Through the Corn Maze

Even though it's unlikely that my survival will ever depend upon my ability to successfully navigate a maze, it is nevertheless reassuring to know that if I were ever placed inside a labyrinth, I would be able to find my way out. How do I know this? Why, because I visited the Little Bear Bottoms corn maze in Wellsville.

 
The key to completing a maze in which the entrance and exit are both on the perimeter is to pick either right or left, and then only turn that direction the entire time you're in the maze. Also, when navigating the maze after dark, you may find that using a glowstick makes it harder to see, rather than easier. It turns out that ordinary humans have good enough night vision to manage within the maze, and all the glowstick does is short out said night vision. Once your vision has adjusted to the darkness of the maze, the only thing you'll really need to be on guard for is the irrigation ditches. I managed to step over all of them until the very last one before I got out of the maze. My toe caught on it, and I went into the most ridiculous, prolonged running trip of my life. Completely without the consent of my higher thinking functions, my body began to sprint in an effort to get back over its center of gravity, only for me to faceplant twenty feet later. So yeah. Watch out for the irrigation ditches.

The Real Dirt on Farmer John

I don't watch a lot of documentaries, and I don't read a lot of memoirs. However, to my surprise, I found The Real Dirt on Farmer John rather compelling. It isn’t difficult to see the plot unfolding through this nonfiction narrative. Any viewer can relate as John Peterson experiences the loss of family members and the failure of romantic relationships, and while he is in many ways an atypical farmer, he experienced the ups and downs of farming just like everyone else. The ‘80s hit him hard, but he found a way to succeed even in the face of impending bankruptcy: community supported agriculture. 

Most interestingly in my opinion, the film reveals a rigidity within farm culture that I never thought about before, but which in retrospect seems fairly obvious. We couldn't have the farmer stereotype if it wasn't true of a significant portion of the farmer population at some point in history. Apparently even farmers think that farmers should be wiry, stubborn, conservative men who wear overalls and trucker caps. John Peterson loved to farm, but in most ways, he didn’t fit the image. His voice and movements fit not into the farmer stereotype, but into the gay man stereotype, which was enough to raise the suspicions of his neighbors. His frequent escapes to Mexico to find himself spiritually during times of hardship give the impression of a man with the spirit of a poet.

Whenever he attempted to display his individuality through his clothing and the people he'd bring to the farm, he was met with considerable backlash from his community. It seems so strange that even in the relatively isolated communities of farming, differences could spark so much hostility. This suggests that the monoculture of farming doesn’t just refer to the crops. Everyone plants one kind of corn, and everyone projects the image of one kind of farmer. John Peterson was only able to achieve success on his farm when he embraced his own quirks and let the community embrace him back, and it makes me wonder if the traditional farmer mold is actually one of the reasons for the decline of farming in recent decades. Maybe there are few who want to be a farmer, but many who would enjoy being themselves while also farming.

Siegel, Taggart. The Real Dirt On Farmer John. Full frame [ed.] New York: Gaiam Media, 2008.

Snow White and Rose Red

This is a story I wrote for an advanced fiction class a couple of years ago. The characters are fictional, but the setting is the four acres of land I grew up on, and Danni's personality is a lot like mine was when I was a kid.

Snow White and Rose Red

            Sweat glued Danni’s shirt to her back and plastered tendrils of her dark hair that had escaped her ponytail to the sides of her face, and her feet slid around inside her dad’s rubber boots, which came up all the way to her knees. It was as hot and sticky as any other June day in Texas, but it would take more than hundred degree weather to get Danni back inside the house, especially now. Jason was over again.

--

            “I did it! I did it! I beat you!” Danni cried happily from the highest sturdy branch in the biggest post oak in the back yard.

            “No fair!” said Laura from a couple of branches down. “I’ve seen you practicing during my riding lessons. You’ve gone and turned into a little spider monkey on me.”

            “It still counts,” said Danni. “You beat me every other time we raced.”

            “Yes I did,” said Laura, at last reaching Danni’s branch. The two sisters sat side-by-side, looking out at the forested landscape of their country neighborhood.

            “Well, you know what this means,” said Laura when they had both recovered from the climb. “You won, so you get to pick the game today.”

            Danni screwed up her face in concentration. “We played Narnia last time, Little House on the Prairie the time before, so…fairy princesses,” she decided.

            Laura grinned. “I’ll go get Dad’s ski poles.”

            “I’ll wait by the Fairy Mound!” said Danni. “The evil Sidhe of the Unseelie Court are no match for us!”

--

            Laura was still inside the house, but if she didn’t want to go exploring, Danni would just do it by herself. It was better this way, really. If Laura wasn’t going, then Danni was free to wear the big boots, which were best for wading in the creek. And there were plenty of games she could play by herself. It would be just as much fun.

            Danni wiped a hand up her forehead, thinking the sweat would make her bangs lie nice and flat against the top of her head, but it really only made them stick straight up in the air. Upon reaching the gate in the fence that separated the backyard from the horse pasture, she bent down and slipped between the rusty horizontal bars, her ten-year-old frame small enough to fit even with the backpack she wore doubling the width of her torso.

