When my farming epiphany came, I can’t remember exactly. It might have been that day, stuck in a Bangkok taxi.
Thai cabdrivers love to chat. There’s nothing else to do, with traffic backed up from one end of the city to the other, as it mostly was.
If you had a telescope, you could climb onto the roof of the cab and see an annoyed police officer in white gloves way up yonder trying to sort out the impossible tangle of idling cars, buses and heavy trucks. The other option is to talk to the driver. If you speak Thai, you can learn a lot.
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I discovered that cab drivers are mostly farm boys trying to make a little cash to help out the family back home. This particular fellow had given up on farming.
“The soil in the northeast is very poor,” he said. “Driving a cab isn’t so bad.”
A garland seller, about eight years old, her skin blackened by sun and exhaust, was standing alone on the boulevard. Most drivers consider the slum children to be a nuisance, and roll their windows up tight.
Instead of scowling, my driver waved her over.
“Hi, beautiful,” he said. “How much for those pretty flowers?”
She smiled. “Ten baht. Three for twenty.” He handed her a crumpled green banknote, and she slid a bunch of purple garlands off the stick and passed them to him through the window. Then she walked away, her flip-flops slapping against the hot pavement.
“You’re kind,” I said to him.
“The flowers smell nice,” he replied. “They bring good luck.”
I looked out to the west. A jumble of shacks with rusty tin roofs stretched for a mile along a canal, its water as black as crankcase oil. She probably lives there, I thought.
The driver was looking at me through the rear-view mirror. “There’s a lot of poor people in Thailand,” he said.
“They get cheated out of their land and end up here. They’re squatters. Someday they’ll set fire to the slum and drive them out.”
What must it feel like, I thought, to have no place, not even one square foot of the entire earth’s surface, where you can rest your weary feet?
It occurred to me then, that for all my clean clothes, credit card, cell phone and rented apartment, I was really not much more than a paycheque away from the same fate.
I suppose that’s what got me thinking about what a treasure it is to have land,
to farm it, and to pass it on to future generations.
