Dear Folks, I like to begin every January issue of the Dana Meadows News Service with a small guide to the people and other creatures of the household, to help new subscribers keep the characters straight. This year I asked Sylvia to make me some little sketches to go with my descriptions, and you can see the result!
I may not have mentioned before what a talented artist Sylvia is. She not only does cartoons like the one enclosed, she does beautifully illustrated children’s books and passionately painted serious pictures, mostly of animals, mostly horses. None of her work has been published yet, but the household is on a campaign to make her into the next Maurice Sendak. Her children’s illustrations are that good — at least I think so. Anna took some of her work to be duplicated, and yesterday Sylvia and I composed a letter with which she can approach publishers.
So hang on to the sketch in this letter; some day you will be the possessor of a limited-edition reproduction of a genuine Sylvia Spain, only 125 copies in existence. (Yes, that’s how many subscribers you are. Your numbers keep growing, without any effort on my part. I continue to regard you all as a wonderful but unexplainable mystery.)
Sylvia’s sketch is quite self-explanatory, but there are some family in-jokes there you may not catch. Me with the teapot trying to thaw out the frozen sheep water. Sylvia sliding down the icy hill from the horse barn. Poppy, our witchy, wild, funny cat, in one of her Moods. The Sheep Chicken sitting on June’s back — we can’t convince her to go back to the chicken coop and behave like a chicken; she insists on hanging out in the barn and being a feathered sheep. June the sheep about to pop, because we suspect she got pregnant when she wasn’t supposed to last August (instead of when she was supposed to last November). We are mounting a winter lambing watch for her and perhaps Godiva, both of whom look even more round and fully packed than usual.
It is being a perfectly awful winter, the very worst kind, the kind with no snow. Normally we’d have 42 inches of snow by this time in January; this year we’ve had 6 inches, all of which has frozen and thawed so many times that the whole Valley is glazed. There is hardly a flat place on the whole farm, so negotiating the ice-slopes has become a real challenge. The other night I simply could not get up to the chicken house, even on all fours. I’d gain a whole foot of altitude and go slithering right back down again. Finally I just gave up and decided to leave the darn chicken door open all night. If a fox managed to get up that hill and grab a chicken, he deserved it. (He didn’t.) In the morning I went out with a bucket of ashes from the woodstove and laid a gritty path up the hill. We have ash paths all over the farm.
People who do not live in the north may not understand why a winter in which you never have to shovel snow is a problem. The ice is only the beginning of our complaint. There’s no cross-country skiing. The land looks dilapidated and brown instead of pristine, sparkling white — this should be our most beautiful time of year. Without the snow’s beneficent insulation the ground is freezing four feet deep. That will make a horrendous long mud season in spring, when the top three inches thaws and the water can’t sink in. It will prevent groundwater tables from recharging. It will heave the roots of perennials and trees.
We’re a country made for snow, a society poised and ready for it, and when we don’t get it, we all grumble and gripe. It’s almost as bad as last summer when we got 90 and 100 degree weather — Not Right, Not Appropriate, Not What We Expect. So far no one’s blaming the winter on the greenhouse effect, but it could be that. It is considerably warmer than usual; we’ve had no twenty-belows, and three or four January thaws.
Now that I write all this, it will go down to twenty below tonight, and a Nor’easter will swing in tomorrow and dump two feet on us. I actually hope so. We’re all ready.
The one thing a snowless winter is good for is logging. Don and I went out and marked over-age, crooked, and too-close-together trees, and he’s been taking a few down every weekend. Sylvia and I like splitting and stacking, so nearly as soon as he delivers logs to the woodyard, they’re stowed away, drying for next winter’s fuel. We’re actually putting wood into the shed almost as fast as we’re taking it out to burn. That’s a first for Foundation Farm in January!
