Retreat

Any land worth having was someone else’s land before you. Of course a house needs less land than a farm, and you can divide land, plant houses and write off the handprint of the farmers who tended the fields. Money isn’t everything, but as the houses got closer to the family farm, the taxes for what the farm was worth had more to do with the price of housing than the value of the crops it might produce.

Taxes went up until Grandpa had to move on and we sold. We all moved north and kept at it with cattle and alfalfa instead of oranges and lima beans. The old place had tack rooms with old harnesses hanging. There was a forge and a place to work metal, the draft stock needed shoes. A can of carbide was in the corner and we could cook up acetylene, although I was too young to start cutting metal with more than a saw. But we sharped nails with the grinding wheel and made spears.

Moving north meant the old horse drawn equipment, the steam equipment and that which was too big to truck went to scrap or over the edge into the barranca. The new equipment yard in Oregon was modern for the times but bigger just kept getting bigger, and by the time Oregon came apart the auction was a bloodbath . We put too much faith in those machines and they really broke hearts, and still it goes on — one farm sale to the next.

Maybe it’s not right that I should hold the machines responsible but I do, and as the hedgerows came down, the fences, the property lines to the neighbors expansion and behemoths rolled across the good land, they killed off both the farmers and the towns nearby. They killed off the insects, the birds and after enough years, even the springs that once flowed.

Anyway I always wondered how it would be if we hadn’t mechanized, if we stepped back in horsepower towards minimalism rather than the grandiose. A hoe, maybe a couple of battery electric tools that could be replaced with something smaller and cheaper, in a pinch. But here it is, the end of expansion. Here we are and bigger is about to lose.

My time is arriving, although the auction was the end, a long time ago. The old farm went down and I picked up a grub hoe. Grandpa had good advice I have tried to live by. He drove horses, fixed stationary combines, got big and got crushed. He said “ buy water not land. “ He said I shouldn’t expect to make any money farming. I took his advice, bought riparian water rights, a little land with it, and I have never been surprised that I didn’t make money farming. The houses are getting closer, everything else seems like it’s further away.