Trauma Farm

by Brian Brett

  WHEN WE FIRST ARRIVED Salt Spring was still a place where parents could send their kids out with the ancient phrase “Be home by dinner,” which translated into “Don’t come home before dinner.” Often they would be gone to their friends for days, with parental approvals exchanged, of course. But every year I notice a growing number of suv s lined up where the school bus stops, because parents are afraid to let their children walk home in the brightest weather. I suspect more children in the cities are smashed by the hordes of harried moms driving big suv s into today’s schoolyards than are snatched by crazed maniacs.

  I WAS DRIVING HOME past the Stowel Lake swimming hole when a wannabe junior baseball pitcher hucked something at the passenger door of my pickup. It struck with a bang. This is a hazardous curve above crowds of swimming and suntanning families and children, and locals drive slowly past it. His dangerous act instantly enraged me. I braked, turned the motor off, and leaped out, running after the miscreant, who was about ten or eleven and impressing his friends. There was no escape route, and he stared at me, aghast. The beach was packed and everyone watched with amusement as I captured our little terrorist. It turned out he’d thrown an orange at the truck. If it had hit me through my open passenger window there could have been a serious accident. I asked him who he was and where his mother was. He looked blankly at me, the little brat. The rest of the crowd soon lost interest in the incident, since the offender had been quickly apprehended, and they all knew me. Learning where he lived, I told him I was taking him home so I’d be sure he told his mother what he did. By then traffic was backing up behind my truck and drivers were growing annoyed. Then a young woman drove in from the other direction, parked, and rushed toward us. She was his older sister, and asked what was the matter. After I told her and the boy agreed he’d done the misdeed, I explained that I wanted the boy to tell his mother what he’d done. The sister obviously thought this was a good idea and said she’d take him home right away and tell his mother. I thanked her and said goodbye to the boy, jumped back into my truck, and drove off.

  That night, at dinner, I mentioned the incident to Sharon, and since she has a much better sense of social politics, she was aghast. “You could have been arrested for kidnapping!”

  “Kidnapping? I was just gonna take him to his mother. He was lucky. If he’d done it to somebody’s fancy car instead of my old beater, they’d have called the cops.”

  After a few minutes of Sharon explaining the new reality to me I grew paranoid. I’d assumed that because of the community nature of the island, multiple parenting was still practised, but of course that’s not necessarily true in our age of fear and victims. So I picked up the phone, with no idea who he was, since I’d already forgotten his name. It was so very island that with a few phone calls I could track down this child I’d never met before. I phoned his mother, identified myself, described the incident, and started to apologize, but she cut me off and informed me that he was a good child but excitable when he was with friends and needed to encounter authority on occasion. We ended up having a lovely chat and I felt redeemed, but Sharon was still nervously drinking her green tea, while I wondered what kind of children will grow up in this new age where they can’t walk freely or get harangued by strange elders.

  FOR A HUNDRED YEARS local markets, the central core of villages, edged toward oblivion; then they began reappearing. Instead of fishmongers, blacksmiths, vegetable and fruit merchants, stalls with meat hanging on hooks, bear tamers, copper-pot makers, and fortune tellers, the markets were soon repopulated by handcrafters, and then the farmers moved back. Salt Spring has a market that’s so packed on Saturday mornings the town becomes near-unworkable. There are musicians, jam and soap makers, potters, wild-mushroom stalkers, felt-hat and basket makers, flower sellers, and people offering decadent pastries, Chinese potstickers, whacked-out fair-trade coffees that’ll make your hair stand on end, world-renowned local cheeses, and garlic braids. Years ago, if I had a big crop I’d haul it to the market at dawn and sell out by ten in the morning. Now, Trauma Farm’s produce is bought by local greengrocers, so we don’t go anymore, but I miss the dawn bustle and clatter, the overloaded trucks, the jokes and banter, those steaming coffees while admiring the sheepskin rugs and the welder-artist unloading a twelve-foot dinosaur skeleton made out of leftover rebar rods.

