Into the eye of the storm

Bad, blurry photograph taken to legitimize my existence to you, dear reader, thus proving that I am, in fact, at work

During the second week of my (genuine, not textual) solitude here, I have committed to putting a new plant in the ground each day, no matter that we're already into July, no matter that I am unable to commit to a place enough to be sure that I won't be in Laos when these things fruit. Or, more likely, that they'll freeze in the middle of fruiting, which breaks my heart every year, and every year I plunge headlong right back into it. Nevertheless: I am planting.

Today I gave in and went to the greenhouse, where seedlings are half-price, which means I am late but not hopeless. The greenhouse, a tubular structure with sheeted plastic flapping in the breeze, was empty save of robust seedlings. I took what I wanted and left my cash beneath a pen near the door. That's a small town for you.

This fall, at least, we will have cucumbers, squash, and peppers, those warm-weather vegetables I always procrastinate starting. And I came home and dug the cucumbers right into the ground. I have so much more ownership being the only one responsible for doing everything—even taping the hose where the lawnmower ran over it, even skewering the sprinkler into the ground, even missing the roots and frying leaves of my plants this morning, despite knowing better. If I don't do it, it doesn't get done, and if I do it badly, that's only my fault, too.

So every day I go dig something into the ground. I use a trowel and s three-pronged pitchfork that probably has a fancier name to dig out weeds. I am combating my tendency to work for twelve hours one day and do nothing for eleven, when I know, truly, that it's better for my soul to work an hour a day for twelve days in a row. Consistency is the magic, ephemeral spell.

Thunderstorms within your purity

Arugula, lettuce, radishes, and radish greens

Dinner tonight is more or less the garden's first harvest. Arugula, lettuce, and radish piled high on a bed of grocer chicken and tortilla. Someday it'll be my chicken, my wheat (unless the catamaran gets to me first). The first week I was here, the vast quantity of what remained to be done immobilized me, but this week I've been attacking the wild in manageable chunks.

Every single day past the equinox always feels too late, even February when I could be starting beet seedlings, and in fact it's never too late. I still have all of July to plant late crops, and every day I can hack away at another corner, and harvest enough to eat. In December I can harvest jerusalem artichoke and kale (unless the catamarans get me). So for the last three days in a row I've had dirt under my nails and deer flies biting my ears.

I can't explain how happy it makes me to have brand new plants in my body for dinner. As always I'm also towing around a trail of guilt, as for anything good I accomplish I experience simultaneous pride for my accomplishment and guilt for my pride, but then if I abandon my farm to weeds I feel guilty about that, too. The psychologists of joy attest that gratitude is linked to joy—but I feel guilt rather than gratitude: guilt for what's good, for showing off, or being cheesy, or bragging.

Well: arugula vitamins banish guilt with their peppery verve.

I think sometimes about how we old sailors have managed to swallow the anchor so thoroughly, the old adage about sailors who leave the sea. They swallow the hook, and we've beaten ours into a plough-share. It's the same kind of nesting, the digging of the hoe into the dirt, the way an anchor buries itself in sand—but there's a feeling that the earth is swallowing us too, as we dig our roots into it, or struggle to get away. The dark ground is a blank slate on which I paint with tools, nesting seedlings and making rows, and the future is, too—blank, unknowable, and potentially delicious.

I'd forgotten work today

Asparagus, first year, gone to seed--you can see the rest sprouting in the distance

The asparagus is growing. I wrote about it last year, when we rooted the year-old octopus-shaped slips of plants, as a symbol of permanence. If we plant asparagus, that means we're staying. Perennials mean that one is perennially rooted in one place.

Or so I believe. The asparagus is going to seed, as it's supposed to in its second year, although I've been desperate to sample some. I tried one bite, raw, of a piece the cat knocked off.

Maybe what I like about impermanence is how its a blank slate on which to draw. The unknown elements in the future.

