Big-City Visits and Me

How did 40 years go by so fast? I'm approaching the anniversary of leaving the US (I hoped for good). 

I loved living in Madrid, if only for a year, but that was so long ago....okay, yesterday. In a quiet neighborhood between Plaza de Cuzco and the once-village of Tetuán, an area that metro Madrid had eaten up in Franco's time, I figured I'd found the best possible combination of quiet repose and urban energy. To quote from a blogger who lived in my old neighborhood 6 years ago, Tetuán remains the right sort of un-hip place that is authentic without being dangerous, as well as affordable since "most of the young international people here in Madrid really want to live closer to the center. They want something 'vibrant' – whatever that means – and full of youngsters like themselves."

I figured Plaza Mayor and Puerta del Sol were only a short metro ride away on the blue line. Our furnished apartment, at $350 US then, was a real bargain. We only had to pay a finder's fee of one month's rent.

Now, in a visit to Baltimore's Little Italy, a neighborhood that recalls my old Madrid haunts, I realize how much life in the country has changed me in just over 12 years. I came north on Amtrak (my way to travel the NE corridor) for the big annual meeting on academic writing, CCCC. Someone not present asked why I didn't stay at the conference hotels. Simply put, the food is awful, the prices high, the scenery 1970s oppressive in a Logan's Run sort of way. Maybe that explains the conference nightmares that I have nearly every week: from burning hotels to drowned rooms with my laptop still inside, to lost directions and meanders around a strange city to find the Hyatt Regency's Crabcake Room.

 So now when I go to conferences, I look for lodgings a short walk away, usually in a traditional B&B that costs less than the conference monolith. I don't really care for Airbnb or Vrbo unless I'm somewhere longer-term, so I can prepare some food. Going to a supermarket in another country is an unalloyed joy to me. I had a great Vrbo experience that way in Fredericton, NB last year but a recent short-term stay in Winchester, VA, made me want to run back to a classic downtown hotel with a martini bar or old-school, owner-occupied B&B.

Baltimore's Little Italy seems my sort of spot. It's a short stroll to the dreary presentation rooms and throngs of professionals still on the rise who need to network. I'm semi-retired and so past all that. I met a few old friends for a drink in a boring and overpriced hotel bar, then left for something more authentically local but not twee or tarted-up. The hipsters with the parents' money or swank jobs are all in Fells Point; it's lovely but curated in a way that bothers me. On the other hand, north of the harbor, parts of Baltimore get sketchy fast. That too reminds me of certain neighborhoods not far from where I once lived in the Spanish capital, or for that matter, the block in Richmond where I grew up; the joke in the early 70s was "who beat you up today?"

These days I don't really want hip, curated, sketchy, or blue-collar urban. I don't want "busy" at all anymore. Traffic noise wakes me after living so long in a rural place. But more profoundly, it's the nature of how transient things are in a city, apart from preserved historic buildings.

Walking by myself on a rainy Baltimore day, the wind trying to destroy my umbrella and my pants cuffs getting soaked, reveals something I don't see when the sky is French blue and the colors in window-boxes call to me. 

In a city, even one where we have friends, we really are loners. Erasure of our lives lies never far away; once we are gone, our apartments will be occupied by someone else, our belongings not taken along scattered. I recall our final day in Madrid, leaving our apartment; we had piled by the curbing things we could not foist off on friends. Manolo, the building supervisor who really never seemed to like us much, did come out with a rare smile to say goodbye. He was inscrutable, but that day he seemed happy, maybe because the young and pesky Americans were finally going home.

An old Roma man with a horse-cart came along at first light a few times a week, to gather the sorts of things we abandoned. Soon our passage would be erased, like a busboy clearing a restaurant table.

You won't see old men with horse-carts in Baltimore, but the vibe is the same. You move on and it's as though you never existed. Little Italy, though charming, is not really the tightknit ethnic place it was half a century back, when children of immigrants lived there and talked to neighbors on the front stoops, as in a Barry Levenson film. The restaurants are still superb and folks friendly in businesses there and on Federal Hill. I went back to Byblos, an excellent Lebanese place I'd visited before, where my "cousin" Sami the owner recalled me, my wife, and two students who had visited him the last time. But the sense of impermanence still hung in the air as surely as over any cul-de-sac suburb. The architecture and patina of history make a cityscape more interesting, but turn a corner and you find a tragically ugly new high-rise that has erased a block of old houses and stores.

One gets erased in the country, too. Even if you have a large family with children, in a generation or two you will simply be a name and a fading photo on the wall, whatever your legacy of genetics or property.  

Maybe that's why it's healthy to visit a big town once in a awhile. I know rural folk near me in Goochland County, often older people, who have not been to downtown Richmond in decades. They still think it a crime-ridden, run-down place. It's not. But if they were to visit the hipsterific areas downtown, it might be worse than confirming old prejudices.

They'd see how quickly life moves on without us. They do miss the innumerable charms of city life: great museums, galleries, urban walks, live music, bespoke and funky-downmarket dining options. 

Yet I can still get that, plus a sense of ennui over time's passing, during a short urban visit. The woods beyond our garden? Those are not eternal, but they provide a different scale of time that stretches beyond our little lives.

