Folks living around here probably know that you can stop by Crossroads Hardees (Centerville and Mt. Pleasant roads) most mornings and find a gathering of older gentlemen sitting around, shooting the bull and carrying on. Many of them are retired farmers with a few other occupations thrown in. Almost all of them have plaid shirts and wear baseball caps with logos from fertilizer and tractor companies. All of them have opinions they share over breakfast while they solve the problems and woes of the country in, oftentimes, very colorful language.
Before Natasha's closed in Pungo that was also a good ol' boy meeting place for some of the local county farmers. When that was torn down I guess the guys went to Seacrest for a while. After that changed hands I often wonder where they went.
The other day we stopped by Burger King near Red Mill for a quick breakfast. Now I don't know for sure, but I think we might have found some of those farmers who'd lost their gathering place... a couple looked a bit familiar to me.
These guys chatted away in their loud boisterous way, drinking coffee and solving various problems; you couldn't help but overhear them talking. At one point I heard mention of different farms that used to be in operation, but had been bought and turned into something else, something fancy like a gas station or a parking lot.
It made me kinda sad. I grew up with a farmer and (in my eyes) he knew everything anyone needed to know. He was a man who loved working with the earth and cherished wildlife, hunting and fishing and such. And like my farmer dad these guys exuded confidence in their abilities. But they seemed like fish out of water, sitting there in a modern building with none of the farm-life trappings around them. Perhaps their years of banging on old equipment to keep it going one more year was long gone because of their age. Or perhaps the modern times had made their small family farm a relic of the past and not worth going into debt to keep it going. Whatever the reason it all made me very sad.
Remember the TV ad about the Indian and not littering? It was sort of like that... something great being reduced to little or nothing by conceding to the new generation's takeover. Since I've always thought that down to earth, good ol' boy farmers are the backbone of America when I see them out of their element and reduced to just being old men drinking coffee I feel a great loss. The world continues to change but are they all good changes?
