Next year our daughter, Hannah Virginia, will go to kindergarten—a children’s garden where, we hope, she will grow and grow. In advance of kindergarten, though, I wanted Hannah to have a garden of her own at home. I wanted to share with her a sustainable practice of labor, meditation, and production that has been essential to my life, and that I hoped would become important in her life too. I wanted her to experience the miracle of a seed germinating, to have the satisfaction of seeing things she planted with her own little hands grow to flower and fruit. I wanted not so much to watch Hannah’s garden grow as to watch her watch it grow. To quote Ken Kesey, I wanted to help her “plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom.” And even if some of the strange plants in Kesey’s garden were illegal (as I suspect they were), his admonition to cultivate mysteries speaks directly to the higher law that governs true gardening. The garden is not only the place where we grow food, but also the place where we plant hopes and nurture ideas, where many plans grow from each thought that is sown.

     The garden is also a metaphor for what is peaceful, harmonious, and productive in our lives, and even our language reveals how deeply our imaginations are rooted in the garden. We celebrate ideas that are seminal, because so much can grow from the seed of a single thought. When we deeply question our culture’s values we are considered radical, because we attempt to address problems at their root. We work hard to bring our projects to fruition, for nothing is sweeter than the fruit of our own labor. The garden is the imaginatively fertile ground where we harvest metaphors along with squash and beans.

     Without realizing it at the time, in planning Hannah’s first garden I had conflated parenting and gardening in my mind. After all, both are practices of love, attention, and creativity that result in healthy growth. Both require vigilance, nurturing, and care; and both result in progressive development that leads to sustaining harvests. Gardening and parenting are disciplines of sustainability: acts of faith in the future that must be renewed through daily practice. Of course this is the same sort of thinking employed by people who believe they are ready to have children because they managed to own a dog. Be that as it may, a gardener’s universe is all sweetness and light, and the gardener’s mind, like his garden, must remain an inviolable space that is impervious to the world’s heartless logic. I had been a good gardener, and now I intended to use a garden to be a good father.

     Even in my glowing optimism, I knew that my child’s first garden might present a challenge. We live at 6,000 feet in the Great Basin Desert, at the foot of the Sierra Nevada, on an exposed hill, amid conditions no gardener would relish: short growing season, extreme aridity, severe temperature fluctuations, desiccating winds, ravenous critters of every stripe. This is a place where even our human neighbors sometimes dry up, burn down, and blow away, which hardly bodes well for a green pepper. Still, to a true gardener the unplanted garden is ever a canvas before paint, an idea not yet gone wrong, a sweet dream from which we have yet to awaken. As with any good idea, the trouble with a garden begins only when we attempt to realize what we have imagined.

     As I spent the last nights of winter by the woodstove, sipping bourbon and strategizing to ensure the success of my child’s first garden, I realized that the pressure was on. What if the garden I promised this sweet four-yearold girl didn’t prosper? Given the metaphorical and philosophical significance of the garden, what larger, darker conclusions might she draw about her small place in the hard world if her own garden failed to come to fruition?

     I had to get this one right, and so I planned and planned. First, I would site Hannah’s garden on the lee side of our big hill, where the hot wind would be more forgiving, and I’d stake and cage everything that grew upright to provide reinforcement against the scorching afternoon wind known locally as the “Washoe Zephyr.” I would bed with the primo double-mix soil I call “black gold,” while also discouraging the cottontails, and, especially, the big jackrabbits that can graze a bed to its roots in the time it takes to fetch a beer. To be safe, I’d wrap the whole garden in impervious wire fence. And in the interest of ensuring my daughter’s success as a neophyte gardener, I would set aside my environmentalist scruples and declare her plot a xeric-free zone where she could water to her heart’s content. Finally, I would swallow my gardener’s pride and grow only hardy, reliable plants: those that are fast-growing, difficult to kill, and, if possible, spicy enough to be unpalatable to rodents. And so, as winter waned, I came to think of my child’s first garden as “the radish plot,” as radishes have long been the mascot vegetable for amateur gardeners: fast, easy, cheap, unfailing, and plenty spicy. In a world of waiting and suffering, the lowly radish signifies certain success and short-term gratification.

     When spring came, which it does mighty late at 6,000 feet, I built the garden just as I had designed it. Reminding myself of Kipling’s admonition that “gardens are not made by sitting in the shade,” I worked all day in the glaring desert sun, transforming a bare plot of weedy hardpan into my child’s first garden. After the chainsaw, mattock, shovel, rake, spading fork, and field hammer were put up, I grabbed a trowel and hand cultivator and called Hannah out to plant her garden. It was a momentous occasion, and I insisted that my wife,Eryn, photograph this moment for posterity. I still treasure those pictures. In one, Hannah is deep-setting her first tomato plant with all her might; in another she is broadcasting radish seed from her little, green-gloved
hand; in a third she is smiling broadly from behind the frame I built to trellis her beans.

      Throughout this photo op, though, Eryn’s face wore a look of bemusement that suggested pleasure tinged with concern.