When Retirement Nears, Making Plans

Back in 2017, I attended a workshop at a national conference in Portland, Oregon. We were there at the national meeting to discuss writing pedagogy, but I figured I was within 10 years of retirement. I then went to a session on how we find meaning when our day jobs end.

The other day, 3 years ahead of schedule, I notified my employer that I'd be ending full-time work for the university at the end of the year. I'd just harrowed the hillside below the spot shown above; we'd buried our first livestock guardian dog, our beloved Vela, at the top of the hill. Life is short. In 2017, Vela had been with us 2 years and was in her vigorous middle years. Now, she's resting.

Big decisions when to retire are naturally fraught with emotion, but honestly, it was the happiest decision I've made in a long time. I don't hate my job or colleagues, but unlike many of them, I have a Plan B waiting. It differs from many retirement plans I hear such as "I'll travel more" (great!) or "I'll be more active in my church or community" (fine!).

I'm neither religious nor able to travel as much as other academics do. Luckily, I find my joy in work with words, machinery, and plants. For so many years, I realized that I love the solitude and hands-on experience of writing, gardening, forestry, and tending to land. I'm happiest on a tractor for many hours on end, coming in the house to share lunch with my wife and discuss what we've been doing that morning. My favorite pastime involves fixing and maintaining machinery and equipment; I find it much more rewarding than dealing with the messy intricacies of classroom or office. I'm getting more social, because it's healthy, but generally, others wear me out. 

As my late father-in-law put it, when done with a task "I like something I can put my hands on."

In Portland we discussed how a mere hobby would not be enough to fill the hours that require intellectual company. My farm-work is not a hobby in the same way as, say building models or restoring an old car, but I got the message. I took it so to heart that after the conference, I began a book project that saw publication in 2019. Nowadays, my plans are less grandiose, but I plan on more fishing and hunting. Those hobbies are great fun but don't quite fill the bill for a healthy retirement.

Having given lots of thought to this transition since 2017,  I'd advise any of you thinking of joining me in the long twilight of a working life to take stock of what brings you joy physically, emotionally, and intellectually, especially as your physical abilities will begin to taper off. A guy named Mr. John Deere helps with that, to a degree, as I find it hard to hire day labor, even for $20/hour in cash plus gas money and lunch. But no pay will buy me intellectual debate over a lunch table.

For that reason, I plan to teach part-time in retirement in my university's Master's Program for continuing students. Most of the work will be full-remote for small classes, allowing more time to help my students develop intellectually. Given my research and writing interests, I plan to be on campus weekly and that will include lunch with old colleagues, attending arts events and seminars, even going to a professional conference every few years in areas where I'm still writing professionally.

All that without the messy things: committee assignments, office hours for undergrads, lots and lots of grading.  That means more solitary time on the tractor or behind a chainsaw or at a work bench. I've lots of ideas about managing invasive species, cultivating land for pollinators and native wildlife, and more.

You'll read about them here.

Homesteaders of America Conference, 2017

We had the great pleasure of attending the first-ever national conference of the Homesteaders of America.  I've been delinquent in my conference reviews this year, especially of the recent Heritage Harvest Festival.  I will cover that event soon, but I have to say that the Homesteader gathering was a Tractorpunk's paradise.

We attended two speakers' presentations and talked to a lot of vendors. The event sold out, so I'm glad we bought tickets in advance.

Warrenton VA hosted the gathering at their Fauquier County Fair Grounds. It provided a perfect rural setting. The area there is building up fast with DC commuters, but it's not all awful sprawl. The twee little downtown area, as well as a sentimental favorite of mine, Frost Diner, show that suburban and rural can coexist. I hope they can maintain that balance.

The balance between a hurry-scurry life of consumerism and debt vs. the potential freedom, monetary and spiritual, of the homesteading life was central to talks by Doug and Stacy, the stars of the YouTube Channel "Off the Grid with Doug and Stacy," as well as author, farmer, and rural philosopher Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms.

Now just a moment. Folks living with no internet connection or electric power but with a series of YouTube videos? Oh yeah, and using their own drone to film the event? At that moment, I knew I was in the right crowd: no Luddites here, just, to paraphrase Howard Rheingold's point about the Amish, very clever techno-selectives.  Think: farm truck to charge electronics + unlimited data for Verizon cellular users. Makes at least as much sense as me building my own shaving horse to do woodwork.

The couple talked about our culture as one that rewards staying in debt, becoming dependent on technology we do not understand, of severing our ties with the soil and the rest of nature. Salatin continued that with his talk later in the day. I grinned at both of their references to "The Man," which propelled me mentally to the early 70s again.

And yet, they are correct. As Doug put it, "barter is what The Man is scared of," and Salatin later chimed in that we are desperately in need of "relationship rather than consumerism." Fine and good, that, thought I, preaching to the choir.  As if anticipating my very snark, Salatin added that the choir did need some preaching-to, so we would be energized to share with others our foodways, our practices that build wealth in the soil and self-reliance in the home. Homesteaders are gentle missionaries of a way once taken but left behind after the Second World War. I was greatly moved by Salatin's remarks, for which he noted Michael Pollan's ideas, that "we know that eating like Great Grandma is healthier and safer."

