Epitaph for a Peach Read online

  I’m not sure where they go during the off season. Many venture back to Mexico and spend winters in their native villages, working and farming a family plot. Others embody images from Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. They follow the crops from early spring vegetables in Texas to California for most of the summer and complete the cycle in Washington, picking fall apples. Some farmworkers remain here, living as neighbors and friends, becoming members of the community.

  Some folks lump all brown-skinned people together, referring to farmworkers as “those people” and blaming many of society’s problems on them. “They” are illegal aliens on welfare, draining tax dollars, assaulting and violating American laws. And we farmers are somehow responsible for them. Because I am dark from my hours in the fields, I have been mistaken for “one of them” and have seen the ugly face of this prejudice.

  I have also been accused by labor activists of being an exploiter. “Why don’t you pay your workers more?” they challenge.

  “I wish I could,” I answer. “But tell me, are you willing to pay more for your fruits and vegetables?”

  If the price of peaches kept up with car prices, I would not be writing an epitaph for my Sun Crests.

  I ask those folks if they’ve ever considered the exploitation of urban laborers, the people who work behind closed doors in restaurant kitchens, mow lawns, or clean rooms and offices after hours.

  “Or is agricultural exploitation worse because farmworkers are so easily seen?” I ask.

  I struggle with all this in my thoughts—faceless laborers stooped over lush green fields, harvesting food for life. They move systematically, like lumbering machines. I sometimes think, Why don’t we employ our high-technology know-how, replace these workers, and end this oppressive work? Then I realize that the crouched workers depend on this work and displacing them from the land will not rid the world of their hunger.

  I DO NOT employ many workers. My farm remains small enough for Dad and me to do most of the work ourselves, except for the pruning and harvesting.

  Dad once warned me, “Once you start hiring a lot, you’re not just a farmer anymore.”

  When I began managing a crew of workers I understood what he meant. I found myself spending the majority of my time preparing for their arrival, supervising them, and fixing problems that arose. I grew frustrated with my own lack of productivity and became stressed by down time, such as when a fifteen-man crew would stand around watching me try to jump-start a tractor stuck in the field or change a flat tire on a fruit-bin trailer.

  With workers in my fields my daily rhythms shift, and instead of jobs and chores I think in terms of productivity and costs. I talk about the farm in terms of expenses per acre, and suddenly yields become the easiest aspect of my work to quantify. I don the hat of a farm manager, not a farmer.

  At certain times, I do this willingly. In order to keep the farm operating I must keep it profitable, and the cost of workers plays a pivotal role in that equation. Suddenly saving peaches takes on an additional burden: my farm also contributes to people’s livelihoods. Finding a home for Sun Crest peaches goes beyond my individual back-to-nature pursuits. I do not farm this land as a hobby.

  My farming creates work.

  MY WORKERS COME from many places in Mexico and live in small towns scattered throughout the valley. Del Rey, where many of them stay, is the nearest town to my farm. The estimated population is about 1,500, but during the summer harvest the town swells to twice that size. The workers live in rented rooms, small cramped boardinghouses, or hidden bungalows in converted garages and toolsheds.

  I visit one of these apartments. The workers live in a small outbuilding behind my foreman’s house. Some of the men are standing, others are crouching in a familiar squat.

  My grandmother squatted that way, peasants I saw in South America squatted that way, old folks in rural Japanese villages did the same. It is a common-folk way of resting and a fine observation point from which to watch the world. It’s the squat I use when I’m waiting, not for anything in particular but the waiting and resting that’s part of farming.

  Squatting evens out physical differences. Tall people and short ones become closer in height when squatting. You share with others a common point of view. Once you squat you have to think twice about getting up; you become conscious of choices and decisions. Squatting is a mark of country folk who have worked the land and whose legs are in excellent condition. You can’t squat well if you are overweight, if your legs are used to sitting in chairs, or if you are lazy. I wonder if we’ve lost the art of squatting. In our fast-paced world today, we’re too busy or think we’re too good to squat.

