viewing jasper mountain a gardener's year risa stephanie bear Copyright © 1997, 2006 stony run press January |
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January
I have a handful of
garden
chairs stacked in the porch area of my country home, and from time to
time lift the topmost from the stack, dust it off, and carry it
through
dew-spangled grass to a point below the fruit trees and above
the
garden,
where a vista opens across the neighbor's field to a bluff, or ridge,
locally
called Jasper Mountain, in the distance. To
get to these homesites, roads several miles long were added to the
existing
network of what were originally logging access roads, removing still
more
forest cover from the steep slopes, and adding to the burden of silt in
the numerous rivulets working their way down from the ridgeline to the
river below, which I cannot see from my seat by the garden, but which
makes
its presence felt by the line of tall black cottonwoods and Oregon ash
that runs along the base of the ridge. I
can
also see changes in the massive promontory that gives the mountain its
name. The rock there is
relatively high quality, a greenish basalt that
makes good gravel for roads and construction sites. A quarry has been
built
into the face of the mountain, and a road, discreetly hidden among firs
and big-leaf maples, provides access for huge dump trucks and
wide-bladed
dozers with gigantic diesel engines. These I cannot see or hear from my
place, but from time to time an explosion gently rocks the valley, and
for a few minutes the mountain resembles a small volcano, as the
powdered
stone drifts along the ridge and down to the long line of cottonwoods. The quarry does not much
spoil the looks of the promontory, because
from
this distance -- or even up close -- it looks like nothing so much as a
natural scree slope somewhere in the high Cascades just east of here.
But
this, too, with its road and its heavy equipment, adds to the burden of
silt, with trace hydrocarbons and heavy metals as well, in the
watershed. And yet I'm feeling remarkably cheerful. That cheer, I recognize, is harldy justifiable. I'm the privileged, an American in a not-poor neighborhood, which makes me part of the most massively consumptive minority in history. Nevertheless, the beauty in the scene before me, of sky, clouds, trees, stone, and the neighbor's ewes and lambs, costs nothing; the price of viewing Jasper Mountain, which, with all that has happened to it, is well worth looking at, is zero. Now, on the one hand, I have "bought" the right to look; the ad said, "country house with view." On the other hand, when I was younger, and had no land, no car, no family to support, and was living out of a backpack and my feet were my transportation, I saw just such views, and they were just as beautiful to me. So I do think that ownership is perhaps the most overrated concept in Westernism. By sitting here, there are several things that I'm not doing that perhaps I should give myself a little credit for not doing. I'm not, at the moment, driving to the mall, not shopping, not eating a hamburger, or watching a car commercial. I'm certainly not tooling around in an outboard runabout, or on a jet-ski or snowmobile. I'm not attending a football game, auto race, or rock concert in some distant city. I could build quite a list here of "nots," but -- not to worry -- you can think of more of these, and never mind that yes, sometimes I do choose to do some of these things; attend a conference in Portland, say. But I am actively choosing to do fewer things, and less consumptive things, not as avoidance, as in "oh, mustn't do that," but as seeking out activities that have the inestimable value that viewing Jasper Mountain has -- partaking of the quality of being that, because it has no price in consumerism, barely has a name, but which every person in the "third world" who is habitually freer and happier than I -- and there are many -- would immediately recognize. Disengaging from the error of capitalized gratification by thinking of it as error, by focusing on the negative, is a project fraught with stresses, pitfalls, failures and depression. We're too deeply enmeshed, many of us, to take the bravest positive approaches, exemplified, in recent history, by so few: Mahatma Gandhi, Vinoba Bhave, Peace Pilgrim, Jane Goodall, Mother Teresa. These challenge us with their total commitment, and it's easy to focus on their commitment, conclude it is somehow unachievable for us, and drift back to our potato chips and our cable news, feeling vaguely depressed, wallowing in a grey fog of discontent with ourselves and our little self-defeating ways. The good news is that none of them
would condemn us for starting
small.
A positive approach is not less positive for lasting for only a few years, or days, or even seconds. It is never a matter of scale. Every moment of viewing Jasper Mountain is its own eternity of getting it right, and no one can ever take that away from you. :::
I like to hike to the top, though each year I find the going a little harder, and look about me. Below, two rivers come together after dodging round the mountain toward each other. With binoculars I can find, in season, fishermen seeking steelhead and salmon. To the north there is considerable urbanization; I can see at one glance the second largest metropolitan area in my state, but it is not unattractive as cities go, and I can forgive its noise and bustle for its not being any worse (yet) than it is. To the south and east is the valley of one of the rivers, opening out of the foothills of a substantial and still very wild mountain range. In winter the eastern peaks are dusted white with snow, and present a dramatic and lovely scene; but my interest is generally drawn to the near view. At my feet are a succession of habitats: the eastern ridge of the mountain, with Douglas fir forest to the left and oaks to the right, with perhaps a herd of deer placidly browsing in plain view; the meadowland within the park boundary, with a few pear trees left over from some farm venture in the previous century; the wetlands with its dark patches of sedge and the occasional blue heron. Beyond are pastures, woodlots, filbert orchards, and fields used mostly for corn, hay, and grass seed farming. Threading among these, I see, are narrow roads along which are some two hundred houses, on properties of anywhere from one to two hundred acres, with their barns, outbuildings, and accumulated belongings left to the winter rains and summer sun: trucks, tractors, harrows, drift boats, and an occasional stove or washing machine. Most of us in this valley are not especially poor, but we are a thrifty people, many only two or three generations descended from pioneers, and we make but few trips to the county dump. Almost no one here can earn a living from farming now. We are an
amalgam
of loggers, retirees, and commuters. The commuters are of two classes:
the professionals -- doctors, dentists, and the like -- and the rest.
These
are mostly school teachers, store clerks, and office workers. I am in
this
last group. Regardless of category,
almost every one of us has a
garden.
I can see the gardens from the mountaintop: at every house, a brown
patch
within
easy access of the kitchen door. Some of us have enough pasture for a
horse
or two, or a few steers; I have room for a flock of ducks and geese;
but
if there is nothing else, there is a garden. Gardens here have a
priority
over lawns. This is a thing that I greatly admire in my neighbors. If, like the people in
my valley, you want to grow things, it can be a
good idea to try to get an eagle's eye view. If no mountain is handy,
try
a map. Most gardeners know the dates of frost in their "zone," but
there
is much more to know. Find out the direction of the prevailing winds,
the
angle of winter sun, the temperature of June nights. Know the depth of
the water table in August.
From the mountaintop I can see that the valley runs east and west, and that the river is nestled against the northern hills; among these is Jasper Mountain, which looks much smaller than from here than from my garden. My own little piece of land is in the middle distance, on the long glide of slope from the south hills to the river. There is a seasonal creek through the property, dry in summer and a raging torrent in winter. This means that I'm in a low-lying spot, subject to the movement of air. In winter the wind comes from the southwest generally, in the form of Pacific storms laden with incessant rain. These winds chill the soil, and the water that drops from them saturates it and renders it clammy. Pools lie on the surface in winter with no place to drain away to, as the water table is even with the surface. Dig a post-hole anywhere and it fills to overflowing. So gardens tend to be planted late, well after the dates recommended on seed packets. In summer the water table drops to ten, twenty, or even thirty feet, while the winds are continual, shifting daily from north to south. This is because of our mountain ranges. The sun heats the slopes, and air rises, drawing air away from the river bottom. At night, this air cools and sinks back down along draws and creek valleys toward the river. Gardens in this drainage must be almost continually watered, as the tender plants are subject to drying out. Watering is more frequent than the books recommend; corn begins wilting within a day of its last soaking. At night the wind stops, but heat radiates away quickly among the glitterings of the stars, and temperatures can drop into the forties (fahrenheit) by morning, even if it's been close to a hundred degrees during the day. All this gives tomato lovers fits. But we persist. The wiser among us build wooden fences, or hedge their gardens about with shrubbery or even hay bales, to combat the winds and the heat loss. A heavy mulch would help, but the main mulching material is straw. The straw available locally contains a lot of weed seeds, and it invites tremendous armies of slugs and snails of all sizes. No one seems to care for black plastic, which takes a lot of fiddling with in the shifting winds, or newspaper, so most of the gardeners keep their soil bare and cultivated. The majority use herbicide to control grass, which is the primary weed; I have reason to believe herbicide is the greater evil in this case, and use the straw mulch, trying to stay just ahead of the weeds by piling on more.
It's January.
Most of us have not had much chance to think about gardening. We have had record rains, with some manual guages registering 93 (!!) inches. That other river, the one you can see to the southwest from the mountaintop, recently jumped its banks and flooded two hundred homes, making the national news. The creek on our place, which doesn't even exist half the year, rose to the foundation of the house and flooded the potting shed, which I'd thought of as standing on high ground. Three fences were destroyed, and tons of earth moved in the general direction of the Pacific. But the garden was spared. The vetch that I planted last fall for green manure is intact, as are the piles of leaves and the compost bin. The wintered-over red chard is still useable, and our Detroit Red beets are superb. Meanwhile, our first harbingers of spring -- elephant garlic, growing from those tiny cloves that stay in the soil when we pull the crop -- have sprung from the cold, heavy soil, dotting the view from our kitchen window like randomly dibbled irises. And on the rainy nights, between the gusts of Pacific wind, we can hear the first chirruping choruses of the green tree frogs. I found one once in high summer, napping as it were, on the shore of a pond of water in the angle of a sunflower leaf. Their sound is, to me, a promise of sunflowers yet to come. I fall asleep to their frantic cheeping, and dream of green things growing in the sun. ::: Ours is the remnant of a particularly decrepit lean-to, which the previous owner constructed out of whatever was handy, and used mainly to store trash and to indulge, with the use of a perilously derelict woodstove, in melting lead for a lifetime's supply of sinkers and split shot. As I stood looking at this structure, which had helped by its presence to bring down the asking price on the property, the neighbor, a stout and cheery farm woman who had befriended us in our first week with a gift of raspberry starts, fetched up on the other side of the boundary fence. "You are going to rip down that eyesore, aren't you?" she asked. "First thing?" So I felt I had an obligation, but once inside, I found that my predecessor had used beams, taken up from the floors of some defunct lumbermill, each eight inches square and sixteen feet long, for framing the roof. I am no longer young, and the prospect of dismantling those massive rafters dismayed me. I immediately began to think of the "eyesore" as the "barn and potting shed," and within days began installing walls, windows, and doors. A coat of red fence stain on the barn boards of the walls, and cheery green trim on the window frames, produced a pleasing enough effect that my neighbor has never called me to account on our unspoken contract. At least, that's my interpretation! One side of the
building, about two-thirds, is given over to Beloved's
ducks and her retired show rabbits. We put down straw bedding over the
bare earth, and change it periodically; this becomes our favorite mulch
and top dressing, as it is rich in duck and rabbit manure but not
enough
so to burn plants noticeably.
It is pleasant, every morning, to go hunting for eggs in the tiny barn. The ducks, Khaki Campbells, produce almost an egg a day each, which they never look at again, but they do like to build their communal nest in a different spot each night. The other half of the building is the potting shed, which we also call the greenhouse, but that's stretching things a bit. To construct this space, so necessary to the garden, I began by removing the south wall and framing in rafters for three sliding glass doors, which had been donated by a friend. These lean against the building and form a kind of large greenhouse window. The east wall, against the duck room, is for tools. Before I did anything else, I gathered the tools, old friends that had gardened with me on four sites in Oregon and one in Pennsylvania, and hung them along the weathered grey boards: two round-point shovels, one square-point, one d-ring spade, a garden fork, a hay fork, two toothed rakes, one mattock, two stirrup hoes, a pry bar, a splitting maul, a bow saw, machete, lopping shears. A comforting sight, these, lined up, waiting for orders. Even in the dead of winter I sometimes go out to look at them and touch each one. The floor was a matter of concern. My predecessor had laid out some of the precious beams directly on the soil and covered them with 1/2 inch plywood. Dry rot and carpenter ants had made of this area a serious ankle trap. I asked my oldest boy and his friend if they wanted exercise. With the pry bar and the maul, they made a joyful noise and large chunks of erstwhile flooring flew out the door for about half an hour. I considered using the bare earth, but as I knew I would be watering plants inside, I looked about for something more suitable. Bricks were what I wanted, but used bricks go for a dollar apiece hereabouts. I mentioned this, in a woebegone manner, to a friend. "Well, I might have just the thing. There is a dangerous chimney on the house I use for an office building, which would cost me a fortune to have taken down by masons. If you can do the job I'll pay you and you can keep the bricks." I thought this was a godsend and took our pickup truck and a rented forty foot ladder to the site. This turned out to be, to my horror, a two-story house with a sixty-degree pitch. I'd need the whole length of the ladder to get at the thing -- forty feet doesn't sound like much but just try it sometime -- but the bricks, the bricks! Greed overcame good sense, and there I was, a million miles above the earth it seemed to me, plucking bricks from midair (the mortar was completely shot) and tossing them at random over my shoulder into space. They made a lovely truckload, though, and with the aid of my nine-year-old daughter, the next day, I laid them in a herringbone pattern, just like the ones pictured in garden books, and they made exactly the length and width of the room. In the west wall I installed wood-framed windows in a row at table height, then dragged a suitable "bench" from the garage and painted it green ( for good luck? Why do we insist on green potting benches?). Using roofing nails, I covered the top of the bench with linoleum. The bench had been a kitchen cabinet once, but had long since lost its doors and hinges. I installed it along the west wall beneath the windows, and filled its shelves with clay pots, green plastic pots of all sizes, and tomato cans. With the addition of a watering can, two trowels, and a couple of bags of potting soil, the shed was done! I envisioned opening the door through the years, admiring the herringbone pattern of the bricks, the row of waiting tools, the sun shining in through the greenhouse window on ranks of flats bursting with lettuce, broccoli, chard...ahhh. "Hello!" said Beloved. "I need to put the duck feed, the rabbit feed, and the geese's cob in here." Excuse me? Three large-size garbage cans? But there's no arguing with fate. Soon other items, large and small, came marching in, like animals into the ark. Boxes, lengths of hose, "white buckets" (even the green ones are called "white"), old pillows (she uses these to kneel on while working in the earth), you name it.... So now, in midwinter,
when it's as dark as an eclipse all day anyway, is
the time to clean out. Find out which things can go in the garage
instead.
Find all the broken plastic pots and move them out. Sort and stack the
ones
that are left. Take the edged tools, one by one, to the garage to be
wire-brushed,
filed, oiled, and have their handles linseed-oiled. Slowly the shed
will
begin to look useful. Even some of the beautiful floor begins to
appear.
But I don't think I'll ever get rid of those huge trash cans. They have
made themselves At Home.
:::
In January, here, it can
be grey and rainy for weeks, as in December, but often it will clear up
and be sunny and almost warm for several days, a condition known as a
Blue Hole.
On such days I sometimes take out my little green kayak and drive over to the nearby reservoir for exercise. Unlike large motorboats and sailboats, kayaks tend to enforce a bit of solitude, which can be a good thing, I think. Mine is a remarkably small craft, built by a family business in Kentucky; it's a rigid shell of nylon/fiberglass, seven feet nine inches long, with a beam of thirty-eight inches. It weighs seventeen pounds empty. Lacking a keel, and drawing a mere two inches, it's subject to wind drift, tracks badly, and is a very slow boat relative to the effort that goes into paddling it, but it's extremely stable, turns on the proverbial dime, and is a superb platform for wildlife viewing. At this time of year the lake hosts from hundreds to thousands of Canada geese, mallards, mergansers, and coots. The black coots, with their stubby beaks, are fun to watch, especially while landing on the water. They crash-land, skittering along on the surface tension of the water with their wings folded, until they stall out in their own bow wave and seem about to flip forward just as they come to a stop. A few days ago, I came across a dying mallard. I realized, as if I had never thought of it before, that every wild duck, as do all of us, must die sometime. She had been paddling, a bit lamely, in the same general direction as I had, but as I came up to her, several hundred yards from shore, she seemed to give it up. I thought at first she might be settling in for a nap. But napping, for a mallard, involves turning one's head about on that long neck and using one's back for a downy pillow. She had her head extended before her, and her face in the water, blowing bubbles, lifting weakly from time to time to inhale. I waited with her, about ten feet away; she showed no reaction to my presence and eventually her head sagged beneath the surface film a last time and the bubbling stopped. :::
Dogen tells the story of Great Master Zhenji, who met with a newly arrived monk. "Have you been here
before?"
