Listening to Broomsedge

More than a hectare of broomsedge crowns the land, just east of Knoxville, where Loves Creek has its headwaters. The native grass appears golden-stemmed at a distance, but on close inspection it reveals a rainbow of greens, blood reds, mauves, canary yellows, and the occasional ghost of cornflower blue. In the strange heat of a contemporary November, its thistledown seeds are bursting from their pods, cream-colored and soft as rabbit fur. The headed ends, like sails, bend mostly east, telling by posture the direction from which weather arrives.

The color and savory scent of a broomsedge field has always held a particular draw for me. It used to be nostalgia; now it’s something else. The grass is a sign of disturbed and fallowed ground in the Southeast, a kind of botanical requiem after progress’s colonial ravishings: the flora of grief. It’s a grief in which I was raised unawares. The apartments where my family lived in North Carolina were built in the 1960s on a broad, decapitated hilltop. The edgeworks there, where much of the offgraded soil had been dumped, were wild with broomsedge, along with briers and blackberries.

Places where broomsedge grows around Knoxville are holdouts oftentimes. If they aren’t family farms by ownership, then they were family farms and are presently owned by bankers, developers, and speculators. The grass therefore is a somewhat dependable marker of ill change. If pasturage goes ungrazed or lies fallow, wait a while, and the broomsedge will appear. After the broomsedge comes into its height, the vinyl signs sprout like invasive tussocks. Then come the dozers, the ranks of manicured housing, and lawns of insatiably thirsty fescue. Behind this years-long but predictable transition are stories of people: the children can’t or won’t keep the farm; the costly husbandry of land overwhelms a retail job’s meager compensation; a long sickness or death in the family intervenes. Over it all is the lure of money mixed with a sorrow covered, ignored, or accepted.

Still, the field at the headwaters is there now, full of well-hidden rabbits, moles, killdeer, swallows, and starlings. The house at the northeast corner is a sixties craftsman, buttercream siding with a gray shingle roof. Nearly a dozen colorful beehives sit along the field’s borders, their tops barely above the tall grass. Someone is still farming; bees, at least. The land is half-Canaan, honey but no milk.

Broomsedge Bluestem (Andropogon virginicus). Photograph by harum.koh / Flickr.

My family occupies a rare, semi-wooded suburban acre. And like Loves Creek’s fallow, bee-kept headwaters, our land is a staunch holdout where we fight against the inroads of all that is considered progress. We are replacing development, ease, and marketability with squashes, tomatoes, and apples; with being disciples of soil horizons; and with the knowing smirk that joy offers entropy. We don’t despise progress. We just have different definitions than those apparent from society’s efforts. Land ownership – land conservancy – changes people. Work long enough, and you will discover that worthwhile endeavors eat monetary profits, and monetary profits are not the chief measure of worth.

It takes near-masochistic doggedness and insurmountable joy to run a farm without going insane. Everything is against you. The weather, the wild, and the government are all frenemies at the table of your agricultural livelihood. And though we do a decent amount of gardening, we are only farmers in the way Huck Finn was a battleship captain. If the fight to feed four growing kids and teach them what it takes to eat respectably in this world means that someone calls us farmers, then sure, I will begrudgingly accept the badge. Not that farmers are perfect. As icons of Americanism, they belong with cowboys, suffragettes, and blues musicians, but they’re always people, always fallen. American farming practices contributed to the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Farmers have sprayed DDT and planted GMOs. Yet these storied combatants remain on the front lines of our fight to remake a sustainable stewardship of land here in the twenty-first century. We all identify to some degree because we all eat.

The waving broomsedge makes me wary, because it is a herald of woe, a town crier caterwauling that someone is doing the opposite of farming. Someone is separating us from our food, from our honor as laborers, from our physiological liturgy as dirt-bodied descendants of Eden. We are born, we work and eat, and then we die and return to earth – dust to dust or humus to humus. Any contrary narrative tacitly offered by convenience is dehumanizing. To refuse the jeremiads of broomsedge around town is to stop my ears to the machine hum of approaching catastrophe.

Catastrophe is a strong word, but maybe it’s needed. That’s what poetry and prophecy are for. Prophets attempt to tell the truth about what is happening. As my Old Testament professor hammered home, prophecy isn’t foretelling; it’s forth-telling. And there waves a golden field of grass, forth-telling its potential development into some parking-lotted paradise, or into a new neighborhood filled with the counterfeit miracles of sod, Bradford pears, and ill-conceived storm drainage. The greedy metastasis of such developments continues, changing the watershed, removing the topsoil, destroying trees, creating heat islands. It is unchecked because we do not see fit to check it.

A healthy subscriber to warnings about our poor stewardship of creation, I find myself wanting to take in Loves Creek while it is still there. And I find some comfort where God closes a portion of Noah’s story with a little poem of promise.

As long as the earth endures,
seedtime and harvest,
cold and heat, summer
and winter, day and night
will never cease.
(Gen. 8:22)

It follows one of the more undeniably Calvinist verses of scripture: “Never again will I curse the ground because of humans,” says God, “even though every inclination of the human heart is evil from childhood” (Gen. 8:21). Those two verses could keep me busy for decades, confessing my guilt and hoping for the best while we watch an economy eat the landscape from which both we and these waters of Loves Creek were born.

