Trauma Farm (2 page)
as soon as we arrived at the farm, I recognized it was what I’d always dreamed, even as a child—a forlorn kid fantasizing in the back of my father’s truck full of potatoes he’d bought from a farmer, while we drove from the country to the homes of suburban wives, who would sometimes buy our potatoes merely because they had nothing else to do. Being a peddler gave him freedom, and he loved the land, especially in the morning. My earliest memories are of lying on those potato sacks, with a few filthy burlap bags pulled over me for warmth as we drove the ice-puddled frost roads of the Sikh, German, Chinese, or Japanese farms of the Fraser Valley and Steveston in British Columbia—the richest, most temperate farmland in Canada, now covered in apartment blocks, malls, and subdivisions. Father and these elders showed me the real world, and their teachings eventually caused me to lure Sharon to Trauma Farm.
At dawn the canvas flap would snap in the wind while the truck bounced and picked up speed, and through the open window in the back of the driver’s cab Father would yell far-fetched stories. He was excited like a puppy, ready to begin the adventures of the day. We sold bootleg potatoes, unapproved by the government regulators of a byzantine protectionist bureaucracy. Potato-board inspectors would hunt us down and arrest us and seize our potatoes, but my father had a knack for dodging the inspectors and the police, and they seldom caught up with him as he unconsciously encouraged the rebel in me. Both my childhood with my adventurous father and this farm taught me that the world is fluid, and that our compulsive need for regulation could simultaneously be beneficial and dangerous.
Born with a rare genetic malfunction that made me middle-sexed, Kallmann’s syndrome, I was a troubled and difficult left-handed child, regularly thrashed by my teachers who wanted to make me right-handed, though there was a lot more help I could have used. So I learned to be ambidextrous and would switch back and forth just to drive them crazy. One teacher used to give me the strap because I’d look out the window and weep at the beauty of the world—bad form for a twelve-year-old “boy,” and he tried to beat the beauty and the weeping out of me. “Be a man!” he said, as the leather strap hit my girlie-boy’s outstretched hand. It was a popular phrase in that era, and I began to understand its real ramifications only when I started receiving treatment in my twenties for this disorder that disables the pituitary gland and causes numerous side effects, including the inability to produce male hormones. The doctor who diagnosed the condition shortly after my twentieth birthday predicted I wouldn’t make it to forty. That was thirty-eight years ago. It took a long time to accept he was wrong—and his comment merely another incident in the absurd circus of life. As luck would have it, he died, and I lived beyond his prediction. Though I will never awake to another day without pain in my body.
These experiences taught me to always look over the wall, to enjoy traditional knowledge, yet never trust authority. And that’s why I am writing these stories in this non-Euclidean form—stories within and alongside other stories—as elastic as the world around us, a web in every direction. It is the way we actually live, despite our attempts to regulate the world—a stroll told backwards and forwards, all the way from Babylon to the exotic archipelago where my island farm exists today.
Milan Kundera long ago discussed how we see the history of a life. Each of us spends our existence walking through a fog, but when others look back on our stories, they see only the missteps, the great leaps, the retracings— they don’t see the fog. History, real history, needs to run with all of it—numbers, dreams, and the fog.
Not only have Sharon and I lost money every year since we began farming, like all small farmers we are also in conflict with the mighty tentacles of agribusiness. Given a bad year or two we could even be forced to sell. It took us only a few years to realize we couldn’t make it financially. Every one of our naturally grown free-range sheep cost us $25 when we sold them last year. We paid our customers for the privilege of spending a year growing their lambs. Now that’s farming.
Yet we’re unwilling to sell the farm. Debt used to terrify me. Farming today is learning how to accept debt—a spiritual exercise in humility. Like the seasons, you live with it. The small farm hasn’t got an ice cube’s chance in hell. But we’ve made our rebel decision. That’s what makes the fight so beautiful. Farming is a profession of hope. You will not meet a farmer without hope even when you encounter a flock of them drinking coffee at the local café, lamenting their lot, bankers, pests, fuel prices, seed costs, weather— hoping they can harvest the low field before it turns to mud, or the rain won’t split the cherries, or they can get the livestock to market before the prices crash again.
