Market Day
An Excerpt of On Gold Hill

I couldn’t shake the notion that Sonora wheat was entangled with my family history, with my own ambitions, and with the fate of my farm.

   
A Saturday farmers market. Midsummer. Morning. Woven baskets and canvas shopping bags. Nylon canopies flap-flapping in the breeze. The tang of overripe melons and a trace of chill in the air.

I walk with my sister toward the bustle. We’re on the shady side of the street and goose bumps pimple my bare arms. But I know it won’t last, this coolness. I’ve spent enough summers here in these parched Sierra foothills to be sure of that. By the end of the hour, the heat will shoulder in and everything will go sluggish, drawing back from the sun as best it can—birds hunkering in the cover of oaks, rattlesnakes slipping under rocks, squash blossoms crumpling inward. Now, a steady breeze sharpens the chill and I glance at the sunny side of the street where honeyed light pools across the asphalt, then step toward it.

Back when I lived in this region of Northern California and spent my days farming vegetables not far from this town, I’d have stayed in the shade. I’d have let the chill sink deep into my skin, tried to store it there in my flesh, a reserve against the coming heat. In those days, too, I’d have been on the opposite side of the vendor tables. Filling bins, counting change, smiles and thank-you’s and recipe suggestions. But it’s been more than three years since I stopped farming: today, I’m just a visitor here.

I’m drifting through the market, enjoying a visitor’s cheerful indifference, when I see the words Gold Hill inked on a banner above a table of vegetables. I know I’ve stopped moving because my sister nudges me, asks, “What?” When I don’t answer she follows my gaze. “Oh, they’re here,” she says. “The farmers who took over your old place.”

I shouldn’t be so surprised. My sister had told me that the latest tenants, the third set of eager organic farmers to lease the land since my partner Ryan and I had left it, were from her town.

 “Come on,” she says now. “I’ll introduce you.”

 

The new farmers are as surprised to meet me as I am to meet them. Like Ryan and me when we arrived on Gold Hill, they’re a young couple thrilled for the chance to farm those ten acres of loamy soil. They wear dusty jeans and work boots, hats sweat-stained at the brow. After our introductions, the man resumes stocking produce while the woman and I talk. She tells me of their plans in sentences that bump into each other, the crops they intend to grow, their commitment to creating a more socially just and ecologically resilient food system. Her enthusiasm is contagious, her aspirations familiar. Soon I, too, am talking fast, eager to recall those particular ten acres, the stretch of land I know better than any on Earth.

We discuss the intricacies of the irrigation system Ryan and I had designed, the stubborn patch of Bermuda grass by the parking lot. She tells me she’s still getting acquainted with the microclimate of Gold Hill. “It’s a banana belt,” she says and I nod, remembering the way the morning light poured over the fields, how it seemed to gather there in that small basin. I remember, too, that I’d planted sapling fruit trees on that land, trees I knew wouldn’t bear much of a harvest for close to a decade. How I’d hung a swing from the mulberry near the farmhouse and imagined my future children spending long afternoons there.

As we talk I begin to feel a familiar unsettledness rising, some slumbering thing stirring inside me. I look away from the young woman, focus instead on her produce. A smudge of dirt interrupts the smooth shine of an eggplant, and I rub it away with my thumb. More jolts of memory: sticky resin blacking my hands after a morning harvesting tomatoes, the hollow plunk of peppers tossed into a bucket, the scent of irrigation water on sun-warmed soil.

“Where are you living now?” the young woman asks. It’s just small talk but I feel my throat tighten. I answer in a voice as breezy as I can muster, tell her we live in Oregon, it’s very green, lush. No, we’re not farming anymore. Yes, we have a big garden. I go on about our garden, how nice it is to be able to take time with everything, tend to each plant, nothing like working with the kind of ruthless efficiency farming demands. I don’t mention how much I miss stepping into the greenhouse on a winter morning, those tables filled with thousands of seedlings—slender needles of onions, frilled blue broccoli, meaty zucchini cotyledons. Or the fall squash harvest, loading truck bed after truck bed with globes of color. Or the way it had once felt to say those words: I’m an organic farmer.

