The Mindful Carnivore (5 page)

Even there in the vegetable garden, where the soil was dedicated to the serious business of food production, Grandpa found room for whimsy. In the first section, behind the lettuce, grew a row of red, white, and pink peonies. Mom didn’t like those in the house either: Ants swarmed the unopened buds, feeding on the sweet resin. Alongside the main vegetable plot—corn, potatoes and onions, carrots and green beans, cucumbers, zucchini and yellow summer squash—stood a row of tall delphiniums, pale blue and dark purple.

Cath’s grandfather had gardened professionally, too, tending ornamental plantings for local estates and businesses right into his eighties. Right up until the day he finished tidying the flower beds around the funeral home in town, climbed into his ’49 Ford, put the key in the ignition, and slumped over, struck by a heart attack. The undertaker found him in the driver’s seat.

When we moved in together that spring, Cath still had his tools: a four-tined soil rake, an edger, a weeder, a heart-shaped hoe. And she also had his passion for forging relationships with soil and plants. For her, making a home meant building a garden.

The idea appealed to me. My time living in New York City, educational though it had been, had left me feeling estranged from nature. It had left me longing to “rest in the grace of the world,” as Wendell Berry put it. Though I had never gardened much, I remembered enjoying what little I had done as a child, helping my mother with vegetables and marigolds. And I was eager to learn, to start growing my own food. With our landlady’s permission, we set to it.

The tiny house—nestled along one side of a large, grassy clearing, with woods all around—had a timber-and-stucco look that made us think of a Tudor cottage. Where an ell extended from the original structure, the front door opened onto a patch of ground perhaps ten feet square, tiled with pieces of dark-gray slate, tufts of grass poking up between them. The two outer sides of the small, rough patio were bounded by the sloping lawn.

With shovels, we cut out the sod in a three-foot-wide swath alongside the slate, then started into the earth beneath. It was reluctant ground. Levered with a shovel blade, it moved in chunks, clay-laden soil packed between pieces of dark shale the size of dinner plates. But Cath and I won out bit by bit, breaking up the dense earth, extracting the rock.

To define the edges of the small raised beds—and to keep them from collapsing—we built miniature stacked-stone walls, first using the shale our digging had yielded, then hauling more from a pile we found on the opposite side of the clearing. When the edges were finished, two gently curved beds cradled the rough patio, one reaching out from alongside each of the cottage walls. We smoothed out the piles of upturned soil with Grandpa’s longtined rake and planted salad greens and flowers. Cath wanted forget-me-nots, dark delphiniums, and hollyhocks like those her grandfather had tended. I wanted orange marigolds like the ones I had helped my mother plant when I was a boy, and delicate purple irises like those that had grown in little bunches around the quarry’s edge.

In summer, we extended the garden, working up the slope beside the cottage with shovels and, for one bone-jarring day, an undersized rototiller. The machine wanted no part of the dense soil, nor of the pieces of shale it locked onto. We levered out one slab the size of a coffee table. We surrounded the piles of dirt with foot-high stone walls and smoothed them out, narrow paths in between. The small terraced beds descended to the cottage, complementing it in scale and form, their stacked-shale borders lending the place an old-fashioned feel. Wild white roses climbed among the trees, their blooms filling the clearing with strong, sweet scent. A few yards beyond the back window of the kitchen coursed a little brook, low and murmuring.

In the quiet—disturbed only by the occasional whine of a speedboat on Cayuga Lake a mile to our east—we tended the garden and watched the songbirds that came to our feeders: chickadees and cardinals, finches and rose-breasted grosbeaks, a bright indigo bunting, three scarlet tanagers startlingly brilliant against the emerald grass. A turkey hen and her brood frequently picked their way through the clearing, giving us the chance to see the young ones grow from small, puffy juveniles into longer, leaner birds almost indistinguishable from their mother. On the grass we often found their broad tail feathers, barred in black and brown. We dubbed our new home Bird Cottage.

The next year was even better. Planting was easy. No rototilling, rock hauling or wall building. We had the luxury of turning soil with shovels, adding some compost, and presto: seeds in the ground. By summer the beds were happily pushing up lettuce and broccoli, nasturtiums and tomatoes. We still got many of our vegetables from the grocery store, food co-op, and farmers’ market. But the garden gave us things we couldn’t buy. It connected us to land and food: handling the cool spring soil, marking rows with trowel or finger, seeing young plants burgeon, inhaling the sweet musk of tomato leaves, savoring fruit still warm from the sun. Five minutes from earth to table.

