This Life Is in Your Hands

by Melissa Coleman

  If I hover close, I can feel the hazy shapes of brightness and color, the loneliness of hunger, and the sweet taste of fullness that made up my world. Around me the chickens fluffed and busied in the dust of the paths as Norm slept nearby, fur warmed and dog-smelling in the sun, paws twitching after dream rabbits. Across the yard, goats hooved the ground and rubbed their horns on the cedar posts of their fenced pen. We didn’t know it, but we were all waiting. It was a feeling in the blood of impatience for spring.

  As Mama and Papa turned the damp earth, two familiar brown birds alighted on the brush by the goat pen, fluffed their feathers, and sang out in perfect pitch, “Old-Sam-Pea-bo-dy, Peabody, Peabody, Peabody.”

  “The white-throated sparrows,” Mama announced, looking up from her work.

  “They’re back,” Papa acknowledged, resting on his fork handle for a minute to watch the sparrows hopping across the ground, searching for seeds, and rustling in the leaves. The arrival of the seasons was the one thing we could trust, and in their regularity we found our livelihood. Spring urged soil preparation, planting, and growth; summer brought the reward of ripening and harvesting; fall meant storage and preparation for winter. And if we were successful during the growing months, we could hibernate and rest in winter. Then spring returned, and the cycle commenced anew.

  Soon the world was full of birds. They coursed the air like thoughts in the brain, twittering, singing, and building their nests. Red-breasted robins pulled at worms, blue jays jabbered, nuthatches walked upside down on tree trunks, woodpeckers rat-a-tat-tatted. There were pearly blackbirds, the flash of scarlet tanagers, bright finches. Crows and seagulls scavenged at the compost heaps, and flocks of swallows scattered in unison across the sky.

  The presence of so many birds was a great comfort to Papa, despite their inclination for stealing seeds from the garden before they could germinate. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring had been published to much acclaim and controversy in 1962—its title alluding to John Keats’s poem “La Belle Dame sans Merci” (“The sedge has wither’d from the lake, / And no birds sing”). In her groundbreaking work, Carson’s research indicated that insecticides such as DDT were weakening the shells of birds, causing the offspring to die before hatching and threatening the extinction of peregrine falcons and the American icon, the bald eagle.

  Used heavily since World War II as an agricultural pesticide, DDT was also, horrifyingly in retrospect, sprayed into wallpaper with the claim that it would protect children from mosquito-carried malaria. While studies have shown that DDT can cause infertility, miscarriage, and breast cancer in women exposed during youth, at the time Carson faced criticism and lawsuits from the chemical industry, especially Monsanto and American Cyanamid, which argued that DDT was safe, and that without it people would die from diseases like malaria. Nonetheless, the public outcry was such that the pesticide would be banned in the United States by 1972. Rachel Carson’s message was so effective, perhaps, because birds represent freedom—the iconic bald eagle—and anything that threatens that freedom threatens us.

  Papa saw the incident as yet another example of chemical companies defending their profits and letting the environment pay the price. He liked to quote a little poem by Ralph Hodgson:

  I saw with open eyes

  Singing birds sweet

  Sold in the shops

  For the people to eat,

  Sold in the shops of

  Stupidity Street.

  I saw in vision

  The worm in the wheat,

  And in the shops nothing

  For people to eat;

  Nothing for sale in

  Stupidity Street.

  Papa was not alone in his concerns. The previous fall, the inaugural issue of The Whole Earth Catalog had put on its cover the first photo of Earth taken from space, giving humans a new perspective on the beautiful and surprisingly fragile orb of blue and green, and as a result, the first Earth Day, planned for that April 1970, would be celebrated by 20 million Americans across the country.

  As Mama and Papa worked in the garden that spring, other news drifted in bits and snatches over the battery-powered radio that sat on the patio by the house: “One hundred thousand protesters march against the Vietnam War in Washington, D.C. . . . Apollo 13 aborts mission to moon. . . . Four students at Kent State shot by national guardsmen during a protest over Cambodia.” Then came the musical outcry of Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge over Troubled Water,” at number one on the charts, and Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi,” drifting across the airwaves.

