Letter from Wendell: How a poet and farmer and a guitarist and teacher connected across time and space  

 Carrie Dietz Brown didn’t have a lot of hope her plan would work. But crazy longshots, along with wild things surviving in unlikely places, are among the revered ideals handed down to her by her father, the late, great Pat Dietz. So she hatched the plan anyway.

She hoped to reach Wendell Berry, the poet, novelist, and essayist whose work had meant so much to her father and family.

Berry is a seminal figure in the American cultural landscape of the last century, a man who, as a promising young writer in the mid-‘60s, left the East Coast literary establishment behind and returned to his native Kentucky to become a farmer. He has written nine novels and dozens of short stories, all about one small place, Port William, each told from the perspective of a different member of that community. He’s also been one of the most prolific essayists in recent American history, most famously for his collection, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture. Further, he has published over a dozen books of poems, a body of work that — even if he’d never written anything else — would have established him as a giant of American letters. The poet Donald Hall called him “a prophet of our healing, a utopian poet-legislator like William Blake.” The writer Bill McKibben called Berry’s work “the most complete — and the most powerful — vision of any American writer” of our time.

Berry is 91 years old. He and Tanya, his wife of  68 years, still live on their farm, and he still writes. Dietz Brown had read a New Yorker profile on him written in 2022 that described one part of his daily routine that caught her attention.

“The Berrys live barely a mile from the town of Port Royal, which has not prospered over the years,” wrote Dorothy Wickenden. “It consists of about 60 residents, Parker Farm Supply and Restaurant, a Baptist church and a Methodist church, a fire station, and a post office, where Berry drops off and picks up his mail six days a week.”

Dietz Brown’s plan was to write Wendell Berry a letter. The first step was to find a way to get it to him. She found a phone number for the Wendell Berry Foundation in Kentucky. It was about two weeks before last Christmas, the family’s third without Pat. Carrie was feeling the weight of his absence.

“I found the number to his foundation in Kentucky, and I had thought maybe I’d get their address, or maybe I’d get his publisher’s address,” she said. “And I call this number, the Wendell Berry Foundation. And it was near Christmas….there is so much psychic pain around the holidays.”

“I call this number and this nice lady picks up, and I’m like, ‘Listen, my late father was this great guy. And I just want to tell Wendell just how much he meant to my dad.’ I’m choking up and not making any sense. And my valley girl voice is at a peak, like my vocal fry is just bottoming out. And the lady says, ‘Well, I’ll just give you his PO Box.’ She gives me his PO Box, his little town. I’m just, ‘Dude, I won the lottery. I can’t believe this is happening.'”

“She wasn’t making me feel like I needed to explain myself. She just got it.”

“And then at the end, I tell her, ‘You know, I am just so grateful for you, I hope you have a happy holiday season.’ And she went, ‘Jesus Christ, honey. Merry Christmas.’ God. That is perfect. It was like the first real laugh I had had in weeks.”

Wendell Berry does not own a computer. He writes by hand, and his wife, Tanya, types his work into manuscripts, while also serving as his first reader and offering whatever suggestions for improvement that might arise while she works. Berry wrote an essay, “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer,” published in 1987. It ran in Harper’s, and drew a famous flood of indignant letters in response. Berry argued that any new technology is only an improvement if it is less expensive than what it replaces, and easily fixable. He has thus stuck to his pencils to this day.

Kelly Dietz Johnson, the eldest of Pat and Carol Dietz’s four children, offered stern advice.

“You’ve got to handwrite it, man,” she told Carrie. “And you’ve got to use your best handwriting. You can’t just scratch something up. It’s got to be just right.”   

Pat Dietz was likewise a handwriting man. Any student or friend of Pat’s, and I was both, carries his beautiful scrawl with him or her, in the songs or scales or other pieces of guitar instruction he wrote on graph paper, or in the inscriptions to books he gave us.

So in a clean script that is not unlike her father’s, Carrie sat down and wrote a letter.

“So I am writing it down. I got it organized,” Carrie recalled. “I had my mom read through it to make sure she was okay with it. She loved it. And I knew the guy, like, famously doesn’t have a computer, right?

The task at hand was kind of nervewracking while somehow at the same time comforting. Carrie had been re-reading her dad’s copies of Berry’s books, all of which contained notes Pat made in them while reading and re-reading them. Pat died on June 28, 2023. So in a way, she’d been in conversation with Wendell and her dad for over two years. In that sense it felt perfectly natural to be writing a letter to Wendell.

She wrote:

Dear Mr. Berry,

I’m writing to tell you about my dad, Pat Dietz, who was/is an incredible husband and father, beloved guitar teacher, and devout student of your work.

