FINALIST: 2007 COLORADO BOOK AWARD, BEST CREATIVE NONFICTION; HONORABLE MENTION, NONFICTION MEMIOR, FOREWORD MAGAZINE
Desert of the Heart by Karen Chamberlain
ISBN 0-9771272-4-9, $17.95
Available from Books West and Small Press Distribution
Book Description: Poet and naturalist Karen Chamberlain intertwines years of history and her own experience while isolated on an ranch oasis in the Utah desert. Her reflective and accessible prose discerns the inner mirages of fear and loneliness, while realizing the lush peace afforded by solitude. These candid essays, including excerpts from her journal, offer a gritty and realistic journey into the dependent entities of place and self, beckoning readers to uncover their own ideas about youth, individuality, and nature.
Blurbs: “…Karen Chamberlain has written a remarkable memoir. For almost five years, she lived at the remote Horsethief Ranch in the redrock desert of southern Utah. Her solitude was intermeshed with live-in visitors, strangers, family, and friends, as the past became the present in this watering hole used by centuries of human beings. Chamberlain has polished what she experienced into shimmering stories, crafting a beautiful narrative of place. This books is luminous in its language, spare and expansive like the desert itself. It exposes our deficit for the wild as we make vows to live more consciously in collaboration with the land.” —Terry Tempest Williams
“This is a memoir of place—a reach-into-your-soul place in southeast Utah’s singular canyon country. It is made intimate by the way Chamberlain brings to life the remarkable people and creatures who share her sojourn at Horsethief Ranch. Its humanity owes much to Chamberlain’s ability to examine herself and the substance of her life in the contexts of desert splendor—at once harrowing and beautiful—and of solitude, love, friendship, and violence. You’ll be reminded of another canyon-country memoir because Desert of the Heart is what Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitude might have been had he been a woman. This book will work its way deep inside you, these powerful words of rock and sun and grace.” —Russell Martin
“Karen Chamberlain has given us an acutely observed and finely written record of maintaining not only courage but high-spirited emotional balance as we contemplate eternities. I thank and bless her.”—William Kittredge
Awards: Honorable Mention, Foreword Magazine, 2007
Reviews: Durango Herald April 28, 2006 (full review archived) by Patricia Miller
Excerpt: [Desert of the Heart] is a “staggeringly well-written book…for the writing and for the sheer burnishing of the spirit.”
A chapter from this work was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
A chapter from this work was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.Excerpt from Eating the Peach, Desert of the Heart
One afternoon in August, while lugging yet another basket of squash from the garden to the sorting table on the patio, my eye was caught by a peculiar quick skitter in the shadows near the patio couch. Zorro, the whiptail lizard who patrolled the general area of patio and kitchen door, had a large something in his mouth and was jerking it about as if trying to subdue it. I set my basket down to take a closer look.
A grasshopper. Zorro had a huge green grasshopper, nearly half as big as the lizard’s own body, gripped by the thorax in his mouth. The hopper appeared dull-eyed, beaten, one hind leg askew. As I watched, Zorro relinquished his hold and the grasshopper half-hopped away. Like striped lightning, Zorro pounced and regained his grip. Hopper struggled, hind legs flailing. Zorro whipped his head back and forth, hard, then let go again. Hopper didn’t hop. Zorro mouthed hopper head first, like an exploded cigar, lower jaw bulging grotesquely. Then cocked his head as if aware I was watching and skittered behind the patio couch.
Oh, no, I thought-I won’t see what happens. But soon the reptile and its mouthful appeared above the couch, climbing the rock wall of the house. Scuttle scuttle stop. Scuttle scuttle stop. Minutes passed between each flurry of movement. I wondered about heartbeat, breath-rate, balance. How could such a light-footed creature manuever its own weight on a vertical surface, never mind that of its ungainly prey? Zorro skittered up under the house beams, reappearing on the metal patio roof. I grabbed a chair and stood on it to watch.
Zorro cocked his head, then took several violent lunges forward, as if regurgitating. Slowly, painfully (to me), hopper’s head disappeared into lizard’s throat. Its thorax distorted Zorro’s mouth dreadfully, its legs still kicked. Long moments, then more forward lunges-but whether to swallow or dislodge the insect was hard to tell. Had Zorro ever eaten anything so big before? Was he being choked, or smothered, by his prey? What an appalling effort just to eat. No wonder his eyes looked squeezed and glazed. What does it feel like, little guy, all that brittle exoskeleton jammed up against your tiny brainpan?
Gag me with a grasshopper. With a mouth that full, who could answer? For minutes, Zorro was still. Then more lunges, as if forward force alone could enable the lizard to engulf its prey, as if there were no peristaltic muscles in its throat. Finally only the hopper’s toes protruded like whiskers from Zorro’s mouth. A breeze rustled the apricot leaves above my head. How long would it be before the lizard ate again? Given a chance, he’d likely catch and devour another meal that size, whatever the discomfort. Nature has no regrets, and no Alka-Seltzer.
