Dear Folks, It’s Sunday morning and the smell of Pine-Sol is wafting upstairs — Ruth must be washing the kitchen floor. Helen is running the vacuum cleaner in the living room, and in awhile I’ll quit writing and clean the upstairs bathroom. It’s busy-bee day around here.
Outside it’s gray and cool, which is a hopeful sign, because, like much of the country, we’re praying for rain. It’s not as bad here as in the Midwest, but it’s bad. We’ve had only one or two light sprinkles all month. The sheep pasture has simply stopped growing and the pond has dropped several feet. We’re watering the gardens continuously. Last night there were storms all around us — the wind was ferocious and there was impressive lightning — but we didn’t get a drop. We live in a trough in the landscape, the Connecticut Valley, and the thunderstorms sometimes jump right over us on their way from one mountain ridge to the next. Ruth tells me it was pouring last night in Hanover on her way home, and about 5 miles from here the rain simply ended and the pavement wasn’t even wet. So here we sit, watching everything beyond the reach of our hoses dry up, looking at the sky ten times a day. I can imagine, at least a little, how anxious and desperate people must be west of here where it’s even worse.
When the dry period began earlier this month, we were jubilant, because it was perfect for the first hay cutting (if this weather keeps up, there won’t be a second hay cutting). We had a solid week of over 90 degrees and relentless sun, and the hay was ready to bale 24 hours after cutting. Pat McNamara moved at a record clip down Daniels Road, cutting the Foundation Farm hay, then our neighbors’ the Meyettes, then the Whybrows’. Our role in all this — getting the bales up into the barns — was unusually easy. (It didn’t seem quite natural, somehow, to be putting up hay without the adrenalin induced by an approaching thunderstorm). Foundation Farm mustered a full team — Dennis, Dmitri, Suzanne, and Richard — who put up 260 bales in a few hot, sweaty, scratchy hours and then jumped en masse into Blow-Me-Down Brook. Dennis moved the elevator over to Whybrows’ barn and Ruth and I put up her hay the next evening. Click, click, it all went smoothly. And since our farms don’t depend on a second cutting (though it’s nice to have, in case something goes wrong with the first), we can lean back and know we’ll get through the winter. Lots of farmers don’t have that security and are wondering what to do if the second cut doesn’t start growing soon in the parched fields.
The drought is good for re-roofing too, which now going on at Foundation Farm. The main house there, with its typical New England collection of added-on wings and porches, has a queer, complicated roofline, which, over the years, has developed a rich and ever-changing collection of leaks. I worried about it when I was living there but never summoned the money or the political will to get it fixed, nor was I sure how to fix it. Dennis, bless his heart, has decided that he doesn’t want to move away and leave me with that problem, so he is getting a “30-year roof” put on. He’s hired a professional bunch, who have fixed one sagging corner and raised the roofline over the loft, so there’s better ventilation and more headroom there, and built up an air layer and second roof over the first one, for better insulation. Now they’re reshingling everything. This little maneuver, Dennis tells me, will cost a staggering $15,000. It’s amazing what it costs just to go on living in a house that’s already paid for.
The June flow of lettuce, spinach, strawberries, and snap peas is coming from the gardens. We eat piles of green stuff every day and feel fine and healthy. As Ruth says, what a shame it can’t be spaced out more over the year. My main job in the garden these days is getting mulch down to hold in as much water as possible. I’ve been hauling cartloads of hay-and-sheepshit from the barn for the crops that can use extra-rich mulch — the onions and squashes and broccoli and corn. So far everything looks good except a few rows that have succumbed to fleabeetle and slugs, my eternal enemies. The potato beetles didn’t stand a chance against my vigilance this year. Early skirmishes with bean beetles are just beginning. The strawberry patch is yielding its best crop ever.
I spent three days in Boston this week at the State of the World School, a seminar for the TV producers who are just starting to research and plan the series. The “instructors” for the school were lots of good friends from the environmental world — Lester Brown and his staff from Worldwatch, George Woodwell from Woods Hole, John and Nancy Todd, and many others. Their combined message as they updated everyone on energy, forests, water, climate, population, etc. was pretty mind-blowing. The news is not getting better, folks.
