From "Tree of No Use" to Useful Tree

 

I've written here many times about the Stinking Sumac / Tree of Paradise / Alianthus. I've yet to find a use for it, but there's another tree that many of us dislike that I've come to appreciate, the Sweet Gum. It has those sticky balls that sadistic children would throw at each other or (slowly raises hand) would shoot out of a slingshot.

I don't bean anyone with the tree's seed pods any longer, but I do burn the wood. Yes, I use a tree that many folks who heat with wood toss into the ravine. The wood is hard to split when green, and not much better when seasoned; the grain is crazy, the fibers clingy. It's not a wood to split by hand. But then I have 27 tons worth of splitting power in our gasoline-powered Trobilt.

Gum is supposed to stink when burned. True, if not seasoned. I spoke to my chimney-cleaner, a Good Ol' Boy who knows his wood. Cut it in the winter when the sap is not flowing, then split it right away gum can be burned in 9 months. In other seasons, one needs to wait a year and yes, that wood will give off an aroma. Use a moisture meter to be sure the wood is ready, to avoid creosote in your chimneys.

 I have been burning some of it lately, from a tree that fell in a summer storm in 2023. It gives off a woodsy smell that I get outdoors. Our stove is too efficient to let that scent into the house.

Numbers like the ones from the University of Kentucky do not lie. There's something to be said for Gum. It has a heating value in BTUs higher than pine. We don't all have a ready supply of Hickory or Osage Orange or White Oak. I get a good amount of Oak, but Sweet Gum is so plentiful here! The tree shrugs off urban pollution and drought, though on the down side it does like to shed limbs in storms.

Why does Gum have such a bad rep? I think it's the pain-in-the-butt nature of splitting it, if done by hand.

So don't toss that gum. Find someone who heats with wood and offer it. I'm reminded of "The Tree of No Use" from the writings of one of my old-school influencers, Zhuang Zhou the Taoist philosopher. That tree yielded nothing but shade: no fruit, no wood good for burning. And it lived a long time.

So will our gums, in the era of climate change.

Pride of Workmanship?

As I retire from full-time work in a month, I have been thinking about pride in one's work a great deal. I have never been fully satisfied with my career, which may be a good thing: too much complacency leads to a numbing of the soul. I would instead invent new directions to pursue. This sort of free-lancing stands at odds with the values of corporatism, including the variety now infecting higher education. Not so oddly, I find the opposite--a sense of pride in serving one's community--in small businesses locally owned. It's a delight in our time of anonymous and virtual commerce to encounter vestiges of craftsmanship and civic pride. 

So often, however, it's just the opposite.

I spotted the worst paint-job in many years recently, pictured, at a roadside place in Buckingham County. I hope the owners did not pay much for the job. The painter, using a spray-gun, clearly cared nothing about putting glossy red paint on the grass and parking lot. Ironically, the paint was not well applied to the picnic table. The finish had run, pooled, and left thin or unpainted spots.

At our own picnic table, not yet "painted," I noticed that the original finish was a good-quality penetrating stain, not paint. Stain provides a better sealant for outdoor furniture, too. It can be renewed easily without scraping, even on the oldest wood, as I found not long ago with the old fence at our rental property.

Yet someone painted over the old stain, and once you put paint over stain, there's no going back. In a year, that haphazard paint-job will peel. The owner will either have to scrape the tables down or, as I fear, toss them out and get new ones. They are not bad tables, either. I'd like to get one, sand the heck out of it, and stain it again.

Usually we take our burgers and go to a nearby pocket-park, a tiny miracle of good craftwork. It features durable picnic tables, nice plantings, and a permeable-surfaced parking area.  You don't see trash on the ground, either. I don't imagine that it cost the county that much to build and maintain. It also speaks to something so old-fashioned we rarely hear its name today: civic pride. The town government does not know the travelers or locals who might stop for a smoke break or a sandwich; the small amenity simply says to everyone "you are welcome."

Pride is a dodgy commodity. "What is the return on investment?" a wily and short-sighted American capitalist might ask.

A great deal, I'd answer, but not something to measure in dollars and cents, the false American god of our era. Especially in the mad rush of Black Friday.

Today, of all days, on Black Friday, our water heater decided to start leaking heavily. The unit, at 12 years old, still looks great, but that's the outside. Not wanting to brave the crowds at the suburban asteroid-belt of big-box stores, I went to our local hardware. They had a heater more efficient than our old one and with the same volume. It took me all day to finish the job, but we have guests arriving and they'll want hot water. "Calling some guy" would not suffice, and I've installed two smaller electric water-heaters.

I needed a few tools not in my plumbing box, one a crimper for the little copper rings that make watertight seals on Pex pipe. A novice can learn this sort of plumbing, as compared to expensive mysteries of sweating copper pipe or the cheap, easily broken PVC pipes that I find mostly good for building hoop-houses nowadays.

A young man helped me find the fittings for the new heater, after I discovered that my old pipes were about 3 inches too short to reach the new tank's inlets. The new hardware was cheap enough, but the crimp-tool cost 60 dollars, almost 10% of what I'd paid for the heater. Yet I needed the tool, badly. The young man looked it over and said "This is a nice piece. You take good care of it and it will last the rest of your life."

I joked about only needing 30 years, but his remark stuck with me. I want to hear more of that in a time of disposable products and bad paint-jobs. I do indeed take very good care of all my tools. In the end, our new water heater is no thing of beauty, but it is firmly placed, not leaking, and looks as if a professional installed it. I'm proud that by sundown, I could have a martini and say "job well done" as hot water again flowed from the taps. I'd done it myself, probably saving 500 dollars. 

You could, too.

Newfound Tastes? Or Rediscovered Ones?

 I have a strange and newfound appreciation for American cheese.

 And Iceberg lettuce. And Bologna Burgers. And, yes, at least annually, Spam.

 What the hell is wrong with me? I'm supposed, by education, travel, and reading, to be a gourmand. A connoisseur, an aficionado. And so I remain for many things: gin, malt whisky, beer (Light Beer is NOT beer; get a *#%ing Lager, people), hot dogs, pizza, lamb, most seafood, most bread, deserts, pasta.

My mother said that one's sense of taste changes every 7 years. Okay, so at 63, mine changed. A casual Web-search reveals no solid evidence in support of mom's claim, so I'll say "I remain skeptical, mom." Slinging about Occam's Razor, my go-to way to resolve conflicting explanations, tells me that something else likely triggered this interest in comfort foods of my childhood. No, not THAT man. He only makes me want to vomit. His name goes unspoken here.

Let's start with cheese. Lord knows, the right Stilton remains my favorite partner for crackers and a dollop of homemade jam.

