Hi Dear Folks, Whew! What a month! You know, normally things around here are sort of leisurely and orderly, quiet, routine, almost boring. But this month everything has been in flux. No time for boredom. All up in a heaval. I have been constantly excited, delighted, shocked, saddened, working flat out, exhausted, having a totally great time, or pushing to meet a deadline. It has felt like a month of nonstop, high-speed acrobatic flying.
Where to begin? With departures and arrivals, I guess.
Chrissie and Scot were scheduled to fly west on the 16th for two months of measuring trees in the Vancouver forest to collect data for Scot’s thesis. That meant a steady acceleration in the days leading up to their departure. Scot had to write and then publicly defend his thesis proposal — a tense and demanding task, which he ended up accomplishing brilliantly on the day before they left. Chrissie was scrambling to close down three gardening enterprises — our own and the two others she has been working for. She and Scot were tilling, manuring, measuring, sorting, planting, and mulching 100 pounds of garlic bulbs for next year’s crop. Drying, cleaning, and bagging hundreds of pounds of onions. Sorting and canning the ripening tomatoes. Packing, of course, and making long-distance arrangements for field work, including rigging a high-flying balloon with a remote-control camera to take aerial pictures of the forests.
Meanwhile, way over in Idaho, Stephen Leslie and Kerry Gawalt were loading their household, horses, dogs, cats, and farm equipment (they have more farm equipment than furniture) for a six-day drive to New Hampshire. They left on October 6 with their friend Don, who volunteered to help along the way, and arrived on October 12, just a few days before Chrissie and Scot took off.
To make thing really exciting, on just the weekend when those folks overlapped, four relatives of mine came to visit — my Uncle Glenn (my dad’s brother) and Aunt Norinne Hager from Delaware, with two of their daughters, my cousins Kristi and Rinnie. I have always liked that branch of the family tree, but we’ve been better about corresponding than actually getting together. The last time I saw them was something like 30 years ago. So it was wonderful news that they’d be driving through New England, and there was no way I was going to miss the opportunity to be with them. But it did make for a lot going on around here at once!
The fall has been gentle, and the weekend when ten people were staying here was gorgeous, sunny during the day, chilly enough for a fire at night, and the leaves were at the peak of their color. The Hagers pulled in Friday night, so I had some good time with them — telling stories of the old days — you know how it is with families — catching up on grandchildren and careers and gossip. I drove them around the valley showing them the sights, including the various farms we are considering for our new community. They seem to be great rooters for the community, especially my cousin Kristi, who got deep into assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the land options. She also told me hair-raising stories of Butte, Montana, where she lives (as does everyone) on the edge of a massive copper mine, a huge pit, now abandoned, so the pumps have been turned off and water is flowing in, reacting with the exposed sulfide ores, developing into a brew of heavy metals dissolved in sulfuric acid — a 130-mile-long toxic waste site. You can read about it in the October issue of Harper’s — which should be required reading for anyone who has ever used copper. We rarely see the damage; we are never charged the full costs of the messes that result from our consumption.
While we were having a great time with family stuff, we were also looking out the window, wondering when we’d see a horse trailer pull up. Finally on Saturday afternoon Chrissie sang out from the front yard, “They’re here!” and we all piled outside. There was a big Ryder truck on the side of Daniels Road, horse trailer behind it, truck behind that (loaded with feed and water for the animals). New farm-mates! Horses! Wow, how exciting!
The first thing we did was free the horses. We pulled the trailer up to Ruth’s pasture, Stephen and Don pulled the pins, opened the doors, and backed out two young, blonde Norwegian Fjord horses. (Their names are Mari and Cassima — I’d better start introducing you to all the new creatures.) They’re work horses, small ones, very pretty. They took one unbelieving look at the pasture after six days of cramped trailer, and then they took off, zooming back and forth, kicking up their heels. Our young dog Emmett zoomed right along with them, outside the fence, entranced by these strange, energetic new animals. It was a lovely sight — green grass, bright trees, ecstatic golden creatures. About that time Stephen and Kerry let their own two dogs (Rudy and Mugwhy) out of the front of the trailer, and everything after that was a blur of bouncing canines. At the end of the day, Emmett collapsed into utter exhaustion. So, for that matter, did we all.
