal Ripken—who was then in the midst of his record-setting consecutive game streak. “Afterward, Heather asked me how it went and I didn’t remember a thing,” he admits. “I still get nervous. If you don’t, there’s something wrong.”

    When I ask him whether he ever feels vulnerable on the mound, he answers: “You’re alone out there. It’s kind of like you’re king of the hill.” Slowly, he windmills his pitching arm, working out some of the stiffness that lingers from the previous night’s strong start. “You kind of have to feel that way. Above and beyond. It’s like you’re at war. Sometimes when I’m doing my thing, it’s like, ‘If I can’t get this guy out, it’s like taking food from my kids’ mouths.’”

    Beside him, Heather visibly flinches at this admission.

    “When you’re getting hit around, sometimes you try to throw harder,” he continues. “But the right thing is probably to pull back. You’re fighting yourself, and that’s the mental side of it. You and the hitter, too. It’s a mind game. Sometimes they give me a look before they get in the box, just to get an edge. And sometimes I’ll look at a hitter—” he pauses, with his boyish smile. “I try and look mean, but I know I don’t.”

    Modesty aside, Radke’s ability to control the ball with consistency is his strength as a pitcher. In more than two thousand innings pitched, Radke has thrown just twenty-four wild pitches. That averages to one misfire for every nine complete games. Over his entire career, Radke has averaged 1.68 walks per nine innings. The league average this year is 3.37.

    Yet statistics also tell a different, more frustrating story with Radke. Dating back to the start of his career with the Twins, his win-loss percentage has mostly not been as rosy as the team’s. (There was that memorable twenty-win season that marked him for greatness in 1997.) Why? For the past decade Brad Radke has had less run support than almost any other pitcher in major league baseball. Many of his best performances on the mound ended in frustration; the Twins lost by one or two runs. Just this year, Number 22 had a long run of beautiful seven-inning games by failing to put more than a single run across. In fourteen losses in which Radke started this summer, the Twins produced an average of just 2.4 runs per nine innings. For all other pitchers this year, the team has scored twice as many runs. This has been the anemic pattern for most of Radke’s career in Minnesota. It is this more than anything else that had him considering the possibility of leaving the Twins four years ago. Ever the team player, though, he refuses to place blame. “Run support,” he says with a shrug. “Yeah, it’d be nice. But I can’t yell at them for not scoring runs. And the flip side is that when you get a lot of runs, pitching gets harder.” He pauses, considering how to describe the subtle shift in the mental game. “In a one-run game, you’re in it for every pitch. If I have more runs, I might not pitch so well.”

    Nevertheless, there have been indications during the 2004 season that Radke is becoming frustrated by the lackluster bats of Twins hitters. In June, after a 4-2 loss in Tampa where he gave up nine hits, three runs, and one walk, the ever-polite Radke left the stadium without talking to reporters. Meanwhile, influential Twin Cities sports columnists and commentators began to publicly note that if Radke had benefited from even average run support, he’d be approaching a twenty-win season—or perhaps even a Cy Young Award. Things came to a head on July 31, after manager Ron Gardenhire pulled Radke in the seventh inning of a game against Boston. The move was a bad one. The relief pitcher gave up a run and Radke ended up with a “no decision” instead of a win. After the game, he trashed the team clubhouse and openly questioned Gardenhire’s judgment to the media. Agent Ron Simon, when asked if the lack of run support bothers Radke, answers simply, “Oh yeah, it ticks him off.”

    Radke’s first two years with the Twins were workmanlike. “From my point of view, I didn’t think they were so great,” he admits. But the Twins, well known for their thrift and willingness to develop low-paid players, allowed him to grow. By the start of the 1997 season, Radke was showing some consistency, but there was no indication that by midseason he would be on the verge of putting together one of the most impressive and unlikely twenty-win seasons by a major league pitcher in recent baseball history. The first month of that year was not strong for Radke. But after a particularly poor start in Texas, “I took a couple of beers from the park back to the hotel,” he recalls. “And then I won twelve straight.” That is as simple as it gets in explaining how a pitcher could supply a team with nearly one-third of its wins (twenty of sixty-eight) in a season.

    Now, approaching the peak years of his career, Radke not only is relied upon as the team’s ace starter, but he is also a model for younger pitchers, who, prior to his starts, can be seen reverentially watching his warm-ups. Carlos Silva, a young Twins starter, refers to him as “the professor.” Radke laughs when I mention this. “Yeah, and get three or four bad starts and they don’t call you ‘professor’ anymore. They start calling you something else.”

