Orchard Gap
Crest of the Blue Ridge
Elevation 2675
We started at the crest of the range, where the Orchard Gap Road that Sam’s father surveyed in 1917 meets the Blue Ridge Parkway. All were present from our cove: Sam and Miriam, dressed for unseasonable April heat in sneakers and slacks and T-shirts; Virginia Price, in a cotton jumper; and us, toting quantities of green garbage bags and, in the back of the pickup truck, nine empty wooden apple crates. After months of talk we had at last set aside that Sunday afternoon to clean up the roadside from the Orchard Gap Deli to our mailboxes two miles down the looping mountain road.
On that sparkling day, with fifty-mile views of the Virginia and North Carolina piedmont below, we set out down the mountain, like a scout troop out for an afternoon expedition. We made our way slowly: two grandmothers well into their seventies, a stooped man in his eighties, and two thirtysomethings hunching over the roadside, picking up pop bottles, beer and soda cans, polystyrene hamburger clamshells, six-pack beverage yokes, disposable diapers, plastic oil quarts, cigarette lighters, brick-pack juice boxes, and tampon applicators. Over the course of the afternoon we found an Astroturf doormat decorated by a yellow plastic daisy, a pill box, a coat hanger, weathered flip-flops, and the fleshtoned arm of a plastic baby doll. Most of the litter flung out of car windows onto the road shoulders was fast-food trash: oblong, single-serving catsup pouches, plastic forks, paper plates, plastic cups, and paper bags from Hardee’s, Druther’s, and McDonald’s filled with the leavings of many a meal on the go.
As the garbage bags slung hobo style over our shoulders grew full and heavy, Wanda and Virginia set to sorting the debris at the back of the truck, a familiar task not unlike grading peaches, nectarines, and apples down at the packhouse. Clear glass went into one box; brown and green into others; aluminum cans were separated from bimetal cans, which were discarded along with everything else into the trash bags. As the two sorters finished separating one load of garbage, they would pull the truck ahead of where the three trash scavengers were working, so they could drop off their latest loads.
Passersby in cars and pickups gawked, sometimes honking what we took to be their approval. Even when handling broken glass or trash laden with dirt and worms and ants, our spirits never flagged. For us it was an Easter egg hunt in which walking a too long stretch without scooping up a prize proved a perverse disappointment. The joy of retrieval was tied directly to the availability of the bounty. Later, upon reflection, we realized that our reward consisted of having purged the landscape of trash—at least for a time.
At the end of the afternoon, after our day’s pickings were sorted and cleared, we surveyed the results: nine bushel crates filled with recyclables. Two boxes each of aluminum cans, green glass, and brown glass and three of clear glass would be driven off to Mount Airy Iron & Metal Co., and sold for $4.35. Eleven garbage bags would be earmarked for the county dump or—today’s euphemism—the sanitary landfill in Hillsville.
A year earlier almost to the day, we were yelling at each other. As we drove home from California, a fight erupted over a small polystyrene cup.
On our road trip we had brought red travel mugs for coffee. Wide at the base and narrow at the rim, the mugs would hold their center of gravity when the car took bumps and curves on the road. The idea was to present these mugs for our coffee whenever we pulled into a fast-food restaurant or convenience mart and thus avoid having to use those environmentally abusive polystyrene cups.
Like a truck driver with no intention of quitting to observe the conventional hours of sleep, Frank had steered the Malibu from Reno through the high desert of central Nevada into the wee hours. Bleary-eyed, he’d stopped in a small Nevada town to refuel both himself and the Malibu.
Stretched out on the backseat, Wanda opened her eyes long enough in the moonlight to spot the surreal whiteness of an outlaw foam cup in Frank’s grasp. When he settled behind the wheel, she challenged him. How could he have forgotten the travel mugs resting idly in the back?
Frank was running on empty, pushing to get home for spring duties at the orchard. The last thing on his mind was carrying a plastic mug into the convenience center at two in the morning and having to deal with some puzzled clerk. Frank snapped defensively. His voice rose, loud enough to wake the sleeping town. Who was doing the driving and who was getting the free ride? He felt like flinging the hot coffee at his wife.
