The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food (14 page)

I HAD ONE CHANCE
to meet Jeff Bickart and luckily I took it. A notice on a bulletin board at the general store in Craftsbury, Vermont, led me to him.

FREE SEED
11 varieties of beans
18 varieties of potatoes

I had been teaching for a week at Wildbranch Writing Workshop at Sterling College nearby. Jeff gave me directions over the phone and I arrived at a modern homestead on the Wildbranch River, a tributary of the Lamoille. A tall man was weeding and mulching grapevines in expansive gardens below a timber-frame house when we arrived. He looked to be in his late forties and wore a sage-colored fishing shirt and dark workpants. A watch dangled from a belt loop.

“We’re the people who called.”

“Welcome,” he said. He looked in no manner ill.

“You have a beautiful place.”

“Yes,” he said. “We’re very happy to be here.”

We stood in the cool Vermont afternoon looking down into the floodplain meadows toward the Wildbranch. The architecture of the meadow was wildflowers.

I had brought a young writer, Holli Cedarholm, with me, because from her writing I knew she was interested in agriculture and because I liked her. Holli was a quiet, rosy-cheeked, down-to-earth redhead who exhibited a rare inner strength. She was camping that week to save money, whereas all the other participants were in the dorm. My husband Raven made three of us.

In the eight years almost to the day that Jeff and his family (high-school Spanish teacher wife and two children, seven and nine) had lived on their eighty-seven-acre farm, they had been planting—160 gooseberries, 45 apples, blueberries, pears. Gardens surrounded us, and beyond the beds overflowing with verdure, green pastures trailed to the river. Jeff’s was a storybook home, made more picturesque by the fervor of Vermont summer. I was smitten, not to mention envious and inspired, as were Holli and Raven; Jeff, poor man, was bombarded by questions.

“Do you grow for market?”

“No, mostly for the family, for subsistence, and the extra we sell.”

“Do you have animals?”

“I’m much more interested in fruits and vegetables.”

“Do you work off the farm?”

“I’m lucky. No.” He swept his hand across his light-brown hair.

“What brought you to Craftsbury?”

“I came to teach at Sterling College and was there from ’98 to 2001.”

I asked what he taught and he told me: ornithology, botany, organic gardening. “Well, you want to go see some seeds?” Jeff asked.

Inside his home the living room was bright, cozy, and clean, its pine floor topped with a red braided rug next to a cranberry sofa. Large windows let in plenty of light. The floor plan was open, and we could see across to the kitchen and the table that served as the dining room. Every element of the home was cheerful, carefully chosen (mostly of natural material), and in its place.

Hanging beside the door was a noteboard with the line,
ALWAYS BE FINISHING SOMETHING
. Someone had jotted below it a list of jobs—
START CABBAGE
and
TOPSOIL
.

Something more was in the room. There was an unnatural undercurrent, an aspect of sadness—or was it contemplation? Was it because all light came from natural sources, the wide windows, that the house seemed to be waiting—waiting for the children to arrive on the school bus and also waiting for something more?

Jeff led us past a spinning wheel (which we learned belonged to him, not his wife—he was a weaver and a knitter), past a blond pine table on which lay a copy of the latest
Small Farmer’s Journal
and Mother Earth’s book on solar food drying. We passed into an office lined with bookshelves, where a computer’s screensaver twirled random geometric shapes at a desk. Jeff knelt on the floor and began to unpack a few boxes full of quart-sized canning jars, neatly labeled on each lid. The jars rattled like shakers.

“Mostly I grow easy seeds, ones you don’t have to bag,” Jeff said. His eyes were pale blue behind square-rimmed glasses. His hair was brown, thin.

The jars were filled with beans. Odd-looking beans.

“Take a look,” Jeff said. “You’re welcome to a start of whatever you want.” Holli’s hands ventured among the jars and she ceremoniously picked up one. I saw something of myself in her. I chose one whose label read
BEAN/BUSH/DRY: AGATE PINTO
, followed by a series of abbreviations that indicated where Jeff obtained the seed. The Agate is a cultivar of the pinto, mottled and slightly flattened, bred to be a bush, although it still throws a few runners. It is not an heirloom per se, but an open-pollinated variety created by Rogers Brothers Seed Company (bought by Sandoz in 1975, which merged with Ciba to form Novartis in 1996, and which became Syngenta in 2000).

I liked the way Jeff’s beans rolled and clattered in their jars when I rotated them in the light. Some varieties were breathtaking. Calypso—a half-black and half-white bean, with tiny black dots in the white area—reminded me of the yin-yang symbol and of orcas. King of the Early was kidney-maroon mottled with tan. There were Black Turtle beans, Pawnee beans, tepary beans, Cranberry beans—all stunningly patterned and colored. “I went through the Seed Savers Exchange catalog and picked the prettiest,” Jeff said.

Practical Holli asked which ones tasted good but Jeff hadn’t sampled all of them, he said. Seeds were his first priority. This year he hoped to have beans left over, after planting and after sharing, and those he planned to eat. One day soon he’d like to be producing a hundred pounds of beans a year.

“My greatest interest is in life-sustaining crops,” he said. “Grains, beans, onions, stuff you can really live on, that provide protein and carbohydrates, calories. Crops that are fundamental to keeping you alive.” Much later I would revisit this conversation in memory and realize the poignancy, wistfulness, and doggedness in Jeff’s words.

