A few years ago, researching a book about farmworkers in rural North Carolina, I visited a labor camp and got an unexpected answer when I asked what crop the men were growing. What follows is an audio essay about the surprisingly thin line between hemp and marijuana, the H2A guest worker program that brings hundreds of thousands of Mexican men to American farms each year, and what happens when a curious writer and his wife ignore the instructions that came with their THC edibles.
I recently posted a family history compendium to this web site. When I started this part-time writing project more than fifteen years ago, artificial intelligence was dream-stuff for a handful of computer scientists. When I finished, there were three AI assistants—Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT—each at my actual fingertips, asking at every touch how they could help me. My family history certainly needed a copy edit, so I gave that job to Claude.
I am one of ten kids of Bill and Lorraine Durbin. My dad’s father died before I was born, but my mom’s dad, the remarkable James Kalish, was a regular presence in my life as a kid.
In the 1960s, he and his wife Bernice lived in East St. Louis, Illinois, and we lived in nearby Fairview Heights. They came to our house all the time, or we went to theirs, and there is one thing that struck me about Grandpa Kalish more than anything else: He was always happy, always impressed with whatever his grandkids were up to, and always so positive—about everything.
As a child, I knew nothing about the childhood of our Grandpa Kalish, nor his family history, nor what his life had been like before I met him. Only now, decades later, do I know enough about his early years to realize how incredible it is that he was so happy in his later years.
For the past few months I’ve been looking into my family history, posting here as I went. Now it’s all in a new section of this website.
I’ve been curious about this story for more than fifty years. In 1973, when I was ten, I asked my parents if we had a family tree. “No,” came the answer, “but let’s make one.” Sitting at our kitchen table in Fairview Heights, Illinois, Mom and Dad jotted down the name of every ancestor and relative they could think of. They tossed out names to each other, pausing occasionally, then suddenly blurting out a name that meant nothing to me. In his perfect cursive handwriting, Dad wrote down names that went back two or three generations, with lines connecting them, until they could think of no more. That tree went back about 80 years. Today we can go back more than three centuries.
When I moved to North Carolina from Chicago in 2005, I had no idea that so much of our nation’s food was still harvested by hand. Now, twenty years later, that hasn’t really changed. Much of the produce in any grocery store–the peppers and melons and berries and whatnot–is still picked by human hands.
What has changed is the number of so-called guestworkers those hands belong to. These are the citizens of other countries who leave their families for the better part of every year to work in US crop fields, authorized by an H-2A temporary seasonal visa. In the early 2000s, the number of H-2A workers across the US hovered around 50 or 60 thousand. Now it’s almost half a million. Most are from Mexico. Most are dads.
To the Mexican farmworker, the appeal of going north each year is obvious. Here, they can earn in one hour what might take two days back home. But they must live apart from their families for the better part of each year–typically 6-9 months, often longer–and live in a labor camp that may or may not comply with even the barest of housing standards.
For many years, no state brought in more H-2A workers than North Carolina. The nation’s very largest H-2A employer is here, as is one of the nation’s only farmworker unions. It’s an ideal place to peer into what works well in the H-2A program and what does not. In North Carolina one can also get a glimpse of true family farming operations, struggling to make ends meet, who depend on H-2A labor. There are scores of those. For the past few years I’ve been diving deep into this little known world, trying to understand it. I’ve done my best to convey what I learned in my bookFinding America’s Farmworkers: Reaching Out in North Carolina.
With the second Trump administration now getting underway, nobody knows what’s in store for the army of guestworkers who depend on the H-2A program to feed their families–nor for the growers who depend on it to feed theirs. There were no day one executive orders aimed directly at the H-2A. Changes are expected, especially for US farmworkers outside the H-2A program, struggling moms and dads lacking work authorization, now at risk of being swept up in mass deportations.
In recent years, the population of agricultural guestworkers in the US has exploded. It’s not inconceivable that growth has just begun. If we are to continue growing food in this country, somebody must harvest all those peppers, melons, and berries. We may also see expansion of the guestworker program in other industries.
Before that happens, I hope we will consider what things are like today for all the homesick dads who work in our fields.
An H-2A farmworker looks out from his labor camp barracks in Sampson County, North Carolina, 2019. Photo by Michael Durbin
It’s a sad truth that tens of millions of people in the United States depend on free food to keep their families from going hungry. Many of these moms and dads plant and harvest fruits and vegetables or raise and package chicken and other meats, all for the lowest possible wage. As a result, the rest of us can spend less of our income on food than just about any other country on earth. Another result? Many farmworkers are too poor to feed themselves.
Fortunately for some, a little-known place in Sampson County has been helping to feed farmworkers and their families for more than forty years. The Episcopal Farmworker Ministry is located in the heart of this state’s farm country on a street named Easy—a misnomer if ever there was one. Just ask the people responsible nowadays for events like this one: Patti Navarro, Linda Reyes, and Anna Reyes are on the ministry staff. Fred Clarkson is the parish priest at La Sagrada Familia, an Episcopal church that shares the Easy Street campus with the ministry. Together, this team of four does work here that is anything but easy.
Patti Navarro first came here as a seven-year-old child of farmworkers, playing on the ministry playground while her mom picked up food for the family. Or some donated clothing. That was twenty years ago. Now she works here, collecting food items and helping to supervise the same food distributions that once kept her from going to bed hungry. She brings more than a firsthand appreciation for what it’s like to grow up in a farmworker family, and more than bilingual fluency. Patti possesses the ability to stay cool when things go wrong. And things always go wrong.
Patti Navarro
Pulling off a food distribution entails not one job but four. The first is advertising, to let families know when and where they can collect food. This job belongs to Linda Reyes. She relies chiefly on a Spanish-language Facebook page (they also have one in English) to get word out to their clients. It’s a well-known source of information for this community, and Linda posts here all the time.
Like Patti, Linda can relate personally to the community served here. Until a few years ago, she worked in a nearby pork processing plant until a ten-pound meat hook fell on her shoulder and sent her home, not gravely injured but frightened at what might happen next. She had been attending and volunteering at La Sagrada Familia (The Sacred Family) when offered this job. She jumped at the chance.
For this distribution, the last before Thanksgiving, Linda posts something new on Facebook: a signup form where families can register to get a free turkey, a ham, or a pair of chickens. It’s a heartfelt gesture but introduces a challenge: Where will they get all this meat?
