Plane to Plane

Vermont countryside, early 1900s. Two men of different social class and age—a college boy and an older farm hand—hoe a corn field and have a conversation. Dick, the younger worker, prizes his formal education and finds it superior to knowledge gained from life- and work-experience. Pike, for his part, prizes his fifty years of tilling the soil and all the wisdom he has gained from it. Both men understand their subject, learning, though they seem not to understand each other. These two “planes”—the one philosophical, even literary, and the other straightforward and commonsensical—run parallel in this script, but they never meet. A third plane, represented by a doctor passing in the background, merges the practical with the learned and becomes a subject of debate by the two laborers. In the end, as the doctor passes out of view, Dick and Pike walk back down the field—reconciled to hoe another row, in silence or in speech.