Hello again, subscribers. A warm welcome to those of you just dropping by.
This week I’m on assignment in Bacalar, Mexico. Here’s some deep background in my Hard Truths for Poor Artists series.
True Clichés of a Working Family Farm
Years ago I went on a date with a Columbia Journalism Review editor. We’d met at New Yorker editor Tina Brown’s townhouse, exactly the sort of place you’d expect to run across a well-heeled New England WASP.
He and I sat in Sunshine Cinema on Houston Street, waiting for a film to begin.
“You mentioned you grew up on a Midwestern farm,” he said. “I’m glad to have a chance to talk to you about your background because I’m writing an article about the farming crisis.”
“Oh?” I said, feeling my guard go up.
“You grew up on a working family farm, right?”
“It was a wheat and dairy farm in Kansas,” I allowed. What was he imagining? Cows grazing on psychedelically green grass among immaculate red-and-white outbuildings? The dramatic threat of foreclosure as sexily depicted by Jessica Lange and Sam Shepard in the film Country?
“Well, what was it like?” he asked.
“Think Little House on the Prairie meets Dickens,” I said, hoping the line would get me out of saying more. My date chuckled and the movie began.
This genuinely or at least professionally interested man did not deserve such cynicism, but my self-mocking stance was honed from years of experience that had proven the impossibility of sharing my Kansas farm life with anyone who hadn’t grown up on one. I’d bored people with my theory that both city and country-raised folk were bred for independence, and thus we got along much better with each other than with people from the uniformity-promoting suburbs. Somewhat more popular were stories that reduced farm experience to exotic episodes, but telling them always felt false. When I took a stab at genuine accounts, people would interrupt me to say they’d already read A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley’s novel of Iowan farming life, and how about its clever King Lear-based plot?
Still, it was my responsibility to figure out how to get my country childhood across to others. The real problem: telling stories of it meant trafficking in clichés of varying accuracy. I’d try to dodge those myths, but end up gridlocked by them. Besides, as I adapted to New York and made a career as a writer and radio essayist, it was gratifying to get some distance from my earlier farm life. Pulling up one’s roots was a way to thrive. I wasn’t the first New York transplant to decide that giving in to the city’s anti-elsewhere bias was a fair price for the opportunity to flourish as whoever I wanted to be.
Most of the Midwestern farmers I know are resigned to misconceptions among people on the coasts. “City people always have these notions of how we work out here in Middle America,” my brother, who ran the family farm with my father, told me. “About how we live, too. And there’s nothing we can do to change it.” We may not be able to correct clichéd notions of Midwestern farm life, because many of those clichés are somewhat true—in my experience, anyway. It’s time I at least tried to address my childhood in Kansas. So in delayed response to that nice editor’s question, here’s something on the record about what it was like to grow up on a working family farm.
I have a recurring dream. I’m walking on the dirt road half a mile from our family farm when I see a storm surging in the West, racing my way. I have to decide whether to make a run for home across the field or stand it out. If I try to run, I wake up sweating. If I stand it out, the storm clears overhead, giving me the lucidity to choose my next dream.
Farmwork and teenage discontent
In 1984, when I was 11, my father leased a quarter section of irrigated land a few miles from our farm. Our first improvement to this land was removing a row of trees that stretched across its quarter-mile length, bisecting the field. The tree row was planted after the Dust Bowl as a preventative to erosion. In the intervening years, a farm due south had also grown a solid wind block of elms. So in my Dad’s eyes, the field’s tree row was now redundant and stood robbing the land of arable acreage, a timbered barrier to maximum crop yields. Dad always saw mysterious and important things in farmland that I couldn’t see. He hired someone to bulldoze the trees and take away the wreckage of large trunks and branches. Smaller branches had to be cleared by hand until not one twig was left to jam up a planter or blunt a disc. For a good stretch of that spring, my Mom, Dad, two younger sisters, brother, and I drove to the field each evening and picked up sticks.
We worked as the sunset faded into a muted concerto of colors. More rousing work music blasted from a boom box hung from the tractor’s wrought iron seat. When Dad would switch the radio from my favorite pop & rock station to his favorite country one, I’d object just to entertain him, since he liked to play up our conflicting musical tastes. Secretly I liked Patsy Cline about as well as Madonna. Mom treated us to frozen chocolate malts, the kind with a small wooden spoon wedged onto the cup’s paper lid—the flimsy spoon would crack if you dug into the malt’s rock-hard center, so you had to scoop patiently at its softened edges. We could see vehicles coming from over a mile away, churning up dust cascades on the smooth county road. When they passed the field, Dad stood tall and waved broadly, drawing attention to his hard-working family.
