The Rest is Silence (2 page)

My friends have a steady supply of labour, eager people who want to learn how to live off the land. Like me, these visitors want to grow food, build houses, and forge community. The ones I've met are idealists. Most are young and full of a naïveté that can be both uplifting and heartbreaking. The few older people tend to be cynical when they arrive but invariably recover a hope for the world that they had thought irretrievable. It makes me think that what Martin and Jenifer are doing on a small scale is the kind of thing that might just save us.

While I stayed with them I went for walks in the forest next door. The “For Sale” signs along the road intrigued me and late that fall I bought all these trees and rocks and solitude. I stayed at their place the rest of that winter, then moved here this past spring.

At the end of April I put up my tent and began the long process of clearing the ground of fallen branches and small trees that had been felled and left to decay. It was a near-impenetrable tangle of brush. I removed rotting stumps. I yanked on spruce roots, some of which snaked through the thin topsoil for twenty feet before snapping off. I dragged all this debris to the crest and dumped it in a pile that grew to eight feet tall and thirty feet long. Later that summer birds and snakes and mice made it home. But this was April in Nova Scotia and all the smart animals were still south or underground, knowing what came next.

April may be the cruellest month where T.S. came from, but it was May in Nova Scotia that broke my heart. I was ready for the blossoms and the bees, the spring rain stirring dull roots, and instead it snowed on the ninth. When I woke that morning my sleeping bag was cold and clammy and a pool of water had collected in the corner of the tent by my feet. I zipped open the flap to see blowing white globules splattering the canvas. I spent that day digging stumps in the wet ground to stay warm. Clumps of earth stuck to the shovel and my rubber boots. By mid-afternoon I was soaked through and muddy. I retreated to Martin and Jen's and sat in their warm, dry house with an orange cat in my lap while we watched TV. Martin drank beer, Jen knitted, and I scratched Charlie behind the ears. Domestic bliss.

Within a week, despite the cold, I was ready to plant peas. I depend on three gardening books:
The Good Life
by Helen and Scott Nearing, which I'd brought with me from New York;
The New Organic Grower
by Eliot Coleman; and
How to Grow More Vegetables
by John Jeavons. The first bed went in among the wild grasses and the previous year's dead plants. I swung the mattock to remove sod, rocks, and roots in a foot-wide row the length of the garden. There were more spruce roots between the basalt bedrock and the surface.

I yanked on them and carried them to the brush wall. The bed ended up being a wonky shape that curved around stumps I couldn't get out. I held a palmful of crinkled peas that the cold and muddy fingers of my other hand struggled to grab. I pushed a seed into the soil every three inches among the stones and clods of wet earth. A Canada jay flitted from the ground nearby onto the brush wall. Even the discomfort of being cold and wet couldn't dampen my joy of putting life in the ground.

I struggled with loneliness, with missing my friends and family. I was excited by the challenge to survive, to carve a life out of the forest, but I wasn't finding enjoyment in much else. I had always liked my own company until then, but what was the point of growing my own food, of making it on my own, if there was nobody to share it with? I wanted a woman in my life, but it seemed that there was no room in this world for love anymore. Everyone looked sick with worry, heads down, plodding into an uncertain future. And what woman would be willing to live in a tent and plant peas in this weather? As much as I was glad to be free of my life in Manhattan, with all its complications, I wondered if I would be able to last in the woods in these difficult times.

After the snow and the pea sowing came warm weather. It brought out the fiery buds of the red maples, bumblebees, and green shoots; it also brought blackflies from one of the rings of hell. Between periods of windmilling my arms to shoo the pesky bastards, I found a trio of wood ticks on my pants. Blackflies have been wed to this geography forever, but a decade ago nobody around here even knew what a tick was. People speculate that they arrived in Yarmouth with a shipment of Florida oranges or cheap American beef, or on the pant leg of a tourist from Maine. Jenifer, who is gentle with her cats and whom I've seen stop her car to help a turtle safely cross the road, is brutal with the eight-legged bloodsuckers. She insists on cutting in two any tick she finds with a pair of nail clippers she carries for that purpose. It's the exceptional trait that makes her goodness human, the flaw we search for in one we admire that makes us like them better. Even if I wanted to kill ticks, doing so one at a time would never get rid of them. We might be moving into an age when all that will survive the environmental onslaught are the small and numerous. I flick ticks into the grass like an arachnid god. Be fruitful and multiply. It drives Jenifer nuts.