    Heather’s earliest memories of being a baseball wife are not altogether warm. At the time Brad reached the majors in the mid-1990s, the culture of the baseball wife was very much about projecting a wealthy, conservative image. “Wearing suits to games, things like that,” she recalls from the Metrodome’s stands during the middle innings. There was a hierarchy—and a rookie wife, naturally, was at the bottom of it. “The tone is really set by the guy,” she explains matter-of-factly. “And Brad was a rookie.” She recalls a meeting of wives where a woman announced “everyone we have pregnant this year.” Heather was seven months pregnant at the time. “But she didn’t mention me.”

    The culture has since changed, according to Heather. “There’s a lot more camaraderie among the wives, and over the last couple of years there hasn’t been a pecking order.” She pauses. “There was a wife a couple of years ago who would say things like, ‘Great, there goes my husband’s win.’ But that’s pretty rare.” Nevertheless, Heather keeps her distance from the other wives. “There’s so much that goes on in baseball and in your own marriage.” She smiles tightly, reflecting on what happens when very young couples are confronted with sudden wealth and fame. “And I learned very early to keep my mouth shut.” Watching as her husband stalks—yet again—from the mound, she adds, “I used to worry so much about being pretty enough, young enough. The women calling after Brad at games, as he’s getting off the bus.” She stops. “You know, it’s flattering now. But it’s only in the last four years I’ve had that maturity. Now I have more important things to worry about, like what kind of men my boys will be in spite of all these blessings.”

    She is particularly proud to relate moments when her sons seem to reject the glamour of the life that surrounds them, such as when Ryan “blew off” Derek Jeter in the family lounge. Yet she is quick to acknowledge the challenges inherent in parenting “baseball children.” “When Brad leaves for spring training [in February] I go through weeks of hell to the point I’m ready to call in counseling,” she jokes. “I’m effectively a single parent until we get up to Minnesota [in May].” Despite their Lake Minnetonka home, Heather spends only three months per year in Minnesota (during school summer vacations), but even the extended periods in Minnesota don’t make the child-rearing challenges any easier. “It’s the same thing during and after a road trip,” she explains. “Those first couple of days after Brad leaves or comes back, the kids are difficult. It sort of puts me in the unnatural role of being a dominant parent, and Brad gets to be the ‘good guy.’”

    The dynamic that Heather first accepted early in her marriage—baseball comes first—is still maintained. Days when Brad is pitching are sacrosanct around the Radke household: “We try to give him his space.” Heather doesn’t really discuss the game with him, or even acknowledge it until he’s almost out the door, when she’ll say good-bye with a “good luck.”

    Though there is no denying the importance of the money in Brad’s 2000 contract, Heather is much more likely to cite the “no-trade clause” that Simon negotiated against the wishes of Major League Baseball (at the time, it was one of only two in the entire league). “The money allowed us to take care of our family,” she explains. “But we’ve had so much certainty because of the no-trade clause. It allowed us to buy a house and let the kids see Minnesota. That’s been really great. Not many baseball families have had that kind of stability.”

    In conversations with Heather, or with Heather and Brad, the phrase “after baseball” recurs repeatedly. Both are aware of and comfortable with the fact that Brad will not be pitching at age forty. “And when baseball is over,” Heather says. “It’s over.” In other words, baseball will no longer come first, and Heather is preparing for the change. Three years ago she started a prestigious salon and spa in Tampa with her sister and mother. “I always said that once Kasey entered kindergarten, I wanted to regain some independence. I didn’t want to wait until after baseball.” In addition to overseeing her business, she also runs the Brad and Heather Radke Foundation, which was established in 2000 and is the only such foundation currently operated by a Twins player or family. Its contributions so far have followed Heather’s interests. “We took a tour of Hennepin County Medical Center in 2001, around the time they started cutting health care,” Heather recalls. “And I asked for a wish list.” That list resulted in a major donation to the hospital’s neonatal care unit. The foundation also supports families with children in treatment at the University of Minnesota’s pediatric bone marrow transplant unit and underwrites performing arts programs for low-income children.

