Epitaph for a Peach (13 page)

As the final clouds of this front move out, I talk to nature. I hope for strong winds and warm sunshine. The wind blows and I ask it to blow more. I ask the sun to shine brighter. I feel much better, remembering that in myth and legend human beings often talk to nature. We lack modern myths in farming, trapped instead within a reliance on science to explain everything. I ask the clouds if they'll help by staying away for a while. They will try but can't promise anything.

SEPTEMBER
20
TH
.

The morning is humid. The sun is out and warms the ground and quickly dries the paper trays. Marcy convinces me to take the family out for breakfast, treat them to something special. She knows there is nothing to be done on the farm.

I realize how few people I've seen in the last few days. In town, people drive and shop and life continues as if nothing has happened. For a moment it seems like a bad dream.

SEPTEMBER
22
ND
.

I talk with city friends about the rain. Unknowingly they begin the conversation with a seemingly innocent question: “Does rain bother you?” Depending on my mood I vent my wrath upon them or unravel a tale of depression and grief.

I use different methods to describe the storms. First I talk about the acres of raisins out in the fields and realize a lot of people don't know how raisins are made. When I start to talk numbers they begin to understand, but saying you have 35,000 trays exposed only makes sense if the listener knows how big a raisin tray is. Some interrupt and ask if I use wooden trays. At least they can picture a vineyard.

Finally I translate the disaster into dollars. “I can easily lose seventy thousand dollars' worth of raisins.” Eyebrows are raised, money is something they understand. Still, much is lost in translation. The farmer sees a lost harvest, the weeks of additional work, the salvaging of a crop. Dollars oversimplify the farmer's story and the delicate relationship we have with nature. Dollars ignore the power of emotions and tradition.

I grieve with a September rain, not from physical pain but from hurt inside.

 

I
PARTICIPATE IN
a legacy of working the land, harvesting a crop, then witnessing the power of nature to take it back. For raisin farmers, every September we reenact a ritual and participate in an annual rite of passage. Each season we age and grow older and perhaps wiser with experience. A few years of good weather have masked the basic anxiety of our profession, for we are always at the mercy of nature. This season she thrusts herself back into our work and homes and families. She speaks clearly and decisively.

If this were being told as a myth or legend, I would use the metaphor of a charging lion. I stand armed. Just as the lion leaps, I hurl my weapon and nothing happens. The lion remains suspended in flight; I stand motionless awaiting my fate. The moment is impregnated with life, not death, an instant that alters my life forever. Young farmers feel that moment of truth with these rains. I am scarred forever and can now claim to be a farmer.

SEPTEMBER
24
TH
.

As soon as the ground dries, we slip the trays by pulling each one a few inches left or right. We try to break the moisture seal between paper and wet earth where mold easily breeds. We also want to drain the pools of water where rain collects on the trays and decaying grapes float like drowning victims. It's painful to walk my vineyards.

I can smell the rot multiplying. Like a miniature factory, the fields breed spores. I become an applied microbiologist, monitoring the fungi as it spreads, regenerating each day, consuming berries and bunches. I learn about the three types of mold that attack raisins. Putrid mold grows like a white spiderweb, breeding where raisins stick together. If allowed to remain damp, it turns gray and slimy, the skin of the berry rotting like an open infected sore. Split mold cracks the skin, often originating where mildew flourished during the growing season. It often enters from the stem and works its way down the surface, ripping the raisin shell and exposing the internal meat. But nodular mold damages the most. It first appears slightly greenish and very sticky. With humid conditions, the mold can erupt and scatter throughout a field within days. It begins as a black dot but festers and spreads like a cancer, eating the flesh. As temperatures rise, the mold slows but remains entrenched in the raisin's skin.

Sand is also a raisin's enemy. Dirt particles cling to wet grapes and sticky mold. As berries dry, sand becomes embedded in their surface, trapped within their wrinkles. The grit will crunch between your teeth and vibrate through your mouth. It makes you cringe, like hearing fingernails on chalkboards.

For the rest of the season I will not eat my own raisins. Sometimes, out of habit, I catch myself gathering some loose berries and start picking off the stems, readying them for an in-the-field snack. But I stop myself. Not being able to eat my own harvest somehow symbolizes this year.

