FARMERS MAKE A LANDSCAPE MORE BEAUTIFUL
by Jonah Raskin Chairman of the communication studies department at Sonoma State University -- (not to mention "Poet Extraordinaire)
The author Alice Walker, who has lived much of her life in Northern California, and written some of her best work here, has been known to say, ``Horses make a landscape more beautiful.'' I can see her point of view in the fields near my Santa Rosa home where horses lend their beauty to fields where they roam freely. For me, however, it is not so much horses as farmers and farm workers who add an aesthetic dimension to the landscape, though I know that's usually not their main intention. They work on farms, of course, to make money, feed and house themselves, and their children, and not to create a picture pleasing to the eye. Still, whenever I gaze at Valley End Farm, probably the largest certified organic farm in Sonoma County, on Petaluma Hill Road, I see it as an oil painting by a 19th-century French impressionist painter. The soft, gentle mountains rise in the background, a white house nestles under an oak tree, and the furrowed fields unfold on either side of an unpaved driveway that divides them into two nearly equal parts. I have worked in these fields out of a sense of curiosity, and with an appreciation of beauty, too. I know that a sense of beauty infuses the way the farm workers look at the farm, and I have seen that they cannot help but make the rows and rows of tomatoes, squash, onion and garlic into a thing far more attractive to my eye than the sprawling tract houses that threaten its survival, and the survival of farms like it. Recently, I worked with Leno, the Mexican-born foreman who speaks excellent English and who dreams of owning his own farm in California one day. When he's off the farm, I have worked with his wife Malu, as hard a tiller of the soil as he, and her 60-year-old father who has worked on farms nearly his whole life, but who has never owned one, and probably never will. Leno and Malu, and the other farm workers, labor at Valley End because agriculture is what they know how to do, and because they like to work with their hands, in the outdoors, planting and weeding, from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. these days, and sometimes until 7 p.m. when crops have to be harvested. ``It's beautiful here, isn't it,'' Malu's father said to me on a June afternoon, as we stood in the hot sun, weeding around the tomato plants -- nearly 75,000 of them -- whose fruit Clint Grossi, who runs the farm with his mother Sharon, will sell at their farm stand along the side of the road at the height of summer. Many local residents, and tourists, too, stop here because they want locally grown, organic vegetables, and because they see the farm as a thing of beauty to which they want a connection. Indeed, increasingly this farm, and others in Northern California, have become locales that provide suburbanites with a sense of roots, and a sense of meaning in a world that feels more and more dislocated and chaotic. They know that the human species cannot live without beauty, and that living farms, where men and women grow beautiful, healthy crops, provide an aesthetic sense that gives them pleasure. So, when I stand in the fields, with a hoe in my hands, I occasionally pause and peer at the traffic on Petaluma Hill Road that looks, in the distance, like toy cars and trucks. Will the speeding drivers gaze appreciatively at the farm as I do? I wonder. Will they see the beauty, here, and will they come to realize that farms must continue to exist here, if we are to maintain our history and our humanity? I take up the hoe again, and, if wishing would make it so, it is so.
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(P2) Political (sort of)
Curt Flood On Issues Related To Slavery
When baseball great Curt Flood challenged baseball's reserve clause in 1970-71 he gave up his expectation of a future as a major league manager. This fight was more important to Flood who regarded challenging the restriction to play for only one team as a civil rights issue. When he won, he became a hero to his peers.
The following is a short excerpt from "Why I Am Challenging Baseball" by Curt Flood in Sport
Magazine 1970)
"Are we right in challenging the legality of the reserve clause? Let me answer you this way. Suppose you are an accountant. One day your boss says to you, 'Joe, we are moving you to the other coast. Now don't worry. We'll pay your expenses, you'll get the same salary you're getting here, and maybe more.'
"'But I don't want to go 3,000 miles away from my family and friends,' you say. 'I don't want to tear up roots.'
"'Of course you can quit and get another job,' your boss says. 'But we've got this reserve clause in your contract, you know. You can't work ever again as an accountant if you quit working for us.'
"'But accounting is the only business I know,' you say.
"'Sorry,' says your boss.
"What would you do? As an accountant and as a man? You know what I am doing. Maybe now you can understand why I feel I have to do it—as a ballplayer and as a man."
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(P3) Poetical
The Base Stealer
by Robert Francis
Poised between going on and back, pulled
Both ways taut like a tightrope-walker,
Fingertips pointing the opposites,
Now bouncing tiptoe like a dropped ball
Or a kid skipping rope, come on, come on,
Running a scattering of steps sidewise,
How he teeters, skitters, tingles, teases,
Taunts them, hovers like an ecstatic bird,
He's only flirting, crowd him, crowd him,
Delicate, delicate, delicate, delicate—now!
2476 Telegraph Avenue
