Dear Folks, It’s Saturday around 4 pm and the sun is just setting next to Mount Ascutney in the southwest. It’s been a rare day for late November — brilliant sun and 50 degrees. A last blessing before winter.
Sylvia and I spent the day scrambling around doing a few of the things left on the “before winter” list. We battened down the chicken house, set up its water heater, dug out accumulated compost in front of its door so there will be room for snow to accumulate. Sylvia repaired the sheeps’ hayfeeder, which was falling apart. I went down to the pasture and counted up fenceposts that have rotted, so I can order new ones to put in next spring.
I”m considering using posts made of ET/1 recycled plastic — see the column this month on that subject. The pasture posts are cedar ones we put in ten years ago. Rotted right at the base now. One whole line of fence fell over this fall and the sheep came charging through. I hope I can get by with replacing about 50 posts next spring and 50 every spring thereafter, rather than having to do them all at once. If I decide on plastic posts (which are five times more expensive), they should last forever.
The sheep are up in the barnyard now for the winter. We had our sheep-parade up Daniels Road last week, stopping traffic and occasionally forgetting ourselves and wandering off into John Mayette’s delicious alfalfa field. The old ladies in the flock have made the trip back and forth from the barnyard to the pasture often enough, though, that they remember where to go, and everyone else follows them, in a ragtag, scattery sort of way. We’ve kept two of this year’s ewe lambs for breeding, we sold half a dozen to others for breeding, that left five lambs for the butcher last week. Their skins are now stretched out and salted down in the basement, their meat is stuffed into our freezer, awaiting buyers. I’ve sold three of them so far and hope to sell the others soon, to help pay the property tax that comes due in December. (In case you’re curious, property tax on a big house and 70 acres in Plainfield NH is $5000 this year.)
There’s not much left to do on our “before winter” list. Most of the remaining items have to do with winterizing tractors, weather-stripping doors, fixing trucks, and other tasks that have traditionally been Dennis’s and that I’m not good at. Either Don will have to do them, or I’ll have to learn how, which wouldn’t be a bad thing.
Don is out hunting today — tomorrow is the end of rifle season, thank goodness. It means that we will see something of Don again, and that the season of half-drunk flatlanders lurching through the woods with funny orange hats and lethal weapons will be over. I, like most women, have little understanding of and no love for the modern practice of hunting. I could have appreciated it in the days when it was necessary to feed a family through the winter and when it was done with bows and arrows; now with the deer/man ratio so reduced and with rifles so high-powered, hunting seems to me a crazy, dangerous manhood ritual that not only excludes me but threatens me. Saw a beautiful doe down in our sheep pasture last week. Our land is posted; hope she had sense enough to stay on it.
Anna’s at her boyfriend Curley’s for Thanksgiving.
This paragraph is being written some hours later. I had the kiddie monitor by my computer, listening for Heather to wake up from her nap, which she did as I was typing “Thanksgiving”. I took the baby watch so Sylvia could go out riding with Binky in what remained of a glorious afternoon. I do only a little baby watching, just enough to give Sylvia much-needed breathers from time to time. Anna does the same.
Anna would object to the word “boyfriend” up there, since Curley is in his 60s and a very distinguished man (a gentleman cattle farmer who used to run MIT Press). As she puts it, delicately, she and Curley are “keeping company”. The big news from Anna is that she entered one chapter of the spiritual biography she’s writing in an essay contest run by America magazine and won! There’s a $2000 prize, which means a lot to her, since she has no income, but what means even more is the recognition of her writing ability. She’s never had time in her life to write, she’s always told herself she’s not a writer, but I’ve read several chapters of her emerging book and she certainly is a writer. Now she kind of believes that too.
Heather is a joy, a beam of sunshine in the house, easy to entertain, a fountain of smiles and hugs, a funny, fearless baby just on the edge of being a kid. Put her down anywhere outside and she goes rocking off on her pudgy baby-legs straight off in any direction, without ever looking back. If we don’t go after her she’s likely to end up in town, or hugging the leg of a horse, or halfway immersed in a water trough. She’s at the age where she mimics all sounds. She speaks fluent Sheep, Chicken, and Dog, and something that sounds like Chinese, and her English words encompass hot, hi, nose, shoe, sheep, dance, and dada. She likes to hear us sing and is picking up snatches of tune. Basil has taught her to play Stick like a proper puppy, and the two of them have such fun at it that they both fall over laughing.
Our two farms combined forces for Thanksgiving — Ruth Whybrow and Helen and Kate and Helen’s boyfriend Tommy, the sisters Binky and Sylvia, Don and Heather and me, and Dennis and Suzanne came back for the day. That’s a bunch of formidable cooks. Suzanne did the appetizers, Helen, Kate and Tommy did the pies, Ruth did the turkey and cranberry, Sylvia made rolls. I got to do the veggies — squash and creamed leeks and Brussels sprouts all from the garden. Quite a feast, and no one had to work hard at it.
I tend to take the food around here for granted, until visitors come and remind me that everyone doesn’t eat like this. It’s plain, nourishing stuff, but it’s all real — homemade wholegrain bread, homegrown vegetables, homemade soups, even, these days, fresh Jersey milk from a friend’s cow. My dad was visiting two weekends ago and Anna served up one of her extravaganzas — Don’s venison (he shot it with a bow, so I approve), red cabbage and beets and potatoes from the garden, fresh green salad (we’ve been harvesting Chinese cabbage, arugula, parsley, and tatsoi all through the November frosts). I think Daddy hasn’t gotten over that meal yet. When I travel and get reminded of the overprocessed, oversalted, characterless, machine-made, months-in-storage, microwaved stuff that is presumed to be food in many places, it makes me sad. People don’t know what real food tastes like any more. And they don’t get the fun of cooking it, much less growing it. I feel sorry for them.