     “Hey, what’s the matter?” I asked Eryn, as I stepped away from the garden, leaving Hannah to water in her new plants. “Isn’t this great?”

     “I don’t know, Bubba, she’s pretty into this. Are you sure this is going to work?”

     I shot a glance over my shoulder at Hannah in her garden, then turned back to Eryn with a look of wounded pride.

     “Come on, I’ve been gardening my whole life. Besides, I’ve got this nailed. Look at what we’re growing,” I said, lowering my voice to a whisper. “I’ve stooped to radishes, for crying out loud. Honey, this is foolproof.”


     Only a fool believes that anything in this broken world is foolproof, and so the proliferation of things called foolproof is proof only that the world has fools and plenty. Still, the troubles in Hannah’s garden didn’t start immediately. There was a golden, two-week honeymoon during which seeds germinated, plants grew, and we gathered around the heavily-armored plot to witness our little garden prevailing, even against daunting desert odds. We had planted tomatoes, squash, beans, sweet and hot peppers, collards, basil, and, of course, plenty of radishes. It was an unambitious, low-risk, starter plot—a prosperous, shining little garden upon a hill that would make the desert bloom and fructify according to promises of old. We showered our plants with well water and attention; we screened them with burlap to protect them from the hot wind. My fence kept out the cottontails and jacks, just as I had hoped. As our plants grew, we also took more pictures, proudly documenting for posterity the triumph of a little girl’s first efforts as a gardener.

     Despite Bobby Burns’s conviction that “the best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft a-gley,” around our place the mice have aft done extremely well, while it is only my own schemes that have gang very, very damned a-gley. One aspect of my garden fortress scheme that was not well laid was my failure to foresee that slack spots along the base of my hardware cloth barricade would be virtual highways to a field mouse, which has no difficulty squeezing through a gap less than a half-inch in diameter. So the “wee, sleekit, cow’rin, tim’rous beastie” got some seeds, as did the chisel-toothed kangaroo rats (Dipodomys microps) that abound here, foraging nocturnally for just such simple treasures as radish seeds.

     This was sustainable damage, and I explained to Hannah that, really, we were just being nice by “sharing” with our nonhuman neighbors. As an added form of insurance, however, I secretly over-seeded her plot, and I tightened the fence carefully in hopes of mending the breaches. Within hours of fixing the fence, though, I discovered a mixed flock of bushtits, chickadees, and sparrows tearing up the seedbeds, and so rushed to string in a half dozen aluminum pie tins, which whipped in the zephyr and made racket enough to keep out the hungry birds.

     The next morning Hannah and I were happy to find the seedbeds undisturbed. But just as I began to relax into a feeling of satisfaction I noticed that the squash plants had been shorn to the ground. After the timeconsuming process of unwrapping various layers of fence, I was at last able to get close enough to the plants to examine them with a magnifying glass. Judging from the size of the lacerated stems and the clean, sharp angle of their cut, I was certain that packrats had been the culprits. I knew all too well that the bushy-tailed packrats (Neotoma cinerea), which occupy this land in impressive numbers, are fantastic climbers, but I had hoped that the wire fence would deter them despite their ability to scramble up sheer cliffs.

     Hope is the coin of the gardener’s realm, but it is a devalued currency, worth increasingly less as it is traded against the incessantly rising tender of the gardener’s despair. It was several days before I made it to town to get plastic bird netting—which I now needed to keep out not birds but packrats—and by then I was forced to buy replacement seed and bedding plants for the garden, which had already been substantially ravaged by the birds, mice, kangaroo rats, and packrats. Indeed, the salad bar that was once my child’s first garden was now so heavily frequented by rodents that the local great horned owl calculated his economies of scale and took up a hunting perch on the peak of our roof. While the final stages of the garden’s destruction proceeded apace despite the owl’s nightly vigil, I now had the additional chore of cleaning from the sidewalk many overlapping bursts of snow-white owl crap, which were so voluminous as to make it inconceivable they could have been dropped by anything daintier than a pterodactyl.

     During this time Hannah and I continued to water what was left of her garden, and she had a great time playing in the mud—even as I was constantly humiliated by having to explain to her mother why I, the seasoned gardener, was finding it so difficult to grow a few radishes. The ripe fruit of my gardener’s pride began to wither on the blasted vine of my child’s first garden, and while I was relieved that Hannah seemed unfazed by what Eryn had begun to call “The Vegpocalypse,” I had no way of knowing how long this grace period might continue. Grace, like good gardening weather, is welcome when it comes, but you’re in deep, uncomposted manure if you come to count on it. At some point, I reckoned, this garden must produce.