  It wasn’t until the weather report came on that Papa ran to the patio and turned up the volume, hoping temperatures would be warm enough to plant seedlings outside, and ultimately, put food on the table. While the songs and struggles of the outside world were hopeful, the requirements for survival in the woods were, by necessity, Papa’s primary concern.

  Or so it seemed at the time. Looking back, I see our isolated farm as the small dewdrop on the vast web, and Papa’s individual goal to grow his own organic vegetables as part of a greater shift in the world, spreading like a chain reaction along the strands. Rachel Carson’s concerns over chemical agriculture led in effect to Papa’s desire to grow his own food, and his example and that of other organic pioneers would be followed by a trickle of oddballs, but a trickle that grew until, as the Y2K book The Tipping Point explains, it tipped, and today the word organic is mainstream.

  Small drops, we see, like raindrops on stone, can eventually change the course of a river. These small forces, too, can change the path of a life.

  Starting seedlings was Papa’s favorite part of the job, hopeful as it was to watch those tiny green leaves emerging from the brown potting soil.

  “Come on up, little one,” he’d say, patting his lap when I hung nearby. I’d climb into the hum of his concentrated excitement, my head under his chin and body in the cave of his arms as his callused hands tap-tap-tapped the card-size envelopes to drop seeds into the loamy potting mix. He’d spent the long winter poring over seed catalogs, settling on thirty-five crops best suited to our climate and soil and sending in order forms with creased dollar bills from under the couch for payment.

  Papa shared with Mama from his reading: “Vegetables are similar to flowers, sending messages to our eyes that we should eat them, the way flowers send messages to the bees to pollinate them.” The orange of carrots and squashes indicated beta-carotene for the eyes, the dark green of spinach held calcium for bones, and the reds of tomatoes meant lycopene for the heart.

  Papa mixed extravagant potting soils from peat, compost, and soil with the care of someone preparing baby food. He whistled with contentment as he cut cedar logs to make into flats, or “borrowed” and modified Herrick’s wooden blueberry boxes left in the field across the road. Soon, these flats filled with potting soil and germinating seeds covered every sunny window ledge, every counter, and all the floor space as well as the beds of the new greenhouse built onto the front of the house.

  It didn’t escape me that in spring Papa spent more time with his plants than with me. Perhaps that’s why, once I could walk, I felt compelled to leave my perfect little footprints marching across his newly seeded flats on the floor. The smoothed soil was sand on the beach, calling out to my bare feet. This happened not once, resulting in a halfhearted scolding, but every spring until after Heidi was born, when I had a human sibling to compete with for attention.

  Despite my meddling, the seedlings pushed through the soil, a V of tiny green leaves folding out from a white stem. Only the wooden stakes with Papa’s scrawly or Mama’s neat handwriting differentiated the kind of seed and date planted. They grew to distinguish themselves with the waxy double oval leaves of melons and squash, lacy carrotlike fennels, red crinkly lettuces, broccoli’s thick, rounded heart leaves, the purple veins of eggplant, and hairy stems of tomatoes. We ate meals with an army of tomato plants that crep
t right up around our bowls, leaving their distinct cut-grass smell on our hands as we moved spoon to mouth.

  “The average for this climate is one hundred and five frost-free days per year, leaving two hundred and sixty nights that might kill plants,” Scott told Papa. So the tender tomatoes and melons were part of our family until after Memorial Day, or Decoration Day as it was called by old-timers, the date it was considered safe to plant outside.

  Two years earlier it was another book from Hatch’s, this one by Leonard Wickenden, that forever changed the way Papa understood agriculture. As a chemist in the 1940s, Wickenden set out to skeptically analyze the claims of the fledgling organiculture—or natural farming—movement, but found that not only did chemical fertilizers deplete the soil, but vegetables tasted better when grown on healthy soil amended with organic matter and natural nutrients.