Yes, I too worry about the slow accumulation of pesticides and herbicides in our bodies without any longitudinal studies of their impact. As Salatin noted, in his Christian-Libertarian way that I found suddenly reasonable, our government now sells us on the safety of GMOs when, just a generation ago, it found that margarine would be safer than real butter and all of the carbs at the bottom of the food pyramid--an innovation of 1979--were equal nutritionally: Twinkies and taters apparently sustain us equally.

It's easy, when on the mass-comsumption treadmill, to dismiss homesteaders as crackpots. One of my colleagues who toured Polyface with Salatin found him to be half visionary, half crackpot. And he charmed my colleague utterly. I agree. It may seem ludicrous to tell a culture seemingly content with morbid obesity, car-based lifestyles, and land-use plans intent of paving our best farmland that "you are insane." Jim Kunstler has been doing so for years. Salatin does it with a different method of delivery, and Stacy and Doug live that vision of a world (almost) made by hand.

So I came away inspired. There is much left to do, but each step adds something in a movement toward more self-reliance. Next year for us? Food dehydration and cooking with a solar oven. We found an inexpensive one available from a vendor. My own plans would cook but not dyhydrate, so having one professionally made tool will be the route I take in 2018. We will also be raising chicks from incubated eggs.

This year we've expanded our seed-saving to tomatoes, begun reloading ammo, and I'm about to hunt deer for the first time in 30 years. Others will pick different skills from our frontier history, but one or two steps at a time will get us closer to what worked for our ancestors. I've critiqued the myth of self-sufficiency here before, so it pleased me that the speakers discussed the need not to build bomb-proof silos but rather resilient communities where we develop some of the skills our grandparents had. In the end we might create collapse-proof communities, if the worst that they and Kunstler fear comes to pass.

I learned a whole lot and, true to the spirit of the event, did not spend a lot of money beyond buying a really nice gardening knife to replace my easily broken hori-hori (replaced once already under warranty).  I will use the new tool this weekend to weed as I harvest hot peppers for our one restaurant customer.

A few quibbles about the event are inevitable, and I think the organizers can iron them out. Next  year, I hope they offer more food. We plan to pack our own food--very rural-thrifty of us--but a hot cup of coffee on a foggy morning would have been ideal. The one vendor with that beverage was overwhelmed by a long line at his food truck. The same problem occurred at Monticello in September, for the Heritage Harvest Festival. I hope the organizers of each event can lure more food trucks--so often a source of farm-to-table fare--to their gatherings.

We who paid ahead for admissions and speakers got first dibs for seating. It was not a problem but being a "Green Wristband" and thus encouraged to get seating made me uncomfortable. I'd recommend just charging one price next year; luckily no fights erupted because we call got seats. I'm looking forward to my own tour soon of Polyface with my fellow crackpot, Joel Salatin. I just wish I could get that "visionary" part going for me. The crackpot part I have down just fine.

Heritage Harvest Festival, 2016: Good Lessons for a Tractorpunk

Two years ago, I  waxed poetic about this annual event at Monticello. This marked the 10th anniversary, and I think we have only missed it one time.  I have to credit the speakers I have met there with so much of what we put into practice here at Beepasture Farms.

The weather was hot, unseasonably so as much of 2016 has been, and attendance seemed a little low as compared to last year. There was a bit of room left in most of the classes I attended. Here's what was on offer, to tempt you to join us next year.

Going on Friday before the main day of the event, or Sunday after, offers a more laid-back experience. One can park at the Monticello Visitor's Center instead of riding a bus from Piedmont Community College. While there are no vendors, there are few competitors for the speakers' attention after a talk. This year, on Friday I drove up to attend an excellent workshop on raising onions and garlic (alliums to us plant geeks), offered by Ira Wallace, a writer and gardener with Southern Exposure Seed Exchange. She convinced me that by accident I'd done some things right with our garlic (such as not over fertilizing the soil) and provided valuable advice for preparing a bed, advice that I plan to use for onions next year.

Our onion crop was a flop but I'll try again with a different perennial variety. From Ira I learned to harvest a little earlier than I have done for garlic, when one or two of the plants' green leaves are turning brown. Digging then insures that the bulbs will have sufficient skins over the cloves and not fall apart. I will also cut and eat the scapes from our hardneck garlic, then be ready to harvest a few weeks later. This was all news to me.

We began to prepare the bed for our alliums this weekend, in order to plant in mid-to-late October. I plan to keep rotating so my garlic never repeats in the same beds for four years, five if possible.

My 2016 changes involve smothering all weeds in the allium bed under thick weedblock fabric for a month, then taking it up when I plant garlic and onions as I did last year, under 4-6 inches of straw. This technique works well for Ira. Already, with my haphazard approach in a raised bed, we harvested about 40 bulbs of garlic, almost enough for a year (we eat a LOT of garlic).

Ira's workshop, pictured here, followed with one by Cindy Connor of Homeplace Earth. She gave an inspiring talk on cover crops and green manures. As with my alliums, I have been uneven since 2012 about putting nutrients back into the soil of our raised beds, beyond adding compost, ashes, and rock dust. Luckily, success involves little more than a few pounds of seed and some rain (or for us in drought currently, saved rainwater).

Next year I plan to follow our winter cover crop of hairy vetch, winter rye, and crimson clover (seeds went in this week and are sprouting) with Buckwheat going in for the Spring. Before our summer vacation, the wheat will be ready to scythe by hand and thresh. Connor's thresher is a grandchild with a plastic baseball bat and a sheet of plywood. She uses a fan to winnow the wheat, as she pours it from one bucket to another. Finally, the remainder of the harvest makes excellent locally sourced straw.

Given how much straw we use for our chickens' coops, I had better buy a plastic bat and hire a local kid to thresh.

For the second day of the festival I went to a really powerful talk about sustainable pest-remedies by Tanya L.K. Denckla, author of The Gardener's A-Z Guide to Growing Organic Food, as well as other books and articles. Tanya and I then exchanged ideas about the vagaries of soil and weather in Central VA; she lives just up the road "a piece," meaning 40 miles, from us.  I plan to test some of her pest remedies on our squash bugs when I next grow squash (2018 season). This year we lost every single squash, despite our use of diatomaceous earth and other natural techniques such as floating row-covers and delayed planting!

Much of her advice would be a delight for the home gardener. Some simply will not work for our market-gardening operation, at least until I begin to remove weeds by some of the planting techniques and cover-crop ideas Connor advocates. I did notice this year that my Thai peppers had to fight much harder against weeds when I planted with recommended spacing. Next year, I'll go back to my 2015 method of closer planting and plant through heavy weed-block fabric. Last year I experienced some mortality because of reduced air circulation, but no plants toppled in storms and best of all, the deep shade under the the pepper plants stymied the growth of weeds.

Patience pays off. This weekend I saw two large worms covered with the larvae of parasitic wasps. We planted to attract beneficial insects this year, and it payed off. The picture below is nearly identical to one Denckla showed us, but it comes from my pepper patch.

The same day I also visited vendors and listened to Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms have an imagined dialog with Thomas Jefferson about being a productive and sustainable farmer. Even on a mountaintop, a place that Salatin said only a dreamer would try to run a farm business!

Except in spirit, I did not see Thomas Jefferson this year, but we had Naturalist William Bartram courtesy of someone's time machine. Bartram strode manfully past me as I waited, in vain, to hear a talk by food journalist Corby Kummer. Kummer, of The Atlantic and my favorite writer about food, was unable to be present for his talk. It was my only disappointment of the the 2016 Festival.

I should have chased down Bartram. Even in facsimile, I would like to pay homage to a writer we environmentalist should know better. He had a real sense of both the wonder and fragility of the New World's ecosystem.  We need a bit more of what Bartram began and that continues every year at Monticello.

Heritage Harvest Festival 2015: What I Learned

This event at Monticello is one, like Maymont's Herbs Galore, that I look forward to for months. I only attended two classes this time, a free one on fermentation by Sandor Katz and a paid workshop with Lisa Kivirist (pictured above) and John D. Ivanko, authors of Homemade for Sale: How to Set Up And Market a Food Business From Your Home Kitchen. The Wisconsin couple has made a living by gradually building up a market for their processed foods. Along they way they became writers, relying upon their experience in marketing to effectively craft words and lobby politicians to change state laws that hurt small businesses.

They answered a question I had about amortizing equipment costs. I guess it surprised them that I'd spent so much already getting started, but my project does not involve merely canning a few cases of pickles in the kitchen or selling home-baked goods. To farm, I needed equipment to cultivate, protect, and water our first cash crop. The idea of selling some pickled peppers or honey have been there all along, and this is where the authors' advice is pure gold to a beginner.

States have gradually loosened laws for "Cottage Foods," though anyone trying to get raw milk will tell you how difficult regulations can be. Luckily, that's not in the works for us. At most, we'll sideline our honey, pickles, and a few other things to supplement our income when the field is not producing vegetables or herbs.

What craft brewing has done for the drinking landscape, Cottage Foods and the broader local-food movement could do to big agriculture, an industry that exacts a heavy toll on the soil, water, and diversity of food.  It may feed the world, but I've yet to be convinced that we could not feed ourselves in a more sustainable manner.

Sandor Katz has me happy that I've been fermenting food from my own soil; Kivirist and Ivanko make me proud that our little LLC has a business plan. As I felt last year, at Heritage Harvest 2015, I came away optimistic about a better world waiting to be born.

An actor portraying Thomas Jefferson strolled the grounds and talked to visitors. I didn't get a chance to ask Mr. Jefferson what he thought about today's local-food movement, but he was a fan of the American yeoman and our self-reliant streak. That philosophical stance, as much as his Deism or the founding of my alma mater, makes Jefferson one of my culture heroes, despite the contradictions and compromises of his personal and political life.

I think that he would approve of how entrepreneurs are taking on the established tyranny of factory food to bring commerce to our communities and variety to our pantries.

The Myth of Self-Sufficiency

Self-Sufficiency is a cardinal American value. Yet our chickens demonstrated, just last night, what a crackpot idea it can be.

The hens missed the dusk closing of the automatic door. I'd made the mistake of giving them a treat a bit too late in the day, so they ended up stuck outside the coop. When I went out to check on them, as we do nightly to be sure all are safely tucked away to roost, all six hens were clustered together, for warmth, on and beneath the cleated board that leads to the closed door. In a few minutes, I ushered them inside and shone a light to help them onto the roosting bar.

Chickens, like humans, have no night vision. They needed a light, and without it, they huddle together for mutual protection.

