Let me start off by assuring you that I am most definitely not a zombie fanatic. Most days, I don’t even think about them. And on days that I do think of them, it’s only in a mildly curious way, like one would think of a particularly interesting cloud formation, idly trying to recall second grade science class where you classified cumulus, stratus, and cirrus clouds.
Zombies do not motivate any of the choices I make in my life.
That said, I’d like to start off this essay by briefly quoting a scene from Max Brook’s World War Z, which is a fun sort of zombie apocalypse novel. The scene takes place as the human race, nearly wiped off the face of the earth by a zombie pandemic, has successfully rallied and is trying to make sense of the wreckage. One of the characters talks about how when local communities were totally cut off from the “global village”, they had to adapt or die.
I met one gentleman on a costal ferry from Portland to Seattle. He had worked in the licensing department for an advertising agency, specifically in charge of procuring the rights for classic rock songs for television commercials. Now he was a chimney sweep. Given that most homes in Seattle had lost their central heat and that the winters were now longer and colder, he was seldom idle. “I help keep my neighbors warm,” he said proudly. I know that sounds a little too Norman Rockwell, but I hear stories like that all the time. “You see those shoes, I made them,” “That sweater, that’s my sheep’s wool,” “Like the corn? My garden.” That was the upshot of a more localized system. It gave people the opportunity to see the fruits of their labor, it gave them a sense of individualized pride to know they were making a clear, concrete contribution…
My mother is a gardener. I remember taking walks with her around the perimeter of our acre of yard in suburban Detroit. She’d point out the individual plants and call them by name, and I grew up with words like scabiosa, dianthus, and rudbeckia, not conjuring up exotic diseases or ancient cities, but rather flowers.
When I was seven or so, my mom let me have a section of her vegetable garden. I chose three strawberry plants. Those three plants, given access to the rich soil of my mother’s garden and then promptly ignored by me, grew to staggering proportions. They soon took over my section of the raised bed, and while I don’t remember ever eating the fruits, I do remember being amazed by the totally mundane magic of growing things.
That sense of awe with gardening has never left me. My first house was located in a flood plain in yet another Detroit suburb. A gardener only had to think about a plant, and there it was, fully formed and thriving. That small city yard hosted my first vegetable garden. My husband and I tilled up a good section of lawn, and I enthusiastically tossed in zucchini, tomatoes, green beans, corn, and mint. The last two had been given to me by older, far more experienced gardening neighbors, who watched my chaotic garden with a mixture of horror and amusement.
Do I even need to tell you the results of that fledging attempt? I quickly realized that my zucchini production far outpaced my ability to use it, the tomatoes grew to monstrous proportions, dropping fruit so far into the remaining lawn that the next year we were finding tomato plants springing up all over the place. The two offerings from the neighbors were equally exasperating, as the mint had brought stinging nettles along with it, and the Lebanese neighbors had given me field corn instead of sweet corn.
I didn’t care. The whole thing was so amazing to experience. Here was this small section of earth, bringing forth things that I had been designed to eat. Amazing!
A few years later, we had been transferred to Mississippi, to a cheaply built subdivision constructed over a former gravel pit. Mississippi clay is good for growing cotton, and the growing season is long and hot enough for watermelon, but little else can be done with it without heroic efforts on the part of the gardener. Add horribly restrictive homeowner’s association covenants and the demands of a growing family, and I sort of gave up gardening for those five years down south.
Now I find myself in New England, thanks to yet another transfer. I’m here in the land of Pilgrims and Colonists, and people who didn’t have the benefit of Miracle-Gro or WalMart. If they wanted to eat, they had to grow it. Or trade with people more or less in their immediate community. I think about these ancestors of mine with a mixture of annoyance and admiration. Annoyed that they’re such smug show offs, finding time to build a nation while still managing to coax food out of this rocky soil, and admiring their ability to do so.
That ability has carried down through the generations and now manifests itself in a number of community farmers’ markets, family farms, and an importance placed on local food. The air seems to sort of hum with it, and I found myself this year, anxiously waiting for the ground to thaw enough for me to be able to put in my first vegetable garden in half a decade.
My soil doesn’t have the same flood plain fertility that my Michigan garden did, but it also doesn’t have the sun-baked clay that Mississippi offered. It offers an abundance of rocks, but will respond favorably to organic amendments. I put peas in the day after St. Patrick’s Day, per my mom’s teachings, and now, three months later, I am eating them. My acorn squash is an entire season away from ready; the tomatoes are still a good month, month and a half away from eating, as are my peppers. The zucchini, however, is poised to explode its bounty everywhere (I never learn).
I stalk my garden every morning with the critical eye of someone who now has children to feed. I stalk my garden and look for the amazing things it is designed to yield, things that I’m designed to eat, and I am filled with wonder at the process and dread that I should ever have to rely just on my efforts, and my land.
I think about the zombie book again (I swear I’m not a zombie fanatic) and wonder what would happen if we really had to shrink our worlds down to the local community level. The benefits to such a proposal are obvious, as people more educated than I on the subject can tell you, but I look at my garden and I think not about the abstracts but the reality. Moving to a food supply derived from only local sources would be easier here in New England than in Mississippi. Until winter came. Or we got a hankering for hummus or kiwi or chocolate or any of the food we’re so used to having whenever we want.
It’s a middle ground I think we’d all be wise in seeking out. A gentler, saner middle ground, where we all took responsibility for as much of our own food production as our living conditions would allow, and we all traded with the global village fairly and with modest desires. Maybe we don’t need access to tomatoes in February. Maybe it would shake us up enough to realize what an amazing thing a tomato really is, how amazing the world is, and how blessed we are to have God entrust us with it.
Whatever the answer is, I’m sure it involves zucchini. Two plants could feed a city. A dozen of those suckers could feed the world.
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