Worker’s Compensation (Part One)

May 10, 2024

Part One of Two

1981 Corn Pick: Charles and Nina in the 1979 Ford Econoline

In 1973, when I was two years old, my parents gave up university life in Buffalo, New York, for vegetable farming in Fairfax County, Virginia. First, they labored side by side, and under, their friend Tony Newcomb, a charismatic economist turned farmer who led with charm, granite intelligence, a hot temper, and scant patience for lazy idiots. We kids (the Newcomb four and the Planck three) were pretty much terrified of Tony, but with tough people, there’s often the compensation that when they are friendly, it’s memorable and thrilling because it’s rare. When Tony announced a trip to the landfill, we knew to race to the dump truck with any coins we could rustle up. He would often make a stop for ice cream at Thelma’s, where my favorite flavor was black raspberry. Only Turkey Hill seems to make it anymore.

My parents loved their new farming life. Instead of grading the political science papers of green undergraduates, my father had the great outdoors and physical labor. My mother, who had been home with three kids for a decade—labor she had loved—now had nature too, as well as her first career. For 35 years they were successful farming partners. 

My brother Charles was inseparable from his equally rascally eight-year-old pal Charles Newcomb, and our big sister Hilary had a soulmate in Anna Newcomb. Me, I trailed behind the transplanter and napped and played in the creek and got terrorized by the rooster, and though I had no special (or really any) same-sized friends, everyone loved me, and I was happy, too. 

From 1973 to 1977, my world was divided between the farm community—Newcombs, Plancks, summer workers, and various orphans and strays who lived on the farm for months or years—and the people who came to The Stand on Route 7 to buy corn, beans, and tomatoes, otherwise known as “customers.” Or, you might say, our living.

When a stranger appeared, I would ask, “Are you a customer?” Once, a stranger asked me back, “Who are you?” 

“I’m a worker.” 

“So why aren’t you working?”

“It’s my day off,” I said, and went off to find a grown-up.

My parents were proud of this exchange, a story they often repeated, as it indicated that I understood the importance of work in our lives. They were proud too, of my ability to think on my feet, to deflect impertinent questions, and to be glib. All these were Newcomb-Planck traits.

Nina milking Mabel, ca 1981

After five years of working for Tony and his wife, Hiu, my parents craved independence. In 1977, they arranged a move to Swannanoa, North Carolina, where they took marginally more-conventional day jobs. My father was director of the Works Program at Warren Wilson College, and my mother worked with ginseng plants at the local agriculture extension office.

We arrived in North Carolina a very different family. On September 19, 1977, only weeks before our move, our sister Hilary was killed by a car in front of The Stand. She was 14, Charles was ten, and I was six. We buried her on the farm. This proved apt as Hilary had written, in the journals she kept from age nine until September 18, 1977—the day before she died—that she would never leave Potomac Vegetable Farms.

In North Carolina, I was submerged in unspoken grief for my sister. Often alone, I played Maxwell’s Silver Hammer over and over on the record player. I am pretty sure I just wanted to hear, “made sure that she was dead,” until it sunk in. Yet the tune was so jaunty.

We had an acre of tomatoes, chickens, and a cow. Charles and I had no idea that my parents had quickly decided that their life in North Carolina working for others was not desirable. They wrote to the Newcombs, asking to come back. The answer was no.

Certain they wanted to farm again, Mom and Dad took us to our own sixty acres in Loudoun County, Virginia. We packed all our possessions in two Fords: a 1962 green flat-bed F500 and a blue snub-nose 1967 Econoline van. We arrived in Wheatland late on Christmas Eve of 1978, bedraggled from a mishap-filled journey. The cat had abandoned us at a gas station, leaving Charles and me to try to feed her starving newborn kittens with eye-droppers. Underneath the potted Christmas tree our friend and tenant Timothy had generously set out for us were gifts for every Planck: a refurbished tractor engine, Data Man (a robot-calculator), and pick-up sticks made of hoes, rakes, and shovels. Despite our efforts, the kittens died one by one.

In Loudoun, our farm community was much smaller. There were no best friends for Charles and me, but the four of us were very close. Each year we recruited summer workers from colleges. One question on the application, which we sent to job placement offices from Oberlin College to the University of Santa Cruz, was atypical of job interviews, and it has stuck with me since. “What jobs, paid or unpaid, have you enjoyed doing?”