The monk said, "Yes, I have been here." The master said, "Have some tea.." Again, he asked another monk, "Have you been here before?" The monk said, "No, I haven't been here." The master said, "Have some tea." The temple director then asked the master, "Why do you say, 'Have some tea,' to someone who has been here and 'Have some tea,' to someone who has not?" The master said, "Director." When the director responded, the master said, "Have some tea." Dogen concludes that "the everyday activity of buddha ancestors is nothing but having rice and tea." Here in the West, when we, or at any rate some of us, read this sort of thing, we tend to get very excited by it, and to visualize becoming Buddhas ourselves by trying out this kind of everydayness -- sounds easier than sitting with our legs painfully crossed. But, of course, there's a trick to it, as one might suspect from reading of the long years Dogen put in, sitting crosslegged, before he felt himself to be, and was certified by his own master as, qualified to say something on the subject. On the one hand, it's very hard to come to one-pointedness of mind (everyone says so), and on the other, nothing could be easier (everyone says that too -- as one master commented, "here I've been all these years selling water right by the river."). Dogen's genius, though, is that he doesn't try to mystify us by embracing either the difficulties and complexities of practice nor the easiness and simplicity of practice. He demystifies, by telling us to relax and simply do what's next. If you want to be a Zen monk, shave your head and wear a robe; that's a start, nothing to be ashamed of. Little steps. Come, he says, patting the tatami and the seat cushion. Sit. :::
I made a soup in the crock pot and baked some bread. The soup is rice, tofu diced small, diced onion from the winter garden, some green vegetables, peas, tomatoes, water chestnuts, thyme, basil, rosemary, some spring onion greens, garlic greens. Threw half the tofu and onions and garlic into the soup, the other half into the mixing bowl. To which I added a dollop of oil, tablespoon of salt, sixteen ounces of warm water, 1/4 cup of honey, a small handful each of miso, bran, and oatmeal, teaspoon of yeast, stirred, then added a cup of white flour, and several cups of whole wheat flour, stirring until too thick to stir, then floured up my hands a bit and kneaded, adding flour occasionally, until the dough "felt right." Covered the bowl and set it on top of the crock pot to stay warm and rise. Looked out: it was raining heavily. Jasper Mountain completely obscured. Went over the supply of seed left over from last year's garden. I have thought that this year I might try to get some greens going earlier than the soggy garden will permit, and so last month cleaned up the potting shed/greenhouse. There's an old radio, tuned to the classical station, and the brick floor with that herringbone pattern. A soothing place to work. Put on a coat, hat, and rubber boots, slithered out to the shed, fired up the music (Mendelsohn's violin concerto, I think), picked six old, cracked flats, loaded them up with potting soil, and spread seeds: Romaine lettuce, Black-Seeded Simpson lettuce, kale, bunching onions, Detroit Red beets (for the greens, really), spinach. Each packet I broadcast round the flat, then covered all the seeds with peat, set all the flats in the window and went over them lightly with a dose of rain water from the watering can. Music off, close door, back to the house, boots, etc. off, check the dough, get out two (not one -- two together helps prevent burning the bottom of the loaf) cookie sheets, oil the top one, shape the loaf, set the "pan" (two cookie sheets, one round loaf) on top of the crock pot. Jasper Mountain is somewhere beyond the window. External fog, internal fog. Wind, rain, and typos. When the bread has risen, bake (in this oven) 40 minutes at 350 degrees. Have we been here before? Have some tea. Last night, not
content with
the flats already seeded, I stepped out to the greenhouse and planted
two
hanging baskets with cilantro, and a gallon pot with chives. I have
been
running low on potting soil, so built up the bottom layer in these
containers
with sphagnum moss, then a few inches of soil, then broadcast the
seeds,
then shook all down, then covered seed with a thin layer of peat, then
watered gently. I hung the baskets on twentypenny nails long ago driven
into the rafters nearest the greenhouse window, sorted pots for a
while,
then swept the herringbone-patterned floor. I also brought in last
year's
planter of lavendar and trimmed its dead growth; perhaps there's still
something doing in the roots. The king, half rosted, was carried away: Not so much for pitty (for what ruth could ever enter so barbarous mindes, who upon the furnished information of some odde piece or vessell of golde they intended to get, would broyle a man before their eyes, and not a man onely, but a king, so great in fortune and so renowned in desert?), but for as much as his unmatched constancy did more and more make their inhumane cruelty ashamed, they afterwards hanged him, because he had couragiously attempted by armes to deliver himselfe out of so long captivity and miserable subjection; where he ended his wretched life, worthy an high minded and never danted Prince. At another time, in one same fire, they caused to be burned all alive foure hundred common men and threescore principall Lords of a Province, whom by the fortune of warre they had taken prisoners. These narrations we have out of their owne bookes, for they do not onely avouch, but vauntingly publish them. May it bee they doe it for a testimony of their justice or zeale toward their religion? Verily they are wayes over-different and enemies to so sacred an ende.I suspect that we, as a culture, have not much improved upon this model. I remember that during Desert Storm I overheard two friends of mine discussing their dismay at realizing how little "progress" had been made in building a civil and humane society. They described to each other the behavior of so many of their fellow citizens that had derided and even attacked dissidents in the nearby city. Their surprise surprised me. Perhaps, I thought, we ought not to expect too much from a civilization dependent upon massive consumption of oil, electricity, metals, plastics, fats; upon television and its steady bombardment of a largely captive population with promises of instant gratification of cynically inculcated wishes. My two friends and Beloved and I also, had spent many years in a small valley in the mountains, among neighbors who had built homes of rough lumber and cedar shakes, with recycled windows through which to view the rain falling among alders and cedars, and watch the deer grazing unharassed in the homeyard. We had had many, many days in which to make our kind of social progress by baby steps, pulling on rubber boots, walking up the gravel road to visit one another over steaming cups of home-grown herbal tea. The outside world, rich or poor, in pursuit of its varied manipulative or manipulated agendas, had not had the opportunity to discover that life. There is a Paul Reps poem that goes something like: "drinking a bowl of green tea/I stop the war." I remember thinking, when I was a Vietnam War protester, that this was a naive approach. But who did I convince, with all my activism at that time, to think differently than they already thought? An action taken that is in itself peaceful, on the other hand, is never wasted. So perhaps Reps' view is the long view after all?
Let us then consider, first of all, what will be their way of life, now that we have thus established them. Will they not produce corn, and wine, and clothes, and shoes, and build houses for themselves? And when they are housed, they will work, in summer, commonly, stripped and barefoot, but in winter substantially clothed and shod. They will feed on barley-meal and flour of wheat, baking and kneading them, making noble cakes and loaves; these they will serve up on a mat of reeds or on clean leaves, themselves reclining the while upon beds strewn with yew or myrtle. And they and their children will feast, drinking of the wine which they have made, wearing garlands on their heads, and hymning the praises of the gods, in happy converse with one another. And they will take care that their families do not exceed their means ... (Jowett, tr.)Glaucon, who has elicited this description, however, seeks a description more like Athens. Yes, Socrates, he said, and if you were providing for a city of pigs, how else would you feed the beasts?Socrates responds by shifting from a description of agrarian simplicity to one of what is in effect a consumer society: Yes, I said, now I understand: the question which you would have me consider is, not only how a State, but how a luxurious State is created; and possibly there is no harm in this, for in such a State we shall be more likely to see how justice and injustice originate. In my opinion the true and healthy constitution of the State is the one which I have described. But if you wish also to see a State at fever heat, I have no objection. For I suspect that many will not be satisfied with the simpler way. They will be for adding sofas, and tables, and other furniture; also dainties, and perfumes, and incense, and courtesans, and cakes, all these not of one sort only, but in every variety; we must go beyond the necessaries of which I was at first speaking, such as houses, and clothes, and shoes: the arts of the painter and the embroiderer will have to be set in motion, and gold and ivory and all sorts of materials must be procured.And now not only our health but that of neighboring peoples has been compromised: And living in this way we shall have much greater need of physicians than before?War is, says, Plato, the inevitable consequence of consumerism. If this analysis is correct, and we do not wish war, what ought we to do? Would it not be to plan a shift in society away from consumerism? One of two things has to happen to Western civilization soon, or it will be superseded. The first choice would be to harden ourselves to defend "our way of life," which hardening is, in itself, especially as it involves giving up constitutional freedoms, a contradiction of that very way of life. Yet this has been a very popular choice of late, to judge by talk radio at least. The second, and to me the more rational approach, is to adopt, to the extent possible, the simplicity practiced by Zen monks and by the society proposed by Socrates as most just because least acquisitive. Socrates specifically states that the families in such a society must live within their means, and here I elided, but will now add back the end of the sentence: " ...having an eye to poverty or war." In other words, if you are consciously doing simplicity you need not call it poverty. :::
The rare sunshine at this time of year always sends Beloved tearing out to the garden to put in peas. We have two gardens, actually: mine is the big one in heavy clay down in the cold gloomy bottoms north of the kitchen window; hers is the small one in sandy loam on the high sunny south side of the house, next to the duck barn. Peas planted in her garden in February will not rot, as they will in "my" garden. (Or maybe it's just that she can grow things I can't.) She climbs into her overalls, ties a bandana over her hair, grabs a "retired" pillow from the greenhouse, plunks it on the ground in front of the row, and goes to work. The neighbor, a tidy retired man who gardens from June to August religiously, finds this behavior distinctly odd. So he comes out to investigate. Not wanting to be obvious about this, he begins on the far side of the pasture, and inspects his fence around into the apple orchard, then, after what he deems to be a decent interval, stops right by the little garden. "What the devil are you at in the dead of winter?" he asks politely. "Peas! Aren't they lovely?" she extends a grubby palm, with a dozen wrinkled seeds. "You don't expect them to come up, do you?" He peers down at the strange-looking, to him, thick straw mulch that has been pulled back to reveal the brown earth. "No, I never expect them to come up, but I always hope they will; and I get some nice surprises. Sometimes." She grins, and picks up her trowel. "Huh! well, good luck to you! I see Mary; I better get inside or she'll think I'm out here courting'!" He ambles off, shaking his head at the improvidence of the Bear clan. We buy a lot of our seeds at the end of summer, from racks of remaindered packets that are made available by our local hardware stores for five to ten cents a packet. A dime is not too much to spend on enjoying a brief spell of winter sun. Some of these year-old seeds, especially of flowers, seem to lose a bit of vitality and planting them can be like doing your thinning in advance; but regardless of what she says, Beloved's peas seem to always come up. Peas are legumes. We much prefer them to beans, as the whole family has a sweet tooth. We like the climbing varieties more than bush, and prefer sugar snap to the shell-'em-out varieties. When the season is at its height, relatively little food preparation goes on hereabouts, as we are all to be found at all hours simply sitting by the pea vines stuffing ourselves. Those that we pick and bring in are not as good after about two hours, though we use them in salads and stir fries, and freeze the rest. If it does threaten to rain too much on the rows or beds soon after planting, cover with a plastic tarp for two days, then pull it off for a day, etc. as needed. As soon as the plants are up, pull the mulch up around them close, and renew it throughout the life of the plants, to keep the roots cool. I stake them out by making tripods of cuttings from ash, willow, and hazel. They hate to be planted in the same spot two years in a row, so think rotation. After the crop is gone, I feed the vines to the ducks, geese, and rabbits, who think highly of them. I see in garden magazines much talk of varieties: endless list-making and discussions of the advantages and disadvantages of all the latest hybrids or oldest heirlooms. I know that by going to the hardware store I'm taking whatever they have to offer, and missing a shot at the "best" of this or the "best" of that; and I greatly admire the work of seed-saver exchanges and heirloom nurseries. One of the country's finest seedsmen is just down the road about twenty miles, too, and we in the valley are very proud of their product. But Beloved and I both work full time, and we have a strict budget to meet. The garden must pay for its share; we can put a little work into it but not much money. We plant whatever comes to hand, and some years we say, "Well, this is not as good as what we had last year," or "Whoa! Now this is better than what we had last time!" There is an element of surprise. And it's all relative. This is organically grown, home-grown, fresh produce; all of it is better than anything we can get in the stores. That's why, even though our lives are busier than Broadway, we make time to get out there and plant, even in February. These seeds, if no one will buy them, will be thrown away. I can relate; I'm middle-aged and trying to build a second career. I have hope that, with a little care, I'll bear fruit yet. A lot to think about while putting a few peas in the ground. :::
Today
the sun came out for the first time since I don't know when. The ground
rises to the east of the house, and a morning-coffee glance through the
living room window revealed a jewelled world -- heavy dew on the
rumpled
grass, which has grown during the last month, and on the leafless lilac
bushes, and the neighbor's apple orchard. Rainbow hues glinted from the
drops, and the glow suffused the house like a dream of a better world. The
originals
were planted by the first family to arrive here, not long after the
original
pioneers in our end of the valley. They built a post-and-beam two-story
house in the midst of three hundred and twenty acres of Douglas fir
forest.
Not old growth, interestingly enough: the Calapooya Indians, who had
lived
here for centuries, periodically burned over the valley floor, to keep
it open for game and for defense. But these trees were certainly large,
and there were a lot of them; their shade was dense, and it would be a
while before this could be farm land. The men, taking stock of their
situation,
immediately contracted to provide firewood for all the one-room
schoolhouses
in the area, and fell to work with axe and crosscut. As the clearing
around
the house grew, the women installed plants they had brought with them:
vinca, daffodils, lilacs. My house was built in
the year I was born, 1949, by one of the
descendants
of the woodcutting family, and his wife grew the lilacs that are by my
front door from cuttings from the pioneer plants. All her neighbors
appear
to have been invited to do the same. The family across the road have a
thick, healthy-looking hedge of them. I was about to cut the
latest ones away, when an
idea came to me -- would they form roots if I hilled up earth around
them?
I brought a barrow-load of dirt and piled it round the bases of the
lilacs,
and went on to other tasks. Isaac Walton's "Piscator," in the Complete Angler, advises his young friend thus: Let me tell you, scholar, that Diogenes walked on a day, with his friend, to see a country-fair; where he saw ribbons, and looking-glasses, and nut-crackers, and fiddles, and hobby-horses, and many other gimcracks: and having observed them, and all the other finnimbruns that make a complete country-fair; he said to his friend, "Lord! How many things are there in this world, of which Diogenes hath no need!" And truly it is so, or might be so, with very many who vex and toil themselves to get what they have no need of. Can any man charge God that he hath not given him enough to make his life happy? No, doubtless; for nature is content with a little. And yet you shall hardly meet with a man that complains not of some want; though he, indeed, wants nothing but his will, it may be, nothing but his will of his poor neighbour, for not worshipping, or not flattering him: and thus, when we might be happy and quiet, we create trouble to ourselves.It's all right to garden and bake, and read, and sing, and nap, and patch clothes, in other words. The trouble comes in when we get ambitious, as Plato said, for more -- that more which sets us at odds with neighbors and neighboring countries. I have gone to the greenhouse; found the two flats of lettuce satisfactory, and the peas, and found the beets acceptable, but little else has responded to what heat has come in through the fogged, rain-streaked glass. I have found some unremembered packets of -- yes, still more lettuce -- and corn salad, chard, and some white radishes, and dedicated still more space to the hopeful flats. Sigh. And swept the floor, mindful of the importance Sato's monastery gave to tidying up round the buildings and gardens. Afterwards, baking. I took up an almost-empty jam jar, added warm water from the tap, a small spoonful of baker's yeast, put the lid on, shook the mix a bit, and removed the lid right away. In experiments of this kind, you don't want pressure building up under that lid. The beasties liked the jam and started multiplying right away. The jar is a sixteen-ounce size, so that's perfect for about pound and half loaf. In
a
large mixing bowl, I put about a tablespoonful of salt, and threw in a
handful each of miso, wheat germ, and oats. Rooting through the current
supply of veggies, I came across a green onion that needed using, diced
it small, and added that to the bowl. A dollop of honey and another
of
molasses, and now, with the salt buried under all that, it won't shock
the yeast too much, so the yeast water goes in.
I keep whole-wheat flour in a five-gallon "white bucket" and dole it out with a hand-sized bowl. After three bowls, I stir, and keep stirring steadily, adding flour, till the batch "rises up off the bowl," which is the expression I always heard for when the lump achieves the right consistency -- cleaning all residual flour off the bowl, into one lump that's not too sticky when touched, yet not too hard to work. At this point I turn the whole thing out onto a chopping block that has been lightly floured, and either shape it into a round loaf, or roll it out and cut a dozen rolls out of it. No two batches turn out exactly the same. Earlier in the week, the "extra ingredient" was raisins; this time it was the onion. I don't really do much kneading, and only have the patience to let the loaf rise once. The bread pan, which is really a large size cookie sheet, or two sheets, to insulate the bottom of the loaf, starts out on the corner of the dining room table nearest the wood stove, then, as I get hungrier, moves onto a trivet on the stove top, then into the oven on "warm." When the loaf is finally tall enough to bake, I simply crank it up to baking heat and check it in a little over half an hour. Much the same for the rolls, which are nothing but little loaves. Bread
this loosely defined can be used to keep a lot of food from going to
waste.
