Week 8: Deferred maintenance

Independence Days Report:

Plant Something: Last of the potatoes.

Harvest Something: Cauliflower, peas, lettuce, spinach, beets, bok choi, mustard, onion greens, nasturtium, chives. Eggs. The cauliflower was so spectacular that Beloved agreed to pose with one for a cauli-portrait, which was nice as I consider her super-photogenic, but she's one of those that-camera-will-steal-my-ghost people.

Preserve Something: Peas, cauliflower.

Store Something: Firewood, kindling, a lot of flattened cardboard cartons.

Manage Reserves: Finally dealing with a decade of deferred maintenance. Painted the north side of the house and am pulling defunct gutters off in preparation for re-roofing. Also wrote a check for $250 to go toward principal on the last $6,500 of our one remaining debt. What with what happened to IndyMac, it seemed the right thing to do with what little discretionary money we have.

Also under managing reserves: We don't air condition and the 95 degree days are a danger; we're not young any more. So we are managing our reserves of strength by taking siestas. If you're house painting and go indoors to lie down and cool off and feel the least bit sleepy, SLEEP. Give it ten to twenty minutes. You'll rise up ready to tackle whatever, and as the light lasts so much longer in the summer (especially north of, say, 40 degrees latitude, or south of same, in that other hemisphere) you're good until 9:30 or 10 p.m. But without the nap you could become a danger to yourself as the evening wears on. See under Learned a Skill, below.

Prepped: set up one of next year's new "raised" beds -- this one was the vinca border along the north side of the house, under the kitchen window, then on the east side around the corner to the "patio." There's a concrete walkway along the entire length of the bed, making it ideal for inclement-weather harvesting. A couple of months ago I mowed the vinca, an invasive species (and mulched fruit trees with the clippings), then smothered the bed with black plastic until we could scrape up enough cardboard.

Yesterday, we moved the potted tomatoes and potatoes, pulled off the plastic, flattened all the boxes and spread them over the bed, then distributed a bale of straw over the whole thing. This bed will be watered from time to time to encourage earthworms to move in and convert the vinca roots and cardboard into castings, and then it should be ready for use as a spring garden. Size: 4X60 feet.

Cooked Something New: have taken to cutting up bread (home baked buckwheat/rye/oats/wholewheat) as it gets a little toward -- well -- stale -- and layering it underneath the stir fried greens and hard-boiled duck eggs.

Way better than it sounds.

Really.

Worked on Local Food Systems: Selling eggs regularly. Have taken to keeping the little rice steamer handy and whenever I come in for a glass of tea or water (it's been 95 four of the last six days!) I bring in some greens or peas, blanch them in the steam, rinse, drain, and bag up in a labeled quart freezer bag and freeze, before going back to my house painting. The whole chore takes about ten minutes, combined with the tea break.

Reduced Waste: More grey water to fruit trees. Mixed two gallons of hideous pale green and pale blue paint left over from a color scheme at my mom's place that she had here, eight years ago. This resulted in a pleasant enough sort of dark olive green that I'm painting the foundation of the our house with it, to hide the robin-egg-blue that the previous homeowner had sprayed all over it.

I could never live in a robin-egg-blue house. Umm, okay, so if it was the last house in the world, sure. A cave might be nice, in that case. I have never spray painted. A roller and a brush are good enough.

Rode the bus to work all week. There were dozens of new people, and we're now into strap-hanging territory. And this town has always hated buses ...

Learned a Skill: How to use a combination folding-extension ladder, which I got for half of retail. These things can be used as fruit picking and pruning ladders and also straightened out to seventeen feet for roofing and gutter work. But it took a little puzzling out, the first time.

And: How not to use a bench vise and pipe wrench. I put too much body english into trying to salvage a galvanized 1/2" elbow that had fused onto a pipe, fell backwards over a little red wagon full of geegaws, and punctured my fanny with a wicked-looking 7" gutter nail. Not much of it got into my backside, but my pride was rather wounded. I used to be good at this stuff!

Lesson! CLEAN UP WORK SPACES ...

-30-

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My heart sang the whole way

[posted by risa]

A little away time, they say, is a good thing, so Beloved and I took Last Son to Daughter's place in the Big City To The North, so they could go see the major fireworks there together, and headed for our favorite hideaway, a tiny trailer (but sited on its own lot) belonging to friends of ours, in a tiny town on the edge of the not-tiny Pacific Ocean. A stone's throw from our own place by air, but by road, it seems far -- and it is. All the approaches are along hair-raising turns of road with sun-drenched dropoffs to one side and fern-clad, perpetually shaded cliffs looming on the other, and the occasional tunnel -- one finds oneself continually putting on and taking off sunglasses, and then at the end there are leaden grey skies and a booming salt wind, cold in July, cold in any month -- really February, when things sometimes calm down mysteriously, can be the easiest month, between hammering storms out of the Gulf of Alaska. Not an easy place to live, it's a good one to visit, if you can find it.

Yet people do, and the few streets are clogged with traffic, much of it surely boorish beyond the patience of the townies, and yet they are unfailingly welcoming, not just of the tourist dollars, but of the company of so many strangers. There's a tiny airport right in the middle of it all, and families walking to the bridge to amble along the five miles of beach sometimes duck, hardly breaking off conversation, as a Cessna roars in at little more than head-height.

There's a brew-pub by the Cape -- their award-winning India Pale Ale has a taste that reminds one a bit of fresh pine and fir needles -- and yet is really very good -- and by the pub runs a corduroy road of fifteen-ton concrete blocks down onto the beach, where the shelter of the Cape and the Rock led settlers to devise a fishing fleet of dories launched directly into the surf. The dories have fallen upon hard times -- no salmon. No salmon fishing allowed at all this year, as a species once numbered into the billions slips into near oblivion, trawled, long-lined, seined, dammed, and fed a steady diet of agricultural chemicals, leaving the dorymen -- rod-and-reel people -- high and all too dry.

Those Who Know Better Than We have resorted to the usual -- fish farming and hatcheries -- but the hatchery fish deplete the gene pool and the sea lice from the hatcheries have become an epidemic among the sea-run fish, both those from the wild and those -- now the vast majority of those still alive -- from the hatcheries. It's a Situation, like many others around the over-humaned globe.

Tuna, which have throughout most of this coast's known history lived farther south, have moved in as the globe warms, but they are shore-shy and live well out of reach of many of the boats. Those that can travel safely the twelve or more miles to get at them are now beached by the five-dollar-a-gallon diesel prices.

Considering these prices, and the way our own driving adds its tiny but measurable fillip to the Situation, Beloved and I wonder if this might be our last time here. We're drawn, yet again, by the mind-numbing beauty, and by memories.

The kids practically grew up in this town, living for weeks at a time in the sand, wind, and stinging parallel-to-the-ground rains, picking up sand dollars, curious round stones and bits of driftwood, gull feathers, and such, trading shy glances with the dolphins, sea lions, harbor seals and pelicans, and poking their snub noses into shore-pine thickets, caves and lighthouses.

Today I went over to the beach and walked south for three miles and then north for three miles. Nothing happened of any particular interest to tell you about -- just that my heart sang the whole way.

