Dogwoods

Hello, Handsome-

This was the thirteenth letter that Anya had written in four months to Avery.  Some were longer and some were shorter, and this one was about an average length.  Avery read it on the porch of his Washington cabin as the morning sky turned from gold to blue. 

Spring has landed in Swannanoa, a wonderful town near my home.  I am here staying with college friends for a few days.  We socialize all night and, while they are at work during the day, I bounce between the music shops and the coffee shops and, when it isn't raining too hard, the woods.  I played dulcimers for hours yesterday in a store downtown.  Some cost more than my car.

I am writing you from the edge of Lake Eden.  We have had a break in the rain the past two days, and the sun is out.  I'm on a bench on a hill and the valley is silent.  There are ripples in the lake where insects skim across, but hardly any movement in the air.  The wind is taking a break after blustering all over the place last week.  There will be a festival here next month, full of music and art and musicians and artists.  I go every spring, but will be traveling this year.  Do you have any festivals you go to regularly?  You should hear the fiddles here!  I can almost here them now, echoing from past shows.  

I love valleys.  There must have been so much slow, geological violence that created these mountain ranges, but then the scars were all patched up with grass and trees and soil.  We settle valleys and then climb to peaks to look back on what we've created.  I'm sorry for folks in the flatlands who need airplanes to get an idea of where they live.  I know you have your big old mountains over on the west coast...but ours are older and easier to get to the top of!

So, I have some good news!  Back in December you said that we should "meet in the middle" sometime because we're so far away from each other.  Google tells me it's about 2,700 miles from your house to mine.  I looked at that conference that you're going to in Mississippi next month.  I will be on my way to Colorado and can't go to it, though it looks sweet.  I'll be driving through just a couple of days early.

BUT...since you're driving east...and I'm driving west...at the same time...

What do you think?  Can we meet in the middle?  Like, maybe in Kansas?  We can see what those flatlanders think about us mountain and forest folk!

  .   .   .

I also want to tell you that I've really enjoyed these letters, to and from.  Your love for the land and perspective on life has been a thrill to hear about.  There's a resonance in my own brain when I hear your ideas.  Like you, I want to work land, smell soil, feel fresh water on my face.  Money is the catch, like always, but there is so much inspiration around me for farming, and I want to join the force of people moving back to the land.

You are on my mind often.  I want to dance with you again have enjoyed wondering where our paths will take us.  You've got a way with words, and I appreciate your feelings towards life and society.  You're a dreamer, I can tell, and I like it.  Thank you for sharing your thoughts, not just on the world, but on emotion and relationships.  Keep 'em coming.

And, with that, my friend, I will leave you.  There is a mountain in front of me (or, as you'd call it from the shadow of Mt. Ranier, "a lump") that I must climb.  My friend is wondering how long I could possibly sit on this bench for while she draws pictures in the lakeshore with a stick.

Do write soon...and...see you in "The Middle?"

-Anya

P.S.  Enclosed is a dogwood blossom, our state flower.  The understory of dogwoods are exploding right now in reds and whites.  The deciduous trees will soon leaf out and cover them up, but for now the flowers are everywhere.  Sometime I'll tell you the story of how the dogwood came to be; it's the story of an alligator.  Yup. 

Above photo from Flickr, by mtsofan, and modified.

Crocuses

It was Sunday morning, and April Fool's day.  Avery was arriving home after two days out in the woods by himself.  He'd caught the bus back to town; it conveniently had a stop near the highway trailhead from which he had emerged.  He stepped from the bus with his muddy backpack and began walking the half-mile back to the farm.

City buses made him uncomfortable, especially after being out in the wilderness.  They smell worse than the springtime wetlands; somehow decomposition of winter detritus was more appealing to him than the combination of sterile cleaning products and the mildewed clothing of the passengers.  The bus was full of people thinking about their lives, hardships, money troubles, health problems, and relationships.  City buses are where men and women can stare out of windows and become mesmerized by thoughts of their own disillusions.  There is always somebody worse off than someone else on the bus.  Thought Avery, there's nothing like a city bus to make you realize that you don't have it so bad.