The second job is the collection of food. For this event, that part culimates the day before the event on a cool and blustery Friday. For years, the Food Bank of Central and Eastern North Carolina has been the chief provider of food to ministry distributions. Today, long-time food bank driver Manny navigates a giant box truck onto the ministry campus and unloads eleven pallets stacked high with seven types of vegetables, watermelons, bread, and soft drinks—six tons of food. Patti and ministry volunteer Ruperto Martinez also pick up a couple hundred loaves of donated bread from the Bread of Life Food Pantry in Raleigh, and ten giant bags of rice and beans from Sam’s Club in Goldsboro. Patti has only $500 to spend at Sam’s Club, so each family will be limited to just one bag of rice or one bag of beans. It saddens Patti to not offer both halves of the staple rice and beans dish, but there is only so much money and she is trusted to spend it wisely.
“It’s kinda my job,” she tells me.
One reason Patti can only give rice or beans is that she had already spent $4,000 on 40 hams, 60 turkeys, and 204 chickens from the food service distributor US Foods. Those arrived first thing Friday morning. Patti had them loaded into the ministry’s aging walk-in cooler, careful to place them away from the constant drip of water from the ceiling. Will these three hundred pieces of meat be enough? Patti is doubtful. She calls the food bank to see if they might provide additional meat—she and Ruperto are willing to drive there to pick it up. Yes, she is told by the food bank rep who picks up the phone. Partner organizations can go to the Raleigh distribution center to pick up donated meat. Patti is ecstatic, but only until the rep asks for the ministry’s partner ID number. Patti doesn’t have it. She’s never needed it during the eight months she’s been at the ministry. So much for that source. The boxes of meat in the drippy cooler will have to do.
On the Friday before the distribution, while Patti oversees the collection of food, Linda guides a small team of volunteers in retrieving clothing from a double-wide trailer so they can distribute that on Saturday as well. Among her other responsibilities, Linda manages this oldest ministry program. In 1978, a group of parishioners launched what was then called the Clothing Closet Ministry, distributing donated clothing from a trailer just up the street from the ministry’s current home.
Job number three is the enlistment of volunteers for distribution day. It’s a difficult one. Being an hour’s drive from Raleigh, and three hours from Charlotte, the ministry’s remote location has always made this a challenge. As a joint operation of two of the state’s three Episcopal dioceses, the ministry can and does attract volunteers from a number of member churches. Indeed, parishioners of both St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Cary, and Trinity Episcopal Church in Fuqua-Varina, sign up to work at this distribution. But most of the 39 volunteers who show up are members of the very community the ministry serves—seasonal crop workers and meat production workers—many of whom are members of La Sagrada Familia, whose brand-new church building, just off the ministry parking lot, is now framed and clad in plywood. Linda is responsible for enlisting volunteers, but she gets some help.
Fred Clarkson, a native of Colombia, has been the parish priest at La Sagrada Familia since 2017. Earlier this year, he took on responsibility for overseeing all ministry programs, effectively forming a joint operation between the ministry and the church. Previously, the ministry had operated like an independent non-profit, sharing space with the church but having its own program and much larger staff. The consolidation has greatly reduced the ministry staff to just Patti, Linda, and Anna—in recent years the staff was more than double that size. But Fred doesn’t mind.
“The healthiest churches have the smallest staffs,” he told me.
With his own small staff, to make these food distributions succeed, Fred knows he has to do more than just help recruit volunteers from his congregation. A few months ago, Fred developed an all-new system, complete with an iPad face-recognition app, for registering food distribution clients and volunteers. It also prints out adhesive name tags for volunteers, to help distinguish them from clients. On the morning of a distribution, it’s Anna’s job to use this app, greeting each volunteer, asking them to look into the camera, then giving them a name tag. Once clients start arriving, Fred and Anna both handle registration.
Father Fred Clarkson helping Anna Reyes with client registration
Once you’ve advertised an event like this, and gathered the food and enlisted the volunteers, you are still left with the fourth job: orchestration. On distribution day, how exactly does all that food get into all those cars? What exactly should everyone do? And when? On the Saturday morning of the food distribution, as the team arrives, they can picture how all of this should work:
From 8:30 to 10:00, after checking in with Anna and donning a name tag, volunteers will unwrap eleven pallets of donated food, load bulk items like apples and onions into smaller bags, and then place it all out on tables—one for each type of food. There are also two-way radios to clip on belts (Anna takes care of this), take-home boxes to assemble, and shopping carts to roll out. Normally, clients roll these from table to table and gather what items they want. But the team will today introduce a small refinement to help speed things up: they will ask volunteers to pre-load boxes with several items and place those into the carts. While all this is going on, clients arriving in cars will be greeted at the entrance of the parking lot, handed a laminated card with a number on it (indicating their place in line once the distribution begins) and then directed to the soccer field behind the main ministry building. There, a volunteer will organize them into neat lines of ten cars each.
From 10:00 to 1:00, as the plan goes, Patti or Anna will use their radio to call out to the soccer field for batches of cars, ten each, to be sent forward. Clients will then move their cars to the ministry’s south parking lot, which has been cleared of all ministry and volunteer vehicles, then walk to the registration table. While waiting to register, clients can look through bins of donated clothing and bed sheets for whatever they might need. Once registered, clients take one of the pre-loaded carts of food and roll it to the meat distribution table. There, Patti will ask the client’s name, look it up on her laptop, then hand out whatever type of meat they registered for: a turkey, a ham, or two chickens. If someone has not registered, they still get chicken. But only one. Their shopping carts full, clients roll them to their car and unload them. When about half the cars have departed, the call goes out by radio to the soccer field for another batch of cars. Cleanup begins once the last car departs, after which everyone goes home.
That’s the plan. And things do, in fact, go generally according to plan. But not entirely.
Linda Reyes, Anna Reyes
It’s 49 degrees and drizzling when the team arrives a little after 8am. The high today is only forecast to be in the fifties, but thankfully the rain is supposed to end in about an hour. By 8:45, almost 20 volunteers are busy putting out loaves of bread, watermelons, and cabbages. Others are putting bulk items like carrots and apples into smaller bags. Fortunately, most of these volunteers have been here before and need only be assigned a station. Once everyone has a task, Patti rolls out a large speaker, turns on some music, and cranks up the volume. The opening lyrics of Luis Fonsi’s Despacito are just filling the open-aired workspace when Patti realizes some of the volunteers brought children with them. She quickly changes the music to De Música Ligera by Soda Stereo. Someone asks Patti why she didn’t like the first song. “Not PG-13!” she answers.
Patti is in constant motion. She checks to see if everything has been taken out of the cooler, from the van with donated bread, and the warehouse everyone calls la bodega. She answers non-stop questions. And at each station she does some math, determining how many of each item will go into a shopping cart. Watermelons are easy: one per family. For things like onions and cucumbers, she must estimate how many there are and divide by 300—the most families she expects. She need not estimate at the massive carton of soft drinks, whose content count is written on a label.