SEPTEMBER
25
TH
.

Some farmers saved their crop. They managed to pick early and had it rolled and boxed before the rains. I hear of one young farmer who said he was happy it rained. His raisins were safely stored in his shed, and the storms would help him make farm payments.

His story reflects how far we've strayed. We seem to have lost our sense of community, opting for profits first and a survival of the fittest. The rains affect the laws of supply and demand: the value of his raisins rises with each drop of water that falls on my raisins. He is a victorious hunter in the world of agribusiness.

The farmer who saved his raisins believes he armed himself with weapons of management, science, and technology. He confronted nature and beat her and now he will be rewarded in the marketplace. Or was he simply lucky? For one harvest season, he escapes the fragile and transient nature of farming. And in his gloating, he denies the fact we all live together and still share the same land, air, and water. His victory is hollow and fleeting: he may have won a battle against this September rain and will be rewarded with money, yet I know that sometime he will succumb in a war with nature, and in the meantime he forfeits the things that matter. I am a farmer and a good neighbor, not a hunter or warrior.

SEPTEMBER
30
TH
.

Even though the sky remains clear with a pale blue hue, I watch a storm brewing off the coast of southern California. Another tropical storm is breaking up into a tropical depression, which turns into an emotional depression for farmers. I watch a huge band of clouds break off and crush the southern coast, laden with moisture from the warm Pacific. The wave is pushed inland. Part of it splits to the east and heads toward Arizona and the high desert, but most of it tracks north. We sit in its path. I know this because I watch it all via Dad's satellite dish.

Initially this technology amazed me, this ability to monitor storms and directly witness their dark march inland. I sat in awe of the ability to recognize patterns, grasp the shifts in direction and chart flows. The satellite imagery is something to behold.

Yet even when surrounded by this technology, I can do nothing about the coming storm. I can watch my destiny, but I'm not sure I want to see it. Outside I hear the first rumble of lightning as the storm treads into the valley with a deep drumbeat.

I stand on the porch in an evening breeze, a warm, gentle wind from the south. I can see the advancing rain and know it will arrive by nightfall. I feel strangely calm, an odd combination of fatalism and numbness. My emotions were hammered all month. This final assault seems inevitable, even just and merciful. Is this how soldiers face battle and death?

The rain falls throughout the night, about a quarter of an inch; more falls to the west and to the east along the foothills. All night the lightning flashes and thunders around me. I do not sleep and spend hours outside watching from the porch. The rain comes in gentle waves with pauses between the showers. But I grow too weary to worry about the raisins. I finally slip into sleep.

OCTOBER AND NOVEMBER
.

The raisins finally dry and we roll them without incident. An abnormal Indian summer strikes the valley, creating a miniature heat wave. I deliver the crop, and it fails for sand and mold. I estimate that about 20 percent of the crop was lost in the fields: berries and bunches stuck to the paper trays, adhered by mold and rot and sugar that had washed off from the tremendous rains. Raisin processing plants have a system called reconditioning where they wash and clean failed raisins, hand-sort and toss out mold and rot, then try to reclaim some of the harvest. Some of my raisins are too damaged to be reconditioned. They become distillery material for fermentation. Some are salvaged, but I lose another 25 percent of the crop in the process and have to pay for the washing and sorting. Farming finds yet another way to make money for someone else.

All of November is warm and dry, and we enter another year of drought. The weather statistics are misleading, though. Thanks to the September rains we are well ahead in moisture for this time of year. I don't remember much about the fall and do very little planning about the coming year. I know, though, that after the fall and winter will come the spring.

 

I
N THE DRY
desert climate of this valley, the heat and sun scar wood, especially the horizontal planks of our porch deck that are exposed to the late-afternoon sunlight. I've seen other decks weather quickly, causing them to splinter and embed slivers in bare feet. Eventually those decks slip into disuse and emerge as passageways for foot traffic, for shoes insulate and offer protection from the wood. The elements of time and weather change the meaning of the porch.

The annual rite of sanding and resealing the porch symbolizes the end of a season. I work on our house and do not venture out into the fields for days. I allow myself time to sort out the harvest.