The watery whey from tofu or from draining a batch of pasta can be useful here. Got soup stock? Veggie stock? Leftover rice? Breakfast cereal? Try it. :::
I didn't care for gardening when I was growing up. I much preferred to spend my Saturdays lounging around the house with a book, or exploring the small wilderness across the creek that bounded the suburban lot we called home. From a hill across a meadow in the wild area, I could look back over the creek valley and see the backs of the row of new houses, set down in pastureland during the explosive growth after World War II, and in the large back yards the men could be seen, each in his own realm, restoring order to the landscape the bulldozers had crushed and tumbled. Some planted a few pines, all planted grass. My father, almost alone among them, planted fruit trees, grapes, figs, and row upon row of vegetables. He owned a walking tractor, the remote ancestor of today's tillers, and I could hear it singing to him, dinka-dinka-dink, as he plowed. He made the earth yield tenfold, twentyfold, an hundredfold, all of which he brought to my despairing mother in brimming bushel baskets. She had neither the time nor the inclination for canning, drying, and freezing, and would surreptitiously slip the produce, as much as she could reasonably expect would go unnoticed, into the trash. Frankly, I shared her point of view. I didn't like squash or spinach fresh, let alone reconstituted in the dead of winter, so why bother? He failed to make a convert of her, and had worse luck with me. I was enlisted to barrow ripe manure from place to place, to hold trees upright while he mixed compost, water and earth gently round the roots, to unroll bare-root tomato plants from their damp newspaper wrapping in my own shade, safe from the sun, while he dug, and poured, and tamped, talking and explaining the whole while. But my mind stayed resolutely elsewhere; perhaps with Herodotus, or Jane Austen. My father sensed the futility of his efforts, and with a sigh released me to my own world, taking up the tomatoes from his shade with one hand and pouring water into the holes with the other, alone. Years later, needing to earn a living on my arrival in Oregon at the height of an unemployment crisis, I signed on to a tree planting crew. The foreman showed the new hands the basics in setting out a two-year-old Douglas fir seedling: "Y'open the hole with the hoedad at the bottom by pulling up on the handle, see? Then the top by pulling down. Now yuh've got a hole twelve inches deep and four across all the way down. Right? Now take yer tree and dangle the roots down; give 'em a shake so they'll hang loose and won't get caught upside down, see? 'Cuz roots upside down don't work -- they'll die on yuh; if all the roots are upside down the whole tree'll die. They only work one way. Keep it out of the sun, too, and don't hold it out in the wind too long. All that sun and air'll kill yer tree. Now yuh pack the dirt around the tree with yer hoedad blade, once, twice, like this, so there's no air pocket in the ground -- that air will kill a tree in the ground just like it will in yer hand. Now press down with yer foot, but not too close to the stem and not too hard. There's hair roots, yuh can't see 'em, on every root yuh can see, and if yuh get rough you'll strip those off at the base, and they'll die, and there goes yer tree. O.K.? now on to the next spot." About halfway through the lecture I realized I already knew all this; it was the tomato lecture! Shade, air, and hair roots. This foreman might not know Homer (and certainly not Jane Austen), but his rough sophistication in physical geography and botany struck me as something admirable, and at that moment with a flash of insight I understood my father's enthusiasm for gardening not as a weird masochistic hobby but as a vital branch of knowledge. I suddenly took an interest in tree planting, which in a way was unfortunate for me, as I lasted tenyears at an occupation which no one has any business doing for more than three. Hand planting of tree seedlings is carried on in the winter hereabouts, beginning when the rains have penetrated about ten inches into the soil. Our crews worked in the Coast Range until March, then fanned out across the Cascades and the Rockies, finishing up usually about the end of May in Montana or Colorado. Summer was the off season. Having nothing else to do that first summer, I took up gardening. After tilling a suitable patch of ground, I went out with a round-pointed shovel, a bucket of compost, a bucket of water, and a flat of tomatoes in two-inch pots (I have never seen those bare-root "field-growed" plants since my childhood). With the shovel, I dug a hole about the depth of the blade, threw in some nice wormy compost, turned up a tomato plant and gently lifted off the pot, set the root ball quickly into the earth (working in my own shade), slopped in some water, and backfilled soil up to just above the root collar, tamped gently with the heel of my palm, and measured to the next spot by simply laying down the shovel and noting the place where the end of its handle reached to. I didn't think about it at the time, but later realized, while admiring the nicely laid out grid of fresh greenery, that I had absorbed, albeit unknown to me at the time, every move of my father's method. The conversion was complete. When my parents eventually made their way west to visit, they caught us at the end of a pretty good harvest. My father looked over the rows of corn, the squash patch, the bean trellises, and the fall bed with its broccoli, lettuce, chard, and kale seedlings, and shook his head. "Where'd you learn how to do all this? " But he knew the answer as well as I did, and I could tell the old man was deeply pleased. ::: In March we do most of our gardening sitting around the table playing with pretty packets as if there were a game called Seed Poker. To Beloved a pair of Sugar Snap Peas and and pair of Broccoli is a really good hand; but I prefer a full house of two Blue Lake Pole Beans and three Candy Corns. One wants something to do, even if it calls for a full suit of rain gear and gum boots. So at about this time of year I usually do the garlic roundup. The previous occupant of our place enjoyed garlic, which I never liked, but luckily his choice was elephant garlic, which has made me a convert. This stuff grows six feet tall, produces interesting flowers that are fun to have around and also great scissored off for salads, and develops a bulb the size of a softball, with great, soft cloves that are a cook's delight. These can be diced and tossed into the pan with whatever's doing, from stir-fried vegetables to roast lamb, adding a much subtler and pleasanter aroma and flavor than the smaller, more common varieties. When you lift the plants, though, there are a myriad of filbert-shaped bulblets, like small potatoes, that get left behind in the soil, sometimes eight or ten inches deep. These become first-year plants of what appears to be a biennial. Because of the depth from which they often grow, the bulblet plants make a fair substitute for leeks, which I'd love to try but don't feel I'd have the time to devote to them. Or if you leave them alone, they come back the second year as the highly productive six-foot beasties. The garlic bed that was in place upon our arrival was an unfortunate business constructed of old boards full of termites, and overrun with blackberries. We decided the location was better for an orchard, and harvested all the garlic, keeping a few of the large cloves for use in the Summer Garden the next year. But in March I discovered about a hundred small plants where some fifteen had been before, on the old bed site, coming up through the new grass. Well, I can't stand to see anything wasted, so out came the fork and a bucket with about five inches of water in it, and I gingerly lifted out the long white stems, with their narrow bulbs and strands of succulent white rootlets, till the bucket was quite full. I then took an ash pole, sharpened at the end, which had been part of a bean trellis, and dibbled the little darlings into the new garden. None of them died. Nor did they amount to much that first year, and I almost forgot they were there, in amongst the tomatoes and pumpkins. But the second year they were a forest of long, lithe stems and purple blossoms, as apt to draw the eye from a distance as any sunflower. We soon were giving away cloves at a great rate. We bagged them up and handed them out almost as a kind of volunteer cottage industry, working feverishly through our birthday and holiday lists. The supply was inexhaustible. Heaps of them lay about in bowls on the kitchen counter. Meanwhile March came around again, and I went out to the new orchard (dwarf: two Santa Rosa plums, two prune plums, two Asian pears, two Fuji apples, a Bing and a Royal Anne, cherries) and -- gasp! -- one hundred more baby garlics, crying out to be lifted. I suppose I could go into garlic farming, but one thing tells me this would be a futile endeavor: along the road, all the way into town, there are signs: Elephant Garlic For Sale. From this I suspect we have here the rain country's equivalent of -- yep, you guessed it -- zucchini! Another sunny patch. I cut and stacked wood, all the while mindful that woodburning, which is how this family has heated its dwellings for twenty-seven years, is increasingly frowned upon. Using a noisy and polluting lawn-mowing device, I shredded the leaves and hay that have been lying heaped about the garden. Then, using seeds acquired from a company owned by a Fortune 500 conglomerate, planted michihli, more beets and kale, white radishes, and three kinds of tomatoes in flats in the greenhouse. Hung Tzu-ch'eng, writing about 1600, said that "Mountains and forests are scenes of wonder. Once they are frequented by people, they are debased into market-places. Calligraphy and paintings are things of beauty. Once they are craved by people, they are degraded into merchandise." The trick, unless I hope to move to a desert island (which would, as Hung could point out, immediately devalue the island), is to wok primarily on one's mindfulness, to become, through re-training of my own mind, not a merchandiser nor a buyer of merchandise where Jasper Mountain is concerned. It should be simply there, as it has practically always been, of interest to this short-lived creature but not to be possessed by it. There is always the hope of extending this non-possession to a wider and wider range of experience. A life caught in the web created by the merchandizers need not be lived in vain, if one's mind accepts that there are circumstances and actions, and one can accept the one while carrying out the other mindfully. Example: a supermarket is a dreadful combination of market forces, the use of bright lights, activity, noise, and the arrangement of goods to tempt us into buying more things than we need, more expensive things than we need, and more processed things than we need. Yet we can enter and buy rice, tofu, pok choi, green onions, mung bean sprouts, a zucchini, and a bell pepper, pay for the items, and walk out again, leaving the vast array of very bad items, nutritionally speaking, unbought and unconsumed. Choices. Hung says: "To concur with a web of circumstances is to dismiss it, and is like the harmony between flitting butterflies and fluttering flowers. To accord with an event is to nullify it, and is like the perfection of the full moon as round as a basin of water." A few years ago, I lived briefly in what is known around college campuses as a "quad." For my $240/month I had the exclusive use of a breezeway, a mailbox, a porch light, a locking exterior door, a 12X14' room with a sliding window, curtains and blinds, a table, two long bookshelves on the wall, a bed, two chairs, a nice vanity with a round sink, hot and cold running water, a closet, several drawers in the built-in vanity cabinet, an overhead light, a telephone jack, and three sets of electrical outlets. Heat, light, power, and water were included in the rent. A lockable interior door led to a corridor with three other such doors, a bathroom, and a small kitchen with four cabinets and two refrigerators, for the shared use of four residents. I was within walking distance from my job, groceries, laundry, entertainment, and public transportation. Add a bicycle, a few blankets, books, changes of clothes, a laptop with CD player and headset, toothbrush, soap, a clock, and a few dishes and utensils, and I was set. My eating habits in this environment became so simple that I seldom met my neighbors, as I pretty much used the kitchen only for storage. On my small dining room table stood a rice steamer with a built-in timer, bought new for under $25. With one of these, you can add a few cups of water to the inner tank, and about a cup and a half to the rice dish, pour in a cup of rice, and set the timer for 35 minutes. After 20 minutes, snap a stem from your pok choi, trim the greens, and dice up the stem. Take about an inch off the end of your tofu and dice that up as well. Throw these, minus the greens, into the steamer. Take about three inches off the end of a small zucchini and dice that up, leaving a bit of the peeling on each chunk. Throw that in. Dice up some bell pepper and do the same. With five minutes to go, chop some sprouts up a bit, and, with the pok choi greens, and chopped onion greens, throw all in. Add some basil flakes from a spice jar. When the bell rings, uncover and serve. Have a glass of water with your dinner. Leftovers can go toward breakfast (instead of oatmeal) or lunch (with or instead of an apple). This regimen will give you enough calories and nutrients to sustain you reasonably well for a long time... April
A few years ago,
we felt we should reduce our "acreage" in the main garden, so I
took
an iron rod, set it up in the approximate middle, and with a rope
attached
to the rod, made a circle about sixty feet across, planting garlic to
mark
the edge as I went. The garlic is up now, and one can see the size of
the
garden-to-be. Beloved came out to see what I had done.
"Whoa! That's way too small! ... where do the brassicas go?" "Right here." "Uh-huh. And the squash?" "Sort of over here." "Right. And the cucumbers, -- and -- and -- where does the pumpkin patch go?" Her voice seemed a bit at this point. "Right back here...no problem, really! Honest!" "And your corn, beans, tomatoes and potatoes?" "Uh, well, I thought I'd revive my little beds up in the orchard." "I thought we were going to have a 'smaller' garden!" "Well, that's what I remember us both saying, so I've cut this one in half. But if you need it all, I can always go back there. And the trees will need watering anyway, so I might as well..." Etc., etc. I figured, with all the quart jars of tomato sauce still in the pantry, I can get by on only four tomato plants this year. But I've already got a flat of two-inch pots. I f they all make it, that's 32 plants. Who's going to kill 28 of those little lovelies? But let me tell you about our first year here. I had a big tiller at the time, and dug up not one but three gardens. Beloved got the well-draining little one for spring and fall brassicas and peas, I got the orchard one, and we both got the big one. I decided to put out four kinds of tomatoes: Romas, Better Boys, Sweet 100's and some vining cherries. So I did a flat of each, figuring on some die-off. Nope. All healthy little beasties. This was early in February, as I was having some kind of light-deprivation fit and had to grow something. So I spent the spring mostly repotting and repotting until the tomatoes were shoving the lids off the cold frames. After ruthlessly giving away all the plants that anyone who knew me would take, I still had 72 tomato plants. So I put them all in the ground. I had forgotten to lime, so there was some blossom-end rot, but not much, as it had fallowed a few years. There were tomatoes, tomatoes, and tomatoes. Big ones, little ones, round ones, pointy ones. I gathered all the pointy ones and sauced till I dropped. The pantry shelves groaned. I chased the kids through the cherries and Sweet 100's and told them that was their dinner for tonight -- and all month, same menu. I sliced the big round ones and added them to every conceivable dish. But more kept coming. One day, late in August, I picked a perfect one-pound Better Boy and looked at it in misery and disgust. A surfeit of your favorite things will, sooner or later, turn you against them, and with a kind of strangled cry I pitched the tomato as high in the air as it would go. It came down in the middle of the duck pen with a satisfying splapp! of water-balloonish disintegration. One of the ducks ambled over to see what the fuss was all about. Idly, almost absentmindedly, she nipped at the remnants of the once-proud Better Boy. I could almost see, from across the creek, her small eyes widen. "Eureka!" She burbled to the others in Duckish, which was a mistake, as the others came boiling out of the shade to take the rest of the prize from her. Ah, said I to myself. Duck food! I threw bombs into the sky with abandon, and as three were coming down among the ducks, three more were launching into the air. At about this moment the neighbor, a tradition-minded stalwart citizen of some seventy-two years, decided he had better investigate. "So, uh, what are we doing today?" came his voice, from right behind the merry bomber's back. "Oh, hi, Mr. Trueblood! Feeding the ducks!" I launched three more missiles. The ducks, who by now had gorged themselves, showed no further sign of appetite and were mostly just dodging the incoming shells. "Right. Feeding the ducks. Well, nice weather, huh?" He watched me closely for signs of more erratic behavior, but none was forthcoming; my arms were tired. Every day until frost, though, I fed the ducks. It was good for my pitching arm, they clearly liked tomatoes a great deal, and were good for about fifteen Better Boys a day. The next year, I put in thirty-two plants. The year after that, sixteen. This year, four for sure. Well, maybe eight? ::: So, what's a gardener to do? We have weeds like nobody has weeds. You can hear them growing at night. Neighbors like to lean on the fence, shake their heads, and say, "Oh, my. Need some herbicide in there!" Well, thanks but no thanks; we had a serious run of birth defects among tree planters' families back in the seventies, including mine, and it turned out to have something to do with the herbicides that were used to keep the clear-cuts free of brush. I figure the big chemical companies owe me about forty thousand dollars so far, but let's just say for now, no herbicides on this place, thank you. So, ok, what to do? I learned, some years ago, by trial and error, that with a long-handled potato fork I could "spade" wet ground: the tines don't seem to compress the soil the way an actual spade does. I turned the clumps upside down, and the roots of sod and weeds, ripped by the fork rather than cut off cleanly by a spade, stood upside down naked in the sunlight, rapidly drying up, a satisfying scene of mayhem. But the earth itself remained stubbornly cold and damp, even for peas. Something more was needed. During one hot, dry summer not too long ago, I tried to water my plants from little irrigation ditches, as I had seen done in a garden book somewhere, but the plants were drying up anyway, because the rows were too far apart for the ditches to have any effect. A little exploration with a spade taught me what most of you old-time gardeners already knew: most of the water goes straight down. You have to water the roots of a plant to do it any good, because if the watering is hitting the ground just a little outside the reach of the plant, it will miss the roots entirely as it goes by on its way to the aquifer. Hmm. If I can water only straight down, said I to myself, then I can also DRY straight down. As with sun and shade, you can manipulate water levels by opening up or blocking paths for water -- or rain! The next winter I bought some stuff I had been avoiding: sheet plastic. 4-mil black and clear. I experimented with both, spreading them over various areas of the garden, and found that the clear plastic seemed to actually encourage weed growth, though it did dry out the soil enough to till. The black plastic seemed far superior. Every green thing underneath it died, and stayed dead, though worms did not seem to be at all discouraged, and moved about underneath quite freely. I've since heard that the clear does work, but it has to be tucked under the earth around all the edges -- absolutely all -- in order to deny air to the weeds and get enough temperature to kill them and their seeds. The black plastic seems much less effort. When I don't have enough to do the whole surface of the garden (which is always), I spread out what I've got, and three weeks later, go back, pull all the the plastic away, till the dry spot, and spread the plastic over the next space for the next three weeks. Thus there is always some earth dry enough to work, even in constant rain. Meanwhile the clear plastic comes in handy after all. In the freshly prepared ground, I can plant whatever rows of seeds interest me at the time, let it rain on them one night for sprouting, then cover the rows with a sheet of clear plastic for three to six days so the seeds won't drown, then remove. And voilá! A garden up and running, even as the cold rainwater keeps up its endless running from the downspouts round the house. Where there is a will, I suppose, there is almost always a way. Now if I could just find a way to keep my wellies from loading up ten pounds of clay every time I go outside! If I pick
up
a pebble and look at it, I see one thing. If I pick up another pebble,
and look at it, I see one thing. If there were no me, these things
would
lie there, until moved by wind or water, or diminished by these, and
the
action of sunshine, until they became sand. They are not appreciable as
two things of the same kind unless observed by an entity
capable
of categorizing. Plants,
and animals lacking a central nervous system, categorize by means of immanent
statistics. Some survive, some
don't, and those that survive may pass
on
their genes, with the result that the continued existence of those
genes
is in itself a record, passively, of there being sets of circumstances
favorable to such passing on. It's not that the
fittest survive. It's that those whose circumstances did not finish
them off survive. You may not be the fittest, but if you're still here,
well, cool. But a common denominator
for a lot of survivors is the utilization, whether accidentally or
purposively, of something like set theory: the successful
organism found or avoided like things, such as a certain
species of predator
or
annual temperature range. I
categorize. I note differences,
which is what senses are for, and if the
differences
are sufficiently minor I take the intellectual leap of concluding that
for my purposes the pebbles are "the same." I can gather like
pebbles,
bore holes in them, and string them on rawhide to make a necklace. I
can
draw a face in the sand, put the pebbles in the face on either side,
and
mean them to be taken, by another observer, as a representation of
eyes.
I can count them: "one, two." These are immensely complex activities,
not
easily described in all their implications. Without this capability
to
recognize, no complex animal would live long enough to pass on its
genes.
There would be no language, no speech, no writing, no art, no political
process, and none of what we call spirituality. And yet, at its, root,
recognition embodies a bit of a falsehood. This pebble, after all,
isn't that pebble. "There are no generals,"
asserted William Blake in the margins of a
copy of Reynold's's book: "ONLY particulars!" The leap of metaphor is a
momentary
fiction, which is the fiction that makes possible for us all the
discovery
of what we call truth. As I sit
for
a moment, watching the mists (which I "recognize" as mists) clearing
away
in the light of a rare sunrise from Jasper Mountain, I wonder where all
this leads. Many conclusions are possible. One of them is that I could
probably stand to be a little more tolerant of the fictions others live
by, having so thoroughly rummaged through my own myths, and discovered
their so tenuous hold on verifiability. People in general are
worthy of, I think, a good deal more
respect than they usually get. :::
The
tomatoes didn't pan out. I hovered over them with the mister till they
keeled over, no doubt with damping-off. I shall have to go to the
garden
store and surreptitiously acquire replacements. I put out peas and then
got sick and couldn't cover them during the heavy rains, and they
rotted. I put out corn -- I
know, it's early, some people never learn -- and
it's
been snowing up at the pass all day and hailing and pouring half-frozen
rain here, and I'm sick again and didn't go out and cover the corn
beds,
and now I can hear the seeds drowning even as I write. Gardeners are a
masochistic lot -- or sadistic, depending on whether you consider their
feelings or those of their seeds and transplants. I looked out the
window
at the already tall grass that would be choking the irises if it hadn't
been lodged by the constant wind and rain, and howled, or rather
croaked:
"my seeds are rotting! My garden is drowning!" Beloved looked
up
from her easy chair, smiled beneficently, and replied ever so sweetly.
"My garden is in the greenhouse, safe and snug." It's true; that's
where
her whole garden is, including the pumpkin patch and the sunflowers,
waiting
for the real spring, which as anyone around here knows, starts sometime
between
June 1 and the 4th of July. She can do this because she's mastered the
art of repotting. She kneels on her
feedsack-pillow,
trowel in hand, and repots from two-inch pots to four-inch, from four
to
eight, as needed, while her garden grows. I always manage to wait too
late
to do this; eventually I'll unpot a veggie only to find that the roots
have grown about sixty feet long, or maybe a mile and a half, winding
round-and-round
the soil plug like thread on a spool. The effect on the growth of the
plant
is not unlike that of creating a bonsai tree by removing its
taproot.
I can produce little teeny tomato plants and little teeny zinnias this
way, and probably should enter them in the County Fair -- in the
contest
about how not to garden. Take a tip from Beloved
and repot
early. She scoops up a canful
of mix, slings some into the bottom of
the
first four-inch pot, turns a broccoli upside down, taps two sides of
the
two-inch pot, lifts it gently off the soil plug, rights the plant into
the four-inch pot, shakes mix in on all four sides, tamps it down a bit
for a snug fit (roots abhor two things: air and light) so that the top
of the soil meets the root collar of the broccoli and is between 1/4
and
1/2 inch from the top edge of the pot, sets it in the new flat, and on
to the next one. This is much faster and
simpler, really than the
description,
and the rhythm of it all is quite relaxing. I prefer doing this with
Mozart
or Bach in the background. She's more a Golden
Oldies girl, but I've never heard Herman and the Hermits in the
greenhouse;
only the chuffing of the tomato can hitting the rich brown surface of
the
mix. The glass is stout
enough to resist
anything that Abner might contemplate, but there are situations that it
was not built for. George, a sheep that lived with us for awhile, made
this point very clear by escaping from his pasture one fine day. We got
him surrounded, and he retreated into the greenhouse, from whence we
thought
to lead him on a bit of rope. He had other ideas, and sailed through
the double-paned safety glass as if it wasn't there, scattering rainbow
shards twenty feet in all directions. Not a scratch on him,
either. And
all this time the greenhouse had faced into the pasture. Made me think
long and hard about which animals to put where. (The freezer, for
example,
turned out to be the best place for George.) They descend upon the
yard in troops of
twenty,
fifty, a hundred, eating, arguing, making love. A goldfinch will land
on
the seed stalk of a dandelion, barely bending it, and sweep the head
clean
of the tiny white parasol seeds in moments, then on to the next one.