  “Did you know there are billions of organisms in a teaspoon of healthy soil?” Papa asked Mama, his nose deep in the Wickenden book, the concept of a self-sufficient natural system opening the door to a new world. Conventional agriculture of the time adhered to the findings of the German chemist Justus von Liebig, the guy who developed commercial baby formula, who in the mid-1800s discovered that the chemical nitrogen was an essential soil nutrient that could be isolated and used to “feed” plants. He defined the law of the minimum, which stated that agricultural yield is proportional to the amount of the most limited nutrient. If the missing nutrient was supplied in chemical form, yields would increase until another nutrient became the minimum, and so on, resulting by the twentieth century in an economic bonanza for the chemical industry.

  After the world wars, the companies that grew rich making bombs sought new markets. Agriculture was the perfect niche; small farms were giving way to large-scale commercial operations that had to sustain crops on overused land. Nitrogen, which had been used for bombs, could easily be dusted on the fields for fertilizer, and chemicals used for killing humans turned out to be perfect for killing pests. Pesticides and fertilizers became the new miracle. Soon the short collective memory had forgotten there was any other way. Wickenden, by contrast, argued for a return to the practices of feeding the soil with natural ingredients, rather than chemicals.

  In the spring of 1967 Papa had bought a secondhand Troy-Bilt rototiller and set to work on a plot of land on the Franconia College property. He couldn’t afford commercial fertilizers, but knew that those expensive products were just replicating the natural forms of nitrogen, phosphate, and potassium—N-P-K—that nourished the organisms in that teaspoon of healthy soil. He located free granite dust in the quarries of Barre, Vermont, for potassium and chicken manure for phosphate, and a local horse farm was more than happy to give him manure that he mixed with compost and bloodmeal to till into the soil for nitrogen.

  “Even the old-timer farmers around Franconia were impressed with the success of our first garden,” Papa told his students when they returned in the fall. As well as an abundance of delicious vegetables, he and Mama gained a deeper sense of satisfaction than they’d ever known before. They’d taken control of producing their food, and it had left them liberated—and well fed. They read books by one of the early natural-living gurus, J. I. Rodale, whose books and magazines advocated nutritional supplements and organic farming, and they soon gave up white sugar and flour, became vegetarians, got chickens, goats, and a horse, and began to dream of living on a farm for real.

  That fall, a call came that shook Papa’s foundations. As he was working in the garden after school, a student delivered an urgent message from Skates. Papa called his mother back from a school phone, hands still damp from the earth.

  “Your father has passed on,” Skates said over a crackly line. “A stroke.”

  Skipper had collapsed at age sixty-two while on a cruise in the Caribbean. Damn his bad diet and too much drink, was Papa’s first thought. Mama found him in the hunting lodge, tears in his eyes for the first time since they’d met, but unable to express the depth of his sadness. His father had left too easily, a gentleman to the end. As he washed the dirt from his hands, Papa swore to himself he’d live a fuller life to make up for his father’s short one. That meant staying healthy so an early death wouldn’t strike him and his own family. Looking down at his hands, he realized that they were his most valuable tool in this quest.

  On that second spring at Greenwood Farm, Papa planned to grow three times as many crops as the previous summer in order to sell vegetables for income, but the acidic, sandy soil needed help. “This area is unsuitable for agriculture,” the Maine Soil Conservation Service report had stated in the first soil test.

  “If you want to get me to do something, tell me it can’t be done,” Papa quipped, having seen firsthand in his Franconia garden that plants, like students, thrived with good nutrition and a supportive environment. That meant healthy soil and an enthusiastic gardener. He certainly had the enthusiasm, but what the soil needed was compost, and lots of it.

  Papa was often out in his rubber boots with a pitchfork, the steam rising around him, as he turned the compost heaps to help the plant and food waste transform into “black gold,” as he called it. The Nearing-style heaps surrounded the gardens like six-by-six-foot log cabins, built from saplings that Papa cut and stripped with an ax. At first the log house was very short, just eight logs stacked in a square on top of each other with ends sticking out, but as the heap grew bigger over the summer and fall with leaves, grass clippings, pulled weeds, dry pea vines, lettuce gone to seed, and scraps from cooking and leftovers, more logs were added, up and up until it was as tall as Papa. “The compost pile is another mouth to feed,” he often said when adding dinner scraps to the bucket in the kitchen.