  As always, we have to be watchful that someone isn’t selling wholesale commercial apples as organic locals, or other scams. But the eyes of your neighbours are more invasive than secret police. Gossip can equal a bureaucracy’s best efforts at enforcing good practice. In a small neighbourhood everyone knows everyone else’s business. Sometimes this can be suffocating, yet it usually works. The market is self-policed in the way that most local living is. Thus the terroir of the goods is protected and our market has become famous across Canada, like a growing number of other local markets offering an alternative to globalized food and goods.

  Not long ago the health Gestapo arrived and seized an unsuspecting farmer’s eggs because they were “unsafe.” Legal eggs must be candled, washed (which removes their protective down and makes them able to absorb organisms like salmonella), inspected, and refrigerated—in other words, they demand a factory farm with sealed biosecurity sheds, complex technology, regular inspections, costly egg quotas, a mechanized packaging operation, and extensive shipping routes in order for a farmer to sell “fresh farm eggs” locally. This is hilarious science fiction when you’re running fifty hens and selling maybe three or four dozen eggs a day during the peak laying months, but it’s the continuing saga of the horror story I discussed in the last chapter.

  The assault caught the community by surprise. But when the inspector came back the next week, the market was waiting for him, and everyone gathered into a clump; hundreds of people surrounded the endangered farmer. They were so packed and so aggressive that the inspector needed a cop. The rcmp officer, wisely recognizing the situation was only going to get ugly, suggested the bureaucrat make a tactical retreat, which he did, threatening, “I’ll be back!” The food police always come back.

  The 2005 Salt Spring Egg War, as it soon became known in headlines across Canada, turned into an epic dust-up, and to everyone’s surprise the inspection agency capitulated temporarily, granting a dispensation to Salt Spring eggs, as long as the eggs were kept in coolers and clearly marked “uninspected.” Creative islanders took up this challenge and produced their version of the appropriate stamp: THESE EGGS HAVE NOT BEEN INSPECTED BY ANY GOVERNMENT BUREAUCRATS.

  One of the glories of small communities is that, left alone, they tend to regulate themselves, utilizing community approval and gossip and traditional community behaviour. Jane Jacobs, Canada’s doyenne of civic interactions, often illustrated how functioning communities can exhibit even better control than distant bureaucracies. On our island, anyone producing bad food, whether wilty greens, mouldy garlic, or unhealthy sheep, is eventually boycotted or driven out of business. This causes citizens to take the high road (except those inevitable sneaky few, buying factory eggs wholesale and selling them on their “organic farm stands”). But no community is perfect, and good neighbours can be circumvented, which is why the injured demand regulations and administrations, gradually flooding the world with laws and police, because laws tend to encourage more innovative crimes, which demand more laws, and that’s how we ended up with all those regulations on cabbages. Strangely, agribusiness also has an affinity for regulation, because it helps eliminate small competitors, while globalization allows a thousand ways to dodge regulations or else pressure governments to alter them to benefit the larger corporations.

  Globalization doesn’t care about customer satisfaction or community reaction because there’s no human contact between maker and buyer. It’s not a true free market. Classic examples are small tools and appliances: returning faulty ones is often more expensive and time-consuming than just throwing the junk away and buying another. Meanwhile, immoral corporations will put a bureaucratic firewall be
tween their service departments and their customers, because they know people will give up after a while. It’s a wasteful, ecologically disastrous, dangerous-to-the-health global market we have constructed. You can’t get away with that kind of stuff for long at the local market. The opinion of a community can be more powerful than any regulation.

