6 August 2009

Arugula, Basil, Beets, Cucumbers, Frisee endive, Eggplant, Garlic, Lettuce, Candy onion, Pepper, Ancho or Anaheim hot pepper, Spinach, Squash, Tomatoes

My friend Jim sent me an e-mail in January from Texarkana asking if he could work on the farm this season. It was in many ways an unlikely request. Even healthy, he tended towards a languid Southern pace, his work frequently interrupted by snacks and siestas.

I would have been happy to spend more time with him. We had an easy friendship, in part because of our shared interests but mostly because of his real genius for friendship—his eagerness to know all sorts of different people as they are rather than as reflections of himself. A fundamental, unshakeable optimist, he took pleasure in my misanthropic tendencies, merely laughing off my gloomiest statements. He was excellent company, but I don’t know that I would have chosen him for a farm worker even at his healthiest.

And he was not at his healthiest. He had been dealing with advanced metastatic renal cancer for a couple of years. While a wonder drug (there are moments I have kind thoughts for the pharmaceutical industry)—and a kidney removal—had taken care of the major tumor, he had lesions on his liver, lungs and brain. He had gone home to Texarkana to spend a warm winter with his parents and gain some weight on a steady diet of good Southern home cooking. It was working—chicken-fried steak being every bit the equal of anything out of a drug laboratory—and he had regained his normal weight and his normal optimism.

But I felt pretty certain his optimism had outpaced his physical capacity. He had the energy to stay up all day, to go around town, to write to friends and read. But farming demands more than that. There are, I know, more grueling activities—fire fighting, underwater demolition, alligator wrestling—but the steady grind of farm work places physical demands on the body that will wear down the fittest in the course of a season. Jim, fatter but still seriously depleted by illness and chemotherapy, simply lacked the stamina for day after day of grunt labor. I don’t know that he had the stamina for one day of it.

Jim certainly knew about the physical nature of the job. He had been here often enough, helped out a bit in the fields, heard me talk about it, seen what the job had done to my back. And, at least on some level, he was aware of his own condition, his basic unfitness for the sort of work we do here. And yet he felt a desire to come to the farm and join me in the fields. I cannot say for sure why, but I think he had fallen prey to the notion that farming is good for you—that an agricultural sojourn would aid in his recovery at least as much as fresh biscuits and medicine.

That farming will cure what ails you is a surprisingly common idea, a misguided extension perhaps of that basic parental injunction to go outside and play, the fresh air will do you some good, mixed with a belief in the value of hard work and the spiritual value of communing with nature, plus a feeling that if vegetables are healthy then growing them must be extra healthy. I suppose there’s something to it. Certainly going outside, an increasingly uncommon destination, offers many possible rewards, including, I suppose the chance for some sort of spiritual awakening for those prone to such things. Hard work has its rewards too, and people ought to try doing a little even if they intend to avoid it thereafter so they can at the very least appreciate what they are not doing. As for the health effects of growing vegetables, it does tend to provide you with more vegetables than you might otherwise have and perhaps a greater desire to eat them, so that could do you some good.

None of that, however, makes farming good for you. Keeping warm in the winter is good for you, but that does not mean you should walk into a fire. I cannot imagine prescribing farming as a course of treatment for any malady physical or mental. It makes the feeble feebler, the depressed gloomier. We might well have had a great time out in the fields, Jim and I, talking about books and noshing on beans and lying in the cool grass admiring the golden evening light on the hillside. But he would not have been able to do much farming, and what farming he did would not, I am sorry to say, have made him better.

It is nice though, to imagine he was right, to think of him blossoming as the days passed, each menial tedious task, each tub spinach harvested, each row of carrots weeded, each tray of lettuce seeded restoring his health. We could have sent him off to clean up the onion patch or pick cucumbers and felt no guilt about giving him the worst tasks because they were doing him good. And then when word got out about his farming-induced remission we would have had an army of sickly peons vying to take on all our work, begging for a chance to pound tomato stakes or grease the tractor. We would have wandered among the suddenly immaculate beds of vibrant crops, cool and relaxed and pleased to help others by having them help us.

Unfortunately, Jim never made it back to the farm to test its healing properties. Doctors and Southern cooking can only do so much. It’s too bad. I could use a dose of his optimism in this strange wet season. He would have known that the weather can only improve, have happily predicted a warm dry fall. And he would have laughed and pointed out that things can hardly be as bad as I suggest when we can fill the bags with fourteen different crops and manage, finally, to coax a reasonable numbers of ripe tomatoes from the reluctant vines. And then, his work done, he would have munched on a cucumber and gone off to nap.

Rest in peace.