No Love For the Dairy Air? (Final Draft)

Brianna
Eng. 308J

No Love for the Dairy Air?

A beautiful sun sets among a pink, blue, and purple sky, the colors consuming the skyline. The sun seems big, close enough to touch as it ducks behind the old, white, chipping barn. To the left is a small wood where childhoods were spent plotting survival tactics and was always the place to run from angry parents. Across the road is an empty field, empty in the sense that there are no buildings for half a mile, yet full in the sense that trees are growing in rows. The government pays a man down the road not to farm this land and to let trees grow. This all occurs what seems like two hundred yards away, just on the other side of the cornfield which blocks the sunset in the height of summer and creates a beautiful mirror in the snowy frigid winters.

This was my playground. This was my booming metropolis. I grew up with about fifteen corn or soybean fields within a mile of me. The white barn was home to a herd of bleating sheep, always anxious to remind you of their presence. A mile up the county road, or “busy-road” as I grew up calling it, was a farm with four horses, all brown with a white diamond on their heads, all with white socks crawling up their legs. It was those horses which I first fell in love with. I loved watching them gallop the length of their fence in the summer and huddle together in the winter so closely that the only way to tell one from another was to look for the trail of condensed air escaping from their snorting noses, reminiscent of a Franz Marc picture in live color.

And since this was my playground, I took it for granted. It was not until the ripe age of nineteen, when I first stepped foot on a college campus that I realized that every school district in the country did not get a day off of school to go to the county fair. Apparently they also could not get excused absences to go hunting on the first day of deer hunting season. Along with these differences, I began to learn what a unique childhood I had. The majority of people I met in college grew up in the city – they could not possibly share my love for farmland, just as I could not share their love for architecture. Agriculture is where I come from. I may not live on a farm, but country air still fills my lungs.

That is why we all laughed when the sign went up, amazed that someone would actually feel the need to post it. My family had lived there, in the shallow country side dotted by small towns, for twenty-five years. Why, at this point, was it necessary to nail this aluminum sign to a telephone pole?

“CAUTION: This land has been zoned for agriculture! With some uses come smells, dust, and noise! Please consider this when moving near.” Our general first reaction was all the same – shock. We all knew that every time a window was thrown open, the car air conditioner switched on, every time we stepped out of the door, there was a distinct chance of nostrils being filled with the aroma of cow dung, mixed with water and spread on the fields. My parents explained to me at a young age that this was called “manure” and that it was spread on fields to help things grow.

However, whenever we smelled this sour reek, laced with a certain sweetness only country air can bring, one of us would scream, as only angelic adorable children can, “WHO FARTED?! JARED FARTED AND IT STINKS!” This was one of our favorite ways to perplex my poor parents. With all of our childhood games, it remains, as I said, covalently linked into my DNA. It is as potent as the smell of home when you have been away. When school gets to be too much, I drive into the countryside of Athens, Ohio, partially just to drive, but partially to fill my lungs with that smell. The smell of hay and manure and life. It is my drug, my comfort, my love.

Why then, must a sign be posted to warn against it? Because the farmers that tilled that land, that poured their time, sweat, and toil into that land owned about seven fields throughout our area and were told that if they did not warn the people living in proximity to their fields of the dangers of living near agriculture, they could be sued. They could be sued for not “disclosing” this information. As if this smell, this use of the land were not natural. As if signs needed to be posted outside of Chicago that read, “CAUTION: This area is zoned for city use. With some uses come smog, carcinogens, and noise! Please consider when moving into this area.” Is it fair for us to decide that carbon emissions smell better than manure and hay? This is not to say that the city is bad. It has been the heart and epicenter of America since the Industrial Revolution. This is to say that the country is necessary. To say that the country is not an inconvenience, something to be “expanded” into. To say that though the city is necessary and beautiful in its own ways, sustainability can be learned from those occupying its borders.

It was when that sign was posted that I realized the countryside was not only my home, but something sacred, something in need of protection. We, in being gifted with the beauty and majesty of the outdoors, have also been bestowed with the responsibility to protect it. Without this land that can so easily be viewed as open and waiting to be built upon, America would lose some richness and I would lose a piece of myself.