“783 divided by 300,” she says outloud, tapping into her iPhone’s calculator. “Three apiece. Wait. We need these for the Christmas party,” she concludes, before asking a volunteer who knows how to operate a pallet jack to move the sodas to la bodega.
Her main job now is to direct people and solve problems, like one at the meat station. At last month’s distribution, each chicken came packed in its own bag. Here, there are six chickens per bag. Volunteer Barbara Lawrence asks Patti if there are latex gloves and smaller bags. “Yes!” she answers, returning in no time with both. She isn’t sure the ziploc bags are big enough, so puts on a pair of gloves and bags the first chicken herself. The bags are just big enough. Patti takes off the gloves and dashes off to where she’s needed next.
Whoever designed this multipurpose space might’ve had events like this in mind. The 200 or so square foot area features a smooth concrete floor, a soaring cathedral ceiling, and no walls—just pillars. This allows for the constant and easy entrance and exit of people at nearly any point, as when Patti exits between two pillars, into the persistent drizzle of rain, to be sure arriving cars are properly greeted and instructed. She’s especially concerned that each client family gets only one of the pre-numbered cards, which will act as their entrance ticket at the registration table. Her mind is soon at ease.
Longtime volunteer Ruperto greets each family at the entrance of the parking lot, hands them one card, and directs them to the soccer field where raincoated volunteer Shirley Lamont forms lines of ten cars each. By 9:15, the first line is full. Shirley attends Trinity Episcopal Church and has been volunteering at these events for eight years, often accompanied by her husband Alex, who at this moment is loading shopping carts with cardboard boxes. Ruperto has been volunteering at ministry events for even longer. He works the night shift at a nearby turkey farm, so typically arrives to work these events having been awake all night. “Trabajaste anoche?” someone asks him this morning. Did you work last night? No, he answers. It was Friday, his night off. When he came here yesterday, to help gather food, he had been up all night working.
At 10:00, when the distribution is scheduled to begin, the drizzling rain shows no sign of letting up. With winds picking up, the effective temperature is dropping. There are 95 cars lined up in the soccer field, their occupants hoping to turn on their engines at any moment. But over in the distribution area, things are nowhere close to being ready. There’s just too much food—more than 20 thousand items—to be bagged and set out in the 90 minutes alotted, despite arms flying nonstop and everyone working at top speed. And some volunteers arrived just minutes before the scheduled start of the distribution. Half an hour later, the team decides things are ready enough. She turns off the music and speaks through a microphone to finalize station instructions, pointing to each table and confirming who will be sure its table remains loaded with food.
“Maria en la zanahoria, Enrique en la repollo, Alex en la sandia,” she calls out before switching to English. “Who can give out hand sanitizer? Who can retrieve empty carts?” English-speaking volunteers raise their hands.
Satisfied that all bases are covered, Patti tells volunteers they can go through the line now to collect a despensa for their own family. It’s the Spanish word for pantry, which in Anglo cultures generally refers to a room or cupboard, but in Latin American cultures refers simply to a load or collection of groceries. Most of the volunteers here need a despensa as much as those waiting in cars do. By showing up early and helping to prepare them, they can be sure to get one before food runs out, as it does more often than not.
At 10:45, everything is finally in place and the team is ready to receive clients waiting in the soccer field. Patti uses her two-way radio to ask Shirley to send out the first batch of cars. There is no answer. She presses the talk button and asks again. Still no answer. Patti disappears into the rain, running out to the soccer field to tell Shirley in person. Ten minutes later, clients are wheeling shopping carts full of groceries out to their cars. Ten minutes after that, Anna uses her radio to call out. “Shirley! Send another ten!” This time Shirley responds. The great transferance of food to families is finally underway.
Farmworker and volunteer Ruperto Martinez greets a client at the food distribution
Many of the recipients of today’s food are cropworkers. I wonder what they think as they eye the very type of produce they plant, cultivate, and harvest in their jobs. One crop they will never see here is state’s number one crop. North Carolina produces more tobacco than anything else—as has been true for four hundreds of years—and far more than another other state. The second leading crop is sweet potato, which is often a feature of ministry food distributions but not this one—perhaps because growers sell so much of it for Thanksgiving there isn’t much to give away right now. But on these tables today the crop workers do see watermelons, cabbages, onions, cucumbers, and zucchini. And those are all grown in abundance around here. The meat production workers here are certainly familiar with the meat items going into these carts. Each year, North Carolina raises, slaughters, and packages these in staggering numbers: 8 million hogs, 28 million turkeys, and nearly one billion chickens—more than 2 million a day.
The explosive growth of this state’s meat production in recent years has altered the very meaning of the term farmworker. It once referred to crop workers but is now practically understood to include meat production workers as well. Like virtually all crop workers, the men and women who actually raise, slaughter, and package all those animals are nearly all Latino, all generally paid the lowest wages that federal law will allow. Meat production workers tend to live here year-round. Some crop workers do as well—they are known as seasonal workers. But a large number of crop workers migrate here each year from Mexico by way of the H-2A visa program, living for the better part of every year in one North Carolina’s two thousand or so labor camps. A smaller number of workers migrate domestically, typically harvesting citrus in Florida during winter months and other crops in North Carolina and other more northern states during warmer months.
Of course, one need not be a farmworker of any kind to receive food at a ministry food distribution. You need only be willing to give your name and county you live in, get your photo taken, and wait in line. There’s a family who lives right across the street from the ministry, at a house where I’ve seen a Confederate flag atop a pole in their yard. I’m told they’ve been here for food.
Volunteer Alex Lamont prepares shopping carts
By 11:30, only 20 cars have left the soccer field. There are more than 100 still there. The holdup is at the meat pickup station. There, Patti must ask each family for their name and look them up on her laptop, to see what meat they pre-ordered. That process stops entirely when she is called away to fix new problems, such as when they run out of ziploc bags for the chickens. Fortunately she finds a new box of bags, far larger than necessary but adequate for the job.
There are issues at the registration table, such as when a family shows up without a numbered card. They did not know they needed one. Father Fred explains the process then sends them back to their car, pointing toward the soccer field where they can join the end of the line to wait their turn for a despensa. The energetic son of a volunteer, too young to work but paying keen attention, notices Fred sending the disappointed family away. Fred notices the boy staring up at him. “We have to be fair,” he explains.
At 12:30, a family with card #98 signs in. Patti has sped things up at the meat station, such that 80 families have been served in just one hour. Things are picking up. So too is the wind. People are shivering now so Fred asks a volunteer to retrieve three propane-powered space heater from la bodega, the kind restaurants use for outdoor seating areas. In the open-air space, they provide heat in only three tiny areas. But at least it’s a place people can go to for a break of warmth.