It's no good beachcombing in July; the sand was so cleanly that any broken bit of mussel shell to flip over with a toe was a relief to the monotony. I found one rock of any interest at all. There was a flight of pelicans. I was observed by a sea lion. A whole lot of dead sand crabs lay belly up on the margin of the tide line, to be picked over by fastidious crows..

I brought the rock to Beloved, whose feet have been bothering her and who had reluctantly elected to stay behind. She turned it in her hands. It was smooth rounded and elongated, gray with brown patches, pointed at one end and flat at the other. She stood it on end on a side table.

"Look," she said. "It's a sea lion."

And it was.

-30-

The Iron Man

[posted by risa]

Just down the road a few miles the Society for Creative Anachronism is having one of their annual tournaments.

Tall Son participates in these, and is building a growing reputation for his tenacity. Having known him for twenty-eight years, I have to say I'm not surprised. He invited me to watch him this weekend, and, while I had my doubts about the enterprise, especially after watching a couple of the tourney's fighters get up very slowly, and with help, I did find myself cheering him on with the rest as the "dead" piled up around him, so to speak.

Idris, as he is called in the SCA, did not acquire armor until later in life than many of his fellows, and so is having to catch up in both technique and conditioning. As the tournament wore on in the hot sun, he found himself taking hits that reduced him to a kneeling posture, but, like the god whose strength comes from touching the earth, he often fights better with his knees under him, and even better with one hand behind him. More than once, he took on at least four opponents in a row from the "wounded" kneeling posture and sent them to the back of the line. At last one would take him when he had been reduced by sheer numbers to acknowledging his opponent with a grunt and a twitch of his sword hand.

Whenever he was sent to the back of the line, I found myself running up to him with a bandanna to wipe his eyebrows and upper eyelids through a slit in his helm, which he appreciated as the sweat kept running into his eyes.

"You really light up when you're doing this," I said, dabbing away.

"This is what I do," he replied, in that Sean Connery voice he has.

Between such times I sat among the ladies of his household, the Iron Ring, and occasionally a lord would drift by and kiss all our hands. Some of them were quite dashing, with tremendous animal magnetism.

As one of the knights walked away, I said to my daughter-in-law, "Whatever it is, he's got it." She agreed, nodding her head sagely.

Part of the day I spent as a scullery maid, washing up with Daughter-in-law, or dishing up some of Beloved's highly praised duck eggs to the household, or taking a break to provide background music with my dulcimer, as the menfolks mingled, sipping their mead and trading shoptalk on gear and sword moves. It's their world and they're welcome to it, but visiting it for a day, every other year, works out about right for me.

My oldest granddaughter is Idris's daughter. She's nine, now, and was to be seen at intervals throughout the day, scrambling up tree trunks and hopping over mudholes with a friend.

She spent the night with us here at Stony Run. We elected to camp out together in the Scriptorium, which to her is the Playhouse, and we hauled a mattress out there for me (she slept on the cot that was already made up for her). We brought a book with us, thinking we would read, but both, quite a bit more worn out than we'd expected, fell into a deep sleep almost immediately.

-30-

Not too tiring if done right

[posted by risa]

Ah, a little bit of sunshine. But Saturday I went to an all-day meeting in Salem.

Sunday, naturally, I went berserk.

Most of the activity centered around the beds we're expanding/reviving to increase our veggie production.

Most of the veggie gardening has been confined, in recent years, to a circular garden fifty feet in diameter. But as we pay more and more attention to the idea of living, year round, on home production, we find ourselves spilling over into containers and the flower beds.

There's room between the house and the grape arbor for four or more 4' beds fifty feet long. That's a lot of room. Constraints have been: water conservation, enough time. We think we can water more garden, with a little planning. And we will just have to make the time.

The perennial beds will remain mostly in flowers, as Beloved loves her bulbs and perennials (I do, too) and likes to have them along the paved pathway from the driveway to the house. I notice she's put a lot of brassicas, especially a variety of lettuces, into one of them, though.

The third bed has been mostly peas and scarlet runners for the last decade. We're widening this one, and this spring it will contain sugar snap peas and scarlet runners, kind of in succession, down the middle, on a framework of poles and wire, and onion sets, beets, spinach and potatoes on the margins. I've built a fourth bed and this one will have the peas and beans down the middle, with radishes and beets, and four rows of potatoes (Yukon Gold and the little thin-skinned red ones) along the margins. These are the early garden and with successful succession plantings, fall-winter as well.

This last bed is a sod-busting project, as what was there before was a failed blueberry planting and we hadn't had the heart to try again there for awhile. The site has a dark, very heavy clay topsoil that drains well compared to the summer garden and can be worked earlier. Even so, it would be too wet to mechanically till until some time in June, so tilling is not really an option. We draped black plastic over it during the late winter, then turned over the sods in chunks about six inches by ten, using a general purpose long-handled five-tine fork. This is what's known as "spading" but I never do it on this scale with a spade (compacts the soil and kills too many earthworms) or "spading" fork (all the ones I've seen have short handles and will hurt your back).

This is a rhythmical and satisfying activity, not too tiring if done right, bending knees, applying leverage, and not trying to lift clay with one's lower back. It's difficult to describe but easy to demonstrate. 1) Tip out one or more turves to make a start hole. 2) "step" the fork into the earth three inches away from the hole, push the fork forward to rip the roots and corms of the grass in your chunk away from those in the ground nearer you. 3) pull back, to lift away the bottom of your turf from the ground beneath. 4) Draw the turf to you, leaning back and using the straightening of your legs to lift the turf. 5) push the turf off the fork tines with your foot. 6) Turn the turf upside down with the fork, poke the tines into it, and drop it into the hole, with the roots exposed to the sun. 7) Repeat till you reach the end of the bed. 8) go back to the beginning, where you lifted out the first turves, start a hole adjacent to the first one, and begin again.

You'll have leftover turf, which can be used to level any low spots in the rough bed before chopping.

This is not the "double digging" described in all the books, but it seems to do the job, just as my bread seems to do fine without the "second rising" the bread books all talk about.

I then chopped up the chunks with a spade, then covered the whole bed with grass clippings four inches deep. Down the middle of the bed, after the clippings had dried to a tan color, I raked back the mulch to make a row about four inches wide, and spread about a half-inch layer of potting soil for a seedbed. Walking along with a piece of aluminum tubing about four feet long, I dropped radish and beet seeds and peas down the pipe, on about a two-inch spacing, then shoveled on another half-inch of potting soil, and tamped it all down with the spade handle (d-ring). And watered gently with a very light manure tea.

The seed potatoes, which I had "slipped" (cut into pieces with one or more "eyes" each) the night before, went into two rows on each side of the pea row by being tucked under the mulch at ten-inch intervals.

Each bed runs north and south, and has in it three iron tee-posts in a line, with a medium-gauge wire strung between them and staked into the ground at the ends for tautness. As the peas come up, I stake them with suckers cut from filbert, willow, and ash trees. Some years these will sprout, and I re-use them after their garden duty as reforestation seedlings. The production of these suckers for this kind of use is something of a lost art, known as "coppicing." It's a low-cost-high-efficiency way to provide yourself with stakes, kindling, and even firewood.

