Pomona’s Penance
The story is that Pomona, wood nymph of orchard fruit, goddess of “what is to be taken,” according to the root words, lived quite happily alone in her walled garden. But this Vertumnus, the Lord of Change, could not abide. And so he disguised himself as an old beggar woman, and, taking advantage of Pomona’s kindness, gained entrance to her garden. Tales vary about what happened next. In one version, he warned her of the dangers of rejecting a suitor and that was enough somehow to convince her to be his bride. Ovid of course spoke of more erotic seduction, that “his hot kisses were ill-suited to an old woman” and thus his disguise was discovered and Pomona’s resistance overthrown.
Whatever the case, Pomona has no say in what happens next, like so many women. The subtext of course is always the subjugation, and often rape, of Nature, the ways in which mankind (which I use here intentionally) bends Her to his will.
I was not thinking of these things at first when we sought out our local apple orchard for picking. Fall is close, the autumnal equinox only weeks away. I was feeling it and when I saw that my favorite variety of apple — Snowsweet — was ripe and my children would be getting out of school early, I couldn’t bear to stay away.
We made the climb up Doe Creek Mountain to the eponymously named Doe Creek Farm. At the height of the picking season on weekends, overflow parking covers the grass. People and dogs tromp everywhere; it’s easy to lose a small human in the wagon-pulling, yelling, fruit picker-wielding crowds.
But that day, that Friday, no one else was there. No one. It was just us and aisles and aisles of apples under the early September sky.
Why does the mere sight of apples waiting to be picked make my heart near to bursting? It’s more than that they’re my favorite fruit. Or that I love their names, sometimes chanting them in my mind softly, like a mantra for Pomona’s ears alone. It’s more than the fact that I love the sound and feel of cutting them — the white flesh beneath the red, yellow, green, or brown skin. The pentacle at their hearts with (usually) five seeds.
It’s their mythic-ness. Whether or not there was ever a Garden of Eden or of the Hesperides, whether or not a golden apple decided the fate of nations or poisoned an unsuspecting princess (I submit that the Wicked Queen and Prince Charming are one in the same, and Snow White is merely a retelling of the Vertumnus and Pomona myth…), whether or not any of these things ever existed…I feel all of that under the skin of an apple as it falls into my palm from its place among the leaves.
What is more tender than apple blossom visited by bees in the spring? What more fulfilling than the round cheeks of apples peeking from between failing leaves in the fall?
In olden days, cider trees would be propitiated with cider from the previous year. This apple wassailing would take place on Twelfth Night. Bread or toast would be hung about the branches of the apple trees, cider poured as a libation across the tree roots, and often young men would go singing — “howling” — among the trees to bring about a good harvest for the coming year.
For most of my life, I never knew what “here we come a-wassailing” meant, but now when I visit the orchard I wish deeply that I could wassail among the trees, though they do not belong to me. It feels wrong that such rituals are no longer performed. (At least, not here.)
Up and down we went, picking Honeygold, Liberty, Royal Empire, and my beloved Snowsweet apples. We observed, much to my children’s shock, a cicada-killer wasp dragging her victim back to her lair under one tree’s roots. We watched the giant wasp slowly and methodically bring the cicada down from the tree, often dropping it because it was so large. Then she disappeared with her prize into her nest underground.
All was beautiful, all was perfect; I was in that blessed Garden as far as I was concerned.
Except for one thing.
The noise of drills was a constant refrain over birdsong and insect buzz.
Turning northeast, I could see the scar running over the mountains and down into the valley just behind the orchard. A gash of red clay through the rolling mountains, a dividing line. The Mountain Valley Pipeline.
Vertumnus incarnate, right up to Pomona’s door.
I didn’t ask the owner of the orchard how she felt about the pipeline. It didn’t feel fair. There was nothing she could do about it; right of way had been seized according to eminent domain. Your land is your land until someone else wants it.
On the Pipeline’s homepage, natural gas is touted as the savior of all the counties it passes through — economy boosting, heat providing, transitioning a region traditionally reliant on coal to cleaner natural gas.
I thought a lot about the few brave Waterkeepers in our area who tried to stand against the pipeline — tree-sitting, showing up at meetings across the state. I was not one of them, but I’d cheered them on silently when they’d chained themselves to equipment or refused to come out of their trees. I’d cheered when a judge had halted construction because of damage to fragile ecosystems here — mudslides into streams that are home to endangered species, destruction of streamside habitat, and so on.
But unlike the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, the Mountain Valley Pipeline did not ultimately suffer defeat. It’s 92% complete. Vertumnus has come to our holler and he is not leaving until he has what he came for.
Supposedly, this pipeline will turn our county into some kind of utopia, bring up everyone’s base salary, etc. The only pipeline workers I’ve met thus far were some guys from Oklahoma who rented the house down our street for a few months. They wanted to rent our empty lot to park their equipment. We said no.
Not long after, they were gone.
I thought about all this as I watched the red wound tear across the farm valley with the apple trees sighing at my back. I felt shame that I had not done more, that I was not one of the ones who had lived up a tree or carried the WaterKeeper banner through the Virginia capitol building.
When I was a student, I had protested a massive road project with many other students, gathering signatures, attending board of supervisors meetings, Sierra Club meetings. I had done everything but chain myself to equipment. None of it had mattered. The road had still been built, a road that goes nowhere, but is used as a test bed for autonomous vehicles. Houses were condemned, habitats overrun.
It was my first fight, and it was one I didn’t know we couldn’t win. My hope was easily diminished, and over time it wore away to nothing, such that I stopped fighting. Which is, of course, exactly what is most desirable to those who would force a pipeline through our mountains and call it an environmentally friendly enterprise.
I don’t know, though, that I really am a fighter, so much as I’m a memory keeper. A rememberer of things. Of the way things were before Vertumnus came sneaking through our garden gate, convincing us it was rude to send him packing. I keep histories the way others keep gems — locked away tight until I need them, until perhaps a warrior needs them for their own critical fight.
Even before Pomona, there was something more, something wilder. It’s not hard to still find old fence rails and banisters made of chestnut on these farms. To remember the elms and the ash before the blight and ash borer took them. To imagine the hemlocks in all their needled finery rather than the brittle husks they’ve become because of the woolly adelgid.
And higher, higher to the north and west, the boreal forest-kin of West Virginia, where the mountaintops were once home to red spruce, deep moss, and salamanders galore. I’ve heard these snippets here and there; I’ve clipped and saved and pressed them deep in my heart.
Memory to me means a place cannot truly die. Someday, beyond the apples, beyond the penance Pomona pays for her beauty and rooted charm, I will stitch together all these memories and unfurl the long quilt of them. I will lay it down across the scarred hills, hoping that the land will remember itself again when next Vertumnus comes.