labor force beyond himself and the small contributions of his growing son.
In addition to the kitchen garden, worked mostly by Ma, Penny must grow
corn and hay for his family, horse, and cow. He would like to have surpluses
of both, plus maybe a little crop of cotton, for sale or trade. They must carry
water uphill from a spring and would like to buy bricks for a well beside the
house. Penny works steadily and hard, but experience has taught him that
human effort is often foiled by nature. Seasons may become arhythmical,
rain too sparse or ruinously abundant; unexpected pests and diseases may
appear from nowhere. Penny’s knowledge of nature’s dynamics, its unpre-
dictability, its local eccentricities, and itslackof balance subtly and bril-
liantly represents, I think, the revolutionary new science of the late twen-
tieth century that overturned the notion of nature asoikos(a sentimental,
equilibrious home) with chaos theory and what is called ‘‘patch dynamics,’’
basically a roil of unpredictability in which human agency and the com-
fort of certainty are diminished if not actually dashed.^3 Penny’s experience-
based realism does not mean, however, that he himself was not devoted to
oikosor oblivious to the ideal as well as the practicality of working within
nature’s nature.
Penny’s crops for went in early and flourished in a spectacular
northern Florida spring. Then came a storm. ‘‘Nor’easters’’ are common
and expected in this country; they bring heavy winds and rain, usually for
two or three days. Except this one continues foreightdays and nights.
Crops are washed away, farm animals lost, roofs compromised, stored feed
spoiled. Beyond Baxter’s Island, surviving wild animals starve in persisting
deep floods. Millions of snakes are drowned, rattlers suffering worst, prob-
ably, in the gopher holes where many made their nests. Survivors crawl to
pine ridges for safety, threatening people and their dogs. When the floods
at last recede, a great deathly stench arises with the long-absent sun. A pack
of about a dozen starving wolves—certainly the last of a once-large popu-
lation—terrorizes the Baxters. Soon they will perish from Penny’s marks-
manship and in the Forresters’ traps.
Rawlings’s fictional eight-day nor’easter may represent elderly Florida
swampers’ memory of a historical storm recounted to her during the s.
There have always been such storms and worse. Until the twentieth century,
however, if nor’easters and hurricanes were recorded at all, they became
‘‘historical’’ and ‘‘public’’ only to sparse populations affected and random
readers of weather records thereafter. In in the hammocks of north-
ern Florida, there was neither newspaper nor television nor a single meteo-
rologist, much less a Simpson-Saffir scale (with categories to ) for mea-