Wanda sank into a furious silence as the car roared onward. She felt like making its driver eat the polystyrene that, when littered along the roadsides, birds mistake for grain. She’d like to see it pass through his digestive tract.
The next morning, when we could talk calmly, something came clearer to us. To live with fewer feelings of guilt and negligence, we needed to make extra time to behave more thoughtfully. We were still too easily and regularly seduced by that courtier, convenience.
No doubt about it, minimizing one’s damage to the environment is a direct by-product of simpler living. Washing dishes rather than buying throwaways and tossing them; shopping discriminatingly and buying fewer items—when possible, in bulk—rather than purchasing hastily and discarding promptly are manifestations of simpler, more conscientious living. Bundling errands into one town trip; hanging clothes out to line-dry when possible, and taking the time to winterize or summerize a home are all thoughtful actions. So is taking care not to heat or cool unnecessarily.
Without being regular activists, we have long been environmentally inclined. In 1973, while a high school junior in Maine, Wanda wrote a paper advocating passage of a returnable beverage bottle law. Maine, in fact, went on to enact one of the earliest such laws in the nation. And in 1977, when still in college, Wanda watched President Carter’s famous fireside chat in which, dressed in a simple tan cardigan, he called for the creation of a national energy policy. The man made sense. Finally she had found a politician who could and would become a personal hero.
Strongly influenced by his uncle, Dr. Alton Lindsey, a professor of plant ecology at Purdue with whom he spent a summer at Mt. Rainier in Washington, Frank joined the Wilderness Society in the tenth grade. Uncle Al—who’d been on Admiral Richard E. Byrd’s second expedition to Antarctica in the 1930s—was a role model for Frank as he grew up, a rugged outdoorsman, conservationist, and ecologist who spoke with scientific knowledge of environmental devastation years before the subject became fashionable.
Our lives in the eighties, however, ran along the lines of the middle-class Americans we were, with crammed schedules, a preference for convenience, and formidable accumulations of garbage. And it was hard not to feel paralyzed in the face of apocalyptic threats to the global environment. What difference could we make? Were our memberships in the Sierra Club or our financial contributions to other environmental organizations really going to help stop global warming and species depletion, stabilize human population, or close the widening hole in the ozone layer? At heart we were deeply confused about our individual roles. More than we cared to admit, we’d let our confusion stymie us. Even seemingly small questions were hard to answer and endless: Were paper bags, which were biodegradable, better than plastic bags, which took up less space in the landfill? Was it worthwhile to drive extra miles to purchase a product with less packaging? Too often, good and bad deeds for the environment seemed hopelessly intertwined. Who could answer these questions, and where did you draw the line?
But lacking clear-cut answers did not abrogate the need to take action. Inspired in part by those whom we met on our western trip, people who raised their lives to meet their principles, we resolved to accelerate change in our lives. One must take as a given that we’re all caught in the web of contradictions that accompanies contemporary life. But, we’ve come to feel, within that web, it’s important to take even the smallest steps—if for no other reason than to be able to live with ourselves.
In San Francisco we met a couple, Suzanne Moore and Robert Holland, who spurred us into almost immediate action. Suzanne and Robert live right in town, on the edge of Golden Gate Park, and had spent the previous year finding ways to reduce and recycle their garbage. In their rented brownstone, in a small, outdated, but cheerful kitchen, they’ve made room for receptacles in which to recycle paper, glass, plastics, aluminum, and bimetal cans.
“My little sister was the one who helped me find a recycling station here in San Francisco, close by,” said Suzanne. “It’s amazing—nearly everything is recyclable. The only thing that isn’t recyclable is Styrofoam right now. The plastics are recyclable, all the glass, aluminum, and paper. Our downstairs neighbor and Robert and I are composting in the backyard. We’re amazed at how little trash we actually have. And there’s a feeling of well-being about that.” As a result of their efforts, their weekly garbage drop-off went from two bags to a third of a bag.