The circular garden currently harbors some of our perennial foods (elephant garlic, Jerusalem artichoke, several varieties of chard, celery, onions and Egyptian onions) and we have been eating from it daily, but at this time of the year, mostly what I do there is add layers of grass clippings to the mulch and attend to the sod-building grasses that invade (no doubt from seeds imported with the clippings -- sigh).

In another month, God-willin-and-the-crick-don't-rise, we'll do the summer things: beans, corn, squash, eggplant, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers and such.

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Lady of the place

[posted by risa]

I started my weekend by getting into overalls and an old wide-brimmed hat. I put my hair, which is well over two feet long, up into a ponytail and did without earrings and makeup for the time being. My feet I put into clodhoppers cut down from old rubber boots.

Olga! Wooga wooga.

I made and carried about eleven mower bags of grass clippings into the circle garden and spread that around, then gathered up a few tools and a ladder and headed out to the barn to reroof where yet another windstorm had ripped the roll roofing loose. One waits until the temperature is above sixty (F.) to do this, and the roofing had hung there for a couple of weeks, with Beloved dodging around it get inside and collect eggs. Now the roofing had softened in the rare but welcome sunshine, and I set the ladder against the barn and climbed up. I set the tools out of the way, and pulled up the errant section.

This stuff is called 90 lb. felt for a reason, as a roll of it, which doesn't go very far, weighs just that. I'm much less strong than when I was, ostensibly, that other person, so there was quite a bit of huffing to get it all onto the shed roof, but it came along graciously enough -- i.e., all in one piece. Getting it down to the roof edge from which it had blown took a good deal more effort than hauling it up, as it turned out, because I could not take the ladder around and pull, which would have been the thing to do -- the chicken run is roofed over with poultry netting, up to and even with and tacked onto the barn roof -- and prevents that. And walking backwards onto the stuff would result in a dismal scene. So I had to kneel, in the heat, and push, encourage and cajole the roll roofing into place, then tuck it under the next course above it before nailing down.

Besides the nails, which had failed, I chose this time to also put in two- inch screws every three nails, using a Phillips-head bit fastened into a brace-and-bit. This tool has been in the family for a good sixty years, is precision-machined, with a chuck that rotates in the hand to lock up the bit, and large and comfortable freely-rotating Bakelite handles. This brace has been sometimes abused with weather and it has never rusted. You couldn't get one of these now, for any kind of money, I should think. It sinks speed screws almost as fast as a power drill, but without all the noise, and is one of our most prized possessions.

Looking over my work, I wasn't satisfied. This roof is always the one that catches the worst of what the winds have in mind. So I concluded to climb down and go get some one-by fours to bolt down at intervals, perpendicular to the troubled edge.

I leisurely backed down the ladder into the farmyard, with Barred Rocks running to me from all the corners for a chance to peck at the paint spots on my trouser legs, and turned around. There, not twenty feet away, stood a heavy-set young man, mustachioed and t-shirted, with his mouth flapping.

A woman alone for the day on a country place does not expect unheralded intrusions of this kind, and I checked my hip pocket first to see that I had unfettered access to my equalizing device, which I did. I then realized that the mouth-flapping meant that I had turned off my hearing aid, probably in response to my own hammering. So I reached up and switched my ears on.

The young man stopped talking for a moment, and covered his mouth in embarrassment.

"I'm so, so sorry, ma'am, I thought .. I called you 'sir' as you came down the ladder, but now I see my mistake."

"That's all right; roofing can be kind of awkward to do in a dress. Can I help you with something?" I moved toward the front of the house, where our current woodpile is, and he accompanied me, presumably in the direction of his vehicle. There it sat in the shade, with a passenger, another young man, this one with a walrus mustache, in the shotgun seat, who waved companionably. The back of the pickup truck was clearly a cooler unit, and was emblazoned with the name of a local meat locker outfit.

"I sure am sorry, ma'am, and that's a fact. Well, we ... uh, we just made a delivery to your neighbor across the street, and we, we wondered if you'd like to buy any meats -- we got beef, lamb, chicken ... " He looked back at the Barred Rocks, who were lined up along the fence, straining to hear every word. "Umm, I guess you got chicken."

"They are all layers. Good ones, too. But we have, in the freezer, mostly goose."

"Oh. wow, goose. Well, uh, maybe some good fresh beef, whaddya think?"

"I think that I like good fresh beef, but the freezer is full. Thank you so much for stopping by."

True about the freezer. Well, it's mostly fruit and vegs, but our geese, Sylvia, Susannah, and Sylvester, had turned out to be Silvio, Susannah, and Sylvester, and we do discriminate against extra boys in the farmyard. So we are down to Susannah and Sylvester, and some pretty good roast goose. Much quieter now, too.

:::

Poor fellas!

I know that I present with mixed signals when my guard is down. One does. They had, presumably, seen me in the distance, and attempted an impromptu cold call. Men with something to sell, who are at all mannerly, as these pretty much were, are more apt to walk right up into a farmyard, two hundred feet from the street, when they see whom they believe to be the man of the place pottering about, and say hello from about thirty feet away, where they might never attempt such a thing if they see, from that distance, that it is the lady of the place. Hence their confusion. They had committed what could have been interpreted as a serious faux pas, and both apologized several more times before they drove away.

Gee, kind of sweet. I had had no idea I could pass in overalls, farm boots, and a man's hat! Such is the power of body shape, for mine, once I had turned around, was clearly not that of any man.

Made my day, anyway.

Which was a good thing, as the very next thing I did after roofing was to round the corner of the house and discover that the hose between the solar water heater and the house could not take the heat from a sixty degree day. The polyethylene outer sheath had swollen in several places, and water had forced its way through the woven inner sheath and burst the polyethylene in one spot, hosing down the house with hot water for I don't know how long. I swiftly shut down the spigot on the hot water tank (hot hot, HOT!) -- and reflected on how prone to error is this business of lowest-of-the-low-budget plumbing.

Having nothing on hand with which to carry out a better scheme, I went back to making and carrying loads of grass clippings, this time to the new potato patch...

-30-

The best way

Sharon Astyk says:

"I garden for food, but also, I garden because it is the best way into myself that I know of."

Chicken rodeo

[posted by risa]

The jury duty thing was a bit of a bust. Have a seat, watch the movie (about the constitution we once had) and get divided into four groups. The Bulldogs and Mutts were sent in for selection, and the Labs and Beagles (I was a Beagle) were let go. It took about four hours.

I got to know a Lab while we waited. She has a Finnish daughter-in-law and about half an hour into the conversation mentioned she has been reading to her grandchildren from the Moomin books.

"We used to read to the kids from those."

"Oh, I've never met anyone who knows a thing about them!" Suddenly we were bosom buddies and comparing notes on our descendants scattered across the earth.

I mentioned that my oldest would be forty on his next birthday.

"No! Well. Well, you must have been quite the child bride!"

Something like that.

:::

Daughter (whom you may know as Grinin) came to our house, with Young Man, and Last Son, to celebrate her birthday. Last Son brought along his first batch of brew, which had turned out well -- I'm told. I wouldn't know -- I was away doing a Freedom Fund dinner and missed much of the party, including all of the beer. When I arrived, everyone was pretty much mellowed out, including Beloved.

