By Hal Walter
It has become a tradition of sorts each fall for my son Harrison and me to travel down to Larga Vista Ranch, owned by my friends Doug and Kim Wiley, east of Pueblo. We pick late-season produce, mostly sweet peppers, but also Pueblo chiles, watermelons and squash, just before the first hard frost arrives. After this, Doug turns his free-roaming hogs into the fields to clean up the destruction in the path of the oncoming cold season.
Doug has always trusted and allowed me to rummage through his fields to pick what I can before the weather destroys it. Each year I watch the weather report, standing ready to scramble before the bounty becomes pig food overnight. I call him up and mention the cold snap on the way and he always responds, “You better get out here.”
Typically there’s a lot to choose from, and only so much room in the vehicle, and only so much that can be eaten immediately or stored. The peppers especially have the most robust flavor of any I’ve ever eaten. I bring home boxes of them, cut them into halves and remove the seeds, then stuff them into ziplocks and stack them in the freezer. These last days before the first frost are nearly always beautiful with clear blue Colorado skies, and the low afternoon sunshine bathes the pastoral landscape in a golden light. I like the wide-open view at the farm, the perspective that the flat terrain gives the sweeping mountain vista to the west. Sometimes we drive the green chiles just down the road where another farmer roasts them for us, and we watch as the peppers turn in the mesh drum, crackling aromatically over the flames in the autumn dusk. I have grown to enjoy this annual rite of fall as much as any other tradition.
As idyllic as this all sounds it can always be an adventure with Harrison, and I have learned to expect some sort of outburst or episode here, just as I would anywhere. Last fall he seemed especially agitated and disengaged as I scurried about the rows picking the red, yellow, green and orange peppers. Doug hires a Hispanic guy, José, to pick his vegetables, and with the cold weather on the way, José’s wife and two kids were helping. My conversational Español is limited, so we usually nod and say hello and go about our harvesting.
I was sorting through the red Rams Horn peppers when Harrison threw a bad tantrum – screaming and thrashing about in an especially berserk manner. José and his family all seemed a bit perplexed by his behavior, I think especially the kids. They looked over at him and then went back to picking. I had to wonder what they thought of this otherwise normal-appearing kid. Do they have any idea? “Autismo” is Spanish for autism. But would they understand even if I spoke it? Language and autism … an odd cultural experience in the pepper patch.
• • •
At these times I am thankful for wide-open spaces. The sound is diffused by the expanse, and seems to be absorbed by trees and plants and the earth itself. Wild animals and most livestock seem more accepting of it than other humans.
Over the years I have struggled to put words to these sounds, these noises, that Harrison makes. Is it enough to say it’s loud? That it’s a constant in our lives with few intermissions? That it’s sometimes grating, like fingernails on a chalkboard? That often – especially in the morning – it can make me believe there are steel marbles rattling around inside my hollow cranium? That there are times it is so startling I completely forget what I am doing, and so distressing it renders me perfectly useless for hours?
How does one spell those sounds? Those screams? That screeching? How does one explain the ridiculous phraseology that makes sense only in the context of years or months of background and experience with this person? Or that sometimes makes no sense at all in the context of anything I can determine? It’s almost like speaking an entirely different language, or vernacular, only one never really becomes fluent.
And these communications seem to be taking on new meaning as Harrison gets older and has questions about birth, and life and death. How does one relate the veritable shortness of life to someone whose way of understanding the world around them so radically and profoundly alters the way they perceive life itself?
• • •
It was a beautiful October day, and the weather report said snow and a hard freeze were on the way. I called Doug to ask about the peppers and he said, “You better get out here.”
I decided to take Harrison out of school early and try to squeeze in a couple hours of pepper-picking. Harrison was thrilled to get out of school early. And for the first time he seemed interested in picking peppers, intrigued with the idea of saving them for the winter. He threw one short tantrum and quickly got back to work. José was working far out of earshot on the other side of the field. I had brought two boxes, and the peppers we had picked nearly filled both of them. But we had made the trip out there, and there were still lots of peppers in the field. They would be pig food tomorrow. I figured one more shopping bag would top off both boxes.
As we worked our way back to the car, our bag nearly full, it was impossible to pass by any pepper that appeared ripe and still firm. The bag was nearly full as I paused to inspect a red pepper on a vine.
“Hey, do you want me here?” Harrison asked.
“Well, of course I want you here. That’s why I took you out of school early and we drove all the way out here to pick these peppers.”
He looked down at the ground, searching for his words. The October sun felt warm as he considered the double meaning of what he’d said and then stumbled with his own language to ask me in his own words if I was glad that he’d been born.
Time stood still for a moment there in a field of peppers washed by the golden sun. I thought of all the struggles, frustrations, stresses and challenges that Harrison’s arrival had presented over the last nine years. How there is only the way forward. The acceptance of what is. The truth.
“Yes, son, I am.”
Hal Walter writes and edits from the Wet Mountains. You can keep up with him regularly at his blog: www.hardscrabbletimes.com.