When I visit homesteading e-lists and Web sites, I run into the "Prepper" mentality quite often. These folks often assume that with enough supplies, ammunition, and skills, they could ride out nearly any human-made or natural disaster.

I think they need to watch a flock of chickens. They might also want to imagine their world without helpers with medical skills, without a policeman to call to sort out contentious neighbor, without a local government to resolve property disputes.

No, thanks. I'll take the imperfect compromise we call "modern civilization."  But either way, I'd also take a community over the myth of the heroic, Neitzschean loner who shapes the world with his bare male hands. In truth, that macho posturing gives way to realism of splitting wood with a hydraulic splitter, using a tractor, and hiring help. I do split wood by hand for exercise, but in a time when I must manage other tasks, the big machine helps us heat enough that the splitter has paid for itself in its first two yeas of operation.

Friends offer help, but too often I know them too well. They are not strong enough, they lack the skills and training that I got over twenty years with my father-in-law. They mean well but "play out" after 45 minutes of clearing brush or moving lumber. Even worse, they might be injured and I trust no one with my chain saws, tractors, or other machinery that can lop off limbs or crush a human body. This is what the Preppers fail to consider. Unless they are both physically fit and have a group of similar friends, any ventures into self-sufficiency would fail. Too many of my fellow citizens are metro-area folks and pretty darned soft.  A gym membership does not prepare one for the sort of work a homestead demands. And while I'm not Conan the Barbarian, I can work many hours outside doing physical work. Thank God for that.

So I'd recommend an old and rather forgotten literary reading when one gets tempted to imagine a world without laws or restrictions. Try Emerson's "Self Reliance." I'm breaking his own rule about quoting sages in quoting him, but this passage tells me how an individual might cope with a conformist world without becoming a misanthrope:

Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say 'I think,' 'I am,' but quotes some saint or sage. He is ashamed before the blade of grass or the blowing rose. These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God to-day.

Emerson is not much read any longer, yet this Unitarian minister had a great influence on many American thinkers and what were once called "Men of Action." While his prose might not have the punch it did in a less harried, more attentive age, we might wade in again.

Once we know ourselves, in the way Emerson recommends, then seek out a community of others, we won't be self sufficient. But we'll have the self-reliance to find others to huddle with us, to help us in a sustainable way,  through the darkest of seasons.

A blessed Solstice to you all, as the light comes back and the ground warms enough for another year of turning the soil

A New Future, Visible in the Distance at Monticello

In his Notes on the State of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson was already fretting about the localized changes to the state's climate, brought on by the clear-cutting of forested lands between his home and the coast.  Jefferson describes hazier, more humid weather from what he recalled from his youth.  At his mountain home, the man could see far and, whatever the foibles and contradictions of his personal life, Jefferson recognized far ahead of his time the changes humanity can bring to the land that should sustain us.

I suspect that the former President, buried just beyond the lawns at Monticello, is proud to see the annual Heritage Harvest Festival take place on his land. My wife and I have been going for several years, and 2014 proved one of the finest so far. The classes ran a bit short; I'd prefer 90 minutes so the presenters have enough time, but I got to attend one free and two paid events.

Here are a few highlights for this Tractorpunk.

• Michael Levatino of Ted's Last Stand Farm (shown above) talked in detail about "The Sustainable Farm Lifestyle" for hobby farmers such as me or "sideliners" who make extra income, which is what I plan to be during retirement. I was impressed by the Levatinos' ability to find the right niche at their farmers' market, to learn the hard way the best practices for water use, weed control, and cool-season crops. Michael also alerted me to the free woodchips from tree companies. They work well in paths and build soil under the paths (that can be raked up onto raised beds on either side).
• Given my larger-than-usual Fall food garden, I was an avid attendee of Pam Dawling's workshop on Cold-Hardy Winter Vegetables.  Pam's excellent book Sustainable Market Gardening has been on my shelf for over a year, and this season I am starting to apply its lessons to our small crop. Next year, we plan a business license and first sale to a restaurant, so Pam's will be indispensable advice. Her remarks on using row-covers and hoop houses at Twin Oaks Community for three-or-four season production came in VERY handy.
• Ken Bezilla of Southern Exposure Seed Exchange reinforced Pam's lessons and added more tips that I plan to use this year. He focused a free workshop on "Fall & Winter Vegetable Gardening," and, like Pam, discussed the cold-hardiness of various crops. I'm already thinking of ordering my big batch of spring seeds from these folks.

What I'm getting from these festivals is nothing less than the birth of a sustainability movement to bring local food and best practices to every corner of our state, a future beyond the Monsanto and Ortho hegemony of sterile seeds and pesticides. A future where local growers and consumers put as much back into the land as they take from it. In a time of accelerating climate change, such efforts may be too little, even doomed. Yet they come not a moment too soon.

Jefferson would be proud of another revolution, this time one fought with muskmelons not muskets, brassicas not bayonets, being dreamed up at Monticello.

Suburban Visitors Meet A Man From Mars

"There might be ticks," she said, stepping out of the car.

He replied, "I told you not to wear flip flops."

For the record, I don't own flip-flops or any open-toed sandals. Out here, they are not practical outdoors.

