Chapter 2 The Orchard #2
They fed the animals apples in reward. And hay, a faded sage, carried to the barn in bales. The rams tussled in their pen. For two days, Pete kept them inside to reacclimate. Then he opened the gates, and they streamed into the pasture, lightened.
A nearby mill turned the coats into yarn, which the Salters sold.
The wool of the Finns was springy and soft; the Romney was less supple, which made it warm and strong.
The Salters’ skeins never sold as well as machine-washable yarns, stripped of scales and coated in plastic, so highly processed that it was hard to believe they had come from an animal.
Some customers held the Finn and Romney wool to their bare skin and frowned.
But those who loved farm yarns knew they kept you warm like nothing else.
Clare liked to knit socks, and Laurel made vests, or long, trailing scarves.
Her greatest achievement was a cabled cardigan, which she lived in throughout college.
It kept her warm in the drafty campus library, and it made her think of the animals.
Clare left her teaching job to manage the finances of the orchard.
They turned the big barn into a farm store that sold bagged apples and yarn, as well as all manner of autumnal things: honey, beeswax candles, cider, spice packets for pie.
As a teenager, Laurel worked the register.
Weekends were madness, but on weekdays, she read her parents’ dog-eared copy of Silent Spring between customers.
She was agog at the world’s interconnections: insecticides found in lake fish and birds’ eggs; arsenic that poisoned livestock and bees, then farmers; radioactive material that cooled into dust and reappeared in crops.
If life was a circle, soil was the circle’s join, the place it all began and ended: cause and effect, birth and death.
“The orchard is a system,” her father said, “more complex than we can understand. When we change one thing, we change everything.”
They walked from tree to tree, hanging the little baggies of human hair—a natural deer repellant—that Pete procured from the local barbershop. Laurel’s mortal fear was that a crush would witness this exchange.
“As for you and me, chickadee?” said Pete. He tied a bag to a branch with string. “We’re no more important than anything else.”
They understood why other farmers sprayed.
Wholesale growers had to produce unblemished fruit to survive.
At Clare’s suggestion, the Salters used a pick-your-own model.
Still, each year was a tense economic dance.
Aside from the yarn, their only income came in fall.
As spring waned and the harvest took shape, the energy at home became taut and watchful.
They stretched meals, darned socks, wasted nothing.
In winter, they traded goods with other farmers.
If the orchard was a system, so, too, were the Salters: her father’s optimism, her mother’s vigilance, Laurel absorbing both.
The sheep lived in synergy with the orchard.
They grazed rotationally, managing weeds, and in November, after the harvest, they ate leftover fruit from the ground.
During rare lucrative years, the Salters could afford to keep the male lambs and older ewes.
But the best wool came from young sheep, and the flock grew every spring.
Clare tried to sell the male lambs as breeding stock, but sometimes she was forced to turn to the butcher.
For Laurel, those were bad mornings, cry-your-eyes-out mornings, at least in the beginning.
When she saw that her outbursts upset the sheep, she learned to be stoic.
“This is part of our purpose in the world,” Pete said, as a throaty bleating sounded from the trailer. The Salters thanked the sheep when they pulled them from the flock—gave them a good scratch, a good rub. “The person who buys their meat helps us to keep the orchard running.”
Every year, Laurel felt wretchedly tender.
In the long run, though, something hardened.
She became adamant in her belief that humans were no different from the rest of the animal kingdom.
She had seen sheep mourn for babies. Once, a lamb named Willie broke his foreleg in the crook of a tree; when the vet came to set it, there were tears in his eyes.
By ten, Laurel was a vegetarian in a state known for bratwurst. Those who questioned her underestimated her determination.
In Antarctica, the presidential election takes place one calendar day later than it does in the United States.
The polls close as the galley preps for dinner.
Some of the cooks sneak wine into the kitchen, certain the win will be Hillary’s, but Louis and Charlie look morose from the beginning.
Stewards run to and from the computer in the dorm lounge, where a crowd is tracking the returns.