Years from now I may confuse the date and exact year, but now I finally understand why old-timers can recall a particular drought in the thirties or the storm of '48 or freeze of '72. Disasters scar memories and tie people to a place. The bond can last a lifetime and generate stories for children and grandchildren. Buried in the drama are emotions and a wisdom of experience.

I now have the memory of September rains on my raisins this year, along with the elation of finding a home for my Sun Crest peaches. The two will be forever juxtaposed, as if in an eternal battle of compromise. They depict the harvest of a farmer, the lows tempered by the highs, a tragedy balanced by great moments of fulfillment.

The Last Generation

Our old farmhouse has a young porch. Once it had a smaller, older porch, but it disappeared in a remodel in the 1950s, when the age of carpets and appliances raged and people took to the interiors of their homes. Status and comfort seemed to be equated with living “inside” and porches were considered relics of the past, like a team of horses or an outhouse. Somewhere in the fifties—with the newfound postwar American confidence and the invention of suburban tract homes, with the boom of babies and a new attitude of cleanliness, after a decade of Depression denial and wartime sacrifice—the outside was equated with being dirty, with its subliminal message of evil. Porches were lost in the process.

We added a porch to our old farmhouse only after I had been farming for ten years. It took that long before I understood what farmhouse porches were all about. I had aged enough to appreciate a shady resting place away from the baking heat of summer and a rest break that stretches from a minimum of half an hour to most of the afternoon, if I can justify it. It took ten years to learn how to look at the farm during the flush of spring growth and see more than grapes, prices per ton, and the hours of work that lay ahead. I now understand why an older generation sat for hours on their porches, watching the world go by between afternoon naps and evenings of quiet with the family. Porches create windows to the world and nurture a sense of place for a farm family.

Our porch symbolizes the blend of old and new. I spend hours with my family on our porch. My youngest believes it's a giant playpen, only we are inside with him. From my lookout I can survey the farm while smelling the aroma of dinner cooking inside. But instead of escaping from an open kitchen window as in the old days, the aroma of our dinner comes via a modern Jenn-Air downdraft fan, which vents the smell of a meal under the porch to the outside, teasing our appetites, spreading anticipation to all the barnyard creatures.

From my porch I witness the seasons. I watch the fog of winter linger in the vines and monitor the delicate pale green of new shoots in the spring. I can hear the flocks of birds descend on my peaches for a summer brunch and smell the aroma of the ripening fruit.

But out on my porch I enjoy autumn the most. The pressures of harvest are over, the expectations and realities reaped and stored. I look over the sea of vineyards to the peaches on the horizon. The grape leaves of spring have aged. With the first series of cool nights they turn yellow, then brown. They are tired. The peaches are ready to drop their leaves with the first good rainstorm of the new year.

On a fall evening I can feel the world change. The last generation of crickets sings and toads croak as they ready for winter's sleep. Sometimes I smell wood burning, a distant farmer clearing his land of unwanted fruit trees or vines. The faint smoke carries a whisper with it, of a peach variety no one bought, of consumers driving a fruit from the marketplace, of another farmer at the mercy of the public's taste.

During these evenings, I map plans for the coming year and changes I have to make, from pest control practices to budgeting and marketing. I hold my annual farm business meeting on the porch with an audience of two, the dog lying on his back on the lawn and the cat curling in and out of my ankles.

The porch provides middle ground, I'm half inside and half outside. I am out of the fields, away from the emotional attachment of ancient peach trees with their thick trunks, away from the gnarled and twisted vines that are the oldest living creatures in the area. Nor am I distracted by phone calls or computer screens or printouts of my fruit sales.

I'll spread out a pile of notes I took during the year: the scribbled thoughts I jotted down while on a tractor; the notes with the dark intense handwriting of stressful moments; the illegible thoughts scrawled during the middle of harvest. I keep a file jammed with these odd pieces of paper, backs of envelopes, corners of napkins, a note pad doodling with the genesis of an idea. All involve reminders about chores and needed repair work or ideas on how to better care for those old peach trees and gnarled vines. With the arrival of fall I allow my intimate feelings to surface. The day-to-day management decisions and their consequences have passed and I finally am able to give my suggestions and dreams a willing audience.

