Normally I abstain from working barefoot in the garden, even though the beach sand constitutes a thermal pleasure. I normally don’t go barefoot on account of my Lutheran neighbors and friends who might possibly stop by to chat about the weather, etc., and these folks gossip enough about Spec’s eccentricities. Bare feet would blow their minds.

A grown man planting carrots, weeding them with a hoe in the days of Roundup-Ready corn and soybeans, with dinosaur spray rigs flying up and down the country roads where horses once pulled buggies, weirds out my neighbors enough, so I really try to keep a damper on non-Lutheran exhibitions. I suppose bare feet would fit into the stereotype of the organic frarmer who spent more than a decade in northern California, but I normally refrain from such a sensual deviation, except this time I simply could not insert my left foot into my leather boot on account of the sprained, swollen ankle.

“How’d it happen, Spec?” they ask.

My son and I had been watching Seinfeld DVD’s rented from the county library, one night after a grueling day running the zero-turn-radius mower, the weed eater, and gas-powered blower for my buddy Mort’s younger brother, Jimmy, who manages a lawn care service in the town of Seymour. Still trying to get this farm up and running, I’d been trading hours of labor for use of Jimmy’s John Deere tractor with the front end loader. With the apocalyptically warm spring, the heavily-fertilized lawns had prospered out of control, and somehow my son and I had ended up skipping lunch one day last week, running on vapors as they say. About dusk, we’d finally had tacos at this absolutely authentic, from-scratch taqueria in Seymour, returned home to chill out with Seinfeld’s first season, and at bedtime I’d attempted to rise from the seventies vintage lazy-boy some dairy farmer had donated to our cause. I guess with my blood sugar still catching up, or my legs numbed from sitting on the mower all day, or something — my left leg was entirley “asleep,” and my ankle collapsed with a crunch.

Not only was my ankle swollen, but with bare feet I’d incidentally stepped on a a dandelion that had been in the middle of pollination with a honey bee, and the bee had stung the arch of the same left foot, which was now also swelling. Hoeing weeds out of carrot sprouts is a slow activity, though, so on Friday I’d taken a break from plowing ground and was limping in the sand when the text notification rang from the cell phone in my blue jeans pocket.

“If I may ask what pantyhose should I wear with my cutoffs[?] Sheer or opaque[?]”

“What’s the occasion[?]” I had to reply.

“Walking aroiund trying to get noticed[.]”

I had no opinion on pantyhose. Ever since fleeing academic civilization in the 1990′s, I’d been with hippie women who generally don’t even shave their legs. But this one, Antonia, had caught my attention last fall with her witty, on-the-scene reporting from the original Occupy Wall Street protests, honest observations and interviews that had irked some of the more zelaous of my Mendo contacts in the heat of revolution frenzy, bursting a few paradigm bublbles. We’d become Facebook friends. Eventually that on-line relationship had developed into a crush on my end, and back in March I’d proposed that Antonia try a tour of duty as a “woofer” on my new farm.

“A Manhattan bitch,” she describes herself as. “No way I could live in — where? Indiana?”

“Well just for like a vacation. . .a break from the rat race.”

“Thanks for the offer, but I’m still in a relationship that’s not Facebook-official,” she’d typed, “and I don’t want to undermine it.”

“The Frey winery?” my mom asked, over the phone. “Howie, Spec’s staying at the Frey winery!” They made me promise to take a bunch of pictures. Turns out my folks, who are retired Lutheran School teachers living on the prairies of Northeast Nebraska, ONLY drink Frey wine on account of the sulfites added to conventional wine as a preservative, which gives my dad headaches. Wine that is produced organically does not contain added sulfites.

“I can’t believe you can get [Frey wine] out there,” I said, adding that I would try to take pictures, but warning that I’m no good at it. Nobody in our family is. Old-fashioned Lutherans have a lot in common with the Amish, psychologically, and we still feel guilty snapping photographs, or posing, so my fingers always quiver with pilgrim stagefright, and the faces are usually blurred beyond recognition. “Maybe Cassandra will take the pictures.”

Cassandra is my second Ex, and a sharpshooter with the camera. “I think something’s wrong with the camera,” she said as we accompanied Luke and Emily’s son, Daniel, and about a dozen goats on their daily walk through the vineyards, where they grazed on cover crops, weeds, perennial leaves of bushes. Here were the pictures, I thought. Damn. The boys were riding on the goats’ backs like a rodeo, falling off into glistening oat leaves, but the camera I’d purchased at a drug store would not accept the SDS card. Fifty bucks, I thought, as Cassandra handed the piece of shit to me. “It says, MEMORY FULL.”

No pictures for Mom and Dad, but we had a great stay at the Freys’. As I travel from farm to farm, I can never help asking myself, “Do I wish I was these guys?”

The answer is almost always, No. Sometimes it’s a “not really,” and often it is a resounding, “Hell No,” which is why I resort to fiction.

Staying in the home of Luke and Emily, where the meat, milk, vegetables, even some of the grain is raised on the soil between the grapes, I had to admit that I wouldn’t mind being in their shoes. They are actually doing what the people in the current Local Food movement, an offshoot of the old Back to the Land movement, aspire to do, thanks to a combination of luck, genious, and perserverance. They’re also making money, which is what the rest of us aspire to do. The first grapes were planted several decades ago, when Luke and his dozen brothers and sisters were kids running around barefoot in cow pastures. It was the kids who put the cuttings in the ground and carried water in buckets to establish them. When Luke was a young feller he worked for the Fetzers, learned about wine making. His brothers and sisters played different roles getting the business established, and the winery grew organically, you might say, from the ground up, as all the crushing equipment, the tanks, they found second-hand, more like hand-me-downs from the established wineries. They started using nitrogen gas to displace the oxygen under every cork, in lieu of preservatives.

On New Year’s Eve I spoke with Luke’s brother, Paul, who had just returned from Atlanta where organic wine producers had battled in the courts over whether to allow the use of sulfites as a preservative. “We actually dug up records from the sixteenth century, to prove that added sulfites had not always been part of wine-making,” he said. “I mean the original documents.”

I wasn’t taking notes, but it sounded like the anti-sulfite crowd won out, for now, though the whole issue will be redebated in a few years.

Since my parents had sprung to fly my pauper ass out to Mendo for the holidays, I really had to send a box of wine to Nebraska. You can ship wine to Nebraska, it turns out, but not Indiana.

“What kind do they prefer?” asked the ladies in the office.

“They’re midwestern Lutherans. They always choose plain white or red. It’s not really what they prefer. What do you like?”

She said the 2010 Zinfandel was her favorite. After that, the 2009 Petite Sirah.

The Kincaids reinforced the frightened prejudices of the German farmers. From the other side of the river, the farmers they regarded as invaders of their native soil, no doubt, as Grandpa, his brother Alvin, and Uncle Huck had purchased most of the neighboring valley’s flat ground, both sides of the meandering creek in a place known as “Buffalo Bottoms.” To get to Buffalo Bottoms from Verona you have to go through Kincaid Holler, and as recently as the 1980′s the Kincaids lived in trailers both sides of the gravel road. Riding with Grandpa or Uncle Huck, as a kid, I was in awe of the leather-faced men standing beside sawdust mountains and shacks where they milled poplar and oak into pallets, men who didn’t wave amiably the way all the farmers our side of the river did, whether they hated you or not. The Kincaid men passed Mason jars and seemed to regard us like deer except slower moving targets, and they were always out there. Every now and then the sawdust piles would spontaneously combust, so driving home through the Holler at night it was lit up and flickering like a scene from Hollywood’s studios. Neither the volunteer fire department, nor the sheriff deputies of either county, both sides of the river, ventured into Kincaid Holler in those days. The Kincaid kids didn’t attend school. They tooled around the Holler, but carried no license plates or insurance, Grandpa always warned me. “You’re screwed if they run into you.”

The Kincaids knew that all the Good Lutherans on the north side of the river were conditioned to a state of fear and loathing towards them, and so the wild hillbilly clan really never had to accomplish any of the dastardly deeds they were accused of, with a century of legends elaborated on and passed down through the generations. They effectively owned the rivers and forests. They must have taken sport in watching Grandpa and Huck or me drive the big red tractors past in the spring to plant corn, corn that the Kincaids would help themselves to when it was fresh for roasting, or later when it was dry to use as feed for pigs, chickens, and horses, or corn meal in their kitchens. Not only did the Kincaids sequester their share of the corn, but since none of them were really legal enough to motor into civilization and purchase hydraulic hoses or batteries for their nearly antique caterpillar dozers and forklifts, they considered Grandpa’s farm equipment to be something like a tractor parts supply outlet that was only open at night, when our equipment was parked there in Buffalo. We basicallly expected some parts to be missing in the morning, and for that reason had installed FM transmitters in our cabs long before the advent of the cell phone. Big Farming was Big Money, and we had to keep the show on the road. For that reason, possibly thanks to a stint in the army in the 1950′s, Grandpa designated one spot in the middle of Buffalo Bottoms as the “Staging Area,” and we would literally park the tractors and respective implements in a circle when we were done working of an evening, like the pioneers had once configured their wagons out West. Not that this approach deterred the nocturnal dismantlers, once we’d returned home to Verona. They probably cracked up at the sight.

Buffalo Bottoms was not named after the wild bovines of the Great Plains, but for the native buffalo fish that would spawn in the annual flooding when the rivers backed up.

“You could try Dad’s place there in Buffalo,” Uncle Huck told me, when I stopped by his shop to relay that my old friend and current employer, Mort, had these business connections from the City who were driving down for the muzzle-loader season, and that my son and his friends had cleaned too many deer out of Mort’s grandma’s farm, which I felt bad about. “You know, that hill next to the church piece, the pear tree field. They can park in the staging area. Just watch out for the Kincaids — you know the property lines up there, Spec?”

“More or less.”

“Steer clear of them Kincaids.”

“No doubt.”

Mort’s friend from the city, Kevin, was gung ho to go home with a trophy buck, though. “I don’t care about any Kincaids,” he said. “It’s on.”

