HELP!

This article first appeared in the Leader Vindicator newspaper.

HELP!

The cry originated as a burst of air, pressurized by a diaphragm and forced through the larynx, causing vocal chords to vibrate rapidly.  By the time the newly created noise was smacked and battered into language by tongue, palate, and lips, it had matured enough to depart its nursery ward and roar into the world at a speed of 761.2 miles per hour, which it did, slowing only slightly thanks to inhibitors such as cool air and geographical elevation.

Despite their retarded velocity, the sound waves traversed the valley quickly, slammed into my eardrums and pushed past like an important businessman will do at an airport, only to collide with the hillside to the east and return, quieter and less composed, like the same businessman upon realizing he’s not as important as he originally supposed, and the flight did indeed leave without him.

HEEEEEEEEELP!  COME!  HELP! HELP!

I was momentarily frozen in place, thinking.  Nearly everyone inhabiting the village around which my cattle are grazing is elderly.  The youngest family, from higher up the opposite side of the valley, owns a business in town; father and sons are likely absent the house, at work.  And someone needed help.  When the situational equation was balanced, the answer became clear: I was the help.

My grazing gear crashed to the ground and I took off across the field at a clip, leaving the cows looking and wondering what demon it was possessing me this time.  I lumbered along on wooden legs, breathing hard, bodily characteristics only prominent when adrenaline is at work.  Finally I was close, approaching the farmhouse from behind the barn, when a green ball bounced into view followed closely by an enthusiastic animal.  The cry from the porch rang out again, the same tone and cadence, the same urgency, but attached to an entirely new context. 

The woman I was rushing to save was playing with her dog.  Whatever command she uses, from a distance greater than a hundred feet, sounds to me like the word ‘help’.  Whoops.

Nothing to do but regroup and pretend as though my hurried journey towards the house was for some other purpose, perfectly logical and vital for the successful fulfillment of my day.

My experience with the dog and his owner caused me to realize another advantage to the marriage of farm and village: presence.  The flow of life takes people away from home.  In-town work, by definition, takes place somewhere other than where the worker lives.  Even conventional farmers are guilty of non-present management: crop farmers plant the seed and leave, while stock farmers fence a whole section, turn out the animals, and forget about them until fall.  Society is built around the expectation that nobody will be home.

Conversely, when our cattle are in the neighborhood, I spend a great deal of time with them because our production methods are markedly different from the ordinary.  My work absolutely ensures that I will be present throughout the day, every day.  If a village, and a meadow, and managed cattle are combined into a whole, the villagers know that in exchange for grassland, they have free, guaranteed surveillance while they are away.

Suggesting presence as a legitimate auxiliary benefit to farming sounds like a thin argument until it’s thoroughly considered.  According to a brief search on the internet, Americans spend just over $20 billion a year on home security systems, from cameras to full-blown monitored surveillance.  Furthermore, I won’t even attempt to put a figure on the cost of at-home healthcare, but I will suggest in many cases that the service is requested simply for the assurance that someone ‘looks in’ on a lonely family member who is otherwise independent.  These are two examples of purchased presence, and the staggering costs of each are a clear indicator that people are desperate for someone to be around.

We’re apart because the culture influences us to become independent towers of our own brilliance, fully in control of every aspect of private life.  So we wall off next door and create neighborhoods of redundancy, each household containing very much the same things as the one prior and the next one to come.  People buy things to make sure they never need to interact with anyone, and then they pay to have someone look in.  (And they say farmers are wasteful.)

It is obvious that a new form of agriculture, one of human scale operations and deliberate, intense management, can dramatically reshape a broken culture of isolation.  If people – farmers – are working right off the back porch, their presence adapts home security from a draining expense to a productive asset that is also growing food; two separate services stem from one management practice.  Farming has the unique ability to smooth over the fractures of property lines, sharing a common interest between neighbors and uniting the village to resemble a fortress in which everyone contributes their own unique ability.

In my wildest dreams, I imagine that someday I will not be the only one walking pastures.  I dream about a beehive of people, choosing the difficult route of precise, hands-on food production carried out on an intimate scale.  Presence will accompany the activity, and both young and old can live with the assurance that help is just around the corner.

I hope everyone else has better hearing.