From Good Earth

Searching for Victor Fresquez
By Kristen Davenport

Two years ago this spring, my husband and I moved our family to our new farm, having spent the previous five years at a leased property down the hill where we never once saw an apple on the lone apple tree near the ditch.
Blooms, we saw plenty. Apples, none.
At our old farm, we were at the very bottom of the valley, where - over the years--it became obvious we weren't ever going to be able to grow much food. In the high mountains of New Mexico, cold air sinks like dead weight --and we were at the bottom of a terrible cold siphon. Each year, sometime in July, a freak frost would come along and blithely kill off all my squash plants, my beans, my poblano chiles. I'd weep and gnash my teeth, then regroup and plant some more arugula. Arugula, at least, doesn't mind a touch of frost.
But I loved that place, with its views up to the 13,000-foot Truchas Peaks. We were a mile's walk up the streambed from the Embudo River. There was a spring down at the bottom of the property where watercress grew-- a spicy treat in earliest spring when it started to flourish. When I dug into the soil there, I'd often find shards of old micaceous pottery from the ancestors of the Picuris, the pueblo that owns much of the land in the area. But several springs ago, a deep May frost once again froze the lilac buds on our bush, dooming the flowers a few days before they would have peeked into bloom. In five springs there, I saw the gigantic lilac bush in full bloom only one time. The other four years frost got the flowers. Meanwhile, the neighbors uphill enjoyed weeks of lilac perfume outside their windows.
And, that same spring, the mercury hit 23 degrees on my front porch on June 6 - knocking down the corn that had been just coming up, zapping all the strawberry blossoms, and turning the wee tendrils of the potatoes emerging from the cold soil into black slime. I decided it was time to go for a drive up into the hills, looking for "For Sale" signs on potential farm land. My husband and I had been growing gourmet garlic for farmers' markets for years, but we wanted to branch out. We wanted to grow real food. I knew some people in our village who lived up higher, who managed to grow things I could only dream about --green beans, winter squash, corn. On June 6, when it was 23 degrees at our house, it was 34 degrees up at the top of the canyon. Thirty-four degrees doesn't kill your tomato starts.
The day we first came here to our new farm, the day we went driving looking for nothing in particular except a place we could grow apples, we came down this road - our road now - and we saw the most beautiful old apple tree growing on the uphill side of the road, with hundreds of little apples on it the size of marbles. We saw the gentle downhill slope of the land and the way some unnamed someone, long ago, had planted little islands of plum trees along the road, at the top of the slope where the water from the acequia enters the hayfields. We got out to look around. We saw a clump of wild cherry trees, gooseberries growing at their feet. We saw the old orchard, the pear tree with woodpecker scars, untended apples, more hedgerows of plums around an old adobe house. We saw the ancient lilac bush in full-blown fat bloom under the partial shade of four stately poplars, and daylilies primping for the afternoon sun. There was a big stand of lovage, a circular bed of oregano.
And I fell in love--not only with the land but also with the people who had lived here before, with the person who so thoughtfully arranged the gathered rows of plums so that anyone who turned the irrigation water onto the hayfields could not help but also water the plum trees. Presumably, this person knew that someone would always turn the water onto the hay--after all, this is cow country. We might neglect the fruit trees, but we won't neglect the hay.
When we left our old farm, I was --despite the frozen lilacs --a bit sad. When you live and work so much outdoors, when you invest so many hours in a field, the landscape somehow becomes a part of you. I used to watch our neighbor, Joe Martinez, spend entire days out in the fields working the water. He wore these cheap, knee-high plastic boots, and after notching little holes in the regaderas (water channels) to send the water into the hay, he'd lay back on his elbows, his left leg tossed lazily over his right, and watch the water. And he'd stay there - for hours, often for an entire afternoon - watching the water wiggle down its pathways, down into the gopher holes, seeping ever-so-slowly into the dry Timothy grass along the edges. Joe was born on that property and knew every inch of those fields--which corners were hard to get water to, which corners impossible. Joe knew, too, that we'd only rarely get an apple on that apple tree, although he did describe them to me as "little and green" ,-and that we would never be able to farm on any scale at the bottom of that valley.
In America today, there are not many people left who know their land the way Joe knew those few irrigated acres. Despite a revival of organic farms and the movement to eat local foods, small family farms continue to dwindle - an estimated 330 family farmers leave their land every week, selling out to the big industrial agricultural machine.
And this is a tragedy far bigger than simply losing a gourmet tomato grown nextdoor, or a source of wheat just down the road. A family farmer has a sense for his family's land-- a respect for the space, a respect for the soil and what lives in it, a respect for its sources of water -- more than any mechanized agricultural corporation. He is vested in his community, because his kids go to school here, because he attends the local church. He cares what his neighbors are eating. A family farmer knows that if he hopes to establish some hedges of wild plums, he needs to think big picture, and think long term: After he's dead and gone, who will water the trees?
I've spent the last two years chasing down stories about the previous owners of our new farm. In fact, when we purchased the property, we made the entire sale contingent upon the previous owner's agreement to meet us and tell us everything he knew about the history of the place. It turned out to be not much-- he was from another part of the state and just ran his cattle here. But guess what? He inadvertently watered the plum trees while doing so. But neighbors who have lived around these parts their whole lives have given me a picture of the guy, Victor Fresquez, who probably built our 90-year-old tumbledown adobe. Victor was apparently a tall, wiry man who wore a black suit and black felt hat. He also had a temper, a taste for hard liquor, and packed a pistol --I imagine him a Spanish version of John Wayne. I've not been able to find out his wife's name, but one neighbor warned me Victor's wife was a black witch. I've heard conflicting reports about who planted the plum and apple trees, but as much as I wished it was Victor's witch wife, I'm told it was probably Victor and his brother.
This is sort-of embarrassing, but I have spent several lovely summer afternoons looking through the old cemeteries in the area for his name. I haven't yet found a headstone for Victor Fresquez. And honestly, what would I do, if I did find his grave? Sit down, pour a glass of Wild Turkey and thank him for the plums?
Unlike some of the outsiders who move into these old New Mexico mountain villages, my husband and I definitely hope to stay here for the rest of our lives. At the moment, it looks like we'll probably have to sell off about a third of our initial acreage in order to stay here, which breaks my heart. But this is the reality of land prices and farming in our modern world.

And all is not lost --we should still have 20 acres to work with. I am thirty-seven years old this year, and I have plans for this place. I want to graft some heirloom apple trees this spring, and plant them and hope for fruit by the time I'm sixty. I am thinking about some fruit hedges along the new fence line that will go up if we do sell some land. In homage to Victor we'll plant wild plums but also wild Nanking cherries, chokecherries, maybe some gooseberries at their feet. I've got visions of raspberries dancing in my head, huge thickets of them, and currants and perhaps a few stately blue spruce.
This has always seemed to me like the gardener's version of immortality. There are certain things you can plant--fruit trees, iris, lilac bushes, oak trees--that will almost certainly outlive you. A Canadian homesteader named Nelson Henderson once said, "The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you never expect to sit."
Living like this, I start to see that my little life really does not matter so much, for who am I but a compulsive gardener and a (perpetually late) food writer?
But the apples trees I plant? I admit: I hope they make a fruit so sweet, they will inspire some future lover of good soil and green things to go searching through cemeteries, looking for my name.