It was the first week in April in Northern Michigan and large swaths of snow still covered parts of the field, especially near the steep bank that led up to Swede Road. In its shadow the snow was still nearly a foot deep, but most of the acreage was clear, with the variety of grasses, weeds, alfalfa and other invasives lying flat along the slowing softening earth. Yet those resilient plants were already sending new roots down and in no time the field would once again be a field, full of thigh high alfalfa, Kentucky blue grass, Timothy and vetch; then later in the spring the menagerie of flowers would erupt in their Monet musical symmetry of colors and perfumes.
Ed Slattery sat up on the hill and looked east to Bass Lake feeling that new, yet familiar, sensation of simply being outside after an arduous winter. Just one month before he was standing on snowshoes right in the middle of the lake, the water frozen solid and over a foot thick. Coyote tracks as erratic as his thoughts shooting every which way through the deep snow. The lake always seemed prehistoric, old, and untouched, as it was, generally, with only a handful of houses surrounding it, and very rarely was there anyone out there, in winter or in summer. In the warm months you might find the occasional fisherman in a Jon boat with a quiet trolling motor trying to bag a large mouth or some perch or bluegill. And usually there was just Old Julius Kolarik’s ice shanty squatting there for most of the long winter.
Ed sat on the cold hard ground looking at the lovely deep blue water surrounded by giant cedars. He recalled the wonderfully liberating feeling of pushing his canoe from the spongy bank, hopping in the vessel as it coasted silently on the still water.
“Old Grandfather Turtle,” Ed said, “are you awake yet?” This past summer Ed took his canoe out many times. The lake was almost a half mile from the road and he stashed the 17 foot vessel in the Tolkien cedar swamp where strange creatures made even stranger noises. Ed loved to be on the water and watch the menagerie of wildlife existing in their peculiar existential bliss: tribes of mergansers with their punk rock hair-do’s, the multitude of fish flitting below the surface, pike, bass, an occasional trout, each one a piece of solid muscle and determination with a tiny dinosaur brain guiding it with eons of instincts and memories. Sometimes at twilight Ed would lie back in the canoe and listen for the loon, that solitary creature whose plaintive and haunting call besmirched the poor bird’s name forever. The bald eagle was his spirit animal, appearing overhead in its silent grace at so many random times, synchronizing exactly with Ed’s many Satoris.
One morning just after dawn, Ed paddled out slowly over the lily pads and water lilies towards the old beaver damn when he struck something hard. It was a large snapping turtle, its grey gnarled shell about two and a half feet long and over one foot wide. It didn’t move, it was just there, like a rock that has been in the same place for a thousand years. Ed circled around for a better look but of course Old Grandfather had descended to the safety of the mucky lake bottom. Ed took a deep diaphragmatic breath, got up, reached his arms above his head and exhaled slowly lowering his torso down to touch his toes. He did a few jumping jacks and high kicks and walked down the hill to the piece of land he designated the site for his first garden.
Le Premier Jardin. He had brought some tools and pink twine and a bunch of green bamboo stakes. He grabbed a few and paced out 10 feet by 15 placing the stakes at each corner of the rectangle. A good size for a first garden. He had two shovels and a rake. Hi-tech. He didn’t care. He wanted to do it this way. The old way, the original way. Plus he didn’t have a Roto-tiller. The land had not been touched by plow or tractor in over thirty years. The field had last been used as a pasture for his grandfather’s cattle. Ed remembered coming to the farm in the summers for a week or two with his family and seeing the huge bovines, wide eyed, curious, skittish and relentlessly hungry. The cows were exotic stuff for a city kid born and bred in Providence where the only wildlife were pigeons and black rats, along with the multitude of two-legged monsters you had to be on the lookout for. The cows would mob up to the electric fence where Ed and his brother would feed them hay. His brother Dennis’ mop of blond hair looked appealing one time, and ol’ bessie took a chunk right off his head causing Ed to laugh ridiculously.