For bath and shampoo, Suzanne and Robert use Dr. Bronner’s soap, which is free of harsh chemicals and enables them to reuse the “gray water” for watering plants in their small backyard—especially important with California’s longtime drought. “We recycle our water. We collect the bath water in buckets to flush the John,” said Suzanne.
The drafty, uninsulated town house is inefficient to heat, so except during the bitterest cold snaps, they make do without, piling on more sweaters and socks to rattle around indoors and heaping extra blankets onto their bed at night.
Living in the city enables them to use public transportation. However, both Suzanne and Robert put miles on their legs each year, she walking to her nursing job at the University of California at San Francisco and he to his studies to become an X-ray technician at the University of San Francisco. Her bicycle and his motorcycle serve as efficient backups. She has one, seldom-used vehicle—a Volkswagen minibus from the seventies—which she uses primarily to haul recycling materials and, every three to four weeks, for the occasional weekend getaway.
Aside from their abundant happiness, the visual image from their home that has stayed longest with Wanda is milk in a glass quart. “This is the first time I’ve seen a commercial glass bottle of milk in twenty-five years,” Wanda exclaimed, “since I was a kid in Illinois!”
Wanda took that bottle as a symbol, a harbinger of change, a physical demonstration that the clock could be turned back, that sensible packaging and practices from the past might return. If we could transform our home and lives into something of a model, might those visiting us feel as uplifted as Wanda did at Suzanne and Robert’s?
The trip had shaken us out of old habits. No longer could we let ourselves off the hook about recycling, for instance, by rationalizing that Carroll County, Virginia, was not San Francisco, that these progressive ideas hadn’t yet found their way here. While in some American communities there was already curbside pickup of recyclable materials, in ours it was still considered forward-thinking to dispose of things in the sanitary landfill. Not long before, rural residents had burned garbage in metal cans or open pits in their yards or buried it in the backyard.
When we got home from our trip, instead of waiting for the introduction of a countywide recycling program, we cleared off our basement landing and rolled up our sleeves. We stacked bushel apple crates three high and three wide, so that we could place empties over full crates and stack, making the need for trips to the center Wanda had located nearby less frequent.
For her first trip to the Mount Airy Iron & Metal Co., located along the railroad tracks not far from Frank’s alma mater, Mount Airy High School, Wanda unscrewed the lids, soaked the labels off the jars and bottles, and washed the insides with hot soapy water.
David Pearce, the tall, middle-aged owner, directed Wanda’s loaded pickup onto a set of car scales. The vehicle was weighed before and after unloading the recyclables. Pearce picked through her aluminum cans and tossed out some alloys that had found their way into the mix. He poured the aluminum cans into a machine that crushed them and shot them in rapid succession through the air into the bed of a tractor-trailer.
“Next time sort glass by color,” he said. “And don’t bother soaking off the paper or removing the lids.” He handed Wanda a key-chain magnet to check the cans for metal. As of this writing, we have returned seven times and collected a total of $32.48 from our combined sales, including the $4.35 of our afternoon mountainside cleanup.
It was a thrill to be doing our own independent recycling, even if David Pearce appeared puzzled by the figure Wanda cut in his junkyard of broken glass, scrap metal, and discarded industrial parts and kitchen appliances. At one point he commented that she didn’t look like someone whose “next meal is coming from what you bring in here.” He could only figure that she thought it her “patriotic duty” to recycle.
Without learning until later the term for what happened next in our household, we fell into it. It was “precycling,” or evaluating the recyclability of an item before acquiring it. For instance, if there were a choice between a plastic and glass peanut-butter jar, we would choose the latter, since we have no way to recycle plastic. If the cost were moderately (but not astronomically) higher for a product we could recycle, we’d pay it, chalking it up as our contribution to the cause.
Like most vital things, our desire to recycle grew beyond its original boundaries. Before long we started scooping up aluminum cans and glass bottles from curbsides or grocery store parking lots and depositing them in our car trunk or truck bed.
