After a summer of high excitement, watching plants grow, I realize that Half Heartedness is something you have to fully embrace, or utterly abandon.  By that I mean if you want success you have to go at it full-on. Otherwise you have to be cool with mediocrity. And it takes a lot to get things right. Most of the summer, for example,  has been spent furiously chasing after ground hogs. Notwithstanding my apparent vegetarian and pacifist leanings I caved, after the first round of lettuce was eaten by the aformentioned rodent, and decided a) to go after the whole family, and b) upgrade my .177 Webley air rifle to a .22 rifle.

Before I made the purchase, I staked out the ground hog hole with my Webley to see if it could do the business. (This is not for the faint hearted). After sitting in the tree fort at dusk, for about 6 minutes, he popped his head out. My sights, apparently, were out, and I missed. Two minutes later he re-appeared, and I missed again.

At this point I realized I needed to be much, much closer. So I hopped down, rigged a painter’s light right a bove his hole (night was fast approaching) and put a step ladder 30 feet away behind the compost bin.

After another ten minutes (ground hogs have short memories) he popped his head out again. This time, rather than hoping for a head shot, I waited until the majority of his considerable body was out of the hole. He didn’t seem to notice that there was a gigantic light balzing down on him like some apocalyptic sun on an alien planet.  When I had his massive girth in my sights I fired and he did a back flip and lay, for an instant, flapping around. I quickly ran up and popped him with a couple more shots before he crawled back into the hole where, I am sure he expired shortly thereafter.

Perhaps I don’t have to excuse myself for this heartless action. We have, afterall, been killing smaller creatures for millions of years. Do we need to now? Perhaps not, especially bearing in mind humans have been responsible for the extinction of thousands of species. All that aside, however, I was acting mostly on a gut feeling of rage when I saw the decimated veggie patch. And they were underminging the barn with their incessant digging.

Several days later, I noticed about six young ‘hogs wandering around behind the barn. Systematically I hunted them down, and I think I got them all. Except perhaps one or two.  To make a long story short, the battle continues, and the weaponry is heavier. Where will it end?

There is more to this story, though. It has to do with pests in general. And where, you might ask, do the gurus come in? Well, that is a reference to our gardening and homesteading expert, Elliot Coleman. On a closer reading of his book, especially the chapter titled “Pests,” he says that you need a “plant positive” attitude rather than a “Pest negative.” By this he means that if you give the palnts what they need they will be immune to pests. This means ample manure, or compost, good levels of nitrogen, and enough water, plant spacing and the right temperature (achieved with coverings if necessary). Obviously he is mostly referring to beeltles, slugs and viruses, and the like, because I don’t know how this would apply to a wood chuck or ‘hog. But I like the idea in general, as it makes redundant the endless spraying and fumigating of palnts to keep nature at bay, and it seems to come from a place of deep philosophy that resepcts balance in nature.

But whatever the Maker in all her wisdom had in mind when setting this whole shitfest in motion, there seem to have been serious deficiencies in the planning department. There is, as I have concluded from my historical research (www.wordpress.worldhistorywriter.com), absolutely NO “natural” state of the world in any meaningful sense. Were we evolved for this or that? Neither in all probability. We just adapted, constantly, and to date quite successfully, as did all the other animals around us.  Balance in nature, I am afraid, seems to be one of the things that we have been busy adapting to destroy. Plant postive? I wish it were so, but looking around I think that is an answer only for a very few of us.

And now if you will excuse me I am off to exterminate another species.

I had just completed a trip to the dump in the truck. Seventeen pounds of cardboard, four heavy stinking bags of old, old garbage, waterlogged and ripe. I was finally accosted by one of the expressionless heavyweights who work there and asked for my punch card. I said I didn’t have it, because I never bought one, and I kind of didn’t know I needed one. But I have been dumping my trash there for two years and no one ever asked me for one. Truth be told I had noticed people putting cards in for a punch, and I guess I had simply avoided the obvious conclusion that there was a system for paying for this service.  At the time I didn’t have any money on me so I told the sweaty town employee that I’d pay next time, and he seemed ok with that.

When I got home I parked the truck on the verge and staggered towards the house reeking of refuse, intending to avail myself of some cold fruit tea  and a few peanuts. But as I stepped onto the porch I heard an unsubtle rustling in the woods behind me. Too big for an animal, but no engine so it could not be a machine. I turned to see my truck careening through the undergrowth, heading for the gorge which lies behind our house. There was something horse-like about the truck, graceful, perhaps, as she galloped towards the abyss. But becuase of the lack of engine it seemed as if she was almost being surreptitious. As if she was in fact committing suicide, while my back was turned.

