The farmer aims to make his mark on the land. He in turn is marked by that effort, quite literally. My earliest childhood memories of my father are of the physical toll that farming takes on a body. His thumbnails, for instance, always seemed to be deep purple — badly aimed swings of a hammer will do that. And his upper back was polkadotted where the sun tanned it through the holes in his shirt.
When I was a teenager working alongside him, my own appearance must have been similarly striking. In 1978, at the tail end of the worst winter of the century, my hands turned black. To keep water thawed for the hogs to drink, we burned small kerosene heaters under the tanks. Once or twice a day, I would have to knock the accumulated soot off a dozen or so heaters, refill them with fuel, and trim the felt wicks with a pocketknife. You could do all this with Mctor Davis Hanson gloves on, but it took twice as long. The kerosene dissolved the soot, and the oily black worked its way so far into the pores that I don’t think my palms turned fully pink again till summer.
