Misery Loves a Blog

My dear readers,

Several of you have expressed a feeling of wistfulness and even envy of my position in life as you sit in you offices day after day, thinking of me working outside. I have decided to let you visit me virtually by walking you through a day of work here at Wellspring, so that you also can experience the pleasure, joy and contentment that can be found on a farm.

The day begins at 6am, when you get up to do chores. It has been raining all night and it is still drizzling now, so you put on your raincoat and rubber boots and step out into the world. You vent the hoophouses and then go to the water spigot to fill a bucket with water for the chickens. You are instantly mobbed by the mosquitoes living in the thick brush; you seem to inhale a cloud of them. You back out, pull the hood of your raincoat up, cinch it around your face and go back in. With less surface area to attack they can now focus their efforts on the few inches of exposed skin. You walk away, deciding that the chickens probably don’t need water anyway.

When chores are done you are already hot in your plastic coat and heavy boots, but it has stopped raining so you take them off. You spray down your legs, feet and arms with bug spray. You put on a long sleeved shirt over your t-shirt, because they can easily get through one layer of shirt. Last, you don your mosquito netting hat, tuck the netting in securely, and head back out.

The thermometer registers 85 degrees by 8:30am, and the air is thick and moist. First thing, everyone goes to pick chard. Now it is a well known fact that not everybody knows that Swiss Chard is the natural habitat of the mosquito, and they come out in droves. Fortunately your defenses mostly hold, but nothing can stop the incessant whining in your ears. The biting flies are also out; they pay no heed to your bug spray but chew on your legs with single-minded determination.

You feel an insect land on your upper leg, somehow under your pants, and you swat at it. Then another and another, and you realize it is not bugs but sweat tickling down your legs. Sweat runs down your body under your two layers of shirts, covers your arms, and trickles down your face. With the mosquito hat on you cannot wipe it away easily so it runs freely, dripping salty sweetness into your mouth, stinging your eyes, and, defying the laws of gravity, slides up your nose, so that for the rest of the day, even after showering, you cannot shake the taste, smell, and feel of the sweat on your face. You don’t know how you could possibly leak so much.

The sun has risen higher. The air is heavy; you can feel it like a solid thing as you suck it into your lungs. It hangs about you, wrapping you in a wet wool blanket as you swim through the air. Your clothes are soaked, and they stick to you and make all your movements feel slow and cumbersome. The bug spray begins to wear off, and you feel stinging bites on your hands and elbows.

At noon, the temperature is 92 degrees, and when you walk across the grass barefoot, it is still damp with dew.

On your short lunch break you lie despondently on the floor, wishing for some of the coolness to seep out of the cement and soak deep into your bones to fortify you against the afternoon work. Or perhaps you write a blog entry about how miserable your life is.

After lunch you discover a whole new level of hell when you pick tomatoes in the hoophouse. It has been soaking up the sun all day, and is at least 10 degrees hotter in there without a smidgen of a breeze. The hoophouse is where the tomatoes are most prolific, and also where the mosquitoes have been most fruitful and multiplied. The tomato vines leave a yellow/green residue that turns to a black crust on your hands that will not come off completely even with persistent scrubbing. It makes your fingernails look like Theoden’s before Gandalf releases him from Saruman’s spell. After five minutes of reaching into the plants your arms start to itch and break out from the residue. You woefully roll down your shirt sleeves, relinquishing the last few inches of surface area where your perspiration may have been able to evaporate and cool you slightly.

The bossman lets you off an hour early; perhaps he can feel the mutiny brewing. You have a rootbeer float with your coworkers, and you talk about how to keep up your spirits in this, the Heart of Darkness that has come upon you. Beyond the rootbeer and ice cream, no one has any ideas.

You take a shower, washing the horror of the day down the drain, and then you make it your goal to not step outside again for the rest of the day. But in the evening you have to go out and do chores. Your short respite has made you forgetful and you don’t wear your mosquito hat, so as you are putting the chicken coop door on, a job which requires both hands, you are ambushed yet again, without a hand free to swat them. Back in the house you develop PTMD—Post Traumatic Mosquito Disorder, a disease characterized by frequent slapping of oneself and paranoid stalking of the house with a fly swatter.

Finally, the day is over and you go to bed. You lay in the dark, listening to the gentle whirring music of the fan, praying for the strength to wake up in the morning, and do it all again.

Welcome to my world. Hopefully this has cured you of any lingering romanticism.

Through all this misery, I am still able to keep within my sight my goals for the future, and even in all of this I still want to be a farmer. I know that August is the last month of stupid heat and that this too shall pass. But I just had to get this out of my system.