As the door of the public transit machine squeaked shut and its gears hissed, he began walking down the dirt road to Nightshadow Nursery.  He passed the Morrison house, with its beautiful garden; the daffodils and crocuses had emerged in the forty-eight hours since he left.  Around the mailbox of the house were two or three dozen little stems, each with a purple or yellow flare developing at the tip.

Springtime, to Avery, was defined by the crocus.  Crocus stems meant that the soil was loose enough and warm enough to work.  Crocus flowers meant that nature anticipated the return of bees and squirrels and sunlight.  And, sure enough, he watched a honey bee, the first out-and-about one that he'd noticed, buzz past his ankle and into the fresh till of Mrs. Morrison's garden.

After a few more thoughts on the poetry of springtime, Avery arrived at the farm, pushing the never-locked wooden gate open towards the house.  It creaked a bit, the wood probably beginning to swell in these first few days of warm weather.  Ahead of him were the greenhouses and, behind them, the cabin that he had called home for the past couple of years.  He looked toward the main house on the right, but did not see any human activity; he heard chickens making a fuss on the other side of the trees, so he figured the farmer was over there, collecting the eggs that they'd worked so hard to create.  He clomped up the three cedar steps to his porch, kicking the toes of his boots on the stair edges to knock off some of the caked mud.  Nobody else seemed to be home.

He opened the door and, before even setting down his pack, looked to the little table on the right for his mail.  The morning sun had not yet reached the skylight, so the room was mostly dark.  He was glad to live in such a beautiful little home, the all-cedar cabin that always smelled like a forest.  Envelopes in hand, he strode into the lighter kitchen and dropped his backpack by the counter.  Passing up the bill, the Land's End magazine (that he'd never ordered from in his life), the REI dividend check, and the much-larger bill, he went straight for the letter stamped "Swannanoa, NC", in the homemade envelope from Anya.

In the past few months, since finding this beautiful girl lost in the rainforest, they had become prolific letter-writers to each other.  They had known each other just four days in person, but had learned each other inside and out by script and email since Autumn.  Avery had read her letters while the leaves finished falling from the trees, while the last of the kale was harvested, while the first bits of snow fell, and while the melting snow filled the creek to near-cresting levels.  He almost always occupied the same spot on his porch while reading her stories, and this time was no different.

He put on water for coffee, but then realized that boiling water would take too long, so he kicked off his boots, traded them for slippers, filled a glass with water from the tap, and went straight back outside to the porch.  This time, the view accompanying her words was one of sparrows, growing grass, golden dew, and, of course, crocuses.

Hello, handsome, it began.

Photo by frederikvanroest, and modified. 

Meanwhile, In Kansas

"Did Henry McKitridge die?" 

"Nah," said Dean.  "He just sits at home these days.  Works on whittlin' spoons and chopsticks I imagine."

Jean looked into her empty teacup.  "Sold most of his farm to the neighbor, the young guy.  Henry's older'n any of us.  He deserves to retire, poor bird."

In downtown Sharon Springs, on the western edge of Kansas, a handful of aging locals sat in Dooley's Restaurant, as they did most Wednesdays.  There was some frost on the ground outside, but most of the snow had melted or been blown away already.  February was always cold, but this one seemed to be more wet than frozen, which made for ugly fields and soggy lawns.  The ever-present wind was blowing, of course.

Dean and Jean Metcalf sat together on one of the benches.  Across the table, past the carafe of coffee and the plastic flowers were Randy James and Hank Marshall, both farmers.  Sam Baird, the pharmacist was there too, and so was Johnny Redd, the cattleman.  Johnny hadn't raised any beef in ten years, but still considered himself a cowboy to the bone.

Dean and Jean, contentedly married for over forty years, were drifting dangerously close to their seventies, fully aware that the routines of their weeks and months and years had been cycling repetitively for a couple of decades.  Both were tired, but took life with enough sarcasm and critique that they couldn't call themselves unhappy. 

All half-dozen characters had finished their small-town breakfast and the empty plates waited to be cleared, smelling of syrup and bacon.  Johnny Redd said "There's too many farmers leaving town."

"They're not leaving town, Johnny," said Dean.  "They're just passing on, giving up the farm for wings and harps and halos up there."

