Up the Hayloft Ladder: An Autobiography

By Kenneth D. Vos

In this work spanning eight decades, the author portrays in concrete detail the joys and rigors of his boyhood on a midwest farm in a bygone era, followed by ten professional years as a pastor which begin with enthusiasm and end in disillusionment. He gets a second chance at life when he and his family move to a Vermont hill farm and he becomes a professor of philosophy at Lyndon State College. A significant part of this renewal is the resolution of a midlife crisis, which the author casts into a Jungian framework replete with numerous dreams and climaxing in a kind of psychological and spiritual redemption. No narrow scholar, Dr. Vos shares his personal philosophy and interest in the history of ideas as well as his passion for activities which include maple sugaring, hunting, softball and collecting early American antiques.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Oct 8, 2013
• ISBN: 9781491809600

Kenneth D. Vos

Kenneth D. Vos was born in 1930 into a Dutch Calvinist environment and spent his youth as a Minnesota farm boy during the Great Depression. During the last 32 years of his professional life he taught Philosophy at Lyndon State College in Vermont. After his retirement in 1999 he was awarded the honor of Professor Emeritus. Like his favorite philosopher, William James, he is interested in the inner life of psychology and states of consciousness. He balances that introspective tendency with numerous physical activities and concerns about the external world of nature, politics, social justice and the history of ideas. He got his elementary education in two-room country schools and earned his PhD in Philosophy from Columbia University. Dr. Vos lives with his wife, Frances, in an 1830 farmhouse in New England.

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KENNETH D. VOS

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© 2013, 2014 by Kenneth D. Vos. All rights reserved.

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Published by AuthorHouse 03/05/2014

ISBN: 978-1-4918-0961-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4918-0959-4 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4918-0960-0 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013914861

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CONTENTS

About The Book

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1:   Boy On The Farm

Chapter 2:   Move To Minnesota

Chapter 3:   Play And School

Chapter 4:   World War Ii

Chapter 5:   The Chosen Ones

Chapter 6:   Portraits Of My Parents

Chapter 7:   Off To College

Chapter 8:   Holy Hill

Chapter 9:   Happy Clergyman

Chapter 10:   A Time To Mourn, And A Time To Dance —Ecclesiastes 3:4

Chapter 11:   Vermont, A Second Chance At Life

Chapter 12:   Inner Journey, A Second Chance To Be Whole

Chapter 13:   Westward I Go Free —H. D. Thoreau

Chapter 14:   Home Again

Chapter 15:   Other Passions

Chapter 16:   Prospects

OCCASIONAL PIECES

Greed, Justice And John Rawls

Wild Blackberries

Response To An Initiative At City College Of San Francisco To Prevent

What Is Sweeter Than Revenge?

About The Author

ABOUT THE BOOK

IN THIS WORK spanning eight decades, the author portrays in concrete detail the joys and rigors of his boyhood on a midwest farm in a byegone era, followed by ten professional years as a pastor which begin with enthusiasm and end in disillusionment. He gets a second chance at life when he and his family move to a Vermont hill farm and he becomes a professor of philosophy at Lyndon State College. A significant part of this renewal is the resolution of a midlife crisis, which the author casts into a Jungian framework replete with numerous dreams and climaxing in a kind of psychological and spiritual redemption. No narrow scholar, Dr. Vos shares his personal philosophy and interest in the history of ideas as well as his passion for activities which include maple sugaring, hunting, softball and collecting early American antiques.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I AM DEEPLY grateful to Carol Brouha for editing my initial manuscript, encouraging me to include whatever I felt appropriate for my autobiography and suggesting a handful of items which she felt might be included.

Pam Turner used her sketching and painting skills to reproduce in fairly accurate detail the barn and act of lifting hay to the loft of our Minnesota farmyard portrayed on the cover. I commend her for her efforts in creating this nostalgic scene from the 1940s and I thank Jacqueline and Peter Sinclair for their suggestions which aided Pam in her creation.

For the picture section in the middle of the book a number of people were helpful in making available old photos. These include cousin Shirley Sneller and sisters-in-law Betty Vos and Frances Vos, as well as sister Linda.

Most of all, I am grateful to my wife Francie for her constant encouragement in this attempt to make sense of my life and to pass on to my children and friends what I have experienced.