I pick up my basket, thinking what an apt image Zorro’s oversized meal is for the immensity of produce I’m harvesting. So far today I’ve picked a large wicker tray of tomatoes, a basket each of yellow beans and purple ones, two of green beans, a tray of cucumbers and a large plastic bag of salad greens. Plus the basket of squash I was carrying when I glimpsed Zorro, the three grocery bags of fruit I put in the root cellar this morning, and the peppers, corn, and eggplants still waiting to be picked. And this happpens every day. So much for desert sparsity-more like ‘add water and stir’ and watch Jack’s beanstalk grow.
But let’s take three steps backward and start with what the desert offered before a garden was ever planted here. Desert vegetation is hardly edenic, but despite its sparsity, it has provided well for ancient and more recent native people. Such staples as meal ground from various combinatins of ricegrass, sunflower seeds, piñon nuts, acorns, currants and squawbush berries were basic. Prickly pear and wild fruit were used fresh or dried. Roots of cattail, salsify and dock were eaten year round. Many plants could be gathered young for greens, and wild onion, mint, peppergrass and juniper provided seasoning. Ephedra-‘Mormon tea’-and cota-‘Navajo tea’-were boiled into refreshing brews. These and a host of other wild plants were used in medicine, art, and other aspects of daily life. In addition, corn, beans, squash, gourds, peppers, and tomatillos were planted wherever there was dependable moisture.
As they moved west, Europeans loosed a number of plant species on the desert, a few useful, most invasive. My desert friend Jim Fulton taught me to recognize and use several of them, and native plants as well. Russian thistle sprouts (tumbleweed), easy to harvest, make a great steamed vegetable or salad green. The tuberous roots of salsify substitute well for potates. Wild tomatoes, though unpalatable raw, are delicious in stews or stirfries. And the wild carrots Jim pulled for me were so sweet I would have fought Bugs Bunny for a patch of them.
From Remo I learned more, starting with the proper way to brew ephedra and cota. We also peeled and sliced cactus pads and sauteed them with piñon nuts and leaves of wild lettuce. We made delicious salads of young pigweed, dandelion and tumbleweed, laced with fleshy white petals of yucca flowers. We roasted salsify tubers and garnished them with chopped wild onion. One fall we made a trail mix solely of roasted piñon nuts and acorns, lemony squawbush berries, and red currants and serviceberries from Remo’s land in the mountains. Tasty, if you don’t mind picking seeds out of your teeth for hours afterward.
I also learned firsthand not to eat certain plants, but that’s a story to be taken up later.
My own history as forager and gardener began in childhood, when I fed my runaway spirit on the bounty of greens, berries, fruits and nuts that grow wild in New England. Much of the lore of wild edibles I learned from my father, who transcended his city upbringing by teaching his three daughters one of the most civilized bodies of knowledge a person can have: the skills of using shovel, hoe, rake, hands, and water to create food. By weekday an accountant for a large corporation, my father preferred to work with his hands. Yes, he often drank too much, and yes, it made him nasty. But the muscles in his arms were tempered hard as iron from building our house, shoveling snow, making toys for handicapped kids, and spading each year’s garden.
If have harsh memories of threats and beatings, I also have clear recollections of my father and mother evenings after work, kneeling, putting seeds into the ground or cultivating what grew from them, while we children played in the grass nearby. If I can still feel the back of my father’s hand across my face, I can also feel the gentleness of that hand guiding mine as we made rows into which we pressed seeds, covered them with fine soil and patted them snug, my child’s hand spread beneath his callused palm. What I don’t recall is a time when I didn’t know how deep or far apart to plant each kind of seed, how much to water the sprouted seedings, and how to tell those seedlings from weeds.
All of which served me well as an adult who has gardened in nearly every place she’s lived. Horsethief, with its huge garden of raised beds filled with handmade soil and watered by Michael’s intricate drip irrigation system, was a challenge from the beginning. Planted but untended during Chad’s last year as caretaker, many of the beds were choked with weeds. The compost pit, intended to replenish the soil in the beds, was a tangle of fruit tree prunings, cornstalks, dried weeds and rotting garbage.
Knowing that Michael planned to visit for a month in June-his first visit since I’d lived here-and would enjoy firing up his gasoline composter and making soil of all that stubble, I ignored the compost pit and instead raked wheelbarrow-loads of winter-cured manure from the corrals. After clearing the beds of mulchstraw and removing each bed’s web of plastic pipe, I spread a layer of manure several inches thick over the soil, then double-spaded it in, turning overlapping rows first crosswise then lengthwise, fifteen inches deep. Finally I chopped the soil fine with a hoe, raked it smooth and level, and put the pipes back in place.
