Dear Folks, Two nights ago the edge of Hurricane Hugo brought us wild winds and tropical temperatures. Basil and I woke up about 2:30 and went outside to watch the trees bending in the wind. Heavy gusts whammed through the valley — we could hear each one sweeping toward us from a long way off, sounding like an oncoming express train. Branches and leaves flew by, a big birch tree over at Ruth’s cracked and toppled, the electricity flickered on and off, but there was no rain, and it was warm. I sat on the front step in my nightgown, with a soft purring Simon on my lap and a big dog at my feet (they hung close to me, a little afraid of the loud wind), marveling at how warm it was for a stormy night at the equinox.
Now today the sky is clear, the wind is from the north, and the weatherman says First Freeze is coming tonight.
We’ll spend this afternoon stripping the tomatoes and peppers and pumpkins and flowers from the garden. It’s always a bittersweet task. Part of me is grateful that garden chores are winding down and the vegetable flood is slowing, but most of me is reluctant to say goodbye to abundance. We’ll go on canning tomatoes for a month, as they ripen indoors. But there will be no more juicy-ripe ones picked right off the vine. Until now Anna, the Keeper of the Tomato Patch, who feels strongly about that right-off-the-vine flavor, has forbidden the picking of any tomato less than fully ripe. I understand how she feels; I’m equally fussy about corn — we don’t go out to get it until the water’s on to boil, and if it’s been hanging around more than an hour off the stalk, I’d rather throw it to the chickens than eat it myself.
Don’s out in the woodlot, energized by the cool weather to get the last of the wood in. Yesterday we fired up the kitchen woodstove — it heated our water, warmed the house and boiled up 14 quarts of applesauce for the freezer. I canned 10 quarts of tomatoes yesterday too. The tomatoes were ours, but not the apples — our unsprayed apples failed again, as usual. (We got bushels of pears, though, which I canned.) There’s a farm on the other side of town that grows old-fashioned apples the way I should, with infinite care and only a little pesticide. They sprayed 4 times this year, the last time on June 19. Commercial IPM growers here spray 12-14 times a year; conventional orchards spray more than 20 times. I went over there Friday, picked up drops for applesauce (for free), and picked 3 pecks of eating apples off the trees. I go there not only for the low spray, but for the varieties — Ribston Pippin (my favorite), Cox Orange, Strawberry Chenango, Snow Apple, Jonathan, Northern Spy. When you’ve tasted those, you’ll never touch a Red Delicious again.
Don is back from Florida. Dave is back too and gone again. He picked up his things and headed back down there, where he thinks living and working will go better. We’re not surprised — Dave’s plainly a guy who’s still blowin’ in the wind — but all of us are disappointed. Don will miss a companion, and Anna and I had gotten a bit mothery, hoping we could help Dave settle down (he’s just a year out of drug treatment, and trying to put two full years into one job, so his father will let him come home and go into the family painting business.) He left owing us money, the first time that has happened in the 17-year history of the ever-changing population of Foundation Farm. Don in particular is really bummed out by that. It wasn’t much money, though, and I suspect Dave will do his best to pay us back.
Even if he doesn’t, I’m not sorry we took Dave in, and I’d do it again. He worked pretty hard while he was here, and, who knows, maybe our way of life and good food and good spirits did help him a little. After years of trying to pick and choose who comes to live here, I’ve relaxed and made a simple policy — we take who God sends. There’s a lesson for us in everyone who comes, everyone contributes, everyone gets something out of being here. And if I’m not doing the choosing, I don’t have to agonize over the results — or try to control them. Now if only I could apply that policy to the rest of my life!
Heather has turned Two since last I wrote, with balloons and pointy party hats with Big Bird on them, and a Sachertorte (at the request of her father) and candles and presents. The party wore the poor kid out before it was halfway over. She’s talking in sentences now, most of them in the imperative mode. “Come here, Basil!” “I want a glass of water!” “I wanna HAVE it!” Maybe these are the terrible twos, but they don’t seem bad to me. She’s still primarily a jolly, fearless being, singing, dancing, laughing, tearing things apart, the light of the household.
It’s a busy household these days. Anna has taken a part-time job running an low-income housing co-op,, and she’s also chairman of the board of an affordable housing trust, so she’s plunged back into community work again. (Her book is nearly finished in first draft form.) With winter coming on, Don has decided not to free-lance any more but to work with a painting firm that can get jobs indoors. He’s found a small company that seems like a good one — you can tell a good one by the fact that it pays for your time from when you leave your door instead of when you get to the job. In this area that can be as much as an hour each way.
Sylvia is working a few hours a day at a horse stable near here, and she has also gone into the T-shirt business. I enclose a sample of her T-shirt art at the end of this letter — in addition to the owl, she’s done horses, a moose, a wonderful Jersey cow jumping over the moon (the logo for her sister Binky’s farm), a dragon — and other designs are on the drawing board. We have hundreds of T-shirts in the house; Sylvia is madly folding and packaging them for craft fairs next weekend. The big craft fair and tourist season is about to begin. The Virginia creeper and sumac have turned red, and within a week trillions of leaves around here will transform the hills into sheer glory.
My nice, quiet, boring writing life has been disturbed by two weeks of high followed by two weeks of low — I can hardly wait to get back to equilibrium. The high came the weeks before and during the Balaton meeting in Hungary; the low came in the decompression afterward.
