The old pickup and I rattle and wind over the back way into my heart space in the Coast Range. Several weeks ago, an October summer as smoky and dry as an open-eyed skull finally flinched and lurched into a rainy Willamette Valley winter. Everyone was exuberant in rain-washed air mercifully cleansed of wildfire smoke. Now, an early cold snap with an inversion traps the valley beneath a fog that seems one part water, one part car exhaust, and one part wood smoke. This morning we hope these conifered mountains will rescue us from the inundation of toxic vapor on the valley side. But even here a wraithlike overcast is slinking across the ridges like a beat dog, damping down the late blaze of vine maple. I can’t decide whether to embrace the cowering haze or look away.
My situation this fall was exacerbated by an inconvenient bout with COVID-19. Before I could test out of viral jail, a series of long-scheduled events disappeared from my calendar like those little metal ducks tipping over in a shooting gallery. My long-suffering spouse was ready to stand in for me at an outdoor book reading with kingfisher citizen scientist Marina Richie. Instead, we stretched the mic cord into the safety of a parking lot, where I flushed down the copious phlegm with a bottle of water, read my pieces, and chucked each finished page through the open car window. My usual November talk for Unity of the Valley, a local nondenominational church, was delivered from my office in a Zoom spacesuit. It became a faith-based presentation; I read off a computer screen, pausing in places that were supposed to be funny, and had faith that someone was laughing. I’m beginning to think those COVID-19 test kits should be labeled Remain Frustrated in the Comfort of Your Own Home! I’m a born marketer, right?
All of this is a long-winded excuse for being a month late planting my fall garlic. The truck and I duck our aging asses into the driveway at the Johnny Gunter place. I’m momentarily grateful that the gate lock is yet again intact, then mildly resentful of the dangling orange and black sign that advertises the hubris of ownership—Private Property. The ritual ensues. Swing open the gate. Rumble up the two-track shaded by second-growth Douglas-fir. Turn the truck around in the parking area. Shut it down. Take a deep breath and briefly rest my head on the steering wheel. Unlock the house. Fire up the woodstove. This morning I’m operating on a limited time budget, so waste no time grabbing a thrift shop pitchfork from the mudroom with one tine that crooks down like an arthritic finger.
The uppermost garden bed is mostly weed free. It is also free of the corn that was supposed to have grown there last summer. Last May I accessed a deep pool of wisdom gleaned from decades of gardening experience, and sprinkled four-year-old chicken manure over the surface of the newly planted bed. Baby corn plants pushed their slender spears toward hopeful May sun, and were immediately scorched. The induced infant mortality rate was 100%. Apparently chicken shit can’t be overly aged. I’m now reaping a benefit of my incompetence—this morning the soil needs only loosening, not weeding. The arthritic tine on the pitchfork begins to cramp my style, so I swap it out for a shovel. Chocolate earth crumbles like an overbaked cake.
A benefit of solo gardening in the middle of nowhere is the opportunity to spend time in my own head. This can also be hazardous; my brain often resembles a DMZ pockmarked with neurological landmines. I lean on the shovel handle, straighten my stiffening lower back, and stare at the decaying south wall of the neglected house built by my great uncle Johnny in 1959. After four generations, this valley has become a metaphorical hub for exploring the various blessings and curses of a multigenerational connection to place. It ain’t all love and light. Hidden inside the mountainous goodness carried by my extended maternal family are dark unspoken canyons of transgenerational trauma. Shame from rural poverty and classism lies untouched by the sunlight of self-awareness. Anger occasionally seethes to the surface. Healing requires a backward trek in time, a trail that twists along bright ridges then falls away into unlit depths.
In 1955, Mom and Dad were newlyweds living in a small trailer at what was then Gunter, ten miles down the road from where I dig. Money was short. Dad came from a long line of independent adrenaline junkies and was cutting timber for a living. His work partner had recently been killed by a rolling log—Mom watched the ambulance roll down Upper Smith River Road without its light flashing. She knew there was a 50-50 chance they were retrieving Dad’s body.
The year 1956 cowers in the recesses of my brain. I can’t decide whether to embrace it or look away. In the dreary rain-soak of January, Mom gave birth to my brother Tommy Glen. Stressors piled on like a succession of winter storms. In March while the first trilliums were unfurling, Mom lost her biological father to lung cancer. The following April as lady slippers bloomed, Tommy Glen left the living world, suffocated from the inside by a congenitally malformed heart that was incapable of delivering sufficient oxygen to his infant tissues. Mom went into an emotional tailspin so all-consuming that Dad decided a complete change in life circumstances was necessary. He gave up his chainsaw and revisited his military career as an airplane mechanic, taking a job with Boeing on the Minuteman Missile project. They moved from rural Upper Smith River Valley to the suburbs of Renton, Washington.
