The families leave, the fields remain

in #art6 years ago

I have a cousin who farms up the road from my family’s place. He raises corn, dry edible beans and sugar beets on the land his father farmed, and his father’s father before him. He’s one of the few in my family left. There was a time when my extended kin worked essentially bordering plots of land for several miles in this part of western Nebraska. Now that’s nearly all over.

I drove past him when I was home last and he was standing on the side of the road, checking his sprinklers. He saw me pass by and nodded. I waved but didn’t stop. What would I say? We grew up with similar lives, yet I have no idea what it meant to be him in 2018. My generation would have been the fourth to carry on the farming tradition, but, aside from the rare few cousins left, the majority of us educated ourselves into other career fields.

When I lived in my hometown of Scottsbluff from 2013 to 2016 and worked for the newspaper there I would occasionally see farmers my age I knew from 4-H or FFA when they came into town. At one of the Mexican restaurants they’d be eating hungrily in dusty work shoes and oil-spotted jeans. I’d say hello and sit down at my table in business-casual chinos, a button-down shirt and try not to get pork chile on my tie.

I knew their lives were hard and fraught with uncertainty, but still I was envious that they made their living out on the land, with their hands and ingenuity, growing food as a way of life. I don’t want to over-romanticize that work; there’s something in my blood that still calls out for it.

As kids, the cousins worked and played together, chasing each other across the fields on four-wheelers when we were supposed to be irrigating. Until freshman year we went to country school in a brick building about 10 miles from town. It sat on the land next to my family’s farm. Kindergarten through eighth grade there were about 100 students, most of them from families like ours. At that time the country was thriving, a family with kids on nearly every quarter mile.

It’s not like that now. The farm crisis of the 1980s shook the agriculture economy to its core. Farmers went bankrupt. Some committed suicide. Banks failed. Parents of farms kids started pushing harder than before to see their children educated into different professions, new ways of life. And for a lot of families it worked.

Today the country where I grew up looks like every other part of America experiencing the downside of Capitalism. The fields haven’t changed. They’re still green from spring to harvest, but the homes that once raised families of active farm children are hollowed out and in disrepair.

It’s deeply saddening. And I’m not sad for the lost beauty of the farmhouses, I’m saddened by the loss of knowledge that was passed down through generations. Decades, if not centuries, of hard-earned wisdom and skills lost to progress. And for that loss to be thrust upon an entire tribe of people without much say in the matter.

Instead, the farm families of America join the rest of the country. We take jobs in the cities. We let our careers carry us out into the world until we are as rootless and disconnected to the land as everyone else. We live in states we know nothing about, in places that are indifferent to ourselves. Since I left the farm for college I have lived in cities, in apartments mostly, with their noise and filth and neighbors beside or under or on top of me. I had wanted that culture, that excitement of cities. I had never wanted to be among so many people and so close.

It might be difficult to understand for someone who has never known a place like we knew ours. To know the dirt roads and the canals and the lakes, to know where the water came from and how to control it to grow hundreds of acres of food, to know all of it down to the weeds and bugs and sand. Then to leave it. To live a life of alienation, of never truly knowing another place that way again.

When I was young and I thought I knew everything I wanted nothing more than to escape my rural life. Now I want nothing more than to be free of cities. I want to find a way to reawaken what’s in my blood. But it’s more likely that, like corn leaves in the wind, I’ll end up floating around this world, settling for a while here before lifting up and traveling to the next place that’s calm enough to float down and rest on the surface.



Posted from my blog with SteemPress : https://selfscroll.com/the-families-leave-the-fields-remain/
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