A farm is a new adventure each season. Based on three years of experience now, I still have no idea what to predict. Certain crops will fail utterly. Others we will drown in and have to throw away. It's impossible to know what will succeed and what will fail, but we have to keep trying, with each, with utmost faith.

The perennial garden grows every year—this year I'm able to identify handily the jerusalem artichoke and echinacea coming up, and the rhubarb is sprouting little alien brains by the day. I may even get a pie this year. The fiddleheads are going gangbusters, and I still haven't made my way out to collect any. The rhythm grows familiar.

Last year at this time I was nesting the asparagus roots in the ground. It's almost a prayer, planting things like that, entrusting them to this speck of earth. Trusting myself to husband them. Trusting they will bear fruit in time, in two years. Next year, we can eat asparagus omelets all spring.

And still the unknown beckons.

The way that Mama raised us

At least we managed to get the spring garden in this week, and the asparagus is coming up, the asparagus whose roots went in last year, and now the jerusalem artichoke and echinacea in the perennial garden are making their appearance alongside the horseradish and rhubarb. It sounds impressive. Maybe it is impressive. Already it's easy to see how much farther we are than at this time last year.

Every year it gets better, more accomplished, more precise. Last week peas, radish, chard, kale, and carrots all went in. It's actually early enough for a lot more, but it's also already easy to begin to wear out on digging up weeds and take a breather. I'm starting seeds in the glassroom, just basil and lettuce, but Thai basil this year.

It's easy to believe that already that's enough. I know that just the half-row of chard will be enough to keep me in greens through October. And the amount of carrots that got put in has quadrupled—in addition to all carrots planted last year that lasted in the crisper through last month. The north garden can be filled with the six pounds of onion sets I bought at Maine Potato Growers this week.

I begin to see how farmers specialize. If the only goal was growing garlic, all that would have to be done now is weeding, cultivating, harvesting, preserving—a job enough, but when you do that for every vegetable you want to eat, it's a lot more work. I'm trying to commit this year not to judge my success against the ideal, but just to try to do a little each day. It's amazing how much I accomplish with a consistent hour. But isn't it the way with everything?

Talking about

K. made us BLTs for lunch today. His obsession with bacon annoys me, to the point where the smell or taste of bacon grease begins to turn my stomach, but he can still do wonders with the meat nuggets themselves. The sandwich was a slice of storebought Canadian greenhouse tomato, a sprinkling of bacon nuggets from breakfast, and piles and piles of lettuce I cut in the garden. Last night was Thai-style tom yum (shout out to my brother, who bought us the tom yum paste) with kohlrabi leaves and cilantro from the garden.

So, see, it's not a complete disaster. That's the thing. I'm constantly panicking about the state of some vegetable or another, when really the thing to do is just to eat it. Even if it's beginning to bolt. The sandwich was exquisite, maybe the platonic ideal of a BLT, something worth sacrificing swine for. Who knew a BLT was designed to be a salad on a bun, with a sprinkling of meat bits?

It's interesting to me how my expectations for myself and for the world moderate. I'm even becoming less of a purist about local food. Of course, the world would be better off if many more people would grow a much higher percentage of their own food. I'm proof that it's easy enough, and it wouldn't be bad to have some chickens scratching around for eggs and meat or a swine in the shed, either. But my tomatoes from Canada I will not give up and I refuse to feel guilty about.

There are all sorts of ways to build and design a more healthy society, but I think there's room for luxury, too. We're only human. We need things like melons in winter shipped from Mexico, like greenhouse-grown tomatoes for all months except this one, and then our tomatoes are still weeks away. The sooner begin to turn our minds around to how we can power this global village in a way that doesn't corrupt our atmosphere any more than it's already been corrupted the better.

Fate

The beaver pond mysteriously drained itself two days ago in the middle of the night.  Turns out there were trout in it.

I wrote about fate recently, this quote, about moira. I've been thinking, among other things, that may be the best name for a boat, ever.

