Epitaph for a Peach Page 6

  I remember watching my children take their first steps. Walking was far more than a physiological task of muscle control and balance; it was driven by something inside, a motivation to explore. Adults often think of walking as merely a function of getting from one place to another, the start and finish is all that matters. But for children, a new dimension bursts open when they start walking, a new world of motion, of adventure, of discovery. They see a new world when they learn to walk.

  Pat and I try to re-create our first steps into an orchard and see what’s really in front of us, to capture the magical innocence of children and their endless curiosity about a new world. We wander through familiar workplaces with no questions in mind, attempting to walk without a destination.

  “It’s slow,” I warn Pat.

  “Almost painful,” he adds.

  As we leave the farmhouse porch and head toward the Sun Crest peaches, we agree to think out loud and share observations. Pat comments about my small five-and ten-acre blocks of vineyards, with dirt avenues dividing the fields. My equally small parcels of peach trees rise above the vines and break the horizon line. Other farms have been replanted in large forty- or eighty-acre sections, solid blocks of vines and trees. We both try to envision my farm from the sky, I imagine it looks like a patchwork quilt with a green appliqué.

  “Think my small field size makes a difference?” I ask.

  “It might,” he says.

  We allow ourselves to explore the topic. I can see him thinking of the possibilities: the advantages of mixed habitat for beneficial insects, the rich diversity of species, the problems of monocropping and the spread of pathogens or pests. I interrupt his mental calculations. “Small fields mean if I screw up in one, I only mess up a little.” We smile. It’s so easy to get too technical about this farming game.

  We approach the Sun Crest orchard, and I focus on the weakest tree. Daily I pass this spot and am reminded of its frail condition. “I can’t figure out what’s the matter with that tree. It just doesn’t like me,” I comment.

  “What tree?” Pat says and grins.

  Pat slowly pans the entire field. Then he crouches to peer down a row. I join him. “Ever notice the changing shades of green?” he says.

  I think of Paul, a farmer and oil painter friend. He enjoys experimenting with green, capturing the subtle nuances of a fresh leaf or the thriving growth of mid-spring or the weak yellow green of a cover crop on bad soil. When a group of us visit Paul’s house, the farmers tend to gather around certain paintings. Paul knows his paintings work when we gravitate toward a few, attracted by the colors, and begin talking about his greens. The true green of a field has depth, like the mysterious colors of a clear but deep lake. Each shade has meaning we all interpret differently. Paul says farmers are his best art critics, we know of more greens than anyone else.

  Pat and I enter the field. Sounds envelop us, birds call and sing, insects buzz and flutter. Each step sounds distinct. Underfoot lies a rough collection of stalks and stems, sticks and twigs, leaves and wildflowers. Diversity dwells in my fields.

  We both experiment with the mechanics of walking and looking. I crouch low, feeling like an imitation Native American in my desperate effort to be one with nature. I try listening to my footsteps and establish a deliberate, methodical cadence that forces me to go slower. It’s uncomfortable. I compare it to riding in a car with someone who drives with excruciating caution.

  I hear myself breathing and discover a type of efficiency in movement. With a slow, patient stride, I can check the vigor of the cover crop, the dryness of the soil, the health of the leaves. I begin to notice the slumping peach shoots where a worm has struck, the different shades of green where mites establish their home. Instead of making three or four different checks of a field for specific pests or problems, I find I can get an impression of the whole orchard in one visit. This means decisions will be easier to make.

  I turn to ask my companion how he’s doing. I discover he’s on the other side of the field. He looks dazed, without direction, almost expressionless, and I realize I must appear exactly the same.

  I try to move even more slowly, turning my head from left to right, right to left, consciously panning the orchard. After a while my method seems to work, I begin to see hints of color I had overlooked. The younger limbs, perhaps only a few years old, push vibrant green shoots, the hue is light, and the surface appears shiny. Growth on the old thick branches seems darker and duller. Then I realize that the two sets of leaves are not the same age. The green on the established branches is maturer, with longer, more developed shoots, while not only do the young limbs have newer shoots but the nodes are closer together. The vibrant green may be a result of denser growth.

