When I was eleven or twelve years old, my father told me to plow a field.
That sentence probably needs some explaining today. This was in the early 1950s, when my family lived on a farm outside Durham, North Carolina. Daddy had bought the property after World War II, and Mother christened it Rancho Eno, presumably because every North Carolina tobacco farm needs a touch of Spanish grandeur. We raised tobacco and other crops, kept livestock, and had both a tractor and a mule named Molly.
Children worked. I don’t remember anybody holding a family conference to determine whether I wished to participate.
The field Daddy wanted plowed was about half a mile from our house, along Hamlin Road. He owned an older house there that we rented out, and I suspect it had once been the main farmhouse before he bought the property and Mother decided to build a new house elsewhere on the farm. An old, empty tenant shack stood nearby. The field ran along the road beside a section of woods.
It was summertime, around tobacco-planting time, and Daddy told me to get Molly and plow the field. Then, as far as this story is concerned, Daddy disappeared.
A Boy, a Mule and a Missing Plowline
I don’t mean that anything mysterious happened to him. I simply don’t know where he went that day. He may have been somewhere else on the farm, or gone somewhere on business, or doing one of the hundreds of other things a farmer had to do. What mattered to me was that I had been given a job and he wasn’t around when I ran into a problem.
The plow I was supposed to use was what we called a walking-bottom plow. Molly pulled it while I walked behind, holding the handles and trying to keep the blade cutting through the soil where it belonged. I also had to control Molly, and for that I needed long lines running from her harness back to me.
I needed a plowline.
I couldn’t find one.
I looked around the barn and everywhere else I could think of, but there was no plowline. I had Molly. I had the plow. I had a field Daddy had told me to plow. I was missing one thing necessary to put the three together.
I don’t remember being particularly distressed about this. It was simply a problem that needed solving.
Since the Hamlin Road field was beyond our house, I looked in the garage as I went by. Lo and behold, there was a new plowline. It was considerably longer than I needed, although I didn’t know how long it actually was. That particular piece of information arrived later and rather loudly.
I cut off enough to make the lines I needed, hooked up Molly, and went to the field.
Then I plowed it.
More than seventy years later, I can still see something of that field. I remember the woods and the long stretch of dirt ahead of me. I have an image of the first run as Molly starts forward, the plow catches the earth, and the soil begins turning behind it.
Then most of the day’s work disappears.
Plowing an entire field behind a mule must have taken quite a while. I would have walked back and forth along those rows repeatedly, controlling Molly and wrestling the plow through the dirt, but I don’t remember doing it. I remember starting, and I know I finished.
The field got plowed.
That was what Daddy had told me to do.
Then Daddy Came Home
I don’t remember the moment Daddy discovered the cut plowline, but I remember enough of what followed to know that he was furious. That was when I learned that the new line had been forty feet long.
I had taken a brand-new forty-foot plowline and cut off the amount I needed. Apparently there was a reason the full length mattered. Daddy had grown up farming and knew considerably more about mules, plows and plowlines than I did, so there may have been an excellent reason that forty-foot line needed to remain forty feet long.
I never learned what it was.
Daddy punished me by whipping me with the remaining piece of the line.
Getting whipped wasn’t particularly unusual in my childhood. I got switchings, usually with a long thin twig cut from a bush, and sometimes a belt was used. I still carry a tiny piece of one of those switches in my left leg. Most of those punishments have blurred together over the years. I know they happened and I know they hurt, but I don’t remember what most of them were for.
I remember what the plowline whipping was for.
More precisely, I remember not understanding what I had done wrong until after I had done it.
Nobody had told me not to cut the new line. Nobody had told me that its full length served some purpose I would destroy by shortening it. I had been given an assignment, encountered something that prevented me from completing it, found something that solved the immediate problem, and finished the assigned job.
Then I discovered there had been another rule.
I had broken it without knowing it even existed.
Something Else Just Occurred to Me
Thinking about this now has caused another piece of the memory to surface.
I don’t remember Daddy ever having me plow another entire field with Molly.
That doesn’t prove it never happened. There are enormous portions of my childhood I don’t remember. But this is the only complete field behind a mule that comes readily to mind, and anyway we had a tractor. Daddy used a gang plow behind it, which was obviously a considerably more efficient way of turning dirt than sending a boy out to walk behind Molly turning one row at a time.
So now I find myself wondering why he gave me that particular assignment.
