Dear Folks, In a fit of frustration Sylvia scrawled RAIN on the calendar across every day this month when it rained. Only two days were left clear. The brook is bank-full, the garden has been too squishy to walk in, the grass is growing like crazy but is too wet to mow. We have been very grumpy.
But yesterday it didn’t rain. It looks like it won’t rain today either, although the morning valley fog is still upon us, and it’s too early to assess the day. It’s Memorial Day weekend, High Planting Time. There’s now a better than 50% chance that we won’t have a frost. If the seeds don’t get in the ground within the next week, they won’t mature before the first frost of the fall. So we have to hustle. With our short growing season timing is all.
We made a good start yesterday, got the corn and potatoes in, the soybeans and bush beans, a second planting of beets and carrots, the sunflowers, cosmos, and even some popcorn for fun. Today we start on the cucurbits (squash, pumpkins, cucumbers) and put up poles for pole beans and climbing fences for the tall peas, which, being frost-hardy, were planted weeks ago and are already preparing to climb.
The only tall peas I plant are peapod-peas — Mammoth Melting Sugar and Sugar Snaps. For regular green peas I use shorter-growing varieties, Lincoln and Green Arrow, and I support those in the old New England way, with pieces of brush cut from the woods. I cut honeysuckle brush; honeysuckle is an aggressive nuisance around here and the pea-brushing gives me an incentive once a year to cut it back a bit. I finished that job yesterday too.
We have to mow the orchard today. We have to till up the remaining patches of garden. We have to dig the deep-rooted curly dock and burdock out of the raspberries. We have to finish making coops so we can move the chicks outside.
At the beginning of May we bought 40 day-old chicks from the feed store, 25 layers and 15 meat cockerels. They have just outgrown the box we kept them in down in the basement. I’ve never raised meat birds before. The household has usually been vegetarian and I still prefer to be, but I’m the only vegetarian now, and since I’m not exactly religious about it, we eat a lot of meat. So we bought meat birds, which are a source of wonder to me. Apparently they are bred to eat constantly and otherwise not move. Within a few weeks they’ve grown twice as big as their lay-sisters, and they hog the feeder. Their feet are so enormous I can see that the growth spurt is far from over. I’ve never raised anything so voracious. We not only have to move them out of the small box, we have to separate them so the egg-layers have a chance at the food. Hence the need for two new coops.
We may have even more chicks coming; there are two broodies sitting on clutches in the barn. That’s the easy way to raise chicks — the mothers do all the work and even provide the shelter under their wings. But it’s an iffy process. The eggs may not be fertile (we have only one rooster for 40 hens). A sheep may step on them. A skunk may eat them. A raccoon may come eat the mother.
In fact Basil and Don caught a raccoon a few days ago trying to do exactly that. About five one morning, just at first light, there was a strange noise in the chicken house, and Basil, who sleeps in my room, insisted on being let out. I groggily opened the door and went back to sleep. When Don got up an hour later he found a huge raccoon perched indignantly high up in a maple tree just outside the chicken house, Basil standing guard underneath. Don got his gun and dispatched the critter with one shot.
Right — blood violence right on this peaceful farm. We have no mercy for chicken-eaters. Basil did just the job we originally got him for. He’s not too good at that job, actually. He usually sleeps right through predator invasions and welcomes skunks as playmates, always to his and our eventual distress. He got skunked again last week. It was the first time in history that he actually leaped gratefully into the bathtub, instead of developing sudden paralysis at the very sight of it.
Caesar and Cleopatra, the regal white geese, emerged from the barn two weeks ago with five fuzzy yellow peeping balls following them. They were already proud birds; now they’re insufferable and also unapproachable. Everyone in the household is carrying a serious bruise from trying to get too close to those goslings; mine is on my left thigh where Caesar bit hard and refused to let go. The problem was, we had to get close, because goslings in a barn at night, even tucked under their formidable mother, are easy prey for rats. We lost one that way almost immediately.
So we went through a comedy routine in which we tried, gingerly, and occasionally forcefully, to convince Caesar and Cleopatra to bed down the family in a safer place, such as the greenhouse. That succeeded for a few nights, but it required such strenuous athletics on our part that we knew it wasn’t a sustainable solution. Karel then spent an afternoon building a rat-proof cage in the barn.
That same afternoon, however, Caesar and Cleopatra implemented their own solution to the problem. They marched their family half a mile down the hill, across the brook, and along Daniels Road to the pond. We didn’t see them do it. We still don’t know how they got through the gate to the sheep pasture. Anyway, there they are, a beautiful armada, two huge white geese on the water with four paddling yellow babies in strict formation in between. They eat grass all day and sleep on the island at night, free from predators. Geese are the only farm birds with any intelligence.
