Letters from the Edge

Who’s Really Trampling out the Vintage?
Una nota de gracias

About a year back, when I was still working with my dear friends at Lingua Franca, I found myself navigating the darkest hour between their night harvest and my dawn harvest at Hope Well. Not enough time to go home and get a nap, too tired to try to even bother getting warm. I was sitting in my car drinking coffee from a thermos in the 7-11 parking lot, as I did not want to wake my family by going home. Some of the people from the night pick were mulling about the parking lot, eating the only warm, cheap food that can be had at that hour of the night / morning. Why on Earth wouldn’t they be already home in their beds, you ask?

Because of course they were all going on to other jobs. Maybe their day job, maybe another pick in the daytime. We were all cold, sweaty, dirty and tired. I looked over to the car next to me and saw a woman sleeping with two little babies on her chest. Her hair indicated she was the abuelita, and the babies slept soundly, but she was clearly stirring. I watched her transition the babies to their mother, who had finished her snack and was taking her place in the car with the children while abuelita put on her gear and boarded the van to go with the pickers to the next job.

I watched them go as I tried to thaw my fingers on my thermos. I thought of abuelita and the three generations of her family working on farms across the valley. Mama was strapping her babies into their carseats and looking so tired that I tapped on her window and offered to follow her home. We delivered her babies to their older siblings. Mama quickly changed into the clothes she would wear while she cleaned houses the rest of the day.

As dawn drew close I asked her to be careful that day, please sleep soon, please thank her family for the beautiful work they were doing, and left to meet my crew at Hope Well. It was an incredibly emotional drive, which helped keep me awake, but I still struggle to convey what was burning in my chest.

At the gates of Hope Well I was greeted by the shouts and smiles of my well-rested compadres.This group of remarkable people I’ve known for so long, the crew that has worked with my family through the decades, also works with me at Hope Well. The work I am able to do because they belong here means everything to the mission of this place.

Since I was a child, I have watched the same group of men and women work the vines, first at Bethel Heights, and now here as well, and how differently they work than any of the very talented crews of contract labor I have had the opportunity to work with in other vineyards.

The way I work is, to put it lightly, different. I am asking these people to take a journey with me and this place. To take that walk I cannot just ask them to go out and do a particular job. I need them to understand the reason everything looks so different here. I need them to understand that our work is always toward the goal of repairing a relationship with this land. I need them to see how everything fits together.

There is real levity in the vines here. We do serious work with great joy in our hearts. As I crossed the gate that morning, into the arms of my crew, I’ve never felt more grateful for the system that my family has fought to maintain, even as the world turns away from any permanent labor model, outsourcing every job that can be systematized, placing the responsibility and liability on someone else’s business. Bethel Heights formed an alliance with Temperance Hill more than twenty years ago to provide full-time work, benefits, and proper working conditions.

I bring this up, because that parking lot at the 7-11 was full of the very same talent and skill that was waiting for me back at Hope Well. They are all a part of an unstable economy, built on their backs, that won’t take responsibility for the most important component of the work we do; The human component.

We have marginalized the most important work being done in this country. We have painted labor in terms of drudgery, mindless, unskilled tasks that anyone with education or talent would be a fool to tarry with. I would be the last person to point the finger at labor contractors or even the businesses that hire them for starting this epidemic. At the heart of this is the systemic death of a type of working landscape that understands how beholden we are to that work, and how our society is failing as that uniting force is vilified, alienated, and persecuted.

To work the land in the growing of food and fiber for your country is, I submit, the very highest calling. To put your body and your mind to bringing the harvest to the first responders, the soldiers, the doctors and the lawyers, lauded all, cannot the people who feed and clothe them be justly honored? To be very clear, the work we do, the synergy between bodies moving through space, the way the naked and healthy environment inspires a free mind to think about the work of the hand, the tool, the effort, there is no cubicle or desk that offers the same promise.

The people in that early-morning parking lot, the people behind my gate, the people who have picked me up when I have fallen, and suffered every loss with me as viscerally as I, WE ARE YOU. We are building your children’s future. Those hands that we classify as ‘unskilled’ and the direction of their work could change the fate of our world. Can we please stand up and give the greatest thanks of this season to the backs that brought that bounty to your table? Right now, they are cutting and wrapping your Christmas tree.

They are WE. The contracted laborer has all the promise of José Luís on my crew, if given the chance and the confidence to BELONG to this place. Our land turns on their affection. Our futures are their futures.

A mi gente: José Luís, Victor, Chapo, Tito, Joaquín, Blanca, Catalína, Asunción, Jesús, Nicolasa, Francisco, Maria, Isabel, Cente, gracias muchísimas por todo, cada día, cada año. Y a todas las familias trabajando en las granjas, ranchos, escuelas, casas, hospitales, ustedes tienen mi
gratitud tambien.

 “Agriculture can play a leading role in combating climate change and reversing ecological damage. Mimi Casteel is showing one way to get it done.” 

