Dear Folks, As they say about New England, if you don’t like the weather, just wait a few hours and it will change. Two weeks ago we had wicked cold, now we have unbelievable January thaw. It’s nearly 60 out today and a beneficent sun is shining. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear it was March and load up the south windowsills with tomato seedlings.
I’m just back from a walk around the block (our block is 2.5 miles around) in my shirtsleeves, with the sun on my arms for the first time in months. Though it’s Superbowl Sunday I ran into half of Plainfield outdoors this afternoon. Most of us were walking or jogging, along with our many dogs, but there were also bicyclers and skiers and snowmobilers — it’s 60, but there’s still a foot of snow on the ground. It took awhile to get around the block, because I stopped to talk to so many people. We hole up in our houses in the winter and see each other mostly in the post office when we go to pick up our mail. Going out today, remembering what it’s like to linger outside just because it’s nice, what it’s like to run into neighbors puttering around in their yards, what it’s like to move around without layers of cloth between your limbs and the air, what it’s like to have smells of soil and wet vegetation — it made me realize how cramped and sensorily deprived our lives get around here in winter. Well, there’s two months of winter still ahead, but it’s sure nice to have this little reprieve.
I started this letter early to tell you about my week at the Geographic while it’s still fresh in my mind — though it’s hard to summarize while I’m still so full of it. I wrote a column of my impressions this morning, which you’ll find in this packet.
I think the Geographic Society may be a little disappointed in its 100th anniversary symposium, because attendance wasn’t great. The auditorium holds 400 and it was rarely even half full. All the tickets had been given out and many people were turned away, but then the ticket-holders didn’t show up, partly because it snowed a little bit, and partly because Washington is a city where everybody is so Terribly Importantly Busy.
But it was a great show, or so I thought, and the Society got it all down in videotape and print, so maybe they can put it to wider use. Many of the papers were fascinating. Tom Wilbanks gave a clear, complete, realistic summary of energy developments over the past 100 years. It should be required reading for all citizens of industrial society. Chris Kraft described the history of space flight and talked about the current problems of NASA, and even I, who have always been more interested in earth where there is biology, than in space, where as far as we know there is only physics, even I was interested and impressed with the magnificent space achievements of the 1960s and 70s, and even I got frustrated with the snafus and funding difficulties of the 1980s.
Mohamed Kassas talked about desertification and Swaminathan about food and agriculture, and both brought tremendous understanding about the Third World, and wisdom about where to go from here. They talked about good news stories and case studies from which we can learn, and their three strongest points were favorite themes of mine:
1. Desertification and low agricultural production are not just one problem, they are many problems that take many forms for different reasons in different places,
2. Therefore there is no one magic solution to these problems, they require integrated packages of solutions that are appropriate to each place and culture — you have to look at and be familiar with and respect the system you are trying to help,
3. The people who can figure out the specific methods and packages that are most appropriate are the Third World people themselves; their active participation in all stages of planning and decision-making is absolutely essential.
Well, there were many more great talks; I can’t possibly summarize them all here. For me it was a week of drinking long draughts of refreshing ideas and of being with old friends and making new ones in that amazing network of people who are working on how to sustain the earth’s population in harmony with the earth’s environment. It is always important when parts of this network come together, anywhere, for any purpose. We strengthen each other and buoy up each other’s spirits and give each other new ideas.
Friday, the last day, was the best in my opinion, though it was a strain for me. I managed to work myself into a tizzy about my own presentation — something I rarely do, but then I rarely talk about flaky topics like Quality of Life. I wrote and rewrote my paper all week, consciously during the day, and subconsciously during the night, with lots of tossing and turning. It was not only twice as long as it should have been, but it didn’t make any sense to me at all. The more I thought about it, the less I knew about Quality of Life. By Friday I was something of a wreck, in spite of the wonderful support of many friends, and I listened to the first two papers of the day — Paul Ehrlich on population and Swaminathan on agriculture — through an adrenalin high like I haven’t had since I had to sing a solo at my eighth-grade graduation. Then when I got up to talk, suddenly it all seemed easy, and everything flowed together and seemed to make sense at last. Isn’t it strange how that works? Why can’t I think like that when I’m not under pressure?
