This Life Is in Your Hands

by Melissa Coleman

  Mist was rising at the edges of the clearing, but the center of the garden glowed with sun from above. A child was walking toward the house on the path from the well, carrying something Mama couldn’t make out. The child’s fair hair caught the sun coming through the mist. Mama felt she was recognizing someone she hadn’t seen in a long time—as if a face on a crowded street suddenly matched one stored in her memory.

  “Heidi,” she said to herself. Her middle daughter. Where had she been?

  “Mama,” I called from the bunk, tattling my morning knowledge of all secrets. “Heidi went down to the beach.”

  “The beach!” Mama exclaimed, opening the door and hustling Heidi in. “You must not go to the beach alone.”

  “Michèle took me,” Heidi said, holding up a shell, then turned and skipped back out the door, and Mama’s and Heidi’s minds slipped out of mine to join the realities of the day.

  Pam and Paul drove up from Goddard College in a red VW bug with brakes they had to stop to bleed every fifty miles. Mama greeted Paul, who had visited the previous fall, and he introduced her to Pam through the window of the car.

  Another beautiful blonde, Mama thought to herself. She noticed that all of Pam’s clothes were neatly folded in the back seat, as if she’d decided to come along at the last minute and quickly grabbed her belongings. Pam smiled at Mama, who was already slender and fit despite the tender baby on her back.

  “What a great model of modern motherhood,” Pam said to Paul as they parked in the lot. The two had met a few years earlier when Pam, having just graduated from high school in Wellesley, Massachusetts, was staying at a summer boardinghouse in Ogunquit. Taken by her fresh innocence, Paul, with his dream-filled Italian eyes and dramatic way with words, soon won her heart. Paul was attending Hobart College, and Pam, William Smith, so come the fall of 1974 their relationship continued, though they found campus life lacking a variety of experience they both sought. When Paul read about our farm in the Country Journal, he wrote Papa, asking if he could come work.

  “It’s magical there,” Paul told Pam upon his return. During his few months with us, he full-heartedly joined the ranks of middle-class, college-educated young people inspired to make farming a way of life. He convinced Pam to return with him to our farm the following summer.

  Always good at encouraging the talents of apprentices, Papa noticed Paul’s inclination for carpentry. “Listen, there’s this big old swamp maple that’s just begging for a tree house,” Papa said, as Paul remembers it. “If you want to build something, knock yourself out, my kids would love to have a tree house, just don’t put any nails into that tree.”

  Embracing the challenge, Paul and Pam set to work figuring out a Tinkertoy approach so as not to use nails. The branches of the tree made a natural palm for the floor joists, and one limb had a hollowed-out knothole, making it a logical place to sink a brace. Another branch went right through one wall and out the other, with canvas around it so it could move in the wind. In the afternoons, Heidi and I often took the little path past the pond and through the mossy woods to check on Paul’s progress.

  “When will it be ready for us to come up?” we called to Paul, our necks arched back to spot him perched precariously in the growing structure.

  “Someday soon,” he said. To our eager minds, that wasn’t soon enough.

  In the afternoons after work, there’d be people hanging out in the campground on the stumps around the fire pit, swinging on the rope, playing guitars and harmonicas, returning from swimming at the beaches, or picking raspberries in the foundation. There were always the smells of ferns and damp bark, wood smoke and baking bread.

  “Have you heard about Barry and Larry and the fireflies?” Pam was saying to the group gathered outside the cook shack. “It’s the funniest thing. They’ve never seen fireflies before, so they were chasing them around the campground last night, trying to catch them in their hands.”

  Larry and Barry, bushy haired in cutoff shorts, explained that they were from California, where fireflies did not live. “I thought we’d dropped acid by mistake,” Larry said. “All these little lights blinking everywhere in the night.”

  “I forgot to tell you I put some tabs in your tea,” Barry deadpanned.

  “Or maybe some mushrooms?” someone suggested with a wink.

