Our neighboring property has a large, hand-painted TRUMP sign on it. Its angle and location, though, makes it easy to miss as we drive by. We wonder if this reflects the owner’s ambivalent politics. There isn’t a dwelling on the property, so it is easy to not dwell on the people behind the sign. The area sports fewer Trump/Pence signs than rural communities within second-home distance of New York City. Familiarity breeds contempt is my theory.
The owner of the TRUMP sign comes up our rutted driveway on his ATV one morning to introduce himself. We discuss our shared relationship with the hunter-farmer who goes 50-50 with him on the corn grown on his land. We discuss the stream that starts from two springs in our property and enters his through an impressive ravine. He volunteers that he collects the water at the bottom of the hill to clean his maple sap lines. We agree that in future we’ll fight over that water. You know how many gallons of sap it takes to make a gallon of syrup? Forty, I say. Huh, you’re smarter than you look, he says. Forty-three. He sees the garden beds I’m making and comments this used to be a corn-growing farm. But did they take care of the land? I ask. Did they grow cover crops? Or did they extract the fertility and give up when it was no longer easy? Yes, that’s what they did, he concedes. What was the corn for anyway? Soda? That’s right, he says, and ethanol, the biggest scam ever foisted on the American public. I agree.
We are invited to dinner at his family’s house, which doesn’t have a Trump/Pence sign.
He graduated high school next to last in his class. Farm work awaited him: forty dollars a month, 4:30 am to 7 pm daily except third Sunday. No wonder US citizens don’t want to be exploited on farms anymore. His father rescued him after a year and sent him to college. He became a high school metalwork instructor. His students got good jobs, started businesses. When Title IX passed and girls entered his class, it doubled his class-size and halved the weeks he could devote to each student. He and I agree on the frustration; we disagree on the fix.
Dinner is delicious.