Passage III

HUMANITIES: Passage A is adapted from the essay “Walking” by Linda Hogan (©1990 by Linda Hogan). Passage B is adapted from the essay “Cold-Comfort Farming” by Arlo Crawford (©2008 by The New York Times).

Passage A by Linda Hogan

I saw it first in early summer. It was a green and sleeping bud, raising itself toward the sun. Over the summer this sunflower grew into a plant of incredible beauty, turning its face daily toward the sun in the most subtle of ways, in community with rain, mineral, mountain air, and sand.

I was an outsider. I only watched. I had a small understanding, nothing more than a shallow observation of the flower, insects, and birds. But they knew what to do, how to live. An old voice from somewhere, gene or cell, told the plant how to evade the pull of gravity and find its way upward, how to open.

There are other summons and calls. Once a century, all of a certain kind of bamboo flower on the same day. Whether they are in Malaysia or in a greenhouse in Minnesota makes no difference, nor does the age or size of the plant. They flower. Some current of an inner language passes between them. They are all, somehow, one plant, each with a share of communal knowledge.

John Hay, in The Immortal Wilderness, has written: “There are occasions when you can hear the mysterious language of the Earth, in water, or coming through the trees, emanating from the mosses, seeping through the undercurrents of the soil, but you have to be willing to wait and receive.”

Sometimes I hear it talking. Once, in the redwood forest, I heard a beat, something like a drum or heart coming from the ground and trees and wind. That underground current stirred a kind of knowing inside me, a kinship and longing, a dream barely remembered that disappeared back to the body.

Tonight I walk. I am watching the sky. I think of the people who came before me and how they knew the placement of stars in the sky, watched the moving sun long and hard enough to witness how a certain angle of light touched a stone only once a year.

It’s winter and there is smoke from the fires. The square, lighted windows of houses are fogging over. It is a world of elemental attention, of all things working together, listening to what speaks in the blood.

Passage B by Arlo Crawford

My parents are organic farmers, but springtime makes my mother sad and anxious. In the winter, the duties are reasonable: the barn cats need food, and the eggs have to be collected. But the first sprouts are needy and will only increase their demands as the season wears on. Farming asks everything of you eventually.

Several years ago when I was living in New York after college, I would sometimes walk through the greenmarket in Union Square. The farmers there seemed sort of desperate; vegetables are never perfect and their customers were accustomed to being picky.

Then, after three years in the same job, I watched my boss drive his business into the ground. I didn’t have a lot of options, so I moved back to my parents’ farm in central Pennsylvania. I was isolated and I missed my friends. But after a few months I met a girl from a nearby farm. She had blond braids and tattoos that showed between her tank top and cutoffs. A few days later she invited me over. We looked at the fields and she bragged about the soil.

If my parents, with years of struggle between them, were revolutionaries, my girlfriend and I were vegetable-growing mercenaries. We were there for the thrill. I drove a stripped-down pickup truck, with a tangle of harvest knives and baling wire on the rusted-through floorboards. I stank of compost and never brushed my teeth. When we went to a restaurant, the civilians all averted their gaze. We looked at the limp parsley garnishing their plates and rolled our eyes.

Soon the season was over. Potatoes and parsnips and rutabagas were stacked in the cellars. The fields were burned over with frost. We decided to go to Peru to have an adventure. When we got back, we realized that all our pictures were of vegetables. Old men selling huge sheaves of green grain. A woman digging cassava root. Donkeys toting stiff bundles of sugar cane.

It’s hard, tiring, often demoralizing work to make vegetables. When I was little, my mother would sometimes hide away in an old chicken coop at the bottom of the yard to cry. As a farmer, you can pour so much into the vegetables that you feel obsessively devoted to them. Farming isn’t about communing with nature—it’s just a job. But if you immerse yourself in that job and things don’t work out, you cry.

A farm dies once a year. Sometimes it’s a lingering sickness; sometimes a hard frost takes it all in one night. There’s no mystery to it. If a farmer wondered why, he would never pick up his tools. And then no one would eat at all.