Death of a Farmer

My mother has informed me that Uncle Paul died in his sleep yesterday afternoon. I recently wrote about the casket that my cousins made for him in anticipation of the event. I didn't know Paul very well, perhaps partly because his three sons were enough older than I that I never went to spend the night at their place that I can remember. He was a smiling, simple, hard-working, devout Mennonite man, although perhaps a sterner father, according to my cousins (via my mother), than was apparent from a distance. He served in a hospital as a Conscientious Objector during WWII.

Those who knew him better will probably remember him for other things, but he was also inadvertently, in the most horrible way, responsible for the banning of field-burning in Oregon. Field-burning was the practice of burning the dead stalks of grass in a field after the seeds had been harvested. (My farming uncles -- and now cousins -- mostly grow grass seed such as fescue and golf.) As a kid I thought the fires were really cool, and I remember how little whirlwinds would throw up pillars of swirling flame -- very dangerous for spreading the fire, but just about the neatest thing in the world in the eyes of a kid. The fire killed plant disease and pests in preparation for the next crop, but it also caused pollution that made the practice controversial with environmentalists, not to mention the people living further south in the Willamette Valley who had to breathe the smoke. Then one day my uncle was burning a field next to I-5, as he had done without problem for years, when the wind shifted suddenly and carried the thick smoke over the freeway. There was a chain accident and several people died.

It was a bad, bad time for Uncle Paul after that, as indeed for the families that lost loved ones in the accident. There were lawsuits, the father of one of the accident victims wrote an angry book, Paul suffered a heart attack and then depression, he retired from farming and fought to hold onto the land for his sons. The state banned field burning, which was just as well, but if only they had done it earlier for environmental reasons or for the health of those living downwind!

There's more one could say about Uncle Paul's ill health in later years and his relentless cheerfulness in the face of it. I didn't know him well and didn't feel a strong connection, and I feel almost guilty for memorializing him with this awful episode in his life. Yet there's something fascinating about it, something bigger than life, something bigger than death. I'm sure Paul believed that the Lord moves in mysterious ways. The Lord's motives in that morass of pain and legal conflict are indeed inscrutable, yet Uncle Paul kept smiling and kept the faith that there was a purpose even if he didn't understand it. Perhaps it's as good as one can do in the face of mystery and the shifting of the wind.