Tolkkinen: At 87, still chopping firewood and telling stories

ALEXANDRIA, MINN. – Arlys Kakac was standing outside her farm shed when I stopped by recently to visit.

Wearing jeans and an old work jacket, she looked tired. At 87, she had just finished putting up the season’s wood supply with a few helpers. Wood sat heaped in the shed in two massive mounds.

“Arlys,” I said, “I hope I’m like you when I’m 87.”

Arlys is my husband’s aunt. Her strength was forged in childhood through poverty and a level of responsibility and hard work that I have never known. She milked cows at 11, dropped out of school at 15, applied for a farm loan at age 16, was rejected and went back to the bank at ages 17, 18, 19 and 20. At 21, when the local banker finally figured she was old enough, she bought her first 80 acres and started a dairy.

They don’t make them like Arlys anymore.

The second oldest of 10 children, she had to be, as she put it, “both mother and father” to her nine siblings. Her older sister was often ill, but Arlys was the strong one, the one who cut firewood for the family and slept on the couch in the winter so she could keep the fire going. As a teenager, she made the loan payments on the family house.

Arlys left school because the farm mechanics program was full and the school tried to steer her into its arts program instead.

So, she hired out as a farmhand. The farmers she lived with never fed her so she survived by drinking warm milk from the dairy cows. After two months, when she went home for a visit, her father saw her thinness and said she couldn’t go back. She signed on with a different farm family and that family doted on her.

Arlys farmed in a time of rapid agricultural growth. In just a few years, she went from the grueling work of hand harvesting oats and wheat to watching machinery do in a few hours what had taken all day for a threshing crew.

Aided by younger brothers, their farm grew to 800 acres. They built the herd up to about 90 cows, and her mom, dad, and the kids moved to a farmhouse on land they acquired. The whole family helped with the dairy.

There were lots of dairies in those years, farms that kept the small nearby towns flush with customers. Little towns had roller skating rinks or bowling alleys. Farm kids filled school buses and church pews. But it was all building toward something unsustainable. When you can bale 10 tons of hay in 11 hours instead of the 65 hours of a previous generation, you don’t need as many workers. Many people ended up moving to big cities for jobs.

In 1995, Arlys and brother Bruce, by then her business partner, paid off their debts. But it was the age of “get big or get out,” and their lender wouldn’t give them an operating loan for the following year unless they scaled up to 600 cows. The siblings — Arlys was almost 60 — weren’t up for the massive task or the piles of debt to do it.

“We decided to sell out,” Arlys said. “It was hard. The auctioneer who sold the cows and equipment said, ‘Arlys, this is the tip of the iceberg.’ There were all kinds of auctions after that.”

She closed the door of the dairy barn and never stepped foot in it again. It was too sad.

Dairies merged, and merged again, and gave way to the 10,000-cow mega dairies of the new millennium. Rural towns lost their bowling alleys and roller skating rinks and grocery stores and schools.

Arlys got a job driving a skidloader, working into her 70s. She rented out her land and eventually sold most of it, keeping enough for a woodlot to fuel her wood furnace, although her wood-cutting days might be coming to an end.

“Harder to carry the chain saw,” she said. “I was thinking maybe this is the last year of it.”

Still. When the temperatures drop this winter, that wood will warm the farmhouse as family and friends stop by for coffee and to hear the stories she’s so good at telling.

About the thieves she trapped in a rental house until deputies could get there. About Norman, the gassy Dalmatian. About the farm that was once her whole life.

“I miss the cows,” she said. “I miss the land more than anything. I miss working the land.”

I pushed her a little harder, trying to learn what it was about the land that she missed. She scoffed at me softly, as if I had missed out on a whole world and it was too bad. I was born too late to understand.