Visiting various homesteads around the Valley, track­ing my kids around and what not, I’m seeing baskets of lemon cucumbers, tomatoes, even buckets of fresh eggs. Friends are trading hams, sausage, bacon. In the kitchens my friends are starting to can tomatoes, though they’re unbelievably late.

I still have a good supply of cabbages, onions, and potatoes to deal with, and am sort of having a blast trav­eling to different homes to have dinner, see their gar­dens. Since my commercial farming days are at least temporarily numbered, I’ve opted to drop all marketing in favor of socializing. At dinner conversations I’m starting to feel like I really know what the hell I’m talk­ing about when it comes to vegetables and farming in general. “It’s like I can’t make mistakes, these days,” I say. “I’m basically right about everything now that I’ve quit trying to farm.”

A local woman invited me over, Sunday night, over cabbages. We were going to pack a five gallon crock with sauerkraut.

I’m a little religious about kraut, which is why I planted the insane cabbage crop. You can’t make money growing cabbage unless you have acres of irrigated land and tractor trailers to haul it off to the Walmart Distribu­tion center. But I figured if you had hundreds of cabbage heads you could call all your friends and say, “Hey, I got as much cabbage as you could ever want if you want to make kraut. I’ll trade.”

There’s no way I’m making kraut by myself. The idea is too daunting. I’m not optimistic enough, anymore, to think that I’d actually keep an eye on the stuff without letting it take on the essence of the inside of my boots The truth is I hate to do that kind of work alone. I don’t mind operating a tractor by myself, but food processing seems to me to be a group activity. So I was legitimately excited Sunday night. We weren’t really just making kraut. You could call it kimche if you knew how to spell it, which I don’t. People made versions of kraut or kim­che all over most of Europe and Asia for thousands of years, and swore by it. The woman I was working with had dried cayenne peppers, garlic, sea palm, ginger, and then we shredded a bunch of onions.

We took turns chopping the vegetables and running them through the food processor while her favorite tunes played from her modern musical playback system. It was all this great African beat stuff like Babba Mal who played here at the Sierra Nevada World Music Festival, and some chick rock, and then Johnny Cash made it in there.

“You gotta admit Johnny Cash was the shits to make it into a playlist like that,” I said. “Straight outta Arkan­sas in the 50s. Then World music?”

She smiled and looked over at me. “I’m having a really good time, Spec.”

“Me, too.”

“I don’t want you to get the wrong idea…”

“That’s cool,” I said.

We dumped the shreddings into a food-grade five-gal­lon bucket, and she added a few pinches of salt here and there while she showed me how to mix and knead the stuff.

I kneaded it for a while, then I thought, What the hell? I started punching it down with my fists along with the African drum beat.

“I never did it like that,” she said.

“Just like tamping in dirt around a fence post. Any­way, it feels good on my knuckles.”

“That so?”

In the morning, at the Mosswood Market, I sipped a cup of Joe and glanced nervously around for about 20 minutes while a bunch of irritating wine tourists went on and on about various varieties and labels of Pinot Noir. It was all they f—ing talked about, and I was relieved when a local finally showed up asking what I was up to.

I didn’t know, I said, and told him about making kraut the night before.

“How much salt did you use?”

“Hell, I don’t know.”

“What do you mean, you don’t know?”

“I wasn’t the one who put the salt in. I was kneading the stuff.”

“You must have some idea. Five gallons. Was it a tablespoon?”

Christ, I had no idea. Don’t ask me for a recipe. ¥¥

]]> http://theava.com/archives/8120/feed 0 http://theava.com/archives/7985 http://theava.com/archives/7985#comments Wed, 01 Sep 2010 19:13:12 +0000 Spec MacQuayde http://theava.com/?p=7985

For weather fans, this summer the globe over seems to be one to remember. I’m never quite sure, though, reading about monsoon floods in Iowa or Asia whether the catastrophes are that far out of the box for what might be expected. I know that in Iowa, as well as much of the Sacramento Valley of this state, entire subdivi­sions and small towns have sprung up on bottomland that every old-timer knows is bound to flood eventually. In the real estate boom of the last decade, we had the pro­verbial Florida swampland scenario all over the country.

“Those barns are all going to turn into boats,” said a good friend of my family’s of the two story houses with­out basements that were going up on land in northeast Nebraska that he knew from 90 years of duck and pheas­ant hunting was bound to flood eventually. He called the houses “barns” because they were essentially barns in the minds of the old timers. In that part of Nebraska, what with the blustery north winds of the winter, the blazing summers, the threat of tornadoes, it was unthinkable to build a house with no basement, just as it was out of the question to plant a neighborhood in the swampy bottoms next to a river.

It was also unthinkable to take out a loan for half a million dollars for a two bedroom house on two acres. “Unfortunately we bought in 2007,” said a visitor to the farm on Friday afternoon. The gentleman and his son, both Anderson Valley residents, were interested in pur­chasing a milk cow.

I’m reluctantly asking $900 each for the mature milk­ers, three quarters of what I’d have to pay for a low-end cow from a dairy. Mostly I want to be sure they’re going to be milked, and no major dairy is going to purchase a six year-old with no statistics from a yahoo like me. Milk cows, these days, rack up stat sheets just like major league baseball players, and if you visited a dairy the farmer could print out her career production records–gallons per day, percent cream, somatic cell count, etc. “She comes in with about seven gallons when she fresh­ens, then after a few months goes down to four (two gallons, twice a day),” I told the men.

They were planning to milk by hand. These fellows grew up in southern Mexico and have the forearms and experience. When yankee homesteaders inquire about milk cows I have to advise them to purchase a little vac­uum pump and milking machine, or else just leave the calf on the teat so there isn’t so much milk to squeeze out. These men clearly knew what they were getting into as they inspected udders and teats. “We have an acre with tall grass, so we’re thinking maybe save some money. We have to do something. We paid $570,000 for the house, now it’s worth half that much and we can’t refinance,” said the older man, shaking his head.

Economic figures stagger my noodle, these days, and I prefer not to contemplate the road ahead. Saturday morning I was sipping coffee with a couple locals, one who owns his own logging truck, the other a woman who works for the county.

“I just took my second pay cut of the season,” said the truck driver. “It’s getting to the point where I’m not sure I’m making money on a run.”

“They’re cutting ten percent off our pay,” said the county worker. “That’s on top of the furloughs.”

I hated to say so, but this is just the beginning. “Wel­come to the third world,” I said. At such a time, when millionaires are flocking to the remote hills and setting up for armageddon, maybe purchasing milk cows to go with their chickens and emergency propane reserve tanks, the last thing I expected to be doing was selling off the herd. “Cattle” is the root of “capital,” as the “stock” market is a descendent of what real wealth once constituted. The economy of the last century enjoyed by folks in parts of North America and Europe was an aberration, and in the decades to come I am certain wealth will once again be determined by productive capacity. It goes against my religion to exchange a pro­ductive milk cow for cold cash, especially for three quarters of her market value. It makes no sense. But I’m grateful at this time to have real stock to liquidate. “Everything must go.”

It could be worse. Now that I’m no longer milking cows twice a day, no longer farming, I’m discovering what other people in these parts were up to all these years. Saturday night was the first in nearly a decade that I brought a sleeping bag along to an all-night party somewhere up at the highest altitude around the Valley, neighborhood of 3,000 feet. It was a real opportunity to hobnob, rub elbows, dip shrimp in cocktail sauce. Bands were playing, people dancing all night. Unfortunately I ate part of an oatmeal marijuana cookie that someone offered before dinner.