Well, all this random association gives you some idea how life is going at Foundation Farm. We’re getting along surprisingly well, given that six weeks ago we hardly knew one another, that none of us has much money, that the days are increasingly dark and cold. Slowly we’re cleaning up messes and fixing broken things and getting the bills paid. We’re sure eating well (and I’m still losing weight, thank God). We’re just taking things one day at a time.
My writing life is far too busy. I’m spending most of my waking hours on the telecourse book and still falling farther behind schedule. I keep telling people that this is a problem and that eventually it will threaten our projected air date, but no one seems to know what to do about it, so I just keep plugging along. I like the book that’s emerging, and the few reviewers who have read it seem to like it too. I’m encouraged that I’m on the right track. There has never been an environmental science book like this one. The one chapter nearly finished, on materials and waste, mixes in economics and geology and chemistry and the engineering of landfills and the psychology of over consumption, all in one big systems mishmash. With lots of good news stories, and a few bad news stories. I think it’s fun, but it takes too long to write.
All I’m doing with the column is writing it; I have no time to sell it any more. Therefore income and number of adopting papers have stagnated at about $1000 a month and 22 respectively. I’ve lost a few papers as editors change and Jerks replace Enlightened Editors (a Jerk is, by definition, an editor who doesn’t like my column, and you can guess what an Enlightened Editor is). But sometimes Enlightened Editors replace Jerks too. One paper (Bennington VT) actually called up and asked if they could run the column every week! That’s the first time that’s happened!
I’ve noticed that conservative editors will not tolerate what they perceive to be liberal columns on their pages, but liberal editors bend over backward to include conservative columns. Dan Quayle’s paper the Indianapolis Star told me long ago that they wouldn’t think of running a column like mine. Nor would the Manchester Union Leader, the biggest paper in New Hampshire. (Little do they know how far afield from liberal I really am — I think liberals are wimps — I’m a Green! — do you all realize how subversive this newsletter is?) I’ve been musing about that. Is it just a logical outgrowth of those two mindsets, part of liberal thought to respect and balance differing opinions, part of conservative thought to believe in One Right Way? Is it that liberals are more confident (or arrogant) that their viewpoint will win out in reasonable competition, and that conservatives are secretly fearful that they’re wrong? Is it that liberals are more widely educated, more intellectually empowered, that they have had more practice in listening to debate and making up their own minds? Is it that conservatives recognize nonsense when they see it and liberals don’t? I don’t know. I turn the question over to you, eager to hear your hypotheses.
I’ve had time to write only one LA Times piece recently; it’s on pesticides and should run this weekend or next. I have a major article in Harrowsmith this month (Nov/Dec) on John Todd’s sewage treatment plant. Look it up — it has pretty pictures. I like writing longer articles, where I can tell a more complete story. I like working with the Harrowsmith editor, who is tough and pesky but always pushing me toward better writing.
Last weekend I was in Switzerland for a steering committee meeting of the Balaton Group and Chirapol Sintunawa, our Thai member, read my post-election anti-Bush column (enclosed here) in great wonder. “If I wrote something like that, I’d lose my job the next day,” he said. Sergei Pitrovanov, from the USSR read the same column and didn’t say a word. I think even with glasnost it was shocking to him. Reactions like that from my good friends make me grateful and sad and angry all at the same time. Grateful that I live where people can write whatever they think (though many papers of the opposite political stripe won’t print it). Sad that my friends can’t live in such a place. Angry at the power-mongers the world around who have the gall, the brutality, the inner fear, to punish people for their ideas.
It was a lovely and productive steering committee meeting. We assembled, as we always do, at the home of Joan Davis, handily near the Zurich airport, but far enough away to be in a timeless Swiss village, with cows dinging their bells, fresh milk delivered in cans, and the (upstream, still unpolluted) River Rhine flowing below the gardens. There were nine of us, Dennis and me and Joan and one Russian, one Thai, two Hungarians, one Hollander, one Dane. We planned the next annual meeting, schedule and speakers, and planned a presentation we will make in Budapest on energy efficiency. We talked about the finances of the network, membership policy, publications — all the things someone has be looking out after to keep the Balaton Group going. My newsletter next September, describing the Balaton meeting, will tell you how all our plans work out.
Between work periods we helped cook and clean up, we listened to Schubert on Joan’s CD player, we drank nice wine, and we carried on all the news-catching-up conversations that are the real work of the Balaton Group. Csaba told us about the latest Hungarian protests against the Danube dam. Chirapol told us about his long conversations with Thai farmers. Sergei gave us the latest news from IIASA (the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis in Vienna, an East-West cooperative venture, and a part-time home for many of us). Bert was on his way from Holland to India to work with our Balaton center there; we sent messages along with him. Jorgen was planning with Chirapol to visit Bangkok next spring. The super-efficient refrigerator the Danish group designed is now on a truck to Hungary, where Tomas and his students at the Technical University will test its energy consumption. So it goes in the Balaton Group. It’s my greatest pleasure to be with and to work with these people.
I’m going to go start some split pea soup now and next week’s column.
Love, Dana