  There weren’t many drugs to be had in our neck of the 1970s, as far as I can tell—though Larry did once find a patch of marijuana someone was tending in the woods. Larry and Barry were, instead, edible-mushroom-hunting fanatics. Searching wooded groves and dells for the pods of pale leathery domes pushing though the forest floor, they found the rain had made for an especially good season. Most exciting were the golden chanterelles, which tasted like chicken when sautéed with garlic, Larry said. I knew not to eat the red toadstools with white dots—they were as poisonous as they were beautiful. Instead I preferred the puffballs, which in summer were round and white and edible, but by fall dried into a leathery sack that I liked to stomp on to release a cloud of dark spores. Sometimes we found artist conks, shelflike growths attached to tree trunks that had a smooth underside onto which we’d carve pictures, or we’d make prints from large-topped meadow mushrooms by laying the grooved underside on a piece of paper to capture its concentric lines of spores.

  As we threaded the edible findings onto string to dry from the ceiling of the log cabin for later use we’d marvel that mycorrhizal fungi, the fancy name for mushrooms, were connected underground by a vast network of roots called mycelium, and the enzymes produced by this network were similar to those in the compost heap, breaking down the organic debris on the forest floor into food for the trees.

  “If the soil is the earth’s stomach, fungi supply its digestive enzymes,” Michael Pollan, a modern-day colleague of Papa’s, explains in his book The Omnivore’s Dilemma. “They stand on the threshold between the living and the dead, breaking the dead down into food for the living.” It was a concept that, to the child I was then, made perfect sense—the law of return.

  Michèle often came by to join us at the campground, as did Nancy, who was now staying in the cabin behind Greg’s with her boyfriend, another Greg. One such afternoon in early June, when everyone was hanging around the cook shack before dinner, a new apprentice named Sandy rode up the dirt road on her ten-speed bike, nearly a month after she was scheduled to arrive.

  “We were hoping you’d show up sooner rather than later,” Papa said when she introduced herself, forgetting in his usual urgency about the farm that she’d just biked across the country from San Francisco. By nature sensitive and shy, Sandy was most comfortable swimming, running, or biking long distances; in the flush of those activities she could be fully herself, without the weight of other people’s opinions. She had no idea of the effect of her long blond hair, strong body, and shy smile.

  “Have you seen the new girl?” Larry asked Barry that afternoon after returning from work at the Nearings’. “Wow!”

  Sandy originally sought to apprentice on a Mennonite farm, but my old friend Frank, who’d been her roommate in San Francisco and dated one of her close friends, told her about us. Frank wasn’t having much luck as an encyclopedia salesman, but he was a great salesman for our way of life. “You don’t want to go to a Mennonite farm where you have to wear a dress all day,” he teased her. “You hate dresses. The Coleman farm is cool. You’ll learn a lot.”

  Sandy wrote to Papa, and he told her to come in May. She didn’t own a car, so she set out in April to bike the nearly three thousand miles alone, armed only with her favorite cutoff painter overalls, one pair of shoes, and a rubberized sleeping bag stuffed in her panniers. She met people along the way who gave her rides and took her in, but she mostly slept out in the open in her rubber sleeping bag, zipping it up against what seemed like the constant rain that spring. Even with the waterproof coating, water would leak in around the zipper and collect in the bottom as she curl
ed her body around the puddle and tried to keep sleeping.

  The life of the farm immediately took Sandy in. She sat around the campfire that first evening listening to Larry and Paul on guitar, Barry playing harmonica, Anner singing, and basked in the simple comforts of good vibes and laughter.

  “Thank you, dear Franklin,” she whispered up to the stars.

  The working days were another story. Perhaps because of her athletic vigor, Sandy was assigned the grunt work with the boys, digging out stumps and hauling water for irrigation, while Bess did the less labor-intensive tasks of seeding and thinning, and Anner helped run the farm stand and cook lunch. Sandy soon bonded with Pam when they found they both loved to bake bread.

  “Why don’t you two bake for the farm stand?” Papa suggested, when he overheard them talking about bread one day at lunch. Our neighbor Jean was no longer baking the whole-grain bread and coveted cinnamon buns of the previous summer. So Sandy and Pam took on the task, rising before the sun to fetch water from the well; grinding wheat groats with the hand grinder; mixing flour, water, and sourdough starter in wooden bowls in the campground cook shack; then letting it rise and baking it in the gas canister oven, all before everyone else woke up.

