The Good Fortune Harvest

The next day I awake feeling rested. My mother is out of the house early, I hear her stroke the keys of the piano on the way out, her sign since we were kids that we are all alone. She is on her way to sit with Mrs. Tandy who is dying from stomach cancer. A lot of it going around these parts.

My mother has heard tell of 45 cases in this area. I didn’t let on that I was already aware of the high occurrence. Pick up any journal or magazine on the environment and this part of the South is headline news. Not only have our politicians allowed industries to poison our soil, water, and air for the last fifty years, but the rest of us have been quietly poisoning one another at the same time in our own backyards.

Over a period of forty years, this town, like many towns, grew dependent on harsh chemicals to perform miracles – grass greener than nature intended, pest-free vegetable gardens, and empty fields barren of any form of wildlife. Almost every family I knew when I was growing up kept some kind of garden in their yard. Or they bought off the folks that came into our neighborhoods hawking truck plot produce. The insecticides and poisons were always used indiscriminately. Innocently. Ignorantly. We avidly subscribed to a future with no bugs crawling, none flying, no small animals burrowing in and around our yards, and no weeds anywhere to be found.

I became aware of our transgressions for the first time only after living away. Maybe it’s because I never noticed a thing outside of my family when I lived here. I thought it was perfectly natural to be told that my opinions didn’t matter by my own Father. So, of course, I thought it was perfectly natural to squirt malathion at weeds to get rid of them. To poison the soil in order to exterminate whatever was crawling under it or on it.

I was ignorant, but the west exposed me. I had gone there to hide, but instead I reached the frontier of this vast country and looked over the edge, down into the green blue waters of the Pacific, and I realized I had to turn around and face what was behind me.

Certain uncalculated (or maybe calculated) steps led me to find work with an environmental group whose interests spanned the globe. This is where I have spent my last six years, in the field studying the effects of insecticides and fertilizers on our soil and our lives. The group I worked with concerned itself with the disappearance of little things – small insects, birds, or creatures whose deaths are harbingers of a more complex picture. After a while I began to look back in horror on the common poisons I had used so cavalierly. Not only did I infest the soil we were growing our food in, but any soil within a two block radius would probably have been rendered toxic as well.

I dated a guy in college whose assessment of me was that I was desperate to find some kind of line, or spiel, or cause to follow. An adage seeker of sorts. Imagine. He thought I was someone likely to join Jim Jones and his cult in Guyana. He didn’t understand me, nor did I, for that matter, understand me. I brandished a deep need to find meaning and early on it manifested itself into dumb enthusiasm for most things new. That’s why he had mistaken me for a zealot.

The years I spent on the frontier helped me turn myself around. Helped me to find my cause you might say. My meaning. I found a way into that need inside of me, and found my way back out again, and in doing so realized it can never be abated, only brought closer to the surface. It is an essential part of who I am. And through it, I have found my life’s work. But performing this work out of context only touched a fraction of my being, and I knew that in order to fulfill myself, I had to return here, to this Southern landscape in which I am so deeply rooted.

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