The Why

      The only thing I did during my 36 hours home between college and farming besides pack (and unwittingly attend the GHS Senior Play) was meet my high school librarian and English teacher for tea. In a perhaps predictable transition, we are now theoretically on first-name terms. Although our relationship remains significantly that of teacher-student, the lines have blurred significantly.

      Conversation began with my impending departure, and the requisite WHY explanation. Especially now that I’m here on the farm, reclining on a decrepit couch and sipping fresh cow’s milk, any further justifications for farming seem unnecessary (why on earth is everyone not doing this?). However, at least at UChicago, explanations are inevitably in order. I’ve had this conversation over the past weeks with everyone from a 96-year-old rabbi to my department chair to a range of friends’ parents and miscellaneous museum acquaintances, all seizing on the perennial question posed to all pending graduates: what’s next?

      When possible, I opt for ambiguity. “What are you doing after graduation?” “I’ll be working on a farm.” Although improbable, it’s possible that my interlocutor could take the explanation at face value and assume that my initial employment reflects my long-term career plan, as with many graduates; someone interning at a law firm will become a lawyer, someone apprenticing on a farm will become a farmer.

      More frequently, a further explanation is prompted and I give my piece about future possibilities for the Peace Corps or agricultural policy. Realistically and initially, this explanation was the most accurate. Friends who witnessed me apply broadly and unsuccessfully to a range of air-conditioned-health-insured jobs knew that I came to farming in part because of the absence of other palatable options. And in that sense, a farming stint had to fit into some sort of trajectory aimed somewhere.

      In other cases, still, I would try to pass farming off as a year off/summer camp/vacation sort of situation. “Having spent all this time with my nose in books, I’d like to get my hands in some dirt.” I primarily found myself doing this when, despite my convictions otherwise, I felt prodded to be impressive or pressured to simplify. If someone was confused or unimpressed by the virtues of farm work, it was easier to plant the impression that I was simply “taking a break,” with the ultimate intention of realigning myself to a path toward bigger and brighter things.  

      Interestingly, though, this decoy reason has increasingly rung the most true. Tired or flustered or possibly just thoroughly done with the question, I sputtered to my former teachers a sloppy amalgamation of my usual reasons. My English teacher, in one of her turns of oblique wisdom, responded by telling how horses, when injured, are often sent out to pasture for long periods of time. It turns out that a drastic change to manner of activity heals injuries better than complete incapacitation.

      When I rushed here almost directly from Chicago, maybe it was not related to any requisite long-term scheming, but instead some other murkier and more fundamental necessity. Not entirely maimed, per se, I have still become incredibly lopsided in terms of daily energetic output, and am in severe need of a reprieve from libraries/ideas/papers/people/careers/table manners/business casual dress codes/et cetera, and am long due for some pasturing.

      Now every day I wear cut-off shorts, a tie-dyed undershirt and sports bra, and rubber boots, bend over in the sun and sweat while becoming coated from head to toe in a variety of schmutz, and blissfully take an outdoor shower followed by a dinner haphazardly thrown together almost exclusively from farm-grown ingredients. I can think of several ways to problematize this dreamy glorification of farm life, but for the time begin it has exceedingly therapeutic effects.