Dear Folks, Sylvia and Heather have written a new story.  They have a whole series, repeated with further embellishments at every bedtime.  One is about Caesar and Cleopatra and their goslings.  Another is about Faith the sheep who thought she was a person.  The latest is titled “EEEEEEEEEUUWWWW Zucchini!”  That was an actual comment, made by one of Heather’s small friends when Sylvia tried to pawn off extra zucchini at her house.  Heather echoes it whenever zucchini is served around here (which tends to be at every meal).  We like zucchini, but this is the time of year when it does get to be a bit much.

Everything gets to be a bit much.  It’s wonderful!  So much broccoli, so many beans and tomatoes and cucumbers!  Freezing or pickling something every night after a day of writing.  Grazing through the garden, a sweet freshly dug carrot here, a celery stick there, a bite of cherry tomato seasoned with a sprig of fresh arugula.  The garden is riotous.  The abundance is ridiculous.  The squashes and pumpkins are running over everything.  The Silver Queen corn is twelve feet high.  August is a blessed month.

Two of Karel’s sisters were up last weekend, and the three of them got into making pesto from the big row of basil I planted.  A house smelling of freshly made pesto is as good as a house smelling of freshly baked bread (which they also did).  We freeze the pesto in ice-cube trays, so we can thaw it out in bits for pasta dishes all winter.

While the Pluhars were into pesto, I was up to my elbows in green soybeans.  They’re as much work as green peas, when it comes to shelling and freezing, but they’re as good as green peas too, or so I think, and I use them for many of the same purposes.  Peas of August.  Higher in protein and more substantial in the stomach.

I was wishing, as I stood in the garden stripping the soybean pods from the plants, that I could freeze just one hour of the perfect August day to pull out next February along with the beans.  You’d think the beans would induce the memory, but it doesn’t work.  It’s just not possible to imagine the full glory of August in February, any more than I can bring myself to believe in February now that it’s August.  All that snow — could it be possible?  Piled up in big cold drifts right here where the bright-lights cosmos are dancing like yellow and orange butterflies?  How can winter be real, when the cicadas are buzzing and the air is sweet with nicotiniana and the sun is burning down out of a flawless blue sky?

Well, winter is very real around here, of course, which is why we scramble to put away so much food now.  Karel just harvested six mammoth cabbages and made them into a crock of sauerkraut.  I made half-sour pickles, and I’ve been freezing Dutch runner beans and broccoli along with the green soys.  Sylvia was putting away bushels of slim French green beans, until the pumpkin vines engulfed them.  Braids of onions are hanging from the rafters on the back porch.  The tomatoes are just about to reach the state of overwhelm.  We’ll soon have to start canning sauce in a big way.

We’re even preparing flowers for the winter.  Sylvia got fascinated with the everlastings page of the seed catalog and ordered one of everything.  So we have a big patch of wierd flowers that I never grew before — helichrysum, ammobium, achillea, xeranthemum, limonium, statice, white salvia.  Great bunches of them are hanging next to the onions on the porch, drying for winter bouquets.  It was a fun experiment; I think we’ll do it again.

There have been no further murders in the pasture, thank heaven.  Don shot one more raccoon in the chicken yard (that makes four — in four shots), and the slaughter rate seems to have dropped off there too.  I’m not sure why.  There are still raccoons around.  We hear them chuckling to each other in the woods at night.  They managed to devastate about half the early sweet corn — something that hasn’t happened around here since we got Basil.  Maybe they’re leaving the chickens alone because they like corn better.  Basil, meanwhile, snores away on his big pillow in my bedroom.  (In fairness to him, I should add that he did tree two of the four raccoons for Don — after I, hearing chicken screams, woke the lazy bagger up (Basil, not Don) and sent him outside.)

I’m soaking up the good veggies and the beauty of the valley, because tomorrow I get on an airplane and go far away from here for the first time since last December.  That must be a record for uninterrupted ground-time for me.  I vowed when I was diagnosed with cancer that I’d do no traveling during 1990 except for the Balaton meeting.  Well, the Balaton meeting is coming up — but I’ve scheduled a lot of other traveling too, partly because I have to get back to earning a living, partly because it’s time now to launch back fully into my life, and my life requires me to be a global citizen.

So day after tomorrow I will land in Budapest and spend a few days at the IFOAM conference (International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements).  I’m thrilled that it’s in Budapest.  Four years ago I took six Hungarian agriculturalists on a tour of organic farms across the U.S.  At that time an academic in Hungary just couldn’t say that it is possible to farm without heavy doses of chemicals.  (Some of them still couldn’t bring themselves to say it at the end of the trip, after seeing it done on farm after farm!)  We ended that tour at an IFOAM conference in Santa Cruz, where they met serious organic farmers and researchers from all over the world.  They were the first attendees ever from the communist nations.  And now the Hungarians are hosting the conference!  I’m going purely for the fun of it, to see organic farming friends, to support my Hungarian friends, to watch the formerly communist world react to these wild new ecological ideas.