    On a cool summer morning, Ron Simon stokes the kindling in the fireplace at his lake home. He’s relaxed in baggy jeans and a polo shirt; his son sits across from him, still reading the New Republic. In a sports-agency career that began in the 1970s, Simon has amassed a client roster that could serve as a short-list for a Minnesota Sports Hall of Fame: Molitor, Hrbek, Broten, McHale. “You know, the thing about Radke is that I’ve never had a guy so quiet,” Simon says, when I ask him what stands out about the pitcher. As for Heather, Simon just smiles. “You know, Brad isn’t into too much socializing or business. That’s her thing.”

    Simon was introduced to Radke by Radke’s financial advisor. “I thought he was a pretty good pitcher. But I didn’t think he’d become a great pitcher. And I don’t think he thought so, either.” The twenty-win season changed perceptions. “My thoughts were that he’d probably want to leave the Twins and go somewhere he could win.”

    The 2000 contract negotiation lasted for much of the season, and both sides became increasingly frustrated. In the media, various suitors were mentioned for Radke’s services, and neither Radke nor Simon did much to dissuade the speculation. Nevertheless, it was clear that the Twins wanted the young pitcher, and they wanted him badly. Simon, meanwhile, was not only asking for serious money, he was also asking for that no-trade clause. The Twins, reportedly at the behest of Major League commissioner Bud Selig, were encouraged to reject the deal. They didn’t: Radke got the money, the no-trade clause, and a provision that would allow him to opt out of the contract after the first season (he never exercised it).

    As the next contract approaches, Simon and the Radkes are hopeful that the negotiation will be less contentious, and less public. Still, some issues could result in an impasse. “Well, one problem is that Brad lives in Tampa,” Simon says simply. “And they’ve got a young family.” Playing for the Tampa Bay Devil Rays probably would not mean a significant boost to Radke’s run support, win total, or salary prospects. But that may not matter so much at this stage in Radke’s career. This next contract, more so than the last one, will be about stability and family. “It’s up to him. If he wants to stay with the Twins, I’ll put him there. If he wants to go to Tampa, I’ll make it happen.”

    At nine o’clock on a summer’s evening, the Radke residence casts a warm glow on the lake. Brad, who has just come in from an evening of fishing with Ryan and Kasey, is in a relaxed mood. He’s chatting happily in the foyer about his bass boat, and the other boat he has in Florida. Heather, busy making dinner, hears us talking and encourages us to sit in the dining room. The night before, Brad had started a no-decision game at the Metrodome. “It’s hard sometimes to come down, especially if it’s a loss,” he says. “It can stay with you.”

    Heather sits at the table. “He leaves work at work,” she says. “If he’s going to complain about something, it’s after the kids go to bed.” But if work stays at work, the opposite is not always the case. “If we have a rift, he has a good game. If he leaves the house and we’re mad at each other—he has a good game.”

    Brad continues the list of what might generate an inspired performance. “On the road, if something goes wrong—if room service is late or bad—that might give me the edge. Or maybe the luggage is late or lost.” More often than not, though, the life of a major league ball player offers few discomforts that occur on schedule. So, on pitching days, in hope of creating that edge, Radke drives to the Metrodome with Metallica and Kid Rock pumping in his SUV. “Some wives will drive their husbands to the game,” explains Heather. “But I don’t.”

    Radke leans back, his arms behind his head, and yawns. “It’s a great job, but when baseball is over, it’s over. I won’t miss the travel and bouncing around.” He glances at Kasey. “You just miss so much. And they’re growing up so fast.”
    As if on cue, Kasey announces, “I like it when Daddy is here to give us baths.”

    Brad smiles bashfully and says nothing.

    Heather, though, can’t help herself. “You act like a superstar, you get treated like one.”

  • Can Organics Save the Family Farm?

    Thor Heyerdahl’s classic adventure story, The Ra Expeditions, has a lesson for agriculture. Heyerdahl wanted to prove that ancient Egyptian sailors could have reached the New World in traditional boats constructed of bundled papyrus stalks. He and his crew studied fresco paintings, three to four thousand years old, on the tomb walls of pyramids for instruction on the size, shape, and style of the crafts. In the paintings there was one rope represented, from the stern’s curled-in tip down to the afterdeck, for which they could discern no purpose suggested by modern physics, and in the ensuing construction it was left out. Ra I collapsed in mid-ocean for lack of that rope. Their second attempt, Ra II, with the newly appreciated rope in its assigned place, completed the voyage without a hitch.

