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 wor
ld 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.
The next day at lunch, Dad talked about his gopher problem and I told him about the pile of bones we had found. I wasn’t going to mention the owl, but then he asked where the bones came from and I described the great bird. I tried to avoid any conversation about our shooting, mentioning only that we’d tried to scare it. Dad asked how, and I blurted “With BBs” before I could think. For days my brother was furious at me and Dad was disappointed. He visited our neighbor to apologize, but the neighbor already knew.
I regret the senseless killing. If I had known more, could I have saved the owl? Should I have protected the owl and opted for the rabbits that fed on tender vine and orchard plantings? Could I have drawn a line between foolish killing and the sport of hunting?
AS A CHILD, I recall asking my parents about hunting but heard few answers. Instead, things like rabbit roundups linger in my memory. Local farmers organized this annual Washington’s Birthday gathering, where the community would get together for a hunt to protect vineyards and young orchards from hungry rabbits. The roundup day began with a breakfast at the American Legion hall. Men with shotguns would drink coffee, visit, and enjoy the holiday. Then they’d walk to their stations, which were spaced about fifty feet apart along a road. At the signal (probably a gunshot) they’d march westward in a four- or five-mile-long line, loudly advancing, scaring rabbits out of their fields, shooting many along the way. A truck would follow and the dead rabbits would be tossed in, their bodies piled like trash.
I sometimes wonder: Had I farmed during the age of roundups, would I have protested the killing? Or would I have accepted these traditions and walked alongside a neighbor? An old-timer says he misses roundup days. During a conversation I sense that what he misses is having young people on our farms. Fewer and fewer shotguns are being passed down to the next generation of farm boys.
I WELCOME THE owls that come and call in the night. We can join forces as hunters. But where will my new owls live? The old red barn where owls once roosted was demolished ten years ago. It was built for hay and dairy cows, not for forklifts and peach bins. Also missing from the farm are the old thickets of willows and cottonwoods where owls could roost. Today we farm the entire landscape. I conclude I will need to do more than simply stop hunting owls, I will have to build them a home.
My owl box will be made from old raisin sweatboxes. No one uses sweatboxes anymore. They’re from the generation of raisin farmers that predates forklifts. We have a few hundred boxes stacked around the shed, more of a weather break than anything else, but they’re occasionally useful for odd jobs like carrying dead vines or broken cement valves. The boxes have aged, their wood now a dark gray from rain and dust. I try washing one, and my rag scrapes decades of dirt from the wood. No matter how long I work, the water only loosens another layer of dust. I sense owls will appreciate old sweatbox wood for their nests as opposed to clear, smooth green lumber from the mill. I believe they won’t trust something new, which would appear more like a trap, too clean and unseasoned.
I’ll construct a simple two-by-four-foot box, with an opening about twelve inches long and a layer of shavings lining the bottom. I plan first to nail it to my remaining wood barn, sister to the old hay and dairy barn we once had. Facing the east, protected from the summer afternoon sun, the owls can look out over a low vineyard. I’ll be able to see the box from my front porch, hear the hoo-hooooo-hoo-hoo of the great horned owl, and sleep well knowing I have a guardian perched there, watching over my farm.
The owls may not like the location. It may be too close to the farmhouse, too close to our car engines and tractors. The ghost of the old great horned owl may warn them, and I’ll have to wait another year and put my owl box someplace else in time for nesting. But my invitation will remain. The owls can’t go home to old barns that are no longer here, nor can I rebuild the past. But we can both enjoy the pruned vines and trees and revel in the winter cover crops teeming with life.
Farm Junk Piles
Most family farms have their own junk pile. Tucked behind the barn or out back near an outbuilding sits a gathering of old tools, machine parts, and remnants of discarded equipment. It lies hidden, obscured by the fog. Moisture paints the rusting metal a dark brown. These piles tell a story of memories and histories, of who you are and where you have been. This collection links generations of farmers to a piece of shared land.
In junk piles the past resides with the present. Scraps of sheet metal become patches on leaking raisin bins. A frozen drive chain from a retired spreader is split into dozens of pieces and lent to repair broken chains on other machines. A set of old pickup wheels and axles is borrowed from the pile and fashioned into the frame for a vineyard wagon. Our collection has an old, rusting hay baler we cannibalized for parts. A large pulley gear easily becomes a tractor weight that helps us gain traction in soft orchard dirt.
When I took over the junk collection from my father, the presence of an old hay machine prompted questions. Where did they grow hay on our land? How long was the field a pasture? Was it used for grazing dairy cows or other animals? Later I learned that my Sun Crest peaches now grow in that pasture. The lush trees and juicy fruit are well aware of this history. The manure has composted well within the earth, and the soil passes it on to my trees with vigor. My harvests are still part of the farm family before me. The old junk pile, shrouded by the mist, helps remind me of the historical landscape.
I visit my junk pile whenever things break. I often have to rely on the grape farmer’s Band-Aid—of old vine trellis wire, a throwback to the age-old habit of fixing things with baling wire. There must be a phrase, “to baling-wire it,” maybe originating in the Midwest amid the sma
ll farms of dairy cows, hay, and baling wire. Wire holds the hay together until feeding time, when the sage farmer will toss the three-and five-foot lengths of metal string into the junk pile until something needs repairing. The wire is perfect for quick fixes; it’s pliable, simple to use, and offers the cheapest repair job available. If something breaks you can easily “baling-wire it” one more time, even over the old strands.
Once I witnessed its strength when a neighbor’s teenager accidentally ran over an old wire pile in a pickup truck. The wire got tangled and wound itself tight around the axle. They had to call in a neighbor with a blowtorch to melt it off. I could hear the father yelling at the teenager a half mile away.
During the winter months, I have time to consider buying new equipment. First, I visit our old junk pile. Modern machines offer the excitement of possibility, sleek tools that promise efficiency and reduced labor bills. Just before the purchase, though, a visit to the junk pile helps me compare the claims of the new technology with the reality of the old. Junk piles are a history of what didn’t work, a documentation of the names of companies no longer in business, along with a collection of each farmer’s hopes and unmet expectations.
The purchase of new equipment creates opportunities, but a machine’s potential is usually realized only with modification from my junk pile. Few pieces of equipment work as well in my fields as they did on the dealer’s videotaped demonstration. I must make adjustments with odd parts, pulling something out of the junk and adding it to the modern implement. An old Bezzerides blade on my new hydraulic drag disk works wonderfully when attacking weeds. Together the two are a perfect blend of old and new.
My junk pile grows gradually, it is well seasoned. My part remains relatively small. I am still considered a young farmer and have taken more from the collection than I’ve added. Yet already I have contributed a bulky portable metal drum irrigation system. It is designed for someone younger than I, with stronger arms, who can reposition a barrel loaded with water. In my twenties, I had no problem with the weight, but today I’d be sore for days.
Epitaph for a Peach Page 18