Trauma Farm (43 page)
I enjoy living on an island where we greet each other, where not saying hello can get you lectured for unneigh-bourly behaviour—though a stroll between the bank and the hardware store can cost two hours in small talk and drive me wild with desperation to get home. Yet how outlandish is today’s urban world, where people walk past people every day without even acknowledging their presence.
People working together will work things out, as Jane Jacobs noted. You only have to watch the wonder of the human interactions at ferry time in our tiny village of Ful-ford Harbour during summer: the ferry overflowing with cars disembarking and boarding, locals picking up milk or a video in the small store or jawing about a bear sighting as they sip a soy cappuccino, while tourists stroll through the cluster of unorthodox shops that sell everything from Balinese mirrors to beads and wood-oven bread. It’s chaos, cars and foot traffic wandering in every direction, yet hardly ever do I see glass from a broken tail light. Everyone knows the place is a hazard, and they watch out for each other. It’s a kind of choreographed conversation among the community, performed with grace and good cheer.
Once I honked at a man’s car straddling the parking lot entrance. Then a neighbour hollered at me, “Hey, Brian, he’s only waiting to get gas!” I immediately understood why the car was trapped in its awkward spot. I turned red with shame at my rudeness. Another time, a friend of ours got stuck in a freak snowstorm and managed to block both loading and unloading ferry traffic, creating a fabulous jam-up, which soon had everyone in the harbour guffawing, while a crew of Fulford irregulars shoved her car into position in the icy snow.
Tonight was another community event. The fall fair is the culmination of the forging of relationships between musicians, farmers, car enthusiasts, bakers, growers, cooks, bead stringers, and blacksmiths. We all show up. When we arrived at the fair and began organizing our produce I noticed Sam, the border collie, in the back seat with a guilty look on her face and what appeared to be a bean stem dangling from her muzzle. Sure enough, there were only eleven green beans in the basket that was supposed to hold twelve, so as soon as we entered the hall, not even having enough time to wonder why a dog would eat a raw string bean, I rang up Bev Byron on the pay phone and explained the crisis as the deadline for entry neared. I knew she’d soon be on the way with her own produce. So she drove up to our house and picked a half-dozen of our pole beans. Once she arrived we found a bean that matched our specimens and finished our entry. Those cobbled-together beans won the trophy for grand champion of vegetables. That’s what community is all about.
LAST CENTURY, AS THE
mixed farms were rolled over by the banks, the corporate bone collectors picked them up for a song. The towns began fading, their population migrating toward the cities, as they have done throughout history when small farming collapses. Our great web of little towns winked out like bedroom lights at night. Yet recently, there’s been a reverse flood of often wealthy immigrants, connected electronically and more educated about local living, finding themselves in conflict with the developers eager to cash in on the outer regions and ruin the communities with success. Salt Spring Island is a forward-looking community where people demand local food from their shopkeepers— yet we don’t supply 10 percent of our own food today.
Living locally, you soon learn that at least the historic modes of exchange of labour and goods still thrive, annually at the fall fair and weekly at the local craft and farmers’ market in Ganges, which shuts down only in the winter months and is a fine conduit for supplies, culture, and eccentric community conflicts. Our island newspaper estimates it has received more letters to the editor about the market than about any other subject. There also may be hundreds of farm-gate stands. Small farmers are an integral link in the rural social structure, whether pulling cars out of mudholes with their tractors, providing land or buildings for community gatherings, or scaring local hooligans up to no good in the fields or woods.
Gifting and helping flow around our island like water. There’s a subtle ritual attitude to debt—a pass-it-on mentality that can grow deliciously eccentric as oddball instruments like a burdizzo (a tool used for gelding male livestock) or a honey extractor travel the island. Although the extractor, donated to the community by a couple who’d given up bees, has become an increasing challenge to track down every year during its migrations.
Tool- and help-swapping can lead to a complicated, amusing, lively web of debts between neighbours—relationships built upon mutual need and mutual gifting, and sometimes mutual annoyance. This is what Pyotr Kropot-kin talked about with his argument that mutual aid was necessary for evolutionary survival. The trick about getting caught in this cycle is to remember that giving is more important than selling. You give tools or help—safe in the knowledge that they will return someday. Theoretically (hey, every system has its failings). If your neighbour needs something, you give it to her. It doesn’t matter who it is. You give, and you keep on giving, never expecting a return. In
The Gift,
Christopher Hyde contrasts the market economy, which has made acquisition the core of society and led to the manufacturing of wants that can never be satisfied, with a “gifting economy,” where, as in Native communities, especially of the coast, self-worth is measured not by what you have but by what you have given.
As Hyde points out, now we have entered the kingdom of the consumer—a kingdom easily manipulated by the manufacturing of wants, so that our economy succeeds only if we are continually wanting, and thus unfulfilled. Gifting rarely goes off the rails, as it did with potlatches for a brief, confused period before they were banned. It’s true that an escalating pattern of gift giving bankrupted chiefs. They also knew that most of the gifts would come back, one way or another, for that is the way of potlatching, which the government officials couldn’t comprehend; and I love how my Native friends rely on the ceremony for community good order. Several times I’ve heard the remark “He won’t complain. I’ve potlatched him more than he’s potlatched me.”
But the “gifting wars,” as I call them, have their drawbacks— such as figuring out who has that honey extractor, which can cost time spent on social calls and lead to excessive dinner invitations or requests for community service, like weeding all those invasive Scotch broom plants from the nearby park. You can also inherit monumental social debt from generous individuals. Farmers have long learned that the more help you give another farmer, the more help he will owe you, and help is always needed on a farm. So I grow twitchy when I realize I’m falling behind, because there are certain farm chores you’d do anything to dodge, like helping clean out a plugged septic system or castrating baby pigs.
If gifting doesn’t always work, there’s barter. Before you know it, you can find yourself in a complex mixture of debts and barter where you end up trading your cow (there goes Betty) for a truck and a load of hay, or an old canoe for five broiler chickens. It’s the glory of a rural community that such dealings remain possible.
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.