While we all were visiting, I got out the breadmaker, cleaned it up as best I could, put in the spare paddle, the manual, the recipe book, and a yeast packet and gave them to Daughter. It might be a good introduction to breads for her, and a chance for me to get a piece of kitchen machinery out of the house. I had baked a loaf for them that turned out especially well, using just the big bowl and a wooden spatula for the mixing, and felt brave enough. This will turn out to have been a good idea if my arthritis doesn't advance on me any time soon.

Today it was 66 degrees Fahrenheit. Maybe not a a record but not what one expects this time of the year. Things were busting out all over. Snakes were sunning themselves, something we don't often see until June, and the mason bees went crazy in the pussy willows. I cut some wood, did repairs to the drains, cleaned up around the fruit trees where I had been pruning, and hauled about eight loads of grass clippings to the garden. I took the rake down to the garden to spread the clippings, then suddenly wished I could have the chickens level them out for me. I went looking for Beloved.

She had gone back to bed briefly and had been napping, some we're doing more and more of in the daytime, but waved me over.

"How about if we were to put just, say, two chickens in garden for the day, you know, just hand-carry them over? The ones that squat down when you go up to them and are easy to pick up?"

"Wouldn't that be a kind of a Chicken Rodeo getting them back up to the pen?"

"How so?"

"Well, we'd be chasing them around in the garden and compacting it."

"No, no, I thought maybe they'd, you know, do their submissive thingy just like they do in the pen and we could carry them back up there, no sweat. Whaddya think?"

"I think we might just try it. I was gonna do inside things next but I'll dress for the barnyard and be there in a bit."

I went out to the filbert, which needed its suckers removed (and made into pea brush), and wielded the loppers until Beloved showed up by the garden gate with a hen under each arm. I held it open for them and in they went.

There was some nervous clucking for about five seconds, and then one of them scratched tentatively at the winter mulch, tipped her head over to eyeball the results, and then it was like -- oh! Hey!! Come over here and check this out!!! They were sold.

Beloved watched them for about thirty seconds, and then went up to the barn for another pair.

The next time I went by the garden, every chicken on the place was in there.

What it's going to be like to round them up, I have no idea. Some, especially among the Araucanas, are not as into being transported as others.

But they are certainly very, very happy right now.


-30-

Blessed clean water

The pump

[posted by risa]

We awoke, on Sunday morning, to snow, which we had less than half expected, and it continued falling until 4:30 in the afternoon. Electricity faltered at 11:30 a.m., and seemed likely, as turned out to be the case, to remain off for some time, as "all circuits were busy" in the direction of our utility's tireless but understaffed emergency crews. We got down lanterns and trimmed wicks, and took stock of the situation.

Our biggest concerns were water and poultry. A pipe or joint has suffered separation somewhere, and we have had, for several days, no access to the well.

We both dressed for the weather, I for the first time in a decade slipping on my rubber boots, of the better sort known in England as "wellies," and headed out. Last summer I made a yoke from a curved, stout tree branch, with four-gallon buckets suspended from plastic baling twine, and plied the creek with these to supply the birds and for flushing and the like. I then investigated under the house, crawling, with a flashlight, into all the tight corners near the various pipes, and finding no sign of a leak. So it had to be outside somewhere.

The pumphouse stands about ten feet beyond the West Window, and encloses the second well on the place, a six-inch diameter pipe ninety feet deep, with an injection pump and an air-tank for pressure. It's strictly a (previous) owner-built affair with sawdust packed between the inner and outer walls, which has sifted down onto the cement over the years and lends the whole thing the atmosphere of an ancient ice-house. It has its own inhabitants; once the pump stopped abruptly and we found that a tree frog had insinuated him- or herself between the electrodes in the switch and proved unable to sustain the charge.

A quick look around with the flashlight indicated no leak here, either, so it must be in-ground. A metal pipe dives through the cement into the ground, parallel to the house, where it is connected outside to a black PVC mainline which travels more than fifty feet around the south corner and tees into the mainline from the first well, a 25-footer in the greenhouse, currently in disuse (and likely to remain so while the poultry live here) for household purposes.

I dug about by the side of the pumphouse and located the black flexpipe line there, fourteen inches deep, following it for about three feet.

No leak.

This was going to take awhile, and supplies in the house would run low. I could call for help, but the plumber who had done no more than hook up the new hot water heater had charged $425 for that, so it looked to be a solo operation.

We're both girls, but we do have some division of labor. I paint, plumb, electrify, roof, fence, mechanic, mow, till, and bake; she splits wood, makes kindling, tends fires, raises chickens, does laundry, prepares the lioness' share of meals, and runs the appointment calendar. We alternate the vegetable garden, she one year; I the next. Too much at stake there...

Under the house, I had noticed two hose-bibb drain spigots, of very clean brass, that I did not remember having seen before, at the elbows of the supply pipes to the second bathroom sink. The one on the left would be the cold-water line. Back to the pumphouse. Hmm....

Rooting about in the garage, I found a short hose of the type used to connect a washing machine to the house supply; female at both ends. It would need gaskets, which I stole from garden nozzles.

A good, non-leaking garden hose would be next on the list; most of these had gone into the chicken business, but I tramped out to the garden, where the deer fence was on the point of collapsing from snow accumulation. I shook the fence all round (Beloved was doing the same to the poultry netting up at the barn), waded through snowdrifts composed half of snow and half of frozen and blasted celery and chard to the irrigation post, untwisted the baling wire arrangement holding the rain-bird in place, and rescued last summer's garden hose from oblivion beneath the snow. This I dragged round the house, connected it to the washing-machine hose, the washing-machine hose to the spigot on the pump, the other end of the garden house to the cold-water-supply spigot in the house's crawl space, closed the valve to the house-supply pipe, opened the valve to the pump spigot, whooshed a bit of air into the tank with a convenient bicycle foot pump, and made for the house, just as an apple-cheeked and very wet Beloved got there.

"Throw the pump switch and we'll see how it does."

"Oh, wow! Okay."

We listened to the air rushing out of the faucet for about twenty seconds, and then blessed clean water poured from the kitchen tap, in quantity. We ran around collecting jars, jugs, and pitchers, and had collected about fifteen gallons for the house, when -- poof -- the power to the neighborhood went away and stayed away.

Talk about perfect timing. I believe she said something about being my love slave for life for this (increasingly rare, these days) display of competence, but one says anything in a moment of enthusiasm.

All this work we did without injury to ourselves, and so I planned to follow the outside line from the other end, along the south wall, back to the pumphouse, today, it being dangerous to drive in to work this morning. But I made the mistake, in the early light of dawn, of leaning too far over while pouring a bucket of creek water to flush, and heard a tiny pop in my lower back. So, when the power came back on, at about eleven, I did what anyone in like circumstances would do.

I sat down, in my robe, with a heating pad behind me, and went blogging.

-30-

The best of work

[posted by risa]

December thirty-first seems to be as good a day as any to practice living as I once did, and may yet again. The sun rose this morning -- a wonder in itself, after two months of dark rain and fog -- on a world white with hoar-frost, which remained all day in the shade; and I dressed for a bit of farm work. On the porch there were four pots of lavender which were getting root-bound, and I was determined they should not be frozen in their pots another night. Hardy as they are, it seemed heartless not to plant them. I have been making noises about going into lavender farming, as this is a crop that needs little if any irrigation, but Beloved, gazing on the land, does not see rows of lavender in her mind's eye as I do; she sees stock fences and geese and sheep, eating grass.

