Reflections on National Farmers Day

Me in my vegetable patch, circa age 8

It’s National Farmers Day. For the occasion, I am restoring a post I published here in 2017, then moved over to Medium when I did a big purge of all the non-show biz related posts on Travalanche. I’m moving it back for a variety of reasons. A) Medium is now a paid subscription site, making posts less accessible; B) It ties in to my recent Rhode Island post; C) It sheds light on show business related posts like this and this and this and this; D) I’m always inserting my life and opinions into Travalanche posts anyway; and E) It remains my intention to write about every damn thing under the sun, whether it sings and dances or not. So here we go (again) with this piece on The Day I Chose Not to Be a Farmer:

My sons are the first generation in my family never to have had anything to do with a farm. Both my mother’s and father’s families were predominantly farm people stretching back through the centuries far back into Medieval antiquity. The chain leads all the way to my father, who grew up on a Tennessee tenant farm, and my mother, whose entire extended family were New England dairy farmers.

My three older half brothers used to work at an uncle’s dairy farm at the end of their street, and my first job was also on a dairy farm, although it was a little farther away — about a ten minute ride by car. I worked for this old Yankee gent Tom Hoyle, who had about a hundred head of dairy cows and essentially worked his family farm alone. He had no wife or children, and just his aging mother to make him meals. My brother worked there and then got me the weekend job when I was 13. Tom and I barely exchanged two words during entire shifts, but I mucked stalls, and herded cows in and out of the barn, and worked milking machines and harvested alfalfa and baled and stacked hay and drove tractors. Indeed, I did, which it might amuse my city friends to know.

When I was about 15 I came to what I think of as a kind of melancholy crossroads. My high school buddies — like ALL of them — worked as bus boys and waiters at a country inn in our town. This place:

The charming New England Inn where I had my first “legit” employment. I was heartbroken to learn it had recently been torn down. It was built in 1831.

And they were constantly on me to quit my job at the farm and join them there. And I was reluctant. I’m not sure why. I liked working on the farm. I liked the physical labor, the peace and quiet of it, the tradition of it. When I had been very young, about five years old, I had actually announced to my father and grandfather that I wanted to be a farmer when I grew up, and they just laughed and laughed. Because their experience of it was not the slightest bit romantic. “We’ll see,” they said, “We’ll see.” So leaving the farm gave me a feeling of something like guilt, like I’d be letting someone down. And my friends were like, “Big deal! So he’ll get someone else!” My friends told me I was exploited. I was getting two dollars an hour at the farm, which was better than my income from the paper route (my previous enterprise), but still not the $3.14 which was the minimum wage at the time.

So I finally caved and quit the farm and became a dishwasher at the inn and enrolled in social security and paid payroll taxes and became part of the Great Holy System, and indeed had lots of fun and hijinks with my pals at work. But it only occurred to me recently, the SYMBOLISM of what had happened. At the farm, I was communing with an experience that had always been my family’s portion for literally CENTURIES. My family, on both sides, were rural people, farmers or not far removed, since like the beginning of time it seems. I’ve recently researched it. You have to go back to the 17th century to find some forbears of mine who came from a city like London or Edinburgh and there are few enough of those. In the old country, too, most of my ancestors were farmers. And now I was turning my back on it somehow…to take part in a different sort of tradition, the dumb show of creating a fake authentic New England experience for tourists. Soon I would join those tourists as an outsider and my days of authenticity were behind me.

In the year 1900, 41% of the U.S. workforce was still involved in agriculture, including all 8 of my great grandparents. By the year 2000, that number was down to less than 2%. Along the way, something especially perverse has happened. Huge sectors of the population are unemployed, aimless, directionless. The mechanization of the farm made a great deal of sense when there were industrial jobs to move to. But now those are gone, too. The masses, no doubt, are grateful that they no longer need to break their backs. But we have this strange situation of machines raising food to feed millions of people with no reason to get up in the morning. Statistics from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration say about 20% of Americans are suffering from some form of mental illness (although that’s a 2014 figure — surely it has grown considerably since November of 2016. It’ll be hard to tell when there are no longer government agencies which measure such things, much to the convenience of a leadership that will benefit from that ignorance). I don’t know if farming made people happy; but I’m certain it didn’t leave much time for lying around being unhappy.

John Adams, lawyer, politician, President of the United States, co-author of the Declaration of Independence, never precisely HAD to continue farming once he attained success in life, but he never stopped doing it. His family had always done it. To stop doing so was kind of unthinkable, nonsensical, to him. Why would you ever BUY food when you can GROW it? Economists have taught us why it makes sense for only a few to grow it, but that’s just economic — material — sense. Spiritually, it may have been a bad bargain.

Anyway, I’m going to go ahead and guess the farm I worked at (called Elm Knoll) is now as dead as the Larchwood Inn. The only reference I find to it online is in Tom’s sister’s obituary.

Sic gloria transit mundi!