He was killed two and a half years ago, saving the life of his 16 year old grandson. My dad and Charlie were headed to a bookstore to pick out a book. In the parking lot a driver lost control of his car and sped toward Charlie. My dad wasn’t in the car’s direct path and he leapt forward to move Charlie out of the way. Charlie was spared from the worst of the impact but my dad was violently hurt. He died two days later.

The pain of losing my dad has been close to unbearable. He was the best of us. 1000 people came to his memorial. Your name was mentioned over and over again. Many people came with your books in hand, copies that my dad had loaned them.

My dad was a treasured guitar teacher and music shop owner in our small town outside of Los Angeles. For fifty years he taught everyone to play guitar and referred to the shop as the “family farm”.

He referenced you and your work constantly. He had photocopies of your poems that we would hand out during teacher training sessions, he’d read out loud from Jayber Crow while teaching lessons, and he gifted your books to everyone. You guided and affirmed him during hard times. Burley made him laugh, reminding him of his best friend. And Hannah made him cry and comforted him while mourning his mother’s passing.

I wanted to thank you a million times over for all that you did for my beautiful dad. And all your work continues to do for us. Your words have been such a soft place to land as we endure the pain of his absence.

I’ve enclosed a beautiful eulogy my oldest sister wrote, Charlie’s mother. And an article that a dear friend/journalist wrote about what it was like to be my dad’s friend.

I hope the holidays bring you and your family peace and joy. And know that you have many students out here in the suburbs of LA, missing a great man and finding some comfort in reading your books.

Love,
Carrie Dietz Brown

She also prepared attachments to her letter. The first was the eulogy Kelly had written, which began and ended with a quote and a reference from Berry’s novel “Hannah Coulter.” The second was a story I wrote about Pat on the second anniversary of his death. She sent the letter and its attachments on December 15.

 

Carrie knew her letter would be received by Wendell. Like her father, Berry possesses a gift for paying attention. For a rare few, in the clutter of our times, the important things do not slip by. The letter may or may not generate a response, she thought, but it would get through.

 

And that was comfort enough.

 

Wendell Berry was born in 1934 in Henry County, Kentucky.

As a young writer he had every door open on the literary East Coast: a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford, a Guggenheim year in Europe (Tuscany and southern France), and a teaching post at New York University. His New York friends thought he was launched.

Then in 1964 he did the thing they considered career suicide. He went back to his people. He bought a farm near his family’s “home place” on the Kentucky River. He and Tanya, married since 1957, bought their house and first twelve acres that year. His New York circle imagined him surrounded by moonshine-swilling hillbillies, sure he’d consigned himself to intellectual death. He set out to prove them wrong — even admitting, in an essay written in 1969, “I seem to have been born with an aptitude for a way of life that was doomed.”

He has farmed Lanes Landing — a white clapboard house on about 117 acres — ever since. He writes in a cabin with no plumbing or electricity, the “long-legged house,” at a worktable before a forty-paned window he calls “the eye of the house.” Over roughly 60 years he’s written more than 60 books — poetry, fiction, essays — most while running the farm.

Berry’s return to Kentucky may have seemed like a retreat from the larger world. It was the opposite. In a rare public appearance — other than a debate he did with then-Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz in 1977 — Berry in 2016 cooperated with filmmaker Laura Dunn in “Look and See: A Portrait of Wendell Berry.” He told Dunn that his farm has been a perch upon which to more clearly see the world.

“To live in a place and have your vision confined by it would be a mistake,” Berry said. “But to live in a place and try to understand it as a standpoint from which to see, and to see from there as far as you can — is a proper challenge.”

In his 2012 Jefferson Lecture for the National Endowment for the Humanities — an essay called “It All Turns on Affection” — Berry borrowed a pair of terms from Stegner, his old teacher. Americans, Stegner said, divide into two kinds. Boomers are “those who pillage and run,” who want to “make a killing and end up on Easy Street.” Stickers are “those who settle, and love the life they have made and the place they have made it in.”

Nearly everything Berry has made is a monument to stickers. It is a body of work built, against every incentive of the age, on the conviction that a small place contains everything. “The local, fully imagined,” he once wrote, “becomes universal.”

But the argument was never only on the page. Berry plowed with horses long after his neighbors bought tractors. He has refused the machines and conveniences that would put distance between himself and the work. The staying-put is not the backdrop to the work. It is the work.

It is also what is, as a reader, most daunting about Berry. Like Henry David Thoreau, to read Berry is to be confronted, not just with ideas, but with strong notions about how to live a life. As much as one may agree with these beautifully wrought critiques of our wayward manner of living, a question arises. We can’t all go live at Walden Pond, or at a small farm in Kentucky, so how do we apply the wisdom of such writers?

