Swallows

“Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them.  The least we can do is try to be there.” – Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

I’ve been reading Annie Dillard.  It’s my first time in her world.  When I bought Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, the guy at the used bookstore gave me a dollar discount because he likes that book so much.  “I’ve tried to read that book three times, and each time I’ve gotten so inspired that I had to stop.  I can’t finish it!” he said.  I get it now – a month, and only 91 pages, in.  It’s so good sometimes it hurts.  Instead of inspiring expectations, though, it leaves a satisfied trail.  Nuggets of light and airiness within the pages, images that bring you soaring alongside her and the banks of her creek. 

She is enthralled by the natural world, and will explain for five or ten or fifteen pages the excitement she feels when she finds the egg cases of praying mantises and watches them hatch, and grow, and mate.  When I read her prose, the awe she feels drips into me like honey, and I want to go outside and practice seeing. 

Last Sunday, I spent the afternoon on the Delaware River, tubing.  A small group of us, two cars full, drove up there and paid our thirty bucks to be bused to and from the river.  We snuck in beers and meandered lazily up to the floating hot dog stand halfway down the six-mile stretch of river we were on.  Hamburgers and pepsi.  A juvenile bald eagle and swallows.

The swallows hovered in two packs along the course of our five-hour ride.  We came at them slowly, idly in our rafts, so they didn’t notice and instead went about their business.  ‘Cigars with wings’ Matt would say, but they weren’t Chimney Swifts, but Bank Swallows, I discovered later.  White belly, brown above, each wing longer than the stout little body they propelled together.  I could feel a breeze now and then on the river in my tube, but they could feel it first.  I would watch a tiny bird swoop across in a straight line and then rise and turn, suddenly swept into the air current.  These birds were perfectly in tune to the movement of the wind, that invisible substance of earth and sky.  I realized acutely the fact that all of us – every element and creature in my immediate surroundings – were going in the direction we desired.  Rock stood firm as water fell over it, resisting in places but always bending.  Bird flew true and then flexed a wing and dove, depending on the texture of the wind on which it hovered.  We humans bumbled along on our rafts.

Annie Dillard wrote this of sitting by Pilgrim Creek, watching swallows and all manner of other elements.  “I didn’t know whether to trace the progress of one turtle I was sure of, risking sticking my face in one of the bridge’s spider webs made invisible by the gathering dark, or take a chance on seeing the carp, or scan the mudbank in hope of seeing a muskrat, or follow the last of the swallows who caught at my heart and trailed it after them like streamers as they appeared from directly below, under the log, flying upstream with their tails forked, so fast.” 

Read that last bit again.  Doesn’t that just lift you up? 

Not my swallows.  From telegraph.co.uk.

Back in time

Peaches in the summertime, apples in the fall

The peaches are excellent this year, succulent and juicy. White and yellow peaches both have wooed me in the past week with their tartly sweet flavor that melts into the corners of my mouth.

This is a point of nostalgia for me. I’ll admit, over the past few years I have avoided peaches entirely, skirting them in the grocery store and even at the farmers market. ‘They won’t be as good as my dad’s peaches’ is what goes through my mind. Ever since my dad sold his final few acres of Jersey Queens and John Boys in that hideaway south Jersey town, I’ve upheld this opinion. But this year – perhaps because I have grown more aware of the trials and rewards of growing food, I have come back around to the fuzzy fruit that followed me through my childhood and adolescence.

Our old Russian tractor, with orchard behind.

Roadstown, New Jersey - Home of the Ware Chair. That’s what the sign when you entered the town used to say. There isn’t a town really. There used to be a general store, it looks like, and a small town center. But now those buildings have been worn down into barns. They house farm tractors if they’re lucky, or flocks of pigeons if they’ve just been around awhile. I used to go down there and spend a day, or weeks in the summer. I would bring liters of water and packets of Emergen-C to revive me halfway through the day, after the dust and relentless sun began to get to me. My dad would fill the gas tank of the old John Deere or Belarus, and I would jump onboard. It felt like boarding a horse to be honest, saddling up. And then I would sit up there, all day long, driving up and down each row, keeping the Deere’s left tire aligned with the left side of the sod strip down the middle, waking up enough to turn the machine deftly around each hairpin turn. It was five rows at a time – you’d do one and then skip a row on your way back, skip another on your second turn and then fill in the blanks. Every so often I would stand up for a row, feeling tall and flexible on the rumbling mower. And then I would sit down and the rows would keep on going by.

I would sell the excess peaches sometimes. My dad sold most of his peaches to a farmers co-op, Jersey Fruit, but by the end even they were giving him pennies for his produce. I would go out to the orchard and pick all the ripe fruit he had to leave on the trees and reserve a booth at Cowtown, sell it all straight to the consumer for three times what we made through the co-op. Once or twice my mom and I took a dozen boxes to Reading Terminal Market in Philly, set up a table and sold them all quick. We handed out samples, that’s what did it. His peaches were good, honest.

We even branded the business, thanks to Lindsey Fyfe's handiwork.

But then he sold the trees, and the tractors, and the irrigation equipment we had all set up and painstakingly fixed each year – my brother, my dad, and I, and he moved to the city. I haven’t been down there since, though every summer my muscles and my mind still long for it. Hours sitting up there on that John Deere were some of the best I spent through college. I learned a dozen Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell songs up there, borrowing my dad’s heavy-duty discman and black leather fanny pack. I cleared my mind just going up and down those rows, stopping for rabbits and birds and whatever else I saw.

Peaches aren’t the same when you buy them in the store. I guess they never will be, even though they’re damn good this year. Still, whenever it hails in June or when there’s a drought in July, I think of the peaches. Or the peaches that never were. The peaches that my dad and I would be picking off the trees right now if he still owned those trees way down there in Jersey. And then, if they were ours, they would be the best peaches you ever tasted.