Other people’s words are just much more interesting than my own.

Here’s some more from the archives:

[me] “So, what do you think about the changes on the island in the last few years–the wheat farming and everything?”

[other person] “I think it’s pretty much the best of both worlds right now.  We went from a farming and fishing scene to a tourism scene where there was almost NO farming, and now we have both. And I see it as something that both employs local people, brings money into the community, and gives us . . .  free advertising, in essence. I see it as we need something on this island that we can export. Because if we’re all fighting for the same money on the ferry, there’s no getting away, no vacationing. And that’s one of the reasons farming died out up here, because it went from in essence working seven days a week, working the land and all the battles that go into that, to working eight hours a day and going home. And it’s much easier.

“But, the land was all sitting fallow up here and a lot of people were wondering why, with all this land, what’s wrong? And now the land is being worked again, and when you have your farmland worked up you get a tax break. So that’s helped, maybe, prolong the ability of people to keep land in the family or keeping it together so it doesn’t have to be divided up and sold. So I have a hard time finding anything negative about the wheat situation. But it’s inevitable up here,  in this community, there’s always a few … no matter what anybody does, there’s always somebody who hopes they fail. Whether it’s from old grudges, old family feuds, jealousies, or their gene pool is just negative.

“We’ve lost, sometimes, the ability up here for people to work together—to say, OK I’ll back you even if this won’t help me, because next time you may help me and the next thing may benefit me and not benefit you. It’s real hard up here for people to see that. They want an immediate gratification in a way that’s going to reward them or they’re either against it or they’re threatened by it, or jealous, or I don’t know.”