Life & Death

The weather forecast predicted a stretch of good weather this week and sure enough the guy that hays our fields showed up. His cutter, which is a set of chains that flail the grass and consequently the ground, was set to cut shorter than previous years. This makes the predatory birds happy as it devastates the mice population by beating the ground where they make their nests, turning the slower moving rodents and babies into mincemeat.

Fields are habitat to a surprising array of birds, animals and insects. When the grass gets taken, so does the food and homes of this sector of wildlife. The average dairy consumer has no reason to make this realization, and having watched birds of prey descend within minutes of the grass being cut, I have accepted this fact, while not really giving much thought to it, knowing I would be hard pressed to give up milk and cream for my coffee if the cows didn’t get fed.

Two days ago, out of curiosity I decided to walk through our fields and take a look at how the ground faired after such a mechanized beating. It was dry and its grassy hair was shorn as close as a rookie marines heading for boot camp.

I almost missed it, but as I took a step, I saw the tiniest furry thing curled up like a shrimp in a cocktail glass. It wasn’t moving and was nestled down in one of the many tiny network of trails made in the fields understory of moss and dead grass. These well-trodden pathways become slightly depressed with the padding of many tiny mouse feet, and this is what saved this baby mouse from being pulverized. It had been low enough to escape the chains passing overhead. Mom and dad were nowhere to be found which means they were quicker than many, or quite possibly maimed or disoriented. Upon closer inspection I found one other baby equally curled up in a wad of dried moss, the remnants of a nest.

This my friends is when I channeled Mother Teresa, or the Y-chromosomes in my genetic makeup took control and my maternal instincts came to the fore. With no thought to the absurdity of it, I gathered up the two furry mouse pups determined that I would rescue them from starvation, or becoming hors d’oeuvres for the next crow, raven, hawk, eagle, owl or turkey vulture that spied them from above.

I say absurd because I have mouse traps throughout the basement and have no qualms about offing the little buggers while lying in bed late at night listening to them scurry around in the walls. But this was different. These little guys were totally exposed and defenseless. They’re eyes weren’t even open yet and they were just lying there in the hot sun. I mean come on, could you leave them there!?

So I gathered up my little charges and became their surrogate mother for two days. Without Googling “caring for abandoned baby mice” I went on instinct and created a mixture of milk, cream (fat protein), and a little sugar which I administered in a makeshift syringe out of a little plastic bottle with a fine needle like tube attachment. I use it to apply fine lines of slip on my ceramic work and it was the only thing I could come up with on short notice.

Every two hours I would try to get them to nurse, heating the milky concoction and testing it’s hot or coldness on my inner wrist like a well seasoned mom. I could never tell if their increased flailing was due to excitement over getting nourished, or I was drowning them and they were gasping for breath. I don’t think it was the latter, but after two days of intermittent care, they died.

I have since Googled and learned that it takes nearly non-stop weaning to impersonate a mother mouse, but it doesn’t assuage the loss of a bond formed in so short a time with two furry orphans. Their plight offered me the chance to leave the preoccupation with my daily thoughts, and by doing so those tiny creatures gave me a powerful gift, and the reminder that when you give of yourself, you get so much more in return.

Grass

AS PROMISED, a post about grass, and the many ways it has become a presence in my life.
Every aspect of the relationship I have with grass I like. It is the perennial guarantee that warmer weather is coming. If the grass doesn’t come, I’ll be sure to pack my bags in preparation for Armageddon, because something is seriously screwed up. It’s constancy in a world that has very little, is a comfort, and a reminder of the forces of nature operating on a level that continually awes me.
In late April/early May the field grass can increase its height two to three feet in a week. It hardens off in July, and if the farmer up the road doesn’t get the first cutting, which he didn’t due to our dismal precursor to summer, the grass will reach a height of nearly five feet.

In the wind this mass populous of stalks with fuzzy heads all randomly flow to the direction of the wind like rolling water on the sea. And when it’s still, the dark green fir trees provide a contrasting backdrop to the soft, verdant yellow-green horizontal line of a million stalks of grass. I feel protected and cloistered by these chest-high, upright sentinels.
On the morning constitutional dog walk, if the sun is out you begin to notice these micro-climates, where tiny clouds form and rise as the moisture from the dew evaporates. Exactly the same cloud generating system as the earth at large, but on a miniscule level.