I like to tell the story of the government inspector who showed up at a farmer’s door claiming he’d heard there was a man cheating his hired help, and was it him? And would it be possible to talk to the workers? The farmer doubted the culprit was himself. “I’ve got a hand here who I pay good wages, and I cover all his benefits. You can talk to him until the cows come home, but it won’t do you any good.”
“Anybody else?” asked the inspector.
“Nope.” Then he thought for a moment. “Maybe you mean the local idiot who I pay fifty cents an hour and feed a bottle of whisky every payday.”
“That’s the one I want to talk to—the idiot.”
“You’re talking to him.”
It’s a comic occupation.
The numbers vary depending on who they come from, as it’s complex trying to calculate what is rural, suburban, or urban, but it’s generally accepted that in 1790 almost 90 percent of Americans lived rural lifestyles. By 1900 the number had fallen to 60 percent. Yet rural skills remained strong. During the Second World War, according to Michael Pollan in a
New York Times
article, 40 percent of American produce came out of Victory Gardens. When the recent century expired, around 2 to 4 percent of North Americans lived on working farms. The farmland has been accumulated by multinational agribusinesses, and the leftovers, the land that once circled the cities, have been swallowed by subdivisions named after the landscapes they destroyed. Hazelnut Grove, Meadowlands, and Orchard Valley have become tacky comments on our vanished landscapes.
But you must recognize that as soon as you start talking numbers you have already made a judgment. The issue of local farming versus factory farming has been a victim of the same dissemination of false statistics as the cigarette wars and the climate change debate—too many of the numbers depend on the point of view of the number cruncher. Lewis Carroll knew what he was talking about when he said, “If you want to inspire confidence, give plenty of statistics— it does not matter that they should be accurate, or even intelligible, so long as there is enough of them.”
Both sides of the debate are guilty of twisting statistics, but this story is not about statistics, it’s about the glory and joy and terror of living on the land. That’s why I’ve decided to treat all statistics as stories. I’ve sought the best numbers I could find, but the reader, like me, should regard them as what they are—stories. This is a story of stories, not of statistical leveraging. Distrust all authority. Suspect all statistics. Although I have abandoned the practice of footnotes, I have included a small collection of my best sources, with some comments on the more interesting books cited.
This farm has given me almost two decades to contemplate the questions that arise out of living a rural life, in both light and shadow. We will begin this solstice day in darkness and end in darkness—walking through a short history of Willowpond Farm, known to its friends as Trauma Farm, told during an eighteen-year-long day that remembers all the way back to the fields of Babylon, and beyond, in every direction.
T
HE NIGHT UNLEASHES
the sudden cry of the peacock, perched on the maple outside our bedroom. When he’s in season Ajax considers it his duty to warn every sheep and leaf to stay away. Our tom, Wu, has ignited him. Wu is so strong the cat door is beneath his dignity, and he prefers to launch himself into the house from our second-floor bedroom deck, parachute through the four-foot-high window, and land with a triumphant thump on the floor—a mouse still alive in his jaws.
In the shadows the ancient game resumes—the high-pitched screams of Wu, the skittering and squeaks of the mouse—until boredom or mistakes lead to the fatal crunch. But tonight there’s a loud
squeeeeeeeee
fading across the deck. The mouse got out through the cat door! I know that Wu, despite his intrepidity, will be sitting in the dark like a dummy, staring at the door that betrayed him, and I can’t help smiling. I lie back in bed, thinking mouse thoughts. Terror and freedom. They live side by side. My eyes are now wide open.
I question the world, which means I sleep like the spring on my water pump—ready to work as soon as the switch level is too low or too high. When I was wild and twenty I fashioned words on a diet of Southern Comfort—raw on the belly and harder still on the nerves. I often wouldn’t fall into bed until four in the morning, catching only a couple hours of sleep before I went to work. Now my body has reversed itself, and I sleep early, waking often, fevered, eager to begin each day—one less sunrise to witness in a lifetime. I’m hot under the comforter. I slip out of bed while I listen to the soft bubbling of Sharon’s breath. She will sleep for hours yet, waking momentarily, perhaps, if she senses I’m going downstairs—to call for tea, which I will bring up, steaming, and leave to grow cold on her night table, since she will have already faded back into the luxury of sleep.
