by Ray, Janisse
My husband and I actively searched for it. We wrote friends and strangers alike.
We are looking for a homestead. We are searching for an old Cracker house on a piece of land preferably in southern Georgia, in the coastal plain. A fixer-upper is good. Over fifty years old and historical is great. We are not looking for a modern-style ranch house or a brick house. We are not looking for highway frontage, but prefer to be on a dirt road. We’d love to have field, forest, a barn, or outbuildings (rundown is okay)—maybe wetlands or a creek or a pond. The more land the better, taking into account that we’re not millionaires. We need pasture. The upper limit of our comfort range is about $220,000. If you know or hear of any such place that comes close to this description, please let us know. We’ll investigate all possibilities. Thank you so much. Please pass this message along. And best of luck to you in finding the things you’re seeking!
We searched over a year for the right place, hours each week scouring the papers and online Realtor listings, more hours on the phone, more traipsing with Realtors around places that would never work. We put notes in mailboxes outside houses we fancied. You never know when and where you’ll find what you desire. But you get tired and you get discouraged. Every morning I knew I had to keep looking, with renewed vigor.
Meanwhile, we had been collecting farm animals and seeds and herbs and skills. All that was striking root. I needed a place to practice.
Part of the urgency Raven and I felt about finding a place was the growing body of evidence substantiating collapse, especially of the climate—and not simply the knowledge but the experience of it. During the two years of our search, the South emerged from a severe, three-year drought. Tornadoes in March were ransacking towns, tearing down schools and neighborhoods, killing people. More and more, the statistics pointed to the need to be settled in a community and able to provide at least some of one’s own basic needs. The national (and then international) housing catastrophe, as well as the stock market crash in the fall of 2008, naturally increased our panic.
During the second September of that long search, I had a gut-wrenching dream. A storm was coming. I had been at a gathering of people, many of them friends, and worry had descended on us. It was palpable. I was leaving with Silas when suddenly he and I were standing on the edge of outer space, on the perimeter of the very atmosphere. All around us the biosphere was blue, all shades of blue, swirling, something you might see if you were doing psychedelic mushrooms. I knew the blue meant ice. The blue hues were eddying, dragged around by speeding global winds. We could feel the cold wind all around us, it was a monolithic wind. I felt amazed and also helpless, and I remember thinking that at least Silas and I were together. Where the colors were powder blue I knew the ice had been melting.
That was the catastrophe. But now the ice was beginning to solidify again, and the whirling winds were turning all colors, rainbow colors, bright and vivid. We made offerings, Silas and I, of what we had, which was strips of potatoes. Then a man appeared. I didn’t know him and neither did Silas, but the man was holding a baby. That would become the important fact.
That’s all of the dream I remember, and maybe that’s all there was. I’ve never studied dream interpretation, but a couple of friends have, and I know that it was both a dream of warning and one of hope, a millennia encapsulated, a collapse and a rebuilding. There was hope in the colors and in the baby.
One day, jogging my daily two miles, I knew in my bones that the place for which we searched was available finally, that we simply had to find it. Such a premonition does little good when you have been looking already for so long, when you have a vast area in which to search (Raven and I had expanded our search into the Carolinas, Virginia, and north Florida, although we were still focused on south Georgia and the most rural parts of it). The last thing we wanted as the news worsened was to blast carbon dioxide into the air while riding on dirt roads, looking for a home. We were, at the time, living on family land and could have remained, but there we owned nothing. We were required to ask permission of my family in order to make changes that would simplify our existence, allowing us to be healthier and safer and more self-reliant, but many of our requests were denied. Our vision was not the vision of my family. My father, a junkman, continued to haul in load after load of material detritus and immaterial valuables.
Our farm came on the market when its owner, a developer, was unable to liquidate properties elsewhere. The FDIC forced the owner’s banks (he had a first and a second mortgage) to put pressure on him to sell. He wasn’t eager to part with the place.
