Webmaster’s note: The format of this column includes all of the Quill’s Endians participating at various times and in various ways! Phil writes this month’s column.
Pull Up a Stump
Bruce Springsteen’s song Glory Days, though catchy, has always rubbed me a little sideways. As someone who lives in the present, it is hard for me to comprehend longing for the past.
However, I came to understand how that can be circumstantial. Every week for nearly a decade, on my way to Tuesday deliveries at the old grammar school in Deer Isle, I’ve dropped in on Garfield Eaton. He bought two gallons of milk for himself every week. Upon my arrival, Garfield would instruct me to “pull up a stump,” and for 15 minutes, we’d talk, mostly about farming, always about how it used to be, and sometimes of what was to come.
An agriculturist by nature, he was suspicious of human institutions and painted a fair picture of the past he recalled and yearned for. He knew what he’d like to have, but also knew that time, his glory days, was past. His physical labor was what he’d had to offer, and he no longer was able.
Garfield suffered a “widow maker” heart attack when he was 42 years old and was on disability for the rest of his life, a life that he mostly lived alone.
I first met him through Ken Rose Farm in North Blue Hill in the early 2000s. Back then, he put his energy into homesteading. He kept a large garden. He kept hogs, sheep, hens, meat birds, and dairy cows. He met Kendall and Flossie Howard at Ken Rose to secure himself a fresh milk supply after he’d discontinued milking.
He was always spinning a yarn and dropping off extra produce back then—a five-gallon bucket of this or that for Flossie to can, rutabagas so big there were only a few in a full bucket. Kendall would say to (mid-fifties) Garfield, “Too bad I didn’t meet you sooner… I could have made something out of you.”
Garfield stopped crossing the bridge on a regular basis after 2010. Driving over 35 miles an hour didn’t suit him. Kendall stopped milking before his death in 2013. When Garfield heard that Quill’s End would deliver milk, he was sold. When we met, he found me a solid BS partner. Often, he’d start our conversations by asking, “What lies are we going to tell today, Phil?” Our weekly stump sitting became important to us both. I listened with new ears to tales of glory days.
The last few months found him nearing his end here, and I’d like to think he was prepared. As a curmudgeonly-hippie-native of Deer Isle, leaving the appropriate people pissed off was important. Leaving before the future he envisioned came to his Island was important. Leaving before he was “a waste of space” was important.
I pray you rest well, Garfield Eaton.
Heather and Phil Retberg and their three children run Quill’s End Farm, a 105-acre property in Penobscot that they bought in 2004. They use rotational grazing on their fifteen open acres and are renovating thirty more acres from woods to pasture to increase grazing for their pigs, grass-fed cattle, lambs, laying hens, and goats. Heather is Vice President of Halcyon Grange #345 and writes a newsletter for their farm’s buying club of farmers in her area and has generously permitted us to share some of their columns with Grangers. Visit the Quill’s End Farm Facebook Page for more information.