All Over Creation Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  first

  second

  third

  fourth

  fifth

  sixth

  seventh

  epilogue: daddy’s letter

  Acknowledgements

  Critical Acclaim for Ruth Ozeki and All Over Creation

  “[Ozeki] is a gifted storyteller.”

  —Los Angeles Times Book Review

  “Ruth Ozeki is bent on taking the novel into corners of American culture no one else has thought to look—but where she finds us in all our trans-cultural and technological weirdness. With a combination of humor and pathos that is all her own, All Over Creation brings the American pastoral forward into the age of agribusiness and genetic engineering. The result is a smart and compelling novel about a world we don’t realize we live in.”

  —Michael Pollan, author of The Botany of Desire

  “Ozeki joins the constellation of such environmentally aware writers as Barbara Kingsolver, Annie Proulx and Margaret Atwood, bringing her own shrewd and playful humor; luscious sexiness and kinetic pizzazz to the table, as well her keen interest in the interface between food, family, science and corporate greed, and the dynamics of spin . . . Ozeki nimbly switches points of view throughout this busy, darkly humorous and cunningly entertaining novel, weaving canny psychological insights into each twist in her purposeful yet anarchically tinged plot. Moving neatly between the intimate and the environmental, the familial and the global, Ozeki hones each vivid description, witty conversation and surprising occurrence to illuminate the complex dichotomies between love and responsibility, nature and culture, traditional and corporate agriculture, fact and fabrication.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “Ozeki deftly and sensitively folds the variegated topics together, whipping up a savory treat.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “A triumph that earns its inclusive title. All Over Creation naturally and joyfully folds concerns about genetically modified organisms into a powerful family drama set in rural Idaho. . . . Ozeki’s skill at weaving these together is extraordinary . . . Ozeki has created a novel at once educational and entertaining, with multidimensional characters and an engaging narrative voice. It will appeal to anyone interested in love or agriculture or politics or family drama or friendship or childhood or the earth. In short, its appeal is as wide as the creation it champions.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “All Over Creation opens wider with every plot twist as it moves from tenderness to comedy to sobering truth and the whole world in the eye of one family’s storm. This is Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang updated by thirty years, with modern environmental challenges on the map and women in the front seat, driving the story. Hooray—Ruth Ozeki rides again.”

  —Barbara Kingsolver, author of The Poisonwood Bible

  “Ruth Ozeki is the Bob Ross of literary fiction, full of quirky glee and a love for purity in her work and the world . . . [Ozeki] is an assured and talented writer, whose filmmaking background gives a cinematic sheen to All Over Creation that most PBS shows, not to mention most decent fiction, couldn’t hope to pull off. Despite the big-book trappings and Ozeki’s skill, though, the author’s most notable trait is a generous comedic and natural spirit.”

  —Ruminator Review

  “Ozeki’s latest takes on the politics of food with even more ferocity and panache. It’s a hyperactive farce but also a serious meditation on cross-breeding (people and plants) . . . All Over Creation resembles a Robert Altman film, all the characters bustling in their own orbits until they gracefully veer into each other . . . its joviality—the very thing that makes it such a fun read—leaves one feeling like nothing real’s at stake, which couldn’t be further from the truth.”

  —The Village Voice

  “Rare is the book that succeeds as indoctrination or instruction, while at the same time delivering indelible characters, pitch-perfect dialogue, wholly involving plot. Rare is a call to action delivered in supple, enduring prose. Ruth Ozeki’s second novel, All Over Creation, stands among that elite handful of books that both teach and inspire, chide and appease. . . . This novel is a tour de force—structurally sophisticated, conceptually sound, well-rooted in a concern for both people and the earth.”

  —The Baltimore Sun

  “This winning novel from the author of My Year of Meats is a feast of humor and wisdom about family and friendship.”

  —Glamour

  “A rare novel whose prose is as solid as its politics.”

  —The Philadelphia Inquirer

  “Beautiful . . . vast and lifelike . . . a modern epic”

  —The Boston Globe

  “A multidimensional, timely and entertaining novel.”

  —Boston Herald

  “Ozeki handles all this with a winning mixture of wit and tenderness. It’s a jungle of a plot, a riot of literary species, sown with strains of deadly satire and heartrending tragedy—winding around kitchen table discussions about family duty and through the international debate on genetically modified food. She’s as good with the broad comedy of wacky political protests as she is with the terrifying ramifications of genetic manipulation . . . But even after growing all over creation, Ozeki returns to her roots: the love between parents and children.”

