Rot, Dissemenation, and Hay Fever

Moving from flow to ebb, expansion to contraction as we welcome a shift in the growing year

It’s rough out there folks. Out there over here, at least. It’s rapid decomposition weather, which is an important, if not stanky, time in the almanac year. Time for the sagging, busted, splattered bounty of rotten tomatoes to fester along the garden paths, their seeds undergoing the necessary fermentation process to become viable for the future. The honey locusts are festooned with bright yellow ribbons of sweet, seedy pods, soon to darken and drop, the sugary quarry sought out by deer and rabbit, cattle and goat. As with tomatoes, honey locust seeds must undergo a specific metabolic process to become viable; they must be consumed and shat out, their seed coats altered by time spent stewing in the digestive juices of animals.

Flies and fungi, slugs and mold and armies of roly polys (wood lice, if you insist) and squiggling masses of maggots and rapidly multiplying colonies of bacteria, spurred on by the humid weather are all at work, invading hot compost piles, decomposing woody debris, deflating carrion, alchemically transforming shit into earth, sugar into acid, and re-animating death back to life, often at an imperceptible scale. The bloated, split, festering and spoiling fruit of the garden renewed as fertile soil to hold packets of DNA in the form of seed, to spring forth again, on the next go-round of dissemination, hibernation, germination, and so on and so forth.

The dank and heavy air, unstirred by any breeze, keeps the dogs asleep in their shade, allowing brazen, hunger inflicted predators an opportunity to snatch a chicken here, a duck there, in the maddening midday heat. It is a tax, issued by this place, a contract signed by our being here, that we are obliged to now and then pay. I find the puffs of down and streaks of blood every so often, and while my responsibility as flock keeper is to provide a safe, humane environment free of fear, the loss of an occasional birds comes almost as some confirmation of our relationship and exchange with place. Out there, in the brambled draws and grown-over bottomlands, where foxes and raccoons retreat with their struggling prey, the weathered confetti of wingtips and stray feathers marks the shallowest of graves, where what could not be consumed by fanged beasts has been quickly assumed into the skin of the earth and made a gift of dirt for future life.

The warm season grasses have begun going to seed, stretching their thickened stems overnight, the tips split to reveal gleaming seed heads, glossy and wet from birth. Emergent monarchs dry their wings, and the humid night air is full of gnats, mosquitoes, and voracious dragonflies. The burning afternoons are still, the turkeys panting in the shade of cedars, the swine in their wallers, and only the multiplying legions of grasshoppers truly active. Soon, the nights will grow cool again, we pray, and the birds will spend chilly mornings chasing down locusts and growing fat.

Pear branches bend, laden with fruit, the scattered drops quickly hollowed out by enterprising yellow-jackets. Limbs of oak, persimmon, and apple all hold the burden of their progeny, soon to be cast across field and thicket by ‘possum, squirrel, rat and bluejay, buried in caches to be revisited or forgotten, or deposited in shit, or accidentally dropped, to reemerge in due time, springing forth from the decayed remains of the summer. The dust blown grass is battered, the tree leaves worn and scarred. The most lively plant out there this time of year looks to be the thick-stemmed ragweed, with its pollen ensconced spires. Some mornings, a gentle breeze lifts the pollen aloft like a golden fog: the casting of some minor curse.

As the human component of this ecological community, we too are participating in this current stage in the cycle, somewhere between decomposition and dissemination, performing the alchemical spells of transformation between life, death, and life again, sugar and acid, feces and food and then vice versa. We ferment crocks of squash and vats of salsa, cast handfuls of winter rye and daikon radish seed upon the manured earth and beneath the slashed stalks of weeds, and turn and tend hot piles of compost and excreta, summoning knots of worms and hordes of beetles and flies. We pull cushaw squash from out of the tangled web of shriveled vines, saving seeds from the largest, best-keeping, and least pest-prone plants, encased in their starchy womb. We pluck cowpea pods with care, setting aside those carrying the most beans, and shelling the rest once they’ve dried down. The summer thrashes in its death throes, like a shot and stuck hog, soon to leave us with its corpse as fertile ground for next spring’s planting. Not before the crocks and jars have been filled to their brims.