Berry has arguably been the most quietly influential voice in what others would call the American counterculture, but he would likely argue is a more fundamental sense of culture, one which restores a connection between people and both their human and larger, natural community of being. He never advocated for a back-to-the-land movement, or, for that matter, any kind of a movement at all. In an essay titled “In Distrust of Movements,” he wrote:

“I am not suggesting, of course, that everybody ought to be a farmer or a forester. Heaven forbid! I am suggesting that most people now are living on the far side of a broken connection, and that this is potentially catastrophic. Most people are now fed, clothed, and sheltered from sources, in nature and in the work of other people, toward which they feel no gratitude and exercise no responsibility.”

The lessons Berry offers, it turns out, can be applied almost anywhere. Even in Manhattan Beach.

 

The Family Farm

 The Dietz family were homesteaders in California. They were farm people looking for abundance. In the unhurried way that is perhaps an ancestral trait, they just happened to arrive several decades after actual homesteaders.

In 1938, Merle and Patty Dietz set out from their hometown of Willow City, North Dakota, a village of less than 500 people about 30 miles from the Canadian border, nowhere near anything resembling a city. 

They drove 2,000 miles, south and west, to the coast of Southern California. As family legend has it, Merle drove down Rosecrans Avenue to the fledgling town of Manhattan Beach, felt the ocean breeze for the first time  and realized it was the only time in his 25 years that he hadn’t felt itchy. He declared this place home. 

Merle and Patty would have 11 children. Merle was a chemistry teacher who built houses in the summer and an eternally curious man who would obtain his PhD. at the age of 50. The Dietz brothers, John and Pat, were the ninth and tenth children in a family of eight girls and three boys. 

Music flowed through both sides of the family, all Midwestern farming folk who came from a culture in which people entertained themselves. As it had been through most of human history prior to the dawning of what came to be called the “music industry,” out on the plains of North Dakota early last century, music was something families and communities did together. People shared songs. 

This was especially so with the Dietz family. Patty Dietz had an older brother whose band, The Dizzy Syncopators, became popular all over the state, and music particularly suffused her life. 

“Everyone in her family played something,” John Dietz recalled.  “Her older brother played a big part in her life, and it was a time when people — instead of watching TV — played music.” 

That inheritance carried west. The first six Dietz children were girls. All were given piano lessons that mostly didn’t take; by the time it reached John and Pat, the ninth and tenth, the piano lessons had ceased. But the boys found their own way to music. John bought a five-dollar guitar off a friend of one of his sisters, sharing the cost with Pat, who put in two of the five dollars. It was the mid-1960s, the Beatles had just played Ed Sullivan, and a generation of kids was forming the country’s first rock bands. The Dietz brothers formed theirs when John was in seventh grade and Pat in sixth.

From the start, Pat practiced differently. Peter Carreira, who had known him since seventh grade at American Martyrs, remembered summer afternoons at the Dietz place, the garage lined with stapled egg cartons for soundproofing. The others would drift toward the beach; Pat would wave them off — I’ll be down later, I gotta practice — and he always did come down later, and he always had, somehow, gotten it done. He applied this focus to most of what he did. “He was an acolyte to the term,  ‘Be here now,'” Carreira recalled. “Wherever he was, whatever he was doing, he was in it 100%. It might have taken him a while to figure out exactly what it was he was going to do, but even if it was just, ‘I’m going to read this book… and I’m not going to be disturbed.’ Anytime you are that diligent, you’re going to be spending a lot of time alone. For as loquacious and social as he was, he had no problem with that.” 

His first paid work was a kind of monastic training in disguise: an influential early guitar teacher of Pat’s, named Brian Hartzler, farmed out some work to him, transcribing songs by ear onto staff paper so they could be copyrighted. He wrote other people’s records down by hand, note for note, until the ear that would carry him the rest of his life was simply built.

Andrew Newhart met the Dietz brothers, through Carreira, early in their high school years. Pat was already a good musician, but what struck Newhart was that ear.  “He wasn’t fully formed, but he had an ear,” he said. “I remember, you could just pull a song out of the air, and he would pretty much figure it out right there.” Pat had started at Costa but figured out soon that he preferred to direct his own education, so he did independent studies at Shores.  At one point during this time, he and Newhart took a beginning piano class at El Camino College. 

“Pretty soon, Pat’s playing piano,” Newhart recalled. “And he’s listening to The White Album, and he pulls out, by ear, the song ‘Martha My Dear.’ Within a week, he had it down. The story was always the same. He’s like, Oh, you know, it wasn’t that hard…But I know he worked on it all week. And he could play the whole thing. It was wild.”