Soon I had another bed prepared and sowed with bunching onion seed, trenches planted with fifty pounds of Century russet seed potatoes, and more rows of peas. I piled the sods I'd removed from the beds with the grass facing down, then mixed manure with soil, shovelled it into the hollowed-out centre of each pile, and covered the whole thing with straw. Once the soil in the centre warmed up, I planted scarlet runners in it. Later, when the days were hot, I sowed squash and corn seed around the bean shoots.

The clouds of blackflies grew thicker as May progressed. I was O.K. as long as I was moving. They found me when I was sowing or weeding, zigzagging in front of my face. They got stuck in my ears and buzzed, biting the delicate skin. They landed on my wrists, drawing blood that dried in crusts on the elasticized cuffs of my jacket. I burned branches and grass, hoping to smudge the flies out. After gardening for a few minutes, I'd jog over to the smouldering fire, hold my breath, and let the smoke surrounding my head drive the buggers away. As soon as I went back to work they rediscovered my bare neck and ears and made life miserable. On the worst days, when it was still and hot, their persistence was greater than mine and I cut my workday short, opting for a brisk walk in the woods or reading
The Good Life
in my tent for inspiration on how to be a homesteader. It is a softcover book with a photo of the authors on the front. A man standing with an axe looking at the camera and a woman sitting on the rocks looking up at him in admiration. It was bought at Books & Co. on Madison Avenue a long time ago.

I needed to buy a screen veil for my head, oil for my bike chain, and a bike helmet. On a Saturday near the end of April I glided down the mountain on my bike. The air breezed through my hair as I picked up speed. I loved the speed and kept my hands off the brakes. I learned to ride when I was five by leaning my bike against a tree by the driveway in our front yard. I kept pushing away and stumbling. After two days of this, when Dad came home from the high school where he taught math, I was ready to push away from the tree, pedal, and stay upright. I moved jubilantly and liberated along the grass.

Middleton is four miles down the mountain in the valley. I passed a field of Herefords destined for the table. They were docile, unlike the feisty Holsteins farther down the road. When I got off my bike, those black-and-white beasts came up to the fence.

Hello, biped. Got any corn for us?

The sweet scent on the soft breeze reminded me that my father loved the smell of manure on a farmer's field. I inhaled deeply. My father moved from here as an infant with his mother and sister. He grew up in dairy country not unlike this, around silos, big red barns, and mixed herds of Holsteins and Jerseys. I am prone to confuse his memories with my own, since I spent time where he had been a boy when we visited my grandmother in Williamstown and because he often told me stories of what it had been like. The newly mown hayfields on the edge of town; the bread baked by his neighbour, slices slathered with butter and jam; roller skating down the steep hill in front of the house with no way to brake. It's as if I did these things.

The cows trotted beside me for a while when I remounted my bike to continue down the hill. I passed a few farmhouses that a green sign said was “Spa Springs.” It's another of the communities whose residents have melted into the city. The Mi'kmaq are said to have used the spring as healing waters. The British spooked, starved, and scalped them off their land and then, in the nineteenth century, put up a hotel and a spa that hosted thousands of European guests. The hotel burned down and was never rebuilt. In the 1970s a German consortium got provincial promise-us-you'll-make-a-couple-of-jobs-for-locals funding to build a water bottling plant. They took the money, built the plant, but never opened it. All that is left of Spa Springs is six houses.

I passed a few more farms, coasted under the highway overpass, and cycled into town. Middleton, population 1,745, closes up tight between Saturday noon and Monday morning. I got to the bakery as Norm was getting ready to lock the door.

“Any chance for a butter tart?” I asked.

