Idyll Banter: Weekly Excursions to a Very Small Town

by Chris Bohjalian

  Chapter 5.

  A GARDENER CAN TAKE PRIDE IN THOSE $17 CARROTS

  LATER THIS MONTH I will be spending the night in Sugar Hill, New Hampshire, and one component of my dinner will be carrots that cost about as much as a DVD player.

  I am exaggerating, but not by as much as you think.

  Moreover, these are not rare and unusual carrots: The packet of seeds cost a dollar and change at the hardware store.

  They are, however, a part of a backyard vegetable garden with a price tag approaching $600. Actually, "backyard vegetable garden" implies the garden is small and manageable, perhaps the length and width of a two-car garage. This garden, by comparison, is about the size of Costco.

  Moreover, this three-digit figure is exclusive of all labor costs with the exception of rototilling ($50), because my sister-in-law and I were the labor, and it would be impossible to put a price tag on the joy in-laws share when they are hacking their way through lupine together underneath the hot sun, or battling armies of bugs so dense that at one point (and here I am not exaggerating) my sister-in-law thought I had put gloves on my hands.

  I hadn't.

  Here is what happened. Though my sister-in-law and her family live in Manhattan, they spend their summers at the ancestral homestead in northern New Hampshire. When she was a child, they used to have a vegetable garden, but they hadn't in the last thirty-five years because no one in the family would ever get to the house until July.

  This year she vowed to change that. In early May she had a plot of yard tilled. I offered to plant the garden for her at the end of May, but she wanted to be a part of this joyful process, and so she and her daughter and my mother-in-law took the train to White River Junction so they could participate. The tickets totaled $372.

  I agreed to meet them over Memorial Day weekend to help get the garden in.

  Immediately I noticed the size of the plot: The Joad family in Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath never confronted a field this big.

  "Where's the seeder?" I asked. "And the tractor?"

  "The what?"

  "We're planting this by hand, aren't we?"

  She nodded. We began at 5:00 in the morning, possibly earlier than my sister-in-law has ever gotten up in her life. During the next two days, we planted the vegetables of her choice: tomatoes, potatoes, turnips (including something very scary-looking called kohlrabi), lettuce, zucchini, squash, watermelons (be kind--she hails from New York and is unfamiliar with New England tundra), peppers, Swiss chard, radishes, beets, beans (lima, butter, and bush), carrots, cucumbers, and corn.

  The seeds and seedlings cost $47. We spent $49 for manure and $16 for Miracle-Gro.

  Since my sister-in-law was then returning to Manhattan until school ended in June, we placed bark chips and plastic mulch between the rows to minimize the meadows of weeds that were sure to pop up in her absence. The bark chips and mulch rang in at $55.

  When we were done, we took comfort in the notion that if there wasn't a frost, if it rained (but not too much), if the birds didn't eat the seeds, if rabbits or deer didn't eat the early plants, if the weeds didn't become a jungle, and if the lupine didn't return en masse, there would be a mighty fine garden awaiting her return.

  Exact cost: $589.

  Three weeks later, I went by to see what had survived, and I was pleasantly surprised to discover that about half of the garden had made it. Nothing needed thinning, that was for sure, but the potatoes and the beets and nine of the carrots (I counted) were thriving.

  In any event, if my sister-in-law were to divide $589 by the number of vegetables we will eat from that garden, it would make an organic tomato in the Antarctic look like a bargain. But then she grew these vegetables herself, and that is the reason we do this.

  Self-sufficiency. Pride. The joy one can only derive from a $17 carrot.

  Chapter 6.

  NOTHING LIKE MOM'S BIOHAZARD

  FOR DINNER

  SOME YEARS AGO my wife and I were trying to spare my mother's feelings, and so we threw away a casserole dish of something she had made with seashell pasta, frozen shrimp, mock crab (not rock crab), stringy mussels, and canned clams. My mother called it fruits del mar or--roughly translated--seafood so bad the smell alone will scar you for life.

  At least once she served the stuff at a dinner party. There were (Surprise!) buckets of leftovers. This was in the early 1970s, when people were downing bourbon and scotch the way today we knock back bottled water, but there wasn't enough alcohol in all of creation to make my parents' dinner guests join the clean-plate club that evening. Consequently, my brother and I ate more than our share of it the following night because--in a rare and completely uncharacteristic show of affection--we thought we should be gentle with our mother's delicate sensibilities. Our mother actually took to her grave the completely mistaken belief that we thought the casserole was not merely edible, it was scrumptious.

  It wasn't. We had four dogs when I was growing up, two of which would eat their own excrement when they were bored, and none of them were willing to touch my mother's fruits del mar.

  That's why one morning my wife and I found ourselves dumping a whole vat of the entree--faux crab, soggy pasta shells, the dried parsley flakes from a jar--down the garbage chute at the end of the hallway in my parents' apartment building in Florida. We had arrived for a visit the night before, and so (naturally) my mother had welcomed us with her signature dish. The next morning when she saw how much remained, she chirped happily, "Oh, good, we can have leftovers tonight!"