She doused her legs with bug spray. So did he, and he was wearing jeans and real shoes, good boots even.  I figured it would not be useful to tell them that I eat lots of garlic to keep the mosquitoes off, and sometimes I dust my boots with sulfur to repel ticks: not a great remedy if one wears that urban ubiquity, the flip-flop.

I also did not mention the tick jar I keep my pulled ticks in, until my bite looks okay, or the gizmo I use to remove several ticks a week from me.

That would lead to some sort of discussion about chemicals, and I'd get angry.

She got about 20 feet down our farm road and turned back. "I'll stay in the car." He said again, "I told you not to wear flip flops!"

I said something about street rods and the shell of a '55 Chevy I'm going to save, just to change the subject.

"So why are you selling these other old cars?" He asked. I have a few junkers on our property, none of them worth much, so I just gave him the real reason. "The wrecks are in the way when I'm mowing, and I've got two old cars already I fiddle with. We're going to cultivate the area to plant cover crops to feed our bees."

"Your bees," he said, as we trudged into the woods, me alert for snakes.

"You know, honey bees."

He nodded and was polite, but I was clearly the Man from Mars.

I didn't tell him, as I looked for snakes, that I'd said "hello, get a mouse!" to a big one that morning, on the steps by my garage. The serpent--a Black Racer--looked at me, stuck out his tongue, and slipped into a crack in the cinder block. My visitor would then probably recommend clearing all the undergrowth by the road, getting rid of brush piles, and so on.

Satisfied with the two pickup trucks he'd be saving from a rusty apocalypse, he and his wife went back to town. I'm sure they showered and deloused themselves. Nice folks, however, they are not my sort.

Later, another visitor came by, a talented painter and car-restorer who is going to do some body work on a car of mine. He and I walked to the garage to chat about the project, and he pointed to a patch of weeds.

"You know what THAT is?" He asked.

I looked, and looked back at him. "Poison Ivy."

He tilted his head but before he could offer advice, I said "We keep bees. I just string trim it, and we use no chemicals on our land, except some Roundup I paint with a brush on 'Tree of Heaven' after I cut them down."

Again, the Man-from-Mars look greeted me. But he too was polite and, again, not my sort.

I have seen the yards from the places where such folk come. Monocultures of grass not suited for our climate, foundation plantings just as water-intensive as the grass. Non-native trees far from the house, if there are trees. A sign on the lawn every so often, from a company with an innocuous name that cloaks its evil--GreenWays! EverGrow! BugBlaster!--that sprays poisons to kill bugs, all the bugs, or that puts toxins down so the lawn will continue its junkie life of constant chemical fixes. Meanwhile the owners of these properties breathe in chemicals daily, so trace amounts stay in their fatty tissue, accruing a little at a time...

I'd rather be a Man from Mars.

Here's a good test of a person I'd want to spend time with: they think the tick-jar is cool and talking to a snake is not odd.

I just pulled a tick off me, after my second paragraph of this post. I'll spare the readers a picture of him in the jar, crawling around.

Getting Really Local

Despite T.S. Eliot's declaration to the contrary, I do not find April to be the cruelest month. I really enjoy it, in fact. In the air are promises of summer ease, given my delightful academic schedule. We always have commencement on Mother's Day, but even before that, we have a week free when the soon-to-graduate go to "beach week" for a final communal debauch.

That sort of thing was never for me, even when I was a callow undergraduate. I tended to enjoy some casual-reading time and a bit of geeky gaming with friends, once classes ended.  And unlike so many hyper-parented students these days, back then I had no money.

Still, let them have some fun. Many of them will soon be back at home, looking for work,\ or slaving as disposable units for a large firm that will one day discard them. My students often--with a few really canny exceptions--find my attraction to the land strange. So do older creatures of chain stores and suburban neighborhoods. They cannot see the fragility and temporary nature of these living arrangements. When someone like James Howard Kunstler challenges them (as he did in a Skype visit to a class of mine a few weeks back) the students are either profoundly shocked or they laugh off Jim's dire predictions about the end of easy capital and easy energy.  After all, their smart phones, to which they are addicted, beckon them into an eternal now of continual progress and easy connections.

I'm not so sure about some of Jim's ideas, but I also doubt that our current exploitative way of life can continue, unabated, for much longer. My own solution may not suit everyone, but it involves living a deeply local life. Jim advocates it, especially in how one uses localism to build community. What does that mean?

I began by taking an assessment of what we purchase. How much of it could be sourced from a locally owned firm? How much extra would it cost, if it did cost extra? Second, I began to try, as best I could, to establish a relationship with merchants, contractors who do quality work, and old-school mechanics, not dealerships. This is not as hard as one might think. Our local butcher shop provides premium, but reasonable, meats and seafood from local sources; the beef, pork, and chicken come from our very county.  While meat may again become a luxury item at some future point, for now sustainably raised livestock help local growers retain the land, make money, and pass on essential skills to another generation. Agribusiness does none of this.

Likewise, the mechanics' shop to the east down the road and the tractor-repair to our west employ local people and have owners who live nearby. These folks will work on older cars and farm equipment that the big shops won't touch. Two small-engine wizards get things to work I can't, and I am not bad at it though chain saws will be forever finicky, even with ethanol-free gas in the tank!