The gritty slice of my shovel continues until the garlic bed is thoroughly churned. The cloud blanket becomes taut overhead, rising above the ridges. Sweating now, I shed my beat-up canvas jacket and hang it from the deer fence. Grabbing a brown paper sack full of seed garlic, I pull a lawn chair into the yard and begin separating bulbs into cloves that rattle into a battered galvanized bucket. The cloves look like pale disjointed thumbs, waiting for the worked soil that will become an opposable finger that makes them whole again.
The garlic and I walk back to the garden. In an appeal to symmetry, I spread the cloves into a neat 5 x 16 grid, eighty incipient garlic plants if the gophers aren’t too hungry. Each clove gets a spoonful of powdered fish fertilizer and is pushed beneath the surface using my own opposable thumb and forefinger. Rarely do I use gloves for planting. I cherish moist soil pressing against bare skin, fingernails becoming dirty crescent moons, and the smell of healthy soil on my hands. For a few moments, I am forward-thinking. I am whole.
Tommy Glen was not a family secret. His black and white baby pictures figure prominently in old albums. Dad in particular was open about why he died. Yet no one talked about what it was like. How it felt to lose him. Not too many years ago, I risked that conversation. Dad started to talk, then strangled in midsentence. Mom’s face clouded and became chiseled basalt. She spat out three words: It was horrible.
The doctor who cared for their dying son advised them to get pregnant right away. They succeeded, and my journey began. But even the liquid warmth and protection of my mother’s womb was a place of trauma. The accumulation of tragedy and upheaval visited upon Mom in 1956 are beyond my ken: little money, moving away from family, the death of her father, the death of her first son, and the constant worry over whether she was birthing another heartbreak.
Trauma is transmitted across generations in many ways, including cultural, genetic, and epigenetic avenues. Epigenetics is the newest kid in the research neighborhood and describes modifications to DNA induced by the environment. These changes are like biochemical boot tracks imprinted in the soft soil of our chromosomes that cause genes to be turned up or down or on or off. Research is piling up showing that stressed-out moms, whether rats or humans, tend to have babies prone to depression and PTSD. Several of these epigenetically modified genes are known to be important in the brain’s response to stress. In 1957 I was born to a mother and father who loved me. This I know. Was my DNA marked with the chemical footprints of trauma I didn’t directly experience? I don’t know. As with most important questions, the asking is more important than the answer.
I also don't know whether to embrace 1956 or look away. I’m reading a book in which the author openly questions their motives for writing a memoir. They are justifiably hesitant to foist the responsibility for their existence onto someone else. It’s a worthy message, and I get it. I’m not trying to heap the burden of my shortcomings onto some personal scapegoat and send it over the ridge. I’m also not looking for the infamous “genetic get-out-of-jail-free card,” the attitude that my DNA determines my life, and therefore I have no responsibility for changing it.
What I am doing is digging a bed for the garlic and searching the friable soil for awareness, which is necessary for illumination, which is required for healing. Our brains are big and malleable and capable of molding themselves into new understandings. With work, some of the epigenetic fingerprints pressed onto our DNA might be scrubbed away by the same biochemical mechanisms that placed them there. Even at my joint-ache back-stiff age, it’s a worthy project. Other than ignoring the issues (and believe me, I have given that option serious consideration), is there an alternative? I should probably burn the old house and begin again from scratch, but I can’t very well self-immolate and start my life over. Since I don’t know whether to embrace that beat-down year of 1956 or look away, I opt for both. I’ll hold it for a time, love on it, then try to let it go.
Every present act teeters on the brink of the future. I return to the decaying house, the renovation project that feeds my future soul. Inside, I grab a stack of newspapers that will cover the garlic bed and keep the weeds at bay until harvest time next summer. Outside, the overcast begins to fragment. Sun-filled pockets of sky are strewn like blue marbles across a gray disintegration of cloud rug. I see my shadow, my shadows, my dark edges.
Shifting my gaze upward, I wish that angels would swoop in, carry me skyward, and stuff me through one of those clear-eyed cloud holes. Up there the sun would shine into my shadowy canyons. Up there I might gather the full magnitude of this patch of dug earth, this dilapidated building, this guy trying to find his way through an earthly existence cratered by the past. Up there I might be able to see the future.
What am I thinking? My feet belong on the ground. Locking the garden gate, I wander off to search for late season chanterelles.
It's hard to write anything after reading that, Tom. There's a lot to digest. I think of garlic as a source of healing. I picture your parents holding you and watching you grow into the man you are, the joy they felt, the joy you gave them. That's what I take from this. Hold onto that.
Thank you Tom for a piece that is beautifully written and poignant-with the planting of the garlic and the growing of garlic interwoven with transgenerational trauma in your family. How better to process than with soil sifting between fingers and acts of faith--planting for the garlic plants to come....And I appreciate the link to my website and relaying the humor of our co-reading at Oakshire Brewing --ingenious solution, wasn't it? Thanks to Kim for that one!