Homecoming, White Pine

So, I haven't written anything here for quite some time -- about half a year. I originally revamped my blog mid-2010 as "On the Farm Road," anticipating being a hobo farmer for quite some time and hoping to document what I was learning on the way. But then my camera filled up with sand and stopped working, so I couldn't post pictures. And then I was too busy to write. And then I was coming up with more excuses why not to do it. In the end, it kind of fell apart. Which is fine. But things have changed quite a bit, and I feel a pull to come back to the "blogosphere." I'm hoping that what I have to say this time you will all find interesting, thought-provoking, inspiring, and useful. At the very least, if you keep reading, I promise to never use the word "blogosphere" again.

I'm back in Maine. I'm back in the house I grew up in, an old turn-of-the-century farmhouse a bit north of Portland in what's considered the "midcoast" ecoregion. And I'm starting a project.

This year is about roots. For the past few years I've been a bit of a bird-woman, flitting from place to place, staying for a few months and then migrating somewhere different. While this has satisfied (for the most part) my wanderlust and has taught me invaluable lessons, the one thing it couldn't give me is a sense of Home and Community (I capitalize these because I did experience home and community on the road, but my transient nature made me always feel a bit like a visitor. By capitalizing these terms I mean the more permanent kinds). So I decided to forgo the lure of nomadism for a year and set some roots down in the place where I already had them. As a recent writer for Permaculture Activist says:

I decided to move back to the town I grew up in. I've lived in rural and urban places that are beautiful, functional and magical. And yet, for me there's something about [the place] where the earth chose to put me when I was younger. There's power in that.

That power of home, combined with my increasingly strong desire to not work for anyone else (except Big Mama N, of course) and my incredible luck in having 37 acres of semi-rural land in the place where the earth put me when I was younger, has led me to take what I've learned these past few years about organic farming, permaculture, biodynamic agriculture, sustainability, and living in community and apply them in my own backyard. That is, I'm starting up the homestead.

So far this winter its been a lot of planning and clarifying what exactly my goals for this project are. And I'm going to use this blog (or perhaps a new one, I haven't decided yet) to chronicle how this thing unfolds, to share my visions, sources of inspiration, strategies, and actions -- in part for posterity, but largely to (hopefully) inspire others to similarly take their lives into their own hands. So stay tuned. In the meantime, here's a short poem I wrote inspired by my desire to appreciate my homestate of Maine more. Its about a white pine tree (very common in Maine, mostly due to its strong presence in areas that have been previously clearcut) that I watched through a window as it bent back and forth with the strong February winds we've been having.

White Pine

While I watch

you are busy

turning water

into wind,

soil to the sound

of secrets

shared among shifting

needles.

Upright, bristly,

an unjaded green

in an ocean of winter white.

Full and juicy,

lush in a sea of sparseness.

Yesterday there was a red-tailed hawk.

Today the moon is almost full.

The river is still covered in snow,

but the rain is coming.

You grow slow, white pine:

the rock of trees.

An anchor

held fast

to something fleeting,

held fast

to something within

turning water into wind,

turning water into wind.

We're not the only farmers in the garden...

So I've been reading a bit of Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan here on the farm. One of Pollan's main points is that while we humans arrogantly like to think of ourselves as in charge of the little plots of land we tend, in reality the plants have more of a say than we give them credit for. That is, he talks about the ways in which plants will "use" animals, such as humans, to carry their seeds for them far and wide, and will develop traits that those animals desire in order to be fruitful and multiply. To snag human help, for example, corn gets big and fat, fruit gets sweeter, etc., etc. In this sense, plants domesticate us similarly to the way we domesticate them. We are both subject and object when we play with our food.

In light of this, I've been thinking about the many ways that we are not in charge of our gardens, and one such project this week has illuminated this truism for me. In doing some aphid control on our sunflowers, it was revealed to me that we are in fact not the only farmers working in the fields. Aphids, as it turns out, are sometimes called "ant cows" because of the way some species of ants will farm them. These ants "milk" the aphids for the honeydew they produce by stroking them with their antennae. Some ants will even gather aphid eggs and store them over winter, then carry the newly hatched bugs back to the plants in the spring. The

y will fight off aphid predators, and queen ants will even carry aphid eggs with them when starting a new colony, in much the way that Europeans carried prized seeds with them when colonizing the Americas.

