The Unmown Path

Sowing, burial, and cicadas

Morning by morning and ever earlier, I traipse the oak shade on the edge of a draw to our northwest, a scythe in my arms, and pick a line to mow before the dew burns off the waist high grass. Standing in the coolness of the wooded edge and shifting in my boots, a murmurous whine –like science-fiction flying saucers– rings out from the bottomlands, between pillars of walnut and sycamore, almost dripping off the gnarled limbs of Osage orange. Nymphs of periodical cicadas (Magicicada genus) begin emerging when the soil at 8 inches (20 cm) of depth reaches 64 degrees Fahrenheit, which seems to be a good time to sow beans, not that I can use this as a marker on the folk calendar– these bugs (I can say that, they’re of the order Hemiptera or “true bugs”) only show up every thirteen years. Breaking the undulating hum and buzz with the sliding scrape of stone on steel, I hone my blade under the watchful gaze of a thousand red eyes.

Of course, it would be a bit egotistical of me to think I’ve captured the attention of a cicada brood, for they are only sexually mature for .5% of their lives, and that time is now. When a cicada leaves behind its nymphal exoskeleton, it has one thing on its mind– butt-to-butt bug love. The males congregate and form “chorus centers” to attract females who respond visually with wing flapping. In the cool of the morning, the sound is like a faint hum, growing to a whirling syncopation of clicks and buzzes in the heat of the day. In the midst of their love calls, the cicadas and I largely ignore each other– we are all quite occupied with pressing matters of the day.

My blade honed for its first swipes across this pasture, and the dew thick on the clover, I take a few cautious slashes forward, moving the scythe in a counter-clockwise arc, stretching forward and opening it wider, laying the flowering stems of cool season grass in a small windrow. Some mornings, I mow lanes for the portable electric fence to be run along, and other times it is to merely keep the ever lush and tick-laden vegetation back from the various foot paths that outline the cycle of my day, from garden to barn to hog paddock to chicken paddock to water spigot and back through. Other times I employ this tool in the provisioning of garden and orchard mulch (If you really want to know all about it, here’s a PDF). I’d like to pretend I do it for the tai chi like motion and the zen mind-space it puts me in, but metaphysically it would be more accurate to admit that the explosive growth of vegetation these past couple of weeks has kindled a feeling of near-claustrophobia in me, and the ever-tightening noose of poison ivy and bramble vine and wet wild lettuce slapping my shins is causing me to lash out sharply.

Buds are forming at the tippy top of fattening stalks of phytophotodermatitis-causing wild parsnip. Dense, tough mats of sedge arch from into the pathways, replete with questing ticks. Rolls of fencing and caches of kindling I thought I’d get around to picking up this past week are fully hidden in the thickening swards of grass, and the burgeoning profusion of monarda and goldenrod has quickly obscured our paths outward. Two poultry flocks, two groups of swine, two herds of goats and a small group of cattle cannot keep up with the vegetative explosion. 

Now I like tall grass, and dense brush, and lush, shaded woods as much as, or more than, the next person. I’m even fine that poison ivy seems to comprise a significant portion of our riparian edges, keeping the humans in their lane. But there is also some great anxiety that comes along with this verdant enclosure, this vegetative creep that begins to choke out the roots of transplanted trees, sending its tendrils under garden fencing in search of water and fertility and springing forth overnight on our favored fencing lane with a scythe-dulling fibrousness. Taking shallow slices at the field’s edge in waist-high grass, dozens of seed ticks making their way round to along my waist-band, I can almost watch the path behind growing back under these conditions- reasonable rains, considerable warmth, and lengthening daylight. 

Bindweed coils around pea shoots and climbs the garlic tops, and thorny horse nettles poke through the lettuce beds. Maturing stalks of dock and chicory project from the strawberries, providing a trellis for wads of winter vetch buzzing with bees. It would appear that the best weather for garden growth is also great for weeds… and when things take a turn for hot and dry dog days, a new lineup of ragweeds and bindweeds and stickerweeds will all take advantage of their adaptation to the harsh conditions of prairie summer. 

Moving up the slope with my scythe, overhanging limbs of mulberry and elm dangle new, long, leafy appendages that catch on my hat or even slap my face. A tough looking crop of dewberries festooned in white blooms hook their whipping, razored stems around the base of slower growing hazelnuts. I carefully slice them back from the vulnerable base of the trees, but with my blade now dull as I am tired I stop short and crouch down at the edge of the planting. 

The path along the draw glistens with discarded cicada wings, and the click and buzz intensifies from the dark and thorny heart of the draw. I have seen sparrows, jays, swallows and crows all pursue the cicadas in flight. The high density of emerging periodical cicadas, as many as 1.5 million per acre in some instances, is a survival trait known as predator satiation. In this first week of emergence, the cicadas are particularly vulnerable to predation– in fact our pastured poultry are cleaning up quite nicely these days, at a reduced cost to myself, and to minimal detriment to the overall cicada population. Overwhelming predators by sheer number is one strategy to ensure that the requisite amount of periodical cicadas can breed, lay eggs in twigs, hatch and begin their long life pupating at the roots of trees, but the periodical nature of emergence itself is a boon to their survival, as well.

Periodical cicadas largely develop over a prime number of years, for example 13 or 17 (There are some cicadas in India and Fiji which do emerge in 4 or 8 years, respectively). This strategy means that predator populations do not receive a continual population boost, because they cannot synchronize their reproduction cycle with cicada emergence. For example, if a predator generation is synchronized with one cicada emergence, subsequent generations will not divide down equally with the next emergence. If a predator reaches sexual maturity over the course of 3 years, some amount of that population, one to two thirds of it, will not be mature enough to take advantage of the limitless flying protein supply… or so it has been hypothesized. 

While these periodical cicadas sound a bit different from our annually emerging cicadas that crop up later in the summer, the wailing, buzzing woods do sometimes fool me into thinking we’re much deeper in the year than we actually are. This year’s turkeys are still hardly bigger than some of these bugs, and being so vulnerable will have to take advantage of the later brood. Not every dead bug in the field will go on to feed animals, but the soil will be nourished in a fairly significant manner by the time the party’s over. Subsumed by the forest duff, only to reemerge in another 13 years, the cycling of cicadas is as close a thing to reincarnation as I’ll ever believe in.

As the earth absorbs wing and shell and buggy birdshit, the time is nigh to begin the annual investment of hope that is pressing seed to soil. The cast-iron stove in my house, cold and fireless for the next few months, has become a seed soaking and sprouting station, with coffee mugs full of swollen corn and sorghum and beans in various stages of germination. Much like the ever expanding vegetation, my material surroundings have become overgrown with piles of seed envelopes, dirty cups, crumpled socks, misplaced tools, and broken ballpoint pens. I have never been a particularly fastidious or organized individual, and the pressure to catch up on assorted time-sensitive tasks like transplanting seedlings, transporting hogs, weeding, plus the occasional improvised acts of triage and repair, have left my immediate environment both cluttered and hygienically dubious. Everyone wants to trade in their 9-to-5 for getting their hands dirty… until they realize they’re working 5-9 instead, and the dirt is actually shit.

Having just tilled up a sizeable plot this morning, I will finish shaping beds tonight and get my beans in before the next bit of considerable rain, estimated to arrive 48 hours from now, give or take a few. Farmers in our area have managed to get their crops in weeks ago in some cases, but I don’t stand to receive a crop insurance payout if things go sideways with my crop– in fact, this year we are producing a small bean and cowpea seed crop for Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, so the motivation to succeed in our planting and growing is higher than ever. The pressure is on, and to some degree, this serves as the motivation I need to get out and grow things. There’s no better way to get a lousy bean crop than to plant into soil that is still cold. The phase of the moon might not be ideal for sowing seeds, at least so far as the Steiner folks are concerned, but I’ve always operated by the adage that the best time to plant is when you have the time.