Work bound us together. It made for long hours, it was sweltering, it was cold, it was relentless. It was also a lot of fun. I liked to ride on the wagon catching watermelons (or cantaloupes or pumpkins) tossed from the vines. A few hours in, I would be buried to my waist in melons, crowned the Melon Queen. I liked the morning corn picks, coming home to breakfast drenched with sweet dew. I loved to ride the transplanter, placing each pepper plant in the furrow exactly when the water splashed out. Weeding is beautiful: you see your work right away. I even loved Rock Picks. We took a flatbed wagon to our fields filled with pink and white quartz and picked up rocks until we had a great pile. We picked rocks to clear fields and to fill holes in dirt roads. How much fun is hurling hunks of brittle quartz at muddy holes? Very.

Arlington Farmer’s Market, 1983

My father called it a vegetable-driven existence. We lived on opposite schedules from the rest of the world. We worked in the summer, when other kids were at the pool or summer camp. On crisp Friday nights, while other kids were at the football game, we loaded trucks for Saturday farmers’ markets. When we got home from school, we’d make a snack. I loved peanut butter and honey in a cup with a spoon and my brother, in his body-building phase, made iced coffee shakes with our raw milk and eggs. We would then follow instructions Mom left in her distinctive capital letters: BARNYARD BEANS, 4 PM. 

Most work was seasonal, from April to November, but there was some winter work, too. While the ground was frozen, there were still the usual household chores—Charles and I had our night to cook, and we did our own laundry from the age of 10 or so—and also milking Mabel, feeding the chickens, and cutting firewood in the Graybeal woods. January and February were for rest, reading, and schoolwork. Sometimes, ignoring the disapproving eye of teachers, they took us out of school for long car trips. We parked in supermarket lots and slept in the silver Ford Econoline van, on beds my father built from plywood, eating beans and rice out of a pot until we ran out and got to go to IHOP for pancakes. 

Contemporaries of my parents have told me that my parents buried their grief for Hilary in work, but I think they misunderstand. My parents were quiet about their loss, yes, but they loved work before, during, and after Hilary died. Labor is something they love, and it turns out that Charles and I love labor, too. 

At home I love cleaning, cooking, repairs, feeding the birds, oiling the floors, and weeding the garden. I love the particular chore of shopping for food at farmers’ markets. As a mother, I enjoyed the repetitive handwork of caring for young children, especially when I could summon its devotional quality. Kid chores have a particular rhythm, one common to all growing things: they are constant for months on end before changing utterly, never to be repeated. One day I realized I had washed someone’s bottom eleven times before lunch. In the same moment I realized that one day, I would not.

Typically I prefer manual work to paperwork and often choose my physical chores over deskwork. Procrastination creeps in, and things pile up. When left with no option but to work at the desk, I choose the jobs I can touch, such as filing papers, before digital ones, such as email. When I’m asked to support a non-profit, I avoid the white-collar jobs, choosing instead to move the chairs or carry bags of clothes. 

The whole Planck family is up for barn-raising. If you need a truck to move to a new apartment, if you need us to shift three dozen boxes from here to there, if you need us to pick up sticks or move rocks, we’re in. Going about work with a sense of personal competence and cheerful purpose is very Planckian. We simply adore visible results. I so much want to impart this to my own children. 

Much of the joy I take in work is having my hands busy while my mind is free. We spent long hours talking while hoeing pumpkins, picking zucchini, and mulching tomatoes. I learned songs and platitudes and words in foreign languages from my parents and the workers I adored and still remember. Charles, an executive at Amtrak, spent years building sets for student and non-profit theaters. “I don’t want to be in charge,” he says. “I just like to swing the hammer.” 

While working, my mind is often preoccupied with the subject of work itself. I like to consider it from all angles. Although my understanding of physics is rudimentary, I ponder work equals force times distance. If I put my force into this action and I cross this distance (or mow this path, lift these stones) I am fulfilling a mathematical equation. While weeding, I think of the ergonomics—we were taught to pull monster pigweeds with our legs, not our backs. Weeding is also the work of discernment. Which plant is a weed and which a welcome guest? It depends on the garden and gardener. I think of the work we do for the joy of giving, like the baker who labors over a special birthday cake. Or the work of service. Jesus washed the feet of the poor. I don’t mean that as a metaphor for leadership, ethics, or privilege. I mean simply that caring for another body is physical work, with a purpose. 

I am grateful that I was taught to respect work and to find work rewarding. It gives me a good feeling. I call it worker’s compensation.