A SHIFT IN THE WIND ©

George G. Epp

Some transitions happen calmly, quietly, almost imperceptibly. Like a shift in the wind direction, or realizing one day that sometime, somehow, your little girl became an almost-woman. Changes whose margins you can’t remember crossing over.

      You think about this when you see Anna cooking, reading a recipe on her iPad, her Lutheran Ladies Aid Cookbook probably now in a box in the crawl space. You think about this when you see there’s a text message from Crystal, cryptic as usual: dad. need 200$ for books man they’re expensive sorry. Loveya. C. :-)

     You think about this while hesitating to hit SEND on your Samsung Galaxy S8, knowing as you now do that TEXTS are irretrievable, that they’re forever, even as a letter written in anger would not be returned to you by the post office in the olden days if you changed your mind five minutes after mailing it.

     Years of almost daily “drop-ins” at Angus’ place—or he at yours—used to mean coffee and conversation and agreeing about hay cutting and baling or fence repair or just repeating jokes off the TV, Victor Borge falling off the piano bench, putting on a seat belt. When and why did that taper off, get replaced by texting? Was it more than the novelty of it that formed the margin of transition? Or was there something else? Was Angus tired of our conversations? Was I so tired of the drop-in routine that the smart phone felt like a relief? Did I do something to offend him?

     Angus. Your boy’s hoof prints are all over my garden. Gerry. Why did I write “Your boy’s?” You delete and write: Angus. Rodney’s horse’s hoof prints are all over my garden. Gerry. That sounds accusatory, something to be taken the wrong way. You delete and write: Angus. Has Rodney’s mare run away again? I think she visited our place but I don’t see her anywhere. Gerry. But then the “again” seems to send the same message: I’m sick and tired of your son’s horse eating Anna’s lettuce, Angus. The only thing more suggestive would be to have put a three-dot ellipsis in front of “again.”

     You delete the message and shove the phone into your pocket.

     “Did you talk to Angus?” Anna asks from the kitchen.

     “No. Not yet.”

     “Well do it. Or I will. There’s no reason why I should put in a garden to feed his horse!”

     “It’s Rodney’s horse.”

     Anna raises a cleaver, deftly halves a cabbage head. “And that’s your excuse for putting it off?”

     “Well, I should really bring this up with Rodney, and I don’t have his cell phone number.”

     Anna looks at you over her glasses. Scrutinizing your face—it seems—as if scanning for blackheads. She slips her cell phone from her jeans pocket and before you can say, “OK, no need to panic. I’ll do it . . .” she’s talking to Beth.

     “Hey, Beth. It’s Anna. How are things?”

     (Short pause.)

     “Great. I love this time of year too. I’m putting in a batch of sauerkraut today.”

     (Longish pause.)

     “You’ll have to send me the recipe.”

     (Still longer pause.)

     “That’s great. By the way, I think Rodney’s horse has been in my garden again.” (She laughs) “Actually, I know he’s been here. Hoof prints are pretty obvious and my lettuce is gone . . . mostly.”

     (Short pause,)

     “No, no no, it’s not his fault. It’s a horse an’ I’ve got more . . .”

     The conversation continues as you leave to finish prepping the combine for harvest. You’ve got parts scattered all over the quonset floor. The wheat’s starting to turn. It won’t be long. When was it that Angus bought a combine and you stopped harvesting together? Has to be a good ten years, you think. The timing never seemed to work out what with rains and unpredictable events and both of you walking on eggs, not wanting to seem like you were being selfish in wanting to do your oats or canola ahead of the other guy’s.

     Does separation—like good fences—make good neighbours? You wondered this when you saw Angus’ New Holland combine roll out from the dealership. A better fence might keep Rodney’s horse at home.

Crystal’s taking agriculture courses at tech college. She said when she announced her choice that she’d researched job opportunities, that ag jobs were out there and that the demand would only grow.

     “And who might you be working for when you’ve got your PhD in twelve or fifteen years?” you asked her.” She punched you in the arm without a break from Googling a graph she meant to show you. “Or are you hoping to take over the farm when I’m old and . . . and decrepit?”

     “Allan can do that, Dad. Isn’t it the eldest son who gets the estate?”

     “Allan makes more in the oil patch than I’ve ever made on this place. He’s pretty unlikely to come down from thirty-five dollars an hour to this.”

