Your Independent Journal from the Heartland
One of the joys of living in the country is that we always have some kind of job to do. Spring, summer, autumn, winter—there’s always some chore to keep us busy. And I never work alone, so chores are always a chance for conversation. Over winter break, I caught up with a youngster home from college. We were cutting bamboo at a friend’s place, cutting it for a staking project at our place at a time to be determined.
You might suspect that the chatting part of the work is more important to me than the job part and you’d be right. How else would I know what’s happening in a college kid’s brain? And this kid, understand, is one of the best and brightest, well-connected and about to graduate with a degree in geography. So the conversation began with my quick question about his future, which stands for the future of all his generation.
“We don’t expect things to get better,” he began. Climate change, job security were at the top of his list of worries. He had almost enough scholarships to pay all his college bills. He’d be debt-free in a few years while some friends faced decades of payments. If he stayed in our neighborhood he thought he could buy a house when he was in his mid-30s. If he moved to a place he preferred, he could never buy.
I could understand the pessimism, but how can a youngster think things will never get better? It took me back to the 1970s and my college days which were mostly spent in protest against the Vietnam war, the draft, racism. The only way my friends and I passed our classes was through the kindness of sympathetic professors. We missed classes, labs and tutoring sessions. Name the protest, we were there—Chicago, Madison, Detroit, D.C. We were sure we could make things better.
On March 29, 1973, the U.S. pulled out of Vietnam. I remember exactly where I was when I heard the news … I was walking the floor with my baby in the living room of the house my husband and I had just bought. Everything was new to me—motherhood, housekeeping, unpacking all the boxes we had brought along. I stood by the radio, lost in wonder. “We stopped the War,” I said to the house. I repeated it over and over. We stopped the War.
But to my young worker, today’s future is grim.
We passed the morning hacking at bamboo and piling it into the truck. We kept talking, even joking around, but his ideas hung like fog.
Our conversation veered into the gender divide. Women are getting higher degrees and men are opting for jobs in the service industry. One of the grads in his high school class had rejected the usual math and science path. He learned welding in shop class and graduated from high school into a $90,000-a-year job. He’s now married to a PhD psychologist. Was there a social-class difference between them? I asked. Could a welder enjoy the conversations at a college professor’s cocktail party? And vice versa?
The discussion kept dodging into new tunnels. We broke up the serious stuff with disjointed musings on whether or not our livestock could be induced to eat bamboo leaves since we only needed the stalks for our project. He googled and learned that only one kind of bamboo is toxic. We thought we could chance it, just a little at a time for the goats, sheep and donkeys that might eat it. Not the cattle. Cattle are too valuable to experiment with.
That was a Thursday… Jan. 1 to be exact. The next day we worked together was Saturday, Jan. 3. The project was pulling honeysuckle—an invasive vine. I had spent the morning on another project but when we met in the early afternoon he surprised me with the news that our government had captured the President of Venezuela. It took me a long time to get the story straight. “We’re at war,” he said.
“Not War,” I said, trying to reassure. I still hadn’t heard any definitive report. We brought a radio outside to listen while we worked. POTUS had gone off-script, was ranting, made no sense and we got nothing helpful from the reports.
Now our conversation was different. He worried about the draft. He wondered if he’d stay or leave—shelter with friends in Spain or Canada. We considered the future of other folks we know, some of them trans.
He had planned a trip to Washington D.C. for the last week of winter break. If there was a protest, I asked, would he attend?
He didn’t know. It would depend.
We finished the day feeling like we had accomplished something. A pile of invasive vines heaped itself in the driveway. Another pile, bamboo, was drying in the yard. But in our brains, nothing but confusion. What would the next announcement be?
Margot Ford McMillen farms near Fulton, Mo., and co-hosts “Farm and Fiddle” on sustainable ag issues on KOPN 89.5 FM in Columbia, Mo. Her latest book is “The Golden Lane: How Missouri Women Gained the Vote and Changed History.”
Email margotmcmillen@gmail.com.
