An Expert in Bananas

I became an expert in Puerto Rican agriculture sometime between buying a farm and learning the difference between a banana and a plantain.

This interval was brief.

In my first year at Copper Hill, I went to visit the neighbors at Hacienda Frontera. We walked through the plantings: coffee, fruit, and the assortment of things that will grow on a tropical mountainside if given soil, rain, and a limited respect for property lines.

We were talking about crops.

I had opinions.

My agricultural knowledge was developing rapidly. My confidence had arrived considerably earlier.

Then I pointed at a plantain and called it a banana.

The neighbors laughed, without cruelty: the laughter of people who had just discovered that the newcomer to the mountain farm had reached the mountains several hundred acres ahead of his education.

I accepted the correction. Further discussion seemed unlikely to improve my position.

···

From a distance, the mistake was reasonable.

Bananas and plantains rise from the ground with the same extravagant leaves. They bend under familiar-looking bunches. To someone raised in Maine, both plants announce themselves as tropical, which once seemed like a sufficiently precise category.

The distinction becomes more important when you're responsible for growing them.

On Copper Hill, there are plantains and bananas of several kinds: red bananas, ice cream bananas, and others whose names reached the mountain long before I did. They do not ripen at the same pace or enter the kitchen in the same way. A plant that looked decorative to me was food, timing, propagation, memory, and work to someone who knew it.

The farm repeated this lesson with unreasonable patience.

Coffee trees that looked alike carried different histories. A cane that appeared harmless could put me in goggles and a raincoat for a month. A patch of forest that looked wild contained old roads, planted mangos, stone patios, and the remains of agricultural decisions made generations before I arrived.

The mountain withheld nothing. I had simply not learned how much I was walking past.

···

The dangerous period in any new undertaking comes slightly later than the laughter. You have learned enough vocabulary to conceal the ignorance, especially from yourself.

I had spent a career being paid for judgment: enter an unfamiliar situation, find the governing facts, reach a conclusion before the room did. The habit had served me well in finance.

Agriculture did not object to the method. It objected to the timetable.

A spreadsheet will tolerate a conclusion delivered before lunch. A tree operates under no similar obligation.

Years later, I can name far more of what grows at Copper Hill. I can also name more of what I do not know. The second list has expanded faster.

The neighbors remained neighbors, and the plantains remained plantains.

Unfortunately, I still had quite a few opinions.