What Happens Next?: Matters of Life and Death

Iowa Wine

.65. IOWA WINE walking through the vineyard, i raised my eyes to the top of the vines and saw new pale-green tendrils corkscrewing toward the sun. Their reaching for light was, of course, natural tropism. But if grape vines had a conscience (and I’ve heard winemakers in Napa and Sonoma sometimes speak of them as if they do—a conscience, a brain, and a resolute will) then their trying to get still taller at that point in the season could also be seen as greedy and thoughtless. For the good of the harvest, it was time they were sending their energy back down to the clusters of grapes holding on below. But the vines and their berries are natural competitors for the carbohydrates and the minerals and the needed nutrients, and it’s a competition the grapes can’t win on their own. So human beings have to intervene, men passing through to snip the selfish tendrils. The vineyard I was visiting on that hot July afternoon was a postcard-perfect eight-acre lot planted on a subtly sloping hillside. And among the pleasures I felt as I moved along between the rows was an atavistic one. I was in a kind of intimate trance, something not unlike my childhood state of mind when I escaped into whatever invented world I was living in that day—the jungle explorer, a iowa wine .66. the sheriff tracking the outlaw in the woods—as I walked stealthily through a jungle, or a forest, depending, of harvest-high corn. As it happens, this is a fitting comparison. For when I reached the end of that vineyard and stepped again into full sunlight the first thing I saw was a grain silo rising huge and royal-blue on the near horizon; and then, panning right, across the gray ribbon of gravel road, a lush patchwork of complementary greens: corn and soybean fields running infinitely. What I was viewing was true and not some hallucinatory blurring of memory and moment. But because I’d been deep in the Zen of tall rows I needed a few seconds to reorient myself, as I did when, a boy, I emerged from my father’s field to confront the vista of farmhouse and barnyard I’d escaped for a time. Simply put, standing in the shade of the leafy end vines and taking in the familiar rural terrain, I couldn’t yet quite believe there were vineyards in Iowa. I’d read that there were, some months earlier, in a front-page story in the New York Times. The piece had predictable fun with the idea of colliding cultures: the Midwest farmer, plain in his tastes, indeed shy to admit to appetites of any sort, his simple mood and attitude honed by the work and the weather; and, against that, the sun-blessed winemaker, the festive sophisticate, believing life is a thing to savor openly and consume until you’re full. Like all stereotypes, these are gross caricatures. It’s also true that I’ve found enough in them to send me fleeing from the first and seeking versions of the latter for most of my adult life. Our farm was four miles from Prairie City, then a village of eight hundred people, and because I performed well in its classrooms and passably on its athletic fields, my school years were rewarding and socially easy. But I learned early on that I had no gift for farming. My mistakes at the wheel of a tractor are too many to list and too astounding to be believed. I could tell you, for instance, about confusing the position of first gear and reverse and driving up onto and nearly over a plow. But even beyond the farcical failures, a more general feeling steadily came to me about iowa wine .67. the Midwest farming life and my place in it—that I was a stranger in a culture whose ambition was for a kind of grand inelegance, a determined plainness. By adolescence, I knew—simply and ever more comfortably knew—that whatever my future, it would be somewhere away. The winding route I’ve taken doesn’t matter here except as an itinerary that leads to the moment of my stepping from the newly planted Iowa vineyard and viewing the verdant scenery of my past. So, quickly: my first city was Chicago, where I found that I wanted to live in cities, for the same reasons that anyone who...