Meanwhile I began the chore of ridding the remaining beds of weeds. Some, like pigweed and kochia, gave up easily. But one quadrant of the garden was choked with two of the most tenacious weeds a gardener could encounter: bindweed, a poor relative of morning glory, and saltgrass, a desert cousin of Bermuda grass. Both have extensive root systems, both sprout from stems as well as roots, and both have roots that break easily, leaving more root growing.
Morning after morning I donned gloves and set mind, teeth, and spade to the task. At the end of each day, I’d have created a five-by-five foot square of weedless soil-an area that next year I’d be able to turn over in ten minutes instead of ten hours. Without that hope, and the example of crops already planted, I might have quit. But two weeks later, along with a stiff back, I had weedless beds in which to seed spinach, chard, lettuces, and a big patch of potatoes.
By then the average annual frost-free date of April 29th had passed, and May’s weather-I hoped-would be warm enough to put in tomato, eggplant, pepper and squash seedlings. A thick layer of mulch-straw tucked around each plant and spread over the entire bed helped keep its soil moist, weeds from sprouting, and worms and sowbugs at work breaking down straw into soil. It also helped keep the tender plants from freezing when they were hit by frost.
I felt had an orderly garden under way, one that took advantage of companion-planting certain species together, each of which enhanced the health and productivity of the other. In every bed were insect-repelling herbs and flowers. Aromatic basil fronted the tomatoes, marjoram and savory grew among the beans, horseradish in the potato bed. Onions, garlic, chives and scallions thrived amid squashes, peppers, and eggplants. Giant marigolds, zinnias, and petunias added bright color to every bed.
Meanwhile, during April and May the fruit trees bloomed, scenting the canyon like a Persian garden. Delicate apricot blossoms, weighted with the bumble of wild bees, then deeper pinks of plum and cherry, peach and nectarine bloomed. Apple, pear and almond blossomed white and sweet, and finally the fuzzy yellow flowers of grapevines-each tree and vine with its contingent of murmuring bees. Native squawbushes around the spring and corrals, and the non-native Russian olive by the bunkhouse, offered the heady perfumes of their flowering. Yellow honeysuckle and white bridal wreath outside the bedroom window sweetened my dreams, while the stately iris bordering the front yard, planted for their elegant purple flowers, instead bloomed the rich red-brown of the desert sand from which they grew.
Life at the ranch from early spring on revolved in large part around the garden. Guests almost always wanted to help, to get their hands in the soil, to contribute in some way to the productivity of the place. All of these people left their mark on Horsethief as surely as they felt changed by the experience of being there-including, in mid-May of that first year, my mother.
Most mother-daughter relationships have at least a little touch-and-go to them, and ours was no exception. We could treat each other as adult equals for about three days before things broke down into familial patterns of nag and sass. When Mom told me she wanted to come to the ranch for a week, and spend a second week with her grandkids in Albuquerque, I thought, Well, maybe there’s space enough here so it’ll work. When she wrote again to say she’d changed her mind and wanted to stay the entire two weeks at Horsethief, with Nance and the kids driving up to visit, I thought, Uh oh. No desert is big enough for that.
Amazingly, things worked out. Except for Mom without asking tossing out all the dried flowers I’d kept in vases to cheer me through the winter, we got along quite well. I drove her around to marvel at the nearby National Parks. She proudly accomplished her wish, at age eighty, of riding a horse for the first time in thirty years. And we spent considerable time in the garden together. She’d even brought her own sunhat.
Watching her one morning as she thinned a row of carrots-the quintessential little old lady in tennis shoes, long-sleeved shirt and cotton pants-I noticed for the first time how long her arms were, how large her hands. Her withered, age-freckled, nurse’s hands, so incongruous on her tiny body, as if enlarged by all the years of care they’d given to so many people, including her children. I felt an urge to pick her up in my arms as if she were the child, and tell her how much she meant to my life, how grateful I was for the life she had given me. Instead, I brought her a glass of cold lemonade, thanked her for all the work she was doing in the garden, and told her how glad I was she’d come.
By the time my sister Nance and her children arrived, the lettuces, cress and arugala were ready for salads, and we made the most of them. There’s nothing quite like the taste and texture of spring’s young greens, that first nibble of tender lettuce leaves pulled straight from the soil. Suddenly winter, with its heavy diet of beans, grains and meat, is far behind. Even if nothing else has sprouted, suddenly one feels liberated from fluorescent aisles of supermarket produce into the cleansing lightness of feeding one’s body what it craves and needs.
Though Mother’s Day had passed, on the evening Nance arrived we celebrated our mother’s day with a dinner of young carrots and peas, a leg of spring lamb, a big salad of baby greens, and a cake decorated with petals of desert flowers. Remo, stopping by on the way to his land, arrived in time for dinner, and later led us in singing old songs from the 1920s, the words to which only he and my mother knew. She and Remo hit it off so well that they were still gabbling after the dinner dishes were done. I bid them goodnight with my hot tub towel over my shoulder. Nance and the kids had gone to the bunkhouse, and as my mother went off to bed, Remo asked if he might join me. “Why not,” I said, still thinking of him as a friend in whom I had no romantic interest. After all, he just wasn’t my type…
Surprise, surprise. I don’t recall how we ended up in each other’s arms, but we stayed that way for hours, kissing openmouthed, taking each other’s breath away, exploring each other with lips, tongues, fingers, arms, legs, all the skin we could press together, underwater and above, playing, teasing, until we noticed the water had cooled and it was almost dawn. Shriveled like prunes, we went inside, only to begin all over again in bed.
