It will not do to write hastily in anger, and yet I shall. It will not do to write hastily without the bulk of the facts in evidence, and yet...
My father-in-law and I have taken to growing a good bit of what our families eat on a plot of land in Eastern Kentucky, where he lives. There we raise chickens, have planted a small orchard, and work a 10,000 square foot garden filled just now with ripening greasy beans, tomatoes, beans, corn, basil, peppers, and whatever else we forgot we planted.
But we learned, quite by happenstance, that the gas company sprayed the pipeline, and it may be that we cannot (or should not) eat any of it. Though, of course, we already have begun.
The natural gas pipeline runs through much of the county. On my father-in-law's land, it runs right alongside where he built his barn, and below the barn is our garden, and below that is our patch of blueberries, and below that is a pond. To the right of the pond is our orchard. All in plain view.
The gas company, naturally, has some kind of easement for the land, though to my surprise -- since my father-in-law comes from eastern Kentucky, where they have learned through hard lessons (see: broad form deeds) to be chary of such things -- we have apparently no paper to establish the terms of that easement. That the barn was built where it is is a reflection of topography and trust, I suppose. It is, regardless, a beautiful place -- to my eyes, anyhow.
Until I convinced my wife to move back to her home town, the garden was smaller, plundered by deer, and hardly organic. But we have prevailed upon my father-in-law, and put in some of the work, so as to make it possible to move toward an organic plot. The soil needs more amendment than we have been able to manage in a couple years, and so even this year we used a bit of 10-10-10 fertilizer.
So we are not perfect, but none of us is.
For both spiritual and financial reasons this garden is particularly important to me. I no longer have a full-time job, and what freelance I cobble together is nice, but not entirely a living. We'll do fine financially because my wife and I work in the family businesses to varying degrees, and because we've always kept our overhead modest (we moved here without a mortgage).
Last week, in the way of small towns, somebody down the pipeline spoke to my father-in-law about a settlement he'd just negotiated with the natural gas company, because they had sprayed something which had killed a bunch of his trees. So he looked, and, yes, there are about 30 trees -- junk, mostly, and not our orchard -- which are dead or sickly along the pipeline. And we've wondered about a trough in the garden where things grow poorly, though that presumably has to do with patterns of water runoff, but...and the blueberries aren't bearing fruit this year, which we've attributed to a late frost in our microclimate, but, again...
So gentlemen came yesterday from the gas company, and listened, gave up nothing, not even the name of the substance that was sprayed, nor when. (Somebody undid the barbed wire fence at the end of the property, and I've assumed it was the pipeline crew, though it could have been anybody.) I wasn't there, which is probably just as well. It also helps that there is a relative in the big city who is a very good environmental lawyer, though he works with mining issues principally. So we are not without resources.
But it is now about harvest time. And we don't know what was sprayed, nor when, nor even exactly where. There was no notification. The sheer gall of spraying alongside a fence with squawking chickens, alongside a pond with bluegill, alongside a garden that is so well fenced we could keep prisoners in it if we wished to film a WWII movie on the cheap, the simple fact that they did all this without telling us, without asking, without blinking.
I am beyond angry. They'll settle, because they know they're wrong.
But it's not about whatever money we can wring from them. This is four months of work. Hell, it's a year's work. It's also about the preservation of a very specific heirloom bean from Leslie County, KY, a greasy bean that is the staple of our winter diet. We canned 125 quarts of them last year. And while I'm sure my father-in-law, ever prudent, has held back some seed against disaster, I'm also fairly sure we don't have enough in the freezer to plant a full crop next year if we are obliged not to eat this. Except that I'm fairly certain the beans are full and we've got relatives coming, and so I expect we will eat beans tonight, the first beans of the season, a day of joy muted now with the possibility that we are about to ingest something that will come back to bite us later on.
They'll settle, but how will they value our time, our food, the ethics and aesthetics we have labored so hard to move toward? How will they replace what is meant to go in our freezers and on our shelves? Will we obliged to move the garden to another space, and begin amending the soil afresh? The barn is less easily moved, but I suppose we could erect a fresh structure for the chickens.
Or maybe I worry too much, as the song goes. Probably I do.
But I'm beyond pissed just now. Thanks for bearing with me.