June 4, 2011
Hard Work and Heart Break
Jim Lawrence's memoir of a farmer-fisherman
Callused Hands, Hungry Heart: Memoir of a Fisherman-Farmer,
By Jim Lawrence, © 2011
Jim Lawrence will turn sixty this year. As a baby-boomer, he has lived through many of the experiences of the baby-boom generation, as his new memoir reflects. His book starts out with him dropping out of university in 1972, rejecting the abstract world of academia for the real world of logging clear cuts on the Olympic Peninsula.
But his life’s dream was always to be a farmer, and after some months of wandering, he ended up on San Juan Island, visiting friends, and stayed. Readers can pick up bits of island history in his recounting of work at the cannery, fishing to earn a living, raising dairy calves, and the evolution of his family farm. The book provides a window into the lives of the 1970s back-to-the-land community; their sacrifice of comfort and convenience, their ethic of opening doors to strangers, their struggle to find meaning.
Lawrence has written a very personal memoir. He recounts his struggle with learning disabilities with compassion for the boy who was literally sick with anxiety about failing in school. He evinces a gentle forgiveness for the young man who learned to cheat to protect his self-esteem. The Lawrence family is well-known on the island. Jim’s honesty in writing about his childhood and difficult relations with his parents will undoubtedly raise eyebrows if not ire. That Jim is publishing the book and distributing it where his farm’s products are sold show he has transcended much of the pain of his struggle as a child to learn.
Given the deluge of books on local foods and organic farming one might expect Lawrence to write about food and farm politics. He tosses off a few polemical remarks about corporate food, and the book devotes many pages to foibles of his farm. But this is a personal story, about Jim as a man, not a book about local food systems. He demonstrates courage in publishing it.
Callused Hands, Hungry Heart, like all books reviewed in this column, may be found at the San Juan Island Library.
