Windfall

"Behold, the fruits of my labor!"

Mariana was a professional. And professionals do not roll their eyes or let annoyance creep into their expression. Professionals smile politely.

Mariana smiled politely at the gringo showing her two handfuls of blueberries. "Thank you for taking time out of your day to talk with me Mr. Johnson."

Mr. Johnson was standing in front of what Mariana presumed was a barn with "Green Acres" painted across the side. Mariana felt flush from the long ride into the foothills. At least she could look forward to an mostly downhill ride home.

"Oh you can call be Bill. Everyone here does." Bill gestured vaguely behind Mariana to the main cluster of sheds and cottages. They were standing among rows of low blueberry bushes next to a young orchard: a few rows of trees not yet old enough to bear fruit. "It's a joke, 'fruits of my labor' is a common saying. Anyways." Bill let out a soft sigh that his humor was apparently wasted.

"Mmhm." Mariana had gotten used to the idioms that litter English and was even fond of puns from her time in the former States for undergrad and then grad school. That felt like a lifetime ago.

"Quite the setup you have here."

"Yeah, it's a start. Not bad for five years, all things considered." Bill had a crooked smile which may have been charming in his younger years. "Say, Willow said you're a journalist. What site are you from?"

"No, not quite. I work for the Office of Settlement and Re-Education. Don't worry, the Re-Education part isn't as scary as it sounds."

Bill didn't look entirely convinced. "Hm. Not ICE or whatever you call it here?"

"No Mr. Johnson, we do not have ICE here."

"That doesn't mean everyone in your government is happy I..." he gestured to the low houses again, "we are here."

"No, it doesn't." She kept her professional mask on well. "My department is tasked with finding out what worked well for established immigrants so that we can better assist new arrivals. The transition can be difficult."

Bill did not care to respond to that. Mariana knew from her background research that Bill had emigrated almost seven years after she had. Things had been getting bad for a while when Mariana's sister finally convinced her to come home, she couldn't imagine sticking it out for another half of a decade.

One thing that pushed Mariana to leave was the fear that her homeland would follow the course of the States and completely shut down all immigration, leaving her forever an expat. At the time it seemed so certain, so vivid, that every country would cave to its most base tendencies of isolation, fear, and distrust. Luckily the States became the outlier, not the norm.

Bill, Mariana knew, could likely never go home: he was a citizen of a country that no longer exists. And it's replacement valued isolation to the point of making immigration functionally impossible no matter your history of family ties. The only real exception seemed to be wealth.

"And we have heard," Mariana continued, "that your commune here has been quite the success story. I'd like to know a bit more about it if you don't mind."

Bill looked faraway, lost in thought, so Mariana pushed a little more, "Your story here could really help others like you. You could do a lot of good."

Mariana wasn't sure if he really trusted her, but his desire to talk about his commune and farm won out over whatever distrust he had for the government she represented.

Bill motioned for her to follow him. "Sure, I'll show you around a bit." He turned his back and started walking, "It's the slow season so most folks are traveling or visiting family. Those that stuck around are in town for the farmer's market today, but we can circle back to the common hall when we're done."

They started to climb uphill; the commune sat on a gentle, north-facing slope which made for excellent sun. On the ridge stood a line of windmills; alabaster trunks stretching into the blue sky. The windmills were of the old style; Mariana figured they may even be from before the collapse. The breeze was light; the gentle "swoosh" of the blades faded into the background noise of insects and birds.

"You can see the mills; the old owner leased his land to the power coop and made a pretty penny off it. For years he also grazed cattle here until those prices cratered. Guess we couldn't afford steaks every night up north anymore once things started to unravel. There's still a few steer wandering around."

"Are these how you get your power?" Mariana craned her neck to see the top of the closest mill, feeling vertigo from the immense scale.

"Ha, that would be nice, but no. We never put together the cash to tie into the grid. But we've got enough solar and batteries to get by. I hear it used to get chillier here, but cold hasn't really been a problem."

"The summers don't bother you?"

"Ah you know, some like hot," the corner of Bill's mouth twitched, "It's a movie. Never mind. Nah, most of the houses are dug into the hillside so that they stay cool enough. Can't say that was the case for our first summer with our tents and first cabin.

"Back then, when we first arrived, we were squatters really. Just trying to find a place. Willow is the one that worked out the deal with the owner. Basically just said, 'hey, we'll be less smelly than the cows and keep squatters off your land.' Ha, other squatters I guess.

"So we rounded up a few other refugees we had met at the shelters and hostels, anyone able to get some credit and willing to pitch in. A few of the folks in town even joined. We pooled our money and all bought in together. Willow had the idea to have the old owner buy a share too. He probably thought it was nuts at first, buying back a share in his own property, but it really got him involved. Invested."

The came to a stand of gnarled apple trees, the blooms gone and the first fruit starting to form. They were much older than the trees closer to the cottages. Bill gestured to the trees.

"It was tough that first summer. We didn't know what to do. All that was here was cow shit and this old orchard. Turns out we weren't the homesteaders we thought we were. Back home I had been a project lead at a consulting firm that specialized in..."

Mariana kept what she hoped was an interested expression on her face and nodded along.

"Anyways," Bill finally moved on, "we didn't even have ladders to harvest apples!"

Bill put a hand on the trunk of one of the trees and looked up. "We wouldn't have had anything if it wasn't for one of those big storms rolling through right at peak harvest time. It knocked down most of the ripe fruit and we could just pick up, easy as can be. Ha, I guess you could say it was a real windfall."