You could really taste the herb, so I turned to the young woman who was standing beside me, offered her half of it. “It’s really strong,” I said. “This stuff really knocks me out.”

“I already had one,” she said, and gobbled the rest, now crumbs in my hand.

So much for hobnobbing. I was entranced, mesmer­ized by the orange sun setting over the waves of fog, the blanket erasing all the bustle of nine years’ scratching out a living on the valley floor, but was for the most part incapable of returning conversation the rest of the night, grateful that a band was playing. A woman about my age belted out the lyrics to old Grateful Dead covers, doing justice where it had always been lacking when Jerry was with us and trudging with that flat voice. I really liked this woman’s style, and darned if she didn’t come sit next to me when her set was done.

“You sing uh, good,” I said. Those weren’t the words I intended. Waxing poetic was beyond my vocabulary at that point, but maybe she was on something even better than pot cookies because she stared back into my eyes for what seemed an eternity, though it may have only been a few seconds of rapture.

Maybe some tequila will loosen my tongue, I thought, slowly getting up to more or less dance to the bar, while the singer was called back on stage by a sub­sequent band. That sort of party stuff went on until way past my bedtime, when I thought I’d amble over to the female vocalist and–and I wasn’t sure what, maybe see if she wanted to accompany me to the sleeping bag.

“Hey,” she said. “What’s up?”

“I uh, have a sleeping bag, and—” I gazed into her eyes, feeling the intimacy, an arm around her shoulder.

“And what?”

“Uh,” there were about a million words coming to surface, possibly in at least six different languages, but you ought to try sometime to utter a million syllables simultaneously. I should have just started barking. Finally I gave it up and staggered out to to my friend’s truck, where my sleeping bag was crunched up in the back, and dragged it to a bumpy spot under an immense live oak. Before I knew it the sun was coming up over the ocean of fog, over the distant mountains of Covelo, and it appeared as if the water had risen 1000 feet.

The frigid summer trough held steady over this valley as of the weekend, with my neighbors’ crops of white corn from Michuacan barely busting out with tassles and silks at a time of August when the ears ought to be ripe for tomales. That white corn from way down south of the border is shivering like naked mermaids beached on an iceberg.

Meanwhile, Vicki Brock has been selling sweet corn at the Boonville farmers’ market. “We got tired of buying the expensive hybrid seed, and a couple years ago just let a few ears grow out. We’ve planted the offspring for sev­eral generations, and it’s still sweet.”

This year I’m a customer at the farmers’ market. For the time being I’ve taken a vacation from farming, am selling off the herd of cows and the irrigation and other equipment, and trying to find a way to twiddle my thumbs without drinking too much coffee and beer. Sat­urday morning was the first in over three and a half years that I didn’t milk the cows. I woke up at about six and laid there, listening to my blue heeler snore and the neighbors’ chihuahua bark frantically at phantoms, watching the first rays catch the redwoods on the western side of the valley’s rim at about 6:45. I tried to return to sleep, only managing to hallucinate for seconds on end until about 7:30 when I decided it was time to throw off the blankets, go into town for a cup of coffee. It was the first morning in years that I had to do without the fresh warm milk, sweet and still not separated that my amigos tell me is much better with a couple shots of alcohol.

“I’m done with stressing about the farm,” I’d told my first ex a few days earlier, when she’d dropped our thir­teen year-old son off in Boonville. “It’s such a relief not to care, anymore.”

“You still look like a farmer,” she said, “wearing over­alls and that hat.”

“Well, you look like a nurse,” I told her. She did look like a nurse, which is now her profession. She was wearing these pink pants that were the same texture, it appeared, as scrubs, as was the flower print blouse.

“Mom is always buying these scrubs on-line when she’s not at work,” my son told me, later. “She’s always on-line when she’s not working.”

A few minutes after my first ex had driven off, my sec­ond one showed up with the two youngest boys, and I climbed in the front seat. This was a historic moment for us, as we were going to spend the day together like a family for the first time since the lightning fires had struck in June of 2008 and we’d split. I had promised to behave. We were off for the Great Day in Elk.

“It’s such a relief not to give a shit about the farm, anymore,” I told her. “Now I’m like totally available for the first time in nine years.”

Our seven year-old was determined to snag the one hundred dollar bill from the top of the legendary greased pole, but we showed up several hours before that contest was supposed to start, so the boys tossed darts at bal­loons while this hippie band calling themselves the “Symbiotics” (organized by a Navarro man named “Nature”) strummed Grateful Dead style and sang about Peace, Balance, and Tranquility from the main stage. I saw the second generation pot growers who are my age with gray streaks in their hair, now, and they asked me what the hell had happened at the farm, what I was going to do.

“We’re really going to miss your milk,” said one woman.

“That Valley’s changed a lot since you’ve been there,” her husband told me.

“I’ve only been there ten years,” I said. “I think the main changes occurred about 1987 or so, according to what I’ve heard.” I was referring to a conversation with an Anderson Valley ranching couple who said that until the late 1980s they’d been leasing square miles of land for their cows and sheep, until Joe Montana’s signature had become so valuable that his financial advisors had ordered him to invest that table cash in some profitable real estate, connecting him with French grape growers who had zeroed in on Anderson Valley as the play of the game.

We all concluded that it wasn’t Joe Montana’s fault, that this overnight invasion of Anderson Valley was inevitable, and perhaps Montana was only the catalyst, but either way it stands now that big money grapes have grabbed most of the available farmland in the valley, and sharecropper cattle herders are a thing of the past. We’re obsolete. Coupled with the recent, escalating influx of capitalist white boys with dreadlocks from places like New York and Michigan as well as the desperadoes from southern Mexico, multiplied somehow by the simultane­ous housing boom that saw your good old forty acre piece of farmland go from forty grand when the back-to-landers landed in the 1970′s to supposedly several mil­lion in the peak of 2008, yours truly has pretty well con­cluded that there’s no way to make it as a farmer in this valley.

For years I looked forward to the time when mari­juana was effectively legalized and its market value reduced, when the real estate bubble would burst and the bottom would fall out of the wine market, incorrectly guessing that in these times the people selling real food would stand tall. What I didn’t figure in was that the people who’d been using their ballooning real estate val­ues as “nest eggs” would freak out when the banks started calling them in on all the cream they’d been skimming over the decades of boom, that there would be no solution to their financial problems.

Thankfully the Blushin’ Roulettes took the stage at the Great Day in Elk, the charming sweetie in tight, bell-bottomed blue jeans winning me over with her genuine smile and salty wit, making me forget the pickle jar we all seem to be crammed into. When she smiled at me I blushed and had to pull my hat down over my eyes.

On Friday the 13th I was supposed to pick up my 13-year old son from the Sacramento airport. He’d been out in Nebraska and Kansas for a couple weeks, visiting his grandparents and extended family. It was a challenge for me because I don’t drive.

“I have a suggestion for you,” my ex told me in a phone message. “You should go to Ukiah, get an ID card, and then take the Greyhound bus to Sacramento and pick up your son, yourself.”

That was her way of saying that she wasn’t willing to drive to Sacramento with me.

