Curl of Promise

by Lynn R. Miller of Singing Horse Ranch
photo by Kristi Gilman-Miller

I was three years old the first time, then revisited those same streets when I was twelve. Don’t know how much of the time signature my memory mixes up but, as this story goes; when I was a baby we lived with my mother’s folks, la familia Perez, in Rio Piedras, on the edge of San Juan, Puerto Rico. My grandmother, Innocencia, would send me ahead, down two buildings, with a coin in my tiny fist, to buy two long skinny loaves of bread that were warm, aromatic, fresh from the bakery oven. She followed me but from enough of a distance (maybe just a couple feet) to give a sense I was doing this all on my own. I took the bread to my grandfather and he tore off a small piece of the heel of the loaf for me as reward.

What I described was what my parents, in later life, shared with me and nothing in my depths felt the story to be untrue. But the loaves experience, charming as it was, was stitched together with other random disconnected bits of memory. I asked them, as a mature man, about these flavored visions I had. These are not things I remembered whole cloth, more like a bath of impressions.

The coin in my hand
felt very large

? But those two long skinny bread loaves were even heavier.

? I have this sensation of walking in the rain, but the sun was shining and it was hot – I was walking through a sidewalk trading bazaar of some sort. Walking past booths that were fascinating. For my little self the space along the sidewalk felt like a long line of boxes made of sticks and filled with, and decorated with, clothing, gadgets, ornaments, fruits, vegetables, pinata-like paper machete hanging sculptures, and certain things the memory of which haunt me to this day…

? There were curley-ques of orange peelings hanging over my head like they were raining from the sky. Fancy black wrought iron framework seemed to hold the orange peels aloft.

? Tall, stalked, symmetrically-rumpled bunches of short little red bananas seemed to be dispensers of some sort. When I look up I cannot see how tall they are, but the lower branches are right in front of me and a smiling man breaks one loose, peels it and gives it to me.

? The air was full of a memory of black pepper, citrus, poultry and banana smells. Plus, there were handmade toys, and bright clothing everywhere.

? After I delivered the bread, which seemed to hurt me it was so heavy, I was carried upstairs to our apartment.

? There was music everywhere but maybe it was just people laughing all ‘round me.

My parents, over time, explained almost all of the sensations. Either that, or our return visit, when I was twelve, cemented certain sensations.

As the personal narrative goes, I was a toddler when we lived upstairs over my grandparents. I crawled out on the porch above the steps and was trying to stand, braced against a watermelon. It rolled and I with it to the bottom of the concrete steps. Broke my collar bone. Seventy-seven years ago there was nothing anyone could do but zone out my crying and let the healing happen naturally. Years later when I was sent for bread I imagine the pain was still very much with me. Carrying those two loaves of bread may have been difficult. For me having only recently learned to walk. But it was a triumph worthy of the memory.

On the island of Puerto Rico it rained almost every day, short showers as clouds blew over, and the sun was always right there. Average temperature at the time, my mother said, was 98. The rains were cooling.

As it was explained, vendors came to the city from the countryside with all sorts of farm produce. My father said lots of people were selling citrus so some of the vendors got creativel a contest ensued. Who could peel an orange with a small short-bladed knife and end up with a perfect, unbroken curley que? Who had the longest peel? And then, of course, you needed to display these spiral peelings for measure and proof. The surprise collateral benefit was the smell of wonderful citrus perfume mixing with the humidity and the rains. It was orange and white curls as brim-fringe to circus hats.

And the bananas? What we westerners commonly eat are called Cavendish bananas and they are bred to be picked green for the long trips north to market. My mother thought these Cavendish bananas were crude and tasteless, and in truth the small ripe purple-red-skinned bananas, eaten immediately after harvest in the tropics, in my experience are world’s superior. As are the big green Plantains, allowed to ripen and then fried — oooee. The way those red bananas were sold, on the islands, is by enormous fruit-ladened stem.

Smells, colors, arrays, presentations, theater, flavors, laughter, and very serious haggling make a Carribean road market twizzle and flirt. It’s like walking and participating in a four-dimensional circus.

