Imagine my culture shock in 1999, when we moved to rural Ohio. I found myself moving into a very small subdivision in the country directly across the cornfield from some other family. I suppose the omen of a previous visit should have tipped me off that I was not in Chicago anymore. I was on one of my previous attempts at fitness. I decided I would jog the rural roads of what would come to be my home later on. As I jogged/walked along the double rail fence of a neighboring farm, let us not forget, I was obese at the time and far from a true runner. Nonetheless, I spent that time basking in the scenery. The green grass, the rolling hills and I could even see the cows grazing in the distance and was thinking maybe rural living was not so bad. That was until a cow came trotting toward the fence, another followed, pretty soon the whole herd was running at me and the only thing between me and them were two small slats of wood. Not even an electric fence. A dozen or more cows stampeding toward this city girl. I ran faster and faster, and I will say, in that circumstance I take no responsibility for what came out of my mouth in that moment. Eventually, I would reach the end of the property where the corner of the fence was and they would simply stop as if nothing had happened.
Despite all of that terror, we moved there anyway, as family proved to outweigh stampeding cows. On moving day, we had a system. Unload boxes, load them up, drive them to our family's seven acre property and toss them on the bonfire. It made it easier, no huge piles of trash. Hmmm.... this wasn't so bad. In Chicago, we would have had multiple trips to the dump. This was faster. We had started the process the night before. The following morning, the fire was still a slow burn so we picked up where we left off. The problem was, the winds had picked up and somehow in the mayhem of the day, some of the embers had blown into the already harvested corn field that surrounded our family's land and started a fire. A family member called the fire department and would start to attack the wall of flames with a garden hose. It was no use, the corn stalks were dry and the wind was strong. Before long, there was a wall of flames creeping along the ten acre field. Suddenly, I would think about where they would plug into a fire hydrant. Wait. Was there a fire hydrant? They had to have hydrants, right? The answer was no. This area was well and septic. No water lines.
A fire truck would arrive, but it wasn't a water truck. Now I was in a small panic. How far would this fire go? Out of the fire truck, a small team of rural firefighters would jump out with straw brooms and begin to start at the outside edges of the fire beating back the flames. I remember saying out loud,"what do they think that is gonna do?" In fact, I was pretty sure the brooms would catch fire too. Pretty soon, the local farmer would show up with his combine. OK really? Was he going to run over the fire with his diesel powered farm equipment? In my mind, we needed water, not a team of misfits with dollar store brooms and a combine. Yet there seemed to be no water truck. The whole scene was comical on the one hand, but on the other, I honestly began to wonder if it would hit the farm house at the other end of the field.
Pretty soon, I would realize the guy on the combine was plowing rows beyond the fire burying the dry cornstalks into wet mud so the fire could go no further. The guys with the brooms seemed to be containing the fire that was headed for the treeline. Wait. This band of misfits maybe did know exactly what they were doing and the person who didn't get it was the white girl from Chicago who just assumed fire hydrants existed everywhere and this was how to do things. Pretty soon the guy on the combine would come close enough to point at us city folk and laugh as he plowed a row closest to us. For years to come the city folk burning down ten acres of farmland would be the thing of legend in our small town.
Reflecting on this experience makes me think about how many times we make a resolution to lose weight or get healthy only to find that we are facing the proverbial ever expanding wall of fire armed with a simple garden hose. We give up because there is no hydrant to quickly squelch the fire, only growing flames as we look at failure after failure refusing to see that maybe our conventional understanding of how to reach our goals may be completely wrong. Maybe what we need is the little guy with the broom. Someone who can contain our self doubt before it spreads to full on failure. Another guy with a broom who will not let one bad day ignite a path for a bad month, or even a guy with a huge unconventional combine to place limits on our fears and let them burn out all on their own.
What I would come to learn from said combine guy later, was that the fire burning up the dried out corn stalks was very good for the soil and was going to lead to a much better harvest the following year. So, just maybe the goal should be to embrace the fire known as the journey, let others help you in new ways and realize if you try to do it on your own using the same old methods you will end up with the same fate as the garden hose, melted and charred and completely non functional. This same farmer would teach me something else about rural living, that is when the cows are chasing, all you have to do is stop. Stop an face them and they stop too. So on those days when it feels like we are being stampeded by fear and past failures, our job should really be to just stop, turn around and pause before we go running off again.
I have since made the move back to suburban upstate New York, only now wiser. I take my rural lessons right along with me.
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