A Busy Time

I can’t speak for other rural places but after the relative inactivity of winter, spring has proven to be a busy time in this neck of the woods. At least it has been for Meredith and me.

Our oldest son, Jake, has a two month break before entering graduate school, and he is spending most of that time here with us. That’s a good thing. When he’s here, he works on his projects. Being the doting father that I am, I have to lend a hand and that keeps me busy. So far he has finished restoring a dune buggy, and he now working on restoring a 1989 Ford F-150 pickup truck. He has it completely disassembled, and its various parts are scattered throughout the workshop and the pole barn. I vaguely remember being that energetic once, but I’m certainly not now. Just being around him makes me tired and in need of a nap.

Our youngest son, Mike, graduates from Marine boot camp on June 5, and we will be driving to Paris Island to see the ceremony. It will be an emotional experience, and I know his platoon mates will be wondering as they march by the reviewing stand who the big sobbing pussy is in the back row of the bleachers. Uh, that would be me.

Mike gets to stay with us for 10 days before he goes to his next training. Jake will be here also. You know that will be a busy time.

It seems like every club and organization that I belong to has gotten very active this spring. In the last month I have participated in the Master Gardener plant sale, helped the Master Gardeners spruce up the Blue Ridge Arts Center, assisted the Fannin County Extension Agent with the annual rabies clinic, worked with the Feed Fannin volunteers to get the Feed Fannin garden planted, started helping the Food Pantry pick up food donations from Walmart twice a week, served as a volunteer at the Blue Ridge Wine and Jazz Fest and spent seven hours in an emergency room to name just a few outside diversions.

And then there is the garden. The garden has been a more hectic task this year than last mainly due to the weather. Last year we had a mild, slow progressing spring. It gradually got warmer, and I was able to take my time getting the garden ready and putting in my plants. Not this year. This year we had three continuous weeks of rainy weather, and the soil was too wet to till and prepare. Then it got unusually warm overnight, and the soil dried out. Like every other gardener in Fannin County, I could not resist the compulsion to get my garden planted. When you have a garden as big as mine that’s no small task.

I’m pretty certain that I’ve gone overboard on the garden this year. It has doubled in size to about 4,000 square feet. To make sure I have enough paste tomatoes to make and can tomato sauce I planted over 35 Roma tomato plants. Then someone told me how productive Roma tomato plants are. If they all grow and produce I’ll have so many paste tomatoes that I won’t know what to do with them. Next winter it could be spaghetti night every night.

I also planted 60 feet of pole beans, 120 feet of potatoes, 100 feet of peppers, 80 feet of winter squash, 80 feet of cabbage, 80 feet of onions, 10 hills of pumpkins, not to mention assorted amounts of okra, collards, Swiss chard, kale, lettuce, spaghetti squash, and corn. I still have to plant two rows of leeks and two long rows of sweet potatoes.

If the secret of happiness in retirement is getting involved and staying busy, then I should be the happiest son of a bitch you ever saw. But the truth is that I’m beginning to feel a little too involved and a little too busy, and it’s beginning to get stressful. I may have to take a time out from my retirement to rest up.

On a totally unrelated and some would say paranoiac note, Meredith has set up two hummingbird feeders very close to our porch, and it’s rare to step out on the porch and not see or hear one or more hummingbirds buzzing around. I mostly hear them. To me they sound like miniature A-10 Warthogs on a strafing run, and I’m beginning to wonder how safe it is to be around them.

First of all, they have two speeds—hovering and Mach 2. They move so fast it’s like they disappear through space and time as they go from one feeder to the other. They may be cute little creatures but they are also high speed projectiles. And then there is the way they are built. Have you ever really looked at a hummingbird? They’re pool darts with wings. Finally, given the size of their heads, their brains have to be on the small size. You have to wonder whether they have enough neurons in their brains for a fully functioning collision avoidance system.

I searched the internet, and I could not find a single documented instance of someone being injured by a misguided hummingbird but I’m still not convinced that it cannot happen. As if I didn’t have enough to worry about. I tell you it’s a jungle out here on the frontier.