The point of sharing this with you is to say that marketing, or the exchange of goods, once was a defining, engaging and memorable cultural event. A time and place you would want to return to. Therein is a sticky magic of a successful time-and-again face-to-face marketing ritual. And this is one thing farmers and farming might need to rediscover, because the tall and rickety system of corporate industrial agriculture is toppling.

The Coin in Hand
Now Feels Small

We buy and we sell, some people do it a whole lot more than others. A few do it hardly at all. There are human dynamics at play coming and going. The whole business of a farmer buying and selling; courage-in- hand traveling from earned security of being apart from the city, then into a class-tangle of engagements, it is daunting isn’t it? It is an arena where the unscrupulous some times find their marks. It may be frightening or disconcerting, but also full of life. It lends opportunity for each of us farmers to feel our worth to the wider society. Either way, it keeps us going – each to different measure.

A few of us are natural at the business of marketing, it can be both amusing and a challenge. And when we succeed we may feel good about ourselves. But a lot of us are not comfortable with the push and pull, the face-to-face of marketing and buying. Some of us couldn’t haggle to save our bacon. My guess is that in between there is a vast majority that would like to find a structured selling and buying scene that they could simply step into. They would like to provide their product, in bulk, to a middleman whom they trust and then take payment. No further hassle. Except the consequence, because such an arrangment might result in a sharply reduced income? Wholesale or Retail? May we add a third option; call it engaged marketing. Wholesale – Retail – Engaged.

We are interested in what a good, safe, structured marketing experience might look like these days, and what it might do for people. My long lifetime of experience has mostly been in the center of such things, not as an innocent coming to the market with a long sack of poultry to trade off, but rather as the clerk, manager, ringman, carnival barker or some combination of those things. From the viewpoint of traveling editor, I have watched thousands of times as market festivals have delivered people unto themelves. You come as an outsider and somehow the atmosphere and the interactions transform you. Hard not to when the kinship of need and need-to-sell comingle. There are these kindling moments when sparks are offered for us to latch on to. It’s that point at which the experience becomes yours, it becomes you, it becomes you. It favors you: As in that hat becomes you. Most everything about these experiences says ‘engagement.’ That’s the defining moment. Not the decision that you need to sell some fruit or fish or special beans or just buy some small lovely thing as a gift. Marketing, as in the barter, has always contained the seed of something much more than the goal of the day. And selling? Well, think Jack and the Beanstalk.

“I started with this to sell,
needed the money to buy that,
and the end result was so much more….
and a whole lot less.”

Thirty-five years ago, Kristi and I made a shopping trek to the city of Seattle — which meant we, by choice, had to visit the then inviting, vibrant and tantalizing Pike Street Market. In city centers around the world there are, or have been, such places; old iconic ‘set-ups,’ alleyways, warehouses, tented lanes, setaside curbways, designated expanses where vendors, hawkers, even craftspeople and farmers came and come to display their goods for sale. If you are lucky the market you visit, the one you come to call yours, that unexpectedly wild and various adhoc market which becomes you, is layers deep in culture, mold, spiced smells, possibility, saw dust, threat, citrus air, noise, enticements, flaxed fibers, garbage and creative juices. When we realize the richness of humanity embodied in thousands of years of the various theaters of buying and selling, we are reaching back through to a history of who the brave amongst us might still be.

On the day in question at Pike Street Market, my partner/wife went to the lower level to look at costumes, antiques, and old advertising art. I stayed on the main floor to catch, if possible, a photo of a salmon on the wing and capture the overflowing produce market in my mind’s eye. And also to visit my favorite restaurant The Athenian Cafe for their legendary seafood chowder.

(“Winged Salmon?” Back then at Pike Street Market, a man working the tables of iced fish would holler out something and then toss a whole large salmon through the air, over the heads of the passing buyers, and it would be caught and sometimes thrown back at him. I imagine there is some history behind it; there is definitely choreography. It’s a live theater snippet I’ve witnessed before, and sure enough that day it was happening again. I can guarantee that if you had forgotten your wife had sent you to buy fish, seeing one fly through the air in this fashion will most definitely remind you).

