A Desert Kitchen Garden

excerpt from the river project

My role in the FED feast is akin to executive chef. I create the frame, orchestrate the proceedings, and as with any start-up, do a lot of hands-on, grunt work to make sure that we put on a unique and spectacular feast for you. Ironically, I’m not much of an executive chef type, no matter how many big ideas land me in this kind of role. Instead, I’m happiest in the kitchen and studio quietly cooking up dishes and pieces from ingredients, often improbable ones, that I have on hand and that I’ve gathered with careful intention and attention, usually over many years.

This week FED serves up one such dish. It emerges from a project begun in the spring of 2021, when I headed for the Texas/Mexico border and the mouth of the Rio Grande. I’ve spent much of the years since spiraling my way throughout the roughly 2000 miles of watershed exploring questions about belonging. One day, I hope little pieces like the one that follows will coalesce into something worthy of the mighty river and all it serves.

Big love, Ashley

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Excerpt from the river project…

In January, I build four little beds for a kitchen garden and begin planting. Smack dab in the middle of North America’s largest desert and adjacent to the Rio Grande—vital water source and ecosystem anchor now dry thanks to water ownership and a legally mandated winter practice of holding water upstream—I hope it is not too early. I hope it is not too impossible to grow my own food, to nurture myself in a time of acute suffering turned perplexingly chronic.

I suspect that it is too early. Days are short, and Saku and I shiver in cold wind that never seems to stop blowing. The little map on the seed packets tells me it’s zone something or other here, and that is supposed to mean something to me, supposed to tell me what to do and how to behave to be successful, but my brain doesn’t work that way. I not only can’t remember the actual number, but I also can’t remember what it means even as I’m staring at the explanation I find online.

Looking it up even once is too much. Deep in a rabbit hole of details I can process only with great difficulty, I consider the permutations of microclimates, the lag time of systems updates and climate change, prevailing winds, pollinators, shifting flyways, and the fallacy of certainty. The effort to translate the pile-up of details into actions only eliminates any desire or capacity I had to plant a seed. Knowing it’s just my neurodivergent brain doing its normal thing takes the edge off the creeping sense of personal failing but does little to render this neurotypical construct of zone logic more helpful than what I already understand about latitude and altitude, which, it turns out, is a lot.

I have spent decades slowly traversing the planet as far north as the Arctic Circle and as far south as New Zealand’s Invercargill, exploring everything from below sea level desert basins to volcanoes in Java to milpas in the altos of Chiapas. What I can’t learn from the usual channels, I’ve tried to learn from hands-on, embodied observation. I remember this fact and also that experience lodges itself in my consciousness photographically and in my body as multi-sensory patterns even when a simple number won’t stick for a second, and I think about Eliot Coleman and Helen Nearing growing year-round on the coast of Maine several zones north of this one. Bolstered by their precedent, I resolve to figure this kitchen garden out in ways that do not paralyze or overwhelm me. I throw zone-sense and seed packets away and sort possibility into piles of above ground and below ground harvests.

The one guide I can follow is the moon. As we have done for millennia, I follow her rhythm the way I follow the sun’s. A locating constant. If waxing, I plant seeds she will pull with her toward full, flower to fruit. If waning, I plant for root crops she will tug below to ripen as she travels to shine for the sun. Each night, I look up to see what she’s doing. Following her lead for what to plant when, I use all available senses to garden from the hip.

If I am too cold in January, perhaps the plants are, too. I prepare for windy days and frigid nights by making them jackets from plastic dropcovers procured from the paint aisle at the hardware store across the tracks, strewn over pvc pipes from the plumbing aisle, and secured with binder clips. If I am too hot, perhaps plants are, too. I offer them water and lament while we all wilt in a June of more hundred degree days than not. As I put booties on Saku’s paws to protect them from hot pavement; I think to try booties of sorts for the plants and make them from what I hope will be cooling mesh held aloft by tipis of bamboo and hoops of pipe no longer needed for jackets.

