Dear Folks,
Sunday morning, summer solstice. I can never believe the length of the day and the glory of the sun around here when the sun comes to its northernmost point of the year. Light already at 5 AM, light still at 9 PM. The sun swings so far around in the sky that it even shines on the grateful north sides of things, the sides that are otherwise always in shadow.
The other night at about 7 I got stopped in my tracks by the way the westering sun was shining on the three enormous black locust trees in our front yard. They are to the south of us, so it’s their north side we see from the house, and they were glowing as if they were on a stage under the incandescence of a thousand spotlights. It was the warm yellow light of evening, and the whole scene was colored the deep, serene green of summer. It took my breath away.
I got my binoculars and bird book and sat on the front stoop for two hours, until the light went out, watching birds come and go in those three tall trees. My two buddies appeared immediately, Simon the old gray cat and Basil the big old yellow dog. They settled down one on each side of me, within easy petting range. Those two follow me everywhere on this farm, but they almost never catch me sitting down, especially not at this busy time of year. So with Simon purring on one side and Basil snoring on the other, I sat and watched birds. It was one of those blessed moments that you treasure all your life.
The birds love the old locusts, which are full of insects and dead limbs and nesting holes. To my surprise that night I saw two kinds of birds that I never knew lived on this farm — yellow-bellied sapsucker and a flycatcher, yellow-bellied too, I think, though I may be wrong. Flycatchers are hard to tell apart. Just think, I’ve lived here 21 years and I still don’t know all the birds. I know all the trees, and all the wildflowers, I’m pretty sure, but I still get surprised by birds. And it will take me another three lifetimes to learn even a fraction of the insects. Yesterday I found a beetle on the potatoes that was so beautiful I wanted to frame it. It had an intricate brown and white pattern on its back that someone should weave into a Persian carpet.
This has been an unexpectedly lovely week, because the Environmental Studies Program at Dartmouth has had to move from one side of campus to another. That’s not the lovely part — it’s a damn nuisance, and a demonstration of how the college, like every college, treats its interdisciplinary programs as second-class citizens. We’re always camping in marginal space and moving whenever a proper, normal department flexes its muscles. This week we moved from the third floor of the business-engineering library, which the library just took over, to the third floor of the old chemistry building, which Chemistry just abandoned for a fancy new building. Next to my new office is a freshman chemistry lab that looks and smells exactly like the lab in which I took freshman chemistry more than 30 years ago.
Well, the lovely part of all this is that my desk and books and telephone and files have been stuck in a Dartmouth moving truck somewhere for four days, so I haven’t been able to work on my book. I was mad about this for awhile, since Diana and I were really cranking away on the energy unit. We finished the chapter on demand and were cruising through the much easier chapter on supply — gas, oil, coal, nuclear, solar, all that nice technology stuff. Then we had to come to a screeching halt, waiting for the moving van. I could do nothing but stay home and garden. That’s the lovely part! What a good idea, to take a week in June and do nothing but garden!
The garden is roaring up in the sudden tropical climate. It’s been constantly rainy. I swear the peas and tomatoes (and crabgrass) are growing two inches a day. We seem to have two kinds of Junes around here, either a very rainy one that makes the hay grow lush and thick but doesn’t let you cut and dry it, or a very dry one that’s perfect for making hay, but not for growing it. We’re having the rainy kind this year, to the total frustration of the haymakers. Pat McNamara cut Ruth’s fields across the road from us, and it’s been raining ever since. That hay will be good for nothing but mulch, which I’ll put on my garden to keep the weeds down. I told Pat to hold off cutting our hayfield, hoping that next week the sun will finally shine.
Last year I gardened in a rush and kind of minimally, because I was doing so much traveling for Beyond the Limits. This year I’m enjoying doing a better job. I’ve even expanded down to the brook garden, down by the brook and sheep pasture, about three times the size of my main garden, which is itself pretty big. I had abandoned the brook garden, because it was too much for me, but this year I decided to put the potatoes down there, to rotate them away from the scab that accumulates in the heavy clay soil farther uphill. The brook garden soil is alluvial silt from the floodplain, with little clay and not a single rock. (Out of the main garden I regularly pry boulders heaved up from bedrock by frost.) Thanks to waters and contours and glaciers, this farm is a patchwork of different soils, which is useful, once you figure out the pattern. The silt isn’t as fertile as the clay, but it also doesn’t hold the pathogen that causes potato scab. (Sylvia has found a way of foiling that pathogen, though. She decides where the potatoes will be next year and dumps all the rakings of fall leaves there for me to till in. For some reason that suppresses the scab.)
