I work at a regional campus, what used to be called “a branch,” though one might aptly say “tentacle.” Or, because my regional campus until recently has had its own regional campus, which was called a “center,” despite being a margin, one might call my campus a “metacarpal” and the “center” a “phalange.” In truth, we at the regional campus are a colonial outpost, a middle station leading to the inner station of the supposed center, which has recently been sold and replaced with a basement room at the Sheriff’s Department, a room which we who come from the regional campus rent two nights a week to teach college curriculum to high school students or high school curriculum to college students.
If the now nonexistent center at the margins can be said to occupy a suburb of the fastest growing city in my state, my regional campus can be said to occupy an exurb, a farm community where few people farm and most of the acreage has been sold as roadside frontage in half-acre lots of Amish-built prefab country-style homes that serve as a scattershot bedroom community for people who commute to a variety of jobs in the city, the vortex of which pulls in their pickups and SUVs every morning then, Charybdis-like, slowly regurgitates the commuters every afternoon. If the main campus to the southeast—and not our largest city to the northwest—can be said to be our colonial metropole, our metropole is otherwise a shrinking Appalachian town in southeastern hill country zoned extraction—the campus itself a small, environmentally right-minded terrarium in what our national agenda quietly designates abandoned strip mine and occasional source of votes.
My regional campus, non-residential, has two buildings, three parking lots, a creek called Fetter’s Run, and a historic covered bridge occupying more than one hundred acres of grass, city bike path, and small woods separating the campus from a hilltop rural suburb of cul-de-sacs, small yards, and tarp-covered UTVs parked beside attached garages.
Keeping in mind our ample arable acreage, one day more than a decade ago some colleagues and I decided our campus should have a vegetable garden.
Because I am a Polish intellectual redneck who grew up among the Amish and who knows nothing about public relations, the garden design disregarded the usual PR furniture of geometrically boxed raised beds and placards in favor of a mostly hand-tilled 30X40 foot rectangle of cheap metal poles, plastic deer fence, newspaper, and straw, wherein students from various classes planted, weeded, and picked produce for a local soup kitchen. The garden was a success and, in its first year, cost under $200. In the summers, volunteer students and I carried buckets of nitrogen-rich water (i.e., farm-polluted run-off) from Fetter’s Run, until a physical plant employee informed us of an unused well and helped us get running an electric pump to send water to a long-dormant spigot near the growing space.
After two years of our simple, mostly cost-free gardening, a new physical plant director was hired, and he devised a plan with the dean to build a parking lot on the south end of the building. The garden would have to be moved. The full verdict was that we could not add bees to the garden—anaphylaxis, litigation, curb appeal, campus mission, and “Who will collect the honey?”—and the garden must be relocated.
An unused sand volleyball court was chosen for the new garden location. Our helpful facilities employees used a loader to remove the sand, and plans were made to move topsoil left over from the bike path project into the void that was left. All of which satisfied my frugality and disinclination to cause unnecessary trouble. A garden committee and I made plans to add small plots by faculty and staff volunteers, who would have a contest to see who could grow the most produce for the local soup kitchen, and all proceeded according to plan, at least until, in the eleventh hour, the physical plant director spent thousands of dollars on a combination of wood chips and human waste, a fertilizer that the physical plant director thought would make good soil. Facilities employees, ready to move the free topsoil but then told not to bother, collectively shook their heads, and amid the stench of urinary ammonia and vegetable death caused by the costly plan to fertilize the soilless former volleyball court, the garden contest was canceled and the regional campus gardeners spent three years composting unused produce from a local supermarket to regrow the earth.
In addition to gardening, I practice martial arts at a local dojo and, for several years, I tested my karate against a former student’s combination of Taekwondo and street fighting in kumite three times a week. One cold autumn day after sparring in a secluded section of campus lawn, my sparring partner and I decided that, rather than running, we would carry some boxes of rotting supermarket fruits and vegetables up the hill to the still-unused topsoil pile, where I had started a new compost heap away from campus buildings. After three trips with boxes up the hill, we were physically spent and decided the drive the remaining boxes of produce up the hill in my Chevy Prizm, both of us thoroughly grass-stained and lathered from the fray in our rat-torn gi and sweatshirts, his like Rocky Balboa and mine like some bald, much larger, and ogrish cousin of Bob Dylan when he is jogging.
Our attire and propensity for driving on grass, which is otherwise driven on most of the summer during a local music festival, turned out to be another in a long line of public relations errors on my part, when a local dog walker unaffiliated with the campus berated us for dumping, as if our composting pomegranates and bell peppers, looking as we looked, was somehow synonymous with our discarding mattresses or car batteries on a high school football field. Having already spent forty-five minutes hitting one another, my fellow composter and I escaped physical altercation with the Samaritan, but not without a lesson in the socially acceptable uses of public space, one of many related lessons learned repeatedly over my nine years of vegetable gardening on the regional campus. These lessons include the following:
Parking lots are good, beekeeping bad, Joni Mitchell be damned.
Expensive fertilizer is good, free topsoil bad.
Dog shit is good, compost bad.
Asphalt cooking next to classrooms is good,…
Have I forgotten to mention the asphalt cooking?
An entity from the state cooks asphalt in a poorly ventilated section of one of our two regional campus classroom buildings and we get paid next to nothing for letting them use the space. When subaltern faculty and staff from our colony began developing migraines from asphalt fumes entering the building ventilation, mostly untenured employees spent three years trying to be heard, only to be told by a main-campus engineering professor in a hazmat suit that the fumes pose no long- or short-term dangers to humans. A roundtable was convened, the first thirty minutes of which were spent listening to a main-campus administrator extol the public virtues of asphalt, which she had just learned; and without even a round-robin reading of the Wikipedia page on the Interstate Highway Acts, the matter was temporarily resolved by physical plant employees, who covered intake vents with cardboard and duct tape until a time more convenient for partial improvements to regional campus ventilation to work their way up the institution’s deferred maintenance list.
