Sharman Apt Russell lives with her husband and two children in Silver City, New Mexico. Her books include When the Land was Young: Reflections on American Archaeology (Addison-Wesley, 1996) , The Humpbacked Fluteplayer (Knopf Books for Young Readers, 1994), Kill the Cowboy: A Battle of Mythology in the New West (Addison-Wesley, 1993,) and Songs of the Fluteplayer: Seasons of Life in the Southwest (Addison-Wesley, 1991.) Her work has won the Mountain and Plains Regional Award, the Zia Award and a Pushcart Prize Award, among others. Her essays and stories appear in a number of anthologies and magazines, including Walking the Twilight (Northland Press, 1994), The Stories that Shape Us (Norton, 1995,) The Threepenny Reviw, The Massachusetts Review, The Missouri Review, and The North American Review.
Sharman's recent books include a collection of essays on botany, Anatomy of a Rose: Exploring the Secret Life of Flowers (Perseus Books, 2001) and The Last Matriarch (University of New Mexico Press, 2000), a novel on paleolithic life in southern New Mexico, as well as When the Land was Young (reissued by University of Nebraska Press, 2001) and Kill the Cowboy: A Battle of Mythology in the New West (re-issued by University of Nebraska Press, 2001).
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It is the process of gardening, not the product, that I have missed most during these cold winter months.
I have missed the texture of soil, its color and moistness when I dig deep. I have missed the sustenance of planting seeds. I have even missed the doubt I feel every spring - the pathetic vulnerability of each seedling. Above all, I have missed the miracle of transformation. Wrinkled plant tissue becomes root, stalk, leaves; the first corn pushes up in delicate whorls through a hard crust; tiny yellow flowers turn into dense, heavy orbs; lime-green pods open like boats with their oarsmen of peas. All this skirts the edge of religion! For seconds, even moments in my garden, I have understood that I was surrounded by powerful forces, that power shimmered in the air before me, that magic infiltrated the very ground.
Ten years ago, my husband and I moved to a small rural valley in southwestern New Mexico. We wanted to be near the Gila Wilderness - the largest and oldest wilderness in the Southwest. We also wanted irrigated land. Although we had never really gardened before, we had happy illusions. Our plan was to grow all our own food, save enormous amounts of money, and become better people. Almost immediately, we spent our savings on six acres of waving yellow grama grass dotted with alligator juniper and scrub oak. Our property was transacted by an irrigation ditch from which we had the right to water a one-acre field. This was our version of going back to the land. This was the Garden of Eden.
Naturally, we were expelled. In the last ten years, our illusions have been . . . not shattered . . . but revised. We had vastly miscalculated the difficulties of irrigation, the "cost-efficiency" of gardening, and the role that chiles and potatoes would play in our budget. We had underestimated our preference for processed food, wine, and Diet-Cokes. We had overestimated our ability to transform ourselves, to become more primitive and more sensual, to eat soil and sun.
Today, our gardening is something like our attempts at recycling and backpacking-every-chance-we-get. We are believers. We keep trying. We fall, inevitably, short of our ideals.
Still, those ideals - and those illusions - remain central to my life. I have not learned to "live off the land," but I have learned a lot about my connection to the land. My original instincts in moving here were right and I continue to vibrate between two poles: the garden and the wilderness. The latter is a place where "man is a visitor who does not remain," a place where we try to relinquish control. The garden, contrarily, is that patch of earth where we seize control and take on its responsibilities. We enter the garden, quite consciously, as co-creators.
In my garden, this human intervention is particularly forceful. In order to grow vegetables here, we must divert the Mimbres River into concrete ditches that channel the water into our fields. Irrigation is an ancient art. Thousands of years ago, the prehistoric Mimbreno Indians irrigated the same field where I plant squash today. Their garden, too, was a very human one, a human design temporarily imposed on the earth. My garden - irrigated, rototilled, supervised, and weeded - is a constant reminder of how much I use, exploit, and depend on natural resources. It brings me (rather more than the wilderness can) into a clearer understanding of my relationship with nature.
As any gardener knows, that relationship - despite all our efforts at control - is still a humbling one. I may not be a visitor in this garden. But I am certainly not the host! I can plant a seed and share in the miracle. But the miracle is still just that. It is a mystery - long familiar to our species, humanly comfortable, and exceedingly potent.
All this skirts the edge of religion. Perhaps that is just how it should be. For me, at least, perhaps that is what gardening is all about.