Dear Folks, It’s Saturday night, windy and wet outside. The Glory has come and gone and we’re into the late fall of bare trees, bleak skies and storm. But I’m sitting here at FOUNDATION FARM, BACK HOME, in the study, with the woodstove aglow, Basil curled up at my feet, Simon purring in a gray fuzzy ball on my desk. It’s so good to be home! It’s even better than I thought it was going to be! Even with all its problems, even with unresolved messes on every side, even with the books only half unpacked, even in a room with hardly any furniture and a hole still in the ceiling where Dennis cut it once to try to find the source of a leak, it’s so, so good to be here!!
On the day I moved in, once I had got all the boxes here, instead of opening them I just sat down and played the piano for two hours.
Hallelujah!
In the kitchen Don and Sylvia are making supper and Heather is singing a little song. Sylvia is 35, Don is 27, their daughter Heather is 13 months. They moved here from Kansas last spring and have been trying to find a farm to live on. Sylvia is a truly expert horsewoman — when Heather is a little older Sylvia will probably go to work at one of the horse farms around here. She’s also a talented artist, especially good at illustrating kid’s books. She’s a great help with all farm chores, but especially with the animals. She has that kind of inner knowledge that’s so important — you can see it when she feels around a bump on Basil’s leg or casts an eye over the sheep in the pasture. A natural talent with animals.
Don is working as a housepainter, a job that pays well in this Valley with its 1% unemployment rate. The building trades are booming and desperate to hire good people. Don is a steady, dependable worker; he had already moved up to foreman in his first job when the boss decided to sell out and move to Hawaii. So he’s just started in a second company, with the promise of a foreman’s job as soon as he proves himself — which won’t be long.
Don has also had plenty of experience farming, and he’s waded into woodcutting around here, which is a big job just now with winter coming on. We have just about enough wood put away for the winter, but he wants to get a start on next year. So he’s begun thinning black locust trees out front at the southeast corner of the farm, and I’ll guess he’ll just keep going until the snow stops him. There’s a lot of thinning to be done in our woods. We won’t run out for years.
Little Heather is a classically beautiful child, a happy one, right at home in a garden, addicted to mud, unafraid of animals, unerringly attracted to dogs and cats. She has just mastered walking, running, and climbing stairs, and she’s an intrepid explorer, so the house has to be toddler-proofed, which Sylvia is taking care of, bit by bit. Heather’s a good and calm child, though she is capable, when frustrated, of emitting a screech that I always fear will carry into town and summon up the Plainfield Volunteer Fire Department by mistake. So far the screeches are rare, and they only summon her mother, who has rigged up a walky-talky so she can go muck out the barn and still hear when Heather has waked up from her nap.
Sylvia’s sister Binky Long has moved in next door with Ruth to take my place there. Binky is 27, a former Dartmouth student and old friend of the Whybrows, a committed environmentalist and farmer. She is the assistant manager of a commercial vegetable farm up in Norwich during the summer; this winter she’ll be working as a substitute teacher and for me as a research assistant for my book.
The other member of the farm family isn’t here tonight, she’s off visiting her brother for the weekend. She’s Anna Pluhar, 55, who moved in here last year to help Dennis and Dmitri keep house. Anna raised four kids, then had a serious religious experience, gave up her worldly goods and moved to a convent, then came here to earn her keep while writing her spiritual history, then fell in love with a cattle farmer named Curley who lives about an hour north of here in Vermont. Anna reminds me of a Central European china doll with a pretty pink-cheeked face — to me she seems made more for being in love than being in a nunnery. She’s a good manager, fiercely capable in all the ways that a woman who has raised a family learns to be capable. She handles the continuous crises around here (the water pump fails, Helen Whybrow is thrown by a horse, Basil has to go to the vet, the truck breaks down) with amazing equanimity. She also discovered all the chantarelle mushrooms in the woods and dried them for winter consumption.
It takes a long time for a new farm family to form its patterns, and I’ve learned from living with so many different people over the years not to make early judgements and not to rush things. But I feel good about this group. It’s nice to have the two sisters next door to each other. It’s nice for Don and Sylvia and Binky to have a country place to live in and bring up Heather in. Sylvia and Don have bought two horses, which are living in Ruth’s barn, so they go over there every day to do horse chores — and it’s nice having that barn full of beautiful animals again. We can put up hay and wood for both places at once. It’s nice for Anna to have a quiet place to write and another writer around to encourage her.
It’s above all nice for me to have everyone here, to keep me from being lonely, to help keep things going, and to help me love the place. This has always seemed to me such a welcoming, fruitful place, capable of holding and nourishing a lot of people and asking only that it be loved and cared for in return. The times I have felt loneliest around here have been when some miracle has happened that demanded to be admired — a blue iris in bloom, a new lamb, the winter sun setting spectacularly behind the frosty mountain, wild ducks on the pond — and I couldn’t find anyone to admire it with me.
Life is certainly different now, of course, from the relative calm at Ruth’s house, and different from any other time on the farm — every group of new people makes it different. For the first time in 16 years I am the only vegetarian in the house, so there’s meat on the table unless it’s my turn to cook. (That’s fine with me — it helps me maintain my abstinence from overeating.) The lamb we raise is being eaten here for the first time. Last week I drove in and found a deer hanging in our garage. Don shot it with a bow (it’s bow-hunting season here, not yet rifle-hunting season) and butchered it that night for the freezer. He was pretty proud of himself, and rightfully so. Bow-hunting strikes me as a real sport — I wish it was the only kind of hunting permitted around here.