    In the story of agriculture’s transition from the traditions of the past to the realities of the present, there is a missing element that is the rope’s equivalent—an unappreciated detail without which the worldwide agricultural system will eventually fall apart.

    That crucial element, found in healthy, viable dirt, is called “soil organic matter.” In the mid-1930s, organic farming arose from a recognition of the vital importance of this soil ingredient. Some farmers saw the undesirable changes in their soil and the diminished health of their livestock that followed the shift to chemical farming in the twentieth century. Their appreciation for soil organic matter was reborn. They realized that they needed to return to pre-chemical practices, and improve them if possible, rather than reject them in favor of chemical shortcuts. They believed this was the direction they needed to go if the health of the soil, the health of the produce, and the health of the human beings consuming the produce were to be maintained. Some of their improvements to old methods included more successful methods of compost making, better management of crop residues—the leaves, roots, or stems that are left after harvest—and adding mineral nutrients, where necessary, in their most natural form.

    The organic pioneers wrote and spoke about their realization that the farm is not a factory, but rather a human-managed microcosm of the natural world. Whether in forest or prairie, soil fertility in the natural world is maintained and renewed by the recycling of all plant and animal residues which create the organic matter in the soil. This recycling is a biological process, which means that the most important contributors to soil fertility are alive, and they are neither farmers nor fertilizer salesmen. They are the population of living creatures in the soil—whose life processes make the plant-food potential of the soil accessible to plants—and their food is organic matter.

    The number of these creatures is almost beyond belief. It was often said that a teaspoon of fertile soil contains at least one million live microscopic organisms. Hard to believe as that may be, that number is now considered far too conservative. Once you begin to understand that the soil is a living thing rather than an inert substance, a fascinating universe opens in front of your eyes. I once watched a specialist on soil creatures perform a minor miracle. He held the rapt attention of a roomful of teenagers by showing slides and telling tales of the endlessly interrelated and meticulously choreographed activities of these creatures. The students were entranced because the subject matter was like a trip to another planet. They were peeking into the secret world of nature.

    The idea of a living soil nourished with organic matter also helps cast light on the difference between a natural and a chemical approach to soil fertility. In the chemical approach, fertilizers are created in a factory to put a limited number of nutrients in a soluble form within reach of plant roots. The idea is to bypass the soil and start feeding the plants directly with preprocessed plant food. In the natural approach, the farmer adds organic matter to nurture all those hard-working soil organisms. This approach is usually called feeding the soil rather than feeding the plants, but what it’s really doing is feeding the soil creatures, and that’s why it works so well. The idea that we could ever substitute a few soluble elements for a whole living system is a lot like thinking an intravenous needle could deliver a delicious meal.

    Through the years, as organic farmers have worked with this world of nature, they have developed harmonious farming practices that are outstandingly productive. The general level of expertise today among the best organic growers allows them to equal chemical agriculture in yield while far surpassing it in quality. Coincidentally, they discovered that this approach to farming could save not only their soil, but the family farm itself—especially from the crushing onslaught of petrochemical agribusiness.

    Since the 1930s, organic farming has been subjected to the traditional three-step progression that occurs with any new idea directly challenging an orthodoxy. First the orthodoxy dismisses it. Then it spends decades contesting its validity. Finally, it moves to take over the idea. Now that organic agriculture has become an obvious economic force, industrial agriculture wants to control it. Since the first step in controlling a process is to define (or redefine) it, the U.S. Department of Agriculture hastened to influence the setting of organic standards—in part by establishing a legal definition of the word “organic”—and the organic spokespeople naively permitted it.

    Wise people had long warned against such a step. Almost thirty years ago, Lady Eve Balfour, one of the most knowledgeable organic pioneers from the 1930s, said, “I am sure that the techniques of organic farming cannot be imprisoned in a rigid set of rules. They depend essentially on the attitude of the farmer. Without a positive and ecological approach, it is not possible to farm organically.” When I heard Lady Eve make that statement at an international conference on organic farming at Sissach, Switzerland, in 1977, the co-option and redefinition of “organic” by the USDA was far in the future. I knew very well what she meant, though, because by that time I had been involved in organics long enough to have absorbed the old-time ideas and I was alert to the changes that were beginning to appear.

