Rural “Bliss” and Other Lies My Realtor Told Me
I remember the day I decided to move to the country. I was sitting in a high-rise apartment, listening to a car alarm blaring at 3:00 AM, thinking, “I need peace. I need nature. I need to wake up to the gentle lowing of cattle and the smell of fresh-cut hay.” Fast forward six months: I am standing in a knee-deep puddle of something that definitely isn’t mud, being stared down by a chicken that has more confidence than I do, and screaming at the top of my lungs: “I HATE IT HERE!”
The Romanticized Version vs. The Reality
People on Instagram make #FarmLife look like a slow-motion montage of wearing linen shirts and carrying baskets of organic eggs. They don’t show you the part where the “gentle lowing” of cattle is actually a 1,200-pound beast named Bessie screaming for snacks at 4:15 AM like an air-raid siren.
The “fresh-cut hay”? That’s just a giant pile of allergens designed to make your eyes swell shut until you look like you’ve gone twelve rounds with Mike Tyson.
The “City Slicker” Learning Curve
When you’re a comedian living on a farm, your audience changes. I used to perform for people who paid for overpriced cocktails; now, my main demographic is a group of sheep who look at me with pure, unadulterated judgment. There is no heckler more brutal than a donkey. You can’t “roast” a donkey. He’s seen it all. He knows your credit score is dropping as fast as the barn roof.
Every task on a farm is a comedy of errors. I tried to fix a fence last week. In the city, “fixing something” means calling a guy or watching a 2-minute YouTube video. On the farm, fixing a fence is a three-day psychological war involving rusted wire, a hammer that mysteriously disappears, and a cow that waits for you to finish just so she can lean on it and break it again.
The Smell of “Success”
Let’s talk about the smell. People call it “earthy.” That is a lie. It’s the scent of a thousand generations of manure fermented in the sun. I’ve reached a point where I don’t even wash my “farm jeans” anymore because the dirt is the only thing holding the denim together. I went into town for a coffee last week, and the barista asked if I “worked with compost.” I told her, “No, I just live in a nightmare.”
Why I’m Still Here (For Now)
Despite the mud, the early hours, and the fact that a rooster named Kevin has a personal vendetta against my shins, there is a weird, twisted humor in the struggle. There’s something funny about being outsmarted by a pig. It keeps you humble. It gives you “material” that you just can’t get from a subway commute.
I might hate the manual labor, and I definitely hate the lack of Uber Eats, but at least the stakes are real. In the city, a “crisis” is a dead phone battery. On the farm, a crisis is the tractor being stuck in a ditch while a storm rolls in. It’s miserable, it’s exhausting, and it’s the funniest thing that’s ever happened to me.