The
males are dazzling, and I find myself moving from window to window to
get
a view of their plumage from a few feet away, empty pot in one hand, a
naked plug of soil with a chard seedling held forgotten in the other. It's a fine way to spend a Sunday afternoon, it really is. ::: My
father's "tiller" was a big machine like the front end of an
Allis-Chalmers
tractor; it had water-filled tractor-tread wheels that were as tall as
I was, and pulled a small but quite real single-moldboard plow. It
lasted
for two decades.
I think I see a pattern
here, and it's one that encourages me to
rethink
my original reaction to Wendell Berry's advocacy of horse-drawn
equipment
and scythes. I thought then that he was being a romantic, too much of a
purist, a professor playing at farming with a professor's income to
fall
back on, but I think now that his views will eventually make the most
economic
sense. My own first tiller, bought from a hardware store in 1977, lasted just two years shy of two decades. We practically farmed with these machines, as neither of us seems to know when we have enough ground in cultivation. My most recent tiller, however, I used for about twenty hours last year, and in its second hour this year, it died of a heart attack -- clunk!! I know the sound of a piston rod giving up the ghost, but I'm old enough to remember that I should be hearing that sound after three or four hundred hours or more, not twenty. My old chain saw, a 1979 Husky, will still cut wood if I get around to putting a new sprocket on it, and that was my professional work saw in the Oregon woods; it fought the Memorial Day fire in Sweet Home, in '82, I think. My new saw, on the other hand, one of those black-and-yellow things you can buy in a box at discount stores, lasted two weeks. Not to a salesman, to be sure, but to someone who wants to live in the country, not go there every night to sleep and back into town every morning, mind you, but to live in the country. There comes a time when plunking down good money for gadgets that look like labor-savers but ain't -- because they are going to refuse to do the labor -- begins to look like money spent foolishly. Pick up a garden magazine and the bright ads rave at you about the labor you will save with this machine or that machine, but in the end, Thoreau was right. He said: "...I start now on foot, and get there before night....You will in the meanwhile have earned your fare, and arrive there sometime tomorrow...if you are lucky enough to get a job in season." If you have to work for two days, or, ten, or twenty, to earn a tool and it lasts you two, ten, or twenty days under normal conditions, well, you really ought to have investigated the corresponding hand tool and saved half your time! Yes, yes, the woman's new tiller is busted and she has taken to philosophizing as she turns over the garden with a hay fork and blisters her soft hands: sour grapes we used to call it, per Aesop and his fox. But the blisters heal, the hands toughen, the body begins to slim down a bit, and if there's any sunshine to be had, some vitamin D into the bargain. One begins to look like one who one understands work. And no one will smirk at the ineptitude with which you yank, over and over again, at the starter cord of an intractable machine if, instead, you reach into the toolshed for a fork or spade. Meanwhile I'm beginning to see articles hither and yon about the disproportionate share that tillers, lawnmowers, chainsaws, edgers, and the like have in the despoiling of the air we breathe. Perhaps -- just perhaps -- I'm onto something. On the other hand, I live where hand-inverted sods resprout at the first hint of rain, which comes almost daily this time of year. So I've taken, as I said last month, to spreading black plastic to kill sods. It's very effective, if kept on for five weeks or more. Technology shouldn't be regarded as either our savior or our nemesis; the key is to use as much of it as necessary to get done what needs to be done, and no more. Now would be the time to rant about skimobiles and power boating, but I'm going to presume that the gentle reader would regard this as preaching to the converted -- take it as a compliment to your good sense. As my power tools fail me, one by one, I become more appreciative of my hand tools, and abuse them less and less. I have several hammers, a straight 22 oz., a curved 16 oz., a tack hammer, a ball peen, a masonry hammer, and a couple of sledge/maul monsters. I've become aware that these are not all interchangeable, and discovering why a tool is shaped a particular way pleases me greatly. My brace-and-bit, plane, bench vise and bench grinder are all over fifty years old and going strong. The grinder is electric, but it's an old electric, sealed, never needs oiling, perfectly balanced. It can heat up an edged tool very quickly, and I've learned to keep a can full of water handy to sizzle things in, so they they won't turn into butter. As time passes, I use the grinder less frequently, instead locking tools into the vise and leaning over them with a sharp bastard file, knocking the file against the bench from time to time to shed filings. A file takes a little longer, but it won't destroy temper and you can keep a clean eye on the angle of the cut. I keep five shovels. There's a round-pointed long-handled shovel for digging and ditching, a square-point for scooping up loose material from a flat hard surface, a d-ring-handled tree planting shovel with plates welded to the step for heavy-booted work, a more delicate d-ring shovel with an eighteen inch blade, suitable for bulb work, and a british-spade type thing -- a cheap imitation -- but useful for light sod-cutting and for mixing things in the wheelbarrow. One finds, after time, the point of balance with which a shovel can be wielded all day without undue fatigue. After more time, one becomes aware of the subtleties, such as when it's time to file the blade, or how one can put more pressure on a handle that has been linseed-oiled in the last year than can be put on one that hasn't. One begins to take the trouble to carry a shovel to the shade when not in use, on discovering that sun damages the handle faster than rain. Different people have different tool preferences for different techniques. Beloved carries around a feed sack with a pillow in it, upon which she kneels to work in the garden with her ever-present trowel. I use the bulb spade and a t-handled dibble stick, which I made from the pearwood handles of a defunct pair of grass shears. She marks her rows and hills with little stakes and yards of string, and sows by hand. I do beds without rows, dropping seeds down a four-foot length of PVC pipe, from a standing position. She seems to use rakes more than I do, and gets beautiful results where I would simply lose patience. I use hoes more, and have come to appreciate the efficiency of stirrup hoes, which she regards as outlandish things, and I believe she has never touched one. I have three -- but it's not that I'm a collector; they came with the place. I get a lot of use out of a pair of pruning shears, thirty years old -- a cheap brand, too -- and a heavy duty pair of limb loppers that have outlasted their wooden handles. I drove the tangs into two three-foot-long three-quarter-inch galvanized pipes, and on these iron legs they have walked with me over the land many times. To draw out the rolls of stock fencing that have languished for fifty years in the blackberry patch, I use a pair of double block pulleys almost a hundred years old, with a two-hundred foot length of rope looped back and forth from block to block, giving me my own strength four times over across a distance of fifty feet. This thing beats a modern "come-along" for speed and distance, if power is not all that's wanted. The rope is new, but that other rope lasted until this year; a mysterious thing of true hemp, soaked in creosote by hands long vanished from the earth. I hated to give it up. There are two footbridges on the place, as a seasonal creek divides it right down the middle, end to end. Across these we go, summer and winter, with the wheelbarrows. A wheelbarrow is an amazing device that can hardly be improved upon. It will negotiate tiny gaps while carrying hundreds of pounds with ease. We bring straw to the barn three or four bales at a time from the driveway, feeling our way with our feet, unable to see round the vast loads. A wheelbarrow imposes a stately gait that adds dignity to any laborer's demeanor. We bought a five-cubic-foot model at the same time as our old tiller, in 1977, for forty dollars. It has done far more hours of work than the tiller did, and looks fair to outlast us. The other one came with the place. Well, actually, we didn't know it was here at the time, and the former owner probably didn't either -- it was deep in the blackberries. I dug it out, bound up its wounds with bailing wire, and found a wheel for it. The thing has handmade handles built for a grip wider than mine, and it wobbles a bit as it goes, but it's still a wheelbarrow, and it does honest labor almost daily. Every family should have two wheelbarrows. We pass, sometimes, the Garden Lady and I, like ships in the night, laden with our separate but equal treasures. June When young, I went west, and made my life in the woods with two dozen good friends who were always on the move. We followed the melting snow from west to east, making the grand spring tour from range to range. Winters we worked within sight of the grey Pacific, or anyway in its rains, which bent the dark firs and cedars left and right, and tossed their heavy branches down, sometimes, at our feet. Rocks and logs rolled anytime, bounding and bumbling among us, and we hid behind stumps, cursing and praying our gods. By March the Olympics opened, and in April the Cascades, May brought the Wallowas, and June the high Bitterroots. We traveled in strange caravans of old trucks and buses, tipi poles tied to our roofs, and long rolls of canvas. Arriving at Shelton, or Big Creek, or the Clearwater River, we circled our wagons and set up our poles, and tipis, and yurts, and trailers, and campers, and spread out seeking for firewood, or springs of good running water. By the light of a lantern, and warmth of the glowing camp stove, we swilled weak coffee, and told the same old stories, bending the truth a little, but only enough for enjoyment; the truth in our lives was better meat than fiction, and anyone could say: hey, remember the time at Alsea... ...when the rain was running sidehill, and the government hid in their truck, and it seemed like the end of the world? And then the sun came out, and right in the hole in the clouds there were seven bald eagles swirling around in the light? You remember that? ...yeah, and when we forded the creek down at Coos Bay, and the creek was all salmon from bank to bank, and Trooper caught one, and put it in Smitty's tree bag, and along came the government, and asked had we seen any fish? And we said yes! We had! Hadda line on both sides of him with that tree bag flappin'. ...or when the Three Stooges did acid and went down to Shelton to talk to the government, and Len demanded more money because of the swamps? "Gators! Alligators in them swamps!" ...uh huh, and that night when they got back to camp, it was no camp, but six feet of river, and we'd moved off to high ground! Had to put up the yurt by our headlamps, and the wind picked it up with nine people attached, and set it back down. ...or the time when it sleeted all morning, and hailed us into the crew rig and down hill to Mapleton, and we sat in the shop eating four dollar sandwiches and drinking hot cocoa, and the government all thought we'd call it a done day, but we rode up to Grayback and worked in that blizzard till evening? Two hundred and twenty-two dollars each one of us got for that day. ...Yep, yep. And remember the heat up at Pierce, and the work done by moonlight, the sleeping all day and working again in the evening? And we'd tell these stories like old men and women, not one us yet thirty, not one of us yet knowing of death, or of pain beyond bearing. This was the work: each carried a sack of grey canvas, rubberized well to hold moisture, and hung from a web belt and buckle. The sack held young trees. Fir seedlings, most often, Douglas, or nobles, or grands, or pines such as yellow or lodgepole. Depending on age of the trees, one person might carry a hundred, two-fifty, five hundred, at a single bag-up. Some lifted the bags with a grunt, and buckled the belts on, while others might lie on the bag, buckle on, and lie helpless, turned turtle, and wait for a hand up. Those tree bags were heavy! Each of us carried a hoedad, or dag, with a three-foot handle smoothed by years of gloved handling, and a curved blade of four inches' width of steel, fifteen inches long, at right angle to the handle, a cross between shovel and hoe, and sharp as an axe. The "goverment" came to us in clean clothes, in a green pickup, and led us in darkness or dawn to some high place, always high up, where the sunrise might catch fire to a wide plain of white cloud tops, or the mists might divide to show frost burning in sunlight below us, deep in the draws of an east face, glittering danger. With our hoes we scattered along the steep roadside, and stepped off in line, talking, or singing, swinging our tools first broadside, to swipe the soil clean, then straight down to open the hole for the tree roots. Buried in earth to its first branch, each tree would be packed in with boot heel, and tugged once to check for looseness, then on to the next spot and repeat. Each day, five hundred to a thousand or more times, each one of those planters did this, without boredom. The weathers, the dangers, the beauty, the friendship, the honor we saw in restoring some green to the mountains, where mile upon mile of stumps stood mutely in mourning of glory, all kept us returning to this work from elsewhere, like salmon returning upriver, or wild geese to their wide silver wetlands. Our homes were our camps in strange valleys, with the nights and the stories. We had a way to hold meetings: one would sit with a clipboard and take names, crossing us off as it came our time to speak. By the clock, we would say our piece, and with a stern warning from the clipboard: "Ten more minutes on this, and we will call the question." There would be a motion, amendment, vote on the amendment, vote on the motion. At the end, criticism-self criticism. A good orator would know how to wave a half-greased boot for emphasis, throw a log into the red-hot Airtight yurt stove for punctuation. For some the yurt was home: they might spread a sleeping bag before the fire, and their dreams would dodge our arguments as we stepped over their heads, brushing crumbs and hay from our beards and braids. My own house was a truck from the forties, a flatbed with duals, floored with smooth maple, and hip-roofed with cedar all hand-shaked, with a stove and stove-pipe, and a lantern, and books, and a bunk, and bacon. A hatchet, pulaski, chain-saw, and calk boots and rain-gear, hard hat, flashlight, and rifle, fly rod, and red suspenders, and my hoedad and tree bag, were all my possessions. Almost: I had also a dulcimer of four strings, tear-drop shaped, of birch wood, and a harp with twelve chords, which I carried to campfires, where the guitars and mouth-harps were playing, and the singers kept up the bright fire and their voices from sunset to midnight, and the sparks from the brands rose up with the music and were lost amid thousands of stars. I once woke before dawn, and walked with a friend to a high cliff for the sunrise, and we brought a drum we had made, and drummed there and sang the sun up, and really we thought we were gods, and had made all the world new. I have aged, and now have only the stories, and my friends are dying by one and by two. One, for whatever reason, went hunting on the island of Hawaii, and was shot by his best friend when the quarry ran crosswise. Another, crossed in love back in Arkansas, came home to the woods he had known and leaped to his death from the high rocks. Another was crushed by a crew rig that rolled down the mountain in darkness; another, hearty and big and healthy, went to his bed and rose not up; another, and another, and another, were caught up with cancers. One who was loved and admired by us all, a tall woman who worked uncomplaining by day and fed and nursed others by evening, and bore one of her children by lamplight and starlight, and kept us together in hard times with her soft words, has died of a wasting disease, while still young in our eyes. We went to her citified death-mass all helpless, and stood in a parking-lot in the rain, and remembered her voice, and we cried. I would go, now, to the woods, with a few things, and go walking with my pack, and my cup, and my rain gear, and go thinking of all the green bones I had found when I worked in the woods. Deer are not buried in boxes, you know; they drop where they stand when the running is over forever. The coyotes come, and the others, a cougar, perhaps, or a bobcat, and last come the ravens. The bones are scattered about where the tree-roots spread and the sword-ferns silently bend in the long rains. I like to find them, green like the ferns, but still hard, still looking as though they have lots of time, which they do. I set them on stumps so they can see better, then laugh at my foolishness, and replace them where they had been, bent on making, no longer on seeing, the world. I am still for seeing, and I sit on the stump, and hold open my eyes, and see for the bones. I will walk to a place with a high cliff, and camp by the lake there at evening, and study the grand firs and the nobles reflected in the water made still by the evening. I will sit by the fire and consider, and lie down to count stars, and sleep, and in sleep dream dreams of green bones. When the morning arrives, grey and cold, I will rise and walk to the high place, bringing with me a drum I have made, and a song for my scattered people. There, on the rock, where no one will hear, I will sing the sun up, and name names, and the names will be holy to me. :::
When
I survey the acre of land with which we have surrounded ourselves, the
oak
and ash trees, rhododendron, hollyhock beds, barn, and house, I turn
upon
all these things a critic's eye, and keep ready to hand the pruning
knife,
fence
hammer, and trim brush. They do not yet appear
to me as I see them in
my
mental eye, and I shape them toward an end which I acknowledge as mine,
though I sometimes remember they serve other ends as well. I shape the
trees to my own pleasure. But so do children, for whom trees are
for
climbing. So do birds, whose need is nesting; so also carpenter
ants, who must bring nectar to that vast colony somewhere in our eaves.
We knew, long ago, that
we would come to such a place, with its diverse
longings, so we called for a document to mark the beginning of our life
together. Such a thing could be bought, but we both said, " oh, no, it must
be hand made." We could see it as clearly as if it were already done. Each
could describe it to the other, and to the other it was the describing
of a thing already seen. The young student who volunteered, who shaped
our wedding scroll, our fractur, with its brave words, was
commissioned
also to frame it with a house and trees, flowers, birds, a sense of
place
in a clearing amid woods. I think she understood
this commission, this
designing of a dream, that it was our weaving of a spell to catch our
future,
to make a future. And all who signed that Quaker wedding
certificate,
thirty-nine in number, understood: hope made visible. This is what art
is, though we are living a time when it is not fashionable (at least
among
the intelligentsia) to say so. "You were headed for
this place the whole time, weren't you?" Such a dream is a lot to
put
one's
name to, so we owe our thirty-nine witnesses much. I didn't know then,
and maybe I don't know now, what the painting meant to those gathered
round
to hear our vows and sign their names. But it's enough to know they
liked
it, and still do, and so easily make the connection from it to our
present
life. Their approval leads me to believe, a little, in my own and
Beloved's wisdom: that we could see a way forward, and say so; then
having
said, follow through. This is prophecy, the oldest art, which also
called
simply the art of living. The seeds and
starts,
balled trees, piles of rocks, and bags of soil amendment are pieces of
a vision already seen, to be brought together with a willing toil and
persistence. Even when the planting
and placing of the elements of this vision is
done,
the vision is not yet attained: what was once seen is still a future
glory,
which the reality must yet grow into. My hollyhocks just now are two to
three feet high, and my vision of them towers over me; in my mind's eye
they are seven to eight feet, dropping blooms like small
ladies-in-waiting
among the clumps of spearmint at their feet. These hollyhocks-to-be,
hovering
in the air above the current scene, are in a sense the real garden, the
garden of the mind toward which the outward garden is progressing. The
two gardens will not come together without labor. I intervene by
fighting
slugs and removing grass and dandelions, and by watering. Some
set up their summer sprinklers right away and leave it all to a timer
and
the available water pressure; those who can afford the initial outlay
very
wisely invest in a drip system, with the tiny tubes running along every
bed, stopping to weep only at a hill of zucchini or at the feet of each
of the rhodies. We're a low-budget
outfit, so our tools, especially
early
in the garden year, tend to be labor-intensive. At each end of the
house
is a spigot, low to the ground to prevent freezing in winter, and to
these
we have attached enough lengths of cheap garden hose to reach the ducks
and geese, the upper garden, the lower garden, the orchard garden, and
the various fruit trees and flower beds. Beloved does the
animals,
the upper garden with her lettuces and brassicas and strawberries, and
the Front Beds, which are mostly poppies and marigolds this year --
wherever
she can tear out enough mint and oregano. I do the rest. This involves
a constant war over nozzles. She really only likes
one, a greenish
fan-shaped
thing that hits exactly the right width at four feet to sweep a garden
row in one slow pass. She bought it over fifteen years, ago and it has
spent enough of that time sunning itself on its coils of hose to have
faded
in color, and it even seems to have lost weight, as though the years of
water rushing through have eroded the plastic from within till we
handle
it like a blown egg. I dread the day that it falls from some unheeding
hand and cracks. This can be anywhere on
the
acre, and I have very bad eyes nowadays. The secret to the
wand
is to hold it "upside down"; the rose should tip up like a flower (a
rose),
facing the sun, and its drops should rise into the air and fall by
force
of gravity alone, gently washing the mulch at the feet of your
seedlings.
