This summer was full of revelations, some terrifying, others uplifting.
Let’s start with the terror. Remember late July, after the Trump-Biden debate and the attempted hit on Donald Trump? I was among the folks frenziedly texting family members to say the election was over. We (Democrats) had just lost because Trump would be lionized as a risen hero whose iconic fist-pumping-while-the-blood-ran image would go down in history. It seemed unfair and even unjust that a man like that would receive a political boost from the universe, even if it had come at the expense of his own near-death experience. I felt dejected in the days that followed as Biden vowed to stay in the race, and my doomsday prediction was echoed by friends and pundits. One day after dinner, I went outside and started weeding like a maniac. I did something then that I had never done before, choosing Spotify over a political or current events podcast as I attacked a season’s worth of knee-high weeds on a side of our house where the wooden gate was covered by overgrowth. The mosquitoes made a meal of me. I was still hacking away at the ground with Lizzo’s “Good as Hell” on repeat as the moon appeared. When I realized it was so late that I couldn’t even see which plants I was strangling, I went inside and turned off the porch light.
Mid-July felt like the end, but it wasn’t. Because things change, often in ways so unpredictable as to seem impossible. With whiplashing speed, Joe Biden dropped out, Kamala Harris got in, and the race shifted. The revelation? How fundamental change is to these teetering lives we lead. We never know what will happen next. This is the core lesson of historical study and the fire beneath our desire for fiction where we get to see characters’ futures unfold as the pages turn.
This heightened awareness about the impenetrability of change seized me close to home. Another revelation arose in a field on the other side of town. Tinworks (an arts organization) was hosting a new work of art by Agnes Denes titled Wheatfield—An Inspiration. That hybrid artwork-agricultural plot was planted on Tinwork’s lot on the northeastern side of Bozeman. When I arrived in the city in 2014, I learned that some residents still avoided this area near the tracks because it had once been a brewery district. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the neighborhood that had grown around distilleries and other industries consisted of working-class people. Homes and lawns tended to be modest there, and passing trains made for a constant soundtrack. People with money chose to live on the south side of Main Street in the Bon-Ton district, a pattern that continued for years.
Over the last decade, though, the northeast area has slowly transformed as the city’s population has boomed. Newcomers seeking lower home prices and an edgy urban vibe noticed the neighborhood’s distinctive character. Investors followed, along with small businesses and art galleries. Stroll through the Northside now and you’ll pass by artisanal bakeries and coffee shops, graffiti-covered warehouses and railroad depots, small worker cottages and multi-million-dollar condo units rubbing shoulders. Denes’s wheat field grows near all these signs of societal change, against a backdrop of architectural variation that reflects layers of history.
When Tinworks asked community members to help weed the wheat field one evening, I went with my three less than enthused high-school and college-aged kids. We were the first to arrive. My kids balked. Why were we the only ones who had shown up to do fieldwork? The fifteen-year-old said the scene was “giving slavery,” then went off to scale a climbing rock in a pocket park down the block. Soon, though, members of the Tinworks staff emerged to greet us, offering beverages and garden gloves. Neighbors and visitors trickled in by bike and on foot, representing the full range of races, genders, and ages. A woman married to a botanist brought her own tools as well as her spouse’s tips for how to battle weeds. Someone who was passing through for a night while visiting Yellowstone shared about her hometown in China. A young person with plentiful tattoos twined through the field to hand out buckets for weed collection. The Tinworks education director (a confessed hard rock music fan) propped her phone and a speaker up somewhere among the shafts. Mellow notes she had selected for the enjoyment of others floated over the golden grass.
And we began. The shoots were fragile. We had to take care not to crush them or uproot them while wrestling with thorny weeds. We recognized the difficulty of our task and commiserated about muscle strain. As we carefully untwisted green weeds from around amber stalks, we unfurled our own selves, opening up with an ease that I had forgotten could be possible among strangers. We traded words. We held silences. We let the music in. The work was hard but calming and the joint endeavor reassuring about the lives we hold in common with this planet that is our shared home.
I paused to look up once, and again, struck by the beauty of the day. The periwinkle sky stretched above us. The solid ground held below us. The sun streamed down, bathing the wheat and softening our skins thickened by worry. This was a revelation that felt like being in church. Sometimes a beam of light, a field of wheat, a felt community -- are all you really need.
*Notes. Community members harvested the wheat last week on September 8th. A New York Times article about the field is linked here and above. My dear Carrying Capacity editor is occupied with her real job editing books for a university press, so you have me bare-knuckling it again this month as my own editor. I know. I’m frightened too. (In spring 2024, I joined the Tinworks Board. I had no role in the wheat field exhibit.)
In today's "New York Times Book Review," Ketanji Brown Jackson writes that she has "All That She Carried" by Tiya Miles on her night stand. I have "Night Flyer" on mine! I love the photo of you weeding in "Carrying Capacity." Much power and love to you, Tiya and friend of Helen Hill's, from Helen's momma, Becky
I'm so glad you told us about the wheat field, Tiya. It reminded me of the sunflowers and corn that Ekua Holmes and Elizabeth James-Perry planted in front of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Did you happen to see that installation in 2021? I would have loved to see it in person but I live on the opposite side of Turtle Island. The idea of reclaiming the land by planting crops feels right on a very elemental level — and spreads such joy!