I mean well: I like tilling, I like sowing, and I thoroughly enjoy reaping. It's tending I don't have the time for. I think it's presumptuous to interfere with nature. As I understand natural selection, the peas are supposed to fend for themselves, and with pluck and tenacity, the best get to be Birdseye.

In 1970, when Canned Heat said it was time to be "goin' upcountry," I did so, with my mail-order bride, several packets of Northrup King seeds, and a copy of The Whole Earth Catalog for the privy. The marriage faltered, but the beans flourished: wax beans, butter beans, Chinese pod beans . . . it never occurred to me that getting back to the earth meant I was going to have to eat my beans. After the first three-bean salad, I began to have misgivings. Perhaps the sons of accountants would not inherit the earth.

Fortunately, it was the height of the resurgence in the primitive arts in America, and I discovered that beans gone to seed -- has-beans -- produce very attractive agatelike seeds, which an enterprising young fellow might string on a little elastic and sell to unsuspecting returning alumni on the library mall on campus. I was that young fellow. Meanwhile, back in the country, the wife was mummifying pickles and putting up preserves where I couldn't reach them. We were that close to our dream of being self-sufficient: We were insufficient.

Naturally, nature had the last laugh. Not only did those strung beans sprout on many an old grad's environmentally ideal neck, but that harvest was my last bumper crop. Now my corn gets the blight, my wheat the smut, and my garbanzos the wilt. I get rootworms that would've stopped Alex Haley, and the slugs just drink my beer bait and stagger on to even greater destruction.

One year I planted potatoes and forgot where. Another time, I had a vigorous tomato plant, but it was on the compost heap. For three months I gave succor to a weed impersonating rhubarb. I tried planting fish, like the Indians, but none grew. Sowing naked by the light of the full moon proved to be of no avail; the neighbors merely moved their patio parties indoors.

Still, when the frost starts to come out of the ground, I can't help but feel that old fierce pull of the soil, and I long once again to walk barefoot over the furrowed fields of my youth, breaking clods of dirt beneath my toes despite the real possibility of trichinosis. Then I remembered my childood was nothing like that, and reach for the phone.