Rather than go to the tedious bother of acquiring an ID card, I called around and found a relatively jobless friend who was willing to do the driving and present his ID as temporary custodian of the minor. In these eco­nomic times the combination of a car and a driver’s license translates into gainful employment which I am happy to provide. “Who cares if I blow a hundred bucks on one trip?” I said. “I’m still saving money by not pay­ing car insurance, and I’m also one less drunk on the road.” Weaving the corners of 253 between Boonville and Ukiah, over the extensive slug trails of perpetual roadwork, I cracked a can of beer and sighed, content­edly. “Basically right now I could be behind the wheel, but instead I’ve made the choice to be riding shotgun, and this beer is living proof. The world needs more peo­ple like me.”

“Shut up,” said the friend who’d agreed to drive.

“Pay attention to the road!” I don’t like to be nag a driver, but we were coming up on the rear end of a truck loaded with smallish redwood logs that some people call “pecker poles.” One truck after another was plowing and snorting up the grade from Anderson Valley to Ukiah where it appears that the Mendocino Redwood company is stockpiling inventory in the hope of an economic turn­around. Armchair inspection has it that a big chunk of the recent surge in logging has to do with the farting deflation in speculative land values, investors liquidating in a desperate attempt to breathe a few more gasps before drowning. Maybe it’s just business as usual. They say the mill in Philo will start accepting redwood again, soon.

As we chugged slowly up the grade, following the redwood truck, a black mercedes sedan passed both us and the rig around a right hand curve, over the double yellow. Grateful not to be the one behind the wheel, I had another sip of the steadily warming beer. It was like climate change in an aluminum can. “That was pure crazy,” I said.

“They must be in a real hurry,” said my friend.

When the truck pulled off to let us by, it wasn’t but a couple more curves near the crest of the hill that we overtook the same black sedan whose driver had nearly committed suicide by smoking past us. It was now trav­eling no more than 20mph, swerving over the double yellow for no reason before each right hand curve, then overcompensating and bolting past the white on the right, into the gravel and rock.

“That guy’s drunk or on meds or something,” I said.

“Or else he’s just old. He looks bald,” my friend said.

“Old and drunk and on meds. It’s barely even noon! Not even noon yet. We ought to make a citizen’s arrest.”

“If only we had a cell phone.”

“Yeah, it would be handy. This guy — ” I cut off because the car ahead of us swerved completely across a double yellow, with another right turn approaching. There was nobody to pass. There was no explanation for this maneuver. It seemed that whatever afflicted the clearly befuddled driver was amplified by the threat of a right turn. The black sedan was completely contained in the wrong lane around the corner as a dumptruck loaded with gravel barreled up on it, and it was only for the defensive driving of my friend and the grace of God that the sedan managed to nonchalantly whip back into its correct lane a bare moment before it would have become a hood ornament on the dumptruck. Slowing, we gath­ered a train of cars and trucks behind as the black sedan in front weaved like it was following some imaginary slalom poles down a snowy slope.

“We gotta pull a citizen’s arrest,” I kept saying. “This guy’s seeing things we’re not, apparently. He’s gonna run off the road.”

“Yeah, you with a beer in your hand.”

“I’m not driving.”

The sedan slowed to 15mph, and we were all holding our breath with each curve down the steep grade. I squeezed the life out of my beer can. When the sedan nearly squashed itself like a potato bug on the grill of yet another dumptruck loaded with rock, I had to slide through the window and poke my upper body out like a turtle’s head and front legs, wave my arms frantically, hollering at the driver ahead, pointing to the side of the road. Whether or not he got my message I’ll never know, because he may have finally noticed that nearly a dozen cars and trucks were stagnating and honking behind him like we were loosely linked on an old steam-powered railroad train. He veered the sedan off into the gravel provided for runaway trucks, and I somewhat coerced my temporary employee to follow suit.

Waving at the stream of cars and trucks flowing past, I reached into the box for another can of beer before making my way to the driver’s side of the black sedan and conferring with the man behind the wheel.

He was indeed bald and probably in his late 70s — not nearly as old as my dying grandfather, this guy on who-knows-what combination of meds, wearing dark sunglasses. “What’s up, buddy?”

Perhaps due to the beer in my hand and the ones I’d already consumed, I wasn’t able to determine at first whether the guy had been drinking. However, I hoped for his sake that he had. If he wasn’t drunk then he really needed some constant supervision, and I had to wonder if the blonde hair streaming from the leathery, tanned face of the woman riding shotgun had been dyed. She also sported massive, dark sunglasses. Maybe they’d been arguing. I had a bunch of questions for the duo.

“Man, you can’t sit there with a beer in your hand and wait for the CHP to show up,” my friend grieved at me, shouting from the driver’s seat of his idling wagon. “What are you going to do?”

“I’m pretty sure I’m well within my legal rights.”

“You’re crazy!”

There I was like an actor who’d forgotten his cues. I didn’t have a plan. “Buddy,” I said to the guy behind the wheel. “I don’t know what you’re on, but you’re clearly in no condition to drive, kind of like me. The difference is that I’m not driving. Now the lady — how about her? Wanna let her drive?”

“Fuck you!” he said, and dropped the tranny into gear, slamming on the accelerator. He blazed around the next curves and lost us before we got to the pumpkin patches at the bottom of the hill, up Robinson Creek.

Ironically we ran into the same couple at lunch in the Ukiah Brewery, where the guy was extrapolating to the blonde chick about why he’d been too assertive for the art community in Mendocino. They were sitting at the bar, as were my friend and I. It was impossible not to eavesdrop. The guy must have recognized me from our little encounter on 253, but maybe with the dark sun­glasses and his compounded state of probable inebria­tion, his being totally immersed in the topic of the coastal art politics, he just didn’t notice I was the one who’d fumbled the citizen’s arrest.

Even more ironically, when we’d run the gauntlet of Highway 20 and descended into the humid agricultural central valley, we stopped at a farm stand to select a plump watermelon reminding me of the open-pollenated Jubilee variety we used to pick when I was the age my teenaged son is now. Darned if we didn’t run into the same couple again in the produce stand that was thriving so much that two teenaged girls were ringing up custom­ers constantly. There were about a dozen customers in a half moon around the room, most of us straining to keep from dropping the 30-pound, green-striped watermelons. The bald artist must not have recognized me because here either because he gestured with a nod to the lunker I was clutching. “Bet you a dollar I picked the riper one,” he said.

“No way. I thumped a dozen — this one had the best ring.”

He shrugged. That was the last I saw of those two.

At the Sacramento airport you couldn’t get into the lounge to sit and drink and socialize with folks from around the world unless you had proper ID, so we had to loiter in the shade of the parking garage for a solid hour before the flight was due to arrive. My friend sipped cautiously on a soda and tried to counsel me on behaving when we went inside, but I assured him the airport secu­rity was accustomed to interacting with spirited, sun­burnt, red-eyed fellers in shit kicker boots. “This is the old west,” I said. “Gunslingers, etc.”

Sure enough, there at the escalator were two columns of crimson-cheeked Vietnam vets in wheelchairs or leaning on American flags, clearly on a mission to wel­come some young soldiers back from tours of duty. This was my kind of crowd, and the atmosphere was fairly boisterous by the time my 13-year-old son appeared with his duffel bag, wearing the bright red St. Louis Cardinals baseball cap his grandpa had given him. He stood along­side a fellow donning the gray, billowing army fatigues. There were cheers and hoots, handshaking and back slapping, a general celebration.