The reports are increasingly grim—Trump wins Ohio, then Florida—but Jules keeps their spirits up, blasting Beyoncé, saying it isn’t over until the Midwest sings.
Laurel and Louis are washing pots when Diego, the pastry chef, bursts into the dish pit.
At his pronouncement (“He took Wisconsin”), Jules sways a little, staring.
Moments later, Charlie returns from the cafeteria, pushing a cart laden with other people’s leftovers and wiping quick, silent tears.
Laurel brings Louis and Charlie back to her room. When they enter, leaden, Nita is holding a stapled article. Finish Your Ugly-Cry, it reads. Here’s What to Do Next.
“Okay,” she says. “Tonya in IT is organizing a donation to the NAACP. When it comes to undocumented immigrants, we can petition our local governments to offer sanctuary. You can contribute to Planned Parenthood directly, but it might be best to wait a few days, because the site keeps crashing. Needless to say, we should all contact our congresspeople. And obviously, we need to abolish the electoral college, but that’s a long-term goal.
” At the sight of their faces, she stops. “What?”
“Nita,” says Louis, “I can’t afford a fancy key chain at the General Store.”
Laurel takes the article from Nita. “I feel like such an idiot. I really thought she’d win.”
“No offense, Laurel,” Nita says, “but that’s because you’re white.”
Charlie looks at Laurel sympathetically. “It feels dystopian. I think a lot of us are in shock.”
“No, Nita’s right,” says Laurel. “I should have seen it coming.”
“I did,” says Louis, “but that’s just because I always expect the worst. I recommend it. No nasty surprises.”
On Sunday evening, though, he balks when Laurel and Charlie stay after work for the weekly presentation. The speaker is a climate scientist from Palmer, the US station farther north.
“I’ve had enough apocalypse for one week, thank you,” says Louis, moving backward through the swinging kitchen doors.
The climate scientist clicks through photo slides. In one, an iceberg as tall as a ten-story building floats in open water. In another, an ice sheet has fractured into innumerable squares, which jostle, as if queueing in line.
“If the West Antarctic ice sheet melted, water levels would rise worldwide by ten feet,” the scientist says.
“At Palmer, supply vessels used to pull up to an ice pier, but now it isn’t cold enough to build one.
Glaciers calve in front of our eyes.” She describes the decline of Adélie penguins, which only live on the Antarctic coast. “They return to the same place every year to nest, but now the snow melts and the nests collapse; the eggs drown. The adults have feathers that repel moisture, but the babies don’t.
They can’t handle the precipitation. They freeze. ”
The presentation doesn’t end until nine, but the sky is still light.
As they leave the galley, Laurel scans the horizon.
The Arc is the first thing she looks for each morning and the last one she seeks out at night.
It changes every time, becoming more or less pigmented, the pink swinging from peachy to rose.
In certain moments—like this one, Laurel notes, disappointed—she can’t see it at all.
There is no pattern that she can discern; the Arc seems to be driven by its own unknowable logic.
Charlie suggests they walk to see the Adélies, which breed along the sea ice near the station.
She and Laurel stop to stare, shocked by their proximity.
At orientation, the administrator said that Antarctica had no native population, a comment that now strikes Laurel as untrue.
In contrast to McMurdo’s human residents, who shiver in their Big Reds, the Adélies look at home.
They totter on the rocks, wings akimbo, heads tilted conversationally; in the water, they leap like dolphins.
But an adolescent stands apart. It seems to be trying to shake the mud from its belly, mud the red-brown color of blood. The animal looks back with one oval eye, its pupil like an olive turned sideways.
Once, in second grade, Silas came home from school distraught.
His teacher had told the class about the Kaua‘i ‘ō‘ō: a Hawaiian bird with golden leg feathers and a curved beak, good for drinking honey.
The species had existed for over fifteen million years, but by the 1960s, less than forty birds remained.
In 1987, a naturalist came upon a male tending an empty nest. It was the last Kaua‘i ‘ō‘ō ever seen.
The naturalist recorded its song, a mating call that would never be answered.