Zoë Bradbury left her urban job in Portland to start farming on the south coast of Oregon. She's blogging here about her experiences. Below is her seventh entry in Diary of a Young Farmer.
IT TOOK A VILLAGE
There is water. Water on my fields. Water in pipes. Water in hoses. Water on asparagus. Water on raspberries. Water on carrots and beets and potatoes and leeks and artichokes and dahlias. There is water at last.
Of course, now it’s raining again.
But during those few recent days when Oregon was blasted with heat so hot that even our coastal mercury pushed into the triple digits, the story had all the elements of a suspenseful melodrama.
The setting: a fledgling farm on the southern Oregon coast, newly planted to produce and berries and flowers. Heat waves dance over the field. The skies are clear without a rain cloud in sight. The soil moisture is dropping, fast. A half mile of irrigation trench lies open along the edge of the field, like a larger-than-life gopher tunnel. Dawn breaks hot on a Thursday. Baby lettuce is sizzling in the field by 10 a.m., flattened and crispy by 2 p.m. Tender new strawberry leaves are scorching along the edges. Newly germinated beets push through a dry crust into a brutal glare. It’s a grim day to be a seedling.
The cast: me, alone, sunburned and tired. I’m covered in dirt head to toe, wearing an apocalyptic respirator while I rush to glue the last PVC joints in the line. Sweat is pouring down my face and pooling in the respirator with the sun high overhead. At one point the trench collapses in on itself and I break into tears while I scoop out the dirt by hand, buried up to my shoulder. I know that I’m running out of time. My body aches. I try not to look behind me at the fields where all of my plants are screaming for mercy. The next day’s forecast is even hotter.
And then, in the peak of the afternoon when I am almost to the point of breaking, they start to show up. A neighbor arrives with a cooler of cold drinks. A long-lost friend drives up and rolls up his sleeves. Danny comes home, puts on his wet suit and dives to the bottom of the creek to anchor the pump. There is a rush of progress, and then it’s time for the moment of reckoning: flipping the breaker at the electric panel.
There is a pit of anxiety in my stomach as I crack open the last valve on the line and wave at my sister to turn the switch. What if it doesn’t work? What if the pipe explodes in a catastrophic geyser somewhere along the line? What if the pump is a lemon, or the wires are crossed?
Abby flips the breaker and there is a sudden whoosh of PVC glue fumes hissing out of the valve. A good sign. I wait. And wait. And wait. And then faintly, from somewhere in the belly of the mainline, comes a rumble like thunder. It gets louder. I hold my breath. Louder. And then suddenly the water jets out, coughing and spluttering and pulsing until it runs clear and fast, straight up into the hot blue sky as magnificent as the Bellagio fountain, more beautiful than Old Faithful.
It is the best moment ever.
I yell a hallelujah and we all converge in one crazy, happy, relieved high-five fest. I am grinning ear to ear. It feels like anything is possible now.
I run to turn on all the drip lines that I’ve laid out and give a long drink to half the farm.
But the saga is not quite over yet. The other half of the farm is watered with overhead sprinklers, via aluminum irrigation pipes that I don’t own yet.
Enter Allen, our neighbor. I went to school with his nephew, who I remember mostly for his habit of shooting frogs with his BB gun each spring. On his few hundred acres next door Allen runs cattle, works as a logger, and owns a rock pit. He’s been watching my little farm unfold for the past few months and stops now and then to talk through the fence. He’s happy to see some of us local kids coming home and is hoping his daughter will start up her own market garden on a piece of their bottom land.
