For reasons I have outlined in this space on a number of occasions, the Kingbird Café is not a place to go for spiritual refreshment in mid-January. And it’s not just because of the weather. January is the month when farmers know everything. All the data is in. There is nothing left to speculate about for the year now past. We know exactly how late everything got planted and how slow it came out of the ground and how wet it was coming off. The truth is staring us in the face and we have run out of ‘ifs’ to comfort us about the way things will turn out.
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Yesterday, I stumbled into the diner to find Bert and Bob Pargeter, the Combine Kings of the Valley, at the corner table with Vern Bunton and old Owly Drysdale, the ancient cattleman from the heights of Hall’s Hill. Owly was talking loudly about leaving the cattle business, as he has every year at this time since he returned from the war in 1946.
“I should have gone into computers,” Owly boomed, his great grey eyebrows bristling up off his forehead like the snowy branches of a Persephone Pine. “Look at the fortunes that have been made in computers. If I’d put as much money into computers as I have into these cattle, I’d be sitting on a big boat in Florida with a fellow in a white coat bringing me my Silk Tassel on a silver tray.”
“I don’t know,” said Bob. “Depends which company, doesn’t it? If you’d put it in Nortel you’d be served by fellows in white coats all right, but it would be more likely over here in the rubber room of the Hillhurst County Mental Health Centre.”
“Sure,” said Owly. “But I was thinking of something like Google or one of these hot new fads like Facebook or Twitter. Think of the money I would have made by now. I could have been a real player. Just think of the cattle barn I could have built.”
Vern shook his head. “Owly, I’m amazed you know what Facebook and Twitter are. But did you know that investors have put somewhere around a billion dollars into Facebook over the last six years and they think it might… I repeat, might… turn cash-positive for the first time… next year. Does that sound like the cow business or what?”
Bert nodded in agreement. “We live in nutty times when you can have 25 million customers but no revenue to speak of. That’s the situation with Twitter. Can you really call that a business? All those customers and nothing to sell them… why that’s just like…”
“The market for #1 wheat this year,” said Bob drily. “It’s all a matter of market timing,” I ventured. “Two thousand years ago, you all would have been significant players. Bert and Bob, for instance, would have been huge. They could have owned England.”
Bob’s eyebrows went up. “How do you figure that, professor?”
“Simple,” I said. “How much wheat and corn would you estimate went through your combines last year?
There was a brief hush and I realized that I had basically asked Bert and Bob how much money they made, so I quickly rephrased the question the way a telemarketer does.
“Would you put your production at less than three thousand tonnes a year or more than three thousand tonnes…?”
“Oh, more,” said Bob. “Well there you go.
You could have kept Julius Caesar’s legions going indefinitely, certainly long enough to invade and conquer England. According to these books I’ve been reading, Caesar took two legions to Britain and each legion used four tonnes of grain per day. Serious coin in those days.
“They would have built a castle for you somewhere comfortable like the hot springs at Bath, married you off to the daughter of some senator in Rome and shipped you all the figs and olives and wine you wanted.”
“Really?” said Bob thoughtfully. “And if I didn’t drink wine, I suppose I could always get someone to make beer for me. They had beer in those days, didn’t they?”
“Sure, but it would be warm beer, just like today in England.”
“But,” Bob protested, “if I had my combines back then, surely I would have had a fridge in the castle, don’t you think?”
“All right,” I said, waving him away. “This whole thing is starting to break down. And it’s probably just as well because they killed Caesar and the people supplying the army didn’t get paid and the whole thing collapsed in civil war, just like Nortel.”
“Jeez, there goes my castle,” said Bob sadly to the others. “And I was going to spend March Break there with Heidi and the kids.”