So my son and I hopped in our Ford Ranger and led Mort and Kevin the round-about way to Kincaid Holler, since the old Cavenaugh Bridge has been condemned by the State. The Holler ain’t what it used to be. The sawmills are gone. Nobody stands around, though you may still spot a few children darting between the same Dodge Chargers and Chevy Novas that have been up on concrete blocks since I was a teenager. Some of the trailers have been scorched in meth lab explosions, their windows knocked out and hollow like blackened jack-o-lantern teeth. It was crank that finally brought the Law to Kincaid Holler. For nearly two hundred years, the county and state police had left the place alone, but meth lab explosions were not easy to hide from the DEA. The place is eerily quiet, now that most of the Kincaids my age are in prison, and the clan’s brush with civilization was the equivalent of war. It’s quiet like the South during Reconstruction. Well, quieter than it used to be.

We parked our trucks in the Staging Area, and I pointed out the general perimeters of Grandpa’s land, noting again that the neighbors would not take kindly to outsiders venturing on their side of the nebulous lines. Not even Grandpa or Huck knew exactly where the boundaries on the other slope of the hill were — they didn’t eat venison, or log the forests, so had never endeavored to venture that way — at least not for decades.

“If I were you, I’d stay back on this side of the hill just to be sure,” I tried to warn, but the conversation got sidetracked, though I did try to point out the cedar grove where surely a bunch of deer must be bedding down, the grove right along the church piece. And then Alvin and Denver were out the other side of the valley, shelling corn, which frequently drives deer out, and that got Kevin excited.

Kevin, it turned out, had been on the swim team at the same university where I’d studied Literature, coincidentally, though neither of us remembered each other. But we both mentioned enough names to confirm that yes, we’d been to college at the same place, the same time. He was as amped for this hunting performance as he might have once been for the Mid-East conference championship. You could see it in his eyes as he poured powder into his muzzle loader. He could well have been pacing behind the starting blocks before the 100 meter freestyle.

“Man, I didn’t think we were working today.”

“No, I’m down at my grandma’s farm. Guess who’s here with me.”

I knew it had to be my 14 year-old son, Craig.

“Craig and his friend just shot a buck, here. Can you meet us–we’re past the dry water bridge.”

“Yeah.” Crap, I thought, hurrying out to the truck. This was the second Saturday in a row that my old friend, Mort, had called to say that my son and his buddy had a deer–the last one had been a doe. The boys had permission to hunt the legendary farm where two fat rivers merge, but here Mort was bringing friends–business contacts, down from the city for the privilege of setting their deer stands in prime hunting ground, and these teenaged boys were taking boats up the river, walking the same fields and forests they’d been fishing and camping in all summer, and shooting deer they’d almost come to know on a personal basis.

Those rolling hills turn from sand to clay as you near the fork in the river, and naturally the last field was once inhabited by several thousand people, a center of commerce thriving as a trading post long before the French showed up. I drove slowly across the craggy limestone rocks of the dry water bridge, rounded a bend, and encountered four fellows in bright orange hats and vests. Mort and his friend from the city wore camo pants and sweatshirts, where my son and his friend were garbed in the same T-shirts and blue jeans they wear to school–though they did sport orange vests, orders of their elders. There was the buck, what they called a “seven point.”

“I thought you weren’t going to shoot any more deer,” I said, pretending to lecture my son, though some of my irritation was not feigned. For one thing, Mort’s friend from the city was scowling, having driven two hours for this adventure, having planned the whole weekend out, having a wife at home who was burnt that he was out participating in a pagan ritual without her and would probably scorn him for coming home empty-handed. “You can’t take every last deer in the damned valley! You’re out hunting for more while I’m still at home butchering the last one!”

“Jeez, Dad. I thought you’d be stoked I got a buck.”

“Yeah, Spec, it’s okay,” said Mort. “I told them they could hunt here. I just don’t want word getting out that anybody can hunt here.”

“Oh, we won’t tell anybody,” said Craig and his buddy. They weren’t lying. They weren’t telling the whole truth, but they weren’t lying, either. The truth is that Mort’s grandma’s farm is one of the best known hunting and fishing spots in the region.

Mort is a building contractor, and on the weekdays we work together, currently putting a bar in basement for a doctor and his wife up in Columbus, an affluent town forty miles from the valley where I live and Mort’s grandma’s farm is. Nobody lives at Mort’s grandma’s farm. The electrician Mort works with, Sparky, really likes to chat while on the job, and no sooner had we struck up conversation than Sparky, upon hearing where I lived, started telling me all about fishing that spot where the two rivers come together. I mean, Sparky lives in Jennings County some twenty miles east of us.

“Mort’s grandma owns that farm,” I told Sparky.

“That’s the best fishing spot I ever seen,” Sparky said. “You’re pulling perch and bass out of one river, channel cats out the other.”

“You’ve been there?”

Turned out that not only had Sparky been fishing and hunting down on Mort’s grandma’s place, but he’d also run into the Kincaids, the legendary clan who have inhabited the hills across the river in a region known as “Kincaid Holler” for about two centuries. The Kincaids don’t buy meat, but not because they’re vegetarians. They claim most of the best hunting and fishing spots, and they have a reputation to uphold, the old-fashioned way.

“Never go in Kincaid Holler after dark,” people always told us kids.

Mort’s grandma’s farm is basically the beginning of Kincaid Holler. Nothing happens there that the Kincaids don’t know about it.

Our heater is one of those outdoor wood furnaces with the boiler and the pump in the basement that circulates hot water through a radiator with a squirrel cage fan blowing the heat through ducts like in the oil or coal deals.  You see a bunch of those kinds in these parts, now, whereas when I was growing up people were still using oil, coal, or else had woodstoves in the basement.  I guess they’re an improvement–anyway, Lupe was thrilled lay in front of that warm heat blast.  Normally she’s not allowed in the house, but I was preparing to drive a bunch of lettuce and carrots up to Indy for the weekend, and wanted to let her spend the last night with me.

The next morning, I left her home to guard the farm, and I drove the Ford Ranger up to Indianapolis, traversing the landscape on backroads that either run straight east-west or north-south except where the ridges between river valleys break up the monotony, admiring all the century-old barns similar to our own that have been properly cared for thanks largely to the hills that break up the square fields.  In other, flatter farm regions like the Central Valley of California, or the absolutely pancake plains of northern Indiana and Illinois, farmers plant five or six thousand acres of corn and soybeans, and have leveled off most of the original homesteads in the name of efficiency.

I consider the original barns and homesteads to be the very picture of efficiency and sustainability, combined with aesthetics, what is absolutely lacking in “modern” agriculture, and I drive slowly down the country roads, admiring the barns kept up mostly these days for sentimental reasons.  I am convinced that these barns will once again be useful for sensible, small farms, long after the modern confinement facilities have rendered themselves obsolete.  After the weekend on the north side of Indianapolis, I am more convinced than before.

The city, or more accurately, people in the city, are rapidly gaining interest in where their food comes from.  I have observed the City of Indianapolis since the early 1990′s, when attending college there, when the demographics consisted mostly of black neighborhoods, poor white hoods, middle class white hoods, and upper class white hoods.

Complain about NAFTA all you want, and all the evil it did to workers in Mexico and North Carolina, etc., but one thing I can say for the treaty’s consequences is the dining in Indianapolis improved dramatically between 1996, when I and my first ex headed west for northern California, and 2001, when my second ex actually dared to leave her Mendo homeland and spend the summer gardening with me on East 46th street.  We dined at authentic Mexican and Guatemalan restaurants, an act which would have been virtually impossible as recently as 1993.  That summer, 2001, Cassandra and I were one of only two organic vendors at the Broad Ripple farmers’ market, the hippest part of that city along the west fork of the White River.

Over the past weekend, I spoke with chefs in half a dozen packed restaurants that now serve mostly local and organic food.  I made some deals, some contacts, learned that other farmers are already supplying lettuce, free range eggs, etc. The growth of small, mostly organic farms in this state has been EXPONENTIAL in the ten years since Cassandra and I represented two of maybe four.

And maybe I’m just getting older, pushing forty, but I could swear that since people are clearly eating better, they are looking better.  Of course it was Halloween weekend and they were dressing to kill along the river.

“You got to have a truck,” everyone tells me.

I more or less agree, though seeing an elderly friend driving past in the horse and buggy, a glimmer in his eyes, I have to tell people I’m willing to drive as long as it’s necessary to get this farm going, and no more than I have to. My plan in Indiana is the same as it was in Boonville: to gradually get to the point where I never have to go anywhere. So some friends from the city who want to see our yet-unnamed farm haul lettuce, at this point, insisted on helping me purchase a truck, partially because they knew if it was up to me I’d get a rusty Chevy from the ’70′s with the rumbling 350, and I still wouldn’t really be able to drive all the way up north. We chose this Ford Ranger 4 X 4 with a manual transmission, and on Saturday afternoon I wheeled it into our farm’s drive, relieved to be away from the city and freeway traffic, happy to be home where I could safely crack a beer, which I did, walking around to get some fresh air.

Lupe seemed unusually happy to see me, and I thought jeez I was only gone for two days — is she hungry? No. What’s the matter with her? This dog was dragging herself trough the back lawn, slinking around me as low as a snake, rolling and literally bowing at my feet. Jumping up, barking, nipping, starting to really scare me. “What the hell, Lupe?” This went on for minutes, perhaps some elaborate dance handed down from her Dingo ancestors in the deserts of Australia. She’d never acted like this — NEVER. What, was she deranged? She was certainly possessed. Had she contracted some strange illness? Rabies?

No way. I thought of the truck. You got to be kidding. As I walked towards the Ford Ranger, I knew it was the case. She somehow had inferred this was “our” truck, and wanted to go for a ride. “Lupe, Jump IN!” I said, opening the door, and it was as if she was already on the floorboard.

Okay, I thought. “You’re the funniest dog in the world.” Cruised the Ranger for a four mile loop around my neighbors’ section of land, past Hollow Log Honey, to the river bottoms and the purple sun melting into the hills, and up the sand dunes to our place, with Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash singing “Walk the Line” together on the cd player. Lupe kept her nose next to the stick shift lever, her eyes on me, no doubt thinking, “What a man! I always knew this would happen, someday, if I stuck with him!”

