A Waste of Time

Travel offers us safe temptation. It lets us be someone we are not, a tourist, for a few days, a week, a month.

A tourist, by design, is there to lap the cream from the top of any place — to roll high, to indulge carnal wants. Be it food, be it warmth, be it drink, adventure or sleep, a tourist on vacation follows temptation, gets it, pays for it, and hopes to be sated somehow more deeply.

We like to think we are educated, enlightened and rejuvenated by vacation.

I do not like leaving home and becoming a tourist for so many reasons. Leaving the farm is not a responsible thing for a farmer to do, because there is always work to be done.

My father, by his actions (and by the angry, disappointed look on his face if I told him I was visiting a friend in New York City), taught me this. To go on vacation was simply a waste of time — and a farmer cannot afford to waste time.

Parental influence, good or bad, is not a weak form of gravity. For years I’ve told people, my friends returning tan and pitying my pale, that loving my work means I never need to leave home, that I live in the most magical place in the world and every day is pretty much an adventure. Wanderlust solved.

At first this was true, and I could abide my father’s influence. But as my home, farm and work have changed, I found myself along with those Wisconsin farmers — they buy mansion-like mobile homes and live large and in charge, heading all the way south to go birdwatching with and for their wives.

I didn’t buy the mobile home, but we do drive, and we don’t take the major roads. We wind along the Delmarva Peninsula. We cross a vast agricultural region, farmland my father always said was comparable to ours, and if things were getting too hard at home, we’d sell and maybe come here.

A farmer sees things in acres. The only thing separating these 300- and 400-acre plots are tree lines and shabby rows of mobile homes. Some occupied, many not. Long driveways lead to white farm houses; many pickup trucks are parked outside. Sometimes I see the whole of a potato operation left out to rust: steel bodied trucks, the modern harvester to be very slowly undertaken.

It is incredibly flat here — the only change in topography is the occasional dip down into ditches and creeks. Waterways are numerous, little towns deserted, much land is for sale.

A flock of snow geese, a group that covers about 30 acres, begins to lift off. The landscape is transformed by their movement. They do not rise at once. It takes such a long time for the entire group to get the message that the first birds are aloft, curving back over the flock as others are still winding into graceful ascent.

And then, even when all of them are off the ground, they barely gain altitude but fly slowly, forming low and bright murmurs, casting both shadow and glint along our path.