The idea is to imitate, not rain, but a long-necked watering can of the
English type, with its brass rose. I drape the hose over my shoulder
and
wander along, visiting plants and offering them the wash of life at
their
feet, where it's wanted. It's very meditative, using the wand, because
there is no back pressure in the hose. Beloved tucks a
bit
more straw around her newly transplanted lettuce. Canada geese pass
overhead
here any time of year, though they are at their most spectacular in
autumn;
we have also mallards who travel in pairs, one green and one brown, and
put down in our goose pen to steal cob and talk to our Khaki Campbells
across the fence. A swallow sits on the clothesline in his green dinner
jacket and scolds me for getting too close to the birdhouse on the
potting
shed wall. The moon rises, sullen and red-faced at first, then
brightens as
night comes on, and the last of the sun sweeps up the face of Jasper
Mountain
and disappears where there will soon be stars. It is altogether restful
to water a garden by hand if you have the time. Take your garden's advice: forget the evening news and the sitcoms. Make the time. As
the winter rains subside slowly across the coastal and inland valley
landscape,
and days are sunny but nights still cool, my neighbors pile up
accumulated
garden and yard debris, leaving it for a few weeks, perhaps under a
plastic
tarp. As soon as it's dry enough out, but not dry enough to get them in
trouble with the fire warden, they torch off the lot. From a mountain
top
nearby, one can see this activity as a a kind of Civil War reenactment,
with the smoke of the guns drifting from various parts of the field.
Filbert
farmers are prone to set off a lot of piles at once, so that their
places
look like some corner of Shiloh.
When I first began to accumulate such material here, I started to build such a pile, but then remembered reading a book by a maverick Japanese organic farmer. He said that he had no way to fertilize a hillside orchard until he hit upon the idea of gathering wood and spreading it around on the slopes to rot. His trees thrived. We've begun to emulate that basic idea. Since we still use wood heat, I do try to saw up larger branches for the woodpile. The natives are ash and oak, so the smaller branches are useful for the small barbecue pit we inherited with the place. Finger-sized trimmings of oak, ash, bigleaf maple, blackcherry, and cottonwood go into low places on the land, to help build soil. When there is a lamb, much of this goes to stock feed -- cottonwood is a favorite -- as does the abundant Japanese knotweed festooned with morning glories. Himalaya blackberry, our region's equivalent of kudzu, I leave where it drops when cut. The lawnmower will eventually chip up the drying stems. Some of them I use for bushing peas, which works surprisingly well. We have let too much mint grow in too many of the beds, and what we can't use we pull -- and stack around the feet of the fruit trees for mulch. Old squash vines, sunflower stems, hollyhocks, zinnias, cornstalks, "mother" strawberries, and old-growth chard or broccoli plants I chop up with a machete and leave in place to be mowed and perhaps eventually tilled in. Sods pulled up from the garden, along with cat's ear, I also throw into the garden or under the trees, if they haven't gone to seed, and of course all the kitchen stuff goes there. We save our dish water, add it to some other choice "household wastewater," and feed this to fruit trees, grape vines, and flower beds. After we've done the woodcutting for the year, the driveway accumulates a layer of sawdust and chips too small for gathering up for the woodstove and too acid for the garden. This material is gathered up with a square point shovel and wheelbarrow, and added to the "low spots." With all this activity, we find there's nothing left over that belongs in a bonfire, so we've never had to have one. In fact, we import whatever we can get. buys buys tremendous bales of straw at two dollars apiece, each weighing about the same as the Titanic, and huffs them up to the barn to spread around under the bottoms of the ducks and rabbits. We fight over the resulting mulch/fertilizer, but I generally lose as I haven't the moral advantage of having hauled the bales. In November of every year, I scout around for bags of leaves left curbside. Last year I brought home some twenty-five of these. Some of the bags were big-leaf maple, which is said to be a no-no in the vegetable garden, but they're fine for the "low spots" and around rhododendrons and the like. Some were oak, which can be sweetened with rock lime and used wherever you like. Some were more of a beechy-sweetgum kind of thing, and these were sheet-composted right out onto the garden and turned under with the hay-fork "rototiller" in the spring. This seems to work so well that I question the usefulness of a compost heap. By the time the pile, of whatever humongous size at first, cooks down, there's so little of it that it has to be rationed to the neediest (usually tomatoes), and the rest go hungry. If I could afford to, I'd get a chipper. This produces a very democratic product which can be spread around evenly, promoting soil health and microorganism and worm activity throughout the whole area -- can be put on anytime, anywhere, in plant pots, on raised beds, around azaleas, fruit trees, or even the lawn. At a commune in Georgia, where I was the truck farmer and bakery woman, I set up a bin behind the bakery, made of three sheets of metal roofing, and while waiting for the seventy-five pound lump of bread to rise indoors, shoveled whatever I could find into a big shredder outdoors. Sawdust, mule (yes, mule) manure, kitchen wastes, grass clippings, and whole piles of cleared vegetation, including a half-acre of high-nitrogen kudzu, went into the machine, in alternating batches, so that there'd be an even mix in the bin. As soon as the bin was full, I added another one, and when that one was full, I added another. The half-acre garden, which had been in ryegrass over the winter, I tilled in, and after the crops got high enough to mulch, I sheeted the whole area with the contents of the bins. The chippings served as compost, mulch, and pathway alike. We would show visitors the garden, and on learning that it was organic, they would invariably ask where the compost heap was. "You're looking at it." We never bought fertilizer, except for some organic mixes for the nursery, where a more controlled acidity was called for. I remember the nurseryman, now a famous organic truck farmer who lives in this area, did sometimes have to fight white flies, the bane of greenhouse operations whether organic or not. He set off pungent smoke bombs that were very effective. I asked what was in them. He grinned. "Nicotine. The stuff's an organic insecticide, invented by tobacco plants to kill any bugs that try to eat the leaves." This gave me an idea. I bought a pouch of chewing tobacco (which raised a few eyebrows in the store), and make a pomade of chewing tobacco, chips left over from old soap bars, and rabbit manure, all tied up in a cheesecloth, and left the "teabag" in the watering can overnight. The resulting tea fed plants yet insulted bugs effectively, and could be used in the greenhouse, on flower beds, and throughout the young garden, though I avoided the foliage of lettuce and the like slated to be brought in to the kitchen. You can put a similar mix into a hose-end sprayer, but it doesn't seem to me that the resulting dilution, even at the highest ratio, has enough kick. Just keep the solution making daily in the watering can, and use it wherever it's needed most. I leave the can in the greenhouse, where the heat from the sun during the day and radiating back from the brick floor at night can"solarize" the tea. The warmth seems to be preferred by the plants over cold water, and I would do this routine of leaving the water in the can overnight even if didn't have the teabag in it. Once you've made yourself responsible to a lot of plants, every good habit helps. ::: We used to mention Ms. Stout to our friends, and the response was always the same: "Yes, but that was back East. Here, the soil stays too cold when you do that, there are too many slugs that live in the hay, it sprouts a lot of grass, and the plants tend to go yellow on you from lack of nitrogen, etc." As time went on, we found that there was something to these objections. Rows of beans or whatever cannot be planted as early in deep mulch as in bare earth, as there will be poor germination due to the clammy conditions. Slugs move in, in huge numbers, as they dislike crawling over bare earth but love hay. Our "hay" is straw, but weed seeds do live in it, and they do sprout, especially if you run low on straw for a year. And, sure enough, give the plants only a straw diet and they do seem starvish, especially if it's the first year. We found, though, that we could modify the system and get some benefit. We do turn over the garden with a fork, and then cover it with black plastic for six to eight weeks. This gives sod (which can form here even in winter) a chance to die, even in the rainy season, and kills a lot of weed seeds. It also raises the temperature of the soil. Then we strip off the plastic and immediately throw on the fresh straw. If it's over six inches deep there seems to be little to fear from compaction, so we've abandoned trying to maintain raised beds and paths -- with the straw, it's all one raised bed. Meanwhile, the whole garden, except for peas, which can be direct sown, and white radishes ditto, is sprouting in two-inch pots in the greenhouse. Along about Memorial Day, if we've managed to wait that long, we move the whole garden out to the garden, so to speak -- annuals to the beds, veggies to the round garden -- even the corn is grown in pots or flats to about five inches high, then moved out. Pick a spot, trowel down through the straw, pop in the plug, tamp, grab another pot and move on. The relatively cool earth is good for the roots, the straw protects the root collar and supports the stem, so there's little need for hardening off or even of flooding the transplants. There's so little shock that there's almost no wilt or slowdown in growth, and the high reflectivity of the fresh straw provides plenty of strong light to the leaves, above and below, for good growth. The plants will still need nitrogen, though, so our next move is to top dress around them with rabbit or duck bedding, and provide a drink of one of our watering-can teas. After a week or two of this, the garden will be virtually maintenance-free right through harvest, just as Ruth Stout said it would be. Oh, slugs. Yes, lots and lots. We have big brown leopard slugs, five to six inches long, medium-sized orange thingeys, and little tiny gray ones. There are also snails in stunning numbers, a mottled variety of very pretty appearance and quite large when full grown, as much as two-and-a-half inches in diameter. Of all these only the tiny greys do any harm, but they do enough for all -- more than the spotted cucumber beetles, which are numerous yet only a nuisance. Beloved says the greys are babies of the orange ones, but I don't know how she knows that. Both turn up by fork or spade, from as deep as eight inches in the ground, in distressingly large numbers. And both are very, very fond of the straw. I have tried the beer trick, and, yes, they like beer, but it's a tiring sort of work. And the slugs don't care to travel far for their night of carousing, maybe because the ones on the far side of the garden haven't arrived yet when the dawn patrol kicks in. I have had success with slug bait, but it only seems to be potent for a day or so, so it's addictive, and not especially cheap. And I suspect the stuff. What's in it? Aluminum sulphate? Good for blueberries but not for tomatoes, and tomatoes is where I need it. I could spread lime to fight it, but that takes thinking ahead -- it takes maybe six months for the lime to weather down enough to feed plants. I hate to admit it, but I'm enough of a townie not to have known from the start that I have the ultimate answer to slugs right here. I was rooting around the foundation of the house a while back, and came up with one of those giant brown mottled snails, which I suspected of munching the flowers, and in a fit of pique threw the little beast over the duck fence. The commotion that ensued was alarming. The ducks were chasing one another in circles, with one duck in front trying to gobble the snail down while five other nipped and bashed at her in an effort to get her to drop the morsel. Aha! I ran into the house and did a bit of research. Yep. The preferred food above all foods, slugs included. Another good reason to keep ducks. I immediatel hereded them to the garden, where they, harly believing their good fortune, stayed busy for the next half hour. I would have kept them there longer, but they began eying the plants. There I drew the line. :::
I have figured
out how to fall asleep in the little kayak. To maintain
stability,
it's best to sit with legs extended, which puts the body in an upright
position. The back of the cockpit is the backrest.
But I've discovered that by stretching one leg until the toes reach the
end of the space in the bows, and raising one knee high out of the
cockpit, I can slip my fanny down from the seat, rest the back of my
head on the backrest, and snooze safely, so long as I'm not on water
with too much fetch (room for strong winds to create serious waves) or
shared by motorized craft -- especially vee-hulls riding low in the
water.
I was snoozing thus on a wilderness lake, miles from nowhere, when a 15-inch rainbow trout, a male with strong September-like shoulders, hit the imitation nymph trailing at the end of my 4 lb. test line. A bit disoriented, I remembered in time: vacation, trail, boat, lake, fish, set hook, commence reeling. I set the drag to let the trout run around a bit and tire himself out. While this was going on, I noticed movement in the corner of my eye, and, after securing the trout, investigated by means of my 8X monocular (made from half of a cheap pair of mini-binoculars that were falling apart). The activity turned out to be of a pair of otters, swimming leisurely from one cove to another, alternately sounding and breaching like tiny, furry whales. I like otters, though I realize I'm in competition with them. Fishing, once a necessary art, is fast becoming a luxury which in many areas, the natural world can no longer afford to have us pursue. Wild fish populations are melting away. The causes are difficult to discover: climate change, agriculture, forestry, urbanization, dams, commercial ocean fishing, introduction of non-native fish species, and high-tech sport fishing pressure. I do fish. Beloved likes to eat them, and so do I. So we add them to our diet of home-grown tomatoes, broccoli, and apples. But I can avoid bothering the wild poulations. The high-altitude lakes where I have been pursuing this vanishing art once contained no fish at all. The Eddeeleo lakes, for example, were named for Ed, Dee, and Leo, three Forest Service rangers who packed in Eastern brook trout to those lakes by mule train in the 1920s. Since then, many such lakes have been visited, some of them many times, by trout-laden helicopters. Some of these lakes are quite remote, and getting my kayak to them means considerable exercise. It also means, often, meditative solitude, an aspect of fishing that is threatened by the advent of gasoline powered boat motors and sonar. Dame Juliana Berners, an abbess in England in the fifteenth century, established non-commercial fishing as an art and sport, and at the same time a means of "communing with nature": For all other maner of fysshynge is also laborous and greuous, often makyng of folkes ful were and colde which many tymes hath ne seen cause of greate infirmities, but the angler maye haue no colde nor dysease nor angre, but yf he be causer hym selfe, for he maye not lose at the mooste but a lyne or an hooke: of which he may haue store plentye of hys owne makynge, as thys simple treatyse shall teache hym. So then hys losse is not greuous, and other greefes maye he not haue sauynge but yf any fysshe break away after yt he is taken on the hooke, or els yt he catch nought whyche is not greuous, for yf he fayle of one he maye not fayle of an other, yf he doth as thys treatyse teacheth, but if there be nought in the water, and yet as the least he hath his holsome walke and mery at his ease, sweet ayre of the sweet sauour of the medow floures that maketh him hungry. He heareth the melodious armony of foules. He seeth the yonge swans, herons, duckes, cootes, and many other foules with their broodes, whyche me semeth better then all the noyse of houndes, the blastes of hornes, & the scry of foules, that hu[n]ters, faukeners, & foulers ca[n] make. And if the angler take fyshe: surely then is there no ma[n] meryer then he is in his spirite. And who so wyl vse thys game of anglyng: he muste ryse early, which is profytable to man in this wyse. That is to wete, most to to the health of hys soule. For that it cause hym to be holy, & to the helth of his body for that it shal cause him to be whole.This is the fishing I look for, knowing that it is disappearing from most of the places I can reach; knowing that wild fish of the size and fighting qualities I remember from my youth are now reserved to people in faraway places, such as the Alaskan Aleuts, whom I admire and whom I wish well, and to the rich, who can hire airplanes to get them to such places, and whom I do not, especially, admire or wish well. Not even the oceans are immune to these changes. In many places, such as Newfoundland, entire communities have been forced to turn their back on their first love, the fishing trade, and turn to oil exploration or cab driving to get by. A recent study of catch records shows a ninety percent drop in population of the large sport species: swordfish, sailfish, and marlin. Tuna are appearing fewer and smaller in the nets each decade. Do the otters know what's in store for them? Do we? There are, roughly, two large groupings, or rather a large group and a smaller group, of sport fisherfolk. The large group, numbering in the millions in the United States, tends to prefer spinning reels, baits and lures, sonar, GPS, beer, and large, fast, and loud boats. Among these are many who will keep all the wild fish the law allows, and some others who will keep wild fish the law does not allow. The smaller group prefers, indeed religiously and perhaps self-righteously, fly reels, artificial flies, barbless hooks, expensive vests, wine, and perhaps a float tube. Among these, many look with murderous disdain on any who do not immediately and with infinite tenderness de-hook and release all fish. They regard themselves as conservationists, even environmentalists, though they somewhat woundedly resist the arguments of others, such as animal rights advocates, who would ban fishing entirely. Bass tournaments are perhaps the most visible instance of sport fishing's excesses. Tournaments are catch-and-release, perhaps to appease their critics, but the fish undergo a lot of stress in being caught, tanked, transported, weighed, measured, and dumped by people in a hurry. Lakes and reservoirs where these tournaments take place are sometimes littered for days afterwards with hundreds of dead and injured fish, much more than the cormorants and ospreys can deal with. Meanwhile, the Orvis crowd are stressing fish too. Some released trout die, many are damaged, and all of them have had the fright of their lives. Why terrorize them if you're not going to eat them? The moral implications surrounding catch-and-release mirror those of many environmental conundrums. The issues around fishing are a microcosm of all the issues: do I drive to the mountains to fish, lowering my blood pressure and improving my quality of life, or save the gas to conserve fossil fuel and reduce global warming? I suspect the math is beyond most of us, perhaps all of us. Quo vadimus? "Where are we going? And why are we in this handbasket?" But to live is, some day, to die, regardless. For each of us, we must decide how to live well. When I fish stocked trout, I'm consciously looking for a fish I'm comfortable regarding as food. I have an at-risk cardiovascular system and the doctors have told me to eat fish. I catch trout, clean them, roll them in corn flour and Italian seasoning, fry them lightly in olive oil, steam some zucchini and make a quick garden salad of home-grown lettuce, cherry tomatoes, beet greens, bell peppers, spring onions, and garlic blossoms. Serve with a glass of well water with a sprig of mint in it. It is my offering to Beloved for the grinding work that she does, five and sometimes six days a week, in social services. August As I rose this morning and carried a cup of English Breakfast to the east porch, I found Beloved already there, with her big mug of coffee, admiring her surroundings wistfully. "Fall has started," she said. This was a shock. The really hot weather has only just begun, and we've become full-time waterers. But I knew immediately what she meant. The air smelled differently, somehow, than the previous morning, and a golden glow on the wall behind us, the telltale September glow, which I associate with Canada geese going up the river, suffused the whole porch area with something like a palpable sadness. Where did the summer go, so soon, that we had waited so long to begin? And we have so little to show for our work, so far this year... The brassicas went in
too late to avoid the flea beetles, which are the
current plague. We only did one small bed of peas, rather than the
usual
four in succession. The tomatoes have barely set fruit. We've just
picked
the first zucchini, and there's no crookneck squash yet.