  Our market is also an important social hub. Once, our eldest granddaughter saw a girl playing guitar—busking— so Kylie begged for permission to take her guitar down there next weekend. We thought it would be fun and off we went. We soon discovered the market had considered the role of child performers, and the rules appeared restrictive and weird. Each child was permitted to play for only one hour. When our cute seven-year-old Kylie strummed a few chords and money began flying at her basket, I immediately understood why. The cuteness factor was difficult for the wealthy tourists to resist, and they poured money onto the children. She made more than a hundred dollars—an outrageous amount of money for such a young child to earn in an hour. The market organizers didn’t want children to play too long because they didn’t want kids to compete with each other, or have greedy parents learn to rely on child labour. Also, more than an hour of some screeching wannabe superstar flautist would scare too many customers away from nearby stalls or drive the marketers crazy. As Kylie grew older, her income diminished, while her younger, violin-playing sister, Jenna, began raking in the cash. We teased Kylie that she’d grown too old and would have to retire by the time she was fifteen.

  ALMOST EQUAL TO MARKETS as social events are the community fairs. At our first fair, we were thrilled, as newcomers often are—and out of control. We entered the “family farm harvest” competition, which gave us the opportunity to display our collected wares. We brought in multicoloured chicken eggs and glass jars layered with varieties of colourful beans, peacock feathers, hand-turned pottery vases of dried flowers, canned jams, bottled wine, apples, late plums, corn, artichokes. We even had our son Roben design a rustic open basket of alder branches so we could heap everything up in the thirty-inch-square space we were allotted on the table. There were grapes and a dozen varieties of squash, the twisted ornamental willows we grow for florists, and rising above all, smiling benevolently down on the display, a spray of gaudy sunflowers.

  I was going back for the second wheelbarrow load (I’m not kidding when I say our display was out of control) just as the garden coordinator stepped up to Sharon and said something like, “Oh, I’m afraid you’ve got this all wrong, dear. It should be displayed like this.” And she pointed to the entry beside ours—six tiny clusters of miniature garden fruit and vegetables meticulously lined up on a paper plate. There wasn’t enough food there for my dinner, let alone a family display of the annual harvest, but judging at these events swings toward the retentive, and the fall fair can unleash the pretentious, the neurotic, and the vicious.

  The majority of judges are scrupulously fair, yet a few often seem to take delight in insulting their neighbours. Display coordinators, generally dedicated and enthusiastic, may also become so rigid, exhausted, or loopy that you want to throttle them. This woman, we later learned, was a tireless community worker, but she was having an off night. Trying to shepherd a pack of ignorant but excited competitors in a two-hour period is stressful, and she was taking it out on Sharon. By the time I returned with the second instalment poor Sharon was weeping over the waste of all the work we had gone through, while the horrified organizer looked down her nose at my second wheelbarrowful, topped with an extra-large pumpkin. The look reminded me of a sadistic elementary teacher who used to slap my fingers with her pointer forty years ago. I can’t remember exactly how the conversation went, but here’s the general idea:

  “Oh, this is just not going to do,” the woman said.

  Sharon said, “We’re doing it all wrong! It’s supposed to be like those.” She waved her arm at the wimpy displays down the table and broke into a fresh round of tears.

  I glanced at the pathetic paper plates with their measly clusters laid out by compulsive minimalists and made my decision immediately. “Are you a judge?”

  “No,” the woman said, “I’m the display coordinator.”

  “Good.” I began heaping the rest into the open framework of the basket, tamping it all down with the pumpkin.

  That got her colour up. “And you’ll just be disqualified anyways, because you can’t exceed your space.” She was eyeballing the sunflowers, which were overhanging our neighbour’s paper plate.

  I reached out and gave the sunflowers a yank, twisting them so that the flowers hovered directly above our cornucopia. “There, is it legal now?”

  Sharon, recovering, had shifted quickly from tears to anger. Defiance was in her eyes. The coordinator looked at us cheeky newcomers, standing proud side by side, and shook her head in despair. “Yes,” she harrumphed, walking away.

  Our cornucopia won the grand championship display trophy of the fair, and along with the silver cup came a gaudy ribbon we stapled to the back of the door of our pantry. It has been joined over the year by numerous ribbons and more than a few disqualified entry forms with acidic comments by judges about our more spectacularly dumb entries. That cornucopia became the talk of the fair and was even mentioned on an off-island radio show.