The grass eventually go to seed, which releases a micro-fine powder of pollen that explodes from each head in miniature plumes. At this point in time the grass is about 4 feet high, and when the dogs run through it, all you see is the occasional upright tail and a plume of pollen flowing behind, much like an expanding vapor trail left by a jet at high altitude. It just keeps spreading, and sends an alergetic person fleeing for the nearest Kleenex box.

Big Grass
The field grass we leave for the dairy farmer to cut and bale for cow food (see the archives for a detailed description of putting up hay). He has big equipment designed for just this purpose. I on the other hand have a hefty, but “weenie” by comparison riding lawn mower as witnessed in these side by side photos.

 I admit to experiencing a happy little bubble of “farmerness” when tooling along harvesting my “crop”. But when Harold is cutting the adjacent piece, and we’re side by side at the fence line racing for the far end of the field, well...

Little Grass
Environmentally, the only way I can justify mowing an acre and a half of grass is to see it as a crop that has some useful purpose. Fortunately it provides that in the form of a smothering mulch that helps a great deal in beating back the weeds in the garden. We don’t use any chemicals on our land and thus, weed control is really an oxymoron around here. The general look of the place is tres “shaggy”, and when the big grass is high, a more apt description would be Serangetti like.
For some men, driving a lawn mower with precision and efficiency brings a sense of purpose and a feeling of accomplishment. Fruits of your labor and all that. Men have been known to go over the edge in a compulsive quest for the perfectly manicured lawn.
Not to take it too far, but in a world of chaos, focusing on the task of creating orderly swaths on a riding mower removes one from the dross of everyday life and offers, if only for a short while, the possibly of attaining a Zen state of meditative bliss that rivals years of monkish devotion.

Whack Job

Let’s just say that you’ve got a 500 ft fence line that needs tidying up. You’d want a tool that was up to the task wouldn’t you? Now let’s say you’re a sick and perverted industrial designer working for whatever fucked up company makes the WeedWacker. You can tell I’m warming up to a serious rant can’t you? This person needs to die by the device he or she so cruelly devised.
Let me share the step by step torture one goes through when using – correction – when trying to use the… god! I can’t even speak the name of this P.O.S. from HELL! OK, I’m better now... where was I?
It has an engine. A smelly little 2 stroke that burns a gas/oil mixture, which no matter how carefully you mix the petrol cocktail, the tiny beast smokes like a chimney and emits enough exhaust to permeate your clothing so you carry the memory of your misfortune around for days.
Now, if you’ve ever used a weed trimmer you know that the head, which is a spinning spool containing the cutting filament, determines the difference between getting the job done, and homicidal behavior. How can this part, this one piece, insite such irrational and destructive thoughts? It could only have been designed by a person abused as a child, or perhaps Satan seeking revenge on those that for God knows what reason, feel the need to tidy up. I prefer the wilder side of our property, but mowing (another post to come) and trimming, give one the illusion of control.
Once you’ve got the thing fired up and spinning one proceeds to the inevitable “whacking” of grassy things. There is a 3 minute span of time where the novice whacker experiences the bliss of whirling and flying grass particles hitting them in the face… and then the line snaps off. “A gentle tap of the head will release the necessary length of line for continued cutting”, says the manual. Tap… tap, tap… tap, tap, tap… whack! You now begin to see Grasshopper, the wisdom and true meaning held within the word whack. It is not the weed that is whacked… but yourself.
But one doesn’t truly perceive the twisted (literally) demonic design of the head unit until one tries to free the tangled filament mess contained within and set the proper length of line. Too short and you don’t cut anything. Too long and the line wraps around the wand, choking the motor off as if it were being hanged by the neck. Hummmm?
A patient man endures this, and finds work-arounds to each hindrance along the way to tidiness. I had been that man, until the day when it was not the line that snapped, but my brain.
The hay farmer was coming that morning so I headed out to knock down the tall field grass around the gate so he could drive in more easily. I knew what was coming – fumes, endless futzing. What I didn’t know was the ultimate torture so cleverly built into this murderous machine was yet to come.
Within minutes of gnawing into the thick grass the head fell to pieces launching filament, plastic, and more importantly the main spring that makes the whole shebang work. The next thing I knew I was spinning in a circle like an Olympic shot putter launching that sorry piece of spent plastic and metal out into the field in a beautiful slow motion arc.
After rolling around in the grass in hysterics for a few minutes I regained my composure, retrieved the WeedWhacker and headed for the shed all the while thinking I would light it on fire a la Jimi Hendrix and his guitar. It has since been relegated to a dusty corner of the shed as I could never give it to the Goodwill or put it in a garage sale and inflict that kind of pain on another human being. I believe in yard karma.
I am now the proud owner of a Stihl FS 90 R. And as much as anyone can find enjoyment from tools with small engines attached to them, this has been the antidote to the misery endured for way too long. I still get kind of twitchy when it’s time to do some whacking though. I guess some diseases you never fully recover from.

