Anne was exhausted, running herself into the ground, trying to meet the demands of a small-town physician in a solo practice, a dinosaur fighting extinction in a dawning era of group practices and medical corporations. And I was frustrated with Anne’s exhaustion, missing her, and feeling frightened from the tingling I was starting to feel in my hand after working the hoe for a bit.
So the last thing either of us needed to be doing on this sweltry night was canning peaches for hours on end. More peaches than we could possibly use. We, like the trees, were groaning under the burden of plenty. But what to do with the bushels of peaches still on the tree? Another exhausting evening of canning was out of the question. But my ruminations on the meaning of harvest suggested an elegant solution. The next morning, after a couple of phone calls, I found to my surprise that not only was the local food pantry willing to take fresh, perishable fruit from a backyard orchard, but they were delighted to have it. I just had to pick it and bring it to the loading dock. I enlisted Zach’s help and we worked side by side, filling box after box with peaches. It was the first time my son had ever been in the orchard with me, and though he didn’t seem to be particularly enjoying himself, I wondered if I was creating a future fond memory for him.
The remaining harvest—a respectable ninety-nine pounds—was thus distributed throughout the Hudson Valley along with the usual fare of canned goods and corn flakes to (I’d like to think) some surprised and appreciative recipients. With that simple act, our harvest was transformed from a disagreeable burden to a rewarding, memorable gift. Anne and I didn’t attend any harvest festivals or dances, but we had found a way to make our little harvest a bit of a community affair after all, and on that hot summer night, that was exactly what the doctor ordered.
The Existentialist in the Garden
Everyone gets the war they deserve.
—Jean-Paul Sartre
The image on the MRI was so clear, even I could make out what I was seeing. There was my spine, my vertebrae, and there, between the sixth and seventh vertebrae, was something dark oozing out on both sides, like a squeezed-down peanut butter sandwich. I had a herniated disc that was pressing on nerves on both the right and left sides of my spine. This explained the tingling down my arms, the weakness (the neurologist, a woman, easily beat me in an arm-wrestle), the chronically stiff neck. It wasn’t life threatening, maybe not even terribly dramatic, but it was life changing. The next words out of the neurologist’s mouth sent a chill down my herniated spine.
“No heavy lifting.”
“For how long?” I asked.
She leaned in toward my face to make sure I understood. “This condition is not going away. Physical therapy can relieve the symptoms, but your disc is not going to retract back between your vertebrae. You have to learn to live with this condition, and lifting is one of the worst things you can do.” Let me add some other things to that list of worst things to do. Hoeing. Digging. Reaching high, as in pruning. Pushing a lawn mower up a hill.
“So this is—”
“Forever.”
Forever. And in an instant, I had morphed from a fifty-year-old gardener to a seventy-five-year-old gardener. No longer would I push wheelbarrows full of compost up the hill; no tossing bales of peat moss over my shoulder. No, I would have to garden quite literally like an old man, hiring people to do all the physical labor, maybe buying a small tractor or golf cart to move heavy materials around the yard. I would be reduced to puttering around the garden in a straw hat, like Don Corleone, picking tomatoes and dispensing words of wisdom.
I felt a little dizzy. I wanted to scream. I wanted to cry. I wanted to have an affair. I wanted to be young again.
“Continue the therapy, and I’ll see you in three months.”
Shit.
I have a theory of the origin of my herniated disc. Being tall, I’m predisposed to having neck and back problems to begin with, but when I graduated from high school, what I wanted to do most in the world was play college (and in my fantasy, professional) football. I was an impossibly skinny eighteen-year-old wide receiver, what we called in those days a split end. Catch the ball and run like hell or, better yet, step out of bounds. The way I played it, football was not, for the most part, a contact sport. I was on offense only and was decent enough that I might have been able to play ball in college, except that the college I ended up at was Duke University—not a football powerhouse, but definitely a big-time football program. I showed up for summer practice in August as a walk-on, practically ignored by the coaching staff and other (scholarship) players, most of whom outweighed me by at least a hundred pounds, even the receivers. It was a brutal time. Picture North Carolina in August, three bruising practices a day (held, inexplicably, in a pasture full of fresh cow patties, although I never saw a cow), except on Sundays, when we were expected to show up at Duke Chapel (my first exposure to that weird relationship in the South between football and Christianity—don’t get me started).
The tackling drills featured a technique that was new to me, one that is now outlawed in college football, called spearing. In high school, I had been taught to tackle a ball carrier by wrapping my arms around the player and putting a shoulder into his midsection, with my head off to the side. This is how tackling is taught today. But in 1971, spearing was all the rage, and the coaches at Duke and countless other colleges were instructing tacklers to lead with the head, sticking the head—not the shoulder—directly into the ball carrier’s chest, thus “spearing” the player.
