Closer to the Ground

by Dylan Tomine

  I spool fresh line on the reels, sharpen hooks, and freeze some milk jugs full of water for the fish box. This year, we’re really going to get ’em.

  It’s July 5, and once again, the old-timers were right. Summer arrived suddenly today, as if somebody had flipped a switch, dark skies turned brilliant blue; chilly air gave way to warm, almost tropical humidity. And now, tonight, I toss and turn in bed, listening to the owls through open windows, my mind racing with thoughts of king salmon and the approaching season. I get out of bed and walk out onto the back porch. Owl calls boom back and forth through the velvety night air. A choir of frogs and crickets swells, suddenly falls silent, and swells again on some mysterious cue. To the east, the starry black sky fades to deep blue; it’s going to be light soon. Summer is here.

  FIREWOOD II: PRODUCT MANAGEMENT

  Blue tarps, freight pallets, five-gallon buckets: the unholy trinity of hillbilly yard art. Accumulate enough around your house and you’re either the punch line to a Jeff Foxworthy joke or you’re getting serious about firewood. I prefer the latter, but the truth is, we’re probably a little of both. When you live out in the woods, your collection of these things just seems to grow on its own; next thing you know, you’re dragging your best blue tarp off the woodpile to wrap rusting kitchen appliances in the yard. Or spreading it over the ’72 Camaro up on blocks out front, and tuning up your banjo. It’s a slippery slope.

  But we’re not all the way there yet. For now, the three icons of modern rural life function mainly in the service of our firewood production. Here’s how:

  First of all, it’s bluetarp. One word, two syllables, emphasis on the first. If you want any kind of credibility whatsoever, you need to get your pronunciation right. Second, it rains like hell around here, so tarps – and plenty of ’em – are critical to properly curing the firewood that’s going to keep us warm all winter. Let me backtrack a bit here. If you’ve stacked your firewood to allow decent air circulation, a little, or even a lot, of rain is okay early on. The process of soaking and drying helps green wood rid itself of sap. But toward the end of August, rain-wet cordwood won’t dry before you need to burn it. That’s when blue tarps come into play. I keep our wood stacked out in the open for as long as possible, letting the sun and wind do their work. But at the first hint of late-summer rain, out come the tarps. When the sun reappears, I pull the tarps off and the curing process continues.

  When the tarps start to be on more often than off, it’s time to move all the dry wood into the shed. And it’s important to remember that the drying process won’t continue inside, even though I’ve ventilated the shed walls with so many holes they look like Swiss cheese. Any residual moisture leads to mold and lousy burning. One year I left a cord of alder out in the rain uncovered and thought it had dried enough before I packed it into the back of the shed. By the time we’d burned through everything in front of it, the stack had turned into a putrid wall of fuzzy mold. There were even mushrooms sprouting from it. It was so frightening, I spent several hours researching rental hazmat suits. When this proved fruitless, I pulled a painter’s mask over my face, hauled the whole pile way back into the woods, and burned my clothes when I was done. Then I went out and bought more blue tarps. You can never have enough blue tarps.

  Pallets are the foundation of our entire firewood enterprise. We get ours from the local lumberyard, where every Tuesday worn and partially broken pallets are left out in the parking lot for the taking. Whenever I’m driving by and have room in the car, I stop and grab the best of the pile. Sometimes you need to replace a broken board or two, but over time, you end up with a pretty decent collection.

  Any wood left in contact with the ground here soaks up moisture, even during the summer. Pallets are perfect drying racks, ready-made to keep air flowing under firewood. Our shed floor is made up of 14 pallets wedged into place and leveled with bricks, boards and whatever else was handy. Outside, the length of the shed is lined with more pallets, buried under double rows of recently split, drying wood, which will be moved inside once it has finished curing. Up by the driveway we have even more pallets, holding a slowly growing supply of rounds waiting to be split. You can never have enough pallets.

