I Wish I Had a Better Word For It
There’s a feeling I’ve tried to explain before, and I’m not sure I’ve ever managed it. Truth be told, I’m not even sure I fully understand it myself, and maybe that’s part of what bothers me. I’m not trying to make something small sound big, and I’m not asking for sympathy or pretending farmers carry some burden nobody else does. I just wish I could explain this feeling.
A few days ago Anne and I finished chores and counted bales again. Less than fourteen left out of more than two hundred we had stacked up going into winter. The girls are eating about a big round bale a day now, which by my rather rudimentary farmer math means we’re down to the wire.
There’s still a chance. A few warm rains and some heat and maybe, just maybe, we can take first cut hay off one field in a couple weeks and start replenishing the pile before things get serious. But it feels like a stretch. The alternative is buying hay, and that’s never a conversation a farmer enjoys. It’s expensive, uncertain quality, and always seems to come with a little swallowing of pride.
So Anne and I did what worried farmers do and went for a little farm tour. Sometimes you drive fields not because there’s anything you can do, but because looking somehow feels like doing something.
We pulled up to the last hay field and both saw it at the same time. ATV tracks all through it.
And not just any hay field either. This was the field. The one we seeded three times last year because it kept failing to establish. The one we’re paying to rent. The one I had quietly been pinning a fair bit of hope on to help carry sheep through this tight feed stretch. And there they were—trails worn in loops and circles where somebody had clearly been having themselves a grand old time.
Now I’ll be honest, it wasn’t devastation. It wasn’t like the whole field was ruined. If I said that I’d be exaggerating. But it was just enough damage to be irritating, and just enough symbolism to hit me in the gut, and that’s where I can never seem to find the words.
A little detective work that didn’t require much of Columbo and I had a pretty good idea whose kids had been doing the riding. A couple phone calls later I was speaking to their mother. She was apologetic, genuinely, and said they didn’t realize it mattered.
And I believed her.
But somehow that almost made it harder, because that’s exactly it. It mattered.
How do you explain that what looks like “just grass and clover” isn’t just nothing? It’s feed. It’s planning. It’s money already spent. It’s stress already carried. Sometimes it’s sleep. Even a bare field isn’t open playground to a farmer. We think about soil compaction, tire ruts, stand damage, forage regrowth… things nobody driving recreationally across it would ever have reason to consider.
And this is the third time in about as many years something like this has happened. Every time it does, I end up sounding to myself like some overdramatic old farmer making a fuss over tire tracks, and maybe that’s why I struggle so much with the feeling. Because it isn’t really anger. It’s something closer to feeling something fragile of yours was handled carelessly by someone who didn’t know it was fragile. That’s about as close as I can come.
Anne and I even found ourselves half-joking about retaliation, not because we’d ever do such a thing, but trying to come up with an analogy. Some way to explain to someone else what it feels like. Would it be like somebody driving donuts through your front lawn? Riding bicycles through a vegetable garden? Muddy boots through a freshly painted room? None of them fit becasue none carry the economics and stress that farming does, and we came up empty.
The saddest part may be knowing it won’t be the last time I feel this. There’ll be another moment someday where someone means no harm but still steps on something that matters, and I’ll likely struggle again to explain why it stings.
But standing there in that field it did occur to me that most harm in life probably isn’t done from meanness, it comes from not understanding what someone else is carrying, and then I had another thought I didn’t much like… I’ve probably done the same thing myself in someone else’s world, not with ATV, but by stepping over some line I didn’t know was there, and that was a humbling thought.
Either way, we drove home, talked about rain, checked the bales again, and carried on. Which is mostly what farming is.
Carry on.
Still, I sure wish I had one perfect line ready for the next time this happens. Some sentence simple enough to make a person stop and say, “Oh… now I get it.”
But I don’t.
Farmer Rod