Epitaph for a Peach

by David M. Masumoto

  Close to home, I often turned off the main highway and took different routes, reacquainting myself with farms and testing my memory. Friends lived in those houses. I had eaten meals and spent time there; I had worked on some of these farms, lending a hand during a peak harvest, helping a family friend for a day or two. The houses and lands looked the same, and I could picture the gentle faces and hear familiar voices as if little had been altered. As I eased into our driveway I’d revert to old ways, becoming a son once again, a child on the family farm.

  My feelings were honest and real. But my eyes deceived me, tainted by my longing for a touchstone—a land where life stood still and my memories could be relived. When I left the farm for college, I could only return as a visitor to the valley, a traveler looking for home.

  Now the farm is once again my true home. I live in that farmhouse and work the eternal lands. My world may seem unchanged to casual observers, but they are wrong. I now know this: if there’s a constant on these farms, it’s the constant of change.

  The keen observer will recognize the differences. A farmer replants an orchard with a new variety of peaches. Drip irrigation is added to a block of old grapes, so I imagine the vineyard has a new owner—perhaps a younger farmer with many more years ahead to recover the costs—or the farm is now part of a larger operation with capital reserves to finance the improvement. Occasionally the changes are clearly evident, like a FOR SALE sign. But I need to read the small print in order to discern if the seller is a bank that foreclosed on the farmer. Most of the changes contain two stories. One is the physical alteration of the farm, the other involves the people on that land, the human story behind the change.

  I’ve been back on the farm for a decade and still haven’t heard all the stories behind the changes around me. But once I add my stories to the landscape, I can call this place my home, a home that continues to evolve and change as I add more and more of my stories.

  A poet returns to the valley and proclaims, “How closed-minded you all are.” He comments about the lack of interest in the arts, in social and environmental issues, in the poverty and inequality of our life. “Little has changed in the valley.”

  He was born and raised here, which supposedly grants him license to criticize and lecture us. Yet he speaks for many who think they know the valley.

  How differently would others think of us if they knew the stories of a raisin harvest in a wet year or a peach without a home?

  Risky Business

  “Those who take risks are those who can afford to.”

  I wish I could take credit for this saying, but it belongs to anyone with the experience of making a living while raising a family. Farmers who try new methods, who change the way they farm, who can gamble to save a peach—we can experiment only because we can afford to. We are the elite.

  I’ve become friends with a Hmong farmer from Southeast Asia. He and his family are political refugees of the Vietnam war. We convinced these peasant farmers to fight for the United States against the Vietnamese. Now we have an obligation to them. Vang Houa and his family have resettled in the Fresno area and are raising vegetables and strawberries.

  Watching his family farm is like stepping back in time and seeing the ghosts of my immigrant grandparents grapple with a new land, a new language, and a new way of farming. Vang Houa’s entire family works the land: children, grandparents, cousins, uncles, and aunts. Everyone has a job in the fields, weeding, irrigating, and harvesting. They have pooled their greatest single asset, their own labor.

  Vang Houa’s first-year strawberries are sweet but small and unmarketable according to today’s standards. Later, a light spring rain almost destroys the crop when mold and rot march in. Vang Houa then discovers fertilizers and fungicides and how the established American farmers grow big berries and escape pest damage. He vows never to farm without some “protection” for his family.

  I cannot blame him. His livelihood as well as that of his family and his extended family depends on the farm. Their dreams are built on those strawberries. I don’t talk much with Vang Houa about my peaches and natural grasses and new farming practices. His future is too precious to gamble on good weather and riskier farming methods. Risk takes on new meaning when hunger and hope are factored in.

  People sometimes wonder why farmers don’t like change. After all, in today’s economic system, those who take risks and make changes are the ones who tend to prosper. But a lot of farmers can remember the days when they were like the Hmong refugee. They still carry the burden of protecting family dreams on their shoulders.

  I’m the product of a lineage of good farmers. I’ve inherited their success, which was anchored in hard work. I’ve been born into the gentry of the landed, a class of elitists who can afford to take risks like trying to save an unwanted peach. My status poses some ethical and political contradictions. Environmentalists may applaud my natural farming but they have trouble believing that some of the most innovative and risky alternative farming practices are being undertaken by some of the largest and wealthiest farmers.

  Supporters of “environmentally friendly” agriculture encourage us farmers to talk with our neighbors and tell our story. What can I say to the Hmong refugee family if they lose both a strawberry crop and the ability to put food on the table? I refuse to become a missionary. I simply want to remain friends with my neighbors as we share common ground.

  ORPHANED BY THE end of autumn—my numerous calls have not been returned, and I suspect there’s a problem. Finally comes the answer about next season. “We will not be needing your peaches.”

  I am stunned. I was proud that my peaches had become organic baby food. I supported the product. I sponsored a fruit-tasting and passed out samples and shared my story about finding a home for my peaches. I even fed the baby food to my son.

  Once again I will have to look for a market for naturally grown peaches with a wonderful taste. My Sun Crest peach is without a home.

  I can respond in two ways. I can blame the nature of American business and its short-term, restless character. A baby food company buys too many peaches, changes a processing formulation, or consolidates and closes its West Coast operation. They try to console the farmers: “We’ll be back in a year or two.”

  “But my peaches can’t wait a year or two,” I snap back.

  Or I can go out and work in the fields. Such an option may not solve marketing problems or address fundamental issues about business, but it has therapeutic value: I can be productive.

