Ryder's Boys

by Cody Ryder

  We followed a dirt pathway into the forest garden, and Dakota pointed out the different crops he had planted as we passed them by. “Down there we have some watermelon. Above it, butternut squash. Planted around the watermelon is maynight salvia, great for bees, and helps to revitalize the soil. Green beans too. They all help each other grow and provide things the others need. It may look wild, but everything here was planted with purpose to create self-sustaining habitats and ecosystems.”

  We passed by a fenced off chicken coop, where a few more plump and happy chickens were pecking around at the dirt. “You have eggs here too?”

  “Oh yeah. Never can get enough of those fresh eggs. And a free-range chicken or two on special occasions.”

  Rosie trotted out from foliage, proudly carrying a thick stick in her mouth. She fell in line with us, following behind as we walked.

  “Got a thousand-gallon water storage tank over there, and I just finished building this fish pond…which is probably the hardest thing I’ve done so far.”

  “How are you watering all of this?” I asked. “It must cost so much to maintain.”

  He walked over to a vine that was hanging with a bunch of ripe, golden tomatoes. “Oh, I forgot to harvest these,” he said. “Rosie! C’mere girl.”

  Rosie dashed over to him, still holding the stick in her mouth. She sat down and look up at him with eyes eager to please.

  “Fetch the basket.”

  She immediately dropped the stick onto the ground and dashed back towards the house. “No, actually,” he continued. “I do water a bit, when things need it. Especially the green house, where I start certain plants off, but even then a lot of it is reclaimed water, or harvested rain water.”

  I laughed as Rosie trotted back over to us with a wicker basket in her mouth. She sat attentively in front of Dakota, and he took the basket from her and gave her a pet. “Thank you very much.” He began plucking the tomatoes off the vine and placing them into the basket. I went over and helped him.

  “How does it all stay alive, though?” I asked. “With the drought?”

  “My dad and I planned it all out at the beginning,” he said. “We designed how and where to plant everything to restore the soil and make it more efficient at retaining the water. Rebuilding the water table so that the plants could drink on their own. And then after that, supplying them with water when necessary, which isn’t as often as you’d think.”

  “This is amazing,” I said. “Dakota, this is just amazing. I can’t believe what you’ve done with the place, it’s incredible.”

  He smiled. “Honestly, Roy, it saved my life.”

  We followed the path further out into the garden, walking under wooden archways that were hanging with fat yellow winter squash, past bushes blooming with vibrant raspberries. Rosie dashed ahead, apparently knowing where we were going. The path rounded a corner and ended in a trio of large trees with a hammock strung up between two of them, and set of lawn chairs on the ground in the middle. Just behind it all was a glass paned greenhouse.

  “Hey,” I said, pointing, “Hey, it’s these trees! These are the ones we used to come out and smoke joints by.”

  “Yup.”

  “They look so different surrounded by all this life, instead of spiders and all those dead brown bushes that used to be here.”

  Dakota went over to the greenhouse and washed off one of the tomatoes using a faucet that was coming up out of the ground, and then came back and sat down in one of the lawn chairs. Rosie was already curled up inside the hammock, her head peeking out over the side. I sat down next to him, and he pulled out his flip knife from his pocket and cut the orange tomato in half.

  “Here, try this,” he said, handing it to me. I bit into the juicy flesh, and was surprised at how savory it was. It didn’t have that sour sweet acidity that most tomatoes had. “Good, isn’t it?” he smiled. I nodded.

  He bit into his and sat back into the chair, chewing thoughtfully.

  “Dad and I dedicated this place as a tribute to my mom. I think I told you how she loved to garden. After she died, dad just kind of gave up on it. Never even tried to do anything with it, and so it ended up the way you saw it.

  “After high school, I threw myself into the project. My dad retired, and we worked on it together. I spent so much time at the library, Roy. It’s amazing how much more information we have available to us now. Then when my dad got sick and eventually passed…I didn’t know what to do. I was two years into the project. We’d completed pretty much all of the landscaping and had already planted things. I thought about selling the house, you know?”

  “It must’ve been hard to live here after that,” I said.

  “It was. I spent a long time thinking that it was over, I was done. I was out in the back, doing some surveying and taking measurements and stuff, I think it was when I was thinking of selling, and it just hit me. This garden was my parents. My mom helped inspire its creation, my dad raised it with me. It’d gotten me through tough times. I couldn’t just abandon it. So that’s when I put everything I had into it. Working everyday finishing the project, I felt like I wasn’t alone, like my parents were with me.”

  His voice was thick with emotion. Rosie raised her head, gave a short whine, and leapt out of the hammock to go and curl up by his feet. He scratched her behind the ears, and she licked his finger.

  “Then it did actually get pretty lonely, so I got Rosie,” he said with a chuckle.