Stupid Is As Stupid Does

A View From The Emergency Room

There is no clever way to tell this story that does not result in the conclusion that I’m an idiot so I’m just going to fess up. The Friday before last I stuck my hand into a running lawnmower and injured the middle finger of my right hand. When people ask me about the large bandage on my finger, no matter how I try to spin the incident the inevitable response is “Boy, that was a stupid thing to do.” Even when people do not utter those precise words you can see that they are thinking it. I’m just waiting for someone to say, “Jim, life is a box of chocolates…”

I can’t blame people for thinking it was a stupid thing to do. That’s what I concluded about four nanoseconds after it happened.

After I injured the finger I walked up to the house and tried to sound casual as I asked Meredith if she would mind fetching me a couple of towels and driving me to the hospital. It’s hard to sound casual when the pain alarms are going off in your head and your brain is screaming, “Holy shit, this hurts. Go to full emergency mode. Battle stations, battle stations. Dive, dive.” If Meredith had replied, “I’m a little busy now, dear,” my next request would not have been casual.

I don’t have a lot of experience going to emergency rooms so I don’t know if my trip to the ER was typical or not. I thought there were some stupid questions. I was wearing work boots, dirty farming overalls and a shirt with its sleeves cut off, and I had a red bandanna on my head. Do I look like someone who visited Africa in the last 30 days? Maybe the red bandanna made the admitting lady think I was related to Aunt Jemima.

Fortunately for me there was a hand surgeon doing surgery at the hospital that day, and he was able to see me following his surgery. That was a good thing because I’m pretty sure the ER physician wanted nothing to do with the finger. The telltale was when he looked at the finger, screwed up his face and walked away. Unfortunately, it took the hand surgeon quite a while to finish his surgery so I was in the ER for several hours before he came in to see me.

ER examining rooms are not the most interesting places to pass the time. This one didn’t even have a stack of three year old magazines to read. The only reading material in the room was a flow chart on how to handle a patient with suspected Ebola so I’ve pretty much got that memorized now. I didn’t really understand all the medical terms, but what I got out of it is that the way to handle a patient with suspected Ebola is to move to another state.

Things got better after I got a shot of Demerol, but time started to drag. After I went through all the cabinets looking at the medical supplies I finally laid down on the table to take a drug induced nap. Just as I was dozing off, the hand surgeon walked in.

I got to watch the surgeon reassemble the tip of my finger. It was genuinely interesting to watch him work. As he was picking debris out of the wound he was telling me if it was bone, dirt or grass. When he was stitching me up I just had to ask him whether he had any hobbies like tying flies or quilting.

The injury is not near as bad as it could have been. My finger is an eighth of an inch shorter than it was, and my fingerprint is now off to the side a little bit. The large bulbous bandage at the end of my finger combined with the need to keep the hand elevated makes it look like I’m flipping people off.

If there’s any consolation for my injured pride it’s knowing that I’m not the first person to show up at the ER in Fannin County with a hand injury due to moving machinery. That’s not a very consoling thought. All it means is that there are a lot of people standing in the stupid line with me. 

Well, that’s it from my neck of the woods. The weather has turned nice, and everyone is rushing to put in their gardens, me included. The time in the garden will give me time to work on my Forrest Gump impression. That's all I have to say about that.

Paradise is not Perfect

There have been quite a few controversies in Fannin County lately involving county and city government. The three county weekly newspapers have made for entertaining reading recently. That’s not usually the case unless you find stories about the 4-H club, high school sports and the level of the water in Lake Blue Ridge fascinating. The truth is that the news in Fannin County is usually boring which is okay by me—that’s one of the many reasons I moved here.

When something interesting happens around here, it’s like an elaborate game of Clue to find out what really happened. Each of the papers has its own spin and perspective so you have to read all three to if you want to come close to the full story. Even then you’re probably going to feel like you’re missing something most of the time.

The controversy that has attracted my attention the most lately involves the use of the N-word in open court by a superior court judge and an assistant district attorney.

The facts of exactly what occurred are in dispute. The News Observer has one slant, and the Fannin Focus has another. The Fannin Sentinel lies somewhere in between. Based on what has been reported in the papers and the transcript from the court reporter, there was a bond revocation hearing at the courthouse in Blue Ridge, and an African-American witness by the name of Alan Duray “Ray” Green was sitting in the hall waiting to be called by defense attorney George Weaver. Inside the courtroom Assistant District Attorney B. Morris Martin was addressing Superior Court Judge Roger Bradley. The rest of the story I will take from a very entertaining letter to the editor in The News Observer:

Assistant D.A.Martin, incredibly, was shaky on the names of the two witnesses who had been subpoenaed. One of them, he speculated was called “N----- Jim” but qualified his words by saying the name was “somewhat of a derogatory nickname.” Somewhat? Really? (And he didn’t even get the given name correct. So much for attention to detail. Jim? It was Ray.)

