Dear Folks, The hay’s in the barn and the chicken slaughter seems to be over.
The chicken slaughter was happening directly under our windows every night. We’d be yanked out of our sleep by the sound of wild clucking circling the house on the run, followed by a sharp shriek and an ominous silence. By the time we got ourselves outside we’d find nothing but a pile of feathers on the lawn.
That’s a pretty awful way to wake up, but the most awful part was when the nightly marauder got our broody hen and her newly hatched chick. Till then I’d been only mildly upset, because the attrition was among the chickens who were too stupid to seek the shelter of the chicken house at night. I figured a little selective pressure on the dumbest birds would be to the benefit of the species. But losing the patient broody and her pretty chick (she only hatched out one, but was as proud as if it had been a whole clutch) made us all fighting mad.
We debated about whether the predator was a fishercat or a skunk. Contemplated setting a trap. Reinforced the little houses where we keep the half-grown chicks. Don experimented with mounting his flashlight on his shotgun. He set them right by his door, and the next night when we heard the clucking, he got out fast enough to catch sight of a big raccoon, sitting on his haunches staring into the flashlight, feathers in his mouth. The panicked chicken ran down the hill and hid behind Don’s legs. The coon vanished.
The next night I heard a great boom from the back yard, and that was the end of that chicken murderer. Don got him in one shot. On that same historic night we caught the skunk in the Havahart trap and transported our primary egg-stealer and dog-squirter to a fine woodland home far away. Since then the nights have been blessedly quiet. The 40 young chicks we have growing will soon replace the diminished bunch of biddies in the chicken house. It’ll take awhile for the coon’s kits to grow up and start bothering us again.
The haying was perfect. The McNamaras came by on a hot, humid Saturday with thunderclouds overheard and asked if I was ready to cut. I went in, listened to the weather radio (30% chance of rain every day for the next three days), said a small prayer, and told them to go ahead. It stayed hot and threatening through Saturday, Sunday, and Monday while the hay dried beautifully. (Is there any nicer smell in the world than a valley-full of down hay?) Monday noon they started baling as the sky darkened. Don and I had both stayed home from work, and Karel got off early, and Heather cooperatively went down for a nap, so Sylvia could help. So we mustered a full team to load the bales in the truck and heave them up into the barn. Just as we pulled the last truckload in, the rain came down.
It happens like that every year. I’ve actually learned to stop worrying about the rain and to just enjoy the work. In fact I love haying. It’s the hottest, scratchiest job of the year, but the most satisfying. At the end there’s a loft full of the luscious-smelling stuff, and we know the sheep will eat all winter. And this year, especially, I was grateful beyond words that I was up to spending an afternoon throwing hay bales around. It felt good!
Hot and humid has been the story here, and the garden is turning into a rain forest. I let down my guard for four nights in a row to watch the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts of the Ring Cycle and the weeds sprang up so high I can hardly bear to look at the garden. I spent yesterday weeding and mulching and freezing spinach. (Eight quarts — if you know how much spinach cooks down, you know that’s a lot of spinach!) Today will be more weeding and mulching, hoeing and tilling, and maybe by the end of it I’ll be able to see the vegetables again.
I love it! Even the weeding! The warblers and sparrows and cardinals and phoebes sing around me. I nibble the wildcat dill that pops up all over, and I smell the spicy leaves of wildcat calendula, some of which I don’t weed out but leave to bloom, making spots of yellow and orange all over the garden. I congratulate the peas on their new blooms and cheer on the kohlrabi and the bachelor’s buttons, and somehow in my head the problems of my writing get worked out. By the time I clean up and get back to the word processor, there’s a clear stream of words ready to come out.
It occurs to me that there are a lot of new readers who aren’t too sure what I’m writing, and some old ones who have probably forgotten.
Well, there’s the weekly column, of course. It still goes to only about 20 papers, since it’s been months since I put any effort into selling it further. The papers stretch from Brunswick, Maine to San Jose, California (with some long leaps in between). I’d love to have someone else do the selling, transmitting, and bookkeeping for me (that someone is called a syndicator), and keep getting little nibbles from syndicators, but no one has bitten yet.
When I have time (roughly once a month) I write longer pieces for the Los Angeles Times Sunday opinion section. These are syndicated to something like 700 papers. It’s fun when they come out, because I suddenly start hearing from people in Baton Rouge or Bozeman or somewhere else exotic.
I get a steady stream of reactions from readers, and I answer everyone except the obvious nuts. Every day I have to answer a few readers, or I get hopelessly behind — like the weeds in the garden, I have to keep at the job.
I’ve just pulled a bunch of columns from the past 5 years into a book, which will be published by Island Press next February. It was fun putting the book together. I discovered that I actually like most of my writing (at the moment I finish it, I never do). I even discovered that it adds up — the weekly disquisitions on whatever’s in the news or on my mind do come from a coherent worldview and vision, and they fell together nicely into a book. We’re still debating the title. The Global Citizen would be the most natural one, but it sounds too political. I suggested A Sustainable World, but, as my editor says, “it doesn’t sound like fun, and reading your columns is fun” (it’s actually the working title for my textbook, which I’ll describe in a moment). If any of you has a brilliant idea for a catchy title that captures the spirit of my columns, let me know right away.
I have two magazines waiting for articles. Harrowsmith (recently renamed Country Life) wants one on risk assessment (how dangerous, really, are Alar and smoke detectors and nuclear power plants, and whose risk assessment do we believe?). And the Gannett Center Journal (a journalism trade journal) wants one on environmental journalism.
I also write the Balaton Bulletin, the newsletter for the Balaton Group, three times a year. And I’m still in the middle of a hot correspondence with the head of the cancer center — that’s going to become something publishable some day, though neither he nor I know quite what. At the moment I’m needling him about modern cancer theory and therapy, and he’s defending himself with gusto. And of course I write this personal letter once a month, which is fun.
And none of that is my main writing task. That’s all done in my spare time. My main writing task is THE BOOK, yes, the one I’ve been working on for two years, yes, I’m still working on it, no, it isn’t done yet, not even close.
It’s a college textbook on environmental science. It was intended to accompany a ten-part PBS television series on the global environment, to which I have been a part-time consultant, to make up a package called a telecourse (financed, as most such telecourses were until their recent unfunding, by Annenberg/CPB). The TV series is right on track and will be aired next fall under the horrible title “Race to Save the Planet.” For reasons too numerous to go into, only one of which was my illness, my book won’t be ready then. Therefore the two projects have become somewhat uncoupled, and I have lost the publicity value of being associated with the series. Eventually, however, when I get the book finished, it will be available with ten spectacular TV programs to match.
This book can easily drive me crazy. I’ve never done anything so hard. Some, but by no means all, of the craziness came from trying to work with the TV producers, who dictated the order of the chapters — and it’s a very unlogical order indeed. I embraced that problem, however, figuring that the environment is such an intertwined system that it doesn’t matter in what order you attack it, you have to go around in circles of cross-referencing anyway. It’s been a challenge, but also refreshing, to have to come at the topic from a different direction than any other textbook. (Every other environmental text in the country has a standard table of contents — which doesn’t look anything like mine.)
Most of the difficulties with the book, however, are either inherent in the subject, or they come from my own always-too-ambitious vision.
The subject, of course, is overwhelming. Just to give you an idea, this is roughly the list of the main topics I’m covering: epistemology and mindsets, systems theory, the scientific method, earth history, human history, population growth, economic growth, biogeochemical cycles, the ozone hole, the greenhouse effect, poverty and development, air and water pollution, steady-state economics, ecosystems, wildlife management, energy, agriculture, materials use and waste disposal, national politics, international politics, theories of social change. I’m binding it all together with systems theory and with the philosophy of paradigm change. And I’m studding it with stories, journalistic accounts of specific examples that read a lot like my columns (some of them are my columns — others are taken from the TV series).
Well, it’s looking to be a thousand pages, not counting illustrations (my research assistant Diana Wright and I are putting a lot of time into designing clear, powerful illustrations) — about 600 pages of which are now done. The publisher will make me cut it massively, but I don’t know how to do that until I’m finished. It’ll take another year, I’m afraid. I’ve so badly missed all the deadlines that I’ve finally stopped thinking about deadlines. I just plug away, day by day. I go to Dartmouth to work on the book, to separate it from my other writing, which I do at home, and to be near the library and my environmental colleagues.
Finally I’ve learned to be patient with this book and its process. It helped a lot when I discovered a biography of Rachel Carson the other day and found that it took her five years to write Silent Spring. There’s a quote from her that I’ve put up in my office:
“The discipline of the writer is to learn to be still and listen to what her subject has to tell her…. Writing is largely a matter of application and hard work, of writing and rewriting endlessly until you are satisfied that you have said what you want to say as clearly and simply as possible….”
“Don’t set up an impossible time schedule. The important thing is to get under way, to see it growing and developing in its own way, at its own pace, but always going on. Never mind how long it takes, or what anyone else expects.”
The trouble is, I’ve got a lot of other books on my mind. I want to get Anna’s book polished and published. I want to write about medicine. I want to write a history of the field of system dynamics. I want to work with Sylvia to write funny children’s books about the farm.
Ah, well, one day at a time, one book at a time. Some days the best I can manage is one word at a time. Like pulling one weed at a time, eventually the garden is beautiful — and the book is written.
Love, Dana