Read the full story by Eric Asimov in The New York Times, published October 17, 2019

Juxtaposed with the exuberance of spring, and the languidly long, warm, caramel colored summer nights that barely dip a toe in darkness before light brushes the mountains, and the frenetic energy and furious productivity of the harvest, winter can appear a hard stop. Amongst the seasons it is the metaphor for death, impenetrable, a mosaic of greys, stealing the last heat from our fevered harvest fingers, leaving them brittle and cracking. Even the second law of thermodynamics points toward a certain, cold end to the disequilibrium of energies that sustains life. We are therefore excused momentarily if we allow ourselves to pin the rap for all our dark reflections on the stoic season.

However understandable, this view of winter blinds us to her critical gifts. The promise of vitality and nourishment, of warm blood, the rebirth of the landscape, begins even as the previous year leans slowly and heavily into the arms of the earth. Winter gently receives and honors the dead and the dying, unraveling the stories of their lives into the letters that will be repurposed, rearranged and reread by every generation of every organism until our world itself gets recycled as our sun dies.

Step outside for a turn about the winter landscape with fresh eyes and within moments you will be humbled by the worlds contained within, beneath, and above our own limited perspective. However grey the ground may appear as the previous summer’s plants break down, upon closer inspection you see it is teeming with the organisms that hasten these processes, the detrital feeders, saprophytic fungi, and slime molds.

If you’re looking that close, you will see the very earth rising up, pushed heavenward by the fruiting bodies of thousands of fungi, their underground networks recycling the minerals that will feed the roots of all the plants they colonize. Even the most unsuitable, the most forbidding substrate becomes the purchase of some new life.

Amongst the Seussian fungal forms you will see, where the detritus meets the rich and fragrant earth, the layer of green that is making the most of the brief sunlight. Even the most compacted ground cannot resist the relentless effervescence that emerges beneath.

The brief fluctuations of winter sun and precipitation even allow a few flowers to bloom here and there, and if you find some and look closely you will see that in winter these are universes unto themselves, sustaining any number of organisms with everything they need to stay alive for just a few more weeks. A spider need only bide her time in one of these oases, her world complete with buffet and tuffet alike.

And on this optimistic carpet of green beneath grey? An attentive and cautious walker may cross the path of a purposeful newt, having just deposited a blob of eggs in a wet puddle or gravelly stream bed. She has to pick her way amongst the dead blades of grass, where the alien-like egg case of a praying mantis awaits the signal for emergence.

Winter. Not so bleak after all, is it?

Even as we spin out our own demise in our poignantly self-interested pursuit of growth, our justification for ruination being our innate ‘specialness’ and our unwavering confidence in our future boot-strapping ingenuity to ‘figure it out,’ even now beneath our feet, in the polluted waters, in the abused soils, in our violent climate, nature tirelessly spins out the mechanisms of repair. For all our wanton destruction, in the rearview our time ends with just another collapse of biological diversity, as has occurred before, history repeating. Even the blockbuster extinction of the dinosaurs pales in comparison to the great extinction event of the Permian-Triassic, when nearly 90% of species went extinct.

Each collapse is a question posed, creating the opportunity for a magnificent and triumphant radiation of biological answers, as has occurred before, history repeating. Even this present collapse that we are witnessing daily, the most rapid extinction event in the history of our world, will not be a hard stop. The substrate that remains, however forbidding, will be the starting ground for another great rebuilding.

With any imagination, one can see the future on a random walk through the winter landscape. You can almost push your finger through the membrane of time and touch it. The bacteria and phage that have persisted through every challenge for thousands of millions of years, may well be the only life left to carry on the business of taking the building blocks of air and rock and carving out new niches, swapping genetic information, generating organic molecules.

And if, somehow, any seeds or spores are conserved in the wreckage, the weeds we scorn for resisting our most powerful chemistries may in fact be the first to colonize the scarred crust, their tenacity and strategies honed by the war we waged against them. They will make hay on the landscape as they did behind the plow, after the excavator and the chemical cocktails we layered upon them. They will cycle nutrients and die, leaving new substrates and more niches in which sex and circumstance will generate more and less successful organisms to be selected through survival, and so on.

The beauty of this is the certainty that life cannot help but raise its hand in answer to even the most impossible and unlikely scenarios posed by the physical and the chemical. Winter is just the forced slowing down that gives us the opportunity to give thanks for and take lessons from it.

Winter. When else can we see more clearly the overlapping cycles of matter, of energy, of life? When else can we observe with crystal clarity the fact that there are no hard stops, that since the very first life on earth emerged, the energetic disparities that turn our globe, that move the earth, that drive our seasons, have created every opportunity that life has exploited, and that the conversation between the physical and the biological has taken us from a prebiotic maelstrom to an eden of infinite promise.

Winter can frame every painful human reality of the moment, or it can fold us back into the web of life from whence we sprang. Winter makes room for reflection, and the challenge is to overcome our human perspective, and humbly attempt to rediscover our true natures.

Participate! Hope Well, And Happy New Year All.

Mimi Casteel