Then after a couple of Fannin County Sheriff’s investigators weighed in on names, batted around a few, adding to the name game, Assistant District Attorney Martin declares that the name is “Ray” and says, “All right, he’s known as N----- Ray.”

The confused Judge Bradley then chimes in wondering if this N----- Ray is kin to N----- Bob who lived right in back of the courthouse in 1974 and wondered aloud if this N----- Ray could be in the same family as N----- Bob.

Does Judge Bradley somehow think that some black families share the surname or given name of N-----? I don’t think they do, actually.

Perhaps attempting to bring sanity to the proceedings, defense attorney Weaver informs the judge that the man in question was sitting right out in the hall and that he had subpoenaed him and that his name was Ray Green.

At this point, maybe someone should have simply walked out in the hall and asked Mr. Green for his name—he probably could have shown them his license.

As you might expect, this story has had some legs. The court reporter was told to transcribe the proceedings, and the transcript was released to the public. Witnesses who were in the courtroom that day say the transcript does not accurately reflect what happened. The court reporter has retained an attorney to represent her. Despite several public record requests, the audio of the conversation has not been released, apparently in violation of the state’s public record law. Green has also retained an attorney and says he intends to sue but at this point I’m not sure who he intends to sue. The state Judicial Qualifications Commission is investigating the incident.

I’m looking forward to receiving the papers this week to see if there have been any further developments.

Am I surprised that the N-word is used in Fannin County? No. The truth is that I’ve heard it here more often and more openly than in Florida or at least in the parts of Florida where I lived and worked. What does surprise me is that the word would be used in open court by a judge and a district attorney in the presence of a court reporter. That shows an amazing lack of sophistication on the part of supposedly educated men. It’s particularly galling to me that the incident involved people in the legal profession. Sometimes you get the feel that large segments of the local population are still living in the early 1960s.

The core question that I’ve been wrestling with is whether this indicates that Fannin County as a whole is any more prejudiced than any other place in the country? After mulling it over for the last two weeks, I confess that I simply do not know the answer. It may well be that the percentage of prejudiced people here is pretty much the same as anywhere else with the only difference being that people around here are too ignorant or unsophisticated or naïve to know to disguise it. I suppose some would argue that makes this area worse than others though I tend to believe that concealed prejudice is a worse evil than open prejudice.

Regardless, I’m disappointed in Fannin County. I feel like I’ve encountered an imperfection in my little slice of country paradise.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not pretending to be perfect. Like anyone else, I have my innate prejudices though I like to think mine are more logical than most. I’m prejudiced against liberals, Ohio State fans, synchronized swimming in the Olympics and reality TV shows. All of these prejudices, I feel, can be defended.

As a trial attorney, I learned not to have high expectations for the human race regardless of race, color or ethnicity. I suppose I should be thankful that people are not perfect. I made a good living for 37 years based on that fact that people were careless, stupid and prejudiced. In a perfect world you would not need lawyers. So I guess the moral of this post is that even here in the blissful, quiet and placid mountains of North Georgia humanity remains true to form.

Helping Out at the Food Pantry

In my last post I talked about helping out at the local food pantry. The food pantry mention caused an old friend of mine to send me an email skeptically questioning whether the people who get food from the food pantry are actually needy, hungry and deserving.

I’m sure that his email was prompted, at least in part, by his knowledge that I am of the conservative persuasion. That’s probably putting it mildly. I believe that liberals and progressives are destroying truth, justice and the American way of life, Roosevelt was a socialist, Debbie Wasserman Schultz is lucky that she didn’t live in Salem in the 1600’s and Hillary Clinton is evil incarnate. My friend is even more conservative than I am. He’s so far to the right that I wouldn’t be surprised if he has circumnavigated the political globe and is actually touching the left.

Given my conservative leanings, his beliefs regarding our entitlement society and his skepticism about the motivation and work ethic of the “needy,” it’s no wonder that he was surprised that I was helping out at a food pantry.