Yet, folks, a soft inexpensive cheese brings delight for certain dishes, including grilled-cheese sandwiches, quesadillas, and hot dogs (Hebrew National, thank you) with cheese. Even a bit of heat makes the moisture-laden slices of American melt, including a palate-pleasing sensation that returns me to the solace of "hot lunches" at St. Benedict's School, the only thing I miss about my eight years of bullied Catholic imprisonment at that place.

As on Thursday St. Benedict's "hamburger days," American cheese adds perfection to a cheeseburger at a place called Riverside Lunch in Charlottesville, VA. That remains my world-beating favorite cheeseburger.

Now, for the bologna, or "baloney" if you wish. I cannot eat the childhood Oscar-Mayer stuff; it reminds me of something pink that would come from Play-Doh's Fun-Factory. My baloney has a different first name, thank you. Fried Lebanon, German, or Kosher Bologna, sliced thick, topped with that American cheese, and nestled between sliced of white toast with Iceberg lettuce and mustard?

Oh, yes.

Iceberg lettuce, I'm told, has zero nutritional value and adds no appreciable fiber to our diets.  WebMD notes the value of its Vitamin K, for blood-clotting. Otherwise, zilch. But that crunch!

I love bitter, healthy greens, too. For salads my favorite is neither bitter green nor Iceberg: It's Red-Leaf or Green-Leaf Lettuce, but for BLTs and other sandwiches, I want a head lettuce, preferably Iceberg.

Did my tastes change? No. Maybe my snobbery waned.

In difficult, complicated times, these comfort foods help to sustain us through heartbreaks ahead, all the while saving money.

What is NOT to love?

Spam needs its own post, as does meatloaf, so I will stop there. 

Just find something to eat that brings you comfort and enjoy it in moderation. Your soul will thank you.

Image source: Wikipedia Commons

My Teeny-Tiny Internet

I'm not known for my online habits or TV watching. I do know who is in the World Series this year, mostly because of a friend who is a diehard and rather rattled Yankees fan. Sorry, man. These things happen.

Other than distantly following that contest, I don't look at sports results. I began to think recently about how little time I spend on Web sites of most sorts, less still on social media: dipping into Facebook daily for about 1/4 hour. I don't use Snapchat, TikTok, or Instagram; I read the news (and play Wordle) via The New York Times, visit the BBC, check the weather at NOAA, look at some space-news sites. I think my regular haunts could be counted on my hands and still have fingers remaining. For long-form story, I read my print edition of The Atlantic but also check their site.

What else do I follow? Sites related to my hobbies: working on cars, reloading ammo, building scale models. I participate in a couple of forums related to these activities, as if it's still the BBS era of the 1990s. Most of my time online relates to doing things with my hands or brain.

As for influencers? I don't follow any. Not a one. Too much is about consumer culture, fast fashion, pop culture. I recall a woman in the DC Metro, in a long pink sequined dress and matching phone on a selfie-stick, narrating her life loudly, amid eyerolls of others on the platform, as she waited for a train. She wanted so badly to be famous. I felt sorry for her.

She and a million others.

Instead of chasing that ephemera, my influencers are are folks known for their work in old media, like writers Willa Cather, Wendell Berry, Virginia Woolf, Edward Abbey, Terry Tempest Williams. Filmmakers like Werner Herzog. Thinkers like Locke, Jefferson, Nietzsche, and Lao Tzu.

I keep wondering what our world would be like, in this era of shallow and reactive thinking and blind partisan rage, if we all spent more quiet time with our intellectual ancestors or with folks who are not constantly shouting in anger? What if sought out folks online who helped us learn new things or improve what we know already? What if we only looked at carefully curated resources, slowly and methodically?

In short, what if we made our Internet use tiny? What if we focused our attention on those things that most influenced our daily lives, including our passion projects? I began thinking about this a long time back, but on Inishmore, Ireland this summer, I saw folks who joyfully live slowly. They don't seem to miss much. Internet access and obsessing over celebrities does not appear to be the focus of their lives. Granted, we talked to mostly middle-aged Irish, but they are a sagacious, thoughtful lot. That they can stay on an island and recast their economy around tourism without ruining the place astounds me.

Can we do the same with our islands online? I've a sense that making Internet use reflective, rather than reflexive, might lead us back to some semblance of a reasoned life. In a season of fear related to America's election, that's the best answer I can give: make your Internet small again. 

Revel in the Joy of Missing Out. Join the Slow Living movement.

Image: Inishmore Ireland

Grandfather's Hammer and Keeping Old Things in Service

Some of you may know the Grandfather's Axe paradox. I encountered it a few years ago. The paradox asks us that if every part of an item is replaced one by one, in the end, is it still the same item? I heard it stated as "this is my grandfather's axe. Since he used it it has had two new handles and one new axe head."

So is it the same axe? The empirical, scientific answer is "no." Every molecule of the original item has been replaced, even if it looks identical.  I'm a Humanist, so I'm going to sail off in a different direction.

The paradox stretches back to ancient Greece, where it was called The Ship of Theseus. I really enjoy logical paradoxes, if you cannot already tell. I am not going to give you my philosophical opinion, right away, but I will talk about an item that evades the paradox because it is pretty much the same as when my grandfather used it.

He was a junk-dealer by trade, an immigrant from Hatay in what is now the southeastern corner of Turkey. Arriving in Richmond in 1911, in time he acquired an old truck and combed the countryside for scrap metal, old broken tools, furniture, or anything that might have some intrinsic value. Somewhere along the way, he found an old claw hammer, or at least the head of one. He fixed it to a length of metal pipe and used a giant nail to hold the head to the new handle.

I found that hammer when cleaning out his basement in Richmond, a couple of months after his passing in 1982. It went into an old tool box I still have in my barn, but the hammer recently re-appeared in my shop, when I found myself in need of something for driving masonry nails in the cinder-block wall for hanging tools, old tin signs, and other bric-a-brac. The old hammer works like a charm.

For years, every time I saw it, my Type-A, rationalist side would say "that old hammer needs a proper hickory handle," but somehow I never quite got around to it. I'm happy about that now. I'm slightly less Type A (and probably less rational) after a dozen years in the country, since farmwork requires a certain amount of clutter and temporary disorder when, say, the garden is bursting with food as it is right now.

We live in a time of fast food, fast fashion, disposable electronics. No thank you. My anti-consumerist, Humanist side wants to stake a claim to keeping old things that work well around as long as possible, even if, especially if like The Ship of Theseus, every single part has been replaced at least once. I recently put new front wheels on an old Woods belly mower that my late father-in-law slung under a 1951 John Deere M tractor he purchased new. In the years that I've been custodian of the machine, I restored and repainted it, replaced the seat, swapped out a new wire harness and battery, put in an electronic ignition. I bought a new mesh inner panel for the grille, a gas cap, and lots more.