Out in the soccer field, Shirley tries to keep moving to stave off the chill of standing so long in the drizzly cold. At one point she has an opportunity to run into the covered workspace, to find her husband Alex. A car won’t start. Apparently, its battery is dead. Alex uses jumper cables to get it going. An hour later, another car’s battery is working but the engine won’t turn over. Shirley thinks the engine is flooded and advises the driver to sit and wait. Later, someone’s car alarm goes off at the end of the line. Too tired to investigate, she lets it wail.
At 1:30, a half hour after the scheduled end of the event, nearly 30 cars remain in the soccer field. Inside the distribution area, fatigue is setting in. Staff and volunteers say little. The music blasting from the loudspeaker does not help. The Girl from Iponema, with its smoky bassa nova beat and minor key melody, only adds to the downbeat vibe. But not everyone is sullen. Outside, the rain has finally stopped, and half a dozen kids, from toddlers to pre-teens, are all over the slides and swings in the playground area, dashing about in glee as kids on playgrounds do.
By 2:30 the rain is back. The playground is again empty. But minutes later, Patti picks up the microphone to announce the last of the cars have left the soccer field. Fifteen minutes later, those familes have driven off with their groceries and cleanup begins.
Two hours later, the team goes home after an intense eight-hour day at work. They think of what to fix next time. First, the pre-loaded carts will go. Families, unsure how much they could take, ended up helping themselves to more food items from the tables. Next time, they’ll put out instructions on each table with the number of items alotted to each family. Linda will also think of how to better advertise the event to more families not on Facebook. And of course Patti will use the ministry’s partner ID number to secure meat products from the Food Bank, saving some of the ministry’s precious cash.
The team is especially relieved that the meat they bought was enough. Not only did every family get a turkey, ham, or chicken, but nearly 30 pieces of meat remain in the cooler, along with several bags of carrots and onions. Everything else is gone. But at least they will have food to hand out for the next few weeks. Farmworker families arrive nearly every day of the week at the ministry, to ask for help of one kind or another. When the help they need includes feeding their families, Patti or Linda or Anna can walk them to the cooler for a despensa to take home.
Food distribution at the Episcopal Farmworker Ministry, November 2023
This little-known ministry on Easy Street has been serving this little-known community of agricultural workers since the 1978 launch of the Clothing Closet Ministry. A few years later, after expanding their programs to include food distribution and other services, the name changed to the Episcopal Migrant Ministry. It took its current name in 1986. Since then, the structure and leadership of the Episcopal Farmworker Ministry has changed many times. Running a place like this entails any number of challenges and periodic reinvention is inevitable.
The people here—the members of the board, the leadership, the staff—they all come and go. Sometimes those transitions are difficult. But the essence of this place, its spirit if you prefer, never seems to change. Nor does the simple reason why people show up here to work or volunteer: They are here to address the poignant and stubborn truth that among the hungriest in this country are those who feed the rest of us.
We know he was 30 years old, a citizen of Mexico, working at a North Carolina tobacco and sweet potato farm. It was just the second week of his first year working there, authorized by an H-2A temporary seasonal work visa. We know area temperatures neared 100 on the fifth day of September. It was a Tuesday. We know someone at Barnes Farming Corporation, one of the state’s largest employers of H-2A guestworkers, whose president Johnny Barnes is the husband of State Senator Lisa Barnes, called 911. We know the responders arrived too late. They could not save the life of José Arturo Gónzalez Mendoza.
We do not yet know the details of how he died. According to Barnes, their new fieldworker went to rest on the field transportation bus after reporting to his supervisor he was not feeling well. Later, checking in on him, they called for medical assistance. His family told television news station WRAL he died of dehydration and heat stress. His brother told the labor advocacy group El Futuro Es Nuestro (It’s Our Future) the Barnes supervisor never gave José any medical attention.
Did Mr Gónzalez Mendoza show signs of heat sress? If so, did the field supervisor recognize them? One former employee of the North Carolina DOL Agricultural Safety & Health Bureau told me that the lack of sweat can indicate a body preparing to shut down from overheating. So heat stress might not be the first thing that comes to mind when you see someone on the verge of dying from it.
According to the North Carolina Department Labor, the state investigates, on average, two agricultural work-related fatalities per year. I don’t know why this one got the attention of CNN and nearly a dozen other media outlets. Most farmworker deaths go relatively unnoticed. I hope these journalists keep a lookout for the state’s report into this one, so we can better understand what happened to help keep it from happening again. Two farmworker deaths each year, in just one state, is clearly too many.
While waiting for the report, we can consider what we do know about farmworkers like Mr. Gónzalez Mendoza and employers like Barnes. There’s a lot to know.
According to H-2A job orders for the 2022 growing season, filed with the US Department of Labor, just over 900 North Carolina agricultural employers sought certification of H-2A visas for nearly 27 thousand temporary workers. A few of these employers were farm labor contractors who act as intermediaries between growers and workers, but most are farming operations, or growers, who hire workers directly. Barnes is the very largest among these, requesting certification of 645 workers. The median number of requested workers per employer is ten.
Roughly a third of this state’s H-2A farmworkers come by way of the North Carolina Growers Association, a trade association that handles H-2A paperwork, transportation, and other logistics for member growers like Barnes. The NCGA is officially a co-employer of workers. It’s located in the tiny town of Vass, where they operate an orientation center for an annual stream of nine thousand or so incoming workers.
Most H-2A farmworkers live in Mexico. They leave their families for the better part of every year; the median 2022 contract length at Barnes was 8 months, with some there for as long as 10. Their journey from all parts of Mexico begins with a bus ride to the city of Monterrey. There, they are interviewed at the US Consulate and complete their visa application. Then they board another bus to take them across the border and bring them to a US farm. A worker might sit on a bus for two or three days to get here, and then do so again, at the end of the season, to spend time with family before doing it all again. H-2A employers are required to reimburse workers for these transportation expenses, and to provide them housing at no cost.
To many H-2A temporary visa holders, this is anything but a temporary job. Many do it for the entirety of their working lives. According to a post on the Barnes Facebook page, 2022 was the 25th year their H-2A worker Pablo had been making his annual trek.
It’s little surprise why they come. H-2A workers earn far more here than they can at home. This year, H-2A workers in North Carolina are paid the government-mandated wage (the Adverse Effect Wage Rate, or “A were” as the acronym is pronounced) of $14.91 per hour. That’s more than they might earn from two full days of farm labor in Mexico.
Living and working conditions for many H-2A workers are not so great. The labor camps they live in, while meeting minimal state health and safety standards, can be disgusting. While at work in the field, supervisors may or may not provide them sufficient water and rest breaks, and some may not know to give new workers extra break time to acclimate to North Carolina’s brutal summer heat. Many workers are also reportedly, and regularly, exposed to pesticides.
