Groundviews

The bear and my potato farm

At the foot of a mountain, in a far away land, I had a potato farm. On top of the mountain, in a cave, lived a bear. It is not of much use to debate which one of us came to the mountain first, I think I did and the bear thinks he did.

Once in a while, the bear would come down the mountain, smash up part of my plantation and eat some of my potatoes. The monotonic increase in the frequency of bear attacks made me live in constant fear. What do I do?

My little daughter said she had a solution. She collected a handful of little stones and was going to throw them at the bear. “That will teach him a lesson”, she said, “He will then leave us alone”.

“No darling”, I protested, “An angry bear is even more dangerous”; “He is big and powerful”, “He could kill us all and wipe out our potato farm”.

“Do you have a better idea dad”, she shouted at me, “If you don’t have a solution, you have no right to criticize mine”.

Did I not have that right?

Over the years, she threw many stones. Her siblings encouraged her. My neighbors urged her on; they gave her stones; they taught her how to aim better. When she ran out of stones, she threw bricks pulled off the garden wall. She even threw my seed-potatoes at the bear.

When she scored strikes on the bear, she celebrated; “my solution is working”, she gloated. “Soon the bear will go away”. Her arrogance grew exponentially with every hit. When the bear struck back, she hid behind the potato plants. At her extreme of arrogance, she even threw a stone at the neighbor once; the very neighbor who taught her to throw stones.

I tried to protest. “Better we compromise with the bear dear”, I said. “There are enough potatoes for the bear and us”, I reasoned. “Bears are beautiful, too”.

It all fell on deaf ears. She wanted me to shut up. I argued with her. When she threatened to throw stones at me, I shut up. When she did cruel things to the bear cubs, killed many little bear cubs that had nothing to do with the damage to my farm, I didn’t interfere. When she badly hurt her own siblings, too, I kept quiet. Mostly out of fear, and partly, I confess, out of my utilitarian calculations – after all, promised ends may well justify the means. Pathetic! Shame on me!

Now, several years on, my predictions have come true. The bear woke up. It was angry and determined. In its charge against my daughter, it has fully destroyed my farm. It has attacked and hurt my daughter. It has destroyed all my potatoes – even the seed-potatoes I had so much treasured and saved to plant when rains next came.

The bear huffed and puffed, as bears do, and our roof is now blown off.

I ran to the neighbors for help. They showed no interest. “It’s not fashionable to throw stones these days, you know”, they said, “particularly at bears”. “You should have brought her up to know better.” “Remember, she even threw a stone at us”.

My daughter is now dead. Her siblings died before her. Potato farm is destroyed. Even my seed-potatoes have been crushed. My loss is enormous. The damage is beyond comprehension. I will never know for sure how much I have lost. I can only use my expertise in statistics to estimate. It is certainly high. Error bars in it, even higher. So I just cry in despair and constantly think of her death.

There she was, lying on my lap, just one breath between this world and the next. I looked straight in her eyes. It was my opportunity to tell her what I most wanted to tell her all these years: “I told you so!” I have been looking forward to this opportunity, just like parents of naughty children often do. But I couldn’t bring myself to telling her that. The shared guilt of not speaking up when it mattered most, put me at a loss for words. Wasn’t my silence partly to blame? Was I actually that helpless not to have articulated my thoughts? Did I really keep quiet out of fear for my daughter throwing stones at me, or was my silence due to just plain selfishness?

Then in her eyes I saw that all the arrogance had gone. Much to my momentary surprise, there was fear instead. It wasn’t clear if she had realized her stupidity, or if she was willing to acknowledge the destruction that her ways had invited. There was panic in her voice, and that could be heard the world over, thanks to the wonders of modern technology.

“I am helpless”, she moaned, her voice cracking, “The whole world is against me”.

“If the whole world is against you”, I thought to myself, “Perhaps stone throwing was rather a bad idea, as I told you”.

And then, in what Physicists call a phase transition, the duration of which I still cannot reliably estimate and the cause I will never know, she just died. My chance to tell her ‘I told you so” suddenly evaporated.

I stare at my ruined potato farm and reflect about my missed opportunity: What good would have come of telling her, “I told you so”?

Would it have eased my pain?

Would it have dried my tears?

Would it have brought back my seed-potatoes?

[Editors note: Read the sequel to this story, The Trial of the Potato Farmer, here.]

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