Thinking local made us look for plants the same way. We were recently at Herbs Galore, an annual sale by Maymont in Richmond. It's a ritual to go and pull around a wagon of organically raised plants from local growers. Given the use of pesticides and herbicides in the soil of plants from big-box stores, we stopped buying their plants. The chemicals may be killing our bees, as seems to be the case for Neonicotinoids already under a two-year moratorium in the EU.  I will need a lot more evidence before I put chemicals into our land again, beyond the same small bottle of Roundup that has been doing a great job of controlling "Tree of Heaven" on our property. I'm so careful I use a small paintbrush to apply the product!

Perhaps it is the hope that blooms every April, but I'm not ready to give into the resignation of Jim Kunstler or worse, the despair of climate activist Paul Kingsnorth. Humans have a way of muddling along, even though we muddle things up in the process. At Herbs Galore, I saw, however, more than seedlings. I saw a new culture, a new-old type of capitalism, waiting to be born. It's at every locally owned brewery, never new bakery, every little business that finds a niche that Target or Amazon cannot crush.

Get to know your local merchants and cultivate some local skills. Even if doomsayers are wrong, any future with strong communities of committed neighbors will be a resilient one.

Why I Don't Make Resolutions at New Year

The tradition of resolutions is doomed to failure, but setting intentions? Now those are flexible. So I will make a few for 2014.

• Minimalism: My dear friend Steve Gott lived a life of fewer and fewer possessions. He was no hermit but thought that one should cherish what one has. I'm going to see what can be done to at least make do with fewer things and more experiences. We've been doing that since we moved to the country. It is, however, a long journey and one worth making
• Planning: Retirement is a gleam on the horizon, but it's a brighter gleam than it was, say, five years ago.  We have a lot to do to get the homestead ready for a time of limited incomes, but we have saved many thousands by doing work ourselves or helping our contractor. We plan to keep looking 3 or 4 years out in terms of what areas of the homestead will be developed by adding trails, expanding the bee-yard, and making our woodlot suitable for sustainable harvesting of firewood for fuel.  I'm thinking of setting up, eventually, at our local farmer's market, but we must first really expand our hives and have some other produce to sell. That's going to take a business license, which is easy in our county to obtain.
• Community: This is a key aspect of rural life that many "come heres" forget. Luckily, my spouse is a "from here" who came back, and we have friends in the community. My goal, without being the sort of butt in at every county council meeting, will be to begin doing some sort of local and non-sectarian volunteer work. I'm going to be giving one day a month to Habitat on a build, so I don't think another day monthly would add too much stress to my life. It also puts a resident on the local map. I may help at our Field Day of the Past, where I know some volunteers who make this rural fair possible each year.
• Humor: Academics are a serious lot. I grow weary sometimes of how serious they can be, but then, the stakes are low and the prestige of careers in higher education--diminishing in many sectors--is mostly visible only to those inside its confines. I realize now that I'm still searching for a way, in my remaining years before retirement, to bring some of what I love about rural life to the Academy. That intention is going to remain nebulous, for now. But it will solidify into a project, at some point.

Meanwhile, Happy 2014. I hope our world limps along better than it did last year. There's a lot of beauty even in damaged times. Go find some or, better yet, make some.

Pancakes at Home: Lessons of a First Summer in the Country

Some years ago, a ladies' garden club invited me to give a talk about shade gardens. The club membership covers an affluent older neighborhood, full of old homes, old shade-trees, and old money. Jags, Benzes, and Volvo SUVs line the driveways of yards kept manicured by yard services.

I put on a nice tie and sport coat, and I even remembered shirt, shoes, and pants.  The meeting was delightful to me, since the appetizers were catered, the wine carefully selected and plentiful,  the ladies lovely and welcoming. Give me a room full of girl-talk anytime, so I don't have to discuss sports, about which I know nothing and care about even less, or find out how little my male companions really know about things I do really love: fast cars, World War II history, the space program, good liquor.

At the club meeting, as the setting sun made us all aglow with our wine and good cheer, I covered the basics of how to work with shady yards, emphasizing native plants, reduction of chemical use, and ways to conserve soil and water in Central Virginia's fickle weather.

I thought I'd knocked my "gig" out of the park, taking questions, drinking in moderation to their success, listening as everyone said it was a great talk.

I was never invited again.

It proved no great personal blow; I forgot about this one-off talk until one day, on the tractor mowing, it came to me: I told these gardeners what they did not wish to hear. They wanted me to recommend non-native species, discuss how to best remove healthy trees that were "in the way," and generally affirm what they already wanted to believe, what they already knew and did.

There on the tractor seat, I saw a fundamental difference between urban and suburban life and life "out here," where the land is Boss, water depends on a well, time moves differently, and the knowledge is acquired, often in harsh ways, never assumed.

So in the spirit of that realization of a fundamental difference between what the country and metropolitan areas teach, here are my lessons from year one in the country.

• Work with the land or it works you to death: Perhaps the very wealthy can simply hire enough help to tend many rural acres. The Amish, scarce around  here, can lend each other a hand. Unlike the garden-club ladies, however, I can't spray or bulldoze my way to a "better" yard without breaking the bank. The land has a will of its own.  A large plot of land necessitates hard work with machinery, something Michael Pollan discusses well in his early book, Second Nature. Even there, however, it would be easy to ruin the character of land and soil with too much scraping and cutting.
  