The ability to earn a relatively high wage is an obvious reason H-2A workers tolerate living and working conditions that most US workers would not. But it’s not the only reason.
H-2A contracts are limited to one growing season, meaning that each worker must be re-hired each year. Employers are free to ask someone back or not. Workers know this. This extraordinary power imbalance is widely believed to contribute to this seemingly endless state of affairs, where guestworkers tolerate living and working conditions in which they risk their lives, not to mention their dignity, in order to feed their families.
Growers must feed their familes too. And while the scale of the Barnes Farming Corporation is an exception, from what I can tell, most H-2A employers in North Carolina are family farms of modest size. And what they do, trying to make a living growing food for the rest of us, is not easy. They are at the mercy of the weather, of course, especially as climate change only increases the frequency of destructive hurricanes and droughts. Most have no say over the prices they can charge for the vegetables and fruits they take to market—especially as foreign competitors can sell produce at ever lower prices. And then there’s inflation. As with most businesses, the cost of everything it takes to produce a crop goes up every year. Near the top of that list is the cost of labor. It’s little wonder that, to most growers, AEWR is a four-letter word.
Having to bear an ever-increasing cost of labor is no excuse, but nor is it any wonder that growers seek to minimize housing costs and maximize worker productivity however they can. I believe most growers want to strike a reasonable balance between what their H-2A workers need and what they can afford to provide them. But I also see and hear credible accounts, some directly from farmworkers, of growers and contractors who clearly cross a disturbing line.
For two years I’ve been talking with farmworkers, growers, legal and health care advocates, and others inside the little-known world of today’s migrant farmworker. Typically I see workers at their labor camps, of which there are more than two thousand in North Carolina, most located in the eastern counties. I don’t know what every camp is like, but I’ve been to dozens. Almost none is a place I would want to spend a night. Just last week, I helped workers carry donated food into their kitchen, a dark and hot and humid place with a cloying odor—from decades of meal preparation in a poorly ventilated space—that had me dashing for the door as fast as I could. I cannot imagine cooking or eating a meal in there.
I’ve had glimpses too of farmworker hardships that go beyond the endurance of poor living conditions. Last year, a worker showed me a photo of a nasty sore on his hand, the result, he believed, of not being allowed to wear gloves when snapping flowers off the top of tobacco plants. A few weeks earlier, another worker acknowledged that he and his coworkers come here by choice, but wondered, plaintively, why they couldn’t have more break time when it gets hot, and why they are forced to run from furrow to truck when harvesting camote. It’s a word you hear all the time when speaking with North Carolina farmworkers. It’s Spanish for sweet potato.
For years, North Carolina was the nation’s top employer of H-2A farmworkers. Today, the majority can be found at farms across California, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and Washington. The recent growth of the program across the United States has been nothing less than explosive, with annual H-2A farmworker certifications climbing over the past ten years from roughly 100 thousand to nearly 400 thousand. Soon, we can expect more than half a million Mexicans will leave their wives, children, and parents for the better part of each year to do some of the hard work that needs to be done here.
Businesses outside of agriculture apparently like what they see in our fields. The US Chamber of Commerce, for example, is calling for the expansion of guestworker visa quotas in other industries. There are also calls for making guestworker visas year-round. Before going there, we as a nation should stop and think: Do we want to separate even more parents from families just so they can feed them? And before we turn this path of hungry migrants into a superhighway, can we at least build in safeguards to protect them from abuse by unscrupulous employers?
In the recent, tragic case of José Arturo Gónzalez Mendoza, there is one other thing we can already be certain of. He left a wife and two kids at home in Mexico. One is said to be 10, the other 17. Not four weeks ago they and the rest of his family got the worst news anyone can ever get: a loved one had died, far from home and way before his time. The shock must have hit them hard. It no doubt still courses through their bodies, in waves, they way grief like that does. It will be some weeks before papa can come back home. He’ll travel this time in a casket. There will no doubt be a funeral. The family may have a few more facts by then, but it won’t much matter. Facts do little to ease a pain like theirs.
Tobacco growing at a typical farm in South Carolina
In 1981, the travel writer Tom Miller made a spot-on prediction. President Reagan was then planning an experimental program to allow US growers to hire 50 thousand Mexican farmworkers each season on temporary contracts, a program that would be enacted into law in 1986 as the H-2A visa program. Writing in The New York Times, Mr. Miller feared this newest bracero program—bracero is the name used for contract farmworkers in two earlier guestworker programs—would fail to protect against the abuse of workers, just as its predecessors had.
Tom Miller knew our southern border well. He had traveled all 2,000 miles of it and had written extensively on US relations with Latin America in popular books and magazine articles. He died in 2022, living long enough to see his prediction come true. The H-2A program today provides the cheap farm labor the US agricultural economy depends on, but stories of worker abuse appear all the time. Tom did not live long enough to witness a sobering milestone just around the corner. Soon, if trends continue, the US will bring more than half a million H-2A workers to our fields each year, ten times the fifty thousand originally planned.
Given the explosive growth of the current bracero program, and urgent calls on both ends of the political spectrum to modernize it, we’d do well to remember what went wrong with the last one. Let’s take a look back at some history.
The United States entered World War I in April 1917. One month later, growers in California and other western states were allowed to hire “otherwise inadmissable aliens” from Mexico on six-month contracts, ostensibly to compensate for US workers diverted to war jobs. The Mexican civil war was then just ending, and peasants displaced by the fighting were desperate for jobs. So both countries saw benefits. However, when this first bracero program ended in 1921, Mexicans continued to cross into the US for work, now without authorization.
Fast forward to the 1930s. With record numbers of US citizens unemployed and many flocking to California to seek farm work, the US repatriated hundreds of thousands of Mexicans in an attempt to free up jobs for US workers.
In 1941, the US entered World War II. With thousands of its citizens either enlisting or taking manufacturing jobs to aid in the war effort, growers in western states pleaded for help. Starting in 1942, they were again allowed to hire farmworkers from Mexico on temporary contracts, presumably only for the duration of the war. However, despite Japan’s 1945 surrender bringing the war to a close, the bracero program went on. And with the 1951 passage of Public Law 78, this second bracero program effectively became permanent, with annual admissions growing to levels unseen during the war, peaking at 445,000 in 1956.
US growers loved the program and its seemingly endless supply of non-union workers, desperate for jobs and willing to do “stoop work” at low wages. On paper, bracero workers were entitled to wage protections and other safeguards against exploitation and abuse. With few enforcement mechanisms in place, however, the reality was something different.