CHAPTER 1

BOY ON THE FARM

IT WAS LATE summer in 1955, when the corn tassels have stopped being erect and the impregnated ears are heavy with milk. I had recently graduated from seminary in New Jersey, and this visit to the Midwest of my youth was a kind of home-coming. Our automobile had threaded its way on paved and graveled roads through a labyrinth of these cornfields, crossing the state line from Hardwick in southwest Minnesota into northwest Iowa. Aunt Tillie and Uncle Datus were happy to hear the crunch on gravel as my parents’ car turned into their driveway. We came to their farm near Boyden in order to enjoy Sunday dinner with them: stuffed chicken with all the trimmings and lemon meringue pie for dessert.

Their only daughter, Marilyn, now in her twenties, was off living her own life. However, I still felt her presence everywhere on the farmstead. In the parlor stood the baby grand piano to which her mother used to press her, pouting, to play a piece for us after dinner was completed and the dishes were washed and dried. It was like a scene from a Jane Austin novel—a command performance followed by polite applause.

As a child Marilyn had been an adventurous daredevil. Once she led my brothers and me up the hayloft ladder, which was attached to one side of a chute in the middle of the barn’s interior. It led upward into the hay floor above. She challenged us to jump to the farmyard outside from the small door opening outward from the hayloft floor. When we declined, she leaped, Icarus-like, with arms extended, hitting the ground with skeleton shaken but bones intact. She ran to the house, weeping. Her mother’s first words were Who pushed you?

Can electricity travel up a poured stream of water? Marilyn dared us to find out by peeing on the horizontal electric fence eight inches from the ground in the barnyard. The wire was meant to shock the pigs into knowing the boundary of their territory. It was very effective, and was supported by insulators nailed to wooden slats extending parallel to the ground from fenceposts. We boys were reluctant, knowing the sharp jolt delivered to your forefinger and thumb if you touched the fence with only a thin blade of green grass. She boldly lifted her skirt (most girls didn’t wear jeans then) and squatted to settle the experiment, but we were still afraid to try.

When my little brother Nelson was visiting her for a week, they went to the middle of a cornfield, pushing the leaves aside with upraised arms as they leapt from row to row. There they pulled down a large number of green cornstalks in order to build a substantial teepee as a base for playing hide and seek. When her frugal father discovered the clearing, he was furious. Now, years later, he was able to look back and guffaw about it.

It was surely more than a whim which provoked me, after dinner, to excuse myself and drive alone the five miles toward nearby Matlock. There I wanted to view the little house on the Iowa prairie where I was born and had spent the first nine years of childhood during the Great Depression. Doesn’t nearly everyone want to go back to visit that first home which dwells in the mist of memory where it all began, for better or worse? Do we also hope that such a pilgrimage will help us in our desire to come home to the self?

As I approached the small house on the right of the gravel road, my initial feelings were nostalgia tinged with disappointment. It was like looking at an old photograph in sepia. Clearly, the house and buildings had been abandoned for fifteen years since the original farm of 160 acres was made part of a larger operation sometime after we moved away in early l940. The roof of the front porch facing the road, supported by wooden posts, was sagging. Tall weeds and grass grown to seed had taken over the lawn. There were no flocks of pigeons alighting on the barn roof, or barn swallows swooping down to taunt the cats.

Everything had become strangely smaller. The distance from the house eastward to the barn, which to a child had seemed immense, was no more than 40 yards. As children we had believed the tales about pioneers being lost in a blizzard as they headed to the barn, lantern in hand, to tend their animals. The prudent ones connected house and barn with a rope, we were told, so that in a whiteout one could navigate with numb fingers. But surely no one could lose their way on this short trek, no matter how blinding the snow storm. Looking at the barn, I remembered the small wind turbine my father once placed at the peak to generate electricity for the batteries in the basement of the house which powered the radio.

Seeing the barn also ignited another memory of my cousin Marilyn’s urge to fly. During haying, Uncle Datus had come to help my father at our farm near Matlock. The large hinged hay door under the roof beam had been lowered so that slings of hay could be lifted from the hayrack by ropes attached to pulleys. A series of pulleys led to a small opening at the base of the barn. There the thick rope was attached to a doubletree, so the Belgians could pull the hay upward to the roofbeam and into the hayloft. Cousin Marilyn, who was three or four years old, announced that she wanted to fly out of that large upper door. The bottom of the opening was now level with the hay in the loft. We brothers encouraged her to begin at the back of the hayloft, where we were sitting on fragrant piles of dry alfalfa. Her intent was to run toward the opening and leap, beating her arms ever faster as she ran. Flap, flap, flap, flap, whee! My father and Uncle Datus looked up in disbelief as she plummeted to the ground below, her print dress rising to the level of her whirligig arms as she fell. This time she lost consciousness and came awake only as her father turned into their driveway at the Boyden farm five miles away. Fortunately, she was again unharmed.

