Silent Night

It's late, and quiet. Very quiet, deafeningly quiet, no... silent. I hear nothing but the hissing in my ears which I've read is the atmosphere passing through the membrane of the inner ear. This silence is not the abscense of, but a presence that feels thick and dense, omnipresent in its vastness.

Listening to silence makes one pay closer attention. Of course it does in this age when nothing - no thing - demanding your attention shocks us as a freakish and fearful anomaly. "Something must be terribly wrong - I don't hear anything!" I admit that age is taking its toll and I don't hear as well as I used to, but what's the down side of that sometimes?

Wait! The single chilling call of a coyote strikes the silent wall like a bell, and the high pitched chorus begins. The pack is passing along the fence line on the hunt. Their calls can be lengthy and complex in pitch and dialect, but tonight it's one long cry and then silence envelopes the night again.

Quiet again. Breathing into my body, exhaling into silence... and again. Meditative perfection and yet I rarely draw upon it. I take it for granted now but there was a time when I lived fifty yards from Interstate 5 and the white noise of traffic had its own rhythm and comfort. A feeling of being "in the mix", traveling with a pack of a different kind.

Distant, dull clacking from moving freight cars comes within earshot, and then the blast of the horn before it crosses the Siper Road five miles to the northeast. They fade out as they faded in and the silence returns. Always there, like the sun - even when obscured by clouds, the earth, or the Path of Totality.

It's late, time for bed.

Wind Spirit Phone

In my previous post I mentioned the difficulty most of us have to some degree of accepting death. While inevitable, the means by which we depart are many. This post is about a story I just heard about a Japanese man who lost his wife, child and home in the 2011 tsunami.

Life and place taken so quickly away. There is a commonly shared word in Japan which I don't remember, but it translates into "get by" or endure. It's woven into the fabric of Japanese culture and helped many go on after the devastation in spite of no way to explain or process their feelings.

This man had rebuilt his home but was struggling with his grief and could find no way to express it. Many Japanese are Buddhists and believe there is another place we go when we die. Part of the "enduring" is so those that have died can leave this world and not get stuck in limbo worrying about those they left behind.

One day an idea came to him. He thought, if I can't find a way to express my emotions I will try calling my wife and son on the phone and maybe this way I can say what I feel. He found an old English style phone booth with a rotary phone and set it up in his yard. He called it the Wind Phone or Wind Spirit Phone and hoped his words might travel out carried on the wind to his loved ones wherever they might be.

It did help him and as people in his town passed by and asked about his phone booth word spread. People started showing up in his yard with the hope of reaching those they lost or simply to find a place where they could let their emotions flow out. 

I heard this on an episode from This American Life and the producer of the article actually got permission to record some of the "calls" people made. To attempt to describe them seems maybe disrespectful and I don't have the words, but you can imagine the range of emotions. What brought me to tears was how much of what was spoken into that receiver was the everyday recounting of events and tasks that make up the substance of all our lives. Maybe the accumulation of the little things, what seems mundane, holds us together and keeps us connected in this life and any other as much as our big life events.

Pocket Change

I’ve always liked the way my blue blazer feels when I slip it on. Silk lined, it slides smoothly over my pressed white shirt and I acquire the look of “dressed up”. The fabric is hand stitched ultra-suede and it was made in France, beautiful, fits perfectly, and I found it at the Goodwill for $10.

There is history in the pockets, unfortunately nothing from the previous owner. But over the years I’ve gradually accumulated moments of time in the form of theatre tickets, a folded high school graduation program, restaurant matches from dinners out, spare coins, a Canadian dollar bill and most recently programs from a wedding and two memorial services for family friends that have passed.

Both rich in emotion, a wedding and a funeral are two sides of the same coin. We hope for good things in both this life and beyond physical death. One is pure celebration, the other is often so stiff it seems as if rigamortis in the deceased becomes manifest in all others present. Either numb with our fear and uncertainty about death or locked into a construct of belief that we hope offers – the Truth. But we don’t really know do we?