Is it the same tractor? Mostly, yes, and it does exactly what my father-in-law did with it. When I'm gone, a grandchild or great-grandchild will get Grandpa's tractor, and one of my nieces or nephews who has a taste for DIY work will get my grandfather's hammer. Perhaps the paradox becomes meaningless if the object's purpose remains the same, and that object gets passed from generation to generation. I hope they don't just use the John Deere for parades or the hammer as garage-art.

It will help if I can get someone to form a bond with the tractor or the hammer, telling the story once a younger person shows interest. Luckily, the interest is there for lots of things that have been family heirlooms, but most of those objects I've handed on have not been tools. To merely hang the hammer on a wall (as I did the mower's old wheels, one of them still quite usable) seems to break a chain.

I don't have a fancy philosophical name for this but "the thingness of things" has been my go-to. I feel the material presence of my forebearers when I get on that tractor, hammer a nail, use a biscuit-cutter that belonged to my late mother-in-law. My favorite skillets are cheap and thin Taiwanese-made ones my mom got me at a Roses store in the summer of 1982, when I was returning to college and an apartment for my final year. I use those pans daily now and think of my mom, gone nearly two decades.

So look around the shop and house at old things your ancestors used to make life simpler: a rolling pin, a favorite casserole dish, the old Buick sedan that grandpa loved so much. Look at the well-made furniture that is not modern chic but still perfectly useful.

Could you still use those things? Why not?

January is My Favorite Month

A recent op-ed in the New York Times, from a fellow lover of winter, got me to consider why January, called fondly "dim and a bit lonesome," and February are my favorite months. I've written about the second month here, before. That post is full of advice from writers I admire. I'll repeat "Time itself is nothing; the experiencing of it is everything" by Dutch novelist and travel-writer, Cees Nooteboom.

Now let's give January its due. It's 1/12 of your year, after all.

It's no secret that I am not a people-person. I try to cultivate Stoic Marcus Aurelius's equanimity toward others while admitting their their trauma lies beyond my control. He found that one must "end your journey content." I find too many humans "energy vampires" and lost souls glued to screens full of fluff and worse, poison. As I glide toward retirement in 2025, I am letting go of some of their borrowed anxiety about their needs, or even mine. I just can say "I hear you. We'll work on that" and enjoy the passing show.

It's different at what I consider to be my "real" job, working on the farm with our animals, equipment and land. In that case, while the demands are constant, the best season for doing certain things, in our changing Mid-Atlantic climate at least, falls during winter. The days are shorter, the ground often sodden, yet the sky! At the zenith in late afternoon, the sky is almost an ultramarine Klein Blue some days. The temperatures can be in the 50s, perfect for outdoor work without freezing or dehydrating. I can put in fence-posts, chop firewood, till the soil if it gets dry, do work on buildings that does not involve painting.

Walks in the quiet woods here invigorate me, with their vistas and their revelations of what lies at ground level. After late spring, all those details of old cemeteries, tumbled walls and fences, and building foundations vanish in the undergrowth. Speaking of that, there's no better time to take chainsaw and loppers to trim or remove saplings, fell larger crooked trees, or do pathwork.

Why don't more of us love the first month? If you don't enjoy chores but can travel now, do it. You'll find prices to non-skiing destinations at their lowest, with restaurants and lodging eager for your custom.

I cannot do that, yet, so I'll get outside instead. The temperature will plummet this weekend, not rising above freezing, so it's just the time to bush-hog half of the six-acre field we will are using to cultivate habitat for ground-nesting birds. 

I'll wrap up and have a blast.

A Mechanic's Lesson From the Yoga Mat

Before you know it, seven years pass. It has been nearly that long since I purchased a deceptively decent-looking 1974 Buick Apollo advertised at Hemmings.

My next column for Hemmings (the 12th installment of "Project Apollo") will focus more on some lessons leaned from failure, but here I want to wax a little more philosophical for my general Tractorpunk reader.

After more than $5000 invested over 6 and a half years, the car does run well enough to take regional road trips, but despite the money spent and many skinned knuckles since 2015, it's been on the lift since February 2022. Why would I do such a thing? Old cars are meant to be driven, right?

The answer is "it depends." My goal for the car has also as rolling classroom, so I'd get over my fears of being a first-time restorer and novice mechanic. To a large degree, I've met that goal. I have a 99 Miata to flog on backroads when I want some cheap thrills.

What I did not anticipate, however, was how failure with a relatively minor-seeming repair would lead me to realize an important lesson that applies far from the garage.

Gearhead Yoga, Parking Pawls, and Flight Attendants

During the pandemic, my Thursday evening Yoga practice moved to a Zoom conference. One benefit of Yoga, physically, has been my ability to contort myself in a car, while seated upside down on the front floor, legs over the driver's seat as I cram my head under the dash to fix wiring.

Little did I know a more subtle and probably more important benefit would happen. Our teacher, Kerry,   shares a short mindfulness lesson with us early in class, as we begin to warm up for the stretching and strength-building ahead. One week she noted how a woman on a crowded, tense, and very uncomfortable flight summoned an attendant for some small need. It took a while for the flight attendant to arrive. Just before barking at the airline employee about how awful things had gotten, an epiphany struck the passenger. Instead of barking, she apologized for interrupting the harried woman and thanked her, personally, for what she'd done on the flight thus far to make it as pleasant as possible.

Instantly, the attendant's face went from wary to grateful, and she and the passenger talked for several happy minutes. A weight was lifted  and of course the passenger's need got addressed speedily. The lesson? Try to turn frustration into gratitude. 

I began to try this with humans, and the effect resembles a magician's spell. It fails sometimes: the UPS clerk who replied to my "How are you?" with "I'm here" answered my "better than the alternative" with "not really." But I tried, and by being pleasant, I got a real smile by the time I left the UPS store. 

Outside, the sky was tumbling with storm-clouds that said something to me about the need to look at the sky. Life is short. You can fix a car easier than a life. Two days later, a tornado ripped through a spot about five miles from that UPS store.

Trying the Technique on the Toughest Person of All

Then I tried Kerry’s idea on myself. My car's parking pawl, a small metal piece in the guts of the Apollo's transmission, looks undamaged, but it does not hold the car in park, no matter what I try. I've replaced the spring, checked the fit of the rod that engages the pawl, and kept the bottom of the transmission off while doing all this work. While I was at it, I realized that the car needed new universal joints. Getting the correct size for the front of the drive shaft proved tedious, involving calipers, some guesswork, and lots of searching around local parts stores. When I got a fit, I saved the empty box for next time!