The Sun ran an interview with the late James Hillman in its July issue, a meaty conversation with an iconoclast, and points he made continue to nourish me. Hillman:

...believed each individual has a purpose or calling in life that reveals itself in childhood and reappears, often as a set of so-called symptoms, until it is heeded. Harnessing this potential is what he considered the great mortal, and moral, challenge. He once said our duty is not to rise above life but to “grow down into it.”

He spoke about something called “acorn theory,” saying:

...it's more of a myth than a theory. It's Plato's myth: that you come into the world with a destiny, although he uses the word paradigm instead of destiny. The acorn theory says that there is an individual image that belongs to your soul.

The same myth can be found in the kabala. The Mormons have it. The West Africans have it. The Hindus and the Buddhists have it in different ways. They tie it more to reincarnatioan and karma, but you come into the world with a particular destiny. Native Americans have it very strongly. So all these cultures all over the world have this basic understanding of human existence. Only American psychology doesn't have it.... Calling can refer not only to ways of doing—meaning work—but also to ways of being. Take being a friend. Goethe said that his friend Eckermann was born for friendship.

And one last quote:

To show one's face is part of having the courage to show who one is. And coming to terms with your own face takes a lifetime. Just think how, when you were twelve or sixteen, you wished you looked different. And that's true for everyone; even the most perfect, beautiful boy or girl is dissatisfied. So why is that? It can't just be that you don't look like the model on the magazine cover. It's something else. You haven't yet accepted your fate, who you are.

Everything uncovering itself to me lately has been about destiny. Like this Ted lecture:

I love that idea, that there's a germ inside of each of us, waiting to sprout if we but feed it correctly.

This year, for the first time, I was able to start seeds. I can really tell you how to do it, in one of these how-to posts I never do. Use six-packs. Fill them with a blend of garden soil, peat moss, and potting mix (any soil from the dollar or hardware store will do). Plant two seeds in each section of the six-pack and barely cover them with dirt. Place them in old cookie trays filled with water (or old plastic trays of any kind). Stretch clear plastic on top so the soil is kept moist (you'll know it's moist because the water will condense on the underside of the plastic). As soon as you see green sprouts, pull the clear plastic off and keep the plants watered as if they're house plants.

It was almost painfully easy this year, so much so that everything was over-planted, and we have two gardens full of plants, plus two ploughed and unenriched sections planted with cucumbers and squash, and the glass room is still full of plants

So what if my destiny is the same? If all it needs is the right kind of moisture and light, and if I figure it out, I'll burst chlorophyll-fueled growth?

Seen people blessed

Salad 

I found this blog this week, another Maine farming family, but one that doesn't seem to share the angst and anxiety, the sturm and drang, I thwart myself with all summer.  I said to two separate friends last week that gardening/farming is an act of wrestling with constant failure, and so easily I forget about all the anxiety from last year, all the failures--the cucumber beetles and hail and blight--and now when I look back on photographs, they seem to be taken from a lush tropical rainforest that magically produced vegetables.

Nevertheless, I made my first salad all from garden vegetables this week, and it feels like a huge accomplishment.  Arugula, red and green oak leaf lettuces, snap peas, green onions.  Tomatoes from the store, a fresh radish pickle as garnish.  It was possibly the most delicious greenery I've ever eaten.

I'm not going to lie about the effort it required--sometimes the harvesting feels like the most difficult part.  Getting out of the house with a pair of scissors and a bowl when I'm hungry and just want a snack, and trimming around the base of the lettuce plants and dumping the slug-infested leaves into the compost and finding good ones and filling the bowl up.  Cleaning dirt from the onions, worm-eaten spots from the radishes.  Convincing myself to put it all together into something delicious.

I, too, have things coming up from the ground that came from last year's plantings, most notably echinacea (cornflower) and Jerusalem artichoke, which has hit the big time as "sunchoke," so called by Gordon Ramsey.  And four or five volunteer tomatoes, all sprung up at the end of a row of leeks.  It's all very exciting, these little gifts that the universe bestows.  But the garden I have is never the garden of my dreams, or even the lush paradise I remember from the past.

