Don't Talk About the Year As If It's Over

So I'm settled back in Montreal with an absurd head of hair. Snow's on the ground, hockey season's here, farming season is certainly over. I went back for a quick visit to the Ontario farms yesterday. The fields were white with snow, the farmers unhurried. There’s time to take it easier until the weather starts to turn. A full season under the belt is not enough experience to speak about farming with authority but it counts for something. Here's my take.

P.S. In the picture below, that big puffball mushroom was edible and unbelievably delicious.

Old farm houses act as a reservoir of many things, collecting things as years and people pass through; old couches, old books and old record and cassette collections, old and new ideas, old and young people. I dusted off and read a book from Les' bookshelf, published in 1976 called The Promise of the Coming Dark Age. It talks about how the breakdown of the Roman Empire was followed by the Dark Ages, a period normally associated with chaos and lawlessness. Yet this was an important period because it was during this time that our modern day institutions of democracy, fraternity and equality were built. I see a similarity on these farms, an incubator for energy and action combined with varying degrees of disdain for the New Empire. It's a lively space away from the monopolizing effects of the city and a place to build a way out.

You find all types of people on the farm and you see the uniqueness of each one because you have the time to really feel them out. You see the way they act when under-slept, how they eat oatmeal to what makes them tighten up and what makes them beam inside. Initially everyone's new and you put your best face forward as you feel thrilled to meet all these independent and intelligent people. Then as usual, familiarity doesn't always breed contempt but it diminishes courtesy and admiration. After all, everyone is human and not everyone is always happy or at peace all the time and there’s more interaction, less isolation. More frustration and laughs and friction, less apathy and boredom. Make-up is a ludicrous idea for a day on the farm, laundry and showers are suggestions, there's more examination of inner qualities, less on outward appearances. The cooking and cleaning and working together is a big laughy chatty Kathy pow-wow or a pet peeve, depending on the day. There's less screen time, certainly less noise but more music and radio. More talk and more action.

I met three young boys on the farms, Elliot, Luke and Nate who are between three and five years old. They are just explosions of questions and energy. We theorized that it must be because everyone that they meet is a friend that comes to the farm and it makes them unabashed, carefree, energetic crowd pleasers with scuffed knees and elbows. There's a real purity to them, distillations of the farm life.

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At the end of the season, I got into a slightly heated argument with David, the owner of the farm in Nova Scotia, as I haggled to get paid $250 for the work of two months of 11 hour days. He told me I wasn’t cut out for farming and that I don’t have the energy, that I should consider practicing the traditional kind of Tai-chi where your hips stay facing forward to straighten out my spine. I was taken aback but I respect his opinion. His perspective is often sharp and clear, a product of experience and wisdom. Maybe farming isn't for me. It's not that I doubt my ability to work hard, nor my endurance. I can work but I analyse and think a lot too. What David saw in me was a waning motivation towards the end of the season as I began to question certain practices and their efficacy. I think in his view, to be a farmer you need the work ethic that never quits. Every day is a long day and the work is repetitive but needs doing. I’m an abstract thinker, mentally strong but a dreamer added the farm manager when I asked her opinion.

When I told Les this yesterday during my one-day return trip to the Ontario farms, he said that the idea of not being cut out for something is contingent on the idea that there is a set way to do things, that things don't change, that times don't change.

Well we all know how it goes. "You better start swimmin' or you'll sink like a stone" sang Dylan. There are movements rising and receding everywhere. There's a real groundswell of urban youths seeing what it's like to try and grow food, temporary buoying the profitability of organic farms with enthusiastic, idealistic and cheap labour, just eager to learn and willing to sacrifice pay for education. There's a trickle of people starting to see the worth in paying two dollars for a bulb of garlic. Meanwhile, technology has reached a deafening pitch. There's a whole generation simultaneously drowned by and trying to stay abreast of cellphones that Facebook. What is considered absurd is a fluid notion, changing by the day. Every new generation is a wave of the most book-educated, mentally-stimulated, self-conscious and self-critical groupthinkers crashing onto the uncharted shores of the 21st century, bumping up against the truths held to be self evident by an old guard that did the same thing. The movement of Shambhala Buddhism to Nova Scotia decades ago is still quietly rolling off eddies.

I'm not convinced my generalisations are necessarily accurate. I don't know what's going on in other parts of the world, in the financial and political circles, in the Middle East or California or Europe, in the newest developments in nuclear energy or computer technology, in the tracking of planets in our solar system and beyond, in the oceans and the skies and the heavens, in the efforts of corporate social responsibility. But it's all moving and I've got faith that what I'm doing will work out.