Trauma Farm (9 page)
The Turkish fig has its own story. I was given a cutting from a much-admired shade tree on Hornby Island, also north of us. We rooted our cutting and planted it in the middle of our lawn—protected from the deer by the dogs and the high fences. It never occurred to me that it needed protection from us until Olive, demonstrating her best black Labrador characteristics, decided to eat it. Fortunately, this was in the fall, so I trimmed the tree back to the ground, mulched the pathetic little stump, and erected a protective fence. The fig shot up in the spring, and I kept it shielded another year, until Olive was older, and I decided to release it before we held one of our “pig parties,” where we cook a pig on a spit and invite a hundred or so friends and family to spend the weekend on the farm. I was watching from the greenhouse when our first guest arrived, overloaded with unassembled tenting parts, and as she walked by the fig whip, she neatly cut it off at a foot high, without even noticing what she’d done. Back up went the fence. I started worrying about this tree.
Today it stands fifteen feet high and provides large, sweet brown figs yearly. It will soon be a fine shade tree. Poor Olive is so arthritic she will probably not see another summer. She is looking toward the stones under the willow tree that mark the history of our dead in this eighteen-yearlong day.
MY WALKS USUALLY BEGIN
at the Chinese-style moon gate beyond the deck, then follow the dirt road around the barn into the cedar forest, which is dark and serene and needle-carpeted. Like most stable temperate rain forests it’s quiet, because most birds and animals prefer the margins where the shrubs thrive with food and protection. Despite the silence and their invisibility, I know life is about. Ravens in the treetops; deer, raccoons, mink in the salal; the smaller animals tucked into rotten logs. A red-shafted flicker swoops between the trees, and sometimes I see a gaudy tanager. This is the night territory of the barred owls who disturb our sleep and make the chickens tremble. The dogs love the forest and race after its mysterious scents. We reach the gate to our lower field, and I survey the split-rail fencing that borders our neighbour’s pasture. Among her horses she has a young stallion our ancient mare, LaBarisha, finds irresistible; she knocks down the rails to get at him, despite our neighbour’s sturdy horse fence on the other side of ours.
A mare in flush is not a sight for the faint of heart. Her vulva pulsates and drips gallons, occasionally squirting. Her “heat” is almost alien in its energy. I pile the rails back into place, then return uphill through a grotto of maple and cedar to the top pasture and the ponds.
AT THE WEEPING WILLOWS
beside the main pond the world is all rhythm, the breeze-rocked branches like jellyfish tentacles in a current. The mallards and the pintails are muttering, circling in the water. Under the largest willow is a clutter of stones marking the lost animal heroes of the farm, the dead we’ve accumulated over the years. It’s a good place to go to ground. The willows make a soothing swoosh above the graves.
Willow
is a proto-Germanic word, derived from the word for “flexible.” Not only are the limbs flexible but so are the uses. We grow osier willows for the ornamental pussy willow market and special varieties for basket makers. We also sell the fasciated Sekka willow, which grows at eccentric angles and is much loved by ikebana enthusiasts and florists during catkin season. Our Chinese curly willow is another “stick” used by flower arrangers. Cutting and bundling them makes for a hectic month before Valentine’s Day; then the market loses interest.
I love our market willows best in early spring, before they leaf. Their branches can be mottled or each one a different colour: scarlet, tangerine, maroon, yellow, brilliant green, black, displaying an assortment of narrow or fat catkins, also multicoloured. The willow is striking in every season. It is early to offer pollen and nectar to the honeybees, as well as important riparian habitat for songbirds, which hide and nest among its branches and feed on the buds. Willow water, derived from cuttings, is an excellent rooting compound. I often pour it on seedlings and struggling plants. Out of the bark comes salicylic acid—Aspirin—long known to Native healers as a treatment for rheumatism and fevers and pain relief. Florists toss an Aspirin into their rose displays. Some willow fanatics claim its water is also an aphrodisiac. Up by the house, Olive is always headfirst into the bucket of cuttings, sucking up the willow water, as if her body knows it’s good for her arthritic bones.
Willow roots yield a purple dye once used for colouring Easter eggs, and the wood has found a multitude of uses over the centuries: clogs, wheelbarrows, flooring, firewood, lumber for boats and houses, chariot-wheel spokes, brake blocks for railway cars, washboards in mills, Gypsy clothes pegs, coracles, sweat lodges, cricket bats, and, most importantly, wickerwork. There’s hardly a person who hasn’t sat in a wicker chair or held a wicker basket. In human hands willow has become lobster and eel trap, clothes hamper and beehive.
The willow is an antique creation—pollen has been found that’s 135 million years old. The ancients loved their willows. Orpheus carved the sound box of his lyre from willow, and ever since he carried the tree’s branches underground, the wind in the willows has been regarded as the song of poets. In Psalm 137, Jeremiah and his people hung their lyres on the branches of the willow trees (though authorities suspect they might have been poplars) and sat down beside “the rivers of Babylon” and wept, before he endorsed the dashing of Babylon’s children against stones. Thus the weeping willow came to be carved on tombstones. Some have thought that the name Wicca derives from wicker, as the willow was associated with witchcraft. Homer’s Circe kept a riverside cemetery planted with willow, dedicated to dark Hecate and the moon magic she controlled. The branches continue to be used for divining rods and witches’ wands. Those born in March are known as “willow people,” and they are said to be beautiful and melancholy. Willows were also placed in coffins. Along with protecting the dead, willow nurtures the infertile, and sterile women lay branches in their beds. Willow is about as multipurpose as you can get.
