162 animal, vegetable, miraclechicken, cow, or canary will be required by law to get onto the map and
this federal database. Farmers aren’t cottoning to the plan, to put it mildly.
“Mark Twain’s wisdom comes to mind,” David observed. “ ‘Sometimes I
wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting
us on, or by imbeciles who really mean it.’ ” But in truth he’s not too wor-
ried, as he doubts the government will be up to the job. Forcing half a
million farmers to register every chicken and cow, he predicts, will be
tougher than getting Afghan farmers to quit growing poppies.
The steer that had contributed itself to the meatballs on our plates
had missed the sign- up. Everything else on the table was also a local prod-
uct: the peas we’d just shelled, the salad picked ten minutes earlier, the
strawberries from their daughter. I asked Elsie how much food they
needed from outside the community. “Flour and sugar,” she said, and then
thought a bit. “Sometimes we’ll buy pretzels, for a splurge.”
It crossed my mind that the world’s most efficient psychological evalu-
ation would have just the one question: Defi ne splurge. I wondered how
many more years I’d have to stay off Belgian chocolate before I could at-
tain Elsie’s self- possession. I still wanted the moon, really—and I wanted
it growing in my backyard.
After dinner, the long evening of midsummer still stretched ahead of
us. David was eager to show us the farm. We debated the relative merits
of hitching up David’s team and driving the wagon, versus our hybrid gas-
electric vehicle, new to us, now on its first road trip. The horses had obvi-
ous appeal, but David and Hersh had heard about the new hybrids and
were eager to check out this technology. David confessed to having long
ago dreamed up (while cultivating his corn) the general scheme of har-
nessing the friction from a vehicle’s braking, capturing that energy to as-
sist with forward momentum. Turns out, Toyota was right behind him on
that. We piled into the vehicle that does not eat oats, and rode up the
dusty lane past the milking barn, up a small rise into the fi elds.
As Elsie had said, the drought here was manifest. The animal pastures
looked parched, though David’s corn still looked good—or fairly good,
depending. The lane divided two fields of corn that betrayed different
histories: the plot on our left had been conventionally farmed for thirty