Gardens, Friends, Life, and Death

I started a garden that year. I lived at the edge of a desert, at the foot of a mountain, and almost as high as a mile is long. It was an unlikely spot for growing things; the soil is sandy and empty of any organic material—even the native sagebrush struggle to get by. The summers are hot, often over 100 degrees, and it almost never rains. The Sierra Nevada rose practically from my doorstep to heights impossible for Pacific storms to make it past. But I had a yard and a garden hose and a healthy appetite, so in it went. A neighbor brought over his ancient rototiller and we turned the earth, adding in compost and topsoil. I put in seeds and seedlings and countless hours caring for them, dodging bugs and critters and blistering heat. The wind blew so hard out of the canyon above me that it actually lifted plants out of the ground, roots and all. I staked and caged, but the entire garden listed to the east, bending to the wind. I used strips of an old T-shirt to tie plants to the stakes, and it gave the garden the look of a civil war infirmary: bandaged, crutched, and leaning. But we soldiered on.

And then came the summer of 2002. Like any plague or natural disaster, misfortune took us by surprise. A small plane went down with four local residents, killing them all. In a tiny community like this one, almost everyone knew at least one of the passengers. A friend and tremendous athlete—or perhaps athlete and tremendous friend—fell from a skateboard and never got up. A dear friend, healthy and spry into her eighties, had a series of strokes and was suddenly aged. Cancer overtook limbs and organs of those around me. I had a bad fall and found out just how strong my bones of my spine were, and how fragile the tissue between them. Through it all, the valley was covered in an oppressive inversion of thick smoke from nearby forest fires, where hundreds of thousands of acres were lost and lives were lost fighting them. I’m sure there were births and weddings and epiphanies somewhere, but not in my circle.

In the garden, a few plants began to flower, and then fruit. From an entire row of bean plants, three survived. Same with peas. Tomatoes grew with glacial slowness. Peppers started and stopped, unsure they could go on. I fed them, understanding. I heard that plants do most of their growing at night, and came to depend on that—on progress that I couldn’t see.

I was out weeding one morning when my neighbor drove by, the one who’d worked in the May heat to till my garden. Two days earlier, his adult son had been hit by a car while crossing the street and killed. Having not yet spoken to him about it, I put my hands over my heart as he drove past. He pulled over and got out of his truck. I walked to the fence to meet him. What’s wrong? He asked. Are you all right? He'd thought I was signaling him about a pain of mine and he had stopped on his way, carrying all that sorrow, to see how I was, and if I needed help.

The English language is dense and powerful, but I couldn’t come up with any words to tell him how sorry I was or how much I felt for him and his wife. I stumbled through a few sentences. I’m not even sure what I said. His hands rested on the fence between us. Deep brown and sun-wrinkled, they spoke of the years he spent at the mine that used to operate in the windy canyon above. I met his eyes, surprisingly blue in the warmth of his Latino heritage. He was silent for a while, then said: It’s a big hurt, Mary. A big hurt. I nodded. I knew big hurts, had been taught them by the summer. He nodded back before leaving. I stayed in the garden for quite a while that morning, hoping I could work through my own hurts. I was just getting the use of my left arm back, and it tired quickly. I didn’t have much to show for my labors, and that morning it felt particularly pointless. I finally laid down my tools and went in. I looked back at my patch and saw it for what it was, wind-battered and sun-bleached plants surrounded by a drooping sunshade fence. When a windstorm blew that night, I didn’t rush out to cover and tether. I just let it go. What survived, survived. Storms like this usually kept me watching from my window, but that night, I pulled the shade. If it went, it went.

The next morning was a beautiful blue-sky day. The smoke from the fires had been dissipating over the last few weeks and I could finally see the mountains. The wind that had cleared the smoke away had broken off tree limbs as large as my thigh and tumbled heavy wooden furniture across the yard, but the garden was intact. All the plants were there, maybe missing a leaf or blossom or two, but still standing. They had made it through the tough stuff I guess, because they grew and produced. In time I ate squash cooked with fresh herbs and wrestled gophers for tomatoes. I had enough for friends. I produced exactly six melons, each melt-in-your-mouth sweet. I ate one and gave the others to people I knew would appreciate them.

Maybe other communities had summers like ours. We all know terrible seasons. But the hands I held at memorial services were the same ones that later held my tomatoes, and somehow that comforted me and made me want to try again. So after the deer migrated though and ate their fill, I tilled under the remainder and waited until spring, then I planted another garden at the edge of a desert, at the foot of a mountain, almost as high as a mile is long.

-Bishop, CA September, 2002

Reading: The New Valley, by Josh Weil

Listening to: Townes, Steve Earle

Blooming: Daylily (still!)