The delays taking off parts and re-installing them multiple times were infuriating for a while, until I recalled Kerri's story of the passenger. A few worn parts, some hard to source, are not my fault. Would I rather be stuck by the road with the drive shaft on the ground, something that happened once to a friend's 1974 Dodge Dart? So I would tell myself "every time you do a chore again and again, you are turning it into muscle memory. Soon you will be able to remove a drive shaft or install a universal joint blindfolded. Be grateful for the lessons."

When I got both u-joints home, the attitude learned in Yoga Class made all the difference. I learned to install the joints with my shop vise, lubed them properly, reinstalled the drive shaft, and went back after the errant pawl, teaching myself to adjust the car's shift linkage in the process (I did that at least five times. It is getting there). When the flimsy plastic tab that holds the shift-indicator needle in the dash broke, instead of screaming I took the dash out for the seventh or eighth time, and using a pin vise from my scale-modeling supplies, I drilled a tiny hole for hooking the little spring in place. It's better than stock now.

Even when I learned that the parking pawl could not be mended without pulling the transmission, I decided to be grateful. Now at least I'd isolated an issue to its probable cause. I will pay a shop a thousand bucks or more (if the gear the pawl engages is worn) to fix it later. Maybe I'll eventually pony up $2000 and have the entire transmission rebuilt, as I know a good shop for that work. Meanwhile, parking the car in gear is not an option as it is on my manual-transmission Mazda. I'll keep a chunk of 4x4 wood in the Buick's trunk as a backup to the emergency brake, so the car does not roll off, park it on level ground or touching a wall (Yay, 1970s 5 mph bumpers with thick rubber pads).

One Over-Torqued Bolt

As I finish work under the hood (at least until I add a heater) I'm focusing on upgrades, such as new finned valve covers, plugs and wires, and a dipstick from the parts car I found in South Carolina. Yes, the cheap aftermarket one that a prior owner had installed broke, with the end of the dipstick falling off.

Remember how Tom and Ray Magliozzi warned us about that, on their wonderful, and sadly gone, Car Talk radio show?

So be careful when you check that oil!

One justifiable, rather than cosmetic, upgrade to the car is a new transmission pan with a drain plug. Transmissions notoriously spill fluid everywhere when a pan gets removed for service or a fluid change, so lots of gearheads add a drain to the existing pan or switch to a pan that has a drain, as I wanted to do. Summit Racing has some good aluminum pans for my car's TH 400 transmission, so I ordered one to the tune of $130.

I installed it with an upgraded gasket and new filter in the transmission. Yes, I was proud of myself. Too proud.

On the final bolt, tightened to spec of 10 foot-pounds by the manufacturer's instructions, the pan cracked. I felt it rather than saw it.  Looking up, I saw the pan was ruined, a solid crack running from the bolt hole down the side of the pan.

It would have really been  easy, even on a Sunday when Summit's phone lines are closed, to "scream" at them through their text-messaging service. Instead, heeding that lesson from the Yoga mat, I texted what had happened and said how sad it made me, because I like the product and so appreciated all the other products I'd purchased from them over the years for the car and others. What might we do next?

In five minutes, I had their customer-service person thanking ME and sending me a return authorization, under warranty.  Everyone was smiling. I got a full refund and for now, my stock steel transmission pan goes back on the car, which then goes back on the road. Maybe later I'll tap it for a drain plug. Steel lasts.

 Out of the Shop and Into the Mean Check-Out Lines

Side benefits of this new approach to frustration continue to multiply. I am the least-likely peacemaker imaginable but recently I stopped a fight in the making in line at Food Lion. 

Letting a man with two items in his hands go ahead of me, I thought to an unattended shopping cart. I figured he'd forgotten two things and stepped back to fetch them. No. Another man came rushing up and began berating the shopper for pushing into line past HIS cart. The man I'd let in line retorted with an unfortunate and unearned "I think you should show some respect." That the speaker was white and the man with the cart was black turned those words into a dangerous spark.

There I was, with two badly over-torqued bolts. 

It hit me to take the blame. So I said "Gentleman, Let's show some mutual respect. It's all my fault." I quickly told them what I'd done. They both looked at me, none too happy, so I rushed on. "Everyone is so angry nowadays. I'm to blame. I'm sorry. Life is short. "

It ended there. They both gave me a nod and though neither apologized to the other, we all checked out and went home. I needed a stiff drink after that. It could have blown up into a fist fight. And these days, maybe one or both of them would have a gun.

Still, my words worked. Maybe breaking aluminum pans and fixing a balky transmission "well enough for now" provides a life-lesson to take outside the shop into our imperfect, angry world.

 Coda: Let The Good Times Roll, Even When The Car Won't

The Buick is about to go back on the road with the old steel pan back on. I fired it up--no leaks!--but it won't move in any gear. Time to adjust the shifter linkage--for the nth time. It will roll. I have an assembly manual for the car now.

I even changed the oil. When it rolls, I can get back to upgrades for the engine bay and a center console I'm building for the interior.

So what frustrations repairing things have you dealt with, creatively? And have you turned frustration into gratitude, like the lady on the airplane?

Rock and Sun: Desert Solitaire at Age 61

 

When did I first run into Edward Abbey? My 20s, certainly: a dangerous age to make his acquaintance. Had life gone in a different direction, I might have blundered out into the desert and died there. Lots of young men get tempted to do stupid things after reading certain authors.

Nearly 40 years later, nearly the same age as Abbey when he passed, I found myself in his neck of the desert, the place he most felt at home. In Prescott Arizona's Old Sage Bookshop, a copy of Desert Solitaire appeared. My wife spotted it, thank God, because I'd given my old paperback away and had been hankering to read the book again while we were in the West. I wanted to see if Abbey could cast his spell on me a second time.

The essays in the 1968 book, set during Abbey's time as a ranger at Arches National Monument in the late 50s, opened up for me in a way they'd never earlier. Partly I've lived a lot more, and partly I have become familiar with authors Abbey notes well, from Joyce to Chuang-Tzu. The man Abbey, at least his younger, angry self who did this writing, did not escape my censure so easily. He was in his late 20s and early 30s when he did this writing, and he comes off as a bit of womanizing misanthrope, a guy we might call a Doomer today, eager to see technological civilization collapse. Easy to claim that at such an unripe age, I thought; one broken ankle and your post-collapse adventures would end forever. The naive enthusiasm and egotism that leads him to get trapped in a side-canyon that nearly kills him remind me of the antics of the Beats; they too have sent more than a few young men to their dooms. I'm looking at you, Chris McCandless and Timothy Treadwell.

Yet Abbey redeems himself, in the prose he crafts and in his ultimate, hard-earned humility. His epiphanies of being so small in so vast and uncaring a landscape make an older reader nod in recognition, something a selfish 20-something could never do.

