Living Off the Fat of the Land

 Actually, my first choice for the yearbook was "mountain man", but Mrs. Kew would have none of that, and it was she who substituted "farmer".  

A year earlier I had told our career counselor, Mrs. Jordan, that I wanted to be a farmer when I grew up.  She asked me if I owned any land or had sufficient funds to purchase some, and of course I did not.  I told her that I planned to work for other farmers until I had saved up enough money to set up my own country estate.  She then informed me that I would never live long enough to do that on a farm laborer's wages, but I might be able to do it if I went to college and studied law or business administration.  After working in one of those fields for 20 years or so, I would be able to buy a small hobby farm that might come in handy as a tax deduction.  None of that appealed to me, so she then suggested a career in forestry.  I would never get rich that way, but at least I could work in the natural outdoors.  That sounded good, so I sent away for some literature and even perused a few college catalogs to check out their forestry departments.  Long story short, I didn't go to forestry college, but I did manage to end up with 88 acers of prime swamp land where I can play at forestry in my spare time.  I tried gardening on it, but eventually decided that it was more trouble than it was worth.  

The notion that ancient hunter-gatherers had a better life than the farmers who replaced them in the food chain is a romantic fallacy.  I've been close enough to that life to tell you that, while it's fun to practice it on weekends and vacations, it's no way to make a living.  Similarly, the farmers of today put in many more hours for less money than their contemporaries who work in factories, offices, or even retail stores.  I think I stumbled into the best of both worlds, playing hunter-gatherer or farmer when it suits my fancy, and working a town job to finance it.  Looking back on it, I could have done the same thing living in Chicago, but I would have spent a lot of time and money commuting back and forth to my country estate.  This way, I just step out the door and I'm there.