Ag Show

These days the potential buyer has the option of observing from the ground or on a screen from afar, via drone-feed. The topsoil—dry, always dry, too dry—is moved around at will and en masse, dust clouding, dirt spilling over the sides of the hopper, a theory of abundance that seems able to allow for imprecision because of its scale. The tractor that does the pulling lacks tires and instead rolls on conveyor tracks like a bulldozer or a tank. The human in the cab is barely discernible, windows tinted, glinting in full sun. The seat likely swivels so he can look behind him and check his work without stressing his neck muscles. I would wager it’s a he in that seat, maybe even an adamant one.

Standing on the same ground as the implement, at the edge of the demonstration field, one can hear a second man speaking into a microphone that feeds through a PA at points swallowed by wind gusts, describing the implement’s features and what the man in the tractor may be considering as he pulls this newest model back and forth. The scraper can dig deep; it takes mere seconds to fill the bin with earth, mere seconds to unload it. In the distance is an applicator with a ninety-foot wingspan. The spray that comes out during its demo gets blown away by the wind, and it is hard to see from afar how much, if any, was injected into the soil. One hundred and forty acres an hour, they claim. Refilled via semi-truck. The wind hot and treacherous, the boreal on fire, again, still. Soil health and downloading to your tablet the buzzwords on ground so dry and compacted it sounds like a wooden floor as people walk across it. Land laced with a chaos of equipment tracks, an industrial number of tracks. Crop protection on banners and pamphlets. Nutrient management. People stand under the outstretched arms of a swath like beneficiaries, like little sprouts waiting to be tended.

The soil is a velvet carpet after the rock-picker goes over it. We’re all invited to come take a look after the new model does its pass. A handful of people squat to feel the dirt with their hands, all of them with grey in their hair, and the feeling of being in the presence of knowledge emanates through to me for the first time, farmers rubbing the processed soil between finger and thumb, eyeing up, talking about what they sense. The rock crusher, a sideshow act, draws some of them away, pulverizing rocks into fertilizer instead, getting that nuisance material working for you. The scale of agriculture has far surpassed the human, the family farm going the way of those rocks under the crusher, and the smoke you can barely smell on the air today gives a clue as to what will destroy industrial ag. That this precarious, oil-fuelled abundance could have an end is too much for most of the people here to bear, so instead many opt not to believe it. Nervous boys try to look adult around this many people at once, walking up and down the gargantuan outdoor aisles behind their fathers, dressed like them. Inheritors.

An aimless walk beside the river. Unsure, suddenly fearful, clinging to the map, using the app to identify the plants, snapping photos with an inherited film camera. Wanting to flee. Thoughts of flood and injury. The feeling that comes of not knowing the place I’m in—being subject to it, unaware of its dangers—is quick to arrive and doesn’t dissipate. I learn to breathe through it, to turn to the plants as company, to feel less alone. To stop and be with them for a while. Remember to be a sensing animal. Crouch down, get closer to earth.

On the way back into town, I see how curvature of highway imitates curvature of river.

Alex Janvier’s painting in the art gallery depicting a similar curve, of that originary curve.

We are only ever of the river and the soil.

The first time looking at his work after his passing. He painted the curves of life to his very last days.

This screen imitates the surface of water, the reflections fed into it, the deceptions, the connections, the knowledge. On the spot, onto this precarious surface, I tap out these words.

And lo, the wall of implements in the Ukrainian museum. Saws and brooms and forks, hooks, hoes, hatchets, and so many I don’t know the name or the purpose of, all made into an art piece, these instruments of digging, deranging. A strange feeling of love at the sight of this, a comingling of survival and ruin. My life for the death of how much else, how many others. The stories told to justify it. The declensions. Ideas proceed over land long after the minds that made them cease firing. Arranged on the wall are the implements that imagined this present.

A horse and some grain. The evolution of the plow. The way the seeds go into soil. The way the wheel has changed through this age. The way the oil is conveyed. Modes of crossing water. Of collecting water. Boulevarded neighbourhood. Gentrified neighbourhood. Suburban neighbourhood. Village memory. An elm-lined prairie avenue. Some of the trunks aren’t well, are sending out foliage all along themselves, last-ditch. Furred elms, scorching elms.

The houses become the dwellings of millionaires. The houses become the dwellings of no one.

The winds shift and the smoke blows in.

The old photos do not move me like they once did. The city as it appeared a century ago, give or take. Photos of threshing crews and farm equipment. Instead I’m drawn to foreground and background, the grey grasses, the black smudges of trees along the river, the gradient skies. The horizons. I take forensic colour pictures of black-and-white photos. How the river is the centre, the story of the image. An origin story.

Concrete floors and electric light, buildings and boardwalks and implements housed now for posterity inside a warehouse. Carriages, churches, train station. Copious things, history as things. The knowledges founding them. The Cree call North America “iyiniwiministik,” the peoples’ island, reads the placard. The forks, the diggers, the scrapers and plows we innovated to trench it all up, painting the equipment a jaunty green, a lively red. Evolution of the seat. The pathetic John Deere presentation at the ag show, the video, the patter, the pitch: I bet not much has changed. Evolution of the wheel, from studded, spoked metal rings into rubber and air. The Rumley Oil Pull. A canopy starts appearing over the driver’s seat. The poisonous oil smell in this part of the museum. The Fordson F. The Titan 10-20. Townsend Oil Tractor shaped like a train locomotive. All these ways to get stuck in the mud, in mud of our own making. Decorative diamond harrows hung on the walls. Threshing roller, a piece of crumbled rock with a rod stuck through it.

To make improvements to the land valued at three hundred dollars. To break thirty acres. To survive six months of the year there. To last three years doing that. To pay your ten dollars for this.

The colourful quilt of the survey: homestead land, railway land, school land, Company land. One picked one’s square, staring at a blank grid, finger outstretched, like buying concert tickets, your choice of the even-numbered quarter-sections. Six in ten weren’t proved up before the droughts came, but look how seamless and endless it is now, the oceans of canola, nothing but crop as far as the eye can see, the squares on the map going monochrome.

The implement dealer was the first to spring up in town. Then puffed sleeves and corseted waists. Sleeping in a tent the first winter. Enterprising. What’s couched in the praise of hard work. What’s passed through all our bodies, one settler generation to the next, solidifying, stultifying our place here.

A re-creation of the sod house. The urge to flee returns, no ground to get closer to. I skid past the rest of the displays, the convening decades—the advent of the telephone, the radio, the television—and then past the giftshop, oven mitts and BBQ sauce—they’re skidding across it too—and back to the car and out of the parking lot and on to the ring road, this present made by the past: imperilled, determined, obstinate, nostalgic, traumatized, besotted, violent, dwindling. Unable to bear how wrong we have been, from the start.

Photo graciously provided by Laurie D. Graham.