Well Nourished

Ara Varma

Seen from above, my hometown in the sticky part of Virginia is a quilt of pristine lawns awaiting their next preventive maintenance. The lawns’ glowing green comes from the relentless sunshine and rainwater. Yet, their uncanny faultlessness comes from their chemical diets. In the stillness of early summer, each class of lawn has a unique character. 

Atop the hills lie the sprawling estates. Acres of lawns maintained by another. A slow, winding old-money boulevard connects them all. From the outside, one can only see the manicure of the lawns and the houses that always gleam as if freshly pressure washed. The ladies of these houses wear pearls, and their daughters call them “ma’am.” Some of the men are one gin and tonic away from looking you in the eyes and saying: “you’re not so bad, you know. You’re not like the rest of them.” Any response other than a smile, you’re causing trouble. When you drive by, you feel that you are in a film negative, awaiting baths of developer and sepia toner. 

In the suburbs are the square lawns ruled by the chaos of young children and the tyranny of the homeowners’ association. There are men in baseball caps who love to mow their own lawn, who take pride in the clean-cut, pristine fruits of their labor. 

Fertilizer in those parts of town was not to grow things, but to tend to the lawns that sit where the tobacco once grew. The lawns do not feed but must be kept fed. They are the essential blank slates upon which we build our facades. At the time, it felt like safety. 

Finally, by the river, are the dirt patches, where spots of bright green emerge in equal force from soil and sidewalk. The grass and roads are imperfect; there is no clear line dividing them. 

The classes of lawns are segregated, such that the estates and lawns rarely see each other, let alone the dirt patches. Yet, the barriers of man cannot protect us from summer’s thunderstorms and hurricanes – the equalizers of nature. 

When the suffocating summer air grows heavy like an overripe fruit weighing down a tree branch, we Virginians sense an untenable tension. We know the discomfort means the doldrums will be dealt a blow by the summer’s first storm. This is the fall from the tree branch. 

The chemical lifeblood of fertilizer–nitrate and phosphate–is washed away from its original home in the rainfall. The righteous torrent extracts concessions from us all. Drivers clench the steering wheels ever tighter, determined to not surrender control. I used to crouch in the gym of the YMCA daycare waiting for the storm to pass. A blinding lightning splits the deep dusk in two. Crouching, I would imagine the flash of a town-sized camera. 

In the day-after air, the thunderstorm’s droplet hangover feels like relief, and the magnolias smell sweet and sickening. This is a momentary escape, and the flowers’ scents soon surrender to the heavying air. The oppressive summer has returned. And so, the cycle of water continues. 

Sheets of rain pour on us and our green grass for weeks at summer’s end. With each new rain, fertilizer continues to move: it moves away from the estates and lawns that it suffocates, away from old money and suburbia. It flows past well-maintained and impermeable asphalt. 

On the way to the Atlantic Ocean, some of the fertilizer’s chemical entrails pool in dirt patches and the bodies of water that surround them. This forgotten excess of beautiful lawns slows with the dirt roads, potholes, and the pockets of luscious forest tucked within the rougher parts of town. 

The chemicals in the runoff change the balance. This delicate ecosystem is now overrun with nutrients, and algae sprouts from the water’s surface. 

More overabundance, more algae, more green. So grows a new class of lawn. 

In the lake I spent a summer in, an algal rug grew so thick and dark that it blocked the sun for phytoplankton and aquatic plants. It choked its aquatic inhabitants, shrouding them in a permanent midnight. The other parts of the ecosystem–fish and larger terrestrial plants–also decayed, losing vitality and life. 

Once an idyllic Terabithian hidden wonderland, this ecosystem became what is coldly called a Dead Zone. It was indeed as dead as it looked. The safe green of the magic forest was replaced by the bubbling, grotesque green of an algal bloom which gorges on the sun’s heat and light and the fertilizer from the other side of town. How terribly gluttonous. 

That summer I learned about the commons. What was common: the wonderland that gave to us but never asked of us and the hurricane that tested us all. What was not equally common: the proximity to the ensuing destruction and whether we must bear witness to that destruction. That which perches atop the hill disrupts the natural order of things, but that is the natural order of things. 

The waters to the east of Virginia used to be replete with oysters. Oysters are a filter feeder, cleaning pollutants in the water. When I was young, I saw a grainy image of a man in the 1700s in the Chesapeake Bay standing next to a twenty-foot tower of oysters. You could put out your hand and scoop them up. The past abundance of this place is unfathomable to me now. The same inadvertent consequences of human intervention wreaked havoc on even the brackish water’s cleaners. 

Centuries of natural equalizers to man’s boundaries and picket fences have led us here: a small group of hopeless romantics trying to revive the oysters, to revive the lake. They have led to me eating one-dollar oysters at the Chinese buffet in a strip mall. I eat too many, and I fall ill. The air outside is hot and sticky, the parking lot has more potholes than pavement, but at least the grass is green.