  There was that tightness again. Throughout all that time, I’d been up at university. I’d been making new friends, going out and partying in the city. I’d met Alicia then too. All that time, and I had no idea what the guy who’d been my first love and best friend was going through.

  What would I have done if I had known? I could’ve comforted him, been there for him…but ultimately, I would still have been eight hours away, up in the bay. Dakota still would’ve had to face this all on his own. Still, I felt so bad about it.

  “You know,” I said, “I wish we’d never made that agreement.”

  Dakota shook his head. “I don’t.”

  “You don’t?”

  “I think that everyone goes through trials in their life. Maybe I’ve had more trials than most, I don’t know. But I needed to go through that to make me the man I am today.” He gestured at the forest garden around us. Birds sung in the trees and bushes, and the aroma of fruit and flowers filled the air. “It brought me this. It brought me purpose. And I’m passing it on to others. And you know, Roy, maybe you’re going through a trial right now.”

  I thought about it, and nodded. “Yeah, I would say so.”

  “Besides. We’re here together now, right?”

  He was smiling at me as he absently stroked Rosie’s head.

  “That’s true,” I said, smiling back. A trial. Maybe Dakota was right. Maybe my relationship with Alicia and our separation was meant to test me. I would either succeed and come out a new person, or fail and…then what? What would happen if I failed my trial?

  I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

  “You’re the first person I’ve ever told all of those things to,” he said, and it sounded almost like he was speaking to himself.

  A fresh breeze rustled all the leaves around us. It was amazing how much cooler it was here just from the natural shade provided by all the trees. The only reminder that we were in a desert was the rocky mountain that rose into view just beyond Dakota’s property. A bird fluttered down from the tree just in front of us and started to peck around at the ground. Rosie watched it curiously.

  Dakota was the first person I’d really opened up to about Alicia asides from my parents, but even with them it didn’t feel quite the same. They’d been there, seen it firsthand. With Dakota, it was like I was telling him a secret, something that I wouldn’t allow just anyone to have access to. It felt like the distance between us from having not seen each other for so many years had quickly grown much smaller.

  With the trade of our buried ex
periences from our time apart, our lives had become undeniably intertwined once again.

  Five

  We left Dakota’s little relaxation spot and continued the tour around the Lifespring Gardens. It turned out that there was actually quite a bit of food that was ready for harvesting, and so we went back to the house, and Dakota equipped Rosie with a pair of side bags that she wore strapped over her back to carry things. He gave me a big spare basket and a small pair of shears, and then showed me how to identify what was ready to be harvested.

  “Having such a huge project to tackle really helped keep my mind diverted from negative things,” Dakota said, inspecting one of the winter squash that hung down from the archway trellis before cutting it off into his basket. I did the same, holding it my hand and tapping on it with two fingers like he showed me. It made a slightly hollow sound, and so I cut it off and put it into my basket. “But more than that, just the process of raising living things was really therapeutic. Being outside planting the seeds, seeing them sprout up, making sure they stayed healthy. It was like every plant that grew was healing me, giving me life again.”

  “Lifespring,” I observed.

  “Yeah.”

  Did I have my own lifespring?

  Maybe my work would’ve been that force for me—I probably wouldn’t have felt quite so worthless if I were still employed. It was amazing though, even just the short amount time I’d spent walking around the garden had made me feel more relaxed and calm—or maybe that had to do with being around Dakota again—either way, I felt the best I had in months.

  Rosie stood patiently nearby, waiting for us to transfer what we’d picked to her side bags. A chicken clucked and walked nearby, looking like it knew that she wasn’t allowed to chase after it at that moment. Rosie eyed it, her tongue hanging excitedly out from the side of her mouth, but she kept her cool.

  “She’s such a good dog,” I said. Hearing my praise, she walked over and looked up at me, her tail wagging furiously.

  Dakota nodded, smiling proudly at her. “She’s great. Sometimes it feels like she knows what I’m thinking. She’s so smart. Always looking out for me.”

  She went over to Dakota and licked his hand, and he scratched her chin and then put the squash from his basket into her side bags. We continued around, picking more tomatoes, some berries, a few radishes and potatoes, and two medium sized watermelons. By the time we were finished, it was already well into the afternoon, and we were starving. We brought the harvest back to the house and added it to his stores for selling at the farmer’s markets. We went inside, and Dakota brought out a spread of vegetables from his fridge to cook into our lunch. It was amazing just how much food he had available – all from his garden.

  We had a meal of fried rice with a side of miso soup and salad, with some of the fattest, creamiest avocados I’d ever eaten. Rosie laid on the floor nearby, crunching on a carrot. Afterwards, we went back out to sit in the garden and enjoy more of Dakota’s homebrewed beer. We didn’t say much then, just lounged in the chairs and listened to the sound of the birds, the trickle of water in his fish pond, and the wind blowing lazily through the trees.