Tonight I caught another PBS documentary--why are they all so good?--about harlequin romance novels.  It filmed various women, one in Japan, another in India, all hooked on the genre, juxtaposed with a male model who poses for covers and a British romance novelist.  The surprising thing, the beautiful thing, was watching these people, all so different, all searching for love in their own way.  And those who, after spending all their time longing for the romance they read about in books, realize that the love they're looking for has been there all along.  In their own home, with their own husbands or lovers.  That love, too, can only be found in the moment.

I'm trying to realize that this summer.  Failing most of the time, just as with the garden, but trying anyway.

Send us now into the world in peace, and grant us strength and courage, to love you, and serve you, with gladness and singleness of heart.

That's what I pray in the liturgy.  That's the reminder.  If only I can remember to grow my vegetables with gladness, and singleness of heart.

Everybody held their breath

It's daisy season 

Today I woke up early and came to my desk early, as I do most days. Late for other people, early for me. Sometimes I regret my vampiric ways, that even in the high noon of summer I'm unable to rise and set with the sun. I insist on late nights, staying up till 1:30, 2, 2:30 every day. “Early to bed and early to rise,” etc. Is it true? Should I fight my nature? It's the debate all of us have, perhaps, with our natural tendencies. Even the bodies, the faces we were born with.

A quote, from Richard Hillman:

The Greek idea of fate is moira, which means “portion.” Fate rules a portion of your life. But there is more to life than just fate. There is also genetics, environment, economics, and so on. So it’s not all written in the book before you get here, such that you don’t have to do anything. That’s fatalism.

I've been thinking a lot about failure, as it connects to fate, as my destiny seems to be to consistently fall short at the things I aim to accomplish. For instance, last year the farm/garden, the farden, had an exotic newness to it. By that I mean that the hard work it required had adventure attached to it. This year, it feels more just like hard work. Which means that less has been done, or more has been done in specific areas (perennials), but in other areas I am far behind where I was last year.

That makes me feel bad about myself. The guilt I refer to frequently, as a necessary connector to my faith, almost a phantom limb. This years garden feels like a failure, and the more so as time passes. I experienced this last year, also: the challenge with farming/gardening is always being on the brink of failure. Any malevolent weather could wipe everything out. Any ravenous bug. Any time, here in the arctic north, that you miss the magic week of planting, the magic week of harvest. The awareness of time passing is like a roller coaster plunging.

When you go out to play

Dill patch, so far unsuccessful.  Jerusalem artichoke, horseradish, rhubarb, echinacea--in clockwise from bottom right.

Then this paragraph from Raymond Carver:

He pulled a chair out and sat down at the kitchen table in front of the big ashtray. He closed his eyes and opened them. He moved the curtain aside and looked out at the backyard. He saw a bicycle without a front wheel standing upside down. He saw weeds growing along the redwood fence.

That paragraph is perfect.

Aroostook County, Maine

Sky above the clouds

My first seeds are in the ground, although not the real ground, the fake ground that I put into plastic six-packs and keep in the sun in the glass room. Although K.'s been hard at work here, and in the real ground, his real ground—we already have garlic peeping up, planted last fall, and beets and spinach and chard—and a pea sprouting. And one hardy lettuce, the one I used to think was a speckled romaine, wintered over in the cold frame. Believe it or not.

These things are so enjoyable to me, and I always hesitate to speak of them because it feels like bragging but I'm beginning to believe that maybe I'm somewhat good at this. Not really, because even just a generic search of farm and garden blogs makes me realize that I'm way down on the totem pole. There are people out there, in Maine, already eating garden greens. It took us till June last year, and maybe it'll take us that long again.

I called Johnny Seed today and they are out of asparagus and blueberry plants. They run out in January. Who knew? And my never-ending war with the herbs goes on. I persist, but I can't get them to turn into the provencal herb garden of my dreams.

