I'd rather be ragweed

Old fencerows, prairie fire, and grief

We built our home on an old fencerow, between the juncture of a broad shoulder of once open grassland sprouting in eastern red cedar, and a rolling slope stripped of its skin by the plow, scabbed over with pioneering brush that managed to break through the hardpan clay– every ten feet impaled with weathered hedge posts, loosely encumbered by sagging, corroded barbed wire. Already a wide break was made in the fence, and gradually, we have cut out and rolled away the rusting coils. A half century or more of birds roosting and shitting seeds along the old fencerow has materialized in a density of pin oak and chokecherry, mulberry and hedge.

We did what humans often do, and cleared some of the trees. We pruned low, arching boughs of Osage orange, bucked and split honey locust, and heated ourselves on the heartwood, set aflame within a cradle of its own thorns, within a dwelling made up of the skeletal remains of old oak. We uprooted poison ivy. Killed and ate raccoons. We dug foundations and tampered with the hydrology and decimated the sod for crops and then, we began building new fences of our own. And this land responded to our disturbance in kind, by erecting a barrier of its own: Ambrosia artemisiifolia- common ragweed.

Ragweed thrives on disturbance. Most often our own. The plants, candelabra-like and studded with inconspicuous floral spikes, produce heavy crops of long-lived seed that can lay in wait in the soil for years, taking the opportunity to sprout with the touch of a shovel, or the overlong grazing of livestock. It produces an allergenic pollen that can travel on the wind for 400-500 miles under proper conditions. As I move through grazed down pastures in the dewy morning, I can see the golden dust puffing into the humid air once the tiny flowers receive the kiss of slanted sun. Herding pigs and stringing electric fence along the bottom edge of the slope, I reemerge from the brush gilded in a fine layer of chalky, yellow pollen. And then, I suffer.

Respiratorily, things have been difficult. Watery rivulets of nasal discharge steadily flow forth throughout my working hours. This thin clear snot soaks into my mustache, and after I’ve blown through a couple hankies I just kind of let it set there. I sneeze very loudly, and I swear I can’t help it. My brain grows foggy, almost as if occluded by mucus. The ragweed offers a clear message, and in its own way, fences out any area that has had a bit too much human economic activity this season– keep out, we’re healing. Some boundaries are worth respecting.

Dripping snot in the heat, I edge by the gangly, seed laden heads of ragweed. In summer’s wane, when the fields grow dry and the fine gravel dust rises on the wind and bleaches the battered ditches with crushed limestone, and the grasshoppers chew down whatever remains tender, and the honey locust bleeds desiccated leaves upon its droughty roots, with the tenderness cooked out of the vegetation and the world turned hard and seedy, those species who will endure exhibit a certain toughness, or maybe unapproachability. It’s admirable, at least among the prairie flora, but I find it a bit pitiable whenever exhibiting these characteristics myself. By rolling back the wire on this old fence, we have put ourselves in a vulnerable place, treading wearily in brambles, callousing our feet and hands if not our hearts. Participating in an ecological community, as a human among humans, will necessarily give us pause– if the pollen and the thorns are not enough to usher us away, it could just be our tired hearts.

Here in our nation’s agricultural heartland, the corn and the beans are drying down, awaiting the high whine of combines running day and night as the region’s brutalist agri-dustrial architecture of galvanized bins and glinting silos are filled, nearly bursting with investment commodities that can be held or dumped at the most advantageous moments on behalf of soft, pink shareholders. Ragweed is becoming a problem in some of these fields, with certain local types developing a resistance to glyphosate and, in places, cutting the yields of soybeans considerably. It’s as if the land builds more fences, and we rip them out to build our own, in perpetuity.

Soon, wagons and hoppers full of corn will traverse these straight-angled roads, cutting over rectangular parcels and boundaries declared by surveyors and courts long ago, perhaps twisting some, along the tamed channels of the Fabius watershed. Some of it will undoubtedly wait in line to become livestock feed and lubricants, or ethanol, or if we’re lucky, human-grade feed. Much of it will just wait, until dumping it on the market can be used to disrupt and disturb some other community, specifically or vaguely, for the limited benefit of a prosperous few. But these shocks and disturbances may well breed a certain weedy resistance along the back edges of these cropped out, plowed down fields, so long as there’s enough dirt left to admit a seed or two of ragweed.

