July 15, 1998, Pittsburgh Airport

Dear Folks, I’m on my way to Alaska — I hardly believe it!  Today I meet my mom in Seattle, tomorrow we ferry over to Victoria B.C., the day after that we return to Seattle and have tea at New Road Map, the day after that we fly to Juneau and get on a cruise boat.

The concept of “vacation” hardly exists in my mind.  That’s partly because I do work I love, so I don’t need a break from it.  And because the place I most want to be is Foundation Farm, especially in the growing season.  And because I’m a workaholic.  I travel for Balaton, for friends, for saving the world.  When it comes to relaxation, I think about hassle, expense and carbon emissions and decide to stay home.

The last vacation I can remember was when Mom and I drove around Switzerland more than ten years ago.  That was fun.  Actually any vacation I’ve been on (Dennis used to prevail upon me to do vacationy things) has been fun.  I do enjoy the parts of life that are there for pure enjoyment.  I just enjoy other parts of life even more.  But I’ve been wanting to go on another trip with Mom for a long time, and she chose Alaska.  So Alaska it is.

I always leave the farm worrying about all the things I watch over, whether it’s my old dog Basil or my newly sprouted second planting of carrots.  In the fading light last night I was pulling weeds and picking off potato beetles.  After dark I sent off two columns to the newspapers and a few last email messages.  Hard to let go.

But probably a good idea to get away from it all.  It’s been a tough month.

Two of my treasured assumptions have been shattered.  One was that electric fences stop coyotes.  The other was that we can save enough by close clustering and small units to make our new community easily affordable.

Judging from the carnage I found in the pasture one morning, I’d guess the coyotes ran right over the fence, because a section was knocked down.  The solar-powered battery was good and the fence was live, so those critters must have gotten a hotfoot, but that didn’t stop them.  There probably was more than one coyote, because two sheep were dead — my most beautiful ewe Tulip, who has given me a long series of lovely black twins (she never, no matter whom I bred her to, had a white one) and Viburnum, one of my bottle baby twins, whose mother the coyote got a month ago.

Nature.  Bloody in tooth and claw.  Just the ecosystem doing its thing.  Coyotes have to eat too.  Right.  I was ready to shoot, poison, castrate, throttle or nuke every coyote in the state.  I was furious, then sad, then desperate as I realized that if the fence doesn’t keep them off, I have no way of protecting the remaining sheep.  I can only look forward to watching my sweet woollies get turned one by one into coyote food.

I put the dwindling flock back in the barnyard, where they could graze the orchard, but they ate that down quickly, and there’s nothing to stop a coyote from getting in there either.  Then I led them out to pasture every morning and back to the barn every night.  That has worked so far, but it’s too labor-intensive for the long term.  I’ve been scrabbling for other solutions.  Get someone to hunt down that coyote family.  Get a bigger battery and higher fence.  Get a llama or donkey to pasture with the sheep and run off the coyotes.  Keep Emmett inside the electric fence with the sheep.  (But I don’t trust Emmett, in the company of coyotes running sheep, not to discover his kinship with the coyotes.)

Actually I’ve known from that sad morning when I found the dead sheep what I have to do.  With everything else I’m trying to deal with right now, I don’t have the energy to solve this problem.  I have to sell the sheep.

My beautiful flock.  Descended from the first ewes we brought in from Naushon Island twenty years ago.  Steady selection for twinning and great spinning fleeces.  I was present at these creatures’ births, and their mothers’ and their grandmothers’.  I live each year by their schedule — lambing, shearing, pasturing, haying, separating the rams, flushing the ewes, breeding, slaughtering, winter feeding in the barn, worming, hoof-trimming, lambing.  How can life go on, if it isn’t driven by that sequence?

Well, it will have to.  I just sold my four best lambs — including Verbena, the remaining bottle baby — to Peter Forbes.  He’ll be joining me at the new farm, so maybe I’ll get those bloodlines back some day.  I’ve listed the rest of the flock for sale in the farmers’ Market Bulletin.  I hope they’ll be gone by the time I get back home.