     Returning from town one day, despondent but with plenty of bird netting and beer, I once again unwrapped the various layers of artillery separating the little garden from the cruel world, and we started over. I dug out the rootballs of the clearcut squash and removed the hard stems of the limbless tomatoes while Hannah gathered the scattered leaves of the savaged sweet peppers. We retilled and replanted Hannah’s first garden from end to end, and while she was in great spirits the entire time—even telling me that she wished we could replant the garden “every single day”—I was plenty surly about it. Given the brevity of our growing season, I knew that the precious time already lost might compromise the success of this second attempt. When
our replanting was done, Hannah went in to wash up while I spent another hour reinforcing my defense systems, concluding with the double layer of plastic netting that I draped over the top of the fortress and snapped down with yellow bungee cords. Then I called Hannah, sat down in my old, aluminum lawn chair with her in my lap,and stared at my child’s second first garden as if it were my mortal enemy.

     I stared, I say, and yet I could see nothing that we had planted. With all the railroad ties, posts, trellises, stakes, tomato cages, hardware cloth fences, burlap wind breaks, shimmering pie tins, and panels of bird netting, it was now virtually impossible to see any living thing through the overlapping walls of the garden. In fact, I could see no garden at all, but only a hideous monument to my determination to establish a barrier where my brute neighbors would have none. My child’s second first garden looked like a miniature factory or prison, or maybe the tangled bones of a steel barn after it meets the tornado’s funnel. It was challenging to water, impossible to
weed, difficult even to see. What the hell kind of garden was that, especially for a child?  “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, that wants it down” wrote Robert Frost in “Mending Wall.” I had instead abided by the maxim Frost’s neighbor endorses in the poem: “Good fences make good neighbors.” If the furry and feathered would just stay on their side of the fence all would be well. It was a simple concept, and I was exasperated by the lengths I was being driven to in order to make sure my kid could pull a radish before her fifth birthday.

     Discouraged as I was, as a gardener I had been toughened by disappointment as well as by wind and sun. Even The Vegpocalypse, I reasoned, wasn’t worse than some other gardening catastrophes I had endured, and as I sat meditating on my failure I was reminded of the heartening words of Thomas Jefferson, one of our most philosophical gardeners. In the garden, wrote Mr. Jefferson, “the failure of one thing is repaired by the success of another.” Perhaps, as T. J. suggested, there would be some hidden consolation to compensate for my current losses.

     Just at that moment, however, something tragic and unexpected happened—something that fatally radicalized my approach to gardening in the high desert. As I sat in my bent lawn chair, with Hannah in my lap and one half of my ass poking down through the ripped canvas seat, two tiny, white-tailed antelope ground squirrels skittered across the rocky patch of dirt that is our “yard,” raced beneath us, and ran over my right foot in their gleeful sprint to get to our newly replanted garden. There they disappeared momentarily behind the railroad ties forming the garden box before popping up in the garden itself, wasting no time in starting to crop our squash.

     All of this happened in a matter of seconds, of course, but in that moment I felt the sting of failure curl over me in a slow-breaking wave of despair. My gardener’s hubris—that profound, unsubstantiated delusion of superiority without which no gardener could long endure his trials—had bitten me on the half of my ass that was exposed to the cruel world. In allowing myself to believe that the replanted and rearmored garden was impenetrable, I had foolishly ignored one of the basic principles of fatherhood, a principle so fundamental that it belongs with such core insights as “If it smells bad, it is bad” or “When your kid tells you to cover your eyes, do it with one hand and cover your nuts with the other.” Humility is the alpha and omega of both parenting andgardening. I had failed to be humble, and in failing to be humble I was now humbled by failure, albeit a failure I was experiencing as anger. In mute frustration I now reckoned that my daughter’s happiness—her future as a gardener, the optimism of her worldview, perhaps her entire philosophical orientation to life—was staked on the uncertain success of the little garden these white-tailed beasts were now devouring. And, damn it, they had stepped on my foot. Both the gardener and the father in me were now called to battle. As I sat with my jaw locked, watching my child’s second first garden being destroyed, I could feel that I was about to cross an invisible line—that extraordinary and perhaps violent measures would be necessary. Hannah, whose response was quite different from my own, just screeched excitedly: “Daddy! Look at the cute little chipmunks in my garden!”


     As the cracked stubs of what were once our plants baked in the sun—a sun whose azimuth had grown troublingly higher in recent weeks—I began a calculated assault on the “chipmunks” that had now become more numerous than flies around our place. The white-tailed antelope squirrel (Ammospermophilus leucurus) is in fact a remarkable creature, one whose adaptations to the grueling excesses of the desert environment can only have been shaped by a zillion evolutionary near misses, each one resulting in a crunchy snack for a hawk or coyote. Until you’ve been in the desert awhile, the antelope squirrel really does look like a chipmunk, though the differences are many and extraordinary. For starters, optimal habitat for the antelope squirrel is sparse juniper, sagebrush steppe, and desert scrub, and it would never be seen in the alpine forest. The white-tailed antelope—the species of Ammospermophilus most widely distributed throughout the arid West, and the one that was chowing down on my child’s second first garden—sports a narrow, white stripe from shoulder to rump, has white cheeks, and carries none of those unsightly chipmunk stripes on its face. Antelopes have thin, coarse fur that is light brown with a gray or, as in my local population, reddish tint. The infallible means to distinguish them from chipmunks, though, is by their amazing ability to run with their tail pulled up over their bodies, a feat your average chipmunk could only dream of attempting. The underside of that raised tail flashes as white as the rump of a pronghorn in flight: an unmistakable visual correspondence that is the source of the antelope squirrel’s odd name. And the antelope lives up to the name “squirrel” perfectly. The word squirrel comes from the Vulgar Latin scuriolus, which is a variant of the Latin sciurus, which comes from the Greek skiouros, which gives this family its name, Sciuridae, and which is almost certainly the source of the word scurry. Antelope squirrels are so small—four ounces or so—that you could mail one across the country for about a buck, but they scurry with such inconceivable swiftness that they make sprinting chipmunks look like they are shuffling from couch to cupboard to get a bag of Cheetos during halftime. Once running, the antelope squirrel, unlike its namesake the pronghorn, never stops or looks back; instead, it flies across the earth like a white-flagged shot that vanishes into the ground at hyperspeed.

