Welcome! I'm Sara Ramsey, a novelist and former/future tech worker who recently moved back to rural Iowa. I write about my wild and weird #smalltownlife, as well as anything else that strikes my fancy. If you haven’t subscribed yet, please join me!
Hi friend,
I’ve occasionally been watering some trees for my brother. He was gifted three small trees (a red oak, a swamp oak, and a Kentucky coffeetree1), and he planted them in the empty space behind my grandparents’ old warehouse. Unfortunately, we appear destined for a drought this summer — it’s 90 degrees today and there’s no rain in sight.
So, when my brother’s not around, I water the newly-planted trees. I fill gallon milk jugs with water and dump them over the fences he built to protect the trees from deer. And every time I carry those jugs, two at a time, toward the trees, I think of my California fitness coach and how she used to make me do “farmer carries.”
A farmer carry is simple — carry the heaviest kettlebells you can handle, one in each hand, across the gym and back. Do it with your arms straight at your sides, core engaged, breath even and mindful. But do it in Lululemon, not Carhartt2. Do it in a temperature controlled gym, maybe with a nice eucalyptus-scented towel after. And drink a $12 smoothie to “recover” instead of eating an overheated bologna sandwich that you left on the dash of your truck.
The farmer carry always makes me feel weird. The name alone puts me straight into overanalyzing, which defeats my coach’s desire to get me out of my head and into my body (a favorite goal of hers).
It’s one thing to know, without saying it, that you’re paying someone to make you do variations of physical labor that your ancestors did for free while dying of dysentery. It’s another thing entirely when the name of the exercise makes that knowledge explicit and unavoidable.
I don’t naturally gravitate toward being outside. I’m starting to find more joy in it — especially here, where outside feels more natural than my manicured Denver neighborhood or the slightly chaotic streets of San Francisco. I like sitting on my balcony, listening to the cacophony of birds.
My balcony is a controlled space, though. I’m comfortable. There’s railing all around me. I have cold brew. And if that fails me, I have a laptop that lets me dissociate entirely from what my body feels here.
I think my discomfort with the outdoors came from learning, at an early age, that “outdoors” is dangerous and deadly. I knew an old man with a glass eye3, which replaced the eye he’d lost when a horse kicked him as a child. There were constant stories around my grandparents’ feed and seed store about men drowning in corn after getting sucked into grain bins. Or people rolling tractors and getting pinned under them. Or other freak accidents, each new one triggering a round of storytelling of other accidents people had seen, which underscored the dangers of farm life.
My granddad once drove his pickup across a dry hayfield, and the hot motor caught the field on fire. He escaped and walked back to the house, but his pickup was incinerated.
My dad has seen more decapitations than is normal for a human to see.
So it’s strange for me to be in spaces where farming is romanticized. I see the appeal of growing fruits and vegetables. I liked picking cherries or apples with my grandma and turning them into pies. But there’s a tipping point for me where it stops being fun and starts being survival mode — like canning vegetables or applesauce for days, or the messy process of turning chickens or turkeys into food to get through the winter.
My tech-world privilege has put me in spaces that bring this discomfort to the surface. In Colorado, there’s a glammed-up ranch in the mountains that my company rented out for overnight retreats. I went there a couple of times on my own during the pandemic. It’s beautiful, and rustic, in a quietly luxe way — framed displays of barbed wire on the walls; old wooden planks turned into walkways between activities; perfect spa experiences in buildings meant to feel like barns.
In Iowa, my grandparents used planks for walkways because they were cheap (and you could flip them over to find worms for fishing). My granddad collected endless barbed wire that his body ran out of time to do anything with. And my first spa experience was in India, not Iowa. There was a hotel near a medicinal hot springs here a hundred years ago, but it shut down after the water poisoned some people.
I’m having trouble getting to my point today.
I think the point is this: farmer carries in fancy gyms, or farm-to-table meals served in gardens of edible flowers and microgreens, or deep tissue massages in renovated barns, are experiences that I love. They are also experiences that throw me into a deep well of shame.