The coyote or something else is also devastating the water birds down at the pond.  The mother duck and her six ducklings disappeared without a trace.  The other mother duck, who was sitting on a nest, disappeared with plenty of trace in the form of scattered feathers and broken eggs.  One of the geese is gone (though she might be sitting on a nest on the island).  It’s been a holocaust.  I’ve never seen anything like it.

I’m taking this horrible summer as a signal to start shutting down Foundation Farm, which I’ll have to do within another year anyway.  Time to simplify.  Shed.  Pare down.  Arrive at the new farm with no encumbrances.  Let the land tell us what to put on it.

Especially so because of the loss of my second treasured assumption.  From the beginning of our project, we’ve developed best-guess budgets (called pro formas) for building twenty houses and a common house.  We’ve hoped the smallest units would come in at about $100,000 for everything — land share, permitting costs, design costs, water, wastewater disposal, and “green” construction, which means at the least extra insulation, superwindows, solar hot water, composting toilets.  I’ve taken the economics of Stephen and Kerry’s CSA as model for the mortgage that a farming family might be able to handle.

We made the first pro forma 18 months ago.  We’ve been spinning out new ones as some of our guesses (such as land cost) turn into facts.  The numbers have crept steadily up, though we’ve been moving the units closer together and making them smaller.  Maybe it was wishful thinking on my part, or ignorance, since I’ve never had anything to do with constructing anything, but I kept assuming we could whittle those numbers back down.

Well, Jeff our architect finally felt he knew enough about the site plan to bring in a construction manager for a serious pro forma — many pages long, counting everything from the first bulldozer to the last kitchen cabinet.  The result was shocking.  The total budget leaped by a million dollars.  The average unit was $180,000, the smallest was $135,000.  This was without any green additions.  And for small, clustered units.

We reeled for a week.  It was the same week the coyote got the sheep.  I was walking around furious with these two problems I not only didn’t know how to solve but didn’t even think I should HAVE.  It’s so MADDENING to find out that the world will not adhere to my assumptions!

We split into two camps, which Jeff called the Tweakers and the Seekers.  The Tweakers waded into the numbers, throwing out covered parking, cutting square feet out of the common house, shortening roads, wondering how much we’d save by doing our own interior finishing.  The Seekers went back to First Principles, asked what kind of community we want here anyway, pulled out and rewrote our purpose statement to say more ringing things about inclusiveness of all income groups, and talked about needing less and sharing more.  We came together in a marathon meeting last Sunday, not really making a decision, but laying out the directions to explore.  It was heartening to hear nearly everyone say they actually could afford the higher price if necessary, they wouldn’t leave the community over it, but they didn’t want to live in a place the majority of Americans could never afford.  We have to get the cost down.

We’ve brought our design team nearly to a halt while we figure this out,.  That will mess up our schedule, and in New England messing up a building schedule by a few months means messing it up for a year.  But as Marc, our energy consultant, says, if you’re building for 200 years, it’s silly to try to save a few months of planning.

What I suspect and hope will happen is that we’ll end up with some very small, simple, inexpensive, but green  apartment units, maybe that share the common house kitchen, some slightly larger, still inexpensive duplex or triplex units in which such things as kitchens and porches and basements are shared, and, for the folks who have the money and don’t mind spending it that way, some larger, more separate “normal” (but green) houses that will cost upwards of $200,000.  (The folks moving in from Boston and California don’t seem to consider that an outrageous sum.)  We will probably design and permit the whole thing but build only partially, leaving some units for people to build or finish themselves (probably ordering materials all together, to get them for less).  Those of us willing to go in for little personal space will be able to buy in for reasonable sums, with most of our investment going toward common space — that’s what I, for one, want.

I’m resisting the move to cut the common house, because I care the most about that.  But I don’t know how it will come out.  We’re being strange by insisting on building the common house at the same time as (or before) the individual houses.  Most co-housing groups don’t do it that way, for exactly the financial reasons we have just run into.  But I really hope that, when we perceive a scarcity of any sort in our community, we will use it as a reason for more sharing, instead of more separateness.