I walked to the open space where my brothers and I used to play ball at the edge of the grove or shelter belt north of the house, near the small chicken coop. In those days, we used a broken pitchfork handle for a bat. That ball field, littered with dead branches, was barely larger than the house, a two-story dwelling which was at most 25 feet by 30 feet.

Just north of the grove stood the traditional windmill which symbolizes the romance of the rural. I remembered my father rushing out during a thunderstorm to pull the long wooden lever which forced the vane to be parallel to the plane of the wheel of fins so that it would not spin out of control in the fierce wind, and felt my sense of relief when he came back to the house, drenched and disheveled.

Turning from the windmill, I retraced my steps past the chicken coop and back to the house. It was covered by loose and greying clapboards. As I approached the door facing the farmyard, I carefully climbed the three rotting steps. The door was locked. Frustrated, I walked to the left a few steps and peered through the dining room window, hands cupped around my eyes. There, across the room, were the bannistered steps leading upstairs. I was taken back to a Christmas morning when I was three years old and to my earliest memory of my father. My brothers and I had run down the stairs to claim the single present waiting for each under the colorfully decorated tree whose fragrance filled the room.

My gift was a team of cast iron horses about four inches high, which could be unhooked from a little farm grain wagon, also of cast iron. Although there were harnesses imprinted on the horses, I wanted to fashion real ones of string. When my father saw my fumbling, he took me on his lap in his armchair. Together we made the collar, the traces and the breeches that encircle the horses’ haunches. That was the only time I can remember his touching or holding me with affection. Perhaps it was the miniature horses that drew his attention. He loved his horses. I have vivid memories of his stroking the necks of his team of Belgians, although I never saw him hug or even touch my mother.

I turned from the window toward the rusted woven wire fence that still encircled the lawn. Such a narrow space of lawn between the house and driveway! There stood the maple tree to which our neighbors, who lived a mile to the west, would tie their retarded daughter with a thin strand of rope when they came to visit. She would sit on the ground in her dirty dress, making guttural sounds while she contentedly tore a Sears Roebuck catalogue into small pieces. It wasn’t that they didn’t love her. Rather, they loved her so much that they could not entrust her to a state institution. I recalled also that it was on this same south side of the house that my wild and exuberant cousin, Marilyn, caught up to me and brought a toy hoe down upon my skull so that the blood ran through my hair and down my neck. She was probably four years old then, and I was five. Her anger had been provoked by my teasing her about something.

One can still see a few examples of these diminutive farmhouses in the Midwest, built in an era preceding the wave of rural prosperity following the Depression. After that came a new generation of modern farm homes, and another after that.

Apparently childhood memories, and memory in general, can deceive us and seem to distort things. We remember especially events that are colored by emotion. But such memories are as real as the objective world is now. They are the way back to what pained and delighted us; to what formed us. If my parents are alive, my relation to them is surely no more significant than the myriad of memories of them after they have died that influence me in all my relationships and actions. That deep well of images and feelings has an immensity and reality all its own.

This attempt at an autobiography will draw on many memories. It is a challenge to weave them into a coherent pattern. One way to bring unity is to read it as a story about getting a second chance. It traces the progress of a shy Midwest farm boy clad in bibbed denim overalls and a straw hat laboring in the fields and hayloft in the years during and immediately after the Great Depression. He was born into humble circumstances and a somewhat dysfunctional family. A promising career as a clergyman begins with success but ends, after ten years, in disullusionment. A move from New Jersey to rural Vermont brings a second opportunity for vocational success and personal fulfillment. This story about rural life and childhood wounds also moves through a midlife journey toward psychological and spiritual wholeness which may offer encouragement to others. Because of that healing, the last third of my life as a professor of philosophy, active retiree, contented husband, father of stalwart sons and lover of land, trees and all things wild, has been the best.