            On her way to the creek, Danni passed the Fairy Mound, a mysterious heap of earth jutting up about eight feet above the rest of the flattest part of the pasture that had been there as long as she and Laura could remember, two battered ski poles they used as swords lying discarded in the weeds that grew at the base of it. She passed the dilapidated shed with the archery target tacked to the back, several arrows sticking out of it at random from the last time she’d pretended to be Merida at the highland games. She passed the fence line where the dewberries grew every May, then the one with the nightshade bush at the end of it. She wrinkled her nose at the memory of the burnt toast milkshake cure she’d had to drink after showing her mom the little red berries she’d been eating one day when she was seven. She passed the small, moss-covered pond where she and Laura dug for old bottles buried in the mud and looked for crawdads under rocks.

--

            “Laura, Laura, look at this crawdad I caught!” said Danni excitedly as she burst into the kitchen through the sliding glass back door.

            “Ah-ah-ah,” said her mom, not looking up from the onions she was chopping. “Boots.”

            Danni rolled her eyes but retreated onto the patio long enough to kick her boots off, before dashing back inside, into the living room, around the corner into the hall, and into Laura’s room, where she stopped dead in her tracks, her eyes wide.

            “Is this your sister?” asked a boy Danni had never seen before. He was big, had dark hair, and wore a jacket with a large letter C over the left breast.

            “Yeah, that’s Danni,” said Laura. The two teenagers were sitting on Laura’s bed and the radio was tuned to a pop station Danni hated.

            “Who are you?” said Danni, still staring at the intruder.

            “This is Jason,” said Laura. She sounded nervous, which made Danni look at her instead, which reminded her why she had come into her room.

            “Look,” she said, holding up the slimy gray freshwater crustacean for her sister to see, its tail, antennae, and legs all writhing in midair in a futile attempt to escape.

            “Gross! What the hell is that?” said Jason, recoiling and covering his nose. “It smells like dead fish!”

            “It’s a crawdad,” said Danni, glaring at him. “And you’re not supposed to say the h-word.” She looked at Laura again. “Isn’t it cool?” she asked, holding it out farther so Laura could get a better look. “I think it’s even bigger than the one you caught last week.”

            “You catch those things?” Jason demanded of Laura, sounding appalled.

            Laura’s eyes darted from Jason to Danni and back again.

            “Of course she d—” Danni began, but Laura interrupted her.

            “No,” she scoffed. “Why would I want to do that?”

            “But—” Danni tried to protest.

            “Get that thing out of here, Danni. Why do you always have to bother me with your stupid kid stuff?”

--

            The tall grass gave way to stubbly clumps left over from the horses’ repeated grazing, and then finally to muddy earth that sucked at the enormous boots as Danni reached the edge of the creek. She squatted down right at the bank. After a few seconds, she spotted what she was looking for. The tadpoles she’d found the other day were still there. She slipped one arm free of her backpack’s straps and twisted it around so that she could reach the zipper, then retrieved the Mason jar she’d snitched out of the pantry from where it had lodged itself between several dog-eared library books. Slowly, she dipped the mouth of the jar beneath the surface of the water and waited. At first, the tadpoles scattered at the disturbance of their habitat, but eventually they calmed down, and one of them swam straight into the jar.

            Grinning in triumph, Danni pulled the jar back out of the water and held it up so she could see the tadpole darting around the edges.

--

            “Laura, look what I found in the creek!” said Danni proudly, sticking the Mason jar in her big sister’s face.

            “Ew, get that thing away from me!” Laura shrieked, throwing herself sideways so hard that she sent her textbooks and notebook paper flying off the table and onto the kitchen floor. “MOM!”

            Danni stuck out her tongue and hurried away with the Mason jar cradled safely against her chest. She went back outside and carried her treasure over to the fort she’d made between the largest two fig trees, where a Rubbermaid bucket two-thirds full of scummy water from the pond sat awaiting its new resident. She tipped the jar into the bucket and watched the tadpole swim around.

--

            Danni turned the final page of Mockingjay and sat in numb silence for a few minutes. She’d stolen it from the bookcase in her parents’ room two days before (it had been placed next to the last three Harry Potter books on the “PG-13” shelf) and sneaked it out to her hideout between the fig trees, safe from the dew and the humidity in a gallon-sized Ziploc bag, and she’d spent most of her time since then curled up with it under the dome of leaves and branches next to her tadpole’s bucket.

            As she closed the book, she thought back to all those times she and Laura had played Katniss and Prim a few years ago. She hadn’t read any of the books yet back then—only after her tenth birthday that spring had she been allowed to read the first two. No, back then, Laura had only told her enough about Everdeen sisters for them to pretend. But when the third book came out, Laura had suddenly declared that game off-limits. Danni had asked her why, but Laura had refused to say.

            Now she knew. The contrast between Laura not wanting to play a game with her because she cared about her and not wanting to play a game with her because she was too preoccupied with her own life sent a sharp ache up Danni’s throat.

--

            “I’m not playing, Danni!” Laura shouted, slamming her bedroom door closed.

            “But there’s no point planting a secret garden if there’s no Mrs. Medlock to take away the key and lock me in my room so I have to escape through a tapestry!” said Danni, pounding on the door. She tried the knob, but Laura had already locked it.

            “We don’t have tapestries!”

            “Yeah, but we have curtains. If you just help me take the screen off my window, I can escape through that.”

            “No.”

            “Come on! You won’t be Miss Minchin so I can pretend the wood playhouse is my secret Indian palace, and you won’t be Jadis so I can defend Narnia, and you won’t even be Hattie, even though you like bossing me around so much that you’d be a perfect Hattie!”

