I’m not exactly a ray of sunshine. I aged into the role of curmudgeon early, and have spent the last decade or so refining and perfecting my own brand of homespun cynicism. I find my pleasures in life, to be sure, but in a world that so often seems to be sliding gracelessly into ruin, a healthy dose of misanthropy seems only appropriate.
I mention this as preamble to the fact that I found myself this past weekend regaling a crowd of fellow farmers with an uplifting anecdote about slaughtering a runaway steer in the parking lot of an industrial park. It wasn’t the sort of tale I think they’d shown up for, but it was about all I had to offer. To clarify, the gathering where I spoke was an annual meeting of the New Connecticut Farmer Alliance. They call it the ‘Hootenanny’. The NCFA is a swell little organization that I’ve been quasi-involved with for the last six or seven years. It’s the local branch of a national movement designed to connect the upcoming generation of mostly young folks looking to make a life in agriculture. At ten years into the farm, I’m not sure I qualify as a ‘new’ farmer, but I’m happy to have a chance to drink a few free beers, chat with the friends I don’t see often enough, and tell the occasional horrifying and depressing story of agricultural misadventure.
It’s worth noting that I didn’t foist my tale of misery of the crowd uninvited. Every year the get together has a storytelling session that they call Cabbage Moth Radio, after The Moth Radio Hour, an public radio program focusing on amateur raconteurs. Several years back I was asked if maybe I had a good story to present to help get the show rolling. I’m not one to turn down a request, but I was a tad reluctant: when all is well on the farm things tend to move along in a smooth and boring fashion, and so all my engaging experiences come from moments of tragedy and disorder. So that evening I told the crowd-pleasing yarn of how my vet and I had struggled together in the middle of a rainstorm to birth a turned calf, both of us with an arm up to the elbow in the poor laboring cow. The birth ended badly with a dead calf, and ultimately a dead cow, and I left the audience with no clear moral to the story and, instead, a festivity-derailing sense of lingering doom. I wisely took the next few years off from storytelling duties.
But this year I was asked again to offer up an anecdote, and again I had to turn to the wellspring of disaster which seems to engulf the farm on a regular basis. I leavened this years tale of bovine atrocity as best I could, gallows humor being a favorite medium of mine, but even with the laughs it was a sad story. I’ll leave the full telling of it for another day, but suffice it to say that it involved me chasing an escaped steer, with blood streaming from my newly knocked-down face, and then my having to cut the wounded animal’s throat as it stumbled about in the parking lot besides the slaughterhouse. A fun account, and sure to please.
The story was received politely, if not enthusiastically; my wife at the very least told me I’d done a fine job and no one outright shunned me for the remainder of the evening. I offered the story as a cautionary tale, one that might not be fun to hear but is worth hearing. It was a story of how even the best laid plans can unexpectedly go wrong in an instant. That remains all too true in agriculture, a lifestyle dependent on weather, machinery, and the cooperation of large and unruly livestock. I wonder if this isn’t the best use of my natural negativity: to settle into the role of crotchety old doomsayer of my farming community. I could show up from time to time to make dire pronouncements and offer rueful tales of faming gone wrong, and then hobble off to my corner to sip whiskey and mutter. The young farmers would regard me with a shiver and refer to me as ‘Old Man Truelove’, and I’d curse the folly of youth and remind them that winter must always follow summer. That sounds just like the sort of role my bitter little heart has been aching to play all along. Bah humbug.
The Edible Complex 