Down on the Old Farm

Getting old is not for the faint of heart. It’s bad enough when you live in an urban community with access to social services, medical care and your friends (maybe even family), but for America’s rural retirees, life can be hard, very, very hard. Life on a traditional family farm is tough enough, if you are fortunate even to own one; crops and farm animals don’t understand things like vacations, weekends or “I’m too sick to come in to work today.” The hours are grueling, prices and costs are anything but stable, and then there is Mother Nature, who can be downright vicious at times. Farm folks are used to hard, they build up emotional calluses that “city slickers” would be hard-pressed to emulate.

But in retirement, a whole set of new complexities set in. Medical facilities, doctors even, are often very long distances away… turning a relatively controllable medical event into a fatality for lack of action. Power failures are common, and cell phone coverage is, to put it mildly, unreliable. Serious Internet access – assuming you are computer literate enough to make it valuable – is also often limited, so communicating with children and grandchildren, who use the Web as their most convenient communications tool, maybe expensive, difficult or even impossible. With increasing numbers of young people leaving the small rural towns and farms, increasingly, America finds itself with thousands of communities of little more than diehards and elderly. It’s all they really know. It’s all they really understand.

The need for a car, in a world of long distances and increasing fuel costs, is critical… just to buy food, seek social companionship and secure medical help. But as the elderly get older, the ability to drive – even to pass the mandatory driving test – creates new challenges. Lose your license and face harsh enforced isolation. And should you car breakdown, or the a sizzling summer or a snow-bound winter take away the driving option, being stranded, alone and helpless, is often the sad result.

For those without assets, the farm workers and wranglers who came from the land or farmers who have lost their land as real estate prices have collapsed, life can be even more difficult: a trailer, a shack, a rented room or trying to make a living when the hands and body don’t work so well anymore. Small towns are drying up and blowing away; small churches – the heart and soul of spiritual and social life for so many of these farm-country Americans – are closing in droves as there are insufficient remaining residents to make continued operation viable.

The December 9^th New York Times (Kirk Johnson writing) did a heart-tugging piece about this issue that skips right by the mindset of most of us urban dwellers. Here are a few of the quotes and stories from the folks who live in this harsh rural environment:

“I don’t see how these towns keep on going,” [said 92-year-old Frank Robinson], sitting ramrod straight in a housing-project meeting room, a feed-store cap on his head. “Years ago on a Saturday, Main Street was filled solid with people, and there was two or three cafes to eat at — it might be 10, 11 o’clock before they went home,” he said. “Now on Main Street on Saturday, there’s nothing.”

Norma Clark, 80, slipped on the ice out by the horse corral one afternoon and broke her hip in four places. Alone, it took her three hours to drag herself the 40 yards back to the house through snow and mud, after she had tied her legs together with rope to stabilize the injury… On a clear day, you can see across her land and all the way, 60 miles or so, to Laramie Peak [Wyoming]. It is a landscape drenched with the memory, she said, of her husband, Leo, who died last year after a long illness, and the six daughters they raised together on the land. “I sit, and I look,” she said.

Mr. [George] Burgess, who has lived and worked for most of his 96 years in Wyoming and Nebraska as a hired farmhand and in later years as a machinist, still drives his truck almost every day into Torrington, Wyo., about eight miles from his home, for a hot lunch at the senior center. But his driver’s license expires in January, and he is deeply worried that he might not pass the test this time around… Mr. Burgess gets housekeeping assistance under a state program that helps older people stay in their homes and out of nursing care. But if he could not socialize in town, he said, he would be lost… “I might be on roller skates,” said Mr. Burgess, still cowboy-thin in cinched-up Levis, his booming outdoor voice filling his home on a recent snowy afternoon. He glanced around the tiny, cluttered living room — the coal stove, the broken television, the walls lined with pictures of his wife, Laura, who died just over a year ago after more than 60 years of marriage… “I wish it was different, but it isn’t,” he said. “So you endure it.”

This is America too, a part most of us never see or experience. Next time an urban inconvenience riles you or creates a momentary inconvenience, think about how you would endure such dangerous isolation.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I approve this message.