     “Anyway, Dad, you’re far from decrepit. In fact you look as crepit as ever to me.”

     Sometimes talking with Crystal is like texting; cryptic, short and open to all kinds of distortion out there in cyberspace, little depth, skipping from mountaintop to mountaintop. And sometimes the message is more about what we want than what we get. Fake news, sort of.

     “I’m fifty-four, honey. On average, men in my family live to seventy-five. If I want any kind of . . . of relaxing retirement, maybe with a bit of . . . I don’t know, travel maybe, somebody’s gonna be working this farm who’s not me . . . pretty soon.”

     “Don’t talk like that, Dad. That’s morbid!” It’s not a request. It’s an order. “Anyway, Dad, here’s the graph. See how ag jobs go up, up, up?”

     She’s right. Charts on a screen exude an aura of incontrovertible truth. “Do you have a graph there somewhere that shows how many family farms there will be in . . . say, five years from now?” You’re more than aware that yours is a dying species. Between the Hutterites, Dutch dairy-obsessed immigrants, locals who have begun to collect acres like classic cars, you and Angus are rarities in a place where corporate farming is gobbling up land; farmyards have been bulldozed and plowed over or are occupied now by town folk with a delusion that they’re gonna like living in the country.

     “Bayer pays Donna twenty-five dollars an hour to manage their test plots other side of town,” she says.

     “And that’s called an ag job?” You don’t want to say to her that your dreams for your little girl never included her working as a peon for a poison-manufacturing corporation. She’d just throw back the argument Allan has posed—more than once. “It’s progress, Dad. No point in fighting it.” That other argument—hypocrisy, some would call it—feels worse: “You rail against corporations, Dad, then spray down the fungi with their product. C’mon, Dad.” Allan apologized for that remark. He needn’t have. It’s true.

     Funny how all this can fill your mind while your hands reassemble intricate combine parts without missing a bolt or belt. Were you thinking candidly about the future, you might have imagined Crystal or Allan patiently reconditioning separator parts on a combine. You might have wondered if nothing else could keep them at home, would the sheer aroma of the first turned soil in spring do it? Would the sound of ripe wheat pouring into a newly-cleaned bin haunt them, draw them back? Not likely. Not likely at all.

Rumour has it that Darcy Crow at the Remax office lives on his phone. You assume that if everyone gets as many texts from him as you do, that there is likely a lot of truth to the rumours. A few years ago, the demand for farmland in the valley escalated at a rate that caught everyone—including Darcy—by surprise. Land values doubled in five years and when the demands outstripped the supply, you started getting Darcy’s texts: Hey, Gerry: Got a customer for a half-section. Offering four hundred thousand to start. Interested?

It didn’t take a calculator to figure out that a section sold would make you and Anna millionaires and more. You actually went in to talk to Darcy after the first such invitation, but he wasn’t in. “He’s closing a deal . . . somewhere,” his secretary told you, “and he’s not likely to be back today.” You texted him instead. Darcy. Thanks. We have to think about it. Gerry.

     And you talked. Anna’s first comment was, “You’ve got to be kidding. He said what? Four hundred thousand? For a quarter section? That’s obscene.”

     “Well only if you don’t figure it in constant dollars. We paid eighty thousand when we bought it but eighty thousand then ain’t eighty thousand now.”

     She sits with both elbows on the table, a coffee cup against her lip. You’ve got one arm over the chair back and the other on the table beside an eggy breakfast plate, toying with the salt shaker. You think you know what she’s thinking . . . or imagining. A house in Saskatoon, maybe on the suburban west side, maybe in elm-shaded Nutana, maybe even on Spadina, some big two-story with a porch, looking out on the river and the jogging trail.

     “I . . . I don’t think so, Gerry, What would we do with ourselves all day?”

     “Whatever we want, Anna. Whatever we want.”

     She sips her coffee. In fact, you know her well enough to know she’d never survive as a rocking-chair-on-the-porch . . . person. You, meanwhile, haven’t begun to imagine beyond a million dollars in the bank, no combines to fix, no rain on ripe swaths . . . and no smell of the first turned soil in the spring, no sound of ripe grain cascading into a clean bin. “Maybe we’d keep a quarter section and stay here.” You say it like a question.

     “You mean like a . . . like a squire and his lady wife? With servants?”