            “But you never do what I tell you, so would you really want to be Ella if I’m Hattie?”

            “Yes, because then at least you’d be playing with me!”           

            “I’m not playing.”

            “But Laaaaaura!”

            “Fine!”

            Danni blinked. “Really?”

            “Yeah. We’ll play Ramona and Beezus. ‘Ramona, you’re a pest! Go away!’ There. Game over.”

            “Ugh! That doesn’t count!”

            “Just leave me alone, Danni,” said Laura. “Not all of us are ten with no summer homework to do.”

            “You liar, you’re not doing homework! I saw you painting your nails and listening to your iPod just now!”

            “Just go check on your stupid tadpole and leave me alone!”

            “I hope Jason dumps you! Ever since you met him, you’ve turned completely boring and mean!”

            A sudden blare of pop music from inside the room ended the conversation, and Danni stormed away. She decided that she was going to be Ella anyway and proceeded to do exactly as Laura had said; she went outside to check on the tadpole. It had been a month since she caught it, and despite Laura’s taunts that it would die and her mom’s insistence that she put it back in the creek (which her dad had overruled with a long-winded speech about how this was the perfect way for Danni to learn responsibility), it was still alive. It had doubled in size and grown back legs. When she looked close enough, she thought she could see the stubby beginnings of front legs too.

--

            It was August. Danni’s knees were scabbed and scraped from all the times she’d fallen down while rollerblading up and down the neighborhood’s roughly paved streets, her skin was tan, her hair was several shades lighter, her hands were callused from the rough bark of the post oaks she climbed every day, and the soles of her feet were as tough as leather from running barefoot over every terrain their property offered, from the sticker patches around the house to the gravel driveways. The arrows sticking out of the target on the back of the shed were closer to the bullseye than they had been in June, and the creek and pond were both about two feet lower after a month with only one rainstorm.

            School would start in a week. Laura would be a junior in high school and Danni would be in the fifth grade, attending the intermediate school instead of the elementary school she’d attended since kindergarten. But that was a whole week away, so Danni didn’t have to worry about it yet. With the house invaded all too often by Jason these days, Danni practically lived in the backyard and pasture now, where her adventures continued to be solo. This particular afternoon saw her curled up in one of the post oaks—this one’s split trunk had a perfectly Danni-sized cradle about ten feet off the ground where the large branches diverged—, her nose buried in the newest Artemis Fowl book. If things were the way they should have been, Laura would be reading it aloud to her, complete with voices and gestures, like she had done with all the others in the series.

--

            “Mom, can’t you tell Laura she’s not allowed to invite Jason over anymore?” said Danni, her arms stuck straight out on either side of her while her mom adjusted the pins holding her half-finished Merida dress in place. They were getting a head start on Halloween costume preparations. She might not have the character’s wild red hair, but hers would be the only home-made, authentic-looking dress, and she would definitely be the only Merida of the girls at her school who could ride a horse or handle a bow and arrow.

            “Your dad and I would much rather she invite him over here as often as she wants during the daytime than for him to take her somewhere else.” She made a twirling motion with her finger, and Danni turned around to give her access to the back of the dress.

            “But Laura’s been so mean ever since he started coming over!” Danni protested.

            Her mom chuckled. “Laura’s sixteen,” she said, tugging here and there at the forest green fabric. “It’s a difficult time for her.”

            “What do you mean?”

            “It’s the same way for every teenager. They get old enough to drive and they suddenly think they have the whole world figured out, but in reality the only difference between them and little kids is hormones. It’s a heavy burden to think you know everything when you really don’t know much at all.”

            Danni frowned. “Are you sure an evil changeling didn’t just swap places with her?”

            “Yes. She’s just a normal teenager.”

            “Well then I’m not going to be a normal teenager.”

            Her mom laughed again. “I’ll remember you said that.”

--

            Suddenly uninterested in reading, Danni tucked the book into the crook of a slightly higher branch and swung down from her perch, landing like a cat on the grass, then springing upright and skipping over to where the horses were grazing next to the fence. She wasn’t allowed to ride them when her dad wasn’t home, not even if Laura (or Changeling Laura, as Danni had started calling her in her head lately) was riding. She clicked her tongue and held out her hand. Wiley, the stout, dark-coated mustang her dad had bought at an auction, was the first to perk up his ears and amble over.

            “Hey there, boy,” said Danni, patting Wiley on the nose. He snorted and she jumped back to avoid the spray of black mucous from his nostrils, but some of it still got on her shirt. With a noise of disgust, she walked away towards the fig trees, picking off the little bits of snot and wiping them on the grass as she went. When she reached the spot where the biggest fig trees met, she dropped to her knees and crawled under the crisscrossing branches that hid her fort from view. The bucket was still safely tucked right at the base of one of the trees. When she’d checked yesterday, the almost-frog had been climbing up on top of the little muddy bank at the edge of the bucket, all four legs fully developed and its tail mostly gone. As it had grown, it had gone from a dull brown to the most beautiful shade of green Danni had ever seen. About a week ago, she’d finally given it a name: Emmie, short for Emerald.

            She frowned. She couldn’t find the frog anywhere in the bucket. She poked around the moss around to see if Emmie was hiding in a corner somewhere, but found nothing. With a flood of anger, she realized what must have happened. A minute later, she was back inside the house and bursting into Laura’s room. “What did you do with Emmie, Laura?” she demanded. But then she froze. Laura was lying on her bed, her face buried in her arms, her shoulders shaking. “Laura?”