It feels good here, workmanlike. The snow has passed. I forget how much I miss the green earth, the green world, the green tunnel that closes me in on my long walks to the back of the land. It's black and white for six months, and then the green comes back. I battle with place, but this place is drawing me in, claiming me.

Said the night wind

Apartment and cat in Chicago (note land line and answering machine)

Back when I had a cohesive iTunes library, I loved listening to John Prine. Heck, I still love John Prine. (Go buy his album immediately.) He sings:

The man down the street, the kid on the stoop
All agreed that life stank. All the world smelled like poop.
Baby poop, that is. The worst kind.

The funniest thing about baby poop is that it's only gross to those of us who don't have kids. My sister listened to that song and said—what is he talking about? Baby poop isn't gross at all.

We shoveled four truckloads of horse manure into the garden this spring, and my parents are trying to find manure for their garden here in Chattanooga. If they were to find some, I'm sure they'd be able to grow peas and spinach year-round. Even now, in their feeble rock-hard clay, they have snap peas hovering above the ground.

I've been dreaming about heaping piles of waste in overflowing outhouses. Gross, I know. But I came together with my artist friends this last weekend, and we discussed the metaphors of dreams, specifically how images like that speak to us about fertility—the fecundity of the subconscious mind. And now I'm going through all of this shit from my past (I can use no better word)--heaps and heaps of files and photographs and ripped, moldy, stained clothes—and I can't part with them. But from all of that waste, the detritus from my past—comes the most potent fertilizer for my present.

What I have realized about the past is the truth, and the truth is how much I've grown. I am no longer the person I was. I realize how much I've grown. How, like Jesus in his missing years, I can walk away from the poop with only what I need.

I've filled up the trunk of a Camry with the manure I need for another year. Tomorrow I head back north, to the land of ice and snow. I leave behind my past, one more time. I carry only what I need, only what will help me to grow.

Nocturne

It’s 1:04 in the morning and a Quebecois movie is on Canadian television about a six-year-old Catholic boy given the ability to heal people. I’m listening to Chopin as I read French subtitles. My garden was hit by hail this week, the day after I posted all of those pictures, which was depressing to the point that I haven’t been out there lately. My chard has immense amounts of tiny little holes in it. The plants that have fruit are less wounded, but it’s still tough to face.

The frustrating thing is that I’ve been meaning to harvest the chard for weeks now. I knew it was edible ages ago, but I was distracted by massive quantities of radishes and turnip greens and radish tops. It’s a good problem to have, a problem I wouldn’t have expected to have even in March of this year. I didn’t realize how much of the task of a garden is keeping up with the harvest and finding ways to cook and eat things. My grandma always made sauteed chard to go with her meat and potatoes, but I don’t cook meat and potatoes that often. Today I had holey sauteed chard for dinner. With macaroni.

I’ve been reading my little boat notebook again, never a good sign when I’m looking for stability. I read this notation today: I can tie a bowline now!! 7-7-07

Except I can’t. Try as I might, that knowledge has slipped away from me. I can’t get the rabbit to go around the tree and into its hole. I know I could look it up, relearn it, but I keep expecting the knowledge to magically reappear. I guess I’m learning new things, that chard is still delicious with holes poked in it, and how to eat it with pasta and horseradish cheddar. Time moves on. The past slips away, and its lessons go with it.

I think you are strange

Cabbage

Friends from Caribou are camping in the backyard this evening. We woke and fed them boiled eggs and maple jelly. My day felt strangely empty, today, but also joyful. I typed “the end” yesterday, and today’s my Sabbath.

I wandered around the yard, tying up tomatoes, transplanting things, watering the cilantro seedlings that have finally sprouted, weeding the row of peppers—garden tasks I’d been putting off for weeks. It felt free and empty and the same time. We made burgers and my overloaded-with-greens fried rice, my new way of disposing of all of the stuff from the garden. So. Things are good. Not much to report.

