Time Passages

West-northwest of me perhaps half a mile, there is huge old abandoned house. To the east of that, north-northwest of me, is a smaller, “newer” house occupied by an approximately 90-year-old World War II veteran and his wife. That neighbor’s father was born in the first house, well over a century ago. The veteran remembers walking across the field between our houses with my grandfather’s brother, on their way to catch a bus to go enlist.

The house I live in was built in 1947, reportedly by my grandmother’s brother, who, according to one of my neighbors to the immediate south (well, if you call 200-300 yards “immediate“), built most of the houses along this road. The former owners of the house, who died in their 70s three or four years ago, after having moved in after their parents, the original owners died. The farm this house and 1.6 acres were “carved out” of has been in that family’s name for more than a century, I’m told, and the “farm” part of it, the 30-acre part of it the house sits on plus 50 acres across the road, still is in their name. The house immediately to the south and the house immediately to the north (again, 200-300 yards away) also sit on patches of land that had been carved out of a farm to sell separately.

Everyone up this 2-½-mile stretch of state highway, besides me and the probably 40-something nurse who will be moving in to the house north of me, is in their sixties and seventies. I’m told the nurse has a couple of kids, so the virtually empty school bus that passes by mornings and midafternoons on school days will continue to pass by, still virtually empty.

Forty or so years ago it was different. I’ve got a second cousin my own age who grew up about a mile west; a neighbor (two miles away, on a different road) of about my own age grew up in a house a mile or so north down on the river bottom that I can see from my yard; in the house I live in were also two kids of about the same age.

Farms along here were in fact the “family farms” you sometimes still read about, and that do, I suppose, in fact still exist, here and there, scattered across the country. Fact is, though, few young families can afford to buy an existing farm, move in and go to farming. Most farms are bought by established farmers who plan only to farm the land, not live on it, as they already have houses on old family farms, which is why so many houses on farms are carved out and sold separately to people who usually are not farmers, like me (or occasionally to some who are, like my neighbor to the south, who farms something like 600-700 acres, I think--some of it land he inherited from his own father, some he bought on his own, some his wife inherited from her father, plus some he rents (including the land my own house sits on).

Equipment--combines, tractors, planters, field cultivators, sprayers, etc.--has gotten so big that one man can cover easily 3-5 times as much ground, or more, than the average farmer could even when I was a kid--and he must, in order to produce enough to pay for the equipment plus a living for himself and his family.

Every farmer I know is a descendant of farmers, but most descendants of farmers I know could never go into farming on their own, unless in partnership with their fathers, because of the enormous amount of capital required. My neighbor to the south considers himself one of the “little guys” in the farming business; forty years ago, he would have been a “pretty big operator.”

Yes, yes, times change, I understand this. What I can’t figure out, though, is WHO is going to be farming all this land in, say, 20 years, when all the farmers now in their late sixties and older either retire or get “retired” by death or disability. The youngest farmer I know is 50, and according to my father, the youngest farmer in the neighboring county is of about the same age, maybe a bit older.

The field to my immediate south and the one across the from it are owned by somebody who has gone out of the business and cash-rents the land to somebody every year. One day I was talking to another neighbor (actually the father of the nurse who will be moving into the house to my north), who said he used to farm both those fields, plus more land farther south. He pointed out some details about the contour of the land and said that whoever was farming it this year was doing it “wrong.” From what he said, I believed him. The guys who worked the land this year probably had never so much as driven over it before--they paid the rent, sent in some guys on gigantic tractors with disks bigger than any I had ever seen, along with a 24-row planter, and got the fields planted in a day. This fall they sent in two enormous combines, along with a couple of tractor-trailers to haul the grain to town, and got the fields harvested in about a day and a half.

They don’t own the land, only rent it, so they’re most interested in what they can get out of it this year, without the concern for erosion, loss of topsoil, etc. that an owner might have. Given the more environmentally friendly farming practices--specifically, no-till farming--these days, it probably doesn’t matter. Still, given what the neighbor told me, I wonder.
Interestingly, there is also a thriving Amish community in this part of the county. It is jarring to see a man with a 4-horse team pulling a 1-bottom plow on the other side of a fence from a huge 4-wheel-drive John Deere “Behemoth” or whatever they’re calling them now.

More or less across the road from me is a tiny old, largely forgotten cemetery, “home” to perhaps a couple of dozen souls, book-ended chronologically by a husband who died in 1871 and his wife, who passed in 1901. It is difficult, maybe impossible to know how many people have been buried there; there are at least three markers that have been broken off at ground level, another that at some point had been placed on top of a fence corner post. My neighbor to the south and I keep it mowed, a “tradition” assumed by my neighbor upon passage of the former occupant of my house, who had originally cleaned all the brush out of the cemetery and began tending it years ago. I’ve seen two people actually stop and look at gravestones there in the past two years or so, probably people working on family genealogies. There are perhaps half a dozen more, similarly sized cemeteries within a 5-mile radius of where I live, at least one of them still a “working” cemetery.

While in some ways it seems there is a lot of history in this little corner of an obscure Missouri county, white people have been here for less than 300 years, probably less than 200; I don’t know if there was a native American population here then or not, although arrowheads and other artifacts pulled out of the little river east of me suggest that they at least passed through occasionally. That’s not a very long history, as these things go.

What thinking about all this gives me most, I think, is a sense of how very briefly transient we all are. Certainly that’s not an original realization--everyone comes to it, at some point or another. It can be instructive, though, to look around you and try to imagine what it must have been like, a lifetime or two ago. Whether there’s any real value in it, I don’t know.