walk

Like a deer yarded up in the snowy river bottom chewing on the diminishing store of palatable twigs, I had become sufficiently disgusted with my winter’s restriction and wanted to get out on the prairie. Grabbing my walking stick, I headed for the fields beyond the yard full of hope that I might go some distance without the need of snowshoes on this warmer day in the middle of February. I was not disappointed for the snow was hard enough with the constant wind and the few warmer temperatures to bear my weight. I judged it to vary from eight inches to a foot and a half in depth, depending upon where the wind had left it. Nowhere did it fail to cover the land. This has not always been the case in my lifetime here, but it does seem to be an increasing trend lately.

Setting out for the back corner where I had set temporary fence around the new hay seeding to protect it as the cow herd foraged and rummaged through the corn stalks, I resolved to walk that fence if I could and see how much of it was held in the icy crust on top.

Polywire held in the grip of the icy crust cannot often be pulled loose without straining and breaking the wire. And if it is left til spring, the melt will bear it down getting it within the reach of the mice that have spent the winter under the snow feasting on the residue meant for the farm’s cows. And they will chew the wire apart at various intervals. But all of it hung in place between the posts.

I noticed the color of the snow. Most of it was quite white but those areas along the west and north boundaries of the farm, just down the prevailing north and west winds from the neighbor’s tillage were beginning to gray and some of the leeward edges of the snow drifts that were high enough to slow the wind showed delicate patterns traced in black. The same was true of the edges of the hay field we had tilled to prepare it for corn planting in the coming spring. The National Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) regards all soil in my part of the county as non highly erodible land (NHEL). The elements beg to differ, and if I am serious about farming responsibly I must hold myself to account for my role in it.

But it was in a sense, a walk over the wind made visible, for the snow lay in drifts on top of drifts, some of it fantastical in shape with irregular scoops underneath the forward edge of the original drift where the wind had managed to scour out some of the softer snow underneath the icy surface. Much of the snow surface was pockmarked with the effects of a short prior thaw, but this was overlaid with oblong drifts of newer whiter snow. The soil life and the new dormant hay plants seemed safe to me, not always the case here when snow is lighter and the winds are able to move it all to the protective tree groves and the winter livestock areas.

There is an earnest teenage Swedish girl traveling the earth these days using whatever mode of transport that is not a jet plane which she regards as unnecessarily wasteful of the earth’s gifts. She means to go wherever world leaders gather and lecture and harangue and shame them without mercy for their lack of attention to the deteriorating situation with the climate. I find myself cheering for her. Go Greta! But what I fear she is finding is that even though she has somehow slipped through the cracks in the wall that allows these masters of the universe types to determinedly ignore any who rise to challenge them, her words are not as effective as she must wish. And I think that is because these elites know very well that even if they were inclined to impose upon themselves the discipline to give up some of their advantages in favor of a better world for all people and a healthier earth, they are in reality powerless to effect this kind of change.

Top down management decisions cannot cure what ails the earth and its climate, though such people could resolve to try to get out of the way of those that can. And those that can are all of us, if we choose to. But there are major issues with us:

• How do we care for the earth if we are not at home on it? Because we as humans are limited creatures, our care is necessarily so. When I took my little wintertime walk, I was repeating what I had done many times over many seasons in my seventy odd years of life. I am familiar here. There is no such thing as being at home on all of earth. Globalization is a delusion. A home must be human sized, because we are. And that means there must be many of us to properly care for what we have been given.
• How can we try to help heal the earth? Are we not allowing technology increasingly to come between our life and other life on our farms? Don’t we each year have fewer people on the land? And do we not have the economy forcefully separating us from the work we ought to be doing?
• We have a long tradition, both political and religious, of despising that which is close and yearning after what is afar. Why do we understand Pluto better than the soil and its life under our feet?
• Do we have the nerve and resolve to get our wants under sufficient control that we do not destroy that which we did not make and which sustains us in order to fulfill our every whim?
• Lifelong care of something precious must be preceded by taking delight in it. But delight is far too much an oddity in the world we have built around us. If we knew how to delight, that world would not be what it is.

I was not always the man who just took a walk in the snow. The idea of walking slowly in the cold, of noticing the wind scallops in the snow, of musing over the difference between what is and what was would not have given me pause twenty years ago. But the time in farming here and coping with agribusiness as it appears in our country have made me sober up and think that I must have missed a lot of sign posts on the way to where I am now.

And so I stood for long periods listening, alert to what I might perceive under the snow, trying in vain to hear the tiny lives there getting about their business and resolving to learn more about their world in whatever time I have left on the land. And I listened too, between the clang of the first Payloader scoop of frozen sugar beets hitting the bottom of the semi trailer three miles to the northwest and the sound of another Payloader revving as it hit the silage pile at the ten thousand cow dairy factory just two miles north and it seemed to me that we have missed the point and gone on on a long tangent and that if we are ever to belong here, to become native to this place, we have to begin to get quiet enough to think we hear the wind in the eight foot tall prairie grass, the sound that our grandfathers heard in this place.

The solutions to our lives in this place will only come in the quiet and humility of a man, any man or woman willing to stand and try to hear the sounds of life among the clatter of industry. They cannot be theorized and imposed from above or bought and paid for.