Well, I’m sure everyone out there wants to read all about potato scab. Control yourself, Dana! You’ve got garden on the brain. I was also going to tell you about my epic struggle with witchgrass down there in the brook garden, but it occurs to me that I may be getting senile and maundering on the subject of growing things in New Hampshire, a topic of limited interest to the world at large. Suffice it to say — and this was the reason I started telling the story — that all moments on this farm do not consist of cuddling loving animals and watching beautiful birds. Some moments are more on the order of facing a vast expanse of entangled, evil, snarling witchgrass roots with nothing but an aging rototiller and a hoe, under the merciless June sun, with sweat dripping down your nose and great vicious deer flies swooping down to bite you just at the place on the back of your shoulders where you can’t swat.
Let’s change the subject, shall we?
Foundation Farm is besieged with raccoons again. We can hear them as soon as the sun goes down, prowling the perimeter of the yard, chuckling to each other over cellular phones and planning elaborate raids on the chickens. If we wait even half an hour to shut in the birds after dark, we get attacked. Sylvia said after the worst such raid, on our growing baby birds, that it looked like a weed-whacker went through them. So we get fanatic about shutting chickens in. Then the coons just pick off the stupid ones that decide it would be fun to stay out and roost in a tree for a change. Those tend to be Dark Cornies, our favorite birds, the ones with a lot of wildness still in their breeding. So every now and then, usually before midnight, we hear the screaming of a Dark Cornie, and Don charges out with his gun. Most times the coon and the chicken have both vanished, but if Don gets a good sighting, it’s bye-bye coon in a single shot. He’s picked off two that way, a drop in the coon bucket.
John hates the very idea of shooting things and objects strongly whenever this happens. (Does our happy little family have disagreements? Ha! Are we human beings?) I’m not wild about it, but I’d rather find the carcass of a dead coon in the morning than the carcasses of a bunch of baby chicks. Besides, I know the merry pranksters are just using chickens for temporary subsistence until my sweet corn gets ripe. And I’m getting tired of the games they are playing with me in the garden.
Every time I go down to the brook garden I find the stakes I put in to mark the potato and bean rows have been pulled up and scattered around. I put them back in. Next day they’re out again. One night I left a few rolls of black plastic down there because I didn’t have time to get it spread on the garden (part of my witch-grass defense system — you know I’m desperate when I resort to black plastic). The next day the rolls were tossed around and perforated with little bites.
Then there was the night the coons got into the tractor shed where I keep my precious box of garden seeds, all separated into labeled compartments — flowers, herbs, greens, roots, beans, brassicas, cucurbits, corn. The box was up on a high shelf. They tipped it over onto the floor and had an orgy. I found seeds everywhere, all mixed up, all the squash seed and much of the corn seed eaten. I was so mad I was ready to grab a gun myself. I removed what remained of the seeds to the cement bunker of the basement, and the next night the coons, in revenge, came back to the tractor shed and chewed up the seed catalogs.
I tell you, folks, farming is not a sweet, idyllic, outdoor exercise. It’s WAR!
So — other business. Sylvia’s wonderful book The Great Sheep Escape has been warmly received by my agent (and hers now) Peter Matson, and by one publisher, both of whom suggested rewrites, however. She decided they were right and is rewriting and redrawing. Her second book about John’s funny ornery cat Kitty is on the back burner for awhile. I include a sample sketch from it to whet your appetite.
I have made a bunch of lightning journeys this month — to Washington for National Geographic, to Wisconsin to speak to the board of the Cummings Foundation (got to have dinner with my dad and stepmother Lu, who live near Chicago), to Boston to speak to the board of the John Merck Fund. (Why are all these foundation boards wanting to hear me, and why don’t they give me money for the Balaton Group?) Travel gets more serious soon, with Tucson and Costa Rica coming up before I write to you again. This peaceful warlike period in the garden is about to be interrupted by larger wars in the “real world.”
Love to you all. Rejoice in the summer!
Dana