It’s all so big and complicated, and we’re all so small and simple, it’s easy to either detach or despair, grieve or leave. But I don’t think I can do either of these things anymore. The fence is torn out, and I’m out in the pollen cloud of our own making, too busy for grief, too annoyed with actionless talk. Were some ecological catastrophe to come along and wipe the great portion of us off the map we’ve drawn up and dissected into little private pieces, would something new come along? Undoubtedly, we’d have a bit of ragweed, and then maybe a bit of cedar, or locust. But I don’t think the long chain of human stewardship that helped to form all this former prairie would truly continue. Because those who stand to gain the most from this level of degradation are never the meek. It’s the prosperous few who wish to shuttle off to Mars and leave behind this worn-down rock who peddle in hopelessness, who view us as “surplus population”, weeds to be pulled.

It is an illustrative, but perhaps naive view, that nature bats last, that climate change is the earth running a fever to rid the virus, that is us, from its body; a convenient and lazy position to take in the midst of such justifiable overwhelm, but no more true than the idea that the ragweed pollen currently attacking my sinus cavities is me receiving punishment for my misdeeds as a human trying to raise food while I figure it all out. And as the symptoms of this “fever” intensify, there are going to be a lot of bad people justifying atrocities against the broadly innocent global population. I don’t have faith in some punitive deity or wrathful Jehovah or animistic planet that we, in our hubris, have imbued with our own flawed behaviors. As an adult, and one who has attempted to repair a lot of my own past mistakes, I see our problems as something we can fix just as much as we can create.

But what do I know? After all, I’m just a stupid, hopeful hayseed, as insignificant as the swirling, ignorant chaff of brush-hogged ragweed being blown about the ditch. I don’t know how to fix it, but I have some ideas to try, and I’m just dumb enough to attempt them.

I’ll accept that much of what I’m required to do as a human is grieve. There’s at least one new thing for me to grieve daily, overlapped with everything else in the near and far past, and underpinned by the big pain of watching our species take part in a murder-suicide pact with the planet. If you want to get Kubler-Ross with it, we can. Most of my grief is directed into anger– it works fine for the small things. If a tool handle snaps on me, I throw it. But some days or weeks later, I do go pick it up and fix it. At this point, denial mostly bores me, but if I need to get on with my day because so many living things, including my friends and family need me to be helpful and functional, I’ll ignore some glaring improbabilities. I’m already chemically inclined towards depression, so whatever. I bargain all the time, especially because bargaining works across cultures. And as much as I sometimes feel like things are fated to go poorly, I do my best to buck the trend of acceptance. Fuck acceptance (and pardon my French). We, the meek, and the whole world along with us, can point to our acceptance of the unacceptable if we want to blame these big, complicated problems on something.

So yes, do grieve if you must. But do not accept, or become complacent and smug as we teeter from this, the latest in many precipices of extinction. Jam the cogs, engage in ethical sabotage, dream up an alternative, do some solid research, plant a damned tree, or if nothing else, become like ragweed, and irritate the nasal passages of those who wish to shrug us off and mow us down. We’re humans: we grieve, we attempt to understand our world, and we manipulate our surroundings, for better or worse. 

A hot wind is rolling up this slope, and we’re hoping to burn some prairie at the low-point of today’s humidity, Typically, we might reserve this activity for a time of year when such a burn would likely succeed in a hotter, more effective burn, but we are trying something new that hasn’t really worked yet. Sericea lespedeza has been popping up in our fields, threatening the fragile interplay between native grasses, forbs, and wildlife. It can only be effectively reduced with fire at this time of year– flowering. The seeds thrive on the fire-opened soil, so reducing them now and hitting the root reserves at its peak of vulnerability is perhaps the only approach outside of herbicide and heavy tillage (which we don’t want) that might work. Like a lot of the work we do here, it’s objectively, a little hopeless. As a collective, we’ve basically agreed to not spray. There’s a pragmatic part of me that views this as foolish. And there’s a part of me that can see the chain of unintended consequences it could result in. A paralyzing proposition, among many paralyzing propositions we must burn to the ground.

Ragweed is not resigned to the destruction of land. Its seeds do not recognize the physical and cultural boundaries we half-heartedly install. It defends what is fragile to the best of its ability, shielding vulnerable soils from further disturbance, and then, it takes what it can glean of the stripped earth with calloused rhizomes and keels over to die, building the first layer of the next prairies. Wherever it crops up, more is sure to follow, until it has served its function. Dusty, battered, and resplendent none-the-less, the only point of verdance in these dried down bean fields, it performs humble and thankless work, in spite of the odds. And I think we could stand to have a bit more of that around.

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This piece is dedicated to our long-time family cat, Ragweed, who is in her final days. She has been a gentle presence, a source of joy, and a tenacious spirit against all odds— an inspiring little weed upon the broad plain of our typically human resignation.

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