Farming is not easy. Crops are dependent on the weather, and you never know when you might get wiped out by too much rain or drought. If you farm organically, like we do, your crops are vulnerable to invasive species like the gypsy moths that mowed down four rows of our blueberries a few years back. I work extremely hard on my little blueberry farm, mowing, pruning, trimming, weed-whacking, pulling up bittersweet and poison ivy and managing the pick-your-own stand in July and August. For the most part, it’s gratifying, especially when there is a stellar crop like this year. But once in awhile someone will escape the blueberry patch without paying, which makes my heart sink since we used to use the honor system for many years without any problems.
I do my best to keep an eye on things with a camera that dings on my phone when a customer comes up the driveway, and which I can observe on the screens of any device in the house. I even have a camera pointing down to the blueberries so I can keep track of the number of cars in the field when I’m in my office or the other side of the house. And, I often drive down on my little tractor (to save the time of walking back and forth) to check on who is there and give best picking advice. When I step out for an errand, I have a friend or neighbor sit in the barn. Now that I’m retired from teaching, this is my full-time job in July and August, and I depend upon the income. I’m usually out in the barn helping customers and when I’m in the garden weeding and harvesting, I have my phone on with the camera so I can see people drive up. The other day I was catching up on some office work on the porch where I could keep an eye on the field. Imagine how stunned I was, when I watched one of those huge “Earth Destroyer” types of SUV’s, big enough to transport a soccer team, pull away from the field without coming up to pay. I ran out to the barn, thinking they may have walked up to weigh and pay without my seeing them. But sure enough, they didn’t fill in the log or leave any cash in the till. I jumped in my car to chase them down, but they were long gone.
As I was driving down the road, wondering which way they went, I was reminded of a favorite family story about my dad. When my parents were first married, in the 1940’s, they were care-takers on one of the large estates along Lake Cochichowik in North Andover. My father was the farm manager for the chickens and the produce, my mother ran the farm stand, and my Uncle Bob was Mr. Bigelow’s chauffer. It was during WWII and money was scarce, gas and other items were rationed, and everything had to be metered out carefully. Since there was a gas ration, it was surprising that anyone would drive all the way out from downtown, or Lawrence just to steal vegetables, but apparently someone was doing just that several times a week. My dad was determined to catch “the sons-a-bitches”.
One night, the dog started barking around midnight and my dad jumped out of bed to look out the window just in time to see a car pull away from the farm stand. They lived in the servant quarters above the carriage house on the estate. He immediately ran downstairs and jumped in the truck, hoping to catch the license plate. Great Pond Road was Narrow and curvy. Gas pedal to the floor, and the engine whining into fourth gear, my dad saw the taillights just as he reached the big turn toward the Old Center. Then the truck began to sputter and cough. Looking at the gas gauge, I can only imagine the string of cuss words he let out. He would have to walk home over a mile and a half. There was only one problem. He was stark naked and didn’t have any shoes on.
My father has slept naked his whole life, much to my mother’s embarrassment. She scolded him on more than one occasion. “What if there was a fire! What if someone comes to the door!” Having toted a bag full of resentment toward authority his whole life, my dad was not about to take orders from anyone about sleeping in the buff, much less from a woman. Her admonishments only served to solidify his commitment to sleeping nude. It’s a good thing he got a farm deferment during the war. He wouldn’t have lasted a day in boot camp.
Usually, the farm truck was a dusty mess with grain bags and rags behind the seat or strewn on the floor, but my Uncle Bob had borrowed the truck that night for a date and had removed everything from the cab in his cleaning frenzy. There wasn’t even an old newspaper tucked under the seat. My dad was in a pickle. Ordinarily, it wouldn’t be a problem to walk down Great Pond Road butt naked in the middle of the night. There was very little traffic, excepting the vegetable thief, and most people were asleep. This was a rural community and a time when electricity was still a novelty. However, during his car chase, my Dad noticed that the Country Club (which used to be his Grampy Foss’s farm before it was turned over to all the rich folks for tennis and golf), was lit up like a Christmas Tree. They must have had a cocktail party that night. As he made his way home, he had to dodge the lights, hopping from tree to tree for cover.
You can bet my Uncle Bob got an earful when my dad finally made it back. He rousted him out of bed, and I can just hear it now…”Jesus H. Christ – God-damn-it all…”
The next morning, my dad went down to the General Store to get the Sunday paper. When he walked through the door, the owner of the store loudly proclaimed, “Well, if it isn’t the bare-assed detective!”
