scarecrow dreams
by bam
the story goes that when i was little i’d stay up all night during a road trip, just to see the cows.
in fact, i remember: nose pressed against the glass, crawling along the back seat of whatever was the family sedan, climbing helter-skelter over one brother or another. excuse me, i need to see the cows. i would moo at the window, hoping the cows might moo me back. my papa, i’m told, mooed right along.
now what in the world i was doing searching for nocturnal cows, i do not know. commonsense is not often a thread in family legend.
as i grew older it was a silo that became the object of my affection. though i don’t recall mooing at the window for a silo.
no, no, for the silo i had other plans. the silo i wanted to climb from the inside, to carry up my typewriter, to make a window, hang a simple curtain, and spend my whole life on a farm, typing and watching the world down below.
farms call me. farms are in my blood. one kentucky farm i never got to see. and a horse farm that wasn’t ours but that my papa knew; my papa grew up there. but, since my papa was not a raconteur, not about his boyhood, anyway, i do not have volumes of horse farm stories. only one or two.
when i plant my foot on farm soil, i feel something. it is rather like a vein is opened up, and something of the earth courses through me. i see the hard, back-breaking work, but i feel the poetry.
a farm is elemental. it is pure. it is loamy soil teeming with lessons worth sinking your hands into, getting muddy. it’s earth and sky, and hard-won curriculum in between.
it’s ancient. it’s eternal.
you cannot speed up the germination of a seedling. you cannot make it rain. but you can sow seed. and you can hope. and you can, God willing, make it on your own. feed yourself, your children, the good folk down the road. at least that’s the way it’s supposed to be. that’s the beauty and the tragedy all at once.
it is you and God, down on the farm.
you have entered, i do believe, into a holy equation that depends on sun and rain and soil. too much, too little, and all is lost. days and weeks and months of labor, of getting up at dawn, of sweat rolling down your nose and muscles aching. of praying. on your knees begging for the rain clouds to come on, to bring the benediction that just might be a quarter inch of rain.
it is, i do believe, a hands-on PhD in all the truths of life. you name it, it’s in the book. birth and death and resurrection, sometimes. anticipation. heartbreak. hallelujahs.
just last week, on a day i was blessed to turn my car down a gravel lane, where the corn gave way to a place called beauregards farm, i was out walking with a woman who is now a farmer and there, right before us where the queen anne’s lace was trampled, lay the head and the feathers of what had been one of her 23 “stepford chickens,” she calls them.
just like that, a weasel, she figured, came and snatched a bronze-feathered hen. she crouched down, the farmer woman did, stroked the feathers, cursed the weasel and then walked on. said she’d be back to bury the dear thing. it was just another moment on a farm.
heartache comes in spoonfuls all day long. you get used to heartache, i suppose, because you know there just might be a hallelujah around the next bend.
i worry that it’s what we’re missing, here in our saran-wrapped urban and suburban worlds. by the time the lessons come to us they’ve been rinsed, flash-frozen and packed in little boxes.
we don’t even know any more what a tomato is supposed to taste like. let alone the goosebumps when a weasel takes your hen.
my farmer friend took me ’round the corn crib, walked me up to ike, introduced me. ike is what you’d call a scarecrow, only she doesn’t, because ike is not there to scare the birds. not so much anyway.
“when i’m not cursin’ them, i’m blessin’ them”, she tells me, of the tug and pull that underscores so much of life, especially on a farm.
ike is there for the chickens. ike is dressed the way my farmer friend usually is. in bib overalls. only ike’s are 10 sizes bigger. and ike is there so the nosey chickens think the farmer’s there, where the broccoli and the pole beans and the eggplant grow.
were it not for ike and his too-big bibs, the chickens would poke around, pull out whatever just got planted, drive the farmer crazy. ike is there, not for scaring purposes, but to make the hens think they’re not alone.
i took a shining to big ol’ ike.
now, when i drift off to farmland in my sleep, i seem to dream of droopy-bottomed ike keeping company with the nosey hens.
i wish my backyard had room for ike. i wish my backyard rolled on and on, in tidy rows of whatever sun and rain and soil had set to reaching for the sky. i wish the world in which i lived was not saran-wrapped, but more earth-stained. i wish i knew the aching arms and legs at the long end of an even longer day. i wish, most of all, i lived the poetry that is the farm.
and i kinda wonder, too, what would happen if you mooed at ike.
anyone else out there yearn to sink your toes in farm dirt? anyone else believe in the poetry of the farm? ever notice how the farmers might know a thing or two that we’ve not even bothered to realize is mighty important? anyone else moo at a cow or a silo or a chap named ike, out standing in his field?
