Animal, Vegetable, Miracle_ A Year of Food Life - Barbara Kingsolver [81]
We left Canada by way of Niagara Falls, pausing to contemplate this churning cataract that has presented itself to humans down through the ages as inspiration, honeymoon destination, and every so often a rip-snorting carnival ride. We got ourselves soaked on the Maid of the Mist, and pondered the derring-do of the fourteen men, two women, and one turtle who have plunged over this crashing waterfall in conveyances including wooden barrels, a giant rubber ball, a polyethylene kayak, a diving bell, a jet-ski, and in one case only jeans and a lightweight jacket. Both women and the turtle (reputed to be 105 years old) survived, as did nine of the men, though the secret of success here is hard to divine. The jacket-and-jeans guy made it; the jet-skier and the kayaker did not, nor did William “Red” Hill in his fancy rubber bubble. And a half-ton iron-bumpered barrel that safely delivered the turtle failed to save his inventive human companion.
If there seems to be, running through this book, a suggestion that humans are a funny animal when it comes to respecting our own best interests, I rest my case.
From the border we traveled southwest across the wine country of New York and northern Pennsylvania, where endless vineyards flank the pebbled shore of Lake Erie. Another day’s drive brought us into the rolling belly of Ohio, where we would be visiting friends on their dairy farm. Their rural county looked like a postcard of America’s heartland, sent from a time when the heart was still healthy. Old farmhouses and barns stood as quiet islands in the undulating seas of corn, silvery oats, and auburn spelt.
We pulled into our friends’ drive under a mammoth silver maple. Lily sized up the wooden swing that twisted on twenty-foot ropes from one of its boughs. A platoon of buff-colored hens ignored us, picking their way over the yard, while three old dogs trotted out to warn their mistress of our arrival. Elsie came around the corner, beaming her pure-sunshine smile. “Rest on the porch,” she said, drawing us glasses of water from the pump in the yard. “David is cultivating the corn, so there’s no knowing when that will finish.”
We offered to help with whatever she’d been doing, so Elsie rolled the wheelbarrow to her garden and returned with a tall load of pea plants she had just pulled. We pulled lawn chairs into a circle under the cherry trees, lifted piles of vines into our laps, and tackled the shelling. Peas are a creature of spring, content to germinate in cold soil and flourish in cool, damp days, but heat causes them to stop flowering, set the last of their pods, and check out. Though nutritionally similar, peas and beans inhabit different seasons; in most gardens the peas are all finished before the first bean pod is ready to be picked. That’s a good thing for the gardener, since each of these plants in its high season will bring you to your knees on a daily basis. Tall, withered pea vines are a sigh from the end of spring, a pause before the beans, squash, and tomatoes start rolling.
We caught up on news while steadily popping peas from their shells. Over our heads hung Stark’s Gold cherries the size of silver dollars. The central Ohio season was a week or so behind ours, and it was dryer here too. Elsie reported they’d had no rain for nearly a month—a fairly disastrous course for June, a peak growing time for crops and pastures. A few storms had gathered lately but then dissipated. The afternoon was still: no car passed on the road, no tractor churned a field within earshot. It’s surprising how selectively the human ear attends to human-made sounds: speech, music, engines. An absence of those is what we call silence. Maybe in the middle of a city, or a chemically sterilized cornfield, it really is quiet when all the people and engines cease. But in that particular dot on the map I was struck with how full a silence could be: a Carolina wren sang from the eave of the shed; cedar waxwings carried on whispery bickerings up