Farewell, My Subaru_One Man's Search for Happiness Living Green Off the Grid

by Doug Fine

SIXTEEN

  CHICKEN LITTLE WAS RIGHT TO BE WORRIED

  You can’t just throw seeds in the desert and expect to eat three months later. Even if something other than a cactus miraculously grows, you’ll suddenly be so popular with the local wildlife that your best bet is to switch back to hunting. The New Mexican squirrels alone are so fond of their veggies that Dudley, the slightly conspiratorial farmer who sold me my organic apple saplings, told me I’d do well to consider the kind of varmint traps that featured pry-apart metal jaws. I had inherited a few of these in the Funky Butte Ranch barn. I was scared to go near them.

  * * *

  Desertification and other land degradation could be responsible for 30 percent of greenhouse gas emissions.

  * * *

  Deflated, I asked, “Should I even bother planting crops at all?”

  “Either that or give it up,” he suggested.

  “Go back to Dominoes and the supermarket, you mean.”

  “That’s really your only other option.”

  “Maybe not for long.”

  “Nope.”

  And so, on to organic gentleman farming in the desert. Enclosing my planting area was my first task, just at the time of year when even sunspots start to think my valley is a little too hot. With the help of my friend Abbot I threw up fifteen hundred square feet of egg-shaped antivarmint fencing next to the goat corral. I chose the spot because it was flat and a water line from the well ran right to it.

  Fence building is hard: you have to maintain fierce tension on the fencing or it droops in the middle like Bush’s approval ratings. It took us five long days, compounded by the fact that Abbot was a Rainbow Family member, which meant marijuana was part of his religion. I think it’s important to always try to honor another’s faith. And he was strict about it. Orthodox, you might say.

  But finally the fence looked done to me, if not as absolutely uniform as I had intended. It was five feet high, and sturdy enough to keep the goats out. I was satisfied for the day or two, until I learned that elk can jump eight feet as though stepping on a sidewalk. So I wove the top of the whole fence with perhaps one hundred strands of bamboo grown by my neighbor Mr. Pittman, in exchange for a share of the produce grown. This touch lent the whole area a vaguely Apocalypse Now feel. I envisioned calling the State Game and Fish Department to ask about the legality of eating an impaled elk.

  Then I had to bury chicken wire a foot deep around the entire area because Dudley told me that the damn burrowing squirrels could get under my new fence. I realized, dehydrated and with my work just beginning, that I was going to have to produce quite a bounty of food to earn back the calories I was spending in advance of sinking a single seed.

  The fence done, I still wasn’t ready to plant. Because Saharan sand masquerading as “soil” is the number one problem with agriculture in the desert, I had to untangle, figure out, and assemble the Byzantine network of tubes, valves, and spigots that comprised my drip irrigation system. It all came coiled in a giant box that exploded out at me like a jack-in-the-box when I opened it.

  * * *

  Every year, 62,000 square miles of land loses its vegetation.

  * * *

  Connecting the system’s 1,542 parts (many of them microscopic) in my new planting area involved punching drip holes in hose, plotting crop spacing, and setting timers—essentially the exact set of design, construction, and agricultural skills I was born without. When I was a kid, I had trouble building with Legos. I was no Michael Pollan or Frank Lloyd Wright.

  Still, once my irrigation labyrinth was set up, I’m sure I would’ve immediately started conserving thousands of gallons of water if it weren’t for all the inadvertent “drips” the system initially emitted from my installation mistakes. I spent another couple of days plugging those.

  Now it was time to fertilize. The Funky Butte Ranch suffered no shortage in that department. Goat ranches are nothing if not fertilizer factories. I began throwing the goat-milk-duds-and-hay from corral cleanings on the planting area. This wasn’t so easy, given Melissa’s proclivity for hitching wheelbarrow rides, but all my neighbors were telling me that this mixture was the ideal fertilizer-mulch. Rather than super-fertile soil, though, the resulting ground just started looking to me like dung-covered desert.

  Still, seeds got planted, and to my almost ecstatic delight, even sprouted! Michelle and I danced around the planting area like wood elves on the morning we noticed the first pea pods had started creeping up their netting. In keeping with my local-living intentions, the garden was focusing on the Mimbreno triumvirate—exactly what my fabulously if temporarily successful forebears grew, possibly on this very spot: corn, beans, and squash. All Southwest varieties. Plus, I was giving some other produce I love a shot: local “Mimbres Giant” green chile peppers, and not-so-local eggplant, brussels sprouts, broccoli, chard, tomatoes, peas, leeks, carrots, cukes, zukes, lettuce, and beets. It was a big planting area. I figured I’d barter with any surplus.

  * * *

  Estimated population of my county in 1000 CE: 9,000. Estimated population of my county today: 31,250.

  * * *

  The drip system worked like a charm, although it seemed mainly useful for the production of almost supernatural weeds. Euphoric with the surprise bonanza of water dripping on them for a couple of hours per day, and knowing that a pesky farmer might at any moment try to pull them, these unwanted plants tended to be sharper than Dennis Miller monologues. They grew two feet per day in amazing variety right where my local corn was supposed to dominate the soil. Crazy gourdlike things and tiny viscid wildflowers with roots that extended to China invaded like flowers from a magician’s sleeve. Overnight, a thousand vines of an annoying plant called spiny amaranth lasciviously entangled my plastic drip lines. I pulled them, and there they were again, the next morning. It was like something out of Little Shop of Horrors.

  “It’s taking us an hour to weed one row of peppers,” I had complained to Michelle one morning.

  “We could let the goats in,” she said.

  I looked behind me. Indeed, the Pan Sisters were foraging away on the same amaranth right outside the gate. It was one of their top five hundred snacks. This seemed to back up Michelle’s basic argument.

  “We could have those weeds cleared for you in twenty minutes,” their munching said.

  “I’m not totally confident that they’d distinguish between the amaranth and the squash, though,” I said.

  “The whole world is breakfast for them,” Michelle conceded. “I’m kind of jealous. I mean, they make bark sound delicious.”

  This was no exaggeration. Natalie actually moaned with pleasure when I dropped a hunk of alfalfa hay into the corral. Myself, I had no such inclination. I’d tried a mouthful of their organic alfalfa out of curiosity, and it tasted like green paper.

  “On the other hand,” I said. “They don’t get to watch Peter Sellers movies.”

  We probably could have bypassed the whole weed problem if I wasn’t so dedicated to organic standards: the Monsanto Corporation, in fact, offers a variety of corn genetically modified to resist a Monsanto poison that will kill everything else in your garden. Just plant, spray, and collect farm subsidies.

  * * *

  Organic farming can produce enough food to sustain even a larger population than the current worldwide one, without increasing the amount of agricultural land needed.

  * * *

  But the truth is I didn’t begrudge a second of garden work. If I couldn’t imagine a Fertile Crescent farmer at the dawn of agriculture sharing our particular weed/goat quagmire, I also hoped that any ancient cultivator would have had as much fun not solving his problems as Michelle and I were having not solving ours. There was something about playing in dirt that took us back to some of our more carefree days of varsity preschool: when play was work and you took it seriously. Jeans are meant to have dirty knees, I remembered after a break of three decades.

  Meanwhile, despite the prolific weeds, my new appl
e saplings grew encouraging leaves almost immediately, chard soon came off my grocery store shopping list, and the corn and bean rows in particular really went crazy. I started to get a “this just might work!” feeling. The carbon miles were coming out of my diet by the week. It looked like my supermarket days were numbered.

  That is, until the most devastating late-spring hailstorm that anyone can remember sent me back to square one. Ice gobstoppers pockmarked everyone’s truck hoods, and when I skidded home from a fortuitous town run, missing the storm, the river and my creek were both at Nile flood levels, trapping me for about an hour. At the general coffee klatch that ensued while we waited for yet another Old Testament plague to subside, Will Ogden’s wife told me, “If you had a garden, you don’t anymore.”