“Last year, in 2007, I began growing barley, seven varieties, including a Purple Hullless, which does not require threshing. Now I grow oats, millet, and wheat for grain production. I’m also interested in the home-scale growing and processing of oil seeds.”

“Such as?” I asked.

“Safflower, sunflower, flax.”

Eager to share his beans, Jeff produced small plastic bags and I chose Paint; Tiger Eye; and Mitla Black—a tepary, which is a prehistoric, drought-resistant bean, this one from Oaxaca’s Mitla Valley. I was careful to curb my appetite, knowing that heirloom seeds are like sourdough culture. They’re pets. You may not have to feed them twice a day, but they come with their own needs, and once you assume them, you’re responsible. You have to do what needs to be done to take care of them. I think Holli accepted only one variety. Her garden is small.

One of Jeff’s jars was full of beans that didn’t look as if they belonged together, some solid, some speckled—
MULL KIDNEY BEAN
. He had ordered them from Will Bonsall.

“These are supposed to be red,” he said. “When I grew them out, this is what I got. Both white and brownish-gray speckled beans contaminated the red. I don’t know if these crossed in Will’s garden or in mine. I’m going to grow them out and see. I may have a new variety here.”

“If you do, what will you name it?”

He smiled shyly. “I don’t know.”

Beyond Jeff were full bookshelves. Both editions of Suzanne Ashworth’s classic book
Seed to Seed
stood at eye level. I saw novels, volumes of nature
writing, collections of poetry. Because the computer waited at the ready, and because something was eerily familiar about the quality of silence in
the house, beyond our chatter and the jangle of seeds, I had a hunch.

“Are you a writer?”

He hesitated. “I attempt to be.”

“What genre?”

“Poetry.”

Of course. And I thought, “You don’t have to be a poet to save seeds. But there’s a good chance that you are.” I wanted to ask him for a poem or two, but he was already giving us a lot. So I asked him, instead, how he got interested in seed saving.

“It was soon after my wife, Jennifer, and I married,” he said, “when we dug our first garden, in the summer of 1994. We got into it together. It dawned on me that it was time to start growing food. Maybe it was finally being married, suddenly we’re making a household and households need food, good food.”

Fourteen years later, eight of those years on the farm, he grew twenty-two kinds of beans, five kinds of barley, eight kinds of garlic, and twenty kinds of potatoes. In the 2008
Seed Savers Exchange Yearbook
he offered fifty-two varieties. He’d only been on the farm for eight years. He had done a lot in eight years.

“Do you ever wish you’d got started earlier?” I asked. I think a lot about that, because I came late to the life I dreamed of, and because when I visit the homes of people who have lived in one place for many years, I
see the amazing things that are possible if one chooses to stay put.

“It’s not too late,” he said. “Although it’s later than it should have been.”

At the time I didn’t realize what he meant.

When I mentioned cowpeas, since they grow so well in our Southeastern climate, Jeff brought out a large grocery sack of seed packets. “I tried to grow cowpeas last year,” he said, “but our growing season is too short and they never did well. If you can grow them down where you live in Georgia, you can take all these.”

I fiddled with the packets. Red Ripper and Papago and Pennyrile and Purple Hull Pinkeye and Queen Anne Black-eye. I didn’t need all these varieties. It was June and the growing season was well underway in Georgia—where would I plant them? I’d have to make more beds, make room. But here, in Jeff’s office, they would slowly lose their viability and they would die. They would die because the life inside would slowly flow out and nothing would be able to retrieve it. I didn’t want the responsibility of twenty kinds of heirloom cowpeas, but better me than nobody. The beans, I told myself, ought to last at least three years at room temperature without much loss of germination, and they would last longer in the freezer. More than a bit regretfully I accepted all of them.

“I understand,” he said. “Since I got sick I’ve had to choose carefully what I can and can’t take on.”

“Sick?”

“I was diagnosed with cancer. Melanoma. I’m now in remission.” That, I realized, explained the trace of sadness in the air and the quietness, the purpose-driven home. Illness is a state of being that makes life more precious than it might be to a person unvisited by meditations upon time.

No one could have remained unaltered by the news. The information took me completely off guard. Jeff was so young and vibrant and healthy—as well as obviously talented, brilliant, and committed to serving the world. Being a hospice volunteer and my husband an EMT, I have seen a bit of death; no amount of society with it, or rationality about it, can diffuse the sense of tragedy. Here was a man so vibrant and good, visionary and hardworking, a man with children who needed him, fighting to live, hoping to remain in remission.

But plenty of people survive calamities of this sort.

Jeff glanced out the window, watching for his children, and with that signal we trooped out, pausing to tour more gardens along the terraced hill around the house. Everything was tidy, weedless, well-labeled, green, and growing—Slavic bread-seed poppies, kamut, fifteen varieties of tomatoes. Beyond the gardens the meadow was filled with forget-me-nots. We thanked Jeff and promised to let him know how the beans and peas grew.

A year will pass before I hear news of him.

WHEN I WAS A KID
,
there was a ditty certain to send my friends into spasms of giggles:
First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes a baby in a baby carriage.
What exactly happens between marriage and carriage is a great unknown, but over time every kid begins to comprehend one thing for sure—
something
happens. Awkwardly, blindly, and clandestinely, sometimes brutally, the great mysteries of sex are revealed to us.