  Fortunately I have brush to shred. Even though leaves still cling to the branches, I decide to prune a few rows of my Sun Crests earlier than usual. I hire some workers looking for fill-in jobs. (Pruning the rest of my farm will wait until winter and a hard freeze.) Following a few days of pruning, tons of clippings from the trees lie in rows, ready to be chopped and shredded. Some of the wood is thick, the size of a finger or thumb.

  My shredder is a violent machine. Metal flails swing on a rotating drum, smashing and splintering wood. The steel arms spin at hundreds of RPMs and strike the brush with the velocity of a gladiator’s spiked ball. The cracking sounds echo over the fields. The tractor engine roars, the flails whine, and the clippings snap and shatter, splinters exploding out from under the machine. I wear a thick jacket but I can still feel chunks of wood bouncing off my back—and occasionally my head. Sometimes I glance back and test my reflexes as a blurred scrap of peach wood hurtles past my face.

  Shredding is good work for frustrated farmers. A destructive child in us surfaces, and for some warped reason surveying the scattered remains of pruning brush feels satisfying. I finish the entire field in a record two hours.

  It crosses my mind that I should market this brush-shredding work as therapy for overstressed managers, “a time share guaranteed to relieve anxiety.” With the power of a revving machine under your control, frustration is released when the brush is mangled and crushed. Cold morning’s could be perfect, the wood brittle, snapping with loud cracks
that resonate over the fields like thunder. My advertising slogan could be “Tranquillity, let the wood chips fly.”

  But shredding orphaned peaches is evidence of a major flaw in my business plans. Having already pruned the trees and invested time and money, I’m committed to the coming year. We farmers have lousy business strategies; we start working and planning for the next year before we sit down and contract our crops. We raise produce on good faith that someone will want to buy it. We make the mistake of believing in the coming harvest.

  Sometimes while shredding brush I wonder if there’s not a better use for the wood. I’ve seen vine clippings advertised for barbecues, promising real country flavor as the special “aged vine-wood smoke curls around your steak.” They get a couple of dollars for a small bundle of sticks, bound by twine. I could probably bring in millions of dollars with what I shred, providing there are enough barbecuers desperate for country flavor.

  But I find comfort in returning the wood back to the soil, part of a natural cycle of farming. The woody fibers add organic matter, which quickly decays and becomes food for worms, microorganisms, and other wonderful creatures I can’t see. It takes only a few months before there’s no sign of them in the fields except the rich smell of earth.

  Most farmers shred their pruned brush, although recently another option has been created. A new co-generation electricity-producing plant has opened nearby. Promoted as a recycler of agricultural waste products (like peach prunings and brush), the plant burns wood to produce electricity, which it sells at an extraordinarily high price. Power companies are mandated to buy this overpriced electricity because it supposedly comes from recycled materials and fosters a new renewable source for our power. It makes wonderful business sense. (In the last ten years, dozens of these plants were scheduled to be built in the valley but were rejected by the various communities. It’s my feeling that they do not better the environment but, rather, deprive farmers of their shredding therapy!)

  My shredding machine sometimes breaks. Belts snap, metal bars bend, flails freeze in place. I stop my work and fix the machine, it’s part of my off-season work rhythm. Shredders I can fix, but the problem of homeless peaches is not so easily remedied.

  I live and work with a paradox. On the one hand I no longer compete with nature in a game of winners and losers. For a year I have been working with nature on my farm, and I sense that something is beginning to work. A quiet voice whispers, “Natural forces are taking over and the land is beginning to take care of itself.” Mine is a strategy of collaboration, not competition.

  Yet I still seem to stumble, wondering if anyone wants to hear my stories, walk my fields, or taste my peaches. In the world of business, I need to look out for myself. If I don’t win I could lose the farm. Maybe I need solutions that make good business sense, like building a co-generation plant.

  I’ve spent the year building a home, a habitat, a place for my family and tens of thousands of other living creatures. The new farm year begins with pruning and brush shredding, returning wood back to the earth. It also starts with orphaned peaches. I have lived a wonderful year of discovery only to return to where I was a year ago, looking for a home for my produce. I again begin to imagine an epitaph for my peaches.

  Porch Spiders

  Every morning I stand on the porch and peer over the landscape. I am overwhelmed by the rapid pace of change.

  I monitor the grape leaves withering and dropping off the vines. The pace is slower than watching corn grow but the change is cumulative; each day you see more that was hidden. The green cover crops poke through the scattered leaves, the different seeds race to establish themselves before the first frosts. They claim territory and position themselves for survival. I have yet to decipher the meaning of wildflowers beating white clovers or the fact that crimson clovers bask in the remaining autumn sunlight while vetch seems to thrive in the dark shadows. I realize why they call it the Old Farmer’s Almanac: when it comes to prognostications and predictions you have to have notched many autumns in order to interpret what you see on the farm.

  With fewer leaves to hide them, I can see small animals scurrying as they prepare for winter. A quick jump and a rustling sound means a field mouse is at work, burrowing in the undergrowth, made anxious by the sudden openness of defoliated vines and trees.

  On certain fall afternoons, the temperature warms enough for insects to fly their final dance before the cold kills them or their metabolism alters for overwintering. I can see swarms take to the air and hover around the remaining leaves, crowding together for a final gathering on the last cellulose in my fields. They seem to take flight for no apparent reason and partake in an aerial party, as if sensing the end is near.

  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 hope

  chapter fourteen

  farming with ghosts

  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, recordin
g 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.