A Language Older Than Words (37 page)

Also in the newspaper, I read that McDonald's opened its first restaurant in Bolivia, the one hundred and sixth country into which the company has metastasized. I suddenly remembered seeing an ad the company placed in business journals showing a photograph of the globe, with the caption, "Our expansion plan." Just as presumably fertilizer and manure runoff is good news for the fibropapilloma-inducing viruses, the expansion of McDonald's, and more broadly the culture it represents, into ever-new territories must be good news for the global domination virus, or better, dementia.

Finally, I read an editorial stating that attempts to mandate a reduction in the emission of greenhouse gases to ameliorate global warming—which disaster even the editorial admits may re
sult in "melted ice caps, rising seas, swamped coastal cities, floods,
storms, diseases, devastated wildlife"—constitute "an unfounded assault on industry." The editorial labeled those who believe global warming is occurring, including the vast majority of clima
tologists worldwide, as the "Chicken Little crowd" and as a "fringe-
minority." Jaded though I am to the absurdities to which we are necessarily forced the moment we begin to value production over life, I still had to read the column several times to make myself believe it.

Years ago I asked one of the editors of this paper what is the purpose of his editorials. His reply was the only honest statement I've encountered by him: "To tell people what to think."

The world is burning up. The powers that be obfuscate and lie. What are we going to do?

It was unfair of me to pick on the Cassini probe as an egregious example of our culture's death urge. The truth is that Cassini is not unusual, which I guess was the point all along. We are irradiating the planet. Hundreds of tons of nuclear waste litter the bottom of the ocean, everything from sunken nuclear submarines to thousands of tons of plutonium, ruthenium, americium, cesium 137, radioactive iodine, and other toxic wastes routinely released from, among many others, Britain's Sellafield nuclear reprocessing plant. As author Marilyn Robinson remarks: "The first questions that arise in attempting to understand Sellafield, and more generally the nuclear and environmental policies of the British government, are: How have they gotten away with so much? and Why on earth would they
want to
get away with it?" A few months ago the former secretary of Russia's National Security Council revealed to United States officials that at least one hundred one-kiloton nuclear weapons were missing. Called "suitcase bombs," these warheads are small enough, as the name implies, to be carried inconspicuously in a suitcase. Neither the American government nor the corporate press has made mention of these missing nukes.

When thinking about the risk from Cassini, remember the missing suitcase bombs. Remember also the radioactive tanks at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in southern Washington: these tanks are leaking into the groundwater, and, soon enough, into the already-beleaguered Columbia River. They also explode with some regularity. No one even knows what's in many of them. Remember that in the 1950s the United States exposed citizens downwind of Hanford to intentional releases of radiation to see what would happen. Remember also that because of nuclear testing—the explosion of hundreds of nuclear bombs worldwide— plutonium residues have been found in the bodies of creatures from pole to pole. Remember also that between 1950 and 1998, the rate for women's breast cancer in this country has gone from one in fifty to one in eight.

I hate to say this, but Cassini is nothing out of the ordinary.

A Life of My Own

"The greatest virtue between heaven and earth is to live."
'The Great Treatise' of the I Ching

WISHING AWAY THE WAGE economy did not make it cease to exist, and my determination to stop selling my hours did not lessen my need for food, nor for a place to stay. In other words, despite my highfalutin philosophy, I still had to find a way to earn some cash.

I was fortunate. There's a world of difference between having the opportunity to take a well-paying job and walking away, and not having been granted that opportunity in the first place. There was a time not long after college when I was poor enough that I collected aluminum cans for money to buy food, but had things gotten really bad, I could simply have taken a job. Or I could have borrowed additional money from my mother (something I have done with too-great frequency). I wasn't going to starve. The same can't be said for the majority of people in the world.

During my parents' divorce, my father essentially got everything but the house. He kept the stock shares, condos in Jackson Hole, and fast food franchises, as well as the other toys and trappings of a truly (monetarily) wealthy person. But the house was valuable, and when after years of working jobs everywhere from race tracks to art galleries my mother sold it, she had enough so that probably she could survive to the end of her days without being forced to reenter the wage economy.

I approached with a plan. I loved working bees, and wanted to borrow enough to become a small-scale commercial beekeeper. That way I could work hard during the season, and use the offseason to read and think and write. She consented.

My time with bees was in some ways a disaster: they all died— twice. It wasn't my fault either time, but that doesn't lessen the sorrow of seeing so many millions of deaths, nor lessen the sense of failure.

