Dear Folks,

It’s Saturday night, a nearly-full moon shining in my bedroom window as I type this.  Dennis has just left for a trip with the craziest itinerary I ever heard — Ottawa, Seville (yes, the one in Spain), New York, Mexico City, Los Angeles and then home.  All in two weeks.  Suzanne is working in Boston this weekend.  We’re hoping that will earn her an extra long weekend here next week.  Kate is over at Mark’s — sometimes I think they’re actually going to make it together.

John and Brenna are downstairs storming over whether Brenna is going to take a shower tonight.  That’s not the real issue; the real issue is whether John or Brenna gets to make decisions like that.  It seems to me that 10 is pretty early to be declaring oneself a fully responsible and quite stubborn individual, but then Brenna is precocious, and, at the moment, something of a pill.  She only has these problems with John, not with anyone else at the house.  She doesn’t have to declare her independence from the rest of us.

The 25 baby chicks we bought last spring have grown up, and it was time to put them in the big chicken house, but the big chicken house was full of the chicks from last year and the year before and the year before.  We’re all vegetarians here and not into chicken-killing, so we run an old-age-home for hens.  Anyhow, the time had come to Do Something.

So I invited the folks from the community dinners in White River Junction — free dinners twice a week for people who are too poor or sick or lonely to cook for themselves — to come fill up their freezer with chicken stew meat for the winter, as long as they were willing to do the killing.  Turns out some of those folks were raised on farms and knew all about doing in chickens, so one evening five of them showed up and we had a Great Chicken Slaughter.

For some reason all my housemates, when they heard what was coming, chose to be away from home that night, and it’s too bad, because they missed a real show.  We had a professional operation going.  One of the guys knew how to hypnotize chickens (you swing them around in a big circle about 20 times), which he did, and as a result each one went to her final reward in a happy daze, without a squawk or a tremor.  The executioner was cleanly efficient and never missed.  The plucking station was outside the back door, the washing and gutting went on in the kitchen.  (The dogs were locked away on the screen porch.)

The conversation was a bit raucus, but incredibly cheerful, and it opened to me a bit more of the world of the down-and-out of the Valley — a world that coexists in space and time with my world but could hardly be more different.  Some of these people, though they are poor and old and sometimes disabled, spend all their time looking after other people.  Those that can drive shuttle the others around to the Senior Center or to doctor appointments.  They cook for the community dinner, or run the Food Shelf (or come to strange farms and kill chickens).  They pick left-behind apples after the regular harvest, make runs to the supermarkets for day-old baked goods, all to fill the coffers of the Food Shelf.

They know each other intimately and gossip endlessly, but the gossip is caring, not malicious.  “Did you hear Jenny fainted again down to the Senior Center last Wednesday?  Yep.  Was a hot day and she thinks it was her sugar.”  (They call diabetes “the sugar”.)

They kept trying to leave one dressed chicken with me.  They couldn’t believe that we are really vegetarians.  One woman looked at our shelves of jars full of beans and grains and nuts and said “how can you ever make a meal out of that?”  Another said, “whenever I get hungry I fry me up a quarter of a pound of bacon.  I don’t think I could stay alive without bacon.  You folks never eat bacon?”  I told them what a typical day’s meals would be at the farm, but the only meal they thought they’d like would be breakfast — pancakes and maple syrup, or fresh farm eggs and home fries with onions.

Well, it was a wonderful evening, and they went off with bags of chicken, and also squash and beets and lettuce from the garden.  They left the kitchen spic and span.  And the new pullets are now safely installed in the chicken house.

Two Saturdays ago, September 28th, was clear and chill, and we were sure The Frost would come that night, so we spent the day in the pre-frost scramble.  We hauled bushels of green tomatoes and nearly-ripe squash and pumpkins onto the back porch.  For the fun of it Suzanne had thrown some Big Max pumpkin seed into the compost heap, and three enormous pumpkins came forth, so heavy that it took Dennis to carry them up to the house.  Everyone came out to admire them and argue about how much they weighed.  Bets were made, a scale was brought out, and a solemn weigh-in established them at about 50 pounds each.  They will be used for jack-o-lanterns; we grow the little New England pie pumpkins for eating.

We stripped the dahlias and marigolds of blossoms and filled the house with bouquets.  We brought in the last cucumbers and beans and basil.  We also dug up and processed the horseradish that day — a breathtaking job.  Some of it went right into a cabbage salad, with carrots, cucumbers, celery, and parsley, for lunch.  That night we had a harvest stir-fry — green beans, cauliflower, Chinese cabbage, carrots, leeks.

Then the clouds rolled in and the frost didn’t come.  It finally came on October 6, quite late for here, so we got a week more of dahlia bouquets.  By now it’s freezing on about half the nights, we’ve started up the woodstoves, the dahlias are dead and brown and I dug them up today to store in the root cellar till next year.

A new sound is coming up the stairway just now (the shower-for-Brenna question has been settled), a sound that has never been heard in this house in the 14 years we’ve lived here.  It all started last spring, when Prairie Home Companion (our favorite radio show) did a television trial.  We went over to the neighbors to see it, and I loved it, and I said, “if that show goes on TV, we are going to have to get one.”

