The Losers: Know-it-all Nick

Know-it-all Nick is based somewhat on myself, although he's a composite of many ambitious young farmers who have more passion than business sense. He's one of the Losers, but I think the Cretin will end up being the main character. Check out parts one and two for continuity's sake.

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   Know-it-all Nick unwrapped the box of pesticides and stared glumly at the two large plastic bottles. One contained the insecticide pyriproxyfen, an insect growth regulator he’d bought to control an apple pest called San Jose Scale. The other bottle was full of Captan, a protective fungicide. He’d stayed up most of the past night reading contradicting studies on the effects of pesticide use, and now he felt like the two bottles before him contained radioactive waste. Jesus, if Gretchen finds out. He’d have to apply the pesticides while she was at a farmers market. In his mind’s eye, he imagined the repercussions of his wife finding out that he was risking their organic certification, not to mention their reputation. What about your values, Nick? What was the point of having an organic farm if you weren’t truly organic? Unfortunately, Nick was a little more attuned to reality than his wife, and the cold hard truth was that they were broke. When they’d founded Dirtbag Organics seven years ago, they had subsisted on buzzwords and enthusiasm. Permaculture, homesteader, farm-to-table, no-spray, sustainability, heirloom—Know-it-all Nick rattled them off in his head, as he often did for customers while delivering his spiel. They’d planted a vineyard, an orchard full of antique apple varieties, peach trees and Japanese plums, Asian pears, a huge vegetable garden, built hoop houses and a walk-in cooler. The land had been cheap—ten acres directly behind his parents’ house—but the initial costs were staggering. They’d taken out a small business loan to buy a tractor. They lived in a tiny house with no electricity, the plan being that they’d expand once the farm was profitable. That day had never come, and Nick was starting to believe that it never would. Running a farm, even a small one, was incredibly hard work. The grapes got brown rot and shriveled in the hot rain. The apples were full of worms and deformed from fungal diseases. Most of the peach trees died from borers and cold weather. The Asian pears did all right, but the plums were always frosted out in the spring. The vegetable garden was moderately profitable, but they had to compete with other farmers, all of whom grew tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, and squash. Gretchen would spend five hours at a market and come home with thirty bucks, much of the produce spoiled from sitting in the hot sun. Drive up business was better, but Nick had to haul ass from the fields every time he heard someone honking in the driveway. They had try a different strategy this year if they wanted to remain solvent.

   Nick put the pesticides back in their cardboard box and pushed it underneath his workbench. Tomorrow, in the morning, I’ll do it. Visions of bright red, spotless apples danced in his head like dollar bills. It was amazing how much your material philosophy changed when you were being harassed endlessly by creditors and scrounging in the couch to find change to pay the electric bill. Just a temporary measure. If he could just pay off the tractor, then they would be fine. They had no car payment, no mortgage, no cable television package. If they needed to use the computer, then they meandered down to his parents’ house. It was natural for one to be dependent to some degree on their parents. Gretchen, of course, disagreed with him, but she didn’t understand that the modern tendency toward single-family dwellings was a new and unsustainable development. “I feel like a child living in the backyard,” she had told him last week. She didn’t talk to her mother, and her father was a washed up professional wrestler still going from indie gig to indie gig, so the idea of a continuous familial relationship was alien to her. Nick had once had very different plans, back when he was involved in the Cincinnati punk-rock scene, but music had been a dead end; you could only play the same empty bars so many times before you realized the futility of your actions. There was a nobility to farming that made up for the scarcity of cash, a purpose in working the earth, in watching the literal fruit of your labors blossom before your eyes. There was romance in running a failing organic operation in your parents’ backyard, just as long as your perspective remained ridiculously optimistic. Nick told himself this while opening the garage refrigerator and removing a bottle of fermented cider. It was hard stuff, liable to knock him on his ass if he didn’t watch his intake, but the partaking of intoxicating beverages was a daily routine that helped keep that aforementioned perspective in focus. Nothing like laboring drunk under the sun.

   He went out to the tomato patch and started weeding. The rain had been mild so far; no sign of bacterial-spot. The electric wire had kept the deer away—now he only need to build a decent deer fence. The conventional method of farming, involving monoculture (endless fields of one species of domesticated or engineered plant; soybean, feed corn), disrupted habitats, destroyed insects, and erased biodiversity. Of course it was ridiculous to imagine farming as anything other than a disruption of natural processes (he’d had this argument more times than he’d wanted to with Gretchen), but there was a better way to do things, and that’s what he was doing, by letting nature take its share. He’d fight the deer, try to prevent their entry, hunt them when he was able, but he wasn’t erasing their habitat by turning a meadow into a field of genetically modified soybeans that could be sprayed with herbicide. That insecticide you’re planning on spraying will likely kill more than just San Jose Scale. “Shut up, conscience,” he murmured, pulling up a wild onion.

   A tiny spec of red floated down to land in the disturbed earth next to his hand. It was unnaturally red, extremely vivid, akin to a burning ember, but animated in a manner that seemed artificial. He looked at it for a while, watching as it sunk slowly into the earth but did not reach out to touch it.

   A dissonant chorus of howls stirred him from contemplation. It was the evening, the sun was low, and the time for work was finished. He left the tomato patch and headed back to the garage for another beer, a dull ache forming in his head. The prospect of a new season usually invigorated Nick and help to shake off the winter doldrums, but the pesticides sitting in his garage deepened the depression and anxiety he had been feeling for months. At thirty-four years of age, he’d thought he would have accomplished more. Ten years ago, he had planned to be a successful farmer, an author, a musician. Now he was struggling to pay his debts, stuck in a cyclical existence, fretting about everything, it seemed. Gretchen worried too. He was always worried about Gretchen.

   The howling died suddenly, as though someone had cut off the volume. Nick put a beer to his lips and watched as Gretchen’s rusted white van pulled into the driveway. The engine died like a suffocated man, a patch of corroded metal falling off the frame as his wife opened the door and hopped out. She had thick, curly hair, brown skin, and long legs that she never hid in overalls or other unflattering work attire. Despite his problems, looking at his wife always provided a temporary panacea.

   “Hey,” she said, walking past him to open the fridge and get herself a beer.

   “How was the market?” he asked.

   She shrugged and looked out at the sun setting behind the hills of Kentucky.

   “I think it’s always a mistake going this early. We have hardly anything to sell.”

   “Did you make gas money?” he asked.

   “What do you think?” she said. Her eyebrows furrowed into a slight V.

   “I had someone drive up for cider. Sold him what we had left.”

   She nodded almost imperceptibly. His throat had begun to tighten ever so slowly, making it hard to breathe.

   “Why don’t we just start selling pot?” he suggested. “I’ll round up a few kids, have them hit the playgrounds. First we hook the kids, then we hook their parents. We’ll get my dad to sell to the old people. We’ll buy off the cops. Then we’ll never have to go to market again.”

   “We will have to organically certify our weed,” said Gretchen.

   “We’ll just ditch the whole organic thing. It’s a pain in the ass. It could free us up, you know, to sell other things.”

   “You serious?” she asked.

   “Maybe. I’m tired of not making any money.”

   “Then why are you a farmer?”

   “Nothing else I did ever worked out.”

   “And this is working for you?”

   “Obviously.” He made a grand gesture. “This is the best stinky old garage money could buy.”

   “You don’t even own it.”

   “Think of all that I will inherit one day.”