Chinook
by George Hosier II  - September 24, 2007

Green Thumb

I’ve pretty much given up trying to grow a garden. It’s nothing but a pain in the neck—and the lumbar spine. It gives you blisters on your hands, mud on your boots, stains on your knees, sunburn on your nose and the mosquito-bitten complexion of a raspberry.

I didn’t always feel this way. I used to have a romanticized, glamorous concept of hovering over tiny green shoots that reached affectionately toward my face as I coaxed them to burst forth into lush foliage and luscious fresh food. I had always toyed with the idea of growing a few tomatoes, squashes, and beans in a charming little garden plot out back, but never had enough backyard or enough spare time to bring my dreams to fruition. Nevertheless, each time I found myself ducking into Lowe’s for a box of light bulbs, my feet dragged me involuntarily toward the gardening section.

There I would strike a debonair pose, leaning against the magazine rack, hat pushed back at a rakish angle as I thumbed knowingly through the latest issue of Organic Gardening. It seemed a sexy and environmentally responsible thing to do. Sometimes I fantasized that the passersby were eyeing me worshipfully, attempting to summon the courage to plead for the autograph…nay, the green thumbprint…of George Hosier II, world-renowned botanist and horticulturalist extraordinaire.

I never actually read the magazine, of course. I was too busy daydreaming about what I would do with all the grocery money a garden would save me. Why, I could squeeze my own tomato sauce and ketchup, by gum! I could create vegetable soup and three-bean salad and squash pie. I could deep fry brussel sprouts and okra. I’d bake zucchini bread. I could serve breathtaking hors douvres like cucumber sandwiches and radish blossoms and vegetable trays with ranch dip. Then with the grocery budget I normally would have spent on vegetables and tubers, perhaps I could invest in some lobster tails or filet mignon. Better yet, I could buy a new river boat!

Only after I had finally acquired 20 agricultural acres out on Tanana Loop Extension did I find myself eyeball to eyeball with the opportunity to fulfill my dreams. It was an intimidating moment. As I stood out in my field and futilely searched for an appropriate patch of ground, I was overcome with bewilderment. How could I plant seeds in this stuff? There wasn’t any room! The whole property was already dense with green things: bushy things, tall things, prickly things, sprawling things…

I shrugged and turned to trudge back inside the house. I could hear my remote control calling my name. Distracted, I nearly bumped into my wife who was hastening to meet me wearing a sun hat and white canvas gloves with blue plastic zits on the palm. She was towing some sort of mechanical device with steel claws where the wheels should have been.

“Where are you going?” She queried, “I thought we were going to start on the garden today.”

“Yeah, I was going to, but I can’t find any place clear enough. I guess the weeds beat us to it.”

My wife stood motionless for a long moment, just staring at me silently from beneath her long lashes, eyes wide in wonder and awe. My heart skipped a beat. She hadn’t looked at me like that since we were dating—and I had dropped a bowl full of punch in the lap of her prom dress. Finally, she just shook her head and pulled the starter cord on her device. It made a loud noise that startled me so that I toppled backwards into a wild rose bush.

By the time I had extricated myself, she had somehow made a large island of garden dirt appear in the ocean of weeds. She’s always doing stuff like that. She once made my favorite sweat pants vanish. Like cheese, cigars and wine, sweat pants only get better with age. This particular pair was aged to perfection. They had nostalgic stains on them, fondly reminiscent of Superbowl hot wings of yore. They were air-conditioned in all the right places. Their once bold colors had subtly blurred into a mellow earth tone with a lingering yellowish afterhue. Yet in spite of all these treasured qualities, my wife took a dislike to them, and made them mysteriously vanish, never to caress my legs again. But I digress. The point is that through her magic touch I now had an area of fallow dirt in which to bury my seeds. Yipee! At last, a garden could be mine!

Oh fool that I was! What naiveté haunts us puny mortals. It seemed so simple at first: Poke a stick in the dirt, drop a seed in the hole, step on it to squish the hole shut, then go inside and practice my remote control operating techniques until it came time to pick a nice juicy bean or carrot or banana or something. What moronic simple-mindedness I displayed!

