Gang Aft Agley: From the Wilderness

What was I thinking anyway? To want so badly, to need to farm. 

I am/was: a city kid who loved digging in the dirt; a suburban teen who desperately wanted adventure, experience, anything other than the white bread life all around me; an idealistic young man angry at the world I had inherited, afraid for the future, eager for change; a community organizer stuck behind a desk, bored and boarded a plane for California and the illegal grows of Mendocino, marooned on a farm in the middle of the forest where a schizophrenic murderer was on the run and I hadn’t a clue how to farm or use a tool or survive without the comforts I had known my entire life and the cops were closing in and the owner hated me and I drank too much and smoked all day and was fired for the first and only time in my life but not before the owner had threatened to kill me and leave my body in the woods and it was right then I decided – I must learn how to farm.  

Years later I was gifted a book, ‘Lexicon of Sustainability,’ and the author kept on about his ‘Road to Damascus Moment.’ Like Saul of Tarsus struck blind, then through the love of the lord able to see once more or really for the very first time, the writer spoke of his come to Jesus moment when he realized we can’t go on living and eating and farming and fishing as we do. I suppose my Road to Damascus had been paved in theory for years before that existential moment staring into the owner’s rage filled eyes, but as I gauged his capacity for violence – as I wondered could he really do it, could I be killed out here because I had some romantic notion of growing weed and rebelling against the man – my vulnerability was laid bare. I realized just how unfit I was for survival. Given what I felt about the world and its injustices and its teetering ever more closely towards collapse, given the certainty with which I spoke about climate change and peak oil and the creeping totalitarian state, given that I had all the theory and such pathetically inept practice, I was a fraud. I would never survive the collapse I felt so iminent. I wanted a mutiny of our system and I didn’t even know how to sail. 

There was another moment on that stint in California that opened my eyes, this one a bit less dire. We had driven up to Humboldt to help a friend of the owner harvest Cannellini beans. The owner in Mendocino, for all his flaws, at least kept us fed while we worked on his farm. He was a phenomenal cook. There wasn’t a day that he didn’t have breakfast out before work and dinner waiting for us when we came in from the field. Toad in the hole and french omelets, pasta pomodoro, thai cabbage salad with sticky ribs. The level of food he put out from a small cabin kitchen powered by solar panels and car batteries and a propane grill stunned me. I still cook many of his meals to this day. 

The farm in Humboldt was a different story. The farm had quite a few field hands and they were expected to fend for themselves. Unlike every other farm I have worked on where generosity and communal eating and a sense that we have nothing else as farmers if we can’t share our food, these Humboldt farm field hands were hostile and suspicious and seemed to view us as competition rather than guests. I now believe the cannabis had everything to do with it. This farm, although engaged in vegetable farming, was propped up by its illegal grow concealed in the woods, and the money and lawlessness and smoke made for a paranoid vibe. We went three days without a substantial meal. Mostly candy bars and coffee and beer to keep us going in the field. Needless to say, my stamina suffered. 

On the fourth day, one of the paranoid field hands must have noticed the pale in my face, my listless demeanor, and taken pity. ‘You can eat from the field you know?’ he said as he tossed a tomato my way. He pointed me to the cucumber patch, the sweet corn growing off in the adjacent field. I stumbled through the rows as my blood sugar crashed, tomato in hand, and harvested a long cool cucumber, a bulging ear of corn. I knelt in the soil shaded by the corn stalks and peeled back the silks, and eating the tomato like an apple, devouring the cucumber end to end, had one of the best salads of my life. It was a revelation. No salt or dressing or knife to prepare the veg, just plant sugars fresh in phloem, minerals pulled from the rich silt soil.

So this is what food should be, I must have thought. Years wasted eating super market vegetables shipped round the world unripe and tasteless. Decades raised on food whose only discernible provenance was the corporate label adhered to the packaging. 

So I left California with those two bipolar revelations – existential dread for the future and my inability to survive, and deep joy and wonderment at the potential of food. An acknowledgement of Lack – in our culture and its relationship to food as well as in myself, in my skillset, in the way I moved through the world – forced me back onto the farm. And my failures out there, the owner calling me worthless, the threats and hostility from the other field hands, kept me going as much as the joy in the food, for there was plenty of that as well.