  And then there are the plastic buckets. Mostly we use the round, five-gallon variety that once held paint, stain, or drywall mud. Some were left over from our house remodel, but I’m not sure where the rest came from. They just seem to appear and join the rotation. Buckets are ideal storage containers for dry kindling, with the benefit of built-in handles for easy hauling up to the house. When they’re empty, I take them back to the shed, where Skyla, Weston, and I form a kindling production line. From a pile out back, we drag pieces of splintered cedar siding, which I split into long, narrow strips with the ax. Then the kids stomp these into lengths that fit our stove. Busting kindling is fun. Weston, fully outfitted in rain boots and swim goggles (my safety glasses were too big) leaps onto each cedar strip with both feet, yelling, “HI-YAAAA!” Skyla, also wearing swim goggles, works much less theatrically and at twice the rate of the Karate Kid. The buckets fill up fast, and we haul them to the house feeling good about our work.

  The utility of plastic buckets, though, goes far beyond firewood storage. Maybe that explains why we have so many. One holds all my wood-cutting gear (chain-saw oil, sharpening files, plastic wedges, measuring stick, folding handsaw), another contains a full set of clamming equipment (mesh bags, lantern, extra mantles, matches, gloves), and yet another is set aside for hauling road-repair gravel. The nice clean ones, especially if they have lids, haul crab bait, crabs, dry clothes, and fishing gear in the boat. I even use one special “food grade” bucket to brine turkey breasts for smoking. The uses are endless: Got some raspberry canes waiting to be planted? Stash ’em in a bucket. Need to bleed a salmon out quickly? Cut the gills and put it head down in a bucket of water. Digging up more beets or potatoes than you can carry? Better bring a bucket. The plastic five-gallon bucket, then, is the duct tape of containers – a versatile, practical solution to most any problem. You can never have enough plastic buckets.

  Before you know it, the yard ends up festooned with tarps, pallets, and buckets. And you’re contemplating a step up to the hillbilly-deluxe level, which involves 55-gallon oil drums and 40-foot steel freight containers. Like I said, it’s a slippery slope.

  Now, a month after the summer solstice, the days are growing imperceptibly shorter. Common sense tells us that the earth should be cooling, but instead, the weather lags behind, as it always does, and we bask in the heat of high summer. Prime wood-drying time. In the weeks to come, the wood stacks will shrink a good four or five inches in height as moisture escapes and logs shrink.

  Next month I’ll have to start paying closer attention to weather patterns. Last year I gambled and lost trying to squeeze in a few extra days of drying time. An unexpected front moved through before I could haul the tarps out, and I spent a nervous few weeks in September hoping for Indian summer to fix my mistake. I’m not going to risk it this year.

  If we can get a solid week of warm, sunny weather in early September, I’ll take it. A dry north wind would make it even better. Then it’s a full weekend spent moving firewood into the shed, and a surprising sense of relief when it’s all safe. After that, bring on the rain.

  Standing here squinting into bright July sunshine, I find these future labors almost as hard to imagine as the cold, dark winter ahead. Could night ever really fall at 4:30 in the afternoon? Will I stand in this very spot shivering in my down parka? It hardly seems possible. Across the yard, Skyla and Weston spray each other with a hose, running and sliding on wet grass. Stacy’s in the garden, tying up tomato vines to support the growing weight of still-green fruit. A bumblebee buzzes past, headed for the late-blooming raspberries. I look back at our long rows of drying wood. Do we have enough? I doubt it. You can never have enough firewood.

  YOU CAN’T EAT DAHLIAS

  Stacy was supposed to be here an hour ago. Skyla, Weston, and
I, having concluded our morning fishing, idle the boat just offshore, turning slow circles in the hot sun, waiting. The plan was for the three of us to fish while Stacy worked at the farm plot, then she would meet us at the beach to pick up the kids on her way home. Weston would get his nap, Skyla her playdate, and I could keep fishing through the afternoon tide. But she’s not here.

  Another half hour passes, and I can feel my impatience winding up like a spring. The good fishing tide comes and goes. Finally, her car emerges from the forested hillside. I run the boat up on the beach, feeling grumpy about wasting time and tide. Waves beat the boat up against the cobbled shore and I quickly lift the kids out and set them on dry land. When Stacy walks down to meet us, I make an exaggerated show of looking at my watch and say, “What happened? We’ve been waiting almost two hours.” She doesn’t say anything. I look at her more closely and see a pale, greenish cast showing through her sun-browned skin. Her eyes are red and watery. “I’ve been on the side of the road throwing up,” she says, her voice shaking. “There’s blight at the farm.”

