Dear Folks, Some of you have asked me why last month you only got two of my columns. You got four; they were printed back-to-back, as they are this month too. I did that upon the suggestion of one of you, who pointed out that I could save trees that way, not to mention postage. If any of you strongly object to this double-sided format, please let me know. Otherwise I shall continue this way — though trees are theoretically a renewable resource, that doesn’t mean they should be wasted, especially since the world isn’t harvesting them in a renewable way.
The farm family has increased this month by one person, two geese, and twelve lambs. But there’s one less mother sheep. Lambing is a terrible, wonderful mixture of joy and tragedy.
The new person is Aimee Boulanger, a 20-year old Mount Holyoke student who is spending an exchange year at Dartmouth. She was in the winter term course on environmental journalism that I was supposed to teach but didn’t because of my book. I did visit the class a few times and happened to mention the farm. Aimee needed a spring term home and asked if she could stay with us. My policy in such matters is that whenever we have an empty bedroom we take whomever God sends — in this case Aimee.
Aimee is not taking classes this term, she’s working as a waitress and volunteering in various environmental and hunger action groups on campus. She works late nearly every night and so has taken on the midnight shift of the Lamb Watch — nice for the rest of us! She’s managed to attend several births and help out in numerous ways, and she brings us bubbly news of the student activist groups on campus, which are many and busy. We’re glad to have her here.
The geese are two huge white Embdens. They have been named Caesar and Cleopatra for the regal way they patrol the barnyard. Those of you who know the history of the farm will remember that we have had geese before. They have received mixed reviews from farm inhabitants. Some of us find them beautiful creatures, good watchdogs, strong and easy to care for, yielding fine Thanksgiving dinners and down comforters. Others see them as intimidating bullies that hiss at everyone, cover the lawn with droppings, and sound like high-decibel rusty pump handles. I have always been pro-goose, so it is no surprise, now that I’m back in charge of the farm, that geese have reappeared too. Sylvia supports my viewpoint — but then she’d support having any kind of animal. The other household members are neutral. So we’re back into geese.
Caesar and Cleopatra have just started laying enormous white eggs. We hope they will hatch out some goslings.
Then there’s the lambs.
We had a household lottery going as to which of the woolly blimps would pop first, and we were all wrong. Baby Dot, a yearling not fully grown herself and not obviously pregnant, surprised us with twins on April 8, one day before the Official Due Date. A yearling has never before produced twins on this farm; yearlings have singles, if they breed at all. These twins were tiny but perfect, a boy and a girl, black with white spots on faces and tails. It took two frantic days before mother and babies, all of them new at this, figured out how to get milk into lambs. During those two days, we milked Baby Dot into a bottle and then bottle-fed the babies. Finally they all got their act together, and now they’re doing fine without our intervention.
Since Baby Dot is now a mother, and her own mother Big Dot produced a set of twins the very next day, Baby Dot finally was given her grown-up name. Sylvia named her Forsythia.
Big Dot had two huge black ewe lambs on April 9, all smoothly done with the whole household in appreciative attendance. To make a long story short, the rest of the lambing went like this — as of this writing:
April 8 — to Forsythia — black ewe, black ram
April 9 — to Dot — two black ewes
April 13 — to Godiva — white ewe, black ram
(The ewe was malpresented, head forward, legs back, and Sylvia had to deliver her, with me giving instructions over the phone from my office at Dartmouth, and with Anna and Aimee restraining Godiva. Sylvia did a perfect job, Godiva ended up a bit sore, but after some antibiotic shots, all was well.)
April 15 — to Cocoa — black ewe, white ewe
April 15 — to Faith — black ewe, white ewe, white ram
(Yes, triplets! Only the third time in the history of Foundation Farm that we’ve had triplets. They were born about ten at night without our help. Sylvia heard them crying and got them into the barn. They are tiny, but healthy, and Faith is mothering and feeding them all.)
April 19 — to Charity — black ram
(This one arrived in the middle of the night, and we didn’t even notice until the next afternoon, when we got into an argument about whether there were 11 or 12 lambs out there. Finally we recognized there were twelve, and welcomed the new arrival properly. By that time he was up, dry, and nursing well, no help needed from us.)