  No, we couldn't. At least I couldn't. Consequently, when my parents went out that morning to run some errands, my wife and I got rid of the remnants, telling my mother when she returned that it was just so delicious we had to eat it for breakfast. In hindsight, the casserole was probably a biohazard and the two of us violated Florida's laws regarding the proper disposal of hazardous waste.

  Memories of my mother's fruits del mar came back to me last month because my family and I were in a restaurant, and there on the menu was the entree. The description was a chilling parody of my mother's version: "The freshest seafood--crab or lobster or scallops--in a delicate clam sauce. Served atop our homemade pasta shells."

  That night when we got home I had to call my father to tell him. "You'll never believe it," I said. "We were just out to dinner, and the restaurant actually had a gourmet version of mom's fruits del mar."

  "It's common here in Florida," my father said, "and it's not half-bad when it's made well." Then he laughed and added, "But your mother and I could never understand how you and your brother could eat it the way she made it. Those canned clams used to make us both gag."

  I was stunned--and not a little confused. "Then why did she keep making it for us?"

  "Because the two of you seemed to love it so much. We just figured it was like Velveeta--one of those foods you seemed to enjoy that struck people with normal palates as completely inedible."

  Then he reminded me that during the Super Bowl this past January, it was I who had made a dish with frozen string beans, a can of toasted onion rings, and a big jar of Cheez Whiz.

  "You've always had very special tastes in food," he said.

  My mother and I showed our love for each other in many ways over the years before she died, but perhaps none as unpredictably O. Henry-esque as her exuberant willingness to make me the dreaded fruits del mar and my feigned eagerness when she served it.

  Chapter 7.

  AT DENVER'S GATE B42 WHEN THE WORLD WAS TRANSFORMED

  I WAS AT Gate B42 at Denver International Airport when the world changed Tuesday morning. And change it did. It was not merely the southern tip of the Manhattan skyline that was tragically obliterated, it was the notion that only skyscrapers and embassies in other countries--foreign lands such as Kenya and Tanzania or cities with faraway names like Dhahran--could collapse with a literally earth-shattering suddenness.

  My wife used to work in the World Trade Center when she was a bond trader and we lived in
New York. She worked on the 104th floor.

  Only nine months ago, my wife and I showed the two towers to our seven-year-old daughter for the first time, when we were taking her to the Statue of Liberty. We stood in the cold on the ferry and told her stories of how quickly the elevators seemed to move and what the view was like for her mother when she would gaze out the massive windows to the west and the south.

  The memory stuck for our little girl, and Tuesday was a long day for her--though I wasn't there to hold her because I had been at the airport in Denver that morning.

  I learned of the disaster when I called my wife to wish her good morning from the gate. It was about 7:15 A.M. my time, and 9:15 in the east.

  "It's not a good morning," she said, and her voice had a quiver to it I wasn't sure I had ever heard there before. I immediately feared that something had happened at our daughter's school or to one of our parents. And then she told me what she had heard on the radio.

  She explained that two planes had crashed into the towers, and at least one was a commercial jet. This was no Cessna accidentally dinging the paint on the side.

  A plane crashing into one of the World Trade Center monoliths has always been one of her fears, something she sees in her mind's eye often when we fly near Manhattan and the skyline seems so close it's as if we're at eye level with the rooftops. We're not, of course, even when the plane is well into its final descent, and she had always presumed this fear was completely unfounded. No longer.

  As soon as she had finished describing to me what she had heard on the radio and then seen on the television, the cell phones around me started to ring. The gate was crowded, and we all had our phones, and there was someone somewhere for virtually every one of us who wanted us to know what had happened because they loved us and were scared. They needed to hear our voices and know where we were.

  Still, the magnitude of the attack wasn't yet clear, and the airline had us board the jet for our planned flight to San Francisco a little past 7:30. I was sitting one empty seat away from a passenger whose brother-in-law worked in the World Trade Center, and he called on his phone everyone he could think of who might know the fate of the complex of buildings tantalizingly close to the Statue of Liberty.

  All this week I have wondered why the Statue of Liberty wasn't, apparently, on the list of targets. After all, we had been shown that Washington, D.C., was not invincible, and the symbol of our financial and corporate wealth was devastatingly vulnerable. Why not add to that litany the majestic icon of our freedom? Surely by mid-morning there are plenty of people on that small island, a good many of whom are likely to be children.

  I will never know whether the brother-in-law of the gentleman I met on the airplane is alive. After waiting about forty-five minutes in the plane on the ground, the pilot informed us that no more flights would be leaving until at the very least the end of the day, and in a voice that was even and calm he told us why. He told us that the number of planes that had crashed now totaled three, and that a fourth one seemed to be missing. We were to disembark.

