THE COSTS AND BENEFITS OF DESERT AGRICULTURE
For a brief but memorable time I belonged to an organization at my high school called, ridiculously, the Future Farmers of the Antelope Valley. Ridiculous, because I believed at the time that neither farmers nor the Antelope Valley had much in terms of a present tense, let alone a future. But I needed a noncompetitive extracurricular for college applications. So, twice weekly after school, I met with the group, led by an actual, visiting farmer, boots and hat and all, named Reggie Nelms.
Reggie spoke to us about farming in general, but desert agriculture in particular. You’d be amazed at how many of the kids appeared legitimately shocked when he informed us that water was hard to come by in the Mojave Desert. We were the product of the population boom of the late ’80s and early ’90s; our neighborhoods were so paved over with shopping centers and tract homes, we sometimes forgot about the biblical ecosystem lying beneath all that concrete. Reggie said, “When you shower or flush, do you think for even a minute about the finite source of that water?” We didn’t. He accused us of not seeing value in anything we couldn’t scan under a price-checker. Then he handed out black permanent markers and told us to draw bar codes on our faucets at home.
I immediately trusted Reggie, who looked like a baseball manager in the wrong costume, eyebrows all bristled like misplaced mustaches. He was a workingman in his late fifties, which meant people had begun to feel for him again after a long drought of sympathy, and since no one else on that first day seemed interested in asking him a question, I threw him a softball.
“Where does all our water come from, Mr. — ?”
“Just Reggie,” he said. Then: “Aside from the all-too-occasional rain, my alfalfa farm is run on a combination of what are known as aquifers — pumped underground — and imported water via the aqueduct.”
A number of us recognized the man-made river in the hills above town not as a source of water, but as a destination, grinning at one another as if to say, Remember that time at the aqueduct.…
Eventually, in the most casual of tones, as if he had no idea how mystifying all of this was to a group of suburban desert kids, Reggie arrived at some general dos and don’ts about farming alfalfa. Starting out, for instance, make sure your pH is over six and a half. Keep an eye out for armyworms and weevils and — if you’ve got horses — blister beetles. They’ll come for the alfalfa and stay for the hay.
The other bit of advice he offered at the end of every meeting: Cultivate a large family. I always thought he was talking shop here, too: children as indentured workers. But he meant otherwise. I learned later that he and his wife, Allison, never had children, and he didn’t realize until she’d passed what a mistake that was.
* * *
In May, Reggie told the administrators he could no longer make the trip to the school. Instead, he asked that they send the students to his farm. He blamed his health, though my guess is he just didn’t want to drive across town anymore, having reached the time in his life when he relied on a consistency in scenery.
Despite knowing that most of the Future Farmers had chosen not to take part in the field trip, Reggie might have imagined a cavalcade of school buses wobbling in the heat off the paved road from town. As soon as he saw the lone purple minivan heading his way, however, he set aside his fantasy. He waved his cowboy hat to let us know we’d come to the right place, even though he knew the driver didn’t need any help.
I was one of five students — three boys and two girls — to scoot out the back of the van, followed by the driver, a bald man with a neatly trimmed red mustache. Reggie recognized him not only as Mr. Peterson, the parental advisor of our club, but also as his brother-in-law, Keith.
By now, Reggie had put back on his hat, which he tipped, and said, “Welcome, boys, girls. Keith.”
“Hey there, Reggie.” Mr. Peterson — Keith — reached out and pumped his hand.
After a moment, Reggie wiped his palms against his sandblasted jeans and said, “All right, then. Let’s start the tour.”
* * *
He lived in a two-bedroom house on a small alfalfa farm east of town, not far from the golf course I used to sneak onto a few years earlier. We all expected cows and pigs, but all he had were three acres of alfalfa, a horse, and six chickens in a coop along the northern edge. The farm was more for personal use than business, although he did make some money off the hay and never had to pay for eggs. The horse, Genie, had been his wife’s. Reggie, he told us plainly, had never learned to ride.
Throughout the tour, the other two boys kept clearing their throats intermittently, trading secret, profane messages in their coughs. I tried to make severe eye contact with Reggie, nodding up a sweat, in order to make amends for their attitude. One of the girls ended up doing what I didn’t have the courage to do myself: She confronted them. In her blond hair she wore a red headband, which brought out the pimple on her chin. I’d seen her on campus before — her name was Jackie Connolly, and her family ran a farm themselves on the other side of town — but I had never heard her speak until now.
“This trip is voluntary,” Jackie Connolly said. “No one forced you to be here.”
Although I appreciated her for scolding the boys, I found myself resenting her strict advocacy of the rules as if I were among the scolded. I understood her eagerness for the opportunity to reprimand the boys as a kind of disrespect toward the farm itself; only someone absolutely bored with an experience would use that fleeting time making sure others weren’t squandering it. I trusted Reggie felt the same.
The other girl in the group was Mr. Peterson’s — Keith’s — daughter, Charitye. It took me a moment to do the familial math and realize Charitye Peterson was Reggie’s niece. Through this new lens I watched her on the farm. At school, in her stylishly unstylish denim jackets and bloodred lipstick, she’d always seemed out of place — tall and stoic and urban like a beautiful door at the top of a New York City stoop. Everywhere she went, she carried a green spiral notepad, which complemented her long orange hair. She was a year ahead of me, a junior, but she still had the two-dimensional body of a boy — a fact that reminded me she was a swimmer. I watched Reggie ignore the bickering boys and the pimpled Jackie Connolly, studying Charitye, some distance from the rest of us, kneeling at the alfalfa. She wedged her pen between her thumb and palm so she could feel the leaves with her fingertips. Then she wrote in her notepad and stood, skinny and nearly as tall as Reggie in his boots, and faced the San Gabriel Mountains to the south like a statue engraved, WOMANHOOD.
Reggie returned to the finer points of fertilization, though I suspected his mind was elsewhere. Later I found out — though I might’ve known by the awkward handshake earlier and the way Reggie seemed unwilling to let Mr. Peterson out of his sight — that he was remembering the vague plan his brother-in-law had relayed to him over the phone earlier that day: The wife and I could use some time alone. Mr. Peterson had asked Reggie if it would be all right for Charitye to spend some time — a few days, maybe — at the farm.