You longtime readers of this newsletter have heard about Balaton every year and probably still don’t understand it — I don’t understand it either. Factually it’s simple enough. It’s an annual meeting of people from all over the world who work on resource and environmental matters. Dennis and I and some Hungarian friends started it 7 years ago; Dennis and I still coordinate it. Every year we meet in a small resthouse on the shore of Lake Balaton in Hungary. We spend 5 days together, having lectures and working groups, playing volleyball and singing, showing each other slides and videotapes, discussing the state of the world and what we can do about it. This year there were about 60 people there, from 21 different countries.
Those are the facts, but they don’t explain the importance of Balaton — in my life and, I think, in the lives of nearly all who come to it. To me Balaton is magic, even when I’m not in the mood for it, even when I arrive exhausted, having worked too hard the week before.
The magic for me comes partially from the fact that many of the people who come are my best friends, people whose minds I deeply respect, and whose hearts and souls I simply love. I spend the entire meeting being in love. But something happens at Balaton meetings that infects even those who aren’t seeing treasured friends after a year apart. A newcomer this time, an Egyptian, said after just a few hours, before the meeting even officially began, “I’ve never been to a meeting like this! I feel like a caterpillar who’s turned into a butterfly!”
Well, I won’t try to explain how we all turn into butterflies for a week; I’d only get all mystical about the power of love, and the energy that comes from working on issues you really care about, and the intellectual stimulation of being with people who are informed and smart and committed. Every year I wonder if the Balaton magic can happen again. I do nothing to make it happen except get people together — and it happens.
I thought this year’s meeting was the best ever, maybe because it was the biggest. Nearly all our old friends were there, plus new ones from Egypt, the Philippines, New Zealand, Sweden, Peru, India. The topic of the morning sessions was a hot one — the greenhouse effect — and we had good lecturers. I got more thoroughly scared than I have ever been before about the effects of global warming, which is saying a lot, because I was already scared. But when Janos Hrabovszky started describing the probable effects of climate change on the agriculture of the Third World, I was seized with a new sense of urgency. Until that moment I had thought that hunger could really end — now I know that it can’t, unless the warming can be headed off.
Which it can — that’s the other message I got. I was especially impressed by Thomas Johanssen from Sweden and Wilfrid Bach from West Germany, both of whom have worked out detailed plans by which their countries can cut greenhouse emissions enormously. By 90%, says Wilfrid — Germany could reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 26 million tons a year just by putting a speed limit on the Autobahn. It would also save money and lives and reduce air pollution, and it could take effect overnight. Not all the measures will be that easy — but they will be a lot easier than enduring a global warming!
So I came out of the meeting appalled, encouraged, and fired up about the greenhouse effect. I won’t go into detail here — you will see more in my columns. There will be a lot of them on this subject. I don’t think there is a more important challenge to work on than this one.
It was also fascinating to be in the East just now. We had Hungarians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Russians, Soviet Georgians at the meeting, all excited, apprehensive, full of news, and fearful that this yeasty time may either get out of hand and tear their social order apart, or stop and go into reverse. Tiananmen Square is in their minds, and the massacre on the streets of Budapest in 1956. There have been yeasty times before. Their history offers them nothing but cynicism. But they are hopeful and excited anyway.
The Lithuanians brought videotapes of their freedom demonstrations, including the one where people made a chain across the Baltic countries (six people deep in Kaunas, where our friends were.) I happened in on a late-night session when the Lithuanians were playing the tapes and translating for the Russians — who were watching enthusiastically. There were many long, serious talks that week amongst the Easterners. They obligingly switched to English when I was around. For the moment they have no secrets. Many of the conversations moved me to shivers and tears for the courage of these people, and the ongoing grundginess of their lives, and the totally unpredictable world they are moving into.
You can’t buy soap in Moscow, but McDonalds is building 20 hamburger shops there (one wonders how they are going to keep them McDonalds-clean without soap.) The air pollution in Budapest is still depressing, but the Hungarians are actually tearing down the fences and watch towers and sand strips (to reveal footprints) on their border. I get choked up with the symbolism of that — who would have believed it possible? The Hungarians are also waiting, of course, for some reprisal from the East German government because of the hemorrhage of East Germans through Hungary to the West.
Our friends are able to talk about environmental abuses in public at last, and sometimes to stop them. But their countries are poor, so poor. Just as environmental truths are finally being revealed, so are truths about their bankrupt economies and their shoddy technologies. There is so much to do, and so little to work with — and, they fear, maybe not much time to work. One way or another, their new freedom could fall apart any minute.
Excitement, release, frustration, fear, and courage. That conversation was going on at Balaton. And so many more I can’t begin to capture them here. I spent the week the way I wish I could spend my life always — alert, open, loving, present in the moment, not planning or pushing or evading or controlling, but just BEING with the people and events around me. I had no doubt that I was where I should be, doing what I should do, and doing it with every ounce of my energy.
Well, imagine coming down from that peak, exhausted and jet-lagged, back to a book that’s behind schedule and that requires putting in lonely hours, back to a farm that needs harvesting, a pile of work generated by the Balaton meeting, a newspaper columns to get out, a dozen phone calls a day from people asking me in one way or another to solve their problems, and you’ll understand the post-Balaton blues. It took about a week for the high to wind down, but of course it did. What I have to do, I know, is just go on being as I was at Balaton, open, present, loving, not controlling, not anxious, certain that I’m doing exactly what I’m supposed to be doing. I know I will get back to that place again. I hope it will be soon.
Love, Dana
