One Man's Meat

I like to watch the faces of people who are trying to get up their nerve to take to the air. You see them at the ticket booths in amusement parks, in the waiting room at the airport. Within them two irreconcilables are at war, the desire for safety, the yearning for a dizzy release. My Britannica tells nothing about Mr. GWG Ferris, but he belongs with the immortals. On the top of the wheel, seated beside a small boy, windswept and fancy-free, I looked down on the fare and, for a moment, was alive. Below us the old harness drivers pushed their trotters round the dirt track, old men with their legs still sticking out stiffly round the rumps of horses. And from the cluster of loudspeakers atop the judges' stand came the Indian love call, bathing heaven and earth in jumbo tenderness. This silvery wheel, revolving slowly in the cause of freedom, was only just holding its own, I soon discovered, for farther along in the midway in a sideshow tent a tattoo artist was doing a land-office business, not with anchors, flags, and pretty mermaids, but with social security numbers, neatly pricked on your forearm with the electric needle. He had plenty of customers, mild-mannered, pale men asking glumly for the sort of indelible ignominy that was once reserved for prisoners and beef cattle. Drab times these, when the bravado and the exhibitionism are gone from tattooing and it becomes simply a branding operation. I hope the art that produced the bird's-eye view of Sydney will not be forever lost in the routine business of putting serial numbers on people who are worried about growing old. The sight would have depressed me had I not soon won a cane by knocking over three cats with three balls. There is no other moment when a man so surely has the world by the tail as when he strolls down the midway swinging a prize cane. Secretary Wallace thinks the farm income this year will be about $7.5 billion, which is about twice what it was in 1932, but which will hardly pay me for my time even so. Since coming to live on the land, I am concerned with all such reports. From a limited experience with farm operation, I should call $7.5 billion scarcely enough to pay off the farmers in a dozen states. I should estimate that the farm income, with or without crop control, would have to be about a hundred times greater than it is to make it worth any man's while to work the land. For example, let us consider my one remaining turkey. She is all that is left of a brood of six. Three were victims of a liver disorder, two were foully struck down by a weasel. This surviving bird, in order for me to turn her over at a profit, would have to be sold for somewhere in the neighborhood of $450. This is a conservative figure that I shall itemize presently. I have been keeping books on the bird and know what I am talking about. Of course my turkey and I constitute a branch of farming the Secretary of Agriculture does not necessarily take into consideration, either in his national planning or in his cost accounting. Yet we are part of the rural scene these days. Our ilk is increasing and must eventually be taken into account. I suppose Mr. Wallace looks upon my sort not as farmers but as middle-aged eccentrics. But here we are. By no means all of America's soil today is tilled by practical people doing things in a sensible way. Matched June 19, the turkey is a bourbon red, one of those beautiful cocoa-colored birds with white tail feathers and a fine sense of catastrophe. This one is rather pendling for her age, for I have been busy this summer and haven't pushed her along. Her account figures up about as follows. Cost of egg, $0.30. Cost of gas to place where I got egg, $1.20. Remodeling chimneys of dwelling house on property, $800. Ware chargeable to turkey, $0.1, $80. Corn for broody hen, $0.25. Growing mash, $1.25. Scratch, $1.30. Hired man's time feeding, watering, etc., $20. My time puttering, reading bulletins, vacillating, whipping off dog, spreading oilcloth over pen, rearranging hopper, setting skunk trap at estimated hour bases of what I might have earned by putting my time to better advantage, $168.40. Pair strap hinges, $0.15. Installing low-pressure steam heat in dwelling house so we can survive in this climate on Thanksgiving Day, $1,300.