Animal, Vegetable, Miracle_ A Year of Food Life - Barbara Kingsolver [175]
In the coming year, I decided, I would plant fewer tomatoes, and more flowers. If we didn’t have quite such a big garden, if we took a vacation to the beach this summer, we’d do that thanks to our friends at the farmers’ market. The point of being dedicated locavores for some prescribed length of time, I now understand, is to internalize a trust in one’s own foodshed. It’s natural to get panicky right off the bat, freaking out about January and salad, thinking we could never ever do it. But we did. Without rationing, skipping a meal, buying a corn-fed Midwesternburger or breaking our vows of exclusivity with local produce, we lived inside our own territory for one good year of food life.
“I can’t exactly explain what we’re looking for,” I told our guests, feeling like a perfectly idiotic guide. “Your eye kind of has to learn for itself.”
We were back on Old Charley’s Lot, scanning the dry-leaf-colored ground for dry-leaf-colored mushrooms. Steven found the first patch, a trio tilted at coy angles like garden gnomes. We all stood staring, trying to fix our vision. The color, the shape, the size, everything about a morel resembles a curled leaf lying on the ground among a million of its kind. Even so, the brain perceives, dimly at first and then, after practice, with a weirdly trenchant efficiency. You spot them before you know you’ve seen them.
This was the original human vocation: finding food on the ground. We’re wired for it. It’s hard to stop, too. Our friends Joan and Jesse had traveled a long way that day, and their idea of the perfect host might not be a Scoutmaster type who makes you climb all over a slick, pathless mountainside with cat briars ripping your legs. But they didn’t complain, even as rain began to spit on our jackets and we climbed through another maze of wild grapevines and mossy logs. “We could go back now,” I kept saying. They insisted we keep looking.
After the first half hour we grew quiet, concentrating on the ground, giving each other space for our own finds. It was a rare sort of afternoon. The wood thrushes and warblers, normally quiet once the sun gets a good foothold, kept blurting out occasional pieces of song, tricked into a morning mood by the cool, sunless sky. Pileated woodpeckers pitched ideas to one another in their secret talking-drum language. These giant, flamboyant woodpeckers are plentiful in our woods. We all took note of their presence, and were drawn out of our silence to comment on the remarkable news about their even more gigantic first cousins, the ivory-billed woodpeckers. These magnificent creatures, the “Lord God Birds” as they used to be called in the South, had been presumed extinct for half a century. Now a reputable research team had made an unbelievable but well-documented announcement. Ivorybills were still alive, deep in a swamp in Arkansas. Lord God.
Was it true? A mistake or a hoax? Was it just one bird, or a few, maybe even enough for the species to survive? These were still open questions, but they were headliner questions, inspiring chat rooms and T-shirts and a whole new tourist industry in swampy Arkansas. People who never gave a hoot about birds before cared about this one. It was a miracle, capturing our hopes. We so want to believe it’s possible to come back from our saddest mistakes, and have another chance.
“How do you encourage people to keep their hope,” Joan asked, “but not their complacency?” She was deeply involved that spring in producing a film about global climate change, and preoccupied with striking this balance. The truth is so horrific: we are marching ourselves to the maw of our own extinction. An audience that doesn’t really get that will amble out of the theater unmoved, go home and change nothing. But an audience that does get it may be so terrified they’ll feel doomed already. They might walk out looking paler, but still do nothing. How is it possible to inspire an appropriately repentant stance toward a planet that is really, really upset?
I was as