Our regular mountain jogs assumed a new dimension: resource recovery. The jogging road, which undulates toward the Willow Hill Moravian Church where Frank’s paternal grandparents are buried, makes for a strenuous jog through our neighbors’ apple and peach orchards. On weekends young boys on the road kick up trails of dust on their dirt bikes, and on weekend nights older boys drink beer and toss their cans out their car windows. Once we set up our recycling station, Wanda found herself picking up these outcast aluminum cans and carrying them home. Occasionally she has collected as many as eight or ten on a single run. Sometimes she totes brown beer bottles, large wine bottles, or pop cans. The paper litter she leaves alone, fully aware of the irony that it will decompose more quickly along the roadside than it would in a landfill.
Our excitement about recycling proved contagious. Virginia Price was an enthusiastic convert. After carrying several loads of glass down to our basement landing, where she had to transfer them into apple crates, Virginia suggested that we set up a second recycling center—at the barn, which stands closer to her house and is also in better striking distance of Sam and Miriam’s. With its warped and weathered boards just barely hanging on, the trilevel Pennsylvania Dutch barn, built by Frank’s grandfather, is now used primarily for storing ladders, firewood, buckets, and other orchard miscellanea. There we stacked the apple crates for the second recycling station.
Virginia pushed our recycling efforts one step further by locating a place that accepted plastic beverage bottles in Greensboro, an eighty-mile drive that she took frequently to visit her older sister, Peggy.
Then she became our resident bag lady.
Each of us has a place—arbitrary and often unexpected though it may be—where we draw the line. For Virginia those ubiquitous white plastic bags to which our local grocery stores had recently made a complete transition from paper bags were that line. One day she decided that she’d wadded up and thrown away her last plastic bag. An expert knitter, Virginia purchased several large spools of heavy synthetic yarn—probably used for upholstery manufacture—from a local remnant shop and duplicated the pattern of the plastic grocery bag with handles. Each roll of yarn made anywhere from six to twelve bags, which she gave to friends and family, to anyone who wanted one. The gift shop at the retirement home in which Virginia’s sister Peggy lived called for the recipe. So did many of Virginia’s friends. She wrote out instructions and ran them off on our copier machine. She included her phone number and address in case her converts had questions.
The instructions run to two pages. Being nonknitters, we thought they read like Tibetan:
Knit Grocery Bags
Use size 13 or 15 needles
Cast on 60 stitches
Knit 40 rows
Row 41—bind off 5 stitches
Knit 15 stitches and place on holder
Bind off 20 stitches
Knit last 20 stitches …
And so forth. …
Bold as she is, Virginia can also be timid, and the trickiest part for her was using her new knitted bag in public for the first time. When her courage was screwed to the sticking place one afternoon, she bought a few groceries and at the checkout thrust out her bag and commanded, “Put them in here.”
The startled but polite clerk pulled out a plastic bag. “Don’t you want me to line your bag?” she asked.
With two thousand square feet and no central heating (the original coal furnace is defunct), we shuttle between microclimates within our house. With no air-conditioning, in the summer our basement office is the coolest room anywhere and a magnet to us both. On a hot July day, of course, no room in the house is truly cool—but there is something satisfying about not insulating ourselves from the weather outside. What isn’t pleasing is stepping into air-conditioned spaces with the inevitable rush of cold air and then facing the shock of a return to the natural climate. Knowing that air conditioners use large quantities of electricity and ozone-depleting Freon upholds our convictions. And in the most sweltering of summer days, Wanda puts her hair up, and we wear breezy cotton clothing. We throw the windows open to let in the breeze and move our two box-size room fans around the house to circulate the air.
In the winter we heat primarily with two woodstoves that burn logs from cut-down apple, peach, and cherry trees. Our kitchen/dining area and living room are served by one woodstove, and an open vent in the ceiling channels hot air into our bedroom directly overhead. The woodstove in the basement office ably heats that space, sometimes so ably that the door has to be opened to the basement to let in some cool air. Electric floor heaters—which are turned on and off as needed—serve the other rooms in the house. We use them as little as comfort allows, positioning ourselves where sunlight pours through windows, layering with warm sweaters and letting our bodies adjust to room temperatures.