    When you study the history of almost any new idea, it becomes clear how the involvement of the old power structure in the new paradigm tends to move things backward. Minds mired in an industrial thinking pattern, in which farmers are merely sources of raw materials, cannot see beyond the outputs of production. They don’t consider the values of production, or its economic benefits to the producers. While co-opting and regulating the organic method, the USDA has ignored the organic goal. And since it is the original organic goal, and not the modern labeling requirements of the USDA, which I believe can save the family farm, we need to know the difference. To better convey this difference, I like to borrow two words from the ecology movement and refer to “deep” organic farming and “shallow” organic farming.

    Deep-organic farmers, after rejecting agricultural chemicals, look for better ways to farm. Inspired by the elegance of nature’s systems, they try to mimic the patterns of the natural world’s soil-plant economy. They use freely available natural soil foods like deep-rooting legumes, green manures, and composts to correct the causes of an infertile soil by establishing a vigorous soil life. They acknowledge that the underlying cause of pest problems (insects and diseases) is plant stress; they know they can avoid pest problems by managing soil tilth, nutrient balance, organic matter content, water drainage, air flow, crop rotations, varietal selection, and other factors to reduce plant stress. In so doing, deep-organic farmers free themselves from the need to purchase fertilizers and pest-control products from the industrial supply network—the commercial network that normally puts profits in the pockets of middlemen and puts family farms on the auction block. The goal of deep-organic farming is to grow the most nutritious food possible and to respect the primacy of a healthy planet. Needless to say, the industrial agricultural establishment sees this approach as a threat to the status quo since it is not an easy system for outsiders to quantify, to control, and to profit from.

    Shallow-organic farmers, on the other hand, after rejecting agricultural chemicals, look for quick-fix inputs. Trapped in a belief that the natural world is inadequate, they end up mimicking the patterns of chemical agriculture. They use bagged or bottled organic fertilizers in order to supply nutrients that temporarily treat the symptoms of an infertile soil. They treat the symptoms of plant stress—insect and disease problems—by arming themselves with the latest natural organic weapons. In so doing, shallow-organic farmers continue to deliver themselves into the control of an industrial supply network that is only too happy to sell them expensive symptom treatments. The goal of shallow-organic farming is merely to follow the approved guidelines and respect the primacy of international commerce. The industrial agricultural establishment looks on shallow-organic farming as an acceptable variation of chemical agribusiness since it is an easy system for the industry to quantify, to control, and to profit from in the same ways it has done with chemical farming. Shallow organic farming sustains the dependence of farmers on middlemen and fertilizer suppliers. Today, major agribusinesses are creating massive shallow organic operations, and these can be as hard on the family farm as chemical farming ever was.

    The difference in approach is a difference in life views. The shallow view regards the natural world as consisting of mostly inadequate, usually malevolent systems that must be modified and improved. The deep-organic view understands that the natural world consists of impeccably designed, smooth-functioning systems that must be studied and nurtured. The deep-organic pioneers learned that farming in partnership with the natural processes of soil organisms also makes allowance for the unknowns. The living systems of a truly fertile soil contain all sorts of yet-to-be discovered benefits for plants—and consequently for livestock and the humans who consume them. These are benefits we don’t even know how to test for because we are unaware of their mechanism, yet deep-organic farmers are aware of them every day in the improved vigor of their crops and livestock. This practical experience of farmers is unacceptable to scientists, who disparagingly call it mere “anecdotal evidence.” The farmers contend that since most scientists lack familiarity with real organic farming, they are passing judgment on things they know nothing about.

    It is difficult for organic farmers to defend ideas scientifically when so little scientific data has been collected. However, the passion is there because the farmer’s instincts are so powerfully sure of the differences that exist between organic and chemical production. I often cite an experience of mine in an unrelated field—music—in defense of the farmer’s instincts. Twice I have been fortunate to hear great artists perform in an intimate setting without the intermediary of a sound system. The first was a saxophonist, the second a soprano. The experience of hearing their clear, pure tones directly, not missing whatever subtleties a microphone and speakers are incapable of transmitting, was so different, and the direct ingestion of the sound by my ears was so nourishing (that is the only word I can think of), that I remember the sensation to this day. The unfiltered music was like fresh food grown by a local, deep-organic grower. That same music heard through a sound system is like industrial organic produce shipped from far away. Through a poor sound system, it is a lot like chemically grown produce.