Departure & Arrival

Dear readers whoever you may be out there – this post is a departure from prior posts in that it is not written to entertain, as I will confess most of the previous posts attempt to do. I’ve never checked my statistics, and have no idea how many or who is reading my drivel, but I imagine, and always hope it is someone that hasn’t had the unique pleasure of rural life.
But tonight, as my wife and dogs are softly snoring, I am thinking about my mother-in-law who passed away not long ago. We had a celebration this last Sunday which was attended by nearly 100 people that Barbara Skinner had touched the lives of in some way.
She was the first librarian in what was then the new McBeath Community Library in Everson Washington. It’s just off the main drag of a small, mostly agricultural farm town. She served for eighteen years.
She, like many living in this area, was a transplant from more citified locales. She knew as much about living amidst the “upper crust” as she did about the intimate experience of birthing a baby lamb and the 4-H crowd. A terrific conversationalist, she could hold forth at a cocktail party and in the morning make beef tongue sandwiches for the kid's school lunch; a culinary experience I’m happy to have avoided. I don’t eat anything that could potentially talk back!
Many a night after dinner plates were cleared and the 2nd, 3rd, (4th?) espresso was consumed, she and I would sit and talk way past midnight while everyone else in the house was asleep. Those are the memories I will hold of a woman that showed me what wit, compassion, and a sharp mind can do.
If death is just a passage to another plain of existence, then I hope she and I can share the equivalent of a good gin & tonic and continue our conversation.
Onward Barb.

27,000 Cuts

That’s how many times I squeeze my Felco shears to snip off all the suckers and watersprouts from the 21 fruit trees we have on our property. That doesn’t include the various other trees and bushes that get shorn at this time of year, but don’t tell my elbow about that, because it’s barely recovered from the last two weekend’s arboreal activities. As a consolation, I’ve got a really good grip to shake a hand with, or grab the occasional errant chicken.
The plum trees are the first to bud out so they get pruned first. They’re lower to the ground but the forest of long narrow spires is still daunting enough to momentarily stop me in my tracks. It’s the kind of grand task you have to think about as a bunch of smaller tasks, or you could never get started. Actually, the less you think about it the better–just start cutting.
The original owners of this land built the barn in 1943, and we think the trees were planted near that time. Consequently we have mature trees which require a small fleet of ladders of varying heights, and compared to the younger or dwarf fruit trees that everyone but us seem to have around here, they are scary monsters that loom ominously looking like Fangorn Forest in The Lord of the Rings. They’re gnarly and bent, their huge arching branches shaped long ago for efficient harvesting. They’re cantankerous crusty old souls, and we’ll never cut them down. As I become an older soul myself, I choose to let the wind and gravity take them before I’d replace them with their mutant little cousins.
And I’ll continue to provide seasonal amusement to the passing neighbors as they often see me climbing onto the branch of a tree to get those last hard to reach suckers. Before we were gifted an orchard ladder, which is truly a thing of beauty and elegantly designed, I spent more time in the trees than on the ground.
But here’s the irony in all this. The purpose of pruning is to maximize fruit production by steering the energy and nutrients held within the rising sap toward the branches that produce the fruit, and not feed a bunch of hungry suckers. Every spring when the last tree is pruned I stand back and realize we will never come close to consuming the fruit we so thoroughly strive to increase the volume of.
We were bequeathed an antique cider press by our neighbors when they moved to Montana. As we were saying our good-byes in the driveway, “If we never see another apple or apple tree again, it will be too soon”, is what they said. They had over 100 trees and were done with all this apple nonsense. Our last parting gesture was to shake hands and I noted he had a really good grip.