Granted, I did get a crop off the early sweet corn, but the late variety should have tasseled by now and hasn't even reached waist high yet. The second-year red onions were our only real show crop, making juicy bulbs six inches across. We took most of these to the Friends Meeting House, where there is a tradition of leaving surpluses for all comers on the back porch, but that looks like it will be our only contribution for the year. There were no plums, and few apples; the Asian pears are too young to count, so there's just the one crop on the lone Bartlett to represent the orchard. One thing we have a lot of, this year, from our point of view, anyway -- is geese. There are in the core flock two White Chinas, Abner and Amanda, and two beautiful grey Africans, Auntie One and Auntie Two. Last year there were about 140 goose eggs, with Amanda producing about as many as the other two together, albeit smaller ones, and of these we left two to be hatched, which produced a couple of fine looking White China goslings, both of whom, however, died not long after fledging, from causes unknown. This year, there were about 100 eggs, of which we left enough in the nest that seven hatched. These came in waves, so to speak. Auntie One took over the brooding early on, hissing if Amanda got anywhere near the nesting box, and hatched three goslings which she took to be her very own. She was willing for Auntie Two to babysit them, or proud papa Abner, but Amanda was not to come near. If she even tried to share in bathing and drinking at the common pools, Auntie One drove her off with hisses, snake-like threatening movements of her long neck, and beating of wings. It got so that poor Amanda was getting dehydrated, and we had to spread the various pools and "white buckets" over a large enough area that Auntie One couldn't cover the entire territory, making it possible for poor Amanda to jump off the nest, run for a drink, and run back. For Amanda had chosen to take on the remaining eggs, and stayed with them day and night. Eventually four new goslings appeared, which seemed to us smaller at birth than those Auntie One was rearing. Three of these were larger than the last, whom we called Junior. It was now Amanda's turn to go on the offensive. Keeping the new babies close to her, she interposed herself between them and Auntie One at every possible moment, occasionally rushing over to give Auntie One a smashing peck in the back, between the shoulder blades, whenever she seemed to threaten to come too close. I was impressed with Amanda's motherly courage, Auntie One having considerably more reach and strength, and about double Amanda's weight. The children grew apace, but came a morning last week when I counted six at feeding time. Had Junior fallen down a missed post-hole somewhere, or had there been perhaps a fox raid? I searched, and before long came across his stiffening corpse -- neck broken -- he'd been severely pecked between the shoulder blades. Amanda?? Oh, surely, not. I elected to weed the upper garden, which is close to the fowl pens, and keep an eye on goose society for a bit. Amanda and her remaining three were cropping weeds and sipping water in one pool cluster, Auntie One and everyone else, including Abner, were doing the same in the other area. Then Amanda, going for some stray bits of cob, was momentarily distracted. Instantly Auntie One, who had apparently been single-mindedly on the lookout, dashed across the invisible line of motherly enmity, and gave a slamming peck to the smallest remaining gosling, right at the base of his neck! I must intervene. Leaping over the fence of the duck pen (to the mild astonishment of the ducks), then over the goose fence, I chased Auntie One through the pool areas, overturning buckets, slipping in mud, rounding Auntie One in ever-tightening circles. We bowled over non-Auntie-One geese and goslings in all directions in our epic chase, which seemed to go on for a long, long time, though it was undoubtedly over in a couple of minutes. I held Auntie One's sleek, almost expressionless face close to mine, my fingers wrapped round her downy neck, and pronounced sentence: "Okay, you -- IN WITH THE DUCKS." And dropped her over the fence. The ducks scattered, goggle-eyed and squawking, then went about their business, which was mostly chasing flies. At that moment I got the feeling one always gets when one is being watched from behind. I turned. Abner, Auntie Two, Amanda, and the six goslings stood together in an amicable group, regarding me with mild curiosity. And just beyond them, my two neighbors to the west, Mr. and Mrs. Trueblood, leaned on the fence. They had thouroghly enjoyed the chase. Auntie One began treading up and down along the fence across from her three darlings and the rest of the flock, calling to them, and trying the wire at every possible point. The others, after getting over the discovery that the madwomanman was not planning to kill them all, simply went back to grazing. Auntie Two was the perfect aunt, spelling Amanda as needed in raising the six goslings, who from that moment looked to Amanda for all orders. Beloved was away at a family reunion during all this. On her return from the Midwest, she got my report on goose events of the preceding week, then went out to survey the crime scene. I made tea, and brought it out to the shady side of the "veranda." Beloved returned, took two quiet sips, and said, "You know what? Every one of those babies is a White China!" The three that Auntie One had fought so hard for, and been willing to kill for, were all Amanda's. ::: Last year, Beloved kept them in the refrigerator for, oh, all the way to this year. I asked about that. "Well, we are going to blow them out and make holiday decorations out of them and things like that...and sell them. We? "Sure, it's easy; you'll just punch a little bitty hole in each end with a little bitty nail and blow it out into a little bitty cup or something." Me. I tried the technique as described, and after about five minutes of blowing, had one egg in the cup and a severe headache. A hundred and thirty-nine more eggs waited quietly on the table. I sat and thought for a bit, then went to get my high-speed mini-drill, and stopped by the sixteen-year-old's room. "Got a pump and a basketball needle?" "Uh, yeah, but what do you want 'em for?" "Trust me, you don't want to know." I selected an egg, and, using a cone-shaped grinder bit, opened one end and soften the other (the skinny end). I punched the needle in ever so gently, then pushed down the plunger, slowly, so as to avert an explosion, while holding the needle-inserted egg in the other hand above the cup. The egg emptied itself in about three seconds. Visions of a cottage industry danced in my head. I made quick work of the pile of eggs, emptying the cup after each one into a mixing bowl (this is in case you find a bad egg), in which the eggs would be later blended and moved into freezer bags -- when thawed, the batches are good in baking recipes that call for eggs. But as far as cottage industry goes, well, we've never sold one yet. Can't bear to part with them. But after two years of this our Christmas tree looks splendid, and so do those of just about all of our friends.... September There is in an obscure Emblem Book by one Henry Hawkins, dated 1633, a tribute to one of the garden's great flowers: The honour of our Gardens, and the miracle of flowers at this day, is the Heliotropion or Flower of the Sun; be it for the height of its stem, approaching to the heavens some cubits high: or beautie of the flower, being as big as a man's head, with a faire ruff on the neck; or, for the number of the leaves, or yellow, vying with the marigold, or, which is more, for al the qualities, nature, and properties of the Flower, which is to wheel about with the Sun; there being no Needle, that more punctually regards the Poles, then doth this Flower the glorious Sun. In the spring, Beloved set aside the packets of sunflower seeds that had accumulated, and announced that she would build Sunflower Houses. "What are those?" asked I. "They are sunflowers planted in a circle, so that children can play in the middle of them in high summer, and make believe that they are houses. It's an old tradition." I went to my books to look this up. I didn't find any sunflower houses, but a favorite writer, the gentle Sharon Lovejoy, tells of Hollyhock Houses, which seems to be the same idea. She plants hollyhocks in a circle, and then when they are tall, ties them together to form the rafters of a kind of tipi. Beloved took her packets to the greenhouse, filled three flats of two-inch pots with potting soil, and poked one seed down a bit over a quarter of an inch into each one, humming a song about Mistress Mary. The long rains went on, and my measured circle of elephant garlic came up, like a green and pungent Fairy Ring. I explained how this would work. "This is a circular garden; the rainbird in the middle will reach exactly to the garlic, all the way round, and this gap here is the entrance. Plant your tall things near the perimeter, and your short things, like squash vines near the middle, so that nothing is in any thing else's rain shadow." "Okay. And where do the sunflower houses go?" "What sunflower houses?" Patiently she explained again. I furrowed my brows. "Won't some of them keep the water off the rest? I was kind of envisioning a row, sort of all the way or half way round, then corn further in, then tomatoes, like a sort of staircase." "I want sunflower houses." "Umm, okay, how about evenly spaced, though, around the perimeter?" "Sure, I'll put one here, and here, and here, and here..." It was to be the Year of the Sunflower. For in the morning it beholdes his rising; in his journey, attends upon him; and eyeth him stil, wheresoever he goes; nor ever leaves following him, til he sink downe over head and eares in Tethis's bed, when not being able to behold him anie longer she droops and languishes, til he arise: and then followes him againe to his old lodging, as constantly as ever; with him it riseth, with him it falles, and with him riseth againe.The sunflowers did not appear only in the circle garden. Another sunflower house came up in the hilltop garden, menacing the lettuce and onion beds. And there were genetically engineered sunnies in all the beds around the house; tiny ones, and full sized ones that stood on short thick stems, as if someone had beheaded some giant and left the trophy by the city walls. Many of these were along the east side of the house, and followed the sun until midday, then continued staring straight up, as though wondering what had become of their lord and master. Eventually they became too heavy with seed for this myopia, and drooped daylong, no longer befriended of bees but increasingly frequented by birds. At first we admired their sunny looks among the poppies, zinnias, marigolds and such, but, later, in seed time, their ungainliness seemed to us to class with the bachelor buttons, thee fathery cosmos, and the larkspurs, and we pretended not to see them. Nature hath done wel in not affording it anie odour at al; for with so much beautie and admirable singularities, had there been odour infused therinto, and the sweetnesse of odoriferous flowers withal, even men, who are now half mad in adoring the same for its excellent guifts, would then have been stark mad indeed, with doting upon it.Sunflowers are difficult to ignore. On a hot day in August, I went to the circular garden to look (vain hope) for a reddening blush on the hundreds of green tomatoes, and as I sloped along, parting branches, ran headlong into a massive flower head, dangling on a stem bent double with the weight, and a good eighteen inches across. Such a plant demands attention, and will bludgeon you if it doesn't get it. I growled and pushed it away, and it came swinging insistently back across my path. Involuntarily my eye followed the stem into the thicket from whence it had sprung. Oh, yes! Sunflower houses. Well, there's such a thing here, I suppose, except it's awfully weedy in there; no child has had a go this year. I went looking for Daughter. But Nature, it seems, when first she framed a pattern for the rest, not being throughly resolved, what to make it, tree or flower, having brought her workmanship almost unto the top, after a litle pause perhaps, at al adventure put a flower upon it, and so for haste, forgot to put the Musks into it. Wherupon, to countervaile her neglect heerin, the benigne Sol, of meer regard and true compassion, graced her by his frequent and assiduous lookes with those golden rayes it hath. And as the Sun shewes himself to be enamoured with her, she, as reason would, is no lesse taken with his beautie, and by her wil (if by looks we may guesse of the wil) would faine be with him. But like an Estritch, with its leaves as wings, it makes unprofitable offers, to mount up unto him, and to dwel with him; but being tyed by the root, it doth but offer, and no more.Daughter at first was dubious. She had after all, recently seen Little Shop of Horrors. But mothers are still to be humored, until one reaches a certain age. I rummaged about in the garage and came up with a couple of large scraps of carpet. By throwing one onto the grassy floor of the Sunflower House, I was able to make it instantly homey -- and she took over from there. "I'll be right back," she said, and before I knew it, my weeding was over for the day. Daughter returned with a wagonload of dolls. "You move into that one over there...and you'll be new in the neighborhood...and we'll come over and see you -- oops, not enough room -- so you come and see us, and we'll invite you in to tea." In this fashion are afternoons of Important Grownup Work lost forever. It is surprisingly cool in the Sunflower House, while the sun's rays are broiling the homeyard only inches away, and shimmering the landscape near and far. One can play for a long time in such a space, and forget the approach of evening. When we gathered our tea things to retreat to our night home, we found the shadows long, and the air golden, and a massive flock of Canada geese skimmed over us, low enough for Daughter to hear the wind their wings made, and for even me to hear the talk among them, heading for the river and the gleaning of the wheat fields there. Beloved met us at the door, and she, being the artist that she is, knew not to break our wondering silence. She only smiled to see that the web of Sunflower Houses she had woven months before had made its catch. It's thus an old tradition becomes a new one. It is like the Scepter which the Paynims attribute to their Deitie, that beares an Eye on the top; while this flower is nothing els but an Eye, set on the point of its stem; not to regard the affayres of Mortals so much, as to eye the immortal Sunne with its whole propension; the middle of which flower, where the seed is, as the white of the eye, is like a Turkie-carpet, or some finer cloth wrought with curious needle-work, which is al she hath to entertaine her Paramour.Friends came, from far away, to visit. Adults sat round in the shade of the east front, stirring cups. The screen door banged. Daughter and Daughter's friend and the dolls headed for the garden. We will remember the Meteor Night in winter, when the leaden clouds, heavy with Pacific rain, shut out Orion and his gleaming belt. We will remember the tomatoes, Better Boy, Cherry, Brandywine, and Golden Jubilee, when their poor cousin, the frozen tomato soup, is brought from the freezer to thaw. But most of all, as the huge seed heads are plunked, face up, on the well-house roof to gladden the hearts of the shivering juncos and chickadees, we will remember the Sunflower Houses. :::
I have made pretty good use of decent weather and opportunity, and spent some time among the woods and lakes. My two daily limits of brook trout (10 fish) I cleaned, put in the bottom of a canvas tote bag, rolled it up, tied the handles in a knot, set it on the lake bottom in eight inches of water, placed a stone over it, and shaded the cache with slabs of bark. I then paddled off to the other side of the lake to admire the view. As I returned to my campsite, I saw an enormous raven sail off among the alpine firs and mountain hemlocks with a cleaned, decapitated brook trout in his beak! The raven had obviously watched me go through all my steps, and simply reversed them. He walked into the lake, pulled away the bark slabs, removed the stone, dragged the tote bag up onto the lakeshore, untied the handles, unrolled the bag, and pilfered the fish. I had to go catch another one. It has been a good bird year, here, of sorts: I’ve watched eagles steal fish from ospreys, and vice versa. The cormorants are back, along with grebes and herons. Plenty of geese and ducks around , and thousands of coots wintered over on the reservoir. There’s a bald eagle sitting, day after day, on a nest about two miles from the house. I'm eating trout fairly regularly, something that can’t be done everywhere these days, either due to depleted stocks or too much mercury in the water. This fish goes well with a salad and a glass of water with a sprig of mint. Since I've walked two or four miles with a boat on my back to get the fish, the calorie count seems to come out about right. I’ve become rather obsessed, lately, with the notion that obesity is not a disease, as everyone seems to be calling it, but, in most cases, a symptom of a disease --- one that has no name that I can discover. One could call it proto-diabetes, perhaps, since diabetes can be one of the full-blown consequences of our poor eating habits. "Poor eating habits" often comes down to simply this: insulin shock. It's not whether we eat carbs and fats, it's how and when as much as how much. If we would eat more slowly, more raw and uncooked, less processed, and avoid not only sugar but sugar substitutes (which often produce the same extra hunger as does sugar itself) we can slow and/or lessen the impact of our food choices on the pancreas, which is really what "improved digestion" means. Take spaghetti, for example ("Oh, no!"). Right now, thanks to Atkins and South Beach exponents, spaghetti or any pasta is a major no-no. But you might consider making only enough that there can be no "second helping." And cooking it less, which results in what Europeans call al dente. This is a little harder to chew and digests more slowly. Now add your own home-made sauce, made in a small enough quantity that there will be no leftovers. Make fresh, eat fresh. Dice very small some zucchini, green onions, pok choi, mushrooms, and, if you like it, tofu. Blenderize a tomato with a chili pepper. Mix all these. No need to cook the sauce. You could put it all in the blender, but I like texture. Drain the al dente noodles, put them on a heated plate, pour the sauce over them, and add two more ingredients: a sprinkling of basil flakes and chopped elephant garlic blossoms (in season). Serve with a simple three-lettuce salad (Romaine, Simpson, iceberg). Skip the thousand island, and use a vinegar-virgin olive oil dressing made with your own hands. Doesn't need to be too fancy;ust add your favorite spices, along with a garlic clove, to a sixteen ounce bottle of your choice of vinegar, and when you're ready for the dressing (don't try to make ahead) combine one oz. of the vinegar to one oz. oil in a four ounce bottle and shake. If you're dining alone, the above should work, or multiply quantities as needed for two or for guests. For drink, try serving water or a very small glass of red wine, or both. You can do all this in a half hour. Spend another half hour lingering over dinner and chatting. For dessert, go take in a nice sunset. This can all be part of a daylong plan: cup of oatmeal with diced apple, or one egg on one piece of toast for breakfast, snack on carrots, salad for lunch, celery for snack, and now the one-helping pasta dinner. I know that sounds like starvation to some people, but, really, that lunch salad can be sustaining if you build it yourself in the morning. Example: Take a pair of scissors and go through a handful of leaf lettuce, some pok choi, spinach, leaf of red cabbage, snow peas, red bell pepper, and those ubiquitous elephant garlic blossoms. Dice up a firm small ripe tomato or halve some cherry tomatoes. Toss. Heat up some diced pok choi and red chard stems in a small nonstick frying pan, lightly oiled (virgin olive, which is good for you). Add cubed tofu and mushrooms. Now add sesame seeds or sunflower seeds, and some basil. When it looks ready (pok choi beginning to soften, but mushrooms not shriveled) take off the heat to cool, then add to the salad. Toss again. Seal in a container and take to work in one of those nylon cooler bags. If you like eggs, try dicing up a hard-boiled egg instead of the tofu and mushrooms. This works! And it takes only about as long as standing in line at the canteen while three people in front of you get their espresso mocha thingies made. Trust me, you'll make it through the day. Drink lots of water between times, though. Not "diet" pop, that will set off the insulin rush, same as sugar, and then you'll be hungry. Same for most anything else they will sell you at the canteen. It's all either salt or sugar (usually corn syrup), or it's a sugar wannabe. Don't go there. Leave your spare change at home if you have to. Or, drink unsweetened mint tea. Consider growing the mint. If you can grow nothing else, you can grow mint. It takes over, like bamboo, kudzu, vinca, or ivy. You can wash a bouquet of mint and simmer it in a pan till the water darkens, or put it in a gallon jar of water and leave it in the sunshine. I'm kind of hard core, I like to take a multi vitamin and grind it up in a mortar and pestle and add that to the tea. I pretend it's that stuff the marathon runners drink. To convince yourself it's exactly that, join a walking group. Take your tea with you. If you like to chat with your friends and sip tea, there's no reason not to get in some of your 10,000 steps a day at the same time! October In arid regions, the
wise seek out plants that require very little water,
the use of which is called "xeriscaping" -- whereas those who own a bit
of marsh look for attractive water plants: lotuses, sedges, perhaps a
bit
of cress. Most gardeners in temperate zones, however, have a wide range
of choices and possibilities. Accordingly, some will try everything --
from cacti to Louisiana irises -- and insist that the local setting
bend
to their will. Plants that have no business in northern climes are
fussed
over ad infinitum, wrapped
against chill winds, covered, uncovered,
covered
again, and finally cursed for disloyally losing their green fingers to
frostbite. When the lake
drained
away, leaving the river and its tributaries to collect the
annual
runoff in its place, billions of small round stones from the
surrounding
mountains, mostly of slow-weathering basalt, lay packed together in a
matrix
of clay particles for miles in all directions. Seeds, borne in by wind,
water, and animals, quickly took root, and a forest sprang up, but one
adapted to extremes of wet and dry, of shallow, nitrogen-starved soil,
of major disturbances by fire and flood. The dominant forest
types were
a mixed conifer forest of hemlock and western red cedar on the damp
northern
slopes, and Douglas fir along the ridges. On southern slopes, hot and
dry
in summer, an oak-madrone forest thrived, with an understory of poison
oak at lower elevations, and of manzanita higher up. In the bottoms, a
mix of cottonwood, ash, black cherry, and willow showed where the water
ran along the bedrock, deep in the ground in summer, or became a
surface
torrent in winter. Our acre, however,
remained forested -- part of a vast tract of Douglas firs
that survived in the upper valley until the first Europeans arrived
with
their steel teeth. Lilacs in the dooryard
bloomed, but never
far from shade. It took almost three
generations for the land to be
anything but a stump ranch, and by then farming had become something of
a luxury occupation. Filberts could make money, or grass
seed
could, but it took money to get started, and these were a people too
proud,
or too honest, to gamble with other people's money. Bit by bit the old
home place was broken up, first into four farms, then eight, then
twenty.