While I was picking up sticks on those spring evenings, my friends were probably at softball practice several miles away in Conway Springs, the nearest town. It was a foregone conclusion that my sisters and I could never play softball, because the season fell during the wheat harvest when all the family’s energies were concentrated on getting grain to the elevator for the best price. We were raised to believe such sacrifices elevated us onto a moral high ground; the greater the deprivation, the greater the superiority. I didn’t need the indulgences my friends took for granted. Hard work was its own reward. By the time I was seven, I was expected to get two five-gallon buckets of milk from the barn out to the calves 100 yards away. When I said I could carry the buckets only a few feet before nearly collapsing, I was asked why I didn’t think to put the buckets in a wagon. Self-sufficiency is cultivated on a farm; it also prospers like a weed, wildly, because so many work situations present natural conditions for its growth.
Our two-week stick-gathering job stands out as an idyll in my memory, because contented farm work soon became the exception for me. This change probably didn’t happen all at once, though it felt like it did. That month, I had a sleepover with a friend whose only chore was clearing the supper table. Instead of feeling smugly industrious, as I had before, I came home with the suspicion that farm work was not so ennobling and was in fact an impediment to the fun the rest of the world was allowed to have. Suddenly it seemed unreasonable that my father was angered by the sight of my younger sister and brother watching Saturday cartoons in their pajamas at 8 a.m. when he came in from the morning milking because he was already four hours into his workday.
Life on a dairy farm, with its two daily milkings—those mandatory, miss-them-at-risk-of-ruin milkings—is as close as a person can come to slavery while owning his own business. “The cows don’t know it’s Sunday,” my Dad would say on his way out to the milk barn. Once a year he got to say, “The cows don’t know it’s Christmas.” Even when he went cheerfully, and more often than not he did, I began to suspect this daily grind was less an elective character-building opportunity than a lifestyle of self-enforced martyrdom, and martyrdom offended my adolescent sense of freedom and possibility.
My first resistance to farm work was passive-aggressive: I nurtured incompetence. Reading a book while gathering cows for the evening milking, I’d leave the gate open and let a few escape. And if I didn’t understand simple tractor repair, how could I be trusted to plow a field way up North? Farming’s entrenched gender roles helped my incompetence project; everyone was all too ready to accept that girls were essentially ill-equipped for important work. “Girls, they’re good for nothing,” Dad said more than once to me. My younger brother, our family’s only boy, didn’t have the option of blundering his way into another future. His fate was sealed. By age five, Kevin had a full set of toy farm machinery and tilled our living room’s gold shag carpet as reverently as he would work the fields 10 years later.
My Dad’s cure for my rebellion was work, as if more chores would somehow inoculate me against my antipathy for them. If I pointed out the irrationality of this punishment, Dad told me to “take my nose out of a book sometimes.” The culture gap between my parents and me grew into so violent a struggle over the next few years that it was a toss-up for who was more relieved, me or them, when I left for college at 18. When I moved to Brooklyn in my 20s, I felt great empathy for Italian teenagers working in family pizzerias, pushing brooms around with resentment while their parents took orders.
After adolescent rebellion, my perspective relaxed enough for me to understand that working harder had been the only solution my Dad knew. I settled into a more moderate view that the culture of farm work, for all its virtues, feeds on and spawns some dark psychological tendencies. At most urban or suburban parties, it would be rude for the host to abandon his guests to do some lawn or garden work outside. Farmers, however, are admired as hardworking if they leave or skip a gathering to check on ailing livestock or perform some other supposedly pressing chore. Even misanthropy can get a free pass in farm country.
Start ‘Em Young
Under U.S. child labor laws, the minimum age for particularly hazardous work in agriculture, such as operating a tractor, is 16.
On a college friend’s first trip to my family’s farm, we drove past a neighbor’s field.
“My God, it’s a runaway tractor!” my friend yelled, pointing. Out in the field was a tractor pulling a plow, and indeed it appeared to be unoccupied.
“Oh, that’s probably just Luke,” I said. Sure enough, when the tractor hit a stiff bump, up bounced seven-year-old Luke on his springy seat in the cab, manning the $60,000 machine as best he could.
When we drove by on the way back, we had to swerve into the far ditch to avoid Luke and his tractor. He was plowing furrows into the road.
Twisters
One summer evening, a thunderstorm squalled and then quieted into an eerie calm. We turned on the TV to confirm what we already suspected: There was a tornado warning for Sumner County, and a twister had touched down nearby. I looked southwest, out the living room window, to see a funnel cloud a couple of miles away, swirling toward the ground.
“We’d better go down to the basement,” Mom said.
“What about Dad?” I asked. “He’s in the milk barn. I have to get him!”
“You can try,” Mom answered, pulling my younger siblings down the stairs. “But hurry.”
I ran to the front milk barn window, trying to remember which scene from the Wizard of Oz I seemed to be reenacting. “Tornado!” I yelled, spooking some cows that were filing past after their milking. “Come to the basement!”
“Feels like one,” Dad said. “But the cows can’t go down to the basement. I’ll stay here with my cows.”
“Come look, Dad! This one is really close.” He sighed, walked over to the window, and stuck out his head. The tornado was closer, whipping down from the greenish sky to stir up topsoil on a plowed field.