  I exited the plane and sat stunned in the very seat at the gate where my wife had informed me that the world had been forever transformed. I called her again, and the one piece of good news she had was that a friend of ours who we presumed had been at the World Trade Center that morning had been fired at the end of last month. My wife had tracked her down at her home while I'd been on the edge of the tarmac.

  Even this kernel of relief dried up quickly, however, when I saw the man from the plane whose brother-in-law had been at work at the tip of the island. He passed by me, squeezing his cell phone against his ear, and his skin was paler than it had seemed when we had spoken together on the inside of the plane. I told myself it was just the lighting in the terminal versus the lighting in the cabin, but I didn't really believe this was the case.

  I wasn't sure what I should do. I was at the very beginning of a lengthy book tour, and I was supposed to be heading west, but I no longer had any desire to talk about my novel. Likewise, I couldn't believe there was a soul on the planet who would have any interest, either.

  I wanted only to go home, but even that was impossible. An airport representative informed us that the airport was going to close. We were to take the underground trains from our concourse back to the main terminal, and from there we were to vacate the airport. It wasn't going to reopen for at least twenty-four hours.

  I was lucky: The hotel where I had been staying hadn't even changed the sheets on the bed on which I'd slept, and my publisher was able to get me the very same room. Other travelers weren't so fortunate.

  Still, that afternoon when I took a long walk I felt farther from home than I ever had in my life, and the sky above--though the fathomless blue that I crave in the fall--made me lonely. I knew, by then, that there wasn't a commercial jet in the sky. They'd all landed as quickly as they could.

  Imagine, I thought. Other than those F-16s on patrol, a sky without planes.

  For all of us there are moments that represent horrific turning points in our lives and images that we will never be able to forget: the paisley-shaped plumes of smoke that trailed the space shuttle Challenger through the atmosphere after it exploded; the rubble that surrounded the skeletal remains of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City; and, of course, the footage we revisited the past few days of Pearl Harbor and the assassination of John Kennedy.

  I doubt any of those images, however, will scar the soul of a nation as deeply as what we all watched on television or in person this week: a plane slicing into one of the World Trade Center towers, its twin beside it already ablaze; two 110-story buildings collapsing in upon themselves in mere seconds in storms of smoke and soot and debris. A rolling wave of ash that tumbled like lava down the streets of the financial district.

  My sense is that this nation will recover. We will not be bullied, and we will not be frightened; we will give meaning to the lives of the people who died by going on--by refusing to see our way of life annihilated.

  But we will all know where we were when the comfort and security we take for granted was destroyed as surely as the skyline of lower Manhattan. And that moment, for me, will be a gate at an airport far from home.

  Chapter 8.

  TALKING THEN, TALKING NOW

  IN THE DAYS immediately after terrorists transformed four commercial passenger jets into guided missiles last year and forever altered our world, people talked. We talked of our immediate past and where we had been September 11.

  Two weeks later I agreed to stumble through the vestiges of a largely canceled book tour in Boston, and I must have had fifteen conversations about the attacks that late September day with people I was meeting for the first time. Everyone needed to share where they were, what they had experienced, and their personal interpretation of how things had changed.

  All the conversations that day seemed to share one thing: the desire to portray oneself as having a connection, however tenuous or vague, to the victims of the attack. One woman told me that she had gone that weekend to a memorial service for a friend of a friend. Another person said that she'd flown twice on the same Boston-based flight that would auger into the World Trade Center's north tower. A man shared with me his fears for his nephew who was living in Brooklyn Heights and who was at the moment enduring the fumes from the fires in lower Manhattan.

  There were more, and I certainly wasn't shy with my own anecdotes: the fact that I had been at Denver International Airport when the attacks occurred and was stranded in Denver for a week, or the footnote that my wife once worked on the 104th floor of one of the World Trade Center towers.

  Throughout the day in Boston I was with a woman who was conspicuously quiet: my media escort, the individual my publisher had retained to take me to the area bookstores and radio stations.

  Around lunchtime I wondered why she was so silent when people shared their tales of 9/11. My sense was that suddenly we were a nation of talkers--except for this woman. And so I asked her
where she had been on the morning of 9/11.

  She rolled her eyes and told me--not a trace of self-pity in her voice--that she had begun the day watching as her brother perished because he worked on an upper floor of one of the towers, and then she helped novelist Jane Hamilton find a way back to her home in the Midwest.

  After a moment she added: "If I entered the conversations you've been having today, I would have stopped them dead in their tracks. There's a lot of one-upmanship going on right now, and I just don't feel like playing."

  Ever since then, I've been leery of talking about where I was on 9/11, or what I was experiencing. It's not that I no longer believe it's healthy or helpful to reflect on my specific place in the cosmos on 9/11. But my grief is different from that experienced by the families of the nearly three thousand people who died, the people who still live in lower Manhattan, or the people who rose to the daunting task of cleaning up the mess: carting away a literal mountain of rubble, trying to identify the tens of thousands of body parts, or even replacing the windows that were shattered at the nearby apartment buildings.