Fences were built along boundary lines, and along the fences spread,
first
blackberries, then trees. Not firs; though they love sun, those do not
usually travel far in open pasture land. These trees were the Oregon
ash,
black cherry, willow, and cottonwood of the river's edge, working their
way uphill along the margins of the annual floods. Also there were, and
had
always been, patches of great California black oaks, bearded with moss
and lichens like live oaks in the hammocks of old Florida. Upon our arrival we
found all the good
shade
-- oak, maple, and ash -- on the north side of the house, where it
would
do least good. To the south and west, where shade would be needed when
the summer sun reached the nineties, were mostly stumps. The northwest corner of
the property has been allowed,
over
time, to go native, and is the haunt of wild things: ferns, quail.
Someone
had planted a bigleaf maple, a generation ago, by the northwest corner
of the house, and some of its seeds had helicoptered into the protected
zone and flourished. The bigleaf (acer macrophylum) is a native
and can be
found
all along the river and on the mountainsides, too, mostly at lower
altitudes.
It's also fast growing, and though short-lived compared to, say, an
oak,
like the ash it's an ideal tree for a short-timer like me who needs
shade
in her own lifetime. I flagged a few of the
likelier saplings and
waited
for winter. On a stormy day after
leaf drop, when the maples had gone
to
sleep, I stole into their sanctuary with a shovel and dug about beneath
their feet. One by one, I lifted them, with what little soil would
cling
to their surprisingly skimpy roots, into a wheelbarrow, and carted them
around to the south side of the house. Make a hole, stick it
in. Well,
it's
a good idea to keep the sod back, to add some peat, to stake it for a
year
or two, and to water generously the first couple of summers, but once
it's
established the bigleaf will make itself at home -- Pretty things, though. And while they aren't shading the wall yet, on a hot day I can go out and lie contentedly in their shade -- sort of. November Jasper Mountain has been
on view a lot this fall; we had
week after week of warm, sunny weather, so that I had tomatoes still
ripening
on the first of November. This was one of our most neglected gardens
ever, and
the number and variety of weeds that sprang up were astonishing and
overwhelming.
To look for beans or cucumbers was an adventure akin to exploring an equatorial rain forest. And yet the veggies were there, in profusion, holding their own. I brought out the juicer my oldest son had sent me last Christmas, and ran it for two or three hours every Saturday, putting fruit juices and soup stocks into the freezer in every available container of whatever variety. Outside, the sunsets on the mountain became redder and darker each week; I turned on the kitchen light and juiced into the evenings. The soup stocks I use in several ways. Once thawed, they can be poured into a crock pot, and diced vegetables and grain thickeners can be added to taste to create soups with those overnight flavor blends. Or, they can be directly served hot or chilled as a vegetable drink. Or, they can be used in bread. If I were doing pot roasts, which I’m not lately, the soup stock would be just the thing to add to the pan and used in basting. When we get tired of the soups, we can whiz them in the blender and use the resulting paste in bread as well. The bread lately has been of two sorts: round loaves raised and baked in stoneware plates, or rolls cut from the dough, rolled (of course) into a ball and plopped onto an oiled baking tin nested in other baking tin (to protect from scorching bottoms). Choice of white or whole wheat or combo, honey, molasses, sorghum or sugar, and throw in anything that takes your fancy: oats or miso, for example. My last two batches included a paste made from pie pumpkins. The pumpkins were volunteers and roamed about the garden at will, investigating the tomato vines and trying to smother the lettuce. I gathered about fifteen (they’re quite small, under three pounds each) and hoarded them away from the carving sort until safely after October 31, then scattered them round the house under the guise of setting the tone for Thanksgiving. Each week I take one, halve it, scoop out the seed pulp into a colander, and simmer the halves until they’ve softened but not fallen apart. I drain the simmer water and let it cool to water plants or farm animals. The halves peel easily. They’re now ready to smash up and use either in bread, as a winter squash dish, or, if you insist, pie (or all three). I run tap water (we have a well and we like the water) through the seed pulp and rummage all the seeds out into a bowl, salt them lightly, and zap them for a couple of minutes in the microwave. I’ve also, in cooler weather, simply left the bowl (a stout one) on the top of the wood stove. Either way, the seeds are habit -orming and, to my mind, better than popcorn. The seed pulp goes into bread, where no one objects to it. Everyone here professes to hate pumpkin so I simply serve the mashings with cinnamon and nutmeg as winter squash, under which name it is quite popular. As the weather cools, I’ve taken to gathering acorns. There are massive English oaks in front of my place of work, and these usually produce bushels of long, dark, mahogany-toned nuts which are very popular with the local squirrels. I understand from the literature that these are inedible for humans due to the high level of tannins in them, and that one wants to shell them, grind them, leach the flour by running water through it for hours, then bake with it. Being an impatient sort, I’ve tried them raw, keeping company with the squirrels, and aside from a puckery aftertaste found them palatable. The two basic varieties of oak in our urban area have either toothed or rounded leaves. Supposedly the toothed kind is more acid than the rounded kind and is to be avoided. The English oaks are decidedly superior, but we have some large, handsome black oaks here (from the Eastern U.S., I think) which produce another large and handsome acorn that seems almost as good. They have sharply toothed leaves. Our native oaks, which produced the acorn meal famous as the staple diet of the peace-loving California Indians, have round-lobed leaves. I have tried roasting these and also the English ones and I think they all roast well. The flavor changes to something between a parched peanut and a black olive. I haven’t noticed any adverse effects at all, except to my waistline, as I understand these things pack a calorie count comparable to peanut butter. Why anyone with two legs and a pair of good hands would starve in a country of oaks, I don’t know. :::
I HAVE dug up and divided the perennials, given the grass a last mow, picked and eaten the last tomato (in November!), and tasted a first frost in the steamed greens. I regret, however, that I did not manage to save seed this year. My target seeds were scarlet runners and sweet peas. Last year's scarlet runners were a big success. We had two kinds, the true runners and a bush variety, which you're supposed to mass, like salvia, for the red blooms. I built a pole tripod for the runners and planted the bush variety around its feet, resulting in a display in the vegetable garden that rapidly became the centerpiece that drew the eye of the visitor, whether human or hummingbird. Somehow I managed to save the big purple beans, in spite of a week of rain at the end of that season, and in separate lots too, though there was no difference between them to see. I put them in clay bowls for safe keeping, one kind in each pot, and gloated over them through the winter. Occasionally I would stop by, plunge a hand into each bowl, and run my fingers though the beans like a miser bathing in gold. On a day in May, with a week to go before planting, I went to look over the beans, only to find that one of the bowls was empty, while the other was twice as full as it had been. "So, um, what's happened to my beans?" I asked Beloved. "Looks like one of the kids has been having a tactile experience," she calmly replied. I was so unnerved that I went out and planted the lot indiscriminately in a cold flower bed, a week ahead of schedule; only about ten came up, which were all runners. These ultimately produced beans, but my heart wasn't in it, and they are languishing now among the year's dying calendulas and zinnias. The sweet peas are more of a success story. We have a spectacular variety that grows here along fence rows and right-of-ways, which with patience can be captured. Three years ago, with this in mind, I rambled into a field near the university where I work, in which I remembered seeing a brilliant display of pink blooms. I looked over the available plants and their pods (there were about fifty to choose from) and selected three healthy specimens which I discreetly marked with flagging tape. Each week thereafter, on my lunch hour, I dropped by and checked the pods. These will turn brown and become dry and rattly, and they begin to twist into a corkscrew shape. You want to get them just after they dry and just before they twist. I was able to do so, and brought home about 100 pods. "What are those?" asked Beloved. "Sweet peas!" I began shelling them into a bowl. "May I suggest you transfer them from that bowl into an envelope at your earliest possible convenience? And label it clearly?" "Sure...uh, how come?" "Well, it's good practice generally, but I notice you tend to leave your experiments round the kitchen -- and these things happen to be poisonous." "Yes'm." So I've been told, and now you have too. Not knowing the viability or germination rates for the peas, and having a shortage of two inch pots, I elected to put all of the peas in the ground by the corner of the front fence, in spring. Nothing happened. Our elderly neighbor dropped by later that summer, presumably on his annual inspection of all the painting and glazing we haven't done (he built the house, after all), and during the course of a tour, I showed him my dismal fence corner. "Oh, those; you plant them in the fall. Takes 'em a long time to get going, too." Oh. So, more as a matter of maintaining a faint hope than anything else, I kept the little spot cleared and gave it a drink or two over the course of the summer, then eventually gave up. The following spring, I discovered three wimpy six-inch-tall pea vines amid the dandelions. Aha! I cleared around them, gave them sips (not much; these are supposed to do fine in our summer droughts), buried them in leaves for the winter, and crossed my fingers. This year, I have sweet peas. They've taken over the fence corner, and bloomed all summer long, right behind the mailbox with its wagon wheel, for all the world like a calendar photograph. There were well over a hundred seed pods, too, ready for harvesting; but life has been been cruelly busy. When I went out to collect the pods for shelling, they had done their thing. Each pod had dried, twisted into a corkscrew shape, and exploded, dumping peas near and far. If some of these come up, two years from now, perhaps I'll be able to write about transplanting them. Otherwise, I'll have to wait for next fall to write "sweet peas -- poisonous" on a manila envelope. ::: I frequent abandoned
farmsteads, where I hope to find enough apples and
pears not yet worm-eaten to stay ahead of our pantry requirements till
the new orchard gets into production. It sometimes happens one comes
across
irresistible items, lost and forgotten in the shifting tides of
homesteading.
I remember coming home four years ago with a small duffel bag
absolutely
stuffed with roots.
"What's all this?" asked Beloved. "Well, I was out at this old place picking apples, and there was all this comfrey and I couldn't resist...." "Comfrey?!" Her eyes fairly bugged out with horror. "Why? Doesn't everybody have comfrey?" I could remember clearly that in a valley where we had long lived, all the communes and homesteads had comfrey all over the place. "Comfrey was big in the seventies, but they found out it's carcinogenic! And it spreads like the dickens and never goes away. You grew up in Georgia, don't you remember the kudzu?" Yes, I remember kudzu. But our kudzu here is the Himalaya blackberry, and we've learned to coexist with that -- just check our freezer. But I had a plan. "Look, I'm only going to put it in the orchard, on the other side of the creek. I'll watch to make sure none of it ever comes up over here." "But what do you want it for?" "Pigs. Gonna feed it to pigs. Heard it's high protein and doesn't bother them." Well, I got away with that one. The comfrey, that is. Our pig barn, in case you're wondering, is the shed up on the hill that's full of all the trash we've pulled out of the blackberries. So that's a project for another millennium... meanwhile the comfrey is a raving success, but to keep it from spreading across the bridge, I harvest the stuff three times a year, before it goes to seed. Makes splendid compost. December When the snows came,
transforming the landscape (which
happens rarely
here nowadays), Jasper Mountain took on that hoary aspect which I
associate with those Japanese woodblock prints set in winter - such as
Hokusai's
print of hunters warming themselves by a damp bonfire.
My poor little boat has been used twice in almost a hundred days, and I found myself numbingly cold on both occasions. Floods have destroyed one of the creek bridges and shifted the other off its foundation. I found one end of it bobbing in the current, the other snagged in a tangle of blackberries. The weather so penetrated my bones on this short outing that I left the bridge in the creek for the next three weeks. With personal energy and initiative out-of-doors so circumscribed, I turned my attention indoors. Shelving for books, some forty-eight lineal feet, was needed. The usual approach, nowadays, is to acquire pressboard cabinets, knocked down, from a giant discount store. These are tolerable painted, but are often left nakedly wood-chip-ish in appearance, due to the difficulty of finding a moment in which to upgrade them; all the available labor time having gone into tapping the tiny nails into the shelves through the sides and back, and cursing as the nails curved in the unpredictable "grain" of the glued and pressed sawdust. The "finished" product then spends its tenure in the household squatting in the darkest available corner, where no one can look at it directly or acknowledge its existence due to its irredeemable ugliness, and the whole time it outgasses unhealthful vapors. The alternatives are: "steel" shelving, ugly, cheap, sharp-edged, and bendy; or expensive cabinetry, which, if sufficiently sturdy must be built-in, at tremendous cost if hired done, or consuming time one doesn't have, and requiring tools one cannot afford, if undertaken by one's self. Early in our tenure here, there was a surplus of used planking and even beams, and these were put to use for what I cheerfully called "vernacular" architecture. I built walls, ceilings, shelving, tables, and cabinets utilizing found materials which could stand either to take a deep brown stain or a coat of daubed spackle, followed by a coat of flat white paint. The effect is cheering and calming, and visitors often use the word "cozy," and if this sometimes said in a tone which I might take as patronizing, I don't mind, as I have done what I could with what I had, a satisfying activity. This year I ran out of the old materials and of time to cadge old materials from others. For the new shelving, then, I would need new material, which, to match the interior style of the house, should be wood, painted white. I found that pine boards cost much more than I expected, but I could live with that; an abused resource should cost enough to reduce the demand. In the old days, I would have put all the bits together with fourpenny box nails, but we now have the fast-moving self-setting Phillips-head screws, which are a blessing. In a way, I hated to paint over the attractive built-in pine bookcase I'd created, but it ran the length of a long, dark hallway, and the white would help prevent further loss of light there. As soon as the drop cloths and tools were put away, I stood in the hallway and admired my (admittedly a bit crude) handiwork for some time. I hadn't chosen the least expensive or least difficult solution for my project, but I had chosen one I found satisfactory; so much so that I couldn't tear my eyes away. It looked as if it belonged, and would last perhaps as long as the house; beyond my time; a statement. As a civilization, we of the West have begun to lose this capacity for the average person to make statements. I'm reminded of that moment in Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano when the protagonist's car breaks down, and a crowd of the great mass of unemployed gathers, which he views with suspicion until one of them wistfully says, as nearly as I can remember it from a distant read: "Maybe I could look at it for you. I used to be pretty good with my hands." The generation just arriving has mostly not read E. F. Schumacher, which is a sad fact. My copy of Small is Beautiful (Perennial Library, 1973) is thirty years old; it's a crumbling paperback, yellow and a bit musty, that has traveled with me, long un-reread but treasured, crisscrossing the Northwest with me when I worked in the woods, and the nation when I worked in Pennsylvania. If we thought Schumacher's views were important then, we should read him now. Everything he found urgent has become more so. Samples: ....one of the most fateful errors of our age is the belief that the problem of production has been solved. This illusion ... is mainly due to our inability to recognize that the modern industrial system, with all its intellectual sophistication, consumes the very basis on which it has been erected .... it lives on irreplaceable capital which it cheerfully treats as income. (20)And: An attitude to life which seeks fulfillment in the single-minded pursuit of wealth -- in short, materialism -- does not fit into [the] world, because it contains within itself no limiting principle, while the environment within which it is placed is strictly limited. (29-30) By "limits" he means
three things; fossil fuels, natural
systems
with their feedback loops, and human limitations (that they can
tolerate only so much of a life that is functionally no more than
slavery, or consumerism, or both). He believes if he can prove his
point with any one of the three, he has made his case.
