You mess up the creek, you clean up the creek

Family lore has it that sometime in the pre-refrigeration days of the late 19th century, my forefathers dug a small cave into a steep hillside on their adjacent farms to store several barrels of home-brewed beer. Like the family’s suds, the cave was cool, dark and prized.

This being southern Illinois, however, a minor earthquake one day sent the roof of the underground rathskeller onto the barrels of beer and soon their hoppy contents were flowing into the nearby creek.

A minor catastrophe, yes, but the brothers and their stein-tippling friends weren’t the only ones without their favorite beverage.

With a slow-moving creek now half-full of sweet-smelling beer, milk production of the neighborhood’s cows soon dropped low enough to worry downstream neighbors.

Within a week, though, the creek flowed clear again, the neighborhood’s cows were back to their regular, sober routine and my family was done with their beer-making hobby for good.

I once asked my father if the tale was true. It was, he replied, and after the collapse his great-grandfather “apologized to all the neighbors for the trouble he had caused.”

“He believed that if you messed up the creek, you cleaned up the creek,” he said.

It’s the rural version of the Golden Rule: Do unto your neighbors’ farms that you’d have your neighbors to do unto yours.

At least it seemed that way in the late 1800s when farms were smaller, neighbors were more numerous and the height of farm technology included a personal beer cellar.

My father’s rural ethic harkened back to his ancestor’s view. In the six decades we shared, I never once heard him covet any neighbor’s land, machinery, or success. Not once, not anything.

Part of the reason may have been what he already had: too many cows, too many acres, too much work and too little time.

A bigger part, however, likely was contentment. He simply didn’t want much more of anything except time to go fishing.

And that included partners. In the late 1970s I asked him what might happen if “the farm” borrowed money to expand its dairy herd to boost farm income so I might return.

“What might happen,” he said almost reflexively but firmly, “is that that news would be on the front page of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch the next morning.”

The answer, deeply in character for a German Lutheran farmer, was one we did not argue, debate, or discuss.

I took it as intended, a clear “no,” and, soon thereafter, the lovely Catherine and I went back to the university with an eye for another line of work.

Equally unsurprising was that neither Dad nor I ever mentioned the topic again. He went about his life’s work and so did I — after I stumbled upon it.

A key part of his work was neighborliness. For example, a neighbor with a carload of growing children often stopped at the dairy barn twice, sometimes three, times a week to get a couple of gallons of milk for, well, a very long time. Decades.

When they did, Dad would fill their one-gallon glass jars while the children made a small show of adding a pencil mark to their already foot-long tab in a nearby cabinet.

When Dad retired from dairying 25 years later, the tab, like the cabinet, simply disappeared. Again, the long-gone milk and long-lost tab were never mentioned.

It was a hallmark of my father’s unwritten rural rules: Among our neighbors, tabs, kept or unkept, were meaningless.

Only one tab mattered to him and it wasn’t of this world. And that, too, he believed, was already forgiven.