A Rural Community Comes Together for a Friend

Enlarge Image Image Gallery Friends and neighbors band together to help a farmer in need. Michele Tremaine

Farmers are among the most independent-minded people in the world. For one thing, they like being their own boss – if they didn’t, they’d go to work in a factory, where they would enjoy the security of guaranteed wages and hours, as well as employee benefits. For another, they have a “Show Me, I’m from Missouri” attitude toward outsiders offering them advice – particularly if the people offering it are dressed in suits and ties rather than work boots and blue jeans. But that freedom comes at a high cost – working long hours in the rain, snow, dust and wind, in the hope that prices for the crops they grow and the animals they raise will hold firm (or even rise) so they can pay off this year’s bills and maybe have something left over for the next one. It’s like the joke about the farmer who won $5 million in a lottery. “What are you going to do with it all?” an acquaintance asked him. “Oh, I’ll keep farmin’ ’til it’s gone,” he replied.

But what happens when disaster strikes, when a farmer comes down with a disabling disease or suffers an accident that leaves him or her unable to do work that has to be done? When I was young, growing up in a small farming community in the southwestern part of Ontario, Canada, that was when your neighbors banded together and helped pull you through until you could get back on your feet.

Witnessing a rural community banding together

I first saw this happen when I was 10 years old. Billy Plaine, who lived down the concession road from my father’s farm, had come down with the mumps. That wouldn’t have been such a problem if Billy had been my age, but instead he was about 60, and he was so ill that even Doc Pardy, who still made house calls even though he was bent over almost double with age, couldn’t promise that Billy would survive. To make the situation even worse, Billy had fallen sick at the exact time the first crops needed to be sown, which in our case meant oats and barley.

Billy came down with the mumps on a Thursday. Toward the end of church service the following Sunday, Reverend Taylor announced that there would be a special meeting immediately following the service to discuss how to help out Billy. Everyone wanted the minister to act as the chair, but he suggested they nominate someone else. “I’m no farmer,” he said. So my father was nominated instead, since he was a member of the church’s Board of Elders and the chairman of the local school committee.