  I’m not sure this makes a difference, but I do know that, on the same tree, peaches from old branches will ripen days earlier than those on younger limbs. Dad claims that old-growth peaches taste sweeter, but I’ve always thought he had an affinity for the old wood.

  Tiny peaches cling to the slender limbs, and I catch myself envisioning them a few months from now at harvesttime. Two or three old branches do not look right, and I sense they may die before harvest. My conclusion is based only on a hunch that comes from having worked with these trees for decades. The trees provide subtle clues in a grand mystery that can alternately frustrate and torment or amaze and initiate.

  I hear steps behind me. Pat is smiling. “We’re getting the hang of it,” he says, breaking the spell.

  We continue to walk in silence. Then he turns.

  “I’m sorry but I just can’t help it.” He pulls out a small hand lens dangling around his neck. “I’ve been trained as an entomologist for too long. I have to revert to my old ways.” I give my approval, thankful he doesn’t ask what I was just thinking. My thoughts have wandered too. I am calculating how many boxes of fruit I can pull from this orchard and what the different pricing schemes and potential profit margins will be this year.

  He drops to the ground and examines some drying cover crop leaves. “They’re full of mites,” he announces.

  A knot instantly forms in my stomach. Immediately I think of the damage mites can cause and what I could spray to control them. Old habits are hard to break.

  “But I’ve never seen this species in a peach tree.”

  I relax, embarrassed by my reaction. I look through his lens, don’t recognize the little spiderlike creatures, and am happy they would rather stay in the clover. We both walk out of the orchard with the knowledge that the peach crop will probably be fine. Should we become too confident, nature will put a stop to our foolishness. In the meantime, it’s wonderful to feel satisfied without knowing or even caring exactly why.

  Five Worms

  “Five worms.”

  I ask Pat to repeat.

  “Five worms, I found five worms in your peaches.” Pat has just finished one of his weekly data-gathering searches at my farm.

  “What kind of worms?”

  His voice is calm. “OFM. Oriental fruit moth.”

  That’s not what I mean. I want to know the size of the worms, their color, and are they eating leaves or peaches? I ask, “Are the worms ugly?”

  He pauses and I try to collect my thoughts. Then he says, “I’m not as familiar with OFM,” and tries to comfort the shaken farmer by adding, “The peach twig borer populations are low, real low.”

  My eyes grow wide and I stare blankly out toward my fields. I mumble “Five worms” to myself.

  I drive out to the field and Pat follows in his truck. The green peaches are growing fat, the size of Christmas decorations. The leaves flutter in a breeze like thousands of baby bird wings. Nervous anxiety builds and I start to search for worms, but I stop. I have no idea where to look.

  Pat sits in his truck, procrastinating with a data log before joining me in the field. I plunge into a dozen questions. “What do OFM larvae look like at this time of year? They aren’t after my green peaches yet, are they? Do other farmers have an ou
tbreak?” I end with my most important one: “Pat, how many more worms are there?”

  Pat shrugs. “I’m not sure. Like I said, OFM’s not my thing. But I did do some reading.” He launches into a ten-minute lecture on oriental fruit moth, and I learn more in those few minutes than in all my years on the farm. When five worms munch on your trees, your learning curve accelerates.

  Initially I want to quantify the problem, break it down into dollars and cents.

  Before, I used to apply a pesticide in winter that took care of all these worm problems. It wasn’t expensive, maybe $20 per acre, for which I’d also get a low-stress spring and summer. But my natural-farming attempt is quickly becoming expensive for the nerves.

  I ask, “Where did you find the five worms? Does each tree have five worms? Each branch?”

  “Oh, no,” Pat answers. “I looked at dozens of trees.”

  I relax a little. Five worms divided by two dozen trees means only a few worms per acre. But this could be the beginning of a new hatch, with only the first wave having emerged.

  Pat explains how he found the worms. He inspects each branch for tiny half-inch or smaller worms or any visible signs of their feeding. It requires hours to inspect a dozen trees. “You’ve never found an OFM?” he asks.

