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You’re driving through Idaho for the first time in your life and all you really know about the state is they make potatoes.
You look out the window and see chocolate brownfields that stretch six to eight football fields long in all directions, out to the horizon, way out yonder, cleanly manicured farm fields now in Spring planting season gearing up for harvesting in the Fall and distribution of potatoes to Americans all over the country.
Never in your life have you seen a farm one-tenth the size of the ones you’re seeing now and you feel stunned.
You keep driving for miles and miles and the farm size remains insanely enormous and you start assuming the end of the farms must be soon—but no.
They won’t end for many more miles. You go around the next bend, more farms; this goes on for what seems like hours. It’s like you’re dreaming something behemoth and brown and don’t want to wake up.
The same colossal-sized farms sprawl across Idaho’s plains as if they rule the state by sheer force of everlasting continuation. You start wondering how many farmers it takes to manage these farms and realize it’s a number so huge you might as well not bother guessing. You see a random farmhouse and tractor once in a while but the rulers of this world are the farms themselves.
Dominant, overpowering, incomprehensible. Untainted.
They rule this part of the world that almost no one outside Idaho has ever seen. We know it’s there but we don’t go there to see it because it’s just too far off the main paths of our lives.
It’s the utter simplicity that moves you coupled with the enormity. Farmers here grow potatoes for so many people who will never see where their potatoes came from but if they did they would be filled with wonder and amazement. Everywhere you look, farms. They pull you in and you let go to the eternal pasture of what’s beyond.
You think about the people who work on these farms and wonder what they think about. Probably not what most of us think about. The lens through which they see the world is probably singular: farming.
Equals survival.
This gigantic world for growing potatoes probably is all they’ve ever seen or known and it’s just a job like the rest of us have. But what they do feels more connected to this country’s historic roots, getting outdoors and down to basics of planting seeds and watching them grow then sharing those riches with countless others they’ll never know.
Day after day, year after year, for what seems like forever they do their part to make America run and survive and enjoy good eating. It’s honorable.
The origins of life begin here in Idaho, so distant from what most of us will ever know, an uncelebrated treasure and humble to its roots, gigantic beyond comprehension.
You never imagined seeing the potato farms in Idaho. It intrigued you but not so much that you would go there.
Until yesterday.
But had you known what you would see and how uplifting it would feel to witness all the marvelous massiveness, you would have gone there a long time ago.
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Sammy Sportface, a sports blogger, galvanizes, inspires, and amuses The Baby Boomer Brotherhood. And you can learn about his vision and join this group's Facebook page here:
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