Stash Hempeck - Entry # 1 My father immigrated to the
U.S. in 1912, at the age of 12, along with his parents and siblings,
from what is now north-west Ukraine. To this day, I remember the
family's reason for emigrating: my grandfather had poured blood, sweat,
and tears into a piece of land, working it into a small but productive
farm; the then-Russian government wanted it, took it, and in return
gave my family--according to my father's words--a hill of rocks. Farming runs deep in the blood on my father's side, and as far as I
know--as it was told to me--that innate need to work the soil and attend
to animals can be traced back many generations. With my father, this
relationship to farming, as he knew it, manifested in his being--much to
the vexation, at times, of my mother and older siblings--what one would
label old-fashioned. We were the last family in our area to put our
hay up in slings, rather than small bales; we were the last family to
not only raise oats, but to winnow it with a stationary threshing
machine rather than a combine; we were the last family to turn our milk
cows out on pasture during the spring/summer/fall months, the last
family to graze our hogs on grass; the last family to side-dress our
corn with nitrogen fertilizer, and to pick our corn and store it in a
corn crib; the last family to start growing soybeans; the last family to
practice crop-rotation, and to use plow-down crops for green manure. In essence, my father lived by a simple code: be good to the land, and
treat it with respect, and the land will return the favor. My
birth-family was never rich, as most people today define the term; but
we never lacked for food, for a roof over our heads, for clothes, for
self-respect. As a result, I had the privilege of growing up in a time
when farming was a respectable and honorable way of life, but at the
same time, was giving way to farming as a means of mining the soil for
maximum profit; of pitting oneself against one's neighbor; of amassing
as much land and machinery as possible, and in the process, producing as
its final result, an emptying-out of the countryside. I loved growing
up on the farm, and from my earliest remembrances wanted nothing more
out of life than to continue the legacy of my father's people. Fate,
however, decreed otherwise, and I spent most of my adult life learning
to be a jack-of-all-trades, a preparation--I now believe--for the
journey I now embark upon, a journey I have hoped for since my earliest
memories; a life of living in maximum harmony with the land and its
innumerable components. If life has taught me anything, it is that if
we humans fail to interact with our environment in a meaningful
fashion--if we feel our duty is to have dominion over this planet rather
than to coexist with it in a state of mutual agreement--we shall not
only experience a great suffering for such a decision, but we will also
lose a great portion of our humanity in the the process. |
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