The pots are hers -- I'm not sure if they are a gift from a friend, or a purchase. I asked about putting them in the second long flower bed by the front walk, but it seems they should go by the house, under the southeast bedroom wall, between the lilacs. This bed, often neglected, has of late been home to a still-growing mass of parsley, some lamb's ears, hollyhocks, volunteer garlic, and money trees (we wish) and, increasingly, grass.

I brought out the spading fork and rooted about in the mess, separating the garlic bulbs from everything else and transplanting them to the border around the truck garden. The rest I dumped into the poultry yard, where it was greeted with joy by the Barred Rocks, who, being the most gregarious of the flock, often accept my offerings while all the others high-tail it to the other end of their yard, missing out on the bounty again, as they so often do, by their mistrust.

Then I got down the heavy tree-planting shovel, one of the few tools I've managed to retain from my tree-planting days. When I was younger, I worked in the woods, and some 325,000 trees' worth of habit reasserts itself when I set out things from pots. The shovel is held with the blade facing toward me, not away, and is chunked into the the earth an inch or two deeper than I mean the roots to go, then wedged away from me and pulled toward me, held by one hand and my shoulder, as the plant is held in my other hand and dandled into the suddenly-formed hole and tamped into place, before and behind, by the blade. It is a movement easily enough taught but not easily described, and is over in seconds.

Feeling too cold, by this time, to stay out, and wary of back trouble, I retired from farming in less than half an hour and took to housewifery.

While moving the garlic, I came across some red chard and beets, and brought in a mess of winter vegetables with which to make a rather Spartan lunch, which I do sometimes, by way of practice.

I cleaned the vegs and diced them up very small and set them in a saucepan on the woodstove to wilt. in very little time the water in the pan turned wine-red from the Detroit Red beets, and a garlicky aroma invaded the house.

While this impromptu stew was making, I brought out some red beans to soak for the morrow, and also set a pan with halves of an acorn squash and a butternut squash on the woodstove to simmer, for a dish with honey, raisins and walnuts for a potluck this evening. When the beet stew was done I had it for lunch, pouring off the red juice for a hot drink later, and peeled the squash and made up the dish, using much the same recipe as as I do for mashed sweet potato dishes of this kind. No one ever asks -- even those who hate squash -- what this is; they eat it all up and ask for more. The secret is to put in enough butter and brown sugar to make it smooth, and bake the dish, with the honey and walnuts on top, until the flavors blend.

Water from simmering the squash went into the bread machine, and formed the base for a five-grain bread for tomorrow that is rising by the stove. The skins and seeds went out to -- again -- the Barred Rocks, though certainly the other birds were invited.

I take pleasure in getting through a day of this kind without using the electric range and the microwave, though I know well what a difficult life I would have if I could not possess them.

It is now about the three in the afternoon of the last day of 2007. I pour myself a hot "toddy" of beet-juice and take up a book I've been reading, It caught my eye while cruising the stacks of the library where I work: Countryside Mood, a hodge-podge but vivid collection of essays aimed at instilling an agrarian patriotic fervor in the British forces in 1942.

Did God give Britons their soil, the finest in all the world, to use and develop or to waste if that suits the pockets of the financiers? Britain's growing arable acreage could provide life-work for hundreds of thousands of families, and a life-work calling for all that the best of work does offer -- craftsmanship, character, and courage." -- Peter Howard

The sun slants across the back of Stony Run. The lavender is already in shade. I wait for Beloved to pull into the garage, home from a day's earning of wages.

We persist

Posted by risa. Reposted from 2002; mostly written 1997.

There is a small mountain about two miles from here that is covered with a network of trails, and is the centerpiece of an attractive county park. The mountain's south slope is a steep meadowland, interspersed with copses of black oak, and dotted with wild plum trees; the north slope is forested with second growth Douglas fir and carpeted with an understory of sword ferns, viney maples, and filberts gone wild.

I like to hike to the top, though each year I find the going a little harder, and look about me. Below, two rivers come together after dodging round the mountain toward each other. With binoculars I can find, in season, fishermen seeking steelhead and salmon.

To the north there is considerable urbanization; I can see at one glance the second largest metropolitan area in my state, but it is not unattractive as cities go, and I can forgive its noise and bustle for its not being any worse (yet) than it is.

To the south and east is the valley of one of the rivers, opening out of the foothills of a substantial and still very wild mountain range. In winter the eastern peaks are dusted white with snow, and present a dramatic and lovely scene; but my interest is generally drawn to the near view.

At my feet are a succession of habitats: the eastern ridge of the mountain, with Douglas fir forest to the left and oaks to the right, with perhaps a herd of deer placidly browsing in plain view; the meadowland within the park boundary, with a few pear trees left over from some farm venture in the previous century; the wetlands with its dark patches of sedge and the occasional blue heron.

Beyond are pastures, woodlots, filbert orchards, and fields used mostly for corn, hay, and grass seed farming. Threading among these, I see, are narrow roads along which are some two hundred houses, on properties of anywhere from one to two hundred acres, with their barns, outbuildings, and accumulated belongings left to the winter rains and summer sun: trucks, tractors, harrows, drift boats, and an occasional stove or washing machine. Most of us in this valley are not especially poor, but we are a thrifty people, many only two or three generations descended from pioneers, and we make but few trips to the county dump.

Almost no one here can earn a living from farming now.

We are an amalgam of loggers, retirees, and commuters. The commuters are of two classes: the professionals -- doctors, dentists, and the like -- and the rest. These are mostly school teachers, store clerks, and office workers. I am in this last group.

Regardless of category, almost every one of us has a garden. I can see the gardens from the mountaintop: at every house, a brown patch within easy access of the kitchen door. Some of us have enough pasture for a horse or two, or a few steers; I have room for a flock of ducks and geese; but if there is nothing else, there is a garden. Gardens here have a priority over lawns. This is a thing that I greatly admire in my neighbors.

If, like the people in my valley, you want to grow things, it can be a good idea to try to get an eagle's eye view. If no mountain is handy, try a map. Most gardeners know the dates of frost in their "zone," but there is much more to know. Find out the direction of the prevailing winds, the angle of winter sun, the temperature of June nights. Know the depth of the water table in August.

From the mountaintop I can see that the valley runs east and west, and that the river is nestled against the northern hills; among these is Jasper Mountain, which looks much smaller than from here than from my garden.

My own little piece of land is in the middle distance, on the long glide of slope from the south hills to the river. There is a seasonal creek through the property, dry in summer and a raging torrent in winter. This means that I'm in a low-lying spot, subject to the movement of air. In winter the wind comes from the southwest generally, in the form of Pacific storms laden with incessant rain. These winds chill the soil, and the water that drops from them saturates it and renders it clammy. Pools lie on the surface in winter with no place to drain away to, as the water table is even with the surface. Dig a post-hole anywhere and it fills to overflowing. So gardens tend to be planted late, well after the dates recommended on seed packets.

In summer the water table drops to ten, twenty, or even thirty feet, while the winds are continual, shifting daily from north to south. This is because of our mountain ranges. The sun heats the slopes, and air rises, drawing air away from the river bottom. At night, this air cools and sinks back down along draws and creek valleys toward the river.