Paul McCartney wrote “Martha My Dear” as an exercise, deliberately setting himself something beyond his reach. The main figure has the two hands moving in contrary motion, a hopping stride-like left hand under a right hand that keeps skipping across intervals — the sort of thing that comes easily to a trained pianist and is brutal for someone self-taught. The song also modulates and shifts feel between sections, so it isn’t a matter of learning one pattern and repeating it. McCartney has said he couldn’t really play it properly, and that he wrote it precisely because it was difficult. 

Carreira and Newhart marvelled at Pat’s willfulness: he worked harder than anyone they’d ever met. It was a work ethic that would continue the rest of his life, but there was a different kind of reason behind it. “Andrew and I were talking , going, that guy —  he’s never done anything he didn’t want to do,” Carreira said. “He didn’t do bullshit work because he worked so hard at the things he wanted to do that he didn’t have to that.” 

His closest friend was Kelly Preach — a born comedian, the kind of kid who could take a room apart. If Pat was the one who slipped away to practice, Preach was the one still down at the water. Pat possessed a seemingly inherent calm, while Preach had the hyperactive soul of a born vandal. Yet the two were inseparable. One night at the top of the beach steps, Preach smashed a beer bottle against the metal railing, and Pat found himself arguing with him — somebody’s going to come down here in the dark and cut their foot open. And in the middle of his own argument a thought arrived that he would turn over for the rest of his life and hand down to his children like an origin story. Someone made this railing. Someone had measured it and bolted it into the concrete so that people could get down to the water safely in the dark — an act of care from a person he would never meet. What he felt afterward was a pull away from breaking things and toward making them, and keeping them.

Pat also came to know loss while young. When he was 13, his older sister Judy was killed in a car accident the day before she was to be married. It was the first of the deep griefs he would carry across a lifetime.

When it came time for college, John and Pat both went north to the University of Oregon, in Eugene, and its school of music, gigging as a duo around town. The focus came with him. And in those same years and those same halls, both brothers found the women they would marry. John met Susan, a pianist and coloratura soprano. Pat met Carol, a violinist who also played viola and harp. She had noticed him before they ever spoke — long hair, a hard-shell case, heavy leather Oxfords and corduroy Levi’s, a dark-green sweatshirt. 

“He just went walking by, and this long hair, and I just thought, Oh, my God… he’s just so beautiful,” Carol recalled. 

When she asked his name he told her it was Paul; it was Patrick soon enough, whether the misdirection was nerves or a joke or both. He offered to help her with ear training, and one afternoon they walked to the old pioneer cemetery beside the music school and ended up on a gravestone, talking for hours until it began to rain, and they stayed out in it. The first time she heard him and John play — fast and furious, at a place called Mama’s Home Fried Truck Stop — it tipped her over.

“It just filled me…their skill and their vibe and the way they played together,” Carol said. “I’d grown up playing chamber music. It was two of them, and they were so connected. My focus, of course, was mostly on Pat, and I just had never seen anybody play guitar like that before, or really any instrument. He was so skillful and it was so musical.”

The larger world was there for the taking; Susan had already made inroads in the classical and opera worlds as far away as Paris. The rock revolution, meanwhile, was reverberating across America. Pat had gone deeper, studying classically under renowned teacher Jon Harris in San Francisco, but had not renounced rock music, either — he had, instead, made himself into a virtuoso. The brothers, had they so chosen, could have had an array of choices as gigging musicians and a real shot at the rock ‘n roll road show way of life that so many of their contemporaries sought.

The Dietz brothers went home, back to Manhattan Beach, to the family grounds — what the Dietzs would come to call “the lot,” and others called “the compound” — near Merle and Patty, and settled in for the long haul. John and Susan lived in a small house beside his parents, Pat and Carol in a garage-like shack. When Carol became pregnant, the couples switched, her and Pat and newborn Kelly living in the little house. And then Pat did the most Dietz thing imaginable: he built the house he would raise his family in, by hand, alongside his father and his brother. Merle the chemistry teacher had framed houses every summer of his life; now Pat took up the same work on the same ground, and made a home out of it. A few years later, they would build a third home for John and Susan as they began their family.

The shop came in 1976. As kids, they’d fallen under the tutelage of a guitar teacher Gene Leis, who published one of the most famed instruction manuals of that time and ran a shop that was equal parts music school, salon, and general hang for any scruffy bohemian afoot locally. He had finally closed his own storied studio, so John and Pat opened theirs — a guitar and music school run by players, for players. It moved a time or two before it settled, in 1991, on Sepulveda Boulevard. Their friends chased the road and the record deal; the brothers built something homemade and rooted instead, a local institution that would pass through the hands of thousands of players and, in time, give work to all seven of the family’s children. An organic operation, John called it. They had only ever done what came naturally. And what came naturally, for a family of farm people two thousand miles from the farm, was to stay.

