Theives and Scythes

My family and I own a small "farm" in northern Davidson County, TN, just north of Nashville. Its situated in the relatively rugged hill country of the northern Highland Rim region. In my observation hill country retains largely the same character as its more dramatic counterpart, mountains--socially, culturally economically, and agriculturally marginal, stubborn, resistant. The world over hill regions provide safe haven for autonomous types, in the anarchist sense (those who have little use for state-level government and who embrace their marginality as a form of self-defense). For a good book about this see James Scott's latest--The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia, a study exhibiting Scott's characteristic erudition and brilliance. The region discussed traverses several nation-state boundaries, a sort of nether region called Zomia, which Scott describes as "a kind of transnational Appalachia." In the introductory chapter he states, "Most, if not all, the characteristics that appear to stigmatize hill peoples--their location at the margins, their physical mobility, their swidden agriculture, their flexible social structure, their religious heterodoxy, their egalitarianism, and the nonliterate, oral cultures--far from being the mark of primitives left behind by civilization, are better seen on the long view as adaptations designed to evade both state capture and state formation." A fitting description, I think, of not only mountain people, but hill people generally.

Anyhow, we worked this hill country farm for a few years, producing mixed veggies largely for a local market my wife and some other local farmers established in Whites Creek. We eventually quit for several reasons--trying to work a full-time job in addition to the full time job of farming proved to be more than I could handle. But I like to say that the main reason for our short tenure as farmers is related to social justice. I just couldn't countenance growing all that wonderful food just to sell it all to the urban green lifestyle bobo's who frequented the market. I thought, and still think, that growers of organic food should be more dedicated to issues of social justice if the movement/practice is to have any meaning beyond its potential to maximize profit. Pricing vegetables based on the going price of their equivalents at Whole Foods is tantamount to the gentrification of farming (which actually integrates quite nicely with other kinds of gentrification). I don't mean to generalize too broadly here--there are plenty of excellent farmers out there (several in Middle Tennessee) who attempt to mitigate this tendency as best they can while still attempting to make a living wage from their efforts. I understand the dilemma, though it was not one I could successfully navigate.

So anyhow, we moved away so I could return to school and have a more flexible schedule that might allow for a slow reentry back into farming (farmers are gluttons for punishment). We weren't ready to part with the farm though, so we rented it out to a young couple interested in continuing the farming operation. They did a great job in their one growing season there, starting a small CSA (which had always been ideal arrangement as far as my wife and I were concerned--food with a farmer's face on it, as the Japanese pioneers of the model like to say). They moved on after a season for reasons that reflect a larger reality facing would-be farmers. That is, land priced for its development value rather than its agricultural value (in Marxist terms, for its exchange value rather than its use value), is not amenable to farming on a small scale. In other words, we had to charge more for rent, to continue to pay our mortgage (I am a student, my wife a teacher, so we're pretty poor), than is reasonable for anyone aspiring to earn a living from the land. That's the real tragedy of the current situation. Those most willing and able catalysts of the small farm revolution are systematically shut out by a political economy that favors condominium or strip mall development over growing food. I began to wonder if entering small scale organic farming might not be limited to those with handsome trust funds (and I'll hold my tongue on the implications attending such a situation). It also made we wonder about the whole sacred American institution of property ownership. I think it's mainly a racket designed to shackle us to the market economy, to make wage slaves out of us (or salary slaves for that matter). Property ownership is overrated, if not a full blown epic myth.

So when our "tenants" moved out (I have an aversion to the hierarchical relationship implied by that term, evident in its historical linkage to subordination), they moved to town, which unless you are growing food for other people seems the only responsible thing to do in this era carbon dependency and climate change. Deciding to live in the country just so you can take a piss off your front porch, as a good old boy back home waxing poetic about the pleasures of country life once told me, just doesn't cut it anymore. As Barbara Kingsolver wrote of the dilemma of owning rural land, "It seems to my husband and me that this farm is something we need to work hard to deserve . . . we recognize that it ought to feed people--more than just our family and those who come to our table." Amen to that. In the interim of the move they had no place to store the BCS walk-behind tractor they had received just months earlier as a wedding gift, so they left it behind in the shed at the back of the property. (They had the ceremony at the farm, a truly beautiful event that endeared the place to me that much more). In the meantime, the place began to acquire the look of an abandoned property. So one day some assholes decided to look around to see what they could lift. The brand new BCS, never used, become the primary object of their desire and they so they stole it. Seeking to maximize the return on their spree of theft, they also heisted a chain saw and a few good hand tools, including a wrecking bar I had borrowed from my uncle to build the shed and had been inexcusably tardy in returning.

This was of course a traumatic occasion. I've been the victim of random theft two times in my life (a beloved canoe and a push lawn mower), and though I was only an indirect victim of this act, I still felt violated in the way that theft makes you feel. The loss of the BCS was obviously the most egregious--the denial of a wedding gift (and a mighty generous and useful one at that).

A curious thing struck me about the theft though. Besides the BCS, the obvious prize, they took the chainsaw, a cheap Poulan, not a Skill or a Husky, and the wrecking bar. But curiously, they left a tool that is worth more, in pure monetary value, than all of those items they snagged as afterthoughts combined. It was a scythe from the Marugg Tool Company that my wife gave me as a gift for my birthday a couple of years prior. Marugg is a 130 year old tool company locate in Tracy city, TN, about an hour and a half south of Nashville, square atop Monteagle Mountain on the Cumberland Plateau's southern reaches in Tennessee. What was curious was why they didn't take it. They understood the value of a wrecking bar, but not a handmade scythe (the handle, or snath, made in TN, of Tennessee hickory, the blade hand-forged in Austria) assembled at one of Tennessee's oldest continuously operating businesses. I suppose I see their ignorance as emblematic of our time. Wrecking bars are, after all, something you can find at Lowes or Home Depot--a fairly common and recognizable commodity form, albeit a very useful one. The scythe, however, is an entirely different sort of creature, one that existed somewhere beyond the periphery of their frame of reference. It was an anachronism, and so, incomprehensible.

It reminds of another book I've been reading, one that refers to a litany of arcane terms used in late Medieval English to describe various rights and practices accompanying the use of the commons--pannage, estovers, agistment, assart, chiminage, firebote, housebote, ploughbote, turbary. It is a book primarily about the Magna Carta and its perversion over the years since its signing in 1215 at Runnymeade on the Thames, and especially modern interpretations that have left out its accompanying document, the Charter of the Forest, which protected the rights of the commons and commoners against the interests of monarch and capitalists alike. The author, Peter Linebaugh, heir to arguably the greatest social historian of all time, E.P. Thompson, writes of this this historical distortion and forgetting, "The appeal of the modern pulls against the veneration of the old." Indeed, even among thieves. Interestingly, in the glossary explaining the arcana populating the book appears the term villein, whose original meaning meant "a class of serfs or peasant occupiers, bondsmen who, according to the followers of Kett's Rebellion of 1549, were Christ's blood set free."