The swirl and toss of Pike Street market takes me back to that previously mentioned 1949-50 and my earliest childhood in Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico. Both markets were, for me, the embodiment of human scale. It was not hard to imagine an individual or family growing, harvesting, preparing all of the produce offered, and for other folks to actually make the clothing items, the weavings, the woodwork, etc. Perhaps a little harder to visualize how difficult it is, each market day, for those farmers and artisans to rise well before dawn and prepare goods and then travel long distances, into New York City or Boston, into Chicago or Mexico City or Cartegena or Lisbon or London or all the way to Copenhagen or even into Seattle.

You have your boxes of fresh-picked green beans, just-pulled radishes and carrots, your cukes, trays of eggs, your plums and apricots, plus a cooler filled with frozen packages of lamb and beef. What would make you go the extra measure to organize and ornament your booth, once at market, organize in fanciful and attractive ways? In essence, to call attention to yourself? It’s sure-enough a prescription for success but what, after all the hundreds and hundreds of long hours of farming in advance of the market, what would drive you to add the fanciful? It’s an act of ‘rounding up,’ of taking you place within wider society. It’s the wonderful self regenerating inertia of embraced culture. It’s ultimately who we are.

There is still time to reclaim this, reclaim before the concrete dries on the Orwellian bargain of an A.I’ driven commerce, where our needs, our appetites and our actions are molded by pervasive and evil manipulations. And where all of that feeds into the coffers of big companies and maligning robber barons. Big picture, the artifice of Commerce IS the villain here. In the name of commerce we are molded, mishapened and controlled. We. We pan-boiled frogs.

Who we are? Is that not a province of how we educate ourselves? Of what we surround ourselves with? The people, the natural world we surround ourselves with, the books, the outlook, the tools, the shared working experiences, the recipes, entertainment, sports, health care, even the live markets? All of these things want to be alive with us for us. And we need our world, our environment to be alive. Comes round to the evidence; for a long time now we have been at war with the natural world, the food being sold in commercial markets is often suspect, money is being made by frightening us at every turn, some of our sporting events are heinous, often our children are NOT being educated – instead they are being indoctrinated, fewer good books are being made available, and our health care is under seige.

The foot prints of our society are huge, loud, selfish, suspicious, paranoid, poisonous, indistinct, disfigured and everywhere. A genuine collective optimism might stem from the fact that within this morass there are maps for the next generations, blueprints of what to avoid, what to cherish and how to proceed.

Starting with those nasty big foot prints, what we need are for those to be much much smaller if saving and restoring the planet be our objective. The consumer driven, industrial foot print of humanity is smothering biological life. We, each of us, need to behave in ways that reduces our individual and collective footprint. We need to think and act small. More than anything else, our scale of endeavor will define the next two hundred years. Every time we randomly think big, we set in motion the rationale that more is essential, that new is primary, that faster and louder and even cheaper must be the priorities.

We need to see to it that most of us are on hover, finding our address in nature, keeping it all clean while embracing the dirt of it, loving our work, dancing on air, gathering goodness to take back to our nests, our homes, our barns, so that the actual weight of our collective farming is less even while the health and vitality continues to thicken.

And our nests our homes our gathering places, they should be about family, friends, neighbors and community. People. Not computers. People of shared faith, not suspect algorithms. Grandmothers attentive to their grandchildren, friends peeling oranges for the odor and ornament, those salmon tossers. The people we surround ourselves with; now in these rapidly changing times, we should be thinking about them when we ask ourselves where we might sell our farm produce. And there is the clue; perhaps we shouldn’t be talking about ‘where’ we sell so much as to ‘whom?’ Simple idea.

Who better to purchase your plums, your cream, your parsnips, your jeruselem artichokes, your 800-pound crate of juicing apples, your capons, your mower repair service, your handmade chairs, your bread loaves. More often, we should be offering our goods and services to those around us, that grandmother and child coming into the bakery, those we know to be participants in our local human community. They are the genuine article, and we know it because we see them, feel their presence, know the effect they have on us and ours. But even when the people in our immediate world are up close, just around the corner, the curious paradox of this articifical world we are standing in, the frying pan of slow boiling water we call society, is that it is difficult for all of them to find us and our farm produce. It is sometimes even harder for us to find them. May I suggest that it is in no small part because of today’s pervasive plastic etiquet of viral competitiveness?