“That part of it was really deliberate,” Pat said in an interview in 2015. “We consistently set this up so we would be around…I call the business the family farm, because it’s as close as I can get, living in the city.” 

He recalled that a former boyfriend of his daughter Robin once asked her a strange question. 

“Are your parents Amish?” he asked. 

“No,” she replied. “What makes you think that?” 

“Whenever I come over, your mom is there. Everyone is there,” the boy replied. 

“If you discount, say, the last 30 years, that’s not weird. That’s normal, right?” Pat said. “But in comparison to what he was seeing at home, maybe TV dinners, his take was, ‘These people must be Amish.” 

He mused that what at times seemed like an outlandishly different way of life —  one built around a tight clan and as much music-making as possible — had persisted long enough to become regarded as almost hipster cool by some of his young employees.  

“We are locals, dude,” he said. “It’s just weird that it’s cool.” 

 

The eulogy

In her letter, Carrie included the full script of what her sister wrote about Pat in the weeks immediately following his death: 

To begin, an excerpt from “Hannah Coulter,” a novel by Pat’s favorite writer, Wendell Berry: “I began to know my story then. Like everybody’s, it was going to be the story of living in the absence of the dead. What is the thread that holds it all together? Grief, I thought for a while. And grief is there sure enough, just about all the way through. From the time I was a child I have never been far from it. But grief is not a force and has no power to hold. You only bear it. Love is what carries you, for it is always there, even in the dark, or most in the dark, but shining out at times like gold stitches in a piece of embroidery.”

My dad loved to tell the same jokes over and over, and had a pact with his best friends that they were allowed to tell each other’s best stories as autobiographical. He loved people who could tell a good story, and people who would listen to his. He loved to stop by for a visit, he loved to eat chocolate chips together late at night in the kitchen while we took turns cracking each other up, and he’d cry with you in a parked car somewhere when life was hard.

When he laughed, you could see all the way back to his molars. He held all babies with their stomach against the inside of his forearm and their head in the crook of his elbow. He loved teenagers, and considered himself still 19 at heart. Somehow, he also made being a real adult look interesting, and possible. 

He shuffled his feet when he walked, and had his same huge Birkenstocks resoled and re-corked every year. He loved P.G. Wodehouse’s novels and William Stafford’s poetry. He drank coffee any hour of the day or night, and he never passed anyone down on their luck without slipping them some cash.

When a hummingbird stunned itself on his window, he rescued it from the neighborhood cats and stayed up with it all night, feeding it sugar water and playing it Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands. It was strong enough to be released by the next morning, but it visited him in his backyard for months. He followed the adventures of the Santa Monica mountain lion P-22 for years, and cried hard when it died last summer. 

He loved Lucinda Williams and Bob Dylan. He sang his kids and grandkids Sweet Baby James

and Prairie Lullaby and Jambalaya. After we blew out our birthday candles, he’d improvise a dozen versions of Happy Birthday in different styles — baroque, atonal, ragtime — until we were all laughing and it seemed like music could have been invented again just from that one melody. He loved figuring out which songs would get people up dancing the fastest at a party, and he loved teaching

guitar lessons. He played so many gigs around Southern California over the years that he joked he’d been on a lifelong world tour of Los Angeles. If he said another musician was “a very fine player,” you knew they were someone special. After the last concert we went to together, he found the guitarist to tell her she should check out McCabe’s Music for an LA gig, and told her that he had taught Hazel [his granddaughter] how to play the song Lowrider the day before. 

He was a devoted son and caregiver to his parents. He loved his mother, her fortitude

and grace.He worked hard to take care of us four kids, and was a patient and joyful father. I was

always proud to be his daughter. He sent us late-night emails with songs and poems he thought we’d like, he helped Erik fix the farm’s irrigation system in 117-degree heat, he floated down the Big Sur River with us on inner tubes in the summer. He encouraged us, without end. He loved pulling extra chairs around the table for Sunday dinner for our friends and laughing together about Daylight Savings Time and a thousand other inside jokes. He was always, forever, on our side. He raised us to be hopeful, to be funny, to love eccentrics, and to be on the lookout for beauty. 

He loved each of his six grandchildren with all his heart: Charlie, Hazel, Josiah, Willa, Matty, and Francis Patrick.  He was generous, tender, and brave.