Beyond the willows, amid the orchard, are the farm’s two hives, and the bees are making their first forays into the day as the sun warms the hives.
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THEY ’RE SINGING THE QUEENLESS
song,” the old beekeeper said. A tall, thin man who doesn’t appreciate fools, he’s known by islanders as the “honeyman” of Fulford Road. Once, he was a mathematics teacher, but the bees snatched him. These days he’s a swarm of advice, educated in many things, and his knowledge makes him cranky on occasion. I go to him for instruction. After he’s finished lecturing me about the failures of my generation, the secrets spill out— he’s generous despite himself as he tells the stories of a lifetime among insects. They’ve spoken to him for so many years I think he’s become ashamed of his own species.
My initial hive was troubled. Even an amateur like me knew it, so I stuffed the entrances with foam and bound it with the bungee cords he’d given me, humped the hive onto my pickup, and drove it to his cluttered yard. As soon as I dropped the tailgate and we stood listening, he knew she was gone. A hive is always talking to itself. This one was humming grief. There was no queen, and all the larval cells were too old to convert into a queen—the hive was doomed, its last survivors wandering mournfully on the empty combs without purpose. A sick hive can even smell different. The odour of the combs, their colour, and their density constantly vary—red, thick and blackish, pale and fluid, or even crystallized like sweet amber. Resting my hand on the lid, I felt a low, sad thrumming. A healthy hive is aggressive if disturbed, and a couple of guard bees will immediately leap into the air. If I bang the hive an angry mob will kamikaze toward me.
When a bee stings, the exquisitely designed barb, its tip composed of two lancets jabbing alternately, sucks itself under the skin until the apparatus snaps off at a breakaway point and remains in the flesh, venom sac attached, shouting an olfactory war cry, as the bee stumbles off and dies, self-eviscerated. The released scent of the sting directs new warriors to the ambush site. Meanwhile, after seven minutes the venom sac reactivates and pumps in another shot. I’ve watched this often; the intestines act like a thinking organism.
When I approach a hive, even if the advance guards do not sting they will seize me with their mandibles and dab me with a volatile odour that will lure other guards, who will decide if I am worthy of the sacrifice, since every sting means suicide. Only the queen can sting repeatedly. Bee venom is a miraculous substance, composed of seventy-six chemicals, which interrelate in a way that amplifies their effects—a tiny stinger slightly thicker than a pin can kill people with sensitive immune systems.
“Deadly poisons,” according to Ovid, “are concealed under sweet honey.” But a poison is only a medicine delivered in the wrong dose. Bee venom has been used for centuries to treat diseases like arthritis and, more recently, multiple sclerosis. Some api-therapists have suggested that acupuncture originated from studying the effects of bee stings on various parts of the body. I have a neighbour afflicted with ms. Every two days his wife uses tweezers to place live bees on the key acupuncture points of his spine. He showed me his back once—symmetrically inflamed by the healing stings. Paralyzed down one side when the disease first struck, he now fast-walks past my gate every morning, with only a slight numbness remaining in two fingers. The effects of bee-sting therapy vary wildly, and the disease can return. Others report that it merely helped them wiggle their toes. For someone with ms that is encouraging news. Hope is huge in the world.
What first drew me to the bees was my arthritis. I stung myself for several weeks. It was a curious experiment. Since Sharon is allergic, I kept a jar of bees in the spare bedroom in our barn. I’d lift a bee out of the jar with tweezers and hold it against my skin. The rush was brutal, especially by the time thirty barbs hung like tiny fetishes from my knees. The adrenalin would speed up my metabolism, pounding my heart against my chest, my skin alive with sensitivity, and I’d leak an awful-smelling sweat that enthusiasts claim is the body’s toxins oozing out. Then, in several minutes, the stings would deliver their second poison-injecting pulse. After fifteen minutes I’d remove the stingers. They slid out easily if I got the angle right. I’d sit and gaze at the water jar where I crushed and drowned the doomed bees (a bee doesn’t die quickly after releasing its sting), and I’d feel overwhelmed with the sadness of the world. During the next days my sweat ceased to stink, and I found myself more energized. I lost weight. The pain in my knees went away. However, after six blessed weeks, the arthritis returned, so I ended the treatment, but I decided to purchase some bees anyway. I guess you could say I’d been stung.
For too many people today bees are scary. There is something about tiny, crawling, stinging creatures that instinctively repels us. Seals are cute; bees, spiders, wasps—we squash. Yet through a microscope, or in a close-up photograph, they are lush, brilliant, seductive creatures— as beautiful as tigers and flamingos.