He held the door for me. “Are you still living with Martin?”

“No, I bought the land down the road from them.”

“Don't know it.”

“You wouldn't. Nobody's ever lived there.”

He saw me eyeing the tarts and pushed the plate toward me. I took one and continued talking with half of it in my mouth.

“It's tough land to grow on.”

“Dad and I planted last weekend. Seeded our beans, carrots, onions, potatoes, turnips, and beets.”

His farm was like many of the older farms nearby. Their hundred-plus acres ran in a narrow band from the river, through the valley, and up the side of the mountain. They had lumber and firewood standing at their backs while they plowed. The soil was sandy and fertile, and if there was enough rain, it was so hot down there that the crops grew while you watched.

“You're lucky to have the river so close for the cattle,” I said.

He shook his head. “You kidding? I wouldn't let them drink that. There's all that runoff from the farms upstream. Last time we let them drink from it our vet bills went way up. Antibiotics and such. No, I'd trade some of our land for the good water you've got up on the mountain.”

“I keep hearing about that water.” I smiled. “Wish some of it was flowing on my land.”

I asked for five more butter tarts to take with me.

“I hope a paper bag's all right by you.”

“I don't have much choice, do I?”

I walked my bike through town. It looked like it hadn't changed much since Dad and I were there seventeen years before. There was a new Baptist church on Commercial Street, and the train tracks had been torn up. Other than that it struck me as sleepy and quaint, as if it belonged to another era. I went to the SaveEasy, hoping for something fresh from the produce section. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. A few dried-up bunches of spinach from Quebec, some local carrots and lettuce. There were, amazingly, a few avocados. I bought them all, as well as a bunch of kale and some snow peas from a farm in Paradise, downstream from Middleton. I went down every aisle. An old man, a farmer whose family had probably lived here since 1800, pushed his cart through the near-empty store. He was skinny, with concave cheeks and bony hands. He wore a ratty ski hat despite the warmth. He stopped in front of a shelf of soup, pulled a single can, and put it in his cart. He reached for a second and held it, as if weighing the can. He was looking at the price. He put it back on the shelf. We are too far off the beaten track to get much of the new plastic packaging, and from what I hear on late-night radio coming out of Boston and Portland, there are shortages even in the major cities. The store did its best to hide the gaps on the shelves by spreading out what boxes, jars, and cans they had.

But then, at the front of the store by the checkout, there was a display of plastic bottles of soda and water. Behind them, a large, youthful face on a piece of cardboard beamed at us. In large red letters she said, “They're here! In non-biodegradable bottles!” I pulled a bottle of water from the display and squeezed it. It was flexible, like the plastic it had replaced. The label read:

NuForm Plastix® bottles are made exclusively with PolyOx® technology. They are guaranteed never to biodegrade. All NuForm products pass stringent FDA regulations and are safe to drink from, and safe to re-use, over and over. For optimal use please keep your NuForm Plastix® product out of direct sunlight.

I had heard about these. They were made by EcoPlast, a chemical company that had made its name manufacturing environmentally friendly plastics. When plastics became susceptible to bacterial digestion, EcoPlast was one of the manufacturers that scrambled to solve the problem. They found a temporary solution by joining the hydrocarbon chains in their plastics with heavy metals. When these new plastics were eaten by the genetically engineered bacteria, they released mercury, arsenic, and lead, killing the microbes immediately. EcoPlast had received special dispensation from the FDA, through emergency legislation rushed through Congress to bypass the normal safety testing, though everyone guessed that the heavy metals would leach into the contents of the bottles like bisphenol A does.

I placed my box of oats, the produce and avocados, and the cans of corn on the checkout counter. The girl in the green smock, who looked sixteen with her strawberry blond hair tied back in a ponytail, was trying her best. She smiled and asked how I was. Had she lived in a more salubrious era, when most of the country's population lived on family farms, she would have been a wholesome farm girl wearing gingham and laughing a lot. She had a pasty complexion and flaky patches of eczema at her hairline. She asked me what the green, egg-shaped thingies were.