I’m impressed by the concept of the Sabbath, one of the things that has been a boon to my life here. I don’t write, walk, or do yoga on the Sabbath, which gives me time to do things I don’t do other days. Let the sun get on my shoulders in the mid-morning. Explore the Subarus in the front yard. Reorganize both the freezer and the cupboards. Blanch greens. Cook.

For the next few weeks my only tasks are to clamber among the clouds and exist. Now I’m listening to The Notorious BIG and loading photos of the garden, as July rolls around to August. The campfire outside burns down.

When I opened my eyes

When I lived in Chicago, one of the alternate careers I dreamed of was being a divemaster in Roatan or Manzanillo. I wanted to live in the tropics, to spend as much time as my hemoglobin would bear 100 feet below the water. I don’t know if I believe in there being the ancient four Greek elements, but something in my body seems to connect to the water. Maybe it just feels like home.

Now, the career I dream of is farmer, as I live in a climate where I have yet to immerse my body in the water. Maybe I can connect to the earth in the same way, draw things up from the ground. But I’m spending more time at my writing career. My self-imposed deadline is the end of this month—hence the blog distraction. It’s funny to me that I started my college career as an aspiring chemical engineer, when I’m so far from that now.

I saw a special the other day on women in science, and I felt some guilt for abandoning the possibility of being a female scientist. As cliched as it continues to be, I had to follow my heart. I remember when I realized that, walking home from campus one spring day in 1996. As cliched as it is, it felt like a lightning bolt from heaven.

I prayed today, in my Wednesday night church service (our farm congregation abandons Sunday services in summer): “send me out into the world in peace to do the work God has given me to do.” One character’s storyline tied up yesterday morning. Two more to go, before the end of the month. I believe I’m going to make it.

I’m gonna dance hall, dance hall every day

Hollyhock about to bloom, at my new friend the artist's house

The cat woke me this morning, kneading his claws against my lips, as he likes to do in the morning when he wants to be stroked. That, and the sun striping my calves, and I woke up early to coffee and an egg sandwich, and then straight to my desk. The list of things I write each morning is getting longer—a stream-of-consciousness journal entry, then my dream from the night before, a way to mine my subconscious for the real work—the book that gets closer to being finished every day. My self-imposed deadline is July 31, and I feel my breath catch in my throat every time I realize I may just make it.

I’m on my last chapter right now, and it’s one of these things, like my desk, like my garden, that I can hardly believe. How can I be this person who has almost finished such a beautiful thing? Even if I tie the manuscript up in a neat knot and put it in my bottom drawer and never again show it daylight, every time I remember its existence feels like a drug. I don’t know what happens next, what happens on August 1, and right now I don’t care.

Then I put down these words, and after these words I go into the garden to harvest radishes, snap peas, turnip greens, spinach, and basil for macaroni salad for a friend’s birthday. Then maybe a walk in the woods or yoga, before I walk up the hill for pork ribs on the barbecue. Tomorrow, I can chose between a bluegrass festival, an Afro-Cuban drum workshop, and a local township’s annual festival on a dirt road, camping in the Maine wilderness. I feel like I’m living someone else’s dream of my life, as if I was mysteriously transplanted into JK Rowling’s world, or something. And I’m broke.

But even there comes synchronicity. Late last night, celebrating with another set of friends their anniversary, the potato harvest was mentioned. The idea of pulling potatoes up out of the ground, working in the open air, breathing nothing but oxygen and herbicide, and making enough money to get halfway through the winter, seems like another gift. Every day I breathe in faith, breathe out faith.

Now here comes the preacher

Beets today in the garden. You can see rocky the soil is here, and also how I'm not such a good weeder.

It was 81 degrees out today—yay. I have such a hard time on these sunny days. I feel like I should be spending every waking hour outside, in as much sun as I can find, soaking up all of it, but that means not being inside my office, where the work that’s most important to me takes place. I always feel that cognitive dissonance, wanting to be indoors and outdoors at the same time. That's one of the things about writing—it’s an indoor sport.