Seasons

Spring is coming, and the first naive crocuses have emerged. You’d think they’d have learned that in late February or early March winter more often than not returns to smack them upside their little white heads and say, “hey, not so fast!” But spring will come, the Alders will turn pink with new growth, the rivers will flood with snow melt from the mountains, everything will become verdant and grow as if this was the only moment in time to do so.
But at this moment, I’m not feeling as inspired by the constancy of the seasons. Last year was a rather barren one from a fruit bearing perspective. The orchard trees which normally produce more apples, pears, plums and cherries than we could ever consume, bore no fruit to speak of, the garden struggled, and it’s indestructible forest of kale was decimated.
Time passes and we hope for the best, but the unknowable origin of these forces of nature acts as a calling card to reflect on our significance, or lack thereof as some believe. The slow transformation of mountain and tree to particles of soil offers a contrast to our hasty routines of work and play, and the consuming thoughts of how we relate to the foibles of human existence, which by comparison is very, very… short.
As I hope for more bounty this year, if it comes there will be much to do. Most of it is physical and hard work, but on a visceral level it has opened me to the rhythm and pace, the interdependancies of the forces of nature.
We all draw our own conclusions as to the how’s and why’s of our existance.

Party Worms

Does anyone else have worms that come out at night and party in their grass? My house in West Seattle had no yard to speak of, and what there was of it never saw the blade of a mower pass over it once. Bad mowing karma, which is another story to be shared once the grass starts growing up here.
On the nightly dog walk around the property I wear a head lamp during the dark of winter. It helps to avoid things like pine trees, doggie residue, and the side of the barn. We headed out across the mown section of “lawn” and I thought, “we must have had a lot of twigs blown off from that last wind storm”. As my light shown on the ground, before me were hundreds and hundreds of worms. Big fat nightcrawlers and short skinny ones, but all incredibly fast as they could disappear back into the soggy ground faster than my boot could unintentionally squish them.
My theory is that they hold their breath when the ground is frozen, and when we get these intermitent warm spells and the ground thaws, they all bolt to the surface gasping for air. Since they ended up in the same place high-fiving each other, why not smoke cigarettes, drink, and party into the night.
Worms are our friends as every gardener knows, but this falls into the creepy beyond belief category and I wish they’d take their party elsewhere.
Sorry, no pictures.

Chicken Tractors

We don’t have cable TV by choice, so when a red Netflix envelope shows up in the mailbox, it’s a happy moment. A particular DVD snuck into the queue a while ago that’s pretty obscure even for Netflix. Poly-Phase Farming – definitely five stars if you’re looking to make the most of your hogs, cattle, rabbits, and yes chickens.
The basic concept is that all your livestock does double duty on their way to whatever consumable they become (burger, cutlets, pork chops, split breast fryers). I’ll focus on chickens as an example as I’ve formed a somewhat intimate love/hate relationship with this bevy of Barred Rock cluckers.
The entertainment value of our chickens has become the only reason we have them around any longer. The eggs they lay are truly wonderful, and nothing like the perfectly antiseptic white units with anemic pale yokes and silk screened date stamps available at most grocery stores. But they’ve long since stopped producing enough daily eggs to make a decent omelet, even though we’ve learned all the tricks to fool them into increased production. And while I’ve thought about pinning a picture of a stew pot full of chicken cacciatore to the wall of their hen house as incentive to lay, I have no intention of butchering them. So forget about Return On Investment–organic feed & corn is expensive, but the wild birds and rats seem to love it, so why not feed the chickens too. No, they fall into the category of pets, but the fun of it is dwindling. It’s a matter of containment.
Free Range sounds so healthy and well, freeing. I can see them clucking away a la Julie Andrews to the tune of The Hills are Alive with the Sound of Music. And on a “range” this would be fine, but around the house, the patio, the patio furniture, the porch you’ll find chicken shit everywhere and on everything. Not to mention their draconian way of clawing through garden and flower bed with devastating results. There’s so much chicken wire surrounding our planted areas it looks like the front line at the battle of Normandy.
Flash back to the movie. I was just beginning to doze off watching a very industrious farmer mucking about in his hog pen, when I heard the words chicken & tractor used in the same sentence – as if they belonged together! Given the poultry plagued picture I just drew, you can imagine how ears perked up, eyes re-focused, and I started paying attention to this wacko idea, or so it seemed.
Get this. Build yourself (OK not you, me) a low, moderately sized, bottomless chicken coop. Slap some bicycle wheels on one end, and Bingo was his name O, you have yourself a Chicken Tractor. Drag that thing out into your pasture, wrestle your chickens into it, and after they’ve grazed for a couple of days on a salad bar of sweet grass and clover, you lift up one end and wheel them to the next patch of grass. The chickens get fed, you cut down on feed costs, and the field gets fertilized. Brilliant!
There’s a delicate balance of labor to value in getting entertainment and omelets, but if this contraption works without too much maintenance, it could be the answer to our, and our chicken’s prayers.

