A Windfall Homestead

In volume one of Henry Buckberry's stories (Get Poor Now, Avoid the Rush), we followed Henry from his early childhood in central North Dakota to the dark, dangerous woods of northern Wisconsin. Get Poor Now concluded in September of 1933, with Henry about to survey the devastation of a forest fire that almost burned up his log shack. A Windfall Homestead takes us into the next two decades of Henry's productive, energetic life, as he logs and hunts, clears land for farming, marries, has children, builds a new barn and house from windfall lumber. Henry's life exemplifies the fate of an essentially preindustrial rural culture about to be overwhelmed by post-World War II technology with its comprehensive commercial "culture" extruded by fossil fuel affluence. Henry's was not so much the "greatest" generation as it was the last unself-conscious rural subsistence generation of European heritage. These stories, all told in Henry's voice, were taken down shortly before Henry's death in 2009 by Henry's son Charles Darwin Buckberry, also known as C. D. or Seedy Buckberry. Seedy claims these stories are accurate and true. Readers are advised to suspend their civilized disbelief.