Apr 27, 2008 - 04:05:05 CDT
A year ago, my mother gave me a rototiller as a housewarming gift. A week ago Saturday, on a moderately warm perfect afternoon, moderate breeze, meadowlarks singing, I tilled my garden.On Thursday, I saw my first crocus (pasqueflower). Last Sunday evening, I witnessed my first thunderstorm of the year. It was an odd, tentative, un-integrated thunderstorm, sharply powerful in bursts but not quite sure of itself.
Tally: First meadowlark of 2008, March 25. First pasqueflower, April 17. First thunderstorm, April 20.
Spring has sprung. The grass has not riz. One of my neighbors is already watering. That's a very bad sign.
It took me about an hour to start the tiller. Note to self: Next year, don't leave it out for part of the winter. I yanked the cord enough times to propel an Apollo capsule all the way to the moon. If I did not quite dislocate my shoulder, I certainly dislocated my heart. At one point, I thought of just pouring gasoline over the entire machine, tossing a lighted match from a safe (?) distance, and seeing what happened. By that time, I knew I could live with the outcome, either way.
In the end, of course, the tiller started, just at the moment when the Barcalounger region of my brain was saying, "Well, you don't really need a garden anyway. They're a lot of work. It's cheaper just to go to the farmers market. If you think about it, you'd be doing a lot of earnest vegetable growers a favor. Fresh food is overrated." And so on.
After that little crisis of slothfulness (No. 4 of the seven deadlies), I tilled happily, even blissfully, for the next five hours. I'm an obsessive tiller - deep, thorough, and many more passes than necessary. Every 20 minutes or so, I'd idle the tiller and run about moving the hose along the line of ponderosa pines. By sunset I had created - with a little help from the industrial revolution - a beautiful, rectangular, black earth garden plot. I took my shoes off and walked through it with winter-tender bare feet, just to feel the warm earth, the consistency of coffee grounds, between my toes. It's so beautiful that I almost hate to plant it.
Thomas Jefferson was right: "Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever He had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue." I would never try to pretend, even to my susceptible self, that I "labour in the earth." I labour, if labour it can really even be called, in the coffee shop and the library and the airport concourse. But my dalliance in my garden is the sanest, most stabilizing and most re-connecting thing I do.
On those handful of days in August when I gather every item of my evening meal fresh from the garden, and do little more than scrub it before eating it slowly, like a sacrament, with a glass of wine by my side, I feel that my life has meaning. I feel a kind of redemption.
But on a spring Saturday afternoon as I tilled, the wind picking up at the rate of a few more miles per hour every hour, I realized how very dry the land is this year. It tilled too easily, and what little moisture there was in the earth evaporated within minutes of my turning it over. Immediately, the veneer of my garden blew away to Minnesota. Trouble ahead, unless some soaking rains visit the earth in the next month or so.
I met a brand new adult North Dakotan this week, just transplanted from Missouri, and naturally I asked her how she likes it here. "Great," she said, and then without pause, "Is ... it always this windy here?" One never quite knows how to answer that one.
I love North Dakota in all of its moods. I'm not fond of the "perfect summers and often great autumns" argument. And though some of my good friends are snowbirds who maintain winter homes in Arizona and Florida, I dislike the phenomenon. I prefer my North Dakota raw and unapologetic. If you don't like to be made aware of your fragile temporariness in the cosmic scheme of things, you shouldn't live here. To be a North Dakotan is to get wind-whipped with some frequency. The sky matters here more than elsewhere and it does like to get in your face, to blow you off the walking path, to make you concentrate hard while driving, to pit your windshield and your siding, to rattle your serenity, to wreck your picnic, to scatter your laundry to kingdom come, and to blow stuff over that you thought was well secured. Now add some driving snow and January temperatures that kill and appall, and you have a formula for a sparsely populated place.
To ease my new friend's mind, I photocopied a page from the State Historical Society's book "A Vast and Open Plain: The Writings of the Lewis and Clark Expedition in North Dakota" and sent it to her.
Lewis and Clark left Fort Mandan on April 7, 1805, almost immediately after the ice broke up in the Missouri River. They were headed up "the heretofore deemed endless Missouri River" in search of its source. The winds were just what we've been experiencing lately, but even more pronounced in the wind tunnel of the Missouri River. For days the expedition could make no forward progress whatsoever, or they would start out in a 20 mph wind and then just give up - for all of their puissance - by 11 a.m. when things really got to blowing. Eventually, Meriwether Lewis, who regarded himself as the first white man ever to see that country near Williston, actually had to wonder, "is it always this windy here?"
On April 23, 1805, he wrote, "Set out at an early hour this morning. about nine A.M. the wind arose, and shortly after became so violent that we were unabled to proceed, in short it was with much difficulty and some risk that I was enabled to get the canoes and perogues into a place of tolerable safety, there being no timber on either side of the river at this place. these hard winds, being so frequently repeated, become a serious source of detention to us."
The winds eventually attenuated. Lewis and Clark did reach the Pacific. And they grew to love the buffalo plains of North Dakota.
If these 2008 winds ever die down, I'll plant potatoes.
(Clay Jenkinson is the Theodore Roosevelt scholar-in-residence at Dickinson State Unsiversity. He lives in Bismarck. Contact Jenkinson at jeffysage@;aol.com.)
REX wrote on Apr 29, 2008 1:46 PM:
Halatbis wrote on Apr 27, 2008 1:14 PM:
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