Tale: The Foolish Young Farmer

Once, in a far-off land, there was a foolish young man who left his hometown to become a farmer.  Leaving home to become a farmer wasn’t his foolishness.  No.  The foolishness ran deeply inside him and would soon become obvious to all.

The young man traveled far from his home and found an empty piece of land near a village.  He  inquired about the price and, having found both the land and the price for it to his liking, he traded his golden coins for the paper deed.  His heart was full of hope and visions of the coming harvest played about in his mind.  

As he headed out of the village, deed in hand, an old man called after him.  The foolish young man greeted his elder with a hearty, “Hello”, being proud to meet one of his new fellow villagers and tillers of the earth.  

“If you plan to till the land and raise crops here, there is something you should know.”

The foolish young man regarded the village elder with a temperate smile.  His head was full of all manner of knowledge about farming.  He understood crop rotations, fertilization, irrigation, could recognize three forms of blight and two molds, and even knew how to keep deer away with the ingenious use of wire and few spare fabric strips.  What more could there be to know?

“Very well, grandfather,” the young man said placatingly, “What eminent wisdom do you have to share?”

“Almost every year, when the crops are about knee-high, in the month of Dran, we often get hail that could wipe out our crops if we left them unprotected.  During that month we cover the crops with sheets of oilcloth.  It makes the crops smaller than the villages around us, it’s true, but at least we don’t starve when the winter comes.”

The foolish young man thought on what the old man had said with an understandable amount of incredulity.

“You mean to tell me this disaster doesn’t come on you every year?”

“In my 70 years,” the old man spoke scratching his balding head and then patting down the few white hair tufts he had left, “I’d say we’ve had five years that hails didn’t come.”

“Well, thank you for the advice, Grandfather, but I’ll take my chances this first year.  It may just be that the hails won’t come and without those ridiculous oil cloths I’ll have the biggest crops in all the village with enough to see me through the next bad year.”

The foolish young man turned away from the wise elder and walked towards his newly purchased land.  The old man called after him but the younger didn’t take the effort to even make out the words.  He had so much learning, such hope, and a positive outlook.  What more did he need?

When the foolish young man came to his land and saw how good and fertile it was, how well maintained the small house that sat upon it looked, his heart flooded with joy.  His nascent luck was clearly holding and thus, in his way of thinking, would always hold.  

He planted at the same time as his fellow farmers and watered from the same source as his fellow farmers.  When it came to fertilizing his fields, however, he diverged from his fellow farmers. 

 While they used one particular kind of dung that was readily available and in reliable quantities, his great book knowledge had taught him what the ideal fertilizer would be.  Through the local merchant he made an order for this fertilizer at a great cost.  Being a small town, this strange young man’s strange and expensive fertilizer became the talk of the town.  

Some criticized, amongst one another though never in front of him, and others withheld judgment.  Those who criticized said that cost was the main reason for its foolishness, others that the planting season had already passed and it would be two weeks at least before the supply could reach their village.  Time was precious and by all accounts the foolish young man had squandered too much of it already.

A greater day of excitement and curiosity hadn’t occurred in that village in many ages as the day the foolish young man’s fertilizer came to town.  Curious children and young men and women with idle time stood at his fence and watched as he spread the strange material.  Within days the seedlings sprouted green and strong above the dirt and they climbed quickly towards the sky. 

In the month of Yrau the foolish young man’s crops were knee-high, while the rest of the villagers’ crops were to their ankles.  More gawkers went out of their way to stand at his fence and stare at what would clearly be a bountiful crop.  

Pride swelled in the foolish young man’s heart at the sight of both the crops and the admiring gawkers.  There were days that he wouldn’t go out to work in the field until there were at least four people to watch him.  He wasn’t so brazen as to walk over and talk to them or get close enough to hear what they were saying, but he could imagine their conversation.  They must have been praising him for his genius, for his book learning, and great success, no one had ever done it like him or had such success.  What use were the old ways now?  As he looked about at his field of green that stood higher than anyone else’s he knew, with all the certainty of youthful ignorance, that his luck would hold.  

Hail.  What hail could come and ruin such success?  At this rate, he might even be able to harvest before Dran, before any threat of hail.  On top of that, the crop would be so supremely bountiful that when it didn’t hail he would easily have twice the yield and could weather the other years.

And now, dear reader, I hope you can see the foolishness of the young man.  I could most likely stop here and the tale be complete and instructive enough, but every story must have an ending.  Every tale must show the full extent of the harvest of foolish seeds sown. 

One day the foolish young man stood at his window for nearly half a day waiting for his regular audience who came to watch his work.  

By mid-day still no one had come.  His eyes scanned the horizon, imagining that only a tragedy like a fire in the village could keep his admirers away. There was no ash gray plume.  He hadn’t heard the church bell ring out any alarm.  Where could the fans of his great knowledge and abilities be?

He looked around his property and saw that his crops were doing well enough that he could likely take the day away from his work to find out just what major event had captured the village’s attention.