     Unlike chipmunks and even other kinds of ground squirrels, the antelope is active throughout the year,which frees it from the need to hoard food in preparation for hibernation. It is not particularly territorial, and in fact will huddle with others of its kind to conserve heat during the winter, so you can’t count on them to off each other the way an aggressive, territorial rodent like a packrat might. They excavate tunnels with multiple entrances, have several burrows in their large home range, construct separate tunnels for food caches and quick escapes, and often appropriate the burrow systems of kangaroo rats, all of which makes them virtually impossible to locate once underground. Somewhere in one of those many tunnels the antelope will make a nest six inches in diameter, which it has likely lined with the golden hair that is cast off when Eryn brushes Hannah’s hair outside on sunny mornings. You can’t easily starve an antelope squirrel, as they are generalist omnivores that will eat almost anything—from seeds, plants, roots, grasses, and fruits to insects, lizards, and carrion, even including the flesh of fellow rodents. Virtually invulnerable to dehydration, they need no free water to survive, instead deriving all their hydration from the plants and bugs they eat. Their kidneys are so highly efficient in saving water by reducing nitrogenous waste that if we were as well designed we could go several years on a single roll of toilet paper. Antelopes around here usually mate in late February, and are born around Hannah’s birthday in early April—a reproductive cycle that is precisely calibrated to the emergence of leafy annual plants here in the high desert.

     What is most amazing about the antelope squirrel is its astonishing ability to keep itself cool in the brutal desert heat. Unlike the nocturnal foragers whose lifestyle seems more compatible with this scorching environment, the antelope is diurnal, cruising around above ground even on the hottest days. It has a number of tricks that make this marvelous feat possible. Its water conservation strategies help, of course, as does its habit of keeping its back to the sun and shading its body with its tail, and its ability to climb into bushes to catch a breeze. Most important, the antelope doesn’t cool itself evaporatively, as humans and most other mammals do, so it isn’t water stressed by cooling. For this little squirrel, keeping cool is literally no sweat. Instead, it is so well adapted to the desert environment that it can allow its body temperature to rise to an incredible 110 degrees Fahrenheit. When it begins to overheat, it returns to its burrow, splays its legs, drops its sparsely furred belly against the earth, and lets the ground pull the heat right out of its body—afterwards, it pops up again and resumes razing our garden. If the antelopes are well hydrated when they get hot, they will also use the neat trick of rubbing saliva on their face to cool themselves, a behavior that makes me suspect that our one-year-old daughter, Caroline, may in fact be a ground squirrel.

     The antelope squirrel’s adaptive strategies are so many and so effective as to give it a daunting home-field advantage, and as a beer guzzling mammalian biped with an oversized but virtually useless cerebral cortex I do not feel myself a very worthy opponent. Still, there was the garden to be saved, and so, like anyone desperate for love or money, I turned to the Internet for solutions to my problem. The testimonials online were numerous and disconsolate, and it quickly became clear that of the many unappealing strategies for antelope squirrel control, only live trapping seemed likely to succeed. After driving to town to buy several small traps, another case of beer, and a large jar of crunchy peanut butter (which I labeled “NOT FOR KIDS”), I began my attempt to catch the cute little antelope squirrels. Following some misadventures in which I trapped a pinyon jay, a kangaroo rat, a scorpion, and my own fingers (twice), I did at last discover that the wee squirrels like Uncle Crunkle’s Old Fashioned Peanut Butter at least as well as they like squash stems. During the next two weeks, I became a more experienced trapper and nabbed sixteen antelopes—all of which I released on public lands far from my child’s garden, since some studies claim that this six-inch long creature can find its way home from several miles away.

     Having more or less succeeded in my efforts to remove the antelope tribe from the neighborhood of our garden (there was one smug little urchin I never did catch), I raked together what was left of my gardener’s selfrespect and helped Hannah put on her gardening boots and gloves. We completely replanted her plot yet again, which was perfectly fine with her, even as I feared that the seasonal window would shut on her plants before they came to fruition. I was now sufficiently desperate that I hatched a plan to photograph Hannah next to the plants as they grew, later interpolating these shots of her third first garden with the earlier ones of her planting the actual first garden so as to create the appearance of success where in fact there had been two complete failures. The fact that I had sprung for larger, more developed bedding plants this time would help support the illusion.