    Like most other farmers I know, I am sensitive to the reactions of my customers, especially young customers, as evidence of the advantages of organic farming. Children are notorious for hating vegetables, but that is not what I hear from parents in the neighboring towns in response to the vegetables we grow on our farm. We have been told that our carrots are the trading item of choice in local grade-school lunch boxes. We have been told by stunned parents that not only will their children eat our salad and our spinach, but that they ask their parents specifically to purchase them. I put great faith in the honest and unspoiled taste buds of children. They can still detect differences that older taste buds may miss and that science cannot measure.

    Lately, there has been a lot of talk alerting us to the takeover of many organic labels by industrial food giants. But to anyone who wishes to eat really good food, I say the sky is not falling. These takeovers only involve industrial shallow organics. They only involve those companies large enough to attract takeover money. Most of these companies sell processed foods, which are substandard nutritionally, whatever the provenance of their ingredients. When the organic version of the Twinkie eventually appears, it will be immaterial who controls it. Some of these companies do sell staple foods, but they only meet the shallowest of standards, thus ignoring those valuable production practices that only family farmers seem to care about anymore.

    For example, I don’t buy organic eggs from the grocery stores. Merely feeding organic grain to chickens, without giving the animals honest access to the outdoors, does not make a free-range hen or produce truly edible eggs. The yolks of these eggs are pale and, being mass-produced somewhere far away, they are not fresh. I purchase eggs from a neighboring farmer who runs his chickens on grass pasture where the sunshine, green food—and a host of unknown factors—produce eggs with deep orange yolks and awesome flavor. I don’t buy organic milk from the large producers who keep thousands of cows in confinement and who claim their milk is special because they feed the cows organic grain. As if preventing access to grass is not bad enough, these producers then ultra-pasteurize the cows’ milk so they can ship it nationally—thereby destroying the amazing natural cultures and enzymes in uncooked milk. I buy milk from a very successful local raw-milk dairy where the cows eat grass outdoors (as they were designed to do) and produce milk that studies have shown is far richer in many important nutrients due to the grass diet alone.

    In other words, the only organic companies that have been bought out are those whose quality is so dubious you don’t want to buy their food no matter how many times they can legally print the word “organic” on the label. Real food comes from your local family farm, run by deep-organic farmers. These farms won’t be bought out because they are too honest and too focused on quality over quantity to attract the takeover specialists. The good news is that small, committed, organic family farms are the fastest growing segment in U.S. agriculture today. Old-time deep-organic farming will save these farms because there will always be a demand for exceptional food by astute customers who can see past the hype of the USDA label and realize the importance of making their own fully informed decisions about food quality.

    ***

    How did deep get turned into shallow and good food revert to mediocre? It is a logical result in a world blind to the elegance of natural systems. Humans think in terms of more milk rather than exceptional milk, cheaper eggs not better eggs. Since modern humans tend to consider nature imperfect, they focus on improving nature rather than improving the function of agriculture within nature. Humans want to change the rules rather than try to operate more intelligently within them. A recent advertisement from a biotech company reinforced that idea by highlighting the phrase “Think what’s possible.” It’s true that these companies think they have the power to remake the parts of nature they don’t understand. However, if they understood them, they would realize they don’t need remaking. It is our human relationship with the natural world that needs remaking.

    Family farms thrive when they operate as participants in nature’s elegantly structured system. Take my own farm. I have visited organic vegetable farms across the U.S. and Europe, and I believe ours is fairly typical. We augment the fertility of our soil with both homemade compost and green manures to provide all-important organic matter, plus locally available organic residues (in our case from the fishing industry). We grow thirty-five different vegetables year round, both in the field in summer and in greenhouses in winter. We use no pest-control products because we have no pest problems that need to be controlled. Fertile, healthy soils teeming with beneficial life grow vigorous, healthy plants. Rather than depending on product inputs, we have created a knowledge-input agriculture where biological diplomacy and management skills replace war mentality and chemical weapons. Our aim is to cultivate ease and order on our farm rather than battle futilely against disease and disorder. When we have had problems (low soil fertility, plant stress) we dealt with them by correcting the cause so the problem would no longer exist. If, instead, we had treated the symptom, then that treatment would have been required again and again unless the cause went away on its own.