The talk went fine, and the Geographic’s pictures were stunning. It was only as I listened to the final two talks of the day — Jerome Wiesner’s and Russell Peterson’s — that I saw how all five talks that day, quite inadvertently, fit together perfectly and were rousing a tremendous desire for concerted action, not only in me but in much of the audience. By the end of the afternoon we had come very close to crafting a manifesto, and I know that several people in the audience, many of whom are real warriors in this field, charged off to do just that. I have a feeling that something concrete is going to come of that last day. I think it is going to have a strong influence on the future of the National Geographic Society itself, and that it won’t stop there. I felt that the environmental movement of the early 70s had just pulled itself back together again, much wiser now, and more holistic, with a determination to integrate all that has been learned not only about the environment, but about economic development and peace and the empowerment of people.
And did I talk to James Reston about my column? I did, for half a minute, which was as long as he managed to sustain an interest in the subject. I did much better with Mary McGrory, yes the Mary McGrory, the Washington Post columnist, the best female columnist in the country. At lunch right after my talk (which she hadn’t heard — the press didn’t attend any of the talks as far as I could tell, they just showed up for lunches so they could get exclusive interviews with selected participants) she sat down with Paul Ehrlich on one side of her and Jerry Wiesner on the other and I signalled frantically to Paul, and he, bless his heart, spent the meal telling her about my column. After lunch he introduced us and she promised to send a batch of my columns to her syndicate, Universal Press Syndicate. It’s one I have two rejection slips from already, but maybe if she recommends my stuff they’ll actually read it. You shall, of course, be apprised of any future developments.
Midway through that week in Washington Dennis called me from New Hampshire and said, “Guess what you have two little black ones of?” That is a secret code message that some lambs have been born out of season. Once again, the ram got active in the pasture last August exactly one week too early — I separated him from the ewes on September 4 and put them back together in early November, planning to postpone the lambs until April. But unbeknowst to me, he and June, that little harlot, had made other plans. I felt like going right home, but Dennis assured me that all was well, which it was. No other lambs have appeared, so I guess the rest will come as scheduled. The new little ones are a boy and a girl, black as pitch except for white topknots. They look so improbable in the white snowy landscape that it’s hard to believe you’re seeing them. As Dennis says, “it’s not that you really see lambs, what you see is absence of barn.” Mother and babies are doing well.
February 1, 1988
By the time I got home on the weekend Dennis had gone to London, and my only helper for the job of cutting off their tails (an unfortunate but necessary task, not nearly as awful as it sounds) was Dmitry Kavtaradze. Dmitry has come to live at Foundation Farm for 9 months. He is a professor at Moscow State University, a biologist, and one of the most imaginative educators in the Soviet Union on the topic of the environment. He is Dennis’s official counterpart on the Soviet-American exchange program for environmental education. A group of Dmitry’s students will be coming to Dartmouth to study this coming summer; a group of Dartmouth students will then go to Moscow State, with Dennis, who has a Fullbright fellowship to visit there next year. We hope this will initiate an ongoing exchange program of students and professors between the two institutions.
Dmitry is a remarkable and adaptable person; he fits in so well with life at the farm that it seems he has always lived here. Within a week of his arrival he had befriended all the cats and dogs, dealt with a sudden leak in the root cellar wall, taken on the animal chores, learned the quirky characteristics of each woodstove, learned to use a McIntosh computer and adapted it to Russian script, and helped me cut the tails off the lambs without even wincing. He is full of interesting stories about life in the USSR. He is helping me with a book I just finished for UNEP about environmental education — with his collaboration I can put in Russian case studies and quotes and examples and make the whole manuscript clearer for people in his part of the world. We’re all going to learn a lot by his being here.
Dmitry reminds me of what a tragedy it is that the Russian and the American people have been taught not to trust each other. I only know a few Russians well, but every one I know is a warm, life-loving, helpful, deep-feeling, generous person. I think Russians have a special talent for warmth, for love of nature, and for patience and endurance. I suppose they have their share of overbearing jerks, as we do, but we Americans are losing much more than we could possibly ever gain by being cut off from that whole nation. Maybe, if glasnost lasts and our government responds positively, we can make more friendships across that barrier and find out what we’re missing.
February 12, 1988
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TANSY THE CAT
FEBRUARY 11, 1988
IN MEMORIAM
Tansy the cat, the color of mixed silver and gold, was born at the Roland farm on Kenyon Road, in Plainfield, New Hampshire, during the summer of 1974, the summer of Nixon’s resignation, the summer the Whybrows moved to Plainfield, the summer the house fell in (literally) at Foundation Farm. She came to live at Foundation Farm in the following manner:
“I’m going over to Sally’s to get some Tansy,” said Dana to Dennis one fine June day in 1974. Sally was the herb-woman. Tansy is a fine perennial herb with yellow-button blossoms and a sharp smell, a medicinal herb used for dried-flower arrangements and repelling ants and curing “female ailments” (whatever that means). Sally and Dana had a fine talk and dug up some young Tansy plants, and on the way home Dana stopped to see Steve and Sydell Roland. There, to her surprise, was a fine batch of kittens, just the right size to leave their mother. One of them, an unusual silver-gold color, was especially beautiful. According to Dana everything went black (this is an ailment that periodically and mysteriously strikes Dana, always with interesting consequences), and the next thing she knew, she had arrived home with two kinds of Tansy.