            Laura lifted her head and looked over at her. Her face was streaked with tears. “Go away, Danni,” she said. She didn’t say it in the snappish, rude voice she always used when she was being Changeling Laura, she just sounded miserable.

            “What happened?” said Danni, moving closer to the bed.

            “Jason dumped me, okay?” Laura bit out angrily, before giving herself over to a fresh wave of sobs.

            Danni watched her for a minute. She’d been hoping this would happen since practically the moment she met Jason, but somehow she felt no triumph. He was a big dumb jerk who had turned Laura into a completely different person, but maybe she really had cared about him. Danni climbed up on the bed and wrapped her arms around Laura’s shaking shoulders.

            “Ew, what’s on your hands?” said Laura, jumping up into a sitting position and scooting away.

            “Oh,” said Danni, looking at her hands. “It’s moss from Emmie’s bucket. She’s not there.”

            Laura looked at Danni, then wiped her eyes. “She’s a frog now,” she said. “She probably jumped away.”

            Danni wilted slightly where she sat. “I didn’t think about that.”

            “Or,” said Laura slowly, “maybe one of the Unseelies kidnapped her.”

            Danni turned to stare at her sister so fast that she cricked her neck.

            “We should go rescue her,” said Laura.

            “Really?” said Danni.

            “Yeah,” said Laura.

            Danni looked at the smeared makeup on her sister’s face. She had to do something to make sure this wasn’t just a one-time thing. A compromise. “After we save Emmie,” she said hesitantly, “if I let you paint my nails, will you play Narnia with me? You can be Susan if you want, like before. I won’t make you be Jadis.”

            Laura offered her a shaky smile. “Okay.”

The Dewberries

This is the recipe for the dewberry pie we made every year:

Berry Good Pie

1 9” pie shell
2 c berries (washed & drained)

Pour in shell

½ c sugar

Sprinkle over berries

¼ c flour
1 c sugar
½ c evaporated milk

Beat and pour over berries and sugar in shell.

¼ c butter
½ c sugar
¼ c flour

Cut in to form crumb mixture. Sprinkle over pie.

Bake at 350° for one hour.

After we moved to Utah, we couldn't do the dewberry tradition anymore, but I was determined to go home, so as soon as I graduated from high school, I ignored the full ride at the U and went straight back to College Station to attend Texas A&M. There, I introduced my roommate and one of the families I used to babysit for to dewberries. My freshman year, we had a good spring, with plenty of rain for the berries. We made a couple of pies and had some leftover berries to mix into vanilla ice cream. My sophomore year, it rained so much we might as well have called it a monsoon season. There were so many berries it was kind of ridiculous. But then, my junior year (and the last year I would spend in Texas before out-of-state tuition chased me back to Utah), there was a drought. A couple of years ago, I wrote this poem for a poetry class.

Broken Tradition

We went dewberry picking every May, my roommate and I,

Filling bucket after bucket with the sweet, wild fruit.

Laughing and trying to keep the heatstroke at bay.

The sun glared down, and the air around us seemed to sweat.

Filling bucket after bucket with the sweet, wild fruit,

We reached in amongst the tiny, brittle thorns.

The sun glared down, and the air around us seemed to sweat.

Dark purple juice dried inside the scratches in our skin.

We reached in amongst the tiny, brittle thorns,

Spikes that broke and lodged in knuckles and under nails

Dark purple juice dried inside the scratches in our skin

Highlighting the battle scars we gladly traded for our spoils.

But this year there was a drought.

The bone-dry ground produced no berries.

Only the withered, thorny vines of past seasons remained.

Along the rare country fencelines that sit beyond the city’s reach.

The bone-dry ground produced no berries.

We searched fruitlessly, our buckets empty

Along the rare country fencelines that sit beyond the city’s reach.

No reward for heatstroke this year.

We searched fruitlessly, our buckets empty.

We returned to the dorm with nothing to fill the pie crusts.

No reward for heatstroke this year—

My last year in Texas.

We went dewberry picking every May, my roommate and I,

Laughing and trying to keep the heatstroke at bay.

But this year there was a drought,

And only the withered, thorny vines of past seasons remained.

Farming of the Future

            My favorite of the TED talks I watched is probably Joe Salatin’s talk about the essence of farming. I’ve always brushed off the complaints of animal rights activists about how horribly the animals are treated before they get turned into hamburgers and chicken nuggets. I never really cared—the way I saw it, my personal participation in the market system is too negligible to affect what happens to the animals while they’re still alive, and since the one here on my plate is already dead, I may as well put it to good use and eat it. They were never going to convince me to become a vegetarian with their arguments about the welfare of the animals. Meat simply tastes too good for any consideration to be able to induce me to give it up, so I’ve dismissed the quality of life of the animals as not my concern. However, Salatin illustrated how this exact factor can benefit the hungry carnivore such as myself at the same time as it benefits the animals. By letting chickens live to the fullest potential of “essence of chicken,” they produced better eggs! How much better would cow’s milk taste if the cows were provided with everything they needed to discover the “essence of cow”? How much better would meat taste if it only came as the conclusion of a fulfilling animal life? These are all fascinating questions worth considering, and they might just steer me towards the organic foods aisle the next time I go to the grocery store.