On the drive back through the ag lands, just about dark we pulled off along a canal and cut open the jubilee watermelon. It was dead ripe with the big black seeds, a little watery but sweet. Just as we were enjoying the first slices a helicopter roared directly overhead, descending to the adjacent almond orchard where it turned on the sprayers and offered a spectacular display, the mist radi­ant in the halogen glow.

July turned out to be one of the coldest of its kind on record — locally, especially in Anderson Valley. The air flow patterns raged in frigid breath from the Gulf of Alaska after one of the most shivering springs in mem­ory, and hot weather crops such as tomatoes, melons, and peppers that are marginal for this Valley to begin with really stagnated in the breezier fields such as those at the old Boont Berry farm. It was a good year for cabbage and potatoes down there.

The tomatoes looked so behind the times that when our somewhat collectively-owned herd of cows and sheep managed to squeeze open an unlocked gate earlier this month I decided what the hell, let’s see if they eat the morning glories and pigweeds before the tomatoes. A little science experiment.

I’m not sure what the herd mowed down first because I was doing child care with the two boys doing target practice with the good old Daisy BB gun, shooting beer cans they’d dipped into a bucket of water. With the strong breeze this summer the only way to do target practice is to fill the cans with water before they blow away. This is a dual purpose approach, central to the theories of good farming, as the strategy both encourages the boys to egg me on to drink more beer, and they have the fun of seeing the wounded can piss water where the BB penetrated the aluminum skin. Not to mention a third benefit, that the water in the can slows the BB so a cou­ple days later they can pour the captured ammunition back into the reloading chamber.

A fourth benefit of target practice with spent beer cans is that I can sit in the shade and read while the boys fire away. Last week I was enjoying the short stories composed by the Russian wizard, Chekhov, when he was only twenty-six years old, circu 1886 or so. He’s got this one about a peasant on trial for stealing nuts from bolts on railroad cars to use for fishing weights, a script that could have made prime time as an act on Saturday Night Live in the late 1970′s. The peasant expostulates on his fishing theories in the courtroom to the exasperation of the judge — he’d only stolen one nut, for crying out loud, and they were trying to say he was attempting to cause a train wreck and murder hundreds of people.

I was reading Chekhov when one of my boys hol­lered that someone was apparently at the farm to pick up some cows. They were pulling a stock trailer behind their truck.

Good Lord, I thought, setting the book down. I knew who it was. They’d called the day before when I’d been reading and preparing for the afternoon siesta.

“I received word from [my ex] that you’re evicted from the farm and selling the cows,” this guy had said. He was calling from a Hindu commune that had started a cow share program somewhere in the hills around Anderson Valley.

“Yeah, pretty much.”

“Are you interested in selling milkers?”

“It depends. I mostly want to make sure they’re taken care of. I’m married to them.”

“You sound like you’re not sure, like you could go EYE-ther way.”

Eye-ther, he’d said. That set me off. I probably need meds. Anytime somebody says something like “Eye-ther,” I go nuts. I go straight vernacular. “Shit, man, I got this one critter that these other Hindus dumped on me cause they couldn’t take care of it. Didn’t have no pas­ture, so they sent her to me, skin and bones. But they don’t want me to chop up any of her bull calves or noth­ing. What the hell am I supposed to do with a bull calf? I bet they’d rather y’all took her, if they heard you was a bunch of Hindus.”

Damned if the Hindus didn’t show up the next day, with the Swami himself telling me they were going to pick up Rohini. I’d met the Swami before. The very per­sona of humility with shoulders and head hunched for­ward, tufts of graying hair cropped short but disorderly like grass pasture recently tugged by herbivore molars, the previous summer he showed up at the farm posing as a potential cow share member. He asked about a hundred questions and cringed when I swung open the freezer packed with wrapped beef, and insisted on obtaining a copy of the contract that my ex had gone to great lengths to procure from an attorney. When I asked if he wanted my phone number, he replied strangely that it wasn’t necessary. Weeks later I saw posters around town adver­tising RAW MILK.

“Yeah, she’s out there,” I said, pointing to our herd which was pretty much mowing down the tomato crop. I never would have thought they’d eat tomatoes before pigweeds and lamsquarters, but I guess the tomatoes were more lush and green. “Just a minute.” Feeling the orneriness pulsing in my veins, I led the Swami and his loyal minions out to where the herd was trashing my already abandoned hopes, leaving every gate open behind us, and bringing our cattle dogs. Once we had the whole clump of bovines and sheep stampeding down the chute, I had to ask whether any of the Hindus had stayed behind to play safety as they do in American football.

“Nope,” said the Swami.

“Well, we’re in for quite a rodeo,” I said.

About a dozen cows, calves, and a small flock of sheep bolted past the gates, stampeding through. The animals were excessively agitated by the time my eager dogs had turned them around and headed them back into the ramshackle old greenhouse that I converted into a hay shed. With some effort, the Swami’s minions man­aged to fasten two ropes on the halter of the cow they were after before she and the rest of the herd bolted through my gardens into distant pastures, pulling the four-footed fellows on ropes over dirt clods like recrea­tional weekenders on waterskis.

Swami hung back with me next to the hay shed where I was shooting baskets, on fire.

“Seems like you’re a little agitated,” he said. “You know we’re not trying to run you out of business.”

“Well this cow just calved a month ago. She’s my big­gest producer right now. I got people depending on her milk. Anyway, you weren’t exactly honest when you showed up at the farm last summer posing as a cow share customer.”

“I’m sorry.”

I kept shooting baskets on an uncanny hot streak. “Sorry, don’t mean nothing to me.”

“Well, we all have our moral flaws. I’m sure you’re not the epitome of moral perfection.”

“What the hell are you trying to say?” I asked, toss­ing the basketball to the Swami. It was soiled with fresh cow shit after the little rodeo.

“Nobody’s perfect.” He was compelled at that point to attempt a shot at the basket. “I didn’t mean that per­sonally.”

I took the rebound, as it were, and fired the ball back at him. “But you said specifically that I am not the epit­ome of moral perfection.”

“I guess I — I wasn’t trying to pinpoint you.”

“Look at this,” I said, holding up a nearly empty can of Pabst Blue Ribbon. “Right here on the can it says this beer is UNION MADE. I drink union beer! That quali­fies me as a saint in my religion!” With those words I was losing my anger, magically. Some people lose their temper when they get drunk. I lose my anger.

Now I watched the Swami grip the slippery basket­ball awkwardly, pushing it with zero arch in the general direction of the goal, and it hit me that this guy bore a striking physical resemblance to the old farmer in Orland who’d sold most of the herd to me. A wave of compas­sion swept my heart. “Okay, man. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have messed with you guys like that. Anyway, I’m a Lutheran, and in my religion if you’ll shoot baskets with somebody you must be okay.”

So we walked through the cow chute to the pastures where Rohini the Hindu cow-goddess was kicking up dust, lowering her head and charging at the dancing minions.

Last week my four year-old son and I harvested maybe six pounds of roma tomatoes. They came in ear­lier this year on account of the starts were blooming in early June when they finally found their way into the soil.

