Community Incubator
Gardening in Food Deserts
Just this recurring daydream
Across decades and thousands of miles of American landscapes, through sundry incarnations and divergent locales, I dont remember the first time the idea came to me.
The oil pumpy bird
It may have been on a walk with my grandfather in the early 80s to the end of the road in rural Western Michigan. “God’s Country,” he called it. There was one of those oil pumper things. It smelled rank of oil or gas or fossils.
I can’t remember if it was John Deere-green or -yellow heavy industrial steel. I don’t know what they’re called. They’re not derricks. They’re the ones that go up and down, up and down, like those little plastic birdies at roadside diners and Chinese buffets that go down and come back up with a toothpick. You know the ones?
The ancient boneyard on an eroded hill, hemmed in by sprawl
In a pre-suburb hamlet outside of Indianapolis, land that had most recently been fields and farms now shocked-and-awed into submission by Progress, and likely, municipal, county, and state tax incentives for Big Corp to relo here.
Trees razed, land flattened, divided, subdivided, and tracted with spec houses. Like pox on a grid.
Somehow, they had the decency, or the court order, or they’d seen Poltergeist, to leave the 1800s cemetery with its generous tree, shade for a hot summer day spent collecting aluminum cans from the gutters and the as-yet unfinished home sites. Only a few stones remained to mark old graves.
How many unmarked grave sites got plowed back under by the great earth movers?
Not the little earth movers — worms, daisies, irises tending loved ones. These tiny alchemists giving us back.
Pat them with soft hands-
Like spades, but pink and loving; they
break rock, nudge giants aside,
affable plow.~ William Stafford
The abandoned mini-golf course on Burnet Road
“It’s Burnet, durn it. Why don’t you learn it?”
A helpful mnemonic from an old Aggie friend who’s made Austin his home since graduation. Against his best advice, I moved here after I fled the mold-infested community I adored. (I didn’t adore it enough to let it keep slowly killing me. Like so many things, I might add.)
“Austin is the allergy capital of the world. Don’t move here.
He was right. But I was on fumes. Didn't know where else to go. Thought I’d get a job right away. I was wrong.
I could have moved to Michigan and been near my parents — back when I had two. I could have hung out with them more and just as easily not found a job there. When Mom’s diagnosis came, I’d have already been embedded, as it were. And there wouldn’t have been any debate.
But, whatever. Spilt milk. Dead moms. Fuck all of it.
The abandoned mini golf course, overgrown with weeds, was on my long walk route. It’s been turned into some kind of outdoor bar for dog walkers. Like an off-leash dog park with a liquor license.
I wouldn’t know. I’m allergic to fur and feathers. And Austin, apparently. My old Ag friend hasn’t said I told you so. Not even once.
Am I teasing you?
Am I taking too long to get to my title thesis?
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,~ Walt Whitman
One more place I’ve had this daydream about and then, dear reader — few reader, still here after the rambling, teasing, indulgent mist-thick nostalgia — then I’ll tell you the daydream.
The abandoned lot on the SB I35 service road just after the 183 merge
Between the palm reader and the taqueria. Something like 17 or 18 lanes across from another nameless faceless giganto-blot for big box shoppers.
Sing along, now.
They paved paradise to put up a parking lot.
~ Joni Mitchell
45 years ago.
I don’t know if it used to be a strip mall before it became blighted. Maybe it was a no-tell motel, rent the room and the sheets by the hour. Maybe the landholders had enough money to rip it all down after it was condemned. It can’t be that it never got built, can it? It’s prime real estate — something had to have been there.
Maybe it fell when the Dot Com bubble burst. Maybe it fell when the Housing bubble burst.
When did you fall?
I started falling when I left my husband, the not-yet-laid-off telecom computer programmer. Left him in late 2006. Had I known another bubble was about to burst, would I have stayed?
When the first bubble burst, I lost more money than I’d ever thought I’d have at that age. When the second bubble burst, I lost job. After job. After job. Like the economy was bitchy little dog yapping and nipping at my heels. That’s when Mom started sending me her Social Security check. I don’t remember how much money I took out of savings. I lived down the balance of the money I “got” in the divorce.
Each time I got laid off, each one said, “It’s not you. It’s the economy. I love your work. You’re great to work with. But I’ve got to keep the doors open.” Or, “ … I’ve got people on salary, not contract, who’ve been with me for years and have families and I can’t keep paying you when I’ve run out of work for them to do.” And, inexplicably, “ … I really hope that someday in the future we can get together and enjoy each other’s conversation again, over a nice bottle of wine.”
So many threads in this weave. Pick at any — does it tighten or unravel? I think it tangles. I get lost. Where was I?
And, I have checked my privilege — it’s pretty outfuckingstanding. I’m aware that for billions of folks the economy wasn’t a groomed ankle biter named Snookums, but some kind of Cthulu monster devouring lives, families, and villages wholesale.
Oh, right, I was going to tell you about my happy place.
My daydream. This fantasy I’ve built and rebuilt. I’ve had bake sales, in my head, to fund it. I’ve put on the power suit and the war paint and wooed VC angels and old money elites and eccentric millionaires and corporate do-good departments to raise the capital, in my head, for this place.
I’ve slept nights in the basin where the new rainwater- and runoff-catchment cisterns will be, lulled to sleep by the river of traffic noise, in my head. I’ve celebrated the grand opening a hundred times. I’ve given Oprah the grand tour.
chillin on the steps,
drinking quarter waters gotta be the best,~ Jay-Z
I’ve shown yoga teachers and students the enchanted path to the studio in the back. There are wind chimes and prayer flags, stained glass and falling waters.
I’ve installed the bike racks. Theres a discount for cyclists, walkers, and public transit riders. I’ve taught children how to harvest echinacea and hosted herbalists to show us how to make tinctures.
We’ve tended the bees. Scraped the guano from the bat boxes and added it to the compost pile. We’ve grown our methods from Will Allen and others and shared them all back to the web. We host specialists in aquaponics, food forests, foraging, and all the other granola back-the-land specialties you might expect. And, if Neil Gaiman ever wants to swing by and give a reading, you bet!
A community center with herb, veggie, and people gardens
We also host dialogue, community workshops, art therapy, financial wellness seminars, grown-folks dance nights with live jazz and blues and artisan booze. We host peace-makers, music-makers, dreamers of dreams, plus a donation-only, all-you-can-eat vegetarian buffet every Saturday.
We sell organic heirloom local fresh produce on an ice cream truck at half the rates we charge chi-chi downtown restaurants named after chefs.
Local children and high-school students earn credit for tending our chickens and goats, experimenting with Joel Salatin’s methods. College kids complete doctoral theses in sociology, urban animal husbandry, folklore, city planning, LEED and net-zero construction tech, and a gazillion other specialties that intersect with and around our hub.
The maker community loves us and courts our favor with their arduino time savers and robot weed-pullers. The business school sends its emissaries and high priests to study us — how can we possibly be for-profit? How can we possibly be making a profit? How can we be incorporating and serving so many strata in our striated society?
And, my stars, did you see the fella with the neck tattoos and teardrops? You know what that means, don’t you?! They’re are children here, Martha.
Hey mami, you see that poor cabron in his fancy work chinos for corporate team-building day? Refused a change of clothes. Marta, you don’t know, his knees was muddy from his shins to his hips. That ain’t comin out. He ruint those pants. They’s kids there. How they gonna learn the value of a dolla when you got Big Pimpin over here, too proud to admit a mistake and just ruinin his threads? Fool.