Gardens in this drainage must be almost continually watered, as the tender plants are subject to drying out. Watering is more frequent than the books recommend; corn begins wilting within a day of its last soaking. At night the wind stops, but heat radiates away quickly among the glitterings of the stars, and temperatures can drop into the forties (Fahrenheit) by morning, even if it's been close to a hundred degrees during the day.

All this gives tomato lovers fits. But we persist.

The wiser among us build wooden fences, or hedge their gardens about with shrubbery or even hay bales, to combat the winds and the heat loss. A heavy mulch would help, but the main mulching material is straw. The straw available locally contains a lot of weed seeds, and it invites tremendous armies of slugs and snails of all sizes. No one seems to care for black plastic, which takes a lot of fiddling with in the shifting winds, or newspaper, so most of the gardeners keep their soil bare and cultivated. The majority use herbicide to control grass, which is the primary weed; I have reason to believe herbicide is the greater evil in this case, and use the straw mulch, trying to stay just ahead of the weeds by piling on more.

The vetch that I planted last fall for green manure is intact, as are the piles of leaves and the compost bin. The wintered-over red chard is still usable, and our Detroit Red beets are superb. Meanwhile, our first harbingers of spring -- elephant garlic, growing from those tiny cloves that stay in the soil when we pull the crop -- have sprung from the cold, heavy soil, dotting the view from our kitchen window like randomly dibbled irises. And on the rainy nights, between the gusts of Pacific wind, we can hear the first chirruping choruses of the green tree frogs. I found one once in high summer, napping as it were, on the shore of a pond of water in the angle of a sunflower leaf. Their sound is, to me, a promise of sunflowers yet to come. I fall asleep to their frantic cheeping, and dream of green things growing in the sun.

Unnaturally bright

from risa

Towhees, juncos, sparrows, finches and cowbirds sought grain on the well-house roof this morning, after our first really major frost, the day after Thanksgiving. We have been limiting them to the smaller bird feeder that hangs by the kitchen window, due to the depredations of squirrels and banded pigeons, none of whom were evident in this neighborhood in the early nineties.

Yesterday, we fed the first shift of our (local) progeny: Daughter (AKA Grinin) and her Young Man, and Last Son, who styles himself a Black Belt in Beer, and brought with him some of the products of Belgium. They took away quite a bit of leftovers, including all the remaining walnut-pumpkin bread, and so I am baking today for the second batch, Middle Son and his flock, who live in what he calls the Barony of Three Mountains.

Today's loaf contains a small handful of flax seed, beaten in a mortar, quite a bit of oats, some creamed butternut squash (from leftovers) and quite a lot of chopped chives, which I brought in from the garden covered with white rime and very cold in my hand.

As the loaf was rising, I discovered that my ironstone baking platter had disappeared.

"Where's my baking dish?"

"Um, it has a ham in it... for tomorrow."

"Eeeee, this is a Serious Matter."

"Hang on! I might have an acceptable substitute. Do I have ten minutes?"

I looked in the mixer. "Yes, just."

So, in the midst of breaking ice for the poultry and other chores, Beloved found a strange, flat, rectangular box, which I had never seen before, and opened it gingerly to reveal a stoneware pizza baking platter. She's had it, she says, for six years, obtained while helping to make some fundraiser a success with a discrete purchase.

It's perfectly round, about three quarters of an inch in height, with a quite level upper surface and, verso, a grid-shaped raised pattern to bolster the strength of the clay (which seems brittle, at least to the eye, but maybe isn't) and to distribute heat more evenly, and, interestingly, is not glazed. One has to wash it without soap and it comes with a soft, pliable cleaning scraper.

What's nice is that one can grease the platter and then use it to shape the loaf directly, rather than greasing or flouring a cutting board, shaping the loaf and then transferring it to a pan. I've formed the loaf and carried the platter in to the dining room to sit by the fire and grow. We shall see how it bakes.

We're having an interesting day, visually -- the house is in a bowl or column of intensely bright sunlight, while all around, about a quarter of a mile off, the fog has not lifted. The sunlight is reflecting from the walls of mist into the house with that kind of horizontal brightness one associates with sun-bright snow. The interior walls and ceilings are unnaturally bright.

I stepped outside and found a large red-shouldered hawk sitting on the end-post of the grape vines, who took off and flapped desultorily to a cottonwood behind the poultry yard. The chickens, ducks and geese were stricken with dread and all stood about in frozen postures for quite some time, but, poultry sense of time being what it is, they eventually forgot about the hawk and went about their business while the hawk remained, seemingly uninterested in the goings on directly below.

Hawks have an evil reputation among keepers of chickens, but as these were never allowed outside their roofed-over pen until fully grown, it may be they are to heavy-bodied to interest our local hawks. None have ever made any attempt on them, which is more than can be said for foxes, dogs and raccoons.

While I was watching all this, a movement beneath one of the old apple trees at the far end of the neighbor's pasture caught my eye, and, concerned lest we were also under surveillance by a red fox (they, too, have appeared here only in recent years), I went for the binoculars and then trained them on the spot, discovering, at the very edge of the bright fog, what appears to be the large male ring-necked pheasant who spent last summer in our veggie garden. So he had survived the visit from this summer's fox. We hadn't seen him since then.

So much going on! I feel like going out again and finding Beloved in her chore coat and miry boots and risking making her a bit cross by insisting on a hug.

-30-

All the water in the river

East of here. Not so very far.

So, four of us went to the new Federal Courthouse (a massive, well-armed and rather paranoid Bauhaus construction to which one cannot cross the street from downtown -- "to prevent marches," someone laughed nervously) to talk with an aide to our Congressperson.

Steep, steep steps, designed to turn aside the wrath of Ryder rental trucks, guards (who radiated considerable Glock-ness), alarm gates, a left turn, another left, and there we were sharing out some peanut butter cookies, that we had brought, with the staffers.

Not with the unsmiling guards. They would have had to send them out to be tested for sheep-pox. As if anyone ever mailed sheep-pox to the executive branch. But I digress.

We were introduced to the aide, and each took our turn.

I told a capsule story of my life, beginning with my knowing who I was at age six and what I would have to do with myself someday (not knowing it would ever be possible, and yet knowing that I must); and reminded the aide that an inclusive ENDA protects at least three categories of people: trans, gay, and straight:

"Trans people are notable for transgressed gender signs, for which they are targeted.

"Gay people are sometimes noted for transgressed gender signs, for which they are then targeted.

"And straight-oriented, straight-identified people are occasionally mistakenly noted for transgressed gender signs, for which they are then targeted."

Whereas ENDA-Lite protects none of the above from the things which actually tend to attract discrimination:

"Gay people can hide. Transpeople, unless they have given up everything, wiped out all documentation and moved, and have an absolutely 'convincing' presentation, cannot."

And with the Real ID Act even this option will be taken from the few that had it.

The other three dwelt on the failure of incrementalism in our home town, while inclusive-up-front legislation has passed easily in other communities in our state, and has now passed at the state level itself.

We ended by reiterating that between the two bills, only H.R. 2015 comes close to being a just response to anti-LGBT bigotry in the workplace.

The aide was a sympathetic listener but, as one might expect, did not give away much about what is going to happen.