Wood

The nurse in the ER said, “oh yes, we see these all the time” as she injected me with whatever drug it is that makes pain go away. As she proceeded to wash out the minute debris from the one inch nick in my kneecap, I realized my own personal little trauma was something many a careless woodsman experiences. In fact, anyone that has truly earned the title of “Woodsman” would never make the mistake of stepping on a slippery log while the bar of the chainsaw (that’s the business end) was anywhere near their legs, especially when the chain is spinning. That was over ten years ago, and I still carry the scar. I’m always mindful of it, even though I wear double layered Carhart’s and am much more present when working in the woods. But I'm a long way from the Woodsman title, and hope I never lose a healthy respect for the latent dangers of cutting wood.

The guy that replaced our roof used to be a logger. He gave me tips that will probably save my life one day. Scary, gory stories that are exactly the kind of education a novice woodchuck needs to hear before they march off into the forest and get themselves killed. An 80 ft tree, a deciduous 80 ft tree is an amazing structure that unlike pine or fir, which are mostly straight trunks, bends and turns and branches as it grows toward the sun. The art of felling a large tree in the direction you want is an exercise in physics that comes from a mixture of experience and common sense. Speaking of… you need to look up every now and again. “Widowmakers” are what they call broken branches hung up higher in a tree waiting to come loose either by wind or the shaking of a tree as it’s being cut. You don’t just walk up to a tree and start sawing or you could end up skewered.

I cut mostly alder as it grows like weeds around the foothills of the Cascades, and burns pretty clean as firewood goes. I try to take trees that are dying or partially blown over by the wind because they too are living things, many older than myself. So when the deed is done and the tree is down, I take a moment and thank the tree for giving its energy to heat my house and barn. I put my hands on the trunk and look closely at the scars and knots that tell a story of it’s aging. I get reflective and feel like I’m looking into a mirror.

I really enjoy this work, and believe somewhere in my genetic code there is woodchuck. It’s almost time to start the process again: felling, limbing, cutting, bucking, hauling, splitting, stacking. Firewood needs time to dry, and I bring in three cords of wood so I better get this on the calendar. It’s hard work, and the workout I get is so much more enjoyable than sweating in some athletic club. A cord of wood for you factoids is 128 cubic feet or 4’w x 4’h x 8’ long, which conveniently is exactly the inner dimension of the funky trailer I bought from a departing college student for $30 bucks.

Who knows how long I can keep this up. I'm in better shape than many men my age, but some form of decrepitude is inevitable, and I have mentioned that condo in the city once or twice. But there's an interum step that I think has real potential. You've heard of these retreats offered to corporate manager types where they remove themselves from the verticals and horizontals of office space and head for the woods to "shift their paradigms". What better way too think outside the box and achieve zen mind than stacking wood, or the focus one can gain by splitting a piece of wood right down the middle over and over again. This my friends is a goldmine in the making, as the opportunities to exchange money for sweat are endless. Thank you Tom Sawyer.

Plowing Competition

We've got about a month and a half before the draft horse plowing match occurs. The ground has softened and the top dressing laid last fall has produced a perfect grassy carpet for the days event. An event that is nearly silent.

Fifteen teams, two tons each give or take, turning a flat green field into row after row of tilled earth. Taking it in as a whole, I felt as if I was witness to a sacred ritual that begged a reverential demeanor as I approached. Moving closer, sounds were muffled to a whisper as the newly exposed soil softened every step of horse and sliding plow, leaving only the faint rattle of tack and the quiet clicks and whistles that are the language of encouragement coming from the plowman.

Man (or woman) and horse are bound to each other by more than leather reins. And as with most things, getting started is the hardest. But once the line is struck and all parts are moving, there are three minds working as one in a powerfully focused endeavor to carve the straightest furrow possible. A crescent wrench in the hip or back pocket is mandatory bling at this dance in the dirt. But the horses are the show, no mistake, and they know it. Ribbons are entwined with well combed mains and tails, and the shine on the harness setups is perfect.