  “To tell you the truth, I’ve never looked,” I blurt. “And I doubt if any farmer has ever committed an entire day to searching hundreds of branches for worms. No wonder you found some, looking so damned hard.” I occurs to me that I may always have had five worms in my spring orchard and never knew it because no one spent hours obsessed with finding them. I ask again, “So how many worms do you think are out here?”

  Pat shrugs again.

  I’m not used to that kind of answer. Pesticide salesmen never shrug their shoulders. In fact they would love my situation: five worms, peach crop threatened, worried farmer, instant sales. Farmer paranoia and good sales commissions go hand in hand.

  “What do five worms mean?” I mumble out loud. Pat smiles and says that sounds like a Zen master’s question. I glare at him and he wanders over to another row of peaches.

  The five worms challenge my attempt to farm these peaches differently. Their discovery threatens my organic methods, all the work I’ve tried this year. I sense a coming crisis of faith, knowing I could spray and kill all the worms in the field but then possibly repeat another ordinary harvest of homeless peaches. I have been hoping my alternative farming practices would become a marketing tool, leverage to get attention for these wonderful-tasting fruits.

  But how can I live with nature? By learning to live with five worms and my stress? I realize that for the rest of the season, with the early morning rising sun or at nightfall with the heat lingering in the air, I’ll stand on my farmhouse porch thinking about five worms.

  I join Pat and we scan a few branches of leaves and green peaches. “Thanks for letting me know about the five worms,” I say. He nods. “By the way, what did you do with them?” I grin. “I’d like to see their squashed bodies.”

  Pat turns to me with wide eyes and a blank look.

  Learning to Fail

  The farm is never far away from my family. Our produce comes from the work of family. On the Masumoto farm our fruits and garden vegetables have been family food for generations.

  My eight-year-old daughter, Nikiko, has witnessed both the successes and the failures of our farm. She has touched and tasted ripening fruits and has watched the power of weather unleashed on the fields. She knows her father is vulnerable to things out of his control. The farm is part of her picture drawing. She watches spring thunderstorms march into our valley and ravage tender green shoots with a downpour of hail. As the first ice balls crash down from the heavens, she sees me stand outside under the darkened sky and cry out, “Stop!” Later she draws a picture of the storm with a farmer wearing a big hat to protect himself.

  We plant an annual vegetable garden, and this year Nikiko helps plant some of the seeds and seedlings. But after growing initially, they begin to die.

  Nikiko’s garden is failing. A virus attacks the fragile squash, causing the leaves to yellow and the delicate growth to wither. Her eggplants glisten from a sticky juice secreted by a herd of aphids with a company of tending ants. A phantom creature even munches on the hardy marigolds, taking huge circular bites out of the dangling leaves.

  Daily I monitor the slow death, assessing the new damage, wondering if I should do something drastic. I consider using a garden spray, but when I read the label from the typical hardware store garden dust or pest spray, I realize it would be deadlier than anything I use on the farm. It will kill the aphids along with everything else, not the lesson I would want the garden to convey to my child. I face the same dilemma as I try to find a home for my Sun Crest peaches. If something doesn’t work right I have to fight the tendency to find a quick solution.

  “It’s OK, Dad,” Niki explains. “We have other squash plants.” Then she quickly gives the napping dog a hug and skips over to the sunning cats for their afternoon tea together.

  Nikiko helps me realize the difference between disappointment and losing. Her garden, like farming, teaches me that at times failure is OK.

  I’ve lost raisin crops, peach harvests, whole trees and vines. I’ve lost money, time, and my labor. I’ve lost my temper, my patience, and, at times, hope. Most of the time, it’s due to things beyond my control, like the weather, market prices, or insects or disease. Even in situations where I believe I am in charge—cover-crop seeding, management of workers, the timing of harvest—I now know I can never really have complete control.

