Reclamation

Witnessing the return of the wild

(Author’s note: This essay is a companion piece to “Ghost Town,” the Dec. 14 installment of Next Chapter Notes. It was first published in the July-August 1993 issue of Sierra, the magazine of the Sierra Club, as a winner of the publication’s annual nature-writing contest.)

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Tufts of dry grass scratched at the floorboards as the car crept along the rutted dirt track. Clumps of unripe grapes hung in the abandoned vineyard along the road's north side, and a purple carpet of fallen plums lay untouched in the dying orchard to the south. Tree branches hung low overhead, and the grasping fingertips of unpruned grapevines reached out to stroke the side of the car as it passed.

Wild blackberries sprawled over everything, choking trees in a thorny grip, heaped in mounds over the vines, sending tendrils across the road. In the summer heat, the smell of ripening fruit rose like a cloud, dense, almost liquid as it poured through the open window, sweetly redolent of damp earth and morning dew and sticky juice running down my chin.

At the bridge over the creek I stopped, worried that hot exhaust pipes would set fire to the increasingly tall and dense grass covering the road. I parked next to a sagging garage in what used to be a graveled driveway, tiny stones peeking through brown weeds, and shut off the engine. The air vibrated with insect song. Every few seconds the cooling engine emitted a metallic tick. A distant airplane hummed.

I was home.

I had grown up on this ranch, 23 acres of prune trees and grapevines in Northern California's wine country. I was 5 when we moved here, refugees from the urban bustle of San Francisco, 65 miles to the south, and I didn't leave until I was a junior in college, 15 years later. We were hobby farmers, I suppose, living on my dad's paycheck from IBM instead of the harvest from orchard and vineyard. If a late freeze scorched the emerging springtime buds, or an early rain rotted the grapes, or unseasonable heat kept the fruit from setting during blossom time, or scab or aphids or any of a hundred other possible assailants beset the crop, it meant digging a little deeper to make the property tax payment, but that was all. No danger of foreclosure and eviction, not as long as IBM needed people like my dad.

Though we didn't rely on the income it produced, we still worked the land ourselves, pruning the vines and trees in the winter, disking and pulling suckers in the spring, crawling in the hot summer sun picking prunes, and suffering knife cuts and bee stings in the autumn-crisp vineyards. We hoisted lug boxes of fruit, dug bogged tractors out of springtime mud, turned storm-toppled trees into firewood with a chain saw, cut drainage ditches by hand in December rain.

You can't make a living anyway on 23 acres. Not any more, if you ever could. It takes hundreds of acres now to make back the investment in equipment, fertilizer, irrigation, and pest control involved in profit-seeking agriculture and still have enough to live on.

The real value of the land, however, lay not in the crops it produced, not even in the lessons it taught us about hard work, the kind that blisters your hands, stains your clothes, puts an ache in your back, and makes a noontime drink of plain water taste good beyond words. The measure of the land's worth was the way it forced us into intimate contact with the natural world and with the place where wildness and domestication rub against each other in a slow, grinding, tectonic embrace.

We would impose order on this land, make of it a garden all straight rows and orderly crops and clean earth naked of unwanted growth in the deep shade of the orchard. And it would fight back, insects multiplying, storm-swollen creek spilling over its banks and taking great, muddy bites from driveway and vineyard. Wild blackberries, lulling us with their sweet bounty, sent pale shoots into the chicken coops and tractor barns to test the redwood planks, finding a loose joint and slowly prying the walls apart. Always a small rebellion, silent in its tenacity. Always put down, with the help of diesel-powered machinery, steel cutting blades, chemicals.

Vineyard on the ranch in its heyday. (John Krist photo)

And now, only four years free of our presence, the wildness that always lurked in the forgotten corners and fallow pastures was asserting itself. Telephone wires snagged and dragged from their poles by willow branches. Driveway reduced to a tunnel through greenery. Vineyard and orchard swallowed by brambles. Swaybacked barns disappearing a piece at a time, wind-torn gaps in their sheet-metal roofs, doors knocked askew by intruding vines. Even the yard trampled bare and hard as a stockyard by two decades of child play had been swallowed by a tawny sea of ryegrass.