“I’ll probably get a nice crop of early ones,” I thought when we set them. This turned out to be the case if you call six pounds a crop, though it also was the case that the plants making the early tomatoes didn’t grow, fruiting on their meager limbs, so the field is this hodgepodge of green, bushing vines and stunted runts. Other local growers made the same mistake, they told me at the Sat­urday morning farmers’ market in Boonville. This year was yet another for the record books as we were stoking wood stoves for weeks on end towards the end of May, highs in the low fifties, while the rest of the planet was smoldering, the hottest spring on record in the northern hemisphere, they tell me.

It took nearly a week to water the tomato crop because I’d abandoned my previous irrigation techniques which involved a well next to the creek, water I no longer was entitled to. The joke was I’d built a pond to catch winter rain and it was still pretty much half full, maybe a couple acre feet of water to flood the spring crops with, but there was no electricity out there and I didn’t want to purchase a decent gas-powered pump for only a month of use, not knowing if I would need the contraption wherever it was I went next to farm. You start thinking differently about a farm when you know you’re not going to be there next year, a factor that is still trying to penetrate my thick skull. Generally I try to farm in such a way as to be considering the next hundred years, so with only four months to go, my decision proc­esses are basically retarded. I ended up borrowing an electric sump pump that was small enough to run off a little five horse generator, capable of flooding the heck out of a hundred foot row before it ran out of gas.

The plan was to soak the soil, cultivate, and cut the weeds out with a hoe. Help is what I needed.

On Tuesday I got a message from a couple of woof­ers [willing workers on organic farms] who were in the area. “Hi, this is Hanna — my girlfriend and I are inter­ested in doing some woofing for about five days. We’ll do anything you ask. We’re like totally flexible on sleeping arrangements.”

Jeez, I thought, playing the message one more time. It was music to my ears, as they say. Totally flexible, she had said. The five dollar phone card was used up so I had to make a run to Pic-n-Pay to replenish phone minutes and beer.

“Yeah, this is Hanna.”

“Hi. I’m Spec from the farm in Boonville; you called about woofing. When are you coming out to these parts? Like we’re in Boonville.”

“Yeah, would you have anything for us, maybe three or four days? We’re pretty much up for anything you want. We don’t have any sleeping gear, is all.”

“Well, all I have is sleeping bags. My mattress is actu­ally in the middle of the garden on a bunch of hay bales.”

“That sounds cool.”

Jeez, I thought, as Hanna said she’d call me back in the morning. Two of them. It couldn’t get more casual. I started cleaning up around the barn and my teenaged son had to wonder what the motivation was. I told him about the woofers.

“Just don’t do that thing you always do where you press your hands together and squeeze them, and your eyes get big. That’s even more disgusting than a booger hanging from your nose.”

“I do that?”

He demonstrated what I do.

“Shit, I don’t just do that around hot women,” I said. I recognized this rare form of posturing. All the melon farmers in my home town did that compulsively. Some of us did it worse than others, but we all imitated each other. Our eyes got big and sometimes we invoked the “Great Watermelon God.” It was some kind of informal, yet precise, voodoo. It really didn’t matter who we were talking to, as I realized several times later in the day when various people stopped by the farm to pick up cab­bages and I caught my hands rubbing together like I was polishing a penny as I paced. I get goddam nervous standing around talking in the middle of the afternoon when there’s so much work to be done every where you turn. I just can’t stand it, talking to people about kids or ex lovers or issues relating to local food production, when we all should be out in the fields chopping weeds. Sometimes I pick up rocks and toss them like I’m trying to throw strikes.

The woofers never called again, never showed up to hoe weeds. When the phone finally rang at noon the next day it was my first ex. She was calling because our teen­aged son is preparing for a trip to the midwest to see my parents and the old family farm, do a little recon. I’ve instructed him to write down beer prices at the grocery store nearest to the home place. We’re torn between moving to Kansas or Indiana, and we’ll see what the teenager thinks of the Great Plains before we consider the Ohio Valley. “I guess your parents said he needs nice clothes for church,” she said.

“Yeah, he’ll be going to church for sure.”

“That’ll be different for him.”

“Yeah, I guess. It shouldn’t be a big deal. Lutherans aren’t too serious about religion. All they really care about is softball, potlucks, and beer.”

“I went to church in Haiti.” My fist ex is a nurse who volunteered recently to spend a few weeks tenting it in a hospital in Haiti.

“Yeah, what are they mostly Catholics down there, them being colonized by France?”

“This was inter-denominational, the doctors and nurses. Actually the people I met who were from down there were mostly voodoo.. I think I met a real zombie. We had these tents to sleep in but it was too hot so I had kind of a private balcony and I was out there trying to sleep in my underwear one night when I woke up and there was a teenaged boy standing next to my bed yelling in jibberish to all the people out in the parking lot. I mean it wasn’t French or any language I knew. He was throwing rocks from my balcony. I had to get dressed and go get security, and they told me the kid was proba­bly a zombie. The voodoo priests do this. They give them the gall of a bladder fish and bury them alive as some kind of punishment for being delinquent or some­thing. When they come back they’re never the same, pretty much slaves for life with no will of their own.”

“Zombies?” I asked. The doors to the milking room creaked on their hinges in the breeze. The generator up at the big pond was no doubt out of gas again, but it seemed a million miles away, like Kansas. ¥¥

]]> http://theava.com/archives/7666/feed 0 http://theava.com/archives/7579 http://theava.com/archives/7579#comments Thu, 22 Jul 2010 04:21:32 +0000 Spec MacQuayde http://theava.com/?p=7579

Her name is “Rohini.” I’m not too sure about the spelling. I never asked.

I think she’s in the neighborhood of four years old, a shorthorn cow that was given to me two years ago toward the end of June when the valley’s air was thick with smoke from the legendary lightning fires. Rohini had been living on a commune of sorts where the white people had taken on Hindu names and decided to start worshipping cows in the flesh, so to speak. The problem with their cow worship scheme was they had no pasture and in the drought of 2008 the price of hay went through the roof right along with the ballooning mortgage pay­ments on the property, so they sent the cow to our farm.

Two women showed up with a brand new Dodge die­sel rig and a chrome stock trailer. I remember the driver with her tanned, sinuous arms and blonde hair, maybe 40, in tight jeans and cowgirl boots.

Rohini was the classic shorthorn maroon with white belly and a star on her forehead, tethered, wearing a hal­ter on her muzzle.

“Do you want me to leave the rope on her?” asked the blonde.

I hesitated for a second, in a hurry to get out of the acrid smoke and on to the hay field we were in the proc­ess of bailing out on Navarro Ridge where the air was fresh off the ocean.

“The other cows might gang up on her if she’s on the rope,” said the other lady, a white chick with a bindi dot on her forehead.

“Shit, just take the rope off. It’ll be okay,” I said.

As soon as she was unclipped, Rohini bolted like a bucking bull in the rodeo, sending clouds of drought dust into the air as she galloped to join the other cows off in pasture.

“She’s a spirited one,” said the blonde. “We just sepa­rated her from the calf for the first time this morning.”

“The first time?”

Running the baler on Navarro Ridge that afternoon, I forgot all about the cow. I had a lot on my mind. My ex was leaving me after eight good years together and I was composing a country song to keep from losing it. Any­way the salt spray was thick on the ridge and I should have worn a wet suit, shivering in damp flannel as the windrows of freshly-raked fescue were tossed about like tumbleweeds.