I marvel at the way light plays with the structures, and shape echoes the peaks of the Organ Mountains beyond the wall, the tracks, and the swirling dusty town. I try to be patient as we all—plants, pup, and human—shrink into ourselves in what promises to be the hottest desert June on record. I hope for cooler weather so that being outside will nourish and strengthen us as I know it can, as I know it is designed to do.

I have been frustrated and confused my entire life by the uniquely human capacity to manufacture suffering. For ourselves, for others, for the planet. It has never made sense to me that we choose to use our gifts this way and not another. Yes, I can explain why—cultural anthropologist style, journalist style, scientist and systems analyst styles. I can even make a personal case. Via these explanations, I can further argue that maybe it’s not really a choice. This capacity to explain, qualify, and excuse—also human—leaves me, however, knowing why we do it no more clearly or patiently than before my brain makes its sense and files its case. Nor, does it convince me this suffering isn’t a choice.

Agriculturalists from the Sonoran Desert in California to the Negev in the Middle East to here in this swath of the Chihuahuan Desert, would have us believe otherwise by shifting the frame entirely to assert that suffering must be alleviated because it cannot be prevented. For this noble cause, everything is possible and just. Turning off a river, for instance. And I, with my tiny kitchen garden abutting train tracks that carry goods north to south and back again through this desert, I tried to believe, too.

Belief yielded half a jar’s worth of beets for refrigerator pickles, enough lettuces and greens for countless salads and stews, just enough English peas to munch on first thing in the morning, standing among the containers in my pajamas, and an equivalent number of string beans to eat, hose in hand, at the end of a hot day, plus one or two carrots, enough radishes to burn my tongue from winter into spring, and a sprig of dill for a can of tuna last week as I ate down the pantry in preparation for leaving.

If I am lucky, by the time Saku and I drive away later this week, in a rented truck full of the remaining belongings I could not donate, sell, or bear to part with, car in tow, and a plan to sleep our way across the country in truck stops and rest areas and call it adventure, I will also have harvested two tiny tomatoes and two equally tiny yellow crookneck squash for our final supper at the end of this road. I will have tucked some zinnias and marigolds into my hair.

Even while I will have enjoyed this small bounty, been proud to have managed it in such a trying time and inhospitable conditions, I will have been anguished to ask this place to alter its nature for me, for the sun to shine more gently, for the moon to pull a little harder, for the river to give over its precious water to slake insatiable human thirst and ease extravagant hunger.

A hazard of moving through the world via multi-sensory, embodied engagement is experiencing everything so deeply that feeling extends to include single grains of sand in a dry riverbed and migrating birds who change their route because the habitat their species has always known disappeared behind a damn for half the year with the flick of a switch. Not exclusively neurodivergent, this mode is also the artist’s way. Add to it, however, a neurodivergent brain that can’t remember a number but can and does process disparate elements rapidly and deeply when sufficiently motivated, and it’s hard to avoid holistic conclusions traversing time, space, species, and culture. This mode is mine.

As I disassemble containers and thank these beautiful plants for their harvests, this place for hosting us, I will realize I made a choice to suffer because imagination failed me. Because I lost faith and settled for belief. Because I tried to believe myself into something I am not. I will know that I was wrong. This kitchen garden in the desert will have reminded me of something I have always known to my inarguable core. Our capacity to manufacture suffering is only the unfortunate flip side of our capacity to create, to transform love into beauty. We make the unfortunate choice, when we have other, more authentic and essential options.

I will conclude that the desert is no place for agriculture and settlement. Nor for testing arsenals, as is the habit here. The desert is not an empty place or a tabula rasa. It is a place for gratefully gathering gifts that are offered and moving on. It is a place to practice balance. It is a place to know one’s place and what it is not. Too hot to handle and prickly by design, the desert does not suffer, nor cause suffering, when doing its unfettered thing. It thrives with exquisite, nourishing beauty.

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& for more goodness…

Learn more about FED’s entire Summer 2024 global crew of musicians, artists, writers, growers, gleaners, cooks, and craftspeople, and be sure to check back Thursday for a recipe for Watermelon and Smashed Cucumber Salad from Darcy Reenis aka DJ D:RC. Recipe drops 27 June.