In 1985 I left my home in Tucson and moved to a small city in Iowa.

Tuesday, November 27, 2001

In 1985 I left my home in Tucson and moved to a small city in Iowa. The move was necessary to allow me to attend graduate school, but it also meant leaving my big city life behind. The change was hard at first, and I am often homesick for things I got used to when I was growing up – the sight of the city spread before me when I was hiking in the mountains, the sound of bagpipes and mariachi music, the smell and taste of foods from every region of the world. I miss real mass transit (taking the bus to work or to a friend’s house was easier there), as well as the jazz club downtown, art museums, the local symphony orchestra, theater and opera company, and concerts ranging from the Boston Symphony to Elton John to the B-52s. There was always something interesting going on somewhere.

Since leaving all that behind I, who had previously only been on a working farm once in my life, have resided in mainly rural areas, and have learned to adapt myself to new ways of living – mostly. For example, seeing commercials on TV for agricultural chemicals no longer seems so &uot;different.&uot; And I have gotten used to strangers waving &uot;hello&uot; at each other as they pass on the road. I understand the importance of prices in the farm report, though I still don’t understand why crops are measured in bushels when they are harvested by truckloads and shipped out by trainloads. I still don’t know how to run a combine, but I’ve been taught how to operate a tractor. One local farmer has even let me do some field cultivating in the spring (closely supervised, of course). The depth to which living in rural areas has affected me becomes apparent whenever I travel to the big cities now, which I find to be noisy, and filled with too many people doing too many things.

Living around farmers and other rural folk has taught me a lot about life, about what it means to work hard on the land for a living, about patience and trust that things will work out, and about the uncertainty of success when so much of the outcome depends on the right kind of weather at the right time of year. Getting to know farmers meant asking lots of stupid questions (which were almost always patiently answered) and reading books about rural life -books written by farmers and also by outsiders.

So what else have I learned? It seems to me that farmers have been taught by their life on the land that change needs to be approached with caution, and their general conservativism is a healthy brake on the too quick implementation of ill-conceived ideas and policies. The contributions to society and the economy by &uot;yeoman&uot; farmers who own and farm their own land (often for many generations) are numerous. Despite the fact that they have never been a majority here in America and their influence seems to be waning in the face of &uot;factory farms&uot; and absentee ownership of farmland, the stability they provide has enabled this country to become and remain strong and vibrant. The spirit and values of the farmer are to be admired and respected.

Which is not to say that rural life today is like heaven on earth. Just as in city life, which includes many negative and dangerous elements, life here can also be destructive to the human spirit. Too often have I seen children in farm families held back from their full potential, forced to conform to ways of thinking and behaving that drain them of hope for anything better in life than what they have now. The creativity and imagination required to &uot;do things differently&uot; are often suspect in rural communities; people who are &uot;not like us&uot; are kept at a distance and treated as if they are dangerous, whether they are natives or outsiders. I have seen how easy it is for the conservatism of farmers to become suspicious of anything or anyone from beyond the boundaries of their own land.

Still, in the end, I would not trade my current situation for any other. Despite the potential for isolationism and suspicion, there is a sense of belonging and responsibility to a place that can only be found in rural communities, among the farm families I admire (if only from a distance).

David Behling is a rural Albert Lea resident. His column appears Tuesdays.