When I parked at the farm, she dutifully hopped out and crawled under the warm oilpan, curling up and wagging her tail.

I was excited for the weekend, as something like 20,000 people were supposed to swell and overwhelm our little town of 500, and I had forked over the sixty bucks to rent a booth space in the vending area, hoping to sell lettuce, arugula, and mustard greens in one gallon, ziplock bags. On Friday night I pedaled a bike over to Grandpa’s and borrowed “the old gray mare,” his 1980′s model Chevy that is mostly used for herding cattle. Saturday morning I woke up at four o’clock, sipped coffee for close to an hour, and ventured out in the moonlight with a knife and several laundry baskets, cutting the green and red salad bowl, leaf lettuce, also some heads of buttercrunch to mix in. The crop is beautiful, and in prime condition with the autumn weather. I kicked myself for having spent too much time sipping coffee, as the clock ticked and I washed the salad mix by the back porch light until the first rays of orange appeared to the east, when it was time to wake up my son, load the truck, and scoot on down to the festival.

Main Street was already bustling, almost like it was prior to the 1960′s, when Verona had boasted a grocery store, bank, hotel, barber shop, train station, grain mill, chick hatchery, cannery, and brick factory. Now, aside from the old mill which is now mostly a distribution warehouse for chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and the Verona bank, where the local farmers do their business, the town is void of commerce — except for the past weekend. At the volunteer fire station, where the guys were frying fish, I met up with one of the organizers who looked my name up on the chart and led me past the old Verona gym. This structure is the community hub, the last lingering remnant of what was once Verona High School, constructed with bricks produced from the local clay hills that surround the sand dunes of our valley and stands as a testament to the past, much like the Roman coliseum in our town’s namesake. The friendly, event organizer led me past the gym, past all the food vendors, past the gun and knife vendors, past the junk dealers, to the very last booth space right along the highway.

“Well,” I said to my son as we unloaded the table and the pre-bagged salad greens, “at least being this close to the road we’ll be able to get back to the farm and cut more lettuce if we sell out.”

If we sell out, I’d said. After sitting for a couple hours and watching the perusing, twitching, wide-eyed dudes and chicks in black leather biker gear turn the corner in the last aisle, thinking they’d reached the last booths, I had to walk down to Main Street where my neighbor and former classmate, along with his wife, mom, and sister, were selling their honey and bags of apples. “Hollow Log Honey” is probably one of Indiana’s largest producers, and Paul ships his bees around the country, to various orchards. The bees actually spend springtime in the almond orchards of northern California, and most of them summer in the alfalfa and clover fields of Wisconsin’s dairy region, though Paul supplies local melon growers with a few hives. “I have to keep them away from corn and soybeans,” he told me in the spring. “The insecticide they use to coat the seed is so strong that it gets into the pollen and kills the bees.”

To which I’d instantly thought, if this stuff persists in the plants’ sap from germination to flowering, some fifty days or so, and is still strong enough to kill off hives of bees, doesn’t it stand to reason the same chemical would still be present in the corn and soybeans? Yum. Not that we omnivores consume much of that grain, directly. Rather, we eat the pork and chicken from animals that dine on corn and soybeans every day of their dark, confined lives. Yum yum.

Hollow Log Honey was doing frenzied business on Main Street, where they were pressing apples for cider, had country music bands on stage, and featured guys dressed in buckskins like French fur traders or Shawnee Indians, armed with muskets and blunt-tipped arrows, re-enacting the battle at Fort Verona. After visiting with those folks — Paul was a classmate in high school, I walked down to the Bluebird Cafe and bought a six pack of beer, thinking this was going to be a long day, and returned to the booth, where the few folks who walked by squinted and frowned at the sign I’d made, “Local Organic Lettuce, Washed and Ready to Eat.” I might as well have written in French. The middle class folks whose kids were getting their faces painted didn’t venture past the gun and knife booths. As I sipped beer I imagined that the rows of junk peddlers were a filtering system, distilling the reddest of the rednecks, so by the time they reached my absurdly juxtaposed organic lettuce greens, you got toothless, cranked-out toughs with bad hair who fit the stereotypes that you might think were too exaggerated to actually exist. Worse, yet, most of the women wore black T-shirts with pink ribbons, breast cancer awareness, and as I got bored and started asking around, sure enough, everybody around seemed to be plagued with cancer. “Find the cure,” the T-shirts claimed. Never mind the causes, support the Cause.

About three o’clock an Amish fellow about my age ventured past, donning the black Sunday hat and corresponding dress duds. He spotted the bag of lettuce on display, and his eyes lit up. His family was selling home-crafted, hardwood chairs and tables, he said, and he was stoked to purchase a bag of greens, even engaging in conversation, telling me he was from a mostly Amish community near New Philadelphia, a few miles south and east of our farm, that he milked goats, etc.

My son had a great day, buying a sturdy fishing pole worthy of the ocean so he could reel in those giant flathead catfish, and we packed up at about five, with a couple of his friends joining us for the ride home where they were going to spend the night camping and fishing at the river which is now the East fork of the “White,” though the French settlers had originally dubbed it the “Adige.”

Sunday morning we showed up a little late for the community church service in the old, brick, Verona gym where I and most of the other men and women had played basketball in grade school, sitting in the bleachers while the Lutheran minister actually preached a sermon on the parable of the vineyard owner who was trying to get his harvest in before a rain storm and ended up paying everyone the same at the end of the day, whether they’d harvested for 12 hours, eight, four, or only one. Making some effort to connect with the times, he mentioned Robert Mondavi as the vineyard owner, and had the original hirelings hail from the local grape-pickers’ union.

Later, when the minister happened past our booth on his way out of the festival, I called him over and insisted he take a couple bags of salad greens for his family. “Enjoyed your sermon,” I said. “Liked the part about the vineyard owner in California, except have to say that in the vineyards I knew of, I don’t think too many workers were union. Many of them were probably undocumented.”

He agreed. “Thanks for the lettuce. See you in church next Sunday.”

“Yeah.” The afternoon was warm, and I grew increasingly bored, watching the skeptical expressions of the festival goers if they even noticed my little organic lettuce sign, thinking that I had a lot in common with the optimistic French monks who’d tried growing Mediterranean grapes in this continental valley. A fellow walked past, clutching a brick that was spackled with mortar on the sides.

“Excuse me,” I said. “Did you just purchase a brick?”

“Yeah!” Enthusiastically, he displayed the lone brick, one side of which read, “VERONA.” “They don’t make these anymore.”

We don’t have to depend on the preacher and the scatterbrained prophets to addle our brains, though. On the way home from church we hear the news come across courtesy of the country music station, and it’s of course dealing with the murder trial of Michael Jackson’s surgeon for the eight seconds or so before a commercial comes on with these downhome-sounding folks telling us that US farmers feed the world, that the U.S. is a net exporter of agricultural commodities, these grass-rootsy statements sponsored by Monsanto.

“What do you mean, Monsanto is dicking over the world?” my son asks me, later, after we’ve been dropped off and I’m venting.

“It would take too long to explain.”

* * *

Last week a friend was literally burned alive in the truck he flipped late at night on Interstate 94 near the Montana border.

His first name was Tomante, and nobody knew exactly how old he was because he was born in Mali and survived there until sometime in his teens when, as a homeless kid on the street, he hustled Diane Sawyer of 60 Minutes right on camera, offering to carry her luggage. Some rich people in Bloomington, Indiana happened to be watching that episode, and they were tearfully moved to contact CBS to sort through the appropriate channels to adopt THAT kid, the one who was missing half his face, it having rotted off.

The rich Americans who first adopted Tomante had done so as one of those public displays of generosity, televising the whole charade on the local stations, and soon realized they’d gotten themselves into more than they’d bargained for, as Tomante hadn’t asked to be adopted, could not speak a word of English, had no idea where he was or what was happening to him when he landed in a Bloomington hospital and had to be restrained, tied to a bed while doctors grafted his rotted cheek to his shoulder. For months he could not move his head, it being stuck sideways to his shoulder. When the doctors finally decided the skin graft had taken, and Tomante was able to move again, the first thing he did was bolt from the hospital donning nothing but the hospital pajamas.

The rich Americans decided to find an easier, cuter, African kid to adopt, and, by default, a young Quaker couple — genuinely generous people, took on the challenge. At first they sent him to a kindergarten at an international school in Bloomington, because he looked like maybe seven years old, but after several months of eating chicken and mashed potatoes with his still hideously deformed face and only half a jaw, the seven year-old suddenly transformed into a teenager with raging hormones and facial hair who still ran away at every opportunity. Having survived on the streets of Mali for perhaps a decade, Tomante was skilled in evading police and subsisting, especially in a college town. Were it not for the fact that the Quaker man happened to be of considerable fortitude and phsycal stature, Tomante might have gone directly from the streets of Africa to the streets of America, but the Quakers persisted, moving to the north side of Indianapolis in the early 1980′s, where Tomante finally settled down.

“I don’t know what we’d have done without the Cub Scouts,” says his adoptive father, who wishes to remain anonymous, as he does not want congratulations for doing what he believes any reasonably compassionate person would have done. “He was drawn to the uniforms, and soon his goal was to be an Eagle Scout.”

The final test of a boy’s survival skills proved to be a piece of cake for Tomante: spending the night alone in the forest.

“The other, suburban white boys, went to all the trouble to build shelters and campfires, all the stuff they’d been instructed to do in the programs,” says his adoptive mother, “but all Tomante did was go out in the woods, find a comfortable place to sit down, and wait until morning.”

His dream was fulfilled, and the picture of him as an Eagle Scout still hangs from his adoptive parents’ wall.

I first met Tomante in the fall of 1995, when both of us were working on a roofing crew in Indianapolis. “Mango Thief” was the nickname the other guys — most of them Kentuckians who’d emigrated to Indy in search of jobs —  pinned on Tomante. He and I both liked to shoot pool, and we frequented the bars in liberal Broad Ripple that winter, not really winning a lot of cash but not losing money, either. That was the last I saw of him for several years, as my first Ex and I went off to Mendo to be hippies, have a baby, and subsequently split up, at which point I returned to Indianapolis to do roofing work, finding that the job market had been inundated by Mexican corn farmers displaced by NAFTA and USDA subsidies that were flooding the maize markets south of the border. It turned out that Tomante was running into trouble with crack dealers in Indy, as well, guessing by the bullet holes in the side of his van.