Returning home that evening, I carried a bottle of beer out to the pastures, my blue heeler pup accompa­nying me to fetch in the cows just like we did every night. I didn’t remember the new cow until I saw her bolting in front of the herd, exciting the pup who nipped and barked at her heels all the way back to the barn.

Not as worried as I should have been, I made the sec­ond mistake of bringing the pup along to help coax the cow into the pen beside the milking stall, where I learned the origin of the old rhyme, “the cow jumped over the moon.” Not only did she jump several wood or steel rails, but she splintered others and bent them to hell. I spent about an hour with the dog tied up, trying to use a bucket of grain to seduce Rohini back to the stall, but to no avail. I couldn’t get close enough to clip the rope on her halter. All the next day I tried in vain, almost as if the cow was a metaphor for my relationship gone to hell and if only I could tether her somehow magically my ex would return and we could all be happy again. “Maybe you should just let her dry up,” suggested my ex after the second day, when, with the help of a soothing woman’s presence, we’d managed to clip the rope on the cow, only to have her freak out and snap the brass clip like a dry apple twig. “She’ll be okay.”

“Thanks,” I said, really meaning it. What a relief it was to turn the crazy cow out to pasture and forget about her.

Over the course of the summer and fall Rohini gradu­ally warmed to me, and by December I was able to toss a flake of hay in front of her without having her jump with the wild glaze in her eyes — an expression that I could have sworn was identical to the passive aggressive vari­ety in humans who have been abused. The other cows certainly knocked this girl around at feeding time. She was low on the totem pole. When her udder swelled in May and she was clearly due to calf, I actually took the cow by the halter and led her into the milking stall to gorge on busted up squash, making the mistake of leav­ing her alone to enjoy herself for a minute. It was a mis­take because the alpha cow got pissed about Rohini being in there munching audibly, and the big bad girl butted the steel door, banging it against Rohini’s ass. Rohini freaked out and tried to do a 180 in the stall, smashing the plywood wall to her right and contorting, shitting, bellowing.

On the morning she calved, I was the one who was catapulted into the air by her forehead just at the moment I determined she’d dropped a heifer. Clipping the rope on her tether proved easy enough at milking time since all I had to do was approach her from the other side of a rail fence and wait for her to charge in my direction with premeditated murder on her bovine brain. But then I usu­ally needed my son or somebody to walk behind and slap her ass so I could lead her into the milking stall where she kicked me in the mouth and side of the head when I tried to attach the rubber milkers. I never did much box­ing, but trying to get this cow milked must have been along the same lines as being in the ring with a heavy­weight wearing brass knuckles until one afternoon when I was reading an interview of a couple British farmers from the 1880s, and one happened to casually mention the technique of cinching a rope around the cow’s mid­dle, right in front of the hip bones along the spine and the udder underneath so it was physically impossible for the cow to kick. “It works much better than chaining the back legs together, and doesn’t anger the cow.”

Those old-timers probably saved me and the cow.

“How’s Rohini?” asked her former owners when they called this spring.

“She’s due to calf in May, I guess,” I said.

“You mean you had her bred?”

“Well, yeah. I have a bull.”

“Oh, I didn’t want you to breed her with the bull. I thought you knew that.”

If she’d told me, I’d forgotten.

“Don’t let her get bred again.”

“What am I supposed to do?”

“I’ll pay for the A.I. [artificial insemination]. I want to use sexed semen.”

“Sexed semen?”

“Yeah, so you’re guaranteed a heifer calf.” Being Hin­dus, the people at the commune didn’t want any off­spring from Rohini to be butchered.

Rohini didn’t freshen until the middle of June, this year. This time it was a bull calf. She doesn’t kick in the milking stall anymore, but I still have to clip a rope on her halter before playing tug of war to drag her in, unless I feel like waking up my teenaged son in the morning to walk behind her.

But a new trick is working out most of the time.

The big alpha cow is apparently smart as well as aggressive, and when I’m ready to milk Rohini, I fasten the rope on the halter, then tap the alpha cow on the rump. She takes the cue and starts headbutting Rohini in the rear end, chasing her in.

I don’t know what to do with the bull calf. I don’t want him for breeding stock, and unless I feel like turn­ing him into an ox the only other option is eating him which I’ve promised not to do. I’m torn between giving him back to the Hindus for them to deal with on the one hand, or just purchasing a short-horn heifer from my friends up in Orland and claiming her to be Rohini’s new calf.

The hay harvest this season was too late and frantic thanks to the abundant rains. It caught me with my pants down, as they say. When I finally had a field raked and ready to bale, my four year-old son and I dusted off the baler and set in to grease all the zerks.

“Smells like something died; maybe a chicken,” I said.

“Look, Dad, there’s eggs in there.”

“Oh, crap.” Sure enough some hen had laid about a dozen eggs sometime in December, from the looks of the putrified capsules deposited neatly in old straw, nestled out of reach beside a couple of sprockets. I vomited breakfast and the previous night’s beer in the act of removing the eggs with a flat shovel. After a few min­utes of puking and inadvertently cracking out the green ooze, I grew accustomed to the reek.

I’d noticed before how quickly one can adjust to a dis­agreeable stench. One New Year’s Eve back in my senior year in high school my buddies and I ended up kidnapped, somewhat, by a few girls who were members of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes who’d sworn off alcohol. They drove a minivan, and sometime after mid­night parked next to the house of several 30-something guys who were actually police in a midwestern town the size of Ukiah.

We followed the girls into this rental pad and were bombarded by the thick atmosphere of dogshit while we watched our female companions recline their tight jeans on the laps of the overgrown cop boys who were watch­ing movies while their dogs free-ranged among old pizza and donut boxes. These girls were trying to teach us some kind of lesson, I mused, and the only one I came away with was the observation that after about 20 min­utes in that wretched bungalow I no longer noticed the gut-wrenching emanations. “I got used to the stink,” I said, later. “You can get used to anything.”

This hay baler is somewhere in the neighborhood of 35 years old, maybe a couple turns my younger. Since I purchased the contraption from the Stornettas in Man­chester four years ago, I would estimate that it has squeezed out maybe 30,000 bales, give or take. Adding 30 years of service with the big dairy, this machine must have cranked out nearly half a million bales in its life, and it did about 500 more this season before a relatively insignificant little plastic guide wheel, about the size of a roller skate tire, broke off, instigating a chain reaction that shattered vital components. I spent a good ten days in the middle of June, when I should have been either making bales or cultivating rows of tomatoes and cab­bages, attempting to reset the chains and timing on the machine, crawling around like an unwilling Charlie Chaplin with a Vermont American crescent wrench manufactured in China to no avail. Even though the timing marks on all the sprockets were reset according to the manual, every trial run only managed a few more bales before shattering more expensive parts until I finally gave up in disgust.

I resorted to cutting and raking the rest of the hay, letting the herd of cows eat the stuff from windrows out in the pastures.

The motif of quitting was reinforced by word in early June that the people who own the Boont Berry farm had never wanted me to keep cows on their land in the first place, that they never would have let me farm there had they known I was going to run livestock like that, and that after nine years they were giving me eviction papers. Maybe I should have gotten into goats instead. You’d be surprised how many people in the progressive food crowd think goats are good and cows are bad.