If its awful beauty impacted my father, he didn’t let on. “Oh, that’s heading toward Joe Allen’s farm,” he said. “You run along to the basement anyway. But come back out and feed the calves soon. I better not have to ask you twice.”
I knew predicting a tornado’s path was a fool’s game. Even people who lived in trailer homes, the sort who were always interviewed on the local news after a tornado, would get Ma and the dogs and kids into the bathtub to pray out a storm in relative safety. I left Dad and his cows for dead and went to the basement to save myself.
But Dad was lucky with his prophecy. The tornado did pass west of our farm, and it did hit the Allen’s farm, grazing one of their sheds, lashing a bit of its roof into a warped sculpture. Theirs became another area farm to display a twisted emblem of the power of the weather. That night my Dad puffed his way into the house, vindicated in his forecast, but I heard a dissonant drone of envy in his voice when he talked about how close Joe Allen had come to lethal danger.
I have a recurring dream. I’m walking on a dirt road half a mile from the family farm when I see a storm surging in the West, racing my way. I have to decide whether to make a run for home across the field or stand it out. If I try to run, I wake up sweating. If I stand it out, the storm clears overhead, giving me the lucidity to choose my next dream.
The snakes
I can remember a time when our farm could have made a solid contribution to Noah’s Ark. We had horses, goats, rabbits, chickens, and many, many dairy cows. We lived closely with them. When our visiting cousin Mike was chased around our yard by a goat, my sisters and I wondered why he didn’t just stop running; the goat would quit chasing him and only chew on his shirttails a little. We also knew not to walk directly behind a horse, except gentle Becky, who was unperturbed when we put a mini-trampoline behind her and sprung up onto her bare back, rodeo clown style.
That animal landscape changed as the 1980s farm crisis forced money to become the bottom line, and farming monoculture prevailed. Dad started calling the horses “hay burners” and gradually sold off all the animals besides the money-churning dairy cattle. I could go on about animals as capital, about how the heifer #87 we milked one week became the grilled steak on our table the next, how I sometimes wished I could afford the luxury of being one of those squeamish, Bambi-loving girls, but when it comes to animals, most farm kids dull their moral sensibilities at an early age.
But what I really want to talk about are the snakes.
Our farm, the only settlement on an entire section of land, drew snakes by the dozens: mostly garter and bullsnakes, sometimes more dangerous copperheads and cottonmouths. Close inspection of dead ones yielded important information. The flexible, rope-like bodies suggested how powerfully they had struck when alive, the surprising iridescent beauty of their underbellies emphasized that they all had a secretive side. And there was the dead snake smell. It was different than the ripe odors from the dead animal truck that picked up our expired livestock, its bed a jumble of stiffened legs and ballooned guts. It was different than the stench of a dead mouse under the washing machine. From my autopsies of snake corpses, I abstracted the smell of live ones. Just as I could tell which summer month it was by the aroma of the sunflowers in the ditch, I could pick up the scent of a snake curved into the petals’ shadows.
We often swam at our neighbor Cletes’s pond, which teemed with water moccasins. “Keep away from those snakes, they’re poisonous,” we were told. We’d scream as they shot across the top of the water right toward us. “Duck,” we’d remind each other. “They don’t bite underwater.”
That was all fair enough. We were on their territory. I felt differently when they trespassed onto ours. When I went downstairs to get white packages of meat from the basement deep freeze, I smelled snakes and sensed them coiled in wait. This wasn’t just a projection of fear; I’d found snake skins in the stairwell and basement. One afternoon my younger cousin Jesse was bitten on the shoulder by a bullsnake as he went down to his basement. “Come on, it was just a bullsnake,” Jesse was told. “People in . . . China have cobras come right into their house. How’d you like to get bit by one of those?” But it hurt, Jesse said.
Jesse’s older brother Daryl pulled the snake up from the basement steps and hacked it into five pieces with a spade—or maybe Daryl just said he should have done this. I can’t remember. Either way, I thought, yes, that’s how to handle them. I began shooting snakes with my Daisy BB gun. It could take 20 or more slow-shooting BBs to kill one, and a snake’s tendency to spasm after death, its reflexes still alive, gave me an excuse to keep firing. Farm boys, often even more prone to displays of fearlessness or cruelty than me, would pick up snakes by their tails, whipping them around like lassoes, and bashing their heads into the nearest fence post.
Agriculture magazines like the High Plains Journal still feel the need to run an occasional article urging farmers to think twice before killing snakes because of their importance in the food chain—as if farmers don’t regularly see snakes with telltale bulges of mice digesting in their long bodies. When my parents eventually tore down our old farmhouse, they found three 10-foot bullsnakes living in the foundation, one of them twisted under the spot where my bed used to be. I still have a passing urge to kill every snake I see.
Loved this
I'm from Cherokee County, KS (& loved both your books)
Thank you, Ms Mercer!
Your generous music writing is surpassed by this unique memoir material. Thanks for sharing your story! Brava! I will be rereading often to learn and steal as much as possible.