     When I suggested to Eryn that some Photoshopping might also help out where evidence of The Double Vegpocalypse was inadvertently revealed (for example, I had carelessly planted a pepper where a tomato had been), she smilingly dismissed my idea as only the most extreme of “the many clear signs” that my obsession with my child’s first garden had driven me to desperation. Undeterred by her diagnosis, I insisted that the plan would work, and so took a raft of pictures of my child’s third first garden, which really did look quite nice. Hannah and I then put up our tools, got out the old lawn chair, and sat together admiring our neat little garden as Venus arced toward the mountains.


     The next morning I awoke before daybreak with a deeply unsettled feeling. I had experienced a disturbingly vivid dream in which I stood in Hannah’s garden, leaning at a slight angle but with arms straight out like a scarecrow, immobilized by a strange paralysis as rodents of every kind crawled up and down my body, even clinging to my beard with their claws as they grinned directly into my eyes. In the dream I was in a state of heightened sensory awareness, and I could not only smell the dank fur but feel the tiny whiskers and even the quivering breath of the mice, voles, moles, pocket gophers, kangaroo rats, packrats, and antelope squirrels as they clambered over me. Just before I awoke, I was beginning to lose sight as one especially cute antelope squirrel nibbled on my exposed, unblinking eyeball.

     Trying to chase away my bad night with java that I made a good bit stronger than usual, I stood at the slider door sipping from my cup and awaiting sunrise over my child’s third first garden. At last the ascending Venus dimmed, the sky brightened, and the little plot was bathed in a golden, effulgent light. There it was, suddenly, in all its shining glory, the little garden for my little girl, and somehow all my struggles now seemed entirely rewarded. Here was the garden I had envisioned, the garden that would grow with Hannah, teaching her to nurture the flower and fruit that binds us to the nonhuman world. Here she would learn the ethic of care that is the highest mark of a moral person, and here she would practice techniques of sustainability that would give her healthy food to eat and a harvest basket overflowing with metaphors to live by.

     As I admired the garden and contemplated my inspiring success with earth-centered parenting, one of the tomato plants disappeared. I quickly scurried back and forth in front of the slider to make sure of what I was seeing, and then yanked open the door and sprinted to the garden, leaning over the various fences and pressing my face against the nylon bird netting to get a closer view. In the soil directly beneath the center of one tomato cage (which was still rocking slightly) there was a hole where the plant had stood only a moment before.

     In that moment I did not cry out, like Job, to the unjust heavens to demand explanation for why I was being punished for a crime I did not commit. I did not observe the natural historical evidence before me in search of a scientific understanding of the depredation nature had here wrought. I did not engage in the inimitable brand of breathtaking, blue-streaking profanity for which I have been reviled by some and celebrated by others. Instead, I felt something deep inside me begin to uncoil, some mainspring in the engine of my tolerance for my fellow creatures
irreversibly unwinding, the psychic rivets of my environmentalist identity popping off as the spring unwound.

     I have only a hazy recollection of what happened next, but Eryn, whom I trust implicitly, reports that she awoke to see me walking through the house very slowly, “like a zombie,” wearing only lime green boxer shorts decorated with orange ladybugs, blaze orange sound-protection muffs over my ears, and carrying a shotgun. I vaguely recall the muffled sound of Hannah shouting “Daddy has a firestick!” as I passed the open door of her bedroom, but this too remains rather foggy for me. I do, however, remember sharply how different the garden looked when sighted down the barrel to the bead, and I recall the feeling of the trigger moving beneath my finger when he popped his head out of the hole where the tomato plant had recently stood.

     It is true, of course, that the shot blasted apart the fence on both sides of the garden—creating gaping holes through with other ravenous beasts would enter and finish off my child’s third first garden in the days ahead. And it is true that the buckshot perforated the leaves of many plants, which hardly mattered since they were soon eaten by the animals that came in through the fence anyway. And it is true that trying to stop rodents is like trying to dig a hole in water: a bucketful closes in where every bucketful is lifted out, forever.

     It is also true that no knuckle-dragging human is a match for animals that are so brilliantly adapted to the desert environment, and that the very proliferation of these rodents was my own fault—not only because the caloric easy money of the garden drew them in, but also because our presence here created a charmed circle that coyotes would not enter. And it is true that gunplay in the garden is not especially consistent with the environmental ethic of care and sustainability that I had hoped the garden would teach my little girl. And it is disconcertingly true that once a pacifist nature lover blows something’s head off with a shotgun, it generates in him a certain amount of cognitive dissonance, which in turn is deeply subversive of the environmentalist identity said nature lover may have spent a lifetime cultivating. But it is also indisputably true that, when pushed far enough, even a person with a firm grip on the ethical steering wheel can veer suddenly off the road of his own morality.