In 1955, the labor activist and writer Ernesto Galarza toured bracero labor camps to see what things were like, visiting 156 such camps. The next year, his 80-page report “Strangers in our Fields” shone a light on numerous cases of wage theft, racism, and other indignities that braceros suffered as a matter of course. The federal government was quick to refute many of Galarza’s findings, issuing its own report to try to highlight the supposedly bad facts and misleading statements in Galarza’s report. But public opinion had begun to turn toward Galarza’s view. Also, many lawmakers believed there were enough US citizens to fill these jobs if only workers were paid higher wages to attract them. The government ended the program in 1964. By then, an estimated 1.5 to 2 million Mexicans had worked as braceros over the 22 years this “temporary” program was in place.
Among the biggest fans of the demise of the second bracero program were the labor leaders Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta. With that program out of the way, it’s no coincidence their United Farm Workers union soon won a 40-percent increase in wages for grape workers, in 1966. And the grape and lettuce boycotts of the late 60s and early 70s would help facilitate passage of the landmark California Agricultural Labor Relations Act of 1975, establishing for the first time ever the rights of US farmworkers to unionize. However, those rapid gains of organized farm labor would not last for long.
After the second bracero program ended, former contract workers kept on crossing the border from Mexico seeking work—now without authorization—and US growers kept on hiring them. The growing problem of illegal border crossings, and the never-ending need for cheap farm labor, prompted the Reagan plan that so worried Tom Miller and led to his 1981 prediction. He saw what was coming, dubbing the plan “Bracero Program No. 3.”
In 1986, the United States enacted the sweeping Immigration Reform and Control Act, or IRCA. One of its key provisions was to make it against the law for employers to hire undocumented workers. But to ensure a steady supply of farmworkers, IRCA also dusted off and modified a decades-old temporary labor program known as H-2. The US had established this temporary and seasonal visa program in 1952, primarily for Florida sugar cane cutters from Jamaica. Under IRCA, the US would issue not one but two types of guestworker visa: the H-2A for agricultural work and the H-2B for non-agricultural jobs. The H-2A remains essentially the same today as when it was enacted 37 years ago, spelling out numerous conditions for hiring foreign agricultural labor, some of them identical to the old bracero rules.
In its first full year in 1987, the US certified just 44 H-2A visas, but it did not take long for the program to surpass the adoption rate of either of the bracero programs. In 2012, the US certified more than 75,000 H-2A visas. By 2018, that number had grown to almost a quarter of a million. Now in 2023, the number of certifications is approaching 400,000.
H-2A farmworkers are better off than the earlier bracero workers in some important ways. First, they are not subject to dehumanizing procedures, such as delousing with DDT upon arrival, nor long registration and induction periods that might deprive them of food for days on end. More broadly, H-2A farmworkers are entitled to numerous provisions of the 1983 Migrant & Seasonal Agricultural Worker Protection Act, including the right to disclosure of and compliance with terms of employment, housing that meets federal and local standards, and transportation in vehicles that meet federal safety standards.
They are also better paid. Each year, the US Department of Labor sets a minimum wage for H-2A farmworkers known as the Adverse Effect Wage Rate (AEWR), which is generally well above the federal minimum wage, and often more than ten times what a Mexican farmworker could earn at home in Mexico. Growers hate the AEWR. But it is an undeniable benefit to the worker.
So do we treat H-2A farmworkers better than we treated earlier braceros? Thankfully, in some ways, yes. But is their treatment on par with that of other low-wage workers in the US? No, it’s not even close.
First let’s consider the housing. One observer, after visiting numerous farmworker labor camps, noted how it “ranges from good through indifferent to downright bad.” That was Ernesto Galarza writing in 1956. But anyone today who visits any number of migrant labor camps, certainly in North Carolina where I live, could use those very same words. Growers have few incentives to maintain and repair farmworker housing beyond what is necessary to pass annual inspection. Providing free housing to workers is a cost of business that few employers must bear.
I believe most H-2A employers do their best to treat workers fairly. As in any line of work, some do not. But how many workers in this country are prohibited from seeking a new job when their employer cheats them out of wages, works them to exhaustion, or otherwise mistreats them? H-2A contracts prohibit workers from changing employees during their contract period, institutionalizing a power imbalance unheard of in other settings. Of course, unionization and collective bargaining have been used to halt unchecked worker mistreatment for decades. But as agricultural workers, H-2A farmworkers have no federally protected right to those options. Nor are they entitled to overtime pay, no matter how many times they work for more than 40 hours in a week.
And then there’s the human trafficking. By allowing farm labor contractors to participate in the H-2A program we all but invite the notorious contratista to exploit foreign workers. They can lie to them, indenture them, steal from them, and treat these human beings as something less. Earlier this year, a story from Prism Reports detailed the results of an 18-month investigation into this little-known but widespread accommodation of human traffickers. Sadly, the Department of Labor’s enforcement of program rules, which would discourage such behavior, is on the decline—and the contractors know it.
There’s something else baked into the H-2A program, something that will never make a headline but deserves recognition nonetheless: How many workers in this country are separated from their families for up to ten or eleven months each year just to earn, if they’re lucky, maybe $15 thousand in a year? Last year I met two H-2a farmworkers in North Carolina who each had been away from home for the better part of the past 30 years. And both have sons now doing the same thing. If there is a more poignant display of family values in this country, of enduring harsh living and working conditions to provide for one’s family, year after year with no end in sight, I’ve not seen it.
US lawmakers on both side of the aisle are under increasing pressure to do something about the H-2A program. Here’s what they should do:
First, the farm labor contractor must go. Employers should be directly accountable for the welfare of their H-2A farmworkers, banned by law from hiding behind an intermediary who might do anything to increase their profit margin. Unfair to smaller farms? They could join a collective to spread both the cost and burden of program compliance. Today’s North Carolina Growers Association is a model for this approach, acting as a joint employer, facilitating farmworker mobility across growers, and willing to stick their necks out to ensure workers are treated fairly.
Second, we must help growers, especially smaller ones, shoulder the cost of housing farmworkers. They have families to support too. In an ever-competitive global market, they cannot simply pass along this unusual cost. Our growers are entitled to meaningful tax breaks or other means of subsidizing the cost of housing farmworkers, in return for reasonable and verifiable evidence of doing well by their workers.
Third, it is high time to give all US agricultural workers—guestworker or not—the right to overtime pay and other basic labor rights. In 1938, farmworkers were excluded from the Fair Labor Standards Act because they were Black and had no voice in Congress. Academics refer to this as agricultural exceptionalism. Surely, 85 years is long enough to recognize and refute such a racist stain remaining on our book of law. Most farmworkers today are Latino, still lacking a voice in Congress, and still doing some of the most strenuous and low-paying work anywhere. If anyone is entitled to overtime pay, I say it’s them.
It appears this latest incarnation of the bracero program is here to stay.