When he left later that morning for his land, a new keen feeling threaded between us.
That first spring, the frosty nights of early June flipped over into weeks of overbearing heat. Friends Mike Moore and Susan Walp arrived from Vermont, joined by a mutual friend from Colorado, George Sibley. Susan, an exquisite and recognized painter, was gone each morning at dawn to sketch and draw. Mike and George, both passionate gardeners, discovered the composter in the breezeway, spent a day repairing it, and were stuffing the noisy monster with stalks from the compost pit when Michael drove in for his first visit since I’d been caretaker.
An awkward half-hour passed while introductions were made and Michael inspected house and grounds and the changes I’d created during the first nine months of my tenure. Not having not seen the place for a year, since the last months of Chad’s stay, he seemed vaguely impressed but said nothing. The next thing I knew, he’d added himself and Ken (who’d arrived earlier) to the composting crew. The air was full of noise, dust and bits of plant litter, and the basic element of the garden was being manufactured handful by hopperful-from sand and branches, stalks and husks, garbage and manure-right before my eyes.
Dirt. Dirt until something was planted in it, or until the earthworms went through it. Then it became soil. Great care was given to the proportions, and disagreements flared, barely heard above the composter’s thrash and clatter: “More manure!” “No, more sand first!” “Hey, help me get these vines in the hopper.” Michael, who with a crew of friends and this machine had made the many tons of soil that filled eighteen garden beds two feet deep, five feet wide and six to twenty feet long, worked with Mike and George until they saw how to produce what was needed. Then he and Ken went off to explore.
When the composter chugged to a halt at lunchtime, silence washed back into the canyon like the walls of the Red Sea. I went to look at the compost pit, running a handful of coarse duff through my fingers and inhaling its raw richness. While I was wetting it down with a hose, Mike, washing up at the sink outside the garden gate, quipped with baritone satisfaction in his voice, “If you can grow good soil, you can grow anything.” I made a note to bring back some cartons of earthworms on my next trip to town.
Add water and stir…The stirring part was going along fine now, but I was having trouble adding water. Checking beneath the mulch, I discovered that the dripheads, which were spaced eighteen inches apart on their pipelines and designed to release overlapping circles of moisture along the rows of crops, were in many places making wet circles only three or four inches wide, and in some places none at all. I began hand-watering everything with a hose. Each evening I slow-danced around the garden, aiming the hose so as not to waste a drop, soaking as many rows as I could before dark. Worried that the fruit trees might not be getting water either, I watered each one for thirty minutes or more weekly.
Needless to say, all this took great amounts of water and time. With the spring down to the outtake pipe and my patience at the same level, Michael arranged for a tank truck of river water to be delivered into the cistern. Shortly after that, the solar pump was installed, and between Michael’s “rain,” the breaking of the drought with summer monsoons, and autumn’s cold showers, a whole year passed before I learned the reason the dripheads weren’t working. But more of that in good time.
Some of the best gifts are things you don’t know you need. We were sitting under the front yard apricot one scorching noon, enjoying a last lunch with Susan, Mike, and George, when a young man wearing dusty clothes and a heavy backpack walked up the driveway and was welcomed by Michael. Ben Johnson, as he was introduced, was on walkabout, aiming to travel on foot from Moab to San Francisco by the straightest possible route crosscountry. Michael, returning from town the day before, had talked Ben into accepting a ride for a few miles, and had invited him to the ranch, which was on Ben’s way west. Ben had hiked eighteen rough straight miles that morning from Island in the Sky. He looked ready for lunch.
Meanwhile, Mike and Susan and George had loaded their cars, leaving behind a pit full of well-made soil, a lovely painting over the kitchen window, great conversations, and words in the logbook: A week under this hot desert sun has been good for the damp New England soul. We’ll not forget these canyons, nor the bighorn we encountered, nor the ranch itself and the people we’ve met…By the time goodbyes were said, Ben had finished his lunch and was leaning over the table with Michael and Ken, staring at a diagram Michael was making.
Glancing at the drawing while clearing the dishes, I saw plans for what looked like an arbor through the garden’s midsection. Fine, I thought, as long as they don’t damage what I’ve already planted. As if reading my mind, Michael explained that they needed me to move the rows of plants bordering the center aisle, but assured me “It’ll be worth it. You’ll have some shade in the middle of the garden, and a trellis where you can train tomatoes and beans.”