  All the heaps needed were organic matter, air, water, and time—about six months—for everything to turn into black gold. If you were to stick a thermometer into the center, it might register temps upward of 150 degrees. Produced by the millions of tiny organisms that digested scraps into organic matter, the heat performed the secondary task of killing weed seeds that might germinate, unbidden, once the compost was spread in the garden. Earthworms also were key. Just as microorganisms consumed the organic matter, the earthworm in turn consumed the bacteria and microorganisms and left behind a condensed casting of nutrients. The only problem was, there wasn’t enough time or compost to fortify the amount of ground Papa needed to cover.

  Fortunately, Papa knew about another soil-enriching secret farmers had used for centuries: manure from horses bedded on straw. Horses were instant compost-producing machines. Their stomachs digested straw and grain and broke down the enzymes in a way similar to the decomposition process of the compost heap. When horseshit landed in the stall and mixed with bedding straw, it continued to decompose to create a mixture that when tilled into the earth could bring to life even the poorest soil, but over the years the symbiotic relationship between horse and man had been lost to the benefits of the automobile. Old-fashioned bedding straw was the key; sawdust, wood shavings, and other modern animal bedding products did not produce the same magic.

  With some luck, Papa located a large straw-bedded stable in a neighboring town with owners tickled to give their manure to anyone who wanted to haul it away. Papa hitched the wagon to Skipper’s old army jeep, often referred to as “Jeep” and later “Good Ole Jeepie” for its fortitude, and made trips back and forth with a pitchfork until there was a steaming brown mountain next to the garden. This he tilled into the soil with rock phosphate and limestone to help increase the pH to more desirable levels. And though he didn’t have to, come summer Papa would compensate the stable owners by bringing them the delicious resulting vegetables.

  Every morning Papa was back at it again, though even the lengthening days of spring proved too short. In the last of the light before going in for dinner, he spread the new garden plots with white rock powder over the compost and manure, so that when he returned in darkness it would catch the moonligh
t to guide the rototiller down the rows. The noise of the old red Troy-Bilt from Franconia growled into the silence of the dark woods and drifted out as far as the ocean. Though Papa wished he could turn the earth in silence with horse and plow like the original homesteaders, he knew the concession to the modern rototiller was necessary to attain his goals for the garden. But then, inevitably, the tiller conked out, and he was up all night in the woodshed with a kerosene lantern, trying to fix it.

  “Son of a gun,” he swore, lying on the dirt floor next to the tiller, hands greasy and oil smudges on his cheek. But as he worked to replace the broken belt, he felt a sense of peace settle in his chest. He had all the time in the world. No one to answer to—except himself and his family. Nowhere he’d rather be than here.

  “How many sons of a gun are lucky enough to have such problems?” he said aloud into the night, and then repeated the words under his breath like a mantra.

  When it was time for my seedling siblings to make their way into the world, the flats were cut into cakelike squares of potting soil containing white cobwebby roots topped by a V of leaves. Papa gently lifted the squares and placed them into holes in the newly cultivated soil along straight rows marked by string. Once I was old enough, he let me tuck the earth in around them.

  “There’s nothing more hopeful than those rows of new plants,” Papa said, looking back at the lines of green against brown. For the first couple weeks after planting, Papa listened anxiously to the weather for any signs of frost. Temperatures below freezing could quickly put an end to my new family. At the slightest risk, he and Mama dragged out sheets and blankets, newspapers and paper bags, anything they could lay hands on to protect the tender plants from freezing.

  Soon enough the weather warmed and the garden exploded with growth. Come midsummer, when Papa climbed the tall blue spruce near the well with Mama’s camera to capture the results, the plots marched across the acre in front of the house with the formation of a medieval army and its many varied regiments. As the Nearings recommended in Living the Good Life, the beds ran east-west in straight rows, with the low crops in one area, and permanent plants such as asparagus, rhubarb, berries, and herbs in another. Though Papa would soon surpass the Nearings with his passion and innovation in the garden, he used their practices as his initial guide. As in the Nearings’ garden, our rows of pea vines were supported with tree branches, the beans with twelve-foot poles; cedar stakes marked the straight rows, the variety of plant noted on them in pencil.