Uncle Bob had already made the rounds and the news was spreading around town. Of course, my mother was mortified. I’m sure she wondered more than once what she had gotten herself into. But my dad relished telling that story for years.
Stealing from farmers is as old as dirt. It’s just one more notch of resentment in the belt which divides rural folk from city folk. Small-time farmers walk a tightrope of tension between their rural roots and the urbanites who really don’t understand the culture and the value of living simply. If you are a child of a farmer, you carry the scars of all working-class oppression even though you might look thoroughly embedded in the middle class. The tension on that rope is even tighter than what your parents faced, and the precipice deeper and wider, because you long for something bigger than the small world which was presented to you, a chance to earn a living without living on the edge of disaster; perhaps a better education and a seat at the table. But rural roots run deep. It’s tough to loosen the dirt around that mistrust of people who come from the city or a place of privilege. I understand why there is such a political divide between the heart of the land and the coastal elites, though I can’t for the life of me understand how my people could fall for such a draft-dodging, racist, entitled rich-boy con artist like Trump who doesn’t understand the heart in the Heartland. But coming from a family of the hired help, I do know the seat of their resentment: the wealthy people who assume you should work for free, and who can afford not to pay for the snow plowing and haying you’ve done all year; the haggling of people with a regular income, who don’t know the true value of your product; the assumption that you must be ignorant and uneducated if you choose to work the land which puts the food in their mouths.
While recognizing the con of Trump who thinks he’s got our number when he plays to the anachronistic assumptions that all rural people are racist, anti-immigrant, and misogynistic, I also recognize the con games of my own people, who can smell a city slicker a mile away. My dad lays on his country ways trying to impress upon every stranger that he was a farmer and proud of it. His Yankee accent gets thicker, and the pretense of a bygone rural life which included teams of horses and hay wagons, conjuring up a Currier and Ives lithograph, is laid upon anyone who will stop and listen. But I can read between the lines. I know he’s letting it be known that he’s smarter than you think, and that he’s worked hard all his life, pulled himself up by the bootstraps, earned every penny he earned and ended up with nothing. He embellishes the misadventures of falling through the hayloft in the barn, and numerous tractor accidents and mishaps which left his body broken and deformed in old age.
This pretense is a cloak of protection played up while trying to sniff out whether a person is one of us or some city slicker who will rob you blind. But I remember being on the other end of the stick when we used to go “up country” to Warren New Hampshire for a quick two-day vacation so my father could fly-fish while my mother and I sat for hours reading books on the banks of the Baker River. We would stay in Mr. Hazelton’s cabin for free and had to go to Claude & Leona Foot’s farm to get a jug of water and the key. And boy, didn’t Claude lay on his thick New Hampshire accent telling garrulous stories about hunting and drinking escapades, while my father tried to outdo him in an effort to prove that he was one of them. After all, we were the city slickers to them simply because we came from Massachusetts. It is no wonder that I lack a sense of belonging, having been raised by people who were always trying to prove that they belonged to one group while building walls to exclude another. After all, “city-slickers” could be a euphemism for any group of outlanders, the people who come from “away”. In my family, city-slickers were the people who would steal your vegetables from the stand or the blueberries from your field. After all, your neighbors wouldn’t steal from you because they knew what it was like to work your ass off on the land with little or no profit.
If it weren’t for the farmer’s mistrust of city folk, I probably wouldn’t be enjoying my little Mini Schnauzers. In order to protect the fruits of their hard-earned labor from thieves in the marketplace, German farmers created the German Shepherd. The shepherd was a great watchdog for chasing away would-be thieves while the farmers slept in their carts overnight. However, as big and scary as he is, the shepherd is a sound sleeper and needed a little alarm system. Hence the mini schnauzer which was bred to go after rats and other vermin. The schnauzer has a keen sense of smell and hearing. After all, they will go to ground after a mole digging beneath the soil. German farmers took to bringing their mini schnauzers and the shepherd to the marketplace. The schnauzers made for a good bed-fellow, being a born schnuggler, but their keen sense of hearing and smell made them less than sound sleepers. The rustle of a rat or the soft footstep of a thief would rouse the mini schnauzer into an alarm that would waken the whole village. Once the shepherd was alerted, those city slicker thieves didn’t stand a chance.
My schnauzers aren’t great alarm dogs, which is fine by me. They are more interested in tail wagging and treats. In the meantime, I will rely upon my own wits, keeping an eye on my field and my farm stand, hoping I won’t have to engage in any bare-assed escapades like my dad.
Another great read – thanks, Donna!