Gang Aft Agley

The best laid plans of mice and men. 

How often had I used the phrase without knowing the consequent lines? 

‘To a Mouse,’ from which the line originates was written in 1785 after a Scotsman plowed through a mouse’s nest and noted what becomes of so many of life’s prospects. We living beings plan and follow premonitions and stockpile for a future which is far from promised. We build our nests, fill our larders, bury bones. We erect silos to fill with the bumper that’s coming and seem to have short term memory loss each time our plans go awry. And they often go awry. Or Gang Aft Agley, as a Scotsman would put it. 

I remember learning the phrase – Gang Aft Agley – seated next to a plow that undoubtedly had turned up many a nest in its time. It all seems a bit too on-the-nose now. A farm on the brink of collapse. Crops in the midst of failing. Bill collectors beating down our door. The Brit and I sat engaged in one of the few things we knew to do when the stress boiled over and the heat was too much and his ex was on one again – we smoked. We commiserated. We planned ahead. Maybe we could lease a few more acres to another Greenhorn. Maybe we could sneak a pumpkin planting in for the fall. Maybe the blight sweeping through the tomatoes could be beaten back and we could build a heated grow for shoots in the winter and we could make enough with the next few markets to get our heads above water and breathe. 

‘The best laid plans of mice and men,’ I must have said at some point.  

‘Hmph you’re telling me,’ The Brit said. Then, ‘Actually, I haven’t a clue how the saying goes. What about our plans?’ 

As we went to our phones to find the answer a sort of poetic truth settled between us, a mist of transcendental meaning, perhaps heightened by the marijuana smoke, which has not left me to this day. It was as though we knew, in those moments sat next to the plow, that this would all be for naught. There were forces beyond our control, or perhaps once within our grasps, now snowballed and intractable, and try though we may, struggle and stress and consternate like mice quivering under the soil, those forces would blow through us like blight, like a plow through a nest, like a late frost in the field, and leave us all agley and askew. 

And yet, we went on planning. We kept up the fight. We worked from dawn until dusk, six or seven days a week to keep on producing food. 

It’s become something of a mantra for me now. Even after The Brit lost the farm the following winter, after my credit was ruined by the investment I had made in his place, after I left the farm for the steady pay check and consistency of the kitchen, and after the kitchen chewed me up and spit me out as well – after it’s all gone about as agley as I could imagine, I keep on planning, striving, preparing for a future I can’t possibly portend. 

Something like McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – ‘Well, I tried, didn’t I? Goddamnit at least I did that,’ – or Camus’s Myth of Sisyphus and the Absurd Man – ‘One of the only coherent philosophical positions is thus revolt. It is a constant confrontation between man and his own obscurity [...] it is not aspiration, for it is devoid of hope. That revolt is the certainty of crushing fate without the resignation that ought to accompany it,’ – we must go on trying and scheming and dreaming up ways to change the world and our place in it, or we must resign to accept things the way they are. 

The near decade I spent farming was the beginning of my revolt. My refusal to accept the world as it is. I suppose writing and my refusal to give up on the dream is my continuation of that, yet both rebellions have left me with much to wrestle with along the way. Missed opportunities and failed relationships. Dead end jobs and dire financial straits. Above all, I am left with the unnerving reality that I have failed to achieve my initial aim – self sufficiency, ecological balance, an independent farm where I could support a family and build a community with the capacity to dream an alternative future, or at the least, withstand the future catastrophes facing society at large. And I wonder, at a time when those catastrophes seem more promised than ever, am I in any better shape to face them? Am I in any place to still try to change the world? 

I’m not sure I will ever arrive at an answer. I’m not even so sure that the impending cataclysms I imagine are truly any closer now than when I first decided the storm was coming and that I must learn to farm. But I intend to grapple with those questions here. To put it down as best as I can remember – the struggle, the successes, the youthful certainty and communal joy, the food and failures shared along the way.