Dear Folks,

Foundation Farm has just invented a cartoon strip, the first installment of which you will find in this newsletter.

It started on the “white board” in our kitchen, the place where we write up the shopping list and the “to fix” list and the “to do” list. Sometimes random comments, announcements, or complaints appear on this board, but normally it is covered with lists.

One morning there appeared a warning on the board about a mysterious monster inhabiting the kitchen, the DRACT (Daniels Road Anonymous Cookie Thief). Commentary followed, speculating on the monster’s habits and identity. Suspicion began to center on our fat cat Jimmy (“The Hunk”), a handy target, since he obviously eats too much (though probably not cookies), and he diverts blame from everyone else. Jim Hourdequin declared himself Jimmy’s personal trainer, to help him with a diet and exercise program. More commentary appeared on the board, along with the first pictures.

There got to be less and less room for lists as the story developed. Most animal and human inhabitants of the household made their appearance, including a Spanish-speaking mouse I didn’t know lived here. Latte our Cuban brown cat showed up as a cigar smuggler and floozy. Jim Hourdequin took on Benedictine orders, became Brother Jim, and oversaw an exorcism program for Jimmy (kind of easy to confuse exercise with exorcism). Jimmy rebelled, organized a Fat Cat political party and is now about to embark on a pro-wrestling career in order to qualify to enter the New Hampshire presidential primary.

But I’m getting ahead of the story, which we will reproduce for you here each month, trying not to fall too far behind the white board.

We work hard here, but we do have fun!

Ariane was here for her two-week spring break, which means she and I practiced Beethoven’s “Primavera” sonata for violin and piano. We wanted to be able to play it for her father, my German friend Otfried, who came to visit last week. While he was here we held our annual March Birthday Party (for me, Kerry, Scot, and Alan AtKisson) — a very musical one this year, with a performance of the Beethoven and Alan doing some of his great songs.

I took Otfried over to see the new farms. We got there on a sugaring afternoon, the sap boiling vigorously, the Cat hauling down sloshing sap tanks from the hill, the air smelling sweet and sticky, the neighbors dropping by for a chat and a taste. Ken Hunt, the nephew of the farm’s former owner, still does the sugaring with the help of Peter Forbes, a member of our Cobb Hill community (with baby daughter Willow in a pack on his back). Phil Rice, another Cobb Hillian happened over with his curly-head toddler Jenna. Otfried and I went walking up to the high meadow in the bright spring sun, my dog Emmett with us, Emmett snarfling and rolling in the melting snow and zooming across the fields at full speed, in ecstasy. (Dogs know how to express the joy of sugar season!)

By the way, I should report that Emmett has healed from the surgery on his leg, but the leg is not noticeably better. It’s still swollen, he still limps when he gets up in the morning — and he still caroms around the farm in his uninhibited puppy recklessness. I don’t know what more to do, except hope that self-organizing nature and his indomitable good humor will slowly heal whatever’s wrong. I’m certainly not going to put him through any more surgery.

The sun has been blessing us at equinox strength all week; the snow is beating a steady retreat. About half the farm is now Out From Under, but the soil is still too frozen to dig parsnips. On the sheltered south side of the house the snowdrops and eranthis and crocuses are in bloom. Yesterday I was out burning brushpiles in the pasture and I heard the first song sparrow and the first robins. The redwings are back gracing the wetlands. My bedroom window is crammed with little green seedlings — onion, leek, pansy, petunia, pepper, early greens, perennial flowers. Stephen and Kerry have the lean-to greenhouse up and filled with seedlings for the commercial part of the garden. Jim and I are doing the household part. Jim’s down in the basement as I write this, planting tomato seeds, which will grow in the upstairs bedroom’s south window. My next job has got to be pruning fruit trees.

It’s strange not to be, for the first time in 20 years, waiting for lambs. I catch myself, on these sunny, crisp days, glancing over at the barnyard to see if any of the ewes is acting like a birth is imminent — but then I see calves lolling in the sun and huge muddy horses, and no sheep. Strange. But I also wonder how I ever crammed the lambing into everything else that happens on the farm at this unfolding time of year. The waters are flowing fast. We’re almost into the continuous rapids of summer.

Winter term is over at Dartmouth; my environmental ethics class was probably the best course with the best class of students I ever taught. It’s so great to see hearts open, truth be honestly sought, the Big Real Questions asked. It’s great to see the students bond into a mutually-supporting, caring group and to know that they know how much I care about them. Whatever else that course accomplishes, I hope it sets those kids on the path of living their own deep values instead of the cheap substitutes their culture offers them at every turn.

Next week spring term begins, and way against my better judgment I’m teaching again. Lee Lynd, an engineering professor and friend, is into the conversion of biomass (mostly waste — urban garbage, forestry and farm byproducts) into energy (methane, ethanol). I keep asking him to what extent we can run our energy system from biomass, given that we’re also trying to feed more people, to shift the fiber load from the forests to the farmland (kenaf, hemp), and to shift the protein load from the oceans to the farmland (aquaculture), and still somehow preserve other species. We need to do a world biomass accounting, I keep telling Lee.