With regards to seed sprouting, I’m experimenting a bit with our pastured poultry this season. I have been soaking and sprouting buckets of corn, sunflowers, oats, and buckwheat and spreading these sprouts out on the chickens’ next paddock. Given a few days and well-timed rain, the birds will arrive on a fresh paddock spotted with succulent young plants. Sprouting grains for poultry in a soilless system, be it an energy sucking $35,000 fodder system or a bucket with holes drilled in it might produce a grain that is more palatable or digestible, but in a vacuum without dirt, the nutritional quality does not necessarily increase. And while our birds will nibble at grasses and forbs, they are ultimately omnivores with a predilection toward grains– the sprouted and widely spread grains will encourage the chickens to stray further from their wagons and shade trees to forage and spread fertility more evenly, a previous shortcoming in our layer-wagon system. With a base of mineral soil to draw nutrients from, the sprouted grains, consumed at their peak, will contain more nutrition than I originally paid for. The flip side, of course, is that these grain buckets are yet another time-sensitive thing to track in an already complex late spring farm protocol. If the rains stop, the sprouting experiment will likely cease, as the freshly cast grains will likely shrivel and dry. And like a lot of citizen science, I do not know what indicators I should actually be making note of when deciding if this practice is at all worth the extra time (maybe 10 extra precious minutes daily). 

The soil takes seed and gives us food. It takes the fallen insects of cicadas and gives us fertility. Everyone wants to talk about the uncanny, the liminal space, and all along we’ve been standing on it– the shifting, cycling skin of the earth that resurrects death on the metabolic, microbial, and molecular level. But sometimes the dirt is hungry, for our sweat and tears and fluids both emotional and functional, and what we receive in return is unclear. I have toiled o’er this patch of dirt for past a decade, and sometimes the reward appears to be little more than bindweed.

Some days ago, we buried our retired working dog. Xena was a full blooded Great Pyrenees, and displayed all the notable characteristics of her breed– aloofness, bad hips, a dedication to her work, and impressively prolonged bouts of sleep. In the past three years, she had declined, as beasts of her size are often prone to, and we made the decision to pull her from her guardian work to fill out her days around the homestead hiding bones and gradually accepting pets until the focus of her work largely shifted from barking at the passing shadows of birds of prey to providing that unique affection only offered to humans by dogs. Xena, when she could keep up, was my most consistent companion, and probably the living thing I’ve spent the most time with this year. 

I’d long been prepared to put her down when the time was appropriate, when her discomfort exceeded her quality of life, and though she’s had some bad days on and off, her death came suddenly and without warning– walking up from the slope after a work shift, I found her lying stiff in her favorite vantage point, where she would bark at and chase varmints or just keep an eye on the fields of livestock. 

I have buried many things here over the years… sometimes in compost, sometimes in the cold clay, from emotionally wrought burials of sickly chicks and ducklings that the kids got attached to, to aggressive, slain boars and even a human neighbor. I have buried goat kids, and other dogs, and at least one great horned owl. A seed is a much more easeful investment to make in this dirt, with a much more tangible return. For the year and a half I’ve been writing this Almanac, death has been a step in front of me, and time and time again I acknowledge its presence and report back on the poetic intermingling of its cold embrace and the eventual renewal and promise afforded to us by the constant cycling of decomposition into new sprouts, new life. But looking out at the unmown path before me, the walls of vegetation creeping and obscuring an obvious way forward, I’m exhausted by death and agriculture, tired of giving all I have to this dirt in exchange for more struggle. I have buried more than bodies here. I suspect, perceptibly or not, many parts of myself have been interred in each grave. Some parts I’m fine to have buried long ago– my hubris, callousness, fear, hate— but others I mourn. 

Night by night and ever later I arrive home dusty, bedraggled, and uncertain as to why I’m doing this work. The moon will be pretty damned full tonight when I’ve finished with the work of raking and hoeing the dirt into long, neat graves in which I will place fat, moist grains of sprouting corn, each dibble-hole a short prayer for rain, for food, and every burial of each seed a eulogy for the sacrifices we make in pursuit of a hope obscured by paths unmown. And the coyotes will yip and yowl a little closer tonight, unpursued. In the course of her farmdog career, I do not believe Xena ever reflected on the meaning or meaninglessness of her work. She merely worked until it was time to rest, and I wish that the part of me that questions all this could be buried alongside what I’ve laid to rest thus far.