  —The Christian Science Monitor

  “In this scampish, rather touching romp of a novel, Ruth Ozeki strikes a tone somewhere between Michael Pollan, Jane Smiley, Amy Tan, and Carl Hiaasen. All Over Creation is the best book I’ve ever read about potatoes, and it’s also good on what Saul Bellow called ‘potato love’—the kind that thrives in close, unpretentious families.”

  —Seattle Weekly

  “This quirky novel is bewitching . . . Ozeki’s story splices a bit of Edward Abbey into an Anne Tyler plot. The fruits of this mix are definitely worth tasting.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “A wise and witty morality tale.”

  —Seattle Post-Intelligencer

  “All Over Creation juggles politics with comedy, family struggles and romance gone awry. Through multiple points of view, Ozeki swirls around hot-button farming issues, circling in search of steady moral ground.”

  —The Oregonian (Portland)

  “Readers who appreciate strong female Asian American protagonists like those in works by Lois-Ann Yamanaka will find this novel engrossing. Highly recommended.”

  —Library Journal

  “Ozeki’s characters are utterly charming, and she writes with sensitivity and inventiveness about the complexities of love and nature, deftly humanizing the thorny issues raised by biotechnology with humor and panache in a tale rich in suspense and pathos.”

  —Booklist (starred review)

  “A feast for mind and heart.”

  —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

  “Ruth Ozeki is a writer of great passion and purpose. She fearlessly tackles big issues, stirs up revolutions, and unveils truths with keen insight and humor that touches our hearts and opens our minds.”

  —Gail Tsukiyama, author of The Samurai’s Garden

  “All Over Creation is a wholly original novel of amazing richness, a tapestry of zany characters who follow their own hearts and passions. With a natural storyteller’s ability to communicate both the hilarious and profound, Ozeki writes about love and sex, bioengineering and social responsibility, deftly communicating her uncanny feel for the texture of contemporary American life.”

  —Paula Sharp, author of Crows Over a Wheatfield

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  ALL OVER CREATION

  Ruth Ozeki, author of the award-winning novel My Y
ear of Meats, worked for more than a decade in television and film. Her documentary and dramatic films have been shown on PBS, at the Sundance Film Festival, and at colleges and universities across the country. She divides her time between New York City and British Columbia.

  www.ruthozeki.com

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  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published in the United States of America by Viking 2003

  Published in Penguin Books 2004

  Copyright © Ruth Ozeki Lounsbury, 2003

  All rights reserved

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product

  of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons,

  living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  eISBN : 978-0-142-00389-3

  CIP data available

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  for my father,

  who was always kind

  first

  Esto Perpetua (“May It Be Forever”)

  —Idaho state motto

  in the beginning

  It starts with the earth. How can it not? Imagine the planet like a split peach, whose pit forms the core, whose flesh its mantle, and whose fuzzy skin its crust—no, that doesn’t do justice to the crust, which is, after all, where all of life takes place. The earth’s crust must be more like the rind of the orange, thicker and more durable, quite unlike the thin skin of a bruisable peach. Or is it? Funny, how you never think to wonder.

  On one small section of that crust—small, that is, by global or geologic measure—in Power County, Idaho, where the mighty Snake River carved out its valley and where volcanic ash enriched the soil with minerals vital to its tilth, there stretched a vast tract of land known as Fuller Farms.

  Vast, by human scale. Vast, relative to other farmers’ holdings in the region, like the Quinns’ place down the road. And as for the description, “land belonging,” well that’s a condition measured in human time, too. But for one quick blip in the 5 billion years of life on this earth, that three thousand acres of potato-producing topsoil and debatably the slender cone of the planet that burned below, right down to the rigid center of its core, belonged to my father, Lloyd Fuller.

  It used to be the best topsoil around. Used to be feet of it, thick, loamy. There’s less of it now. But still, imagine you are a seed—of an apple, or a melon, or even the pit of a peach—spit from the lips of one of Lloyd’s crossbred grandchildren, arcing through the air and falling to earth, where you are ground into the soil, under a heel, to rest and overwinter. Months pass, and it is cold and dark. Then slowly, slowly, spring creeps in, the sun tickles the earth awake again, its warmth thaws the soil, and your coat, which has protected you from the winter frosts, now begins to crack. Oh, so tentatively you send a threadlike root to plumb the ground below, while overhead your pale shoot pushes up through the sedentary mineral elements (the silt, the sand, the clay), through the teeming community of microfauna (bacteria and fungi, the algae and the nematodes), past curious macrofauna (blind moles, furry voles, and soft, squirming earthworms). This is life in the Root Zone, nudging your tendril toward the warmth of the sunny sun sun.

