Trauma Farm (37 page)
The next year, when nesting season came I was determined to protect Lady Jane’s daughter, Lady. I had the good fortune to find her nest immediately—peahens remain still on their nests and are nearly invisible in the brush. I phoned around and discovered a farmer who had a broody hen resolutely attempting to hatch a porcelain egg, which he’d placed under her in case he needed an emergency hatchery.
Since I feared Lady would hate me forever, I decided to disguise myself. I found a pair of rubber gloves and some overalls. Sharon announced I’d look terrific in a feed bag, so she cut out eyeholes and slit the sides to fit it over my shoulders. Then she handed me a cute little basket with a bright red towel to wrap the warm eggs in. There I was, all two hundred pounds of me, with an empty hog-grower bag over my head, gloved and padded, clutching a tiny red basket, resembling either a deranged IRA gunman or a monstrous Red Riding Hood. In retrospect I now realize I was the victim of an elaborate practical joke by Sharon.
Restraining her laughter as much as she could, Sharon said, “I’ll start the truck.”
I nodded my feed bag and lunged into the woods, praying nobody would drop by for a visit. This would be the capper to my reputation on the island. I smashed my way through the brush, trying to be scary, which wasn’t hard. It’s tricky stumbling around dense shrubbery with a feed bag on your head and a delicate basket in hand. I practically fell on the nest. Lady regarded me with disdain as she backed away from the eggs, reminding me of my crabby grade-school teacher after a kid had vomited on her desk. Lady didn’t even fight while I gathered up the eggs and threw some spiky debris onto her rudimentary nest, hoping this would be enough to keep her out of the raccoon’s clutches. I’m convinced she knew exactly who I was but was so astonished by my performance she temporarily forgot about her nest. I fled through the bush, triumphantly holding the wrapped eggs in the basket, and leaped into the truck after tearing away my feed bag and other gear, feeling like a bank robber who’d just pulled off the big one. I said to Sharon, “Let’s get out of here.” Those eggs had about thirty minutes before they’d lose viability.
As Sharon drove off, she turned to me and said, “If you’d told me ten years ago this was what farming was going to be like, I would have left you.”
And we both started to laugh . . . hopelessly . . . hysterically . . . .
By the time we returned—the eggs now under a slightly annoyed hen who would soon be hatching the strangest chicks—it was dusk. In a month we’d pick up those chicks and raise them. But tonight we walked down to the lower pond. The moon had risen behind the half-dead big maple reflecting on the sheet surface. Myriads of small bats skimmed the water, ghost-flying for insects, dipping once in a while to shiver the mirror of water.
Ajax gave his long nerve-tearing scream from the maple, and distantly, behind the house, high in the cedars, Lady replied, a little sadly I thought, but safe, at least for tonight.
NOT EVERY FARMER ENJOYS
the absurd. You have to be a bit deranged to even consider taking up farming. As the old farmer said, farming is tough because it’s so close to the ground. Faced with dead birds, the progress traps of human culture, the vagaries of weather, intransigent government regulators, clueless customers, and insane income tax forms, farming cultivates a dry wit and patience, an almost Buddhist ability to accept the fortune of the natural world. What did the farmer say when he won the lottery? “I guess I’ll just keep on farming until it’s all gone.” He understood living in beauty.
One of our south island farmers leased a neighbour’s field and used the elegant heritage barn to store the hay after he mowed and baled it every year. Recently, the uninsured, empty barn burned to the ground.
Less than a month later, under a threatening sky, I was phoned to pick up the hay I was buying from him, but I couldn’t make it until later that day. I drove onto the field, noting my load was safely under a tarp. The storm had come and gone by then, drenching the field. The farmer was on his tractor, contemplating hundreds of uncovered bales still in the field, ruined by the rain. There hadn’t been enough time to get them all covered.
He just sat there with a wry smile and said, “I guess if the weather had been better last month and the tractor hadn’t broke, I could have got all the hay into the barn before it burned down.”
I
T WAS A
feast. Spontaneous dinners occur often in this big log house when friends arrive. There were a dozen of us, mostly in the galley kitchen—washing and preparing the salad, carving meat, plating dishes, setting the table— drinking wine, whisky, tea, water, or beer—talking too much and too loudly.
We sat ourselves at a table so overflowing with food it was embarrassing: boiled black potatoes and a plate of Yukon Gold potatoes roasted with garlic and basil and oregano; free-range chicken; parboiled young chard, cooled and drenched with oil and balsamic vinegar and sea salt; a stuffed leg of venison; a stir-fry of Chinese greens, snap peas, noodles, seeds, and nuts; a salad garnished with edible flowers. Almost everything—except the noodles, some of the condiments, the nuts, and the seeds—came from the farm.
We were laughing and shovelling food onto our plates until a shriek jarred us into silence. Our eyes turned to Mary, and the long pink worm escaping from her salad. Then the laughter erupted again as I picked the worm out of her oak-leaf lettuce and returned it to the garden where it belonged.
