Farming

The traveler sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see. ~G.K. Chesterton

Ben the farmer, not exactly what I had in mind when coming here, and not really something that I have ever imagined, but it felt really good to just do some hard labor and to give back a little to Cash and her family for the food that they had given us. There were a few things to know about planting rice in her fields. One, it gets hot, so keep hydrated and be careful not to get sun sickness. Two, there are some pretty nasty snails that likely have diseases and eat the crops, so we don’t like them. Supposedly there were some bloodsuckers too, but I didn’t see any of them. Third, learn to walk through the mud, or else you will get stuck. Anyway, I learned a whole bunch of lessons on my morning of work. Cash and her brother Eric supplied me with boots, gloves, a poncho (for the first couple of hours when it rained) a thumb tool to dig into the grass and plant it, and Shawn gave me a long sleeved shirt to wear.

I did four jobs for the most part. Cash’s father ran the machine, which takes the rolls of grass and seeds and turns gears in the back to plant rows in the field. However the machine is not perfect, and turns around the field tend to mess things up, so it was our job (Cash’s and mine) to go through the paddies and plant by hand where the machine had missed. I can understand why this would be back breaking work when working from five in the morning until seven at night as Cash and her family did. I only worked four or five hours so I didn’t feel too bad. They were all worried that I might crumble, but I’m a bit tougher than that, even if I don’t look like it. So I planted a rice field by hand, that was pretty cool. After that I took a rake and walked along the fields and removed excess sticks and debris that would get in the way of the planting. Then I used a hoe of sorts to go through the fields and spread out clumps of mud so that the machine would not have difficulty getting through and planting. This work was pretty difficult, especially navigating through the mud while not stepping on any of the rice. I almost got stuck a couple of times, but I made it out and around without too much difficulty. The last job I did was the most difficult and probably the most frightening. I got on the back of the machine while Cash’s father was driving and fed the rolls of grass into the back as it planted them. That machine bucks and moves so erratically that I almost fell off several times despite having good balance. I really thought I was going to fall at first. It was terrifying. Fortunately, I never fell, and I got the feel of the machine after a minute or two and was able to help plant the field. I watched as the grass levels go lower and then grabbed a role, positioned it in the slot and fed it down a little chute. It was more tiring than bending over in the field.

The time went by fairly quickly. Before I knew it, we were taking a break for lunch and local motorcycle ice cream salesmen had come around to sell his merchandise. That is a brilliant idea. Going around selling ice cream to sweaty farmers has to be a successful method. I’m not sure what kind of ice cream I ate, it didn’t look normal, seeing as it was brown and purple and red, but it was cold and it tasted fine, so I didn’t ask too many questions. Cash, her father and mother, Eric, Shawn, Mrs. Kao, and I all sat in the shade eating bento boxes for lunch and chatting (they mostly chatted, I mostly listened), and then we were off. They would continue in the fields and I would continue on with my day.

Tonight had one interesting point. There was a parade and festival going through the city tonight honoring one of the local gods, (actually apparently the god is from China and is here visiting and the festival was a sendoff) asking for rain and good crops. It was really cool. There were trucks with lots of people playing traditional music with large drums, cymbals, and statues of the god. It was a really cool feeling to walk down a street with signs written in Chinese, a festival to a foreign god going by, and the sounds of a foreign city. It felt really surreal. Then I heard lots of pops. People from the trucks were sending fireworks up into the air about ten feet away from us. I’m really glad that woke me, otherwise what came next would have been too much of a shock.

I saw them before I heard them. Large brightly colored trucks with thousands of flashing lights and floats and animals and dragons and phoenix’s which would have been cool and traditional except that they were mixed with crazy looking pigs and reindeer and random assortments of things. And blaring from these trucks was intense techno music that was in complete contrast to the traditional part of the parade that had preceded it. The parade was circling the city, which is not too large, so I kept running into it wherever I went. And there was no escaping that techno music. Little children were covering their ears, people were just laughing. Even the locals thought that the techno floats were weird and ridiculous.

So yeah it’s been an interesting day. I planted three rice paddies this morning as an undocumented laborer and saw a festival that comes once a year tonight, so I’ve had a couple of unforgettable experiences. I don’t know if I will do any more farming in the future, but Cash’s family was nice enough to invite me back to work for the harvesting season.