Jul/Aug 2006

A Portrait Of Farm And Field

The story of Jim Mason demonstrates how the simple life of days gone by survives today in the open spaces of Virginia's Eastern Shore.

By Jim Fossett

Evidence that 100,000 acres of farmland still exist in Accomack County goes unnoticed in the way a beloved spouse becomes an unconscious routine in a long marriage. But the signposts are everywhere, the most obvious near U.S. Route 13: barns and grain bins, irrigation systems on wheels, tractors and combines and crops that instill in a heart-the poetry of farmland.

Cotton whitens a field. Heat waves put the field into motion. Passersby are slowed and dazzled by the sight of cotton pulsating. A young farm girl flirts with it at a field's edge in Melfa, late for the school bus again. To her, "Cottonland" is a fairytale place and a playground for ideas in the story her grandmother told.

Our Mexican friends measure the day in buckets of sweat when they row-drill thousands of tomato stakes into the soil. They are part of an annual tide of labor that quietly floods coastal farmland in eight states, from Florida northward to Pennsylvania.

With an offshore breeze, wheat fields are brushed, parted or flattened by the invisible hands of an invisible messenger. Wind on winter wheat fields is sign language. From a stand of pines, a man who has hunted here for 60 years rests his gun to watch the deer watch the wheat.

In an age-old cycle, soybean fields shift from yellow to a lighter shade of chestnut brown, the color that infects an Eastern Shore farmer with enthusiasm for the harvest and his family with eagerness for the holidays.

Mid-autumn, on a back road, the sight of a turn is lost in tall, thickened rows of corn; the rural postman feels good to be walled in by bounty-even though he must slow down around the bend./p>

And shortly after the nor'easters have scraped the farmland clean, spring rain crowds the rim of every field with clumps or runs of Queen Anne's lace, Jimson, partridge pea and wild garlic. There is freedom only in places where a healthy variety of wild things can live and grow. Ask the senior citizen in Locustville about that, the one who deliberately rolls the new stoplight in Onley whenever the urge to protest sets in.

These are the portraits of farm and field that frame the story of a stalwart Virginian farmer. Right or wrong, good or bad, Jim Mason is a stalwart Virginian farmer. And whether his day and time are newsworthy or not doesn't really matter.

He is one of those who breathe the memory of a vanishing community, the guardians and caretakers of Virginia's last unbroken territories on the Eastern Shore, a place where natural interfaces between humankind and creator still exist and where farm and field still have purpose. His story is told for no other reason than to advertise the essence of that part of rural America still clinging to the worn edge of the last coastal wilderness.

This story is for those who sense the presence of farmland on the Eastern Shore and are moved by the land for its suggestion of wilderness and the small town freedoms it engenders. Some here believe that farming is a necessary part of life for which there is no greater compensation.

The thing that distinguishes this farmer from the rest is the way he handles his food. He devours-doesn't nibble. Tanks up-doesn't straw-sip. And he excavates coconut pie with the power of a front-end loader-doesn't sit there hoeing it like time doesn't matter.

Jim Mason has handled food like that for the last 44 years of farming, since the day Russia became the first country to revolve a human being around the planet half a century ago.

Throughout his career, he has driven farm vehicles 900,000 miles without crossing the Accomack County line-farther than the cosmonaut's circumnavigation of a planet. And the cosmonaut didn't return with a single thing to show for his trouble, not so much as an ear of corn.

That's not the issue, though. Jim Mason isn't focused on record setting or recognition. He knows farming is not practiced for cash rewards, tenure or a doctoral degree, and he knows full well that if he decides to farm until his last day, it won't get any better than it ever was. All he wants to do is get crops in the ground-and every year he approaches the game with attitude, even if it means that one sour turn of luck could take it all away.

"Farming is a crap shoot," he says. "If you went to Atlantic City and rolled the dice, it'd be a whole lot quicker and a whole lot less painful. But once you start, it gets in your blood and becomes a way of life. We farmers farm for one reason-we love doin' it." Those words come from someone who spends eight days a week running a daycare center for some 200 million plants.

It is early morning. Shelves of ground fog girdle Redwood Gables Restaurant on Route 13 in Onley, about midway between Salisbury, Md. and the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel. There I'm to meet Jim, have breakfast and then go for a ride on a corn combine. -

For the rest of this story, see the Jul/Aug 2006 issue of Hampton Roads Magazine, currently available on newsstands.