Reflections of a postmodern farm worker

We are grateful for having Hans Friedhoff work for us during the 2004 season. His intellectual curiosity and wry humor combined with a good heart made him a wonderful companion while we toiled in the fields. We asked him to write a piece about his farm experience. Here it is.

In our postmodern world, where pretension and angst are fashionably adorned with perverted moralities, one is sometimes hard-pressed to reflect positively about our experiences. Sullen and brooding always inspires a trendier contingent. Certain brands of twenty-four year olds (myself excluded, of course), enthusiastically press each other for evidence of latent pathologies, self-torture or psychotic episodes; the more twisted, outlandish elements being taken as evidence of a healthy skepticism and a life richly lived over traditional morality and conventionality. So when I announced that I would spend the summer working on a farm in Maryland, reactions frequently hung between incredulity and outright suspicion. A reluctant suspicion among the more traditional, "adult" element, that either I had lost all sense of the progress America had made since the industrial revolution or that finally that twisted liberal arts postmodernist morality had taken me over the edge of reasonable behavior and into bed with the cows. And as for the younger, darker element, the farm was just a touch hokey. So much the better if we were to start in with the cows, surely that would be cooler and more subversive, I imagined them thinking.

Prior to arriving at Clagett Farm, I had been working at an office job in downtown Seattle – a truly mind-numbing activity that, ironically, never aroused the same suspicion about my sanity as has my presence on the farm. The office is a place that helps one breed a darker sensibility and while that may be popular with the cynical twenty-something existentialist crowd, it does not do much toward nurturing a healthy mental space.

Despite being far too positive to have much effect on my more sardonic arguments about the depravity and absurdity of human experience, my tenure on the farm has revived a fundamental curiosity about basic structures that is too often absent in everyday life. Throughout the summer it has forced the question –why this is so? It can sometimes be a difficult question in a culture that frequently forces us to sell ourselves as the final arbiters of truth on matters about which we speak and which, in terms of questions, generally regards simple and stupid as intimate bedfellows. We have long been a society of proud answerers in which humble questions are seen more as signs of weakness or naivete. I suppose that any job has the potential to force this question, but my experience on the farm has had an elemental quality that places that question above others.

There is the sense that one is among basic elements here. Uncovering the shape of those elements means uncovering the answer to essential questions bigger than asking why is it better to hoe during the mid-morning than in the late afternoon or why should we pluck the flowers in the new strawberry field. It inspired in me an itchy sort of intellectual groping aimed at uncovering the essential qualities of those things that we face every day and frequently think nothing more about. It’s a form of discovery more profound than most of us have regular occasion to make and one that has troubled authors and scientists alike. It’s an exercise undertaken by farmers all the time and it’s ironic that as a class they are so often regarded as unsophisticated as they may seem to be. In any case, my experience on the farm has reminded me of the sheer excitement of curiosity and discovery, and that questions regarded as simple generally prove to be the most honest and often uncover the sharpest understanding.

So passed the 04 growing season, light on the angst, not even a touch of psychotic behavior to help us ‘keep it real,’ but all the more substantive for it. Working on Clagett Farm is an experience that I wish was more reflective of the way I have lived. I will always perceive how integral the work we’ve done here is to us as individuals and community. Thank you to all.

Comments

[Fernando Ortega]

I am in search of Hans Friedhoff who posted this article on Dec, 2004. Hans lived with our family in Ecuador 4 years ago and now that I happen to be in Oregon with my wife, Marleen, we both would very much like to find him. The e-mail address we had does not accept our messages. Would there be any way for you to help us find his family number in Seatlle. We greatly appreciate it.
Thanks,
Fernando Ortega