It was perfect. I had achieved my goal. I was a benign herbivore, as nature intended me to be. Leaving blood and carnage behind, I had found the moral high road, the one true path to a harmonious, harm-free relationship with my fellow creatures. Alongside my sweetheart, I was working the earth, reaping the fruits of our gentle labors.

Others, though, were reaping them as well.

First, we caught glimpses of a pair of fawns venturing out of the woods and into the clearing. Then we started seeing them near the stone-walled beds. We found browsed salad greens, and neatly clipped stems where tulip buds had been the day before. Cath decided the fawns needed a talking-to.

She was, I think, uniquely suited to the task. Children gravitated to her everywhere we went. She had been a nursery and elementary schoolteacher and then a professional storyteller, performing for kids in that same age range: jobs I could not do well if my life depended on it. She had loved and excelled at both. More than a decade my senior, she had also raised two fine sons who were in high school and college by the time I was on the scene. All this is to say that she knew how to deal with misbehaving youngsters.

Walking out the front door one day, she gave the twin fawns a firm but gentle lecture. While she talked, the spotted rascals stood their ground, just a couple dozen yards away. When she was done, they sauntered off, unperturbed. We saw them less and less after that. Coincidence? Perhaps.

Yet the garden ravaging continued. Were the fawns coming at night? Entirely possible. If so, however, they weren’t the only visitors. A full-grown woodchuck had begun putting in appearances in broad daylight. Here, Cath’s lectures had no discernible effect. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner, our garden beds became a favorite stop on the critter’s daily rounds.

“Did woodchucks bother your grandfather’s garden?” I asked.

“Yes,” said Cath. “We ate them.”

Like me, she had grown up eating meat: beef, chicken, and pork from the grocery store her father had managed in the nearby village of Cazenovia, rabbit from the big, shedlike hutch her older brother tended out beyond the barn. And woodchuck from the garden. Cath said her brother would shoot and dress them, then take them over to their grandfather.

“Mom was embarrassed by them,” she said. “She wouldn’t cook or eat woodchuck, but Grandpa did. He never wasted food.”

He told the grandchildren about his cavalry service in southern Italy, before he came to the States in 1904. The soldiers had been so hungry they had taken to hunting squirrels and crows.

Committed as I was to eating harmlessly, I couldn’t imagine hurting our garden visitor. The animal was simply living its life, taking advantage of the easy pickings we had planted.

But one afternoon, when it came ambling across the lawn for another snack, I flung open the door and raced out, yelling. The lettuce thief turned on a dime and—with surprising speed for such a small, ungainly creature—hurtled toward the woods and disappeared.
There
, I thought. With that scare lodged in memory, it wouldn’t be so eager to return.

Fat chance. The next day the woodchuck came again, trundling along as nonchalantly as before. This time I spied the animal a fair distance across the yard. From that direction, its view of the door was blocked by the corner of the cottage. Deciding a bigger scare was in order, I slipped out and flattened myself against the rough slate landing by the front door. That low to the ground, I was well hidden.

After a minute, I raised my head cautiously and peered over the nearest garden bed. There, six feet from me, was the raider. I sprang up and leapt, roaring. The woodchuck bolted, and I raced across the grass in pursuit.

In the middle of the lawn, the animal spun to face me. I was so surprised that I almost tripped over it. Caught in the open and unable to outrun me, it had done the only sensible thing: turn and fight.

There we stood, the woodchuck hissing and baring its teeth, me looming over it trying to look threatening. What was I supposed to do? I had lain in wait, pounced, and … nothing. I had no gun, no spear, no shovel, no rock. Even if I had wanted to kill it, I wouldn’t have dared to get any closer bare-handed. Those chisel-like teeth could have torn a nasty hole in my flesh, no doubt about it.

This oversized rodent, its shoulder not much higher than my ankle, had called my bluff. Slowly, it backed away. When it got far enough to be confident that this oddly hesitant predator wouldn’t catch up again, it turned and dashed for the woods. So much for Man the Gardener striking terror into the hearts of salad nibblers.