If I didn’t quite trust Michael’s knowledge of hands-on gardening, I couldn’t argue with the success of the projects he’d designed to support it-the railroad-tie beds and their soil, the greenhouse he’d had helicoptered in in parts and assembled in situ, the entire irrigation system. I transplanted the squash and pepper plants out of the way.
In the days that followed, Ken, Michael and Ben dug holes, set tall cedar posts in them, then bolted lodgepoles horizontally to form the framework of a sturdy arched ‘roof’ above the garden’s center aisle. Reinforcement wire, stapled over the top and halfway down the sides, left the lower half open so there’d be room to work in the beds. No sooner was this framework complete than Michael and Ben drove to town and returned with a bucket of grapevine cuttings and a potted trumpet vine. As we planted them at the corners of each bed and trained them around the arbor posts, little did I foresee the size and productivity these vines would attain, nor the grace, shade, and vertical growing space the arbor would add to the garden.
Each year’s garden was different, not only in what was planted and where, but in the ways various crops responded to that year’s rainfall, temperature patterns and insect pests. In many ways, the canyon is an island, biologically isolated from other gardens and their pests-which is why it can be grown organically. It was fun each year to grow something new, like gourds, Turk’s turban squashes, strawberrry popcorn, colorful Indian corn. At Michael’s insistence I tried peanuts, which worked somewhat, and yams, which didn’t work at all. The peanut plants went chlorotic, which is to say they turned yellow from lack of available iron in the soil-an ironic situation, since the canyon’s rocks and sand are full of, and colored by, iron. However, most of it is bound up in an insoluble form (ferric oxide) that some garden crops and most non-native vines and fruit trees can’t access. To compensate, at least twice a year they must be dosed with a solution of ferrous sulfate.
During Michael’s spring visit the following year, he designed an ‘apron bed’ between garden and driveway, and got Ken and another long-time friend, Edric, to build it. That was the spring I fled to Arizona to escape the crowds of visitors. When I returned, the apron bed was finished, complete with its own drip irrigation hookup. Ken had planted asparagus among the apple trees that already grew there, and another of Michael’s friends, a smart jolly woman named Betty, had filled the bed-and thus also lined the driveway-with a brilliance of scarlet petunias.
Edric, Michael’s one-time college professor, was a courtly gentleman with a passion for gardening. A resident of Florida, where he held a master gardener’s certificate, he visited the ranch each summer with his wife, Beth, and had helped Michael construct the garden early on. Always ultrapolite, Edric would ask me each year if he could plant this or that, and where. Each year I would say “Of course,” show him areas of the garden that hadn’t been planted, and remind him-beg him-to plant whatever he wanted, but please to plant it next to drip heads, so I wouldn’t have to hand-water his gifts. And each year I would find the oddest flowers scattered here and there through the beds, often replacing what had already been planted, and seldom if ever near a drip head. By ‘odd’ I mean water-loving, as in lupine, delphinium, even morning glory-cultivated kin of the despised bindweed.
On the other hand, it was Edric who asked, in his courtly manner, if I thought flushing out the garden pipelines and replacing clogged drip heads before planting would help the system function better. Bingo! Lightbulb! Something no one had ever mentioned and I had never thought of. All those hundreds of hours of handwatering, chained to the hose, missing my sunset horseback rides… It was too late to pull the irrigation lines out from under this year’s mulched crops, so I still had to handwater unless it rained. But from then on, spring’s first task was to flush pipes and replace drip heads.
As every gardener knows, after planting comes waiting, sometimes days, sometimes weeks, to see what will sprout, what will take hold and grow. Pea-tendrils reach toward rabbit wire, hand-over-hand their way up, blossoming as they go. Spinach, beets, lettuce and chard come from the ground with two tiny leaves spread like dancers’ arms, then four, then begin to look like themselves. Tomato plantlings, plain as palm trees, begin branching sideways as well as up, need support, respond to being touched, to being helped into place. Respond with their green scent, their yellow-petalled blossoms, their stems glistening with tiny golden hairs. Baby fruits, hard and green, form behind dropped blooms. Marigolds branch and bud, petunias need pinching off, melon tendrils unfurl, beans put up tri-leaved umbrellas and twirl up the arbor’s tightwire, opening blossoms to the bees. Orange mouths of squash flowers open wide, while young corn plants, encountering each other’s leaves, whisper like children.
Spring turns to summer the day you pick the first ripe tomato. At Horsethief this happens around the first of July. Meanwhile you’ve been dining on sweet peas and peapods, mostly in the garden. You’ve had a dozen meals of fresh spinach and several of chard, and you slice into the second planting of radishes for a radish/purslane/mayonaise sandwich on dark molasses bread. July’s garden still has a sense of delicacy. Everything’s so young and fresh you hardly bother to cook-you just graze while you’re working, or whenever you feel the urge. You make little sushis right in the garden-a sunripe cherry tomato wrapped in a leaf of green or purple basil; a snap pea-pod or baby carrot banded with a feather of dill; crisp yellow or green beans bound with a sprig of savory; a fingerling of summer squash knotted with garlic chives. Every year it’s like this. Every year, for a while, you fool yourself into thinking it’s going to be easy.