    If we view modern society through the lens of this agricultural model, the parallels are striking, and the potential for deep-organic farming to transform more than just the family farm becomes obvious. It has the power to transform the world. Our present economic infrastructure is focused on selling treatments for symptoms, rather than finding inexpensive ways to correct the causes. For example, the medical profession, under the influence of the drug companies, peddles pills, potions, and operations rather than stressing alternatives to destructive Twinkie nutrition, over-stressed lifestyles, and toxic pollution. The economists push conspicuous consumption as a panacea, despite the fact that alternatives to hollow lives, addictive behavior, and meaningless work would bring us far more satisfaction. The government colludes in preparing for conflicts and then waging them (symptom treatment), rather than committing our country to permanent resolution of differences through diplomacy (cause correction). Although deep-organic farmers demonstrate daily the existence of a successful parallel universe where cause correction rules over symptom treatment, the significance of that option is unknown and thus unheeded. If its implications were fully known, deep organic farming would certainly be suppressed, because it exposes the artificiality of our symptom-focused economy and, incidentally, explains why society’s most intractable problems never seem to get solved.

    So what is the future? If you want to eat really good food, support your local deep-organic farm. Committed growers are engaged in a quest to grow better food because they understand that real food makes an enormous contribution to human well-being. In the food world, family farmers are the last link maintaining the old-time values of quality rather than quantity, of the deep satisfaction from meaningful work rather than the shallow return from excess consumerism. The values of caring farmers were once so common, so basic to human existence, that they did not need to be expressed. In today’s world these values have been so overwhelmed by greed and shoddy thinking that they now very much need to be put into words. When pronounced, those words seem quaint and idealistic. Just as organic foods have become the last refuge protecting eaters from GMOs, rBGH, and food irradiation, so have family farmers become the last refuge protecting the values of the early organic pioneers against the onslaught of the industrial organic hucksters. I cast my vote for quality and for idealism—and for putting the rope back in place.

  • Cosmos

    The sleek and chic stylings of Cosmos may, at first, cause some to feel underdressed and overly-Midwestern. Are you cool enough to eat here? The answer is always a resounding yes, and Chef Seth Bixby Daugherty, a local hero, wants to make sure you know it. The food is simply amazing, offering the safety of an Ahi tuna entrée as well as the more daring chop of wild boar. To choose the chef’s tasting menu is to embark on an adventure into the future of the Twin Cities dining scene. Not to mention that the servers are New York professional with Minnesota graciousness. And we’re in love with Cosmos and their Moulin Rouge cocktail. Le Meridien Hotel, 601 1st Ave. N., Minneapolis; 612-312-1168

  • Butter

    How can you not flock to a place named for the very thing that binds life together? Butter is an homage, my friends, to the joy of living, the celebration of life that happens every time you suck the creamy center from one of Stacy Sowinski’s éclairs. In its first life, this little joint on Grand Avenue in Minneapolis was a cute little bakery shop called Sweetski’s. Now, as the stylish and expanded Butter, the magic has spread to delicate and flaky turnovers, chocolaty tarts, and savory biscuits. You can also get soup and sandwiches and a kicky veggie chili, but you’re only throwing those home to get to those life-affirming pastries. As you should. 3544 Grand Ave. S., Minneapolis; 612-521-7401

  • Tea House Chinese Restaurant

    Casual suburban dining is usually limited to greasy food courts, carb-laden sandwich shops, and franchised “microbreweries.” But one day, heading for home off Highway 55, we spotted the Tea House: A shining beacon amid a tangle of road construction it had been here, waiting for us, all along. Serving up two menus—authentic Schezuan fare and gentler, Americanized dishes—the Tea House welcomes people of all palates. The city-dweller can end his search for marinated bamboo tips here, the farmboy can test his tolerance with a variety of hot chili sauces, and the soccer mom can quiet the kids with egg rolls and dan-dan noodles before heading to a movie at the Willow Creek Theater. If all this can happen at a strip mall in unassuming Plymouth… well, there may be hope for Maple Grove after all. 88 Nathan Lane, Plymouth; 763-544-3422

  • 2004 American Pottery Festival

    A celebration of the beauty and usefulness of pots, as well as a chance for art lovers and art creators to come together and exchange ideas and techniques. The festival will include exhibits and sales of pots by twenty-five guest artists from all over the country, as well as demonstrations, studio tours, and artist talks. Admission starts at $5 for exhibit and sale areas, or up to $275 for the grand Collector’s Weekend package, which includes tours of artists’ private collections with brunch and dinner. 2424 Franklin Ave E, Minneapolis; 612 339 8007; www.northernclaycenter.org