Well I woke Sunday morning
with no way to hold my head that didn’t hurt…
I woke with a headache. Despite the scotch last night, my throbbing head had less to do with being hung over than with residual stress from navigating the ninth circle of hell that emerges when summer construction intersects with the Chicago tollway system.
Travel to work in Michigan enables me to layover at my parents place. Normally, I drive up on Saturday and spend Sunday morning with Mom and Dad before heading to my worksite. These mornings usually involve church and a gracious Sunday dinner with happy conversation about their grandkids, my siblings, and the state of the world. This Sunday, however, Mom and Dad are traveling. So last night I let myself in, helped myself to Dad’s liquor and tried to figure out the satellite TV. One is never fully alone here because every wall and all but the most utilitarian of horizontal surfaces hold tastefully framed and displayed family photos. At every turn I reacquaint with younger versions of people I love most. I am old enough to have honest gray in my beard myself so late on a Saturday, with the contributing effects of fatigue, good scotch whisky and conversations with ghosts, I went to bed feeling pleasantly melancholy.
and I shaved my face and combed my hair
and stumbled down the stairs to meet the day
With the refrigerator empty, I needed coffee and breakfast in that order. Its summer and its hot. I looped through town to check on the coffee shops and cafes I knew. They’re all closed. Indeed, most businesses close on Sunday in this pleasant and self-satisfied little city. Resigned, I hit the grocery store on the edge of town and find a Starbucks embedded. I buy a large black coffee and some yoghurt and I decide to indulge myself with a drive through the landscape of my boyhood.
I grew up near an important edaphic anomaly. We lived on a hill of debris left by a retreating glacier, but one of a legion of rolling hills that typify the Great Lakes basin. The topsoils are rich in clay minerals and polished granite rocks and boulders that the glaciers had abraded off of the Canadian Shield. Local farms grow corn, soybeans and forage crops and the farmers are mostly dairy producers. Four miles away, a distance I peddled hundreds of times on my bike, an abandoned river floodplain is excised through the glacial till, left when one of southern Michigan’s largest rivers changed its course following the retreat of the last glaciers.
Then I crossed the empty street and caught
the sunday smell of someone fryin' chicken
The river bored a winding path through the glacial till, and as rivers will do, it created its own geography, superimposing a broad flat plain on the otherwise gently undulating landscape. In its time, this floodplain conveyed the sediments of the watershed to the catchment that is Lake Michigan. When abandoned by the river, it became a catchment of its own. For ten thousand years this floodplain absorbed the runoff of the surrounding glacial hills, carrying with it both mineral soil and suspended organic matter. In time it was reclaimed by wetland plants and would have been a rich mosaic of swamp forests, shrublands, and herbaceous wetlands as determined by variation in the subtleties of elevation and drainage. For ten thousand years the mineral soil was enriched with a yearly autumn rain of dead leaves and rank herbaceous plants that were compressed by uncountable snowfalls to be decayed over the next seasons. For ten thousand years speckled alder and its microbial symbionts pumped atmospheric nitrogen into the soil. For ten thousand years fungi and bacteria broke down the dead trees that blew over in our majestic summer thunderstorms or died simply from living too long.
'cause there is something in a Sunday
that makes a body feel alone
Dutch immigrants settled here eventually and it’s probably no coincidence that descendants of the resolute people who freed the
Polderland by pushing back the
Zuiderzee drained and cleared the wetlands to reveal a treasure more than ten thousand years in the making – rich, black, organic soil. The soil is known as muck and that is no pejorative. Indeed, muck farms anchored the local economies and muck farmer families have disproportionately lent their names to the network of small businesses that coalesced to form this town. Like most kids in my High School, I earned my first paycheck working on a muck farm. I learned to endure long sweaty hours in the summer heat and to value honest labor and I worked shoulder to shoulder with families of migrant workers and learned how privileged my middle class upbringing was. I also wondered about the weathered old logs that emerged with the spring tilling. Various muck farms grew beautiful voluptuous vegetables but the signature cash crops were celery and fat yellow onions. At harvest, the onion crates were staged in warehouses at the edge of town and the end of summer and the start of a new school year was marked by the scent of fresh onions curing in the heavy August air as reliably as by the arrival of Labor day.