"Well," said Sam, who had been dealing in medications and hokey greeting cards since Kennedy's inauguration, "the trouble is, the kids ain't sticking around.  See, if the kids bothered to become farmers, we'd have plenty of folks in the field, but they all head out to college and don't come back.  Last I saw your kids," he nodded to Dean and Jean, "was a couple of Christmases ago, wasn't it?" 

Jean nodded.  "Our daughter's got a family.  Our son would have been a good farmer, I suppose, but he's doing good in school.  I don't think he'll want to come out here to live.  Why would he?  Dean can handle the farm on his own anyway, with the tractor drivin' itself and everything."

"You two gonna retire like Johnny Redd here did?" asked Sam.

"I ain't retired," said Johnny Redd.  "I just ain't felt like keepin' any cattle for a spell.  Thinkin' I might get a new herd comin' up here.  Next year."

Dean smiled at Johnny.  "Yeah.  I don't know.  I imagine we'll just sell off the fields to the neighbor.  He's already got a couple thousand acres of his own, and we lease him another couple hundred.  It's all the same wheat and hay anyway.  There's no reason for us to keep separate operations these days.  He's a good farmer.  A little snide sometimes, but not a bad guy."

"Snide?  He's only really pleasant in the morning before he starts drinking," said Jean.  She hadn't had many good interactions with the neighbor over the years and they generally didn't look each others' way when they were near the fencelines.  The Metcalf's house and the neighbor's house were nearly a mile away, so it wasn't hard to avoid contact.

Randy, who kept a farm a few miles west of Sharon Springs and grew more sunflowers than anything, said, "You know, wasn't too long ago everyone had their little homesteads out here.  My granddad used to tell me how it was all 80-acre plots, west to Colorado and east to Lawrence.  He came out here when he was a boy, when his folks fell for the whole 'westward expansion' package.  Lived through the Dust Bowl.

"He told me what it was like to watch everything dry up and see everyone he knew pack up and get out of here.  Most everyone left, but our family stuck it out, raising what they could.  All them other families left all them homesteads here, just empty and bare, and the bank claimed most of them.  My family had a little money and the bank sold us a bunch of little farms cheap.  Same went for your family, Dean."

Dean nodded.  "Little farms got pretty big pretty quick.  Lot of folks out on the coasts who don't like farms our size these days.  They think we're too big, that we're corporate and bad and drinking chemicals in our coffee every day."  He smiled at the thought of Roundup Lattes. 

Randy continued, "Hell.  But then, next generation, half the kids went off to college or to California, and didn't come back.  All my granddad's peers started dying off, selling the land to the neighbors.  Same thing with my dad's generation.  Then mine.  Those of us that stuck around saw all this land come up for sale, cheap.  What were we gonna do, let it go stale?  Just sit there while we grow ten-acre gardens?  Wheat won the war back in 1918, and hippies still eat bread and Cheerios, don't they?"

The six patrons sat quiet for a few seconds.  Randy stared at the fake petunias on the table, obviously riled.  He took societal accusations personally.

Hank, the other wheat farmer, finally said, under his breath, "My kids aren't coming back."

Jean said, "Ours either."

Randy pursed his lips, imagining his family surviving those dust storms, growing wheat for World Wars I and II, feeding the world, going through generations of Allis Chalmers tractors, John Deers, and now big red Case combines.

"Mine either," he said, barely audibly.

A Seed in the Mail

Avery sat under the same storm cloud as Erika.  Erika, however, was over a hundred miles away; the cloud was as big as the entire Northwest.  On a Tuesday morning he heard the postman rattle down the gravel road in the rain.

He put on his raincoat and boots and dashed out to the mailbox.  It was his day off, but the nursery at which he lived and worked was waiting for some rare seeds, ordered from overseas, and after all the trouble of international trade laws and customs, he wasn't about to let them sit in the cold, damp mailbox any longer than they had to.

The mailbox was welded to an old shovel in the ground and was emblazoned with the words, "Nightshadow Nursery."  The "O" in the name was a fat, red tomato.  Avery opened the squeaky door of the box and did not find any packages from Norway; he grabbed the pile of envelopes and solicitations and quick-stepped back into the house, shaking himself off on the porch.

