The Fence Tells You Where the Property Line Is. It Don't Tell You Much Else.

Sat on the porch the other evening watching the light go flat across the fields, and I got to thinking about fences. Not any fence in particular. Just fences as a concept. The way they tell you exactly where one thing ends and another begins, but don't tell you a blessed thing about what's growing on either side, or what the soil is like, or whether the crops are doing well or just hanging on.

That's what the jobs numbers feel like to me. Every month the government tells us how many positions got added, how many got cut, what the unemployment rate did. Precise as a property line. And about as useful, if what you actually want to know is what's happening to the people inside the fence.

Big Earl at the grain elevator reads the commodity reports the way Pastor Holmgren reads the Psalms, which is to say with great conviction and personal application. Earl can tell you the price of corn down to the decimal and give you a forty-minute opinion on what it means for spring planting. What Earl cannot tell you, and will admit this if you catch him in the right mood, is what it feels like to be the one whose whole year hinges on that number. To stand in a cold kitchen running the math on whether the tank gets filled or the fridge does. The report doesn't go that far. Reports don't do kitchens.

Now, I know somebody's going to say, Bobby, the numbers don't lie. And that's fair. They don't. But not lying and telling the whole truth are two different things, and we've been confusing them for years.

Take the Lindqvist twins. Been feuding since, well, nobody's entirely sure, possibly including them. You could put together a real thorough spreadsheet on the Lindqvijst situation, dates and incidents and acreage disputed, and you still wouldn't know the first thing about why two brothers who used to share a tractor now won't share a fence line. Some things resist the column format.

Aunt Vi has a gift for reading between the numbers. She can look at what a family brings to the church potluck and tell you more about their finances than any quarterly report. A homemade hot dish means things are stable. A store-bought rotisserie chicken means things are tight but proud. A bag of dinner rolls and an apology means somebody's having a real hard go of it. Vi's been tracking this data set for forty years and her margin of error is negligible. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has not called her. Their loss.

The county fair was supposed to happen. The official explanation involved a scheduling disagreement among the organizers. The unofficial explanation, which everybody in Chamberlain's Bend understood without needing it said out loud, was that the money wasn't there. Not enough of it, anyway, and the kind that was there had other places to be. The numbers that year would've shown you something. They wouldn't have shown you that.

Pastor Holmgren got a related lesson this fall when the church basement committee sat down to plan the bazaar. They had a number in mind, a reasonable number, arrived at through what I'm told was a fairly civilized meeting by basement committee standards. Then the boiler went. Suddenly the number meant something completely different than it had the week before. Same number. Different reality underneath it. That's the thing about figures. They're fixed and the world isn't, and eventually the world wins.

The Federal Reserve is going to do what the Federal Reserve does. They've got tools and models and people with advanced degrees who've thought about this longer than I've thought about most things. I don't begrudge them any of that. Smart people with good data are not nothing. But the economy they're measuring and the economy that Chamberlain's Bend runs on are, I suspect, cousins at best. Ours runs on whether somebody shows up with a chainsaw after the storm. Whether the ladies' auxiliary covers the co-pay when the insurance falls short. Whether Earl extends a little informal credit to a farmer he's known for thirty years, no paperwork, just a handshake and a reasonable expectation. None of that makes it into the report. It's not nothing, though. It might be most of it.

What I'm getting at, and I realize I took the long road to get here, is that numbers are a starting point and we've been treating them like a destination. The jobs report tells you the shape of the fence. It doesn't tell you what's struggling to grow inside it, or who's been tending it, or who just stopped because they ran out of reasons to try. Those are the questions that matter and they require a different kind of looking.

When the next report comes out and the commentators start explaining what it means, I'd suggest holding the number lightly. Ask what's behind it. Ask whose kitchen it doesn't account for. Ask what Aunt Vi would make of it, if she were there, which she isn't, but she'd have a view.

The fence tells you where the line is. The line is not the land.

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