Money is often made by companies (and entities of many ilks) by fanning the flames of neighborhood and community discontent. But there are times we do it to ourselves. Innocent novice farmers in many locales may be surprised, as they have been for decades, to discover that, regardless the suitability and quality of their produce, they may not be allowed to sell at their local farmer’s markets, which often ‘jury’ applicants. “We don’t need another person selling oranges, honey, or eggs. That just reduces what we original members are able to make.” Tricky stuff that – especially since the dynamic has always been that the more vendors and products you have for sale, the more vigorous and vital is that individual market and the more people who are attracted to it. But what we (small ‘w’) feel compelled to fall back on is the spurious etiquet of market solidarity and self preservation. Where’s the poetry and vitality in that?

Instead of thinking about marketing of farm goods and products as either retail or wholesale, let’s consider returning to sales as regenerative theater, as a most excellent way to expand local culture and identity, as volley-rich bartering – safe, comic, endearing and illuminating – as a decent modern approach to rendezvous? What if folks set up produce ‘auctions’ and swap meets? Engagement! In other words what we sell and/ or what we buy is less than half the equation of the experience.

All across North America there has been a rich tradition of farm auction sales, rich and sometimes heart-breaking especially forced sales and estate liquidations. But within that entire tradition there have been subsets of auction events as fundraisers and as regularly scheduled alternative market events. From early on. I was attracted to estate and liquidation auctions of farm tools and miscellaney. It took the Amish and a set of particular experiences to demonstrate for me the power of a regular market day’s auction.

Back in the early eighties, Kristi and I were returning from conducting a Work Horse Workshop at Kemptville College in Ontario, Canada. We were driving my old pickup truck and returned to the states through New England and into Ohio, where we were to attend a couple of Amish horse auctions with a booth for this Journal. It was in Holmes County Ohio where we met Jonas Raber, who was to become a lifetlong friend.

Our meeting was at an Amish Relief Sale, where the consignments included any thing and everything you might expect from small farm surplus. Building materials, fencing, tools, incubators, sinks, old wagons, wringer-washers, farm implements, cabinets, parts and pieces. Hundreds and hundreds of items all needing to find a new home within one short day. A couple or three auctioneers, each with a clerk, walking up and down the rows offering buyers 20 seconds to make up their mind and declare what they would give for the item of the moment. The crowd was attentive, even laser focused, since it took but a few seconds to lose that item you were waiting for for hours or years. There was an electricity in the air that was infectious. Standing on the fringe I overheard a man tell another “That wheel you just bought? I got three more just like it back home if you’re interested?” and they scribbled names and addresses while never taking their eyes off the line of items next up for bid.

We were hooked. Proof? Kristi bought an antique wooden table top incubator and an enormous poreclain kitchen sink. We still have them both.

There was something hard to describe in this auction process, something I could feel but not fully understand. Then a couple of days later came another sale. A weekly Amish event at the Mt Hope auction yard. In the small, tight ampitheater-like auction ring they were selling single and team draft horses and buggy horses. Then cattle and a few sheep. But at the same time, in an adjacent covered area, another auctioneer was selling wiggling burlap sacks. He’d untie the next bag in the row look inside and holler out “Swartzie’s got five red setting hens – whada-my bid!?” When he got that sold he said, “behind me on the wall there’s that shelf of canned sauerkraut, gotta be leastways over a dozen big jars, who’ll be a dollar times the money?” Fresh vegetables and fruit by the crate, live chickens, ducks, and geese, jars of honey, even a pile of used burlap sacks, and a mess of plow shares. Then someone came in and hollered, “rain;s coming.”

“Okay boys lets go outside and get that hay sold.” I noticed three little Amish boys in suspenders and white shirts leaning agains the wall, heads down respectful-like, hands in pockets, obviously whispering to each other. When they heard the hay call, they darted outside, two of them went to a team of Belgians tied to the fence in harness. The boys went as though on assignment.

In the parking lot were three wagon loads of hay, all three piled high, each obviously a different forage. Within five minutes the auctioneer sold each wagon load and immediately teams were hitched to the wagons for delivery. One team was tended by those two ten-year-old boys. I watched amused and worried as one boy scurried up the head-board of the wagon and perched on loose hay, only shoulders and head visible, fourteen or so feet in the air with lines in his hand, while the other boy reached way up and held one horse by his lead. Top boy said something Dutch and the second boy scurried up the head-board and lay on the hay. Raindrops started and an Amish man climbed the wagon and took the offered lines to drive the team out of the parking lot and to trot down the road. Every day occurance to the folks in regular attendance, but to me it was so many overlapping circles; oddly it felt like I was back as a youngster looking up at the curling orange peels.