The foolish young man went from farm to farm and soon discovered what was keeping all away.

Each family had spread huge clothes one every open part of their land that didn’t have crops.  The father inspected each looking for holes or weak points in the stitching.  The children stirred some liquid in a huge cauldron under their mother’s watchful eye as she tested the strength of ancient-looking ropes.  

The foolish young man watched family after family as they prepared the cloths that would stretch out over their crops. 

The foolish young man chuckled to himself and shook his head at each stop.  “So many halfwitted people spending so much time preparing for something that may not even come this year.  Their already puny crops will be even punier compared to mine.”

In his daydreams, he saw the other villagers praising him for his bounty, and even the old man he met on the first day bowing before him, asking him, begging him, to share his harvest, or at the very least the foolish young man’s wisdom.  His newfound popularity might win him a seat on the village council.  The Duke may even visit and make him burgess over the entire village if his success was great enough.

All around him, as the month of Dran began, the huge oilcloth coverings were raised at every farm. Each family sent massive billowing sails skyward and covered the much-needed harvest. 

“When it doesn’t happen, they will feel so foolish” he was just saying to himself for what may have been the fiftieth time.  He looked out at his lush, green, nearly fully grown fields and felt nothing but pride.  

He laid himself down in his bed to dream of his bright future among the, supposedly, foolish villagers and was just drifting off when he heard a noise that filled his heart with dread.

A stabbing chill went through him at the first, but he assured himself it was an acorn falling from the oak tree onto his roof.  There was another and another, and he convinced himself it must be the activity of squirrels dropping little armloads of acorns.  Soon it became such a torrent of sound upon his ear that the idea of an army of squirrels fighting it out was clearly too ridiculous to hold back the truth he could hardly bring himself to admit.  

When he stepped out the door, the sky was a menacing shade and all he could do was watch as all of his hopes, all of his foolish actions, all of the benefit of his expensive fertilizer was obliterated in a torrent of hailstones driving down hard from heaven.

I wish I could say that he learned his lesson, and became wiser on that day.  I am grieved to report he did not.

The foolish young man foolishly believed that the single hail storm would be the only.  He lost a quarter of his crop to the first storm and believed it to be an acceptable loss given how well grown the three quarters left were.  Hail storm after hail storm pounded his plot of land until everything green was reduced to ground level.  

He cursed the sky, cursed the village, cursed the land, cursed his neighbors, and cursed the old man who told him of the hail in the first place.  

The green turned to brown, which turned to rot, which mixed with the peculiar fertilizer and caused a horrible stench to rise from his land.

It was late Autumn when he found that his dreams could no longer sustain him.  His imagined luck could no longer provide hope.  The winter was going to be hard.  He found that he had no curses left to fling except at himself.

When the neighbors came to his fence, the same young boys and girls who had regarded his green fields with wonder, they came to survey the destruction and doom.  Their parents would come and pull them away.  Though the foolish young man couldn’t hear them he imagined what they would surely be telling their children:  That the foolish young man had been foolish.  That every man earns the harvest he sows.  That there is  wisdom in the old ways.  That the children were fortunate to see it so that they would not make the same mistake.  That ten pounds of knowledge is worth less than an ounce of experience.  

He had become a proverb, a warning, and felt that he would be for the conceivable future.  Even if he left, the story would go round about the foolish first-time farmer who thought he knew better.

Anger, resentment, and hate grew in his heart as he prepared to leave, prepared to simply walk away from the farm in the middle of the night, and leave the deed on the table.  Who needed this little village where the hail crushed men’s dreams and countered their learning with terrible force?

His bag was packed and he had set his humiliated heart to leave when he heard the first timid knock about the farmhouse door.

He opened it to see a young lady with a basket in her arms full of the products of her family’s harvest.  His hunger was so great that he nearly wrenched the basket out of her arms to devour it like an animal.  But his sense prevailed and he invited her in.  

She sat at his table, noticed the deed laying there like an open secret shame, and began to explain that she had seen his failed crops and wanted to help him when the door was knocked upon again.  The father from the next farm over that shared his west fence stood before him with a basket of his crops in his arm.  The foolish young man invited the father in as well and as soon as the door was closed another knock came and another and another, until his entire house was filled with people, and filled with crops.  The villagers smiled and held out from their bounty to the foolish young man and his heart began to soften and change.  

These villagers he had cursed and their puny vegetables were far more successful than he.  Their ways had yielded far more than his.  The light and life in his house increased as each promised to share more of what they knew and offered him handfuls of seed for the next year. Others committed their old oil cloths into his care.  There were holes on them that needed patching, and weak spots in the stitching, and frays around the edges, but they were certainly better than nothing.  

The old man he had met on his first day came into his house last of all; after all the others had gone.  The young man greeted him warmly; far more warmly than any of the others he had welcomed into his house that night.

The pair sat down at the table together.  The old man picked up the deed and smiled as he saw his own name on the list of previous owners inked on the page.

The old man spoke, and the young man listened.