Trauma Farm (40 page)

THE FARM PROVIDES A
great opportunity for kids to develop country skills. Our city-raised grandchildren spend at least a week at the farm every summer. They arrive fresh-faced and eager and immediately fight over who gets the better bed; then we send them out to explore. By the end of the first week they’ve been eaten alive by mosquitoes, got sunburned, run screeching out of the bush after encountering a wasp nest, discovered a dead chicken crawling with maggots that’s been dragged away by a raccoon, picked flowers for the house, eaten peas from the vine, and casually nibbled fennel in the flower garden. They scrape their backs falling off swings over a creek, ride the horse, peel the garlic, and are sent back to their terrified parents a little bruised and beaten but almost islandized. Their parents recognize that this experience is essential to their upbringing, like violin or dance lessons.

Grotesquely few children encounter the natural world these days. A few guilty, dutiful parents send their children to “park experiences,” where rangers complain that the kids carry antibacterial sprays so they can sterilize themselves after touching a leaf or a slug. A writer has named a syndrome, “nature deficit disorder,” after these unfortunate and deprived urban children. While it’s natural for a parent to fear every poisonous bug, falling branch, and imaginary cougar behind the trees, it’s also natural for a child to experience these events and fears, and the loss of this experience is a danger to our civilization. People often phone and ask us if they can bring a friend’s children over to the farm, because they have never encountered a live chicken or sheep, or picked vegetables from a garden.

I WANDER DOWN BY
the willows, at the edge of the first pond, in this eighteen-year-long day of the time-shifting, endangered, yet eternal farm. Chloe the goose is conversing with LaBarisha, the Arabian grey. Horse and goose have a curious relationship. They meet almost every day at the water’s edge, and I wonder what mysterious conversation travels between them. Chloe will swim up to the shoreline as the horse sips meditatively from the water. Then she will lift her head and they remain motionless, beak to nose, sometimes for several minutes, soundless, at least as far as I can tell from far away. Over the years I’ve watched similar conversations. Jackson loved the pigs and Jesus the ram. Animals talk, they die, they’re born, they die again, until all the stories fold into a long summer’s day of memories.

A giant, shimmering goldfish leaps into the air and lands on its belly with a slap, disturbing the tableau of horse and goose, and they separate, the horse eyeing me as I approach. Then a cluster of mallards crash into the air and wheel several times overhead before deciding I am going to stay, and they leave, no doubt disgusted. In the far rushes of the lower pond I see the red-headed merganser slip through the reeds and evaporate into the foliage. Mergansers are clever, and this one has the knack for raising broods from eggs laid in the muddy bank in this semi-public pond, miraculously shielding them from eagles, raccoons, and my dogs in the night.

The ponds are still high, but as summer drives its hot fingers into the earth the water level will drop, and the big pond we use for irrigation will soon resemble a bomb hole in a field near Baghdad. As the water tables fall with global warming, I have twice had to bring in an excavator to deepen and enlarge the pond, and only now are my water plants starting to fill in. These are artificial ponds. It’s tougher than it looks to create a natural ecosystem. And my plantings are often shredded by the geese, wild ducks, the horse, and sheep when the water level drops.

Yet somehow the life is moving in, aquatic plants arriving as seeds in the excrement of overflying birds or on the feet of ducks—insects from the unknown. There are water boatmen and fascinating stick bugs that resemble dead branches underwater, big fat toe-biters like aquatic cockroaches and leeches—both of which can make the grandchildren studiously avoid the water. Contemplating our ponds, as immature as they are, I understand that I could spend my life researching them and still know very little. My gaze sweeps the farm, and I am struck by the inadequacy of my years of studying and practising the art of living on this tiny parcel of land.

Like the pond, like myself, like the changing and surprising world, the farm is countless events occurring simultaneously—an organism, a mycelium sending out threads in every direction. When we “rationalize” and narrow the diversity in the name of greater production efficiencies, we diminish it, although we may produce more yields initially. The fatal flaw of the infamous “green revolution” is our failure to comprehend that the more we expand our production abilities, the more we diminish the quality of both farm produce and rural life. Natural laws are a lot more complex than they first appear. And the natural world is always slipping through our fingers.

We have a tendency to reduce this complex world to simplistic, systematic, and superficial formulas. The scientific method is our greatest asset and our greatest failure. It applies reductionist, linear logic to a nonlinear world. This can work spectacularly in specific cases, but it slides into muddier ground as we witness with growing horror the results of this reductive logic in factory farming. That’s why so much of our land and ecological management has been disastrous. The more bureaucrats manage fisheries, the fewer fish we have; the more we “scientifically” regulate our livestock practices, the farther we drift from good health and good nutrition. If our science fails to take in the lessons of traditional knowledge and its intuitive skills, we doom our science. Nature doesn’t create factory environments, with good reason. We create them at our peril. Jane Jacobs points out that natural organisms thrive in conjunction with thousands of stimuli, not just one. If you consider the immensely complex world of the small farm, reductive and linear practices generally work, but all kinds of nonlinear approaches also work.

Running a farm or cultivating a garden means accepting life within a cat’s cradle of fertility and rain and sun and weeds and deer. The insistence on perfection is the habit of the human mind. The drive to make sure that each crop is as good as or better than the last is the direct route to artificial fertilizers, pesticides, single-cropping, and gm seeds, even though they eventually diminish the entire system.