I begin to look for a way out of this conversation, a way to move my body away from this stall before I smack into the question I imagine she’ll ask next: What happened?

What’s so hard about that question anyway? We’d simply chosen to leave, to let it all go and move on. I’d typed up the letter terminating our lease, sent it in. And yet, there were those tired questions, bubbling up again in my mind: What if we’d only stayed another year, what if I’d been a shrewder businesswoman, a harder worker, a better farmer? Would things have been different? Had I made a mistake, was farming the good life and I’d given it up? Had I chickened out? Gotten out? Sold out? Dropped out? Failed out?

A customer steps up, ready to pay for his bag heaped full of leafy greens. Beautiful produce, he tells the farmer. And it’s true, her display is stunning: all bright colors and broad leaves. She smiles at this compliment, and I watch as she adds up the total. Her hands are callused and strong, dirt staining the creases of her fingers. Her stall buzzes with shoppers. She chats warmly, grins easily. Here, a hardworking organic farmer, diligent and prosperous, doing the good work, bettering the world while living out wholesome, worthwhile days. She plays the part well, I think. Maybe she is the part. I watch her and wonder, Why wasn’t I?

I look down at the pepper in my hands and see it is trembling, so I put it back on the pile, tell myself it doesn’t matter. All that is in the past now. I’d done those years on the farm, nearly four, and lost nothing. Ryan and I had transformed a fallow field, dust and star-thistle, into ten verdant acres, a productive organic farm, and we’d left happily, ready for something new, unscathed.

Another customer approaches the farmer. My hands have stopped shaking, and I’m feeling better, fine. I’ll wave goodbye, mouth “Good luck!” and walk away. I turn to do just that, but the woman lifts a finger, wait a minute, and motions for me to come over. She finishes the transaction, steps away from the register, and leans toward me across a heap of squash.

“I wanted to tell you,” she says, “we’ve had a pretty impressive stand of volunteer grain come up this spring.”

“Volunteer grain?” I repeat.

“Along the west edge of the farm, all the way to that back corner near the creek.”

When I don’t respond she adds, “We think it might be wheat.”

The back of my neck goes hot. “Oh?”

She waits for me to say more, then prods, “Didn’t you and Ryan grow wheat? There’s that mill stone still in the barn? We heard you were doing some kind of heirloom grain thing?”

I nod. Ignore the heat spreading down my spine. I haven’t talked about our wheat for a few years, have tried to put it out of mind since the day I poured the last handful of flour into a mixing bowl, then stared at the empty Ziplock bag dusted faintly yellow. That bag sat on my counter for days before I finally threw it out, the last trace of my wheat clinging to the plastic.

“We tried,” I say, making a sound I hope comes out like a casual chuckle. “It was just an experiment. It didn’t really pan out in the end. Anyway,” I add, “that was years ago.”

“Well,” she says, “we’ve asked around. As far as anyone knows, none of the other farmers grew grains.”

The west edge. That would be the place we’d last planted the wheat.

“How tall is it?” I ask.

“Pretty tall, four, five feet maybe.”

 “Blond?”

“Yes.”

“Beardless?”

The woman falters. “I’m not sure,” she says. “I don’t really know much about grains.”

As far back as I can remember I felt a kind of cavity in the place where I imagined this sense of heritage might otherwise have lived.

When I arrived on Gold Hill, 25 and brimming with ambition, I, too, knew hardly anything about growing grains. Ryan and I hadn’t planned to grow wheat. We intended to grow vegetables—ten acres of certified organic produce. At the time, the “farm” was only a weedy field, thistle and ryegrass. There was an old hay barn and a long-abandoned spring-toothed harrow half buried in the baked earth. There was no irrigation, no greenhouse or tractor. There was no farm stand, no washing stations, not even a stray shovel. All those things Ryan and I would need to build or buy. But we found none of this daunting, only laden with possibility.

It was one afternoon that first summer, a few months into the rush of all the building and planning and gathering, that a baker friend of mine came sauntering up our driveway, a loaf of bread in hand. The loaf, he explained, was made with a grain I’d never heard of: Sonora wheat. The wheat had been grown on a farm not far from my own. “Seems like it would do pretty well here,” he said, fanning out an arm in the direction of our newly leased fields. “Maybe you should plant some.”