  And historians wonder why Jamestown struggled? Those people didn’t have co-ops and Wal-Mart to fall back on. The weather patterns for the next couple of millennia, if the Farmer’s Almanac and local wisdom are to be believed, are best categorized by the description, “worst drought ever followed by worst flood ever followed by freakiest hailstorm ever followed by some other nightmare, etc.”

  Only the squash and a couple of peas survived the deluge without at least some damage. (The peas were already clinging firmly to their mesh wall and the plants were holding hands, a teamwork strategy that no doubt got them through the storm.) I replanted everything as quickly as I could, but the event was the first in a series of frustrating setbacks for me in the food-gathering arena.

  Most notably, the Funky Butte Ranch’s next two births, the cutest little fluff-ball chicks you ever saw, were scooped up by the red-tailed hawk that nested on the next ranch before they even saw their first weekend, which got me down. Growing up in the suburbs, I just never envisioned myself chasing a bird of prey, screaming, “Hey! Bring those chicks back!” They didn’t teach it in precalc.

  “She’s just trying to feed her family,” Michelle reminded me as I bolted for the shotgun.

  A few days after that, the second most devastating late-spring hailstorm anyone can remember blitzkrieged across southern New Mexico, this time while Sadie and I were on our run. It was like living in a driving range. Until it happens, you simply don’t expect golf balls to pound you on the head while you’re on a tour of your neighborhood. This is what Chicken Little was worried about.

  We were right in the thick of it, and it got truly scary for a while, with violet lightning missiles dancing on both sides of us, apparently closing in. With each soul-readjusting clap of close-by thunder, Sadie did a couple of mad circles around my legs and then tilted her head up to me quizzically as if to ask, “What do we do now?” Her hair was sticking up as though she were suffering an electric shock, and I almost laughed, until I noticed from my arm hair that the same was true of me. We were experiencing an unstable electrical situation.

  “Pray,” I advised my dog. She was familiar with the concept, as miracles happened in her life with regularity. Take the way beef bones from the local butcher would magically emerge from the freezer now and then. Hallelujah! Sadie’s reality was filled with the awesome result of prayer. She knew it couldn’t hurt.

  About two ridges away from my canyon, I took my own advice and bargained with God, promising that if we survived this one, I’d no longer go out for runs when an obvious prophesy was on its way. As they so often seemed to be these days. I turned off my iPod in case it was a lightning draw, though I kept the headphones on as a partial hail helmet. I fought Sergio Leone winds and forged ahead like some kind of hapless British explorer. And so over the next mile and a half I got to experience the strange phenomenon of overheating and hypothermia in the same hour. It’s almost like travel—to Ecuador followed almost immediately by Antarctica.

  Flood, hail, slow-arriving contractors. What was next? Locusts? Boils? That storm, needless to say, created even more carnage in the garden. As did the one that followed a few days later. I was thrown into a resentful grumpiness, thinking my whole life plan would be sidetracked by this initial agricultural setback. For a few days I grumbled when I should have been humming, swore when I should have given thanks.

  SEVENTEEN

  REAPING REWARDS

  On a moist and almost nippy June morning, I re-replanted, but I did it while whining the way farmers throughout the history of agriculture have whined when dealing with the benevolent trickster Mother Nature: with diginity; unless I was alone. I suddenly felt like there were just too many tasks involved in green living. And Laurie David made it look so easy. At any given moment, about nine loose ends were looming, lingering, appearing, and reappearing. Say, a broken barn door, or nature behaving like Lindsay Lohan. It was to the point that I had no choice but to implement an “if it’s important I’ll notice it again” policy when some new problem popped up in front of me as I was treading water on any given day.

  After the third storm, Michelle sensed my pending implosion, and suggested we take an afternoon off to innertube the river for summer solstice. But I whined to her that before I could do something like “innertube the river,” I had to feed three species of mammal and one of bird, check the house battery bank charge, do some math to make sure the holding tank was full enough for the morning drip watering, scare away any threatening hawks or coyotes, dump a couple of gallons of waste veggie oil into the filter barrel, and maybe do a little emergency goat hoof trimming. All while not getting bitten by a rattlesnake. But then I’d be totally free until the evening goat feeding, as long as nothing broke, leaked, or climbed through the pet door and onto my bed (this was Melissa’s latest trick).