Well, then things began to get really busy. Don and Stephen cruised Ruth’s fence and fixed 6 breaks to be sure the horses would stay in. We parked the new cats (Latte and Jimmy) in the upstairs bedroom, so they could creep down at their own pace for the inevitable howling encounters with our cats — which weren’t as bad as I had feared. Stephen and Don and Kerry unloaded the Ryder. In the course of finding places for their equipment, we all did a much-needed basement cleaning and brought the house plants in from the lean-to greenhouse and took the greenhouse down and stored it for the winter. The Hagers headed back down south. Chrissie and Scot and Stephen and Kerry and I began the many conversations and projects that will eventually help us to know who we all are. The house started getting rearranged, as it always does to accommodate the coming or going of any new person or animal. I barely kept up with my classes and columns, and Chrissie and Scot actually did get themselves off to Canada. Don hung around for awhile nursing a cold and splitting and stacking wood for our kitchen stove. Finally he found a ride in a direction he wanted to go — he’s in a rolling-stone time of life right now. He’s a gentle soul and a good worker; I hope we’ll see him back here sometime.
Now it’s two weeks later, and I know that, again, this old farm has been blessed. Stephen and Kerry are special people. You’ll get to know them gradually through this newsletter, but I can tell you this much now. Kerry grew up attending a Waldorf school at Hawthorne Valley, which is an anthroposophic community and organic farm in New York state. She’s the kind of cook who turns out quantities of wonderful food without fluster or even recipes. She’s a natural with animals, especially horses, a knitter, a gardener, someone who with the skills and willingness to fit into and support and whatever activity is going on. One of those people I think of as the essential lubricants of community.
Stephen is an artist, a farmer, a deep spirit. He grew up in southern New Hampshire, and then spent six years in the Benedictine Priory at Weston, Vermont, where the brothers not only lead a monastic life, but also work to help communities in Latin America — and compose and record songs of liberation theology that you may have heard on tape, if not at the Priory itself. He left to go into farming, went to Hawthorne Valley to intern, met Kerry, and the rest is history, a history still unfolding. They spent a year farming in Montana, another year in Idaho, always on someone else’s land, and now they’ve decided to come east. Since we didn’t know each other except through telephone conversations, I told them they could use our farm at least as a launching pad for whatever they want to create out here — and at most they could farm here and go with us to become part of the new community.
Last month we plowed and harrowed a 3-acre plot down by the brook so Stephen and Kerry (and perhaps all of us in a cooperative venture) can plant enough vegetables for a serious money-making garden. We have the winter to plan it. Over the past two weeks, they have gone around and met almost every farmer in the valley, especially the dairy farmers, since Stephen hopes to land a part-time job milking over the winter. These farm visits are also good research for them, so they can learn the markets and suppliers around here. In the meantime they’ve been helping me put our farm to bed — digging carrots, cleaning the chicken house, moving sheep around, getting the wood in, fixing fences.
The list of fall chores is long, the time is getting short. Not many more weekends until snow. Last time I wrote you the leaves were just gearing up into their fall celebration. It was a subdued celebration this year. For some reason the colors emerged slowly and hung on a long time. The maples weren’t as bright as usual, but the oaks, which are dominating the scene now, have never been so beautiful. The maples are usually the bright fire, the oaks the dying embers, but this year it was almost the opposite.
Scot and I, carpooling to Dartmouth, theorized about what makes the colors different in different years. You’d think, with a major tourist industry dependent on those colors, someone would have done research on them. (I can just picture the first genetically engineered maple, programmed to turn neon red and hold it for two months.) But Scot says there’s almost nothing known about why the turning came two weeks late this year, why the colors were so much brighter last year after a drought, why some maples turn yellow and others, right next to them, turn orange or red. Is it soil minerals? Day length? Water content? Genetics? Early or late frost?
Science is no help here. There’s nothing to do but wonder — and drink in the beauty.
