Epitaph for a Peach (16 page)

I can see differences in cover-crop blends and uneven growth, certain rows of vines or trees shimmer with the dew, dense with new vigor shining in the morning sun. Rain collects in spots where I must have damaged the soil and compacted the earth. The mud and stagnant water remain for days, seeds drown in the puddles. I'm certain, though, that different microscopic fungi and mold now swim in the water. New life has been restored to my fields.

My list of autumn work projects grows long. Some of the jobs are repeated every year: repair of tractors and equipment, cutting dead wood from the fields, restaking a vineyard, replanting fallen trees. I am a novice with other projects and may spend hours talking with Dad as we devise a new weed-control strategy or cover-crop management plan.

I think of conversations with neighbors. Some are concerned about the loss of another pesticide, others complain about the expanding role of government. I can picture farmers shaking their heads over the inevitable changes in the marketplace and in regulations. We are unable to determine the direction of political winds and recognize that with each passing autumn, in more and more ways, someone else will be telling us how to farm. We no longer have much control over it. I realize we probably never did.

As the autumn ends on my porch, I watch spiders spin webs in the porch corners, between the rail posts, up at the intersection of the roof joists and the house. I sweep them away but by the next day they reappear, part of my porch, part of the farm. I tolerate them and only occasionally clear their webs when the dust has collected on their strands. The webs hang low, drooping with dirt particles, shaking in the breeze, empty of prey with the loss of their glue. I'll whisk them away knowing fresh ones will appear tomorrow.

Winter's Fog

On cold winter nights I step out onto our porch to check the thermometer. It has not changed much all day, ranging between a cold in the low thirties to a high in the mid-forties with a damp, biting fog blanketing the valley farmlands. From my porch I hear the
tap-tap-tap
of dewdrops trickling down the barren branches, falling and landing on the damp leaves below. I can feel the cold on my cheeks and the warmth of our home's wood stove still within my sweater.

Beyond me the vines and peach trees change seasons too. I think of the past year and the decisions I would have altered, modifications I can plan for in the coming season. Yet no matter what new course I may choose, a natural rhythm remains. I know the vines and trees will still be pruned soon, as they have been for generations.

The fog continues to roll in. Where it's heading I do not know. It passes in front of the porch like a shifting cloud. If I stare at it long enough, it seems that I start to move instead. I imagine our farmhouse cutting through the gray mist like a lost ship, my porch transformed into the bridge. I lean against the rail and peer into the drifting fog as my vessel heads into the night.

I sail on, the thermometer the only instrument on board. I like watching the gradual temperature changes, the measurement of a cold front moving in or the dramatic drop in readings with the loss of sunlight. Several years ago an arctic blast moved into the valley like a silent wolf. For days it hunted, freezing oranges and killing trees. I monitored its progress on my thermometer, recording historic low temperatures—dropping below twenty and never rising above freezing even in sunshine. Farmers could do little except watch. We only had our thermometers to help us verify what we already knew.

But a thermometer enables me to see the wild. The arctic wolf of that winter came alive in the dropping mercury. During the summer a different creature ventures into our valley—the searing heat that stays above 100 degrees into the evening hours. My senses feel the extremes and my thermometer enables me to process the impressions like a series of snapshots. The wild is seen.

A naturalist may disagree, claiming that agriculture tames the wild and farmers manipulate their world to disable the beast of nature. Judging by my last year trying to save a peach, though, I'd say that that gives us farmers too much credit. On a farm, much more is out of control than is in control. I fool myself when I call myself master of my farm. My thermometer reveals my impotence, for I cannot even consistently predict a day's highs or lows.

The fog carries a deep, penetrating cold with it. It doesn't take long before I'm chilled to the bone, especially when I'm in the fields, walking in the damp grass. Once my boots and pants get wet, I have only hours before my legs grow numb. At night while standing on my porch deck, I feel the fog invade my clothes, infiltrating the layers, announcing itself with my involuntary shiver.

I return inside, where I can watch the fog sail past our large windows. We have few curtains in our house, most of our windows are bare. From the inside I can see the panorama of the farm. I am exposed to the wild nature beyond the glass. I've spent hours in front of the windows, watching storms march in from the west and the wind blow rain and hail onto the porch. I can witness the sun rise and set on the mountains that ring the valley, study the ripples of August heat rising from the earth, and feel the glass warm against my skin.

