Va l l e y
The Empty Diner
ILLUSTRATION: RICK KURKOWSKI
Dan Needles is the author of “Wingfield Farm” stage plays. His column is a regular feature in Country Guide am breakfasting on my own these days, which is never a good idea. The Kingbird Cafe is deserted because every single one of the neighbours has cashed in a few loads of grain at the elevator and booked a trip south. Everyone, of course, but Vern Bunton. Vern and Elma arranged another of those farm swaps they do for a holiday. Right now they’re milking cows on Vancouver Island for some people they met in an Internet chat room. Their new friends are learning to run a snow blower for the first time and having so much fun they are taking work away from the township snowplow on the Petunia Valley Sideroad. My wife and I chose to stay home this year because for writers there has been no sudden spike in the price of pithy prose. The market for words peaked way back in the 1990s and has been drifting gently downhill ever since, travelling in lockstep with hog prices, RIM stocks and GIC rates. I’m not complaining. My Anglican soul recoils from the idea of another tropical all-inclusive shared with crowds in withering heat. After last summer’s drought I don’t think I will be completely cooled off until April. My wife is not so sure. She has been spending more time in the basement in a recently renovated plant room she uses to hold all the potted palms, oleanders and other tender plants she brings inside for the winter. She arranges them along the wall in stacks under fairly powerful grow lights. My goldfish go in there too, in a tank that is filtered through a gravel water garden of hostas and day lilies. This year, I dumped a couple of wheelbarrows of beach sand on the floor and set out a deck chair for her. With the heat turned up and the water trickling over the rocks, the effect is quite tropical. F e b ruar y 1 , 2 0 1 3
Before he left, Vern noticed the fierce glow one night and called me up. “If you’re trying to supplement your income with a grow-op, you’re behind the times,” he said. “The hippies up on the hill are ripping out their marijuana plants and putting in Roundup Ready corn.” Does nothing stay the same? For all of my adult life I have listened to farmers complain that markets have long since decoupled from reality. For years they have been asking, “How could a bushel of wheat sell for the same as a double-double at Tim’s?” They aren’t asking that question anymore, at least not since beans climbed above the price of a Starbucks Triple Ristretto Venti Half-Soy Non fat Decaf Organic Chocolate Brownie Iced Vanilla Gingerbread Frappuccino, whatever that is. And the answer remains that yes, a whole lot stays very much the same as it ever was. I’m sitting here in the Kingbird Cafe, which has been operating under various names and management since the Depression. The guys I sit with in the corner booth have been complaining about basically the same things ever since I moved in 35 years ago. Feeding people in a little hole-inthe-wall restaurant is an idea that the
Romans invented. The bacon and eggs on my plate date back to the domestication of animals maybe 8,000 years ago. I’m wearing shoes and clothes fabricated out of leather and animal fibres, ideas that stretch back to the Paleolithic era. The jokes we tell in the diner date even further back, to the early Cretaceous period. The point is, it doesn’t matter what new fiscal cliff looms on the horizon, chances are very high that a lot about the future is going to look pretty much the same as it does right now. This seems like an important thought to me and I’m sorry there is no one with me today to share it. So there you are. This is the risk of dining alone. Your thoughts wander like children in a cornfield maze. It is a reminder that no matter how many acres and sections we till up, we still need the neighbours to keep us from living in our heads too much. Is there anything fresh and new for 2013? I think there is. For the first time in my association with farming in this country, my immediate circle of friends is not moaning about the death of agriculture. That alone is worth popping the cork on a bottle of champagne. country-guide.ca 39