It was all bills and advertisements that day, except for the long white envelope with his name on it.  It was addressed, in script, to "THE Avery Mason," and had Erika's Portland return address.  The stamp featured Calvin and Hobbes, his favorite comic characters.  He poured his second cup of coffee and headed back to his bedroom to open and read it immediately.  Coffee and a letter on a rainy day:

"Avery-

 How goes the growing in these winter months?  And what, exactly, creates a nightshadow?  Is it like a normal shadow, cast when the moon is full and the evening is bright?  Or is it the opposite, a ray of light cast when it's pitch black outside?  I suppose it would be like a bright, glowing aura, visible only when there are no fluorescent or solar distractions.

The rainy months are here, obviously.  I should be surprised if this letter makes it to your hands dry.  But the weather is suspiciously warm and I wonder if we will ever have that late winter freeze.  At this point all of the fruit trees in the city seem to think it's time for Spring.  They are waking up, budding, blossoming, and I fear that we'll lose our fruit crops this year when the temperature drops and freezes the poor flowers right off.  I should stock up on apples before they become as valuable as oil.

Why is it that half the people our age are heading back to farms right now?  Not even heading back, just heading to them!  Most of us were not raised on farms.  We have no land, we have no childhood memories of our mothers making jam and our fathers chopping wood.  Despite that, our entire generation seems to be advocating for food, spending their vacations working - for free! - on farms around the world.  Why do we drift to the soil after twenty-some years on concrete?  Why are we fascinated by worms when we have been educated on the Internet?

It bothers me sometimes.  There is too much shouting.  There is too much "anti-everything".  There is too much rhetoric and roundabout rambling advocating for changes in our food system.

I'm no exception.  I'm from Boston for Crissake.  But for some reason I decided to learn about food and soil.  While my parents told me about economics I was fascinated by cation exchange capacity, nematodes, and nitrogen fixation.  I was fixated on goats, though before moving here I'd never seen one outside of the tiny ones at the zoo (which are still adorable, mind you).

Too much yelling.  That's the problem.  I'm no advocate for big business in agriculture, but I know that it must exist.  I know that there are good reasons that five-thousand-acre wheat farms exist, that ten-thousand-chicken barns are all over the country.  More people eat food than grow it, so somebody must produce, produce, produce.

Yesterday, despite the rain, there was a march in the city, protesting big agriculture.  "Down with corporate farms!" the signs said.  "Get small or get out!"  "Bring the culture back to agriculture!"  

And yet, most of the young people, the folks our age, want to create our small farms and stick around the places in which we're comfortable.  There must be a thousand CSAs around Boston now.  Hundreds around Portland, who-knows-how-many supplying San Francisco and Seattle with vegetables and meat.  

But something in the equation doesn't look right to me.  If every new farmer sets up shop near the cities and in these hubs of support, what happens in the midwest?  There is so much land out there!  So much fertile, deep soil!  I mean, the plains are where this whole mess began, with thousands of small homesteads.  Where did they go?  Most of the farmers went west with the dust bowl, and more of them left with each generation.  Now it's all giant farms, run by small families, and the families are getting smaller out there.

If we (I say "we" meaning our whole freaking generation) are going to advocate for small farms, homesteads, and the breakup of the massive farms around the US, I think we need to go back to the Midwest, the plains, the prairie.  We need to get out of our comfort zone and see what we can do on those massive, open canvases of grain.  The biggest complaint, at least amongst the farmer wannabes that I know, is that they can't afford land.  What if we all go where land is cheap, and we go together?

What must happen next is this.  We need to clear out of the cities.  We need open spaces.  All of these people want to farm and feed the world, but can't find the land to do it from.  We need to repopulate Kansas.

Keep in touch!

With love and greenbeans-

Erika"

Moonshine for the Marlows

Different forests hold different fortunes.

In South Dakota, if you are hiking in the woods and you discover sluice boxes and other gold panning equipment, you are advised to leave it alone.  In Kentucky you'd best keep walking if you find a marked hillside covered in ginseng, and in Oregon sweet spots for chantrelles and other mushrooms are guarded secrets.  There are unspoken rules and codes in the forest, and it is the fault of the ignorant if they break them.

In North Carolina the things to avoid are other people's moonshine stills, marvels of simplicity and creativity that have been passed through generations of mountain families.