  On my visit to their home, I recognize two of the squatting workers who picked my peaches that morning. With beers in their hands, crushed cans lying next to them, one jumps up and waves me over to offer a beer. I am about to accept in a gesture of friendship, but somehow I can’t. I know the price they pay for a six-pack of beer equals an hour of work. I calculate that a single beer equals picking one extra tree in 105-degree heat. I think of that worker earlier in the day, his sweat mingling with peach fuzz, his expression exhausted. I politely decline the drink and squat next to him.

  I examine the workers’ apartment, converted from a toolshed or a freestanding single-car garage. I’m sure it isn’t legal housing and I’m positive my foreman makes a good income from renting out the space. Yet I’m certain the workers are satisfied with finding any housing at all and with the protection they receive from my foreman, a good man who seems fair and quiet. He doesn’t allow gambling, drugs, or prostitutes on his place. In fact, his own family lives in the adjacent house and one of his daughters is married to one of the steady workers. One farmworker tells me he has returned here for ten years, coming back to Mario’s place every time. For these farmworkers, this is their shelter.

  Inside the house are rows of bunks and a small kitchen, with a bathroom attached to the outside. One fellow is designated cook, and he explains how skillful he is at saving money and stretching the meat with beans and vegetables. The cook says he makes lunches for everyone who has work the next day. They pool their expenses. Some of my peaches are sitting on the counter to be shared. He finishes his beer, asks if I’d like a peach, and smiles. I can’t tell if he’s joking or not.

  I am relieved to see that everything seems adequate and that my workers are being treated fairly. A lot of farmers do feel responsibility for their workers. Most of the older farmers know from personal experience what it is like to work the land for low wages and to live in simple shelters.

  As I leave, I think of the disparity between my home and the farmworkers’ housing. I remember my first summer after college at Berkeley. I wanted to solve the problems of poverty and inequality immediately. I adopted the popular idea of thinking globally and acting locally by doubling the prevailing wages for our workers. After calculating expenses and income for that month, I realized we had lost thousands of dollars. My idealism was then moderated. I concluded that providing jobs was the best contribution I could make to the world.

  Now I try to pay a little better than the prevailing wage and I work out in the fields alongside the workers. And sometimes I still squat with them.

  The Lottery

  A handful of lottery tickets scatter in the wind and drift into my peach orchard. I count over thirty of them, equaling more than half a day’s wages for one man. Four hours of a man’s labor and sweat, wasted and lost on a summer breeze.

  The next day I ask about the tickets. A few of the workers smile and one razzes another. None of them has ever won more than five dollars.

  Why do they keep playing lotería? Don’t they understand the terrible odds against winning and the squandering of their hard-earned wages? Their answers are probably no different from those of anyone else who gambles, especially those whose lives are and will continue to be a struggle. They play for the chance to dream.

  The California lottery payout nears a national record. We all feel
the lotto fever, and I joke with the workers about it. They ask what I would do if I won. I say I’d quit farming and give them the farm tomorrow. One snaps back, “You can do that now without winning the lotería.”

  One of the farmworkers banters with me and says, “Patrón would never give us his farm.”

  I concede he is right.

  “So,” he adds, “if I win the lotería, I can buy your farm.” The field roars with the work crew’s laughter.

  I don’t play the lottery and cannot share the dreams of my workers. Occasionally when disking the peaches or grapevines, I’ll find one of their losing tickets tossed among the leaves. The blades slice the paper and turn it into the earth, and for hours I’ll think about lotteries and hope.

  chapter three

  as if the farmer died

  Allowing Nature to Take Over

  I used to have armies of weeds on my farm. They launch their annual assault with the first warm weather of spring, parachuting seeds behind enemy lines and poking up in scattered clumps around the fields.