Unlike most Americans today, my roots can be traced almost entirely to one nationality and culture—Dutch Calvinists who emigrated to the U.S. in the second half of the l9th Century. Unlike the earlier Pilgrims, they came here not only to seek a better life, but to escape liberal influences which threatened their sense of being a holy people who must preserve a strict morality and a religion that was obedient to the principles of John Calvin and the Bible. From Geneva, Switzerland, where Calvin presided over a theocracy in the l7th Century, Calvinism spread to other places. They including Scotland, where it became the Presbyterian Church, and Holland, where it was known as the Reformed Church. Immigrants brought both denominations in various forms to the New World.

A very early strain of Dutch came to the New World in a movement we associate with Henry Hudson, who explored the Hudson river in New York in the l7th Century. Many towns, cities and streams in the Hudson Valley and New Jersey have names that reflect this first wave of Dutch settlement in the new world. Fishkill (fish creek), where I had my first parish and where Brinkerhoff Mansion was located, are good examples.

The much more conservative l9th Century Dutch immigrants who came here 200 years later went mostly to the Midwest. They were clannish, and formed enclaves of Dutch Calvinist culture in places like Sioux County, Iowa (where I was born); Plankinton, South Dakota; Pella, Iowa; and Grand Rapids and Holland, Michigan. When I read the history of The Netherlands, which has a rich heritage of trade, the arts, toleration and attempts to protect her Jews from Hitler as it had offered them refuge from the Spanish Inquisition, I am proud of my Dutch ancestry. In my personal development, however, I increasingly defined myself in opposition to the strain of Midwest Calvinism into which I was born. The philosopher Nietzsche finally helped me to articulate, when I was in my thirties, why I found that culture to be so stultifying and life-denying. Back to the body, cried Nietzsche Back to the earth! In recent years I have come to realize that much, though not all, of that rigid Dutch Calvinism has softened and adapted to new times.

I was born on October l0, l930 at 3:30 A.M., the second of five children, to Michael Vos and Anna Faye Aardema. My father’s real name was Mitchell, but for reasons unknown, he was always known as Michael. His father’s parents were second generation immigrants. Peter Vos, his father, was born in 1871 and his mother, Nellie Van Wyke, in 1878. Their parents came to the U.S. from Gelderland, a province in the East Netherlands.

The parents of my mother came directly from Friesland, a province in the North Netherlands. My grandfather Charles Aardema was born in 1862 and died in at age 74. His wife, Emma Jansma, was born in 1865 and died at age 71. One of her daughters-in-law rembered her as being quiet and a little moody. She loved to bake, especially ginger cookies, and kept a neat home. They both died of cancer in 1936 within three months of one another.

Charles and Emma emigrated to Sioux County, Iowa, shortly after she was a bride at 18 years of age. We tend to think of immigrants then as fleeing poverty and political or religious oppression. That was not the case with Emma, according to their favorite grandson Harold, who, although stricken with polio in his youth and confined to a wheelchair, published The Doon Press for several decades. The homey weekly catered to the interests of the surrounding Dutch communities. In his editor’s column, Ink Spots, Harold once described his grandparnts and the homesickness of his newly-married grandmother Emma for her little village of Achlumi in Friesland.

She missed the rows of little brick houses with red clay tiled roofs, the winding country roads through green pastures an the blue canals. She missed the old stone church with green lichen growing on the north side and the vines festooning the whole rear wall, and and the graveyard around the church, a sad reminder of families of bygone days. She missed the Friesian sky, so often marked with scudding white clouds like so many sail boats. She missed the smell of sweet earth and salty sea. She missed the distant smell of green grass and cow dung. She missed family and friends she would never again see. Grandma Emma was a quiet, inward person, somewhat aloof, with just a touch of class and propriety. Grandpa Charley in sharp contrast was a bit noisy, outgoing with a touch of buffoonery and his very own brand of humor. (Quoted by permission of the Doon Press).

My father, born in 1898. was the second eldest of twelve children, of whom only three were boys. Mother was the youngest of eleven, four of whom were girls. Her year of birth was 1902. The Voses were, on the whole, assertive and confident, while the Aardemas were more self-effacing. Perhaps it was because they were first generation immigrants, and quite poor. My mother used to repeat a saying which revealed the inferiority felt by more recent immigrants: The Irish and the Dutch, they can’t be much. While the Voses were farmers, the Aardemas, after an attempt at farming, made various building materials produced from cement. Located in Doon, Iowa, it was a dusty business. Two of my mother’s brothers died prematurely from silicosis aggravated by smoking.