My response to his email was that, like him, I'm very skeptical of the statistics about the number of hungry in the United States. I think the latest one I saw is that one child in four goes to bed hungry. I'd like to see how they define hungry and how they gather the data. But that’s another discussion, and one that is probably not suited for this blog.

That being said, I know for a fact that there are a lot of low income people in North Georgia. This area isn’t exactly a Mecca for job seekers. Still, I question how many of the people who come to the food pantry in Fannin County truly qualify as hungry, needy and deserving of a helping hand. I’m willing to bet that a certain percentage of them are dirt bags who are gaming the system. That’s not based on any personal knowledge but rather on my 37 years of an experience as a trial attorney. The human race consists of saints and sinners and every variation in between. You sample any human population, you’re going to find a fair percentage of dirt bags.

Still, knowing how prideful people in these parts can be, I’m also confident that some percentage of the those who use the food pantry are decent people who have fallen on hard times and really need help. Like most Americans, liberal or conservative, I am more than willing to give a helping hand to those who will help themselves. That’s always been the American way.

But that’s not the point of this post. The point is that I believe the local food pantry is an example of how folks in these parts tend to respond differently to perceived problems than, say, folks in the big city and is, therefore, worthy of support.

The local food pantry does not receive government funding to purchase food (though it does purchase low cost government food). All the food offered by the food pantry is paid for or donated by private sector. An all-volunteer group called Feed Fannin raises thousands of dollars and donates it to the Food Pantry or uses it to buy food for the pantry. Feed Fannin and a couple of local churches grow food for the pantry. The local Walmart and Food Lion donate food that they would otherwise throw away. Doctors, professionals and local businesses have food drives where they discount their services in exchange for donations of non-perishable food items for the pantry. One doctor managed to donate 15,000 pounds of canned good in this way recently. Hell, people come in off the street with extra produce from their gardens and donate it to the food pantry.

In my mind, the food pantry and the groups and individuals that support it represent the old-fashioned country virtue of local folks helping local folks. Rather than turning to, relying on or expecting government to solve their problems, some folks around here saw that there were people who had trouble making ends meet and so they tackled the problem locally using local resources. That says a lot about the community and the folks who comprise it. It may not be surprising that things are done that way around here considering that the root stock of many in this area are the Scotch-Irish who left the British Isles to get away from the intrusive and controlling hand of government.

This attitude of independence and self-reliance was once a defining trait of Americans. Alexis de Tocqueville was a brilliant Frenchman who visited the United States in the early 1830’s in order to examine this new experiment on the world stage―Democracy. He traveled around the country and spoke with persons of high status and low trying to figure out what made America tick. He wrote about his observations in two books entitled Democracy in America Part 1 and Part 2.

Tocqueville discovered that most Americans in the 1830’s mistrusted government solutions and preferred to rely on themselves to solve problems. He said: “The citizen of the United States is taught from infancy to rely on his own exertions in order to resist the evils and difficulties of life; he looks upon the social authority with an eye of mistrust and anxiety, and he claims its assistance only when he is unable to do without it.”

My perception that folks in this area are more self-reliant and less inclined to run to government for help than in other places may well be a romantic delusion on my part. If it is, don’t bust my bubble because the delusion makes me feel good. There’s one thing you can say about being fat, dumb and happy—at least you’re happy.

So I think I’ll continue to help out at the food pantry. It operates in a manner that is consistent with my conservative beliefs, probably helps some genuinely needy people and makes me feel like I contributing to my adopted community. Besides, if it wasn’t for helping out at the food pantry I’d have never learned that you can buy frozen chitlins at a grocery store.

Nothing To Write Home About

Sometimes it is a challenge to write a post on this blog every week.

My objective when I starting this blog was simple: to write about my reactions, observations and experiences as a crusty, cynical and somewhat eccentric retired trial attorney who has moved to the sticks of North Georgia after spending close to 40 years living and working on the west coast of Florida in one of the most populous counties in the South. Because I have a natural tendency to see the humor or inanity in most situations, I try to bring a certain puckish levity to my posts.

You would think that writing one moderately funny post a week would not be that tough. It’s not like I’m writing the Declaration of Independence or a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Hell, Lincoln wrote the Gettysburg address on the back of an envelope during a three hour train ride. In my defense, the Gettysburg Address only has 272 words. Most posts average a thousand words. Furthermore, I’m using modern words, and we all know that things were simpler in the old days.