Anyway, I’m moved by our meetings.  We have our frustrations and snappy moments, but every time we have a challenge, we seem to move closer together and closer to our principles.  I couldn’t ask for a more wonderful group of people to work with!

July 18, 1998, Seattle Airport

Mom and I are waiting for our flight to Juneau.  We spent the last two days mainly in Victoria, where we went to see the Butchart Gardens, one of Mom’s long-time dreams.

We took the Victoria Clipper from Seattle Harbor for a spectacular ride up Puget Sound and over the Strait of Juan de Fuca to the southern tip of Vancouver Island.  The snowy Olympics on one side, the huge cones of Mt. Rainier and Mt. Baker on the other side, Bainbridge and Whidbey Islands closer in.  Fog on the Sound slowed the boat a bit, but basically we had cool air, bright sun, and long views — rare for this part of the world.

Mom’s heart melted the minute she saw the huge hanging flower baskets on every street light post in Victoria.  Like a butterfly, she gravitated from flower to flower, culminating at Butchart Gardens, a 45-minute city bus ride out of town.

Now, Mom and I are both long-time gardeners.  Twice she has won the Garden of the Month award in Tahlequah, Oklahoma.  We’ve been to Longwood Gardens in Pennsylvania and Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis.  It takes quite a garden to impress us.  And we were wowed by Butchart.

The garden was created early this century by Jennie Butchart (a chemist and a balloonist!) who was married to the man who brought Portland Cement to Vancouver.  She planted to screen the cement factory from view and later expanded into the played-out limestone quarries, covering their steep walls with dripping ivy and filling the pit bottoms with tons of imported topsoil (brought in by her husband’s workers) and millions of blossoms.  I love feats of restoration, and this is a great one.  Imagine turning a quarry into a world-famous garden!

In July the place is brilliant with dahlias, snapdragons, begonias, roses, calendulas, geraniums, coreopsis, nicotianas, heliotrope, petunias, lobelia, fuschia.  In the shade under the Douglas firs are astilbes and impatiens and the biggest tuberous begonias I’ve ever seen.  The begonias knocked our socks off.  I didn’t know they could grow so lush.

Being gardeners, we analyzed the place.  Who does all the deadheading?  How do they water everything?  Do they use pesticides?  There must be fertilizer in the water to account for the huge sizes of the flowers.  How can every bed be in maximum bloom at once, especially since the place opens early and closes after dark every day of the year.  Do they work at night?  We imagined them growing gazillions of flowers in pots in a greenhouse somewhere and trucking them in at night, pulling out the old pots and sinking in new ones, covering them with bark mulch so they look like planted beds.

Don’t get me wrong, we actually spent our time oooohing and aaahing and carried out the analysis on the bus on the way home.  The color schemes and landscaping are gorgeous.  The trees and bushes are as spectacular as the flowers, beautifully pruned; sometimes the arrangements of trunks and branches are as breathtaking as the flowers.

We wandered happily for hours. I got a wheelchair for Mom, because she had a heart attack just two months ago and is supposed to go easy, but I couldn’t keep her down.  She kept jumping up to take pictures of begonias and wandering off toward roses.  Sometimes we found a cool shady spot near a fountain and sat for awhile, absorbing beauty.  When we had exhausted ourselves, we sat in the cafeteria, studded with dinner-plate-sized tuberous begonias, and had tea and soup and waited for the bus back to town.

We liked Victoria, too, a beautiful city, great waterfront, flowers everywhere, old British graciousness, and, best of all, full of Canadians.  We love Canadians — friendly, honest, sensible, always so NICE.  There are times I wish I were one.

Back to Seattle, a few happy hours with my friends at New Road Map — I could talk with them for days and never run out of either intellectual interest or heart connections.  And now here we are, on our way to Alaska!

July 19, 1998, M/V Sea Lion, Tracy Arm, Alaska

Wow!

The flight to Juneau (via Sitka) was spellbinding — such wild, steep country, such a jumble of mountains plunging into oceans, such sickening clearcuts, especially on Vancouver Island — what are those nice Canadians THINKING of, to do that to their forests?  (Not that we aren’t doing the same in the U.S.)

