Getting Off the Couch and Back Down to Earth

I think I finally figured out why those otherwise thoroughly professional kids who toady up to Barney the Dinosaur on his show dance so jerkily. They’ve probably been so busy being Hollywood child actors that they never learned how to actually jump around and play. So, to simulate the effect, I believe the producers glue the kids’ feet to boards and then have burly off-camera stagehands wiggle them up and down.

I get a chance to think about stuff like this because very often the first thing I do when I wake up is stumble to the living room and turn on the TV. I want to find out what’s going on in my world. As often as not I find what’s going on is: Jim sits and watches “Captain Blood” for the nth time.

I think I reached my limit a couple of months ago, though. Somewhat more bleary than usual, I’d switched the set on, and, staring back at me, inches away, was a plastic talking diaper. “I think it’s time you and I had a little talk,” he said, his mouth located in prime soak-zone. “Do you think this is any way to live? Why not get your sense of the world from the world itself? Get outside and pay some attention, chump, or I’m gonna gitcha! Yeah, look out, I’m-a gonna gitcha!!”

Then he started singing the Supremes’ “I’m Gonna Make You Love Me,” dancing maniacally and coming closer and closer !

OK, what this future fragrant landfill was actually saying was the usual commercial blather about its wondrous properties, something along the lines of, “Mothers, did you know that my exclusive patented layers wick away so much moisture that your baby will look like a dehydrated prune?”

But the message I was hearing was that a change was in order, and not just a change of diapers.

So I’ve been spending more time outdoors. And you know, that diaper was right. It balances out all the doom and unreality of the electronically connected world to go out and get some sunlight (however fatal) and some dirt under your fingernails, to catch on to the news that, at the most basic and important level, the world still works.

I’ve enjoyed bits of gardening in the past. Like so many novices of the ‘70s, I got my introduction with that hardy youth-oriented crop that grew well in all conditions except under the shadow of a police helicopter.

Often working seven-day weeks in recent years, I’ve let my gardening decline pretty much to mowing. Even then, I couldn’t really call it mowing the lawn so much as I was just cutting the weeds to a uniform height. It really didn’t look bad, from down the block a ways.

But starting a couple of months back, I guess with the catnip I planted over the grave of my cat, Smokehouse, I started a small garden. It’s not much: spaghetti squash, tomatoes, garlic, epasote and other herbs. It’s certainly not enough to achieve subsistence, unless I start nipping the catnip too. But it does help make me feel more connected.

All we essentially are is dirt that gets up and walks around. Whether we get it from plants or animals, our molecules all come our way via the combination of dirt, water and sunlight, and you feel a little more complete having a causative hand in that process.

I like a box of Screaming Yellow Zonkers as much as the next guy, but the way we get most of our food is ridiculous compared to the way we could, should and historically have obtained it.

Buy something at the market and it probably started at some big diversity-crushing agribusiness factory farm, growing in a fog of chemicals on land that is being quickly depleted, using ruinous amounts of water and petrochemicals, harvested by machines or people made to feel like machines. Then it’s trucked along with more petrochemicals, road-wear, smog and traffic jams to a processing plant where the really scary stuff happens, and then trucked again to market, where next to nothing of the amount you pay makes it back into the pockets of the person who worked the crop.

Compare that to the process of chucking a few seeds in the ground, watering them, fertilizing with compost that otherwise would be adding to the landfill problem, doing a bit of work in the open air, and then having a boodle of spaghetti squash that you don’t know what the hell to do with.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this gardening business lately and was loaned a book, “The Gift of Good Land,” by Wendell Berry, which has stirred that thinking. He’s a beautiful writer; his essays on agriculture can actually make you care about the size of potatoes. He makes a strong case for subsistence farming, not just for ecological and moral reasons but for cultural ones--for what farming can mean to a family and community. Much of the alienation we feel today, he and others propose, comes from our near total alienation from the land.

It’s easy for me to see the enchantment of farming because I don’t do it for a living, and I wouldn’t be sitting here writing this on a computer, nor you sitting where you are reading it, were we only subsistence farmers. There are countries where ground-to-mouth survival is still a constant after thousands of years, and I don’t need that much constancy in my life, thank you.

The farming that looks good to me is the Mediterranean type I’ve seen in Italy, where it seems taken for granted that families raise a fair amount of their own food. That seems a good goal to me, though I could do without the rabbits. In northern Italy, one family showed me and my friends their rabbit hutch and asked us which ones we liked. I thought it was a bunny beauty contest; the winners turned up on our plates later.

One good reason to know your food personally was brought home to me just the night before writing this. I was having dinner in a South County restaurant with a friend, and before he even got to the main course his tongue and extremities started to itch and swell up. Then he got a rash all over that was so painful he had to go to the emergency room, which added some $500 to the cost of his meal. The doctors guessed the incident was caused by chemicals used on his lettuce.

When you start caring about one patch of your yard it’s hard not to take an interest in the rest of it. Since I still work a seven-day week sometimes, the only time I had recently to mow my lawn was at night. One of my neighbors walked over, bemused. All I could think to say was, “You know, I’ll bet one of the real drags about being a vampire is they have to mow their lawns at night.”

Sometimes I think one of my jobs in life is to keep my neighbors bemused. They sure seem to think so. They’re bemused that I’ve stopped using a power mower, instead pushing a manual “acoustic” lawn mower; bemused that I’ll hunker down for hours in the yard now, weeding by hand instead of using chemicals.

Let them laugh. Even now, the vines of my spaghetti squash are creeping, creeping into their yards.

T. Jefferson Parker’s column resumes in this spot in two weeks.