These measures have not only led to desertification and poisoned fields where our food is grown; they’ve also affected the flower industry. Store-bought roses carry a legacy of ruined gardens, toxic greenhouses, and ill workers in the Third World, where environmental and labour regulations are nearly nonexistent. A few flowers from a local field or greenhouse sold at the corner store have been replaced by an enormous $40-billion-a-year multinational industry in which the flowers have travelled far more than the young couple buying them at the corner market.

To combat this phenomenon a wave of environmentalists have been working on the ethical and ecological flower trade. You can avoid the whole issue by either growing your own flowers (what an innovative idea!) or, if you can’t because of your living circumstances, buying real flowers from local growers at farmers’ markets. Common sense is most uncommon in our species. Meanwhile, Valentine’s Day has become a toxic festival. Fifty million greenhouse roses wilt around the world each year in order for us to celebrate this day. Ninety percent of them are purchased by men. It has been calculated that more than £22 million is spent on flowers for Valentine’s Day in England alone. This news made me stop and consider the madness of our society, gearing up for an annual extravaganza of supply-and-demand globalized economics at its kookiest excess. The majority of sales are geared toward perfection on a single day. Imagine the cost of the lighting, heating, fertilizers, and pesticides necessary to force a flower into reaching its prime on a single day. The rest of the world might be collapsing from starvation and aids and ecological catastrophe, but we are putting our romantic shoulders to the wheel, keeping that skewed economy blossoming.

On Trauma Farm we soon learned about that cat’s cradle weaving together many fingers and criss-crossing patterns of string, and learned to celebrate it. I start cutting firewood. I have to get the sheep out of the field so that I don’t drop a tree on them, especially if it’s a maple, because they’re mad for the sugar in the maple and if they see me with the chainsaw they will follow me in hope of maple leaves. To get the sheep out of the pasture I need to fix the cross-fencing, which involves splitting a couple of new cedar rails or removing them from another fence. Then I need to mow the field before the broken branches make a mess. With all that done, I discover some of the junk wood is very beautiful filigreed maple—a crime to waste for firewood. It needs milling. But by now I can’t get the mill in until fire season is over. It’s a multidimensional chess game always in process. There are no solutions. Farming is life itself: the means are more important than the end—the means
are
the end. As Oswald Spengler noted: “Godhead is effective in the living and not in the dead, in the becoming and the changing, not in the become and the set-fast.”

The natural world is a miracle: mystery after mystery. Though it is full of wonder, it’s not necessarily wise or nice, as the Gnostic heretics noticed. I wouldn’t call liver disease, tooth decay, anal maggots in sheep, and stillbirths wise or nice, even as I recognize the natural systems and the evolutionary beauty of how they arose. Though I’m amused by the teleological argument—that nature is like a watch designed by a watchmaker—or its new variation, intelligent design, I would have wished for a more kindly designer.

Nature actually is the complicated watch of teleology, only one designed not by a god but by blind and amoral natural forces. And though I worship its beauty I recognize it’s just as twisted as we are. Living inside an ecology and meditating upon it deeply—the gore, the parasites, the gorgeous birthings, those green leaves after a rain, the rusty nail in the foot, a nasturtium blossom close up, and the babies born headless while a tidal wave approaches—we can only suspect that if this is intelligent design, the designer is a devil indeed. That’s not my kind of god. But maybe the god is the energy to break away, the energy behind the whirlpool, the need to perpetuate itself, breeding and changing—entropy—and that’s why we recognize and worship the insanity of diversity and why I’ve long admired the cosmologist Brian Swimme’s remark “You take hydrogen gas, you leave it alone for 14 billion years—and it turns into rosebuds, giraffes and humans.”

Besides rosebuds and giraffes, you also get succulent strawberries at the height of their season, and that’s how I end up back in the garden, remembering that we haven’t picked any for a few days. We have to cover them with netting or remay cloth to keep away the birds. We grow two varieties, the fat, one-shot wonders of early summer, and the perpetuals, which really aren’t that perpetual. They just have a second burst of fruit later in the summer. They are smaller, not as lush, like little jewels compared with the tasty fat boys of this time of year. The taste of either is so superior to those big woody things in the supermarkets. This has been a good year for strawberries. We fended off the birds and the slugs, and the weather was perfect. But sometimes the farm takes away our dreams. We wait for crops all winter and then they die on us or don’t fruit well during days of rain, or they shrivel and burn under a malicious sun. Farming, like foraging, is as much about hope as about accepting what you receive.

Sharon and I engage in our share of good-natured, amusing disputes in the garden. They are usually all about memory, which is why we keep a gardener’s log to resolve the extended differences of opinion. My short-term memory is so bad I can never remember where I left the garden hoe, which frustrates her no end, yet when she announces the lemon cucumber is useless I remember that it was spectacular last summer, and it was only a late planting and poor weather that made it perform so badly this season. Over the years, like all domestic couples, we have learned the benefits of banter, and also when to quietly ignore a disagreement. Her one habit that still breaks my heart is when I’m facing the imminent demise of one of my thirty-year-old bonsais, which I’ve accidentally moved into some corner where it didn’t get watered for a week. Sharon will look at it and tell me, “It’s getting better.” This remark, I’ve long ago learned, is the kiss of death. She unconsciously has that nurse’s knack for recognizing when death is near. There’s a brightness in the dying human eye and the struggling leaf—just before everything gives up and the life fades. That brightness in the dying leaf always gives her hope.