Illusion of Control

I did not grow up on a farm, but I visited my grandpa's hobby farm pretty often as a kid. It was only about 20 minutes away from my parents house. My grandpa lived the farmer/rural life and my parents and our family lived the suburban life. Now I live in a pretty rural place, and we have a hobby farm that's surround by a heavily wooded park.

The suburban life is nice and insulates families from a lot of the darker aspects of the world. Death is pretty rare in suburbia for example. When death does happen it is often in pretty controlled circumstances, where an ambulance shows up to take care of an ailing relative for example. On a farm, or even in just a rural or wilderness area, there's just a lot more life, so there's correspondingly more death and it's more random and intrusive.

In fact, this time of year--right around the summer solstice--is peak life and also peak death time here at my property. Everywhere I look during the day there are some animals busy trying to make a living. A crazy number of song birds are flying around this time of year because the birds that hatched in May are now full size. Critters like squirrels and raccoons are running around all the time and there are deer and fawns passing through the yard several times a day. If I go out at night with a headlamp on I see green glowing eyes all over the place.

Unfortunately, every year a handful of wild critters get in trouble of various kinds and end up dying in places on my property where I have to deal with it personally. A few years ago I put a poor skunk out of its misery. It had possibly been maimed by another animal or hit by a car. Last fall I had to cleanup a dead deer, for example and last summer one of our ducks got killed by a raccoon and this year two of our ducks got killed when a possum found a weak spot in the enclosure for the ducks and the chickens and broke in over night. 

Dealing with the dead wild animals is a downer, but not too emotionally draining, but finding the dead stripped carcasses of domestic animals early in the morning is a much bigger hit to the psyche. They're not quite pets, but they're pretty close, and they are more vulnerable than a dog or a cat, plus they require quite a bit of care from the time they are young until they're outside. To see them dead and ripped up is disorienting, sad, and feels like a big failure all in one.

Anyway, I think I have a more realistic idea about how vulnerable life is now than when I was a kid in the suburban bubble. People invest a huge collective effort in trying to control the world and end up sterilizing it in the process. That more sterile and controlled world makes personal safety and really the safety of the human species seem assured. Of course it's not, though. The human species is just a mega disaster away from extinction, and individuals are just lucky to get through each day in one piece.