Page 22 RAIN Oct./Nov. 1982 Access Lettersfrom the Country, by Carol Bly, 1982,184 pp., $4.95 from: Penguin Books 625 Madison Avenue New York, NY 10022 Here's an important voice, witty and perceptive, bringing news about farming and values from a small town in western Minnesota. Carol Bly has been there watching for 25 years and her reports on habits, hopes and hardships among her neighbors offer a wide range ofperceptive insights. — George Resch From: Small Farmer’s ]oumal On open tractors vs. combines: . . . One gets too many impressions on the open tractor. A thousand impressions enter as you work up and down the rows: nature's beauty or nature's stubbornness, politics, exhaustion, but mainly the feeling that all this repetition — last year's cornpicking, this year's cornpicking, next year's compicking — is taking up your lifetime. The mere repetition reveals your eventual death. When you sit inside a modem combine, on the other hand, you are so isolated from field, sky, all the real world, that the brain is dulled. You are not sensitized to vour own mortality. You aren't sensitive to anything at all. This must be a common choice of our mechanical era: to hide from life inside our machinery. If we can hide from life in there, some idiotic part of the psyche reasons, we can hide from death in there as well. On “monkeying": Monkeying, in city life, is what little boys do to clocks so they never mn again. In farming it has two quite different meanings. The first is small side projects. You monkey with poultry, unless you're a major egg handler. Or you monkey with ducks or geese. If you have a very small milk herd, and finally decide that prices plus state regulations don't make your few Holsteins worthwhile, you "quit monkeying with them." There is a hidden dignity in this word: it precludes mention of money. It lets the wife of a very marginal farmer have a conversation with a woman who may be helping her husband run fifteen hundred acres. "How you coming with those geese?" "Oh, we've been real disgusted. We're thinking of quitting monkeying with them." It saves her having to say, "We lost our shirts on those darn geese." The other meaning of monkeying is wrestling with and maintaining machinery, such as changing heads from combining to compicking. Farmers who cornpick the old way, in which the corn isn't shelled automatically during picking in the field but must be elevated to the top of a pile by belt and then shelled, put up with some monkeying. On confronting dragons: . . . Much of the alternate-life-style living going on in the Minnesota countryside right now does not mean engaging any very serious dragons. If we are throwing clay we are not lobbying for environmental hope. If we are living with little cash turnover by doing a lot of canning and dry preserving (which take time), we are not in Minneapolis organizing planning retreats on the cash economy. Generally, Minnesota farmers do little to influence the legislature for justice outside their own farm-marketing interests; the new artistic or intellectual element also do very little. The air full of cold and snow informs each day with beauty; if one is here enjoying it, one does not think very much about Steve Biko's comrades. . . .
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