  They work underground first, incognito to a passing farmer like me. By the end of winter, dulled by the holidays and cold fog, I have my guard down. The weeds take advantage of my carelessness.

  The timing of their assault is crucial. They anticipate the subtle lengthening of each day. With exact calculation they germinate and push upward toward the sunlight, silently rooting themselves and establishing a foothold. The unsuspecting farmer rarely notices any change for days.

  Then, with the first good spring rain, the invasion begins. With beachheads established, the first wave of sprouting creatures rises to boldly expose their green leaves. Some taunt the farmer and don’t even try to camouflage themselves. Defiantly they thrust their new stalks as high as possible, leaves peeling open as the plant claims more vertical territory. Soon the concealed army of seeds explodes, and within a week what had been a secure, clear territory is claimed by weeds. They seem to be everywhere, no farm is spared the invasion.

  Then I hear farmers launching their counterattack. Tractors roar from their winter hibernation, gunbarrel-gray exhaust smoke shoots into the air, and cold engines churn. Oil and diesel flow through dormant lines as the machines awaken. Hungry for work, they will do well when let loose in the fields. The disks and cultivators sitting stationary throughout winter rains await the tractor hitch. The blades are brown with rust stains, bearings and gears cold and still since last fall. But I sense they too may be anxious to cleanse themselves in the earth and regain their sleek steel shimmer.

  Even the farmers seem to wear peculiar smiles. Through the cold winter season, they were confined to maintenance, repairing equipment, fixing broken cement irrigation gates, replanting lost trees and vines. Their hibernation culminates with a desk assignment at the kitchen table, where they sit surrounded by piles of papers, laboring on taxes (farmers are required to file by March first). After restless hours of poring through shoe boxes of receipts and trying to make sense of instructions written by IRS sadists eager to punish all of us who are self-employed, farmers long for a simple task outside. We are anxious to walk our fields, to be productive, to work our land. A full winter’s worth of pent-up energy is unleashed on the tiny population of weeds.

  Within a day or two, the genocide is complete. Fields become “clean,” void of all life except vines and trees. Farmers take no prisoners. I can sometimes count the number of weeds missed by their disks. “Can’t let any go to seed,” a neighbor rationalizes. Each seed becomes a symbol of evil destruction and an admission of failure.

  Farmers also enlist science to create a legion of new weapons against the weeds. They spray preemergent herbicides, killing latent seed pods before they germinate. Others use contact or systemic killers, burning the delicate early growth of weeds and injecting the plants with toxins that reach down to the roots. As spring weeds flourish between rows, a strip of barren earth beneath each vine or tree magically materializes from a spray applied a month or two before. At times I wonder what else is killed in order to secure the area.

  A weed might be defined as any undesirable plant. On my farm, I used to call anything that wasn’t a peach tree or a grapevine a weed. I too considered a field clean if it contained nothing but dirt, barren of anything green except what I had planted. All my neighbors did likewise. We’d compete to see whose field would be the cleanest. But our fields weren’t clean. They were sterile.

  We pay a high price for sterility, not only in herbicide bills and hours of disking but also in hidden costs like groundwater contamination. Some farmers can no longer use a certain herbicide because the California Department of Agriculture tested and discovered trace residues contaminating the water tables beneath their farms. It had been widely used because it kills effectively and is relatively cheap; for about $10 per acre it would sterilize an entire field.

  But signatures of a clean field can stay with the farm for years. Behind my house, I planted some landscape pines, hardy, cheap, grow-anywhere black pines—that kept dying. They died a slow death, the needle tips burning before turning completely brown, the top limbs succumbing first, the degeneration marching down toward the heartwood like a deadly cancer. Uncertain of the cause of death, I gave up trying to grow the pines after the third cremation. Staring at the barren area I at last discovered the reason: nothing grew on that strip of earth. The preemergent herbicide I once used remains effective and has left a long-term brand on the land.