I have admiration for the power faith has to change the living, but the dead, well we here are left to wonder and either get busy living or get busy dying as was said in The Shawshank Redemption. And there in is a lesson in letting go. Living in the present, doing what we can in this moment and taking stock of our aspirations and actions not out of fear of retribution from a god, but for the selfish and selfless acts of connection to Life in all it’s manifestations.

I hope it offered comfort to some, but near the end of the service a minister got up and asked us all to pray in the name of Jesus Christ. He said if we wanted to see the deceased again we needed to accept Jesus as the way to get to where they were – presumably in heaven. I guess any Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist or other denominational friends in attendance were out of luck, and I had to use better judgement and restrain myself from shouting out “Shalom!” at the end of his preachy lecture. And I'm Irish!

I don't plan on being buried but I haven't decided for sure just yet. Maybe I'll make myself and urn as I have for family and friends. But at my demise, if my blue blazer is still intact I don't think I'll be wearing it. If there is another plane of existence I want to go casual.

Junior Birdsman

It was mid-afternoon in the barn and I was working in my clay studio. This structure, this ship in a grassy sea has a soul, and I'll post in detail about it sometime. But for now I'll focus on the cupola or more to the point of this story, the owl nest within.

A cupola is basically a box with slats that's positioned on top of the roof of a barn. It's designed to vent heat and moisture from the hay in the loft below. Someone long ago decided it would be a good idea to make a roost for owls and sectioned off a third of the cupola with a plywood floor. I have since come to think of this as an idiotic decision, but that too is another post in the making.

I spend a lot of time in the barn and there are constant sounds which have become familiar. In the wind it creaks and moans like an old wooden ship. I hear mice and yes, the occasional rat, although not many of them since we got rid of the chickens. Starlings have a nest in the Southwest corner and have a remarkably complex dialect.

Last weekend this quiet symphony was interrupted by an irregular rustling sound coming from the loft. At first I thought it was a mouse or Starling scurrying about or the occasional bat. But this sounded different, so I cleaned off the clay from my hands and climbed up into the loft to investigate.

Back behind a big sheet of black plastic huddled next to the wall was a fuzzy, all white... thing. I couldn't really make it out at first as the light was dim, but as my eyes adjusted I began to make out a wing and then an eye and a beak. About the time I realized it was a baby owl, it lifted it's wings and turned it's head in a way that can only be described as "alien like". What the hell is it doing!? Is it hurt, in its final death throes, I wasn't sure. Then I realized, even in its tiny infancy, it was trying to look big and fierce by putting on a "don't fuck with me" display (in an alien sort of way).

It was also doing odd things with its head, like lowering it and shaking it back and forth as if to say, "ooooh nooo, this can't be happening!" (See video clip below)

I had two choices. Not to interrupt its fate and let it starve to death on the floor of the loft, as over the years I've seen other baby carcasses lying about. Or call the Humane Society hoping to get some official Owl Person or zealous young volunteer who would enlighten me. "Need to get 'em back in the nest if you can", was the happy suggestion. "They'll hiss at you but aren't too aggressive when approached". Hummmm... really; it's a raptor, I've seen the claws.

Probably a good time to tell you the cupola is just shy of 40 feet above the loft floor. Extension ladder. Does anyone even make a freaking 40' extension ladder!? They do.

OK, let's compare adjacent alternatives:
   Plan A
      Let chick die
   Plan B
   Rent ladder, strap on car, drive car home - check.
   Remove ladder from car, muscle ladder up into loft, extend ladder - check.
   Put chick in shopping bag and strap to hip with caribiner - check.
   Climb ladder - oh.
   Place chick in nest without getting a shredded head - oh my!
   Descend ladder, treat wounds - AM I OUT OF MY MIND!!!

I did it. I gathered up the furry little alien, stuffed him/her in a sack and began ascending the ladder. Did I mention it's a really flexible 40' ladder. The higher I went the springier it got. As my comfort zone evaporated and my muscles tensed, I started moving at about the pace of a three-toed sloth while my wife is yelling, "don't squash the baby!" That I'm even having this experience is a mystery to me at this point.

