Yield

We were ten miles from the nearest town, a handful of us working twenty-five acres planted smack in the middle of Oregon, where only cheat grass and junipers grow. After a month of farming the high desert, Amar and Noëlie began sleeping in separate beds. When she told him to go back to France, Amar told me, we are no longer one. In July, we had seeded a row of brassicas, and the farmer had told us that our hands would seep into the plants, that we would be given to the land until the vegetables ripened. Amar and I had drawn deep lines in the soil, dropped the seeds in one by one. We were still waiting for the harvest.

When potatoes filled our crates, I thought of Yusef Komunyakaa's poems, his flesh-colored stones along a riverbed, his farmers unable to divide love from hunger. Amar told me he had come to the farm to improve his English, that there were still so many words he didn't know. We knelt in the dirt, harvesting potatoes while he repeated the sounds: ripe, grasshopper, vine. Our dark arms reaching into the holes we dug like children at the beach, excavating at the sight of skin. When Noëlie walked past, Amar called after her in French, pulled off his gloves.

On the farm, we were insatiable. There was food, but no time to eat all that we wanted. Every day, I packed a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and headed out into the fields. I wrestled with weeds and thick roots for hours, collapsed into the grass to devour my sorry lunch, then went back to work. For dinner, I coaxed kale and onions and beets from the ground, carried the harvest to my campsite only to find that no armful would satisfy the hunger that had grown in me. When the farmer piled beef on my plate at a communal dinner, I ate it all and went in for seconds. When I walked through the pea field, I grazed. When the sun went down, I slept because there was no light for food and being awake meant I would only get hungrier.

Some days, I couldn’t imagine anything more beautiful than a vegetable. The carrots coming up purple and crisp orange, ready to be wiped on jeans and bitten into. Rows of feathery fennel, smelling of licorice. How the cabbages seemed to close in on themselves and tighten, then burst open when the sun found them overripe. And how I loved sliding my fingers around the tops of the beets, just under the soil, to feel if they were quite grown. Pulled up and washed, they lay in their baskets like small wet hearts, not quite thumping.

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In town, when we would place our vegetables into the canvas bags of the shareholders, we would repeat their names: turnips, fava beans, zucchini, chives. The old women would smile at us, browned and dirty as we were, oh and ah at the lettuces we placed on top like whipped cream. They would turn back to their SUVs, their dinner parties, their too-white tennis shoes, and wave goodbye. Sometimes, I’ll admit, I didn’t think they quite deserved those lettuces.

I lived down the road from the farm with a woman named Sweet Medicine. She slept in her trailer, and I slept in my tent, and we both made oatmeal in her shack of a kitchen. Sweet left for two weeks, and I sat alone in that kitchen as NPR reported the drought-induced famine in Somalia. Refugees walking for weeks to get to Kenya, where there was still no food. The skeleton-thin boy with flies on his face. The terrorists preventing aid drops. Food is power, they said.

My grandmother wrote to me from Illinois. She told me it hadn't rained since I left, that the cornfields were drying out, that her lawn was brown. She had grown up on a farm, milked cows each morning until she ran off with the schoolteacher. It wasn't until I worked the land that I understood why she spoke so much of weather. It's dry here too, I wrote.

Amar drove up in the old white truck. I’m lonely, he said. Let’s go to the river. On the banks, I asked him about the scars across his chest where the skin looked grafted on. He turned away, said it was nothing. We watched a dragonfly land on my leg, back away, land on my leg. You don’t have to tell me, I said. But then he did. How he was sixteen and leading protests in Algeria, how they beat him to a pulp and he can’t remember anything except the man who started hitting him. He woke up in a hospital three months later with both legs broken. And when I said how terrible it was, he shrugged: In these places, a lot of people are tortured. A lot of people go hungry.

One afternoon, the pigs burrowed under their fence and started gnawing on rocks outside their pen. Tall drug them back in by their hind legs, his own leg healing from the bronco that bucked him off, that stepped on his shin. Too Tall, they called him at the rodeos. A lanky black man in a stadium of short, solid cowboys. He pulled out his harmonica, told me he wanted to build a tree house above the pigs so he could look down on them. We dumped turnip greens into the pen and watched them fight over the scraps, biting at each other’s ears to protect their hoard.

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When the bean plants began producing, Amar and I would sit on either side of the row, picking green beans into two big baskets and eating them raw. He would sing “Mambo Italiano,” forgetting all the lyrics but the title and the parts about pizza. Of everything in America, Amar loved pizza and string cheese the most. I made pizza dough from scratch one afternoon, and we took long lunch breaks three days in a row because he kept asking for it and I couldn’t say no. Yours is my favorite pizza, he would say, making eyes at me. Fine, I would say, tearing up kohlrabi greens and basil.

Noëlie taught me how to pick the ripest cabbage, scaling them against her open hand. Head-sized, she said. Some were already too large, split down the middle like a fractured skull, insides just visible. I harvested one and carried it down the road to Sweet’s place, shifting the weight from arm to arm. We could only eat a fourth of it before the heat spoiled the rest.

Dave was a hay farmer turned surfer. He owned the farm, but didn't want to work the land, didn't want to be stuck in the desert. I’ve never seen an American look so emaciated. Skin hung over his chest as he fed the horses in the morning, shirtless and brown. Sometimes I would come across him sleeping in the garden near the house, smelling of pot and beer—his only staples. It always seemed like he would never wake up, that he would fade into the soil there, his ribcage gathering misplaced seeds and sprouting. Or perhaps, like the neighbor’s horse that broke its neck trying to jump the fence, he would be picked clean by the wild animals, skeleton and hair left to bake in the desert sun.