And the writing! Kerouac would never type a sentence like this:

Turning Plato and Hegel on their heads I sometimes choose to think, no doubt perversely, that man is a dream, thought an illusion, and only rock is real. Rock and sun.

The beautiful indifference of wild nature, moving according to its own calendar, redeems Abbey and his essays, published in the rebellious year of 68. Time does that; petroglyphs from 700 years ago look permanent, until one grapples with the deep-time of a 600-million-year-old vista where the artists put down their marks. As Abbey learns these truths, he's at his best when confronting a stubborn rattlesnake or when the side-canyon temporarily defeats him and he breaks down crying, facing starvation, then mummification, in a spot he cannot escape. Nature repeatedly slaps him silly, and he learns from the harsh lessons. Kerouac and Neal Cassady never learned; Kerouac died a sad drunk, and the same year as Abbey published the  book, Cassady's body was found beside a railroad track in Mexico, dead from exposure following a party. Neither Beat made it out of their 40s. They had raced across the desert in a car they drove to pieces, saying they were "digging" it but really only digging the sound of their own unceasing voices. They should have shut up for a while and listened to their friend Gary Snyder. Or Abbey.

Conversely, Abbey spends a lot of time in this book being quiet. After all, he's alone for much of it. To whom is he going to speak? A Prickly Pear?

If you do not know Abbey's fiction, save them and start here first, but read with care if you are still young or impressionable. The book spawned a cult following for many reasons, some good. Abbey and the writers he knew and influenced, like Terry Tempest Williams, in turn changed the nation's ideas about the sanctity of untouched wilderness. Even as what he called "industrial tourism" thrives, we rarely hear any longer calls to dam the Grand Canyon or run paved roads into every remaining tract of wilderness. The Park Service is not perfect, but it stands a little closer now than in the late 50s to Abbey's vision in its "leave no trace" philosophy. Tourism helps to fund preservation.

Perhaps I'm overly charitable in a time when a new and global threat to civilization has arisen. The pressures on us grow every year with additional gigatons of carbon dioxide. We might end up, in a few centuries, with little more to show for our folly than postmodern petroglyphs beside drowned coastal cities. 

I would like to leave a better world to the bright and eager young people I teach. Their children will hate and curse our selfishness and laziness, as bitterly as Abbey did at  his bleakest moments.

I am uncertain if I will read Desert Solitaire again. I don't have another 40 years, but one other fact remains clear. The past 40 mark how far I have come from the angry young man who, like young Abbey, felt it best for a rotten and rapacious civilization to fall.

Now I want us to make it. Not for my short-lived self, for a human nation sure to fall some day, or even for an undying God. I'm a Deist and know now in my bones that God, who blessed us with this lovely world, does not meddle. I learned that from Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel. We are free to wreck or thrive. God made chaos and put evil inside us too. Get behind me, Satan, you sham, you lie. Loser in the basement, you don't exist, but we have hell enough in each of us to make a hell right here.

Why keep hoping we'll endure and do better? Hope makes one happy. Even if it is all just rock and sunlight, we have others around us. Human contact is sacred, too, in whatever time each of us has.

Summer Tractorpunk Reading: Alas, Babylon

June managed to slip by in a flurry of Fall-semester planning and summer-garden planting, so not a post from me. But now that some of the frenzy is behind, and the tomatoes beginning to ripen, I've had time to read a few books. My summer custom is a nautical book (Williwaw,  by Gore Vidal) and a travel one (Mani, by Patrick Leigh Fermor). I even read Rowling's second Harry Potter novel; I'm not a fan but it's a fun diversion from racial-tensions, atop American incompetence and selfishness in the face of a pandemic. Then I tackled a book for the very times we are in, one I'd tried to read 40 years or more ago.

When I was a teen, I began Pat Frank's then famous 1959 novel Alas, Babylon. Back then, the world seemed dangerously close to a nuclear exchange with the Soviets, and to an OCD kid who loved dark science fiction, I wanted to see the glowing mutants stumbling through the radioactive dust of scorched cites. It was a sort of whistling in the dark. I never finished the book, because the cover was the scariest part. The image above is the edition I owned, but the back had no bar-code. Those didn't exist on books in the 70s.

Inside the book, to dorky me, the human drama of survival was boring.  I wanted big explosions and flesh-eating monsters under a Strontium sky.

Now I prefer well developed characters. It seems that only character will get us out of the perils of 2020, when everything seems a powderkeg of a different sort than the global one in 1959. One detail that did stay with me from my teen-aged abortive reading was the blurb on the paperback's back cover, something about the "thin veneer" of civilization vanishing. Well, I learned a new word at least. And that's a good take on Frank's novel, one that compares favorably to more recent work such as Jim Kunstler's World Made by Hand novels or the older Earth Abides by George Stewart. That final one might have been best for this summer, as it concerns a pandemic. Or Octavia Butler's The Parable of the Sower, with its depiction of a racist American dystopia in the midst of environmental crises.

As for nuclear-war fiction? My gold standard has come to be Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz, but that too is another story.

Yet Frank's novel kept calling me. And this time, the human drama kept me reading it. I finished in a couple of sessions, so it's most definitely a page turner.  The book might be called one of the gentlest treatments of nuclear war imaginable; Brian Aldiss called such fictions "cozy catastrophes." Frank lets the horrors happen offstage, making the book readable for those who are ordinarily terrified by such fiction. The little town of Fort Repose, Florida, gets lucky, when an east wind and perhaps a Russian dud aimed at Cape Canaveral save them from the fallout. Yet necessities soon become scarce, the lights go out, and the town's one doctor must cope as best he can.

He'd make a fine protagonist, but Frank chooses Randy Bragg, who begins the novel as a somewhat dissolute Korean-War veteran whose family fortune is quickly vanishing. He's not a static character, as one recent reviewer claims, nor a shallow one. The same review critiques, rather unfairly, a perceived masculist tone of the book, largely based on one moment of internal dialog in Bragg's head.  If anything, Bragg exemplifies the sort of Southern small-town Progressive whose was very rare then and, too often, now: he helps and befriends his African-American neighbors The Henrys, and he demonstrates sympathy for the women in his life. Minor characters, while not as richly drawn as some of Kunstler's, offer a glimpse into the world of ours, circa 1959, on the brink of ending. I particularly enjoyed the Western Union operator, whose contacts with the outside world on The Day show that before the Internet, there was still a global network. The arrogant town banker remains sadder; soon his bank is worthless, because it has only paper money no good for trade.

That points to what remains my biggest problem with World Made By Hand; I wanted Kunstler's story to begin in our own period of technological plenty. In Frank's book, we get that for a good part of the novel. It's nostalgic, too. I well recall pre-Interstate Florida before over-development began the ruination that a rising sea will finish in a century or two.