At the creek’s beginning, there is no spring indicated on maps. Waters are not only born at springs but also borne, arising from deep within the earth, which itself gathers them at every rain. A mazework of tunnels, seeps, fensters, dolines, and passages weaves through our ground at the thicknesses of hair, of fingers, of arms, and of tree trunks. A molecule of water could feasibly slip from one end of the county to the other without seeing the light of day.

If the old farm to which the field once belonged had no spring, someone could have drilled or dug to build a spring house or well house. Little ghosts of such brick or stone structures squat roadside in both rural and urban locales around the county, remnants of a time when we drank or watered animals not with a fluorinated cocktail from city taps, but from the land. They were guard shacks against animal waste and autumn leaf litter, and evidence that we once understood the yearly rhythm of circling the sun.

The human endeavor of moving water has been not only civic but personal since time immemorial. Before municipal governments took the baton, it was up to each landowner to discern and fight for the neighborly use of water, to shepherd the acquisition of it. In many places, water rights are still personal, protected by firearms, cussedness, and a propensity to attend town hall meetings, though many years have elapsed since such a thing was true in Knoxville. And even now this land bears watermarks, as it were, of the immigrants who arrived in the nineteenth century, their ponds and millstones. The beehives around the sedge field are also European in origin, and endlessly fascinating.

Beekeeping is one of the oldest forms of domestication, informing other local aspects. Bees are at the forefront of anti-pesticide efforts, and gum tree logs are called bee gums, as mountain people found them to be useful hives. There is the local legend of Lemuel Ownby, a blind beekeeper and one of the last private landowners in the Smokies.

It takes near-masochistic doggedness and insurmountable joy to run a farm without going insane.

Ownby accounted his hale old age to honey, which works as medicine of one kind or another in many cultures. People used to find honey – and still do – by following bees to their hives. It seems a poetic practice, full of quietude and sharp attention to detail, to trace the meandering airway of a bee. Indeed, the stereotyped illiteracy of rural peoples can often be matched by the lyrical pace of the rural life. Time spent at dawn on a deer stand, or shaded by a hat brim with hands in the mud can offer just as much beauty, truth, and goodness as immersion in an expensive education in the classics. We would know much less of soil pH, riverine heavy metals, and varroa mites (insidious pests for bees) but for the tireless work and attention of rural people, who are smarter and more expressive than prejudices suggest.

The broomsedge is also a marker of fire country. Locally, the Cherokee, or Aniyunwiya/ᎠᏂᏴᏫᏯ, made prescribed burns a practice for centuries, but they might have gotten wind of some techniques – no fire pun intended – from Europeans, who burned the great forests and heathlands of Scotland to create farmland and grazing for sheep. Whatever the case, fire is now a part of where we are, and broomsedge plays a role because it’s flammable.

Maybe all this feels too dismal. That isn’t the intent.

My ten-year-old daughter recently lamented that her class was talking about the future.

“I don’t like talking about the future,” she said. “It makes me sad.”

I expect the anxiety epidemic bulldozing the nation’s youth could do with a bit of pushback. The present doesn’t have a monopoly on dread anyway. Perhaps a joke would be best. “Fill the earth and subdue it.” This is God’s command to Adam and Eve (Gen. 1:28). I wonder if it was said with a wry grin. Subdue the world; go on, give it a shot. You and your elder brethren of creation, which you call nature, are going to be lovably bellicose, as all brothers are at the best of times. Have fun subduing it. It certainly isn’t unlike God to have jokes. All laughs are in part laughs of recognition.

Sibling rivalry is perhaps the modus operandi of our engagement with the earth and skies, then. I’m not sure if this condition is always a bad thing, but the tale of Genesis sets up questions about the humanly irreparable scope of original sin. What part of sibling rivalry is a good fight, and what part is bashing your brother with a stone – or a nuclear waste disposal site? Or even a brand-new vinyl suburb?

The country lane passing by the broomsedge and the bees is called McCampbell, a name of old Scottish stock. Blackberries grow along the roadside, as does wild asparagus. Round-leaved bittersweet clots the old fencerow in places, flaunting its vermillion berries as they split from casings that turn a deep saffron upon disuse.

This is the now of Tennessee, a place summered by cicadas, autumned by katydids, and wintered by songbirds. In November, farmers finish pulling crops from fields. Pecans can be picked off the ground if the squirrels don’t get them first. The hog killing is close. Subsistence farming and bartering persist. A creek is an icon for the people, even if we have forgotten it. The watershed is a soul map detailing the needs of locals and their attempts to fight the entropy of the universe to meet those needs.

So we go outside, and we seem better when we do. It is liturgical, or at least contemplative, to do so. At the beginning of this water, there is golden grass, there are trees, there are bees, and there are small creatures unseen. Also, there are people. That we may learn, we must see these with open eyes, jokes and all.