Juneau is, like Montpelier VT, a small, cute state capital.  A city built on mine tailings, the only flat places.  Only 30,000 people, over 30,000 cars, and 45 miles of road heading in any direction.  You can’t drive to Juneau; you have to get there by air or sea.  We took a bus to the Mendenhall Glacier and the state museum and then got aboard our little ship, almost invisible next to the 1200-passenger, 500-crew Nieuw Amsterdam and Crystal Harmony tour boats, which look like floating cities and are in fact floating casinos.

Our Sea Lion holds only 70 passengers and has no casino.  This morning I knew it was the boat for us, when it stopped for a bear.

It was low tide.  A black bear had come down to the rocky shore to scrape up mussels and barnacles.  “When it’s low tide, the dinner table is set,” said one of the four naturalists on board.  The captain cut the engines and we drifted slowly toward shore.  Over the next hour we watched four bears cruising the beach, unconcerned about our quiet presence across the water.  We hung over the sides with binoculars and cameras, talking in whispers.  Above the busy bears, wooded slopes soared up to snowcapped peaks.  Thousand-foot waterfalls coursed down.  Bald eagles sat perched near the top of tall Sitka spruces.  The glacier-green water was pocked with shining blue and white icebergs.

Wow!

We nosed right up to two of the waterfalls — “right up” means I reached out from the bow of the boat and stuck my arm into the cascade.  The bowsprit hung well over the frothing spot where the fall hit the sea.  It was amazing piloting.

Right now we’re at the end of the fjord called Tracy Arm and I’m sitting in our cabin with a glacier wall soaring several hundred feet high in front of me maybe a quarter-mile away.  Every now and then a chunk of the ice wall “calves” off and plunges into the sea.  The smallest chunks are the size of a bus, the big ones are the size of apartment buildings.  They thunder when they fall, and the big ones kick up a splash that goes as high as the glacier face and launches a huge impact wave.  The captain swings the ship so it will take the wave frontward.  Before it hits us, the wave goes through a field of icebergs upon which hundreds of harbor seals are basking with their pups.  The seals calmly rise and fall on their icy cradles, as if they purposely came there so the calving glacier would rock their babies to sleep.  Arctic terns, kittiwakes and four kinds of gulls swirl around, feeding off small sea critters churned up by the turbulence.  About 500 feet up a steep mountain face to my left are four white mountain goats, each with a kid, browsing on the brush.  How the brush or the goats manage to cling to that face, I don’t know.

Mom said, after we had seen all this on the morning of our first day, “Well, that’s enough for a lifetime.  We can go home now.”

July 20, M/V Sea Lion, Chatham Strait

Yesterday afternoon we landed by Zodiac in a quiet cove and went for a hike in the dripping, mossy northern rainforest.  Salmonberries, watermelon berries, nangoon berries, blueberries, raspberries.  Bear droppings everywhere, black from blueberries and full of crushed barnacle shells.  Thick moss gardens on every fallen log.

Then, right after dinner, in the fading light, we were suddenly in the middle of a pod of feeding humpback whales.  This ship stops not only for bears, but for whales.  We watched them rising, blowing, arching their dorsal fins out of the water, and going back under with a toss of their beautiful tails.  What a sight!  Finally it got dark and we went to sleep to the sound of whales huffing right outside the window.  Whales huff hard.  They sound like the dinosaurs in “Jurassic Park.”

We woke up to the same sound in the morning.  I felt the ship stop around 5:30 am and heard them breathing and splashing.  I threw on a jacket over my nightgown and hustled out just in time to see a whale breach all the way out of the water, in a leap so fluid and graceful you would never guess it was a ton of flesh being heaved.  We watched this whale for an hour, as it alternated between breaching leaps and tail slaps — head down it tossed its tail out of the water and waved it crazily, coming down in hard slaps, a dozen at a time.  We could hear the smacks and also its humming or singing or whatever.  Sometimes the whale turned over on its back and waved its long flippers at us.  The naturalist said it was a young whale, just horsing around.

Isn’t that great?  That young creatures of all kinds, full of life, just play?  Reminds me of my lambs, a few days old, jumping around the barnyard for the pure fun of it.

