‘This is our land; we are its people.’
The impact of the East Palestine derailment on local farmers
Awarm day in March can be a good time to haul firewood. This morning after breakfast we load up help and equipment and head out to the back pasture, where a neighbor’s logging project has left a lot of unprocessed treetops; cleaning up the understory will assist in healing the damage caused by careless woodcraft. We sort as we go, cutting billets of the larger wood, throwing the smaller-diameter brush into piles for wildlife shelter. We’ve completed maybe two hours of work when the truck gets stuck on a slick hillside. Someone goes up to the barn to fetch the tractor.
During the period of enforced idleness, we entertain ourselves by counting the earthworms under each weathered cow pie. Our highest score is nineteen; our lowest, two. There should be more as spring advances. Flipping cow pies to tally squirming earthworms may not be most people’s cup of tea, but for us they are the visible result of many years of steady work, the sign of our success in turning an acreage of stripped, defeated land into an organic farm. Earthworms are blessings.
This winter we’ve been made more than usually aware of our blessings by a tsunami of tragedy — in Ukraine, howitzers silhouetted against their own muzzle flash; in Turkey and Syria, bagged bodies and dusty white rubble of collapsed cities. Disasters at a distance.
At a distance, that is, until the night of February 3. Enter a volcano of fire and black smoke rising to the stratosphere; oily smears and dead fish in
Leslie Run and Sulphur Run, just 15 miles upriver of our farm; and in a moment the sense of danger is personal. Our earthworm count gives us a record, a highwater mark of earthworms before the derailment of more than 30 cars of toxic chemicals in East Palestine, Ohio. From here forward we don’t know what will happen to them. This land, which has been under our family’s care for decades, suddenly feels fragile.
The land can’t move
Down the hill, the tractor has failed to extricate the pickup; instead, both vehicles are wedged further into the trees. We stop to consider options. With a maple twig I dig a small hole in the cold ground, exposing the tangled roots of orchard grass and Queen Anne’s lace. As far as I can discern, everything looks perfectly normal. In East Palestine, where yards and yards of soil were saturated with vinyl chloride, a chemical known to cause cancer and respiratory problems, soil denizens like my earthworms were killed on contact.
The people of Syria, Turkey and Ukraine are leaving their homes, forced away by circumstances beyond their control. Farms and cities are reduced to bomb craters and rubble. People have died, are dying. No one has died in East Palestine — not yet, at least. Neither has the land been reduced to craters. The people of that community have been told they can return to their homes. Much of the harm that has been done is invisible, and largely speculative.
But in another sense those people, like the ones in Syria, have been made homeless. Who would now buy land in East Palestine? Go inquire into the market price. When summer comes, who is going to patronize the stands at the farmers market that, last year, proudly displayed their farm names alongside their town’s name? Not my neighbors, who are even afraid to plant their own gardens this year. Will the folks of East Palestine feel safe eating a local tomato?
Do milk tank trucks stop now at the many dairy farms near East Palestine to pick up their milk, or is that milk now unwelcome at the bottling plant? How does the bidding at auction go when cattle are announced from an East Palestine farm? How do you stay in a place if you can’t make a living?
Money has been offered to the townsfolk of East Palestine; a little, then a little more, then more than that.
But really there is no rectifying this mistake, because the land itself — the hills, the trees, Sulphur Run and Leslie Run and who knows how many smaller waterways — can’t move away from the mess. And I’m willing to bet the farmers won’t go, either.
‘This is our land; we are its people.’
Down in the woods below our mired vehicles there used to be a mudhole that never dried up. Years ago our family dug it to its source and tapped it, running the water through pipe to a tank made from a repurposed tractor tire; from there to another tank lower on the hillside; from there to a third. What had been a muddy spot in the trees became a stream of clean water cascading downhill to water cattle, and dropping at the last into Wildcat Hollow Run. Maybe you see the point.
Our son William put it into words. “Farmers can’t leave; we don’t have a right to leave. Who else knows this land, knows what it needs? If the farmers go, who will take care of it? No one.” His words, maybe, but the sentiment is that of many, perhaps most people whose lives and livelihoods come from the soil. We can’t leave. This is our land; we are its people.
One image from the aftermath of the earthquake in Anatolia has remained clear in my memory: the face of a sixmonth-old child rescued after five days trapped under his collapsed home. The face is dirt-streaked and teary-eyed, but the expression, remarkably, is trusting. That face does not yet imagine betrayal. I’m not feeling very trusting right now.
Norfolk Southern refused to meet with townspeople on the grounds of fear for their own personal safety. Really? First they poison our land; then they smear our good name. Why should we believe their promises of restitution?
The price of prosperity?
In the end it takes two hours to extricate the farm equipment, and our efforts leave the pasture deeply scarred with tire ruts. What was one moment’s carelessness in the management of a machine has led to hours of labor and an undetermined degree of damage. We’ll do what we can to repair the scars; when the soil dries we’ll dig and
rake the ruts and sow them to rye, then lay down a mulch of straw — but the compaction will take many seasons to reverse. We needed the firewood, but there is a price on the harvest.
It would be easy to think of the East Palestine train derailment and its aftermath as an us vs. them conflict, but that may be too easy. Trains crossing this country provide energy-efficient and generally safe shipping for goods destined for American citizens. The derailed train in East Palestine was our
train. Norfolk Southern was carrying vinyl chloride for making PVC pipes like the ones that carry our spring water down the pasture. It was our vinyl chloride. Even some of the howitzers in Ukraine are our howitzers.
The ruts in the pasture we can repair with our own hands. It’s harder to withdraw our proxy from institutions that wreak destruction on our behalf.