Even to an eighteen-year-old, this sounded wacky and dangerous, not to mention ineffective. The coaches, aware of the potential for neck injuries, had added neck-strengthening exercises to the weight-room regimen. As if that could make any substantial difference overnight. Of course, I should point out that most of the defensive line-men had no discernible necks to begin with, although somewhere between the head and shoulders there was presumably a complete set of vertebrae.
Being a catch-the-ball-and-step-out-of-bounds receiver, I hoped I would be spared the spearing, but no such luck. Every player at Duke had to learn both an offensive and a defensive position, so in my alter ego as a defensive cornerback, I was subjected to long, agonizing drills every day, slamming my head and neck into a tackling dummy, pow, pow, pow, like a human pile driver. Occasionally I had to demonstrate the technique on a live body, although I was so inept at tackling that I usually missed the target altogether, to the mirth of my teammates and the ridicule of my coaches.
After a couple of weeks of three-a-days, I decided I had had enough. I was exhausted, dehydrated, and so far down on the depth chart I would have to fight the water boy for playing time. I clearly wasn’t cut out for major college sports, so to the relief of everyone, I tearfully handed over my playbook and turned my attention to my studies. In 1976 the NCAA would outlaw spearing, but not before thirty athletes-turned-quadriplegics had traded in their football pads for wheelchairs. Today I can’t help wondering if those weeks of pounding a skinny, still-growing eighteen-year-old neck into a tackling dummy set me up for problems more than thirty years later. Not that years of extreme gardening helped.
Regardless of the source, I had a new reality to deal with now. I had to reevaluate my place in the garden, the garden’s place in my life. Actually I had already started that process even before (maybe in subconscious anticipation of?) the disc problems. The garden had sneakily been transforming itself from a place of solace and pleasure to, well, a pain in the neck. I had been trying to ignore this subtle transition the way a spouse ignores the obvious signs of a troubled marriage, but given my new physical limitations, it was time to face facts. I had a troubled garden, and I had to get it under control.
But what exactly was the trouble? Certainly the garden was too large for a fifty-year-old with a bad neck, and my stubborn resistance to mulch and plastic had ensured that it was always in need of weeding. All right, so Larry was right: it was going to be a lot of weeding. But something more was troubling me, more than hav
ing to mow the grass, than having to weed constantly. The garden no longer felt like me.
It is a pretty, and in most years productive, garden, the kind of kitchen garden you see in garden magazines (except with lots more flowers), neat, linear rows delineated with grass and gravel paths. The rectangular beds are just the right size, and the drip irrigation makes watering a snap. Each year the soil grows richer with the addition of manure and compost. This is a damn good garden. So what was my problem? Why was I growing increasingly dissatisfied with it? What was wrong with those neat, linear rows? Those boring, neat, linear rows. Predictable, boring, neat, linear rows. It occurred to me that if I showed someone a plan of half the garden, he could, never having seen it, pretty accurately fill in the other half. But was my complaint really about symmetry? No, it was more than that. This garden was too linear, neat, and predictable, too—as I had said to Bridget all those years ago—Cartesian.
Sitting in the garden, staring out at these rows, I realized that, in the way we get the leaders we deserve, in the way that dogs often resemble their owners, I guess in the end we get the gardens we deserve. The French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre said it another way: each of us gets the war we deserve. I wanted a garden that was sloppy, rambling, surprising, spontaneous. But I had to face it: as much as I hate to admit it, I am khaki, deliberate, and straightforward. Maybe that’s what Bridget saw in me, and that’s the garden she designed for me.
On this day, though, I wasn’t feeling khaki and deliberate. Maybe it was the impact of seeing the MRI, the hint of mortality that it implies, the fact that I’d recently turned fifty, but on this day I felt—or wanted to feel—a little wild, adventurous, and unconventional. I wanted to live in Paris. I wanted to learn the guitar. I wanted to rip up these rows and replace them with rambling paths that disappear around a bend, under an arbor, that end up—where?
My biggest fear was that I would end up doing nothing. Several times over the past couple of years, I had wanted to make changes to the garden, only to find myself frozen by indecision until the urge passed. But doing nothing was not an option this time. The disc oozing from between my vertebrae had seen to that. Something needed to change in my garden, in my life.
The garden was less often satisfying these days. I still felt passionate about it, but now the passion I sometimes felt was homicide. But love it, hate it, or somewhere in the middle, I have never lost the passion, and I have always felt responsible. Responsible for its past, and responsible for its future. Design too linear? Grass paths? They’re my responsibility, not Bridget’s. Sod webworms in the corn? Grubs in the lawn? My fault. I installed sod, I planted roses. No tomatoes this year? Guess I did something wrong. When not agonizing over what to do with the garden next season, I feel weighed down by the choices I made last season, burdened by the freedom of choice, seared with passion, determined to squeeze the maximum out of its very existence.