It isn’t just our larder that must be filled, but our hayloft as well. This year’s hay crop has been looking very concerning in regards to the extensive drought, until recent rains brought on a resurgence of fresh growth. It is the nature of hay, of course, that it must be made when the sun shines, as the expression goes. This specifically relates to being able to quickly cure it in the field and put it up dry. The best haymaking weather coincides with a high pressure system or heat dome in which we can be assured that no cold front will sweep through with bouts of rain that can ruin the harvest. This inevitably results in the time-honored tradition of heaving bales into our loft in the hottest conditions of the year. Various pulleys, tracks, elevators, hydraulic or horse drawn lifters and even raised earthen roads have been deployed to make this work easier. We have none of these. The hay must be kept high in a dry loft in order that it might keep through the winter, and it does provide a bit of insulation for the lower quarters at first, until the supply begins to thin out late in the barn season. While we were happy to get some good hay for the loft, we had to pitch it up on a 96 degree day from a wagon below. 

Starting from the top course the bale tosser stands at the peak of the load, heaving 60 pound bales onto a platform, while a crew in the hot loft catches them and stacks them carefully so as to not fall down and kill anyone. It happens. I’ve had it happen to me, but I’m alive. As the bales on the wagon dwindle, a pyramidal platform on which the heaver stands remains until it too must be disassembled and tossed, bale by bale, higher and higher. At this point, all parties are exhausted, particularly the tosser. Sweating through my pants, trembling and covered with chaff, the world outside the loft feels supremely cool if there’s a breeze, even if it is a 96 degree breeze. As I will be covering in an upcoming piece, the hay harvest used to be a largely communal effort in agricultural communities before the time of machine harvesting. It was a duty performed out of necessity, of mutualized survival; one day spent mowing, raking, and putting up hay on one farm would be followed by the same at another, and the collectivized labor kept everyone fed and afloat for the winter ahead. Nowadays, asking for help with putting up your hay from your neighbors will quickly help you to determine who your friends really are. It is amazing how this necessary activity in the farm calendar will suddenly turn folks against this simple life and have them discussing things like a fair dollar per hour, or how workshops on how to grow food are so much more lucrative than food growing itself.

Sitting on the hay loft platform, overlooking the battered and weakened tomato vines, as moribund as my own clammy flesh, I cannot help but think of the Osiris myth of Ancient Egypt. At least a little. It’s a very complex tale, and one I won’t entirely recount here. The gist is that Osiris, ruler of Egypt and primal god does something to piss off his brother Set. I think he kicked him, actually. They weren’t willing to talk it out, and so Set murders him, and tears his body apart in an act some might describe as sparagmos. Some other stuff happens: his wife Isis becomes a bird and copulates with his corpse, but maybe she also gets pregnant from a lightning bolt, but either way she ends up crying, her tears symbolizing the annual flooding of the Nile, except in some versions where the flooding is related to a release of Osiris’ bodily fluids (No further details on which exact fluids). What we have here is a classic death and rebirth, symbolizing the interplay between decay and fertility which was, and is, so important to agrarian peoples. Perhaps a bit convoluted to us as a modern and largely demystified culture, but illustrative, nonetheless: In agriculture, and biological systems generally, the processes of growth, fertility, and abundance (or at least enough-ness), are inextricably linked to death and decay.

Late summer finds us with one foot planted on each side of that line between growth and decay. In the process of growing this food, we have slashed grass and brush and left it to deteriorate, composted, managed manure, even killed and dismembered that which we once lovingly cared for. We have done this to some parts of ourselves as well, I suspect. I find pieces of myself spread out among these fields and gardens, left to build soil like the eviscerated shells of prey on the field’s edge and the hulking swaths of slashed down sunflower stalks. When it does become my time to make a bit of dirt, I hope not to be ceremoniously slumped in a hole, but rather scattered by coyotes, the range of my influence expanded and diluted in death like it is now in this deep heat of summer.

Expansion will soon give way to contraction. The herds of goats and cows and pigs and birds will reverse their spiral outward and eventually make their way back to their barns full of bedding and hay. The fruits of our labor will become interred in crocks and jars and cellars. We will eat away at what we’ve grown, saving enough seed to be safely stored over the coming months, and one by one we will cull many members of our herds and flocks, leaving only a little bone and gut for the gnawing of scavengers and the provisioning of spring soil. The river of life is receding. It is time to bring our neglected knives to the stone and prepare ourselves for the springtime of death.

Hay fevered and half-rotted,

BB