Anya Marlow, back home from her wander to the Pacific Northwest, was in the familiar grove near her uncle's house.  It was late evening, uncomfortably close to morning, and the time-pocked copper parts of the old still flickered in firelight.  The old contraption sat in a twenty-five foot grove, surrounded by mountain laurel and young hickory.  Tyrer Creek swished and rolled nearby in the darkness.

There were only a couple of working stills left in the area; most had been stripped for parts or left to rust and decay years ago, but the Marlows were a reminiscent bunch for all of their bravado and intensity.  They fired up the boiler a couple of times a year and experimented with mashes of apples, corn, pears, or other creative sugar sources.  At every moonshine meeting, somebody was sure to remind Billy Marlow of his famously disastrous inspiration to use his bumper crop of tomatoes in the still.  "Bill's lucky he didn't kill off the Marlows that year!" his brother Tom would always say.

Anya was the only woman present, as usual.  Her mother and the other ladies, though only one generation apart from her, tended to uphold the perception that these events were for the men.  Another unspoken code of the forest.  Anya had no trouble breaking codes, especially since she'd been coming to this still for twenty four years.

Tom was her father, and obviously so.  She shared his black curls and his slight nose, and they wore their hair at the same shoulder length.  He sat with her on a two-by-four bench, waiting for the mason jar to come around the circle again.  Fifteen other people were present, including two toddlers, three teenagers (who were over by the creek, no doubt trying to figure out if there were any possible way to rebel against this family), and Cort Crispin, one of her cousins.  The rest were older men:  the five Marlow brothers; Rand Marks, the doctor; Stephan and Micah Yoder, the dairy farmers; and Marvin Huynh, the Vietnam-born actor.  Marvin was turning seventy-nine that night.

Tom asked Anya, "Did you fall in love with anyone up there?"

"Of course I did," she answered.  "But Washington is a long ways away."

"Not many fellows worth having these days if they ain't willing to come courtin' from a distance."

"I was lost in the woods up there, you know.  This guy and his friend came out of nowhere and rescued me after a few days of me wandering around."

"Oh, a hero?"  Tom received the mason jar from Marvin.  It was getting low, another quart sank low into the bellies of the party.  "What'd he do when y'all got back to civilization?"

"He took me dancing."

"What kind?"

"Contra.  He was pretty good.  But Washington's got a few moves to learn before it could compete with Carolina."  Anya took the jar from her father and drank the apple moonshine from it.  It looked just like water, but it felt like fizz and fire and fancy as it traveled down her throat.  She screwed the lid on and handed it to Micah, who went to the still for a refill.  "He wants to farm."

"Great," said Tom.  "You know how to pick 'em."

"You did alright," she said.  "For a farmer, I mean."

He put his arm around her waist and she laid her head on his shoulder.  He stared at the fire for the best part of a minute, thinking about his family and listening to Tyrer Creek.  "I did.  I do.  I know."

The Writer

Erika was surrounded by the smell of roasted coffee beans.  On the cedar table in front of her was the lengthy letter that she had been writing all morning.  The eggshell paper didn't look quite right to her, covered in the cheap blue ink from the pen labeled, "Verne's Hardware."  Her laptop was on the table as well, also looking out of place in front of the cafe's stone fireplace.  

She had been told that she spent too much time and money in coffee shops.  By her mother mostly.  An hour in the morning, maybe two?  Was that really too much?  "And it's not like I have any other vices," she'd respond.  "No car, no debt, I rarely drink alcohol, and, thank God, no children."

Cafes were her offices, really.  To rent an office space would be hundreds of dollars each month, but to "rent" a table once a day, to allow herself a space to write; that came out to just two or three dollars each day.  Cafes were where she wrote.

"Balance and Swing," was the title of her latest novel.  On her computer were thirteen unfinished novels, twenty-five short stories, and three nearly-polished screenplays.  She had yet to fully complete any one of her writing projects, but she was in no hurry.  She was nowhere near thirty yet, and her mother hadn't been published until she was forty years old.

