Me and Wendell
By Clay Hipp
My hero remembered, an afternoon I will never forget
Wendell Berry — August 5, 1934 – August 31, 2026
Last week, to my chagrin, I learned that one of my all-time heroes had left us. Wendell Berry—an author many have called one of the greats of the twentieth century—died at his home in Kentucky at ninety-two.
A writer of fiction, poetry, and insightful social commentary, he was also a champion of sustainable farming and conservation. He was well on his way to becoming a university professor when he decided instead to move back to his ancestral hometown and become a farmer. He settled on an old place on the banks of the Kentucky River, where he raised sheep and cattle and grew crops, using draft horses instead of a tractor. He wrote in a small cabin, looking out on the stream through a single window.
I started reading his fiction in the eighties and never stopped. His subject always wrapped around a small town and its people. The first big piece was A Place on Earth. It was followed by other novels and short stories that, taken together, are almost like the Odyssey in miniature. We follow some characters from cradle to grave and watch them mature; others simply never change. He became a dependable source of a glimpse into real life—and of his own hard-won wisdom. After I learned that he was gone, I could think of little else, and I was moved to change the subject of my Thursday class—in law!—so that I could play for my students a fifteen-year-old video in which he was interviewed by the incomparable Bill Moyers. I highly recommend it.
Was I merely taken by his writing? I am happy to answer "no." I was fortunate enough to meet him in person three times: once when I heard him read the first chapter of a new novel in a small church near Asheville; once at a ministers' conference in north Florida, where I was accompanying a friend who IS a preacher; and finally—dare I say it—at his farm in Kentucky. I must tell you about that. Please forgive me.
I found that on a trip to Louisville I would pass within fifty miles of his farm. I sent him a handwritten letter; it was the only way to reach him. In this day and age he would have looked me up online, but he never owned a computer. I identified myself and asked, "Mr. Berry, do you ever accept visitors?" He replied promptly: "We receive guests on Sunday afternoons at 3:00." I wrote back at once and said, "I will be there on January 3rd, if that is all right." He simply affirmed that he would be honored to meet me.
His wife, Tanya, met me at the door. Mr. Berry wrote in pencil on yellow legal pads, and she typed them up on an old manual typewriter. "Wendell is in the kitchen having tea," she said. "You may go on back." He stood up, shook my hand, and offered me a cup, just as if I were a neighbor. We sat and talked for two hours. I do not remember much of it. I was awed. I am sure I must have told him where I had seen him before, and asked about Jayber Crow, the novel from which he had read that day. As we talked, two beautiful shepherd dogs paced outside the windows, plainly restless to go do some work. Finally he said, "Well, it is time to do some chores. You may take your leave, or come along with us—the dogs and me."
Guess what I did.
The rest was a blur, but I still hold a few clear memories. The land was frozen hard and the creeks were thickly iced. As we rode along, he said, with a wry smile and a twinkle in his eye:
“I guess you can see that I am trying to create an old-growth forest.”
We made two stops, each one a small revelation.
Standing beside a strong wire fence, he may have made some low sound—and from clear across the field came a passel of sheep. They were tight-packed, almost circular, and smack in the middle of them rose a long neck, extending several feet above the flock. I suddenly realized what I was looking at: a llama. Many farmers, Wendell explained, were using the animal to guard their yearling sheep. Next year the two-year-olds would be moved up to the steep pastures above the farmhouse.
At another wide pasture, running to a stand of hardwoods perhaps a hundred yards off, there came again—a whistle? Soon I heard, though I could not yet see, two very large animals headed our way. The pounding of their hooves on the frozen ground seemed almost to send a tremor up through my feet. They were both deep black and heavily muscled: the substitute for the tractor he never used or even owned. With these he plowed and mowed the whole of his pastures and fields. In one of his books I remember him recounting how hawks and ground animals would join him through the workday—something that never would have happened behind a loud, intimidating machine. It was a large part of what made him a citizen of the natural world, a brother to the creatures who shared it.
As I was preparing to leave, he handed me a very small paperback book. That night I discovered he had signed it. Unfortunately it has since disappeared—lost, most likely, in one of the two moves I have made since that day. I am sure it still exists somewhere; I do not need to hold it. I had already read it cover to cover. It described, in close detail, the brutally hard work of cutting tobacco—at least he ate very cold slices of watermelon under a great old oak at midday, halfway between dawn and dusk.
Need I say more?
Only this:
Would that each of us could know a relationship like this at least once. Look around you—that person may already exist. They need not be a famous soul.
“The Peace of Wild Things
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”