  Old-timers used the first tractors and backhoes and bulldozers to push back the woods to what I call "bowshot range," as if some ancestral memory of Indian raids haunted them. While I do provide the local raptor-birds with a good "kill zone" around our garden and house to cut down on the population of rodents and snakes, I also don't try to make the land into a golf-course or Japanese tea-garden.
• Local really means local here: Ours is not the meritorious "locovore" movement in town and the DIY ethos of hipsters (I say that with admiration, not irony).  The local businesses here offer limited goods and services rather than boutique goods, but in nine months I've gotten on a first-name basis with my butcher, hardware-store manager, and deli owner (where the food is drop-dead fabulous, he being Lebanese-American like me). I support our tiny post office to keep it open, as do many neighbors. It means a job with benefits for another neighbor. 
  
  I think one of our biggest adjustments has been "making do or doing without" so we don't have to drive to the suburban hell of Short Pump on a night I want left quiet. If Food Lion only has one type of really good cheese, so be it. I pretend I'm in 1970 at the A&P, and I make do. I do my "town shopping" in clusters to save gas and during  the off hours, when even Short Pump "Towne Center" can be as pleasant an excursion, almost, as loitering in Cary Town.
• Time slows..and then slows some more: From a county extension agent, I got a booklet about making the transition to rural life. One fact stands out as impressively accurate. Locals don't hurry, and they look down on the "oh, I'm SO busy" attitude of urbanites. One is expected to linger, share news and, more importantly, listen. This will probably erode over time, given the always-online culture of kids here, but who cares? I'll be gone to whatever reward awaits me, by then.
• Holding your tongue is a good thing: Local Tea-Party activists, mostly older white folks, meet in our deli. They could not be further from me, politically, but they are pleasant and not grumpy. We say hello and I eat my felafel while they bash Obama (rather politely).  In town I'd have fired off a verbal salvo. Not here. I've learned not to talk about religion, politics, or tractor-preferences save with close friends. That is reported to have once been a nice part of American life.
• Being older has its advantages: I no longer feel the urge to be part of a scene that excludes those my age. That means it's fine to make my own pancakes at home instead of driving 30 minutes just to visit the latest hip place for pancakes that would cost me $10.  And my batter recipe is good enough, when paired with the locally made sausage.

Perhaps I expected real transformation, spiritually and emotionally, out here. Instead, country life means the slow accretion of the "facts on the ground" and a gradual calming of life through acceptance and hard work that builds the body and clears the mind.

Not bad for nine months. If the ladies of the garden club ever ask me back, I'll make that my focus.

It Takes a "Bunny"

We are overwhelmed, at times, with nearly 100 acres to manage in one county and 11 at our residence. "Poor you," I hear some readers saying, but while such rural land is a blessing, if one plans to use the land for anything but scenery, a great deal of back-straining work must be done regularly and in all weathers. You can see what our land in Buckingham County looked like, from the photo above, in 2001. Today, thanks to a lot of family labor, the house looks very different indeed.

Ironically, I am trying to type with two very sore arms, the results of weeding, setting live-traps for ground hogs, and helping a contractor renovate an out-building into a usable and snake-free garden house and place to extract honey from our bee-hives.

That would never get done without having paid help one can trust. Try dealing with several 80' pine trees that topple in a snowstorm, all by yourself.

No one can do it all, and a first lesson of country life I've learned involves finding and sustaining community.

I read a great deal about sustainability and homesteading, and some on the fringe of these movements veer into what today the popular media call "Preppers," though I still prefer the term "Survivalist." There is nothing wrong with being prepared for natural or man-made troubles, but one curious fact emerges: many of these folks strive for self-sufficiency that seems improbable. If a chain-saw were to break, the game would be over.

Recently in Buckingham County we confronted about five-acres of waist-high grass that needed cutting. Had we time and equipment, we could have rolled hay.

Even with two passes of a rotary cutter, the grass near the house remained daunting. We'd contracted with our neighbor, Bunny, to cut the grass after that weekend, since renovating a city home to sell and maintaining our new homestead (and editing a book at night for publication!) take every second of my free time.

Bunny is the sort of African-American guy who is the anchor of a local community. Everyone within 20 miles of his home knows how capable Bunny is. His name is ironic, of course: he has reportedly rolled a refrigerator onto a blanket, flapped the blanket over the top, grabbed the four corners, and carried the refrigerator up a flight of stairs. He has helped me build a spillway, move huge logs and boulders, and generally keep our sanity as we do so much hard work.

As my wife despaired of the cut-but-still-formidable grass where the tractor would not reach, she heard another motor. Up roared Bunny on a riding mower with a weed-whacker in a cradle alongside it.  No knight of Camelot looked more heroic.

As I learn more about country life, I find that friendships like Bunny's are to be cultivated on their terms. He gives us cabbages and we give him honey from our hives. We pay him and let him hunt on our land, and he phones whenever trees fall or something else happens nearby.

In the City we had great neighbors and always looked out for each other. The terms of community are different in the country, but the rules don't change: it's a quid-pro-pro system and it works well. No one lives alone, isolated, and can get things done well.  It takes not only community and trust, but some anchors like Bunny, who can do nigh anything.