August 15, 2009

I am not too sure what to think about this, but I will share this story with you and let you think about it for yourself…

We called it the “pot plane”. There was a small single engine plane that flew very low over our farm almost every week. Not just a fly by, but it circled three, four, and sometimes five times. It then repeated the same circling maneuvers over other properties in the area. It continued its circling patterns right down the highway.

We suspected that big brother was looking to see if any of us were growing marijuana on our farms, in our backyards, or in the wooded areas around here, hence we began calling it the “pot plane”. I doubt they were counting our horses, or appreciating the colorful view of our free ranging chickens from up there…Every so often, some one does get busted in the area.

This year I left the white plastic on my hoop house, where I store perennials over the winter and begin vegetables for spring. Normally I remove the plastic once the weather warms up, but this year it stayed cooler than usual, so I decided to just leave it on.

I came to accept the circling plane each week, wondering what they were really doing up there. When it came over, I am sure they saw me go in and out of my hoop house with a watering can to water my daylilies, spinach, and garlic sets, although they could not have seen inside the hoop house to know that that was what I was watering in there. I often wondered if that made me suspect. That is, if they really were pot cops.

After a few weeks of this, I came home from work on a Saturday afternoon and found that the white plastic had been torn from the hoop house, exposing the perennials and vegetable plants inside. No one had been home that day to see what had happened. There was not a storm or wind that day. But there was the plastic – ripped all apart, though still attached to the batter boards. There was nothing left to do but take it all off.

Since that day, the plane stopped circling my farm…. I haven’t seen it since. I can’t help but to wonder if it all was a coincidence, or if someone needed a better view?

It does give me something to think about…