In short, I am the Existentialist in the Garden. Camus in the chamomile. Sartre in the salad. How on earth did I get here, and how do I get out? Do I want to get out? If I leave, where do I go? If this garden is my war, then the golf course is surely Armageddon. What I’ve been doing is rewarding, nourishing, and reflective of a philosophical belief in self-sustenance and healthy, fresh food—but how do I make it fun again? This is, after all, supposed to be a hobby, not a burden. I think about the burden of canning peaches: my lesson in how quickly novelty becomes ritual becomes chore.
The great, terrifying existentialist question: If you were doomed to live the same life over and over again for eternity, would you choose the life you are living now? The question is interesting enough, but I’ve always thought the point of asking it is really the unspoken, potentially devastating follow-up question. That is, if the answer is no, then why are you living the life you are living now? Stop making excuses, and do something about it. A thorough examination of this issue is probably a quick path into therapy for most of us, but as the Existentialist in the Garden, I have been implicitly asking this question of my garden. Is this the garden I would build again? If not, why not? And what, if anything, should I do about it?
It’s remarkable what’s happened to this garden over the years. When Anne and I first contemplated building it, it was just a garden. This cigar really was just a cigar. Not a (conscious) extension of our personalities, or a political statement, or even an attempt at self-sustenance. It was a large, pretty kitchen garden, something we’d always dreamed of in the abstract. And to Anne, it largely still is. But when did it become something more to me, an inseparable part of me, a third partner in our marriage? More startling, why did it take me so long to realize how it had moved into our lives? After all, for years we’d been arranging vacations around harvests, I’d been spending virtually all of my leisure time between May and October tending it, and more than once it had sown marital discord.
Suddenly, given the limitations on my activity, the question was, How do I proceed? How do I make this work for me? Am I really ready to become Vito Corleone? I would have to think about that later. In a few weeks the first apples would be ripe. But before that, I would have to harvest the remaining peppers, potatoes, and tomatoes. There was so much to do.
The $64 Tomato
We will gladly send the management a jar of our wife’s green-tomato pickle from last summer’s crop—dark green, spicy, delicious, costlier than pearls when you consider the overhead.
—E. B. White
Summer, like my tomatoes, was showing its cracks. A pre-back-to-school hush filled the school yards. The late-August nights were delightfully cooler, the days noticeably shorter, the afternoon shadows more angular. I watched a single rust-colored leaf blow across the garden the other day, a startling reminder of the passage of seasons, a hint of the winter to come.
But I still had tomatoes. Sweet, juicy heirloom tomatoes. I was in the garden, having just picked one of the few remaining Brandywines, when Anne came by and exclaimed, “What a beautiful tomato!”
“It should be,” I joked lamely. “It probably cost us twenty dollars.”
Anne looked at me, waiting for an explanation.
“We hardly got any,” I said. “And we spent a lot on the garden this year.”
“Surely you’re exaggerating,” Anne insisted, used to my hyperbole. I conceded that twenty dollars for one tomato was probably a gross exaggeration. But the exchange got me thinking.
Most of the gardeners I know don’t garden to save money on groceries, although that might have been the norm a hundred years ago, when the backyard vegetable patch was a staple of most American homes. Most gardeners today garden because they enjoy the activity, or crave the freshness, or want vegetables, such as Brandywine tomatoes, that cannot be bought at the local Piggly Wiggly. Nevertheless it is reasonable to assume that it is cheaper to grow your own food than to buy it. That $1.79 pack of tomato seeds has the potential to feed a small community; most of us will use a half dozen of the seeds and throw out the rest, or use them next year. And the rest of the materials are free. You stir a little home-brewed compost into the vegetable bed, throw the seeds in the ground, add a little water, and presto, in a few months you have tomatoes, n’est-ce pas? Your initial $1.79 investment can return, I don’t know, potentially fifty, a hundred, maybe even two hundred dollars’ worth of tomatoes. Try to get a return like that on Wall Street.
But that isn’t the total fiscal picture. I ran into a few expenses along the way before and after the ground was ready to receive those tomato seeds. Like building a garden. Like keeping the groundhogs and deer from eating everything in sight. This year seemed especially bad. I knew I had put a lot into the garden this year and hadn’t taken an awful lot out. So just for the heck of it, I decided I would try to figure out just what this “free” tomato really cost.
I started with the costs of building the garden (orchard excluded):
Garden design
$300
Initial construction
$8,500
&
nbsp; Extra charge for stump pulling
$300
Irrigation and drip hoses
$1,100
Cedar edging
$400
Electric fencing equipment (exclusive of charger)
$400
Posthole digger
$50
Posts for fencing
$50
Two wrought iron gates and posts
$400
Additional topsoil
$250
Havahart trap
$65
Velcro tomato wraps
$5
Cedar for tomato posts
$10
Steel edging
$1,200
Labor for installation of edging
$600
Forsythia border (including labor)
$700
Gas-powered hedge trimmer for forsythia
$75
Wood-chip mulch for forsythia
$300
Chipper/shredder for shredding leaves for compost
$400
Dark bark mulch (fifty bags at $3 per bag)
The $64 Tomato Page 19