I can embrace my bougie side and enjoy the moment.
But always, too close, is the memory of places with barns and barbed wire that are not at all safe.
And really, even more bluntly, it’s a class issue. Class issues trip me up and make me moody and ruminative. Two minutes of doing a stupid farmer carry ends up ripping at me from all angles — the desire to present as sophisticated and interesting, and the competing desire to not seem too much like a snobby coastal elite.
Let’s get even more blunt than that. It’s not just class — it’s survival. It’s who gets access to safe workspaces and medical care, and whose bodies break before they are eligible for Social Security or Medicare. It’s what labor we value, what labor we hide from sight, and the blinders we all wear to keep ourselves comfortable with how we’ve chosen, or been forced, to live our lives.
But I’m not asking you to pity what I’m describing here. The thing people are most allergic to in my small town is pity. To get political for a moment, I think that’s part of the Democrats’ problem in rural areas. It’s easy to read an article (or this newsletter) and feel pity for people you’ve never met and will never see. I do it all the time with natural disasters, economic issues, various think pieces.
But if you’re in this small town world, the farm accidents and drownings and decapitations aren’t the focus. They’re a tradeoff of living a life entwined with the earth. It’s no different than how I defend San Francisco to people here — I don’t focus on needles and feces and what they see on Fox News because that wasn’t the core of my experience in San Francisco. Instead, I remember and cherish what’s wonderful and vibrant about a city that I deeply love.
So actually, my point is this: there are reasons to pity everywhere. But pity creates a comfortable distance, and ultimately an inherent inequality between the pitier and the pitied. Once that unequal relationship is established, it’s a straight line from pity to contempt when the pitied party doesn’t accept help on the pitier’s terms, or behave in an appropriately grateful way. And contempt, as we all know, is the poison that kills relationships.
What’s harder, and I think more necessary, is finding the reasons to celebrate what’s good about these places and communities that are so different from the standard American suburban experience. And, in that celebration, attempting to build connection.
I’ll end by saying that I’m trying to be balanced about what I share with you. Sometimes I feel like I’m engaged in gross disaster tourism, because the weirdest and worst things make the best stories. And truly, there are plenty of weird and terrible things here.
But maybe I can do more celebrating too.
Cheers,
Sara
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Interesting note you didn’t ask for: botanists think the Kentucky coffeetree was originally distributed by now-extinct megafauna like mammoths and mastodons in North America. Its seeds and pods are toxic (unless fully cooked, as some European settlers did to try to make coffee from it - and I understand their desperation). So, it’s not naturally dispersed anymore except in wetlands where its pods can rot to expose the seeds, although there’s some evidence it was cultivated by indigenous populations. #themoreyouknow
Carhartt was a popular ironic fashion choice in San Francisco awhile ago. I even saw a Carhartt shop on a trendy side street in the Marais in Paris in 2014. But here, Carhartt’s coveralls and work jackets are completely unironic (and completely necessary).
Also, I’m a Beyond Yoga girl, not a Lululemon girl, but they’re basically the same.
The old man with the glass eye is still alive, and I still know him. I nicknamed him “old man” when he came into my grandparents’ store, but I’m guessing he was 45 then - which is a real kick in the teeth, as they say here, since I’m nearing “old man” age now myself.
I remember when I moved from NYC to suburban Connecticut. I was fascinated with people complaining about not getting enough exercise all the while hiring someone to do all the lawn care and leaf raking, and snow plowing.
I think the same pity experience extends to inner cities. For some reason, politicians can't relate to that experience either. Then people are considered awful for not feeling grateful for whatever aid/services are offered. The contempt quickly follows.
1. Pity-->contempt is why universal assistance programs make more sense to me than means tested
2. Curious about your thoughts on how the rural experience compares to different ethnic experiences. Would you say farmer carries are "farmer appropriation"? (I don't really care for the whole concept of appropriation, fwiw)