     “No. I mean like the couple on the Brandt place. They garden and putter and he makes children’s furniture in the shop. He does some classy work.”

     “And are you itching to tinker in a shop, day in, day out?”

     “Haven’t thought that far.”

You’ve done well. No debts except for the tractor you bought last year when the old one wore out. It’s worth more than you owe on it, so not really a debt at all. 

     The thought of it swells inside you; you look up “Net Worth” on your computer and spend an evening filling in the assets lines: land, buildings, equipment, livestock, grain, incidentals. Then the liabilities and beside the tractor loan and the upcoming municipal tax, you can’t think of anything. You consider including four years of Crystal’s education but decide against it. It’s not really your liability, at least not legally.

     Using four-hundred thousand as the per/quarter value of the land, your bottom line amazes: two-million, two-hundred twenty-five thousand. Even without investment interest you would have, like, almost a hundred and fifty thousand a year between now and dropping dead of a stroke or heart attack as did your Dad at seventy-five and your uncle and grandfather at less than that.

     On the other hand, Anna’s a great cook and mightily health-conscious about it. Eighty’s not totally out of the question if your arthritis doesn’t get a lot worse. You calculate the annual interest on two-million dollars. Even at two and a half percent, you can see yourself living off the interest indefinitely, leaving Allan and Crystal each a million.

     Allan just bought a house in Lloydminster and a state-of-the-art pickup truck the year before. He’s got a live-in girlfriend and a baby on the way. You think if he did the Net Worth calculation, he’d probably end up in the red. But then, so did you . . . once. Around 1965 or so.

     Three knocks on your phone. It’s Angus. Gerry. Sorry about the horse. Won’t happen again. Angus.

     You send back a simple thumbs-up emoji.

     You close the Net Worth calculation without saving.

“I don’t garden because I need to,” Anna is saying to Crystal in the kitchen. Crystal has just commented that sauerkraut is two for a nickel in the grocery store. Oh child, you think. Twenty years with your mom and you still haven’t learned anything about what makes her tick? 

     You think that if you showed Crystal your Net Worth calculation she’d say something like, “Daddy, Daddy. What can you possibly be waiting for? You could spend the rest of your life in . . . in one of those resorts in Mexico, lying on the beach during the day, eating in restaurants at night.”

     She never knew or has forgotten what it’s like to smell the first turning of black earth in the spring, the sound of ripe wheat cascading into a clean bin in the fall. Allan never caught on to that at all; he’d ask to quit combining early so he could make it to the dance in town.

     Where does the margin separating them-from-me lie, you wonder, and when and how did they step across it without me noticing?

     Three knocks on your phone; Dad. Tracy and I are coming for the weekend. OK? Allan. You expect Anna got the same message. You reply with a thumbs-up emoji and tap send.

Was it in Toronto? Montreal? You remember something about an old woman who refused to sell the house she’d lived in since she married and ended up living between a high-rise condominium and some corporate headquarters building. She tried to sue one or both for blocking out the sun so her garden wouldn’t grow worth a damn anymore.

     You remember this because Crow just texted you to say that he’s found the land for the dairy but that yours is still a prime option for a good sale. You know its Angus. Intuitively. There was a time when Angus would have come over to talk about such an eventuality, would even have commiserated with you about what it would mean for you. 

     But that time isn’t this time, you think as you sweep up the few remnants of last year’s canola in the only flat-bottomed bin you still own. Seems only yesterday hopper bins were state-of-the-art, a daring innovation considering the expense.

     You’ve put in a field of chickpeas this year. Chickpeas, no less. You think back to the days of wheat-barley-oats-forage and wonder if it’s people’s changes of diets that drive the transition to, for instance, canola and field peas, lentils and corn . . . and now chickpeas—garbanzo beans, no less. You read everything about growing and harvesting chickpeas last winter (on the internet), even talked Anna into making a batch of falafel to see if you’d find the stuff edible. Wasn’t bad. You decided it would never hold a candle to Vereneki with plum sauce and cream gravy though.

     Damned Angus. You imagine a thousand-cow dairy upwind, a thousand animals shitting five times a day. Most likely they’ll offer you manure at a price, even offer to spread it on your fields. The Hutterite colony has converted a downwind half-section to a one- field, canola, canola, barley rotation and with their four combines and three seeders, they’re in and out in no time. They’re no bother at all.