            In three of the other TED talks I watched (by Mohamed Hage, Dickson Despommier, and Stephen Ritz), I could see a clear theme that farming is the key, not just to solving current and future food shortage problems, but to revitalizing our cities. Rooftop gardens and vertical farming can be an energy efficient and space efficient source of fresh food, fresh air, and employment in cities. “Edible walls” are a fantastic way to connect people (especially underprivileged kids) to each other, the earth, their community, and future career possibilities. All of these videos do away with the age-old idea that farming must be done in the open fields. It can be on top of buildings, inside them, and it can even turn sideways and run up our very walls.

 
It needn’t be done only by the stereotypical farmer—anyone can get involved, and they won’t necessarily end up covered in dirt and sweat. Better food can result, because we can control the very elements (as in atoms, not earth, air, fire, water) in which the plants grow. There is no need for pesticides or other harsh chemicals. The weather does not control the crop yields. Ultimately, urban farming is the bright, exciting future of food.

Farming: the Existential Crisis

            The readings for this course began with a feeling of optimism and idealism. Jefferson’s yeoman farmer is the perfect American citizen. Things darkened somewhat with Willa Cather, but at least remained nostalgic. She portrays farming as backbreaking, yes, but still meaningful and a source of as many joys as heartaches. Some more cynicism followed when we looked at the hilariously false advertising of Idaho, luring unsuspecting farmers into a land that did not want to be farmed. From there, we tumbled steeply downhill with Steinbeck. Unlike Ántonia’s family, the Joads don’t own the land they work; they are only allowed the means of scraping a living by the mercy of businessmen and bankers they’ve never even met before.

            We next studied Tomás Rivera, and got a glimpse at a side of farming just as depressing as Steinbeck’s. Unlike the Okies, Rivera’s migrant farmers had plenty of work to do, but the pay was barely enough to survive on, the conditions were appalling, and the bosses were suspicious, greedy tyrants. There seemed to be no justice for the child dying of heat stroke after working a ten-hour day in the fields, in Texas, in the middle of summer. Or for the child shot in the head for the crime of trying to quench his desperate thirst in the cows’ water trough. Ownership, then, seems to be the key to deriving fulfillment from working the earth. If the farmer doesn’t own the land he works, then he is nothing but a cog in a machine. Indistinctive, interchangeable, expendable. Still, even at that point, I thought “Well, the things Rivera wrote about happened decades ago. It isn’t like that anymore, right?” If only.

            According to a recent article on Cracked.com (which is mainly known for its humor articles, but has recently expanded to include a series of exposés about various sides of life the average middle class American has no knowledge of), the situation for migrant farmers has seen little (if any) improvement since Rivera’s childhood. Even now, in 2014, they still live in chicken coops, for which they must sometimes pay rent (Evans). The children are expected to start working at ages as young as six. They have to live wherever the work is, so education becomes fragmented and inconsistent. It’s one of the most dangerous jobs out there, and it’s still perfectly legal for children to do it.

            I feel so helpless about all of this, not only because I have no idea how I could personally help the situation, but because I can’t see how positive change could even be implemented on a larger scale. We like our food cheap and readily available, most of us don’t like growing or raising it ourselves, and we rarely think about how it made it to the grocery store. Until I read Rivera and this article, I had no idea there was such a thing as a migrant worker, let alone what it means to be one.

Work Cited

Evans, Robert. “5 Awful Things I Learned as a Child Laborer (in the USA).” Cracked.             Cracked.com, 29 Sept. 2014. Web. 16 October 2014.

One Hour of FarmVille

So I have now played FarmVille for an hour. Behold the fruits of my labor:

What's that, you say? You don't see the aforementioned fruits?

Well that would be because it takes FOUR MORE HOURS before I can harvest anything. You see the little farmer me there on the side? Even her tiny, low-resolution features seem to reflect my boredom and disdain. Don't believe me? Take a closer look:

That is the face of a woman who has given up on trying to find meaning in anything.

Now, I've had gaming problems before. When I was in grade school, I enjoyed endless (meaning that there is no clear storyline or ultimate goal) games like World of Warcraft to a certain point, but my addiction was Pharaoh, a simple but awesome ancient Egyptian city-builder. I could easily sink many hours of every day into that game, to the point that I forgot to be hungry when mealtimes came around. And more recently, the games like Candy Crush were my poison. Knowing that FarmVille was a lot like a city builder and that I am quite capable of getting addicted to games, I was very anxious about playing this game.

I needn't have feared. The interface is clumsy, buggy, and confusing. You don't see results from your labor for far too long for it to feel exciting, and when I couldn't even find a red barn to build on my land, I stopped caring entirely.

Mother Hubbard

Ma was heavy, but not fat.
Strong, broad, bare feet moved quickly and deftly

Sparse, steel-gray hair gathered in a wispy knot

Strong, freckled arms, hands delicate and girlish

Hazel eyes have experienced all possible tragedy

Steps into a high calm—

The citadel that could not be taken.

Healer, arbiter, goddess.

__________

I scrapped together this found poem from the only bit of The Grapes of Wrath that I actually enjoyed: the introduction of Ma Joad in chapter eight. By that point, I'd grown to expect unflattering, uncouth descriptions of characters, so Ma Joad was incredibly refreshing, and her reunion with her ex-convict son Tom was heartwarming and touching. It was one of the least cynical passages of the entire novel, giving this hard-working, selfless mother the reverence due her and allowing her this tender moment with her boy. It lasts barely a page and a half, but by the end of it, I was in tears.

