A thunderstorm is bearing down on our old farmhouse on Iowa Highway
7. The sky has turned black, and my family is near the broken window. Mom is
looking for a $5 bill that has mysteriously disappeared. My dad is the subject
of her anger, which matches the fury of the approaching storm.
“I don’t know where it is, Gam!”
He exclaims it almost as if he’s having a good time, mixing
genuine innocence with a trickster’s twinkling eye. Dad probably knows that he
deserves to get soaked, but is attempting to avoid being struck by her
lightning.
“Pat! A $5 bill may not mean much to you, but it’s sure
worth a hell of a lot to me!”
Thunder cracks loudly, and warm rain pulses in sheets
through the window. Pastel bath towels from the nearby bathroom are tossed underneath
the window’s sill, and my mom’s determined hands mop up the pooling rainwater
on the wooden floor.
**********
The mystery of the $5 bill remains. I’m fairly certain that
if I investigated the fight some thirty years later with its witnesses as my
subjects, it would be a cold case with few leads.
Today I live in a different old farmhouse, but with my own husband
on a quiet gravel road in Wisconsin. The windows keep out the rain, but
sections of plaster occasionally crash to the floor off of the upstairs
ceilings, the subject of a leaky roof and a century’s worth of service.
Our disagreements are less about money, and more about the
meaning of our lives. Why are we on this farm? And what is the purpose of our
existence here?
So now I’m back on a farm, and I’m thinking … what happened
to that $5 bill?
***********
My husband and I are pig farmers. We’ve gone the way of
organic, and have started a business selling pork directly to customers at a
local farmers’ market, and to our friends in Minneapolis.
Each month I take three grown pigs to the local butcher
shop, and I pay them $1,000. I come home with coolers full of meat.
And each month I call the local feed mill, and they deliver
a truck full of organic grain, and I pay them
$700.
And each week, we go to the Viroqua farmers’ market. We cook
up samples, and with the delicious smell of sausage and meat wafting through
the air, we come home with about $500 each time.
It’s true that we do have a bit of money left over to cover
a few things, like our truck’s gas and repairs, pig fencing, and pasture seed.
But nothing for our time.
It makes you start to wonder, how did my parents even get
that $5 bill, with a farm income and no town jobs?
************
We moved to an area a few years ago that reminds me of my
childhood. There are small farms with struggling operations. Tiny towns are sort
of hanging on. Vacant buildings line Main Streets, with scattered bars and
restaurants sprinkled in between, captained by men who have been at the helm
for decades. They look as tired as their surroundings.
I work from home, with a job that pays me a decent wage. I
use my mind through a computer screen and a mobile phone, living on government
contracts, helping agencies to implement transportation plans and projects.
My husband uses his mind for a paycheck as well, swimming
through paperwork and appointments on behalf of a government contractor. He
helps people with disabilities find jobs in these small towns, and the “Department
of Give People Jobs” foots the bill.
Our paychecks go toward our farm mortgage and food, fixing up
the farmhouse and outbuildings, dinners out, repairs for our cars, and taxes
and utilities. And then of course we trade cash for pork and pork for cash, and
that all evens out in the end.
************
At the farmers’ market one day, my mother-in-law is here for
a visit. She wanders around the market, cheerfully bounding about the festive,
bountiful atmosphere. She sees us selling pork to a woman and her children, and
by chance later walks past her, out of hearing distance from our booth.
“Those pork chops were way too expensive!”
Her children are the subjects of her message, but she
doesn’t know that my mother-in-law is a subject as well. My mother-in-law passes
the message back to us.
Weeks later, I go into a local grocery store to buy a rat
trap (!), and I take the scenic route past the meat coolers. I see that pork
chops are $1.89/lb.
Ours are $8.50/lb.
*************
My husband goes to work, and I clean up the breakfast
dishes. The computer screen holds a promise of keeping me company, if I can
find something to watch besides the news. Oh please God, help me to find
something that’s not the news!
Thank you internet Gods. You have brought me: The Farm
Crisis, a documentary by Iowa Public Television.
It is suddenly the 1980s, the decade of the missing $5 bill.
Newfound global trade in the 1970s creates an era of
unbridled agricultural optimism … China wants corn, and Russia wants pork …
Iowa farmers respond by becoming more efficient, farming from fencerow to
fencerow, building hog warehouses … Business is booming, and loans fly out the
bank doors.
Then trade comes to a screeching halt in the 1980s … Prices
for corn and pork fall below the cost of production … Banks call farmers who
aren’t paying their loans, and people lose their farms … and by happenstance I
see an advertisement in a grocery store window.
It’s three decades ago, but you wouldn’t know it when it came
to the price of pork chops.
$1.89/lb.
************
On the telephone, I ask my mom later that week if she has
seen the documentary, and she has not. I know she will watch it, with her inexplicable and never
ending appetite for learning. So I email her the link. She replies back with
the subject line “Too Little, Too Late,” and says:
I guess if you were in
the middle of it, you didn't realize how bad it was. I remember having a very
convicted belief that we should hunker down, get town jobs, and save what we
had, just wait it out. Of course, my say was nothing. But that's ok, the rest
of the story's what happened!
It’s all coming back to me, hearing my parents’ stories over
the years.
My dad was raising pigs. He had just used a small
inheritance to buy an acreage on Highway 7, around 1980. The bank gave him a
loan to buy pigs, and the price of pigs dropped, for good. Stories of the
sheriff coming with a livestock trailer to haul pigs away swirl through my mind,
and I think I know where that $5 bill went.
My dad probably spent it on beer. Wouldn’t you?
*************
American farming reads like the opening line from Charles
Dickens’ novel A Tale of Two Cities:
It was the best of
times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of
foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it
was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of
hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing
before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the
other way …
Yesterday I went to a small gathering in our local community
center. A retired librarian leads a group singalong every other Saturday. We
sing songs from the 1960s, and traditional folk and gospel songs. She has surrounded
us with well-organized shelves of donated books. After we finished singing, she
pushed a razor thin, brightly yellow, homemade book into my hands. On the cover
it says, “Ten Poems of Richland County, by Randall Durst.”
An awkward moment of internal thought ensues, while I
attempt to recall her husband’s name who is standing next to her, “Randy must
be Randall, and his last name must be Durst!”
“Oh, I didn’t know you were a poet, Randy!”
He demurs with a toothy smile on his face, cocking his head
lower. I know him instead as an organic dairy man with thirty cows in a
century-old barn, who sells milk to Organic Valley.
Later at home, I first read silently, and then aloud to my
husband a poem, with the title handwritten as “Fortress”:
My farm is my fortress.
Encircled by economic enemies
I smile with all my teeth
And sling another shovel-full of
shit.
I shore and patch up,
I wear things out and I do
without,
And still I cherish my right
To taunt them from the fence
line.