My grandparents and their children were quite prolific. While I have lost touch with most of them and many are deceased, I had 52 first cousins on the Vos side of the family and 25 from the Aardemas. How many Americans today can claim 77 first cousins?

Because my mother’s immigrant parents spoke mostly Friesian Dutch, a distinct dialect, her English was salted with Friesian and Dutch phrases. When my parents swore, they almost always did it in Dutch. They did not think they were fooling God; only shielding their children from hearing what was forbidden to us. We were not fooled. Some of mother’s Friesian and Dutch phrases were quaint and colorful. When my little brother or sister dirtied a diaper, she said in Dutch that the baby had oliekoek in de broek (oil cake in the pants).

Long ago my mother informed me of the first distinct word which I spoke. A hired hand asked my father for his wages. Mike, I need some money. I looked up from where I was lying in a bassinet and repeated the word, money. If that was in any way prescient or symbolic, it was probably no less true of me than the Dutch as a whole. They were traditionally eager to acquire money and loathe to spend it. That is probably the origin of the expression, Dutch treat. Another early phrase which I spoke, according to my mother, was prompted by frost on a window which was so thick that it enveloped a thin curtain as well. I exclaimed in wonderment, All ‘no’ (snow) on the winnow. All ‘no’ on the ‘curt’ (curtain)!

My first childhood memories go back to life on that 160 acre farm two miles from Matlock, Iowa, which my parents rented shortly before the start of the Depression. Among the most vivid are recollections of inexpressible joy provoked by things concrete: gourds of various shapes placed on the back porch; a belly flop into a pile of raked leaves; the smell of leaves burning in the fall; walking with my mother from the garden back to the house, she carrying a huge basket of cucumbers, green beans and other vegetables; the numinous flash and crash of a thunderstorm at night. I recalled these experiences of joy and awe when, in college, I read Wordsworth’s Ode on Intimations of Immortality. The Romantic poet interprets such upwellings of childhood ecstasy as memories of a pre-existence with God. We come into this life trailing clouds of glory. In retrospect, these surprises of happiness were far more religious than anything I experienced in our Calvinist church.

Not all of my early memories are pleasant. Some are mingled with apprehension, perplexity or pain. For example, the neighbor girl tied to a tree like an animal was frightening and unlike any thing I had ever seen. When gypsy bands came by occasionally in their colorful horse-drawn covered wagons and camped overnight in a nearby slough, we were told to have nothing to do with them. If we misbehaved, we were warned that we would be given to the gypsies.

Then there was the series of childhood diseases to be suffered through: measles, mumps, chicken pox, pinkeye, whooping cough. I remember especially the upsurge that sent me running to the sink in the mudroom which drained into a bucket to vomit from a convulsion of whooping cough, and my mother’s reprimand to use the bucket instead. I was fortunate to have made it to the sink. Whether the world is getting better is always debatable, but barring some new worldwide pandemic, we have certainly made progress in the ability to combat known diseases. For the generation preceding mine, the threat from disease was even more ominous. My mother remembered from her childhood her little sister, Emma, stricken with diphtheria at three years of age. Her last words, spoken in the Friesian Dutch used by her parents, were, I am dying. And my father, as a young man on his home farm near Sioux Center, Iowa, did the chores for five neighboring farmers who had contracted the flu that killed 50 million people worldwide in 1918.

When I was four years old (I would be five in October) my parents decided that because we had to walk two miles to the two-room school in Matlock, it would be advantageous if my older brother, Homer, who was six, and I started the first grade together. It was not a wise decision. I was neither emotionally nor intellectually ready for school. On the first day, I wet my pants because I was too shy to admit an urge so personal, and to ask about the location of the school outhouse. Homer was highly intelligent, so that by contrast I felt inferior in mastering what we must learn.

For all that, the two-room school brought some moments of happiness. During recess, we went through a season of throwing, and later shooting with rubber bands, gliders made of balsam. They would ascend, dip down, and recover for another phase or two of flight before falling to earth. The universal fascination with flight found expression at home as well, where we flew box kites. Before we moved to Minnesota in l940, war in Europe was already in the air. My younger brother Nelson and I devised a second string which was tied with a loose knot to a corncob secreted in the kite. We would give the second string a tug, and the falling cob became a bomb dropped on the enemy. It was at the Matlock school that I first watched softball, which was to become