pull up a chair 
farms are the bane or boon of our civilization, depending upon how you look at it. agribusiness loves farms, not in the sense of “to steward” but as a return-on-asset. agribusiness has thrived on the consumption of fossil fuels and petrochemical-based fertilizers, and within the USA created the dead zone in the gulf of mexico, up to 7,000 square miles of oxygen depleted waters where life cannot be sustained, the result of nitrogen runoff flowing through the mississippi watersheds. massive corporate farms spew tons of nitrogen-rich fertilizer upon monoculture crops, and the paragon is Archer Daniels Midland, pride of Danville, Illinois, proud sponsor of PBS programs, and beneficiary of ethanol tariffs safeguarded by farm-state democrats like Dick Durbin and Barack Obama of Illinois. how did “farm fresh” become so complex?Richard Manning, in his scintillating book, “Againts The Grain” argues that civiliation’s development is directly linked to the ability to cultivate grains, primarily wheat, corn, and rice and thus when hunter/gatherers learned the art of husbandry they were able to settle, to trade, to amass and store up wealth in the form of easily detached, dense clusters of carbohydrates. within our generation we have seen the movement of california cuisine, think Alice Waters’ 1970s Berkeley, grow into the FDA-sanctioned organic agribusiness marketplace, a global supply chain where Wal-Mart will consume huge amounts of fossil fuels moving organic produce to the consumer. come to think of it, an organic supermarket is an oxymoron because the organic escarole that costs $8 USD per pound has a much greater real cost in terms of fuel consumption per food calorie burned. whole foods and wild oats, to name just two, have centralized distribution networks; when i worked at a wild oats in evanston i learned that the store’s goods were delivered via semi-trailer weekly from boulder, colorado. photos of local farmers in their produce section are one savvy marketing program.now i don’t mean to be the “skunk at the garden party.” there is poetry in a small farm operation, which i believe is the thing for which you pine as you say, “farms call me.” to be grounded we need to see both sides, and i just felt a need to comment on the other side of farming, which is choking our waters as fast as it fuels the obesity epidemic.
Mr. Wm. Ulyssees–How and where do you procure the food that you eat? (I really mean this question because you have tossed out Walmart and Whole Foods in the same paragraph! I have been inspired by Barbara Kingsolver’s “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” and Michael Pollan’s “The Omnivore’s Dilemma”, but what alternatives are there? Barbara Kingsolver says that the average food item has travelled 1500 miles to reach the average American mouth. Symbolically, we should be tasting gasoline every time we bit into a meal.That is why I did my (very little) bit this summer and eliminated a row of impatiens flowers for a row that includes a little bit each of corn, eggplant, zucchini, cucumber, sugarsnap peas, tomatoes, lettuces and herbs. But, what can any of us really DO? If we ate more locally-grown food from smaller growers, that might work.
bummer. i just blogged a long response to carol, and when i hit the submit button, it read “problems processing” and disappeared into the ethers. anyway, the blog concluded that our foodsourcing is relational – we know the growers – and we find that when our relationships are in line, then the other “larger” issues become clearer.
Wm U–Sorry your posting got lost in cyberspace. But your short response sums things up well. We need to source our food from the community of growers and producers–hence getting back to the farm that Barb visited.
hallelujah to both of you. i am still making my way through “animal, vegetable, miracle, ” one sleepy page at a time some nights, but even before i’ve read it, i get the point, and i find myself drawn to living it. it is, again, a subtheme of the chair: taking the time to make the relationships to understand the nobiity and the decency of those who knead your dough, pluck your bush beans, roast your coffee, even. if the smallest moments of our lives are considered, are given the dignity that they might hold, then we all live on a higher plane. in baby steps we can steer our choices to those who live and work in ways we honor. thus we can push back the industrial farms, the bulldozer chainstores that would have virgin woods paved over. when i read wm ulysses’ references to a gulf of mexico that holds lifeless waters, i want to weep. do we not know what we’re doing? have we so lost our souls that we think nothing of what we send down river? Lord, have mercy. Lord bless the ones whose labor might lift the day. if enough of us refuse to give up hope, we stand a chance of reclaiming something pure before it’s lost. now off to bed to try to read another page before i fall to sleep. gnight.
i had to comment, for i know Ike well and as far as i know, he still has that silly grin on his face, knowing he’s being talked about and all…and please may i share the shrug of the chicken’s untimely death, it is a part of the cycle, living this close to the harshest and lovliest realities. perhaps you can relate to this telling of an early ending-Dear Lily,I hate to see you cryyou loved that little white goatbetter than any of usso sad you were to see itlying there so stillas if asleepWhat happened you wondered aloudand all I could dowas hug you long and hardand explain nothingbut proclaim my sorrowfor you, sweet girlThe warm hard earth seemed unwelcometo your little friendan awkward grave I dugthrough the tangled Silver Maple rootsholding the dirt like tentacleseach one I chopped throughbreaking the shovel but my will was intenseand intact long enoughto bury your naive companionwho nibbled on the Night ShadeI neglected to pullOn this farm, we bury the deadlonged for, loved beastsamong homemade grave markersfor Elwood, Floyd, nameless lizardsand small sparrows, each had their storymemorized in our heartsand God listened to our ceremoniesof praise for the little livesthat touched our own-Bless your sweet heartfor that little white goatknew of your devotion,Dear Lily.
i sit here weeping, lump in throat. do you see why i have fallen in love with true, short for true wonder? oh my Lord, that poem, that tale, it silences me and all my chatter. there is wisdom in our midst, people. and she is true, so true. bless you. may i be the first to say in print we need a book of true poetry. you are so supremely heaven sent. that we might be so graced by the grace of you. it awes me. sometimes, i do believe, the hand of God is not so subtle. some times it klunks on the head. klunk. bless you. each and all.
Dear BAM, Dear Carol and Wm-U, Dear Ike, Dear True, Dear Lily, Dear well-loved goat and hen:You are all great gifts and precious connectors — of thought and feeling, of good and true, of life and death. Our world is a much better place for your presence in it. Thank you for all that you do. Terra