Events leading up to
A “before” story from Seize You on the Dark Side of the Moo
Events leading up to
A person's death figures in this story. Just thought we'd get that out of the way from the starting gate. Best for a reader to be warned at the beginning. It could probably have been left out, but now it's too late. The story is in print. Life, as it's said, is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans, and some-times, like Wile E. Coyote you don't see the anvil coming until it's too late.
[Image courtesty of drawception.com.]
Jennifer (not the foredoomed person) was making other plans when she met Susanne (ditto) at the library one balmy September afternoon. Susanne mentioned a lecture slated for that evening, at the university, by the author of a book about carrots. As you likely don't know, unless you've met Jen at the co-op or perhaps up in Weaverville at Reems Creek Nursery, Jen is kind of a, well let's be kind and not use the word “nut,” kind of an extreme aficionado of root vegetables, I mean to say, excessively so, with a particular emphasis on carrots. Carrots!
You likely only grow Nantes. Am I right? And more than likely only one or a couple of Nantes varieties. Me too. But Jen had a dozen types in her garden last season, and that's just the Nantes. There were two Imperators and as many Chantenays and then the minis. It's a wonder the woman didn't turn orange, though, of course, she grows yellow, white and purple types in addition to the more traditional pumpkin-toned ones.
Oh, and parsnips, natch.
The idea that such eensy-bitsy seeds could produce such sweet succulence in as little as 58 days had really blown Jen's mind only three years ago1. That's not radish-fast, of course, but neither are they radish-hot. I mean, you'd never actually put a radish in a juicer, right? Horses couldn't drag her that way, to coin a phrase. (If you are one who would—oh dear—please put down this book, raise your hands way up high and back away slowly.)
So you can well imagine that our protagonist wouldn't be kept away from a lecture by a real carrot expert! She cancelled her date with Mike (no, not him either).
Mike, unsurprisingly, doesn't share her passion for columnar root vegetables. Few do. I mean, he's a good egg and they're friendship hasn't suffered from their disparate views on veggies, but she knew he wasn't going to sit still for a deep-dive discourse on what might be accurately described as somewhat phallic root vegetables.
Large carrots leave him feeling, there's no way around it, inadequate, so when they occasionally dined together she was careful to only put minis in the salad. Otherwise he was, as noted above, a good egg. He would likely tune in to some sort of sporting event (Not golf. What were you thinking? I mean, really… an actual sport.) and chill.
Solomon Delgado (nor Sol, FYI) had written his book, Should You Carrot All? Rooting around in the garden, after more than a decade as an experimental agronomist at the Rodale Institute. If there was anything to know about the tubular treasures, he knew it.
As Delgado began his talk Jen was distressed to discover that he was possessed of a profound stutter.
“I n-n-n-know y-you uh-are uh-all h-h-here t-to ...” a pause, “t-to l-learn uh-about k-k-k-carrot k-culture.” Here he took off his glasses, pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and polished them briefly.
Oh boy. This was going to be a chore.
He went on to say that the key to successful production of a carrot crop was preparation of the soil, though it took him a good bit longer than the preceding phrase to get that information out. Then, “The p-p-point uh-I w-wish t-t-to k-k-k-con-v-vey,” another pause, “is that, is, the d-d-dai-k-k-kon is your t-t-tool, y-your w-way t-to d-dig d-d-deep, in-t-to the s-soil, to p-p-pen-pene-t-trate, to p-part th-the l-living b-b-body of th-the earth ...” and so on. Jen had to concentrate, to fully focus, in order to follow the halting thread of the talk, interspersed as it was by more polishing of lenses and third-trimester-long pregnant pauses, together with a recurring rendition of that phrase. “The daikon (a mild-flavored winter radish usually characterized by fast-growing leaves and a long, white, root, cf. Wikipedia) is your tool, your way to dig deep, to penetrate, to part the living body of the earth.”
But as she listened intently the difficulty in parsing Delgado's speech seemed to fade. The rhythm was almost hypnotic. Soon he was discussing Masanobu Fukuoka's landmark tome, The One Straw Revolution. “M-m-mas-uh-ano-b-bu,” and etc.
Fukuoka, she learned, was famous, at least within certain circles, for causing deserts to bloom with a combination of daikons and logs. The giant radishes to break up hard soil and the logs to build loam as they decomposed. From decades of experimentation he had discovered that burying logs was the fastest way to create nutrient rich topsoil on land that had been laid waste by poor farm practices or suffered desertification..
At the conclusion, Jennifer realized she had never attended a more spell-binding lecture and joined in the extended round of applause. She'd found a new certitude about her favorite veggie though it wasn't just the crispy cylindrical edible shaft, short or long, slim or plump, that fired her imagination. Rather it was the entirety of the micro and macro ecosystem in which each relentlessly reaching root resided. The relationship between plant and soil, leaf and sun, bacterium and cell wall, flesh and vole2. She waited while the hundred or so attendees left, or bought books from a young woman at a table just inside the entry doors, then stepped into the back of the line of autograph seekers. She checked her phone just before it came her turn to speak to the lecturer and saw that it was almost 9:30. The hours had passed as in a dream.
“Mr. Delgado.”
“Sol.”
“Oh. Okay. Sol. I'm Jen. Jennifer. That was marvelous. I mean, I feel like I've come away with a much more profound understanding of what it means to draw life up out of the soil. To participate in, in, magic I guess.”
“It is that,” he responded. “Alchemy practically. Sunlight and nutrients and soil chemistry and a person to watch over it. As Fukuoka framed it. 'The best fertilizer is a gardener’s shadow.'”