  And then imagine the triumphant moment when you crack the crumbly crust, poke your wan and wobbling plumule head through the surface and start to unfurl—imagine, from your low and puny perspective, how vast Lloyd Fuller’s acreage must look to you now.

  Of course, during most of his tenure and the decades that followed, these three thousand acres were given over primarily to the planting of potatoes, which means that you, being a random seedling, a volunteer, an accidental fruit, will most likely be uprooted. Just as you turn your face into the rays and start to respire, maybe even spread out a leaf or two and get down to the business of photosynthesizing—grrrrrip, weeded right out of there. Sayonara, baby.

  That’s what it felt like when I was growing up, like I was a random fruit in a field of genetically identical potatoes. Burbanks—that’s what people planted. Centuries of cross-pollination, human migration, plant mutation, and a little bit of backyard luck had resulted in the pride of Idaho, the world’s best baker, the Russet Burbank. From one side of the state to the other spread a glorious monoculture of these large, white, long-bodied tubers with rough, reticulated skin, high in solids content with a mealy texture when cooked and a pleasing potatoey flavor.

  Honestly, I never liked potatoes much. I preferred rice, a taste I inherited from my mother, Momoko, and which, in a state of spuds, was tantamount to treason. Momoko used to make me rice balls, the size of fingerlings, to take to school in my lunch box. Lloyd called them “Tokyo tubers”—this was his idea of a joke—and when I was a little girl, I thought it was pretty funny, too. I used to look forward to lunchtime, opening my plastic Barbie box, where, nestled next to a slice of meat loaf or ham, I’d find the two little o-musubi sitting neatly side by side. They tasted faintly salty, like Momoko’s small hands. If the other kids thought my lunch was queer, they didn’t say much, because Lloyd Fuller had more acres, and thus more potatoes, than almost any other farmer in Power County, and I was Yummy, his only child.

  No one said much either when Lloyd brought my mom home from Japan after the war, at least not to his face. Just that she was the cutest thing they had ever seen, so delicate and fragile looking, like a china doll, and how was she ever going to handle the work of running a farm? But she did. Lloyd had inherited five hundred acres, adjacent to the Quinns’ place and up from where the Snake River was dammed, and he and Momoko rolled up their sleeves and went to work. People used to smile, call them Mutt and Jeff, because Lloyd was one of the tallest men in Power County and Momoko bought her work clothes in the little boys’ department at Sears. You can imagine the two of them, standing in the fields, side by side, Lloyd as tall as a runner bean stalk and Momoko barely coming up to his buckle. Dressed in jeans turned up at the cuff and hanging from her shoulders by suspenders, she looked like Lloyd’s son instead of his wife. The son they never had. After twelve years of trying, they had me instead—named me Yumi, only nobody in Liberty Falls could say it right. Yummy, yummy, yummy, I got love in my tummy. People said I was the apple of Lloyd’s eye, the pride of his heart, until I went rotten.

  As it turned out, Momoko was a born gardener, or, as Cassie Quinn’s mom used to put it, “She may be yeller, but her thumb sure is green.” Maybe this was meant to be a compliment, and we all took it that way. Over the years Momoko’s kitchen garden grew into a vegetative wonder, and she planted varieties of fruits
and flowers that no one had ever seen before in Power County. I remember her whispering to her pea vines as they curled their way up her trellises: “Gambatte ne, tané-chan!” “Be strong, my little seedling!” People drove for miles to see her Oriental ornamentals and Asian creepers. Their massy inflorescence burst into bloom in the spring and stayed that way throughout summer and deep into the fall. It was truly exotic.

  Momoko must have been proud of Fuller Farms, in the early days. Lloyd surely was. In the first years of their marriage, they battled droughts and early freezes, mildews and viruses and parasites, and a host of pests that nobody could imagine why God had even bothered to create:

  Seedcorn maggots, leatherjackets, and millipedes.

  Thrips and leafhoppers.

  False cinch bugs, blister beetles, and two-spotted spider mites.

  Hornworms, wireworms, white grubs, and green peach aphids, not to mention corky ringspot . . .

  And, most dreadful of all, the rapacious Colorado potato beetle.

  All these creatures were dealt with, and thank God for science.