He loved Carol, my mom. They married at 19 and 21, a few months after they met at the

University of Oregon, and they took care of each other their entire lives. Their home, and the love in it, was a sanctuary for anyone who needed one. Through illness and loss, joy and dailiness, they each held the other, always,at the very center of their own life. Their devotion to each other, to the life they made together, never wavered. If you knew them, you know that true love is real.

There would never have been enough time with him. We’ll bear the grief of losing him, forever. We’ll be carried by their love, forever.

 

Mad farmers

I come from farming folk. Like Wendell, and like Pat, my father was the first in several generations who left the farm. He fought in WWII, where he became an Army officer and served in the liberation of France, returning to small town Iowa with a sword that had, at least by one telling, been awarded to him by the mayor of a small French town. Shortly after returning, he married my mother, Betty, and was made Postmaster in our little town, Cascade, but resigned a few years in because he wasn’t the indoors sort. Instead, he drove 104 miles a day for the next 35 years delivering mail to farmers — through blizzards, heat waves, administrations, and the raising of seven children. Farmers loved him so much that every Christmas season he’d come home daily with boxes of chocolate covered cherries and bottles of whiskey in appreciation for the constance of his effort. He also looked after first his own aging parents and then every widow and outcast in the two square miles of Cascade. W.T. “Mac” McDermott was an old Irish chieftain. When I was growing up, few people called me by my own name. Like my brothers before me, I was “Mac’s boy.”

The century since my father’s birth has not been kind either to the American family or small rural places. My siblings and I all left Cascade, with only one brother remaining in the area, in another small town 10 miles away. We scattered across the continent, and though none of us would intellectualize it to the point of saying it was for economic reasons — in retrospect, it was for economic reasons, or what Berry derisively refers to as The Economy. 

In 1935, there were 6.81 million farms in the United States, averaging 144 acres in size. Today, there are 1.86 million farms, averaging 455 acres. This transformation wasn’t just about the farms — though those, too, radically changed, becoming technology-heavy, chemical-infused operations and often debt-ridden to boot. It was about where and how people lived. We went from nearly half of all Americans living rurally to 83 percent now living in urban areas. We have gone from a largely agrarian society to a corporate and, relatively speaking, depersonalized society. And more important than where and how people lived once upon a more simple time was the why — those who live in community live for each other.

Pat Dietz kept it country. Not musically, specifically — though he could play bluegrass with the elegance of a country gentleman — so much as in the scale in which he lived. This probably had a lot to do with how we became friends. Pat was like a country neighbor. He’d show up at my house, always unannounced but strictly announced in his regularity — Sunday or Monday, early evening, his boots upon my stair were as dependable as spring rain in Iowa, coming just to check in. We were also both part of what Berry describes, over and over again, as a homemade rebellion. I came to his work first through his poem “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer’s Liberation Front”, which begins:

 

     Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
    vacation with pay. Want more
    of everything ready-made. Be afraid
    to know your neighbors and to die.
    And you will have a window in your head.
    Not even your future will be a mystery
    any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
    and shut away in a little drawer.
    When they want you to buy something
    they will call you. When they want you
    to die for profit they will let you know.

    So, friends, every day do something
    that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
    Love the world. Work for nothing.
    Take all that you have and be poor.
    Love someone who does not deserve it.
    Denounce the government and embrace
    the flag. Hope to live in that free
    republic for which it stands.
    Give your approval to all you cannot
    understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
    has not encountered he has not destroyed.

 

    Put your faith in the two inches of humus
    that will build under the trees
    every thousand years.
    Listen to carrion – put your ear
    close, and hear the faint chattering
    of the songs that are to come.
    Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
    Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
    though you have considered all the facts…

 

Pat Dietz collected jokes as if they were precious jewels, and was always on the hunt. And so it made sense that Pat loved Berry’s novels, out of all his work, most of all. The novels are suffused with both loss and laughter. Berry is making the same argument in his fiction as in his essays, but in warm and human form. Many of his characters are both suspicious of the world and in love with it. Most of the main characters are trying to stay decidedly out of the way of the runaway train of bureaucratic, corporate, technological society, or as the town barber of Port William, Jayber Crow, puts it, “the man across the desk.” 

“Jayber Crow” was perhaps Pat’s most cherished of Berry’s novels. It was also the very last book he completed; he reread his favorite books over and over again, and dated  the completion of each reading. He finished “Jayber Crow” April 23, two months before his passing. It is the story of a boy who gets orphaned twice – first his parents die of influenza, then the family friends he calls aunt and uncle die of old age, when he is only about 10. The boy is forced to leave his small place in the world and thrust first into the harsh confines of a school for wards of the state, then a theology school, and finally into city life. It isn’t until his early 20s that he finds his way back to “his people,” less as an act of volition so much as gravitational pull. He becomes the town barber and grave digger – an “ineligible bachelor” who in his unadorned way is, if not the spiritual center of Port William, then its principal confessor, listener, and observer.