Superman: Origins

 

I’ve always felt that Superman was boring because he’s basically invincible, and the only weakness he has is one he can never overcome. It doesn’t seem like the best formula for producing stunning character arcs (which was exactly the problem that drove me away from Smallville after a few seasons). Fans of Superman have informed me that I’m missing the point; he’s not supposed to be the flawed anti-hero like Tony Stark—he’s supposed to be an uncorrupted symbol of hope. No matter how bad the world gets, there’s one almost perfect man who will never turn his back on humanity. And that’s kind of beautiful (not to mention allegorical).

As I was thinking that over, it occurred to me that Superman's origins are highly significant to the kind of person he is. Now, when I say "origins," I'm not talking about Krypton. I'm talking about the Kent family farm, where he grew up. One of the best known, most beloved superheroes of comic book history is a humble farm boy from Kansas. But is the farm where he fights the bad guys? No, because the Kent farm and the town of Smallville are home, and no evil dwells there. The farm is wholesome and idyllic, a quaint paradise, and it’s the reason Superman is a wholesome, ideal individual. The evil springs up from and resides in the big city, Metropolis. Essentially, the big, corrupt city needs the good, honest, hard-working farm boy to swoop in and save it.

Clark Kent’s farm upbringing says a lot about farm culture in the U.S. The Kent farm is exactly the stereotypical image of a Great Plains family farm: red barn, slightly rusted grain silo, comfortable and inviting farmhouse, tractors, and livestock, all surrounded by acres and acres of tall, green rows of corn. And the people are just as idyllic as the farm itself. Jonathan and Martha Kent are kind, wise, sincere, and loving, and they encourage their adopted son to reach his full potential. Growing up on a farm did not turn the last son of Krypton into an uneducated bumpkin; it molded him into the kind of man who would devote his life to helping others.

Perhaps this was accidental. Perhaps the creators of the original comics weren’t trying to make a statement about the character of farmers in general when they crafted Superman’s backstory. But if it was an accident, then it seems all the more telling about how Americans perceive the farm. It’s not about being complex and clever; it’s about being a constant, simple standard of goodness.

Like Mother, Like Son

            Mary E. Wilkins’ “The Revolt of ‘Mother’” is a highly amusing tale of one long-suffering farmwife gaining a well-earned victory over a husband who had grown far too accustomed to focusing solely on his own goals while treating her like a doormat. Wilkins does not devote much of the page space to the children of this couple, but the words she does spend on them—particularly on the son, Sammy, add a considerable measure of depth to the story. Sammy is the barometer of the power balance in the household and a forecast of the effects of the examples parents set for their children.

            The fourth and final member of the family to appear in the story, Sammy introduces himself much like his father: very like Adoniram in looks, set on his own tasks (no matter how insignificant they are), keen to attempt an “ignore it until it goes away” strategy on the females of the household, and stubbornly monosyllabic when this strategy fails. His mother and sister are confused and upset by the ground-breaking of the new barn, yet he is more interested in combing his hair and tying his shoes than in telling them the information he’s known for three months. He “didn’t think ‘twould do no good” to tell them Adoniram’s plans, either because he knows his father wouldn’t have “nothin’ to say” if they raised objections, or because he has grown to believe that their objections simply don’t matter (102). His father’s example has taught him well: the plight of woman is not worth considering, particularly when it is inconvenient to the ambitions of man. If nothing changes, he will surely grow up to imitate his father’s behavior as well as his appearance and become the kind of man who takes the women around him for granted.

            Fortunately for Sammy’s future wife and daughters, his mother is not the doormat his father believes her to be. As her scheme to claim the new barn for the promised house she’s been dreaming of for four decades unfolds, Sammy’s silences change from obstinate and dismissive to respectful, and he begins to see himself not as superior to his older sister, but as an equal. Wilkins conveys this transformation with subtle, but very effective language: “Nanny and Sammy stared at each other;” “Nanny and Sammy watched;” “Nanny and Sammy followed their mother’s instructions without a murmur; indeed, they were overawed” (107). Wilkins repeatedly pairs the siblings’ names (notably, Sammy’s name is always second) and unites them in their actions. Nanny has always been respectful of and a willing helper to her mother, and syntactically attaching Sammy to her in this way elevates him to the same status. He is becoming a better, more considerate son.

            As Adoniram’s return from his trip draws Sarah’s barn-to-home conversion project to its climax, Sammy’s behavior continues to improve. After several more “Nanny and Sammy” moments, Wilkins gives us an even greater demonstration of Sammy’s transformed character: “Nanny kept behind her mother, but Sammy stepped suddenly forward, and stood in front of her” (109). The new conjunction separating the names of the brother and sister is crucial. Sammy has now surpassed his sister, and is willing to defend his mother from his father should things turn unpleasant when he enters the room. By quietly and cunningly taking what she wanted for the first time in Sammy’s life, Sarah shattered all of her son’s notions of how marriages are supposed to work. She earns his respect and allegiance far beyond anything he’d ever felt towards his father.

            Without Sammy’s subtle transformation over the course of a handful of sentences scattered through the story, “The Revolt of ‘Mother’” might not have been much more than merely amusing. Sammy’s character suggests something of greater value. A boy may look, talk, and act like his father, but one bold action from his mother could be all it takes to completely change the trajectory of his life. Sarah’s revolt defeated Adoniram, but what Sammy has learned from them could spare him from a marriage defined by battles of wills. It isn’t just Sarah’s living situation and her marriage with Adoniram’s that will improve as a result of her actions. Sarah’s triumph is one that will last generations.