Well, it didn’t, but the subject of a TV kept coming up.  My housemates kept saying I could do better columns if I knew the kind of trash the nation was regularly exposed to.  They kept telling me about Metropolitan Opera broadcasts.  John mumbled a lot about Boston Celtics games.

I am so innocent that I never realized why the discussion was heating up over the last week.  Finally I said OK, as long as the darn thing doesn’t appear in any of my work spaces, and as long as we have clear rules about TV and the kid, and as long as conflicts between the Celtics and the opera can be settled by flipping a coin.  Today John and Brenna went out and got a TV, and guess what, it came in the door exactly two hours before the first World Series game!  Wasn’t that well maneuvered?  John and his girlfriend Kat and Brenna are downstairs right now watching it, with a big bowl of popcorn and a fire in the fireplace.  It’s a noise I’m not really glad to have in the house. I’ll stick to National Public Radio for the news.  But I’ll love the opera!

There isn’t much news on the column-selling business.  I have started sending samples off to syndicates again, and I send to two new papers, in Schenectady NY and Springfield Mass, neither of which have taken anything yet.  It’s about time for another blitz of letters to a new bunch of papers.  You, dear readers, so regularly tell me that you like this little letter at least as well as the columns — many of you like it better — that I’m wondering why I put so much work into the columns, when it takes only the typing time to sit down and write the Dear Folks letter.  I’m thinking of trying to get some homey magazine, like Country Journal or Maine Times to publish a monthly farm letter.  It would be fun to write (I’d just edit up these letters I write for you), and it would add a bit to the exchequer.  I’ll let you know how that comes out.

October 24, 1986

Well, it’s nearly a week later and I have been down at Woods Hole on Cape Cod most of the time in between, at a conference on biological diversity.  It was an amazing meeting.  The very best field ecologists from all over the world came and delivered papers, usually with color slides, on what is happening to the ecosystems of the world.  It was top-flight science, most of it new to me.  I was completely rapt, drinking in information, fascinated by the science and horrified by the general message.  I may never have learned so much so fast before.

Here are some of the studies we heard about:

• the response of the Eastern U.S. forest to acid rain,
• the effect of clearcutting of the Amazon rain forest on islands of undisturbed forest of various sizes (1, 10, 100, 1000, 100000 hectares — it seems only the largest of those numbers is a big enough area to preserve the forest diversity)
• the elimination of life for 100 miles downwind of the smokestack of the copper/nickel smelter at Sudbury, Ontario.
• the effect of oil spills on the coral reefs of the Red Sea,
• the disturbance of the tundra by oil exploration and development in the Arctic,
• the loss of species because of overgrazing and the invasion of foreign species in New Zealand,
• the effect on a test forest of a radiation source at Brookhaven National Laboratory (very relevant now to the kind of ecological damage expected from Chernobyl),
• the way air pollution kills lichens,
• the loss of the peat-bog ecosystems of the U.S. and Canada,
• how eutrophication changes the forms of life in freshwater lakes,
• the elimination of hundreds of miles of native grasses and forests in the U.S. West by the invasion of cheatgrass, abetted by human-caused fires,

and much, much more.

Part of the message that emerged from all these studies was how very resilient nature is.  Under some terrific assaults, some forms of life do manage to survive.  Some grasses, especially, and sedges and insects can be found, even where there are heavy metals, even under high radiation.  They are usually not the species that were originally present, but life in some form is very persistent.

Another message was that a damaged ecosystem, though it still may support life, rarely recovers the same species and communities it once had.  One Canadian researcher has taken a pristine lake and deliberately acidified it, as is happening through pollution to the lakes farther east.  He studied carefully which species disappeared at which levels of acidity.  Then he brought the acidity slowly back to normal.  The species didn’t all come back.  For instance, some acid-tolerant fishes that had never lived in the lake at all came in (from the inflowing streams) and took over, and now the lake trout can’t compete against them.  The same thing happened when the radiation source was removed at Brookhaven and when the Sudbury smelter cut back its emissions.  The natural systems were heavily unbalanced, and didn’t recover.

The third conclusion was the most depressing.  It was shocking to see how many enormous manmade environmental assaults there were to study, in every part of the world, in every kind of ecosystem.  Even the people studying the deep seabed are seeing it.  The most worried talk at the conference was about the atmospheric disturbances, the changes in the amount of ozone and carbon dioxide that could lead to more ultraviolet light, and/or a global climate change.  Those are changes that would assault every single ecosystem at once; the first completely global human-induced environmental disasters.

These folks were pretty glum.  And they knew a tremendous amount.  I felt privileged to be with them.  And I figure I had better go take their messages to the world — they’re too busy out in the field, getting the information to tell the world the real costs of all our busyness and greed.

On my way home, I stopped at WGBH in Boston, where they put out the TV series Nova.  I may be working with them on some programs about the state of the world’s resources.  More on that as the story develops (and don’t get excited, Mom, I’d be a consultant and writer for them, not a TV star!).  Maybe I can get them to make shows about the field ecologists and the sobering stories they have to tell.

Well, this is far too long, but a lot has been happening around here!

Love, Dana