'If You Want Less Trouble, Plow the Sky'

I had a suburban kid’s notion of life on a farm -- hearty yeomen and Jeffersonian gentleman-farmers tilling the soil and bringing in the sheaves. Working for rural newspapers in the Midwest and upstate New York educated me to the realities of mortgages, tractor accidents, unpredictable weather and even more unpredictable markets.

In the mid-nineties, under the influence of Verlyn Klinkenborg’s first book, Making Hay (1986), I decided to write a feature about the cutting of hay and spent several late-summer days with a farmer and his family in Saratoga County, N.Y. They worked a small dairy farm in the foothills of the Adirondacks – the farmer, his wife, their kids, one hand. This was the opposite of corporate agriculture. From a rise at the northern end of their acreage I could see the Green Mountains of Vermont to the east and the Catskills to the south. The work was hot and dirty but the smells were intoxicating, even the cow manure. This naïve and ignorant suburban kid learned two new words: tedding and silage.

 

My most vivid sensory memory: standing sweaty and tired in the barn in the late afternoon, sunlight shining through narrow gaps in the walls, the hot air dense with dust from the hay. Deborah Warren is a poet who raises heifers on a farm in Vermont. She published “Hay Field on Methodist Hill” in Southwest Review in 2003 and collected it in Zero Meridian: Poems (2004):

 

“From the time we cleared it, all it’s been is trouble,

stubborn and recalcitrant and proud—

every winter, fractious and uncowed,

throwing up new rocks and glacier-rubble:

It’s clear it never wanted to be plowed.

 

“And once we got the stones out, it was trees

behaving as if they had the right of way:

Every March the maples have a field day

—don't expect them to give you a year of peace—

shoving, off-side, elbowing out the hay.

 

“When the saplings get above themselves, it’s over.

Let them grow a foot or so too high

and—teen-age trees? You might as well go try

and sow the sea with rocks and hope for clover,

or, if you want less trouble, plow the sky.”

 

Nice wordplay: “uncowed,” “field day.”