Sandy was taken aback. Where was the stutter? Or had she become so accustomed to his ratcheting speech that she no longer heard it?
“You're a gardener.” He said it as a statement, not a question.
“For a few years.”
“And I'd bet organic.”
She nodded. “I'm learning. I kind of specialize in carrots.”
“Nantes?”
She nodded.”
“Which ones?”
“Scarlet, Bolero, Nelson, Yaya, Napa, Touchon,” a pause. “Let's see, um, Parano, White Satin, Purple Dragon, oh and Cosmic Purple.”
“You're no slouch.”
“And then the others.”
“Oh?”
“The Imperators and Chantenays. And some minis.”
“You must have quite a garden. I'd love to see it.”
“Oh, it is what it is.” Sandy thought a moment, then added, “You could come by in the morning. I mean, if you have time. I know you're on your book tour.”
“How about tonight?” he replied. “There's a full moon.”
“Oh. I guess.” Should she? Walk around in the moonlihgt with a near stranger? Authors on book tours do not always behave (as we all know). Then, “Why not? Have you got a car? I don't live far.”
“Came from the airport in a Lyft.”
“You can ride with me ...”
“And I can figure it out later. I'm traveling light. Just the briefcase,” he gestured toward the base of the lectern. “And an overnight bag.”
As she drove Sandy decided to ask the obvious question. “I hope I'm not stepping into anything here, but when you were lecturing, you, um ...”
“Halting? Stuttering?”
She nodded, “That's it ...”
“An act.”
“An act?”
“Did you notice that you really had to pay attention to follow what I was saying?”
She nodded again. “An act.”
“I've discovered that how I deliver my talks is every bit as important as the information I'm trying to convey. Sort of McLuhan's Medium is the Message combined with a dose of Bucky Fuller.”
“Fuller?”
“The glasses polishing and the long pauses. The repetition of a beginning phrase. Of course Fuller was nearly blind as a bat, so he probably needed to keep his glasses clean. Then going back to the start and coming forward to a different piece of the story. Learned that watching a video of Fuller explaining Synergetics. Didn't understand much about his math but I could see how his rhythm, his repetition worked. 'Your way to dig deep, to penetrate, to part the living body of the earth.'”
“The way you say it now, without the stutter, it's, uh,” did she dare say it? “Almost erotic.”
“Almost, yes. And intentional. The stutter was my own idea, to sort of trick people into paying closer attention.”
“It works.” Almost erotic, she thought, and now she's taking him home? Maybe this wasn't a good idea after all. Still and all, he seemed nice enough.
“Thanks.”
In her kitchen, before they walked out to the garden, she offered and he accepted a glass of merlot and they carried the stemware into the moonlight.
“It wants weeding,” she offered.
“Always do by this time in the season, unless you've got a full time staff,” he laughed. “With this tour I'm afraid my own plot is a jungle. Yours is neatness itself by comparison.”
“No one to help out at home?”
“Nope. When I worked at Rodale of course there was a big team. But now it's just me and the cats.” He knelt beside a row of feathery greens and pushed his fingers into the soil. “Aha!” He pulled a carrot up and out. “Voila! Magic!”
“Cats?”
“Tuxedo Joe and Azulapanula. Hired a sitter they seem to like, but I still imagine they'll be pissed at me for being away for two weeks.”
“Where is home now?”
“Burnsville.”
“Burnsville? That's only, what, forty minutes from here? And you're flying?”
“Tour schedule. Just stopped in here between D.C. and Atlanta. Otherwise I'd have driven down.”
“Do you like touring?”
“Not the travel, but it's the best excuse I have to share something I dearly love. If I inspire just one person at each stop to go deeper, to connect more intimately with the soil, the rain, the sun, all that. I probably sound messianic or silly ...”
“You're with one now.”
“Success!” He clinked glasses in a toast and leaned forward to give her a quick peck on the forehead, arms spread with the wine in one hand and the aforementioned carrot in the other but stumbled. Jen caught him, bent back in the process, and the lips aimed at her forehead tracked downward and hit her own. “Oh,” Sol apologized, “that wasn't my intention. I was just ...”
Jen stepped close again. “It is mine,” and returned the oral gesture at a bit greater length. “That's for the inspiration.”
In the morning they toured the garden again, arm in arm, being rather more intimately acquainted at this point, and Sol offered some suggestions for her next season's planting. “I know you love carrots, but it'd be a good plan to rotate some other things through those beds. That would help slow down the pests.”
“I did lose some to voles.”
“Try putting in some mint. Peppermint in particular. They don't like it.”
“But it's pretty weedy. Won't it take over?”
“There's that, but it isn't deep rooted and it smells great when you pull it out. I've got about six kinds of mint all over the place. Just walking through it gives me a lift.”
“Jungle or not, I'd really like to visit your garden sometime. And your cats.”
“I'll be home next week.”
“If that's an invitation ….”
It was.
On the way to the airport Jen asked if Fukuoka was still teaching.
“No. He died in 2008, at 95.” Sol reached into his brief case and pulled out a well worn copy of One Straw. “But we have this. You can borrow it.”
“I was going to find it at Downtown Books or maybe online. You don't have to …”
“I know. But if I let you borrow mine you'll have to bring it back.”
*****
NOTE PER FOOTNOTES: Substack starts off with new numbering each time I post a story. But Footnotes in the original book are continuous and often refer back to previous super important stuff. So original Footnote #s are included below in [#]s.
1 [34] Jen is a newbie gardener. Better late than never.
2. [35] Ah yes, the vole. The vole who availed itself of mole tunnels and gnawed at the savory roots of her desire. The dastardly vole.
Copyright© 2019, Cecil Bothwell, All rights reserved.