GROWING PAINS

BY KELLY VAUGHN KRAMER PHOTOGRAPHS BY SCOTT BAXTER

A rosebush blooms burgundy velvet in Double Adobe, in dirt the color of slate, earth that crumbles like sandstone. Find the crumbs under your fingernails, and it will take more than washing to set them loose this dirt requires the kind of fevered scrubbing that leaves your hands pink and your skin screaming for moisture.

Find the rosebush, and you'll wonder how it grew in dirt dry as stone.

Double Adobe isn't much on a map or otherwise. A tiny community on the outskirts of McNeal, it's in the bottom grid on the last page of the Arizona Atlas & Gazetteer. There are dirt roads and a few tattered houses tucked into groves of tangled mesquite. There's a canning facility and a smattering of fields. There's dust and green and clouds that drip over the distant Mule Mountains like frosting.

And then there's Arevalos Farm, where Aaron Cardona and his cousin, Bryan Fontes, are trying to regrow what their grandfather planted nearly 60 years ago.

There are shades of something literary in the story of the two men, ages 31 and 32, respectively a parable, perhaps, about growing up, going out, returning home and carrying with them the things they learned along the way.

Cardona grew up in Double Adobe; Fontes moved there From Elfrida at age 6. After college and a taste of life's adventures, they returned to Double Adobe and pursued careers off the farm Cardona as a counselor at Cochise College, and Fontes as a consultant to nearby farms. But they didn't return for work alone. They were pulled by something powerful and intangible back to the place where they spent their childhood.

So he returned, and he planted a new garden where acres of chile peppers once grew.

Mesquite trees are hard trees.

Their wood is strong enough to be turned and sliced and whittled into furniture. Their thorns bite. Their roots, taproots, can pull water from far away. Lesser plants that try to thrive around them don't stand much of a chance. And when Gilbert Arevalos pulled up to run his brother-in-law's 440-acre land lease in Double Adobe in 1955, there were mesquite trees. Everywhere. He cleared many of them, built houses in the shade of others and began planning crops he hoped would overcome the earth, the Southern Arizona sun and too many taproots too nearby. He dreamed it would provide enough to stock a farm stand he'd run with his children. And within a season, it did.

Chile peppers outmatched the mesquites, their roots, the sun. And soon, Arevalos had a hearty enough crop to begin dehydrating the peppers, crushing them into powder and selling that powder in bulk. Arevalos Farm and Chili Dehydrator thrived, and people came from as far as Globe and Phoenix to pick their own peppers.

"It turned into a real family farm," Fontes says. "But it reached its peak in the '70s. My uncle was recruited by bigger farms, and my grandfather's health went downhill quickly."

So the chile crop dwindled. The uncles left. Arevalos' daughters — the cousins' mothers — stayed and lived on the land but worked elsewhere. The farm idled in the early '90s as the boys grew up, and when Fontes and Cardona decided that they "wanted to get the hell out of town," they took with them only memories of picking green beans all day to earn a dollar from their grandfather. Of falling off the back of the farm's pickup truck. Of plucking caterpillars from ears of corn.

And near the end of his Vermont-based master's program in international education, Cardona carried the memories to Oaxaca, Mexico, for what he calls his "rebirth."

Oaxaca's Zapotec people emerged, they say, from the earth. The anthropomorphized offspring of jaguars, of trees, they sprang from ancient caves and canyons. But unlike their feline ancestors, who are programmed to hunt, the Zapotecs are hard-wired for farming. Corn. Beans. Squash. Chocolate. These are the crops of the Zapotecs. And as Cardona learned more about the indigenous people of Mexico through the reflective-practice phase for his degree, he realized that their ways could be easily adapted to the family farm at Double Adobe. "I studied the differences between indigenous practices and practices common in the Western world," Cardona says. "I realized that I had neglected things in my own community. There's a strong connection between the land and social movements. The fellowship was such an education in Western thought versus the ways of the indigenous world."

Cardona found that many of the younger people he worked with in Oaxaca had lost their native languages, the ancient tongues of their elders. Their speech had devolved over centuries, and, just as he and Fontes had, a spate of 20and 30-something Mexicans also wanted to leave home. "There was a big generation gap," Cardona says. "It happened in Double Adobe, too — there are a lot of older people here, but there's almost no one my and Bryan's age."

And there were more similarities between Oaxaca and Double Adobe, among them the relationship between health and traditional eating. "People don't make the connection," Cardona says, but as he compiled food histories of the border, he found that the more people ate of their traditional food, the healthier they were. And the biggest similarity was that strong sense of community of neigh borhood dances and local gardens and family gatherings that ultimately lured Cardona home. "Farming brings people together, and when that happens, a lot can hap pen," he says. "That's why I wanted to come back. As his cousin was exploring Mexico, Fontes was finding his way home, as well. After earning his master's degree in agricultural biology from New Mexico State University in 2009, Fontes remained in Las Cruces. That is, until 2012, when he hit the highway for a 7,000-mile road trip that took him all over the country. Then, he met a girl. Though he didn't immediately return to the family farm, he did return to the family business. He worked as a field man and tractor driver for Ed Curry, who runs the thriving Curry Seed and Chile Co. in Pearce, one of the larger operations that supplied the Arevalos dehydrator with red chiles decades ago. "I learned a lot in terms of modern farming by working for Ed," Fontes says. "I backed away eventually to spend more time here, but I came back with some ideas." Those ideas evolved into a business plan, and now, Fontes works as a consultant to Curry and other farmers, helping them develop efficient record-keeping methods and means by which to catalog seeds. He married the girl, and his business plan began to benefit Arevalos, where Fontes' cataloging, combined with Cardona's interest in traditional Mexican and Native American farming, led the cousins to experiment with such crops as Tarahumara beans, Mexican June corn and purslane after they received a crash course in farming from family members who grew up under their grandfather's wing. "We had about six months where we learned about all the possibilities for the farm," Cardona says. "My uncle was in Oxnard, California, recovering from two back surgeries, so he exposed me to his understanding, and we learned a lot from my mom."

Cardona knew they needed a greenhouse, so he applied for and received grant money to construct two of them, which he hopes to ultimately use for aquaponics, a system of growing food that uses fish-fertilized water in an otherwise standard hydroponic garden. It's a method believed to have been developed by the Aztecs, who developed agricultural islands, known as chinampas, on lake shallows.

But there are no lakes in Double Adobe, no shal lows. Nearby, the San Pedro River rarely flows. This is a land that cries for moisture, and when the rains come in summer, they are both a blessing and a curse just a few seasons ago, monsoon storms and hail wiped out one of Fontes' chile crops. It's a Saturday in late May, and after an hour or so of chat