Amar and I were eating string cheese when he announced it would take him a whole month to get over Noëlie. They had been together for a year, and the scientists said this was how it worked. One year in love means one month in misery. He curled up with the farm dogs, holding the cheese away from their mouths. Sometimes I am very sad, he said.

I kept listening to news on the radio—the hospital abandoned in Tripoli, bodies left to rot in a makeshift morgue. We followed a dried trail of blood, the reporter said. And nearby, the Gadhafi forces indiscriminately shooting people at close range. I thought of the bathtub in the backyard that we filled with water and lettuce. How the dead must be washed. How any hospital will let you baptize your child in the sink if she isn’t going to make it. How some days I wanted to climb into the bathtub with the greens, sink into that cool river. In Libya, bodies were left to split open. The doctors ran away in terror.

Some afternoons Noëlie would sit at the kitchen table, eating bread with honey and sketching the human heart. In France, she said, medical students must learn to draw anatomy. We watched her erase the ventricles, retrace them just so. Sometimes she spoke of the bodies she had dissected. Sometimes she spoke of past lovers, how she crawled into their sleeping bags at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, danced with them in Marseilles.

Just above the garden, the horse carcass nestled in the sand. You had to be right on it before you could see it: bones brown with the remnants of flesh; the vertebra snapped, left leg torn off into the weeds; lizards under the jawbone, picking at the broken teeth; its ribcage upturned as if to say, crawl in. People kept asking why we didn’t do something with the body—bury or burn it. We told them we couldn’t go near for days, the predators defensive of their feast. And after all that, why bury a skeleton?

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In the high desert, there was rain and then there was no weather for weeks. No clouds, no humidity. Just far-away lightning storms we could see over the mountains. The irrigation hoses dripped steadily, roots barely getting wet before the water evaporated. The tops of my ears burned and scabbed off. The spinach field dried, and we spent hours pulling up plants, salvaging anything still green.

After a long drought, it finally rained in Somalia. But the downpour did not save the harvest. It wrecked the makeshift homes in the refugee camps. It washed the bodies left unburied along the road. One doctor said that people were dying because they could not find shelter from the rain. And they were still starving. Many rural families had been relying on corn and sorghum, crops we use in the Midwest to make syrups and feed the cattle. In the New York Times' series "At the Nation's Table," one Kansas family recalled sorghum as tasting like wild honey. They recommended drizzling the syrup on warm biscuits in the morning.

In August, I said goodbye to the farm and began roadtripping back home to Illinois, weaving up into Seattle, then across the big-sky states—Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota. For hours I looked for a crop I recognized, but the land was all ranches and hay farms to feed the horses. Where the food came from was anyone’s guess. I stopped at local diners, ordered burgers and pie.

It wasn't until the middle of South Dakota that the landscape stopped looking like a desert to me. Too much sagebrush, and all those forests gone to ash from recent fires. In Wyoming, every sign was either, Last chance for cheap gas! or, Come visit the rodeo! I stopped to watch some cattle graze on brown grass, barbed wire keeping them to their meal. After eight hundred miles of plains and badlands, I finally veered south into the Midwest. There, I watched thick clouds roll over the cornfields, felt humidity for the first time in months.

In a hotel in Minnesota, I gorged myself on Belgian waffles and bacon while a family read the news to their children: the Libyan rebels had taken over Tripoli. Who won? the son kept repeating. Who won? And then the earthquakes out East. The son looked up at the father, But what if we fall through? And into my coffee I thought, yes. I had driven through Idaho at night, weaving through the Bitterroot Mountains that I knew were there but couldn’t see. Every ledge had seemed like an open mouth, ready to swallow me.

The whole way back, I still ate like a farmer. Pumpkin curry in Portland. African stew with apricots and dates. Udon soup and pork buns in Seattle. Calzones stuffed with fresh ricotta. Roast beef sandwiches. Tempeh and arugula in Missoula, Montana. Salmon and Brie crepes. Crispy chicken. A bacon cheeseburger and fries in Chamberlain, South Dakota. Banana cream pie. More burgers. And in between meals: endless trail mix, bought by the pound.

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In the New York Times: an article on hunger in rural Kansas. With an eye on efficiency, most Midwestern farmers had stopped growing vegetables, instead focusing on two or three feed crops. When grain prices dropped, many could no longer afford enough store-bought food. One corn and sorghum farmer said that he was working hard, that his children were still hungry. Farming is the only thing I know, he said. I want to raise my kids on a farm, and there's nowhere else for me to go.

Before the uprising, Libya had hopes of expanding its agricultural markets. New irrigation opportunities would allow them to grow wheat, oats, and corn—crops traditionally imported. Under rebel control, food and water supplies became scarce in Tripoli. Although the coast is able to grow crops, the fate of the desert—which comprises ninety percent of the country—remains uncertain.

Along the road, I tried to pick up little gifts for my friends back home. Portland microbrews. Huckleberry tea from Missoula. Tchotchkes from Wall Drug. I thought sometimes of writing them apologies instead for all the vegetables I couldn’t bring back in time. I’m sorry I couldn’t bring you eggplant. I’m sorry I couldn’t bring you onions. I’m sorry I couldn’t bring you collard greens. I’m sorry…

When I made it to Illinois, the corn near my house had grown nearly eight feet tall, but the drought had prematurely dried it. Soon it would be harvested and fed to the livestock. I walked between the rows, listening to the stalks rustle against each other like rough paper, slipping my fingers beneath the husks to feel the smooth kernels, thinking of how I could curl up in the dirt, stay there all night if I wanted to, surrounded by all that feed. I could disappear right into it.