The porch is a place of transition, exposed and yet protected. From my shelter I watch the year coming to an end, the realities of one season merging with the hopes and dreams of the next. Out on the porch I reach out to a larger world; my private farm life connects with the public agenda. This is the season for assessing my crusade to keep my orchard of old peaches.

When I was a kid, many of us still had families intimately tied to the land. The migration to the cities had begun, but the majority of us still had family who farmed and memories of a place in the country. We could recall picking ripe apples and smelling freshly cut hay. We knew where milk, eggs, and home-grown vegetables came from and understood the meaning of the long hours of physical field work.

We understood the rhythms of farming. Spring meant work, summer meant harvest, fall a time for gratitude, and winter a pause for reflection. We were exposed to nature and witnessed the birth of seeds and animals, their eventual death from time and age, and how the cycle repeated each year. We visualized the fruits of hard labor and the true flavors of harvest. Many of us from this generation knew what produce was supposed to taste like and did not require advertising, promotions, or special interest groups to explain, label, and indoctrinate.

I had begun the year hoping most of us could still distinguish the difference between a green peach and a ripe one with real flavor, the kind that triggers memories of savory juices dripping down chins and nectar with the aroma of nature's bounty. I had faith in the power of family stories to convey the meaning of a summer peach.

For one final moment in our evolution as a nation we still have a community memory of the family farm. Many still carry the personal baggage from our rural past, a history of family members who sustained the land, and the legacy of a community that worked the earth for generations.

But this is the final generation holding an affinity with the American family farm. This is the generation that will control the destiny not only of my Sun Crest peaches but also of my way of life.

The Year Begins

People often assume that the new farm year begins in the spring with the first warm spell and the stirring of life that breaks winter's chill. But veterans of the land recognize that a farm year ends in late summer, with the final harvest. Closure of the year is arbitrary; I often set a mental date, only to have nature and lingering warm temperatures stretch the calendar and extend the season for weeks.

A problem arises when seasons overlap with no clearly defined start or finish. I often don't realize when a new year commences until I discover myself well into the race. Much of the autumn is spent trying to finish one year while beginning the next.

So when does the old year end? In some years it's when I finally receive payment for my peaches. The reality of the year sinks in with the prices and numbers, no more over-optimistic guessing and projecting but rather a time to sit with records to determine if there were any profits. One year I never received a check and had a peculiar feeling about the just-completed harvest. It wasn't until December that I was finally contacted, the packing house hesitant about breaking the bad news that I owed them money.

Another sign of closure is when my raisins are safely under cover. Then I can focus on my jammed file marked
FALL PROJECTS
. The weather outside remains too good not to work. I hate to burn good sunlight.

For me, fall and a new year officially begin with the first cool spell that visits and breaks summer's monopoly of heat. In some years, the heat will return but I'll have tasted the start of a new season. With the first brisk northern winds and the turning colors of the leaves, a farmer's perspective changes. If it was a bad year, he starts thinking about the next. I know one fatalistic farmer who has mastered this art of self-defense and beginning anew. With the first sign of bad news, even with a problem in spring or early summer, he hangs his head and sighs, “Just wait till next year.” (Perhaps he's also a devoted Chicago Cubs baseball fan.)

Once my new year began on Labor Day weekend. I had made only a few acres of raisins that season because grape juice prices were high, and we had harvested and crushed most of my grapes before September. The weather then oddly dropped into the mid-80s for weeks. I had just returned from a summer trip, yet during the entire vacation I was restless, as if my internal clock were set for peak performance. I felt I was supposed to be worrying about something instead of relaxing. I wanted to get started on new projects: equipment repair, new storage systems, painting the house, writing, playing with family. I started my new year because I had had enough vacation.

Cruel Bulldozers

The new season starts when I call in the bulldozer to topple an orchard. It rumbles and advances across my fields. Veteran soldiers of trench warfare know this vibration, the shaking of the earth and the clatter of the metal treads as the creature marches over the terrain. Refugees from Southeast Asia who have settled in the valley to farm tell me it's the same with helicopters. The whooping and piercing wailing of the blades cause some to instinctively drop their hoes and grab their children to flee the fields for cover. Only with time and self-control do they stop running, but their thoughts and imaginations continue to race and create uncontrollable shivers.

