The view from the road to nowhere
I see a huge vegetable garden on my way to work every day, set in the sunny side yard of an old farm house. I began to track my jealousy in early spring when the vast, rectangular patch of dead weeds got turned under and became a perfect blank slate of soil. All through the spring, I slowed my truck as I passed so I could check out the various additions. By early summer, the entire bed was set with precise rows of beans, tomatoes, peppers, squash, eggplant, okra, cabbaage, leeks, garlic and goodness knows what else. That’s just what I could see from the road. All of the plants were neatly tied to perfectly straight stakes. The walking rows in between remained bare dirt all season long. Someone either spent a lot of time on hands and knees, or they walked a small tiller down between the rows almost daily.
I never witnessed a single person in this garden, not in the morning or during my commute home in the evening. Never saw anyone bent over the plants, or yanking weeds from the between the rows. But this garden thrived. The plants grew enormous and set what looked—from my distance—like prize-winning fruit. State fair worthy. Oh, how my jealousy thrived on this double-daily reminder of what my garden is not, of how my pantry will go unfulfilled for yet another winter because I don’t have enough sunlight on my vegetables.
It reached a nearly unmanageable level, my jealousy, once the tomatoes began to ripen. I nearly drove off the road every day as I gawped at the fat, red globes of love hanging in clusters from every available inch of row after row of healthy, hearty, robust plants. Why can’t I have that? Why can’t I move my big backyard garden at the old place into town?
But recently I’ve noticed that the fruit is rotting on the vine. Hundreds of tomatoes and peppers unpicked, just wasting away before my very eyes. Where is the gardener? Why are the rows all overgrown with choking weeds? The purslane is now half as tall as the pepper vines. What’s happened? Has the gardener lost interest? Was it only ever about making them grow and not about the end product? Or is something wrong? What if the gardener has become somehow incapacitated and has no other person to help harvest and process all of that food?
Now every day I drive past and fantasize about pulling into the driveway to ask if I can help. But what would I say, exactly? And when would I carve out time to do whatever it is that I think needs doing? I press my foot deeper into the accelerator and drive on past, late for work again. Then I slow as I pass on the way home, picturing myself with my stranger’s offer to harvest and can the crop, then split the bounty. Instead, I hurry home to get dinner started. And this fact gives me a bit of a tummy ache. This makes me think about what Jim Kunstler said about redirecting our culture more toward things-we-do-with-other-people. How are we, the average people, going to do this when we’re all living at full-speed?
I don’t know. I try every day to make some effort towards a more simple life. I’m teaching myself to say no more often to the gadget-credit-have-it-now lifestyle I had become addicted to, and that feels like a solid step in the right direction. But there’s so much more to it. I’m driving past it every day. On my way to what, exactly?
"Stories open up new paths, sometimes send us back to old ones, and close off still others. Telling and listening to stories we too imaginatively walk down those paths – paths of longing, paths of hope, paths of desperation."
~Arthur Kleinman
