Dear Folks,
TRIPLETS!!! Born on the hour of the equinox! What a way to start the lambing season!
The lambs are not due for two more days. I turned Wally in with the girls on October 23, and it’s a 150-day gestation period. The ewes that are in heat when the ram arrives usually pop precisely 150 days later. The others all give birth within the following 16 days — 16 days being the heat cycle. But as I was saying on the phone to Sylvia at what must have been the moment these triplets were born, looking at those walking blimps out there, I wouldn’t be surprised if they come any time. I wouldn’t be surprised, said I, if they come bing, bing, bing. Dahlia will be first.
I hung up, walked out to start the evening chores, and heard an unmistakable tiny bleat from the barn. I did a quick census of the sheep out in the yard and sure enough, Dahlia was missing. There she was at the back of the barn, licking a little black thing. A little white thing was wobbling to its feet at her side. And — what’s that? could it be? — ANOTHER little white thing was at her other side!
You’ll have to excuse me, this happened just an hour ago, and I haven’t yet calmed down. Triplets are rare with sheep (which are equipped with only two nozzles). Production farms have developed breeds that regularly produce 4,5, or even 6 lambs, which are separated from their mothers and fed artificial milk, like calves. Those breeds are good for meat only, not wool, and I think they are a perversion of nature. So I use old-fashioned breeds (mongrels with a lot of Romney and Corriedale in them) and hope for a steady stream of twins. Only rarely do I get triplets. When I do, they are usually trouble. They can get tangled in the womb and require intricate help to get out. Or a mother can abandon one of them and leave it a bummer that we have to nurse every few hours, day and night.
But these three little ones came out with no help, and Dahlia loves them all. I just tucked the new family — a black ramlet and two white ewelets — into a barn stall. I’ll go out and check on them in an hour or two. I’m delighted, because Dahlia is my best ewe, and I had been hoping to keep a daughter from her and Wally. Last year she had twin rams.
We are still covered with snow several feet deep, having had several more blizzards this month. But in the daily battle between melting and freezing, melting is gaining a slight advantage. This week it has been in the high 30s every day, dropping back to the 20s every night. Long icicles drip from the north edge of the porch. On the paths we have shoveled there are tantalizing bare spots, which are expanding with agonizing slowness. There is a strip of open soil at the south-facing front of the house. I can see a few nubs of daffodils and crocuses poking up there, but most of their brethren are deeply buried under the heaps of snow that slid off the roof. I was hoping for a slow melt, so we don’t have floods, but at this pace, we won’t see the yard till July.
Well, there I go, getting antsy. I do at this time of year. Compared to January, we’ve come a long way. It doesn’t go below zero any more. We’re gaining half an hour of daylight every ten days. When the sun shines, it carries real conviction. (It doesn’t shine, much, though. Next to November, March is our stormiest month.) My windowfull of seedlings is expanding; yesterday I planted the tomatoes. House finches and mourning doves have reappeared at the feeder. So did a kestrel the other day, a hungry sparrow hawk that decided to abuse my hospitality and go chickadee-hunting. I’ve never seen one do that before. I held my breath on behalf of the chickadees, but I needn’t have worried. Suddenly, in a place that’s normally as busy as a supermarket on Saturday morning, there was not a chickadee, not a nuthatch, not a goldfinch in sight. Only a stunning stillness. The kestrel lifted off in disappointment, and I haven’t seen it since.
The term is just over. Two of my journalism students (out of 14) have already gotten published in the mainstream media for pay — the criterion for getting an A in the course. One wrote a piece about the plight of wild turkeys during deep-snow winters like this one; the other wrote a news piece about a Dartmouth professor just back from ecological research in Antarctica. Because it takes time for editors to respond, I give the other students Incompletes until June, so they can go on working on publication. It’s a good group this year. I expect lots more A’s.
I made only one short trip this month, my usual jaunt to the National Geographic in Washington. You know those articles about expeditions to dig up dinosaurs in Australia or to find the sunken Titanic or to study rare lemurs in Madagascar? You know how it says “this research funded by your National Geographic Society”? Well, I sit on the committee that gives away the money — about $4 million a year. It’s hard work, and fun. We meet every other month, having read through 60 or so proposals each time. The proposals cover the world — tracing Mayan trade routes in Mexico, placing instruments at the high climbing camps on Mt. Everest in order to measure the upthrust rate of the Himalayas, checking the fat of polar bears in Alaska for its PCB and DDT content.
Fortunately the other members of the committee are expert at something — geologists, archeologists, ecologists, anthropologists — so they can judge the proposals on scholarly grounds. I know little about any of these fields, so I just try to find proposals that would make a difference — not a difference to knowledge (they all would do that), but a difference to the survival of biodiversity and human civilization. I presume that is what they wanted me to do when they asked me to join. The Geographic is undergoing some upheavals, the politics of which I do not understand, but I think, and hope, that it is swinging in the direction of making that kind of difference.
(Just checked the triplets. White with Black Tailstripe is the strongest and is nursing well. Black Ramlet managed to connect while I was out there. White with Graylegs is the last-born and weakest and is crying as if she had nothing in her tummy. So I held her to the spigot till she figured it out and her little tail started wiggling with enthusiasm. I’ll go out again before bedtime and be sure she gets at least one more drink.)