Economics, as practiced by industrial society, is in Schumacher's view fatally fragmentary: the society's judgments are based on a definition of costs which excludes all "free goods," that is to say, the entire God-given environment, except for those parts of it that have been privately appropriated. This means that an activity can be economic although it plays hell with the environment, and that a competing activity, if at some cost it protects and conserves the environment, will be uneconomic. (43)Thus you have the strange condition in which extraction of oil from the ground is an activity which can be rationally charted, and leaving it there so that we can breathe, avoid being roasted by climate change, and survive as a species cannot. One effect of the fragmentary view of the world encouraged by industrial economics is that agricultural work is regarded as of little value; since agriculture is seen in this view to be simply another kind of factory, and no "profit" can be extracted from it unless it is practiced on an industrial scale, more farming must be done by fewer and fewer people and the rural population is displaced into the cities to look for work there, adding to the enormous problems of social disintegration and grinding poverty that appear in urban settings. The subtitle of the book is "Economics as if People Mattered." Schumacher was Catholic, and regarded St. Thomas Aquinas as the underpinning of his understanding of science. He knew that much of his audience would be unwilling to hear him if he made much of this at the time, so he devised a clever and famous chapter, "Buddhist Economics." A discussion framed in Buddhist terms served his immediate aims just as well as one framed in Christian terms, for his point was that economics ought to serve humanity and not the other way round; and economics cannot serve humanity on its terms, for that which makes us human is unquantifiable in dollar amounts. What is desirable to the materialist economist is undesirable to the Buddhist economist and vice versa, so that their aims in the short term are diametrically opposed. This is because the Buddhist economist has an interest in the long term, which is an interest that is unquantifiable in the industrial economist's system. Buddhism is concerned with the alleviation of suffering so that one can focus on understanding one's self and the universe better, with the aim of right living, of choosing a path that promotes one's own well-being and that of all others: what are called "sentient beings" in Buddhist lingo. So the way of Buddhism trends toward peace and the way of a materialist system trends toward the opposite: As the world's resources of non-renewable fuels -- coal, oil and natural gas -- are exceedingly unevenly distributed over the globe and undoubtedly limited in quantity, it is clear that their exploitation at an ever-increasing rate is an act of violence against nature which must inevitably lead to violence between men .... Before [materialists in Buddhist countries] dismiss Buddhist economics as nothing better than a nostalgic dream, they might wish to consider whether the path of economic development outlined by modern economics is likely to lead them to places where they really want to be. (61)All well and good; but as with almost all liberals, one might expect that at this point Schumacher will rest on his laurels, having simply noted that what we are all doing is a Bad Show. But, unlike others, he has a specific set of proposals toward what might be a Better Show. Schumacher notes that when local people produce local goods for other local people, the relationship, the bond, between them, that sense of well-being for which industrial economy can find no place in its equations, is strengthened. Hence what are called "economies of scale" -- nation-states, multinational corporations, mass production, and export -- are false economies because they encourage bankruptcy in those three things, the state of the planet, of its non-renewables, and of the well-being of its beings. Whereas local economies, inefficient as they are in those equations, tend to conserve the Three Things. It's true, notes Schumacher, that in what are called Third World countries, there are what might be called one-pound (or we Americans could say one-dollar) workplaces, and life is marginal and sometimes prey to drought, disease, etc. But the cure proposed by the industrial economy is to bring in one-thousand-dollar workplaces, which cannot be justified economically except though extractive export strategies that ultimately only benefit the industrial chieftains in the developed countries. Local people, on seeing the implementation of these impressive workplaces, often give up (and forget how to return to) their own one-dollar strategies, expecting full employment, except that the one-thousand-dollar solution, due to its capital cost, cannot be emplaced quickly enough to provide this. So from marginal existence a great many of them go straight to a starvation existence. Schumacher proposes an intermediate solution. Devise the one-hundred-dollar workplace, using technologies that can be built and managed locally, to produce a higher standard of living by marketing the product locally. To the objection that local people from a one-dollar background have no buying power, he answers that with the ten-times-cheaper-than-industrial-scale one-hundred-dollar workplace, you can do ten startups simultaneously, with the goods from one workplace affordable to the workers in one of the other nine. There is thus no need to export, eliminating the need to carry on in the extractive and eventually bankrupting manner to which the West is addicted. Also, rural populations, by recovering a measure of independence and self-worth locally, are then not so easily driven to the urban ghettos, which reduces the strain on the megalopolitan cities which our industrial economy has created. This sounds Utopian, but in fact his approach has been extensively tested. To show what would be examples of intermediate technology, applied to local economies by the local people themselves and not by well-intentioned but locally ignorant strangers, he formed, with other scientists and interested parties, a barely capitalized organization called the Intermediate Technology Development Group (ITDG). They still exist, thirty years later! ITDG, with little real cooperation and much disdain from the developed nation-states and megacorporations, has for three decades doggedly kept up its mission of demonstrating the economic and scientific principles of E. F. Schumacher, and carried out numerous local initiatives, always sharing the lessons learned with anyone who seeks them out. In the field of local energy development, they began with the obvious: people in developing countries depend on biomass for energy, and open fires waste energy. ITDG designed low cost cooking stoves to reduce impact on the forests and other vegetative cover, as well as the tremendous labor expended, usually by women and children, in going farther and farther to strip the landscape of available fuel. When a locality is ready for more, ITDG is ready with more: micro-hydro plants, small scale wind generators, solar lanterns, biogas. A serious bottleneck for local production, which cannot easily reach even local markets in rural areas of undeveloped countries, is transportation. ITDG offers expertise in locally controlled construction of cycle trailers, improved ox and donkey carts, and efficient low-technology road building. I refer those interested to ITDG's website to grasp the scope of their activities. None of the ideas described are vaporware; they have applied them all in the real world and have the stories of local communities where the projects are being carried out. See their links on agroprocessing, food production, information and communications technologies, small-scale mining, water and sanitation, disaster amelioration, advocacy, and education. One might think that ITDG would have an extensive Peace-Corps-style volunteer program. That's not the case. They seem to be a low-overhead operation, focused on getting information into the hands of the rural populations that need it, rather than bringing in mysterious expertise as if from some "higher" realm, deus ex machina, to carry out projects little understood by those they "help." This is not your patronizing World Bank here. What ITDG brings is accessible knowledge, created not for but in cooperation with rural populations in Third World, countries, the kind of knowlsedge that takes root in the heart of the woman or man who says, "yes, I can do this." When I hear of current events in the Near East and elsewhere, and the continued world-bankrupting goings-on that he so articulately warned us against, I think of Schumacher. We all owe him another read. And we should support the activities of the Intermediate Technology Development Group, one of the few Good Shows still happening. :::
Populations of any
species explode when the limiting
resource
becomes, in effect, unlimited. More phosphorus in a lake, more algae.
There's an exponential increase, then when the limit of the phophorus
is reached, the algae suffers a catastrophic crash.
It's the same for civilizations. Ours craves energy and has discovered that the most economical (under rather carefully engineered circumstances) form of energy is petroleum. Petroleum is due to run out soon. On that, see the June 2004 National Geographic, "The End of Cheap Oil,'" pp. 80-109. If you read nothing else this year, read that, and especially study the chart on pp. 90-91. After that you'll understand pretty much everything that's being said, and carefully not said, on cable news channels: about politics, prices, stocks, warfare, terrorism, all of it. There's little chance of our escaping the future foretold in the article without global change in our habits and intentions. How do you think that's going to go? ...and there stood the first arrivals of the guests, slightly bug-eyed. I do enjoy putting the gardens to bed for the winter, though. There are hoses to be drained and rolled up, tomato cages to stack and file away, tools to organize, pots to sort, disposing of those too badly cracked to save another year, and passing Canada geese to be listened to as they go over their itinerary for the trip south. The flower beds I have taken to simply mowing and covering with leaves. All our perennials seem to know how to deal with the mulch, and come back in fine shape, especially the daisies, while the annuals seem to like best starting out in pots and being transplanted right through the mulch, with better results in June than in May. The warmth in our soil comes late and stays late. This year the warmth has stayed very late indeed. The grass is growing, and smells of spring when cut. The daisies have sent up several December blooms, and the Garden Lady's nasturtiums, calendulas, and miniature hollyhocks have done the same. We still have cosmos, though these are finally on their way out. I have gone round to check the lilacs and the trees, and the filberts are perilously close to bud-break. The green spikes of elephant garlic, which I usually see in February, are already a foot high. There are flies, and bees, and the air is full of songbird noises such as one might hear on a June morning. So much warmth is lovely but it is also disturbing. El Nino? Global warming? A few years ago the creek went almost a hundred feet wide, hauling tons of my soil away to the Pacific, and shifting my well-house on its foundations. Several people in our area died that night in mudslides. This, too, I'm told, was a sign of global warming, a type of immense storm front known as the "Pineapple Express," rolling up from the waters off Hawaii, dumping six, seven, eight inches of rain at a time in various canyons of the Cascade Range, overwhelming the might and pride of the region's vast network of flood-control dams and levees as though there were nothing there. Global warming, I've read somewhere, doesn't especially produce hot, sunny summers. It produces cloud cover, an increase in precipitation, an increase in wind, and records: record tornadoes, record hurricanes, record blizzards: spikes of hot and cold, fast and slow, all over the record books and the insurance company ledgers. News anchors will rehearse the "the most" this, and "the biggest" that. And the most and the biggest of anything to do with weather will get our attention when we're out in it, or even when it comes knocking at our door. I once tenanted a house built of oak, half-timbered in the Tudor style. A storm came in the night and threw a two-hundred-year-old oak tree against that house, oak bone against bones of oak. The house stood the blow, and the tree rolled down the steep pitch of the roof's edge, shredding slates and pitching them over a quarter of an acre. I awoke in time to see an enormous branch punch through the bedroom window, pass within inches of my face, and withdraw again as suddenly as it had come, leaving the empty window to fill with night and a moaning wind. If we are causing an increase in events of this kind, it's time to seriously consider our actions. It's my understanding that while climate swings are unavoidable, there is evidence that the current one, if not caused by human activity, is influenced by it. The principal ingredient of that influence is the increase in what are called greenhouse gases, and the major component of these is carbon in the form of carbon dioxide: one carbon atom and two oxygen atoms per molecule, to the tune of millions of tons of these molecules in the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide is in fact a principal ingredient of life; plants have to have it, in order get hold of their primary building block, which is carbon. They throw away the oxygen, which is how we animals get our free oxygen molecules to breathe. When plants die and rot, or when they burn, which is a normal and frequent event in nature, they release nearly all their carbon back into the atmosphere, so one might ask: how is it that carbon dioxide is a problem? How can there be too much of it if all the plants are returning it to the atmosphere all the time anyway, in a natural cycle? A way to understand the problem is to use a banking metaphor. We make a certain amount of money a year, and we spend most of it to maintain our lifestyle. We have a checking account. All the money in the checking account will be spent eventually; but there must be a minimum balance today or we'll start bouncing checks. Perhaps we also have a savings account, and we use its funds to cover our checks, to prevent our overdrafts from ruining our credit. If we've been abusing the checking account's minimum balance, and If we use up the money in the savings account, we won't be able to support our current lifestyle. Where the carbon went is into limestone and fossil fuels. At the bottoms of the seas and peat bogs of the world, for perhaps billions of years, carbon has been taken out of circulation that would ordinarily have been exhaled into the atmosphere in the normal rot cycle. Most of this went into the limestone, but a lot of it is crude oil and natural gas, a buried and compressed soup of molecules with long names, nearly all of which contain carbon atoms. There are billions of tons of carbon in this savings account. Our checking account of energy is sunshine and the flows of energy that are directly the product of sunshine: wind, water, wood, animals, farms, gardens, alcohol, natural rubber, hydrogen. Our savings account is the stuff from beneath the earth: coal, diesel, fuel oil, gasoline, synthetic lubricants, synthetic rubbers, and plastics: vinyl, polyethylene, nylon, polyurethane. We spend this account at a furious rate, because we cannot live as we wish to live on our income from the sun. There are too many of us, with our real needs, and of us there are too many with artificially induced needs. We are perhaps at a point where bankruptcy is inevitable; where our tenure on earth has become untenable and we will soon be forced to give up the lease. Other tenants will come: perhaps the cockroaches, and perhaps this will be a good thing. But I do love my children, and I feel I should have something to offer them. This is not about their holiday wish list, it's about seeking to stabilize my finances, my planetary-bank-account finances, on their behalf. I wish to offer them a tenable hold on our lease. I well understand this is a project fraught with hypocrisy. I'm a middle-class American, and Americans, less than two percent of the world's people, are producing over forty per cent of the drain on the savings account. I'm going to drive in to work tomorrow, and there will be only one of me in the car. Circumstances have dictated this. But, there are things that can be done, small gestures which, multiplied by millions of slightly changed lives, will slow the pace at which we're running toward bankruptcy, and give our children a bit nore time for making more satisfactory changes. None of this need involve chaining yourself to a tree and screaming at some poor logger; just a few things here and there to keep the kids alive, on the off chance that there's more to this universe with people in it than without. Now, you've heard all this before, but let's just go down the checklist one more time: First, consider the automobile. What's the mileage? Carry more gas (petrol to some of us) at a time, to prevent evaporation loss, get regular tune-ups, check the tire inflation. Trade down in size to better mileage: there are vehicles that do fifty miles per gallon, and this is more significant to your kids' future than the prestige that big one gets you. Get more passengers, and carpool. Be a passenger. Leave the car home and ride the bus, the train, the subway, the ferry, the monorail, the light rail, the taxi, or the bicycle. No light rail? No bike lanes? Write and call the local planners and city fathers; lobby relentlessly. Push hybrid; push electric. Sell the $*#!!! thing. While you're at it, sell the motor home, the motorboat, the plane, the skimobile, the jet ski, the go cart, and the dirt bike. You don't need 'em; if you do find you need one once in a while, don't buy, rent. Telecommute. Lobby for a shorter work week, then spend the long weekends, the holidays, and the vacations at home (working in the garden!). Second, consider the home. Why have a big one when a well-planned small one will do? Insulate, turn the heat down a bit, put on a sweater and a lap blanket, get rid of the air conditioner and plant shade trees on the south side and a windbreak on the north side. Make things out of rocks or used bricks instead of concrete. Use hand tools. No time? Turn off the television, you'll have more time. Look for low-wattage entertainment. Try romance. Romance can be cheap; instead of diamonds and skyview restaurant dinners, try being a good listener. For music, play an acoustic instrument. Read. Read E. F. Schumacher. Reread E. F Schumacher. For lighting, go with sunlight through a skylight, or low-wattage fluorescent. Paint the walls white; you won't need as many watts. Replace the hot water heater, refrigerator and the freezer if they predate the energy-saving models. Install a ground cloth in the crawl space. Sort, reuse, sew, mend, repair, recycle, compost. For the furnishings, when possible make your own or buy locally made. Tear up the lawn and put in ground cover, fruit and nut trees, and fruiting perennials, on a schedule that will prevent your having to buy a new gasoline lawnmower when the present one gives out. Third, consider the food. Cigarettes? I won't even tell you, you know better. Drink less alcohol and more water. Eat less meat and more fiber. Eat less prepared food and more fresh produce. Cook less, check out raw. Use double boilers and steamers and avoid frying. Don't send out for pizza; pizza sends for you, and what it wants from your arteries you should want to keep. Audrey Hepburn said the most effective diet is to share your food with the poor. Clean out the cabinets and put the stuff in the food drive bin. Find out who's offering organic produce in your area. Find out if what they're offering is really organic. Find out what "organic" is first, if you don't know, and don't depend on the television to tell you. Patronize local organic cooperatives, merchants and farmers. Raise your own food. Avoid those patented hybrid seeds from large corporations; patronize farmers, merchants and cooperatives providing heirloom varieties. Use hand tools. Garden organically. Plant fruit and nut trees. Preserve your own produce. No time? We already talked about that. Fourth, look at your clothes. Buy less frequently, go for longer lasting, and think cotton and wool and natural dyes. Most clothing now comes directly from the planetary savings account, and "polyester" should become an embarrassing word in your wardrobe. When possible, make your own or buy locally made. Fifth, think about your work. Are you working to get your kids out of planetary debt or deeper into it? What are your living expenses? If you're a couple, consider cutting those expenses until only one of you has to work or both of you can work half time. Give the earned time to increased quality of life for the children, or, if you've wisely refrained from contributing to the disastrous population curve, to your friends and neighbors. If you're in the mining, manufacture, distribution, transportation, sales, advertising, or application of planetary-savings-account items, from autos to herbicides, re-career as soon as you feasibly can. Think small. We're not talking communism here, just common accountability, with the following: the outlawing of for-profit corporations, with retention of nonprofits, cooperatives, partnerships and sole ownerships as the only legal entities for commerce, would all by itself go a long way to fixing the drain on your kids' planetary savings. Think about that when you're looking for work. Or looking to buy, for that matter. Or about to vote. Sixth, and I'll stop here, what about that vote? If you don't have the vote, be careful who might be reading this over your shoulder, and start working on what it will take to get the vote. For this, your life will not be too cheap a sacrifice for your childrens' future. If you have the vote, think about what you're allowed to vote on. Is it just big political party versus big political party? Or nuclear versus solar? Roads versus light rail? Agribusiness versus sustainable farming? Clear cuts versus forest maintenance? Or to put it more simply, corporate greed versus life? If your vote can't access reality, if it isn't patching the holes in the planetary savings account, change that. Campaign finance reform will be the least of your worries. Get the vote, keep the vote, use the vote; get the real issues up for a vote; inform the electorate. Perhaps you won't see results on this in your lifetime. But consider the alternative. Whew! OK, I know, I haven't done maybe a hundredth of that stuff. But I chip away at it here and there. I'm aware, particularly and painfully, of the cost of the infrastructure that maintains the glorified suburb that in my neighborhood passes for country. It takes six times as much of the planetary savings account to establish a rural home as it does for a comparable urban row house. I've elected to be a creature of privilege, and I don't care to look too deeply into what the mirror says about that. But in some things I can give back something of what I have taken. One way is to learn from the past, to gain pre-fossil-fuels skills, and to apply them, redesigning this acre of the landscape to produce food, shade, and windbreak in ways that do more good and less harm than was done here previously, and to share the knowledge gained, as best I can, with others who also care to learn. :::
It was a good year
in the house, and a good year in the garden. But I'm also grateful for
the times I was able to spend at the high mountain lakes. The high
point of my year, I think, was, as is so often true for me, at the
height of summer. So I'll return to that memory for a moment, to round
out this memoir.
While I was in the boat, the sun set, and as I knew a full moon was coming, I stood out from shore to the middle, and watched the last brilliant solar rays deepen in color, turning the tops of the Douglas firs and mountain hemlocks first golden, then red, and then almost purple. Planets and stars winked into view, and I found myself surrounded by bats, more than a dozen jittery shadows that flicked across the star field in tight circles. They seemed interested in my fly rod, which stood up in the bow, supported by the gunwale of the cockpit, and would zoom toward it and away, missing my face by a few feet each time. I could feel the breath of their wings. A small something briefly touched the shaft of my kayak paddle and fell into the water, but struggled back into the air unseen. I thought at first it might be a bat, which seemed odd, as they don't, in my experience, land on or thump into such things. Then a small night bird, dressed in cream and grey like a swallow, landed on the front deck of the kayak before me, seemed to adjust its feathers a bit, then sputtered off into the darkness. Mystery solved: the paddle had been mistaken for a branch, but its inorganic smoothness had defeated two tiny sets of claws. It was then that the yellow moon rose, so hugely majestic that it seemed to me to invade the companionable darkness we creatures had peopled. I retired to my campsite, landing with the aid of a flashlight, and, lighting a candle in my tent, read of Penelope and Odysseus while, outside, the unobserved bats and birds carried on their moonlit escapades. In the morning, I took to the boat again to chase the first available sunlight and warm my bones; then, when day had reached camp, set about learning to fry fish over a can of Sterno; this takes patience but it can be done. I dislike the hiss of pressurized camp stoves; and we are too dry here most years for an open fire in late summer; a forest fire in the next county, near enough to have colored the moon last night, has grown to ten thousand acres and is keeping seven hundred people busy. Besides, the fire pit was filled with unappealing trash, especially broken glass. I've never really been one to pick up after others, even in the woods, but this time I took a personal interest and wound up 'policing' the entire site. My pack was already heavy and I had four hundred feet of elevation gain ahead of me, but I had been getting stronger of late and knew it would not be any trouble. I once spent some time with a teacher of Zen and asked him about beer cans in the wilderness. "If I see it and it offends me, I pick it up, but I've been disturbed by the offense I've taken. But in Zen, it seems I should simply observe it and not be offended, but that seems to reduce my motivation for picking it up.. And it does seem that Zen takes some of the activism out of those whom I've seen practicing Zen." The teacher said, "Well, we should just either pick it up or not. It depends on the flow." I must have seemed puzzled by this. He added, "Observation is its own reward, but that neither adds to nor takes away from right action. We can think of some good reasons to pick up the can; trash is harmful to wildlife, and so on. And a natural setting, once cleaned up, is more conducive to contemplation for others. But there is no need to think about all that; you may have a tendency to speculate about whoever 'threw away' the can, and such thoughts lead to unnecessary problems. Right action begins in seeing the can without looking into its past. The can itself has had no motivation or intent and we cannot know exactly how it got there." I tossed the contents of the wilderness firepit into our kitchen trash can and dropped the lid. Looking out the window, I could see that Jasper Mountain was wearing its late- summer motley coat, dusty green patches of second-growth fir trees alternating with the brown of parched mountain meadows. This time, I thought, I might be able to see the mountain without too much fear of becoming bogged down in thoughts of who has done what to it. It will outlast us. That's the key to peace, I told myself. Clarity of mind comes when you deal in the things before you and not in their speculative causes. If it seems there are not enough trees, plant one. If there are a lot of cans around and you'd like them picked up, pick up one. This can be extrapolated, if you have the energy, to planting schools and clearing minefields, or writing a check for those who do. But remember, while planting and picking, to look up. The mountain will be there. |