This to me is absolutely fascinating. I was so captivated by this process that I took time to snap a few pictures while I was pruning the more infested sunflower leaves from our house garden. Check it out:

Those little green bugs you see are the aphids. The top picture is one of my faves because you can see the "milking" in action. So cool! Also, the other bug you see in the top-left of the second picture is a young ladybug. If you have aphids in your garden, ladybugs are your best friends. Unlike the ants which are the farmers in this food web, ladybugs are the hunters. When they feed on the aphids, they kill them (the ants don't kill when they suck the honeydew), so they help get these "pests" out of your garden before they suck the juices out of all your plants and deposit toxic saliva all over them. Here's a nice close-up of one of these young ladies:

Some lessons to take from all this: While we think of farming as something peculiarly human, something that sets us apart from the "less evolved" creations, it is in actuality an act shared with a creature as small and "simple" as an ant (and likely countless others, if we took the time to notice). Yet another example of how we ain't so special after all.

Second, as an aside, is the question of "good" or "bad" creatures in the garden. We tend to think of corn as good and pigweed as bad, ladybugs as good and aphids as bad. But its all a matter of perspective. Ladybugs, after all, are not very good for aphids, and aphids are wonderful for ants and ladybugs. And in the case of weeds it becomes even more blurry. Pigweed is in fact edible (its a form of wild amaranth), but we pull it out without hesitating because we prefer the taste of cultivated veggies. Neither are good or bad. They're just plants.

Third, and perhaps most important, is that when we plant a garden, it really isn't our garden. We may be planting the seeds and encouraging some plants to grow while killing others, but really we are just assisting in the creation of an ecosystem that quickly leaves our control (Pollan might argue that even planting the seeds is out of our control -- we are merely being manipulated by various species of plants who wish to be propagated). On the underside of each sunflower leaf that I plucked was an entire food web, consisting of aphids in all stages of life, ladybugs in various stages as well, and hungry ants working just as hard as we are to keep a steady food supply. This is as much their farm as it is ours. Its really quite humbling.

Of course, recognizing that we all equally own -- or equally do not own -- this plot of land isn't gonna keep me from sending those ants and aphids packing. Girl's gotta eat, after all.

Desert Solitaire

So, its been a long time since I have been very inspired to write, let alone write a blog. But more and more I've been feeling the need to document what's been going on inside and outside of me, and so I've decided to revamp my blog and start writing again. So welcome to the Farm Road -- a road I'm happy to share with anyone who cares to walk with me a while.

Quite a bit has happened since my last post, and I won't attempt to share all of it. Currently I'm WWOOFing at a glorious little farm in Southern Utah called the Red House Farm, and I anticipate most of my writing in the coming months will also reside in wonderful Boulder Town. But for now, I'd like to share a bit of writing I did while hitchhiking here a few weeks ago. To set the scene: I left Heart's Desire Homestead in California on a sunny Sunday afternoon, and departed on a week-and-a-half long hitching trip across Nevada and Utah, taking mostly Highway 50 -- "the loneliest road in America." Here is a peak at what transpired during this journey:

6.25.10

I feel compelled this morning to try and share some of the magic of hitchhiking, the magic of solitary travel, and the magic of the desert.

I've been on the road since last Sunday, when I left Redwood Valley, the beautiful wonderful place I called home for the past half-year or so. I'd been stationary for so long that I was pretty nervous venturing out into the great unknown, but I got my road legs back real fast and have been riding that high ever since. There are many stories, big and small, packed into the past seven days, and to try and tell them all with whatever energy and time I have now would do them a disservice. Instead, I'll offer up an brief sketch of how the road has unfolded behind me.

Day 1: hitched from Redwood Valley to Nevada City, CA in three rides. David, the self-described vinyl hustler, with his two kids heading down to Fresno to visit gramma. Brandon, freshly moved to Colusa to become an apprentice of sorts to the DA ("there are a lot of crazies out here," he says, and he punctuates the conversation frequently by jokingly calling me one of them). Finally, Tom, a 66 year-old retired drawbridge operator out for a solo drive on father's day. Beautiful people, all of them, who went out of their way to get me further down the road then they had originally planned on going. I arrive in Nevada City around 4:00 to the sounds of a hundred women speeding down Broad St on bicycles, and meet up with Juniper, who takes me back to the homebase of the Living Lands Agrarian Network -- an awesome farm project that installs gardens in people's backyards, where she's been working for the past few months. Turns out that Ed Buryn is the owner of the land (!), author of Vagabonding in America (sweet travel book he wrote back in the 60s). I get to meet him and he gives me a big hug when he hears that I read his book. :)

I spend the next few days living and helping out at Living Lands, exploring Nevada City and celebrating Solstice by scrambling naked around the wild Yuba River. After my time there was up, I head to Lake Tahoe. One of the more bizarre landscapes I've been to -- the only place i've been where you can sit on a sandy beach 6000 miles above sea level under the watchful eyes of snow-covered mountain peaks. Walking along the beach I find a coupon for a free psychic reading, which I of course take full advanatge of when I head back into town, where Tanya the psychic tells me (among other things) that I'm due to wander for another 4 years, at which point I will settle in the desert. Hmmm...