Another good friend had washed the greens and, being from the city, hadn’t been as thorough as Sharon and I are. Even though our friend seeks real produce, the world has changed. There are no bugs and dirt in stores anymore, unless you can find a real farmers’ market—salad greens are generally already cut and washed and sealed in carbon-dioxide-injected plastic containers.
The loss of insect life in our greens has long been a source of concern for those who still respect the natural world and reject a culture that believes it can extinguish bugs and bacteria. Though many methods for destroying insect life and fungi and bacteria are clever and harmless, the logic of the chemical assault chasing the illusion of bug-free iceberg lettuce is too dangerous. And along with the other dangers I’ve discussed—specialized plant breeding, monoculture, and the demands of globalized transportation industries—it’s why supermarket food has managed to become both tasteless and easily contaminated on a large scale. Dinners like ours have become rare events.
I am the child of a diminishing generation that accepted a little grit in its lettuce and never thought much about bugs in the water unless it was foul. I grew up in various backcountry communities where the old-timers threw live newts into the well to clean up the bug population. Today the horror of salmonella and every other natural terror would get that well padlocked, but in those years of wood-cribbed, spider-and-woodbug-rich, leaky-lidded wells it was a good idea.
YOUR BLOOD IS LIKE
soil, living and learning and thriving on the wealth of invisible creation. The body learns as much as the brain does. According to Frank T. Verto-sick Jr., author of
The Genius Within,
“The immune system must learn and recall billions, perhaps trillions, of different molecular patterns. Our lives depend on its ability to make instant discriminations between friend and foe, not an easy task.”
There’s much talk lately about how our antibacterial fixations and the fetishism of pill culture is endangering us. Since a controversial article appeared in the
British Medical
Journal
in 1989 there has been increasing interest in the “hygiene hypothesis,” which claims that our futile attempt to separate ourselves from bacteria has led to childhood immune system disruptions and a surge of allergies and other immune disorders. Incidentally, these disorders are much less common in farm children. Natural living is proving less dangerous than unnecessary sterilization. This is why traditional “raw milk” dairy farmers insist that those who run modern dairies, knowing their milk will be pasteurized, are not always as scrupulous about contamination.
DIRT IS GOOD. EVERYTHING
comes out of dirt. Farmers know this, which is why so many old gardeners still eat their soil. The tongue tells the truth when it’s not twisted by a culture that has cut off its own roots. You can taste soil’s texture, its acid balance, its life. Eating soil is like eating life, and that’s why it’s tough to stomach for some. I’ve never been good at it. I’m thinking this as I begin preparing tonight’s dinner. I’m peeling a basket of Pontiac potatoes—a favourite. Crisp fleshed, they make for magnificent baby potatoes, and fully grown they’re excellent fried, mashed, or baked. They don’t go sawdusty like the modern early-season varieties when cooked a minute past their prime. But they have a fatal flaw: deep, dirt-collecting eyes, and I begin to wonder if I’m also developing a dirt fetish as I meticulously scrape the eyeholes clean.
Modern addiction studies tell us the brain takes thirty days to form an addiction and a lifetime to overcome such dangerous chains of synapses. I probably wash my greens more meticulously than the average person because we have plentiful water and I’ve met what can come crawling out of our garden, and I’m not fond of eating cutworms or grit. Common sense is the answer for food handlers, not the paranoia promoted by industrial farming and the advertising campaigns of cleanliness-addiction industries.
Dangers in food are a fact of life. Parasites, protozoa, bacteria, viruses. A myriad of creatures. Everything from
Salmonella
to
Listeria monocytogenes
to
Campylobacter jejuni,
from
Escherichia coli
O157:H7 to parasitic worms. These days we’ve all learned to be more careful, but traditional behaviour and general cleanliness are less invasive than dangerous factory methodology. A few years ago a single infected steer in a multinational slaughterhouse contaminated thousands of tons of meat that appeared in places as diverse as Guam and Nevada within days. This, as I’ve explained, is why the local-food movement was born— out of the common sense of people who want to purchase their food from producers known and respected in their community. Those willing to take their chances with natural food, whether it’s real milk, organic produce, or traditionally slaughtered livestock, should retain that right. Eventually, Western society needs to make sane decisions about what is safe and what is not, because the increasingly sterile hygiene levels our government is driving us toward are becoming more dangerous and unhealthy than living with our feet and fingers touching dirt—and more environmentally expensive.
Lately, all local farmers have been required to take a foodsafe course before we are allowed to sell our produce in supermarkets. Sharon got the short straw and attended. The woman giving the course displayed a classic case of too much science and too little common sense. Sharon and a clutch of local organic farmers had to sit there suffering a lecture about how manure is bad for the garden “because it’s full of bacteria,” along with other such useful information. The instructor’s paranoid list of dangers even ended up implying all water should be boiled before drinking. When one farmer finally asked her what was healthy to drink, the woman replied, “Soda pop is safe.” On this island, she was lucky she wasn’t tarred and feathered and set adrift in a rowboat.