Not-quite wilderness; not-quite town
“The desert and the sown” seems an accurate way to describe contrasting ways of life in the ancient Middle East: nomadic herding and settled agriculture. I’ve tried to find an original source of the phrase; although it isn’t in the Bible, it describes the language of the Old Testament. It’s also the title of a rather famous book by Gertrude Bell.
In Old Testament writings, the desert was both something to be delivered from – the Israelites wandering in the wilderness – and a place to meet God. Think of Elijah the Tishbite, who fled to the desert and prayed for his own death, or John the Baptist, the spiritual fulfillment of Elijah, who emerged from the desert preaching repentance.
The sown, on the other hand, is the land of milk of honey: Canaan, Palestine. It represented a sort of stability but also religious syncretism, idolatry and class divisions.
The desert and the sown
The desert and the sown: they are neat categories for making generalizations, but life is seldom quite that neat. As far as I can tell, in central B.C. life takes on many forms: village, city, rural, resource extraction and wilderness. Each has its own appeal, possibilities and dangers. We live in a rural area at Eskerhazy Farm, but about five kilometers away the wilderness begins, inhabited by grizzly bears, wolves, moose, hunters and trappers. Our farm serves as a border country for true wilderness and a highway for large mammals passing through.
I prefer rural life, the life of small farms. Only a handful of farmers here count their land in quarter sections and even then not too many own more than four or five quarters of deeded land. Services are almost non-existent, except for electric power, and fire protection is only near the villages. Our life consists of graded gravel roads, septic tanks or sewage lagoons, a few (or many) sheep, goats, cattle, horses, chickens and turkeys and lots and lots of pastures, some developed and others rough.
If this sounds idyllic, think again. There are abused lands as well as carefully tended fields; house trailers and fancy new homes and old pioneer homes like ours with the architectural style best described as being of the Afterthought School, with added on wings, ells and lean-tos.
There are a few highly-mechanized dairy farms using advanced silage machinery and robotic milkers. At the same time, there is at least one commodity crop farmer who owns or rents many plots of land to grow canola, small grains, timothy seed and hay.
The rural life
What is it exactly that makes for rural life? It’s difficult to pin down. Neighbourliness is part of it, mutual aid in times of stress and celebration. Forest and farmed fields. ATVs and motor bikes, pickup trucks, families with children who are sometimes home-schooled. Residents who delight in the Ottawa trucker convoy and think vaccination is a threat to society; devout church-goers; home-churchers; back-to-the-landers who practice hügelkultur, raise lots of herbs and are involved in anti-climate change activities; lots and lots of musicians who get together to perform in community halls. In our area, there is even a “little brown church in the vale” that holds about 33 people (legally), worships periodically and gets jammed to the rafters (almost!) for Christmas programs and harvest celebrations.
There is the desert, and there is the sown. But there is plenty in between too.