But as the garden’s greenery overflows its beds like a river in flood, and everything begins to ripen at once, you start to panic. You’re only one person, what do you eat first? A head of broccoli or cauliflower will make three meals. One stirfry will use up two peppers, three summer squash, a fistful of green beans, an onion and a small eggplant-and last another three days. The refrigerator’s so jammed with what you picked yesterday you can’t find what you picked the day before. Meanwhile, more beans, chard and spinach are waiting, if you made yourself a salad you’d slow the lettuces from bolting, you’ve hardly touched the spicy arrugala and cress you love, you know when the corn ripens you’ll bypass everything else, and right now you’re so stuffed with ripe apricots you can’t even think about eating.
And this is just the beginning. You’ve given the top two-thirds of the apricot trees to the birds, and still hundreds of these little globes of orange sugar are smashing on the ground before you can get to them. You split and dry apricots, split and dry cherry tomatoes, slice and dry romas and regular tomatoes, snip and dry herbs, there’s never enough room in the drying racks on the roof. You make jam, dozens and dozens of jars to give as winter gifts. You make up shopping bags full of this and that and take them to the food bank, the bookstore, the laundromat to give away. You bring more bags to the Parks for the rangers, or give them to Bonnie to dole out. You stop for the flagman on the highway project and plunk a bag of veggies and a cold beer in his free hand. You dream about finding a section of the garden you haven’t touched, you didn’t know was there. You find a whole section of the garden you haven’t touched, you forgot was there, behind the greenhouse, a tangle of ripe and ripening and overripe tomatoes, basketsfull.
In the back of your mind is the compost pile, where nothing ever goes to waste. But this is food, food of the highest order, fresh and unpolluted, and everywhere in the world are the eyes of hungry children. Even the zucchinis that hide under their leaves and grow huge, you take by boxfulls to the food bank. As the apricots wane and peaches and nectarines begin to ripen, you realize that if your hands were tied behind your back you could still graze heartily. Michael has suggested planting only half the garden-but which half? Half of each bed? Half of each row? The sunny half, where corn and squashes, peppers and eggplants grow best? Or the shady half, with its greens and root crops and potatoes? Which half of the flowers, which half of the herbs?
It’s easier, you decide-every year you decide, because it’s there and because you can’t help it-to plant the whole thing and just let it go.
And go it does. By August the corn is tall and tasselled, golden pollen collects on silken threads and dusts the green leaves, which rustle and sigh, nudge and shoulder each other like playful lovers. Gone are the orderly rows of spring and early summer, overtaken by chaos. Eggplants peek from beneath the elephant ears of squash plants, tomatillo bushes bear chile peppers, watermelon and canteloupe vines intertwine, writhing like nests of snakes, guerilla armies of gourds are stationed high in the apricot tree, pumpkin vines leap the fence and block the driveway. Tomato, bean, grape and trumpet flower vines enmesh the arbor’s wire walls, crisscross the roof, reach three feet into the sky like the tentacles of undersea creatures hungry for light. Each harbors the fruit of the others, grapevines bearing orange trumpet flowers, beans hanging from tomato vines, grapes under the bean leaves, a bewildering synaesthesia of fruits and vegetables you’re too busy harvesting to sort out. The only remaining singularity resides in the ten-foot tall sunflowers that tower over everything, heads bowed, leaning with the wind like monks on a journey.
Summer’s heat draws fewer guests than spring or fall, but those who come eat heartily while they’re here, and go away laden. A friend from California, Hathaway Barry, had written that she would be driving east in August and wanted to bring her ten-year-old daughter, Co, for a few days of horseback riding. No guests were ever more eagerly awaited: ah, people who can help harvest, help eat! I felt like a spider about to entrap two damselflies. When they arrived, however, we spent three whole days exploring on horseback. I hardly even thought about the garden except when we’d pick a few things for supper. I was liberated, for the time being, by Co’s love of riding and by Hathaway’s calm, smiling wisdom. “The Dalai Lama, you know, talks about the kinds of tyranny we place ourselves under. You…” she paused, looking up into the apricot tree we were sitting under, “I think you are under the tyranny of abundance.”
The phrase stuck, as did the subtle advice. I continued to try to harvest ‘everything,’ but my efforts became more detached. I took time to notice what was happening in the garden beyond the baskets of produce I continued to pick. I even sketched in my journal and observed in words several things I’d noted only in passing.