So desert it is, after a brief stop at a bluegrass festival filled with banjos and fiddles and too much whiskey, I head down the east side of the Sierra Nevada into the hot desert sun. In the interest of time, I won't bore you with the details of this leg of the journey, other than to tell you about my adventures in Fallon last night. I had originally intended to make it all the way to Middlegate, recommended to me by my fellow vagabonder Skippy. But plans changed, as plans are wont to do, when I was picked up in Silver Springs by a young man named John in white '68 Chevy truck, one of the loudest vehicles I've ever been inside. We chat for a bit and get along nice, so he asks if I want to join him and his friends down at the river for some beers. I, of course, accept his offer.

I don't drink that much, since I'm still recovering from the whiskey the night before, but its great fun to watch these folks get progressively more sloppy. I kick Sarah's butt at air hockey, and lose miserably at pool, but my favorite game of the night was the jukebox. The 90s rock, CCR ("best band of all time," says John), and Tracy Chapman were some crowd pleasers.

After taking a whirl through the Jack In the Box drivethru (again, John pays for my mozzarella sticks like a true gentleman), they decide its a good idea to hit up the other bar in town. Bad idea. Sarah's ex-boyfriend is there, and we're not in the bar for more than 5 minutes when he comes barreling down at Ernie and tries to sucker punch him while he isn't looking. Chaos ensues, but the fight is a relatively harmless one -- nobody bleeds or gets bruised, but we do get kicked out of the bar pretty fast. The night is officially over.

I head back to the hotel room that John was nice enough to get for me and I sleep on a real bed for the first time in a long time.

6.26.10 -- Fallon, NV

The wheel of my suitcase chirps incessantly as I walk through the front of the Safeway grocery store. People stop and stare as I squeak past the checkout lanes. I smile and nod, meet their eyes. A few return the gesture of kindness, others look away quickly. Behind my smile, I'm a bit worried about the wheel. My mobility, given the inordinate amount of STUFF I have, depends in large part on my ability to pull this schoolbus yellow plastic box behind me. Granted, I haven't had to walk much -- being a woman hitchhiking gets me more rides than I could possibly need, and knowing the tips and tricks of a successful hitch (where to stand, what sign to hold, etc.) ensures that I can hang out in one spot and be guaranteed a ride within the hour.

Today might be different, though. I stayed last night at the Super 8 motel, courtesy of my last ride, John, and its at least a mile to the edge of town. Hitching in the midst of intersections and traffic lights can be tricky. I'll try it, but I prepare myself for the half-hour-plus walk under the high noon desert sun just in case.

My relationship with food has been an odd one these past days. I've not eaten a proper meal once in that time, instead consuming the random chunk of bread and fistful of grapes; whatever I happen to have in my food bag lovingly purchased with stamps while in Nevada City, CA. Thinking I need sustenance, I buy a mess of a Safeway "sandwich" that now sits half-eaten in front of me, its innards spilling out onto the oily wrapper like roadkill freshly hit. I can't imagine eating the rest of it -- but why not? All logic says I should be starving. Pure nerves and adrenaline, I muse, must be what I'm running on. I try to force a few more bites down -- this think won't travel well and I spent $5 of my food stamps on it. Can't let it go to waste.

I linger in the Safeway, basking in the artificial cool of civilization, not wanting to face the heat of the day. I imagine business here booms in the summer months, as heat-dazed consumers linger in each aisle, every moment spent pondering which kind of bottled water to buy meaning one less moment bathing in sweat.

----

This sums up only about half of my southwestern hitching adventure, and there's lots I'd like to share about what transpired after that. But that's for another day, my friends. For now, suffice it to say I survived the loneliest road and made it safe and sound to Southern Utah, probably one of the most beautiful places I've ever been. Rest assured, I've fallen in love with this little community and will be expressing that love through writing very soon. Until then...

Have a Good Everything,
S

Live Oak Grove

You are old men,
pointing with crooked fingers,
telling long stories.
Wispy beards
pointing down
to heaven.