The woodchuck kept helping itself to the fruits of our labors. So be it. I would just have to chalk up a win for my furry friend and shell out a bit more cash at the grocery store. I wasn’t going to draw blood over a few bowls of greens.

These days I wonder: Was that the moment when it began to dawn on me that the larger-than-human world was entirely indifferent to my fantasies of harmless eating and conflict-free coexistence? Was that when I first began to see that I could not achieve utopia by planting a vegetable garden? Was that when I first knew that nature would not bend to my will or be chased away, either by my cleverness or by the ferocity of my bluff?

By the time we built our next garden, I was sure I had the woodchuck problem all figured out.

Cath and I had moved to Vermont and bought a house. Like Bird Cottage, it sat in a clearing, nestled far back into the woods. The first couple summers we contented ourselves with flower beds—phlox, delphiniums, and irises in the sun; hostas, pulmonaria, and lilies of the valley under the apple trees—plus a tiny patch of salad greens protected by some old fencing tacked to aspen poles. Now, though, we were ready for a full-blown vegetable garden.

On the other side of the driveway, in a circle thirty feet across, I mowed everything to the ground. Next came the shovel, chopping out the roots of grasses and wildflowers, wild raspberries and nearby aspens. Then the borrowed rototiller, its tines turning smoothly through the fluffy soil, folding in compost. The light, sandy earth is an oddity in this part of Vermont—a gift, a geologist friend tells me, from twelve thousand years ago, when this spot spent three centuries in the shallows of a glacial lake.

I knew that woodchucks would find the garden sooner or later. The sweet, juicy veggies would be a tempting buffet, and a lowrisk venture—a long stone’s throw from the house, with the cover of tall field grass all around and woods close by.

I knew, too, the kind of moral quandaries that woodchucks could present. The year before, I had driven up to my carpentry partner’s house one morning and had seen him standing in the tall grass near his garden with something in his hand. He walked over to my truck, looking uneasy.

“You caught me in the act of murder,” he said, showing me a partially empty package of anti-rodent smoke bombs. He, too, was a vegetarian. Woodchucks had been obliterating his garden. When I drove up, he had just dropped a bomb or two into a burrow, sending sulfurous smoke down to asphyxiate the unsuspecting tunnel dwellers. His dilemma—let rodents eat the vegetables or kill rodents so his family could eat the vegetables—wasn’t one I wanted to face.

His mistake was in not having a fence substantial enough to keep the critters out. I was going to do it right. Around the perimeter of our new vegetable plot, a friend and I set thirteen cedar posts, digging two- and three-foot-deep holes straight down into the sandy earth with a narrow-bladed shovel. We drove in the sharpened post points, wielding a twelve-pound maul from a stepladder, then backfilled the holes and tamped the soil down hard. Standing seven feet above the ground, the ring of rough posts looked like the beginnings of a medieval palisade. I buried sheep fencing a foot below the surface to keep woodchucks from tunneling and ran it to the top of the posts to keep deer from leaping. Between two posts, I hung a Z-braced gate made of old lumber scraps and latched it shut.

Done!
I thought.

3

Trouble in Eden

To live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood of Creation. When we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament. When we do it ignorantly, greedily, clumsily, destructively, it is a desecration.

—Wendell Berry,
The Gift of Good Land

T
he trouble started small: holes in the leaves of our squash seedlings.

Investigating, we discovered the little yellow-and-black-striped perpetrators. Cucumber beetles. Perhaps, compassionate vegans that we were, we would let them be. We could live with a few perforations, just as we had overlooked the woodchuck’s depredations at Bird Cottage and the pinholes inflicted on our salad greens by flea beetles.

But soon the tiny squash plants—each with only a pair of tender, rounded leaves—were being stripped entirely.

So I started making forays before work each morning. That early, at fifty degrees, the beetles walked slowly and couldn’t fly. I would find them, usually clinging to the undersides of the seedlings’ leaves, pick them up between thumb and forefinger, and squish them one by one, their exoskeletons cracking, their innards staining my skin orange. Far better, I thought, to hunt them down like this than to spray those few plants with a toxic pesticide whose indiscriminate, invisible work would save me the gory morning task.