April can be the cruelest month, bringing false crops of thistles out of the dead land, mixing memory of harvest rains with vain desire for a perfect spring seeding season, stirring dead winter wheat stands with the last shreds of snow . . .
Actually, I can’t feel that way this late-April, although I must admit it was how I was feeling yesterday when I drove out of Winnipeg.
Perhaps the royal wedding of William and Kate has cheered me up. Usually, if I wake to feed the baby at three a.m. and then don’t get back to sleep, I’m a bit grumpy by mid-morning coffee break, but today I’m cheerful. Of course, this time I forced myself to stay awake so I could see the whole wedding live, and after that grand display of pageantry and tradition – the beating heart of our society – it’s hard not to feel hopeful about the future. I look forward to telling my infant daughter in about 20 years time that she did actually see the royal wedding, even if all her eyes could register probably was a bunch of shapes and colours moving about on the TV screen, and all she could hear was her father droning on about the glory of the hymn “Jerusalem.” Luckily she didn’t have to hear me attempting to sing it. I left that to the choirboys.
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While England seems a green and pleasant land today, the prairies seem mostly dull, dun, grey and brown, with little of anything growing yet. And as I drove out of the city yesterday to tour the farmland west towards Portage La Prairie and north to Fisher Branch, I expected to find dire conditions in the country, with floods pushing farmers into despair and dejection.
But I found fields drying up remarkably quickly everywhere except beside a few watercourses, and more remarkably, farmers growing very optimistic – even in the moisture-ravaged Interlake area. The Interlake has suffered years of drenching rains that has repeatedly ruined crops and driven farmers to desperate acts of harvesting, which have merely left gigantic ruts in the fields. Yet a couple of farmers I spoke with told me farmers there are feeling cheerful and confident. Some of that has to do with the lack of rain this spring, which is giving a chance for last fall’s heavy moisture to pass through the soil. A big storm is roaring in right now and will dump more moisture up there, but if it isn’t a deluge, the drying should continue after a couple of days.
I think most of the optimism comes from the farmer’s perennial optimism, which like the lilacs in T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land, eternally springs forth from the dead land. You’d have to be a wild-eyed optimist to not lose faith in farming after what guys up there have had to deal with. But it’s that kind of faith and optimism that allows a farming industry to continue. Rationality doesn’t suffice.
That’s one of the factors that’s floating around in my mind as I call analysts and farmer advisors to ask about the incredibly low summer fallow numbers in this year’s StatsCan seeding intentions report. With such wet soils and such a cold spring, how likely is it for us to see all those millions of acres that farmers want to seed actually get seeded? It’s a hard thing to peg, because farmers will no doubt seed what they can reasonably seed by safe dates, then seed some more. With such high crop prices hanging in front of us today, farmers are not going to find many reasons to not take a lot of chances and roll the dice with the weather and seeding dates.
So while the mainstream media is full of stories of flooded towns and riverside farmland, the quickly drying fields in most places are filled with optimism, and that’s a cheerful way to end April, even if we have a big wet snowstorm coming in.
And since it’s still April, I still have an opportunity to share my favorite lines of poetry, as I do every year in this month. Allow me to channel the spirit and voice of Geoffrey Chaucer with these opening lines of the prologue to the Canterbury Tales. I hope William and Kate are feeling this sort of April cheerfulness, and not the grim April disappointment of T.S. Eliot.
Whan that Aprille,
With his shoures soote,
The droughte of Marche hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every vein in swich licour
of which virtue engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephyrus eke with his sweete breethe
Inspired hath in every holt and heath
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the ram his half-cours y-runne,
And smale fowles maken melodye
That slepen all the night with open ye
(So pricketh him nature in her corages)
Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimmages,
And palmeres for to seeke strange strondes.
To ferne halwes, couth in sondry londes,
And specially, in every shires ende
Of Engoland, to Canterbury they wende,
The holy blissful martyr for to seeke,
That hem hath holpen, whan that they were sicke.
(Best of Luck Will and Kate – may you and the farmers of Western Canada find your optimism and hope rewarded!)
