The Garden

By Goody Lindley

What could I do – one person? And not just an ordinary person. I was far past my prime – pushing seventy. Yes, I knew we were in the middle of a climate crisis – and if the past summer with its forest fires and smoke obscuring the sun wasn’t enough to sound the alarm bells, there was the winter that locals said, was the first of its kind in their memories.

We lived in the West Kootenays on a mountainside acreage. By the end of January we should have been buried in a couple of metres of snow, and shovelling the driveway daily, only to get down to the road to find the snowplows hadn’t been able to keep up. Frozen water pipes and power outages should have been the norm. But we had no snow. Daytime temperatures refused to deep into the minuses. My skis were still stored in the shed and even my snowshoes were lonely.

What could I do? I was no Greta Thunberg! Heck, I wasn’t even one of the local high school kids collecting bottles and cans for the recycling depot.

And just as I was falling into despair, realizing that I wasn’t old enough to escape the full human-engineered catastrophe, I heard that some of the biggest Creston orchards had failed. The soft fruit tree buds had browned and withered during the winter’s one brief deep-freeze when the polar vortex had rolled down past a jet stream that had been faltering for years.

I took stock of our situation. My husband and I both drove electric vehicles – recent purchases. We recycled. We did everything we were supposed to do. We had a garden and an earth-battery greenhouse. Expand the garden? Sure – it wasn’t much, but we had some acres and it wouldn’t be too hard to  throw in a few more rows of potatoes and onions that would keep through the winter.

That spring, I got out and started digging. My back wasn’t happy about it, but then it didn’t exactly jump for joy whenever I lifted a laundry basket or a bag of dog food either, so it would just have to get used to the extra strain.

I bought massive sacks of seed potatoes at the local hardware store.

“That’s a lot of potatoes,” Marge said as she rang them through.

I plunked half a dozen bags of onion sets on the counter.

“That’s a lot of onions.”

I rifled thought the seed packets: beans, lettuce, tomatoes for the greenhouse, cucumbers, peppers, peas – an army of peas – squash, kale, chard, carrots, broccoli, cabbage, spinach – everything we liked to eat.

“You’re growing a lot this year,” Marge said. “Gonna preserve it all?”

“No – I don’t like preserving. I like growing and harvesting. And I can dry some of these – we have a drier.”

“If you’ve got extra, I’d preserve it for both of us.”

Oh! Okay – I’d never taken the thought that far. Sure. Why not?

I was planting my fifth row of potatoes when Chad stopped by to do some repairs to the soffits on the upper balcony. When he was done he came down to the garden to hand over his bill. I was leaning on my spade by then, trying to ease my rotten back.

“That’s a lot of hard work,” he said.

“Yes it is.”

“Do you have any help?”

“Simon helps when he can but he’s working.”

“My girlfriend could come by. She likes gardening but we don’t have any land.”

“Sure – that would be great. I’d be happy to share the harvest with her.”

“Done.”

Chad’s girlfriend, Lacey, brought her friend, June. The garden got planted faster than I could have imagined. Lacey suggested we dig up another half-acre of rich, sunny soil near the creek. Well, why not? If I was going to share the garden, we might as well make it big. June brought her mother out and Lacey brought her uncle with his rototiller.

After that, it just took on a life of its own. Simon and I had the land and all these other folks from the village had the strength and the will. But what was this? A co-operative? I had no idea how these things worked, and we all wanted it to be fair to everyone – there was enough land to feed us all. All we had to do was keep enriching the soil and practice good organic permaculture. Did we need rules? Laws? A constitution?

Chad said all we needed was good will, because there was enough for everyone and everyone was willing and happy to work together to give our little village food security.

Well, not everyone. The trouble began when I offered our tiny house rent-free to a young homeless couple who’d been living in a tent near the RV park. They’d been passing through, travelling from Vancouver to Calgary, getting a bit of work here and there. They’d just showed up one morning, hitching a ride with Lacey who said they were hungry and wanted to work for food.

But they had nowhere to sleep – only a ratty tent. We had a tiny home. Frank, one of the old Kootenay-born-and-bred natives, objected. “They’re just drifters – probably drug addicts. You let them stay in your tiny house and they’ll break into your house and steal everything they can get their hands on.”

I shrugged. “We never lock the door – no need to break in.”

“People like that – they’re nothing but trouble. They need to be in a city where they can access some sort of services.”