I’m trying to make room for everyone to participate in the establishment of this new household. It’s hard, because I’m so naturally opinionated, and because this place is so much more home to me than to any of the others. But it’s also easier than it might be because I haven’t been here for the past year, so I don’t know where things are any more or how things have been working — Anna knows more than I do. And, fortunately for everyone else, I’m not around much, so they have to work things out for themselves. I’ve been at Dartmouth long hours working on the TV book. And for the past week I’ve been in Costa Rica.
Carlos Quesada of the Balaton Group was asked two years ago to coordinate the preparation of a National Conservation Strategy for his country. He’s an intense, energetic, bright, committed guy, the sort who would take such an obligation very seriously. He brought most of the intellectual power of Costa Rica into the effort, coordinating thoughtful work not just about conservation and national parks, but about the whole long-term future of the country. The final product is now called not a conservation strategy but a Strategy for Sustainable Development. It was presented this week to the few remaining people in San Jose who hadn’t participated in writing it, and Carlos asked me and a Balaton Group member from Denmark, Neils Meyer, to come speak at the unveiling.
The presentation was at the National Theater, one of the few architecturally distinguished buildings in San Jose, a Baroque opera house in the old tradition. There had been five days of presentation before I arrived, going through each part of the strategy — population, economics, land, water, energy, transportation, etc. I don’t know of many nations anywhere that have taken such an integrated look at its current state and its possible futures, or that have involved so many people in the process.
The final day, the one I came for, was the grand summary and overview. Carlos was the first speaker, then Alvaro Umane, the Minister for Natural Resources, Energy, and Mines, under whose auspices the Strategy was prepared. I was very impressed with Umane, who is young, gracious, and very well informed. I was thinking, as I listened to his speech, that I would give anything to hear a United States Secretary of Energy or Interior or Agriculture talking like that.
Neils and I gave rousing speeches full of genuine admiration for the Costa Ricans for coming up with this Strategy. Costa Rica is one of my favorite countries — a fierce democracy, no army at all, the money that would be spent on the military going instead to education and health care. Eleven percent of its tiny land area has been preserved in national parks and forests. Oscar Arias the President is, of course, leading the way toward peace in all Central America. It’s a country that thinks for itself and that usually chooses humanitarian values over power and might and bombast. But it has its problems, of course. It’s a materialistic population, eager to buy all the shining goodies that the multinational corporations have to offer. It has a big foreign debt and a stagnant economy. It imports all its oil; its only indigenous energy resources are hydropower and biomass. Its population growth rate has actually increased lately, from 2.6% to 2.9% (because of the economic slowdown, my friends tell me). And outside the national parks, even to some extent inside them, the forests are disappearing, the pastures are overgrazed, and the land is slipping off the mountains into the rivers and down to the sea. No other country has such a good Strategy for Sustainable Development, but this is a country that surely needs one.
That’s more or less what we said in our speeches. Four out of five of the candidates for the next Presidential election were there, and they ended the day by responding (can you imagine that happening in the U.S.?) That guaranteed the attention of the press, of course — this event was cleverly planned. All the candidates endorsed the plan with varying degrees of understanding and commitment; the ones from the Liberal Party (the party of Arias now in power) endorsed it strongly. They had done their homework. Again, they were impressive. The U.S. Presidential candidates looked like dummies in comparison, I’m sorry to say.
The following two days were spent helping however we could to endorse the plan and educate the public, and just enjoying being together with our Balaton friends Carlos Quesada and Gerardo Budowski. We had a nice dinner and a lunch with Minister Umane — I like him a lot, and I hope when his term of office is over he will become a member of the Balaton Group (in Costa Rica you can serve one 4-year term as President, period, so Arias will be out in another year and a half, and Umane too). We gave a talk at the University of Costa Rica where Carlos is on the faculty, and we visited the U.N. University for Peace outside of town, which Gerardo is working to get going. That University is a wonderful idea that has had almost no financial backing yet (the U.N. set it up but didn’t fund it). Gerardo has designed a graduate curriculum for it on Natural Resources and Peace, but so far he hasn’t been able to hire faculty to teach it.
While we were there Hurricane Joan (Juana in Spanish) was threatening offshore the entire time. Up in San Jose in the mountains it just meant sultry continuous rain, but down on the coast near Puerto Limon the population was being evacuated — a big job for little Costa Rica. I was shuddering to think of the effects of all that rain on the hills. Even on the short drive out to the University for Peace we saw the rivers running red with silt and the land sliding down onto the roads. A country that is so sloping and so rainy has really only one way to keep its soil — that is to keep its forests.
Juana did not prevent the departure of my plane, and I had an uneventful trip home. The season has advanced here to the point where fall chores are becoming urgent. We’ve washed the windows and put up the storms, planted the tulip bulbs, harvested most of the garden, except for the leeks and Brussels sprouts and rutabagas that can stay out there until the snow flies. Tomorrow it’s time to make potting soil for winter seedlings, and to oil all the tools and put them away, and to get the snowblower ready for winter and the tiller ready for spring. Spring. Funny thought!
Love, Dana
