Dear Folks,
It’s a glorious Sunday morning. Everything was coated with frost when the sun came up, but the air is warming fast, and we’re predicted to reach the 60s this afternoon. The maples are bare, but the oaks are still glowing orange and red. John is out front with his chainsaw, attacking the last of our log-length wood. Yorinde is stacking split wood in the shed.
Out in the barnyard Wally the ram is making babies. We turned him in with his harem early (usually I wait till November) because a neighbor wants to borrow him, and I didn’t want to make the neighbor wait too long. So we’re expecting lambs starting March 22. Judging from Wally’s current activity, Tulip will be the first to deliver.
Beautiful fall weekends like this are precious. There’s so much to do and so little time to do it before the landscape seizes up. I started yesterday harvesting crops for the root cellar, which is already packed with potatoes, onions, and squash. I brought in celeriac and beets and then decided to put off the carrots, rutabagas, leeks, and turnips for awhile longer — they keep even after many frosts, and I’d rather dig them fresh as long as I can.
While I was out there, I got mad at the horseradish spreading over my salad garden, so I rooted out every trace of it. This happens annually, with no noticeable effect on the horseradish. Since I couldn’t throw the roots on the compost pile (that would make new colonies of horseradish), I had to bring them in and make horseradish sauce. This also happens annually, though it always takes me by surprise. I never plan to make horseradish sauce.
Have you ever smelled freshly mashed horseradish? It’s an experience never to be forgotten. I peel the roots, chop them in chunks, and throw them into a food processor with some vinegar. That part of the job is fairly pungent, but nothing compared to the whammy of taking the lid off the food processor. I get out a jar and a spoon, open the doors and windows, take a deep breath, hold it, charge in, open the cover, maneuver a few spoonfuls of horseradish sauce into the jar, break down weeping, slam the cover back down, retreat to a distant corner till my eyes and nose stop running, and repeat the performance until the jar is full. By the time the horseradish is packed away, my sinuses are thoroughly reamed out, clean and shiny and ready for winter.
Two hours after I finished that operation, John came into the house, took one sniff, and said, “Whew! Horseradish!”
As long as I was in the kitchen messing about, I decided to make a coleslaw with newly harvested cabbage, carrots, celeriac, rutabaga, parsley, and of course horseradish. It’s a coleslaw that makes you sit up and take notice! I cooked up squash for lunch and for squash cookies. I made a pot of borscht from beets and potatoes and leeks and other assorted veggies. All served up with our cider, which has gotten slightly fizzy. Yum!
I love doing fall chores. Many of them are about battening down for winter, but others are full of hope for the coming spring. I’ve got the potting soil made for starting seeds in February and March (two big garbage-cans full). I’ve planted daffodils, narcissus, tulips, crocus, eranthis, snowdrops, lilies. I plant hundreds of bulbs each fall, and each spring I decide to plant more. I probably won’t be satisfied until I’ve bulbed over the whole 75 acres.
Don, Sylvia, and I pilled the sheep yesterday and trimmed their hooves before we turned Wally in to start next year’s lambs. That may sound like a simple operation, but it took planning and ingenuity. We had the ewes up in the barnyard, letting them out occasionally to ramble around the neighborhood, cleaning up apple and pear drops, grazing on our lawn and Ruth’s hayfield, and stopping traffic. They’re used to the grain bucket, so it’s relatively easy to get them back in, trap them in the barn, and minister to them.
It’s trickier to deal with Wally and his seven sons down in the pasture. They’ve been ungrained, undisturbed, and wild all summer, so Sylvia and I started graining them several weeks ago, to get them used to following us into the sheepshed. Once we had them trapped yesterday, we had to throw Wally to pill him (he weighs over 200 square, stocky, solid pounds). Don can manage to do that, after a struggle. When we got Wally done, my plan was to let him out of the shed, and I’d lure him up to the barnyard with the grain bucket, while Don and Sylvia finished up the ram lambs (which we’ll leave down in the pasture till slaughter time).
Well, I managed to get Wally out the gate and onto Daniels Road, at which point he decided he wasn’t interested in grain and headed off the wrong way, into town. At that point Don and Sylvia let the ram lambs out. They came bleating up the fence, calling for their dad. Wally turned around and tried to butt his way back through the fence to his kids and his comfortable pasture. We alternated between trying to bribe him with promises of food and sex, and trying to scare him up the hill to the barn. The trouble is, Wally is both unbribeable and unscareable. He decides where he wants to go, and if you’re in the way, he goes over, under, around, or through you.
After a breathless half hour of chasing this enormous sheep up and down Daniels Road (with strange looks and offer of help from passing pickup trucks), I finally said, the hell with it, let the bagger find his own way up to his girlfriends. We went home, he stayed down on the road, a fence away from his ramlings, stopping traffic. (“Traffic” is an exaggerated word for the odd vehicle on Daniels Road — anyone who drives that road is used to wandering sheep, or an occasional white gander defending against all comers the bridge over the brook.) It wasn’t until an hour later that I hit upon the brilliant scheme of bringing the girls down to HIM. They happily followed my bucket down. When Wally saw them, he forgot about his sons and followed them — and they followed the bucket. Soon Wally and the girls were up in the barnyard living happily ever after, and I took a bucket of apple drops down to console the ram lambs.