April 23 — to June — black ram
(But neither the mother nor the baby survived, sadly, sadly. I’m just back in the house now after this mess. I’ve known for a week that June was going to have trouble; I don’t know how I’ve known, because she was bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, and constantly hungry, as always. Today, about two weeks too late, I think, the lamb finally tried to get out and clearly wasn’t getting anywhere. Sylvia and I tried for awhile, found the most enormous lamb I’ve ever seen, with head back and twisted and thoroughly stuck. Two of our three great lady vets came to help, and we all struggled for two hours, to no avail. Finally we had to put Juney down and cut the lamb out, and he was dead too.)
We are still waiting for Lily and Baby Lily. It’s possible that neither of them are pregnant. Lily had triplets last year and it may have worn her out, and Baby Lily is a yearling.
Well, that’s how lambings go. You have to say “Not my will, but Thine be done.” And a lot of prayers of gratitude too. There are two lovely white ewe lambs out there; one of them will replace Juney. The preponderance of ewe lambs (eight of the twelve) is a bonanza for us, and also a confirmation of the Meadows Theory of Lamb Gender. It’s my belief that young rams throw mostly rams and older rams mostly ewes. Zesty George, the honorable father of this bunch, is six years old, getting on for a ram. We borrowed him for a month last November from a neighbor. He’s a fine gentleman, actually a grandson of our own very first ram Coriander. Given this crop of lambs, I wish he were mine. I might ask for him again next fall. I’m also thinking of keeping one of his sons from this batch to be the future father of our flock.
April is a teaser month around here, everyone ready for spring, but spring holds back and we are suspended in rain, mud, and cold, or sun alternating with snow flurries. The birds are filling the mornings with symphonies, but the daffodils are barely out of the ground. Crocuses are in bloom, shivering in the wind. Every weekend I’ve been going out and trying to hack the overwintered parsnips out of the hard-frozen garden. First I got one inch down, then two, then finally six and eight inches down — with solid ice still below. At that point we started eating the top eight inches. I couldn’t wait any longer.
Finally Anna went down with great determination and managed to hack out a whole bushel of roots one or two feet long. We had them cooked with butter and frozen peas for Anna’s gala birthday party (with chicken barbecued by Don, and rice, and a big salad, and a Sachertorte worthy of old Vienna, requested by Anna, baked by me. I can’t eat that stuff any more, but I’ll be darned if I’ll miss the fun of cooking it now and then!)
The household has been working diligently on our spring chore list. Anna has pruned the orchard within an inch of its life and I’ve sprayed the trees with dormant oil spray. Don has made a brooder box for the baby chicks we’ve ordered. Anna and I changed the back porch from glass to screens. We’ve gotten the lean-to greenhouse up and stocked with seedlings of all kinds. Sylvia set up a nesting stall for the geese with a sheep-proof entryway. I’ve pruned lilacs and other brush. The whole household went down and repaired broken fence and replaced rotten posts in the sheep pasture. It feels SO GOOD to spend weekends outside and working!
Yes, of course I’ve been writing too. It seems easier to do, when I can balance it with farm work. I’m just finishing the chapter on Poverty; Wilderness is next. I’m still behind, still frustrated with the process of coordinating TV and textbook, still excited by the whole project, still incredibly challenged to bring this book together into a coherent whole.
At the end of March, while the lambs were still safely tucked inside their mothers, I made a lightning 24-hour trip to Washington to participate in a wierd gathering, the tenth annual conference of the World Media Association. I accepted an invitation to speak there (about the media and the environment) because I was told that several hundred editors would attend. I couldn’t pass up a chance to meet several hundred editors, though I was suspicious when I heard that the sponsor of the conference was the Washington Times.
Those of you who live in the unimportant world outside the Washington Beltway may not know that the Washington Times is a super-conservative paper owned by the Reverend Moon — but I knew it. I discovered that the World Media Association is also owned by the Reverend Moon. And the keynote speaker at the conference was going to be Ollie North. I gulped, wondering what kind of editors were coming to this conference. But my pledge to myself is to go meet editors anywhere they’re found. And, not inconsequentially, the right wing always pays speakers much, much better than the left wing does. So I went.