There is a tendency on my part, and I think on the part of the producers, to want to launch off into the most urgent, passionate, dramatic, system-shaking TV series ever made. There is another tendency, reinforced by the Annenburg Foundation and the ultimate educational purpose of the telecourse, to keep it restrained, rigidly factual, understated, and “scientific”, which would give it much greater credibility and more school adoptions, though perhaps less immediate impact. It’s the same tension that runs through my column every week — the battle, as Thomas Jefferson put it, between the head and the heart. It’s a good battle, a good tension, in which neither side should win. But sometimes, standing in the middle, feeling tugged by both sides, I feel it’s more than I can sustain. There’s no question that if I let go, I will go on the side of passion. Fortunately, there are some cooler heads than mine in this production team. Some hotter ones too.
I am continually fascinated and occasionally appalled as I discover how TV documentaries get made. Of these ten shows, five will be made each year. The producers for this year’s shows were just hired. They are bright, young, energetic, and apparently fearless as they launch into what is for most of them a totally new subject — energy or wilderness or waste disposal or poverty and development. They all have impressive backgrounds making shows for most of the major public television stations of the U.S. and/or England.
They have about two months to research and plan each show and set up its shooting schedule — and they tell me this much preparation time is an unusual luxury. They will be scattered over the globe shooting for two or three months, then come back to the studio for editing and writing and recording the final script. About eight hectic months from now the first five shows should be essentially finished, and plans begin for the second five.
The academics on the team are horrified at this pace, of course. We tend to think they should spend a year or two taking graduate-level courses in their subjects, then another year checking out sites and experts to film, then maybe a year filming and editing. Of course TV is simply not made that way — it couldn’t be. The role, and great challenge, and genius, and chief failing of a journalist is to come sweeping into a new field, go straight to its leading experts, extract the essence in a matter of hours, get them to articulate that essence into a microphone in a few crucial sentences, zero in on those sites in the world where things are happening most dramatically, and then weave snippets of all the above into a rapidly-moving montage that will capture the jaded attention of millions, for most of whom one TV program will be the beginning and end of their education on the subject.
If that last paragraph sounds a little churlish, it’s the normal churlishness of a person who spends twenty years on a subject and who has just been with people who by spending eight months on it will have far more impact than an academic can have in a lifetime — and who will spend far more money. There’s a lot of admiration and some envy woven into my complaint, and considerable excitement about being a part of the project, and some apprehension about being able to keep up the pace. After all, I have to have five chapters ready in eight months, too, and that is just not the normal schedule by which textbooks are written — and there’s one of me to do that job, compared to ten of them. I like the producers, though, and I appreciate their competence. They’re quick studies — they have to be. It’ll be fun to work with them. In a sense they’re a crack research team for me, out there in the field, bringing back not only vital information but poignant images to enrich the book. And their naivete in the subject matter is an asset, since ultimately they have to communicate to a naive audience.
Still there are plenty of differences and difficulties already, mostly at the conceptual level, about the main focus and the simplicity or subtlety of the message of each show.
Should the program on development focus on the World Bank and the rich countries and the discoveries and mistakes they have gone through while trying to “develop” other nations? Or should it focus on the poor folks themselves, their lives, and their own efforts and obstacles and successes?
Is it a profound truth or a gross oversimplification to say that China is a success and Africa is a failure and India is poised on the brink ready to go either way?
How do you handle nuclear power in an energy show when, on the one hand, it’s the most controversial, dramatic, newsworthy, politically interesting energy source and, on the other hand, you think it’s basically dead and the truly interesting developments are in conservation and renewables? Do you leave it out entirely? Do you put it in just to dismiss it? Do you devote major time to the ruckus it creates, being careful to balance its detractors and its advocates? Do you devote a whole show to making the case for its demise?
In a show about materials and waste, do you focus on sewage waste or solid waste and garbage or hazardous industrial waste or all of the above?
Stay tuned, folks, as these and other major issues of the world get resolved, somehow.
Love, Dana
