American author Dale Peck’s book “What We Lost” intersected with the family history of producer David Swatling. Two upstate New York dairy farms in the late 1950s were separated by memory and imagination. 

October 2003: I was heading upstate for a family visit on the train which runs along the Hudson River. The Catskill Mountains were ablaze with autumn colors and I was reading a book about a boy making the same journey with his father some fifty years ago…
 
“The only mountains the boy has ever heard of are the ones the old man is always going on about, the mountains of his childhood. Those verdant slopes were green and crisscrossed by babbling brooks and sweet clean streams… Whereas these mounds are jagged as cookie dough: their leafless forests are as ugly as January Christmas trees heaped on the curb… The combination of the land’s sprawl and the lumpy protrusions, in such stark contrast to the old man’s drunken rambles about his youth in the country, give the boy the idea he is being driven into a past that isn’t as rosy as the old man would have liked him to believe.”
 
The book was called ‘What We Lost’ by Dale Peck. A few weeks later I was sitting in the author’s East Village apartment in New York City, a few blocks from where I once lived myself. I had read his debut novel “Martin and John” when it came out ten years ago and was overwhelmed by it. In alternating chapters, John recounts life with his lover Martin who has died of AIDS and writes stories that feature different characters who are always named Martin and John.
 
Electric boom collars
‘What We Lost’ is the story of a boy (Dale Peck Senior) whisked away to his Uncle Wallace’s farm.
 
“The dairy barn contains four feeding troughs: two on either long wall, and two more running next to each other down the barn’s center. This is called the milking alley, but the boy prefers to think of the long metal bins as two sets of train rails run side by side, and when the ladies stand haunch to haunch between them they form the ties, and once they’re all in place his uncle lowers the electronic boom collars… Their only function is to keep the ladies from walking away while their teats are hooked to the claws of the milking machine…”
 
Electronic boom collars descending from the rafters? On a rural dairy farm fifty years ago? That wasn’t familiar at all. But having spent every summer as a child working on my grandfather’s farm, many details in Chapter 3 of Dale Peck’s book gave me the odd sensation I was reading my own memoir: the stamp of a cow’s hind leg nearly upsetting a milk pail; the flat shovel used to clear manure from the gutters into an old wheelbarrow; even the layout of the barn was exactly right.
 
Accuracy versus imagination
I could imagine Peck’s father telling him about some things, but where did he come up with the rest? Small independent dairy farms like this have virtually vanished from upstate New York. I know because my grandfather’s farm, now run by my Uncle Glen, is one of the very few left.
 
“You go online and sure enough there are 800 dairy farms,” Peck explains. “Then the novelist’s imagination takes over. I wasn’t really concerned with reportorial accuracy… What I was really trying to capture was the sound of my father’s voice when he would talk about his experiences on the farm – the emotions he couldn’t give a name to. This is not a book on how to be a dairy farmer.”
 
“Imagining Farm Machinery” was originally broadcast in December 2003 as part of the series Vox Humana. The program was produced by David Swatling with technical assistance by Ronald Hoffman.