I plan to terminate a peach orchard, not the Sun Crest block but a towering orchard of old Red Top peaches. These trees have aged and stand tired and worn. I tried to coax more years out of them and they responded wonderfully: this past year we had our largest crop in a decade. But I also saw something that was very disturbing. For the first time ever, my Red Tops were displaced in the marketplace by newer varieties, my peaches stood behind those with better color. Red Top ripens with a streaky red blush, while the new varieties are a solid red. A warning flag waves in my mind.

My problem began with slow demand, pallets of peaches unsold and sitting in cold storage, my fruit passed over for other varieties. I was forced to accept a lower price, a concession to the buyer, a compromised exchange.

My Red Tops were succumbing to forces beyond my control. I know this feeling from my Sun Crests. Yes, this year I learned how to find a niche in the marketplace for the Sun Crest. Could I repeat the performance next year for both varieties?

Obsolete.
The word carries feelings of failure, rejection, loss. I can't help but take it personally, since my peaches embody my labor and commitment. Yet how can a food become obsolete? My businessman's muse answers, “Simple, when fewer and fewer buyers will pay for it.”

I explain my dilemma to a friend and she does not understand. After an animated conversation I realize she is unable to think of the value of food beyond qualitative parameters. “Food is sacred and valued,” she says. “You cannot put a price on your work. You need to keep those peaches for us all.”

For a moment I bask in her flattery. I envision working my orchards to feed the world, my social responsibility, my contribution to the public. Quickly my muse responds, “There are easier ways to support causes.”

I have other reasons for calling in the bulldozer that do not make me feel compromised. More than half my Red Top trees are over twenty-five years old, and every year I lose dozens of thick branches. They break under a heavy crop and crash to the earth in a jumbled heap of leaves, branches, and fruit. I've stood in the orchard and heard their shatter echoing through the field. When I turn to see the fallen giant, leaves are still shaking and staggering from the jolt, a cloud of dust enveloping the fallen warrior. I survey the loss but may not be able to pull the carcass away until after the harvest. The heavy wood is thick, lodged in the soft earth.

Unlike the Sun Crest trees, very few new young shoots grow in the lower parts of these Red Tops. The bark is hard and coarse, and new growth is confined to high sections of the tree where it cannot be trained. Also, most of the old trees have lost a major branch and stand lopsided like an inverted tripod with a missing leg.

Yet my decision to call in a bulldozer is complicated by the other half of the Red Top orchard. There, the trees are younger and by my standards still in their prime, less than twenty years old. (Twenty years doesn't sound like a lot for a tree, but most farmers consider orchards over twenty years old as unproductive. Considering competition and the proliferation of new varieties, growing fruit is now like horse racing: we compete for a frantic few years, then put an orchard out to pasture.)

I could keep half the orchard, which would complicate my work. I'd have to manage each half separately—irrigating, fertilizing, monitoring for pests—thus doubling my work for the same acreage. Dad's generation would have split the field, maximizing production and use of the land. He winces at the thought of pushing out such young trees. My generation wants to simplify operations. I think of the field as a single unit, with rising costs for the older trees. Am I lazy or am I rationalizing my decision as a type of euthanasia for old peaches?

The warning resounds through my fields like a disturbing whisper of a muse:
obsolete.
Battling to find a home for the Sun Crests requires energy and has taken its toll: I lack the will to fight on two fronts. Besides, I had a good year, with good production and adequate prices for the Red Tops, so I opt to end on a good note.

The bulldozer marches in to begin its task, and the new farm year begins in the 90-degree heat of early autumn. The massive machine rips and tears out trees. Branches crunch and crack against the roar of the engine. From a distance the machine works with a low growl, I can tell when it strikes a deep-rooted tree because the engine races and lets out a piercing moan. Over and over, tree after tree falls and is pushed into small stacks to be burned. A pillar of dust rises in the air like residue from a bomb. I can see it a mile away. The hot, still air traps the dust on the surface before it can gradually rise to the inversion layer, then the cooler temperature of the earth pushes the particles upward as the surrounding air heats and rises.