loading . . . Review of Sourland Book Cover ISBN “You probably have the wrong idea about outlaws,” Ariel Delgado Dixon says at the beginning of her second novel, Sourland. “It’s true that a single harvest might net you enough to disappear and live large, for a while… It’s truer that a single night will cost you.” Set in the extralegal backcountry of Humboldt County in far Northern California, Sourland is the name of a weed farm run by an enigmatic older woman named Sapphire. She lives there with her girlfriend, Frankie, and a seasonal rotation of drifters, stoners, cheats, and idealists who work as trimmers during the harvest season. Frankie is a former ballerina from San Francisco who follows Sapphire home after a disastrous performance, and the one-night stand turns into five years as Frankie accustoms herself to life on the farm. And it’s a hard life, with days that begin at sunup and end after ten pm, the night work lit by truck headlights as the season reaches its peak. Dixon does not shy away from the grueling physical toll of raising not only weed but cows, pigs, chickens, and goats, of trying to coax one more year out of ageing farm equipment held together with duct tape and hope. Nor does she sugarcoat the inherent dangers of growing an illegal crop that can be felled by any of a dozen different threats: feds, thieves (who might also be your workers), nosy neighbors, drought, mold, fire, supply chain collapse (read: your connection in the city turned state’s evidence), violence, poor yield, or any random act of God. If I’d ever had any fantasies of growing my own cash crop (and for the record, Officer, I do not) this book would have dispelled them all. But through it all Sapphire and Frankie scrape and toil and persist, that is, until a young man named Fizz washes up from Idaho, starts sleeping with Sapphire, and throws off the fragile balance of the whole operation. Soon after the three make an uneasy throuple, Sapphire disappears, and the central question of the novel becomes, whose vision for the farm will win out—Frankie’s or Fizz’s—and ultimately, what’s it all worth? Dixon has a prodigious skill for writing the complicated dynamics between lovers. When Fizz usurps Frankie—literally displacing her from the bed she’d shared with Sapphire and forcing her to move into a derelict Windjammer trailer in the yard—Frankie is understandably upset. But she also displays a stunning amount of compassion and love, for it’s ultimately always Sapphire’s happiness that Frankie is after. The picture muddies even further when Frankie realizes that Fizz loves Sapphire too. When Sapphire disappears Frankie has to make some hard decisions about whether she’ll stay on at Sourland, find Sapphire, and keep the farm going as she’d intended, or else cut her losses and run. Sourland is a sweaty, physical novel that wrings a lot of descriptive juice out of the quotidian grit of farming. Dixon is a farmer herself (as well as a professor of English at Smith College), and she leans hard into that knowledge. Some of the most beautiful passages in the novel happen when Frankie is alone with the plants and animals under her care. “I was learning to read the increments of the plants and animals around me. I understood the lashes of grass as they grew or stalled, the texture of mastitis in a teat, the lean of a dehydrated stem…I sensed a fluency at my disposal. A new kind of wakefulness.” And as Frankie learns the farm she learns Sapphire as well. Sapphire is a lifelong Humboldt resident, a child of hippies who grew up on a communal farm selling and trading homegrown goods, including pot. Unlike the other people who drift in and out of the area, to Sapphire weed isn’t a job or a get-rich-quick scheme or a way to thumb her nose at the government—though it is, of course, all of those things—but it’s also settled deep into the history of the land she calls hers, in the wind and the water and the soil. You get the feeling she’d grow weed whether there was a market for it or not, for the same reason bees make honey or beavers build dams. In a new economy where cannabis is a viable and, sort-of legal, business, Dixon shows us some of the people who were already there, sweating under the tree canopy, always listening for helicopters, their crops as much a part of the American farm landscape as corn or wheat. With dank prose that is as rich as the ripest bud, Sourland is a dirty, sexy novel of ambition and alliances, hunger and lust, with notes of salt and blood on the tongue and a clean finish that’ll leave you wanting more. Elizabeth Gonzalez James is the Porter Square Books Writer in Residence for Adults and the author of the novels Mona at Sea & The Bullet Swallower, as well as the chapbook, Five Conversations About Peter Sellers. Her stories and essays have appeared in The Idaho Review, Southern Humanities Review, The Rumpus, StorySouth, PANK, and elsewhere, and have received numerous Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominations. Originally from South Texas, Elizabeth now lives with her family in Massachusetts. Back to The Porter Square Review of Books. https://portersquarebooks.com/blog/review-sourland