“I never judged Tomante for the choices he made,” says his adoptive father. “I’d say things to him like, you know what you need to do is get into a nice house, in a nice neighborhood, and find some nice woman, and he would just look at me and laugh. That was when I realized that crack whores were the only women he would ever get.”

Even after the surgery, Tomante’s face was like something out of a horror movie, a frightening mask he had to wear every day like a walking advertisement for the disparity in the global food supply. He should have carried a goddam sign like the protestors on Wall Street the last couple weeks, or worn a name tag explaining the root causes of his condition. “Hi. I starved while you got fat.” His rotting jaw had been a direct result of severe malnutrition. His utter lack of fear was a direct result of a childhood on the streets of Africa, as was his ingenuity. On one roofing job, Tomante had suddenly paused in the middle of laying shingles. “That branch is perfect for a slingshot,” he told me, leaping like a squirrel from the roof into the canopy of a hard maple, taking his roofing hatchet and chopping off a wishbone. “We made those all the time in Africa, using tubes from bike tires. Used them to kill bats, birds, and lizards.” On lucky nights, this was what the homeless children roasted over campfires.

Later that evening, after nightfall, he paid a visit to the crack dealers that were out to kill him, climbing one of the trees in their front yard, armed with a pocketful of pebbles and the slingshot. He proceeded to shatter first the front window of their crib, so the furious gangstas charged outside with their assault rifles, ready to ice the muthafucka. Calmy, from up in the tree, looking down at the would-be assailants, Tomante fired pebbles through the windshields and tinted windows of their cars. The thugs ran around the yard like decapitated chickens for hours, swearing bloody murder, but finally gave up and disappeared back inside their drafty, cold house, shattered glass everywhere, at which point Tomante climbed down from the tree and sauntered through the streets, back to the bullet-ridden car that doubled as his home.

He had to leave town, quickly, his Quaker parents assured me, offering to pay the gas money if I’d accompany him back out to the ranch north of Ukiah, California, where I’d had my garden the previous two summers. I was ready for another season of growing watermelons and skinny-dipping with hippies, so we drove across the great USA, stopping in college towns along the way to shoot pool.

At Round Mountain Ranch, Tomante helped get my garden started that spring — spreading chicken manure and oyster shell lime out of buckets, planting watermelons, cantaloupe, okra, and this Hopi blue corn I was growing out for seed.

“With your survival skills, you could probably teach courses here in Mendo,” I told him. “I’m serious. These hippies are all into that shit. They’d pay to know what you know.” I wasn’t lying.

One spring morning, as we direct-seeded the Hopi blue corn, Tomante motioned to a grassy clearing beside the willows that lined the creek running out of Lake Pennyroyal. “I’d like to build a house over there,” he said.

“Sure,” I agreed, thinking it was harmless enough to go along with him on the idea, even though this was not my ranch, and he was not technically a “member” of the community. I walked up to the communal kitchen for lunch, leaving Tomante down at the garden.

He basically subsisted off salted peanuts from filling stations, and had no need or desire to join me for lunch.

When I returned to the garden, an hour later, there was a hut constructed of willows, with stripped, twisted cordage to tie the joints, and a thatched roof.

Last week, Tomante decided to head for British Columbia. He’d heard it was a good place to live on the streets, the only life he’d ever been comfortable with. Apparently he dozed off in the middle of the night on I-94, flipped his truck, and was scorched when it burst into flames. I almost have to hope he wasn’t wearing his seatbelt, but at the same time, Tomante’s life was a living hell for decades, so if anyone could handle going out that way, it was him. He did, anyway. He went out like that.

“You should let me do it,” my teenaged son, Craig says. “I have better balance.”

I have to admit that he’s right, though the idea of watching him climb around on those steep slopes with the rope and harness scares me more than the reality that I am growing clumsy and my hands shake after too much coffee. Rather than commence to sliding on the barn roof, I’ve decided to hone my skills on the less daunting, chicken coop in the back yard. The “chicken” part is inherent in this decision. This coop is the classic small-farmer’s model with the concrete floor, the one-by-whatever native timber for walls, fourteen by twenty feet with the sloping roof facing North. Some of the roof was rotted out, and I had to scrounge around the farm to replace a few rafters, noting that the family who’d thrived here from the forties until the late eighties had originaly spliced together scraps of two-by-four with random nails poking through everywhere. So I did the same. On this farm I want to restore every building to its original purpose, knowing that I’m not half as wise in the ways of the land as Roy and Luis were. Also I believe in ghosts and ancestors watching from a “higher perspective,” and if it was me looking back at the farm I’d worked to build every day for decades, I’d probably rather see the future inhabitants repairing and reinforcing my brilliant intentions, than see them triumphantly destroy everything.

“Man, you should see the lumber we threw away in Ag today,” my son said when Kenny the bus driver had dropped him off. “[The ag teacher] had me and a few other guys doing clean-up outside, and we were throwing these two-by-sixes in the dumpster.”

“How long?”

“I don’t know. Twelve feet or so.”

“But they had nails sticking out of them, or they were split, or covered with concrete?”

“No. They were left over from some project last year.”

“So your Ag teacher is instructing you to throw away perfectly good two-by-sixes, twelve feet long?”

“Yeah, I should have told him we’d take them.”

Gene Logsdon said in one of his popular back-to-the-lander books of the early 1970s that if you were looking for the perfect place to start your little market garden venture, don’t choose on account of the schools. They’re just as pathetic no matter where you go, he said, in other words.

Missing the Fair in Anderson Valley this weekend. Can’t wait to read about it.

Another sheet blew off the roof of the picturesque barn. This barn is at least twenty-five percent of the reason I returned to Indiana, because the entire decade I farmed in Boonville and gradually got into milking cows, I felt silly trying to raise funds to construct a new barn with the milking room on the side, knowing that our country is dotted with beautiful, sensible barns that were framed a hundred years ago by folks who really knew what they were doing. The one on the farm we purchased comes with a concrete block, milking parlor that is fitted with two elevated stalls built in compliance with the USDA guidelines of the 1950′s. It is perfect for the type of cow share program that we were doing in Boonville at what will hitherto be known in my writing as the “Local Foodie Farm.”

It turns out that the cow share program we did in Boonville WAS illegal, after all—or at least the California Department of Food and Ag contends so. Earlier this summer, as has already been reported by Bruce McEwen, a goat milk share program in Willits, Green Uprising Farm, was served “Cease and Desist” orders at the Willits Farmers’ Market. Last I heard, they were still dumping milk out in the grass and teaming up with attorneys to fight for the rights of individuals to decide whether or not they want to drink raw milk from a tiny, unlicensed dairy where all the cows or goats have names. The stakes are rising in California now with regard to the legality of milk share programs, and several weeks ago a buying cooperative, “Rawsome Foods,” in Venice beach was raided by a SWAT team. The owner was handcuffed and taken away, charged with something like conspiracy to deliver raw milk, and the goat farmer was also handcuffed and detained.

The same cow share programs are absolutely legal in Indiana, and dozens of farms advertise on-line.

So last week, as I washed dishes at the kitchen sink and gazed through the windows at the picturesque barn with the white-painted, concrete milking room on the side, the corrugated metal flapping like the wings of buzzards attempting take-off, I cringed. My dad had paid for 20 sheets of the corrugated metal to be delivered to the farm, but I didn’t have the cordless drill to apply them to the roof for weeks on end while I twiddled my thumbs. I’d entrusted all my tools with friends in Anderson Valley last January, and was now too broke anyway to go purchase an inferior animal. Day after day I looked at the stack of brand new corrugated roofing, at the rusted pieces blowing in the north breeze, and stewed. I had no driver’s license, no vehicle, no job except tossing watermelons a few hours a day for some distant MacQuayde relative, and was chomping at the bit to do some work, hoeing weeds out of my lettuce even though drizzle was falling and the weeds weren’t even dying. I was literally rearranging weeds in the sand like a Buddhist monk on the damned beach.

So on Friday I couldn’t take it anymore, called my son’s grandpa up in the hills of Brown County to see if he would take the boy for a few days. I had to get up to Indianapolis. I telephoned one of my numerous unemployed high school buddies who are living on their parents’ sofas after divorces and two decades of working in factories or construction jobs that have dried up.

“What’s up, Spec?”

“I need a ride to Nashville.”

“Sure, man,” he said. “Just get me some whiskey.”

Highway 135 from my place to Nashville is similar to 128 through Anderson Valley, and you even pass houses in the hills with big signs out front declaring that “THC CURES CANCER” or just, “LEGALIZE IT.” My buddy used to do motocross semi-professionally, and has literally scared the living shit out of more than one passenger over the years, though he’s only totalled two trucks. “They didn’t amount to five thousand in value, though, so if you think about it, that’s barely even one truck. Know what I mean?” His folks started taking him to the local speedway every summer Saturday night when he was a baby, and he grew up around the racing scene, partying in the pits. We met my son’s Grandpa at the Nashville Inn, had a beer around the table outside where minors are legal, talked about frying snapping turtles and the superior quality of wild mink pelts compared to the stuff raised on “mink farms.” My plan had been to hitch north from Nashville to Indy, because it was a toss-up whether it was more dangerous to have my hell-raising, hillbilly friend sip whiskey as we joined the growing stream of traffic turning to sub-urbs, or to hitch.

“Son, I can’t let you hitch. I’d couldn’t be a-goin home, thinkin you was standin there with your thumb out. Know what I mean?”

He liked the adventure, anyway. Dropped me off at a bar on the the south side of Indy where my attorney who will hitherto be known as “Lu Anne,” met us. Can’t really remember what all I did the first day or so up here, but on Sunday afternoon an old friend from college showed up at Lu Anne’s place, a sanctuary literally in the middle of Indy that was built in the fifties with double-paned glass for walls looking out on five acres of forest, with a creek running by.