A plow blade is designed to slice through the top grass and lay the soil to the side. I was mesmerized by the fluidity of the dirt as it curled up like a shore break at a good surf beach, and broke upon the previous row like a chocolate layer cake with green frosting. And as the remaining strip of grass gets thinner and thinner, those horses place each hoof, which are as big as pie tins, exactly where they should to not disturb the perfect rows of tilled earth.

Nostalgia aside for the moment, imagine how many hundreds of miles a farmer of the day would have plowed in his lifetime. And not this pristine river bottom stuff, but ground full of rocks and boulders clanging against the blade and throwing it easily off course.

There is no going back; we know this. As much as nostalgia pulls at our hearts, technology and the hunger of a growing nation pushed the horse drawn plow into the realm of all handcrafted things. And plowing a field with a team of draft horses most assuredly is created by hand and hooves, the intimacy and knowledge gained in the doing of the task now known only because of plowing competitions like this one. Although I passed through Pennsylvania Amish country a couple of years back, and they were driving teams of six horses.

Honey, Have You Seen the Mailbox?

It was just beyond twilight as I headed out to get the mail. I usually walk across the street around noon which is when the mail gal usually comes, but I got busy and put it off. She must be dyslexic or the auto-sorter at the post office is, because we are forever getting mail with the numerals transposed. I walk down the road and swap mail during daylight hours which is the only time you want to be walking on our road. We’re situated on the only long straight-away of what is mostly a pretty curvy road. People just floor it, and I’ve seen young speedsters in small souped up cars passing one another at 60 plus miles an hour, and even a few 18 wheelers blasting down our little two lane road. The same road our dog got hit on, so I’m careful not to be added to the frequent batch of road kill from the evening drag races.
After looking both ways as good mothers everywhere advise, I crossed the road to find the mailbox missing and the ground littered with small cherry red fragments, part of a side mirror, and further down the road the lens from a tail light. I gathered the auto remains and eventually found the mailbox and 4x4 post across the ditch in some bushes.

An etiquette problem arose the next day when I saw one of my neighbors pulling out of their driveway in a brand new cherry red SUV with the side mirror and tail light missing. These are tribal folk, and while I have good relations with several of the families in the area, some Indians still hold a grudge about their forefathers and mothers treatment back when we were bringing “civilization” to the west. They would rather keep their distance and have the last laugh in the form of modern day reparations at the casino down the road. The guy with the SUV was decidedly in that camp.

I replaced the mailbox and waited a few days to see if he would come over to talk about it. Didn’t happen. I debated whether I should take the bag of car parts over to him saying, “hey neighbor, I found these, could they possibly be yours?” Do you broach the situation, or let sleeping dogs lie. I opted for the latter, and nothing has changed. He still doesn’t make eye contact, and I keep hoping he will. But if it happens again, I’ll create a mailbox fortress so impervious, it won’t be quite as kind to his shiny new car or the arm of that joyriding kid with the baseball bat.

Cutlery, Guns & Knives, Oh My!

I don’t know where you come down on the whole “Gun” thing, but in my hood you can hear, at any time of the day or night, weapons being fired. Some people come home and turn on the news, or have a drink to unwind, or… fire off a few rounds of ammo from their semi-automatic as a capper to the day. I may have felt safer in the CD (Central District – a rough part of the city, for those who aren’t street wise). Speaking of, I’m not sure I’ve found the local equivalent of street wise yet, which I guess would be road wise, as I keep wondering where all those bullets are ending up.
My former neighbor is a tugboat captain. He’s got a pretty nice collection of guns, a few of which I’ve fired. A WWII German Walther pistol, his 12 gauge shotgun, and a black powder long rifle which is a subculture all its own. As a neighborly gesture, or enticement to buy some guns of my own (I’m not sure which it was), a few years ago he suggested we go down to the Gun and Knife show at the logging showgrounds about a mile down the road. But let me digress here slightly.
The sketchy hand painted road signs alerting motorists that the Gun & Knife show had returned start showing up a few days before the weekend event. At first they seemed kind of hostile and all kinds of visions came to mind. Camouflaged Rambonians emerging from the fir trees looking to upgrade, with an automatic rifle in one hand and giant serrated blade in the other. Grizzly Adams, deer hunters, survivalists – I didn’t have a clue, but envisioned this traveling road show of weaponry as quite possibly the dark underbelly of the NRA they would rather us non gun toting folk didn’t know about.
When the signs showed up again this year, something had changed. No longer the Gun and Knife Show, it was now the Gun and Cutlery Show. Pardon me… cutlery? Were they thinking they would attract the Mrs. Rambos of the world? I would like to have been a fly on the wall in the brainstorming session that suggested targeting (yuk, yuk) a what, more cultured, feminine, gay(!?) demographic. “Get real and think White”, as Jack Nickelson says in As Good As It Gets. Apparently those in command felt a kinship with that sentiment. Knife is back, and I say it’s a good thing.
Grammatically it’s all wrong to begin with. Gun and Knife show could suggest there is one gun and one knife at the show. But Guns and Knives Show is awkward. You throw cutlery into the mix and now you’ve got singular and plural crashing into one another and really, it’s just a mess.
OK, I’ve drawn this out too long as it is. We paid our five bucks and entered into a world I had no prior knowledge of – a reoccurring theme for me since moving to the country. Tables lined the walls with more tables in the middle of the room, all covered in guns and gun paraphernalia. Lots and lots of guns. Oh yes, and a few pieces of cutlery.

