T. Boyle - Budding Prospects

The third problem was neither mechanical nor human. It was instead a manifestation of the wilderness itself, of nature red in tooth and claw, of the teeming, irrational life that surrounds and subsumes us and that our roads and edifices and satellites struggle so hard to deny. It became evident about two weeks after the bulldozer incident. Vogelsang had long since repaired to the cool, umbrageous, sumac-free corridors of his Bolinas lodge, the sun had mounted a degree or two higher in the blistering sky, and the vital, life-sustaining flow of the irrigation system had settled into a pattern of smooth reliability we’d begun to take for granted. Then, one torrid morning (we watered in the morning and evening, for obvious reasons and in accordance with Dowst’s superfluous instructions), as I picked up the hose to drench our Jonestown growing area in cool translucent aqua pura, I was stunned to find that none was forthcoming. Perplexed, I flailed the hose along its coiled length, stretched it, peered into the nozzle like a clown in a slapstick routine. Nothing. Next, I followed the hose to the nearest cluster of 55-gallon drums, only to find them empty, and finally made my lung-wrenching way up the precipitous incline to the main reservoir above the Khyber Pass. There I discovered that all six 330-gallon horse-troughs were dry, and concluded that the pump must have malfunctioned. But after stumbling back down the spine of the mountain, through thorn and briar and banks of stinging nettle, I found that the pump had in fact dutifully consumed its gas, pumped its water and shut itself down. So where was the water?

My cohorts were hunched blearily over breakfast when I stepped through the door and informed them that there was a major break somewhere along the pipeline. They yawned, scratched, farted, their eyes like hunted things. A fork rang out as it made contact with knife or plate, two pairs of lips sucked at the rims of coffee mugs. Since the heat had set in, we’d taken to staying up late into the night, drinking, shooting the bull, playing poker, Monopoly, and pitch, and resting through the ferocious dizzying heat of the afternoon. We alternated morning watering assignments, Dowst pulling his weight like the rest of us — when he was there. On this particular morning, as on most mornings, he was not there. No: he was in Sausalito, in his breezy, ocean-cooled apartment, no doubt knocking himself out to come up with the additional seeds we so desperately needed.

Gesh looked up from a greasy plate of scrambled eggs and chorizo and asked if I’d checked the pump. I nodded. Phil was bent over a sketch pad. The fires of artistic expression had been lately rekindled in him by the proximity of so much antique junk — an entire yardful of bedsprings, machine parts and dismantled automobiles — and he was working out the blueprint for a major new sculpture that promised to be “a monument to our heroic agricultural efforts.” Without glancing up he asked if I’d checked the upper reservoir. “Uh-huh,” I said, pouring myself a cup of coffee that looked and tasted like molasses laced with stomach acid.

There was a ruminative silence, during which a lizard darted out of the breadbox and lashed across the wall, and then Gesh set down his fork and drained his juice glass in a single decisive gulp. “Sounds like there’s a break in the line,” he announced.

We found it almost immediately. The main line from the pump had been breached just below the Jonestown area, punctured in half a dozen places as if savaged with a sharp instrument or blasted at close quarters with a.22. “Kids,” Phil said. “Fourteen-year-old punks.” The pipe, which we’d simply laid out on the surface of the ground, certainly looked as if it had been intentionally vandalized. It was a tense moment. If adolescent vandals were roaming the woods, not only could they wreak havoc on our operation and make off with half the crop, they could expose us to the authorities as well — or perhaps they already had. I watched as the realization filtered through my companions’ faces, fear and loathing and murderous intent flickering in their eyes. “Maybe it was Sapers,” I said, knowing it wasn’t. “Or Marlon?”

It was Gesh, the Angeleno, the city kid, who came up with the conjecture that proved conclusive. “Animals,” he said. “Something big.” We looked closer. Sure enough, there were the telltale signs: coiled heaps of dung flecked with berries, clumps of stinking reddish hair, tracks the size of Ping-Pong paddles. In the first rush of paranoia we’d somehow managed to overlook them, but now we saw clearly that the agency of destruction was animal rather than human. I guessed that the vandal must have been a bear, but if so, the creature’s motives remained obscure. What was the attraction in a twenty-foot length of mottled plastic pipe? Gesh had an answer for this, too: the bear was thirsty. And lazy. Instead of clambering down the hill to the stream, he could drink his fill — and have a shower in the bargain — simply by puncturing any link of our aqueduct he happened across.

The existence of the presumptive bear was confirmed three days later when Phil, buzzing along the lower road on the 125-cc Kawasaki, rounded a corner to discover an obstruction in his path. The obstruction, on closer examination, turned out to be a lumpy, broad-beamed, auburn-colored thing squatting over a fresh mound of berry-flecked excrement: viz., the bear. With a blare of horror the bear lurched up, feinted to the right and then scrambled off down the roadway, Phil in pursuit. The animal’s great shaggy hindquarters pumped at the dirt, Phil gripped the accelerator like a fighter ace zeroing in for the kill, leaves rushed by in a blur. One hundred yards, two hundred yards, three. And then, as if he’d been schooled in diversionary tactics, the bear suddenly skewed off into a scrub-choked ravine, while Phil, caught up in the heat of the chase, rammed a downed tree, tore the front wheel from the bike and did a triple-gainer into the stiff brown brush. The Kawasaki was wrecked, and Phil suffered a strained shoulder in addition to contusions both major and minor, but at least we’d firmly and finally established the identity of our antagonist.

An uneventful week slipped by, the heat like the flat of a sword, dull and stultifying, and then the bear struck again. This time he chewed through a pipe on the lower slope, and the enormous pressure of the gravity-feed shattered the plastic and sent a jet of water rocketing forty feet in the air. By the time we arrived on the scene, the dripping ecstatic creature had lumbered off, taking a section of deer fencing and eight healthy cannabis plants with him. “This has got to stop,” Gesh growled, kicking angrily at the ravaged pipe. I watched his face through its dangerous permutations, watched as he flung sticks and stones at the mute leaves that surrounded us, bearlike himself in his bulk and his rage. Finally he turned to Phil and me to announce in a dead flat tone that the bear had to go: it was him or us.

Gesh put out poisoned baits that afternoon — marrow bones and kidneys soaked in strychnine — while Phil and I replaced the length of damaged pipe. The bloody heaps of flesh didn’t look particularly appetizing, covered as they were with flies both quick and dead, but I assumed it wouldn’t make much difference to a scavenging garbagophagist with a taste for plastic pipe and Campbell’s Chunky Soup cans. I was wrong. As far as we could tell the bear never touched any of the baits, though one afternoon I did find a dead turkey vulture sprawled in the bushes like a discarded parasol.

As if in compensation for denying himself the baits, the bear took to rummaging through our garbage each night, disemboweling the green plastic bags with the alligator fasteners, gnawing cans and spreading a slick coat of mashed vegetable matter, grease and undifferentiated slime over the porch. Gesh saw this as a provocation. He spent the better part of an afternoon rigging up a battery-powered light system that would illuminate the bewildered scavenger’s shaggy nighttime form just long enough to spell his doom. Pissed off, grim, wrapped in an old poncho and chain-smoking joints, Gesh sat up with the shotgun, waiting for the bear to signal his appearance with the fatal clank of can or bottle. When dawn spread her rosy fingers over the eastern sky, garbage was spread over the floorboards of the porch as usual, and Gesh was staring numbly down the barrel of his gun. “Never heard a thing,” he said, his voice trailing off.