We are cutting down on such taken-for-granted habits as jumping in the car for day trips or weekend rambles. Thinking through the desire for trips has been especially tough on Frank, for whom—like his parents—hitting the road has long been one of life’s greatest pleasures. Sometimes the values we associate with simpler living come into conflict with each other. Is it better to burn the gas and drive twelve miles into Mount Airy to attend the silent Quaker meeting that nurtures our spiritual life in a group setting or to meditate at home?
Answers don’t come easily. The fact is, staying home more, carpooling with other residents of the cove, and conserving trips have at times felt constrictive. One has to overcome the long-ingrained habit of immediate gratification. But the rewards are real: the less cash we spend on gas, the more money we have for other things. The less we travel, the more we see what’s here on the mountain, all around us.
An environmental audit of our home would reveal a number of curious pecadilloes. One might notice the stacks of used envelopes and letters that sit near our telephone. Most of them are junk-mail envelopes. Some are the white backside of the letters inside. These envelopes are perfect for shopping lists and notes to each other and ourselves. Even squeezing one extra use out of a throwaway item somehow lessens the sting. This goes for foam cups (whenever they find their way into our sphere), plastic wine or other glasses, and even tin foil and cellophane wrap, which we hand-wash and reuse until it breaks or frays. Freezer bags are washed and reused repeatedly. Except for the most soiled specimens, even our paper napkins are reused—stuffed into a cup to serve as surrogate paper towels. (For Christmas Wanda has asked sister Jane for a set of twelve cloth napkins that we can wash and reuse.) Rags serve for floor cleanup and dusting chores.
In our bathrooms, an open bag collects cardboard toilet paper rings, which we use along with kindling in the woodstoves.
A clean-home purist might be astonished to happen upon the occasional spiderweb in our home, which reveals two aspects of our housekeeping philosophy. First, unless it gets to dustball stage, why not put it off another day or week or month? And second, it would take a true infestation (of something like termites) to drive us to the exterminator. Other insects we can live with—or swat.
In a number of ways, we concede, what’s acceptable to us is probably unacceptable to many fellow Americans. But it’s easy to see that applying the standard of unmarred perfection to every aspect of our lives—from our skins to the skins of our vehicles, from carpet to the siding on a house—can not only consume much of one’s waking life, but can eat away part of the soul.
When living more simply, one finds the time to borrow and lend possessions. We learned this first on the orchard with costly equipment that you have no choice but to borrow or rent from neighbors, and now we apply it to the rest of our lives. We use Virginia’s food processor often, and she borrows our tools. We borrow Sam and Miriam’s lawn mower; they borrow pots, pans, and use of our oven when cooking for crowds. And we all raid one another’s cupboards.
We no longer regard it as lowbrow (but as sensible) to ask for a doggie bag to take home leftovers when at a restaurant. In fact, once you get away from the idea that everything should be perfectly clean, unmarred, unblemished, and new to be acceptable, it becomes fascinating to see the changes. A spotted blouse suddenly becomes usable again. You can leave the house with a pimple on your nose and no makeup on your face. An older car that has a dent in the side is more practical—it needs no burglar alarm system. In fact, perfection in the consumer culture and in personal appearance now seems to us a tainted ideal—an island of self-indulgence on a planet crying out for help from all of us.
There’s a contradiction here, of course, not unlike the contradictions confronting anyone who thinks of him- or herself as environmentally sensitive yet uses electricity or gasoline or anything else that degrades the environment. As orchardists we sell fruit in a marketplace that demands a measure of perfection—not a pockmarked peach or apple with worms inside, but one worm free and with a visually appealing exterior. Perhaps in time more consumers will accept locally grown “organic” fruit. (One of the problems in discussing “organic” fruit is that there are no national standards on what organic fruit is.) In our wet eastern climate, that means much “organic” fruit, if fungicides are not used, will also be rotten by the time it ripens; the cost of growing a high percentage of rotten fruit would necessarily be shared by the consumer. Perhaps we could create our own market for cosmetically flawed apples and other fruit, though the transition, in which we would lose many if not most of our old customers, and be stuck with acres of unsold fruit, might very well bankrupt Levering Orchard.