     The wise Cicero, who wrote that “if you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need,” clearly didn’t know about the California Ground Squirrel, or he would have had a shotgun too. Spermophilus beecheyi is, if possible, even more remarkable than his cousin the antelope squirrel, though I did not know that at the time I disemboweled him with a firestick. Almost a foot long with a tail that can extend another nine inches and weighing in at more than two pounds, this beautiful monster is a prodigious excavator and vegetarian with a huge appetite. As a result, it is a real threat to agricultural enterprises on the commercial or domestic scale. One study found that a single squirrel home containing eleven animals consisted of a tunnel system extending over 700 feet, including thirty-three openings, and descending nearly thirty feet below ground. Females often mate with more than one male and sometimes do so more than once each season, and they may give birth to a dozen or more pups in each litter. Their tunnels usually protect them from predators other than rattlesnakes, and even here their defenses are daunting. Adult squirrels are actually immune to rattler venom, so when a buzzworm slithers into a tunnel system it is not unusual for a squirrel to harass it, even kicking sand in the bully snake’s face like the pugnacious little bad-ass that he is. And while squirrel pups are not immune to rattler venom, female squirrels collect sloughed rattlesnake skins, chew them up, and lick the snake-scented saliva onto their pups, thus using smell to trick the rattler into thinking the baby ground squirrels are actually fellow snakes, and encouraging the predator to seek elsewhere for supper. The California Ground Squirrel is fast, agile, intelligent, resourceful, and has vision as sharp as yours. It protects others of its kind with high-pitched alarm cries by which it communicates danger across miles of desert—a piercing, surging, metallic cry that now plays in my ear as the soundtrack to my own defeat as a gardener. Although diurnal like his cousin the antelope, the California Ground Squirrel goes into estivation (a period of strategic inactivity) when the weather becomes too hot, and goes into true hibernation in the winter—a physiological shutdown so amazingly like suspended animation that the animal’s heartbeat is reduced to a tenth of its normal rate, and it draws a breath only once every few minutes.

     After I learned all this about my neighbor Spermophilus, it seemed fairly clear that I was overmatched. Since he didn’t need to chew through or climb the wire protection around our garden, he could tunnel under from anywhere he pleased and pop up beneath a tomato plant—which, as the literature on ground squirrel crop damage shows, is among his favorite foods. But everything I read suggested that if I didn’t deal with these ground squirrels immediately they would soon overrun the place, undermining the foundation of our house with their tunnels, eating ornamental plants as well as vegetables, spreading fleas that can carry bubonic plague, and driving my truck to town to buy expensive whiskey with my credit card. They are, in fact, so destructive to croplands and irrigation systems that it is illegal to release a squirrel that has been live trapped. A sense of how far folks will go to try to kill them is suggested by this discouraging remark, which I discovered somewhere in the voluminous anti-squirrel literature: “truck-mounted vacuum devices that suck ground squirrels out of their burrows have not demonstrated sufficient efficacy to justify their use.” Still, I made up my mind that if my child was ever to have a first garden I would have to try everything short of burrow vacuuming.

     Having already become a cold-blooded killer on that fateful morning, I at first decided, like Huck Finn, that “I would take up wickedness again,” and so resolved to keep blasting away at my scurrilous neighbors. After all, once you’ve crossed the line and become a heartless murderer, what are a few dozen perforated corpses more or less?

     Eryn talked me out of the gunplay, not so much by pointing out its incompatibility with the environmental values I aspired to inculcate in my daughter, but more by reminding me that if I was going to walk around heavily armed I wouldn’t be able to drink at the same time—something I prognosticated could become imperative in the battle ahead.

     I began instead with attempts to live trap the big ground squirrels, as I had their smaller cousins; however, they proved far too wily to be snared, and as my traps sat empty my child’s third first garden was completely wiped out. At this point I could have acknowledged that after three strikes you’re out, but instead I did what my species does best: I chose foolishly to believe against all evidence that nature doesn’t bat last, that I could still somehow win one for the humanoids by knocking it into the bleachers in the bottom of the ninth. Spermophilus had become my white whale. In a weak moment I ordered a case of “Wild Bill’s Shure Kill Varmint Hole Fumigating Bombs,” and had soon prepared a new strategy to defend my child’s first garden—which, granted, was now an entirely hypothetical construct—by smoking out my subterranean opponent. The next Saturday morning I dressed for the occasion, in boots, long pants, long-sleeved shirt, gloves, hat, safety goggles over my eyes and bandana tied over my mouth. As Eryn observed, I did resemble the insane, drunken-looking “Wild Bill” who appeared on the cylinder of every single bomb.