The exchange is reciprocal, especially during the winter. The cold easily permeates the interiors, chilling the house and forcing me to wear sweaters even inside. The intrusion is welcomed, though, the seasons a natural cadence I feel within, a natural clock I respond to.

The change of season connects me with the surrounding wild, a wild I work within. I grow crops from the earth and have discovered that the best soil is also wild. This past year I have learned that productivity is little more than managed chaos, wildness the source of fertility.

In the fog I can hear the voices of farmers before me. Once I believed their old stubborn ways had no place in the progressive world of modern farming. But now they sing of traditions that have a place in my winter season more than ever.

Two wind socks flutter in the shifting fog. In Japanese, the wind is called
kami,
with an honorific
sama
often added. Wind is respected and revered,
kamisama
becomes a spirit that's alive. I can see that spirit in a wind sock, the energy captured for a moment in a dance of colors, then released as the tail flaps and waves.

Even in winter there is life on the farm. I feel something sacred, a meaning added to my work and my peaches and grapes. I feel connected with the universe. The world of nature and human nature are my teachers, showing and not telling me the secrets of the wild and sacred. From my porch deck I sail into a new world. Discoveries loom in the fog, opportunities inhabit this wilderness. It is a sacred place for myself and my family because I can call this farm home.

Farming with Ghosts

Silently I stand in the fog. The wet cloud envelops my farm, I cannot see more than a hundred feet. A dense billow rolls past and the barn disappears from view. I can barely distinguish the outline of the vines across my driveway, their stumps and arms like a band of tiny people marching in the mist. Marcy and the children pile into the car for work and school and, like a spaceship rocketing into the clouds, the car also disappears into the gray. I strain to hear the engine roar and fade in the distance.

The fog beguiles my senses, my vision is restricted and unreliable. Sounds seem to carry long distances. Do noises really echo differently in fog? Or is it that, without sight, I rely on my other senses and literally hear more? The grayness acts as a filter. I can hear individual noises distinctly: a dog yelps, a truck roars along the road, voices speaking Spanish carry through the mist. I listen to laughter and some Mexican music.

The fog shifts, yet I cannot decipher its direction. I'm used to monitoring clouds, especially threatening thunderstorms. Peering into the sky I can lock onto a faster-moving, usually lower and darker billow, freezing the pattern in order to detect motion. For a moment the higher strata seem to move in an opposite direction. A trained eye corrects the illusion and recognizes that both are in flight, the lower layer racing faster, speeding along in a passing wind lane. But the motion of fog seems random, swirling and spinning.

By midmorning the sun emerges as a light gray sphere suspended in the sky. Some of the haze runs away from the heat and an opening is created as the fog seems to part in reverence. Quickly the gesture is reconsidered and the fog returns to block the sunlight, teasing us earthlings. The game may continue for days. Marcy reports that people in town grow moody; being deprived of sunlight wears at their emotions. They too are gray.

I find the fog strangely comforting. I work my fields with the mist dancing around me, happy to be alone and hidden. I can literally feel the silence, an emotion others may find in freshly fallen snow.

The fog is rich with moisture and drips from the tips of shoots and branches. I can feel the mist licking my face. On cold mornings the dew freezes and then melts with the gray midday sun. I can hear the frozen water come to life and tap dance on fallen leaves. As I walk the fields, my boots are quickly soaked from the moisture trapped in the cover crops. My pants brush against the higher grasses and absorb water like a sponge. I'll use the same route through the lush undergrowth and break a trail that will last into spring. Even into the summer I can detect the paths I've traveled before.

In the middle of fog season, my shears cut through branches as I renew the ancient act of pruning. It has required ten years to hone my pruning skills. After a decade I've gained enough experience to know how to prune and to learn what I must accept. With different strategies I can amend errors of the past by cutting more wood or redirecting shapes. Opportunity is born with each new year. This is where life begins.

And continues. In the fog I feel alone but share work with the ghosts of farmers before me. The primitive ritual of pruning recalls a time when the first farmers began manipulating nature. A sacred act is performed and represented every winter, a moment on a cusp of nature's timeline where a single act connects the past, affects the present, and determines the future. In the veil of fog I can hide or be hidden, a wet blanket embraces and protects my farm, and the ghosts are easier to see.

Owls

They call in the night, deep voices outside my bedroom window echoing across the cold landscape. I can hear two, one in the distance answering the talkative one who sits atop a pole behind the house. At times their calls overlap and reverberate through the dormant fields.