The last day of the IFOAM conference will overlap with the first day of the Balaton Group meeting.  Those of you who have read this letter for awhile know that Dennis and I organize a meeting every year at this time on Lake Balaton, about an hour from Budapest.  This will be the ninth year we’ve done it.  The attendees are, basically, our friends from all parts of the world who work on sustainable resource management.  It’s a special meeting for us, a chance to exchange information and design joint projects and get our batteries recharged, with hugs and new ideas and just the moral support of knowing the others are there.  The meeting grows every year — this year 54 people are signed up, from China, New Zealand, Costa Rica, Thailand, India, Tanzania, and all over East and West Europe.  This year’s topic is the rethinking of economics, so that it serves the planet.  (About time, right?)

Well, I’ll be back from that trip exactly three days before I launch off on the next, to Arizona.  Hmmmm, how to explain that one?  As a strong push from the universe, I guess.

I have a dear friend, you see, who goes once a year to a psychic in New York.  She never told me about this, knowing what I am likely to think of psychics.  But last June when she went to see him, he said to her, “You have a friend who has survived cancer.  She has some important writing to do on this subject.  Please be sure I’m on the mailing list for her newsletter.  And tell her to call this doctor.”  And he gave her the phone number of a doctor in Arizona.

Well, what would you do with such a phone number?

I called it, of course.

The doctor’s name is Harvey Bigelson.  He was a standard M.D. until fifteen years ago, when he left his practice to become a homeopath in, he tells me, the pure German tradition.  Now he runs a large cancer clinic, which includes homeopathy, acupuncture, chiropracty, nutritional counseling — a whole pantheon of holistic techniques.  He told me that by looking at a sample of my blood he can tell whether my cancer is gone for good, and he can put me through treatments that will guarantee that it will never come back.  He also said that he’s been trying to write a book that will revolutionize cancer treatment, but that he hasn’t had enough time; he’s too busy treating cancer.

That same week I was invited to go to Arizona for a meeting at Biosphere II.  For those of you who haven’t heard of it, Biosphere II is the hectare-sized greenhouse-laboratory-house-farm-ecosystem, in which eight scientists are about to be sealed for two years to test out technologies for living in space.  Ideally all their needs — air, water. food, energy — will be met by the intercycling ecosystems inside — just as they are in Biosphere I, namely the Earth.  There should be enough plants to recycle their breathed-out carbon dioxide back to oxygen.  Enough bees and hummingbirds to pollinate the plants.  Enough soil and condensing “rain” to purify wastewater back to drinking water.  Enough organic waste to compost to fertilize the farm.  And so forth.  It’s an experiment that every redblooded environmentalist would love to go see.  I’ll see it two weeks before they seal it up.  And it will pay my way to Bigelson’s clinic.

Clearly the Higher Powers intend for that trip to happen!  You’ll hear about it next time.

I have a book in my head.  The idea of it excites me so much that I can hardly work on the book I’m supposed to be writing.  The book I envision will be an illumination of the treatment of cancer in this country — the full range of treatment — by following around and reporting in great journalistic detail on various leading-edge practitioners.

At first I thought it would just be a contrast between two doctors: Ross McIntyre, the head of the cancer clinic where I was treated and a highly respected specialist in leukemia therapy, and Deepak Chopra, the head of the modern reconstruction of Ayurveda.  But that idea may not work out.  I may add Bigelson.  Chopra will be darn hard to follow around, since he tends to hop continents weekly.  And McIntyre, in a perfect example of the nontolerance of the various schools of cancer therapy for each other, refuses to appear in the same book with Chopra.

So I’m not sure exactly what form the book will take or who will be in it.  But I do see it as centered on specific doctors, all originally trained as modern M.D.s, their (wildly different) theories of what cancer is, their (wildly different) ways of treating it, their personal philosophies, their paths toward the therapies they now believe in.  Actually I can see the portrait of each doctor as a separate New Yorker article, but the real puzzle comes in the contrast of setting each one next to the others (two or three or four at the most).  The story is in the competing paradigms; the very ones I felt caught between and frustrated by when I was a patient.

Well, that’s the next book.  It doesn’t have to take clear shape yet, since I have so much to do on the present book.  Today I finished second drafts of the first six chapters, for my publisher to send out for review.  I like them!  I think they will transform the way environmental science is taught!  They are only the first six out of 21 chapters, however.  Eight more are finished in first-draft form.  And then there are seven more I haven’t even started.  And I have been working on this two years.  And the TV series will air in October.  Oh, me!

Well, one day at a time, and then one more day at a time.  The task for the remainder of today is to get one more column written, and, if there’s time, to pickle some beets.  The task for tomorrow is to get this newsletter to wonderful Diana Wright, my research assistant, who will get it out to you, and to get myself in some semblance of order onto the airplane.

Anybody out there need any zucchini?

Love, Dana