The Green River Melon Fields

The road arrives from the west, out of the San Rafael Swell, where the earth is folded like a blanket thrown down in a hurry and never smoothed. For a long stretch there is nothing but juniper, rabbitbrush, and the long red shoulders of rock, and the light is so dry it makes everything look as though it has been left out in the sun since the beginning. Then the bridge. The interstate lifts over the river, and below it the water runs wide and slow, the color of old bottle glass, and beyond the water the first perfect rows of green appear — not a garden, not a park, but acre after acre of melon vines laid flat along the floodplain.

The town of Green River is a small knot of houses, motels, and railroad tracks pinned between the river and the cliffs. The Book Cliffs hang over the north side of the valley like a weather system that decided to become geology instead. The San Rafael Swell hulks to the west. By almost every measure this is desert: the rainfall is a rumor, the soil is mostly sand and gravel, and the summer afternoons climb past a hundred degrees without apologizing. Yet the river, carrying snowmelt down from the Wyoming mountains, stops here long enough to make a green exception. The farmers have never let it forget.

A Green So Unlikely

Seen from the bridge, the fields are a shock. The red country runs right up to the edge of an irrigation ditch, and then, without any transition, the desert stops and the melon rows begin — endless parallel lines of vine running toward the river, each one an argument that water explains more than weather. The leaves are a deep, dusty green. The fruit sits out in the open rows, round and heavy, the skins striped and netted and, in the right light, almost glowing.

Green River has been growing melons on this ground for as long as anyone can remember. The railroad is the reason. Trains needed a stop between the mountains and the coast, and a stop needed water, and water was the one thing the river could provide in abundance. The town grew up beside the rails, and the melon fields grew up with it. The reputation traveled east on the very tracks that built the town, and in the cities the name of the place became a promise: Green River melons, “the sweet ones from the desert.”

The crop is cantaloupes and watermelons, mostly, the rows divided between them. There are other things in the fields too — because any farmer who grows melons in this country grows other things as well — but the melons are the point, the thing that has a season and a festival and a reputation the way some towns have a mountain.

The Water Work

The fields depend on a system as old as the oldest ditch. Above the town the river is drawn off into canals; the canals feed smaller ditches; the ditches run between the rows, and the farmer at the upper end of a field holds the water’s schedule in his head. He opens the headgate, the water moves, and for a day or two the rows drink. The cycle repeats all summer, timed to the heat. The sand drains fast, so the water must come often. The nights cool fast, so the sugar concentrates in the fruit. That is the whole trick of a desert melon, and it cannot be copied in a wetter place, where the conditions are too easy.

Water here is not a backdrop; it is the argument, the oldest one in the West. The river is not especially large, and its water is measured, shared, and fought over in the ancient Western way, but in this stretch it is generous enough. The fields spread the width of the valley, and every one of them is flat as a table, leveled by floods that came down the canyon for a million years and laid down the sand that makes the melons possible. The river built the ground it waters. That is not the usual order of things.

The people who work the fields are not many, and most come from families that have been at it for generations. They are out in the early morning, before the heat has its say. The pickers move down the rows with the sun low over the Book Cliffs, working the melons loose, loading them into the back of a truck. By ten o’clock the work has a hurry to it. By noon the ground between the rows is hot enough to burn through a boot sole, and the air shimmers over the vines. The melons themselves hold. A melon in the morning is heavy and cool from the night, and holding one makes the arithmetic of the place plain: the desert gives its days, the river keeps its cool, and the fruit is where the two meet.

The Sweet Season

September is the month, when all that summer work comes due. The fruit stands appear along the highway — plywood tables under tarps, melons stacked in pyramids of green and striped rind. The stands sell by size and weight, and there is no arguing with a good one. Cut open, a cantaloupe from Green River is dense and perfumed, the flesh the color of late apricot. Split, a watermelon is crimson under a pale rind, cold from the shade it has been sitting in.

Melon Days is the town’s way of keeping the season honest. In September the main street closes off, a parade makes its slow turn, and tables groan under cut fruit. The slices go out free or close to it, and people stand in the street with juice running down their wrists, spitting seeds into the gutter. It is not a tourist production. It is the harvest having a party with itself.

The taste is hard to describe without sounding like exaggeration. A Green River melon is not watery. There is a density to it, a grain that the teeth find, and the sugar clings to the back of the throat in a way that seems to have nothing to do with the desert that grew it. But then it does. The desert heat did its work in the daylight; the cool of the night banked it like a miser; the river, all along, was the only thing making the conversation possible. Eating a piece with the juice running makes the answer plain — it tastes like the place it came from, which is the only flavor worth growing.

The Desert Takes Its Loan

By October the harvest is done. The vines turn brown and brittle. The stands come down, one by one, and the fields are plowed under or left to wither. The traffic on the interstate never stops, but it stops buying melons, and the town settles back into the quiet that desert towns keep for the other ten months.

Long before any of it — before the town, before the railroad — the river ran through this country carrying the boats of John Wesley Powell’s expeditions, mapping the last great blank space on the map of the American West. What his men saw from the water is what the water still is: a green thread through the red, the one route that made sense, the one dependable thing in a country that offered nothing else.

After Powell, the river kept its habits. The railroad came, then the highway, then the interstate, and the river accommodated all of them. It is accommodating still, every spring, when the headgates open again and the water makes its way through the ditches to the waiting sand. The tourists who pass through in summer stop for a melon and drive on toward the national parks, carrying the taste of the place a little way with them before it fades.

In November the fields are empty. Frost comes down from the cliffs, the stubble glitters in the morning, and the river runs on — cold, inevitable, green. The sand will creep at the field edges. The wind will worry the old fences. That is the arrangement: the desert loans the ground, the river lends the water, and for a few weeks every year the two of them make something neither could make alone.