Perhaps there was a perfectly practical reason the tractor couldn’t be used. Perhaps Daddy wanted me to learn how to plow with a mule. Perhaps it was some sort of test. Or perhaps he simply needed to keep an eleven- or twelve-year-old boy occupied while he did something else.
I don’t know, and I don’t want to improve the memory by pretending that I do.
At the time, none of those questions existed for me anyway. Daddy said plow the field, so I went to plow the field. The questions arrived many years later.
One of them has become considerably more interesting than why Daddy wanted the field plowed.
What Did Daddy Know That I Didn’t?
Daddy and I could have stood in that garage looking at exactly the same forty feet of rope and seen two entirely different things.
He knew what the plowline was for. He knew why it was that length. Presumably he knew what usefulness would be lost if some damned kid cut a chunk off it.
I didn’t have any of that information and I only saw the missing piece of the job Daddy had given me.
Neither of us had to be stupid, careless or unreasonable to reach completely different conclusions. We simply didn’t possess the same information.
That distinction didn’t mean much to the boy who got whipped, but it means considerably more to the old git remembering him.
I’ve spent a large part of my adult life giving other people things to do. I’ve owned businesses, managed employees, dealt with borrowers and business owners, and built procedures intended to let people accomplish things without having to ask me what to do every five minutes. Somewhere along the way, I became rather interested in giving people the tools and information they needed to succeed.
I can’t tell you that this happened because Daddy whipped me with a plowline. That would turn a complicated lifetime into a much neater story than the evidence permits.
But now the two pieces are sitting beside each other, and I can see a relationship I didn’t see before.
When we give somebody an assignment, we know everything we know about it. That’s such a ridiculous sentence that it hardly seems worth writing, but it creates a problem. We can easily assume that the other person knows some of it too.
The instruction sounds complete because it is complete inside our own head.
“Plow the field” sounded complete.
It wasn’t complete to the boy who couldn’t find a plowline.
The Problem You Don’t Know You’re Solving
For years I could have described what happened that day as a simple problem-and-solution story. I needed a plowline, found one, cut off what I needed, and got the job done. Unfortunately, my solution created another problem.
Now I think there was something else going on.
There were two problems.
The one I knew about was: How do I plow this field when I can’t find a plowline?
I solved that one.
The other was: How do I complete the assignment without damaging something whose purpose I don’t understand?
I couldn’t solve that problem because I didn’t know it existed.
Perhaps I should have waited for Daddy. Perhaps I should have searched longer. Perhaps I should somehow have known not to cut a piece of new equipment without permission. Perhaps Daddy should have told me where the proper line was, or afterward explained what I should do the next time I encountered something similar.
Probably several of those things are true.
What interests me now isn’t deciding which one of us should win an argument seventy-some years after the fact. It’s what happens when somebody is expected to make a good decision without possessing a piece of information that makes the right decision obvious to somebody else.
I suspect that happens rather often.
A manager knows why a procedure exists. The employee sees an unnecessary extra step. A parent knows why something is dangerous. The child sees something interesting to climb. Somebody who has done a job for twenty years says, “Everybody knows you don’t do that,” without realizing that the person standing in front of him has been doing it for twenty minutes.
Sometimes the rule is important. Sometimes the rule is obsolete. Sometimes the person who breaks it discovers a better way.
But until the knowledge behind the rule travels from one person to another, the fellow trying to solve the immediate problem may be standing in the garage looking at forty feet of perfectly useful rope.
And wondering why in hell he shouldn’t cut off what he needs.
Where’s Your Forty-Foot Plowline?
There may be a forty-foot plowline somewhere in your own history.
Maybe you were the person who got in trouble for violating a rule nobody had bothered to tell you. Maybe you were criticized at work, marked down at school, punished at home or simply told you had used poor judgment when, from what you knew at the time, your decision made perfectly good sense.
Or perhaps you’re on the other side of the rope.
Maybe you’ve given somebody an assignment and later discovered, to your amazement, that they didn’t know something you thought everybody knew. You may even have caught yourself saying those dangerous words:
“You should have known better.”
Should they?
That’s not a rhetorical question. Sometimes the answer may be yes.
But I’d like to know how they were supposed to know.
If you’ve got a forty-foot-plowline story, tell us about it. Tell us what happened, what you knew at the time, and what the other person apparently knew that you didn’t. Or tell us about the time you were Daddy and discovered that an instruction you thought was perfectly clear had a hole in it large enough to drive a tractor through.
There may be something useful hiding in those stories.
Because somewhere between giving people enough freedom to solve problems and giving them enough information not to create new ones, there has to be a better solution than whipping them with the rope.