One day I saw a picture of the house online. I remember the afternoon well. Raven was particularly dejected about our search that day, stymied as he was in his ability to move forward with his vision. I was on a writing deadline and needed to pack for a speaking engagement, but I’d sneaked a look at a Realtor site.
“Why don’t you ride over and look at this place?” I asked Raven. “Just to make sure. I know it’s not where we want to be, but it looks interesting.”
He was back in a hurry. “Drop everything,” he said. “We’ve found our farm.”
The house was two stories and painted white with forest green trim. Its metal roof was forest green. It was built in 1850 by Lawrence Pearson using native longleaf pine in the Federal style, although during renovations the front porch had been wrapped around in the style of Victorians. The wood for the house’s construction had come from surrounding flatwoods and had been milled less than a mile away, at a mill operated by Pearson’s brother.
The house sat on 46 acres. To the north and south were large pastures. To the east stood a mature pecan orchard where wild onions scented the fall air, and beyond that ran a dirt road. To the west mature deciduous forest descended slowly to a cypress-lined, blackwater, lilting stream named Slaughter Creek (because of a battle between Native Americans and white settlers). From any window of the house, only nature was visible—no neighbors, no streets, no electric lines, no gutters.
The farm was located in the delta of two rivers, each of them a couple miles away. To the east, the pristine Ohoopee carved its way through white sand, joining the fat Altamaha south of the farm, which drifted lazily toward Darien on the coast, some eighty miles away. The yard of the house was planted with redbuds, cedar, holly, and crepe myrtle trees. Best of all, in front of the house grew an ancient swamp chestnut oak—a landmark, tall and awesome—which covers an eighth of an acre by itself and which was dropping incredibly large acorns, its seeds everywhere.
In the fall of 2009, I would remember all the months of waiting; all those harangued months filled with longing for a place of my own, the place I dreamed of, where we could live the life we desired, where we could build things that would stay, where we could stay, even where we could be buried; and all those months of evenings when I searched newspapers and magazines and websites for the one ad that would call out to us, a home that we could afford. I remembered all that one morning teaching a nature-writing class as a visiting writer at Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania, while wind made the yellow trees sound like rain and somewhere a tractor puttered, while back home in southern Georgia my husband was in a lawyer’s office, signing for both of us, and although I wouldn’t be able to move in until I returned home a few days later, I would soon have the farm I dreamed of.
Consider the possibility that I had been moving toward this land all my life. Consider that it was meant for me.
No one ever settled in more rapidly. We unpacked boxes in the evenings, and during daylight hours erected a mailbox, set up the chicken tractors in the meadow, planted fruit trees and berries, got a garden spot harrowed, planted more shade trees, fenced two pastures, cleaned out and moved things into the barn, built a hog pen. One day the name of the farm came to Raven: Red Earth. After five months we had a goat shed and a sheep hut. We’d thrown a few parties and entertained a constant stream of visitors. Our EGGS FOR SALE sign
was up.
There were all the usual chores, egg collecting and supper making, combined with an endless list of tasks for setting up the infrastructure for a new farm to sustain us as quickly and beautifully as possible. We began to haul in loads of biologic debris, manure and spoiled hay and wood chips, cardboard for mulch, shrimp heads from the fish market, ash from a neighbor’s outdoor furnace. We needed meat for the year and so Raven was up early many mornings before dawn, finding his way to a deer stand he’d erected at the edge of the woods. Sometimes I rose and layered my warmest clothes and went in another direction, to a tree stand the previous owner had left at the northwest corner of the property. In the mornings the roadbed would be scribbled with hoofprints and sometimes we would see deer in our headlights when we came home late from a reading.