  A week of heavy rain and warm temperatures put a layer of mold on ripening raspberries and powdery mildew on the broad leaves of zucchini and squash. We already knew there was some trouble in the garden, but figured that if seasonable weather returned, we could deal with it. But blight, that’s something else altogether. Some say it lives in the soil and splashes onto plants when it rains; others believe it arrives with the rain itself. One thing everyone agrees on is that when dark blotches appear on tomato stalks, there is no hope. Four years ago, late blight hit our tomatoes just before ripening and our frantic, all-out efforts to save the fruit proved futile. Last week, when rain started falling through warm, humid air, a collective dread rose in the gardening community. A few days later, there were whispered rumors of blight. Not that anyone actually admits they have blight; it’s so contagious that if you show up with a blighted stalk at the feed and seed, people flee in horror. Nobody wants the Black Death.

  While the term “Black Death” may sound melodramatic when used by modern recreational gardeners, it’s worth noting that our tomato blight is the same fungus that caused the Irish Potato Famine. Within a year of its appearance on Irish farms in 1844, blight had wiped out nearly half the national crop. The result was catastrophic in a country where potatoes had become the primary food source. Nearly a million people starved to death, and twice that number left the country in desperation. This little fungus brought hunger and tragedy to an entire country and changed the course of world history. More than a century and a half later, it still carries a heavy load of residual dread.

  When Stacy got to the farm this morning and saw black spots on stalks that had been a healthy green yesterday, she knew it was over. The heat-loving tropical tomatoes, already weakened by our late spring and cool summer, were sitting ducks. All the months of labor and coddling were wiped out overnight. The 72 remaining plants from all those seedlings started in our laundry room back in March had to be destroyed.

  She had spent long, sweaty hours digging up her cherished plants and stuffing them into a burn barrel. It was heartbreaking work. On the way to meet us, she was overcome by nausea and cold sweats so powerful she couldn’t drive. Whether it was heat exhaustion, emotional distress, or a toxic effect from so much contact with the plants themselves (tomatoes, like potatoes and eggplant, are close relatives of poisonous nightshade), it was hardly the joyful day of garden work she had anticipated. After my initial greeting, belated attempts to offer comfort feel lame and insincere to both of us.

  I push the boat off the rocks and watch them drive up the beach road and out of sight. Hardly the joyful afternoon of fishing I had imagined. And it’s not just the blight, either. We can always buy tomatoes at the store; they won’t be nearly as good, but we aren’t going to starve. What I’m really upset about is me.

  In my experience, you rarely catch fish when angry (“Don’t fish mad!” they say), and I doubt that’s going to change this afternoon. My bad juju sends out negative energy the way boats with ungrounded electrical systems pulse with fish-repellent voltage. I can’t shake my mood and, predictably, I fail to find a fish in the next two spots. After a distracted pass through a third, I decide to pack it in. It’s just not going to happen today.

  I load the boat on the trailer and drive up through town on the way home. Passing the grocery store, a new thought occurs to me: We haven’t bought produce in months. Even with today’s loss, the garden has hardly been a failure. Through sheer effort, Stacy has willed a plentiful harvest from the garden in spite of all our lousy weather. We’ve had armloads of green, yellow, and purple string beans; long, crisp Japanese cucumbers; bunches of chard and spinach; four kinds of carrots; enough broccoli to eat five times a week; mixed salad greens of trout’s back lettuce, romaine, and peppery arugula; pungent basil; more zucchini and crookneck squash than we know how to use; sweet, earthy golden and red beets.

  We’re up to our eyeballs in beets. Last month, Stacy and her friend Jenn drove up to a large organic seed farm in the Skagit Valley, where acres of experimental beet cultivars were about to be tilled under for compost. They returned home with five-gallon buckets full of beets stacked to the roof of Jenn’s van. We ate them boiled, steamed, roasted and sautéed, barely putting a dent in the supply. Finally, Stacy brought out the canning gear, filling shelves throughout the house with sweet pickled beets, savory canned beets, beet relish… If you happen to find yourself running short of beets, give us a ring. We could use the shelf space.