But there are weeks like this last one when nothing of note happens and my experiences are humdrum and boring. It’s at such times that writing a post becomes a task.

It has rained here every day for the last seven days. The extent of my activities over the last week is to attend a monthly meeting of the Fannin County Master Gardeners, help out one afternoon at the Food Pantry, go to the public library three times, and work in my workshop. Over the last week I have not encountered one unusual character, stumbled into a funny situation or made a fool of myself. Hardly the stuff to write home about, much less use as material for an interesting post.

The rain has made it impossible to move ahead with my garden because the soil is too wet. If you try to work the clay soil when it’s wet, you end up making adobe bricks. That’s great if you’re building a pueblo but not so great if you’re trying to grow vegetables. Like every farmer and gardener in North Georgia I’m waiting for three or four dry, sunny and windy days to dry the soil out. Waiting for the weather to change is not an activity that’s fraught with high excitement.

A meeting of the Fannin County Master Gardeners is more exciting than an embalmers’ convention, but not by much. The most interesting things discussed were the upcoming Master Gardener plant sale and the annual Rabies Clinic. I don’t think I need to say much more than “plant sale” to take the excitement out of a room. Independent testing has shown that a plant sale has the same effect on a horny guy as salt peter.

The Rabies Clinic has its humorous possibilities. It brings out all classes and types of people in Fannin County to get their dogs vaccinated to comply with state law. It’s a rare opportunity to see a snooty rich lady with her equally snooty lap dog in close proximity to a good ol’ boy with his pack of large, snarly and vicious hunting dogs. Both of them are seeking discount rabies vaccinations. A clash of lifestyles is always fodder for an interesting post. Unfortunately the clinic is not for a couple of weeks.

What’s it say about your life when the high point of the week occurred when I was helping out at the Food Pantry? I saw something that I have never seen before. The Food Pantry distributes food to needy persons in Fannin County. I was unpacking boxes of food donated by the local Walmart when I discovered that one of the boxes was filled with 5 pound bags and 10 pound buckets of frozen “chitterlings.”

Chitterlings, a/k/a chitlins, are chopped up pieces of the small intestines of pigs. At least I think they were chopped up. It’s possible the packages contained entire pigs’ intestines. It was hard to tell. To be honest, the packages looked like they contained a bunch of frozen condoms all pressed together.

Admittedly, I have not done a lot of grocery shopping but I didn’t know you could buy frozen raw chitlins in a grocery store. I wonder if it is a regional product that is supposed to appeal to people in these parts. Since Walmart was getting rid of the chitlins it may indicate they are not the popular seller that Walmart thought they would be. Maybe some smart ass Yankee in the corporate purchasing department thought: “Hey, I can buy these cheap and sell them to the hillbillies in North Georgia. Don’t they eat stuff like chitlins?” Yeah, and black folk in the South sit around and tell B’rer Rabbit stories.

What I really want to know is what you do with a ten pound bucket of chitlins. I know that you can deep fry them in grease and make something like a greasy, crispy snack food out of them. I’ve tried them that way, and it took a week of brushing and gargling to get the taste out of my mouth.

It never occurred to me that people actually buy them to cook at home. I thought people stopped eating chitlins for real about the time of the Tennessee Valley Authority and rural electrification. If pressed I would have said that today chitlins are cooked and eaten only in Third World countries or just maybe in this county for ceremonial purposes to celebrate your ancestral roots if your ancestral celebration ritual includes slaughtering and butchering a pig.

According to the Joy of Cooking you can sauté chitlins with onions and peppers. I looked up what sauteing means, and it’s a fancy way of saying frying in grease. I guess the distinction is that the snooty lady with the snooty lapdog eats her chitlins sautéed while the good ol’ boy with the vicious dogs deep fries his. All I know is that Meredith will have nothing to do with them. If I want to try them I’m on my own. And I may do that. There’s a certain cache to being able to say that I bought a ten pound bucket of chitlins.

As you can see, there’s not a lot to talk about this week. I vow that as soon as the weather clears and I can get my garden in I will seek out persons, events, and experiences worth writing about.