The thing is to do it like the farmers say: early to bed and early to rise. As another adage goes: easier said than done. I’d love to be one of those people, like my Papou the writer, who woke at dawn. I once read that National Geographic only publishes photographs taken at dawn or dusk. So if you don’t wake up at dawn, you’re halving your chances.

But I don’t believe in that crap. I wake up when the sun slants across my ankles, or as close to it as my dreams will let me. And then I come to my little sun room and put some words into the computer. Sometimes they are good words. Sometimes they are bad words.

As now, when I have been to the top of the hill celebrating the midsummer full moon a day late, the first, and last, of the true summer. I’m told it just gets colder from here on out. I don’t believe it, not yet. But it’s possible. I’m no longer supposed to plant endive, according to my book.

I suppose I’m spending enough time outdoors. I spent an hour in the garden this afternoon, getting sun on my shoulders and waging war against the cucumber beetles and deer flies, weeding the pepper plants and putting in another row of radishes. The garden’s beautiful, and brings me more joy than almost anything on a sunny day. But it’s still hard not to feel this conflict. The mornings I spend inside, and as much bravery as I have for the rest of the day outside.

Happiness, come back a while

Grandpa Jenks, the gardener, electrical cord clearly visible

It’d be nice, when attempting to live a back-to-the-land lifestyle, to have a trio of men to perform each of these essential tasks: electronics, mechanics, and plumbing. Someone proficient in electronics could help with circuitry, soldering, and wiring; a mechanic could fix cars, small engines, lawnmowers; a plumber could help with heating, septic systems, drainage. Who can imagine a family with all three of these skills? No one.

I don’t know why I’m so fascinated by families that are different than mine. My grandfather focused all of his life on books, theory, and theology, as though the world of ideas was what mattered, not the world of things. He spent his life waking at dawn to write, most of his life in an office. The story my grandma tells, was that when she asked him to dig a hole in the backyard for some tomatoes, he dug the spade in, looked at her, and said, “Why, Joan? Why?”

My grandfather from the other side, who carpeted his garden with scraps from his living room to keep down weeds, who built a tomato trellis out of old electrical cord, who composted styrofoam and meat scraps, so that he had to keep the raccoons away with a .22, who never had garbage pick-up in forty years, so that he burned his old tires cut up into his basement furnace, was much more in touch with the physical world. The last meal my grandmother cooked for me, two years before her death, was ham, scalloped potatoes, braised chard, sliced tomatoes with mayo, zucchini bread, and ice cream with raspberries. Four things came from their garden.

The two sides of myself at war: my grandfather the intellectual and my grandfather the pragmatist. I spend half of my day locked up in my office, with books and papers piled around myself, and the other half picking cucumber beetles off my squash plants (we’ve determined they’re cucumber, not potato beetles), weeding the beets, heading basil. Maybe I can get them to peacefully coexist. I always end up immersing myself in the world of things, the world in which I’m much less comfortable. Biking, sailing, farming… All of those things require the ability to respond to sensory data. But that’s the point. It’s a challenge. And life’s no fun without a challenge.

Only in dreams

Speckled romaine

The first radish

Today, at long last, the first salad from my own lettuce and radish. I feel a bit like a braggart, like one of those people who say: hey, look what I can do! But I think the astonishing thing was that I never really believed it was possible, that food could come from seeds in little packages, even though everyone keeps saying that it is. I was operating on complete faith.

I had to keep trying. It wasn't even that I didn't believe it was possible to grow things--my grandfather did it his whole life--but I didn't believe it was possible for me. So, as an exercise DVD I used to do says: consistency equals results. Try long and hard enough, and use all of the resources at your disposal, and eventually it'll happen.

A graduate professor of mine used to say that being a writer required three things:
1. Persistence.
2. Stick-to-it-tive-ness. (I know these are the same thing, more or less, but it's so important it requires two line items.)
3. Willingness to adapt and learn from one's own mistakes.