“There is nothing more permanent than temporary workers,” writes Philip Martin of the Wilson Center, drawing on an old adage to describe our nation’s insatiable need for cheap farm labor. He may be right. Our H-2A farmworkers are both perennial and essential. The least we can do is treat them with more dignity and respect.
Photo credits: Top half: Michael Durbin. Bottom half: Extension Bulletin Illustrations Photograph Collection, Oregon State University Special Collections and Archives Research Center, Corvallis, Oregon.
We live in an era of deeply polarized politics. But anyone who gives it much thought is likely agree on this: Our nation’s agricultural economy would grind to a halt without farmworkers, nearly 400 thousand of whom leave their families in Mexico for the better part of each year to plant, cultivate, and harvest crops in the United States. The number of so-called guestworkers, here on a temporary work visa known as the H-2A, is growing rapidly. It’s likely to top half a million any year now. Many more farmworkers live year-round in the US, some with work authorization and some without. Because practically no US citizen is willing to do this work, nearly every one of America’s farmworkers is Latino.
And that’s about where the agreement ends.
There is deep disagreement on important matters such as how much farmworkers should be paid, how to protect them from human traffickers and sub-standard living and working conditions, and whether or not they are entitled to a path to citizenship.
Earlier this month, those questions were all on the table in Washinton, DC at a hearing of the Judiciary Committee of the United States Senate. Congressional hearings don’t get media coverage like they used to, but I listened closely as five deeply knowledgeable witnesses gave testimony to Chairman Dick Durbin (a Democrat from Illinois, and also my uncle), Ranking Member Lindsey Graham (a Republican from South Carolina), and other members of the committee.
Three witnesses—two farm owners and an attorney—spoke on behalf of the growers who hire farmworkers. Two witnesses spoke on behalf of farmworkers. At the end of this post is a link to their written testimony and video coverage of the entire hearing.
Much of the debate centered on the nonimmigrant temporary work visa program known as the H-2A, written into law in 1986 as part of the landmark Immigration Reform and Control Act, or IRCA. Subject to a number of requirements, the H-2A program allows US growers to hire as many temporary seasonal workers as they need. The 35-year-old program is showing its age. Both growers and farmworker advocates have serious issues with it, issues they highlighted at the hearing.
Advocates called attention to the illegal recruitment fees many workers must pay, oftentimes putting them in debt to the farm labor contractor—an intermediary between grower and farmworker—who recruited them. By tying an H-2A contract to a single employer, the program generally denies workers job mobility. It also makes them reluctant to speak up about poor working or living conditions for fear of losing their jobs, conditions that are often extremely bad yet go overlooked due to ever-shrinking enforcement of labor laws. Advocates also pointed to the denial of basic federal labor rights such as overtime pay to farmworkers, and to the lack of a path to citizenship no matter how long and how hard they work. Witness Diana Tellefson Torres, CEO of the UFW Foundation, summarizes it this way:
“The H-2A visa program has become the worst source of human trafficking among U.S. visa programs, deprives farm workers of basic freedoms, and subjects US and foreign workers to widespread violations of their rights”
Growers are equally impassioned about what is wrong with the H-2A program. Their chief complaint is the minimum wage they are required to pay to an H-2A worker, known wonkily as the Adverse Effect Wage Rate, or AEWR. The Department of Labor announces the AEWR late each year. Growers don’t like how this gives them little time to budget for the next growing season. They also don’t like the methodology used to set the AEWR. What they dislike most is how it goes up so much each year. For witness Chalmers Carr of South Carolina, who runs the second largest peach farm in the country, it went up 14% last year.
“This is a prime example,” Mr. Carr observed, “of how the AEWR is directly driving up food costs.” He spoke for all growers when he added “this is a crisis that will only grow out of control.”
As they must compete with foreign growers in lower-cost countries, US farmers are generally unable to set the prices at which they sell their crops, often giving them no choice but to absorb rising labor costs or go out of business. Growers are also unhappy with some of the restrictions placed on H-2A workers, such as their inability to perform non-agricultural labor during their time here. Nor do they like the bureaucratic requirements of the Department of Labor.
In a nutshell, growers would like to see reasonable limits placed on what they must pay farmworkers, and advocates want to see those farmworkers better protected against abuse. To me, the asymmetry here could spell opportunity. Each side wants something different. Farmworker advocates don’t seem up in arms about keeping the AEWR unchanged—other things are more important—so they might go along with some measures to cap its growth. It goes without saying that growers are not clamoring for the right to abuse their workers, so I expect they would support increased enforcement of existing labor laws, and even new ones to keep farm labor contractors from crossing the line into human trafficking.
And both sides might like some loosening H-2A restrictions, such as by increasing job mobility. Why not let any H-2A farmworker move to a different farm if work dries up at the farm that brought them from Mexico, as they can if they work for the North Carolina Growers Association? And if a grower has a camp full of workers but no farm work, due to weather or what not, why not let those workers do some other kind of work? Naturally there would need to be measures to minimize the abuse of such mobility (starting with overtime pay) but I doubt there’s an H-2A farmworker out there who would not jump at the chance to do some landscaping or painting rather than sit idle and unpaid at a camp.
There are any number of pathways to making things better for America’s growers and farmworkers both, even in divided times like these. I just hope we can pick one. And soon.
Here’s a link to a page where you can read the testimony of each of the five witnesses (listed below) and watch a video replay of the hearing.
Chalmers R. Carr, III, Owner & CEO, Titan Farms, Ridge Spring, SC Leon Sequeira, Prospect, KY Daniel Costa, Director of Immigration Law and Policy Research, Economic Policy Institute, Washington, DC Adam Lytch, Operations Manager, L&M Farms, East Palatka, FL Diana Tellefson Torres, Chief Executive Officer, UFW Foundation, Bakersfield, CA
When Becky and I decided to build a house, it did seem a bit impulsive. We had just met. When Covid hit a few months later, the idea seemed suddenly improbable. Then impossible. Then, positively insane.
Our original plan was to do what most people do and just buy a pre-existing place—a used house, as it were. So, one very hot Sunday in July 2019, we decided to scope out neighborhoods just north of downtown Carrboro, North Carolina, where I lived.
Becky Broun and I had been dating for less than a year. Indeed, less than two months. Seven weeks earlier we’d met at Caffe Driade, a local institution whose name translates from ancient Greek to “place for online coffee dates.” It’s rather popular with the Match.com crowd.
I had an iced herbal tea, having given up caffeine some months before when I realized it was giving me weird bouts of vertigo. Unfortunately, what I’ve just explained here in 24 words I took several hundred to explain to Becky that day, just as we sat down, prattling on as if defending a research thesis. Another woman might have excused herself and raced off in her car. But Becky stuck around until at last I gave her a chance to speak, and by the end of our date we had each pretty much decided our online dating days were over. How we could be so sure, so quickly, is a story for another time.