I’ve started washing windows and getting the screens and storms set. I’ll keep working at it all week. I told myself I only had to do one room a day — that’s how I get myself into jobs that are going to be long and tedious. But I got carried away and did half the downstairs at one go. I got happier and happier as the beautiful afternoon light poured in through window after window without being stopped by a single spider-spot or kiddie fingerprint,
The firewood is about 2/3 cut and split. I’ve brought up the houseplants from the lean-to greenhouse, which John will take down today. John has drained the sink in our canning kitchen on the back porch and replaced the screens there with glass storms. I still have to clean the chicken house, mulch strawberries, trim raspberries. Yesterday I raked up cartloads of leaves and piled them on the garden where the potatoes will be planted next year — the tannin keeps down potato scab. (Sylvia’s idea — it works).
It’s so GOOD to be home! This is the first time in three years I’ve been able to do the fall chores — last year I was in Germany and the year before in a crash effort to finish Beyond the Limits. This fall I’ve been rushing around on entirely too many trips, but I’ve had all of last week, and I’ll have all of next week free, before I set off on more travels.
Let’s see, where have I been since I last wrote? I’ve been to Mountain Lake, Virginia, high in the mountains on the West Virginia border — and I’ve been out on the northern prairie in St. Peter, Minnesota — and I’ve been down near the Mexican border in the Sonoran desert near Tucson. Quite a contrast of places and purposes!
Mountain Lake was where the Pew Scholars met this year. I’m starting my third and last year of the Pew Scholarship; I guess they’ll let me come to one more meeting. This one was the best so far, because the Scholars finally came together as a community — the meeting began to resemble a Balaton meeting, which is what I had hoped would happen from the beginning.
Ten Pew Scholars in Conservation and the Environment are chosen each year. Most of them are outstanding field ecologists, experts on freshwater fish of the East African lakes, or rainforest trees, or how bird breeding habitats vary with temperature. Every year, though, they let in some oddballs like me who do more activism than science — such people as Victor Sher, who litigated the spotted owl case for the Sierra Club, and Carl Safina, who is trying to use CITES to save the bluefin tuna, and this year Theodora Colburn, who is on a crusade to eliminate chlorinated hydrocarbons (including pesticides, PCBs, dioxins, and more) that act like reproductive hormones and therefore mess up animals and people . You can imagine how I love being with these people! And there are ten more every year!
I guess it was the fact that there are now 40 Scholars, and that some of us have been coming together for 3 or 4 years, that made the group coalesce. Anyway, by the end of the meeting we were drafting a consensus statement on the scientific basis for a better Endangered Species Act, and planning a popular article on Theodora’s work, and launching visioning sessions on a Sustainable America. I was teaching STELLA and figuring out how to get various Balaton people involved in Jane Lubchenco’s Sustainable Biospheres Project. And so forth. I had a super time, even if I barely got home in time to unpack, pack, and head off to Minnesota.
I always feel at home in Minnesota. I went to college in Northfield. I listen to Garrison Keillor every chance I get. I like the cold prairie and the common-sense Scandinavian culture. St. Peter is such a little Sweden that its Gustavus Adolphus College even has a Nobel symposium every year, officially sanctioned by the Nobel Committee in the home country, and usually featuring Nobel Prize winners. The topic was ecology this year, however, for which no Nobel Prizes are awarded. So they had to make do with lesser luminaries like Tom Lovejoy, Jared Diamond, Robert May, Dan Botkin, George Woodwell — bright stars in my firmament and people I would happily cross half the country to hear. My job was to make an after-dinner speech commenting on what the ecological heavy-hitters said.
It was a sweet thing, this symposium, a big deal for a large chunk of the Middle West. Five thousand people come, including busloads of high school kids from several states around. The main lectures are held in the hockey stadium, decked out with Swedish and American flags and potted flowers and trees, and a big TV screen so the folks in the high bleachers can see the speaker’s face. The Gustavus Adolphus band plays festive marches. There’s a formal academic procession with robes and hoods and mortar boards, only the third one I’ve marched in my whole academic life long. (The first was my high school graduation, the second was my PhD from Harvard. I’ve never even SEEN a Dartmouth academic procession. I have a long history of avoiding pomp and circumstance.) Two of my favorite chemistry teachers from Carleton showed up to say hi, so did several other friends from the Twin Cities area. The occasion was pure fun for me, and it was wonderful to hear the other speakers.
Back home I had a breathing spell to write a column and do laundry before a lightning trip to Tucson. I should have stayed in Arizona longer. I should have gone out to the Biosphere, where the folks had just emerged after their two years on a simulated planet, and to the Orange Grove Middle School, where they’re doing such great systems teaching. But fall work was piling up on the farm, and I’m months behind on the mail, and some day I have to get back to writing books. So I spent a day getting out to Rio Rico, Arizona, a day at the Environmental Grantmakers meeting, and a day back, period.
