“A farmer farming at the right scale knows the needs of the land.”
— Wendell Berry, The Need to Be Whole
Italy was transportive. Being elsewhere, always is. Here, the immersion. The storms. Walking and walking over so much uneven ground. The worn, tabular borders. I love being in a place that doesn’t accommodate but asks me to pay attention. It lacks the convenience of consistency.
When elsewhere I feel my body feel my body. I engage all my senses as I do when walking in the woods. Or walking and reading. Things pipe up that were dormant. I can hear more, feel more. I know where there are roots and potholes. I know when the lights change colour.
In Italy there is no consistency of steps, of doorways. There is no levelness to things.
Back in America, a sweet Beagle sniffed out what he was taught to sniff out — my dad’s green apple with a produce sticker upon it in his nearly empty Hunter Satchel: a snack uneaten. Obviously.
Wanting to say goodbye to my parents heading next to Florida, I followed my dad and stepmom and their red plastic-enveloped passports and their zombie wheelchair pushers, because there was no pause. No explanation. I didn’t imagine a stickered apple in the bag of an 83-year-old would yield such an absurd protocol. We were walked along the perimeter of the place that gave off old high school vibes and into a linoleum-floored room with glass walls and conveyor belts that I swear were larger than the normal contraptions. But maybe it was just the space there, and the of lack so many bodies.
We ended up in that room with other unlikely criminals whose uneaten snacks landed them there. The only one I recall, was a woman with two young children at the end of their long trip home from India, with two unfinished ham sandwiches.
The absurdity of this!
We were told we had to wait, Soren and I, for once you enter, you can’t leave, even if you were uninvited. Walter and Silas were free on the other side.
“No one is accusing you of anything,” said a large man in a button-down shirt, “but accidents like this lead to billions of dollars of destruction.”
No mention of trees.
No mention of the ecosystem. Nothing meaningful at all.
Just money.
I thought of the Chestnut blight of the early 1900s, the result of a New York nurseryman importing ornamental chestnut trees a generation earlier. I thought of the Ashes currently falling and the emerald ash borer, a beetle that arrived in shipping pallets. I felt the barbs of barberry in my flesh and the rest of my lengthy list of unnavigables that have me questioning much of my life’s recent decisions. I remembered our garden in Philadelphia that existed only because we put $80k in escrow to avoid being forced to pave our longed-for acre to “fix it” because tests showed tainted groundwater twenty feet below. I thought of the stripey mosquitoes that wake me in the night with their high-pitched buzz that arrived with a shipment of tires in the 1980s.
I knew, as I stood there, that I was carrying some of the very things they should have been searching for: three porcupine quills, a shed antler, pressed flowers, and a feather. I cared enough to know what each of them could theoretically carry across a border, but I brought them anyway. I navigate my decisions.
Has anything disastrous arrived on a stickered apple, a ham sandwich? Maybe on an antler, but maybe not. A porcupine quill? I read horror stories and so, soaked mine in warm soapy water before packing.
We waited. “As soon as the luggage is off the plane, we will pull your parents’ bags off the belt and run them through the scanner, and you’ll be on your way.” Meanwhile, Silas and Walter on the other side saw that no, they weren’t grabbing the bags first thing. They waited for all other luggage to be removed then picked through what remained. “I could take their bags off the belt”, Walter texted, “I see them. It would be much faster, but I know it will make it worse.”
I was chatting with the mother about her five suitcases. One is full of their clothes, et cetera. The other four are full of food and gifts from family in India for family in America. I wish I got her name; I would love to know how that ended.
There were signs in this area that I didn’t see. Søren told me about them after we escaped.
DECLARE:
Fruits & vegetables
Plants & Cut Flowers
Animal Hides & Trophies (with a graphic of an antler)
Meat & Animal Products
Well, I’ll be. Between our two families we had at least one of each. But correlation is not causation — the perpetrators of those crimes were not the perpetrators of the others. An apple got us here. Not an antler.
FUCK.
I tried to slither out when Pop and Judy’s bags were finally going through. “Have your bags been checked?” a kind-eyed woman asked. “Yes!” I lied. Someone shouted, “No they haven’t.” I behaved guiltily because I was guilty. The woman misread my guilt and assured me I did nothing wrong. And that I would be okay.
My bag was flagged!
The guard had found what he’s trained to find on the scanner.
He unzipped my bag and fished around and pulled out — an apple-sized, apple-green lacrosse ball. He was perplexed. I laughed, relieved.
After that long and fruitless ordeal, we were free to go.
The quills are here with me, ink stained on the ends, as I’ve written with them. The flowers were already pressed and glued into my journal. I turned the feather into a paintbrush, and I set the antler on a shelf with so many other treasures that will eventually find their way back out into the world. And perhaps in some future excavation, some adventurer will wonder how this roebuck found a home in Pennsylvania.
Some photographs from our adventure;
It is amazing to me the transportation of words.
And the mistranslation of an apple. :)
A forgotten apple also detoured us coming home from France. If only they had known in the suitcase there was an elephant tooth…
Ah the treasures, all the more special for the stories they hold…!