Now we were highlighting streets on a paper map so we’d know when to pounce if any of those houses went up for sale. The real estate market had cooled some as summer heated up, but only a little. It was still the kind of market where if you wanted a nice house you had to be there on the day it hit the market with a fat wad of money in each hand.
“Wouldn’t it be great to find a house in walking distance to Weaver Street? Or even better, to build one?” I said to Becky as I lurched my car through tree-lined streets, with one eye in the rearview for cars that might want to get by.
I was referring not to actual Weaver Street but to Weaver Street Market, the cultural centerpiece of Carrboro where people gathered to shop for groceries or fill plates at the food bar for dining under the giant oak trees out front. On Sunday mornings bands play live music there, and I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that more Carrboro residents go to Weaver Street on Sunday mornings than to church. I had worshipped there countless times over pancakes and Mexican scrambled eggs.
Becky agreed. “It’d be amazing to live so close to Benj and Rachel” she added, referring to her brother and sister-in-law who lived on a street just behind Armadillo Grill, another downtown Carrboro fixture. Becky and Benjamin are close. She’s the only person on earth allowed to call him “Benj” and I’m pretty sure they talk on the phone every day.
We’d arrived at Weaver Street and decided to hit the adjacent neighborhoods, slowing to take in the quant mill houses the town is known for: impossibly small structures—tiny houses way before tiny houses were a thing—built for Carrboro’s cotton mill workers at the at the start of the 1900s. Houses are packed tight around here, on some streets like cereal boxes on a store shelf, and the odds of finding a vacant lot are impossibly long. But this was our impossibly lucky day.
Someone else had managed to build a house on an empty lot in this neighborhood—I had watched it go up with envy. We were driving by it now. What I hadn’t noticed before is that the house took up only half of a double lot. But Becky noticed it right away. “There’s a For Sale By Owner sign!”
I slowed to the car to a stop and we both jumped out. The grass was nearly as tall as we were, so we couldn’t see the entire lot and hesitated to go romping through it just yet, but we took down the web address on the sign. As we drove away Becky tapped the URL into her phone, we texted the owner, and set up a meeting.
The next day we pulled up again at the lot and parked. There was now a path mowed in a giant figure eight through the tall grass, and shortly after we arrived a spectacled man with close cropped hair rode up on a small bicycle.
“Hi, I’m Chris.”
We introduced ourselves and thanked him for cutting the path.
“While I was mowing I found a dead deer back there,” he quickly offered up. “The smell was awful and I had to drag it to the curb myself so the town would come pick it up. I’m glad they got here before you did!”
As were we.
Chris had lived in the area for many years, so it didn’t take long for him and Becky, who grew up here, to identify people they both knew. He and his wife had bought half the double lot with the couple who now lived in the recently finished house on the northern half—the one I watched go up. There had been a 1950s brick house here, in bad repair, which the two couples tore down. When Chris and his wife decided to renovate their current house just a few blocks away, rather than build a new one on their half, they put the lot up for sale.
We strode around the path, listening to Chris tell us how great it was to walk to everything in Carrboro, especially the restaurants. “Some nights we just start walking toward Chapel Hill until we smell something that draws us in. It’s pretty sweet.”
Carrboro is adjacent to Chapel Hill, home to the main campus of the University of North Carolina. The college town is known for being one of the more liberal outposts in the southern state, much to the frustration of conservative politicians, of which there are more than a few. The legendary Republican Senator Jesse Helms, when the state was debating where to put a new zoo in the 1970s, is said to have asked, “Couldn’t we just build a fence around Chapel Hill?” Carrboro, just to the west, is even more liberal. “A little to the left of Chapel Hill,” a sign here once said.
The next day, Wednesday, I called the town hall and spoke with zoning officer James Thomas. He confirmed it was a buildable lot but warned us there was a stream buffer along one side, on either side of a drainage ditch. “You can’t build within the buffer,” he stressed. We’d seen the ditch and didn’t think it would be a problem. On Thursday we gave Chris and his wife a cashier’s check and executed an offer to purchase.
It was done. Becky and I, eight weeks after meeting, and four days after first laying eyes on the lot, had committed to building a custom home, something neither of us had ever done before nor even dreamt we might. The next several weeks consisted of both easy things, like securing hundreds of thousands of dollars of financing and choosing a builder to entrust it to, and difficult things like convincing our families we weren’t out of our gourds.
We hired a local design-build firm to put a house our lot. In September, their architect, after just one meeting with Becky and me, produced plans we loved at first sight. It was a craftsman bungalow with a big front porch–we found ourselves looking at it several times a day. The firm’s owner, our “builder” in construction parlance, told us if they submitted the permit application by end of year then construction could start in February. Neither of those things, it turned out, would happen.
By early March we were growing more frustrated by the day. What could be taking so long? Then frustration gave way to the gratitude when an impossibly small creature, a coronavirus named SARS-Cov-2, began causing the infectious disease COVID-19. It had already wreaked havoc in China and was now grinding life on the rest of the planet to a halt. Restaurants closed (the Weaver Street lawn was eerily empty even on beautiful Sunday mornings), college students all came home, and toilet paper disappeared from grocery stores. I began working from home and set up a desk at a window that looked out on the local health clinic, where I watched them erect a tent for drive-through screenings. Seemingly overnight, life had turned upside down and outside in.
Nobody knew how bad this was going to get. Becky and I had to wonder, if we started construction now, could we finish? Would workers be available? How about all the materials? We had visions of a half-built house rotting in the sun for months. Or years. And what if one or both of us lost our jobs? All that cash we were about to pour into a house might come in very handy.
We put the project on hold. “I’d probably do the same,” our builder offered up glumly when we called him with the news. We told him we were postponing for two months, knowing it might be much longer. It was depressing, pulling the plug like that. But, we decided, it was better to be sad than scared.
Then, with the pressure off, we took a few days to size up the situation. Yes, if the worst of our predictions all came true, then Becky and I would be, as a learned economist might say, really in the shit. But it might not be so bad. There was uncertainty.
There was no uncertainty, however, on the likely effect of pulling the plug on spending hundreds of thousands of dollars. Construction workers would need to look elsewhere for work. Our orders of cinder blocks and two-by-fours and everything else would be cancelled. The national economy was facing its worst crisis since the Great Depression, and we had control over just this tiny little bit of it. But it was our bit.
We might get hurt if we proceed but others will certainly hurt if we don’t. Fuck it, we decided. We called our builder back not two weeks after postponing. Let’s build this thing, we told him, full speed ahead. We could hear his sigh of relief. “This will be one special house,” he said.