Ed cut into it the earth with a long handled shovel, its wood cracked and blade rusty. He took it along with some other tools from the woodshed of the farm. With each thrust into the earth, he listened to the pleasant sound of the blade piercing the warming earth. Ed planted his heel on it and pushed it in, leaned the handle back to loosen the ground. He worked slowly, getting a feel for it, moving along the edges of his staked out rectangle. The soil was dark and rich and flecked with bits of white and organisms and worms just waking up. Ed had consulted his Rodale to learn how to prepare a garden bed. It needed to be turned over, weeded, fertilized with good organic chicken dung and later planted with all sort of wonderful seeds and starters: spinach, beets, kale, potatoes, broccoli, cabbage, onions, hot peppers, green beans and heirloom tomatoes and whatever else. The day before Ed was a kid in a candy store talking with the friendly guy at McGough’s Feed and Seed, picking out different varieties and discussing gardening methods. It was a whole new area of interest for Ed, and he did not miss the irony of him choosing to garden now, while as a child he was famous for avoiding any “yard work” to the dismay of his father.
The sun was brilliant and still seemed very distant, with the cool April air flushing through the woods and pastures blown in from Lake Michigan. Ed quickly built up a sweat and stopped to catch his breath. He looked around and up in the sky a red tailed hawk flew over head and called out. Ed watched it as it circled and let out a high pitched call. The sound was so ethereal and strange, yet deeply familiar. How much ingrained memory dwells in us from years and eons past. Genetic memory, spiritual memory. Listening to the hawk’s call gave Ed a similar sensation to what felt while swimming in the lake. In the water he felt at home, normal and natural, and free. It was as if a new part of him opened, a part of him that had been around forever, but rarely tapped. His human consciousness was silenced while the instincts of body, breath and soul fused together immersed in the mother blue.
The hawk circled two more times, let out one more magical scream and disappeared to the north. Ed kept going around the edges of the garden, loosening clods of earth. After making an outer edge he did the same on the inner edge. The cut grass ran deep, sometimes running down a foot, and made it very hard to loosen the earth. Ed got on his knees and pulled one clump up and shook it hard with both hands, dirt flying everywhere, until he held only the scraggly roots of the cut crass and the top layer of green. He tossed it to the edge of the field. A pitchfork would be nice, he thought, got to get one. Surrounded by fields and the hardwoods to the north, Bass Lake and the cedar swamp to the east, Ed knew without feeling, felt without actually knowing, that he was truly home.
A car went by and Ed looked up and raised his arm in a wave. It was the only car to pass by in an hour. Ed continued loosening the earth with his shovel and then shaking out each clod to keep the good humus laden soil where it belonged. The scent of it brought other strangely familiar sensations. Kneeling in the earth, the mother, the Gaia, Ed began to grow new roots, shooting down and digging in. He experienced a new feeling of doing productive work, work that was for a real and tangible goal, not just to pay bills or buy the latest gadget. Pure physical work that was for survival and sustenance.
A few hours later decided to call it quits. His lower back was sore and his arms and shoulders as well. The sun was lowering in the west over the big hill and the damned cherry orchards that never should have been planted, and the cool breeze was picking up and whipping through the trees and the dry weeds already rising like Lazarus from the earth. Ed ate a handful of snow from the bank near the road and grabbed his tools and the few bamboo stakes and walked back up the hill to his ’76 Mercedes. He loaded them in the trunk and took a beer out of the small cooler that held a six pack of Molson Golden nestled in ice. He cracked it and sat on the hood looking over at the lake and then down the hill to the beginnings of his new garden. The outer half of the rectangle was chocolate brown earth, while the remaining middle was a patch of grass and weeds waiting to be dug up the next day. His hands were caked with dirt. The earth was now a part of him. He felt it. The scent of fragrant humus, the pleasant ache in his muscles, and the slaking of a thirst with cold beer suffused Ed’s manic brain with a rare calm and quiet. The aching rush and slow soughing of the large bare limbs of the sugar maples and beech and oak swaying high in the breeze behind him. Ed looked over his shoulder at the farmhouse that was once his grandparents, and just beyond it to the large blood red barn looking like it was built a thousand years before, just when Grandfather Turtle was born. Ed scanned the acreage and down over the hill past the wild apple orchard and the cedar swamp to the stippling waters of Bass Lake. It was his dream to one day have a small cottage on the slope, to bring food from the soil, have animals and a woman and children to surround him and nourish him, like the land and the sky above. He drained his beer and popped another, got in the car and fired up the diesel. He took off down the road coasting in neutral with the engine sputtering and shaking and the sun sending its residual golden afternoon light from behind the hunchbacked hills.
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