It was hopeless, I was too far away to leap in and pull the parking brake. I stood with the word NOOOOO running through my head. I imagined her bouncing over tree stumps and rocks and flattening saplings in her path until she was brought up sharp by the large boulders that form the brook in the gorge. There she would rest, perhaps for years, possibly for ever, a home for racoons and fisher cats for millenia, or until humanity blows itself up.

As luck would have it, there was a large Ash tree in front of the truck. She was not, in fact, going very fast, and before the tree her front wheels hit a large-diameter root which slowed her down just before her bumper made contact with the tree. There she stopped and all was silent.

No problem, I thought, I’ll just throw her into 4wd and back her out.

She started right up but when I popped the clutch the wheels spun. I threw the wheel left, then right, I moved her forward, right up til her bumper was cutting into the lithic face of the ash tree, then bounced her back. Nothing. The root under the front wheels was massive and there was no getting back over it without a considerable run up.

Tractor, I thought to myself, and, always delighted for an excuse to operate another piece of my mechanical portfolio, I ran for the barn where I found my 1987 Kubota. I had to take the forks off the bucket, and leave the weight box behind so I could use the tow hitch. Eventually I backed the tractor up to the truck’s rear bumper and wrapped a chain around the tow hitch. As I moved the tractor forward the wheels started digging into the soil. Soon They were two feet down, and getting deeper.

Shit.

I lengthend the chain and moved the tractor until its heavy agri tires were on the more solid ground of the gravel driveway. Same thing. Now I had holes in the lawn and the driveway. And still a truck in the bushes.

People were coming to pick up their kids any minute. People that I didn’t want seeing me struggling to get my truck out of the bushes.  I walked up the track and little and looked at the truck. No, there was no way I could claim I had just parked it there to put it out of the way. It was in a bush. Teetering on the edge of a gorge. Surrounded by holes made by tractor tires. 

As I searched my brain for the solution of a cleverer man, a red car came down the driveway.  I looked nonchalant, as if whatever I was doing was cool, was not a desparate struggle to cover up a stupid blunder–that of failing to apply the parking brake. Digging holes in the driveway with my tractor tires while my truck sat in a bush was par for the course.

Scott got out of his car. I had to spill the beans. His eyes lit up, clearly desparate to play with machinery after having been watchin his small children all day.

“I was thinking I would cut the root with a chain saw, then it’ll come out easily.” I said.

Scott looked dubious. “Naw. That’s not going to work. Getting under there with a chain saw, cutting from that angle, not that’s all wrong. What you want to do is jack her up at the front and drive her out.”

“But once its jacked up, how will i drive it out? Won’t the wheels be off the ground? It’ll fall off the jack…”

“Nah, just shove some boards or blocks underneath.” We discussed it for a while longer until his kids showed up and he had to get going.

I liked my chainsaw idea, but Scott probably kne what he was talking about, even if i didn’t quite get the picture. I went and got my heavy duty jack. I crawled under the front end, narrowly avoiding having my eyes poked out by sticks and saplings. Once there I found that the axle was too far under the truck to allow me to operate the lever on the jack. And because the front of the truck was obscured by the large ash tree I couldn’t put the jack in from there. To spare you complicated and technical details, suffice it to say Scott’s idea was a non-starter. Which delighted me for numerous reasons, not the least that I could go and fire up my chainsaw.

As those of you who read some earlier posts will know, I have a ridiculously long bar on this saw: 36 inches.  All salacious quips apart, this made it very easy to crouch next to the wheel and cut the offending root. Actually it took several attempts because the root had other roots growing off it and they were deep underground. Ten minutes later I pulled out a two foot piece of root easily one foot thick. Now there was nothing blocking the front wheels. I jumped in and reversed her out.

That, in short, is the end of the story. I did update Scott on the outcome of this event, and he raised an eyebrow as if to say, “well, i wasn’t wedded to the jack idea anyhow. As for the other characters; well the truck is fine, although I did open the glove box the other day to find a mother mouse sucking five babies in amongs all my old reciepts. She crawled through the fire-wall to esape me, dragging her babies, still attached. And for expressionless town employees, you might ask? Well, even if their’s was a bit part, I am still intending to do my civic duty and pay for that punch card.