  Dakota and I had always been able to enjoy silent moments with each other, and even despite the years that had passed, it still felt comfortable just sitting there quietly, not having to speak a single word to appreciate it. Alicia was definitely not that way – she hated silent moments and always felt like there needed to be something going on. We used to get into arguments about it. I never quite understood why she was so averse to silently enjoying each other’s company, while she couldn’t get why I was so okay with not saying a word.

  Rosie had taken her spot in the hammock, and she suddenly perked up and let out a loud bark. I jumped in surprise, from both the abrupt break in the silence and because she’d been so quiet the whole time that I forgot that she could make noise. She jumped out of the hammock and ran back to the house.

  “Probably one of the neighbors,” Dakota explained. “They come by on Sundays to buy food.”

  It was one of his neighbors—an older couple who were restocking their supply of fresh vegetables. After they’d picked out what they wanted, Dakota invited them to stay and try some of the watermelon we’d just harvested. He went inside to fetch it, leaving me sitting out in front with the couple, who were petting Rosie.

  “I’m happy to see he’s got someone to keep him company,” the lady said to me. “It must get lonely, living here all by himself.”

  “Hardly see anyone come by, except for his tour groups,” said the husband, giving Rosie a scratch behind her ears.

  “Dakota’s always been the kind of guy who gets along pretty well by himself. I think he might prefer it, actually,” I said. It was true, Dakota was more of an introverted type, and I always knew him to be perfectly happy to spend time by himself with a book or whatever. But if he really didn’t have any friends other than the people he saw at the farmer’s market, I wondered if he was happy with that. He did say that he’d gotten Rosie because things had become lonely…

  A few minutes later, Dakota emerged from the house holding a plate of watermelon slices and a roll of paper towels, and I enjoyed one of the sweetest, juiciest tasting watermelon I’d ever had.

  We chatted for a while with the couple, Gloria and Rudy, who lived three houses down from Dakota, and were soon joined by his next door neighbor, a young woman with a baby. She bought a bag of tomatoes from Dakota, and afterwards tried some of the watermelon too. The experience struck me as interesting—Powlton was a small place, but it still had that closed off feeling that most upper middle class suburbs seemed to have, where neighbors seemed to do their best to avoid interacting with each other. The Heart Lifespring Gardens provided a reason to break that pattern.

  “They definitely wouldn’t normally talk to each other,” Dakota said, when I mentioned my observation to him after we’d gone back inside. “In fact, I don’t think I’d ever met Rudy and Gloria until after I’d started the garden, even after living here for my entire life.”

  I’d thought I was only going to spend the afternoon over at Dakota’s, but now I was in absolutely no hurry to leave. He showed me his website, where he posted information on how to start a permaculture food forest like his, and his YouTube channel, which he’d started from the very beginning of the garden. Because he’d been making videos for so long, he’d amassed the biggest following of any gardening channel, and was actually making money from his videos.

  “You know, to be honest, Dakota, I had some doubts when you used to tell me that you were going to make a living doing something different. You never really seemed to have a plan back then, did you? You just said, ‘I’m going to do things my way,’ and here you are.”

  He laughed. “I was pretty fortunate. I had the means given to me to be able to get to this point.”

  “But you knew it, and you did it.”

  “It was a rough road to get here, for sure.”

  “But it was worth it. You achieved your goals, proved yourself. You must be really happy.”

  He leaned back in his computer chair and nodded thoughtfully. “Satisfied, yeah. Fulfilled. But, you know, I don’t think I could say I was completely happy. Not until now, at least.”

  “Not until now? Why not?”

  He turned and smiled at me. “Well, because you’re back, Roy.”

  Those words kept me up that night.

  After he had said that, I couldn’t stop myself from blushing, and I realized just how happy I was to see him again too. It was relief, like I had been churning about in the middle of the sea for so long, unable to find my way back to land, and I’d finally spotted the lighthouse on the shore. Dakota was that light. Being around him made it feel like my feet were back on solid ground.

  Was I still in love with him? After all these years?

  Memories and feelings were flooding back to me, things that had been hiding just below the surface that entire day. Of course I was still attracted to
him—he had become hotter than ever—but when I’d met him at the farmer’s market I didn’t feel anything more than that.

  I lay awake in my bed, with thoughts of the day churning around in my mind. Did he still have feelings for me too? Or was he just saying that as a friend? Was I feeling this way because my mind had been all screwed up from the past months?

  You two have different lives. You went your separate ways eleven years ago. There’s nothing more to it than that. Don’t look to the past, Roy. The past will only hold you back. Look to the future, to new things.

  Dakota was my past.

  It was my job that I needed to focus on, getting back up to the bay and continuing where I left off. It was great that meeting Dakota again had helped to straighten out my thoughts, to give me a reset, so to speak…but I couldn’t let the remnants of old feelings distract me.