Young Nick peers at his phone, then back at the house at the top of the long driveway behind a stand of trees. The farm extends as far as he can see on three sides. His driver, in the oldest Uber vehicle in existence, clunks to a stop at the gate.
“There’s no number on the gate,” Nick complains. “Are you sure –“
“It’s the McKinney place,” says the driver, “family’s been here forever.”
Nick waits for him to drive up to the house.
“Out you go now,” the driver says.
Nick dutifully pulls out his roller suitcase and laptop bag, turns his baseball cap back to the front, and exits the vehicle.
He shivers a little and grins. This is it! Not as exciting as Barcelona Summer Abroad maybe like his boys are doing, but an adventure into unexplored territory, what everybody at BU calls flyover country. Why spend your summer sipping espressos with other tourists from the USA when you could really help someone?
Oh, it smells like a farm too. Wisconsin AF. The smell is the first thing he notices as he walks up the drive. It must be cow shit, he thinks, or fertilizer. Same thing? And the barn—the barn has loose boards popping out and peeling paint, not like his family’s country place in Bucks County.
A man in blue coveralls walks toward him. The plumber? A baby goat trots after him. Nick wonders if they put pajamas on him like they do on YouTube.
The man smiles, shakes off the dirt, and holds out his hand, “David McKinney. You must be Nick.”
“I am,” Nick replies and gingerly extends his own hand to the farmer.
“But everyone calls me Mac.”
“Sure, Mr. McKinney…Mac,” Nick replies.
“Let’s go inside. Weren’t expecting you so early but dinner’s almost ready.”
“Film and TV, that’s my major,” Nick says, as Mac and his wife Marnie and he sit at the kitchen table eating fried chicken and boiled corn. Nick is scarfing it up.
“What’s your favorite movie?” Marnie asks.
“Well, these days, it’s ‘Easy Rider’,” Nick smiles.
“Hmmm, interesting choice. Little too nihilistic for me,” Mac counters.
Nihilistic?
Nick ponders that for a moment.
“Oh, sure, but I love the gritty underbelly of the nation stuff,” Nick responds. “I’ve never tasted fried chicken and corn so…awesome before,” he says between mouthfuls.
“Well, thank you,” replies Marnie.
The bowed heads and the saying of grace before they sat down was worth it. It was kind of nice.
He is shocked when the farmer wakes him up the next day. It is still dark.
“What’s the matter?” he mumbles.
“Time to go to work,” Mac laughs.
He assumes it would be an easy day to check things out, see how he could help Mac with his intro to computer farming spreadsheets. But now they’re on the tractor together, digging patterns into the earth that follow the curves of the slope. The sun rises above the fields, spreading its light on the freshly tilled ground, and Nick is wowed.
Mac’s brother Rankin is there most days helping out when he isn’t working in town in the insurance office. His wife has passed away and so did the B&B she ran in their home. “We all got a side hustle,” explains Mac.
“Oh cool, by the way, I’ve kind of developed a little spreadsheet for you and…”
“Oh we’re good. We’ve got FamFarm. Great stuff for inventory control.”
“Oh, okay,” Nick responds.
“I’ll show it to you sometime,” Mac says.
One day Marnie calls out to him as he writes his daily report for school. “Get to the barn, quick.”
Nick steps into his tennis shoes and coveralls and runs to the barn.
A cow is in trouble, with her calf stuck in the birth canal. Mac and Rankin tend to the cow and the calf, whose hoofs and a length of his legs dangle lifelessly out of the mama.
“Hold the jack, Nick,” Mac orders, and Nick grasps the jack braced against the hindquarters of the cow. Mac nods, and Nick cranks it.
His tennis shoes are ruined in a few minutes, covered in muck and water. They rest for a minute when the cow stops pushing, so he runs back in the house and pulls on the waders. Mac calls after him, “Wear a hat or cut it off,” and motions to his pony tail.
As the cow rouses, the team resumes the pressure. Finally they pull out the listless calf, covered in slimy afterbirth and blood. Rankin grabs a pail of cold water from the spigot and douses the calf. No sign of life still. Mac pries open the calf’s mouth and they hear a deadly gurgle from the animal. They hold him up by the hind legs and try to shake out the phlegm. After one choking breath, the calf gives up.
“Damn,” Mac exclaims.
“We lost him. He was a big boy, too big for the mom,” Rankin adds.
Nick leaves the barn, so the men won’t see him, and sobs. The closest he’d ever gotten to watching an animal die is when the vet came to the house to put down their beloved Harvey, his first and only dog.
Marnie appears at the door later.
“Rhubarb pie?” she asks, Nick’s new favorite.
Nick sits up in bed and accepts her gift.
“Does that happen often, I mean, you lose a calf?” Nick asks.
“Not too often, but it does happen,” she answers. Nick stops eating.
“You only see this on a farm, Nick.”
“For sure,” he answers.
“We’re the middleman. Between all the people who don’t live on farms and all the forces of nature.”
“What do you mean?” he asks.
“As soon as you are born, or as soon as a stalk of corn germinates, nature tries to take it back. It’s a war.”
Nick’s time on the farm ends, yet he feels like he’s lived here forever. He looks out the airplane window on the ribbons of gold and green snaking up and down the hills in alternating green and gold. Pretty, of course, but now he knows their purpose: efficient use of the rain water to ease erosion and to keep the water on the crops: the preservation and conservation of the fertile soil, well loved and respected, and its war with nature.
He recalls the shock when his parents told him where he was going for the summer. It wasn’t Florence or Barcelona. Were they hard up for money, or was it some other parental plan? Probably the latter. They are pretty smart. They didn’t send him here because they thought the farmer needed help, that’s for sure. More like, if you are pretty much sitting on top of the birthday cake of life, it’s important to appreciate the love and care that went into baking it. Delivering a lost baby calf was probably the most real life a film major could ever experience. Maybe he would be a farmer, and a director too.