Dog Doo

My life up until eight years ago has been basically dog free. I never owned nor formed a relationship with anyone from the canine family. Not so any longer. I’d have to say I’ve gained an intimacy with these two redheaded mutts that surpasses most of my human relationships.
I’m not a rabid dog lover. In fact, I feel a certain clumsiness around them, and wonder if they somehow know that my intuitive sensibilities lie with cats. I’m guessing not as they still treat me with a kind of wary curiosity, and have accepted me into their pack knowing I don’t mean them any harm, having good intentions no matter how alien I might appear.
Harm - as if by not meaning to harm them, it won’t happen. This was not the case, and our lives have been permanently altered since Toby (top dog - literally) was hit by a truck. The details surrounding that gut wrenching evening are another story I may someday tell. But my relationship with Toby the golden retriever, brother of Jack our other dog, changed forever after that night. And this sets the stage for the inordinate amount of attention the rear end of this dog receives on a daily basis. He’s farting as I write.
His hips were fractured in two places from the accident, and consequently compressed. One day we noticed Toby squatting beyond the normal time it takes a dog to do its business. His narrowed pelvic region prevented him from taking a normal doggie dump. And so began the routine of 15cc’s of laxative three times a day. Not injected, no suppositories thank god, but in his food, which means he gets three meals a day and “the walk”.
The walk, while providing some exercise, helps his digestive tract get going and has evolved into a study of all aspects of K-9 crapping. Posture, tail position, ritual pre-poop circling, and of course consistency, shape and quantity of the poopers. My wife and I have entire conversations about it. This is when the carefree cat days come back to haunt me.
When we hire a dog sitter, the list of details they must follow scares off all but those who take dog care to extremes no sane individual or cat lover would dare consider.

Bitten by the Shutterbug

OK, here's a photo I took with my new Nikon d7000. When you get a good camera in your hands, well at least for me, it's hard not to imagine one's self a click away from Edward Weston.  I have been bitten once again by the shutterbug, and the welt it has left appears to be growing.

I seem to be drawn to roads. You are looking north, and those mountains are in Canada; the border is about 10 miles away. This is the crossroad of the Noon and Hemmi roads, and is one of my favorite places in Whatcom county. Someone had the forethought to put these fields under the protection of the Land Trust and that is a very good thing. Developers roam the county looking for good views and aging farmers, salivating at the vision of culdesacs sprouting for sale signs every 150 ft.

Yes, I am a transplant to this area, but bought an existing house that's over 50 years old. Not that I wouldn't love to build a place one day. Maybe in a future post we can discuss expansion, population growth, the inevitable encroachment of the masses on land that has provided so much to nourish them.

Picking & Clucking

This summer we had a stretch of hot weather, which typically melts Northwesterner's as they dwell in the 30’s to 70’s throughout the year. We hit 91° yesterday, and that was the day we decided to go pick blueberry's. With forethought on our side, we left mid morning to arrive at a lovely, mature field of organic blueberries with our sunhats and pails. At a dollar a pound we were primed to get some serious picking done. And we did, successfully avoiding sunburn and heat exhaustion. We will enjoy the bounty of our labor throughout the winter.