We thanked her and left.

As I was going, she put her hand on my sleeve, briefly, and thanked me for my story. It was more than I might have looked for.

Still ... exhausting.

I took the rest of the day off, went home, ate everything in sight, crawled into bed and pulled a blanket over my head.

The next day, I skipped out on assorted meetings for worthy causes and, grabbing my kayak, headed for the hills. Hence the photo above.

I went first to a favorite lake two miles into the local wilderness area. The colors at the lake were just -- stunning, as they were everywhere; we don't get this kind of October, here, especially above 5,000 feet elevation, with such bright sunshine and paddling about, in a tank top, and with butterflies dancing around one's head. But apparently now we do. The undoubtedly limited-duration silver lining of global warming. To which I contributed by driving to the trailhead. After a few hours, the mist had burned off the water, a chill breeze had whipped up, and other people were arriving, so I packed up and packed out, threw the boat in the back of the wagon, and freewheeled down off the mountain into the canyon, stopping at a favorite place along the river (photo above, again).

There has been enough rain lately to refill the aquifers above our mountain rivers, here, unlike the intense drought to the south of us in California and elsewhere in the West; the water beat like a thousand drums through the basaltic boulders scattered along the streambed. We can get a hydraulic minimum and maximum differential in these parts of 100,000 to one, so there are times when there is very little water in this river; other times it is thirty feet deep, tumbling the giant boulders like billiard balls.

In the spot where I sat, by the falls, with the wan sun on my shoulders and the cold reaching up from beneath me in the ancient, shaded stone, there was nothing to say and nothing to be said. I could sit there, if I like, and pull up my tank top and show the river my breasts, and say,"what?" -- if I so chose; the river would simply flow on. I stayed on, watching the shadows shift in the canyon, until my ears couldn't take the sound of the falls any more. I would have stayed for days if there was a way to do it.

All the water in the river might not be enough to wash the slime of politics from my soul.

-30-

The commons doesn’t have to be a tragedy

We were driven to the train station by my wonderful in-laws (a privilege, as they seldom drive any more), and made our way onto the Amtrak Surfliner, expecting to get home around three o’clock the next day, i.e. two hours late.

Didn’t happen. We got home about seven. So, five hours late both ways. What did happen? A. there was a freight derailment that took two days to clean up. B. Another suicide, this time in front of the Coast Starlight previous to our own). These incidents, besides the desultory and endless track repair work being done on Union Pacific rails, good enough to keep freight moving, but often not good enough for passenger trains, which need to be able to do eighty miles an hour sometimes in order to meet schedules, put all the dispatching in disarray, leaving us stranded for hours at a time between boring weed-infested embankments -- and the weeds were spindly from repeated doses of Roundup, and therefore not at all pretty.

We were bracketed the whole way by screaming infants whose mothers seemed not to have gone to infant-care school (and all the babies were going to Seattle), and the train attendants seemed to have shorter and shorter fuses as we crept through the night.

But there were pluses.


For one thing, the Santa Barbara shore from the train is a once-in-a-lifetime treat; I would brave the horrors of much worse trains to see it. On this trip there were many dolphins and a few whales as a spectacular bonus.

"Look! Whales!"

The area around Mount Shasta is all it’s cracked up to be in the brochures.

Going north from Dunsmuir to Klamath Falls

The Willamette Pass and the gorge of Salt Creek (The Middle Fork of the Willamette doesn’t turn up until you are almost in the valley) is one of the truly great mountain railroad vistas on the planet.

Why can’t this journey be as unstressed as most other Amtrak routes, such as the (horribly named) Empire Builder, where they apologize for pulling into your destination five minutes after the posted schedule?

Well, there are social, political and economic issues. Engineering ones, too, but those could be managed with a little foresight.

Socially, we’re ill adapted to train travel in this country. We’re rude to our passenger trains and their passengers by diving under them with our expensive cars whenever we’re crossed in love, but I’ll leave that for another post.

I’m thinking about the politics and how it’s been driven by the needs of large corporations, but while noting the pressure from the corporations in their ubiquitous promotion of advertising/consumer culture, we have to remember that what they are pandering to is a focus on self that comes natural to human beings. We’ve, as a people and as individuals, earned our overstuffed Wal-Marts.

Consumer Choices Destroy Downtowns and Family Wages could be a title, on the model of “guns don’t kill people, people do.” I’m acknowledging there is some truth to that...

Our collective obesity, to give but one instance, is an outward sign of an ongoing illness that has no end in sight.

This is the point at which my progressivist friends who believe in spiritual evolution may say, “but...” Unh-unh. There is no such thing as a free lunch. And human nature is to spend nearly all of our time looking for a free lunch. (the large corporations know this; and this to some extent why there are large corporations).

This is known, over on the right, as “the tragedy of the commons” and is used as a basis for much head-nodding over the mutilated body of the commons as the pie is divided up by corporatist CEOs and their cronies. Conservatism this is not. But I’m starting to digress. More about that another time, God willing and the crick don’t rise. Or maybe I’ll try to do it all here, this once; have patience, though. It all takes time to say.

Suffice it to say, right now, that people are a mess and Amtrak, especially in the far west, gets to be an expression of that mess. We want whatever we want, such as to get from point A to point B, now, not tomorrow, and without screaming, toy-throwing, mother-punching, mother-punched babies.

So we go by car (much more resource consuming per capita) and skip the babies, or by plane, putting up with the screaming but for much less time (but again consuming, relatively massive amounts of planetary capital).

And here my other friends (how is it I have so many of these? I’m a bleeding heart, fer crying out loud. have they no taste?) will say, perhaps: Well, you worked hard, you’ve earned the privacy and the speed because you can afford it.

But the middle/upper class privilege game has its limitations too. On a finite, crowded earth, when I travel (and this includes travel by train, and, yes, I’m aware that I’m a hairsplitting white liberal -- so sue me -- ) I take from others. Some of whom might fit the “well, they were lazier, that’s why you have and they are the have nots” argument.

But not very many. The moms with the screaming babies on the train, for example, didn’t have much of a clue (in my all-judging view) but they both had labored mightily (one overhears these things) for minimum wage at two jobs at a time for years and had little prospect of more. Some of that is race and gender barriers, along with the stigma that STILL attaches to single moms. Yes, Virginia, racial and feminist analysis does have some valid things to say.

And even dolphins and whales could have better water and air prospects than they’re getting right now. I'm, just all for that. I just am.

The commons doesn’t have to be a tragedy. But there’s that digression, almost, again.

So.

The discretionary dollars have, for decades now, stayed away from trains, and the corporatists, who make better short-term money on freight, trucking and auto infrastructure, cars, gasoline sold to individuals, airports and their attendant hotel and ground transport industries, aircraft, and jet fuel than they do on trains, and blame the discretionary dollars for it, thus driving both discretionary and indiscretionary dollars to themselves, and to be sure all this is self-fulfilling, lobby Federal, state, and local governments to keep it that way.

It’s not a deliberate conspiracy, except on the part of a relatively few particularly astute pirates, but the effect is the same. Pay attention, now: where self-interest is assumed to be the greater good, social, economic and political practice tends to feed on that assumption, draining the public good to the eventual detriment of that self-interest.

