This Life Is in Your Hands_ One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone - Melissa Coleman [68]
“My mother was a pushy realist and my father a laid-back idealist,” Papa liked to say. “Now my sister is the laid-back realist, and I’m the pushy idealist.”
Papa hoped to see organics taken seriously by the agriculture industry rather than being dismissed as some hippie thing. “The scorn in which organic agriculture is held by the University of Maine and by the Extension Service is something which should be changed,” he told a reporter for the local paper. “Their attitude probably isn’t based on malice but on misinformation. The organic idea has been presented in a naïve sectarian way, and I can understand the reaction of the professionals but can’t condone it because they are not fulfilling their hired role to be investigators instead of front men. They should be the first to say, ‘Let’s look into it.’ Instead they are the first to pooh-pooh it.”
Papa had a button pinned to one of his jackets that read, “The meek are getting ready,” a tongue-in-cheek reference to the beatitude, “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.” Papa was getting ready, but he was finding that action required a lot more power and money than the farm stand could provide. The outside world was far more concerned with financial returns than with Sir Albert Howard’s law of return.
In Washington, Secretary of Agriculture Dr. Earl Butz had made sweeping changes in the 1973 Farm Bill that would significantly alter the course of agribusiness in the United States, but not for the better, in Papa’s opinion. Butz’s motto, “Get big, or get out,” further encouraged agribusiness to buy up small farms and plant thousand-acre crops of government-subsidized, pesticide-sprayed corn. As some farmers saw it, Butz’s policies gave the chemical industry carte blanche to control the nation’s food supply and push all but the most determined small farmers out of business. While Butz’s motivation was born of the scarcities of the Great Depression, his solution—cheap food for all—had its own set of consequences. High-fructose corn syrup and corn-fed beef, two by-products of cheap corn, were soon sold into every channel of the American diet, leading to the prevalence of fast food, which in turn contributed to what would become a nationwide health and obesity problem. Papa hoped to encourage a healthier alternative.
Hurricanes blew up the coast from the tropics in fall. You could tell one was coming by the heavy-humid-warm feeling in the air. The gulls lined up on the rocks, waiting. Clouds slunk in from the sea. The radio squawked out staticky warnings.
“She’s a comin’,” the locals said on such days in Robert McCloskey’s book Time of Wonder, written about his summer island just off the coast from us. “It’s a gonna blow.”
“Let’s go!” Papa—the Departure Nazi, as we called him—hollered. The clouds hung just above the farm, full of the coming storm. Papa moved out the door with a force greater than his wiry body, a strength beyond muscle. His hair stood up with the energy of it. There were airplanes and faraway places in his eyes and a thrill in the smoothness of his shaved cheek. Papa would be doing research in Europe for two weeks, the longest he’d ever been gone from us. We followed him out the door, Mama trying to button her shirt after nursing, Heidi and me hustling behind. The farm was quiet, waiting to see what would happen. Papa swung his satchel into the back of the jeep and clapped his hands.
“All aboard.”
“I love Papa so much, I don’t want him to leave,” I said to Mama as I followed her to the jeep, and knew she agreed by the way her face went soft and distant.