Sigh.

Around the playful whale were more sober adults feeding, mostly in pairs, as coordinated in their movements as if they were in a water ballet.  They acted like great scoops, opening their mouths and steaming through schools of fish.  We could look right down their gullets and see their baleens and the panicked fish jumping out.  We could count the barnacles on their flukes.  So amazing.

July 23, 1988, M/V Sea Lion, Elfin Cove, Alaska

It’s not true that if you’ve seen one whale, you’ve seen em all.  The ones off the ship this morning were exceptionally close — one came up and blew literally under our bow.  Another young one breached full out of the water over and over.  When we looked closely we could see he (she?) was playing with a Stellar’s sea lion — both leaping or diving together, the whale slapping the sea lion with his flipper sometimes.  (You’d think he would crush the sea lion, but it just came back for more.)  Such wonderful sights!

We’re trained now.  Whenever the boat cuts its motor, we grab binocs and cameras and rush out on deck, knowing something interesting has been sighted.  Bears, glaciers, whales, seals, sea lions, waterfalls — all in a normal day.  Tufted puffins, marbled murrelets, sea otters, eagles galore.  Mom and I counted 36 eagles when we rafted down the Chilkat River day before yesterday.  Sea birds of all kinds — I’m slowly sorting out Mew gulls from Bonaparte’s gulls and white-winged scoters from black oystercatchers.

There are some insatiable folks on board, like me, who pretty much drop anything to see another whale.  But each day more and more people stay in the warm lounge (the weather is misty and in the 50s pretty steadily), drinking coffee, watching the sights, if at all, out the window.  They’ve seen their whale, they’ve snapped their pictures.

I suppose I should say something about the sociology of cruise boats.  The crew of 22 is an energetic bunch of mainly young folks, who sign up for a six-month tour of cutting vegetables, waiting tables, cleaning cabins, hauling anchor, and painting the ship (every time we dock, they paint something), so they can spend time amidst whales and glaciers (and deserts — the boat goes to Baja California in the wintertime).  They’re cooperative, cheerful, knowledgeable, and seem to be having fun.  The boatswain — pronounced “bozun” — a muscular young woman whose job is to run and maintain the Zodiacs, flung a hook over the fantail one day and brought up a 90-pound halibut, which we all ate for supper.

For the planning of our common house I’m taking note of the kitchen and dining room, which graciously feed 70 people 3 meals a day, including baking all the bread.  The dining room is 900 square feet, the kitchen no more than 400.  It has one wall of refrig and freezers, one wall of sinks, drains and steamers for washing up, one wall of cooking stuff (three ovens, a huge grill, three warming ovens) and one wall for prep.  Five people easily work in there at once.  Our cabin, by the way, is about 80 square feet, including bathroom, and very comfy.  A ship is a marvel of spatial efficiency.

The 70 passengers are predominantly retired people, sometimes accompanied by sons or daughters about my age.  The two youngest just graduated from college and are accompanying a mother in one case, a grandmother in the other.  The passengers are generally wealthy, of course, and into heavy-duty tourism.  A lot of conversation compares this trip to other trips.  (Favorably.)  The rest of the conversation has merged, over 5 days, from “where are you from?” and “yeah I was there once,” and “I know someone from there” to stories about family and children (primarily the women) or about golfing, fishing, machines, or the war (the men).  The talk stays at a trivial level; there’s an avoidance of personal or political topics.  (I know, I’ve tried.)  This is an intellectual crowd; there’s a lot of reading and the books are good.  There’s heavy use of the ship’s library, which consists of nature books, Alaskan culture books, and the poems of Robert Service.

The naturalists give information on the habits of whales and the formation of glaciers, but skirt carefully around overfishing, climate change, or the underfunding of national parks.  (We spent all yesterday in Glacier Bay National Park, picking up a ranger in the morning and dropping him off at night.)  There’s a group on board on a University of Michigan tour, and one of their professors just gave a lecture on climate change, long on geology, free of economics, conservative on politics.  The ship company seems environmentally aware at the level of stern lectures about throwing stuff in the water, picking things up from the shore, or wasting fresh water on board.  Meanwhile we carry a load of 10,000 gallons of diesel fuel, which we burn at 40-50 gallons an hour at cruising speed (11 knots/hour), plus 5 gallons an hour for the electric generator.