How often
i am told to not pay you
any mind,
Grandpa.

that strange little house in dragonwood

You will wander up to an abandoned house, small with odd angles and chipped-off paint. Approach cautiously. Yell hello? Nothing. Sneak quietly around the back. You will find a small door with a padlock. Another building off to the side, rectangular with two more doors, side-by-side with similar locks. You step carefully onto the creaking porch, testing a patch slightly darker than the rest, littered with miniscule oak leaves. The old wood will bend under your foot like a tall tree in the wind, and you will step back and find a safer route.

Continue. There is one small, fogged-up window, but keep going. Another follows, clear and large with an open shutter, inviting investigation. You peer inside and see a large plastic child's pool, inflatable and still inflated. Then, a pile of rope, some illegible publication draped over the edge of a small table. Then one long yellow piece of fly paper, mottled with insects. It is as if this place sits waiting for its owners to return. The pool is ready to be inhabited by both water and child, and the flies are carefully preserved for the caretaker to dispose of. The porch groans in anticipation.

A Midas of Sorts

I read somewhere once that over the course of human existence, we as a species have significantly and single-handedly altered the landscape of the entire planet. That there are very few spots, save the ocean floor, that are without some evidence of the human touch. I am thinking about this as I near the summit of the mountain, and when I poke my head above the tree line my first instinct is to dismiss such an extremist notion. Just look at all these trees, these rolling hills, these jagged rock faces, this horizon! I think, for a moment, that its a bit arrogant to consider the entire earth as reshaped by our existence. Look how much has been left untouched! Look at what we hasn't been subdued under our axes and plows and bulldozers! Lets be grateful!

And we should be, of course. We should thank our lucky stars that the valley isn't a dust bowl at this point. But nonetheless, as the minutes pass, I can see and hear humanity coming back into focus. Kind of like when you first turn off your bedroom light -- at first its pitch black but then gradually you start to see the outlines of furniture. But instead of bureaus and bookshelves, its roads carved into the new-growth trees, hacking up the forest like a farmer butchers an animal. The constant whirr of wheel on road drowning out the whoosh of leaves on wind. The graffiti vandalizing the cliffs, leaving permanent records of stoned-out teenagers partying stupidly close to the edge. "Dude, where's the beer?" "Smoke up! 6-28-95" "Haj hearts Jamie" "Can I feel your twat?"

(A modern day Lascaux. I wonder, despite the importance we confer on them, those famous stylized horses were equally trivial and frattish. Or maybe I'm diminishing the significance of these latest paintings and twenty thousand years from now arhcaeologists will discover these remains of a culture obsessed with sex, love and drugs and will use them to make theories about our relative intelligence.)

So I take back my original skepticism. Of course we have reshaped the landscape. In fact, we can no longer escape ourselves. Everything we touch is left with the residue of humanity, for better or for worse, and we have our hands in all manner of pots. Since we've chosen to to play the role of mini-gods, however, continually remaking the world in our image, maybe we should think twice before touching. Economist William Nordhaus once famously recommended minimal action on the problem of climate change, since the only sectors that would be noticeably affected were farming and forestry which contributed little to GNP. In the meantime, we have constructed a landscape divorced enough from the natural world, in which we can effectively produce our own climates (shopping malls, office buldings, etc.). So no need to worry. Touch all you want.

Bill McKibben, though, responds with a warning ominously reminiscent of greek mythology. "Well, its true that not many of us make our living as farmers anymore," he writes, "But its also true that, first thing in the morning, before we go to work in the software design cubicle, most of us prefer to eat breakfast." In other words, even if we think we've got the gift of transforming dirt and grease and blood into something precious, we should be mindful of the ways this is simultaneously a curse. I read somewhere once about a guy who thought he was King Shit for having this power, until he touched his dinner. You can't eat gold, he quickly discovered.

Do you feel full?

I found this on a metafilter page in which someone -- presumably considering quitting grad school -- was asking others about the reasons they quit and whether they ever regretted it. I thought it was pretty smart, so I decided to repost it:


"MasonDixon writes:

I am completely serious: Do you feel full? You know deep down if you are full or not.

When people ask me why I quit I I tell them: "I was full so I got up from the table and quit eating," and that is what it felt like to me.

The prospect of cigars in the parlor with those who finished dinner was not a strong enough lure to keep me sitting there stuffing my gob --even though the food was fine. I said, "Thank you, Good Night and Goodbye."

I decided that if I want to learn more about "X", I'll do my own snacking later. I have yet to have any regrets about it."


I'm starting to full pretty full myself, but it varies. Some days I feel incredibly hungry and love every piece of food I put in my mouth. The next day it all tastes like dog food and it makes me nauseous. An apt metaphor, since I've recently started studying the sociology of food. I'll keep y'all posted on my unfolding quarter-century crisis.