  A brief side note on beets: If you’re going to eat them in any quantity, it’s important to remember you ate them. I repeat, remember that you ate beets. I won’t go into details here, but let’s just say that the natural red color – often used as organic dye – does not break down in the digestive tract. If you forget, there will come a moment of utter terror, and perhaps an unnecessary trip to the doctor. Trust me on this.

  The fact is, we’ve been eating like royalty for months. There were fresh garden stir-fries with ginger and oyster sauce, salads every night, sautéed chard in garlic and olive oil, buttery parmesan zucchini, Kabocha squash braised to the texture of roasted chestnuts. The steamed broccoli was so sweet you wondered if it was really broccoli. Nasu dengaku became a favorite treat, made from sliced Japanese eggplant coated with miso, sugar, and soy and broiled to caramelized, jammy perfection.

  The blight has left our potatoes alone (at least so far), and the kids revel in digging through the mounds with bare hands to find them. We’ve used the golden German butterballs for gratins bubbling with cream, butter, and cheese. (So much for my cholesterol count.) Small, creamy reds we’ve boiled and cubed for potato salad. Fluffy Rio Grande russets have become hash browns, bakers, and, mixed with butter and sour cream, mashers good enough to make a main course. With more still in the ground, we’ll store what we already have in a cool cabinet and enjoy our “buried treasure” all through the winter.

  And really, it’s not as if we won’t have any tomatoes. Before she pulled the doomed plants that had yet to show blight symptoms from the ground, Stacy harvested a dozen flats of uncontaminated green fruit. These will slowly ripen in the coming months on windowsills. They will not be the glorious, sugary, vine-ripened tomatoes we hoped for, but there will be plenty. And the indoor-ripened versions, with their lower sugar content, make salsa and spaghetti sauce more to our taste anyway.

  Despite Weston’s attentive care and fervent wishes, his watermelons didn’t pan out this year. The vines came up and grew but languished for lack of sunlight and heat. Flowers formed on the stunted plants, eventually producing three rock-hard, dark green melons about the size of golf balls. They molded away without ripening. But he’s already looking forward to the “big sweet ones” he’ll grow next summer.

  Then there are the dahlias. When Stacy first planted them, I protested, saying we needed food, not flowers. “Why waste time and space on decoration?” I asked. Of course, she ignored me and went ah
ead. Looking back, I couldn’t have been more wrong. Especially in what has been a cool and gray summer, these otherworldly explosions of color provide a kind of nourishment I did not foresee. I know, it sounds corny. But to wake up on a foggy morning and see radiant blooms through the bedroom window, to find them glowing from a vase on the kitchen table, to stop and watch a tiny, fluorescent-green tree frog nestled between burgundy petals…somehow lifts the spirit. It’s a value that’s difficult to quantify, but a value nonetheless.

  There’s one kind in particular, called Tequila Sunrise, with volleyball-sized flowers of astonishing design. Brilliant yellow dissolves to warm peach tones on the outer petals, gradually gaining intensity toward the deep orange center of the bloom. How could anything be more perfect? On my way through the yard, busy with this or that, I frequently pause for long moments to marvel at its beauty.

  The garden has fed us in many ways this summer. Beyond the meals and flowers, there is the image of Skyla and Weston making deliveries to our neighbors, their baskets overflowing with vegetables they helped grow. There have been boxes of produce to help feed needy families. And there’s the community of gardeners that has grown up around the farm plot. All of this is Stacy’s doing. I resolve to tell her how important her work is to the family and how much it means to me.

  When I unhook the boat and walk around the side of the house to get the hose, I see the dahlias – fuchsia, pale pink, hot orange, deep crimson, sunshine yellow. A tangle of dark green summer squash and tricolored Northern Lights chard sprawls out below. Hidden somewhere in the foliage lies the behemoth zucchini the kids are saving for the harvest fair.

  Stacy slides the kitchen door open and comes outside. She’s changed clothes and showered, and though her eyes look tired, her color is returning. I put my arms around her. “I’m sorry about the blight,” I say. There’s more, but I haven’t figured out how to say it yet. She hesitates, then pulls in closer to my chest. I can feel her damp hair on my neck. “So am I,” she says, “So am I.” We stand there together for a long time, looking at the dahlias.