ON THE LIGHTER SIDE

This is a yarn about a little country called Romania. It's a fifth the size of Ontario, has twice as many people, and an equal number of cell phones. (I swear, the people there have phones glued to their ears.) This is only a windshield farm tour where rubbernecking is permitted because my son is doing the driving, at least for this part of the journey. It's a grand fall day with the sun shining and the temperatures requiring only a light jacket.

We start off from the Hungarian capital of Budapest, where my son now lives. We head southeast of town and across the alfold, farm country that's a cross between Saskatchewan and southwestern Ontario: big flat fields bounded by drainage ditches and dotted with grain elevators and at least one brewery. Soon we're at the border crossing on the road towards the Romanian city of Arad. Now that the wall is down and the USSR has taken their toys and disintegrated, you'd think this crossing would be a cakewalk, but think again - the folks keeping an eye on that imaginary line make sure their customs agents check every vehicle. No duties are being collected; they're just trying to stop the movement of contraband. (The hassle at the border could also have something to do with frosty relations between the two countries: when the great powers redrew the map of Europe back in 1920, Romania made off with Hungary's eastern half, where we're headed, and even today many Hungarians are none too happy about this.) An hour and half later and with a clean bill of health for both our vehicle and ourselves, we exit the European Union and press on into Transylvania.

We cruise through the industrial wastelands of Arad, dodging car-sized potholes and gawking at the blackened smokestacks and cooling towers littering the landscape. Massive, rusted water pipes twist along and over the roads, their shoddy insulation hanging in shreds. Not a pretty picture. But then we hit the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains. It's beautiful countryside, with many of the hills used as pastures for the millions of sheep they have there. Dotting the hillsides are mini haystacks built around a pole to keep them from sliding down the hill. It's apparent that the hay is cut, dried and then collected by hand with forks and stacked on these piles that might receive the bounty of a quarter acre or just about as far as the worker could walk with his fork full. The sheep apparently over-winter on these hillsides, munching down the stored hay. Weaving our way between horse-drawn carriages, which by now outnumber cars, we pass through village after village, each a piece of the ethnic jigsaw puzzle that is Transylvania: one town is Romanian, the next Hungarian, and the next kind of Germanlooking but actually full of gypsies.

Then we come upon some large stretches of land where the topography changes to resemble Corn Country Ontario. There's deep, fertile black topsoil, supporting some darn good looking corn crops. The pattern, though, looks like something from the early part of the last century back home. Little strips of corn,S to 10 acres at most, divided by other small strips of stubble fields left from a cereal crop harvested earlier in the year. The corn is fully ripened and waiting for the combine. But while Brand P and other common North American hybrid corn company signs stand guard over these strips, there's no combine in sight. There's just a lot of people, as well as some horses at work. Men, women and children are busy taking down shocks and hand-harvesting the corn. They throw the ears into the horse-drawn wagons with boxes capable of carrying 20, maybe 40 bushels each. These same wagons would deliver the crop to tiny little corn cribs in the local villages, and from there they would be used for feeding pigs and cattle in yards that are integral to the villages.

We stay overnight in one of those tiny villages where, on the main corner of the dirt street, there's a pub with four little tables and a bar covered with cigarettes and plastic bottles of the local hooch. While I don't speak Romanian, I do speak farm and I'm able to talk about the brands of seed they plant, which ones they liked, and what the harvest was like. The sun sets, and on the way back to the house we happen upon an endless train of thousands upon thousands of sheep coming into the village for the night. There's no sign of the shepherd, but every once in a while a sheepdog runs alongside the horde, nipping and barking and looking pleased with his job.

Travelogue over. What I witnessed in Transylvania is a people that have become re-entrenched in their peasant style of living. You'll see why in a minute.

Romania was getting back on its feet after the Second World War, keeping the Soviets at bay and rebuilding with the help of financing from outside interests. But then things got out of kilter. Nicolae Ceausescu, a peasant himself, ruled the country with an iron fist from the 60's to 1989. The megalomaniacal dictator wanted to drag his country out of the past and build a brave new socialist paradise, and so he set out to destroy the peasant way of life. His 'systemization' policies had a big impact on farm country. While the heavy equipment was demolishing the classic architectural jewels in downtown Bucharest, Ceausescu's forces went out and torched these peasant villages and the people were forced to move to newly-built towns that supported collective farms. Romanian agriculture took a turn for the worse, with the morale of these newly acquired farm workers dropping lower than a nit's butt.

Ceausescu had some weird ideas, including paying off the national debt all at once, thus plunging the country into depression. Commodities such as corn were used to payoff the debt and as a result, food was in short supply. In response, Ceausescu told the people they were getting too fat and instated harsh food rationing called the 'rational eating programme'. Problem solved.

I think the wall coming down in other parts of the Eastern Bloc had little to do with the demise of Ceausescu. The people revolted and the boss left town to hide. They found him, though, and he and his wife were summarily tried and shot on Christmas Day in 1989.

With that problem out of the way, the food system had to rebuild itself. Some of the collective farms still exist, but many of these agrarian people just headed back to their old villages and began doing what they know best: taking care of themselves first, in a sustainable food producing system that's good for the countryside and good for the country. You can imagine doing all that fieldwork by hand requires a large labour force. Keeps a lot of people busy and a lot of people from revolting. And they are all well fed!