Country Culture

If someone gives you their morel foraging spot, there's not much more to give. Like a good fishing hole, it's a place tucked away from the world and full of treasures to be found. The other week, I crossed the field and hopped the fence to Rick and Debbie's house, just north of our garden. After debriefing on the latest neighborhood drama of a rogue donkey, we got to daydreaming about spring and all the spring things. Debbie, having exhausted her stash of last spring's frozen morels, was counting the days until conditions were ripe for morel mushroom caps to peek up from the forest floor. Neither of us has mature woodland on our properties...conducive to mushrooming, and admittedly our Foxhole crew doesn't go exploring as often as we'd like once the ground thaws. Debbie shot a sideways glance at Rick, hesitating just a bit. Then in an unnecessarily hushed voice, with acres of space in between ourselves and our next neighbor, Debbie disclosed their favorite hunting ground for those honey-comb laced caps.
These are not the conversations that our parents had with our neighbors growing up. Rich and I experienced the epitome of suburban upbringing, set in a landscape of well-trimmed lawns, cars parked in garages or in a neat row on the street in cul-de-sac laced neighborhoods strung around town. A particular culture occupies the suburbs...a civilized, bustling, dense, and industrious one, buzzing with all the business of its inhabitants...commuters on the way to the office, kids burning off steam in their yards, delivery trucks idling in the street and inevitably all breeds of dog at their wits end, barking at the chaos. We spent our respective formative years in such a hive, and so we are bees of that colony at heart. The culture shock of moving our life together to the country was unforeseen.
One of our first jolts came when we took an opportunity in Michigan, starting a certified organic vegetable farm in the heart of conventional corn and soy country. I remember early on heading to the local dump with Rich and introducing ourselves to the manager and single employee of this small-town operation. When Dave discovered Rich and I had just moved from New York, he balked, "I can't imagine being out there! It must be nice to be livin' here now, with all the 9/11 going's on and all". Neither of us had considered this, being that the world was nearly 15 years into healing from 9/11. Dave was right about something...it was good to be living in a quaint, quiet place, tucked into the seams of the country. Life is simpler on the tip of Michigan's thumb with Lake Huron in front of you and fifty miles behind you until you hit a decent-sized town. It's a place where the seasons are determined by perch fishing and summer folks coming up from Detroit. We still retreat to that town when we can make time. When we do, the chef at the diner in town remembers us and the tomatoes we would bring him. Though a well-spoken man, our friend did wield one of the 'Thumb' colloquialisms when we would deliver those summer gems to him "them is nice!".
Up in the thumb, we ran a booth at farmers market directly across from a multiple-generation family farm that managed their land conventionally. This family spent most of their efforts running soy and corn rotations, but grew produce for market on the side. Being stationed across from them was predestined. Having different growing philosophies, but peddling the same menu of produce, there was certainly a barrier to kinship. I'm not sure if it was the midwest air, but it didn't take too many Saturday mornings before we got to talking. In an act of good will, the patriarch of the family invited us to visit their farm. It wasn't until we were riding in the bed of a pick up across their farm after a day of work, clinking bottles of one American beer or another, that a beautiful realization was made. These folks who were steeped in 'Big Ag' culture, one very foreign to me, we share so much with them. Our sun-stained, tired summer bodies relished the relaxation that summer night as we put our endless task list aside and swapped stories of farming in sandy Michigan soil. This night was monumental in my understanding of how people fit together. In the sustainable farming community, conventional agriculture can be villified as destructive or unethical even. What I saw in this group of folks were well-intentioned and hard-working people who carried on a tradition passed down from generations before them. They were carrying a torch handed off to them in an effort to make a good life for themselves.
In truth, my youthful conviction to grow food in a 'mindful way'...well, it had built up an arrogance in me. These people must be wicked to try to kill everything but the monocrop they want to harvest every year. You could say it was ignorance. There is a history of people, innovation, corporate motives even, which has led food production to where it is. Once I set aside my biases, and opened my heart to that 'foreign culture'...I realized that the people I've met on the ground level, the ones working their tails off on their farms, they have similar intentions as Rich and I do: to live simply on the land and away from the noise, to raise a family in a peaceful place, and to work with the land doing good, honest work, hopefully having something to bring to the table by the end of the season.
The outlook is brighter when seeing people for who they are. These peremptory judgments are so very isolating and oppressive. How would ideas be shared, changes be made, and any sort of community thrive if we only surrounded ourselves with the dogma which we already subscribe to?

And so we have really immersed ourselves in it now, living in small town Ohio, surrounded by conventional farmland...a place with its own customs. And you know what we got ourselves by doing so? Rick and Debbie, people who roll down our drive with extra eggs from their hens and who look out for coyotes when our sheep rotate past their property. We got ourselves another neighbor who brings us all the packages wrongly delivered to his door, and who never lets us forget to invite him for group projects. We have the peace of the country where the dogs are all calmer and quieter for having space to breath and distance from the hustle and bustle.
When I think back to all the farm properties we scoped out before finding this one, I remember the discomfort I felt. Rich and I looked at each other...can we raise a family here? Why are there three cars on that lawn? Will this place, so different from where we came from, feel like home? Here we are four years deep into living in our little country oasis...as our neighbor calls it, a dream property :). And if we wouldn't have found our way here, I would have never learned what 'heaven on earth cake' is and I would have never known that the whole time I considered myself a suburbanite, there was a whole lot of country gal waiting to rise to the surface.