why this

When asked why he is farming, he said, “My dog told me he really needed to live on a farm.”  I have always liked stories with talking animals.

My answer: I spit words about the importance of feeding people and keeping farmland in production. 

Pushed further on the question, I would slip into the easy chronology of how I became a farmer, turning three short years between apprenticeship and farm owner into a parable of lessons and culminating skills that have brought me, so easily, to this point.

I have come to realize that my true why has the same logic and honesty as my partner’s.  I farm because physical exertion is one of the few healthy activities that relieves my anxiety.

After defending my thesis in graduate school, one of my readers asked me if I was interested in staying at the University to complete my PhD.  I blurted out, “I want to go learn how to make solar panels!”  It was a strange expression of my desire to get out of academia and into practical, sustainability-focused work.  As I think back to that moment, I wonder if that crack in my voice was the tension from my anxiety breaking right at the word “make.”  For over an hour, I had rolled myself taut as my readers generally praised my thesis, then added comments like, “Your writing reminds me of this author, who is a terrible person.”  Something deep inside of me needed to express the desire to make my hands sore with a screwdriver or, perhaps, pound at some walls with a sledgehammer.

Because I never studied farming, nor did I grow up on a farm, people are curious about why I am doing this.  When I am transplanting in the cold or breaking old equipment, I am curious.

Yes, I enjoy the feeling of a tired body at the end of the day.  It gives me satisfaction to watch my hands and arms strengthen through the season.  And I get some masochistic pleasure from the blisters, deep cuts and stiff dryness of my hands, even as I struggle to do basic things like hold a fork.

I enjoy my mutual communion with the other outside workers: the ones on my farm, the robins making their nests, the insects busy with the most mysterious of privates lives.  And the ones outside my farm: road crews lined up for coffee at the general store and the guys at the diner loudly discussing the ending sugaring and coming lumber seasons.  We are all moving together out here in the sun and rain; a slow, uncomfortable dance.

These pleasures are like the joy of cutting a great looking head of lettuce or the emptying of the cash box after a good day; they are not the thing but they make the thing what it is.

When I am done for the day, my anxiety is back.  Not the running list of things on tomorrow’s agenda, not the plan that I have to adapt because of weather or some other chaotic system.  My anxiety is just a steady pulse between synapses:  it is the rabbit startling again and again.