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Title: Two Ecological Fancies Author: David Watson Date: 2003 Language: en Topics: agriculture, environment, fiction, Fifth Estate, Fifth Estate #360 Notes: From Fifth Estate #360, Spring 2003
Only later did some say that the first of what were to be many
miraculous births was presaged in signs. Only much later did a long list
of the omens appear. Some could not resist applying the veneer of old
myths to circumstances that seemed entirely novel. Someone had reported
a two-headed comet, but that was predictable. It had been done before.
Different indeed and widely reported was the experience of being
awakened from troubled sleep to the sound of a woman laughing, laughing,
saying, “Oh my children, my beautiful children!”
The first birth made local, then national and international news. A
young woman claiming to be a virgin (a claim no one believed, of
course), gave birth to a California condor chick. Various government
agencies stepped in, and the chick was placed with foster parents in a
condor nest. It proved a perfect condor, right down to the DNA.
Fundamentalist Christians protested, demanding that such freakish
manifestations be aborted before it was too late, but most people
thought it a creation of the tabloids or a government conspiracy to use
the population in genetic engineering experiments. Some blamed radical
environmental terrorists. The young woman did tell of a series of dreams
in which an old woman, perhaps an Indian, had visited her and told her
to prepare to “receive the blessing.” She admitted remembering having
sex at one time or another beforehand, but could not recall any details
except to insist that the father was most definitely not a condor.
Soon followed a flood of such births, of rare and not so rare ani-mals,
even of creatures known to be extinct. Repeats came in from remote
precincts — miraculous (some thought monstrous) births of nearly extinct
lemurs, humpback whales, quetzals, rhinos, wood-land bison, passenger
pigeons, dodos, even a snow leopard born in Tibet at the exact place and
time when the next Dalai Lama was to reappear according to certain
adepts.
But that was not all. While women birthed animals, men began birthing
plants, usually after a nervous attack while walking outside, where the
plants would take root. A man would suddenly fall ill, trembling in
spasms of pain, expel the plant, fall into exhausted sleep, then awake
in the shade of a redwood or mahagony, a sandal-wood or teak tree that
had emerged as a seedling. A sneeze might also discharge several rare
insects.
By then few human births were occurring, and those were considered
highly unusual. Scientists speculated that these children were in fact
Neanderthals, not modern humans, while others argued that they were a
type not previously encountered. Such speculation lasted less than a
generation before science itself began to die out along with religion.
None of the old responses made any sense, and people were beginning to
take the changes for granted, practicing a metaphysical discipline based
on laughter and dancing. The new human babies seemed to speak a common,
completely unintelligi-ble language among themselves, and even appeared
to communi-cate without speech at all, and with plants and animals.
Even the air was changing, becoming sweet and thick, heady and narcotic.
Those who lived through the change found themselves frequently giddy,
sexually aroused, overcome by an invasive sense of awe at simple things
like doing the dishes or sitting under a tree. They stopped going to
work. Armies, governments, corporations dissolved. When a few holdouts
tried to set off a nuclear conflagra-tion to stop the inevitable,
nothing happened. Even minerals were changing, and by now uranium had
turned into a kind of obsidian, like the slag that comes out of blast
furnaces. People collected it for its strange shapes and luster.
Earthquakes finally toppled most of the landmarks that made the world
recognizable to the late twentieth century. The last pre-transformation
generation would gape in wonder at the pterodactyls roosting on the roof
of what was once the White House. Not long after, that last generation
was gone and none of the words were the same for anything.
It started when the carrots refused to germinate. They’d had enough. If
they had had tools, say, drills and hammers, they would have laid them
down. One might imagine their abandoned chisels and mallets left on the
elaborate scaffolding around the precariously tall, swaying, irregular,
auger-like cathedral of what was to become a mature carrot; the fine
lattice work of the leafy pinnacle unfinished and flapping like the torn
rigging on a scuttled sail-ing ship; the incomplete wiring around the
foundations in the dusty soil. One might imagine the tiny orange rivets
growing along a narrow, shallow furrow made by the gardener’s fingers,
each displaying a minuscule, feathery green handkerchief to wave at the
watering can as it made its rounds, each fine linen spray containing its
maintenance instructions for the growing vessel. But the seeds left
there curled up and petrified like dead fleas buried in a tiny trench.
