Seeds

Last May, while I was preparing to plant my garden, my two sons, ages four and two, watched while eating apples. “I want to grow an apple tree!” my older boy exclaimed. He pulled a seed from the fruit’s core and held it up to me. We live in Southeast Alaska, a couple miles from a glacier—not the ideal climate for growing fruit trees. Nonetheless, he dug a hole in glacial sediment next to a planter box and dropped his seed in.

“Next, we should plant a pear seed!” he said.

We didn’t have any pears so, instead, both boys “helped” plant seeds I’d ordered from Foundroot, a small family gardening seed and goods business in Haines. Foundroot’s seeds are selected to grow in northern environments like Alaska. I like that they are Alaskan, and I like their goal “to empower more people to grow their own food, no matter the scale, and support systems of self-reliance and food sovereignty for northern communities.”

Some say spring is the cruelest season, but I’m not sure they ever experienced six months of winter. This spring juncos and chestnut-backed chickadees, who use our backyard all summer, were joined by migratory flocks of white-crowned sparrows here for just a few days. The hooting of sooty grouse echoed from the mountainside. Mountain goats, the nannies soon to give birth, grazed along cliffs and the edges of avalanche shoots. Spruce tips were budding, and blueberry bushes were blossoming. It was still a bit early but warm temperatures were forecasted for the week, so I moved my tomato and pepper starts out into the greenhouse.

Around that time, my family had dinner with my older brother. He showed me two organic beets he’d purchased for four dollars at the grocery store. They were beautiful. We joked that we’d never grow a beet that looked so good. It didn’t have nearly the same mental health benefits of what we grew, though.

I felt a bit like those white-crowned sparrows, as I had to leave town soon after getting the garden in order. I was training youth bear viewing guides from Angoon. We’d spent six days earlier that month at and around the Pack Creek Bear Viewing Area. I wanted the three boys I was working with to see how bears and people can coexist peacefully together. Now, we were going out to experience bears closer to their village on the west side of Admiralty Island. We were looking into the possibility of developing new bear viewing areas, with the hope it might create good, sustainable jobs for these youths and their community. I’m pretty sure it was as much of a learning experience for me as it was for them.

Most evenings, after making the three teenage boys sit in meadows for way too long, we made fires and ate our freeze-dried dinners. Sometimes we’d add recently emerged deer heart to our meals. At night, I’d listen to the boys giggle in their tent and the sound of shows playing on their phone. It was an odd juxtaposition to the calling of loons, hooting of owls, and the sounds of ocean waves lapping onto the shore.

During one encounter, a large male bear approached despite me talking to him. At around 30 yards, he lowered his massive head and smelled where we had recently walked. His expression went from curiosity to horror and he charged off. For a while after, I felt a powerful energy in myself and in the earth that I was sitting upon.

On another occasion, we came across a large bear that appeared to have been killed and mostly eaten by another bear. Knowing how fast a dead bear generally gets eaten, I guessed it had died a few weeks earlier. A loud groaning made things tense until we realized it was only the trees talking in the wind. The ground had been trampled to mud by bears and smelled strongly of urine from males having marked the area. Soon, though, the earth would absorb the bear. The first grasses were already sprouting around the carnage.

When I returned home, I visited my garden and marveled over all that had grown in my absence. I knelt over the plants, pulling weeds and thinning rows. Weeds had grown over where my boy had dug a hole for his apple seed. Knowing full well it was futile, I still pulled them away. Gardening reminds me to have faith in life, even in the face of so much uncertainty. I want to do everything in my power to cultivate those sorts of dreams.

This story originally appeared in Issue No. 29, Fall 2023