  In the rural communities of British Columbia the fall fair has begun to blossom again, a gesture of defiance against globalization as well as an act of community. According to the local-food grapevine this is also happening across North America and England. I love watching the children chomping on candy apples or practising their archery, the cheerful firemen talking passersby into buying corn on the cob for a good cause, the bikers grinning benevolently in the beer tent. Then there are the competitions. Every jar of preserves is like tasting your summer, but my legendary peach jam, so sweet it gave you a headache, was disdainfully rejected for being too sweet. I had my revenge when my photograph of a flower blossom won first prize even though it was hung upside down. We won first prize for twenty-four perfectly uniform hazelnuts, but I miscounted the zinnias (sure winners) while rushing an artful display, which was disqualified, of course, and then I managed to forget the scissors in the prep area—earning the remark “I thought you could at least count to five.”

  People engage in these competitions with a lunatic ferocity, and store-bought pickles have been disqualified by discerning judges at fair competitions. Sharon determinedly challenged the flower events and lost every year, disqualified for the most picayune mistakes. Then one year she practically swept the board and she was stunned. It almost seemed too easy after all the years of rejection.

  The fair brings out everyone’s energy, and absurd events erupt when too many enthusiastic volunteers get together. There was the year the swine people and the goat people feuded over space in the barn during set-up day until they ingeniously solved their problem by shuffling aside a painstakingly crafted display by the cattle people, who had gone home. Returning later to discover this misdeed, the cattle people packed up and left in justifiable outrage over the cavalier mistreatment of their hard work—taking their cattle with them. The animal coordinator reputedly repaired to the bar to drown his sorrows and was nowhere to be found for hours. Ah well, these things happen. They are also part of the community. By fair time I gather everyone was friends again (more or less).

  SINCE HE HAS WORKING herd dogs, a livestock hauler, and a classic case of public spirit, Mike usually volunteered to haul people’s livestock to the fall fair. While he was hauling one year—on the other end of the island—a pair of pigs escaped from their owner. Mike and his dogs were called. He soon had the rogue pigs herded into his truck, but because he was so busy and had no idea who the owner was, he left them in a spare pen at the fairground until everything was sorted out. Upon returning to the fair he discovered he’d won second prize for them.

  THE VARIETY OF LIFE is what we live for; it’s all here, even more than at the market—the good, and a little of the bad. There’s the apple grower w
ith 120 kinds of apples, offering everyone a taste. The seed savers. The salmon stream keepers. The woman who makes dolls like angels, basket weavers and wine makers, and the lonely politicians at their booths. The scarecrow that wouldn’t scare a mouse. The cute rabbit with immense ears. The little girl crying beside the road after she scraped her knee. Famous islanders—rock stars, lawyers, artists, writers, politicians—cheerfully washing dishes in the recycling booth. Hidden away upstairs a clan of women elders count the fair’s proceeds with a moral accuracy that’s daunting.

  The market and the fair and the miraculous movement of gifts flowing through us like water in a creek are what make me love my local culture. Real communities are held together by just that, the community. The hand-crafters, the artists, and the skilled tradespeople—from cabinetmakers to clothes makers to backhoe drivers—are the core that attracts and civilizes the rest of the rural community. Sometimes it’s merely everyone meandering down to the park beside the bay, wearing silly Halloween costumes and eating junk food while the children run ragged among us, and we sip hot chocolates sneakily laced with a touch of rum. Later, the fireworks fall in cascading fountains over the blue-black waters of the bay and all of us go “Awwwwwwwww . . . .”

  23

  THE LAST ROUNDUP

  DYING IS THE way we live, and as night approaches I often find myself recalling our losses—the dimming of light can do that. Without death, the world wouldn’t be alive. Some years ago I was at an Ontario farm with a young farmer who happened to glance over my shoulder and see that one of his ewes was dead under an apple tree, a half-eaten apple in her jaws. She had choked on it. The unhappy farmer gazed at his once-prime ewe and remarked dryly, “If you’ve got livestock, you’ve also got dead stock.”