July 26, 1998, Seattle Air

Well, Mom just got on her flight back to Tulsa, and I’m waiting for USAir to take me to Philadelphia and then Manchester NH.

The cruise ended triumphantly with more whales and bears and birds and some fetching sea otters and an incredible plume of billions of jellyfish, all bunched together, looking like a column of smoke in the water.  The boat stops for jellyfish too.  On our last Zodiac trip ashore we took a hike along a salmon stream in an old-growth forest, the fish surging upstream to spawn with an age-old, incredible force that brought tears to my eyes.  The salmon cycle brings sea nutrients back up onto land, to feed eagles and bears and Tlingit Indians and now canneries.  The abundant life in this cloudy, cold, beautiful place, the greenery coming in to take over as the glaciers recede, the waters seething with whales and seals, the seabirds everywhere — it’s so breathtaking it feels holy.  Now I look hard at the Eskimo drawings of playing seals and the Tlingit totem poles of bears and salmon, and I have a gut sense of the one-ness with this amazing land that produces that art.  As we discovered at the museum in Sitka, totem poles look completely right standing in forests of upright trunks like the ones from which the poles are made.

Our last hike got stopped completely when a mother grizzly and her cub appeared right across the salmon stream from us.  This is not supposed to happen.  Our guides go to extremes to be sure that we never meet a wild bear on land.  They scout trails in front of us and yell “Yo bear!” as we walk, and just in case, they instruct us to back off and drop to a fetal position if a bear is sighted.  That’s not what we did, of course.  We yelled and pointed and snapped pictures.  The bear looked at us calmly, led her cub into the woods, crossed the stream ahead of us and made a big circle around us down to the shore — where the folks who stayed on the boat saw them and radioed to our guides that the trail was clear and we could proceed.  I was glad — I love being in those forests, and I would have hated to go back to the boat just because we were scared of a bear.

On the last day we saw the industrial clearcuts.  There aren’t many on the tourist-boat routes, but, as we could see on the flight back from Sitka to Ketchikan to Seattle, in the back country the ugly bare patches are everywhere, on the steepest slopes, mile after mile.  This is OUR forest, the Tongass National Forest, and those trees are going to a few companies through sweetheart deals arranged with crooked senators.  Especially now that I’ve been in those forests, now that I’ve felt the rhythm of this beautiful, cool, rainy land, now that I know how many things live here, from devil’s club to bog orchid, from Dolly Varden trout to golden-crowned kinglet, old-man’s-beard moss hanging down from Sitka spruces, sphagnum-covered downed logs out of which new trees are sprouting, murrelets and eagles and bears — it’s all so magnificent, I can’t imagine having the hubris to take make it into kleenex and toilet paper.

I think we should just outlaw chainsaws in old-growth country.  Anyone who wants a log can cut it with an old-fashioned two-person crosscut saw.  Then the trees will come down at about the right rate for the forest not to be harmed, and we will treasure the wood and use it respectfully.

Well, it was hard to leave that ship.  We got happily accustomed to its cozy warmth, its smoothly running staff, its willingness to stop for beauty, its incredible meals (fresh-from-the-local-water halibut, salmon, Dungeness crab — wow!), clean cool air, quiet, complete absence of TV, radio or news of any kind, constant views of fog-shrouded soaring forest slopes, reading and nap-taking accompanied by gentle rocking.  Since we disembarked I have felt parking lots and airports rocking gently under my feet and I understand what they mean by “sea legs.”  I like ships.  In my next life I’d like to be a deckhand instead of a pampered tourist and see how it all works behind the scenes.

July 27, 1998

Got in late last night.  Everyone and everything seems fine.  It’s foggy this morning; forecast to burn off and get up to 80.  The sunflowers and phlox are in bloom.  The sheep are gone.

It’s sure going to seem empty around here without sheep.

Love, Dana