Later in life, finally the man across the desk comes for him, in the form of a health inspector who discovers his little shop does not have running hot water and is thus illegal. His good friend and benefactor, an outdoorsman named Burley Coulter who is a key figure in all of Berry’s fiction, happens to be in the shop at the time. Burley always reminded Pat of his old friend, Preach: “Freely in love with freedom and with pleasures… [he] watched the world with an amused, alert eye… and if the world did not seem inclined to get on very soon to anything of interest, he gave it his help.” As the health inspector threatens closure, it is of course Burley who immediately figures the workaround. “Jayber,” he says. “I think it’s fine of you to give all us Port William people free haircuts. But I think a little donation from time to time is only right.” And he drops a dollar on the counter. 

Even so, Jayber realizes he must close shop, which he also lives above. Burley likewise intercedes when Jayber admits he’d just like to go live by the river. He gives him “the use of” an old cabin on the river that has been in his family for generations. Slowly, all Jayber’s of customers find their way to the cabin, and leave donations for their cuts. And the character that is in some ways most like Pat Dietz, Burley’s son Danny Branch, likewise begins to frequent the cabin: “…a barbershop in the woods on a riverbank giving free haircuts in return, for which people gave away dollars. A barbershop bootlegging haircuts in defiance of authority, dispensing and receiving lawless charity that appealed to his fundamental dissidence and contrariness. Pretty soon we got to know each other and were friends behind or beyond the smiling reticence with which he maintained his distance from other people’s curiosity about him. He was watching this getting and spending modern world cautiously, and with suspicion, as I understood well enough, but also with an amusement that I liked but couldn’t reach on my own.”

One of the great short stories of our time, titled “Fidelity,” concerns the passing of Burley Coulter. Danny Branch, like Burley, like Pat, is a natural protector of the people and places he loves. Burley by this time has grown old and begun to shrink into himself, and finally his mind begins to blinker. His closest people decide to take him to a hospital in Louisville, and almost immediately realize their mistake. The hospital, attempting to fix an old, dying man, quickly has him connected to a bunch of machinery, insensate and lost in the maze of mechanization that Burley had spent his whole life wildly apart from. 

And so Danny Branch rises in the middle of the night and gets in his old truck – what Burley had described as “a loose association of semiretired parts, like me” – and rattles his way onto a freeway doing 20 mph less than all the other traffic on a rescue mission to free his father from the machinery: “He hated the interstate and the reeking stream of traffic that poured along it day and night, and he liked the old truck only insofar as it was a salvage job and his own.”

About a dozen years ago, before I had become closer to Pat Dietz,  I was driving south on Sepulveda Blvd. near Dietz Brothers Music when I suddenly saw him standing on the median, like a cross between a crooked tree and a large vigilant bird, eyeing the oncoming traffic with suspicion while attempting to jaywalk. I would later learn that he distrusted cars in general, although, like Danny Branch, used them begrudgingly, and with great care, as a necessity. 

I will not give away all the plot points to “Fidelity” except to say that near the end, the law bears down, somewhat ineptly, on the “membership” of Port William for the alleged kidnapping of Burley Coulter. Of course, there is no evidence. But an old attorney, Burley’s cousin Wheeler Catlett, delivers a beautiful summation about things that are beyond the law to a beaten-down detective who is beginning to realize he’s in over his head. 

“Well, anyway,” Detective Bode said, “all I know is that the law has been broken, and I

am here to serve the law.”

“But, my dear boy, you don’t eat or drink the law, or sit in the shade of it or warm yourself

by it, or wear it, or have your being in it. The law exists only to serve.”

“Serve what?”

“Why, all the many things that are above it. Love.”

This passage, in Pat Dietz’s copy of the book, was underlined. 

 

The letter 

 Last November, a week before Thanksgiving, just as the weight of the holidays was arriving for the Dietz family, a somewhat unusual thing happened. Wendell Berry published a poem in the New Yorker. He had not published a poem in the magazine since 2009. The poem was titled “The Loved Ones”:

The loved ones we call the dead
depart from us, and for a while
are absent. And then, as if
called back by our love, they come
near us again. They enter our dreams.
We feel they have been near us
when we have not thought of them.
They are simply here, simply waiting
while we are distracted among
our obligations. At last
it comes to us: They live now
in the permanent world.
We are the absent ones.

