Rural reticence sounds good
MONTEZUMA COUNTY, Colo.—Halfway through a 20-mile ride with a friend, taking our horses down a canyon in southwest Colorado, I chose to expound confidently on a topic I thought I knew.
My friend listened from the saddle as he looked through the trees. He smiled and seemed to ponder my words as they spilled out. When I wrapped up the treatise, all he said was, “Hmm.”
It wasn’t long—maybe a week later—when I realized I’d been foolish and hasty in my understanding of the facts. I confessed as much to my friend. He said, “Oh?”
In the rural West, quiet reserve is an essential skill and a fading art form, lost on people, like me, who rush to react and to be heard. Inevitably, it is rapidly losing ground to a louder, vainer way of being.
The change has probably been underway for generations, and the digital age has quickened it. While online memes and political salvos monopolize people’s attention and influence behavior, the more contemplative, measured mindset typically found in ranch and farm country takes on fresh appeal. I’m learning that there’s value in observing, taking stock, and reserving judgment while a day or season runs its course.
Erin Nissen is a fourth-generation farmer in the San Luis Valley of southern Colorado. Her family harvests a million pounds of potatoes each year. I asked for her thoughts on online acrimony and she laughed, saying, “My dad thinks if only people worked longer hours, they wouldn’t have time for the nonsense.”
She noted that most people are generations removed from their farming and ranching roots. In 1900, 41 percent of the U.S. workforce was employed in agriculture. A century later, that number had fallen to less than 2 percent. “I tend to study, sit back, listen, watch. It’s a calmer way of doing things,” she said. “That’s a pretty common thing in ag, although water meetings can get heated.”
Not all water meetings and not all Westerners are quiet and mindful. And not all Easterners are pushy and opinionated. My friend’s “oh” is an alternative to “ayuh,” a Maine expression endlessly parodied but one that is beautifully reflective, rather than reflexive.
Before he wrote “Charlotte’s Web,” E.B. White moved from New York City to Maine and worked a farm, raising sheep, chickens and crops. In “One Man’s Meat,” he wrote that farmers were “impressed by education, but they have seen too many examples of the helplessness and the impracticality of educated persons to be either envious or easily budged from their position.”
Fence-sitting—literally sitting on the fence and watching animals, feeling the wind shift, smelling the sage after a hard, fleeting rain—is not a waste of time. It’s honorable listening that can inform one’s worldview more than any tweet thread.
Don’t call me a romantic. There is little romance in my work of bucking bales in July heat or shoveling manure in February rain. But there is quietness. Like the white space of an elaborate print design, it can be refreshingly satisfying.