Whatever the direction we take in the future, apple growers nationally are under fire these days. The 1989 controversy over Alar, the chemical agent by which some growers enhanced the color and firmness of certain varieties, led not only to its withdrawal from the market, but also to a new public image for many orchardists. No longer were apple growers producing the fruit that proverbially keeps the doctor away. Many consumers felt they were using the vilest of substances—chemicals—to jeopardize public health. Consumers no longer held apple growers above suspicion. Armed with blanket statements about all pesticides, some omniscient souls pronounced only “organically grown” apples and other fruits and vegetables safe to eat.
Though Sam had used Alar only one year some twenty years ago on a trial basis (it was not particularly effective here), since 1989 we have repeatedly answered questions about Alar and other chemicals. Many of our customers want to know how our fruit is grown and what effect eating sprayed apples, peaches, cherries, apricots, nectarines, and plums will have on their health. As we’ve answered these questions, and as the orchard has become ours as well as Sam and Miriam’s, we’ve also been giving more attention to the effects of our practices on our immediate environment.
Fruit grower’s jargon for how we cope with the insects and fungi that rot and disfigure fruit in eastern America is “integrated, pest-control management,” or IPM. The idea, essentially, is to let natural predators do the work of defending the fruit and leaves as much as possible. For example, ladybugs and predaceous mites, which some entirely chemically dependent growers kill in the course of their sprays, eat red mites, which, when left unchecked, will virtually strip an apple tree of its leaves, leaving the fruit small and the tree weakened. By not using chemicals that kill these predators, we don’t need the miticides that are still widely in use. The same principle applies to several other so-called pests.
Unfortunately, in a wet climate it isn’t possible—particularly with stone fruits like cherries and peaches—to grow fruit that won’t rot in large quantities without spraying. But there are ways to spray as little as possible, stretching the time between applications to the absolute maximum. In years past most fruit growers simply sprayed on a fixed schedule based on stages in the development of blossoms and fruit. A better method is to keep a close track of the weather and of the fungi, such as apple scab and brown rot that flourish in rainy periods. Timing and watchfulness are critical. By keeping a close vigil for the spring emergence of the destructive coddling moths, we spray only when really needed, not the many times that are still called for by some experts. Make no mistake, in highly concentrated form and during the time of their potency, insecticides and fungicides—commonly lumped together as “pesticides”—are toxic chemicals. When handling them, we have to be careful not to inhale or swallow any of the liquid or dust. But unlike the infamous DDT, which remains poisonous for years, the compounds of the organic phosphates, which are the only spray materials we use, break down under weathering in a matter of weeks. Guthion, for example, a main-stay against coddling moths, becomes calcium phosphate (often used as a food additive) within three weeks or so after application.
Ideally, of course, we would prefer to use no chemicals at all, not only because of the period of toxicity, but because of the thousands of dollars we could save every year. But the blanket notion that all agricultural chemical usage threatens human health and farm and surrounding ecosystems is far from accurate. Here at the orchard we are practically swimming in bird, insect, and other forms of life. And not only are we forbidden to apply toxic chemicals at any time close to fruit harvest, but we are also annually tested by the state of Virginia for toxic residue on our fruit. In all the years that samples have been taken, the laboratory in Richmond has twice found legally harmless traces of one toxic metal—lead. Since lead has not been used at the orchard in spray materials for more than fifty years, we were more than curious the first time as to where the sample apples had been picked. It turned out that they came from a tree right along the Orchard Gap Road—these apples had inhaled the fumes of leaded gasoline!
Like other farmers, orchardists must also concern themselves with soil fertility. Before Sam’s parents arrived, this land had been planted in corn every year for many years without regard to soil erosion, and some of the topsoil had washed away down the mountain. The first thing Sam’s father, Ralph Levering, did when he bought the property in 1908 was to build stone walls along the contours of the hillside; these caught much of the washed soil. Nowadays, given the thick mat of weeds and grass that we mow twice every summer, there is virtually no water runoff or soil erosion. The black dirt, enriched every year by the mowings, stays home rather than clogging the small creeks that wind along the timbered edges of the orchard.