So he and I are going to do that, with the help of our students and a host of incoming speakers. Lee is going to work with them on the technology side — what conversion and efficiency technologies are coming along, how can we get the biggest energy bang for the biomass buck. I, of course, am going to force the total accounting, all human needs together, and to enforce the limits (there’s only so much land; there’s only so much photosynthesis; the rest of nature needs some too).

Should be interesting. Wish I hadn’t agreed to do it, though. I am going nuts with projects and unmet obligations. The Beyond the Limits update is due in June. Cobb Hill needs full-time attention. I should be getting Foundation Farm fixed up and ready for sale. We have Y2K gardens to plan and plant. There’s tons to do before the next Balaton meeting is organized, much less paid for, and the spring Balaton Bulletin should be ready to go out (and hasn’t even been started) The Sustainability Institute also needs fundraising, and constant work with the great modeling teams, and the development of the education program and the publications, and the radio program that Beth and I want to develop.

Help!

Why do I do this to myself?

Why am I so darn enthusiastic? Why do I think up terrific projects ten times faster than I can do them? And then lose sleep, because they aren’t getting done?

“Doin’ the best I can,” goes a chant from my magical musical friend Rachel Bagby. She thought it up as she walked to her classes at Stanford Law School, where she, like me, felt overwhelmed. “One step at a time. One day at a time. Doin’ the best I can.” (Rachel’s book, Divine Daughters, has just been published by Harper San Francisco. It’s almost as much of a trip as Rachel is in person.)

The Cobb Hill project is, as usual, stuck in perplexity and uncertainty. I’m beginning to accept the fact that this project is like every writing project I’ve ever done: always stuck. Every time you figure out how to get out of one stuck place, you move ahead till you get stuck at the next place. The minute you get that one worked out, you hurtle into the next stuck place. The way you know you’re making progress is that you’re not stuck in the same place you were stuck at last week or month or year.

I’m afraid I am the cause of most of our latest stuck points. I started a commotion this week when our design committee chairman casually mentioned that he expected our move-in date to be summer 2001. I felt like I’d been hit over the head. Two more years? I can’t hold out that long, I can’t keep my attention on three farms, I can’t afford it, I can’t manage it. So I started agitating about hiring a full-time project manager to push things along faster than we’ve been able to do, with all of us amateurs volunteering snatches of time from very busy lives. I suggested saving a few months by starting detailed house design even before we have our permits. I scared everyone into a sense of urgency.

And then I slowed up the well — or anyway I think I did. We’re due to hydrofract the lower well, on the edge of the farm field, this coming Wednesday. Last night I got a vision of the heavy hydrofract equipment squishing across our thawing farm field to get to the well, maybe bogging down, certainly compacting the soil in a way, as Stephen says, that would take 20 years to heal. I just couldn’t let that happen. So now we’re investigating whether there’s a way for the truck to go around the field. If there isn’t, I don’t know what we’ll do, but we won’t have a well very soon.

Go faster, we’ve got to get this eco-village built. Go slower, we’ve got to take our time and do it right and not go on, just because we’re driven by time and money, abusing the land the way it has been abused for decades by people driven by time and money. But we can’t go slower; I can’t keep my mind stretched over three farms; Stephen and Kerry are aching to put their hearts and sweat into land they know they can keep; other families need homes and want to be in community. But we have to go slower. The engineering team is giving us information about the graywater leachfield that indicates we may be trying to put too many bedrooms up on the hill. We can’t start the Act 250 process until the well and engineering are done. We haven’t done our legal documents yet, or gotten a bank to promise a construction loan. We haven’t got all 22 families (or however many we have room for) signed up. But time and money are real and pressing.

Oh dear. What to do? As Phil Rice says, it will take as long as it takes. But the 3-mile stretch across the valley from Foundation Farm to Cobb Hill is wearing me out physically, mentally, and financially.

So the idea surfaced this week that I should put Foundation Farm on the market right now, and Stephen, Kerry, Jim and I should move to the Hunt house next fall. Then we could start putting all our energy into the land and buildings that so need attention over there.

I find that idea shocking and logistically unimaginable. And it’s probably the only way to go. Stay tuned. By next month’s letter either the whole idea will be dead, or there will be a “for sale” sign in front of Foundation Farm.

Gulp. A “for sale” sign in front of Foundation Farm. Well, it’s not as if I didn’t know it was coming.

My favorite part of one of my favorite books, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, is about the stuck screw. You’re trying to fix your motorcycle, and you’re taking the screws off the engine cover to get at the problem, and your screwdriver, instead of turning one of the screws, tears out its slot. There you are, stuck, stopped by a stupid little screw you hadn’t even been paying attention to, with your mind on the bigger problem. This is not the worst moment in life, says the book, though it feels like it. It’s the moment when you are going to be forced to re-evaluate screws (that stuck one is now worth the price of your whole motorcycle), learn intensely about screws, and come up with some creative solution you never would have come up with otherwise. Rejoice!

I try to, but it ain’t easy. I don’t like being stuck. “Doin’ the best I can” doesn’t seem good enough. I have to remember, as my friend Rachel Bagby says, that these troubles are not so serious, given the great gift of life, and the unfolding glory of spring.

Another of her chants goes:

“What a miracle

We live.

We got

So much-a life to share.

So much-a love to give.

And the joy of laughter song work and play.

I say

What a blessing is today.

Yeah, yeah.

I say

Thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you

For today.”

Yeah!

Love,

Dana