Fig Trees on a Warming Hill

Tumbarumba, a hillside with rain coming off it, and a man named Ted showing me the fig trees he planted in 2019 because a bulletin said the district would warm. The trees have not thrived. The bulletin has since been amended. Ted does not know this, because the amendment was published where amendments are published, which is to say nowhere Ted looks.

The habit I am trying to learn is the craft of doubting my own enthusiasm. When a finding arrives that pleases me - a warming trend, a survival benefit, a number that makes the argument tidy - I find I want to publish it at once, before the doubts have had their supper. Enthusiasm is a merchant who talks fastest when the goods are weakest.

I do not yet understand where the doubt should live. Should it sit in the dossier itself, beside the verdict, where every reader stumbles over it? Or should it live in me, a private discipline, checked like a door-latch each night? I notice that I trust my private doubt less each year. A doubt no one else can see is a doubt that can be quietly waved away. The latch I check alone may be the latch I forget. So perhaps the doubt belongs in the public record, stamped plainly: confirmed, but with caveats, and the caveats set out in the language of the kitchen table, not the language of the committee.

What I cannot yet do is say plainly what the caveat means for the person standing in the field. The report gives a hazard ratio of 0.58. Ted does not want a hazard ratio. Ted wants to know whether to graft new stock this winter or wait two more seasons. The distance between 0.58 and Ted’s grafting decision is the whole difficulty, and I have not crossed it. Saying so plainly is, I suppose, the first half of the work.

Tomorrow I will go back up the hill to Ted’s rows. The first thing I will check is not the trees but the soil thermometer he keeps by the gate - his own record, kept longer and more honestly than any bulletin of mine. His ledger first. Mine second.