  Larry loved waking to the aromas coming from the cookhouse. He was drawn not just to the bread, but even more to the chef. From the moment he’d laid eyes on Sandy, he felt an immediate urge to protect and care for her. Hers was such an appealing combination of beauty and shyness, he had to restrain his desire to shield her from the slightest harm. However, the tough whole-grain bread that practically had to be cut with a saw was somewhat less lovable.

  “It’s not exactly flying off the shelves,” Pam said, laughing.

  That June, Papa and some apprentices piled into VW buses and pickups and headed to UMass-Amherst for the Toward Tomorrow Fair, a gathering to promote sustainable living. Scott Nearing was delivering the keynote address at ninety-three years of age, and a large crowd gathered in the speakers’ hall, young people with cutoffs, healthy beards, and long hair, some sitting on the floor, others fanning themselves in the heat. Helen and Scott sat at a table onstage, Helen knitting as she often did at conferences, unable to let idle time be wasted, her fingers flying toward the completion of a scarf or mitten.

  When Scott was introduced, Helen gave him a hefty push up toward the podium, shrugging off, as she did, the burden of the younger wife tending to an aging husband. Scott, his mind sharp even if his social skills were beginning to slacken, shuffled up to the podium, smiled, and said a few words of introduction before delivering his lifelong battle cry.

  “Pay as you go!”

  The audience cheered enthusiastically at the well-known Nearing belief in eschewing debt, even though Scott then turned and sat back down next to Helen. His job, he must have felt, was done.

  One of the young hippies nodding in agreement in the audience was a tall, skinny, and bespectacled twenty-six-year-old redhead named Rob, founder of a new organic seed company. A few years earlier, George Oshawa’s book on macrobiotics, the Asian-inspired diet of whole and raw seasonal foods, had been responsible for Rob’s conversion from a bookish guitar-playing UMass math major to the manager of Amherst’s first health food co-op. Eventually he’d dropped out of college and found himself working on a farm near Keene, New Hampshire, at a commune, of sorts, that provided lodging in the drafty attic of the old farmhouse. Lying in his sleeping bag in that attic, Rob began to dream about seeds, and those dreams turned to action. Where could you find the unique varieties of squash a Japanese buyer had requested, for instance?

  He wrote to international seed breeders and farmers, asking for heirloom varieties. Soon he opened a business checking account, moved back to his parents’ home in Massachusetts, and placed an ad in Organic Gardening, advertising heirloom and vintage organic seeds selected for a short growing season. He backed all of his products with an L.L.Bean–style 100 percent satisfaction money-back guarantee, and named his company for the legendary Johnny Appleseed, who wandered America in the 1800s, planting apple trees from seed. Before he knew it, Rob had forty inquiries in his mailbox.

  As his business grew, Rob took friends up on an offer to locate his fledgling company on their farm in Maine. As a result of the energy crisis, there was a demand for seed tailored to the small home garden. Backyard gardeners wanted sustenance crops—corn, potatoes, beans—that tolerated the short New England growing season and provided ample sustenance. “Based upon our projected seed needs for the 1976 season,” Rob advertised in the MOFGA newsletter, “we cannot possibly raise all of our own seed here at Peacemeal Farm. We have a need for growers.” He was eventually able to purchase land in nearby Albion, where Johnny’s Selected Seeds grew and prospered over the years to become one of the foremost organic seed companies in the country.

  When Papa and Rob crossed paths in 1976, both scrawny and roughly dressed in soil-worn clothes, they didn’t know each would contribute to the success of the other, but they did recognize in each other a similar passion and drive. They were the younger and hipper breed of organic visionaries who would soon replace the older and somewhat kookier J. I. Rodale evangelism.