     But then Angus’ pickup dusts up your driveway and he tells you he’s sold his farm—lock, stock and barrel—to Dutch Dairies Inc—and that they’ve bought a place on a mountain side in Panama where it’s warm all year.

     You don’t know what to say; it’s almost too big to be talked about off-handidly. “You think Beth is gonna like that?” is all you can think of.

     “Beth? You kidding? She’s all gung-ho to go. Can’t wait.”

     You think later: and what about you, Angus? With what are you going to replace the smell of the first-turned soil in spring, the sound of ripe wheat cascading into a clean bin in the fall?

     “Handwriting’s on the wall, Gerry,” Angus says. “There’s no going back.”

     “When is all this happening?” you ask.

     “Possession date is October 15, doesn’t include the crop. I’ll take that off and then we’re gone.”

     You lie awake a lot for the next few weeks. Handwriting’s on the wall. The phrase rings a bell. You get up one night, turn on your computer and Google it. It’s about King Belshazzar “mene, tekel, peres—you have been weighed in the balance and found wanting.”

So, you think, what if we stubborn, old-fashioned farmers had not been found wanting? What would agriculture look like? Would we have worked to prohibit the sale of farmland in big chunks? Would we have insisted on keeping education close to the land instead of busing our kids into towns and cities? Did the changes that overtook us begin happening right after the two-bottomed plow and a four-horse hitch? Is a life in the towns and resorts, the factories and high-rises really a life at all, and if Anna and I decided to give in and ‘make the best of it,’ what are the chances that ‘best’ will be good enough to keep us interested?

     Is it all inevitable?

Allan’s girlfriend has a name. What’s more, she has a bubbly, infectious personality and she’s way more pregnant that you’d thought. Anna and Tracy Campbell hit it off, especially after Tracy asks her to teach her everything she needs to know about cooking. “Can you stay for a month?” Anna asks and they laugh. “I could use you for the canning and freezing,” and she pats Tracy’s swelling abdomen, “except for junior here.”

     After the first, awkward exchanges, you both loosen up over a scrabble evening and Tracy takes to calling you “Gramps.” You’re not sure you like it. By the next morning you’re pretty sure you like it a lot, especially after Tracy gives you an awkward hug (since Anna was pregnant with Crystal, you’ve had plenty of time to forget how one properly hugs a woman so pregnant she waddles) and she asks, “mind if I call you Gramps? It’s either that or ‘Gerry;’ I’ve already got ‘Dad.’”

     Crystal comes home for Sunday. She brings with her a person about whom she’s given no warning. She should have. The tattoos up both arms you find revolting, particularly since he seems to lack the good grace to cover them up with sleeves for a first meeting with his girlfriend’s parents. You note Anna taking Crystal aside at the first opportunity while Allan and tattooed Ron go out for what you imagine is a toke. Anna reports back to you; she’s noted your reaction to this Ron, of course. “She says he’s just a classmate needing to get away from critical parents for a day, so let’s not be critical strangers, OK?”

     “You believe that?” I say.

     She gives me the look. “Crystal’s never lied to me, Gerry, nor to you. Let’s not start mistrusting her judgment now, OK?”

     She’s wrong, of course, about the “never lied to me” part. A few swaths in her high school days that you got wind of didn’t get to Anna. You dealt with Crystal one on one regarding a threatened suspension over a marijuana escapade, had her trade her confession for forgiveness . . . and silence. She didn’t say then how grateful she was for your giving her another chance. But she did text: Dad, I’m so, so sorry and I won’t do it again. Thank you for giving me a chance to prove it. Loveya :-)

     Maybe the handwriting’s not on the wall, maybe it’s implied in Crystal’s shaky honesty. Maybe it’s written on Tracy’s abdomen and Allan’s emergence as a father and owner of a RAM 3500 with dualies. Maybe it’s in Anna’s sauerkraut recipe. Maybe it’s written into a text Crow sends you even as you’re waving goodbye to Allan and Tracy on Monday morning.

     Three knocks on your phone: Gerry and Anna. Got an offer for your place you’ll want to see. Can I come out? Darcy. You don’t hesitate: this mornings OK. Gerry.

     Maybe the hand writer on the wall cares nothing about the smell of first-turned soil in spring, the sound of ripe wheat cascading into a clean bin in fall. Perhaps he's more subtle than that, maybe, like a ghost, or a shift in the wind.