People knew Erika as a writer, which made her smile.  "What do you do?" she would be asked at potlucks and conferences.  "I write," she said.  "Oh, what do you write?" was usually the next question.  Conscious of the intrigue, she would smile and tell them, "Words.  All kinds of them."  The query, she figured, was not, "How do you make your money?"  It was, "What do you do?"  She wished that more people would identify what they do...she didn't often care that someone worked in a restaurant or a telemarketing company.  She wanted to know what they did.

But she had learned some time ago that probing too deeply was not a good idea.  She liked to believe that everybody in the world had some creative outlet, that every person she passed on a highway was headed home to paint a picture, to play a cello, to work on some private equation that would solve questions of the universe.  In the mind of Erika, mankind spent most of its free time productively.  Even at the cafes, she would eyeball all of the other young people with their computers and imagine that every screen was full of multi-syllable words or epic photography.

She had also learned not to look at those people's screens when she walked past to the restroom.  Most of the time they were staring at endless torrents of Facebook updates.  Her imagination was populated by a far more ambitious bunch of people than the real world.

That's where Erika spent her morning and, often, her evenings.  Writing.  It would pay off someday.  She would either change the world or get rich.  Preferably both.  As it happened, it was in the cafe nearest to her house that she wrote something that would change the world.  It was misty outside and the city streets were full of puddles left over from a wet evening.  She watched a white and blue TriMet bus splash through the intersection outside and looked at her computer.  She looked at the tall brick buildings and the towers across the river.  She thought about food and farms and soil and cities and wished she were living in a small town, the more rural the better.

"What must happen next," she wrote, "is this.  We need to clear out of the cities.  We need open spaces.  All of these people want to farm and feed the world, but can't find the land to do it from.  We need to repopulate Kansas."

With that line she finished the letter to her old friend, Avery Mason, and packed it up into an envelope to mail.

Billy Marlow

Billy Marlow was a seventh-generation North Carolinian.  He stood on his porch on a sunny morning, smelling the odor of ice and wood chips.  It had snowed a bit the night before, and everything had frozen solid by morning.  The water pipes that kept his chickens and rabbits hydrated had stopped up with ice, despite his various inventions meant to keep them dripping.  He had been up for two hours already, tending to that situation, and was ready for breakfast.

Funny thing about wood chips is that they stay warm.  A pile of them at the edge of his yard was constantly breaking down, composting, a process of any biological substance.  Even though the night had done its best to turn the world into a Popsicle, that pile just kept steaming and melting it away.  As any accumulated ice thawed and the water seeped into the middle of the pile, it just fed the process of breakdown.  One of Billy's cats, the orange one, was laying curled into a divot in the pile.

Billy was known by many to be a sweet fellow, and a practical farmer.  He had managed to turn his family's hilly land, with its mediocre soil, into a productive farm.  Every acre was packed with fruit and nut trees, berries, small crops, and animals.  The goats had been slaughtered for the winter, filling his freezers and providing a good chunk of winter income, but not before he used them to trim his raspberry canes.  Most of the rabbits were still in the barn, getting fatter every day, and his two dozen chickens were just layers.  He figured that everyone and their mule was selling chicken meat these days, but rabbits and goats were harder to come by. 

Billy turned forty-five that day.  His wife was probably just waking up, and he was sure that she was all set to make him some surprise cake.  She had made a different kind for him every year since they were married.

His niece was coming back to town that day as well.  She had been visiting her brother, the money one, up in Seattle for a couple of weeks.  Billy wasn't sure what had happened to that boy; all the other kids in the Marlow family were...well...practical.  But that one was a hundred thousand dollars in debt for an education that allowed him to get a desk job that allowed him to spend the next ten years paying off his debt.  When he fell from the tree, he must have rolled down a hill and been picked up by a racoon.

The sky was pink and a sliver of silver sun began to fill the gap in front of him.

"Hey, buddy," came the voice of Sharla from inside.  He turned and saw that the windows were steamed up; she must have been up for awhile already with the stove heated up.  He realized that his fingers were completely numb and he had rabbit droppings all over his shoes.  His long hair was a tangled mess.

He responded, "I must look like a truckload of manure right now."

She drew a heart in the condensation on the front door window and stepped back into the shadow of the house. 

Billy sucked in one more breath of woody air and smiled at the valley that lay before him.  The orange cat stretched its four limbs out into the world and snuggled deeper into the warm pile.