It feels good. It feels good when I spend all day every day at a word processor to go out and bash locust logs for an hour or two. It feels good to be taking our fuel from the farm, and to be improving the forest in the process. It feels good to know we can go on heating our rooms and our water this way essentially forever. All the trees Don and I marked are within sight of the house and cover maybe two acres, one of the most thinly treed two acres on the farm. If we go on doing that much every year, it’ll take us 35 years to cover the whole farm and cycle back again. And we’re leaving behind 90% of the trees to grow up for lumber and maple syrup and shade and bird homes and beauty.
As another added bonus with this issue I’ve enclosed some responses to one of this month’s columns — one that got a lot more responses than usual. I knew it would. The raw nerves in public discourse are fairly obvious, and every time you touch them, you get a reaction, no matter what you’ve said. Every now and then I just can’t resist. That column was an experiment, trying to deal with something that was bothering me very much. I don’t think it worked, but it was interesting. You can form your own opinion.
My life seems pretty bleak at the moment. I spend a goodly amount of energy resisting the things I’m supposed to be doing. It may just be low-light January and winter stir-craziness. (It may be that writing all day is, in fact, darn boring!). The column is going well — an old newspaper (the Kennebec Journal) that had dropped my column actually wrote this week asking to start running it again. The book is fun and exciting to work on, except when I’m stuck, which I often am. I’m also frustrated by the impossible deadlines and by the lack of consistency between the book and the TV shows. I think people watching the series are going to wonder whether the book and the shows were made with any coordination at all.
Last week I was in Boston to see a rough first version of the second show to be shot, the one on energy. There’s some great stuff in it. I’m beginning to understand at the gut level what makes good television (before I understood intellectually, but intellectual understanding alone is worthless as a motivating force).
What makes good television, in fact, is communication at the gut level, communication not of ideas, but of real human experience, moments when people are doing and feeling, not moments when they’re just mouthing off. It’s beastly difficult to arrange to be there with a camera at just the moment when someone is doing and feeling something relevant to a big point you happen to want to make about energy. The very presence of the camera reduces the likelihood. When people see cameras they panic and start to operate from their intellects instead of from their hearts. They know the power of the camera to reveal the whole person, and so they do their best to hide.
So television-making is in large part serendipitous. When you’ve been lucky enough to catch a great emotional moment, you highlight it, whether it makes the point you want or not. If someone else has made a major, vital point, but has done it with leaden self-consciousness, that point gets dropped, literally, on the cutting room floor. Once you understand that, you can understand a lot about the world — why the media are so attracted to disaster and conflict (where peoples’ barriers go down and their emotions come out), why rigid, self-controlled Michael Dukakis couldn’t make it in a world of television elections, why it never mattered what Ronald Reagan said, only the way he said it, etc. etc.
On the whole, it’s a good thing to have a way of representing ourselves that distorts in the direction of action and emotion, to counteract our paper-bound way of representing ourselves, which distorts in the direction of words and rationality. I understand the TV producers’ choices. I don’t like to watch self-conscious, self-concealing talking heads any more than anyone else does (though my tolerance level for them is high, because I’m trained and calloused by academia). But in what is supposed to be education television, I’m bothered to see snippets of great television being gathered from around the world and strung together in what seems to me to be arbitrary order, with no point, and with considerable distortion of the subject matter. Though I like every piece of the programs I’ve seen so far, I don’t see them adding up.
This may be a temporary frustration, which will work itself out as both book and shows get refined and shaped by each other. Anyhow, at the moment it’s a real frustration. It’s prompting me toward great conclusions that I shouldn’t be drawing this early in the process — like, stay away from television at all costs from now on and stick to print, or, alternatively, get yourself into television in a big way and learn to use its great ability to transmit human feelings — feelings are important, they’re real, they are and should be part of decision processes, and since everyone else is manipulating them, I might as well do it too.
Well, the sun is shining, it’s 21 degrees out, and I see Don has lined up some more logs to be split. I think I’ll go out a take a few whacks before I start my column.
Love, Dana