"Mhmm, yes," Mariana the professional kept her voice even. "And what do you think would have made your first season here easier?"

Bill chuckled, "Anything. Everything. We didn't know shit. Even the local recruits: they weren't farmers. They were middle class folks just like us, trying to figure out how to adapt. It really felt like things were changing so fast. I guess they still are.

"We didn't have money. Or at least not enough. Aside from Willow we didn't even speak the same language. We had seeds and had watched videos online and had read 'Little House on the Prairie' in school. Oh, sorry, you probably haven't heard of that book.

"We lucked out with this land. There's a spring nearby. We can walk to town for odd jobs, and the folks here are kind. Our first crop was a disaster: the soil was shitty and all of our seeds were for cooler climates and needed a bunch of bullshit to keep the bugs and fungus and all that off. We came here thinking we could just plant our own Eden, but we only got by thanks to government assistance.

Luckily the old owner helped us out, got us some native seeds and showed us how to compost all the cow manure, the one thing we had in spades. Ha, I guess now the soil really is shitty."

Mariana wiped some sweat off her brow. She was fairly fit for middle age, she liked to think, but judging from Bill not even being short of breath, she realized he had been working hard. Maybe he was some pudgy middle manager in a previous life; now his muscles looked as gnarled as the ancient apple trees as they climbed the slope.

Beyond the orchard, the slope was terraced with retaining walls built out of what Mariana assumed were found rocks. There were rows of plants in various stages of growth and of a large variety. It all looked rather haphazard to Mariana and lacked the uniformity of the mono culture farms she remembered driving past in the States.

"Here's most of our growing land. Took damn near forever to build up all these walls and infill with compost. Oh, and bio-char. Andrés figured that one out. The forest you biked through on your way in? We manage a good chunk of that. We pull out the invasive trees or anything newly dead, chip it, and put it through the kiln. Makes for really rich soil."

Mariana smiled, a genuine smile, "It's a great way to sequester carbon too. Are you aware of our grant programs available to support sequestration?"

"Haha, yeah, that's how we built the kiln. Don't worry, one skill we have never been short on is being able to do a lot of bullshit paperwork." Bill glanced at Mariana's clipboard, "eh, no offense."

"None taken, we don't like all the paperwork either."

Bill cleared his throat, "We're doing good now. I think this year we'll add another terrace but honestly we are just about hitting capacity." Bill had a look of pride. "We eat about a third of what we grow and trade the rest in town here, but I don't know how many more veggies they can eat. We can't just keep expanding endlessly, at least when it comes to farming."

Mariana nodded her head. "Willow mentioned you all were diversifying a bit."

"Yeah, that was always the plan for Willow. Now that we've established the fields," he gestured broadly around them, "there honestly just isn't that much work unless it's planting or harvesting time. Nothing we do is going to make the plants grow faster, so in the downtime folks have naturally started following their interests. It's taken some getting used to."

"Can you tell me a bit more about some of the projects?"

"Sure, let's see," Bill began ticking his fingers as he enumerated the projects, "Willow has her student exchange program and just joined the local garden club. Andrés has been building all of our furniture and we just went in together to get him a mill so he can start making his own lumber here. I've become the de-facto chef and I'm not even half that bad at it. We've got a retired engineer who is working on connecting all of our solar setups together; he promises we can use the extra power to have hot showers. We were thinking of offering the vacant house for an artist residency. What else?" Bill trailed off for a bit, absent-mindedly plucking a few sprouting weeds from the nearest bed.

"I saw a few buildings that didn't look like houses on the way in." Mariana prompted, still jotting down a few notes.

"Oh, yeah, it seems like we can always use a bit more space. Most of that is storage, we do a lot of canning and even a bit of brewing when we get a bumper crop. Oh, and you probably saw the wood-shop.

"So, you really think your 're-education' department is going to help folks out?" Bill was looking right at Mariana now. His face was creased with age and a perpetual tan.

She held his gaze, "I really do Bill. We have a lot of rural communities that have been shrinking away for decades; small towns with rich land but not much else."

"You're sounding like a city slicker," Bill interrupted, then reconsidered, "not that unlike me not that long ago."

Mariana nodded, "Always will be. We're working on cities too, but I wanted a change from urban planning for a bit, get some fresh air.

"Our department has been buying up plots to help establish cooperatives like yours. Seeing what you have here..." Mariana took a long view of the slope, "we need to work on local buy-in. And some sort of knowledge exchange. Would you be interested in visiting a few? We could send you on a bit of a tour as the first round of farms are established? Willow and Andrés too of course."

"You're kidding? Me? Yeah, sure, why not." Bill chuckled, "Wow, looks like I'm back to consulting after all. I didn't see that coming. You're actually serious?"

"Yes. Look around: this is quite impressive given what you started with."

"Thanks! It's good to hear that validation after these years struggling."

Bill took his wide brim cap off, "You know, I never really thought I'd be a farmer, but here I am. And I feel like I finally have it down, like I have a real knack at it." Bill was grinning ear to ear. Mariana had a sense that even this felt like false humility to him, like Bill was holding his hubris back even now. "I mean, look where I am now!"

But she had to give it to him, the farmstead here was certainly impressive all things considered. And it would be a boon if they could replicate the success of Green Acres elsewhere.

"Yes," Mariana put on her best serious, thoughtful face, and made sure that she caught Bill's eye, "you are truly out standing in your field."