“Duncan Alney,” the guy’s name is. He agreed to let me use his real name. He grew up in Calcutta, India, and came to Indiana in about 1990 to be a cowboy, originally, though he ended up getting a business degree from Hanover College on the banks of the Ohio. Now he runs his own advertising agency, mostly internet-based. “So for a cow share program, combined with the vegetable CSA, you’d want how many members ideally? Fifty or a hundred?” was his first question when we finally got down to business.

“I need at least fifty up here in the city to make the deliveries worthwhile.”

“No problem. You need a hundred, though, my Negro.” Duncan has dark skin and a magnificantly sick sense of humor, combined with the cultivated Indian accent that has been seasoned by two decades in Indiananapolis. He reached out and grabbed my earlobe, pretending to eat something that had been dangling on it, as is his trademark gesture.

Today I’m getting a ride home with my attorney’s husband, who instructed me on Kant and Nietzsche back in college, and he’s sending me with a cordless drill and all the tools necessary to repair the barn roof. I’m a little daunted by the challenge, having never worked on such a steep, elevated, slick surface with the rope and harness before, but it’s a rite of passage if you want to be a farmer in my neck of the woods.

The shadows are lengthening, noticeably.

Basically the whole crop is owed to Grandpa and Uncle Huck, one way or another, as they loaned me the old Massey Fergeson 65 and the three bottom plow, then the six foot disk, and then the old offset Cub for cultivating. They also purchased the seed and the granular, certified-composted chicken manure.

I haven’t actually applied the “organic” granules, yet, because we haven’t been up to Seymour to load them, and I’m shocked at how fast the lettuce I planted two weeks ago is growing. It’s a puzzler. Any other place I’ve been, even if it looked like you had good, dark, topsoil, if you didn’t apply tons of manure or something, the lettuce would not grow. It would sprout, and a week later you’d still just have those two, tiny, symmetrical leaves. Two weeks later, you’d still have nothing but a sprout. Then you’d dump some kind of foliar fertilizer on them, and they’d immediately start growing like weeds.

We had been dumping catfish heads, guts, and coffee grounds out there all spring, and when my son and I had cleared about a one acre thicket of elm saplings and poison ivy vines, we’d lit some nice bonfires, and later used buckets to spread the ash in rows over the sand — ash being high in calcium and potassium which is what this phosphorus-rich sand is low in. Also I had drunk a lot of beer and coffee over the previous month in the course of writing my farming memoir, 101 Ways to Strike Out, and every time I’d gone outside to get away from the damn laptop screen, readjust my eyes, and take a leak, I’d peed where the lettuce was going to be planted.

There’s more to the explanation why this lettuce is growing faster than I’ve ever seen, even though I didn’t apply the dorky “organic,” sterilized, expensive, fruity pebbles yet. We’d gotten a six-inch flash flood one night at the end of June, and in the morning the whole quarter acre had been covered by a foot of water from the surrounding sand hills, in which literally millions of some kind of tree frog were swimming around, fornicating, laying eggs for several days. The waters receded and the frogs hopped back to the trees. “Could they have somehow added fertility, maybe by laying all those eggs, most of which would have been trapped in what was then about five inches of clover and crabgrass?” I ask myself.

I asked Grandpa the other day as he was driving me down to Salem for our 20th attempt to get Spec a driver’s license. “You think it was the tree frogs, or could it have been all the nitrogen they’d applied in March to those wheat fields around the place leached in to our lower ground?”

“Well, Spec, you also got to remember most of that field was a hog pen for a good while, back in the fifties and sixties. And anytime ground is not farmed for a long time, it’s going to raise a good crop.”

Grandpa had to drive me to the license branch TWICE that day because I went in there with two I.D. cards, one from California and one from Indiana.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” said the friendly woman with the blonde curls dark at the roots. “California issued you an I.D. with an Indiana address. But the Indiana card has a different address.”

“Yeah, that’s my place,” said Grandpa. “Spec was staying with us when he got that I.D”

“I’m sorry, but now we’ll have to verify the correct address, which is on the California card? We’ll need phone bills, electric bills — ”

So Grandpa had driven me to Salem twice, and in the end we still ended up lacking the expiration date on my California license. “One step closer, though,” he said, philosophically as he gassed up his truck.

“Lupe, get back!” I hollered at my blue heeler bitch, while hanging up a load of laundry on the line in the backyard. I was prepared. I had known they were going to show up at nine, because Grandpa had stopped by Saturday afternoon to warn us.

“Is Craig ready for church?” Grandma could see that I clearly wasn’t, wearing blue jeans, a T-shirt, and barefoot, petting my dog on the forehead to keep her from scratching the shiny cardoor.

“Uh, he sets trot lines on Friday and Saturday nights, so he’s actually down at the river, checking his lines.”

Craig’s latest obsession is to catch the mighty flathead catfish. There are three main breeds of catfish that lurk and interact in the two rivers that converge about a mile from our farmstead, and that is where Craig fishes up and down the banks of the quicker, more lucrative river. This time of year it resembles the Navarro more, as the swift, deep currents of June have dwindled to meandering streams, pools and massive sandbars. This is the time to catch catfish.

Our freezer is filling with channel cats, who are at the bottom of the catfish food chain, caught on stink bait that is basically a mixture of steer blood rotted with flour. A lot of people are afraid to eat the fish in the rivers on account of mercury, or herbicides and fertilizers and industrial waste, so the catfish population is plentiful. My take on the whole Afraid-To-Eat-The-Fish-From-The-River deal is just a basic question, like after seeing Grizzly spray strawberries with fungicide the day before harvest, or harvest watermelons that had been sprayed with a miticide that had the skull and crossbones on the lid, after seeing farmers inject growth hormones into beef cows, why be afraid to eat the fish? I mean nobody intentionally injects weird shit in those wild creatures that probably still feed off earthworms and mostly organic crap that washes down. Nobody sprays them for insects. They probably gobble a lot of dead bugs that got sprayed and end up drifting down the damn river, maybe they swallow some bubble gum a kid spit in the gutter, but then again what’s the difference between that and the strawberry that got sprayed the day before harvest?

Case in point, from the perspective of Craig and I, would be the fishing gurus who’ve been pulling channels, flatheads, and blue cats, as well as largemouth bass and perch from that river all their lives, eating catfish for dinner just about every night. These folks seem pretty healthy to me, and they are also knowledgeable in the subject Craig is most interested in, which makes them teachers in my book, might even be part of my book.

“Craig needs to get a good education,” Grandpa says. “He needs a fair crack in life.”

These days he is studying catfish, and his main instructor would be the fellow down at the bait shop, were Craig rides his bike for the stink bait, treble hooks, trout lines, and advice. Located in the middle of nowhere, life is slow and quiet in the bait shop, and Larry, with a beard like Santa Claus, has studied catfish and those two rivers for seventy years. He knows every local fisherman, and what they’ve caught, and when, and how, and maybe even why. He knows catfish, and he knows the people who know catfish.

“I asked my ag teacher if maybe we could research catfish,” said Craig, who has already started high school. “He just ignored me.”

But at night, over a dinner of catfish, fried tomatoes and peppers from the garden at Uncle Huck’s, etc., I hear all about the differences between the blues, the channels, and Craig’s current goal in life, the mighty flatheads. “The channel cats go around in herds like cows and eat from the bottom, is why you catch them on stinkbait. They’re all about scent. The blue cats are more about sound, is why you caught that big blue I think, that night when you just kept plopping your stinkbait in. But the flatheads — the flatheads hunt at night. They hide out in the shade of logs all day. They don’t like the sun. And this time of year, when the current is more shallow between the pools, the flatheads stay around the edges of those pools and surround the channels, won’t let them out. Some people think they communicate. Then they move in for the kill.”

Using frozen turkey hearts for bait, Craig sets lines overnight for the coveted flatheads on Fridays and Saturdays, so I had an excuse when Grandpa and Grandma stopped by at nine to pick us up for church. “He’s probably catching channels left and right, too, so he won’t be back ’til noon. Here,” I said to Grandma, whose window was rolled down, offering the epson salts, the rubbing cream, the hydrogen peroxide, and the antibiotic ointment that Grandpa had brought over on Saturday when Craig had showed him the wound on his hand where he’d been stabbed by the barbed forefin of a channel cat. “Thanks for bringing this by. Craig’s hand is okay.”

“Oh, you just keep it. You might need it, Spec.”

“You know, Spec, I hate to say it but you’re headed the wrong direction if you won’t join us for public worship.”

“I’ll think about it,” I said. “Thanks.”

Sure, I felt bad about not going with them. Here Grandpa had first shown up to invite us to church, and then when he’d seen Craig’s puncture wound he’d gone back to the house where he and grandma had put together all those topicals, and they still weren’t getting Craig and I to go to church.

Thing is, Craig has to get on the bus at 7:25 every weekday morning for the ride to school, and that doesn’t really leave enough daylight to ride the bike down to the river, check the lines, and the trouble there is he’d probably just be tempted to try tossing some stink bait in for channels ONE TIME, since they’re so hungry in the mornings right now, with the pooling of the late summer river and being under seige by the flateads. One cast would probably lead to another, since they’d be hitting, and sitting on the river like he was with church this morning on one hand, weighing out the pros and cons of going to school or church or going fishing, he’d be too tempted to stay there. If the channels were biting, from the perspective of the riverbank, I have no doubt which direction Craig would go. The wrong direction, as they say. Fishing would win out every time. So he can’t do that on school days because then, instead of explaining to Grandma and Grandpa that Craig was checking lines and must have gotten sidetracked because the channels were hitting like yellow jackets on a busted watermelon, and couldn’t go to church, I’d have to explain all that to the bus driver, Kenny, and then to the Principal at the high school. When it comes to mercy I believe Grandma and Grandpa, the Good Lord and the Preacher might give Craig a little more slack for playing hooky to go fishing. The public schools draw a hard line.

Feeling guilty about missing church, I waited for Craig to return home on the bicycle before completing this piece. Let’s go see what he caught this morning: no flatheads, unfortunately, but eight channel cats, a few of them maybe three pounders. Thanks be to God!

“I wasn’t trying to strike it rich in California,” I said. “I never really cared about money.”