Two owls return to my farm and announce their arrival with a nightly conference. I hope they will stay and join my farm. Despite the winter frosts, my fields are full of delicate and tasty creatures for their menu. Mice scamper over the barren fields. Small rabbits and gophers, confused by an occasional warm winter day, scramble out of their dens in search of food.

I've erected tall wooden poles for nightly owl perches. The staffs mark my rows but double as observation platforms for winged hunters. Nocturnal owls should have no trouble sharing them with the hawks of daylight.

Actually I need the owls. Mice, rabbits, and gophers run wild and multiply geometrically. Normally they are harmless, preferring the rich treasures of seeds and grasses to vines or trees. But I can see the nightmare of overpopulation. The stumps of a few trees bear scars of desperate creatures gnawing bark for food.

One mouse family invaded my irrigation pump. A small corner of the wire mesh was bent, opening the door for them. They must have felt cozy next to the core windings, especially on their first visit in the dead of winter when I had just tested the pump. The motor remained warm for hours and the mice moved in. Even though I didn't start the pump again until spring, the potential for warmth may have provided them enough justification for their relocation. When I first found the pump's housing full of their droppings, I immediately retested it. Mice nibble at wire coils as midnight snacks and can disable the largest farm pump. I was relieved to hear the engine whine and see water tumble from the outlet pipe. I straightened the mesh and cursed the damned mice for invading my property. Weren't they content with the eighty acres of winter grass covers I provided them?

Gophers create different problems. During my summer irrigations, their holes and tunnels change the course of my water, redirecting it from one row to another. I often play irrigation roulette, a game of chance to see which row will fill with water. For years my fields received free water from a neighbor when a family of gophers created a secret underground passage that connected his field with mine. Whenever he'd irrigate, my rows received his water too.

Lately I notice that the mice and gophers seem to be organizing, fighting back and reclaiming territory. They seem to be rising in numbers, not only in my fields but especially on farms that utilize a preemergent herbicide program. There, with a barren landscape, the mice have been driven out of their natural habitat in search of new homes. Sheds, barns, houses, and pumps have been invaded, desperate acts by desperate creatures.

Gophers, though, have a wicked streak of vengeance. Every year more and more farms are expanding into previously undeveloped territory such as virgin hillsides and uneven terrain. New technology accompanies the transformation, drip irrigation systems are commonplace, the black plastic hose lines stretch over miles and miles of new farmland. But the gophers of the world have united against this intrusion upon their sacred ground. They attack these new settlements, gnawing on the plastic hoses. This terrorist activity forces farmers to spend hours checking for severed lines and spurting water.

Farmers wage a campaign to purge these vertebrate pests. Fields are disked and no weed is left standing, a scorched-earth policy. (Poison may be set out, but farm dogs have a bad habit of getting confused and eating the bait. Eradication becomes very expensive with the addition of a veterinarian's stomach-pumping bill.) I know of one farmer who ends his winter by setting dozens of snares and checking them every morning. He reminds me more of a trapper than a farmer, spending hours on his early morning rounds. Most of his efforts are only minimally successful before a new population migrates to reconquer the territory.

Owls are wonderful hunters for gophers and mice. As a ten-year-old, I discovered a pile of small skulls and bones in a neighbor's old dairy barn. Three farm boys—my brother, a neighbor's son, and I—explored the wooden cavern. Sitting above the pile of bones in the dim light was an old barn owl. (Actually it was a great horned owl, but we had discovered it in the barn.)

We quietly backed outside and whispered to one another, the excitement making our voices crack. We talked about the bones, the owl's dark hiding place, and the size of the creature. I wanted to see the owl fly. Imagination and the thrill of discovery took control; we concluded that the best strategy was to shoot BBs at it to scare it into flight.

We returned to the shadows with our guns, then got into an argument over who would shoot first. My claim was that I'd seen the bones first, but my brother had spied the owl, and it was the neighbor kid's barn. We opted for collaboration, agreeing to shoot at the same time. We didn't think all three shots would hit the target.

The owl was stunned by our aim. He staggered and tried to fly, flapping his wings, churning straw and dust into the air. We panicked, imagining the talons attacking us. We recocked our guns and shot again and again. The owl could not take flight and bounced against the barn walls and settled again on a rail ledge. Explorers turned conquerors, we shot and shot until the owl finally fell. Between the barn wood siding, streaks of sunlight penetrated the darkness and drew lines across his body. Dust danced in the slits of the sunbeams. We abandoned the carcass and took an oath to remain silent.