Our soil, however, remains naturally low in boron and nitrogen, both of which are essential for tree vigor. We add borox in spring sprays, where it’s taken up by the fruit tree leaves. We add nitrogen to the soil by spreading it by hand under each fruit tree in the form of calcium nitrate, about five pounds to each mature tree. At this amount the trees take up the nitrogen, and aided by the ground cover, we avoid troubled waters. Nitrogen that seeps into groundwater remains an environmental threat in many agricultural areas.
Some farmers and gardeners who think of themselves as organic allege the superiority of “natural” over synthetic fertilizers. One can, in fact, make a reasonable case that in the best of all possible worlds, less environmental harm is done by avoiding the manufacture of fertilizers. And it’s essential to promote soil fertility through natural processes, a fact too often forgotten in the widespread use of synthetic fertilizers. But to tout the superior fertility of “natural” fertilizers is a dubious business. The borox we use is indeed natural—only nature produced it. But in fact there is no chemical difference between the nitrate of soda that derives from the concentrated nitrogen in bird droppings in Chilean caves and the brand of calcium nitrate we use, manufactured in Norway by the Haber process, in which an electrical discharge fixes the nitrogen. Certainly our fruit trees—almost all of them a showcase of green vigor in the height of summer—make no distinction as they stretch toward the sun.
The truest form of environmental simplicity is abstinence: leaving nature alone. We can’t do it with our fruit trees. But we can practice environmental abstinence in the forests that surround the four coves where we grow fruit.
Every year since we moved here from California, timber cutters have knocked on our door with a wolfish gleam in their eyes. They’d been prowling in our forests—either on previous occasions before we moved or, in two instances, without our permission shortly before they reached our door. Each timber cutter, friendly but not shy with his opinions, howls the same high-pitched tune: You’d better cut your trees, they say; if you don’t they’re going to be past their prime and you’ll lose them.
Perhaps we’re just peculiar; perhaps, like Sam’s father, who started this tradition of not cutting in the forests, we think the trees are doing just fine on their own; or perhaps, as Theodore Roosevelt once wrote, “nothing is more practical in the long run than the preservation of beauty.”
But as time goes on, we’ll happily “lose” them—the huge ninety-year-old poplars, the maple and ash trees, the various kinds of oaks. They’re the biggest trees on private land in Carroll County, or so the county forester tells us. And short of unforeseen circumstances, we’ll let them all grow old and fall. The black earth will gladly take them back. It will also replace them—a job it does very nicely when left to its own devices.
Ours is a logic that defies financial reason. Neighbors who regularly cut their timber and who know about our orchard debt shake their heads at yet another eccentricity from the Leverings (and now a woman named Urbanska). Why, hell. If they don’t want to cut ’em all, they could just thin ’em out a little. Wouldn’t hurt those woods one bit.
But we persist in the status quo. In fact, with even the most careful of loggers, “thinning them out” means logging roads, soil erosion, fewer trees for years to come, and a haggard look to these undisturbed groves—and maybe that is the bona fide reason we send the timber cutters back to their pickups. But it’s probably not the reason that strikes at the heart of the matter.
Sure, it’s nice to have trees. “The forests are the lungs of our land,” Franklin Roosevelt once said, “purifying our air and giving fresh strength to our people.” And it’s nice that they’re beautiful in every season—inhaled daily, beauty does a lot more for the soul than money in the bank. But it’s something more, we think.
Compromised like every environmentalist we’ve met, we yearn to live closer to our ideals. With these forests we leave behind our profane world and say, “This is sacred. This is where, without compromise, we give back to the environment a small measure of what we have taken.” They may not be the most spectacular trees in the world. Their preservation may not make much difference against the riptide of environmental degradation. But at least for our lifetimes, these forests are in our custody. Toward that just and lasting peace that must come between economics and ecology, this is one step we can take to defend an ecosystem on privately owned land. This is our hallowed ground. And keeping it that way is our way of forging a link to the ideal.