“You can’t go back and forth between here and California,” said Uncle Huck, who also sat across the table in his farm shop, next to Grandpa. You would be surprised to learn that Huck is Grandpa’s son, as Huck’s hulking shoulders in the T-shirt and overalls dwarf Grandpa by a three to one ratio; even his face is much larger, topped by the red Case IH (International Harvester) baseball cap. “Your son there needs to get a good education, and we know what kind of things he was into out there.”

My fourteen year-old sat next to me. “It doesn’t matter to me if I go to school here or California. They’re all pretty much the same.”

“I just want you guys to start living right,” said Grandpa.

“Well, I feel the same way,” I said. “Thought we were living right out there.”

“Then why’d you come back here?”

“Thought I could make a difference.”

“Now hold on here, Spec,” said Uncle Huck, wagging his finger the way Grandma MacQuayde famously does. “You was misleading us, and here we’ve helped you get the farm you wanted.”

“I didn’t deliberately mislead you. You guys assumed I’d had it up to my ears with all the hippies and organic farming and naked people in saunas high on marijuana, because I came back here, but the truth I kept trying to say all spring was I wanted to show you that consumers don’t want antibiotics and growth hormones in their beef. They don’t want pesticides on their produce. I went to church and all that because I really did feel like God was calling me back to the Midwest to make a difference, that we actually need to get back to farming the way they did when Grandpa was a boy. I know everybody laughs at Spec, Spec’s ideas, and usually I don’t care, but do you ever wonder why cancer rates are so high around here? Why all the hog farms and dairy farms are out of business?”

“If you go back to California, you can’t come back here.”

We’d reached a stalemate. This was a steaming afternoon in late July, enough to raise the tempers of moderate folks, and we MacQuaydes are not famous for our even keels.

Nearly every morning I am awakened at dawn by a few shotgun rounds, by the sound of it, as my neighbor blasts away at the crows that flock to these parts annually. My neighbor is one of the last remaining traditional watermelon growers, the markets having been swallowed up by big players like Grizzly and Bambi, Kroger and WalMart. His fields are fertilized by pig shit from the hogs on his farm, swine that are not his own. Hardly anyone owns the pigs in their confinement houses ever since about the year 2000 when the market suspiciously dove to around ten cents per pound, driving all the small players out of business. Now those who feed hogs do so on contract, basically employees of Tyson.

“You really only smell the shit two days a year,” my neighbor nervously said when our dogs were getting acquainted out in his melon field a few days after I’d been fired from Grizzly and Bambi’s mega melon plantation. “Just when we’re cleaning out — ”

“Yeah,” I agreed, only to cut the crap. The odor doesn’t bother me too much because I don’t have a girlfriend around to complain about shit, but the truth is you can smell the confined hogs about two times every day, especially since the prevailing winds come from the southwest and our farm is due northeast of the hog facilities. This might be one reason the MacQuayde family was able to purchase this old homestead so cheap. Besides, guys with smelly hog operations make good neighbors, because as long as we don’t complain about the incessant reek we’re doing them a huge favor. I was paying him the visit because I knew my blue heeler bitch had been paying visits to the graveyard where all the sickened confinement hogs are buried, and just wanted to let him know that I knew, to prevent her from being shot. All was well, especially since he heard I’d been fired from Grizzly and Bambi’s which turned out to be a step up in the eyes of this community.

I rarely saw a single crow all spring, but as soon as the watermelons approached ripe, it seems that every crow this side of the Ohio converged on us. All the growers who remain after the conquest of global corporations use different strategies for combating the raucous fowl. Grizzly and Bambi, who plant more acres of melons than the other handful of family farmers combined, probably approach the crows with the same strategy they apply to weeds and soil management: none, then claiming all the losses for insurance or subsidized USDA bail-outs — nobody is sure but everyone suspects. So they do the smaller growers an indirect favor by letting the crows have orgies in their weedy jungles. A few of my neighbors park tractors in conspicuous viewpoints of their fields, also stringing lines from poles that dangle aluminum pie pans. My most immediate neighbor chooses one old method of shooting crows periodically throughout the day and dangling the dead birds from posts like Jesus and the other protesters and miscellaneous sorry sons of bitches in Roman times, with limited success as far as I can see because I suspect that crows, like people, are actually glad to see their old buddies strung up dead on the cross, and they take macabre pleasure in partying down under their dead bodies. Think about how sales of Nirvana albums spiked after Kurt Cobain shot himself, or the recent surge in popularity of Amy Winehouse who I’d never heard of prior to her jumping on the sweet chariot ride.

Speaking of swing low, sweet chariot, my son and I were somewhat astounded on Sunday morning when a 1929 era, open-cockpit, cloth-winged airplane landed on the lane that borders our farm with the next. The adjacent fields where the sand ends and the river bottoms begin were actually a landing strip for training pilots during the second world war, and the crazy bastard who landed here actually flew in the airforce during the sixties before settling down to become an elementary school science teacher in Northern Indiana. “Duck” Beamer, his unoffical name is, possibly on account of his habit of flying that little plane under freeway overpasses. He and his wife raised two boys on homegrown, organic vegetables, goats’ milk, and meat all through the seventies, and I actually met his son, Don, up in Carlotta (Humboldt County) during the Headwaters redwood forest protests of 1996. More on that next time.

“Cheated death once again,” said Duck after taking me up for a terrifying spin in the old plane.

Missed church, but had one hell of an excuse.

“Thanks, man,” I said, as if I’d been on the verge of heading out the door.

Actually I was standing naked in the kitchen, having just been startled awake. I had gotten up before six, noted the approaching storm to the west, and returned to the sack, concluding that we’d be putting the brakes on Grizzly’s Napoleonic charge to plant some four hundred acres of melons. Ever since the floodwaters receded way back when, all I’ve known from dawn to past dusk has been endless rows of watermelons, whether planting or cultivating, and the numerous reports I jotted down in the wee hours intended for the AVA were discarded and forgotten, probably for the better as they tended to be scathing indictments of Grizzly’s farming methods.

It is true that we are mass producing watermelons for WalMart. While Grizzly certainly does not go out of his way to act PC towards the dozens of Mexican fellows he refers to as “boys” regardless of age, and it is true that this farm reminds me of a cotton plantation in the antibellum South, it must be remembered that Grizzly and Bambi put in more hours than the rest of us, and they are probably the most tragic victims of corporate agriculture’s invasion of the land. Last night, for example, Grizzly and the crew were just getting started planting a late succession of cantaloupes on forty acres he is renting from Uncle Huck. Grizzly had spent the entire day laying plastic mulch eight miles away on another farm, while the migrant laborers had bent over rows of early cantaloupes for twelve hours, pulling weeds, but a massive storm cell had developed to our west that was supposed to hit at about dawn today, so Grizzly had decided to stay up all night with the crew, setting starts.

“Mah boss in Joh-Jah nevah made us wuk no mo den twelve, thuteen ows,” said a Latino fellow who spoke with the fluent, unmistakeable accent of a southern black man. He was Mexican but appeared black, covered with fertile dust after sitting on Grizzly’s three row plastic mulch raised bed gizmo all day. “Twelve, thuteen ows, not one mo. Dis deal sucks. Heah dey take us up to town on Sunday fo groceries, Sunday! Cain’t poichis no damn beer on Sunday in — wheah is we? Indiana?”

I had made friends with the new arrivals from Georgia earlier in the day by stopping at a gas station in the nearest town on their way to lay plastic, allowing them to purchase cigarettes, which they’d also done without for two grueling, mournful, fourteen hour days in the dust and scorching sun.

“Dis heah a raw deal. No drivah for pete’s sakes. Wheah the devil can a man find a ho around heah? Strip club, even?”

“Wish I knew,” I said, honestly. “Nearest strip joints I know of are down on the Ohio.”

The field where the “boys” were getting set to start planting at dusk happens to lay between a major river and the adjacent field where Uncle Huck’s cantaloupes are vining out dark green and setting fruit except for the rows next to what Grizzly is renting, where the plants are white, void of chlorophyll, thanks to the pre-emergent herbicide Grizzly thoughtfully sprayed when the wind was blowing. In the corner of that field is a small pond where my teenaged son sat in a lawn chair next to Uncle Huck’s son, fishing. They’d spent the day cruising around their melon fields in a little 4-wheel drive Ranger, replanting any starts that had not taken the first time around, half a dozen teenaged boys and girls wearing scant duds and tanning, flirting, cavorting.

“I’d rather work for Uncle Huck for free than get paid to slave for Grizzly,” my son says. Now he and Huck’s son were dining on hamburgers and soda pop, pulling bluegill from the pond and razzing me as I maneuvered a tractor and water wagon and the Mexican slaves dragged their feet, loading flats “plasticos” of cantaloupe starts freshly sprayed with fungicide onto the shelves of the transplanting rig, a three row mobile industrial farming wonder.

“No tierra no planta,” hollered Grizzly, like a drill sergeant.

One season, I tell myself. A tour of duty to get real, report on ag in corporate America which reminds me more and more of what I used to hear about ag in the Soviet Union before the walls came down, when nobody gave a fuck. Of the army, grunt soldiers worth less than the minimum wage they are grudgingly paid, no names remembered. My son has spent countless days shoulder to shoulder with the sweaty, doomed guys, riding in the backs of pick-up trucks and on wagons, actually drinking water from creeks and splashing it over his head to avoid “heat frustration,” as he calls it.

I wanted to kill Grizzly when I discovered he’d given my son clearance to drink from creek water, rather than providing fresh drinking water for the crew, one article I’m glad I never submitted. Of course I was in an oblivious, air-conditioned tractor cab that day.

The teenagers had more than a little reason to ridicule our operation. Grizzly was in such a fervent zeal to stay up all night and get the cantaloupe plants in before the rain because he’d screwed up royally in working the ground, letting the abundant moisture dry into a forty acre brick of sand and clay that busted up into arid clods the size of angry, biblical softballs. In his haste, Grizzly had commenced to shape the dry clods like sharp kidney stones into raised beds that had remained bone dry even after a subsequent two inch rain had nearly flooded the field, ironically dry even, given that between the plastic raised beds the soil was too wet to pass with a tractor.

