I have written here before that February is the toughest month for the farmer because it’s the one time of the year that he knows everything. Crops are in
the bin, yields are recorded in the book, there’s nothing left to break down, dry up, wash away or get eaten by bugs. In short, there’s nothing left for him to fret about besides prices and climate change, and it leaves a void that unsettles and makes him anxious.
In the Kingbird Café the other day, the subject moved as usual to impending global chaos. Rev. Ray listened to us drone on about the awful consequences of imperfect weather colliding with perfect world food demand and he raised his hand, the way he does for a difficult Sunday school class at St. Stephens-on-the-Drumlin.
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“Excuse me, gentlemen, but last week it was vanishing honey bees, the week before it was Fox News, and the week before that it was banana virus. It seems to me that the breakdown of civilization is kind of like vitamin D to your systems. You need a dose of it every day to stay balanced.”
There was a dead silence around the table as we thought about this. Bob Pargeter broke the silence for us. “It’s just a Canadian thing we do,” he said. “It’s like fishing or pick-up hockey. There’s no harm in it.”
“Well it’s depressing to listen to,” said the reverend. “Do you do this at home in front of your wives and children?” We all looked at each other and there were a few shrugs.
“Of course we do,” said Bob. “They’re used to it and they know that it works.”
Rev. Ray snorted. “What do you mean? It works on what?” “Worry protects you from bad stuff that would have happened except that you got in front of it and worried it away,” said Bob.
Ray shook his head in disbelief. “Superstitious nonsense. Can you bend spoons with these thoughts?”
“Interesting idea,” said Bob mildly. “Never had time to try it. Too busy worrying about more important stuff. You take last summer. Here in Ontario it ended up being basically perfect. But for a while there it looked like we might not get the corn crop off. And we wouldn’t have except that we got busy and worried long enough and hard enough that it dried up and froze and everything worked out fine.”
“That’s true,” said Vern Bunton. “And I was talking to my cousin in Manitoba over the holidays and he told me that things were pretty bad out there at the harvest but they could have been a whole lot worse if he hadn’t got busy and worried about it, too. He was grinding along in the combine, staring at that moisture monitor and he was able to pull it down as much as four per cent some days if he really concentrated. True story. He says he worried that wheat from feed grade all the way up to #2. And a neighbour of his said that all those years he worried he was going to be skunked finally paid off this year, because he was perfectly prepared for it when it happened.”
Wilf Smalley nodded agreement. “It has been proven scientifically that if you apply crop inputs and then put them out of your mind, they don’t work. You’ve gotta keep an eye on that field and maintain a constant gnawing feeling in your gut to activate the chemicals. Otherwise, you’re just leaving everything to the mercy of natural forces, like a newborn lamb alone in the pasture overnight. And who would do a thing like that?”
“And you wonder why the rest of the world doesn’t understand you,” said the reverend and he turned to me. “Does this make any sense to the writer?”
I thought for a moment. “There was one scientific writer, Lewis Thomas, the doctor-poet-philosopher, who once said that we are the only animal that worries, which is why we survived so long.”
“But don’t worry, Rev,” I added. “As soon as they put in their seed orders and start booking fertilizer they’ll get back to fretting about how they’re going to pay for it all and you will know that life has returned to normal.”
“I need some air,” said the minister as he rose and headed for the door.