Cow Farts and Gardening

I read a while ago that the Environmental Protection Agency is funding a study on cow farts. Apparently this has something to do with the theory that bovine flatulence is the single greatest source of ozone-damaging methane on earth. I’m not sure I’d like to be the scientist for whom that theory is named. Having an impressive sounding theory named after you like the Theory of Relativity or the Theory of Plate Tectonics is okay, but Yacavone’s Theory of Cow Farts is not something I’d like to have as my legacy.

I find this study highly interesting from a technical standpoint. First, you would have to determine what is an appropriate sample herd. This leads to the question (which I assume is unresolved) of whether all types of cows fart the same. It’s possible that Guernsey cows fart more or with a higher concentration of methane than Jersey cows.

My experience is that some people fart more than others. I had a fraternity brother who may have been the world champion. Not surprisingly, his nickname was Stinky. He was from New Jersey and of Polish extraction. I’m not sure whether either of those factors account for his prodigious flatulence, but I though it was worth mentioning. Anyway, if it’s true for people, then it’s probably true for cows. It could easily take a year’s worth of research to resolve that preliminary issue.

I also think the study would have to take into consideration the effect of diet. It would not surprise me if some grasses and grains caused cows to be gassier than other grasses and grains. Just think about the effect of Mexican food and beer on humans. Who knows, maybe alfalfa has the same effect on cows as refried beans have on humans.

But more than anything I’m intrigued by the question of how one goes about measuring the amount that a cow farts. I suppose you could put a bunch of cows in an airtight barn and measure the concentration  of methane in the barn after a certain period of time, but where do you get an airtight barn much less one big enough to house a representative sample of cows? I would think that sealing a bunch of cows in an airtight barn would put the cows off their feed and affect the results of the experiment. Moreover, wouldn't an airtight container the size of a barn filled with explosive methane have the potential to be a giant bomb?

I’m convinced that the only way to get accurate results is to capture a cow’s farts in the cow’s natural setting: grazing in a pasture. That would require some device attached to the production end of the beast which would capture the farts as they occur. It would have to be lightweight and comfortable. The last thing you want is a cow with a chapped ass.

The only thing I can think of that would fit the bill is a cow diaper with an inflatable balloon. As the cow tooted its way through the day, the balloon would inflate. Of course, since we don’t know how much gas a cow passes in a day (that’s why we’re doing the study) it’s entirely possible that by the end of the day the cow will look like it got rear-ended by the Graf Zeppelin. Seeing a herd of cows with blimps hanging from their butts could produce nightmares if you aren’t prepared for it. The sight might frighten young children into becoming vegetarians.

Another concern is that methane is lighter than air. It’s possible that the test cows could just float away. I see a Chic-fil-A commercial in here somewhere.

I suppose the ultimate mystery is what the EPA is going to do once it gets the results of the study. Assume it does show that cow farts are harmful to the environment. What then? It’s not like you can train a cow not to fart. I suspect that most of us have difficulty with that issue time to time, and we’re intelligent animals though you wouldn’t know it if you have ever watched daytime TV.

The more I think about it the more I believe that there are a couple of good old boy scientists at some agricultural college in Middle America who are laughing their asses off at the windfall of funding they just got from the EPA. Meanwhile the taxpayers are paying for yet another stupid study. This one stinks—in more ways than one.

But who am I to poke fun at the bureaucrats at the EPA? I’m a gardener, and there’s plenty to poke fun at when it comes to that hobby. Here I am barely able to contain myself now that the start of the planting season is almost here. I’m carefully sprouting my vegetable sets under grow lights in the work shop. I’ve made meticulous plans about where I’m going to plant my sets and seeds in the garden. Every day I check the weather forecast and assess the soil moisture and temperature. When the right day comes I’m going to run out to the garden with barely controlled excitement and eagerly plant my sets and seeds, then step back expectantly waiting for nothing to happen. Talk about anti-climactic. There’s more action at a quilting party.

An old McDonald’s commercial had the line, “Gee, you’re easily amused.” That pretty much describes the action-packed hobby of gardening. A gardener needs to have a low entertainment threshold. Watching a garden grow is like watching rocks erode. Progress is measured in weeks not seconds. You could learn to play the viola or become a licensed cosmetologist in the time it takes a garden to grow. And yet, every day a gardener will trudge down to the garden to see if there is the slightest change from the day before and get really excited if there is.