When I open the mud room door a dog rouses. It’s Olive, our Labrador-Rottweiler cross, unwinding out of her Japanese/Thai/raincoast-fusion doghouse, one of the more absurd structures I’ve built over the years. She’s short-furred, large, black, and muscled like a bodybuilder on steroids. Jen, the border collie, our herd dog, stirs beneath her doghouse. Jen prefers hidey-holes and ungratefully sleeps under the deck and the house I built for her. She slithers out and arrives like a dart, eager. They expect raccoons—the opportunity to prove themselves in the protection of the farm—but tonight we’re only walking. I step into my gumboots. They’re stagged—cut off at six inches high because that makes them easier to pull on, and as anyone who wears gumboots knows, if you stick your feet into mud deeper than six inches, it’s going to get messy whatever you’re wearing. I close the door softly and take the path behind the house with the ease of a man long-lived in his home and on the land he’s worked. I’m a raincoast boy, in my element. I walk this landscape one or two nights a year. Depending on the season and my mood, I might heat a mug of hot milk or run a glass of cold water and slice lemon into it. I find my way to our back road where the cedars are six feet thick—the dogs panting at my side, wondering what’s up. Nothing. Only the night, only the lovely darkness.
I dislike clothing because my syndrome made my skin so sensitive every touch almost burned me until I was twenty and the treatments began. Years of steroid injections have blunted that raw barrier, so sometimes I relish small delicate contacts, like the damp, humid air of a summer night. Now I want to feel the world on my skin, especially when the world is tender. That’s why, on these special occasions, I enjoy walking naked in the forest. This was once common to the human species. Today, it is so rare that most people regard it as kinky, or even disturbed, which is only more evidence of the growing separation between us and the wilderness that was once home.
I live in a temperate island climate. That makes it easy to slip out from under our goose-down coverlet on a night like this—the shortest of the year. The solstice. The plants are gearing up for summer while washed in the silver moonlight. Everything looks like an old science-fiction film. The tomatoes already want to flower, the snow peas are extending their green tendrils. The ferns are Jurassic.
Walking among the cedars I feel as if I’m also made of quicksilver, cool and pale. The moon, peeking between branches, is actually a dark landscape, one of the least reflective objects in our planetary system. Its intensity is equivalent to only a quarter of a burning candle—hard to believe when witnessing this spray of silver and shadow across an X-ray landscape—shaded thus because the human eye’s receptors can’t receive all the wavelengths of light from the moon at that low level. This makes me wonder if we perceive moonlight the way the honeybee sees flowers. Its colour perception is weighted toward the blue end of the spectrum.
Olive, blacker than the night, pants alongside me, her oily fur glowing. This makes me remember the varieties of darkness I’ve seen. Prairie dark, near-Arctic darkness, darkness in the high mountain country, the total blackness of jungles, and the luminosity of nights at sea. Most of all, there’s the darkness of my homeland, the raincoast. When there is no moon the Gulf Islands have a darkness you can almost breathe. It’s a cloud forest, and we can live for weeks inside clouds. Sometimes, you’d swear the rain erupts from the ground. Rain showers strike when there isn’t a cloud in the sky. That’s when they say the devil is kissing his wife. Standing at our window I’ll watch clouds appear miles away on Swanson Channel and drift inland, and the rain will hit our house on the upswing. It can also be drizzly for months, yet warm, a temperate climate at the end of the Japanese Current. I am so born into our weather, my forgetfulness, and the usual neighbourhood visits, I often spend weeks trying to figure out where I left my jacket.
Night walking has its disadvantages. A few summers after we moved to the farm I was awakened by the dogs. The chicken coop again. I jumped into my boots and rushed outside. When I reached the coop it was locked tight and quiet, the hens muttering softly. The night was island dark and the dogs were running strange—this wasn’t a coon chase. Their hackles were up, and there was a nervousness in their circling. I moved around to the back of the coop, curious. Then I heard a branch break under the big rock maple. Something was moving between me and the field.