158 animal, vegetable, miracleblock to get the car started, fresh spinach and broccoli would be a wel-
come sight. I’d buy it if I lived here, and fly the flag of La Californie in my
kitchen. Even down in Dixie I’d bought winter cucumbers before, and
would probably do it again. I wondered: once I was out of our industrial-
food dry- out, would I be able to sample the world’s vegetable delights
responsibly—as a social broccoli buyer—without falling into dependency?
California vegetables are not the serpent, it’s all of us who open our veins
to the flow of gas- fueled foods, becoming yawning addicts, while our
neighborhood farms dry up and blow away. We seem to be built with a
faulty gauge for moderation.
In the market we bought apples, maple syrup, bedding plants for our
hosts’ garden, and asparagus, because the season was over at home. Like
those jet- setters who fly across the country on New Year’s Eve, we were
going to cheat time and celebrate the moment more than once. Asparagus
season, twice in one year: the dream vacation.
/We left Canada by way of Niagara Falls, pausing to contemplate this
churning cataract that has presented itself to humans down through the
ages as inspiration, honeymoon destination, and every so often a rip-
snorting carnival ride. We got ourselves soaked on the Maid of the Mist,
and pondered the derring- do of the fourteen men, two women, and one
turtle who have plunged over this crashing waterfall in conveyances in-
cluding wooden barrels, a giant rubber ball, a polyethylene kayak, a diving
bell, a jet- ski, and in one case only jeans and a lightweight jacket. Both
women and the turtle (reputed to be 105 years old) survived, as did nine
of the men, though the secret of success here is hard to divine. The jacket-
and- jeans guy made it; the jet- skier and the kayaker did not, nor did Wil-
liam “Red” Hill in his fancy rubber bubble. And a half- ton iron- bumpered
barrel that safely delivered the turtle failed to save his inventive human
companion.
If there seems to be, running through this book, a suggestion that hu-
mans are a funny animal when it comes to respecting our own best inter-
ests, I rest my case.