While I was in Washington I ducked over to the White House for a brown bag lunch. (That’s the way I tell it when I want to impress the secretaries at Dartmouth.) Actually it was the Old Executive Office Building next to the White House, where the President’s Office of Environmental Policy resides. A friend, Harriett Crosby works there, and so does a former student, Cathy Zoi, and they stage brown bag lunches once a week with the staff. Herman Daly, Amory Lovins, Paul Hawken, and other stars in my firmament have already been there. A crowd showed up, including Katie McGinty, the head of the office, Molly Olson, the head of the President’s Council on Sustainability, and several people from Al Gore’s office. We had a good discussion about — well, really about everything. Beyond the Limits, and paradigm shifts, and systems and why they don’t work, and how to make them work. I don’t know what any of them will make of it, but they’re good folks, in deep water, and I’ll do anything I can to help them. In May I’m scheduled to do the same thing for the staff of the President’s Council for Sustainability.
I was almost late for the meeting, because I was held up crossing Pennsylvania Avenue by a police blockade. A Visiting Dignitary (I never found out who) was making his way from Blair House (I think that’s what it was) to the White House across the street. So all traffic, motor and pedestrian, was frozen. A swarm of about 20 motorcycle cops pulled up. So did three limousines. The Dignitary and staff got into the limousines. With a cop car in front and another behind, and the motorcycles alongside, the three limousines started up, made a U-turn, drove a quarter of a block, and entered the White House gate. Then the busy noontime traffic could resume.
How is it that we let any human beings get to the point of thinking they are so important that they need that kind of foofaraw and resource consumption and inconveniencing of other people to go across the street for lunch on a nice spring day?
March 22, 1994
Well, maybe not bing, bing bing. Maybe bing ……., bing, bing. Nothing has happened out in the barn for two days, except that everyone has swelled up a little more. When Paprika lies down, she spreads out a foot on either side, and can hardly breathe. I wouldn’t be surprised if she has triplets too. (Her appetite’s still good though. The usual sign of impending lambing is a sudden disinterest in food.)
The triplets are doing fine. I’m keeping them in the obstetrics ward (barn stall) with their Mom because there’s no other demand for the space at the moment, and it’s slippery out. This morning we had several inches of wet, gloppy snow. It came down in great lumps, and now it’s melting. A typical March setback — now there’s NO bare ground visible. I bet there will be by tomorrow, though.
The “ad” for forming a new community here, which I sent out to all of you last month, has brought some responses, from people who sound wonderful. There are at least a dozen folks now talking to me about coming here. It feels like bees flying around in circles, contemplating a spot of honey, but not yet sure whether to land. That’s fine; it’s too early for anyone to make a decision, since we still have to fix up the back house, and I’m a long way from getting permission to build any more houses. Next week we’ll have a meeting with two families in this area who are contemplating building. (They are the ones who got me thinking about adding space and turning the ownership pattern into a condominium.) When the snow clears I’ll have to start spending serious money on perc tests and detailed surveys and a full site plan. Since I don’t have serious money, we are about to reach the “put at least a little money where your mouth is” stage.
I am determined to keep the planning and discussing to a minimum, but there will have to be more of it than there ever has been before. Community at Foundation Farm has been an unserious thing for 22 years. Somewhere between 50 and 100 people have lived here, depending on how you count the folks who have stayed for years, versus the folks who have stayed for weeks or months. I have put little intention into it, just taking in whomever God sends and learning to live with them and working out whatever rules seem appropriate. It has been easy, and for the most part delightful. But now I have a greater vision, a stricter definition of community, and greater hopes for the land. All that is going to move the ever-elusive balance between freedom and order more in the direction of order — and planning and discussion. I hope it won’t ruin everything!
Anyway, no decisions can be made for awhile yet. Probably the decisions will ultimately be made by the rule that has always been operational here: the space is open to whoever is first ready to make a commitment.
Later that day
TWINS to Violet!! Two little ewes, one white and one black as coal. I found them at the same time I found the triplets — at evening chores. Still wet and wobbly. I scooped them up in a towel and tried to coax Violet into following me and them into the barn. She freaked. This is only her second lambing, and she’s not as trusting as Dahlia is. So while she dashed frantically around the yard, I put the babies in the barn, tucked sweetly into the hay I had spread in a stall. I backed off, they yelled, and Violet found them right away.
I just went out to check on everybody and found the triplets learning how to jump. One of the white ewelets started it. She gave a hop in that funny stiff-legged spring-loaded way they have. Then she stopped a minute in amazement. Then she hopped three times. Then her little black brother picked it up. Pretty soon they were all doing it, caroming around the stall, boing, boing, boing, like kids on pogo sticks. I was laughing out loud. The little newborns in the next stall had no idea what was going on. They’re still trying to figure out how to make their way reliably to the milk.
What kind of universe is it when one of the first instincts of creatures only two days old is to play?
Well, before any more bings bings turn into boing boings, I had better cut this letter off and get it out to you. The robins came back today in bunches; they are flocking around every little bare patch of ground. It’s predicted to be sunny and in the 50s tomorrow. I’m leaving on Friday to go see my Mom in Oklahoma. We’re having a family reunion; my brother and two cousins are coming too. We used to spend every Thanksgiving and Christmas together, but we haven’t all been together in the same place and time for years — actually decades.
John is away too, also visiting his family, so Sylvia and Heather are coming back to farm-sit and tend the maternity ward. Since Sylvia has helped me through five lambings, I know I’m leaving everything in capable hands. Maybe when I get back, there will be a lot more lambs, and the snow will be gone.
Love, Dana