The Wolves of Russia

Last week, I read Willa Cather's My Ántonia for the first time. It was an interesting experience, because I found it very easy to read even though the pacing was slow. (I have a short attention span, so that doesn't usually happen.) The language of the book is beautiful, whether the subject matter in any given chapter is miserable or happy, which I think is the biggest factor in its enjoyability from cover to cover. It certainly isn't the narrator who makes it enjoyable. I'm not a huge fan of first person in general, and when it is used, I like for the narrator to actually have an active role in the story, but Jim Burden is incredibly passive and almost useless most of the time, however impressive (if biased) his powers of observation. He's a good storyteller (and a little bit too proud of that). He doesn't merely tell the story of his experiences surrounding Ántonia; he recounts the stories the other characters told him. These stories range from charming, like Ántonia's father's stories about Bohemia, to grisly, like the man who committed suicide by wheat thresher right in front of Ántonia.

One story, however, stands apart from the others as serious nightmare fuel: Russian Peter's confession about the reason he and Pavel left Russia. They were in a wedding party, happily traveling through the woods from the church ceremony to the banquet on a snowy winter's night, when they were set upon by hundreds of wolves. Peter and Pavel were in the lead sledge with the bride and groom, and after hearing and seeing the wolves overtake each sledge behind them one by one, their own horses beginning to lose strength. The village at last in sight, they threw the bride and groom out of their own sledge in order to ease their horses' burden and give themselves a better chance of survival. I had to sit there for a few minutes after I got to the end of Russian Peter's story to process my horror. Not to mention my disgust. Whatever happened to chivalry, to women and children first? I'm sure the bride wasn't weighing down the horses nearly as much as Peter and Pavel! Ugh.

But it gets better. I started Googling to see if there were/are really enough wolves in Russia for something like that to be plausible, and I stumbled across this little gem in the archives of the New York Times. Guess what, guys? Russian Peter's tale is based on a TRUE STORY that happened in Russia in 1911 (seven years before My Ántonia was published). Enjoy.

Edit: I have been invited to write about this discovery for the Cather Newsletter.

At the Farmer's Market

            Today, I caught the bus down to Willow Park and the Cache Valley Gardener’s Market. After hearing good things about it for so long, I finally made the trip. At first, when I got off the bus, I was very confused. There’s a clothing exchange market at the north end of the fairgrounds, and I initially thought that was the Gardener’s Market. It seemed odd that there weren’t any booths with produce inside the pavilion, but maybe I’d missed them because I arrived towards the end of market time. However, I’ve been to Willow Park before, and I knew that the fairgrounds were something different. So I left the pavilion and all the used-smelling clothes behind and wandered south.

            I passed a bunch of people preparing for what seemed to be an ultimate Frisbee tournament, a couple of family reunions, and the fairgrounds stables before I finally reached Willow Park itself. I could see white tent covers in the distance, and I knew that this time, I’d found the market. Still expecting it to be mainly produce stands, I was delighted to find such a wide variety of things being sold in the booths. It was like being back at the Renaissance Festival, minus the costumes and the jousting. There was a booth full of delicate wire jewelry. I spent so much time admiring it that I felt guilty when I walked on without buying any. There were a few food stands, and I quickly got in line for fresh-squeezed peach limeade, which was delicious. Next, my eye was caught by a booth where a man was selling a selection of rather beautiful rolling pins and breadboards. I bought a rolling pin. I already have one, but it’s only 10”—which those of you with cooking experience may recognize as being too short to roll almost anything with. This one is gorgeous and longer than my tiny rolling pin and its handles combined.

            I walked on. There was a booth selling magnets made from bottle caps and pictures of fandom things, so I bought a set of Avatar: The Last Airbender magnets. They are awesome. I will not be asking my flatmates’ permission before I put them on the fridge.

            Then, of course, the produce. There were about seven or eight booths selling fruits and vegetables grown in Cache Valley. Many of them sported signs that boasted multi-generational family farms. I walked back and forth along these booths as nonchalantly as I could before I was able to single out the one that had what I was looking for (raspberries and tomatoes) and one of those multi-generational signs. Once I found the right booth, I waited until it didn’t look like there would be any customers for at least a minute or two, then stepped forward.

            “So how long has your family been doing this?” I asked the smiling, forty-something lady standing on the other side of the produce. She looked like she’d be easier to talk to than any of the overalls-wearing old men sitting nearby (as much as those men reminded me of my grandpa).

            “We’ve been coming to the farmer’s market for the last eight years,” she said. “But the farm itself—we’ve been on it for four generations.”

            “Oh, wow,” I said. “How many acres do you have?”

            “Eighty,” she said. “But we only grow produce on about fifteen. We do hay on the rest of it.”

            “I have an uncle in Idaho who grows alfalfa,” I said, nodding.

            “We used to only do hay and alfalfa, but the boys wanted to try produce.”

            I asked her what the growing season is like, and mentioned that my grandpa used to be water marshal when he had his farm in Morgan. He hated all the drama. She laughed and agreed that water is kind of a tricky issue up here in Utah. She told me how they plant lettuce, cilantro, and some herbs early in the season, because those plants can handle the cold. Then they do strawberries, potatoes, beans, peppers, tomatoes, and summer squash in the first half of summer, and finally corn and pumpkins in the second half of summer. Having only ever worked on a half-acre garden when I was growing up, I didn’t realize that you could extend your harvest by staggering your planting. Instead of planting all of one crop at once, you do some one week, some the next, some the next, and so on for about five weeks.

