A Piece of Land: The Beginnings and The End

Grape pickers. Zikh’ron Ya’aqov, 1939 | Library of Congress | No known copyright restrictions

Where does it begin? Is there a beginning?

Digging a hole in the ground and planting. Setting the plant, with its tender roots, in the soil and letting it take hold. The act is repetitive, quite straightforward. The considerations to bear in mind are basic and logical, varying according to the type of crop, but they must be taken into account and respected.

For me, the most-oft repeated and familiar beginning is that of planting vines. It carries a touch of symbolic mysticism because we make the hole with a cross-shaped dibber. Each vine is a cross driven into the ground; each cross is a narrow space, just big enough for the small cutting.

At this point, the vine is no more than thirty centimetres tall, a stick covered almost entirely with green wax that seals the graft. At the top you can just see the bud that will sprout if luck is with it. At the bottom, where it has recovered its woody texture, the roots come out.

To place the vine in the ground, the roots must be cut very short. This is done so the plant may more easily fit into the hole, and it is strange that to take root, the roots must be cut.

The next step is to fill the hole with earth, a handful right down to the bottom, and to tamp it down, which means to press it against the roots so there are no air gaps. You need to make sure no stones fall in, because even the smallest can become an obstacle.

The action ends with a few strokes of the hoe to break the walls of the dibber hole and cover anything that is not yet covered with more earth. Beside it, a small cane is placed to mark the vine, barely two palms tall, and in the air, a thought rises, a mix of faith and hope, that the vine might prosper. And so it goes, one after the other.

Planting is a beginning and replanting a continuation, and it is not easy to distinguish between the two. A vine that is planted will always be a starting point, the beginning of a life. If it is replanted, placed in the empty spaces left by others that have died in already-established vineyards, it is both a starting point and a continuation.

That planting is a beginning is, however, also a fiction. It is to imagine the years to come, the clusters of grapes, the shapes into which the trunks will grow and the vision of the vineyard’s tidy rows. Yet it is also half lie.

What, then, is the beginning?

To ready the land. To cut down the woods, reconvert the uncultivated plot or clear the crops that might have been growing there. Once the surface is clean, weed, subsoil and till; loosen up the earth well. Sometimes it must all be done, sometimes half is enough. If the space is not marked out, modify it: trample out the unevenness and divide it into terraces, make margins and banks. And design, always design.

Decide where the paths will go, or keep the existing ones. Calculate the space needed for the plant to grow and the space required for the tractor to pass and manoeuvre, and based on these considerations, make the best possible use of the space to fit in as many plants as possible.

This design involves following a meticulous order to trace out a lattice of perfect lines. Functionality, born of necessity and the inevitable topography, gives way to a harmony between the crop and the environment in which it grows. The vision and the work of the farmer shape the landscape.

The beginning, however, goes further back.

Cultivated land is the legacy of an ancient civilization of which we still form part. There was a series of men and women who, decades and centuries ago, who knows how many, applied their feet, hands, effort and time to the very same land we now tread and toil. Some of them were the first to begin transforming the wild expanses into cultivated land, and many others followed. All of them marked the beginning – those who made the first plots and the first terraces, those who gathered up the stones to make the first margins, those who, once the land was ready, learned to cultivate it through trial and error.

From them, what remains is this built-up world and a body of knowledge that, over the years, from generation to generation, has been passed on and received, modified and adapted.

***

What is the end? There is always an end, although as long as the world keeps turning, it will never come to a complete end. Nature is stubborn and strong, and it has the luck and the ability to continue by itself without the help of human hands, but without people, there would be no crops, no agriculture, no rural class, none of the landscapes born from collaboration and adaptation, from need and care, from action and vision.

It is impossible – and quite pointless – to predict the end of the world, it is difficult to foresee the end of agriculture, but the end of the rural class is lying in wait, and it is impossible not to think about one’s own end within this sector. How will it all end? When? And why?

On the individual level there is the great end, the inescapable certainty of death, in which case, while unavoidable, we may hope that we keep our health until the last, that fate does not whisk us away before our time, that our body might grow old and give up, and that our mind can accept it.

Leaving aside the personal scale and turning back to cultivated land, the end is the law of life, constant and ever-present; cycles begin and end, all that lives must die, the place left by some is filled by others, and the wheel turns unceasingly.

But sometimes the end is a catastrophe that is impossible to avoid and hard to recover from. Frosts, sharp and sustained cold spells, downpours, hailstorms, uncontrolled fires and pests and diseases wreak blind havoc through all that they can find and reach, and although they cannot stamp out the regenerative capacity of wildlife, they mortally wound those who depend on domesticated nature.

Episodes from recent history are recorded in our memory – written, but above all oral memory in the places where they happened: on our land, grape phylloxera, the hailstorm of August of fifty-five, the frost of the following year, or the chronologically uncertain period – it must have been around the twenties – that saw several years of continuous drought. And today, the emptiness of the villages and the countryside is, in part, the result of those times. To work the land is to know that, at any moment, an unforeseen event of such magnitude might occur.

If we are still here today, it is because the absolute end has not arrived, neither of the crops nor the rural class, despite the many hardships, but with every blow, our obstinacy and capacity to withstand have been weathered; if in every wash a sheet is lost, with every crisis people are lost.

As a result recent history, the current situation is very fragile, although it is of little use to fret over the fact if not to attempt to maintain a level of calm that, should the time come, will lessen the feeling of resignation. What is it that will make the few of us who are left in the village, or in more general terms in the region or in the country, finally quit? Or, without wishing to generalise, what is it that will force me, or persuade me, to give up working the land?

Will it be the impotence of suffering an increasingly wild and unpredictable climate that will make emergencies and exceptions become the norm, dictated only by a disrupted and unpredictable meteorological tumult that will break with all rhythms, making any kind of minimally normal and reliable progress impossible? Or perhaps the surrender will come after seeing that, collectively, we are unable to adapt to the changing weather, that both from inside and out, those who work the land have become entrenched in models that are poorly adapted to the new contexts, focused more on finding short-term solutions that are mere patches, promises and mirages, when what is needed is to build a solid and resilient network?

Perhaps, apart from the weather, the day will come when the final stroke will be marked by a blow to the table and a match to the papers of a bureaucracy that obstinately insists on controlling everything through registers, logbooks, formulas and calculations that should guarantee a better life for farmers and consumers but which, in practice, are nothing more than the dross that feeds a sick system that lives and grows to justify – although it never voices or recognises the fact – its own existence and survival, that favours whoever has the financial strength to cope with the blows and abandons those on the front line who wish simply to work with passion and dedication under the same laws and regulations as everyone else, as long as they are fair and adapted to the reality of everyday life.

It may be that the last straw will be a simple “this is as far as we can go,” a last sigh born from sheer tiredness, from the acceptance of one’s own limits and from a finite predisposition to continue fighting against the tide – at the cost of time, sweat, resources, sacrifices and hope – to defend a way of life and of understanding the world.