Farm Photos
by William Etling

We worked through spring and winter, through summer and through fall, but the mortgage worked the hardest, and the steadiest of us all: it worked on nights and Sundays, it worked each holiday, it settled down among us, and it never went away..." (Will Carleton, "The Tramp's Story," 1881)

Green is gone, the flowers are fried, and the hay is headed for the barn. Crop circles aren't from outer space, they're what farmers do for a living. There's hypnotic therapy in ever-dwindling ovals, farmers everywhere have found from time immemorial. The task is clear, the limits sure, the end finite, fixed by the field. Whether racing in a crowd of combines across the wheat fields of the Midwest, cultivating crops by GPS in the Central Valley, or following a mule, The Farmer Is The Man, Ry Cooder sang, who feeds us all.

His tools and the places he puts them have iconic appeal. Stark silhouettes of barns and silos evoke hard work and harvest, sweat and storms. There's a tomb raider feeling to entering the vast shadowy spaces of a big barn: mysterious shafts of mote-speckled sunshine lighting warm, smooth wood, dusty antiques forgotten in spider-webbed recesses, scents of hay and harvest. There was a time when a majority of Americans were at work on the family farm, probably praying with Herman Melville, "Oh, time, strength, cash and patience!" Today just 2 or 3% are farmers, but check out all the barn books at Barns & Noble.

I was always a little scared of my great-grandfather Henry Marquardt when we visited the family farm near Wausau, Wisconsin, in summers past. He was 93 and I had just turned six the last time I saw him, in the summer of 1959. Henry turned over the dairy farm to his sons and mostly just sat by the woodshed in the sunshine, dressed in a formal black suit, fine white hair shining in the sun. I don't recall ever hearing him say a word as I tiptoed by. I really didn't know what we were doing there, that it was where Grandma grew up, but I thought it was heaven.

My mother talked to Henry, of course. "It must be nice to sit in the sun," she said. "It's not much fun when all your friends are gone," he replied. The way bulk milk prices are dropping, family dairy farms will be gone soon, too.

When I started hauling hay in Montana in 1971 I worked so hard I thought I'd die, soaked with sweat, swinging iron hooks, wearing leather chaps, body covered with hay chaff, wrists scratched bloody by sharp stalks. After bucking bales all summer in the sun, we were tan as milk chocolate and strong as spring steel. The barns were often hotter than a hundred, with no welcome wind to cool things down. We slogged in that sauna until the truck was empty, the stack was full, and we were off down the road, straw wafting in our wake.

Here is an album of photos by my son, Will Etling.

William Etling is a 42-year resident of Santa Ynez, and the author of Sideways in Neverland: Life in the Santa Ynez Valley.