Yet Alas, Babylon is far from perfect. Dialogue can get wooden between the sexes, in particular. Randy is a bit of a stretch. He has three (at least) old or potential flames and this takes the book into the male-fantasy camp. Yet despite that misstep, the novel really looked ahead in terms of racial politics and a sense of social justice, even if that includes rough justice for highwaymen. Their menace is well portrayed, as they begin to prey upon all races in Fort Repose when the pickings grow slim elsewhere in Florida's "Contaminated Zone."

Why read the book now? And what is it doing in a blog about rural life? I would claim it's a study in building a self-reliant community. I don't believe in the American myth of self-sufficiency, as I've noted before. But self-reliance as a key to resilience? That I celebrate, and Bragg's story takes off when he decides that he and his family need to join others in town to keep that veneer of civilization from vanishing, altogether. They share resources to get well water, post notices about dangers, keep a short-wave radio working, organize a constabulary, make their own alcohol, maintain the town library, fish in the uncontaminated waters around Fort Repose. 

In that regard and others, Alas, Babylon proves a hopeful book for this pandemic. Theirs is a world where folks do what is best for each other, even if they choose a wrong path initially. I compare that to our failure to stay out of restaurants and off beaches. Those show our lack of self-reliance, our inability to sacrifice. Yet there's hope. In the store yesterday, I saw only one white, angry-looking guy without a mask. A few weeks ago, most of the customers went about unmasked.

It's good to see some progress. That's one reason to dig out this old book and see how a classic story of disaster handles the human capacity for cooperation. May we do half so well this year and beyond. Seeing that angry man in the grocery store actually encouraged me. He and his selfish notion of "freedom" looked puny, and I think at some level, he knew it. 

We'll outlast such attitudes.

Cornmeal or Gunpowder?

I'm going with cornmeal. Hell, I can roll ammo every day on my reloading press, but I can't eat bullets.

A few weeks back, I called the current situation a hurricane, but with lights and power.

So very wrong, that analogy. The same colleague who asked about prepping just got garden produce hand-delivered, at an acceptable social distance, to his front door. Yesterday, while going to our closed-down campus for a few books, I made my egg-and-greens deliveries that usually get dropped off at academic departments.

First difference: one does not self-isolate during a hurricane.

My university, friends, is a ghost town. The few students left are being cared for, as we prepare for getting them home. As for those already home, we are using technologies I know well to provide remote learning.

I can come in to the office as often as I wish, to an empty building and campus. Food service will close when the last students leave, so I'll pack lunch.  If I'm still healthy, I'll ride my bike around in what may be a cruel April.

Meanwhile, I get edgy reports of increased gun sales, mostly by folk who never before owned one. Oh, what could possibly go wrong? Even at online forums for reloading, no hotbed of gun-control sentiment, there's a good deal of concern about these folk who are prepping without much of a plan.

Hence, my call for cornmeal, not gunpowder. While shopping with my normal weekly list, recently, I noticed a curious phenomenon: in addition to predictable shortages of cleaning supplies and toilet paper, folks out here in the country had run low the stocks of corn meal, wheat flour, oil, sugar.

Good on them: Southerners may be recalling Granny's stories of hard times past. These are basics, like beans or rice, that keep body and soul together.

People might learn how to cook again. I will never forget, on my part, my dad's tales of onion sandwiches in the Great Depression. He was not overly fond of onions, afterward. My mom told me how dad and his Lebanese mother would go to a big field, now the site of a downtown Lowes, to pick dandelion greens for dinner.

We are far from that point, but I'd say that I see hopeful signs in pieces like this from the New York Times, about how cornbread is making a comeback during these uncertain times. Closer to home, Joel Salatin wrote one of his stronger posts about how the pandemic might be a time of close reflection upon what is essential: keeping a larder, staying home with loved ones, avoiding frivolous expenses, and the like. Joel and I disagree on many things, but with that post I'm with him 100%.

You can learn to cook, as the cashier at my local organic/local market told some fretting Gen-Zs who had no experience. When the restaurants close, you'll have YouTube and allrecipes.com.

Use them. And for God's sake, instead of spending money to binge on some TV show, get some DVDs free from the local library. That closed? Read a good book.

Next up for me? After Amin Maalouf's Samarkand, I'm going to embark on a virtual tour of London with Peter Ackroyd’s London: A Biography. I'll get back to that favorite city of mine, in time. Every journey teaches me something, especially the ones through the seasons of the year. This was our first winter with lettuce and greens, all through the cool months (we did not have snow or a real winter). We used a low tunnel to stretch the fall into March.

So will these times we are in. How about learning to make cornbread?

Putting Like with Like

I have a Type-A, OCD personality. Clutter drives me wild with anxiety. It can keep me awake, nights, just as lack of social capital or "FOMO" (fear of missing out) keep my anxious students glued to phones all day and sleep deprived.

Yet in a barn, let's get real: Entropy is more than a Law of Physics. It's a way of life. My wife jokes that I can tolerate dirt, making a space merely "guy clean," as long as nothing but the unstoppable cats are on our counters.

Yet gradually, ever so gradually, I've come to accept if not love the inevitable clutter of rural life and DIY projects.  At the same time, why waste half an hour looking for a tool or the right-sized board when that time could be spent making, fixing, planning? One way to reduce wasted time comes, as with my last post, from a common-sense saying. My mom was always fighting a long delaying action with chaos; with six kids, what else could she do? She would fold clothes as I watched, in wonder. How could that jumble get into such a neat pattern?

"Put like with like, Joey!" And ever since, that has been my rule.

On one occasion, with 20 bored undergraduates unable to hammer nails at a Habitat for Humanity build, and certainly not capable of doing roofing or running a miter saw, I put them in teams, each with a pair of buckets, while a kid with skills and I got on a roof to put down tar paper. My charge: "Go pick up every nail you find, put it in bucket A. All the screws go in bucket B. We'll be saving them hundreds of bucks!" For a few hours, the kids stayed busy. The Habitat folks were amazed when we trudged up with pounds and pounds of dropped fasteners.

This can be overdone.  My habits drove my friend Jeff, a talented carpenter, insane when I helped him. I'd clean up the site before he'd finished, and at least once I saw him reach back for some fasteners but he hand closed on empty air.

Cussing ensued. I learned to delay my compulsions.


Now I have a more subtle way of approaching the mess made by projects. Every week an empty hour or two opens up, time enough for something small but not a big item from my to-do list around our property. Sometimes I load up a hundred rounds of ammo, or check a small box off as I restore my old car. Increasingly, however, I turn that spare time sorting tools and materials--there are acres and acres of time, if you refuse to watch TV or whatever movie is now popular, except on your own schedule. And if you prepare extra food on the weekend, then freeze it? You save more hours and money not eating out.