and it took me back to somethin' that
I'd lost somehow somewhere along the way
Truth be told, the old river bed has been feeding us since long before the muck soil was first tilled. Many muck farmers can show you a coffee can or shoe box full of arrow-heads and spear points demonstrating that the ancient wetland was a productive hunting spot for the region’s native peoples. If there was a sense of continuity between the lives of the native peoples and the lives of my own community in this same place, it was the sense that our most basic dependence on the gifts of this good earth were optimally realized in the prehistoric coincidence of that old river bed.
In the park I saw a daddy with
a laughing little girl who he was swingin'
But it’s disappearing. I was alarmed at the degree to which newly constructed homes are consuming the old riverbed and the surrounding landscape. The muck farm where I worked is still there but the neighboring fields have disappeared under a network of bucolically named streets and cul de sacs, sidewalks, and fashionable homes. The blueberry farm where I picked blueberries with my mother is memorialized with a street named in its honor. One drives through these neighborhoods and the sense of prosperity is overwhelming. Shiny new vehicles sit in shiny new driveways surrounded by manicured lawns and tightly husbanded landscaping. Kids are playing and their parents are barbecuing.
It’s hard to begrudge some family the joy of a new home but I get a sense that this isn’t right. The Midwest has been called the bread basket of North America and I’ve heard Midwestern farmers talk with pride about feeding the world. And I can’t help but think about that mucky treasure - reburied, built over, paved over, and consigned to burning through its ten thousand years of microbial super-charging in the mundane tasks of growing bluegrass and yew bushes. It’s like eating your seed corn. Our best farmland is a finite resource and the productivity increases possible with higher and higher inputs of fossil fuels and technology in lesser soils would seem to yield diminishing returns.
and I stopped beside a sunday school
and listened to the song that they were singin'
But I see this pattern again and again in my travels between Midwestern cities - farmland yielding to an ever expanding ring of suburban and exurban development. Maybe I’m just being sentimental. I am prone to that. Maybe I am feeling a twinge of guilt at my own complicity – I came from a culture where nobody questions the implicit assumption that if one can afford it, a spiffy custom-built home on a pristine lot is every person’s birthright and I worked as a carpenter during college building some of them. Sustainability must also mean thinking harder about how to live on the land we’ve already devoted to living space. Sustainable living means a view of community expansive enough to include concern for cumulative impacts and for distant and future neighbors and, as Aldo Leopold says, non-human nature. I mentioned my concerns to a friend recently and he pointed to Wendell Berry.
"But soil is not usually lost in slabs or heaps of magnificent tonnage. It is lost a little at a time over millions of acres by the careless acts of millions of people. It cannot be saved by heroic acts of gigantic technology, but only by millions of small acts and restraints, conditioned by small fidelities, skills, and desires. Soil loss it ultimately a cultural problem; it will be corrected only by cultural solutions.”
Wendell Berry, 1993. Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community: Eight Essays. Pantheon Press
I know that I am a product of those places where I’ve felt the sun on my neck and the wind in my face. But for that ancient river, but for that black soil, but for the happenstance of growing up in that place, I would a different person. Perhaps that’s why I love our farmer’s market so. I’m no economist but perhaps when I buy a fat yellow onion from a farm family, I help tilt the scales in favor of keeping them on the land and keeping the developers at bay. Its motivation for why my daughter and I tend a small garden and why I like to prepare locally sourced venison for my family. It contributes to choosing to eat less meat day to day and to bike to work. Small acts and restraints, small fidelities. Desires. One can hope…
Then I headed back for home and
somewhere far away a lonely bell was ringin'
and it echoed thru the canyon like
the disappearing dreams of yesterday.
Sunday morning coming down - Words and music by the great Kris Kristofferson, EMI Music (memorably covered by the immortal Johnny Cash)
5:14 PM PT: Update: I am overdue but Thank You (!) to the rescue rangers for pointing to this one this morning.