  Ironically, the moment I step off my farm I enter a world where it seems that everything, life and nature, is regulated and managed. Homes are built to insulate families from the outside weather. People work in climate-controlled environments designed to reduce the impact of the weather. The government develops bureaucracies and statutes to safeguard against failure and protect us from risk. In America, a lack of control implies failure.

  As a kid I was taught that sports is a great training field for life, where you learn about the difference between winning and losing. But you also learn to make excuses to avoid looking like a failure. It’s far easier to blame someone or something—a teammate who couldn’t catch a fly ball, a lousy referee—than it is to learn to live with losses.

  On the farm, the foul lines aren’t marked and nature doesn’t play by a rule book. There are no winners and losers and the game is never finished. There’s always next year and the next harvest, more dark clouds on the horizon or aphids in your child’s garden.

  I also learned something about failure from my father. One year it began to rain on our raisin crop. A year’s worth of work lay on the ground, exposed and vulnerable to the elements. The rain would soon begin to rot the harvest. I remember running outside to tell the clouds to go away. I came back inside and watched my father grow angry too. Restless, we walked back and forth to the window to check the march of dark clouds and listened to the tap-tap-tap of rain on the roof.

  “What can we do?” I blurted out in frustration.

  “What can you do?” he answered. “Make it stop raining?”

  We lost most of the crop that year. We failed. But the grapes grew the next year and it didn’t rain.

  When I farm or garden, I learn to fail without winners or losers.

  The Furin

  A small furin hangs on our farmhouse porch. Its miniature bell delicately jingles with the slightest breeze. A long strip of paper captures the air currents and translates the movement into sound. I can peer out over the fields, watching the advancing spring season with its green blankets of foliage, and hear the wind.

  Nikiko likes the fragile sounds. The metal chime rings like a whisper, the voice tiny like a child’s. Occasional spring winds in the valley blow strong enough to snap the outstretched vine canes. Most of the time soft breezes brush our cheeks with such subtleties that we ignore their presence. A furin reminds grown-up
s what children already sense. Niki says she hears the wind singing.

  I spend the spring battling nature, trying to farm differently, hoping somehow I am contributing to the quest to save my peach. The more I struggle, the more the burden seems to weigh. Each new approach generates more questions; the complexity of working with nature slips into a growing pattern of chaos.

  I remember a Japanese saying about the power of bamboo. Its strength is not found in a rigid structure that blocks the wind; instead, the stalks bend with the wind. Their power resides in their very flexibility. I’m working on becoming like bamboo. I’ve abandoned my attempts to control and compete with nature, but letting go has been a challenge.

  I’m trying to listen to my farm. Before, I had no reason to hear the sounds of nature. The sole strategy of conventional farming seems to be dominance. Now, with each passing week, I venture into fields full of life and change, clinging to a belief in my work and a hope that it’s working.

  As I recall the past spring from my porch, the ringing of the furin helps me understand as it flutters in a subtle breeze. For the first time in my life, I see the wind.

  summer harvest

  chapter six

  summer work

  Summer Dreams

  Summer hits with a blaze of heat, defying the calendar and my scheduling of farmwork. Some years it begins in early May, other years the first blast is delayed until mid-June. Temperatures rise to 100 degrees and I begin a routine of the two- or three-T-shirt workday. I sweat so much that by midmorning my shirt will be drenched, so I’ll peel it off, leave it in the sun to dry, and pull on another. I repeat the ritual at noon, and by my afternoon work session I can recycle the dry morning shirt. Within minutes, though, I begin sweating. I can never predict the arrival of this first heat wave and instead find myself collapsed on the porch after foolishly trying to work straight through that first scorching day.

  The burning heat lingers even as the sun settles on the horizon. The mud caked on my boots, now cured and dried, breaks off in small piles next to my outstretched legs. My damp shirt clings to my flesh, with an odd chill creeping across my back. My face rests on the wood boards, the knots smooth against my cheek. Between the planks I feel a kiss of cool air rising from the darkness below. I listen to our golden retriever, Jake, panting, releasing his body heat. I open my mouth too, trying to allow more heat to escape so I can recover from the annual initiation of summer.