Hanging in the by-kitchen, above our constantly churning washing machine, was a large, sepia photo of the farm’s founders. Already elderly and haggard in the picture, the couple looked straight ahead with an aura of anger. Or maybe fortitude. Probably it was just being told to stay still for so long. Coming home from school every day, I tried to ignore them staring fixedly over my head. At six, I imagined they wouldn’t approve of my life, full of grownups who drank too much, argued with each other, or disappeared for the evening. By twelve, I knew they’d be disgusted by a girl whose heart fluttered for another girl, who made friends with boys who didn’t always act like boys, and girls who wrestled and yelled.
I uncoiled the fuzzy, pink belt from my bathrobe and looped it through a hook in the bedroom ceiling mounted in front of one of the room’s two tall, double-paned windows. The little, decorative hook was designed for a few feet of macramé and a plant, not a depressed, sexually confused preteen. But one thing queers and the mentally ill have in common is how incredibly resourceful we can be.
Or maybe that’s something all the desperate have in common.
My sisters had left home by the time our parents bought the farm, so I grew up as an only child of Dutch-speaking immigrants. Shyness, low self-esteem, and a heavy accent set me apart, even in a class full of unhappy, white, lower-middle-income, anglophone kids.
In the Huron County of the seventies and eighties, it was every family for itself. Small-scale, factory-style farming was booming when my parents bought our place, which saw two thousand head of pigs across three barns at the farm’s peak. But a few years in, the bottom dropped out of the North American pig market. Meat once sold at big profits became, almost overnight, worth less than the cost to breed and raise the hogs, let alone the cost of keeping farmers’ lights on and fridges stocked.
It never got better. After years of losses, many farmers filed for bankruptcy, until, stuck with too many unsaleable farms and too much worthless land, local banks started refusing to foreclose. With no way out of—or, now, even away from—ever-growing debts, some farmers planted illegal crops, hiding them from helicopter searches amid canopies of bean leaves or tree cover.