That first winter, I was eager to get my thirteenth and, I hoped, last garden planted. I remembered all the gardens I had created and left behind—because I grew up, because I broke up, because the rent got raised, because I went off to graduate school, because graduate school ended, because, because, because. In a stable home, with no intention of ever moving, I could curate the seeds I had collected along the way, had read about, or was saving already as best I could. I could guard seeds more securely. We began to double-dig beds four feet wide and ten feet long, fifteen in one garden and twenty-five in another. As I dug I thought about a line from author Fred Magdoff, who said there are three sources of soil fertility—“the living, the dead, and the very dead.” He meant microbial life, decaying organic matter, and finally humus.
I spent exciting evenings speculating over seed catalogs and finally made my orders, all open-pollinated varieties. When the seeds arrived, Christmas twice, I scrounged up every seed I had stored in the freezer, in jars and coffee cans and packets, and I organized them by dividing them into crops. All the lettuce packets went together in a bag, all the flowers, all the cowpeas, all the Swiss chard. I put these bags into two larger ones, summer crops and winter crops. In the last weeks of late winter I began to plant.
I almost never write about the hours I spend in the garden, not even in my journal. Something happens to me when I garden. I am fully, reliably, blissfully present to who I am and where I am in that moment. I am an animal with a hundred different senses and all of them are switched on.
I mix planting soil, stirring like a witch at a cauldron of compost, peat, and ashes. Nothing is scientific, nothing is tested. Everything I do is an experiment. I am planting seeds in eight-inch pots, carefully spacing the little pillars of life, little buckets, little germs of ideas. A germ, from Latin germen, meaning “sprout,” is the seed of disease, yes. But it is also the bone marrow, the pith, the essence, the oil. Night is coming on and I am working quickly. I hear a bird call from the sandspur field across the road. It is the first chuck-will’s-widow arrived from the South.
What do a seed and a pebble have in common? Both tend to be small, and rounded, and smooth, and hard. One is harder than the other, stronger than the enamel of human teeth; the other mostly capable of being crushed by enamel—although I know people, myself included, who have broken their teeth on seeds. Popcorn, specifically. Pebbles and seeds can be mistaken for each other, until you drop something in a hole that will never sprout. I think of all the jars of soup beans I have sorted and in which I found stones masquerading. Of seeds and pebbles, each has many kinds, people collect each one, museums are devoted to each, each has a science. And each has a mystery beyond science, the life of a stone unknown, the life of a seed waiting in its patient dormancy. They come in all sizes, colors, forms. One carries information between generations, the other between geologic periods. One deconstructs from the inside out, the other from the outside in: if a pebble evolves it does so because of erosion. Both have clocks, one biologic, one geologic; one quick, one slow. Both lie for a time in the ground.
I am cutting labels from old pie tins, pressing a dried-up ballpoint into them to write the labels. KALE, LACINATO. KALE, DWARF BLUE CURLED. KALE, RED RUSSIAN. KALE, GREENPEACE. I am hoping that the labels won’t get lost or become unreadable. Someone told me that old metal blind slats would be good for this. I wonder where I can find some.
It is dark and I am watering the pots of seeds.
It is morning and I am watering them.
Four weeks later and I am transplanting into the long perfect beds, kneeling in a thick mulch of wheat straw, over a layer of wood chips dumped by the electric company because we sometimes tip the workers, over a layer of cardboard. I am watering the seedlings that so shakily stand in their little water saucers. I am sticking more labels in soft ground. I am drawing a grid of the South Garden on graph paper, another of the North Garden, and I am naming what is there.
I am racing nightfall to get three-inch melon starts in the Round Garden, where we concentrate vining crops. I am mulching the seedlings. I am watching them grow. I am side-dressing with aged manure we hauled in from the livestock sale barn, sprinkling worm castings. I am weeding. I have my eye on the first sugar snap pea. I am picking the first lettuce.
Then it is summer and the pigeon peas that my peanut pathologist friend Albert Culbreath gave me are taller than my head. They are eight feet tall, flowering way up there in the most astonishing and giddy scarlet. I have risen from weeding a few stray plants, pigweed and purslane and a chinaberry sprout, from beneath the forest of pigeon pea stalks. I hear the distinctive twittering of a hummingbird. It is a rubythroat, feeding at the pulse flowers above me and making more noise than I think necessary.
