My journey is quite the reverse. I grew up on a dryland wheat farm in northern Montana, 60 miles from Canada, 90 miles from Glacier Park. Dryland means that there are about 12 inches of rain in a year, about what Tucson, AZ gets. Growing season is about two days shorter than what it takes to grow wheat. I did most of the tractor driving during the summer starting when I was 12, and my Dad and I had to do all the harvesting by ourselves the summer that I was 13, as the hired man quit two weeks before harvest. Harvest was 100 hour weeks.
In the winter, Dad went to the library each day, checked out 3 books, (the maximum then), returned them the next day, got three more. Mom would always be cooking and cleaning, getting us kids off to school, secretly writing poetry.
Farming for us was mostly about driving. Tractor, truck, swather, combine, rake, fuel pickup. Not so romantic as painted by the article.
Lots of fond memories. Sunsets would often fill the vast sky. Light in the sky until 10:45. Milky Way an astonishing sight. Occasional Aurora. On the tractor on a summer day, if you watched very carefully, you could see the dust devils form, and see the smooth-walled tube raise up a 1000 feet or more, then disappear. The satisfaction of learning how to drive a caterpillar pulling a duckfoot plow and making a half-mile long very straight line. The satisfaction of the end of harvest, which statistically would be on the day that the sky turned black and the fields were inaccessible for weeks.
But hard work during the summer, for sure. 10 hours each day on a tractor, no radio or other entertainment other than daydreams. (And still the only place that you can find me singing. And even then, not very often.) The risk incumbent with a state known for violent weather making sure you got all the harvest in in the approximately 30 days that you had available. Or the day in late June when I was about 8 that a sudden thunderstorm came up and the three of us watched, transfixed, as a 10 minute hailstorm wiped out the crop. Dad says "Well, that's it for this year".
And there are some irreconcilables. Judy Blunt in Breaking Clean said it very well about her own boys after she left the farm and moved to the university town: "On the farm, they were men in training. Here, they are just boys".
What most folks don't understand is that in America, the lives of small farmers, staring with my Grandfather's generation, was more affected by technology than any other way of life. A nearly two orders of magnitude of improvement in productivity over that time span. So even the farm of my youth isn't any more. Patterns are already different, machines are larger, more sophisticated. I am pretty sure that both Dad and Mom don't have much romance for that way of life. I couldn't wait to get out of there to University, with the full support and encouragement of my family. Even thought there isn't really a horizon here in Illinois. You can't see what the weather is until it is upon you.
I do get back now and again, having some family there. The sunsets are spectacular. So is the wind, occasionally tipping over boxcars. And there is February.
But props to the author of the article. Do what you love. But I can't help but wonder if there isn't a bit of a Hawthorne effect for both of us.