Imagine, among bright red jewels of cherry tomatoes, an oval web about fourteen inches across, not symmetrical, not perfect, but with its radii and spiraling chords in good repair, taut and glistening with morning dew. And in the center, a most handsome spider, bright gold, black flecks on back and sides, ventral parts yellow. Elegant legs banded in tiny rings of black and gold, poised and tapering to fine ebony points. The garden spider, whom I try not to disturb, seems not to move from the center of her web. She is there in the morning as I stand with my mug of tea in one hand, plucking basil seedheads with the other. She hasn’t moved when I come to harvest tomatoes during the day, and she’s there when I check by flashlight while gathering herbs for a midnight supper. She isn’t dead: if I tap her web she turns to face the tapping. I think about the coordination it takes to manage eight legs, and my brain goes feeble. I watch her sidle away from me in two directions at once, one set of legs taking her backwards, the other set sideways. If she has no language or philosophy I can understand, she has her dance.
Not all of the garden’s denizens were so attractive, nor fared so well under my scrutiny.
Repulsion and fascination go hand in hand. I could watch for hours the huge green hornworm, translucent in late August light, as it munches its way audibly along a tomato leaf. Its 4 inch long body is chubby with rounded segments, like Alice’s hookah-smoking caterpillar, but more colorful, with its large eye-like spots-black dots ringed with white and yellow. Even more interesting is that what appears to be the hind end, unmarked and smooth as a baby’s bottom, is actually the head. The end that looks like a head, with its half-inch pointed ‘horns,’ prominent eyespots, and suckerlike ‘mouth,’ is a decoy. Any bird hungry enough to jab at that formidable ‘face’ would be spearing a beakful of ‘tail.’
Like Alice’s caterpillar, the hornworm has a voice. When I disturb it with the trowel I am going to use to kill it, it clicks a loud protest: tsk tsk tsk tsk tsk. Lewis Carroll, stoned, might have read words into this reproach. So do I. Clinging heavily with its stubby proto-feet to a denuded leaf stem, the creature is difficult to dislodge. So I break the stem off, placing it and its cargo on the garden path. I cover it with a large sunflower leaf before whacking it hard with the trowel-to avoid being spattered by the leaf-jelly it has digested, and also so I don’t have to see the murder I’m committing-the green, gooey, skinless mess I make out of such an intricate, cleverly formed trick of nature.
By the end of August each year I’d become so intimate with the garden that by day it seemed part of me. The garden at night, however, withdrew from intimacy and took on a powerful presence. Though I knew it as well as I knew my hands, I hesitated sometimes to enter, fearing to disturb the living, breathing being darkness made of this jungle. Sunflowers no longer monks, but hanged men silhouetted against the sky. Rustlings caused not by wind or lizards but by the breathing of plants as they sensed my presence. Spooky. Before stepping through the gate, I tried to breathe in resonance with the breathing around me. In one way, it was like going into something benevolently monstrous. But in another, what I felt was simply logical: plants undergoing cellular respiration at night, completing the cycle of photosynthesis they were bound to by day. I thought of the story told me by a favorite poet, W. S. Merwin, about Fiji islanders who worship ficus trees as gods, and who, when the ficus trees grow so huge as to threaten their homes and streets, gather in ceremony and feasting to prune their gods.
As September’s sun slants toward fall and its heat subsides, a sense of mild urgency arises in the canyon. By this time the lettuces have bolted, and the peas have spent themselves in the heat. The early corn has turned to stalk, to linen, though if I’ve planted smartly I may have fresh corn until mid-month. Late peaches and early apples overlap, and in the upper orchard blackberries are beginning to ripen. Most of the garden is still producing prolifically, and most of my days are still spent harvesting, often by stepladder.
A year and a half after she visited in the spring, my mother came for a week in September. I wanted her to see what her spring labors could produce, and share with her some of the bounty. Above all, I wanted her to see that she deserved, and should accept and enjoy, some reward for her labors. Often I had stood before my canning shelves in Horsethief’s root cellar, remembering my mother’s shelves, stocked each season with hundreds of jars of canned tomatoes and tomato sauces, green beans and peas, cut corn and creamed corn, carrots and beets, peach halves and pear halves, pickles and relishes, fruit butters and a dozen kinds of jam. Not blessed with her stamina, I was awed to think of the labor she put into preserving so much, especially while working full time as a nurse, sewing our clothes, packing lunches, preparing meals, and all the care she gave to us.
This visit, she brought with her curtains she had sewn for the windows, burnt-orange burlap lined with off-white monk’s cloth-appropriately rustic and sturdy-that would help keep the house warm in winter. As always, she refused to relax. She mended window and door screens, the fireplace screen, the screen sieves for hot tub and cistern, the drying rack screens between uses. She helped harvest and dry tomatoes and herbs, dig potatoes, pick berries, make peach and nectarine jams. She mended all my clothes that could be salvaged. And complained there wasn’t enough for her to do.