My like-with-like method is simple. I :

• Tidy at least one square foot of space every time I clean up. 
• Sort items waiting for their final home into boxes I find (plastic or wood, not cardboard. Need to see what is inside!)
• Move sorted items to the spot where they'll be used. So blades for my two miter-box saws, scattered between two buildings, went to a spot nearest the saw they fit. Same with the arbor saw; all those blades will not fit the other saws.  Warning: this can be an endless process if you have lots of tools.
• Put things away, ASAP, when I'm sure (thanks, Jeff) I'm done.
• Toss or recycle anything broken beyond further use. I do scrounge usable bits for later use before I toss the rest.
• Sort small parts (springs, fasteners, etc) into labeled carpenter chests, using that old Dymo label maker to know what is what.
• Stage things: I keep a tool tray out for frequently used tools like my impact driver, fencing pliers, and batteries plus a plastic jar of a few dozen decking screws in a plastic jar. Grab and go! This aligns with the Roman philosophy of making haste, slowly, or festina lente.
• Buy multiple copies of common items and stage them. We have flashlights near the chicken coops, socket sets, screwdrivers, wrenches, and screwdrivers in tool boxes around the place. I keep a wrench and a hammer on the tractor for dealing with balky three-point-hitch fittings or cotter pins.
• Keep the floors clean. This keeps things from vanishing in dust, wood shavings, mouse droppings, snake skins, and more. I now rarely trip on cords or grab a snake (did that once with a black racer on a cold morning; he was torpid but not happy with me).

Do I still waste time looking for stuff? YES. But not as I once did. Try it in the house, too!

Meanwhile, back to work.

The Cold, Clear Light of Day

I recall my mom's advice when frustrated or scared, "It will look better in the clear light of day."

That's great advice for anyone struggling with rural life. I didn't grow up with it and am still very much a city boy. I may always be, deep inside, despite all the skills I've slowly acquired.

Yesterday was one of those awful days. I had struggled with a large rotary mower I use several times a year. We'd had a great success clearing a large patch of Tree of Paradise, amid a jungle of vines. I wanted to mow them before the snow flies again, as it's about to do today. We are talking about enough piles of vines, cut and still attached, to overflow two 8' pickup beds.

Everything seemed aligned, cosmically, until the tractor's PTO shaft would not align with the mower's drive shaft. It's a tedious, heavy job that involves pry bars, cinder blocks, and cursing. In fact, I increasingly see why farmers have multiple tractors for multiple jobs. My dedicated bush-hog tractor, a Ford 8N, is simply too fast in reverse to trust near hills, and it lacks a seat belt or roll bar.

As I tried to connect the mower, the light faded from the sky. I put the tractor on a slope, with the loader bucket down, to increase the distance between the connections. No dice. Nothing, including adjusting all the linkages, would make something fit that has fit many times before.

As it got dark, I recalled my mom's advice. I put up the gear and then it hit me: the next day I would shorten the drive shaft about an inch. I was bone tired and needed a stiff drink.

I did that early, with a reciprocating saw. Then with my Dremel I beveled the edges. The shaft fit, the tractor cut the vines, and I was done in 45 minutes.

If you push yourself too hard when tired, a friend advised me once when chainsawing, you are going to end up in the hospital.

Good advice at twilight. Wait until the clear, cold light of day, then get back to work.

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.

Farewell Robert Pirsig

This post began as a comment at Hemmings Motor News, which announced the passing of the author.  At this distance, I can say with certainty that Robert Pirsig's book had a long-lasting impact on who I am now, though at the time I did not recognize it.

Just the other day, I noticed my lilac-colored copy of Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance the other day: when I was the worst aerospace-engineering student ever to attend UVA, the book was required reading for all engineers. It’s the only book I saved from that part of my education, and I reread it once while living abroad.

Funny how Socrates’ dialog with Phaedrus means a lot more to me now than anything Pirsig wrote then, but the name did stick and I got curious about why Phaedrus was so important to Pirsig. In a nutshell, Phaedrus was a punk kid who thought the new technology called “writing” was spiffy, while Socrates derided it as a block to really remembering things. It was an early warning against the cheapened, the simulated, the virtual.

What did Pirsig teach me that I most recall? The story of climbing a mountain with his son. The boy only wanted to summit, while the author was content with enjoying the journey and knowing when to turn back. I’ve lived by that philosophy ever since, as well as the need–a nearly glandular one–to avoid Interstates and mass culture when I travel. Blue Highways, by Least-Heat Moon, did me in for all that, permanently. I read it not long after Pirsig’s book.

As for motorcycles? They still terrify me and I’ll never ride one. As for books? I am a colleague of Matthew Crawford’s wife, which is NOT why I recommend Shop Class as Soulcraft for a better take on this topic for gearheads or beatnik-farmers like me.

So farewell Robert Pirsig, and thank you for helping me along my crooked and continuing journey away from the boring and banal.

The Shaving Bench & Hand Tools

I did not know who L.P. Hartley was until I searched for the famous dictum "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." Hartley wrote a number of books, some very well received; his obscurity now makes a writer pause and think "why bother?"

But why bother at anything? In 100 years, anyone old enough to read this post will, at best, be a half-recalled series of stories told by descendants and an inscription on a stone, somewhere.

Now that I have depressed you thoroughly, let's hop into a time machine and cheer ourselves up a bit. It's one way I find solace as I face, as we all do, the final erasure of ourselves and our accomplishments. I'll use Rod Taylor's gizmo from the George Pal film; I think it best captures the intentions of H.G. Wells. I look forward to teaching the novel in my course on Science Fiction and Fantasy, this Fall. It puts human vanity into perspective.

So did William Faulkner, when he claimed that "The past is never dead. It's not even past." I feel that way whenever I visit Colonial Williamsburg. It always gives me a strange hope that whatever our species does in the near future, short of nuclear catastrophe an interesting and more sustainable life for our descendants will be possible.  I am beginning to regard the Past as a foreign country, but one we can visit.

Beyond Williamsburg's occasional theme-park dissonance, as bored or dumb tourists meet very savvy historical reenactors, I find something precious for the future of our civilization going on: the conservation of old-time skills. I've become increasingly obsessive to learn a few, myself, from scything and baling hay by hand to acquiring more skill with hand-tools. These were skills that most rural residents possessed in living memory. As a Williamburg employee, working on a hand-built sawpit and barn, reminded me, you don't have to go back 200+ years to find the skills he used. In 1950, my late father-in-law built structures using most of the same techniques and many of the same tools.

After a recent visit I decided upon a hot-weather project: building a "shaving bench" or "shaving horse." That's not for shaving oneself or anything equine, but it holds wood for smoothing out with either a hand planer or a "spoke shave." This site shows how one can be made easily in a home shop. It should last a lifetime, unlike many modern power tools.