  Also in attendance at the fair were Winnie and John, former filmmakers at Rodale Press’s media group in Pennsylvania, who had started their own venture, Bullfrog Films. The young couple had obtained permission from the Nearings to shoot a documentary on the good life. John, thin and bearded with an English accent, and Winnie, with a new baby in her arms, approached Helen and Scott after the talk. Helen took one look at them and said, “Pretty irresponsible to bring another little one into this world, isn’t it?” Taken aback, but not deterred by what was known as the brusqueness of the Nearings, Winnie and John made plans with Helen to come to Maine that August with a cameraman and capture this newly in-vogue homesteader lifestyle.

  Back on the cape, the Nearings’ stone home was close to completion, thanks to the help of many free hands and Brett’s fine woodworking skills. True to Helen’s vision, the new house looked as if it had always belonged on the spot overlooking the cove.

  “A building should appear to grow easily from its site,” Helen would quote from Frank Lloyd Wright’s On Architecture in her picture book Our Home Made of Stone, “and be shaped to harmonize with its surroundings if nature is manifest there, and if not, try to make it as quiet, substantial and organic as she would have been were the opportunity hers.”

  Lanterns lit a circle of people at the center of Hoffman’s Cove as the ocean shushed on the shore. All the apprentices were there, and other people I didn’t know. Heidi and I’d gorged ourselves on strawberry-rhubarb crisp, and our blood raced with the sweet-tartness of it. Mama said it was the shortest night of the year, so we were allowed to stay up after dark for the party, a special treat, but her face was somber in the firelight as she sat on a rock nursing Clara, while Papa sat with Bess and the others.

  “Almost time to go home,” Mama called, shy of parties, we knew, and glad for an excuse to leave.

  “No, no,” Heidi and I screamed. We ran from Mama in all directions. We were full of the light of the endless June days, fields swaying with the purple-blue temples of lupine. The light, too, was full of itself, sun rising before we woke and setting after we went to bed. It bubbled up from some endless underground spring, tumbling over itself to be free. Even after the orange of sunset faded from the horizon, the light burst through the darkness in the blink-blink-blink of fireflies and the flash of phosphorescence in the black water of the ocean, mirroring the sparks of stars above. The moon was like a hole in the fabric of night, allowing the constant light to show through from behind.

  Everyone sang and laughed and talked all at once, swimming and splashing naked in the ocean. We chased fireflies with Larry and Barry, catching them in our cupped hands, and stirred the sea with our toes to watch the phosphorescence follow their path in the water. Heidi was another light in the night
, a lively firefly, bouncing here and there, sitting on laps, singing in her little voice to herself, putting pebbles in her nose. And then she ran out into the ocean after Michèle, tripped on a rock, and fell underwater.

  “Whoa!” Michèle said, grabbing her and pulling her soaking wet body to shore.

  “Time to go home!” Mama called again.

  A guitar strummed. Another joined in. People were blowing on the mouths of empty beer bottles to make hollow foghorn sounds. Someone was booming a drum, and a tambourine jingled. Bruce’s harmonica jangled in reply.

  “Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man,” Anner’s voice joined. “Play a song for me . . .” The rest of the sounds adjusted to follow the tune of her voice until soon the song turned into another. “I am just a poor boy, though my story’s seldom told . . .”

  The light of June was like the loudest crashing music at the end of that song. “Lie-la-lie, boom, lie-la-lie-la-lie-lie-lie, boom, lie-la-lie, boom.” After this the light would still fill long days for the rest of summer, but it would get slower like honey. By July the fireflies would mate and extinguish, and the phosphorescence drift out to sea.

  “Lissie, Heidi,” Mama called. “Time to go home.”

  “Nooo, we don’t want to go!”

  We ran across the road to hide behind the rose-hip bushes.

  “Watch out for the poison ivy,” I called, but Heidi kept running into the darkness. I heard Mama calling, so I ran after her.

  “Run, run,” I said. “Hide.”

  A couple days later, we couldn’t stop itching.

  “You got into the poison ivy,” Mama scolded. “Serves you right for hiding.”

  “Stoppit,” I said, my tongue worrying a loose tooth, as Heidi trickled water from her bucket onto my sand castle in the sandbox by the woodshed.