 I still need to finish the floor with cedar and put in benches , but it all seems to be in working order.  

Also to do: add a water barrel to complete the steam part of the sauna. The idea is that you effectively sweat out all of your toxins.

Today I was up in the orchard with the kids. They were following chickens around and I was getting a jump on my wood splitting. The UPS driver showed up and we spoke briefly about this and that, and I mentioned something about “in a perfect world…” to which he responded, “well cutting wood at home with your kids, it doesn’t get much better than that.”

 It was one of those moments when someone else shares a vision of your life, giving you access to an outsider’s perspective. Whereas before I had been focussing on the task, sweating and unable to contemplate the big picture, his words struck a chord, and I had to stand back for a moment and appreciate his insight.

Cutting firewood is a spring through fall activity. I should just do it all in the fall, as the weather’s best for it then. This spring I went down into the lower woods and started picking off the 10-15 year old poplars that cover the hill. These are good logs and make easy cutting without the need to split them.  But it was early March and the snow was too deep still to make much headway. I dragged what I could out and left the rest for summer collection.

When it comes to cutting firewood, bigger is usually better, in terms of saws. My debate was not over the capacity of the engine, although I went with the Stihl MS 460, a big professional grade saw, but the size of the bar. I ended up with a 30″ bar which is mammoth.

I had five cords of tree length wood delivered, and stacked it in a large pile in the orchard. Cutting a big pile poses several logistical questions. Should you just dive in and cut it all as it sits? The problem with this is that your saw tip will be hitting the log behind the one being cut, and saftey rules argue against that (kickback, etc.)

But then you are left with manoevering individual logs into position from which you can cut them cleanly without hitting anything else.

I tried this approach first, and found that I spent way too much time with a crow bar prying logs free from the pile and laying them out separately for cutting. Not only that but there was the distinct danger of being trapped or crushed under a log that slips and rolls onto of your leg.

Driving around town I noticed other log piles. I would take note of these piles, and watch to see how long it took people to cut them up. Most remained intact for months. But occassionally I would notice a pile that had been ripped through, seemingly in one go, and I marvelled at the speed of this. I noticed that in these cases the pile seemed to have been attacked in situ–meaning that the owner had just gone at the logs where they lay piled up.

This is where my 30″ bar comes in. I figured I would just go for it and cut two logs in one swoop. When I got cutting, however, I found that the length of the bar was a problem, because you want your logs to be the same length, otherwise they don’t stack neatly or efficiently. And log piles are never very symmetrical, so when cutting one log, the others are positioned differently, making it unusual to cut two logs to the same length.

I got myself a new bar (16″) and this made life much easier. I was more or less able to leave the pile in place and with the much smaller bar, pick away at logs where they lay, until I had the pile reduced to a winter or two’s worth of firewood.

As for the monster bar, I still use that, when I come across a really big log, and then, theres nothing sweeter.

As for the UPS driver and his Zen words, well, I’m just glad I’m not doing what he’s doing. And I hope he has a pile of logs and some kids to go home to.

A few months passed and magically the children’s brains evolved to a place from where they were willing to let them go. They admitted that they had not so much as looked at them sideways for several weeks, had not even spared them a passing thought, in their pursuit of other childhood joys–Pokemon, sugar, play dates and GoGos.

Lucy Posing

Realizing that we were not going to slaugher our own sheep, I came to the conclusion that I was not really prepared to slaughter anyone else’s. The project of animal farming has lost its appeal, it now seems to me too much like being a gaoler, then executioner. And I’m not enough of a carnivore to justify that. From now on it will be the occassional small amount of excellently raised meat from someone we know.

So I quietly uploaded three sheep and two goats (all girls, all ready to be impregnated) onto Craigslist, along with some very cute photos. So cute that I almost deleted the posting.

A couple of days later I get a call from a farmer in New Gloucester. He is no-nonsense, with a Maine accent. This is old-time farmer, I think to myself as I tell him about their lineages. There is Lucy the feeder we bought last year. We kept her from slaughter to see what breeding would be like. She gave birth to Prancer, mentioned variously on HH. Then there was another feeder I bought this spring. When I realized that we couldn’t kill prancer, I felt it was unfair to send the other orphan to slaughter all alone.