No, it is not as cool-looking than George Pal's rendition of Wells' time machine, but it serves a similar purpose: adventuring into another era. Whereas The Time Traveler went into the dim and grim future of the human race, then, heartbroken, beyond to the end of the Sun, my Shaving Bench will take me back no more than a century, so I can begin using hand tools for more woodworking. I'm learning to be good with our hand-auger and have long been decent at hand-sawing, but it's a journey to unlearn muscle-memory honed with table or chop saws, drill-presses, and jigsaws. I will use some of these power-tools to fashion the shaving bench, in both the interest of time and in order to conserve materials.

There is a focus all tools engender, simply because you can too easily nip off a finger or worse by not paying attention. Hand tools add something to that focus, because the experience is quiet enough to eliminate hearing protection and, depending on the tool, bulky safety glasses.

At times like that, I realize that as hard as our ancestors worked, the experience was less mediated. The world was a wooden one, as ours largely is, but the experiential distance from tree to board to finished good was much shorter. 

I plan to travel back to that foreign country, increasingly.

Intensity or Communion?

"The search for intensity is the shadow side of the healer."  One of my Yoga teachers, Nitya, said that, something she'd learned from one of her teachers. Now I share it here.

So what in the Sam Hill does that principle of Yoga have to do with DIY country life?

A lot, actually.

Modern farming--to feed a nation of more than 300 million souls--does involve a great deal of intensity, not all of it sustainable. Yet food is the best healer I know.

I suppose that if farmers saw themselves as healers, fewer of them would engage in practices that are fouling our rivers and depleting our topsoil. They'd put back in windrows and riparian barriers around waterways.

If consumers saw that food was healing, those who could afford it would pay more for local food grown sustainably, even if it meant cutting portions and losing a bit of weight. I joked that for our Thanksgiving turkey, I felt as though I knew the turkey. I did now which farm it came from.

If county councils saw the land is what heals us now and will sustain the next generations, they'd not rezone things so suburban sprawl, that odd mixture of cancer and cannibalism, engulfs prime farmland. These "public servants" would thus serve future generations, not merely the next election cycle and the pressure from deep-pocketed developers. As Edward Abbey, whose work so influenced my thinking in my 20s and 30s, put it, "Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell."

It's a dream that we'll change our ways, but dreaming is good. In the dark years to come following a disastrous election, we are going to need to keep our own long visions as the evil in high places destroys itself. It so often does.

I'll keep turning the soil, but keep in mind that Shadow, the shadow of intensity.  Edward Abbey also advised us to "Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards."

I plan to do so, and I dream of those days to come.  Begin your own journey by healing yourself, and then spare a little healing for the soil that birthed you and sustains you still.

Blessed Solstice, all.

No Till? I Think Not.

I've been fascinated by small-scale successes with no-till gardening, such as lasagna gardening, but so far on our little farm, it is simply not working for commercial growing. I have 7000 square feet of raised beds now, and more on the way. In time, however, I will greatly reduce tillage. I cannot even fathom how my friend Dominic would manage 3 acres without tilling. He uses a cultivator on a row-crop tractor.

In my case, the tractor goes into the field once, when I first busted the sod. First I plowed, then harrowed. To get raised beds ready, I tilled, then amended the soil before planting and mulching. Since we use no herbicides, the weeds still creep in, particularly Cynodon dactylon, AKA wire grass, AKA Bermuda Grass and, yes, AKA Devil's Grass. It grows up and through the wire mesh we keep around our raised beds and colonizes new areas but growing roots from its runner through layering.

You cannot get rid of it without chemicals. On our patio, far from our food, I do spray Roundup on calm days. I've used it concentrated and carefully for years on stumps of Tree of Heaven.

In the garden, however, poison is out of the question. So I reach for the tiller whenever I replant a bed.

Wire grass can be reduced or even killed by shade, but that's no help in a sunny vegetable garden. Some plants form a dense canopy, such as sweet potatoes or our big crop of Thai Peppers, but the wire grass is still around, biding its time even under 6 inches of wheat straw mulch.

We own two tillers, a walk-behind with rear tines and forward and reverse gears. It's a beast. I use it for new beds or those badly overgrown by wire grass. For other beds during rotation, I use a handheld tiller to break the weeds' hold on the soil, then rake out with a for-tine cultivator or field rake. I then add amendments, usually four parts of our homemade compost, one part rock dust, one part fireplace ashes. That yields the holy trinity of gardening: Nitrogen, Rock Phosphate, Potassium.

I call this method "low till" and it does keep weeds manageable.  I try never to till too deeply.

But who wants to live on a golf course? No one that I'd want to drink with. Or have as a neighbor.

My method of low-till cultivation has kept weed pressure manageable, though I have to go around after rain and pull long runners of grass out of and around our beds.

Nature will win this battle in the long run. So be it. Wire grass is excellent in lawns and shakes off drought and even dog-urine attacks that leave brown circles in our field.

The Illusion Is Real To Me

This post began with some musings at Wagner James "Hamlet" Au's blog, New World Notes. Au has also covered the utopians and skeptics of virtual reality in a piece at Wired, "VR Will Make Life Better--Or Just Be an Opiate For the Masses." Some proponents of the Occulus Rift 3D viewer are claiming that a virtual world good enough is as good at the life we lead without goggles and a fast internet connection.

Since this issue involves both of my blogs, I hope readers will excuse the cross-postings. I have also been thinking about how Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook is very much invested in Occulus tech and why the picture of him, striding among a crowd wearing Rifts, chills me to the bone.

Here was my reply at New World Notes.

Even a happy virtual life would neglect the agons of a happy real one.

Yesterday I labored a few hours on a farm tractor I'm selling, checking for issues and eliminating possibilities in the electric system. I used a lot of stored knowledge in the wetware of my brain to trouble-shoot. I was in a place without reliable wireless, so double-checking hunches with the phone was not possible.

Then I went to work on the fuel system, turning wrenches and skinning knuckles until I had the likely culprit. At night I went online, into a flat virtual community, to check my assumptions. This weekend I'll clean out the fuel tank, blow compressed air through all the fittings, and restart the old diesel.

Simulating all that with an Occulus might eventually be possible. Doing so might even feed me if my virtual farm supplied RL (real life) income. But you know what?

Virtual is still FAKE. Always will be until someone really does achieve the Singularity. Hence my consideration of SL (Second Life) and more advanced forms of virtual worlds as just something nice for entertainment, like a novel or film but more immersive.

As for the possibility that our RL world is a Matrix? Let me quote a famous fake person, Conan the Barbarian. I only slay groundhogs and cold beers, but the rest is apt:

"I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content."