It did not begin disastrously, only dishonestly. I bought three hundred hives from a man going out of business in Arkansas. At least that's what he initially told me, and presumably what he continued to tell the bank. His luck had been awful: he'd had eight hundred hives when he'd moved down from Oregon several years back, but he lost hundreds by this means and that. He placed several hundred in beautiful drop sites between rivers and irrigated fields of soybeans: no one told him that rivers in the South flood every winter, and when he went to visit his drops early that spring he found nothing but a few empty hive bodies high in the boughs of trees. Later that year he lost hundreds of stored bee boxes when a pile of oil-soaked rags spontaneously combusted, taking with them his honey house. The bank was after him for his remaining 150 hives, or to my extremely vague understanding, the 150 the loan officers knew about. All I know is that I bought 150 from the bank, and the same number from him. Those I bought from him were located in drops down labyrinthine roads I could not have retraced alone.

I took the bees to California, in many ways the promised land for beekeepers. The winters are warm, and there's nearly always something in bloom. In addition, the density of monocrops means extra money.

Modesto, California, is beautiful in February, with hills rolling for miles covered in white-blossomed almond trees. Hundreds of thousands of acres bloom in essential simultaneity, and if pollen isn't carried from flower to flower almonds won't form. Although monocropped miles of almond flowers may be beautiful, they're as unnatural as Frankenstein's monster; the staggering number of blossoms to be pollinated in these densely packed orchards grossly overmatches the capacity of such wild pollinators as bumblebees, moths, wasps, beetles, and so on to set fruit, prompting almond ranchers to pay beekeepers up to $40 per hive to bring in bees for the three week bloom.

Almonds aren't the only crop needing pollination. Apples, cherries, pears, raspberries, cranberries, blueberries, cucumbers, watermelons, muskmelons. Each of these densely packed crops requires similarly densely packed beehives to set fruit. The same is true for the seeds of other crops—onions, cauliflower, lettuce, carrots, cabbage, broccoli, radishes. Without bees, these crops disappear.

Beekeepers with the right contacts can turn a lot of cash. A few weeks after almonds comes prunes ($15), apples ($12), cherries ($12), and so on.

Moving bees is the hardest hard work I've ever done. You move them at night because they fly during the day; if you move hives then, you leave behind to die all those bees in the field, which would be a good portion of the hive. I shared work with another beekeeper and his wife, a wondrously generous couple who let me stay in their home for weeks at a time, and refused all offers of rent: they did let me take them out to dinner once in repayment, but insisted it be to Burger King so I wouldn't waste any money.

About three each afternoon, Glen and I began getting the forklift and flatbeds ready, so we could be out to a drop by dark. Then we'd load the truck—confused bees crawling everywhere— tie the hives down, untie the hives and unload the truck because the additional weight had sunk the truck to its axle in mud, pull the truck out with the forklift, reload the truck—confused bees
still
crawling everywhere—retie the hives, drive an hour or two to an orchard, get the truck stuck again, pull it free once more with the forklift, unload as many hives as the grower contracted for, drive to another orchard, and repeat the process till we'd unloaded the truck. Then we'd clean off the machinery, get it as ready as we could for the next night, sleep from maybe ten in the morning till two in the afternoon, get up, and start over. We'd do this for a week or ten days at a time.

It was exhausting. I remember one rainy night, toward the end of a series of moves, when I couldn't run the windshield wipers because they immediately hypnotized me, and another when for the final three hours of the drive the only words that passed through my mind, as taillights left red and blurry traces on the backs of my eyes, were "automobile mesmerization, automobile mesmerization." I remember a night, also, when Glen forgot his protective beesuit. Since it was a small load, and since our judgment was clouded, we decided to proceed anyway. Because they were his bees, we decided he'd wear my suit and do most of the work, while I would just drive. The load was the smoothest we could remember, as was the drive back to the drop, within the city of Modesto. The night was foggy, as February
nights so often are there, and the only vehicles we saw were copcars
and other beetrucks. It was four in the morning. We reached the drop, and Glen began to unload. I lost concentration, and drove too close underneath a tree. A branch swept the top row of hives off the back. I stopped the truck, and because this was an emergency, I ran out and, suit or no, began scooping frantic bees back into boxes. They crawled everywhere. Piles of them clumped together to comfort each other. Individuals crawled over my shoes and socks, and up my pant legs. I swatted at them, but there were hundreds. I began to curse, and curse louder. Telling Glen I'd be right back, I ran into the street—the only place light enough to see what I was doing—and whipped off my clothes. I put them back on, and, cursing the bees still in my pants and up my shirt, took them back off. I began to jump up and down on my shirt and pants, still cursing. Finally I stepped outside myself enough to realize I was standing in the middle of a four-lane
road, wearing shoes, socks, underwear, and long leather beegloves,
stomping my feet and shrieking. I began to laugh as I put my clothes back on, and laughed harder as I returned to help. Again the bees crawled up my pant legs, and all I could do, as I scooped handfuls back into their homes, was laugh at myself, and keep on laughing.

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.