Like crop rows, in between almost everything Berry has written, there is a space for loss. But unlike his sometimes fretful lines regarding the state of the world and the technological onslaught befalling it, Berry writes about death without even a shade of dread. Instead, he writes about it much as he observes the changes of the seasons on his native hill, a natural cycle that may include the hard thump of violence but also an accompanying peace. As in all his work, there is a sense of regeneration. Of further possibility. 

As Jayber Crow tells the reader at one point, “…the mercy of the world is time. Time does not stop for love, but it does not stop for death and grief either. After death and grief that — it seems — ought to have stopped the world, the world goes on, more things happen, and some of the things that happen are good. My life was changing. Now it had to change. I’m not going to say it changed for the better. There was good in it as it was, but there was also good in it as it was going to be.”

Pat Dietz was well acquainted with loss, starting from a young age with the loss of his sister, later his parents, and his best friend, Preach. He also played at a lot of funerals and, in his own studies, contemplated impermanence as almost a daily practice (that word, impermanence, was in fact the very last word he would speak to his daughter Carrie, at her doorstep 20 minutes before the accident that would claim his life). He once wrote a poem in which he considered how both the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hahn and the country singer Lucinda Williams had become part of who he was (it was titled, tellingly, “Way More Lucinda.”). 

A farmer and a certain type of musician have more in common than might be readily apparent. A farmer, particularly of the traditional kind – less mechanized, not reliant on chemicals – practices the most fundamental art of paying attention. There are variables beyond count on a hundred acres of growing life. So a farmer becomes his farm. If he’s a good farmer, it’s something beyond diligence or dedication. It’s almost disappearance. 

Likewise there is a level of musicianship that is beyond performative. You might call it spiritual, but that might give it the wrong connotation. It’s the kind of practice that requires sitting alone for hours, doing the same thing over and over — scales, memory, technique, intonation. Rows and rows of crops. You just keep turning and hoeing the earth, planting those seeds. You can’t plan for the crop to grow; you can only invite growth, hopefully creating the conditions in which it can occur. If all goes well, at some point, the musician becomes the music. 

This is all related to what Kelly, in her eulogy, called dailiness. Especially in times of loss, it was what Pat Dietz taught his children and students. “You’ve just got to do the next thing,” Carrie recalls her father saying. “You’ve got to connect what you are doing now to the importance and clarity of what comes next – the next hour, or the next month, or your next change.” 

At one point in the “Look and See” documentary, filmmaker Laura Dunn can be heard off camera explaining to Wendell Berry why she has come to him. She mentions Yeats’ poem, “The Second Coming,” which contains the famous verse, “things fall apart.” “That theme, unfortunately, seems to define the world that I’ve come of age in,” she says. “And so there’s this need to try to find a way to piece things back together. So you look to places where there is still a remnant of togetherness or unity or community, a connection to the land…because I don’t come from a place. I come from divorce.”

“We all come from divorce. Now this is an age of divorce,” Berry says. “Things that belong together have been taken apart, and you can’t put it all back together again. What you do is the only thing that you can do. You take two things that ought to be together and you put them back together. Two things, not all things. That’s the way the work has to go, so that the made thing becomes a kind of an earnest of your faith in and your affection for the great coherence that we miss and would like to have again. That’s what we do, we people who make things — if it’s a stool or a film or a poem or an essay or a novel or musical composition, it’s all about that: finding how it fits together and fitting it together.”

“I do think there is this overwhelming theme of disillusion in our culture — everything in our land and everything,” Dunn says. 

“But that’s the kind of a reasonless conclusion to come to, and it comes from people’s acceptance of the money economy as the only economy,” Berry replies. “The world, in fact, unless you’re in prison, is full of free things that are delightful — [like] flowers… It won’t be long till we’ll be having free flowers around here. The yard will be full of dandelions. The world is also full of people who’d rather pay for something to kill dandelions than to appreciate the dandelions. Well, I’m a dandelion man myself.”

Carrie Dietz Brown’s letter to Wendell Berry arrived at the Port Royal post office days after she sent it. Berry wrote back immediately. One pictures him in his long-legged-house, writing at his desk. The letter she received from Wendell was dated December 20 and postmarked December 27. It arrived in Carrie’s mail December 27, only 12 days after she’d written Wendell. 

He had recognized, in Pat Dietz, a fellow dandelion man. 

Dear Ms. Brown,

Thank you for your letter and all you sent with it. I don’t always, or maybe often, read enclosures, but I read every page of yours and I’m glad I did. There are no words to say how humbled and honored I am to have had the approval of your father, or how grateful I am for the life of such a man.

Very gratefully yours,
Wendell Berry