Touching earth - gardening

Sierra, July-August, 1992 by Janet Lembke

A small tank lumbers through the short grass at garden's edge. Camouflaged in gray-green armor plating splotched at random with charcoal black, it moves at a deliberate pace that indicates both purpose and a destination. Where can it be headed? And why?

The bright, blue North Carolina morning drips heat. The garden that was sown in April (root vegetables on the warning moon, light-loving crops as it grew full) is beginning to look like a jungle. But not one of the tender food-plants can match the bursting, opportunistic energy, the sneaking tendrils and the skyward thrusts of Bermuda grass and Johnson grass, ragweed, pigweed, bindweed, goosefoot and dock, dog fennel and rabbit tobacco. The spaces between the rows have been tilled clean, but hand work is required to extract the competition that's elbowing out our hopes for a decent harvest. So here I am, glasses slipping down my sweaty nose, fingernails packed with enough dirt for another garden. And there's still one more 50-foot row of beans to weed before lunch. Even so, it seems permissible to take a small break to watch the colossal eastern Hercules beetle haul its two-inch-long dome through the grass. Marching onward with unfaltering and measured tread, it is surely embarked on some labor as arduous as any performed by its ancient namesake, Herakles.

The sight of the beetle conjures the Hellenic myth, wherein Herakles was set 12 punishing tasks that called for superhuman strength and sent him amid the world's most perilous ugliness and its most astonishing beauty. He slew the man-killing Nemean lion and the many-headed Hydra. Without harming either, he captured a boar of extraordinary size and savagery and a sacred deer with bronze hooves and golden antlers. Other labors demanded that he steal horses, rustle cattle, and fetch golden apples from their orchard in the far Hesperides, where the giant Atlas held the world upon his shoulders. On his way to the Hesperides, Herakles encountered another giant, Antaios.

This behemoth was the son of Earth and Poseidon, lord of the oceans. One meaning of the name Antaios is "hateful," and hateful he was. To honor his father, Antaios constructed a temple of human skulls. When brave men attempted to stop his murderous work, their heads became a new building materials.

Enter Herakles. Even such a hero found it difficult to battle an enemy whose physical might seemed never to fail, no matter how grievous his wounds. Finally Herakles guessed the source of the giant's strength: It rose anew each time he touched his mother, Earth. Herakles killed Antaios by holding him high above the ground until his power bled away into the empty air.

Trudging steadily on, the beetle enters the garden and disappears amid the bell peppers. I return to my own labors, contemplating the peculiar story. It seems inappropriate if not downright perverse for Earth to nurture such an evil being, to repeatedly restore his vigor and his very life. Granted he was her son, but even mother love might balk at saving such as him.

Then I realize that Earth is nurturing these brash weeds, every last one of them. Supporting the useless along with the useful, the fatal monsters along with golden-antlered deer, Earth doesn't play favorites. The only ones who do are human beings. And who are we but Herakles and Antaios, both of them at once, tangled together?

Out, Bermuda grass; keep your tendrils in the lawn where they belong! Out, pigweed and ragweed! This is my day, not yours, for touching Earth, for finding not only present strength but assurance of it in days to come. We will store Earth as well: onions and garlic, green beans and carrots, corn and cucumbers and dill to pickle them, butternut squash for eating plain or making pies, and always tomatoes that, fresh or preserved, retain the rich red heat of summer sun. Later, even in winter's most frigid darkness, that heat rises fragrant and sweet, and we touch Earth again.

Janet Lembke is a translator of Greek classics and the author of River Time (Lyons & Burford, 1989) and Looking for Eagles (Lyons & Burford, 1990).