Little Black

The goats: well, we bought them in a fit of absence of mind. Truthfully, Kate saw a picture in a Bates alumni magazine featuring a woman walking through a Maine field to milk her goats: children in tow, sun in the West. Seeds of dream were planted. We got goats. Two years later we couldn’t find a buck to impregnate them, and we realized we didn’t like goat cheese enough to have to milk these suckers every day. Kate’s dream evaporated, like a pool of goat  piss in the early morning sun. I was left caring for Robin Hood and Little Black (both of whom are very nice and I’ve developed some affection for.) But we were  just paying for hay and grain through the long Maine winter for nothing. So Craigslist it is.

Back to the Maine farmer. He isn’t interested in their readiness for childbirth. “I’m mostly into meat.”

Ah, well that’s not really gonna work, I’m afraid.

Call me if you change your mind.

I hang up feeling a bit sick.

Then a nice woman from Valley View Farm called, and I went through the same script with her, and she sounded much more promising.  

Some days later she showed up with her husband, and to tell the truth I felt slightly suspicious because they were more old school farmers than I had thought, and neither one seemed interested in what I had to say about the animals (although the husband did seem to have a kind way with the animals).

As we were loading them into the trailer Gemma came running down the path to the barn in tears. “I just want to say goodbye to them!” She bawled.

We opened up the trailer to let Gemma in  while trying to stop the ruminants from escaping, then we assured Gemma that it was for the best, that they were going to a nice home. Katy even managed to get the woman to agree to have us come visit, although she rather strangely told me “although, once they’re in a flock they’re hard to pick out.” Was she suggesting that these ones would not be around, but there’d be other animals she could try to fool Gemma with: Look there’s Robin Hood, doesn’t she look happy?

Then she confides to me on the side, ” anyway, I’ve always thought out of sight, out of mind.”

Which turns out to be the case.

So no more biweekly runs to the hay farmer down the road. No more trips to the feed store for foot rot treatment and grain. No more hustling out to the barn first thing to hay and water (chickens can wait). 

An eerie quiet, filled by the soft sigh of vegetables waiting to grow in the spring. 

Goodbye animals. Goodbye.

Kidz with Goats

With certain notable exceptions such as Burning Man, and I guess Mardi Gras, these modern-day festivals are almost always civic activities driven by chambers of commerce more than by the profound sense of restlessness created by the change of seasons, or the maddening sense of dread engendered by the onset of fall. In otherwords they don’t come from an almost primordial urge, but from a very contemporary and mundane place–entertainment capitalism.  Here the real prime movers, the juice in the veins, are the tourist boards and local merchant associations.

No, Thank You!

 But often the Nearing way, the hard-core back-to-the-lander attitude seems too hard-core, in fact it often seems downright pathological in its austerity.

We, on the other hand, quite often venture into the city, to entertain ourselves,  but it has to be said, we sometimes come back smarting from a sense of agrophobia, nursing a sense of disappointment, nay, distaste for contemporary mainstream society, and wishing we hadn’t bothered. Last weekend was a case in point.

The “Old Port Festival” in Portland is a pretty typical modern American festival. Unlike ancient festivals–the bacchanalia of Ancient Greece, or the Mexican Day of the Dead, or the Easter Parades of Sicily– these modern American “celebrations” tend to celebrate nothing more than consumerism. Whereas old world festivals still have a sense of participation, and are focussed on transforming consciousness to some extent (usually in some pre-Christian sense, involving a certain licentiousness, a purging of  every day restraints and conventions) the modern American festival is a venue for one thing: Fried Dough.

pump those sales up

Perhaps that’s an exaggeration, but they tend to cater to a very low denominator, and when its not fried goods that are being sold, it is something else, the focus here being on sales.  Sure, there was a nice parade, for what it was worth, but even that, unlike old-world parades, was not exactly audience participation, it was something you watched, sipping your Dunkin Donuts or Starbucks, before you went to have a fried lunch and take in the vendors who were….selling stuff.

Granted, there were a few attempts at reasonably creative floats, some vaguely political statements about how we should eat local, or somesuch, but thats not really the spirit of a festival–the pushing of a political message, even if it is quite on target and necessary to save the planet. But the entire festival was a planet-destoying activity anyway, so that’s a bit of a paradox right there.

who the hell am i?

nice match

Hmm

want some?

Whoops, that must be Rio!

cheer the f&*k up will you?

Anyway, we sat though this, and it was fine, the crowds didn’t really bother us, as we half expected them to (dragging small children through crowds, while they are whining to have all the garbage they see around them is never fun). Then when the parade was over it was time for lunch.

American street food