I dug in, royally pissed. Frank had hit one of my sore spots. “They’re homeless. They need a home. That’s it. If someone’s hungry, you give them food. If someone doesn’t have a home, you house them. It’s that simple.”

And just like that, our harmonious, peaceable kingdom where we shared and got along, divided sharply into two camps: the “you have to earn the right to food and a roof over your head,” side and the “food, shelter and clothing are a human right” contingent.

So – this was it – the story of humankind – the basics of the deep divisions in our society: Republicans versus Democrats, Conservatives versus Liberals, Dictatorships versus Democracy, traditional versus progressive, rich versus poor. Is this why we were doomed? Were we doomed?

A flash of memory: I was in my early twenties, walking home from work in downtown Toronto. There, under a storefront awning, a bearded man in nondescript clothes – something beige or brown, smeared with soot and dirt, crouched down on a ratty mattress, beside him a shopping cart stuffed with garbage bags, a roughly lettered cardboard sign in front of the tin on the sidewalk: “Homeless. Please Help!”

I stopped, a hundred thoughts flying through my mind and away – only one left behind –shock. I was standing on a sidewalk in one of the richest cities in one of the wealthiest countries in the world – and someone was homeless? How could that be? This wasn’t India or Cuba or Mongolia. This was Canada! How was this possible?

The shock never left me, and if I had a tiny house no one was living in, then I could offer it to people who needed a home.

I tried to convince Frank and the others – gave them positive statistics from other countries with policies of “homes first.”

I should have known better than to use logic. Right – if I couldn’t convince them, I’d show them. Maybe.

Cara and Jim moved in. Frank and his cronies came around less frequently. I agonized over our little problem until I felt like a hamster spinning on a wheel. Here were two of our biggest problems – food and shelter – the most basic of human needs. If we couldn’t solve that here on this tiny scale, how could the world deal with it? Was it really all about ideologies?

Capitalism says you have to earn the right to live; it also is based on the idea of infinite growth on a finite planet – clearly a bit of madness. So, in order to change the system, you first have to change the way we think. And how do we do that?

I had no answers. I wanted a cataclysmic event where one of the “old guard” was in trouble and Cara and Jim were the only ones with the skills to save the day. Then everyone would acknowledge their integrity and worth and we’d all live happily ever after. That happens in movies – not real life. Life tends to move more slowly than movies, less dramatically and more subtly, and change often happens long before you notice it.

Jim and Cara worked hard, even picking up a few odd jobs in the village. In late September, they moved on. By then, even Frank had got used to them, grudgingly acknowledging they’d worked hard.

The next year we added beehives and a wildflower meadow to the garden. Frank said that the small cottage he rented out as an Air B&B might be available for any young kids who wanted to help out on the farm. Sophie told her daughter in Victoria about it, and she had her husband moved in for the summer. It was a small thing. It seemed awfully big to me.

When our neighbouring village heard what we were doing, they came to visit, taking our ideas back with them. Then the local paper sent a reporter and photographer to have a look. Somehow, our story got syndicated and some filmmakers from California shot a documentary. I was interviewed a lot – a surreal experience, but I took the opportunity to talk about housing. It was easy enough to see what was happening on the land: the furrowed rows, the beans climbing up the corn stalks, but not as visible was the difference we were beginning to make with making housing affordable. People had basement suites, apartments above garages, and extra cottages that had been used as holiday rentals. What we were doing here wasn’t just about food  – it was also about shelter.

It was the documentary that really did it –  the beginning of a worldwide movement. What could you call it? Not a co-operative. It was more than that. Not once did we care or notice what religion anyone practiced or what their skin colour was, who they voted for, or what country they hailed from. All that mattered was a willingness to contribute and care.

Like a peach tree growing in a loamy well-drained soil, our success grew from the ground up. Our roots ran deep into what really mattered – caring for each other enough that the whys and hows didn’t matter. I think if we had started off with the concept of changing the world into what it is now: a place of peace and joy instead of a world of war and hate, we would never have started. The task would have been far too daunting.

We started by digging into the soil, planting seeds, and sharing with those around us – our little village. It continued by letting people be, by not convincing them that their worldview was wrong, and by letting change happen slowly and organically. And one day, we looked around and saw that our village was the earth we live on.

Who would have thought that I would live long enough to see a world like this – a world that is a garden that feeds and nurtures all of us? I’m still surprised that it all started with a few sacks of seed potatoes.