     Carefully following Bill’s directions, I first located what I felt certain were all the holes to the squirrels’ tunnel system, and then began to execute my plan. For a moment there was a wonderful rush of excitement, as I sprinted hole to hole amid swirls of fuchsia smoke, dropping flaming canisters into the four burrow entrances I had located. Hannah stood at a safe distance with her Mom and clapped her hands, hopping up and down enthusiastically. Then there was an ominous hiatus during which nothing at all seemed to happen. As I stood perched over the squirrel hole nearest the house I finally looked up to see Hannah and Eryn smiling and pointing at something that was apparently behind me. Lifting my goggles from my eyes to my grimy forehead, I turned slowly around. I wouldn’t be telling the truth if I said that one, two, three . . . fourteen columns of fuchsia smoke curling off into the cobalt blue desert sky wasn’t a lovely sight, in an Apocalypse Now sort of way. Thus was it colorfully brought to my attention that the burrow system had far more escape hatches than I knew of, and that this superb ventilation system had prevented my aerial gas attack from being anything more harmful than a fireworks show for Hannah, who in fact liked it so much that she made me a thank-you card out of fuchsia colored construction paper.

     Being averse to using poisons, and having now given up on the trap, gun, and bomb, I had but one weapon remaining in my armory: piss. Relinquishing the treasured idea that a human could defeat these squirrels, in my desperation I resorted to an unlikely, indirect form of biological control. The ground squirrel used smell to trick the rattlesnake into believing that Spermophilus pups were not what they seemed. What if I could pull a stinking page from the ground squirrels’ own playbook and make the scurrilous brute think I was his lethal arch predator, the coyote?

     And so, having failed in my roles as Mr. MacGregor, Elmer Fudd, and Wild Bill, I now prepared to transform myself into Old Man Coyote. And how is this trickster, Canis latrans, known unmistakably to his neighbors in the wild world? By his wicked grin and by the reek of his piss. After becoming the first person in my family to mail order a jug of coyote urine, I now possessed both the grin and the pee. And while I tried not to think about just how one would go about getting a statue gallon of coyote wiz, I did feel a late surge of hope that my final plan had a chance of working because I was now strategizing to go with the flow of nature, so to speak, rather than against it. If the crucible of evolution hadn’t taught these squirrels to fear gardeners or smoke bombers, it had certainly taught them to dread the loping death that was Old Man Coyote.

     The problem with my “desert doggie wee wee plan,” as Eryn unsympathetically taught Hannah to call it, was that in order to test its results we would have to plant my child’s first garden a fourth time, even as I was now virtually certain that after the time consumed by The Triple Vegpocalypse and its attendant skirmishes, frost would kill the garden even if Spermophilus did not. And so Hannah and I spent the next Saturday replanting the plot from scratch, of course using the most humiliatingly large bedding plants that a child’s raided college savings can buy. While I experienced the replanting as a Sisyphean labor, Hannah spontaneously preserved a Jeffersonian equanimity that demonstrated a healthy resilience that I was incapable of. She expressed her happiness that the squirrels had eaten such a healthy dinner (“Dad, vegetables make them strong too!” she said, holding up her tiny arms in an attempt at a bicep flex), and she repeated that planting the garden was so fun that she wanted to do it every day—which, as things were going, seemed a distinct possibility.

     Once replanted, the garden had yet again to be rearmored, and in fact now looked even more unsightly, what with the additional hardware cloth patches I had wired in to cover the large holes blown out by the buckshot. None of this bothered Hannah, of course, and she “made rainbows” while watering in her new plants, after which we put up our tools and went inside to wait for late afternoon, when I would administer the last deterrent in my arsenal.

     I should admit that as the day wore on I became increasingly nervous about the outcome of my looming experiment, and that I drank a fair amount of whiskey in an attempt to swallow my growing uncertainty. I had to admit that things didn’t look good. My wife, who is both more sensible and more intelligent than her husband, thought the “desert doggie wee wee plan” absurd, which seemed vaguely inauspicious. I had of course failed in every other attempt, so my poor track record suggested that I was the only creature in my local environment completely ill-suited to inhabit it. And what could it signify that in my hour of greatest need I had resorted not to the dual consolations of acceptance and prayer, but rather to the twin elixirs of bourbon and
coyote urine? If I failed in this final attempt, I would have to admit, finally, that I was not only a humiliated gardener, an ineffectual environmental educator, and an environmentalist pariah, but also a half-drunk, firstorder, second-grade, third-string, fourth-first-garden-planting, gas, gun, and pee-toting five-star vigilante.

     By late afternoon I was sufficiently lubricated that I should perhaps have reconsidered my plan to resume work in my child’s fourth first garden, but I knew that the garden would soon be gone without some form of protection, and I still had a rather expensive Jug O’ Wiz with Spermophilus’s name on it. I drained one last whiskey, fetched my secret weapon, and approached the garden with the jug gripped tightly in my right hand. I climbed up onto the garden’s railroad tie frame and balanced myself there, slowly wrapping the fingers of my left hand around the jug’s screw-top cap. I paused, taking one last, deep breath before opening the seventh seal.