It’s kind of silly when you think about it. To be honest, measuring cow farts sounds like it would be a thrill a minute compared to gardening. Silly me. Silly EPA.

Hard Work

I assume that some people read this blog because they are attracted to the idea of moving to the country and living the simple life—having a big garden, canning vegetables, raising chickens and goats, making cheese, baking bread, and otherwise dwelling in idyllic pastoral splendor. I think the current term for this is hobby farming.

Hobby farming is a fantasy for quite a number of people who have grown tired of the life in crowded suburbia. There are enough people who dream about a life of simple country leisure to have spawned several magazines devoted to living La Vita Rural. Be forewarned that the ones I have seen, particularly the slick and glossy ones, paint an overly romanticized and sanitized version of the rural lifestyle. The odds are that the people who publish those magazines prefer to write about country life rather than live it.

A typical article in one of these magazines might be about the joys of raising miniature Nubian goats. The accompanying photos show an attractive middle-aged couple leaning against a white painted fence gazing at their flock frolicking in a green clover-filled pasture. The woman is wearing freshly shined boots, gleaming white jodphurs, and a white linen blouse. The man looks like he stepped out of an L.L. Bean catalog. You get the impression that they spend much of their time sitting on the veranda sipping gin and tonic as they enjoy their slice of heaven.

I’m here to tell you that it’s not like that at all. If you really want to get back to nature and live the rural farming life, be prepared for hard work and dirt. 

Take the joys of raising goats. I have met several of people who raise goats. That seems to be a really popular thing to do around here. (That and raising llamas and alpacas. Go figure.) I even know a couple that is breeding miniature Nubian goats. They do not look like they stepped out of Better Homes and Gardens magazine; they look like stepped out of a National Geographic article about the life of peasants and peons in East Buttcrackistan. 

What these rural glamour magazines do not depict is getting up at 5:30 in the morning when the temperature is 20 degrees to milk your nanny goats. They do not tell you about the joys of shoveling goat poop, carrying heavy containers of goat’s milk for pasteurization, and all the other gritty work required to raise goats. The goat farmers I’ve met do not wear shiny leather boots. They wear big rubber boots to keep their pants out of the mud and goat shit.

Back in the day, there was one magazine devoted to country living—Mother Earth News. I used to love reading the old Mother Earth News. The great thing about the magazine is that it never gave me the impression that homesteading or hobby farming was like living in a sanitized high-priced gated community. Two images always came to my mind when I read Mother Earth News and thought about living the lifestyle. The first was walking around with grubby bare feet in a commune somewhere in the hills. The second was any place in the undeveloped Third World. 

What else could anyone think when the articles were about building a house out of straw bales, heating your dwelling with composting cow manure, and the joys of living in a yurt? Mongols live in yurts. If living in a yurt is so great why did the Mongols work so hard to conquer the known world in the 13th Century? It’s because living in a yurt sucks. The Mongols knew that. The reason they went on their rampage is because they envied the lifestyle of the civilized world and wanted to live better. Living better did not include living in a yurt. 

I aspire to live the simple country life, and I have a big garden even by Fannin County standards. It gave me a great deal of inner satisfaction to look over my garden last summer and see all that I had grown. It was even more satisfying to eat fresh vegetables from the garden.

Obviously, I enjoy gardening, but I have no illusions that it’s easy to have a big garden. The fact is, it’s hard work. For example, a couple of days ago I spent five hours preparing my garden for spring planting by spreading bucket loads (that’s a tractor bucket) of manure and compost over the soil and rototilling it in. I have a big walk-behind rototiller, and muscling that puppy up and down the rows was a challenge. My lower back kept telling me, “Hey bro’, this sucks. Are you sure you don’t want to sit down?” Thank God for Motrin and a couple of stiff drinks. 

When I was finished I did not look like the people you see in the glossy hobby farming magazines. With my work boots, bib overalls, old t-shirt, beat-up baseball cap and blue bandanna wrapped around my head to catch the sweat I looked like an Oklahoma dirt farmer in the Great Depression. Add to that the fact I was dirty and grimy and gimping along with a sore back. Think of Pa Kettle playing the part of a zombie on The Walking Dead, and you’ve got the picture.

This is my long-winded way of suggesting that you look before you leap into your fantasy of moving back to nature.