I woke up to a gorgeous morning today, as always seems to happen after a spell of bad weather has passed. The sun was shining through the ice in all the trees. There was a layer of frost on top of the ice, which I’ve never seen before. I packed slowly, saving my only dry gloves for riding. My hands got cold quickly cracking and shaking ice off of everything.

While I was packing, the neighbor’s dog came into the woods. He had barked at me every time I left the woods, so I yelled at him to leave until I saw his owner behind him. It was the same guy I talked to Christmas morning. I could hardly understand him for his accent. That’s been happening throughout North Carolina. I repeat every sentence in my head before I understand what people are saying, and even then I have to ask people to repeat themselves sometimes. He had come into the woods to see if I had frozen out here. He said he couldn’t imagine staying in the woods that long in the cold. He kept saying, “You must ha yuself a warm sleeping bag!”

He is a farmer, and he told me a little about farming. The tobacco crop I thought I saw a few days ago was actually a collard green planting. Tobacco does not grow this time of year. He grows cotton, soybeans, peanuts, tobacco, and a few other crops.

I asked why he grows different crops, instead of simply the most profitable.

“Variety,” he said. I didn’t understand.

“You can’t put all your eggs in one basket. You never know how your yield’s going to turn out, how your chemicals will work, or how the markets will be, come harvest time. If you plant a few different crops, you stand a chance of doing reasonably. You plant one crop, you could go under. A lot of people are farmers now, who won’t be next year. They’ll find that out this week. They go to the banks this week to get loans for this year. They don’t have the finances to start a crop on their own, and once the banks say no, that’s it.”

I asked him what keeps him from going under like so many others.

“I reckon it’s the size. We’ve got a fairly large farm, about 2400 acres. I imagine I get some discounts on equipment, chemicals, seeds that smaller people don’t get. You know how we harvest peanuts? You know how they grow?”

“In the ground?”

“Yes. We have a machine that turns them upside down. Reaches in, pulls the plants up, sits them on the ground. We let ‘em sit four or five days in the sun, dry some of the moisture out. Ain’t much that’ll keep long with a high moisture content.” Except he says, “moiyah conen”, so his words sink in about three seconds after he says them, like a radio delay. “Then we have a machine that picks the peanuts off the plants, leaving everything else where it is. A machine to turn those plants over costs $200,000. That’s why so many people can no longer afford to farm.”

He said something’s going to happen when we suddenly have so few farmers that we actually have a shortage of food. “Nobody thinks about it when it’s there, they just want it as cheap as they can get it. But if those hot dog rolls you been livin’ on get scarce, how much you gonna be willin’ to pay for ‘em?”

He marveled at my tent a while longer, then went on his way. By this time the forest was raining ice on us. I banged ice off the fly, pried it from the ground, and stuffed stiff guy lines into the bag. I traipsed out of the woods on stumps for feet, and stood in the sun to warm up. The sound of crashing ice was all around, and it continued until well into the afternoon. Sixty-foot trees sent cascades of ice crystals crashing to the ground. By the end of the day only the tops of the trees had ice left, because they were the only branches left to just melt, instead of being constantly pelted by ice from above. It was a beautiful day to listen to the woods. I liked passing old shacks and hearing the ice crash down onto tin roofs. It was an amazing day, a shaking off, a day of rebirth.