“If he tries to plant tomorrow he’ll have some uncomfortable lead in his head. He has no respect for the land, itself,” is how Uncle Huck had put it, watching from the vantage of his front porch several nights before as we’d shared beers and looked out across the two vastly different cantaloupe fields. “I told him that stretch along the river was heavier, more like clay, not good for transplants unless you work it just right. He’d a done fine with sweetcorn or pumpkins there, but he didn’t listen. He don’t think about soil. All he thinks about is WalMart.”

It turns out Grizzly is somewhat infamous in these parts, especially after admitting in the newspapers that he aspires to turn our little microclimate of hot sand into a serious competitor with California, Texas, and Florida. His reasons are not all invalid, as we are much closer to New England, Chicago, and even Atlanta than the other major produce-growing regions, but the old German farmers in these parts have seen enough of ambition and its effects on land stewardship. The general consensus is that Spec MacQuayde went out to California to learn about big-time produce techniques, and now is in cahoots with Grizzly, which in some ways might be true but in other ways is a joke. They can’t fathom the difference between Anderson Valley and Fresno, Bakersfield.

I have to wonder why Uncle Huck bothers dealing with Grizzly, but then I am also fully employed by the Wal-mart maniac, thanks to Uncle Huck, who had been dead on a year ago when he’d called me up at the old Boont Berry Farm to encourage me to come home, that “Grizzly needs help.” Now I drive a company truck and get paid to think for the first time in my life, so it is a little hypocritical to complain, though I look forward to the day when my son and I can do our own farming and not have to answer, ultimately, to Wal-Mart like some smiling God the Father the Son and the Holy Spirit, Three in One, up in the sky.

The first day of planting out there on Huck’s rented land had been disastrous, like the French or Germans trying to invade the Russian plains except the opposite, more like if they’d attempted to conquer the Sahara, the starts wilting immediately in the 98 degree heat that turns into well over a hundred on our sandy microclimate. Grizzly’d had me pulling a water wagon desperately over the dying starts all afternoon, which was why I’d ended up drinking beer on Uncle Huck’s porch that night, discussing Grizzly’s shitty farming methods.

For example, in nearly one hundred acres of melons that Uncle Huck and his kids and their friends have planted, nobody’s pulled a damned weed, yet, whereas Grizzly’s had dozens of chain gang Mexican guys laboring from dawn to dusk, tediously untangling weeds from the tiny holes where the melon starts went into the plastic on his fields, because he doesn’t rotate his crops. He has weeds that they warned about in Genesis. That, and he’s turning our famous sands into brick by not cover-cropping in the winter, and by relying too much on the plastic mulch that creates erosion similar to blacktop in the cities preventing water from being absorbed. I cringe when I work his fields. Now, with nearly a 100% chance of rain the next morning, Grizzly had no choice but to try to encourage the bedraggled Mexican dudes to stay up all night cold sober and repeat the same mundane task they’d been at for more than a month.

He finally gave me clearance to go home at about 9:30 pm, as I waved goodbye to the Mexican amigos who were doomed to see the madness through. Back at our own farm (which is supposed to be on hold for this season, though in the more frustrating moments at Grizzly’s I do start considering planting a crop of organic lettuce and carrots, etc., for late fall harvest), my son and I went down to the fish cleaning station in our basement and skinned the bluegill, then fried them in cornmeal batter, finally eating dinner at eleven, which was one reason Grizzly needn’t really have bothered calling me at seven this morning to save me the trouble of showing up for work. I’m not that crazy about growing melons or making money.

“Bunch of racist homophobes down there,” my friend, Mary Jane, who lives up in Indianapolis said when I invited her down to see the new farm that my family is helping to purchase for my son and I to do our organic, hippie thing. “South of the Mason-Dixon line.”

We’re not actually south of the Mason-Dixon line, but folks in northern Indiana judge so on account of the accents down here. The last few weeks, though, we might as well have been living in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, with fourteen inches of rain falling in as many days, bogging down the local farmers who are spending May Day stoking the woodstove in the shop and swapping hunting stories or discussing what the hell happened to Osama Bin Laden’s body while rain pours on the tin roof, Canada geese swim in the flooded fields. The early watermelons should have been planted around April 15, and the starts now loiter around in the greenhouses, pale as if dwelling in caves. The rainy day jobs are done and done again.

Even Grizzly and Bambi, the crazy produce growers who race around sixteen hours a day like hens with their skulls decapitated, are giving me a temporary reprieve. Hell has frozen over. These people never take time off in May. On Saturday, when the sun actually came out for a few hours and temperatures soared in the eighties outside, naturally the beer truck showed up loaded with seedless watermelon starts from the greenhouses up in Michigan, of all places. Seedless watermelons are finicky about sprouting, so the growers down here purchase all their plants from professionals with industrial-grade “germinators.” The only watermelons we actually grow from seed are the “pollenators” required to grow the seedless ones you see in the store. One in four plants in the field is a “pollenator,” basically an open-pollenated heirloom, seeded watermelon that growers like Grizzly and Bambi don’t even bother to harvest. On two hundred acres, then, you’re talking fifty acres of watermelons that are left to rot. Fifty tractor-trailer loads that are unsold, basically up for grabs, which is why I was calling my friend Mary Jane up in Indianapolis, hoping she will help hook me up with buyers in the inner city.

“Selling watermelons to black people, Spec,” she said. “Real cool, there.” Mary Jane is actually an attorney who makes a good living representing workers who have been sexually harassed or racially discriminated against, which is one reason she has the opinion that people down here are a bunch or racist homophobes.

“Hey, I know it’s not PC, but think of it this way: have you heard the term, ‘food desert’?”

“No.”

“Well, say you’re one of more than half a million people living in Indianapolis’s poor neighborhoods, whether you’re black, white, Latino, or whatever. You’re like ten miles of grueling traffic from the nearest supermarket, if you’re lucky. Maybe you have no car, have to bus it. You’re screwed if you want a big watermelon. What we need to do is find a way to get the watermelons into the city.”

She was somewhat game to at least meet with Grizzly and Bambi and explore the idea, and, being a busy attorney, Saturday afternoon was the best time for her to drive down from the city. The hip, urban, professional woman just happened to show up at the same time as the old beer truck that had been converted to haul flats of seedless watermelon starts. A perfect opportunity to meet the local color, it turned out, as the truck driver slid open the doors on the beer truck, revealing infant watermelon plants lined up like soldiers, and who else should show up but my good friend, the jovial, red-faced, Uncle Huck who was generously donating his time–partially because Canada geese were swimming around in most of his fields and from the looks of it he was a week of hot days away from planting the first corn.

Uncle Huck is not a racist in the traditional sense. I’ve known him for decades, and have basically concluded that he could come across as anti-semitic, anti-gay, anti-black, anti-muslim, anti-latino, anti-white, anti-woman, anti-asian–there is nobody on earth for whom he has not come up with some reason why those people are inferior, and I also know that he would include himself in the mix. I also know that when I was an English major in college and came home to visit, bringing hindu or black friends back to this community, it was to his house that we went to visit because of all places it was there we would no doubt be welcome for dinner, and anyone who has met this fellow has come away amazed, wondering, “How does he do it?” I’ve met professional comedians, actors, politicians, attorneys, people paid for the gift of gab all over the country, including many of note in Mendo, and I’ve never swapped stories with one who was as quick on the trigger as Uncle Huck. If you put him on camera and paid him to blab he’d probably clam up like the farmer he actually is, but in his natural element this man has no equal.

That said, another legendary characteristic of Uncle Huck is that he sweats bullets, that even when we were loading cattle out one morning in January when it was five degrees outside with a stiff wind coming in from the north, and the rest of us were bundled up like Eskimos, sweat and steam were radiating from his red forehead although his noggin was protected by nothing more than a seedcorn, baseball cap. And he was managing to hurl insults at every heifer as she went up the loading chute.

“You’re just in time, babe,” said Uncle Huck when he saw my friend, Mary Jane, pull up in her silver sedan. “Spec didn’t tell me you was hotter than a french whore on nickel beer night. Nice legs. You might have to kick off them there high heels if you’re gonna pitch in and throw these sexy little melon plants around.”

“That’s Uncle Huck,” I said, quickly. “This is Mary Jane, my attorney.”

“Attorney, huh?”

“Yeah, she’s represented me more or less, pro bono.”

“You lucky devil, you.”

“Um, Mary Jane, this is Grizzly, Bambi.” That was all the time we had for introductions. Grizzly and Bambi don’t fool around. Next thing you knew we were all lugging flats of watermelon starts that some thoughtful oaf had taken the time to thoroughly water before loading on the beer truck, and we grabbed two flats of 98 starts in each hand, gripping with our index fingers dug in the corners. They probably weighed ten pounds each. Due to the wet weather we were only able to pull the beer truck up to one end of the sweltering greenhouses, as the far end opened up to a veritable swamp, so we had to traverse one hundred-fifty feet across scorching concrete. Bambi and Mary Jane both took their shoes off. I joked that they ought to wear roller skates, but I was only half-kidding. Roller skates would have been just the trick. One reason Bambi and Grizzly are so successful as produce growers is they work harder than anyone else, all the time, which helps out with the morale of the migrant farm laborers from south of the border who are currently waiting down in Georgia for our weather to clear. One reason Mary Jane is such a successful attorney might be that as a college student in Iowa she spent her summers detassling corn, and even after years of desk and courtroom work she pitched right in, grinding the soles of her bare feet on that concrete. Most of us worked quietly, with the exception of Uncle Huck who soon started melting like an ice cream cone stuck on the radiator of an overheated tractor.

His face transformed from its normal tone of beet red to what he describes as “Red # 41,” which is more or less his age. Possibly the color of International Harvester tractors, as if when we painted their 1970′s model, 1486 over the winter his pores absorbed too much of the toxic spray. Naturally he started lashing out like a pit viper at me, as I was a safe target. “What’s the matter with you, Spec? Jill wear you out last night?”

“’Jill’ is Jack’s sister, a word you can spell out with your right or left hand depending on how you rotate it.

“Well, Jill ain’t got much to worry about,” I confessed. “Them Dairy Queen girls might make her jealous, but they’re all either married or in high school.” That was when I noticed a tomato plant in one of the flats of watermelon starts. “There’s a tomato start?”