It was like going to Mars. I didn’t speak the language or understand the customs. My role was to be a curiosity to the natives, who had rarely seen a creature like me. (An environmentalist? How interesting! Tell me about the Movement, how’s it doing, what are its plans, who’s funding it? What power plant are you planning to stop next?)
I decided my personal job there was to learn to love these people, and my professional job was to present my views and listen to theirs, not to try to win arguments.
I arrived just in time for the dinner at which Ollie North spoke. On my left at the table was James Meredith, a name you may remember from the civil rights movement as the first black to attend the University of Mississippi. That apparently was his moment of glory, 27 years ago, when he was 18 or so, and it’s been all downhill ever since. (Can you imagine what his life must have been like at that university?) He is now an embittered, unsuccessful, paranoid human being, who thinks that his troubles and those of all black Americans are due to the Liberal Elite Conspiracy. He was a conference speaker too. They had assembled more right-wing blacks than I knew existed, for a panel on civil rights. All of them are against welfare, against affirmative action, and for very tough crime control (but not for gun control, of course).
On my right at that dinner was the chairman of the board of Accuracy in Media. This is an ultra-right-wing group whose mission is to harass newspapers and TV networks that do not consistently put forth the Truth as defined by Accuracy in Media. On their hit list of unacceptable liberal organs are the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the LA Times, and of course CBS, NBC, and ABC. (No kidding — the Wall Street Journal!)
I pretended I had never heard of A.I.M. and asked him to tell me about it, and as he talked I remembered that I was there to try to love him. I tried, really I did. But the more I listened, the more I decided that he was an unintelligent, prideful, angry, fearful man. Christ and Gandhi could probably love him, but I didn’t have it in me. OA has sufficiently trained me in honesty about my feelings that I admitted to myself that I thought he was a jerk, and that it was OK to let him know I thought that. (Something I never do, being too compulsive about having to get along perfectly with everyone in the world.) I was just about to tell him, politely, what I thought of him and his fascist organization, but at that point the flashbulbs started going off. Ollie North and his bodyguards had arrived.
Everyone but me gave him an immediate standing ovation. He gave a long, impassioned talk, which I, to my surprise, found quite boring. It was a mishmash of unspecific, ringing patriotism. Having heard it, I can give you no further insight into Ollie North than you could have gotten out of the televised hearings two summers ago. He seems to run on imagined adventure and self-glorification. They gave him another standing ovation when he left.
The next morning at breakfast I sat next to a nice-looking older man, and we exchanged get-acquainted pleasantries until he came out with, “Well, you’re a college perfessor and you write for the LA Times. That makes you doubly suspect!” At least he was honest.
It went like that all day. I was beginning to feel like a leper.
Of the several hundred people at the conference exactly 14 attended the panel on the environment, 4 of whom were Moonie staff who had to be there to run tape recorders. The panel was me plus two conservative economists (from Resources for the Future and the Hudson Institute — leading think tanks dedicated to telling rich folks that all’s right with the world). I said things were definitely not right with the world, not in a scientific sense, in terms of what is measurably wrong with the environment, nor in a moral sense, in terms of how we relate to God’s creation. I was speaking primarily to the Moonies, who recognize a good moral argument when they hear one. They were nodding their heads in agreement. Beyond that, I’m not sure that I reached anyone, or that there was any point in my being there.
I never met a single newspaper editor. Most of the people there were not from the media, but from all the organizations who want to tell the media what to do, or who like to blame the media for the problems of the world. At lunch I sat next to a nice young Moonie, a clean-cut guy who had been the Reverend Moon’s personal bodyguard for four years, and who now works for the World Media Association. He told me what it was like to be a Moonie. He reminded me of many people I have met in the Hunger Project, and I could understand and love him easily. Then, with great relief, I went home, with a bad taste in my mouth and a sense of lurking disaster.
Since then, however, the grass has slowly greened, the spring peepers have started to call from the pond, and little black and white lambs are jumping around the barnyard in long-legged glee. Somehow that all seems more important than the ideas, bad or good, circulating inside the Washington Beltway. Fall and spring, life and death, left and right, Truth and Falsehood, rich and poor. What a bittersweet world of opposites this is!
Happy spring to you all,
Love, Dana