The unknown lay a few rungs ahead. No hissing, one more rung. Don't look down, just focus on the task at hand. Another rung, head ascending into the cupola - h i s s s s s s s s s s s - Freeze Motherfucker! And I did.

At this moment in time it occurred to me that donning a bike helmet and face shield, an idea I tossed side in my desire to get this over with in a hurry, would have been prudent. Not to mention a safety harness! But I had almost reached the summit of my owl Everest climb and I'd be damned if I was going back down without planting this bird in its nest like a flag on a mountain top. I unclipped the bag, raised it above my head and unceremoniously dumped the owlet in the nest.

The hissing had stopped and since my hand wasn't turned into hamburger at the talon of a pissed off mature owl, curiosity won out and I decided to take a look in the nest. Hell, I'd made it this far and hadn't fallen to my death, why not tempt fate a little more. I ascended one more rung and peeked over the railing and staring me in the face was another, somewhat larger owlet looking as surprised as I was.

He immediately became Suspect #1 in the alleged "accidental" fall from the nest. Had this larger bully nudged his sibling over the edge as a true believer in the survival of the fittest? Family disputes are often better left to the individual members to resolve, so I told them to play nice and made my way shakily down the ladder, hoping the parents would give Johnny a good talking to.

For the last couple of days I've climbed up into the loft (no, not the cupola) looking to see if my little charge had been shoved out again - no sign of it. Would I choose Plan B again if I did find the errant junior birdman wobbling around the loft? I'll keep you posted.

Here's my little friend doing its alien "woe is me" dance

  

One Man's Passing

People die. Those loved ones and friends that remain choose to honor, celebrate, grieve or sometimes ignore a life lived. I was invited to celebrate and acknowledge a man that I had only just begun to know. Most everyone at the gathering were long time friends with stories to tell and many memories. I was a voyeur to an intimate look at a man's life and family that has been so steeped in a loving, thoroughly integrated lifestyle that is so rarely seen in today's frantic rush to have it all, which of course is never enough.

John was a worker of wood in all its manifestations. Carpenter, craftsman, artist, perfectionist. The Westgate's home is a testament to his craftsmanship and love of the medium. The house was made with milled lumber cut from trees on the forested hillside of their property. Bringing in cord wood for the fireplace, a chore for some, was an expression of artistry and an intimacy with the details of tools, trees and the dance between them.

In an adjacent room picture boards of the years gone by. Frozen moments in time giving only a partial glimpse, a hint at the constant thread of their family's DNA code. The man's commitment to a dream, embodied and shared by his partner of 46 years. Soul mates that built a sanctuary for raising a family on the side of a mountain. They have two sons.

Nice story you say. Rare, even quirky by today's standards, and maybe not your cup of tea as a life path. But in death - the beauty of their grieving brought to light the depth of their bond, and that was profound to witness.

The heartfelt eloquence of the youngest son as he spoke of his father. The elder son spoke to his father as his belief is that John was with us in the room. We sat and listened and witnessed their grief as they broke down weeping several times recounting and thanking their father for the lessons they'd learned.

John chose to be cremated, and state law says the body must be placed in a casket. John was not one for flashy expensive things, yet his sons knew in life he would abhor the shoddy, cheap wooden casket the funeral home offered, so they went home to their father's wood shop and began building the casket he would be cremated in. They chose good wood, but not the best stock as John would have admonished them to save it for a project more deserving. What's the sense of burning up a fine piece of cedar?

They made a bed of cedar bows and snowdrops and laced the casket with native flowers from their property. It's said that the western world has a strong aversion to death. Having experienced the programmed efficiency of a funeral home twice I realize, given the altered state of most and the requirement for documentation, that places for "handling" death need to exist. And these places, where bodies are boxed, burned or buried with a briskness designed to avoid the ritual of grieving, seemed a cold alternative to the immersion into grief the Westgate family chose, thereby beginning the mending of their broken hearts.

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.