“Oh, a little baby,” said Bambi, who really belongs in Mendo. With nurturing fingers she rescued the tomato plant and, not missing a beat, planted it between her voluptuous bosoms for safe keeping until she had time to replant it.

“Good God, Bambi, are you nuts? This heat must be getting to you. Now I see why you and Grizzly hide out in the greenhouses all winter. We all know what you do in here.”

“It’s Spec I’m worried about,” said Bambi. “One of these days we’re gonna catch him sunbathing nude in here.”

“When hell freezes over,” I said, quickly.

The heat was getting to most of us. Pretty soon Uncle Huck was situated on a stepladder next to the beer truck, unloading flats of watermelon plants for someone else to grab. “Here’s something for you to write about, Spec.” Somehow it came up that the greenhouses where these seedless watermelon starts had been planted was up in Michigan, and that got him going. His latest enemy is Michigan. The whole state is full of dumbasses who just want handouts from the government, probably referring to the automobile industry. Never mind that Uncle Huck owns three Chevy trucks. “We ought to kick them bastards out, let them become part of Canada,” he said. “Them goddam unions up there. All them people do—”

“Mary Jane represents most of the unions in Indiana.”

“Well, now, Mary Jane, Miss Hot Legs attorney in the black skirt, tell me why these unions want to shut down all our factories and send them down to the wetbacks, or across the big water where we send all the jobs, the land where they dine on rat, cat and pigeon. What the hell’s up with that? What’s happening here?”

Once the beer truck was relieved of its green cargo, Mary Jane and Uncle Huck and I retired to the bar in his basement where we downed a few shots of Maker’s Mark and discussed global politics until it led to the possibilities for marketing these heirloom watermelons that Grizzly and Bambi were going to be throwing away, twenty-five acres of which were going to be grown on Uncle Huck’s land.

“They ain’t gonna be as big as you think, Spec,” he warned. “Grizzly and Wal-mart don’t grow ‘em like we used to. They want to irrigate them and plant ‘em too close together.”

I told him about the UC Davis rootstock grapes in Anderson Valley. After that, it’s hard to say what happened, except that I had one hell of a hangover in church on Sunday morning.

Mary Jane wouldn’t go to church with me. “I’m not sitting next to you like some ornament.”

“It ain’t like that.”

“Yeah, right. And what happens if some flamboyantly gay, black guy walks into your country church?”

“Why would he?”

“You got a point, there. Have fun in church, Spec.”

The real reason I didn’t have the heart to haul tools out of Boonville was I didn’t want to leave all the friends there, but now it looks as if we’re going to stay in these Hoosier hills. I’ve somewhat signed on to work with Grizzly and Bambi Brown, produce growers who recently returned, tanned and sun-bleached, from Florida where the husband and wife of two decades managed harvesting operations over the winter, working in pepper and tomato fields near Miami.

We carried out the job interview in one of their many greenhouses where the temperature was probably comparable to South Florida. The Browns were repotting various species of flower starts. They talked about the irrigation techniques in the white sands, said pepper growers down there benifitted from an unusual killing frost that wiped out most of Mexico’s crop in January, driving the price of bells from around eight dollars a bushel to nearly forty.

“Spec’s been growing organic out in California,” said my uncle, Huck MacQuayde. This was his birthday and his sister had already taken him out to lunch where he’d put away several pitchers of beer along with most of a Mexican buffet. They call him, “Huck” around here. That was his nickname long before I was born, so I don’t know where he got it. He’s one of those people that no handle can do justice to. He was doing a huge service by personally driving me over to the produce growers for an iterview, as his presence was worth more than any reference on earth. “Lettuce, carrots — I told him you all might not be opposed to new ideas.”

“Organic,” said Grizzly. “Ha.”

“Them big growers we know who sign up as organic use more chemicals than we do,” said Bambi.

“I can tell by the smell what they’re spraying — they just pay the USDA inspectors and get on with business — nobody checks up on it. They’re just paying for the goddam label.”

“You ever heard of how they use horse blood?”

“For what, a pesticide?” No, I’d never heard of using horse blood. “A fungicide? A foliar feed?”

“I don’t know.”

“No, I never heard of it. I didn’t ever fool around with organic pesticides too much. Instead I just grew crops the bugs didn’t eat — like hay. I guess lettuce and carrots did okay. We didn’t have too many bugs out there on account of the cold nights.” I told Grizzly and Bambi about the killing freezes Anderson Valley had registered in June and September over the decade I’d farmed there, which amazed them.

“That’s a shorter window than we have!”

By a long shot, I said. I hadn’t been growing watermelons commerically for most of a decade, on account of the cold nights. Not commerically in the same sense that Grizzly and Bambi were doing, as they’d sold over a hundred thousand seedless melons to Wal-Mart the previous summer thanks to the drought that had wiped out Georgia’s late crop. That same drought had extended the growing season in Indiana, with October one of the hottest on record, so dry that combines harvesting soybeans and corn had spontaneously combusted in the fields all over the region, including Uncle Huck’s. He’d been cutting soybeans one afternoon when he’d started whiffing smoke from the cab, thinking, Hmmm, and climbed out to investigate, finding the rear end of the machine already in flames. Quickly, he’d unloaded the contents of the hopper into a grain wagon, then parked the blazing triumph of modern technology in the harvested part of the field and made haste to exit like Americans evacuating Cairo or Libya in recent weeks. Soon the flames exploded from hydraulic lines, and then the diesel tank sent fire into the sky while Huck jumped on the tractor and frantically pulled a disk implement in circles around the scene, creating a firebreak. He’d had the tractor and disk on hand because combines were igniting left and right, and the risk of fire was on the front of every farmer’s mind.

“Spec got tired of trying to grow organic,” said Huck. “He got tired of growing rabbit food for #$%%s and #&^^%%$*#s.”

That wasn’t actually the case, but I didn’t argue. “Mostly I just wanted to work with somebody else for a change — I’m tired of being in charge. I was losing too much hair over it.”

We shook hands on the deal.

“I say we head back the way we came, hike to Gaia Goddess Gulch,” I suggested. “Catch a ride with your mom back to civilization. Helga was your mom, wasn’t she? I forgot.”

Yes, Helga was her mom, but of course Dana and Fly said the other fork would lead us to Covelo, and once again my idea was nixed. “That’s where I was going,” said Dana. “Before my car broke down. What am I gonna do about my car?”

“Afraid it’s junk at this point.” I couldn’t help thinking the two of them would have chosen the other fork if I’d suggested otherwise, but let it go. The uncertain path might hold unimaginable opportunities. This was my first winter in California, and the only flu I’d come down with was a certain gold rush fever. I was certain that around the next corner was fame and fortune, shrimp cocktails at Hollywood strip joints, the lucrative lump sum at the end of the rainbow. Anything was possible if we took the road less traveled, I told myself, ecstatic enough to be temporarily free of my first significant Ex and the responsibilities of diaperhood and snotty noses. No doubt those little details like child support and visitation rights would turn out petty once fame and fortune had smeared red lipstick all over my envelope, spelling “magic” in cursive like an old-fashioned letter to the editor on college-rule paper. At the very least, another story would emerge. It would sprout the way morel mushrooms pop up through ashes in the spring after a forest fire.

We three pilgrims passed around an apple cider jar filled with water filched from Wayne’s spring, resting on a slab of granite, I thought it was, in the afternoon sun. It was hard rock, anyway. Basking like lizards, hearing the red tail screech, removing our reeking socks and boots and napping, too exhausted for whatever spark of romance had once jumped between us. Maybe a passing truck would rescue our asses.

No, though. The stingy winter sun was descending when we awoke somewhat collectively and decided the only thing to do was keep on walking. Bad thing was, Dana said she remembered the way back and no way we’d make it by nightfall without hitching a ride. Hitching was sketchy in these parts, she asserted, and it was a mute point anyway out in the ghostly silent Yolly Bollys. We argued about this or that but kept walking until we came to another fork in the road.

“Well, this looks like a driveway,” said Fly. “Maybe we oughta try it.”

“And end up practically kidnapped by another per-verted hermit?”

“Okay, Dana. You got a better idea?”

I just let them argue. Machs nix, my dad had always said in our version of German. One of his favorite stories is the time he’d been riding in the backseat of a ’66 Chevelle with the 396, his cousin driving, and they’d come to a tee in the road. In the farm country they’d had tees rather than forks like in the mountains. On a muggy summer night in 1969, half the half-drunk occupants had voted to go right at the tee, half left, so my dad’s cousin had just driven straight ahead into the corn field and eventually gotten lost out there. They made a near-perfect number “9” in the process of finding their way out. That’s what they told us, anyway.

In the end we decided to try the apparent driveway and approach the homestead with caution. Before long we encountered a fellow with black dreadlocks and a beard who was fervently cutting a fallen oak limb with a bow saw.
“We come in peace,” said Fly.

“Right on, brother.” The guy’s name was “Just,” he said. “Just ‘Just’.” His skin was barely dark enough to hint at some African ancestry, his biceps and forearms sporting bulging veins reaching out from short sleeves with the exertion from cutting firewood.

I’d never seen anyone cut wood like that without a chainsaw, and offered to take a turn.

“Well I was actually going to lug this length back to the cabin and do the rest of the cutting there. We have sawhorses.”

So Fly and Dana and I each loaded somewhat damp lengths of half-rotted oak on our shoulders and followed Just to the “cabin,” more of a one room, tarpaper shack heavily shaded by dense firs. Turned out that Just had four roommates, and all of them were refugees from Earth First! One was a very pregnant babe who called herself, “Avery.” Her guy, apparently, was a dreadlocked, freckled white boy from Michigan, “Carrot Top.” Carrot Top’s noggin was adorned with the reddest dreads you ever saw, and I almost wanted to point out that carrot tops are actually green. Then there was a self-deprecating dude from Indiana, originally, “Duck,” and another Michigan dreadee who claimed the handle, “Tree Top.” Tree Top was maybe six foot seven, hence the alias. These young folks’ story was they’d been dropped off at the cabin by a local pot grower who had subsequently gotten busted, so they were temporarily stranded with a dwindling supply of beans and rice. They wondered if we knew the way back to Covelo.
Beans and rice had never tasted so good.