Both Tansy the plant and Tansy the cat grew and prospered at Foundation Farm. In her kittenhood Tansy was cared for by Sussanne Blegaa and Peder Hedegaard of Denmark, who were living on the farm that year. By the time they returned to Europe, Tansy had already conquered the other cats in the house and the neighborhood, and she reigned supreme in the feline pecking order to the end of her days. When dogs became part of the household, she took control of them too. At Foundation Farm no dog in his right mind ever made the mistake of messing around with Tansy.
There have been residents of Foundation Farm who have felt that Tansy had a somewhat prickly and standoffish manner, but they failed to see her true character. She was only prickly if you tried to pet her in a certain wrong way, down by her tail. If you knew just how to rub the top of her head, you could reduce her to purrs in no time. In fact Tansy was one of the greatest lap-warmers and bed-nestlers Foundation Farm has ever seen. She was also an able mouser and tree-climber, and as for those times when she used the flats of onion seedlings for a cat-box, well, no one’s perfect and we forgive her. She had a high-pitched voice like a kitten’s even after she was grown up. She liked to lick people with her sandpaper tongue. Unlike some Foundation Farm cats, whose names shall not be mentioned here but who shift their favorite sleeping-place every week or two, Tansy developed strong loyalties to certain people, or at least to those peoples’ down comforters, and slept with them every night, year after year.
Tansy became more beautiful the older she got. Over this past year we often remarked how sleek and healthy she looked, though she was getting very old. She continued to be active, to play, and to stalk the gardens. She had developed, however, a sort of epilepsy that sent her into a frightening fit of violent jerks every now and then, a fit that lasted only a minute or two and scared the daylights out of us, but from which she always recovered quickly. The fits gradually got more frequent, and in the last month of her life Tansy suddenly started losing weight and strength. We knew the end was near, and when Dennis took her to the veterinarian, the advice was to put her away peacefully and quickly, which he did.
Foundation Farm is a heavenly place for a cat to live, and this cat lived a long, full life with plenty of love, mice and catnip, and no nonsense from dogs. We celebrate the beauty and warmth she brought to our lives. May she rest in peace.
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February 20, 1988
Since the last writing there has been a great two-foot snowfall and then another thaw. Winter will be with us for another month, but its back is broken, and we all know it. There’s a kind of lightness in our behavior — what we have to look forward to now is SPRING! We have at least 2 more hours of lightness every day, the snow is getting slushy, the chickadees are beginning to whistle their long spring call, the maple sap has begun to run.
More changes at Foundation Farm — Binky Long has come to stay for awhile. I first met Binky when she was a Dartmouth student and she enrolled me in helping to save the La Selva tropical forest in Costa Rica. Since then she has had an ongoing connection both with the Whybrow family (she was Kate Whybrow’s camp counselor one year) and with Foundation Farm (she worked at the RPC, she went to Auroville with Suzanne, now she is becoming an organic farmer). Binky is looking for a job on a commercial organic farm in the area; if she finds one she may become a long-term resident of our little community.
We lost Caspar Weinburger this week, of an unknown ailment. He does not get a full-scale IN MEMORIUM because we haven’t known him as long as Tansy (we had him only 2 years), and because rams just aren’t real popular characters around here. Caspar has knocked down each of us at least once and bashed in several metal buckets. But he did his primary job with relish, as last year’s lamb crop indicates and, I presume, as this one’s will too (no more early lambs were born; the rest are due the first of April). We were about to get rid of him because I have kept two of his lovely daughters, Aida and Pamina, and we will need a new ram when they are ready to breed next fall.
Ruth is on vacation for two weeks, chasing whales with a sea-kayak in Baja California. She is a very athletic and adventurous lady. I’ve just finished writing an article on land trusts for the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests. I started the pepper, celery, and celeriac seeds today; I should start petunias and onions soon. When the days lengthen as they are doing now, I can’t keep my hands out of the dirt. The planting of the peppers is the very first beginning of the 1988 garden, the very first sign of spring!
Love, Dana