Not because the rain had washed them away, or because they were too dry
or too soggy, too shal-low or too deep. The conditions were appropriate.
Of this the gardener could be sure.
One might also imagine the carrot proletarians leaning back (if they
could lean back) and folding their wise, gnarled hands into sinewy arms
(if they had hands and arms), declaring, “No more.” But of course
carrots make themselves without tools and scaffolding, in a kind of
Moebian caprice, making themselves out of what appears to be nothing,
like rabbits pulling themselves out of a hat without the hat. They work
quite mysteriously, under cover, a secret guild. Now you don’t see them,
now you do. A seed grows a hair like a polliwog’s tail, or the tail of a
comet or galaxy. After a while the gardener will tear it from the ground
and deliver it to the chop-ping block — if the deer haven’t gotten to it
first.
Not this time though. They never opened their shutters, never came out
of their shadowy hovels. No carrots the first year. It would be almost
possible to imagine them behind closed doors, drinking their home-made
grog, kicking off the wooden clogs for which sab-otage has been named,
and dancing to a carroty music of their own making. The mute refusal of
the carrots — no leaflets, no broadcasts, no communiques, no congresses
— sent shock waves through the garden. Quite soon afterward the other
rows joined the mutiny. First the beans, after growing opulent in their
foliage, and after producing flowers insouciantly and dazzlingly
seductive, bore no fruit. It was a wanton gesture bordering on
vindictiveness. The manic blossoms made the bees swoon. The beans might
have been as hallucinogenic as peyote if they had come on, but they
didn’t. But that was the year, or so the gardener was told, that the
cactuses, too, produced no buttons.
The following year the beans didn’t germinate at all. Like the car-rots,
they simply boycotted the event. The row lay there, indifferent to sun
and rain, like slightly raised scar tissue. One could imagine getting
down on all fours and placing an ear against the ground to hear what
might be going on there behind the locked door of the beans’
renunciation. But there would only be a capacious silence, as if the
beans, turned inward after that year of sterile profligacy, were
meditating on cushions. They were not going to answer that door. They,
too, might themselves be listening at another locked door.
It was only a matter of time before the corn and the squash and the
chilies, lonely without the beans, all followed suit. They, too, put on
a startling display one year before giving up the ghost the next. One
had to suspect what was coming as one gazed on a row of beautiful, deep
green corn, tall and lusty and almost blue as a tropical sea, tassling
lasciviously and then bearing no issue. The gardener must have gazed
across the corn with the despair of a thirsty wanderer who realizes that
the desert oasis is nothing but a mirage.
Finally, all the crops joined the strike. Replacement seeds — new and
supposedly improved strains from distant laboratories-were trucked in as
a situation one might first consider an irritant became a question of
consternation, growing unease, a sense of peril and outright cataclysm.
But the seeds fared poorly. Some germinated only to be mowed down by
obscure plagues. One hardy little tomato plant would catch a blister or
blight start to sniffle, and overnight all would be struck down with a
biblical violence. The engineered seeds were too perfect, too uniform,
too docile. One might imagine them smiling identically in the
conditioned optimism, all of them properly inoculated, all unblemished,
all sporting the same smartly creased and starched jump suits, all
shouldering their tools, all blissfully daydreaming to the same piped-in
music. But then would come a ripple in the smooth surface of things, and
brutish, muscular insects would arrive, scarred and hirsute; or sly
viruses would infiltrate the crowd like pickpockets; and the
manufactured seeds and plants would grow even more pale than they were
made, wither and crumple all at once.
Gradually it became clear that whatever it was the carrots had initiated
was now more than a limited refusal. Rather, an entirely new regime had
emerged, and qualitatively different conditions were now in place.
Leaving the tools hanging in their storage shed, hoses coiled and the
granary empty, the gardener moved on, actually becoming the tattered,
hungry beggar that had been a flickering apparition in a dream that
season when the carrots began, obscurely and tentatively, to turn
everything upside down.
Emblem of that shadowy vagrant disappearing on the horizon only the
scarecrow remained, its weathered frock flapping exhausted in the gentle
wind, a twisted, wiry arm pointing away at nothing.