Interview with a Farmer

There is a woman from Tulane University who was supposed to interview me at nine this morning for a study on urban farms in New Orleans. The text I received from Miss Cate at 9:03 said this: I came by but you were sleeping and I didn’t want to wake you. I’m around quite a bit now as my class is done so any time that’s convenient for you just let me know and I will make it work. Thank you! You have very lovely neighbors. I wondered if she meant Bernard, who smashed up a man’s car with a machete for parking in front of his house, or maybe she meant the 15 year old who has a gun, or Miss Nancy who I have never seen walk past her front porch. Maybe she meant the white gutter punks who each have six or eight dogs, or the kids who run in packs like the feral chickens. Don’t get me wrong. I love all of these people. And I think that Miss Cate might have seen something I don’t always see. And I am sure that she met a lot of the neighbors, seeing as they are always outside, always friendly, and usually short of cigarettes and money.

               What she saw through my window is quite another story. A 40-year-old man in his boxers, spralled across a mattress devoid of linen, a mask on his face as though the apocalypse could come at any minute. The room in which he slept looked like it may have already been hit. There was stucco and dust, and the floors were rough wood with nails. A couch faced a blank wall and butted up a foot away from the base board. A ladder, hammers, a flat bar and crow bar, Styrofoam cups, a Hoosier cabinet that looked like an antique—all of this strewn in no particular order. She didn’t know that I had pulled up the floors in less than five hours with two 13-year-olds from our street. She didn’t know that I had sleep apnea or that my room was filled with dust or that I usually didn’t sleep within view of the front door.

               And this is how I would write her article or interview or case study if the material were in my hands:

               A farmer is of the species homo erectus, the result of ten thousand years of walking, and has been around ever since man stopped his nomadic ways. But farming must also take its toll on the individual, for I arrived to find this farmer unconscious, lying half-naked on a bed without a thread of linen. It wore a mask connected to a machine, perhaps to defend against the oncoming apocalypse or for protection from the dust that spun in beams of sunlight. I feared rousing our subject from sleep. The stirring of arms and legs was enough to assure me that the subject was alive.

               In my field notes regarding the natural habitat of said farmer, I recorded the abnormality of a sofa pressed so close to the wall that your average-sized man or woman would have been unable to sit comfortably. It should be stated that the wall was blank. I must research whether or not staring into a blank canvas is one of the effects of working in the hot sun all day, a means of bringing the human psyche back into the comforts the rest of us call home.

               There were other curious deviations. Namely: a ladder in the middle of the room that was open and ready to be climbed, but there was nowhere for the ladder to lead. Based on the prior clinical observations of others, I could come up with no reason for this and had to begin forming my own hypotheses. I was left with metaphor. Knowing the state of urban farming in New Orleans and the pressure our subjects face trying to juggle the duties of seven people, I could only surmise that the ladder was some kind of escape. Bearing in mind our proximity to the Bywater (a haven for self-professed creatives), I had to dig deeper. I had to find out whether or not this signaled a more complex issue, a statement for all who passed by and cared to look inside, an existential crisis of the artistic kind. Our farmer was perhaps a modern day Dostoevsky, reveling in the notion that only a symbol can speak to the inner desire to feel useful, and it was this symbol that allowed me to finish the case study without even having to interview the farmer.

               This is my prognosis. The ladder is the urban farm. The ceiling New Orleans. More on this after the actual interview.