the hole, our breath steaming in the cold damp air, watching Dowst like Botany 101 students on a field trip. It was seven a.m. Gesh was wearing a black turtleneck maculated with grease stains (the result of a breakfast mishap), Phil was hunched in the carapace of a paint-spattered K-Mart sweatshirt, and I was sporting one of the flannel shirts I’d bought for the country, now torn and dirtied beyond recognition. Dowst was wearing eighty-dollar hiking boots, pressed jeans and the yellow rain slicker he’d had on the night I met him. “This,” he said finally, “is the model hole. Once you get the fences up you’re going to have to dig two thousand of them.”
Gesh had a cold. He dredged the mucus from his throat and spat noisily. “While you’re sitting on your ass in Sausalito, right?”
“No, no, no, no, no—I’ll be right here the next three or four days at least, working side by side with you. We’ve got to get those fences up and start the seedlings before we get too far behind schedule.”
“And Vogelsang?”
Dowst tucked the bandanna in his pocket and pushed the hair out of his eyes. “He said he’d be up tomorrow.”
“Shit.” Gesh focused on a fist-sized stone and hammered it against the side of the house with a vicious swipe of his boot. “That’s what he said a week and a half ago.”
Dowst had showed up at dusk the previous evening—eight days after the appointed time. For a week and a half we’d been on our own, isolated, bewildered, putting in twelve-hour days with the come-along and then collapsing on our soiled mattresses at night. Once the initial hillside had been fenced (we called it the Khyber Pass in tribute to its vertiginous goat-walks and sheer declivities), we erected a greenhouse to specifications Dowst had given us in Bolinas. It was a joy compared to fencing. I took charge, relieved to be doing something I was familiar with, and we threw up the framework in an afternoon. Then we nailed Visquine—clear sheets of plastic—over the waterlogged studs and painted the whole thing green, khaki and dirt brown: army camouflage. “I feel like we’re going to war,” Phil said over the hiss of his spray can. His right hand and the sleeve of the jacket from which it protruded were a slick uniform jungle green, owing to a sudden wind shift. Gesh stood beside him, his arm rotating in a great whirling arc, spewing paint like smoke. His jaw was set, he was squinting against the fading light. “Damn straight,” he grunted.
Then we began to get itchy. Neither Dowst nor Vogelsang had showed up and we had no further instructions. And yet Dowst had repeatedly impressed upon us the vital necessity of keeping on schedule. The plants had to attain their optimum growth by September 22, when the photoperiod began to decrease. Once the daily quotient of sunlight was superseded by a greater period of darkness, the plants automatically began to bud—it was built into their genes—and that was that. The lateryou got your seedlings into the ground, the smaller your plants would be when the autumnal equinox rolled around—and the smaller the plants, the smaller the harvest. You didn’t have to be a botanist to appreciate how all this smallness would relate to net profit.
“So what do we do?” I asked. We were inside now, sipping at the evening’s first cocktail. We’d just driven the final nail into the greenhouse, the moon was up and the birds were crouched in the trees, grumbling like revolutionaries. “Just sit around?”
Gesh was in the kitchen, rattling pans and slamming drawers. “Mr. Yale is fucking up on us already,” he said, swinging round and slapping a blackened pot of ravioli on the table. “How could we ever be so stupid as to trust somebody with a name like Boyd Dowst?”
We’d put in a tough day in damp, forty-degree weather. The fire was warm, the smell of food distracted us, canned ravioli, boiled potatoes and pale yellow wax beans had appeared on our plates. There
Gesh had a cold. He dredged the mucus from his throat and spat noisily. “While you’re sitting on your ass in Sausalito, right?”
“No, no, no, no, no—I’ll be right here the next three or four days at least, working side by side with you. We’ve got to get those fences up and start the seedlings before we get too far behind schedule.”
“And Vogelsang?”
Dowst tucked the bandanna in his pocket and pushed the hair out of his eyes. “He said he’d be up tomorrow.”
“Shit.” Gesh focused on a fist-sized stone and hammered it against the side of the house with a vicious swipe of his boot. “That’s what he said a week and a half ago.”
Dowst had showed up at dusk the previous evening—eight days after the appointed time. For a week and a half we’d been on our own, isolated, bewildered, putting in twelve-hour days with the come-along and then collapsing on our soiled mattresses at night. Once the initial hillside had been fenced (we called it the Khyber Pass in tribute to its vertiginous goat-walks and sheer declivities), we erected a greenhouse to specifications Dowst had given us in Bolinas. It was a joy compared to fencing. I took charge, relieved to be doing something I was familiar with, and we threw up the framework in an afternoon. Then we nailed Visquine—clear sheets of plastic—over the waterlogged studs and painted the whole thing green, khaki and dirt brown: army camouflage. “I feel like we’re going to war,” Phil said over the hiss of his spray can. His right hand and the sleeve of the jacket from which it protruded were a slick uniform jungle green, owing to a sudden wind shift. Gesh stood beside him, his arm rotating in a great whirling arc, spewing paint like smoke. His jaw was set, he was squinting against the fading light. “Damn straight,” he grunted.
Then we began to get itchy. Neither Dowst nor Vogelsang had showed up and we had no further instructions. And yet Dowst had repeatedly impressed upon us the vital necessity of keeping on schedule. The plants had to attain their optimum growth by September 22, when the photoperiod began to decrease. Once the daily quotient of sunlight was superseded by a greater period of darkness, the plants automatically began to bud—it was built into their genes—and that was that. The lateryou got your seedlings into the ground, the smaller your plants would be when the autumnal equinox rolled around—and the smaller the plants, the smaller the harvest. You didn’t have to be a botanist to appreciate how all this smallness would relate to net profit.
“So what do we do?” I asked. We were inside now, sipping at the evening’s first cocktail. We’d just driven the final nail into the greenhouse, the moon was up and the birds were crouched in the trees, grumbling like revolutionaries. “Just sit around?”
Gesh was in the kitchen, rattling pans and slamming drawers. “Mr. Yale is fucking up on us already,” he said, swinging round and slapping a blackened pot of ravioli on the table. “How could we ever be so stupid as to trust somebody with a name like Boyd Dowst?”
We’d put in a tough day in damp, forty-degree weather. The fire was warm, the smell of food distracted us, canned ravioli, boiled potatoes and pale yellow wax beans had appeared on our plates. There
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