I have learned that the same thing is true of the garden.

To the words I said

My beautiful lettuce, grown from seed.

Planting a row of collard greens today, I thought about water. Mainly because the beans I planted last week aren’t getting enough, and now they may be rotting in the ground. I’m partly thinking that it’s foolish to be planting anything this late, but my garden book assures me that collards taste better after a frost, and that there’s no point in planting pole beans in this climate until the soil’s warmer than 55 degrees. Nonetheless. Water.

I’m not sure I’m watering the garden enough, but watering is another of those ecologically sensitive topics. There’s a well at the house, but the water is pumped using electricity from the Maine power company. Maine gets almost half of its electricity from renewable resources, as proven by the massive windmills on top of Mars Hill. So that’s not that bad, right? Certainly not as bad as the lousy 18 miles-per-gallon the Econoline I drive makes.

This state has water in spades, and this land, with its low-lying acres of beaver swamp, has even more than most. The land I investigated in Georgia had no water and was built on absolute solid rock, with not much possibility for a well. I was convinced I could poke through the woods and find a spring somewhere, but water in Georgia is a matter of life and death. Something that battles, at least political ones, are fought over. My back-up plan was to install a cistern and collect water from the sky.

One of my favorite things about life aboard was catching water. I drank and showered with rainwater, and my only conundrum with water was that I had to lug it forward and pour it beneath the vee-berth into a little plastic tank. My dream was to install a deck fill for water, and then an elaborate contraption that would funnel rainwater directly into it.

I love drinking well water here, even if it does clog the coffeemaker every six months. It tastes great, and whether or not it’s true, I choose to believe I’m drinking essential trace minerals that make me healthier. My dream now is electricity generation, a small solar panel or windmill, to pump the water, with the eventual goal of complete sustainability. More and more, that’s what I’m identifying as my purpose with this kind of life.

Whether it’s planting collard greens or living on a boat or installing a solar panel, my ideal life is one where I fend for myself. My Christian family would perhaps say that’s not good enough, not a high enough ideal, that Christ sent us into the world not away from the world. But I don't see another way to live a moral life in the contemporary world. Certainly not one where my conscience is clear.

So I’ll stop and look right past

I’m at the library in Mars Hill today, freezing my butt off because they have the air-conditioning on. It’s 69 degrees outside, people! That’s cooler than my grandma keeps her heat in winter! But I’m not complaining because they have high-speed internet, so for seven more brief minutes I have access to the world of art and civilization and celebrity gossip.

Today it’s a bit of good news, bad news. The good news is that aspects of the garden are flourishing. I can’t believe I managed to raise such gorgeous lettuce from seed. I have not been brave enough to eat it yet, although I’m convinced that tomorrow is the day. It’s not that I’m afraid, but more that I don’t want to kill it by too vigorous grazing, as I always do with my basil plants. But I want to be able to say I had farm-fresh lettuce, raised from seed, before the end of June.

In the bad news, I discovered an infestation of potato beetles in my squash yesterday. Argh. The anger. I can’t begin to explain it. I feel the same way as I do about the deer flies that persist in biting me on the butt through my yoga plants. Or maybe worse.

I’ve never been sold completely on the idea of organic gardening—I’ve spent enough time in the third world to know the advantages fertilizers have given to the poor, and it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me to pee in a bucket and let it ferment in order to get phosphates in the soil rather than just letting a factory do that for me. Anyway. The jury is still out on that decision, but I’m having a much harder time making the decision to use pesticides. It just seems brutal, and reading that the pesticides my 1970s-era gardening book recommends also kill honeybees chills my heart.

Still, I can’t just watch my squash and cucumber plants shrivel up and die. More and more I understand the conundrum of the contemporary farmer. I don’t want to kill my bees or my birds, but I want those dastardly beetles gone. I’m investigating organic solutions, and in the meantime, crushing as many as I can between my fingers.