Sagg’s Soundtrack

The music is coming from a house on the pond. It’s only late afternoon, but these are dance tracks.

I am searching for the first tomatoes of the season, walking every row in the field, and my rows lead toward the pond, so my progress is marked by intensifying volume.

This early in the season, I can walk fast, but half-bent and sideways. A flash of color from deep in the foliage means one of two things: a ripe find, or blossom end rot. A seasoned tomato picker knows not to get excited until the quarry is felt in full, and heavy in your hand.

What I am doing now is a quick survey, seeing where the most weeding is needed, or where the plants need another line of tying-up. I’m looking for insects, I’m looking for disease. Here, though irrigated, the lack of rain is noted.

The music, however, literally changes my tune. I approach the tomato rows methodically, but with a disco beat I step out and move between the rows. I am not outright dancing — I am weeding to the beat and bopping between rows, just grooving for lamb’s quarters. I am not paying attention to the tomatoes in a critical way; I realize I’m caught up in the music and hardly paying attention to them at all.

A less appealing soundtrack plays over by the eggplant. Here, separated by several tall hedges, the sound of several pressure washers breaks the silence. Every Sunday morning, they clean up from the day before. Which, in turn, takes us back to the night before, with bass so strong that the pillow over your head only made it worse. In that muffled state, you now feel the summer noise.

Sometimes, most times, in fact, the soundtrack is nothing. All we hear is the ocean. True, the sound of the waves is not “nothing,” but in Sagg, it is our ambient and our constant noise with a volume that depends largely on the wind and the tide. All other sounds — the train whistle, the tractor-trailer, the ice cream truck, the bark of a dog, even birdsong and the helicopter — are momentary.

A summer without significant rain means that most crops have never seen more than a shower. Depending upon their native climate or their adaptability, plants weather the non-storm differently. The okra has never looked better; the carrots, seldom worse.

Even in a good year, I consider the carrot to be the lobster of the vegetable garden: slow growing and hard to get at, as if designed to be elusive. The core belief in agriculture, however, is that you can plan, ply and shepherd your way to food from this earth. But the Earth, contrary to my occasional illusion, does not readily offer up her goods.

These carrots, weeded by hand, delayed by drought and nursed by irrigation, have grown, but are driven like spikes into hot dry earth. Grab on to her tempting brittle greens to pull, and you’ll have a fistful of nothing to harvest.