Fuck it, is about all I can think every morning when I awaken at around five and desperately try to pull enough blankets over my head to return to sleep and forget the farm. Nothing works. I lay there and sweat until six when it is time to start gathering the cows for milking. For eight years I pressed on, trying to restore the old farm to some reasonable level of production even though I knew in the back of my mind that the owners didn’t really want some outsider from the midwest calling the shots out there. I deluding my body and intellect with the fiction that if only this or that were improved, if I took out a permit and built a pond to collect winter runoff to avoid to relying on the well. If—. If I just kept hoping I could prove that the work I was doing was valuable…

But just about the time I got the tomatoes in the ground before the last of the late spring rains, I got the news that me and my dogs and cows and boys and the whole enchilada had to be out of there in November. It was a good thing I’d built the pond to catch the winter rain because they said that was the only water I was allowed to use for irrigation.

“Why don’t you just quit farming?” asked my second ex after she left me, two years ago. “Now two women have left you.

“Why don’t you get it, and just quit?” asked my first ex after she heard that my second ex had left me.

“Spec, I just don’t get why you come out here to our farm and work with us,” said an elderly farmer one summer day when I was 18. “Why on earth don’t you go get a better job?”

I never knew what to tell people all those years, but on Sunday afternoon it hit me. I realized why I got into farming in the first place. The epiphany occurred while the whole world was watching the World Cup final match between the Spaniards and the Dutch.

There in the heat of the day I was hiding out in a friend’s house, trying to forget the farm and the last dec­ade, when we realized that we were out of beer. The Redwood Drive-In was packed, standing room only, the soccer game on the big screen. Gawking there with our brown bags, we saw the contest was in overtime, tied at zero.

“Wow,” we said, and rather than returning to my friend’s place, we walked down the highway to a yard where some amigos had pulled the television set into the yard and were brandishing cervesas. They invited us to climb over the chainlink fence, advising us to watch out for our “waybles.”

No sooner had we sat down with the afternoon sun glaring off the screen, revealing our reflections more clearly than the green playing field, and the fellows asked who we were rooting for.

“I don’t really care,” I said, shrugging.

“Uh, Spain?” ventured my friend awkwardly. You could tell he only said “Spain” because he naturally assumed his Mexican buddies would be rooting for the Spaniards.

“Fuck Spain!” said the amigos, but their oaths were cut short when a midfielder from Spain sent the ball in the net as overtime was ending. In disbelief, the stunned fellows narrowed their eyes at my friend as if his tenta­tive mention of “Spain” had been responsible for the goal.

We saw one replay after another, and as I watched the Dutch goalie lunge for the ball, impotently deflecting it with the side of his outstretched, desperate hand, I realized why I got into farming. I was 13 and they were just introducing “soccer” to us backward kids in Indiana. I was playing goalie, and two kids from the opposite team came roaring past our defenders, passing the ball back and forth in front of me before aiming the fatal blow.

I sprung. One thing I had in those days was an excep­tional leaping ability with legs like a frog. Arms out­stretched in pursuit of the ball, sailing like superman without a cape, my forehead rung solid against the steel post of the goal and I dropped, limp to the ground like a bluejay crashing into a big picture window. The ball sailed out of bounds, a fact I learned later. It was quite a while before I came to and saw my classmates standing in a ring of faces fading in and out.

From that day forth I’ve been obsessed with farming.

The cherries were ripening in what seemed to be the first warm days of the season, the bings and those yel­low-red blush ones mostly for the delight of blue jays and crows. Just the minute you notice the crows tearing into the cherries it’s time to clean the trees and let them ripen fully in paper bags or something, unless you want to fool with bird netting and all those contraptions. I had mixed feelings about the crop of cherries because they’re mostly rootstock, tiny red beads that are bitter but might be tasty soaked in schnapps, and the few true trees remaining from the old Boont Berry farm after the fires raged across the tiny prairie some years ago are those yellow-red ones that don’t really get sweet enough for kids to fight over.

We’d just planted corn a week before, and the sprouts were barely poking through the dry dust and clods at the surface, so as the boys and I harvested cherries I had to wonder if the crows were going easy on the cherries in favor of the corn sprouts, or vice versa, or if the buggers were simply devastating everything.

Corn sprouts are of course the sugar source of malt liquor and Tennessee whiskey, and they’re sweeter than cherries. The ravens and crows of Anderson Valley are keen to this knowledge, and with their piercing eyes they can detect the first twisted chute protruding. Turn your back for a minute and you’ll see 80 of them like a biker gang whooping it up, pulling your maize by the roots. The strategy I’ve developed is to plant the corn in fur­rows, only burying the kernels a couple inches so the sun can warm the seeds, and hopefully there’s enough mois­ture in the soil after you press down with your foot that the seed will sprout. I don’t like to irrigate over planted corn because there’s the danger of forming a crust at the surface. Besides, you just don’t need to.

Then about the time I see the first crows poking around in the furrows I know it’s time to hurry out there with a disc harrow and lightly push another couple inches of soil over the furrows, so the corn blades won’t reach the surface for a few more days. This way they’re well rooted when the crows can get their beaks on them, and the birds can’t pull them up for the sweet kernel, which is what they’re after. Plus, you end up getting a real jump on the weeds. You have to plant thick using that strategy, though. “One for the raven, one for the crow,” they used to say. “One for me.”

“Looks like the corn is just about to poke through,” I told my youngest boys on Wednesday afternoon as we braved the frigid northern wind and inspected the fur­rows. We were raking the clods and dust aside, inspect­ing. White spurs were evident. “I better come out here tomorrow morning first thing and pull the disk, hide these guys before the crows get them.” Here and there were sprouts nipped off or uprooted — evidence. “Darn it, I should have done this yesterday.”

I would have covered the corn sprouts on Tuesday, except it took all day to cut this hayfield because the peas and oats were so overgrown from the wet spring. Where they weren’t falling down, the peas with their clinging tendrils held the oat stalks upright so with each pass of the mower I could barely tell where I had previ­ously mowed. They stood like soldiers trained in boot camp. The crop was a success and a nightmare all in one, with clumps of peas and oats that bunched in front of the old mower, tangled together so I had to rip with all I had — manually — to drag them behind the blades. Three acres of hay I thought would be cut in a few hours, but it was dark when I finally limped home, and never got around to covering the corn.

Then I was wiped out Wednesday like you feel the day after you wrestle with an even match, muscles sore that you didn’t even know about, as they always said. That evening, after the boys had gone off with my ex, the dogs and I ventured out on our nightly stroll to fetch in the cows. I glanced at the cornfield where I would esti­mate that 80 crows and ravens were partying. There was no way to count them. “Crap!” I hollered, running in the general direction of the field so the dogs would get the gist and raise hell. The whole flock raucously took to the air like a squadron of helicopters kicking up dust in eddying clouds. They flew over the hills, in fact, none lingering, like they knew they’d just robbed me blind.

In the morning I reluctantly pulled the disk with the tractor as I’d originally planned to do several days ear­lier, and buried the remaining corn sprouts, wishing them luck. You never know if a crop will fail, if some critter or fungus will snatch it from your fingertips.

