There are wide expanses of “farm” here in the Midwest, formerly wide expanses of prairie. Cities continuously mushroom out like stones thrown into water. This concept of “farm” is odd, is it not? What defines farm? Is it a place to grow food? For who then? Is it a place to grow biomass for fuel? Or do we turn pigs into the biomass that we eat, massively?
These unappeasable vistas, nary a tree. Uniform masses of corn tassel and soy pod, flush with nary an insect, “weed”, bird (blackbird?). I remember the time it rained incessantly for two days and what was once wet prairie became just that, wet prairie. The beavers started to move in searching for trees. But the fencelines had all been obliterated, so the beavers moved on to the rivers. It was a long journey, but when we are in search of food and shelter, sometimes the journey can be far-reaching.
So what is the point here? Where are the prairies now? The big bluestem? The butterfly weed? The butterflies? They have gone the way of the dandelion, once the arrogant flower of the American lawn (prairie? poison?).
There was this guy who wrote a letter to the editor when we were in the process of getting the livestock ordinance in our town overturned so that we could have a few chickens in the backyard. He was troubled by the fact that chickens would shit in yards and cause interminable ground water contamination and oh the smell would be dreadful (along with fossil fuel contamination, dog and cat feces, plastic and formaldehyde laden junk strewn about the yard?).
How far have we come? Maybe as far as the superstore. Maybe as far as the car will take us on one tank of gasoline. Maybe as far as the oddity that when I go “outside” in the morning to take a long walk I seem to be dodging automobiles by myself. Damn if there is not one other human being enjoying the sunrise while working up a sweat.
Or like the time I was driving to Dallas through Arkansas and it was cotton harvest season and there was this combine, big as a massif, and there was no one in the driver’s seat, and it was doing what combines do, and there was no one in the driver’s seat and I was thinking about the history of cotton production in the South, and slavery, and the fact that cotton destroys our precious soils, and that massive chunk of steel is voyaging over the landscape, and there was no one in the driver’s seat and I thought to myself, “what’s the use”, and I wrote an email to my friend and I said, “what’s the use?”, and he wrote back: “we have to hold out hope for people”, and I haven’t stopped since…