At Dartmouth my environmental ethics class is cooking along with 20 interesting students. It’s a 3-ring circus to run, because we do many readings, have many guests, write many papers. We do three big case studies — this year on global population policy, the management of the Northern Forest (with Maine’s clearcutting referendum coming up that’s a hot one around here), and endocrine disrupters. The students are asked first to listen carefully and respectfully to all sides of the issues, and then to write papers on what is the ETHICAL, as opposed to the economic, political, easy, or popular thing to do. They write a fourth paper on a case of their own choosing. And I also manage to fit in three of my favorite books, Ishmael, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and The Universe is a Green Dragon. It’s a lot of work for all of us, and every year I ask myself why I do it. Then I get to know the students, and the answer is obvious.
Just to complicate things even more, the MacArthur Fellows held their get-together last weekend in Chicago (this happens every 18 months) and I went, partly because the reunions are fun and partly to be with my Mom. She flew up from Tulsa to be my guest for the weekend.
It’s a huge party (over 300 people, counting Fellows and their families) in a glitzy hotel in the glitzy part of the city. All day long there are running seminars, three at a time to choose from, and the variety is mind-blowing — reflecting the uncanny breadth of the secret nominators of MacArthur Fellows. The press likes to call it a “genius” award, but I’d say it’s a “weirdo” award. Here, to give you a sample, are some of the talks I attended:
– George Archibald on the status of endangered Asian cranes.
– Bernice Johnson Reagon (of Sweet Honey in the Rock) on the history of black gospel singing.
– Bill T. Jones on how he’s choreographing his next dance, based on an ancient Greek play.
– Amory Lovins on tweaking market economics to produce radical energy efficiency.
– Anna Roosevelt on human evolution in the Zaire Basin,
– Jared Diamond on why Asian and Caucasian peoples developed urban/industrial cultures and other peoples didn’t (based on the biogeography of the regions they inhabited).
MacArthur Fellows are mathematicians, social activists, scientists, environmentalists, artists, musicians, historians. You’d wonder that they would find anything to talk to each other about, but this multi-disciplinary intellectual feast is very popular — people keep coming back even after their fellowships are over and they have to pay their own way. And people seem to like going to the talks that are as far away as possible from their own fields.
Well, Mom and I had a great time. One of the best parts was the night the whole party moved to the Field Museum, Chicago’s great natural history museum. We had the place to ourselves. A candlelight dinner was served in the great entry hall, right by the brachiosaurus skeleton and the stuffed elephants. Mom and I wandered around filled with memories, because this museum was one of the sacred places of my childhood, and she was the person who introduced me to it. I used to know every inch of it, and certain exhibits, especially of wildflowers and birds and butterflies and rocks, I would lean into so hard I nearly fell through the glass. All the displays have been rearranged since I was last there (which must have been 35 years ago) but guess what! They’re all still there! The diorama of northern Illinois wildflowers (white trilliums, wild geraniums, yellow violets). And Bushman, the great gorilla of the Lincoln Park Zoo, who died in 1951 when I was 10, and was stuffed for the museum, where he still stands.
So I got to revisit my childhood, and after the MacArthur party was over, Mom got to visit her best buddies in the suburbs, all of whom taught with her in the public schools, back in the days when public schools were great. (Have any of you figured out why they stopped being great?) I heard about that part of the trip five days later, when she got home and called me. She was still on Cloud Nine. Sounds like those ladies partied all week.
The new community and Sustainability Institute are coming along, though I have little time to put into them these days. The Institute is now a legal entity, but not yet an IRS-sanctioned nonprofit one. I spent last Friday at MIT, where our group presented a first rough commodity model to the system dynamics group in a three-hour seminar that gave us lots of useful feedback. Then we spent another three hours, since many of the prime movers of the Institute live down in Boston at the moment, talking about possible projects and how to handle them.
And just today we had a meeting of the larger community. To please those of us who hate to sit around in circles, we decided this time to climb a mountain, and we lucked out with a perfect day. Mild, sunny, clear. (Just a week early we had a raging nor’easter — and of course at any time now, especially in the mountains, we could have a blizzard.) Peter and Ann Forbes live in Canaan, near Mt. Cardigan, so that was the mountain we climbed, a gentle one with a glacier-smoothed granite top that offers beautiful views. We straggled up and down in a long line with a bunch of conversations going, then we piled back to the Forbeses for a meeting and pot luck.