  But I now have very few weeds on my farm. I removed them in a single day using a very simple method. I didn’t even break into a sweat. I simply redefined what I call a weed.

  It began with an uncomfortable feeling, like a muse whispering in my ear, which led to an observation about barren landscapes. It doesn’t make sense to try and grow juicy grapes and luscious peaches in sterile ground. The terms juicy and luscious connote land that’s alive, green most of the year with plants that celebrate the coming of spring.

  A turning point came when a friend started calling his weeds by a new name. He referred to them as “natural grasses.” I liked that term. It didn’t sound as evil as “weeds,” it had a soft and gentle tone about it. So I came to think of my weeds as part of the natural system at work on my land, part of allowing nature to take over my farm.

  And nature did take over. Once I let my guard down and allowed a generation of seeds to germinate, they exploded everywhere. For years I had deceived myself into thinking I had destroyed every weed seed. I was wrong, they were just waiting for an opportunity.

  The first weed of spring is the pineapple weed, covering the vine berms. But it quickly wilts with the first heat of May. Chickweed hugs every tree, growing into a lush mat before dying with the first 80-degree days. This grass may be allelopathic, producing toxins that kill competing weeds. Because few other plants grow through the mat, the yellowed and dry chickweed works like a protective mulch guarding the tree trunks.

  By the middle of spring, the grasses flourish and a sea of weeds fills all but the sandiest and weakest earth. I try to keep my vine and orchard berms clear, a lesson gleaned from an earlier confrontation with a weed named mare’s tail. This tall and slender creature can grow straight up into a vine leaf canopy and out the top. Mare’s tail doesn’t hurt vines, but at harvest the workers must battle the pollen and fight through a wall of stalks and leaves to reach the precious grapes. So I try and keep my new natural grasses away from the vine berms and tree trunks.

  As nature takes over my farm, everything grows voraciously. New insect life swarms in my fields. Aphids coat sow thistle like pulsating black paint. Normally aphids aren’t a problem for grapevines and peach trees, they would rather suck on sow thistle. But they are denied that meal because of the thousands of lady beetles that invade my fields for spring feasting. I wonder what other invisible life thrives in the natural grasses, what pathogens and parasites join my farm. I can’t measure their presence but I feel secure, and the grapes and peaches still look fine.

&nbs
p; I walk my fields and feel life and energy. In the evening a chorus of voices calls out, legions of insects venturing out to feed. On family bike rides we have to keep our mouths closed or bugs will fly in.

  I often think, There’s something going on out here, and smile to myself.

  I was a fool to try to control weeds. I fooled myself by keeping fields sterile without knowing the long-term prices I was paying. Allowing nature to take over proved easier than I imagined. Most grasses will naturally die back without my intervention, and I’ve learned to recognize those few that I should not ignore. Most natural grasses are not as bad as farmers fear.

  In the eyes of some farmers, my farm looks like a disaster, with weeds gone wild. Even my father grows uncomfortable. He farmed most of his life during an era of control, and to him the farm certainly now appears completely chaotic. He keeps a few rows next to his house weed-free as if to maintain a buffer between him and a lifetime of nightmares from fighting weeds.

  I still have bad dreams about some obnoxious grasses like Bermuda, but my nightmares ended once I stopped thinking of them as weeds.

  Lizard Dance

  While weeding, I feel something tickle my calf. Without stopping my shovel, I brush the back of my leg. It happens again and I assume the clumps of johnsongrass I dug out are rolling off their pile, the thick stalks and stems attacking their killer in a vain attempt at revenge. Finally, I shake my right leg, and the thing bolts upward.

  Immediately I throw down my shovel and stamp my feet. The adrenaline shoots into my system and my heart races. I initiate my lizard dance, shaking my leg, pounding my feet, patting my pants as the poor creature runs wild up my leg. The faster I spin and whirl, the more confused the lizard becomes and the more frantically he scrambles up and down the dark caverns of my pant leg.