On Sunday morning I was surprised to see a dozen canada geese out in the field where potatoes, onions, and tomatoes are growing. They were clearly feasting on something, but what? Hardly anything wants to eat the somewhat toxic leaves of spuds or their tomato cousins, and I’d never seen any insect, mammal, or bird gnaw on onion greens unless you count some voracious snails in a greenhouse, once.

“They’re probably eating the green tomatoes off the starts, doing me a favor,” I told the dogs. “Wouldn’t that be something?”

When the milking was done, I had to venture out to the field to see what these geese had been up to. It turned out they’d gobbled several rows of onion tops pretty much down to the ground.

“Ate them clean down to the ground,” I told two X’s later, at about eight in the morning as we had coffee on the picnic tables in front a coffee shop that wasn’t open, yet. The people inside had generously allowed us to fill our mugs, and we were enjoying a pleasant conversation while one carload of tourists after another pulled up to the curb wondering if in fact the coffee shop was open.

“Nope, they’re closed,” we said, and watched the peo­ple slam their doors and roar off, squealing tires in disgust, perhaps opting to stop for Joe in Cloverdale.

The two X’s at the picnic table with me were not mine. They were a single mom and a single dad. Neither one was the ex of either, or of me. We all have one or more X in Anderson Valley, but none mutual that I know of.

“Who’d of ever thought anything would eat onions?”

“Why didn’t you pull out the shotgun?” asked the ex who is now a single dad.

“Well, shit, there it was pretty much first thing in the morning and I hadn’t even had any coffee, yet. I mean, I wondered what the heck they were eating. Since when does a flock of Canada geese descend on your field in the middle of June, anyway?”

“It’s such a nice day,” said the other ex. She’s a single mom. She’s probably got as many X’s as I have, but I’m not one of them. Not yet, anyway. “We should go to the river.”

“I’ve got the kids,” said the ex who is a dad.

“I’ve got one,” said the one who is a mom. “Perfect. Let’s do it.”

They both looked at me. “How about you?”

“Man, I got to cut hay today.”

“Oh, it can wait.”

“To shit it can. I cut half the field yesterday. I’ve got the boys, tomorrow. I have to do it today.”

I thought about them all the whole time I listened to the clatter of the old sickle bar mower slicing through dry wild oat stalks and dark green trefoil with the yellow flowers and honey bees scattering before the blades. I thought about my two friends, their X’s who are also my friends, my own X’s who are pretty much my friends. Someday we would all be friends, by and by. “They’ll probably all be each other’s X one of these days,” I told myself. Driving the tractor, there’s not a man alive who doesn’t talk to himself all day. Shout over the roar of the motor, more like it. “Fools, all of them!” Hell, I was lucky I had these hay fields to keep me out of trouble. I was lucky, also, to have a cooler of beer for all the times the vetch got plugged up in front of the sickle bar. You ought to hear the things a person says when they’ve just cleaned a whopping wad of green legume from in front, under, and stuck in the teeth of the rustic mower, only to have the whole thing bunch up again without cutting a single stalk. The sickle bar mower will teach a person to slow the heck down. The implement is pretty much obsolete these days, sort of like the typewriter, the cas­sette player, and the ball point pen. Yet there is a certain peace of mind that goes along with the sluggish pace. And if you’ve ever run one of those modern disc mowers with their rapidly spinning blades spitting stones like a whole gang of boys with slingshots, you might appreci­ate the antique.

The hay fever kicked in this year before I started mowing hay, the lateness mostly due to the rains. They originally said we were supposed to get six inches last Friday, then three inches, then two, and finally we got about 0.2 of drizzle, though I guess it did rain almost an inch as close as Fort Bragg. So I held off on cutting hay. The weather was only half the reason though. This year I decided to get most of the spring vegetable planting and cultivating done before haying, rather than juggling those activities the way I did the last three seasons. One thing I learned over those years was that I’m just not smart enough to concentrate on too many things at once.

The ryegrass and harding grass pollen was blowing in the Boonville breeze sometime Friday. I knew that because I was sneezing profusely, eyes itching, unfortu­nately using my T-shirt for a handkerchief in the circum­stances.

“It’s an excellent protein source,” said a visitor to the farm on Sunday. A few single dads had brought their kids over to pick up kittens, jump on the trampoline, and get hollered at by me for chasing after a couple heifer calves, upsetting them for no reason. Walking through the pastures, one of the dads grabbed a stalk of harding grass and was shaking it, the pollen billowing in green-yellow clouds as he demonstrated that the grass was “procreating,” he said.

I sneezed and cracked a beer. “Protein source?”

The guy was instructing his seven year-old son to shake as many harding grass stalks as he could get his fingers on to catch the valuable protein source in a salad bowl shaped like an old-fashioned satellite dish. “This pollen is really high in protein.”

There it was accumulating in the bowl like the nutri­tional yeast that hippies like to sprinkle on their popcorn. I was sort of thinking that milk and beef are really high in protein, as well, and it was high time to start cutting hay, but as I sneezed the thought occurred that perhaps when the harding grass pollen was blowing in the wind a person could go clean without eating and just live off the mucous. Better yet, I let that one go and followed every­one into the barn.

I had to let go with one hooter of a sneeze.

“Bless you, brother,” said one of the dads.

The whole crew was at the farm on a mission to adopt felines.

Five black kittens were born on a sleeping bag, nes­tled in the cradle between my upturned knees one night in April. I heard their high-pitched meowing the sound of bat screeches at about three in the morning, cursed and wadded up the sleeping bag, lugging it into the solarium and tucking them under the water heater. “Good God,” I said. I’d known this moment was coming, with a preg­nant cat sleeping on my bed every night, but I had pre­ferred not to conceive (sic) the inevitable.

It wasn’t but a few minutes later, just as I was drifting back to sleep, that the mother cat deposited a mewing kitten on the remaining thin blanket between my legs. I had to give up the fight and let her lick and nurse them as she added one by one in my bed, eventually moving them over to the side in a clump of blankets that muffled the racket somewhat. They piped down and stayed up there for weeks without causing too much trouble. I think the momma cat licked up all their excrement because I never detected any until nearly the end of May. Then I moved them down to this futon on the floor, where the kittens actually stayed put.

I know you’re supposed to spay and neuter your cat twice a year or something, but the funny thing is the pro­gram has been so successful in California that there is almost a black market demand for kittens. The mother and tomcat each cost eighty bucks as kittens when my ex purchased them from a Lake County program in 2008. Eighty bucks for a kitten, I thought, the last few weeks before we split up. We never went to battle in court, but if we had I would have accused her of insanity for pay­ing $186 for two of them. That would have been my big beef. It was on the top of my list.

Five in the last litter, and they were all spoken for in days. I just give them away which is probably a mistake. If they’re going for $80 maybe I should charge at least $50 under the table.

“Let me know when they’re weaned,” said about ten people on my answering machine. “We’ll come over, pick one out.”

“Are they weaned, yet?”

“No,” I said on Saturday. “They’re still nursing like crazy.”

The next morning the kittens were darting all over the barn, fighting over cubes of a boiled beef heart. They were shitting everywhere. Their mother disappeared for 20 minutes at a time and returned with a fresh-killed mouse, dropping the rodent off for the kittens to scrap over. She was actively weaning them. She deposited one mouse after another in front of the five. It was almost easier for her to go out and catch a mouse than it is for some single parent to wander around the aisles of a gro­cery store and pass the credit card through to return home with a bag of grub for the young ones.