Farmer Thoughts: A Little Life Up Here

Contributed by Farmer Becca, Bottomland Farm —

Last week, I had the rare opportunity to get out of town. Farmers, especially livestock farmers, don’t often have the chance to travel, but luckily Farmer Bill was able to “hold down the fort” while I was off gallivanting.

I spent my week on the barrier islands of the Outer Banks in North Carolina, visiting friends and spending time with family. I’ve been visiting these islands for a week at a time, once a year, for the better part of my life, usually during the off-season when folks are much less likely to spend their entire day lying on the beach sand, basking in the sun like a lizard. 

My island days have been spent walking the edge of the waves looking for shells and sea glass or exploring the salt marshes with my binoculars, checking off the bird species as I go. Maybe not quite the beach vacation most people have in mind, but it suits me.

What has always amazed me about the islands of the Outer Banks is that they literally shift with the sea, moving back and forth with no regard for the man-made roads and houses that have been constructed. When I was a kid, we always stopped at the National Wildlife Refuge’s visitor center, unloading ourselves from the car, crossing the road, and climbing what felt like miles of sand dunes before we reached the beach.

But last week, the only thing that stood between the visitor center and high tide was the highway and a short, man-made dune with no beach grasses to hold it together. A good friend of mine, who now lives there, told me that they spend just as much time and money clearing sand off the highway as we do clearing snow. It seems that soon the ocean and the islands could shift even further west, taking the highway and the visitor center with it and leaving only the beach, the salt marshes, and the wildlife.

But what will happen then? I think the wildlife will probably revel in their own solitude and flourish for being left alone, but how will people interact with this landscape? How will they fall in love with it and know to keep it safe? How will people like me, from an entirely different habitat, interact with a place that seems so far away?

The reality is that how Farmer Bill and I manage our own little farm along the banks of East Owego Creek has far-reaching consequences. Water droplets from our hillside travel to the Susquehanna River and end up in the Chesapeake Bay, eventually making their way out to the Atlantic. What we do here matters, even to the birds and the butterflies flitting through a salt marsh hundreds of miles away.

Each time I’m in a new place, I ask myself the question: “Could I live here?” Last week that question was constantly rolling through my head as I walked the beaches and the salt marsh trails. It didn’t take me long to know the answer: I wouldn’t want to leave my home in these green hills for life on the Outer Banks. I’m a visitor, and that’s all I ever care to be, but I do know that my little life up here still matters a great deal to all of the lives down there.

(Bottomland Farm, located in Berkshire, N.Y., can be contacted via email at farmer@bottomlandfarm.com.)