  Unless, of course, it’d been cloudy for a couple of days, in which case I had to do any showering and laundry by the afternoon, to give the pump enough time to fill the holding tank before sundown. Otherwise there’d be no water for breakfast in the morning. The thing about solar power is you need the sun to power it.

  * * *

  The first solar cell was developed in Bell Labs in 1954. It still generates electricity. Solar panels routinely come with thirty-year warranties.

  * * *

  Life was just more…manual than it had been on Long Island when operating the television remote control had been my biggest physical chore. Still, Michelle, Sadie, and I floated the river, and when we returned, the world hadn’t ended. In fact, everything was fine at the ranch: goats, solar batteries, water supply.

  So I stopped gaping at the sky in dread like Chicken Little as I went through the motions of getting the garden back in order. And like an unsought reward, the monsoon for once came right on schedule to help things along. Within two weeks the garden looked like a weedy Eden again. Plus, I had enough hay stashed in the barn this year to outlast even another epic flood. Organic, New Mexico–grown hay at that. I still planned on trekking to the El Otro Lado river crossing to shoot the breeze with Will Ogden, but this year such coffee klatches would be voluntary.

  Even the chickens were recovering—they are blessed with extremely short memories and I’d be hard pressed to say Agatha even remembered her old boyfriend. The hens were back to two eggs per day by August.

  “I’m the king of the world!” my new rooster, Donald Trump, loudly boasted as he led his family to a shady pecking spot. “I have eight girlfriends.”

  “Check that, seven,” he crowed the next day after the hawk paid a visit. “Still, who’s cooler than me?”

  At about that time, weeds once again became the bane of my life. “May this be the worst thing that ever happens to you,” my grandmother, who Natalie looks like, used to say to me when I came home weeping with a skinned knee. Indeed, when garden weeds are your biggest problem, life is pretty good.

  Michelle and I proceeded to spend much of July avoiding dealing with them. Instead, we kept planting new crops to get weedy when we weren’t eating pudding at three a.m. When we finally got to thinning the prickly forest toward the end of the month, we found hidden carrots, leeks, and broccoli that had been protectively shaded by the unwanted “weeds.” The bru
tal New Mexico sun, even at monsoon time, had been tempered by our shrewd laziness to allow the fall harvest to grow to cornucopia levels. On top of that, we found out that amaranth leaves are not just edible, but as nutritious as spinach—our weeds were part of the garden.

  “We’ve got to remember to implement this strict nonweeding regimen next year,” I said. “Not before the end of July do we start thinning and grooming.”

  “I’ll mark it down on the calendar,” Michelle said between mouthfuls of pudding. “Or we’ll forget. We don’t want to be late for neglecting the garden.”

  In truth, I don’t know what we did right. Maybe it was beginner’s luck, or the wet July. Daily, automated drip irrigation didn’t hurt. Michelle not-so-secretly believes it was our Bob Marley song that did the trick, which she sang to the goats (as thanks for their manure) just outside the garden egg fence on the day before the first flowering zucchini looked ready to bear fruit.

  It’s the Pan Sisters’ favorite song, a modified version of “Them Belly Full.” It goes like this:

  Them belly full but they hungry,

  A hungry goat is every goat…

  The next day a dozen zukes were hanging from the vine. Whatever the source of the bounty, by August I harvested more lettuce than I could reasonably be expected to eat in a year, if I was a rabbit. I stuffed it in gallon bags and put it in the fridge. Peas came next. And like magic one morning there were twenty stir-fries’ worth of peppers on the stalk. They were shiny—like earrings from the early Madonna era. I liked looking at them. Michelle stuffed some of them with cream cheese and fried them, and when she dumped the oil from the effort into a mason jar, I thanked her for saving it. “This’ll get the ROAT twenty yards, easy.”