I walked up the lost driveway, my socks collecting fox-tails and burrs, toward the house where I grew up. It stands on a slight rise, shaded by a pair of tall evergreens. Four children were raised within its cramped rooms, leaving one by one as they married, went away to college. Finally my parents left, too, my father accepting a job transfer that took them out of the country for three years. By the time they returned, the house — which had never been more than a couple steps ahead of dilapidation anyway, due to a combination of age and idiosyncratic construction methods — was uninhabitable. And so it sits, decaying, while around it the land slips out of control.

I waded through summer-dead grass, visiting the landmarks of memory: the loamy corner where I'd helped plant a garden and learned about the mysteries of seed and root, the sluggish creek where I'd fished for crawdads, the places I'd captured tadpoles and caterpillars and learned about the small miracle of metamorphosis. In this place I once happened upon a spider wrapping a struggling fly in a fatal cocoon; it was a quarter-century ago but I still remember the sound of vibrating wings slowing as the sticky strands drew tight. Down there, protruding from the earth near a perennial spring that set a boggy trap for unwary tractor drivers, I had found a carefully flaked obsidian blade, which now rests on a windowsill in my office. Over here I had hunted lizards, chased dragonflies, picked berries, watched snakes etch the dust of the road.

It was always there, the echo of the wild place the land had been before someone laid out the rows of trees and vines, cut the road, erected the buildings, strung the wires.

Wildness, not wilderness. It's been more than a century since even this rural landscape lost its virginity, its native stands of grasses grazed over by cattle and crowded out by exotic weeds; longer still since the Pomo began exerting their subtle influence on the distribution of favored basketry materials, critical oak trees and their staple acorns. Were everyone to leave tomorrow the way my family left this ranch, it isn't likely true wilderness would return. The native ecosystem is lost.

But the wildness would reassert itself That unruly force in nature that resists graded roads and monoculture crops, our convenient straightening of meandering watercourses, our reluctance to surrender a single piece of fruit to insects or mold, would suddenly find no opposition.

We always knew the force was there. There was the inevitability of the seasons, the song of storms, the piercing beauty of frost mantling the grass, the summer fog swooping in from the Pacific only a few miles to the west. They disregarded the needs of horticulture and could not be manipulated. And there were all the little live things, the quail that marched like unruly battalions of fat little soldiers into the yard each morning, feathery topknots bobbing like caps on their heads. And the million varieties of insects, the vultures floating motionless on July thermals, the bullfrogs and jackrabbits and swooping hawks, the lizards and barn owls. Creeping morning-glory vines, with their trumpet blooms and strangling tendrils. The ubiquitous blackberries. The spreading willows that choked the creek and dammed winter runoff

All of them held to the fringes, resisting the order and predictability that are the hallmarks of modern agriculture. They waited with the patience of glaciers and eroding streams. They lived their lives in the spaces we neglected, and by their presence they made the land something immeasurably richer than merely a producer of commercially valuable fruit.

They had outwaited us, and now the ranch belonged to them.

There was something saddening in the realization. The place I had spent my childhood and my youth, the place that as much as anything made me who I am, no longer existed. The ranch where I worked and played and wondered, where I explored and daydreamed, where my family lived and evolved, was gone. House ruined, orchard and vineyard dying and overrun, equipment standing in rusted immobility. As I returned to my car and prepared to leave, the sense of that loss colored every stalk of grass and drooping willow branch.

Yet I felt curiously comforted too. For in all that decay was also the triumph of rebirth, the joyful freedom implicit in the ascendance of the wild. In the grass that blurred the outline of the driveway, the blackberries that choked vine, tree, and barn, was the handiwork of the same force that turns smoking volcanic islands into lush tropical gardens, colonizes glacial moraines when the ice retreats, shatters and shoves aside the forgotten asphalt of derelict roads after the last car has passed. The abandoned ranch wasn't as grand and overwhelming to the senses as Yosemite's waterfalls or the monolithic stone carvings of Capitol Reef, but in its quiet way it paid homage to the power that created them. It, too, was a monument to wild nature, but on the scale of grasshoppers and fence lizards.

The wild was obliterating my history, I thought as I turned the car around and followed the ruts back along the driveway. It was reclaiming the land unhurriedly, as if it had always known it would. We had only been borrowing this corner of the earth, and now it was time to give it back.

I stopped at the end of the driveway and let the car idle as I got out to close the gate. Looking back across the sweep of gently rolling landscape, straw-colored and silent beneath the August sky, I latched the gate and surrendered the land to the hawks and blackberries.