Ridiculous as it sounds, I felt like what I was witnessing was proof that all was right with the world. All round, all right. Then it dawned on me. These particular auctions were alive and human with all parts and pieces swirled together like spaghetti in a bowl, like those orange peels. I couldn’t help but see it as consequential, alive, valued, important and defining. It was not just promising, it was promise manifest. No typical class structure, the rich and poor at that auction yard were inches apart not miles. And the distance between each of them was navigable and respected.

And there was something sonic about it as well. It was a circumstantial equivalent to a musical round, like “row row row your boat” sung in overlapping circles. It was a market place – not wholesale not retail, it was engaging. But you had to be there. You had to experience it all in person. Try though I may, it is impossible to describe.

The internet does not serve well as visual sales component. There is NOTHING that replaces standing at an item, (or animal or stack of hay bales or box of canned plums) to give a wholeness of perception, an assessment of quality, to tease the tentative buyer to make the deal. Words in the right hands will go a long ways toward that odd primary objective, the one which requires we offer the viewer or prospective buyer an acceptable opportunity for this moment to suspend disbelief. To that end words fail us as they succeed.

To feed this country NOW in a healthy and variety-rich fashion will require a bare minumum of 15 million additional aware, enthusiastic and dedicated heritage-bound farm families. Not everybody agrees on the number, but a starting point would be the oft-repeated fact that the U.S. has 1.9 million farms now. That is a serious, serious shortfall. Artificial Intelligence-infused, vertically-integrated, chemically-intensive, industrial farming operations are NOT feeding people healthy food. Our lifespans are shortening because of it. Our already abandoned health care systems will not be able to deal with scurvy, and rickets, and malnutrition. Insurance, if it exists, won’t cover it. Only way out of the dilemna is for more people to grow food. That is beginning to happen, but now we have new garbage coming from our culture wars, hurtful competitive attitudes, and the death rattle of tech-bred economics. Shortages are driving prices up. Access to good food is being throttled. Even setting aside the dirty underwear of politics, we as a society have bought into lifestyles that are flattening the planet.

In Our Hands
The Curve of Promise

What Flattening of the earth looks like for small farmers:

You want to sell at the local farmer’s market and this is the response you get.

“We will keep your information handy. Consider yourself on the list. No sir, there aren’t any openings right now. Yessir we encourage farmers who want to sell here on Saturdays but right now we already have several folks selling beans, corn, lettuce and such. And there are quite a few folks on the waiting list ahead of you. I’m sorry you feel that way. Yes, we do have an association. I will get you a form so you can apply for membership. We are open to farmers, craftspeople and customers to join. No, I’m sorry. Once again, our vendor quota is full, You will have to wait until there’s an opening, but mind you there are lots of people ahead of you.”

Compare that with winding up your courage to take some live poultry, canned fruit and ten sacks of seed to an Amish auction where you understand you are “taking your chances.”

It’s always easier to write an informational article when you have an audience clearly in sight. Folks sitting in front of you who have come with questions, stories to tell and a general notion that you don’t seem qualified to talk on the subject.

At least it is for me.

I appreciate volleys. I like to receive a slow serve that I can tap back, sweet and low, so my opponent can think a little before returning it sweet and slow, so I can then shift my torso slightly and tap it back over just a little bit faster but still handy for the proper return. It’s the volley I enjoy. When someone slams me a serve that hits me in the forehead I think naturally about other more productive places to be. It’s an in-person, personal sort of thing. It rounds you out.

Cattle are round, fruits are round, the curve of vegation, the curve of the sky in the morning – in the evening, the curves of people at work, the curvature of hopefulness, the circling birds, the undulations of sadness, the upwards spiral of joy, the curley-ques of those orange peelings. Let’s all go curl up together in our work and fold ourselves into Nature’s embrace.

Out both beyond and before questions and answers, there’s the promise, the curl of promise.