tomorrow’s another wednesday.

I re-planted a fancy vineyard today. 

 Last night, as I was driving up the hill to see my fiddler friend, I saw a fawn, nursing beneath its mother.  They were in the middle of the road, and I scared them dumb as I braked.  They looked at me and hopped off.    Last night, after the deer and after the fiddling, I stayed up too late, those fiddlers, they do that, they make you talk about your feelings and  the air was clear and the Sirius was out, so today I woke up tired and sad, and already kind of defeated.   

Planting a vineyard is supposed to be some sort of spiritual endeavor, but it’s grim and hard labor.   I guess on one of the mountain vineyards I take care of, before it was a vineyard, before it was some hippy nudist colony, it was a back-to-the-land spiritual cultish thing, where wealthy people seeking something would pay good money to plant a grapevine themselves.  What a beautiful con job that was, as good as Tom Sawyer’s whitewashing the fence, because the planting of a vineyard is just a whole lot of sweat and dust and bullshit. 

The shovel, at a certain velocity sparks, it flames when it hits a big rock, and if you don’t know how to let go of the shovel at the last minute, you’ll feel the rock lightning down to your spine and into the soles of your feet.  

 

 

 

Now, I don’t know how much you know about  him, I can’t be sure how in tune you are with the cosmic macho powers of the universe, but listen, nobody is more macho than Julio Cesar Chavez.  Nobody.   I remember hearing that for one of his biggest fights, maybe the one with Hector “Macho” Camacho, he didn’t really traditionally train  or spar or anything, he just dug fencepost holes around his rancho.

He punished “Macho” Camacho, Mr. 41-0 with 18 KOs, that little puto with his fancy assed hair and his clown pants,  and went home to his ranch, like it was nothing as hard as a hard day working under the sun like a real man, digging holes in the unforgiving earth.   

 

It was like 4 years ago when I got my first 9 hours of planting a vineyard, of breaking shovels and rocks, and I understood.  I take pride in that I get the respect of my coworkers for being a gabaacho who works in the fields as hard as they do.  It’s unheard of.  They don’t understand.  I just tell them that I’m from Iowa, and that we’re different.

The killdeer is in the plover family of birds and is smart and pretty and I just love em.  Today, in the face of my crew of 2 tractors and maybe 50 men with shovels and picks, a mated pair of killdeer sang a beautiful warning song and defended their four spotted eggs laid in the bare dust of a recently laid out vineyard.

 

 We taped off the rows and wouldn’t let the tractor through.  We warned all the guys, but we had to go close to the nest, you know, we had to work.  The two retreated in our presence, singing loud raucous warning songs, beautiful really, and there we were, a bunch of dirty macho cowboys, each of us keeping an eye on all of us, protecting their four, fragile eggs from one another. 

I think they made it.  I think it’ll be alright.  They seemed like they’d be good parents. 

I didn’t bring Sancho with me to work this morning.  It was maybe 90 degrees in the boring sun, and he doesn’t really care for it when I just have to stand and slowly work all day.  He gets bored and he gets hot, and just sits under a tree and looks at me, like, “is this really what you want us to do with our lives?  Really?”

 

So I didn’t bring him to work, and he insisted on a long walk in the woods when I got home, I was all at once thirsty and hungry and smelly and dirty and I still had work to do, but after a quick shower, a cold beer in my pocket, I took him out.  As we got to the woods, and I should tell you- it’s an urban woodland, you know, it’s a abnormally low, and once a bit more proud but now polluted and urban creek in the working class part of town.  But in the creek, (Sonoma Creek), strangely, and I wouldn’t have believed it had I not seen it, I saw that a lone salmon had made it all the way up the creek from the bay and expired here, a few blocks from my house.  Had it made it?  Did it find another and spawn?  I guess I wish I was a bit more optimistic.  The scene made me sad deep down, you know?  Like even though I braked so as not to not kill the doe and the fawn, even though I made sure nobody fucked with the killdeer eggs, I didn’t really do enough.  The salmon are leaving the earth, you know? And I love the taste of lox.  I love my spicy salmon sushi rolls.  The whole thing was really kind of my fault.    

 

Also, the deer, the killdeer, and the salmon, they all kind of looked at me accusingly, like my coworkers do when we talk about having kids, seeming to ask me why I’m fucking around, why not just leave it in one night and make some kids?    I don’t even know what to say anymore. 

Maria Isabel Vasquez Jimenez was a beautiful, 17 year old , migrant, and  pregnant vineyard worker, who died last month before her boyfriend could give her the gold ring he’d saved up for.  They were both from a small little village in Oaxaca.  Their manager wouldn’t give them enough time to go and get water on a day that was 95 degrees out.  She died in the dust, in her boyfriend’s arms in a vineyard in California.  

 It was a Wednesday.