I shook my head. “I don’t know anything about growing wheat.”

“Well,” my friend said after a moment, “you could look into it.”

I turned toward my fields, tried to imagine them filled with wheat. Though I’d never spent any time on a wheat farm, I found I had no trouble conjuring an image, a cereal box vision of amber stalks gleaming in the sun. I shrugged and told my friend I’d think about it.

I assumed I’d do some halfhearted research, an hour of googling maybe, an email to an acquaintance who had experience with wheat. The search led to a phone call with a seed supplier. I asked some basic questions and nearly stopped there—nearly hung up the phone and forgot all about the idea of growing wheat. I might have done just that if not for the words that came at the end of the conversation, a detail offered casually, the woman’s voice crackling over a bad connection: “The grocer told me Sonora makes flatbreads just like the ones he remembers eating when he was growing up somewhere in northern India. Punjab, I believe.”

I didn’t tell the woman on the phone, not that day, that my family was from northern India. I didn’t tell her I was Punjabi. In fact, I don’t think I’d ever said those words—I’m Punjabi—to anyone. Though the statement was true—my mother was born in Punjab, as were both her parents, and their ancestors as far back as anyone knew—it seemed equally false. At the time, I’d never been to India, knew little about Punjabi customs or traditions, didn’t speak the language. I knew only that my mother had left that place and come to America with her family when she was 15, and at some point thereafter lost her Punjabi accent. To me, her voice had always sounded just as Californian as my own, with one exception: the v and w sounds had gotten irrevocably switched in her mind, so that windshield wiper often came out vinshield viper; wisteria, visteria. It was the one remnant of India my mother had failed to shed. The rest of it she’d seemed to have sloughed off long before I was born. Once, I heard my mother refer to herself as a “nonpracticing Indian,” as if she’d simply chosen to opt out of this facet of herself like one might a religion or a profession.

I can’t recall a moment when I first began to wonder about my mother’s past, to look for a sense of my own cultural roots, or when I noticed these things were nowhere to be found. As far back as I can remember I felt a kind of cavity in the place where I imagined this sense of heritage might otherwise have lived. As a child I believed this vacancy would shrink as I became an adult and other forms of identity filled in the space, but instead it only grew. By the time I spoke with the wheat seed supplier that summer morning, it had become an aching hollow, and her words—flatbreads just like the ones he remembers eating when he was growing up somewhere in northern India. Punjab, I believe—landed there with an echoing thud.

After hanging up the phone, I replayed the conversation in my head. The seed supplier had given me plenty of compelling reasons to grow Sonora—it was drought tolerant and didn’t require any irrigation, it produced a distinctly flavorful flour and tender dough, it was among the first wheats ever grown on North American soil and one of the oldest varieties still in existence. But it was, of course, the link between this wheat’s history and my own that I found most irresistible. The coincidence struck me as an opportunity: Might this obscure wheat contain within it a door to my own heritage? If I could manage to grow Sonora—plant the seed, harvest a crop, mill flour from the berries—might I, in turn, reclaim a piece of the inheritance I’d lost?

Ryan and I planted a two-acre field with Sonora wheat that first fall. We grew the grain for three years, encountering a new obstacle with each attempt, until, at last, I held in my arms a sack of flour. I’d done what I set out to do. And yet I felt no closer to understanding my roots. Instead, I was less certain than I’d ever been of what constituted my heritage and what it could meant to “reclaim” it, of why I’d wanted to become an organic farmer and how that conviction had unraveled, and what wheat had to do with any of it. The one thing I’d learned enough to feel sure about was that it did, in fact, have something to do with it.