How was I to guess that food plants have to be babysat! I don’t see anybody out there pruning spruce trees or fertilizing sphagnum. Fireweed seems to be able to grow just fine without insecticide. Foxtail doesn’t demand that all other plant life in a 10-foot radius be pulled up by the roots in order for it to survive. But can garden plants make it on their own? Noooo! They’re helpless before the ravages of bugs and weather and ferocious herbivores. Those flimsy green shoots were more demanding than an infant with colic. That garden forced me to spend more time on my knees than a Franciscan monk on a vow of penance.

My wife will argue with that. She claims she’s the one who did all the work out there, but I alone know how deeply I have suffered at the whim of that tyrannical chunk of topsoil. I have left enough epithelials on the wheelbarrow handles to provide DNA samples for a thousand CSI teams. The combined juice from my popped blisters could have watered the garden for decades if I had been able to invent a method to extract it from the hoe handle.

We messed around for three years. We battled stampedes of drooling moose with napkins tied around their necks and saltshakers clasped in their hooves. We stacked massive logs and cubic miles of dirt to build raised beds. We blanketed the area with acres of plastic and hay. We squirted tanker loads of special substances all over the cootsie widdle baby plants. All the river boat and filet mignon savings got dumped into our frantic but futile attempt to become successful gardeners. For all our efforts, we never managed to harvest enough produce to make a small side salad. A few times I thought we were about to reap some bounties, but the next morning, we would discover our bounties eaten down to the roots or frozen solid or fallen off of the stem and lying on the ground looking like a blob of mucous garnished with a split rind.

At length, my wife began to exhibit signs that she was blurring the line between fantasy and reality. She began inventing the most humiliating activities for me to do. For instance, she became enamored by the theory that plants respond to music, so she made me sit out beside the garden and play my harmonica. That ended in short order when the broccoli commenced hissing, the tomato plants started pelting me with green tomatoes, the cabbage made a big stink, and the lettuce wilted into a puddle of green goo. Another time she took to making me stir vats of something called “goat berry tea”. It actually sounded delicious until I smelled it. I wish I had smelled it before I gulped a big swig, though.

The final straw came when she announced that I was going to “help her” build a greenhouse. I knew that was code for having me build a greenhouse for her while she supervised. I could hear her now: “I asked you to hand me a two-by-four. This is a one-by-three.” “You measured it at 32 ¾ inches. Now I’ve cut it and it’s 4 ½ inches short!” “You’re holding the level upside down, George, for crying out loud! No wonder this door won’t close.” “No, those are roofing nails. I need the ring shank nails.” My wife can be very nitpicky and she’ll get downright bellicose once she gets an idea set in her head.

Of course, I put my foot down. I informed her that building a greenhouse was out of the question. In fact, it was the most ridiculous thing I had ever heard. Everybody knows you don’t build a house for plants. They’re plants! They grow outside. How did she expect budding young impressionable sprouts to make it in the real world if you create some sort of artificial environment for them? I told her that I wasn’t about to be an accomplice to her wanton plan to create a wimpy, dissipated generation of young shoots. Besides, any vegetables grown under such permissive and sheltered conditions would be completely devoid of nutritional value. I might as well just overdose right now on aspartame, MSG, and red food coloring and save myself the bother.

The scintillating brilliance of my logic went right over my wife’s head. She’d talked to some know-it-all wannabe Alaskan farmer type who told her how greenhouses were all the rage around here, and now she just had to have one. She launched into a rambling nonsensical rant about Alaska’s climate and short growing season and soil temperatures and who knows what else. I picked up a hammer and tape measure and headed for the field just to shut her up.

I expect to die out there some day. They’ll find my emaciated form, perspired dry of all body fluids, mummified in the tropical heat of that greenhouse. No doubt I’ll be clutching a watering can or a trowel in my skeletal fingers. Maybe a spilled basket of moldy cucumbers will lie at my feet. Then my wife will be sorry. Yessiree! Then she’ll wish she had left well enough alone. Everybody will gather around my casket and talk about what a skilled remote controller I was. They’ll whisper what a shame it was that my wife had driven me to my death by forcing me to pick tomatoes and water chives. Then they’ll suddenly smile beatifically and turning to each other will exclaim, “But wasn’t he a brilliant botanist and a horticulturalist extraordinaire?”

“Oh yes, indeed,” Someone will reply. “And his hors douvres! Weren’t his radish blossoms divine?”

Solemnly and reverently, they will plant me in the ground like a seed. Not long thereafter, I shall receive my long-awaited reward. My thumb will at last turn green.
 

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