The garden is gone, along with part of the woods above Fetter’s Run. These two developments are, if related at all, related ideologically. The woods, a legal nuisance because of dead trees and summer festival goers’ love for hammocks, was clearcut and replaced with drainage using funds acquired by a non-university entity through a grant from the state, the state which now cancels diversity-related events. The non-university entity that cut the trees exercises sovereignty over part of the regional campus property, and the mowing and pay associated with care of the property has been taken away from the facilities employees, who continue to collectively shake their heads and ask their union for the work that is contractually theirs.
The garden, however, ended a few years after the regional campus and main campus switched to semesters to follow the lead of another university, which resides in the fastest growing major city in the state.
This essay is a work of nonfiction. I would call this essay “creative nonfiction,” but I have redirected most of my creative energy to gardening and occasionally raising poultry on the back four of private property I own with my wife in a rural suburb of the birthplace of Zane Grey and a sex worker named Jumbo with whom Grey once fornicated, causing local public scandal in the years before Riders of the Purple Sage.
Public gardening is exhausting. Terry Tempest Williams has left the program she started at the University of Utah; at the time of my writing this, Wendell Berry is 91 years old; and Will Allen’s Growing Power has declared bankruptcy. I must admit that, for me at least, the new agrarianism has lost its newness, and I am back to frequent re-readings of Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day and to watching episodes of Columbo and Murder, She Wrote on Tubi. I do not mind the ads. The whole geography of my world is ad space.
But one day about ten years ago I was dropping produce at Foundation Dinners. It was the magic hour, and in the gloaming, a nearby glass factory looked like the rooftop where Roger Moore unceremoniously killed Blofeld in For Your Eyes Only. As I was arranging, on a picnic table out front of the soup kitchen, some honeydew-looking melons—grown from seed smuggled in by a retired Classics professor who had just returned from an archaeological dig in Greece—a meth head in his early twenties, riding a little girl’s bike with tassels on the handlebars, coasted in and started circling me like a shark, muttering something I could not understand. Eventually he rode away, and I returned to my car, and as I sat in my car digging for an appropriate CD—my car still had a CD player—a kid of maybe nine or ten rode up on another bike, this one with a basket, and filled the basket with grocery-store plastic bagsful of tomatoes and peppers and zucchini. Already deeply cynical, I doubted the kid’s intentions—I have seen children collect produce donations to throw at one another—so I watched this kid as he continued down the street, fully loaded.
The kid rode past a corner where I have witnessed drug deals in the middle of the day and past a house where a local resident every year grows sunflowers ten feet high, and as the kid rounded the corner, I drove down the street, not so much in pursuit, but just heading home along the same street, and I reached the corner previously rounded by the produce kid as the kid rounded another corner near a house with a vintage country music record sales sign mounted above a porch filled with hoarding and overgrown with weeds. The kid turned into an alley near the YMCA, and, now curious, I continued to follow at a distance until I saw him stop in front of a house with vinyl siding pockmarked in a Poisson distribution from some previous hail. The kid grabbed all the produce from the bike basket, three or four of the skin-colored plastic bags hanging from the fingers on both his hands, and walked, shoulders slumped from the weight, up to the porch of the house and, with considerable effort, through the screen door and the heavier door behind.
What is allowed in a bicycle basket? And what is allowed on the regional campus? Food? Soil? Mutually beneficial labor?
What even is allowed on the main campus?
Once during a visit to the main campus, I was asked if I wanted to see a campus garden kept by some graduate students in Biology and Environmental Studies. The garden was hidden behind a wall of live bamboo—which, in my state, is an invasive species—so that the garden’s growing could not be claimed to interfere with a local campus lawn. The garden, even here in the supposed metropole, the colonial hub, snug within one of the scattered terraria of the greater Appalachian extraction zone, must be hidden from Samaritanism. Here in the main campus garden, surrounded by food, the graduate students become just a few more derelicts on bikes. Rednecks without a proper appreciation for ad space.
Anaphylaxis. Litigation.
Curb appeal. Campus mission.
And who will collect the honey?
Matt Wanat’s (he/him) books include Breaking Down Breaking Bad and The Films of Clint Eastwood, and Wanat has published critical essays, encyclopedia articles, reviews, and book chapters on a variety of authors and filmmakers. Wanat’s publications of fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction are available in The Wayfarer, Coffin Bell, The Wax Paper, and Pennsylvania English. Wanat resides in rural southeastern Ohio.
May, Stephen. 2000. Maverick Heart: The Further Adventures of Zane Grey. Athens: Ohio University Press. May discusses Pearl Zane’s father’s opposition to his fishing, incidents of corporal punishment in the family, and a particularly prickly incident involving Pearl’s being arrested for an underage visit to a Zanesville brothel “proprietress” named “Jumbo” (May 2000, 17–19).
Hulse, Megan. “Terry Tempest Williams’ Resignation Shames The U.” The Daily Utah Chronicle, May 30, 2016. Accessed February 23, 2026. dailyutahchronicle.com/2016/05/31/terry-tempest-williams-resignation-shames-the-u/.
Hauer, Sarah. “Growing Power Founder Will Allen to Retire as Nonprofit’s Debts Mount.” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, November 20, 2017. Accessed February 23, 2026. emke.uwm.edu/entry/growing-power-inc/.