I left the farm with all I could carry of our final harvest—a bin of onions, two crates of winter squash, a scant 20 pounds of flour—and a gnawing confusion. I couldn’t shake the notion that Sonora wheat was entangled with my family history, with my own ambitions, and with the fate of my farm, but I couldn’t then make sense of the ways these things were bound up. For months I picked over memories, attempted to stitch them together into something I could understand. But then a sudden wash of regret would pour over me, or a scorching sense of failure, or the blinding frustration of being so unable to find any meaning in the tangle. Eventually I gave up, pushed the questions aside. The wheat, the farm, all that, I assured myself, was behind me now, just a youthful endeavor, nothing to dwell on. By the time the last remnants of my farm produce had been used up, I’d laid my questions down to rest.

 

Now, at the farmers market, the young woman is still looking at me as if waiting for a reaction I haven’t yet supplied.

She clears her throat. “What I mean is,” she says, “your wheat, it’s still there.”

I feel my heartbeat pulsing in my temples. Resist the urge to rub at them. I can’t quite wrap my mind around this, can’t think it through—how many seasons had it been since we’d tilled under the last crop? Could enough of those seeds have germinated, grown tall, set seed, been tilled under again?

“No,” I say flatly. “I don’t think so. My wheat, those seeds are long gone by now.”

The farmer and I look at each other for a wordless moment before another customer steps up ready to pay. We exchange smiles, great-to-meet-you’s, then I turn and walk quickly out of the market.

 

Back home in Oregon, I can’t get the woman’s words out of my head: Still there. From a shelf near my desk, I pull out a wooden box of keepsakes I’ve collected over the years and dig through its contents. Old letters. A few smudged photos. A river stone. It doesn’t take me long to find what I’m after: a thimble-size bundle of fabric, bound with thread. I set the bundle on my desk and gently work at the knot until the thread slips and the fabric falls open. There, in the cupped depression, a mound of wheat. Thirty or 40 grains in all, enough to fill a teaspoon.

I haven’t looked at these seeds, haven’t unbound the bundle of fabric since the day I tied it up a few weeks before we left the farm. Now, I peer closely. Half of the grains are plump and butter-colored, my own Sonora seeds. These were the last of them, I’d thought—kernels I’d rubbed loose from an ear of our final harvest. And then there are the other grains. Longer and narrower, their hue a dusty auburn. These seeds don’t really belong to me at all—I’d stolen them from a rooftop in Punjab where they’d been dumped from a dustpan and left for the birds.

I pinch up one of the auburn seeds. It’s nothing special, no traditional heirloom—just a modern variety, high yielding and conventionally grown. I roll it between my fingers and recall the morning I’d picked it out of the dust pile: a lone kite overhead, scent of wood smoke, the slap of my cousin’s chappla sandals on concrete steps. One memory leads to another—the taste of a raw wheat berry chewed to a gummy pulp, then stretched thin to test the strength of gluten; the rattle and ping of a combine; a flock of drought-starved geese grazing a field of knee-high stalks; yields per acre, dollars per pound; the warmth of just-milled flour seeping into my palm; an empty fertilizer bag stuffed with scraps of fabric—and with the memories, that familiar feeling, a blend of vexation and yearning, like trying to untangle a mess of yarn, if I could only find the right strand to tug. Still there.

I study the seeds, line them up to inspect each one as if I might find some insight among the kernels. The seeds, of course, yield no such answers so I wrap them up again, drop the bundle back into the box, and turn instead to my bookshelf where I find my copy of The Wheat Plant by John Percival. I thumb through it until I land on the page with the photo of the Sonora stalk. I don’t really need to look to know what’s there. By now, I’ve memorized the page. It hangs in my mind alongside a collection of other facts and images, information accumulated over those four years on the farm, a fragmented history of this plant. What I want now is the rest of the story. Because knotted up with it, I suspect, I might find a piece of my own.

I don’t imagine, not on this day, just how far into history I’ll wander, or where the threads I tug will lead me—to times of gold miners and seed hunters, into colonial India and through Partition, to the beginnings of the modern organic farming movement and past the unfolding of the Green Revolution. On this day, I’ve no idea where I’m going at all. I know only that I need to go, need to start somewhere. So I examine again the page in the book, squint at the photo, reread the words, then turn back to chapter one and begin at the beginning:

Among the world’s crops wheat is pre-eminent both in regard to its antiquity and its importance as a food of mankind.