            “This all sounds like pretty hard work,” I observed after she told me all this about their farm.

            “Oh, yeah,” she said, her eyes widening. “Farming is probably some of the hardest work, and it isn’t for a lot of pay, but the boys love it, so it’s worth it.”

            As I headed back to the bus stop, careful not to let my rolling pin smash the raspberries and tomatoes, I wondered what it must feel like to put in months and months of backbreaking work, and then to have all those baskets and bushels of plump, ripe fruits and vegetables of every color to show for it. I’ve made things before, and I’ve stood back to admire my work, but it’s been at least ten years now since I helped anything grow.

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I'm the daughter of a farm boy and a small town girl. I grew up on a four-acre piece of land in Texas with two little brothers, and I spent my childhood picking dewberries, climbing the post oaks, exploring the creek bed, and riding horses. This blog is where I'll be exploring my farm roots through a mixture of memoir, literary analysis, and cultural analysis (with perhaps the odd recipe or two).

My mom's maternal grandparents had a dry farm in Trenton, and her dad was raised by his grandparents, who were farmers. My mom grew up in Logan, but they had enough property for a few fruit trees, sixty beehives, and a huge garden. My dad grew up on a farm in West Bountiful, where they grew asparagus, corn (field and grain), tomatoes, wheat, potatoes, barley, and hay, and they raised cows, hogs, and hens. Dad's dad was a hardworking farmer until literally the day before he died, and he and Grandma both grew up on farms. When I was a year old, Dad got a job in College Station, Texas, and we lived there until I was seventeen.

I was kind of a tomboy when I was a kid--I suppose that's what happens when you have two younger brothers, no sisters, and no neighborhood girls to play with. I would lead my brothers on our adventures in the backyard and pasture. We never succeeded in persuading Dad to make us an actual treehouse, but that didn't stop us from equipping every good climbing tree on the property with the trappings of a tree fort. We slung buckets attached to ropes over the branches, so that food and gear could be hoisted up to whichever of us was keeping watch from the treetops. We'd dig in the creek bed like pirates looking for treasure. We also had ground forts between the fig trees. The low branches with their huge leaves made the perfect cover, and luckily no fire ants ever built mounds there.

Every May, the dewberries would grow all along the fencelines of our property. Dewberries are like the best kept secret of our part of Texas (and wherever else they grow, I'm sure). Nobody with neatly groomed fencelines would ever discover them, and certainly nobody with a suburban lawn. They were left to the country neighborhoods like ours, with untamed grazing pastures sparsely fenced with barbed wire. Over time, the vines coil and loop their way up fenceposts and sprawl out along the wire. The tiny, spiny thorns are more wicked than any metal barbs, but it's worth scraping up your hands to get the berries waiting amongst them. After we finished stripping the berries from our own fencelines, we'd drive out in search of other fencelines where nobody had noticed the berries growing, and we'd pick those too. We usually had enough to make a few dewberry pies, add berries to our cereal, make dewberry ice cream for the church ice cream socials, and then still have enough to freeze a few gallon-sized bags.

For about ten years, my dad would plow the northwestern portion of the pasture (the part you had to drive past when you were entering the subdivision) for a garden, and we would grow corn, squash, cucumbers, tomatoes, cabbage, and I think I remember doing potatoes one year. When me and my brother Ben were young enough to be tricked into thinking that work was fun (this was before Josh was old enough to help), the whole family would work on the garden together, and we loved eating corn on the cob at the end of the summer. But as I got older, I got more and more irrationally terrified of bees and wasps (despite having never been stung), so I'd start weeding, but as soon as a bee or wasp wafted over, I would sprint back to the house in panic. Eventually, Ben and I were so resistant to working on the garden and Dad was so busy with his actual job that he gave up on it and fenced it off as extra pasture for the horses.

We got our first horse when I was about seven. He was a gorgeous mustang, and Dad named him Wiley (because he's wild) on my suggestion. A few years later, after we'd boarded a couple of other horses for a while, I wanted a horse of my own, and Dad found a gorgeous paint mare for sale. But instead of buying it, he made me work for it. Together, we mowed the lawn of the mare's owners for two years. At the end of the two years, I had Scoot (the mare) and Dad had Skip (her half-brother, a paint gelding). We trained them and rode them until I was seventeen, when we moved to the suburbs in Utah and couldn't keep them on our property anymore.

We also raised Barbados sheep (which look a lot like goats). These sheep are extremely cute for the first few months of their lives, but because they don't grow wool, they just end up looking kind of fat and lumpy as adults. Much less cute. We got two pregnant ewes, and when they gave birth, we made the mistake of playing with the new lambs too soon, so one of the ewes abandoned one of her lambs. I named him Little Buddy and bottle fed him until he was old enough to graze. He would bleat loud enough for me to hear him inside the house every morning. The plan with these sheep was to eventually slaughter and eat them, but that plan failed. Three of the lambs (including Little Buddy) died because they overate and there was some kind of toxicity thing with the bacteria in the grass, and then a neighbor's dog got into their pen and killed one of the ewes. In the end, we only slaughtered one, and let the last one run around with the horses until she thought she was a horse too.