Vignette: Hill Tweakers and a Failed Grape Harvest

Why making cider is better than making meth, and some thoughts on the concept of salvage

I.

Fog swallows the road and the road swallows itself like a serpent and the air is silent except when the truck makes its savage grinding noise when I take a hard left turn that I should probably get checked out (but haven’t in the four years it’s sounded like that). I can’t make out the next bend in Territorial Highway. Curving south towards Lorane the haze masks the stately chateau of King Estate high on its hill and the rippling vines that ring it, but its sign appears as a landmark and its orderly grid of small apple trees that flank the entrance. Next door the neat lawn of Alesong, its tasting room also obscured. Beyond, the wooded heights have dissolved into a gray billow that veils whatever shadow economies might operate there while polite society drinks pinot noir underneath.

Traveling further old oaks emerge from the mist, their sprawling limbs sheltering cattle that appear as dark shapes in the pale late September morning. A derelict donkey watches from beside a listing trailer as I pass, an endless wall of doug fir rising behind it like a wave.

The gas gauge dips toward empty. Halfway there, I pull into a general store, its siding weathered to the color of old bones. Two pumps stand like forgotten monuments, their hoses coiled and dusty. Inside the attendant squints at me through curtains of gray-black hair. Those pumps aint worked in months, brother, he rasps. I press on, hoping my truck can hold out on fumes. Back home, Bernadette and the kids are still asleep. Her parents are visiting and they all plan to join me later for what I'd promised would be a bountiful grape harvest.

II.

Brett is out chopping wood when I pull up to the farm. He buries his maul in a stump and trudges over, boots scuffing the gravel. I’m pretty sure he’s in his late thirties, only a few years older than me, but he looks older than that. His winter work as welder shows — you can tell he has dad strength. His family’s double-wide sits backed up against BLM land. Another houses his father and brother nearby.

He updates me on the junkies camped in the public forest beyond their property. He’s had to shoot over their heads to instill some visceral fear of boundaries. We left Nevada to get away from this shit, he says, eyes scanning the tree line. The hill tweakers are the ones too crazy to live downtown. That hits home. Downtown I’ve been sucker-punched once and screamed at too many times by raving meth-fueled prophets who lurch down sidewalks muttering a hilarious but disturbing modern apocrypha, some odd blend of Revelation and Napoleon Dynamite¹. But these rabid pirates are another breed. They descend from their tarped hovels when night falls, wild-eyed and yipping like coyotes come to scavenge copper and chainsaw parts and metal scrap.

I ask him how the year's been. Not good, he says. He shows me a series of white poly tunnels sprouted up across the hill, new grow operations that guzzle water and energy, abusing their water rights from the adjoining river. And earlier in the year his next-door neighbor propped his twelve-gauge on the floor of his trailer and pulled the trigger with his toe. The man's kids had called Brett first. Property's for sale, he adds, knowing we're looking for land.

III.

Despite everything, they’re farming for a living and making it work. Brett and his wife focus on vegetables and flowers, the vineyard an inheritance that came with the property. Two acres of semi-feral pinot noir and pinot gris sprawl beside a tin sheet A-frame barn they plan to convert to a roadside flower stand. A hedgerow of ragged Chardonnay grows up alongside it, holding its own against blackberries so far in a doomed war of attrition for sunlight.

The grapes grow largely untended, left to their own devices to produce what they will. Between the demands of the market garden operation and raising four kids, the vineyard receives only peripheral attention, and its small crop holds little interest for commercial wineries. I'd bought a half ton the year before for a good price.

This year I messed up. Busy with the new baby and my day job, I hadn't walked the rows, hadn't witnessed the fruit’s progress or monitored the browning of the stems or crunched the seeds between my teeth to see if they’d moved past their harsh greenness. Brett had tested and told me grapes were hitting 24 Brix, so I told him I’d come pick soon. But now I walk the rows and re-walk them and find only skeletal vines bearing sporadic wizened clusters — most shriveled to raisins, others rotting on the vine, skins split and leaking. All told, barely enough to fill a five-gallon bucket. A year's potential reduced to compost, and no one to blame but myself.

IV.

Brett stands at the end of a row, hands deep in his pockets, apologetic. He's been consumed with vegetable production and making the farmers market circuit and hasn't kept a close eye on the grapes. The January ice storm that ravaged the Willamette Valley explains the rest. For days, rain fell through freezing air, transforming everything it touched into crystal. Venerable oaks that had seen generations pass split under the weight of their frozen limbs, cracking open like gunshots. One nearly crushed our neighbor’s camper, destroying the trampoline next to it instead. Power lines drooped and snapped, and stellar’s jays lost their tails.

The cold was democratic in its destruction but unequal in its depth. It pooled in the Lorane valley bottom where air sits like water in a vernal pool, settling into every depression in the land. Where we live, closer to Eugene, pipes burst and a fallen fir branch speared the barn roof, but the fruit trees were fine. Here the damage ran deeper. Spring arrived with its usual fever, but the trees had suffered too deeply. The apples failed to sprout blossoms, the pears set fruit that withered and dropped by June, and now the grapevines hang on their wires like gangly marionettes, empty-handed against the autumn sky.

Brett lugs out a jerry can with some gas and I add a couple gallons to the tank to get me home. I back out of the gravel drive and wind my way back through the valley. My disappointment fades as I notice the wild apples that seam it, waiting to be salvaged — true bearers of this year's potential.

V.

Driving home I mull the idea of salvage and those lost boys camped in the hills, what they might reveal about our collective future. I can’t help but see them as canaries in a collapsing coal mine in some sense, unwitting scouts in a world of increasing scarcity. They’ve been cast aside by society through some tangle of bad luck, a bad system, and bad choices. I don’t have any solutions, and encountering them is unpleasant, but to pretend they don’t exist is to also pretend that the age of industrial growth will go on forever.

Their precarious existence represents the harshest edge of adaptation, at its core destructive. But there are other pathways through these transitional times. While they tear down, dismantle the well pump and pawn the copper wire, Brett and I try to build, cobbling forgotten scraps into something worth keeping.

He roughs it in a trailer on modest land with society's malcontents as his neighbors, coaxing vegetables to grow without chemicals, converting a run-down barn into a space to sell flowers, digging a passive root cellar to preserve what he grows. And I collect the fruit that no one else wants and transform it in a homemade alchemy not entirely dissimilar from those backwoods labs. But whereas the toxic chemistry of the meth-head atomizes — burning up the human into a hollowed out shell with caustic hunger — wild fermentation is a more ancient act of faith, one where the destination is never fully known and that ideally brings communion rather than oblivion. It asks you to trust fickle microbes and apples with forgotten histories and neighbors willing to trade salmon for cider.

The fog breaks and the sun glazes the top of the forest as I climb out of the mist-choked landscape. The grape harvest may have failed, but there are still apples to be gathered, and cider to be made. Chop wood, carry water, and all that jazz.

1. I remember one specifically telling me: the wild tigers gnash their teeth, black stinking birds of prey tear human flesh with their large talons. THEY’RE COMING FOR YOU.

I couldn’t help but laugh thinking about this scene: