A Language Older Than Words - Derrick Jensen [129]
For the first time, my life was my own. Never again, at least that I could foresee, would I have to work for another. I didn't mind working through the night, nor through the next day, because the decision to work was my own. I didn't mind getting stung, because it happened with bees I cared about.
Each day became an adventure—my adventure—and time was never something to be wished away, but savored. I saw a dozen migrant workers playing baseball, and hopped the fence to join them. I know no Spanish, and the only English they knew was "Have a good one," so for the next three hours we said only that to each other, after each single, double, out, or error. And we smiled.
Soon after the almond bloom ended I moved the bees to Orosi, south of Fresno, in orange country. Small white blossoms filled the air with their scent. The bloom was so heavy I put all three hundred hives in one drop, and still the bees made honey: light, delicate, sweet.
Next to the field where I placed the hives lived another wondrously generous couple. They invited me for dinner, and gave me a place to shower. They ran the largest wasp ranch in the Western Hemisphere. Figs are pollinated by wasps. Not just any wasps, but a specific kind who lays her eggs only in a specific kind of nonedible fig. The eggs hatch and the grubs eat away at the fruit, then pupate there. The fruit falls to the ground. The tiny adults emerge, mate, and fly to find new fig blossoms. In laying her eggs, the wasp pollinates the fig. The next generation of both species is well served. This man collected nonedible figs from his ranch, put them in paper bags, and sold them to edible fig growers who placed them about their orchards. The new generation of wasps would emerge, enter the fig flowers, but then, sadly, find no suitable place to lay their eggs. Nonetheless, pollination occurred.
Because his great-great-grandparents had homesteaded the property, and because all succeeding generations had known better than to mortgage the land, he did not face the agricultural equivalent of the contradiction mentioned earlier as the one that dooms revolutions, a variant of which ultimately dooms efforts within our culture at sustainable agriculture. Economic production, once again, requires that resources be funneled toward producers, while ecosystemic production requires that resources be returned to all members of the natural community, including, especially, the ground. So he ran a loose ship. Like mine, his days seemed savored, and especially shared. He made regular trips to the pound to pick up animals about to be euthanized. I saw a blind horse, one three-legged dog and several who were partially blind, any number of scrawny yet happy (and spayed or neutered) cats, and a passel of peacocks ("Dad lives by himself in the old farmhouse, and if anything happens we can just listen for the peacocks to let us know."). Not even the horse was fenced, but all roamed free among the fig trees.
Every moment that spring was pregnant with meaning, as if I were seeing the world for the first time. I went to the Fresno zoo. I saw there a lone wolf—normally a social creature who lopes for days at fifteen miles per hour—pacing a small concrete pen. A woman stood next to me, and said to her child, "That's the big bad wolf"; I thought, "Another industrialist is born."