More and more people come to these meetings. Wonderful people. It seems a miracle to me. We have all kinds of uncertainties and sticking points, but, so far at least, we seem to bumble our way to solutions. Today we decided to push on the one farm where we’re not able to come to agreement, and if we don’t get anywhere within another few months to drop the whole idea and go elsewhere. Meantime we’ll get more systematic about checking out other farms, farther away from the Upper Valley. (The farther from Dartmouth, the cheaper the land — more than a half-hour commute away and the price drops by about half.) People stepped forward, willing to take on both those tasks.
At the end of the evening we invented an interesting game, which started with asking everyone to hold up a finger for each cat they owned. (I didn’t count, but the number was horrendous.) Then dogs. Cows. Horses. Sheep. Cars. TVs. Tractors (two). Pianos (three). Snowmobiles (none). Then we started throwing out a mix of serious and funny questions. Who likes to sing hymns? Who has an alcoholic parent? Who is compulsively neat? Compulsively messy? (We have a good number of both of those.) Who cross-country skis? (Everyone.) Who knows their number on the Enneagram? (About half of us.) Who goes regularly to church? (Very few.) Who regularly meditates or does yoga or some other spiritual practice? (Very many.) Who has ever lived in group housing or community? (Just about everyone.)
It was a light, quick way to get a sense of who we are.
Sadly, when we held up fingers for cats, I put up only two fingers, not three. A sweet little light has gone out on our farm. Sometime during all the ruckus of the past two weeks, our Poppy disappeared, and she’s apparently not coming back. She was 15 and wasting away from a thyroid problem. We had been medicating her, and Chrissie had been feeding her pure cream, but she must have decided not to go through all these new transitions and adjustments and just crawled off somewhere to die. She always was good at finding hidey-holes. I know where many of them are and searched everywhere, but I’ve found no trace of her.
It was her time, and she wasn’t feeling well, and we expected we would lose her soon, and gee, she’s just a cat and we’ve had lots of cats around here — but, you know, a shared consciousness grows up among the creatures here, human and otherwise, a sense of who everyone is and where they are and what they’re up to, and when even a small consciousness blinks off, it leaves an emptiness. Poppy was our “witch-cat,” wild, but affectionate. She loved to be petted, but you had to catch her first. When Sylvia lived on the farm and drew pictures of our animals, she always showed Poppy at the edge of the picture, in mid-air, skittering off the page. Poppy skittered everywhere. She spent the summer living off the land and the winter next to the woodstoves. She was long-haired, gray and white with green eyes, and ever playful, right up to the end. It seems strange around here without her.
We’re about to lose some sheep, too, but that’s all part of the plan — and I have to say, though I love the sheep and they play an important role here, their consciousnesses are, well, not as bright and shiny as those of the cats. Steady, dull, kindly glows, those sheep. Tomorrow we take Satchmo the ram and Rosemary, one of the ewes to auction. Rosie had trouble delivering triplets last spring, and I’m afraid she’ll never breed again. And Satchmo has given us so many daughters that we’ll have too much interbreeding if we keep him. So a new ram is coming soon to start up next spring’s lambs. (We’re borrowing a Border Leicester from our shearer, who says we should breed some of his long-stapled shininess into our flock of primarily fine-wooled, crinkly Corriedales.) Last spring’s lambs have an appointment at the butcher in early December.
So it goes in the fall, always a busy time on a farm. Also a time to count blessings, with hay in the barn, wood in the shed, the root cellar full of squash, potatoes, carrots, and jars of tomatoes and jam, the freezer full of green beans, broccoli, strawberries, sweet corn, the kitchen shelves full of dry beans and grinding corn. Pretty soon now — about the middle of December — the teaching term will be over, the farm will be blanketed in snow, Chrissie and Scot will come back, and we’ll be in the quiet, reflective time of winter.
I can hardly wait!
Love, Dana