The owner of the field, a hearty woman with long graying hair and a passionate commitment to organic farming, had invited several of her girlfriends over to pick berries that day. Now Steph and I get down to business when we take on a project. We’re not averse to small talk while working, but we’re focused. I realized after picking for about forty five minutes that the three women picking just a few rows away had been talking non-stop the entire time! I lean toward the “celebrate the difference” camp, but eschew the men are from Mars, women are from Venus baloney, so no sweeping statements here. It's just as the morning wore on I became increasingly amazed at how much verbal ground these gals could cover without missing a berry.

If you’ve ever spent any time around chickens, you know they burble about in a loose group picking at whatever catches their eye. A steady stream of poultry inflection and tonal range pours out of their throats in a chit chatty way that comes as close to those three women’s banter as anything I’ve ever heard.

Later That Evening

There was a slight mist over the fields when I took the boys out to pee. The evening sky had stars peaking through a thin layer of clouds, and made me feel - just for a moment - calm, and happy. As my senses adjusted to the atmosphere, the individual parts of this nocturnal moment began to separate themselves and become more distinct. From the cupola of our barn the steady squawk of a parenting barn owl mingles with the muffled base line of some band warming up for the annual logging show this weekend. A wall of grass stalks is visible just at the edge of illumination cast from the motion light that the dogs triggered on their way off the porch. Out “there” at the edge, where things get soft and gray, the grass blurs as if in slight motion, and meets the infinite dark above as a fuzzy but definite line. I’m sure prescription glasses would clear this whole thing up.

The field grass is tall. Unusually tall; taller than I am. The farmer that hays our field missed the last window of sun, and the rain has dispensed with any notion of starting the methodical events that result in baled hay. “Make hay while the sun shines”– not a casual quip to a farmer. I’m always a little sad when the fields are eventually cut, as I like the cloistered feeling of being nearly surrounded; hugged by thousands of living sentinels. As a crop, this mass of verticalness arrives every year with unfailing regularity. They can’t help but reach for the sun, until a heavy rain or wind bends them in half, and their perfectly level heads, no longer form that wonderfully fuzzy horizon line against the dark firs the flank two sides of our property.

Making Hay

I grew up mostly in suburbia and my career path has always kept me in big cities. Colloquialisms like “make hay while the sun shines”, or “having a field day” were quaint sayings of another era that pretty much never came up in conversation, and if they did it was to garner a laugh. I knew they had agricultural origins, but the pragmatism of them escaped me until the first time I watched the dairy farmer up the road come and hay the field to the south of us. When I see Harold on his tractor, we’re going to have sun, or at least no rain for the next three days.

He got a loan a couple of years ago and upgraded his equipment to include some Case tractors, a new cutter, tetter, bailer, and some contraption that will lift a thousand pound bale of hay, spin it while two opposing arms loaded with plastic wrap spin on the opposite axis and set it back down looking like a very large sugar cube. Or if he’s doing 1,300 pound round bales, the field ends up looking like some giant dropped their bag of marshmallows. There is no Winslow Homer romanticism or Monet hay stacks here. This is all business, and the speedier they can get from standing grass to bale the better. The sun doesn’t have to shine as long with this kind of high-tech giddyup, and not one hand touches that hay.

DOES NOT PLAY WELL WITH OTHERS
The farmer that hays our field is a different kind of animal. He’s a nice guy even though he has a tattoo on his arm that says, “does not play well with others”. In contrast to the speedy newer machines, he has a much older tractor and attachments. They’re always breaking down, and we never know when he’s coming, but I’m not sure which is more satisfying to watch. No spinning, swirling, or shrink wrapping here. His bailer spits out seventy pound square bales, and when it’s time to pick it up, three or four, or if he’s lucky, five strapping young men will show up, grab those bales and toss them onto the hay wagon as it’s being slowly pulled around the field. This is called “bucking” and while slower, it has the same economy of motion as the new gear, but it comes from years, possibly generations of learned efficiency and practicality. An urban sophisticate would do well to watch and learn. The frenzied multi-tasker might gain insight by seeing a process started and finished with such methodical, tangible results.

Catch Up

I'm going to cheat here a bit as I've got quite a few written observations that occurred before this blog existed. I've done a little cut and paste job to get them into the flow as it were. Read on o' interested parties.

Here We Go.

This is the beginning of potentially the most banal and mindless ramblings on the web to date. But I've had a growing number of experiences and observations after living in rural Whatcom County for the last nine years that I can no longer keep from the world at large.

Enjoy.