I stand still. The hummingbird flies away and lands on the hogwire fence that surrounds the garden. Then I notice a smaller hummingbird a foot away, on the same fence. A good deal of animated hummingbird conversation is underway at the fence; another bird zips from a pecan tree nearby and into the flowers. My face is a daylight moon, staring up through composite leaves, below a field of flowers. I am two feet from a couple of the birds, which are careless, and I realize that they are fledglings, they are leaving a nest nearby, they appear to be learning from their parents how to suckle nectar. They are very excited. For a long time I do not move, they are not startled, and I watch the two young and their parents darting in awkward, helter-skelter ways between blossoms, but unable to hover for long, they careen back to the enclosure wire to rest. I watch until they all fly away through the blue-swirling biosphere.
What I am saying is that lovely, whimsical, and soulful things happen in a garden, leaving a gardener giddy. I am on one side of a row of Striped Roman tomatoes and my son Silas, out of college for the summer, is on the other. He works faster than I, grabbing handfuls of weeds and ripping them out. Sometimes he gets the roots and sometimes he doesn’t. I am more painstaking. I oust every blade of grass, every henbit and celandine, grasping them at ground level to satisfy myself with the sound of uprooting, a tearing muffled by dirt. I’m in high spirits to be working with Silas. He’s talking to me about his life. He and a friend are on the outs, over a skateboard that one borrowed from the other. I listen, sometimes asking a question for clarity, keeping my head down, pulling weeds, trying not to grab a raspberry cane by mistake.
“Is the fight really about the skateboard or is it about something else?” I ask Silas.
“He thinks I’m cocky,” Silas says. All the while the sun is beating down hard and I am wishing for a hat. Raven in the distance photographs flowers.
“You know what kind of tomato this is?” I ask Silas.
“Nope.”
“Striped Roman.”
Silas doesn’t answer.
“It was developed by a man I know, John Swenson. It’s really pretty, long and pointy with orange stripes.”
“Right on,” he says and no more. We finish the row and move to another of younger plants. “I read your emails to Dad,” he says, “and I agree with you.” He’s speaking of a series of emails in which I am discussing college finances w
ith Silas’s father, opposing student loans. I’m glad Silas wants to talk, even if he doesn’t want to talk about what I want to talk about.
“Good has come of it,” I say.
“I’m just saying I thought you were right,” he says. “I’m on your side.”
“I expect you to always be on my side, when all’s said and done,” I say. “Because I’ll be siding with you. I’ll be standing beside you.”
“I’ve always been on your side,” he says. We move to the eggplant and fall into silence.
I am alone in the garden, as I most often am, planting more seeds. I am transplanting, thinking of supper, because it’s time to cook. I am grabbling sweet potatoes, pulling radishes, stripping basil leaves.
When I harvest the food I eat, I stop to consider the coming seeds as a crop. Some of this thinking is second nature. I can’t pull all the radishes. Nor do I want my okra over time to become late okra, so I leave a pod or two of the very first okra on each plant before I begin harvesting. I know some people say not to mix eating and seed saving and those people would eat no fruit from this okra, but people have been doing both for centuries. I may be wrong but that feels natural. I am tying cotton strips torn one inch wide around the stems of chosen pods to remind myself and Raven not to pick them. I am gathering cowpea pods dry on the vine along with the green ones; I eat the green and save the dry. I am stuffing the ripe seed heads of parsnips into old feed bags. I am squeezing the pulp of marble-sized Matt’s Sweet Wild Cherry tomatoes one by one into a canning jar.
I am making pesto, roasting zucchini, rinsing lettuce, chopping a cabbage into slaw. I am scrambling yard eggs with Swiss chard.