I would never have used up so much jet fuel for so short a stay, if Betsy Taylor hadn’t asked me to do something I just couldn’t refuse. Betsy is the new director of the Merck Family Fund. The Environmental Grantmakers meeting is the annual gathering of U.S. foundations that fund environmental projects — over 150 foundations, big and small. Betsy thought it was time to hold a plenary session to raise the question of overconsumption as a force contributing to unsustainability.
Ha! The great undiscussed topic! Along with population THE driving factor! How could I say no, even if I had to overconsume to say yes?
I was the opening speaker, followed by Alan Durning of Worldwatch and Yvon Chouinard of Patagonia (talking about how he is running his sportswear company so as NOT to GROW, and NOT to sell consumers useless stuff that will change fashion or wear out). I think we did a good job. Given that there were millions of dollars of leverage in that room, maybe we did some good.
For the rest of the day I got to talk with many friends who happen to be environmental grantmakers, and with Gary Nabhan, a Pew Scholar and terrific ethnobotanist, who was on hand to give tours of the desert ecosystem.
Nice trip. But too many trips, too close together. (And more coming up.) With Don and Sylvia about to move away, I have a new resolution, designed to restore proper balance to my life. NO MORE THAN ONE TRIP IN ANY MONTH. As soon as one engagement goes down in my calendar, that means an automatic no to any more that month, no matter how much fun, profit, good work, or meeting with beloved people they offer. Since I already have to go to Washington once a month for National Geographic, that means my schedule is already SEWN UP for the coming year. (Balaton trips are exceptions, of course.)
Hurray! No decisions to make! The answer is no!
Seriously now (no, wait, that once-a-month vow was serious!) I have been sobered by these past months of gadding about. I have loved every trip, but I have dropped all book writing, and the farm needs much more of my attention, as do my friends at home. I could become a speaker, a Personality, traveling wherever invited, and I’d make more money doing that than anything else I do, but it’s not the career I’ve chosen. I could spend full time serving the Balaton group, and that would be immensely worthwhile, but I can’t see how to make a living that way. Nor, in some way I can’t explain, would I be fully me, if I couldn’t stack wood and plant bulbs and contemplate the gestation period of sheep and the wood ducks the dogs and I scared off the brook back at the swimming hole yesterday.
What I have CHOSEN to do, and should be able to make a modest, non-overconsumptive living at, is writing and farming, neither of which is furthered by being on the road.
Well, for the short term at least, the Universe has spoken. It put the following two quotes in this week’s Science magazine, marked especially for my attention:
H.G. Wells to Julian Huxley: “You are always busy. You have a finger in every pie…. It gets you nowhere. It gets nothing done. You are the Mad Hatter of the Scientific World.”
Edwin G. Boring to B.F. Skinner: “I do not mean to be harsh, but your very versatility and polemical cleverness make it necessary for some older people to tell you bluntly where they think the trouble lies. Otherwise you might go through life doing half-baked work which wins applause from the uncritical and the unsophisticated, working hard and sincerely, and thus never realizing that your work was superficial…. You have very unusual experimental ability; you have exceptional drive; you write well; your enthusiastic personality will make you a stimulus to others; you think clearly when your drive does not carry you away. The only flaw in this gem is that you are too clever … to be thorough.”
Jorinde will go back to Germany next week, taking a real light out of the house. Don and Sylvia and Heather are nearly moved, though they seem to be reluctant to finally transfer the flag — as I am reluctant to have them go. Only John and I will be left to manage the daily chores, so we will have to stick close to home.
The Universe has not yet told me what this big hole opening at the farm will mean for the longer term. So far the only clear signal I am getting is that the time of emptiness and staying home, however long it lasts, is a perfect opportunity to fix the place up. So I’m going to spend winter weekends cleaning, repairing, painting, and throwing out the accumulated junk of dozens of people who have lived here and moved on. I’m going to have the back house, where the Spains have been living, refurbished and expanded — either that or tear it down and build a better one. As long as we’re going to have a hole, we’ll open up lots of space — and see what falls into it!
While that is going on, I am holding in my lap all possibilities. Sell the place and move into a condominium and never worry about lawns or woodpiles again. Move to San Francisco and join the Zen Center. Find some other spiritual community with a farm, Move to Washington where writing could make a real difference. Find a paid farm manager for both my place and Ruth’s, and build a community of people who are interested in environmental and/or spiritual work but not farming. Build the community ONLY of people who are interested in farming — nonfarmers need not apply. Put up more buildings and make a bigger community. Or just let the present opening be, and, with no particular intention, see who God sends — which has been my policy heretofore.
Now that I’ve surrendered to the uncertainty and let go of my panic (how on earth am I going to keep up this PLACE?), I’m actually enjoying this space of Not Knowing.
Love,
Dana