Well, you can see where my mind has been this month — back on the farm. I haven’t yet mentioned in all I’ve written here how beautiful it is. The crab apple tree out my study window is covered with pink blooms. The smell of lilacs is overwhelming. The bird chorus is at its peak — the last and most melodious comers, the thrushes and orioles have just arrived. I’m better this year at turning my mind away from the farm to-do list and at just soaking in the beauty. I have Housman’s poem circling in my head:
And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.
And the apple and the lilac, the pear, the plum, the wild shad.
The other place my mind has been is back on the writing, thank goodness. It’s hard to write in this newsletter about writing. What can I say? From the outside it looks like the world’s most boring activity, though from the inside it can transport me anywhere in the world. I can be experiencing the most intense emotions. I can be learning the most entrancing stuff. But there’s nothing to see, nothing to share, except the writing itself when it finally emerges. So I’ve spent hours and hours this month (and every month) sitting in front of a word processor doing apparently nothing.
You can see from the month’s columns that I have been spending many of those hours in the high stratosphere, three times higher than Mount Everest, up where a ferocious invader, much more insidious than the rats in the barn, much more powerful than the chicken-hungry raccoon, is devouring the ozone layer. I’m on the ozone chapter in my book, and news events are bringing the problem to the attention of the human world again. Hence the columns. That’s where columns come from; from the intersection between the obsessions in my mind and the current news.
The cancer column in this month’s collection is, of course, just a release of all that’s been pent up in me on that subject, a kind of condensation of the past five months’ newsletters. I wrote that column at white-hot heat and close to deadline and didn’t take the time I should have taken to calm it down. I’m still trying to decide whether that was a mistake or a lucky accident. At any rate, probably because of its intemperate language, that column has brought more response by an order of magnitude than any other I’ve written. I’m amazed at the response, some of which is heartbreaking, some heartening.
The heartbreaking part is the flood of letters and calls I’m getting from desperate patients asking where oh where did I find my alternative health care. I can tell just when the column runs in the twenty or so papers across the country, as the calls start coming from sick people from Brunswick, Maine, or Harrison, Arkansas, or San Jose, California. Everywhere people are fed up with their medical care. I’m reluctant to become a consulting service for untraditional medicine, not only because I’m unqualified, but because I have doubts about it as well as an attraction to it. So I try to duck the question and tell people they have to find their own source of healing; that what works for me might not work for them. The tricky part of that kind of medicine is that it operates on faith, and faith is not something anyone can impart to anyone else. (Come to think of it, regular medicine probably operates primarily on faith too.) Anyway, my heart goes out to these people, searching so desperately for reassurance and comfort.
An even more heartbreaking response is coming from health practitioners, mostly nurses, telling me that I’ve hit the nail on the head, that they’re not able to be as caring and careful as they want to be, that they’re working in a quagmire of stupid bureaucracy, and that they want out. They ask me where I found my alternative health care, so they can go join it. I’m floored by this response, especially since some of it has come from the best of the people who cared for me. I’m horrified. If these people leave the regular medicine system, if the only ones who stay are the insensitive ones, there’s no hope for it at all.
A heartening response, however, has come from doctors and administrators at good old Mary Hitchcock Hospital, who know that my criticisms are levelled directly at them. Apparently the column is reverberating like a bomb blast around there. As one of my (good) doctors said, “Well, Dana, you’ve finally gotten their attention.” I’ve received anguished letters from several doctors, deeply disturbed that their colleagues gave me such a negative impression of their profession. I’ve been asked to address the medical students during their oncology rounds to share with them my experience as a patient. A vice-president of the hospital has asked me to write out a list of all the things that could be improved — which was easy, because I’d already written the list during my correspondence with the head of the cancer center. I sent it to her, and she’s asked me to work with her to make the needed changes.
These are such constructive responses that I think there’s great hope, at least for this hospital. Underneath all the nonsense, the federal regulations, the technology, the godliness of doctors, the bureacratic maze, the hecticness, there is a wonderful core of personal commitment on the part of many people. I am in awe of the power and purity of that commitment. I’m also in distress at how the institutional structure manages to take advantage of it, or scatter it, or smother it. How can a closely functioning network of very dedicated people manage to make each person feel so alone and unappreciated in his or her dedication? There is something so wrong, so evil, in an organization that wastes or warps or burns out such intrinsic human excellence.
Well, that, of course, is not a problem that’s limited to hospitals. As usual, I’ve bitten off a lot more here than I can chew. I’m grateful for the opportunities that the column has opened for me to try to help at the hospital, and I’ll do my best, feeling inadequate to the challenge, but trying to represent the interests of the cancer patients I have met. From my first diagnosis six months ago and still continuing, this experience has felt like something way out of my control, something ordained for me for some reason, a series of unexpected doors opening in front of me, through which I have no choice but to pass and find out what’s next. I’m ready now to end the whole story and go back to my column and book and farm and forget about the problems of the healing professions. But that’s obviously not going to be permitted to happen.
Strange. Life is so very strange.
Well, the sun has come out and the farm is calling. Time to go plant squash.
Love, Dana