     I still remember how lovely that newly planted garden looked in the glow of the low-angle afternoon sun, how the light breeze rippled the leaves of the tomatoes and squash, how moist and fertile the seedbeds appeared, how neat and well-tended the plot seemed. I vividly recall feeling that I was seeing the perfect garden in a perfect moment, though this transcendental epiphany was no doubt animated by the blush and tingle of the whiskey that had by then loosened all my muscles. I remember how lovely that moment felt, how hesitant I was to twist that cap and lose the wonderful feeling that little garden inspired in me. I remember, with a dreamlike sense of distance, an overflowing feeling that it had all been worth it after all—that this tender plot was truly a monument to my love for my daughter and for the earth, despite the trials it had presented. Maybe, I recall thinking, there is some cosmic plan within which this struggle has been an indispensable part of my own journey as both a father and as a gardener. And then I twisted off the lid.

     Friends, there can be no word in any human language that even begins to suggest the overpowering, unspeakable stench that exploded from the jug the instant that lid came off. Nothing in human evolutionary biology could have prepared me for this reeking bomb, the first whiff of which instantly flooded my eyes with tears, filled my mouth with a choking metallic tang, and set the whiskey roiling violently in my gut. I felt as if my body had suddenly become a permeable membrane through which the worst stink in the universe was blowing at gale force, carrying off my flesh as it howled through and reducing me to a shattered pile of smoldering bones. It was, in truth, as close to spontaneous human combustion as you can get and still live to tell the tale. After all, this was not just the urine of who knows how many very angry and presumably catheterized coyotes, it was a highly concentrated gallon of the stuff, and it had been stored for who knows how long in this vacuum sealed container. While it was at least hypothetically possible that a single drop of this behind Old Man Coyote’s ear might get him laid, I now held at the end of my hyper-extended arm a quivering vessel of the kind of stench that could make a gagging human hope to be sprayed by a polecat just to cover it up.

     This all happened in a flash, as you can imagine, but in the instant that I recoiled from the revolting stink, which blasted out of the jug and attacked my face like a swarm yellow jackets, I heard that signature metallic chirp of victory ring out from the sagebrush behind me. It was Spermophilus, either laughing at me or warning his kin that ten thousand coyotes had just simultaneously taken a huge leak. Spinning my contorted face away from the jug and toward that piercing cry, I suddenly felt my boot sole begin to slip on the edge of the railroad tie upon which I had perched. And it is at this moment—the only such moment in my life as a gardener, either before or since—that time seemed to slow almost to a stop, and I experienced the next second or two in that frame-by-frame fashion that the human brain reserves for only the most unthinkable of accidents. I fell for what seemed quite a long time, and I even remember seeing the pee that splashed out of the jug floating in mid-air, as if in the zero gravity of a space capsule. Eventually the handle of the jug released its grip on my fingers, and it too turned slowly in mid-air, as if it would remain spinning there forever. And then, at last, came the splintering crash of my body as it landed on my child’s fourth first garden, taking down fences and netting and stakes and cages as it did, and crushing the plants that by now had assumed a metaphorical significance very different from what I had originally intended. As I looked up through my stink tears and through the fragments of the garden in which I now lay, I could just make out Hannah in the distance, pinching her nose with one hand and waving at me with the other. She was, as always, smiling.


     I scrubbed until I had about peeled my skin off, but I still had to sleep outside that first night. In the weeks that followed I couldn’t get near enough to the superfund site that was my child’s fourth first garden to initiate remediation, though we diluted the terrible pee stench by hosing the garden down from about thirty feet upwind, an ablution that Hannah and I performed twice each day in order to make it tolerable for her to play outside. Five weeks later an early frost hit, and the cold snap knocked the stench down enough that I could approach the wrecked garden to clean it up before the first snow. When I pulled away the broken fences and cages, I found that a few plants had actually survived, unmolested because the not quite empty Jug O’ Doom still
rested near their stems. One of these was a tomato plant, and while its tiny yellow flowers were now burned by frost, it had set some fruit, and a single tomato looked pink enough that it might ripen off the vine. I harvested the tomato, washed it well, and gave it to Hannah to put on the sill of her bedroom window. Over the next few days that tomato did ripen, and so our family gathered around the kitchen table to celebrate the ritual of the first fruits—well, fruit—of the season, even as the snow began to fall outside. Hannah took a bite, wrinkled her nose, and said “Thanks for the tomato, Daddy. I don’t like it. Can we have a garden again next year?”

     In gardening and in parenting we risk failure every moment of every day, and how could it be otherwise? We hope and yet we fail; we fail and yet we hope. What education would our children and our gardens provide us if they did not constantly show us our limits? A sustainable relation to both the human and the natural worlds depends not upon our ability to transcend but rather upon our ability to embrace these limits. Sustainability is not a game we can play to win. Like parenting and gardening, sustainability is instead an endless string of failures, a practice of love, humility, and humor through which we just keep trying, not because our success is certain but because it certainly is not.

     I have promised Hannah that we will plant her garden in the spring. And it will again be her first garden, just as every garden is a first garden, just as every day with those we love is a chance to start over, to hope and to learn, to plant something again. I hope and trust that my child’s next first garden, which will not be her last, will succeed just as wonderfully as it has this year.