How Do You Spell Hypocracy?

There was this one guy I grew up with who was called Larry. He was quiet, easy-going, watchful, what I’d now describe as sensitive, and he was usually alone. We lived pretty close together, considering we each lived on farm steads of 20 or 40 or however many acres and for many years, we rode the same school bus as we grew older and older. I think I was closer to Larry than just about anyone else in our neighborhood, but even though he would engage me in conversation, he never let me get very close at all.

When ever I’d ask him about personal stuff, like curious, growing kids always do, like about his family’s religion or what they ate, that sort of stuff, he would always shun the questions and never give any sort of real answer. Though he never got in any trouble, though he was very calm and respectful in regarding adults, my mom never allowed me to invite Larry over to our house. In school, teachers would call on him as much as any other student, but during recess he always seemed to end up being alone. Feeling sort of sorry for him, I’d sometimes try to buddy up with him but with little success.

Larry’s father was a strawberry farmer and we all knew that growing strawberries was the most demanding and sensitive of all the row crops that we tilled in the Almaden Valley. Picking them was back-breaking work, hunched over the low growing clumps of leaves and berries. They were very quick to be ruined by a frost and if the irrigating water rose just a little bit too high in the furrow, the wet leaves would burn as soon as the sun hit them.

Unlike the tomatoes and cucumbers that we raised on the level, flat lands of our valley floor, strawberries couldn’t be irrigated in the casual way that we used, with earthen canals to feed the individual furrows made simply by cutting a trench in the dirt at the end of all the irrigation furrows. Nope, strawberries insisted on much more precise irrigation levels that were maintained by long, hand-made wooden flumes about ten inches wide and ten inches deep. The flumes were made of redwood planks about twenty feet long and a half-inch thick. The joints of the U-shaped troughs were sealed with roofing tar and when left in the hot sun, the tar would stain your hands where you touched it.

These flumes would be installed end to end, each union being sealed with the same tar, at the head of all the furrows and there would be a hole cut into the redwood to feed each row. Above each hole, there was a length of twine attached to a pine-wood “cork” to plug the hole when the furrow had reached the correct level of water. We called these cork shaped plugs “bongs.” For row crops, this was an elaborate and high maintenance system that was to be used year after year, for several decades. While we other row farmers rotated our crops, from year to year, so as to not leach out all the nutrients from our famously rich top soil, strawberry farmers would keep the same crop . . .

(clcik here to read conclusion)