Not until I took her to hear my ranger friend Bonnie’s campfire talk at Dead Horse Point, did I realize my mother’s age and fragility. As I helped her from the car, at an altitude eight hundred feet higher than Horsethief, she complained of shortness of breath. She balked at looking out over the canyon rim at the view, saying the wind would blow her away. And then she balked altogether, insisting that she had to go back to the ranch, now, that the wind was taking her breath away. By the time we reached the ranch she felt better, but was adamant about not going to that altitude again. Two days later, as I drove her the hundred fifty miles to the airport for her flight home, I foresaw that this would be her last trip to Horsethief. I did not envision it would be her last trip in an airplane, her last visit west, her last visit anywhere outside her home town. I grieved for her aging. Even more, I grieved at that being her life’s reward.
Returning to Horsethief, I listened to the voices of the corn, now all gone to linen, now scraping and scratching, hitching and coughing in the voices of old men, old women. I listened. I needed to understand what they were saying. But the wind took their words away.
I consoled myself with munching translucent clusters of sun-ripened grapes, and with eating the season’s last peach, so heavy with juice it had to be sipped from its skin on the tree. I wished I’d been able to slice it into a bowl for my mother. Wished she was still here to enjoy the plums and pears now at their peak, the dark sweetness of thumb-sized blackberries. The garden just wouldn’t quit, and I thought of my runaway life through my mother’s eyes. I keep waiting, I wrote, for this wild growth to slow of its own accord, to be halted by the sheer weight of leaf and stem, flower and fruit it has put out, to relax its reach, consolidate its gains, squeeze its strength into what is already ripening. But I have not lived my life that way, either.
October days strung themselves out like gems on a necklace, windless and radiant, perfected by the kindly angle of the sun. Pumpkin vines continued to insinuate themselves among the potatoes, loop over the grapes, and roof the arbor, orange globes dangling like Chinese lanterns. It was easy to be fooled, then, to think fall would last forever. But the crickets, my chirping prophets, began sounding more subdued.
Then one day the lizards would be gone. The air would tighten, the wind begin to blow, or a cold rain start to fall, and the twinge in my bones warned of killing frost on its way. Did I back off in relief, bow to the inevitable, thank the season for its bounty, and retreat? Did I feel what Robert Frost expressed in “After Apple Picking”-
For I have had too much / Of apple-picking: I am overtired / Of the great harvest I myself desired…?
I did not. I grabbed every basket, box, paper bag and plastic trash sack on hand and raced out to pre-empt the frost. I picked every tomato that stood a chance of ripening, and then I picked the green ones. I picked beans and more beans, cucumbers, peppers, eggplants and squashes of all sizes-anything beyond the blossom stage would do. I picked every melon that might ripen. I pulled up all the herbs and hung them in paper bags upside down in the root cellar. I did this as the air froze or rain or snow fell, freezing my hands until I had to use gloves, freezing my wet-gloved hands until I could pick only with opposable thumbs or knuckles pressed together. I did this under gray sky, or at night by headlamp, working until I could no longer see or feel anything, or until everything that could be frost-killed was safely stored. Only then did I go inside, thaw my fingers until I could unbutton my clothes, and sleep.
In the morning, I went out to face a garden of black rags. Bean and tomato leaves frozen olive drab. Potato plants flattened and charred. Marigolds burnt ochre, umber. After living with and from the garden for half a year, I was always surprised to feel so little sense of loss. But there were still potatoes to dig, and the hardy greens like spinach, chard, and sorrel would last until harsher cold throttled them, too. Meanwhile, I still had some of the best fruit to look forward to: tangy garnet-red winesaps and jade granny smiths, sweet blue-purple plums, dark musk-sweet blackberries.
I soaked each fruit tree once more before draining the pipes, then argued in my mind about whether to strip the garden of its spent stalks and vines, rake the debris from each bed and feed it to the compost pit, and leave the beds ready for spring, bare and stark as rows of coffins. Or whether to leave the garden as it died, to provide food and shelter for winter birds, color and texture for me, a polyphonic orchestra for the wind.
Usually I compromised, clearing some of the beds, smoothing them flat for the white sheets of snow that would soon cover them. The rest-the lacework of dry pea vines along the fence, the lattices of bean and tomato plants woven into the arbor, the sunflower and pumpkin leaves furled like black umbrellas, the burnt lacy marigolds going to seed, and especially the bleached linen cornstalks-these I left for winter to deal with.
As night after night of frost went deeper into the ground and the earthworms retreated downward, I went about downloading fruit into yet more cardboard cartons and winterizing the rest of the ranch. Gradually the sap in the trees sank into the roots; tarnished leaves gilded the yard. Sitting on the edge of an empty garden bed, I thought about the fruit and produce stored in the root cellar, the tomatoes that would ripen for Thanksgiving. I thought about the snapshots I’d taken of the outdoor table laden with a colorful array of produce, my mother standing next to it, arms raised in invitation. I thought about the soil under my hand, resting around its billions of inhabitants. And I thought about how the first snowfall would look, making visual music of the garden, while the pale, skeletal cornstalks whispered like ghosts.