Again? Okay. Where self-interest is assumed to be the greater good, social, economic and political practice tends to feed on that assumption, draining the public good to the eventual detriment of that self-interest.

This is why Amtrak seems to perform poorly overall, and more poorly on the West Coast than throughout the system (partly because the Union Pacific is rather hostile to Amtrak and partly because U.P. has let its infrastructure fall into disarray through corporatist raids on the till).
But we’re going to need the trains. They use much less oil than planes and cars, and, leaving aside for the moment arguments about global warming (where I do think my “side” has the edge), the stuff just went to eighty dollars a barrel and this is a trend that will continue, as the flow of blood in the Near East attests.

Trains are also more easily converted to electricity. Electricity does not HAVE to run on coal, which is pretty much irredeemable stuff from all angles.

Trains can run fast. The tracks we have now were not given to us by God, as tracks in Europe and Asia make very clear.

There’s a need. And the inaction re that need is generally expressed as “market forces.”

So, what exactly is at issue here?

Where there is a need, but market forces do not adequately address the need, create a government and pay taxes.

SOME things, that’s how you do it. You nationalize the rails you need to have passenger traffic, or, if that’s too distasteful, you build a national system without harassing the private entities for access to their dilapidated resource. Hire them to build it, if you wish, but build it and maintain it and don’t take “big government can’t run a business” as an answer.

Because, well, it just isn’t. Our fire stations are expensive and don’t turn a profit so we don’t turn them over to private industry (no money in it and they might insist on putting out only the fires they can make money on). So we maintain them with tax dollars.

It’s not business. It’s service. You could run it cheaper -- no one really needs to make sixty thousand dollars a year running a train (but no one really needs sixty thousand dollars a year -- to live with food, a roof, and education and health care for the kids -- in the first place, for providing a SERVICE, mister CEO). But there’s no requirement that the results be shoddy.

I’ve seen good government-run trains. On-time trains. Clean trains. Without seat assignment right by the screamers. Tax supported.

All it takes is the will, in the community, that the commons shall not be raided for short-term profit ... Elect the representatives, make the laws, close the loopholes, assess the taxes, build the system, keep it as simple as you can, and pay a family wage to keep it running on time and clean.

If you can do it with firehouses you can do it with trains. Yes, really you can.

:::

And oh, hey -- market forces: Eighty dollars a barrel? Ridership is up. Way up. And Amtrak is hiring.

-30-

Small gifts

We arrived, hours and hours and hours from home, by charter bus (having, of course, missed the Los Angeles train connection) in the Coastal Town not far from San Diego, where my in-laws live, at 5:30 in the morning, and took a harrowing, sharp-cornering cab drive to their house. As I brought in the first suitcase, I got a hug (actually the first one ever, after years of handshakes) from my father-in-law, and from that moment began one of the Great Visits.

There is a certain danger in Great Visits. I'm afraid I would become "very traditionally built," like Mma Ramotswe of The Number 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, if I were to live in this house very long. In-laws, like one's own parents, seem to feel a compulsion to check every fifteen minutes to see if you are starving. In self-defense, Beloved and I began right away doing some serious walking.


On one such journey we went a couple of miles, to the pier to spend much of a morning and afternoon watching people fish and surf and so forth. There is often a very brisk breeze from the north at this location, so I tied on a bandanna to keep my hair from blowing away, and climbed up the rampway onto the pier in the bright sun, with my red Miami sundress flapping like a pennant, to find myself staring into the eyes of a pelican resting on top of the ladies' room.

In every direction from here there is much family history. Beloved graduated from high school from the bandshell on the beach, and she completed her training as a San Diego County life guard by leaping from this pier ( a very considerable height) and swimming through the surf all the way back to shore. I am not sure it was a thing I could have done -- certainly could not do so now. She could, though, I think. She is stronger against the elements than I am.

Beloved and I walked out, on the rough, hot boards, to the end, where the water is deep and very blue, observing the intensity of the fishing culture.

Many of those fishing from the pier are Asian, especially Vietnamese or Hmong, and wrap themselves in large hats, kerchiefs and windbreakers or shawls and stay all day. Some stand by the railing, snatching their rods up and dipping them down, jigging with gangs of treble hooks for baitfish from within the long shadow of the pier on the blue water; others sit in camp chairs and let out their lines, with shrimp or chunks of baitfish on them, in search of mackerel, sea perch, or something larger.

On our way back we found the brown pelican sitting rather forlornly on the railing, and I leaned against the rail, close enough to have played gin rummy with him (or her), and carried on a conversation in what I hoped might be passable pidgin Pelican as the sailboats and boogie boards went by, far below. A pelican's eyes are not large, but they are brown and soulful, and it seemed to me to be a fairly deep conversation. When the large webbed feet were lifted to shift weight, and then set down again on the railing, I could feel the thumps in my elbows -- a very heavy, very present and impressive bird, folded up into itself, looking down into my face from less than four feet away.

:::

The following day, Beloved's sisters, who had not met me as I now am, swept into the household spreading zany cheer, hugging us both, talking animatedly with her and with their parents, saying all the right things about the small gifts I had brought them, and making plans for an outing. I was able to hold my own in this environment, but only barely. (Before, I'll admit it, I had been a complete wallflower, so there was a change, and altogether a healthy one.)

To give their parents a rest from all of us, the Sisters piled us into a vehicle, took us out onto the freeway, and stopped at a large restaurant for lunch while continuing to debate where to go. Their minds made up at last, everyone rose in a body and headed for the ladies' room.

I didn't particularly need to go just then, and so, surprising myself a little, hung back. There was a large and very beautiful wooden boat hanging from the ceiling directly above the aisle, so I studied that, and waited there for everyone to return. I realized that I had become shy. Thirty years of going to --well -- a different bathroom under these circumstances seemed a bit much for me to overcome in, as it were, a new instant, even though I have now been doing so for more than three years.

I thought no one had noticed, but Beloved said, as we made our way to the parking lot, that she had looked for my feet beneath all the doors before she realized I had not come in with them. The Sisters grinned at me from beneath their sunglasses, and I realized I had been a bit foolish.

I had always, despite a certain cultural and personal distance, loved them for being Beloved's family, and realized that the feeling -- one which could not diminish even through years of neglect and major life changes -- was one they returned.

Beloved and Risa in Old Town

At the Old Town we watched children demonstrate traditional dances, and shopped, and dropped in on dilapidatedly historic buildings, including the old-time print shop, where I lectured the Sisters a bit on the equipment and procedures on display, and stopped for photos from time to time. By this time I did need to go to the "old ladies" room, and one of the Sisters made short work of locating one, upstairs in a very old adobe-and-wooden-beams plaza that had been converted into a large open-air restaurant, and leading me to it. We went into the two stalls, washed up at the two sinks, and emerged into the bright sunlight together, putting on our sunglasses like smiling twins.

After shopping for only a little bit, Beloved and I indicating that we were tired, we all piled back into the car and onto the freeway, where I promptly conked out and slept all the way back to Coastal Town.

There, while the nap-renewed Ancestral Ones were receiving small gifts from all of us, I was handed a miniature rainbow-embroidered stringbag which contained four tiny dolls, each less than an inch high, by my old-new Upstairs Bathroom Sister.

"This is the four girls going shopping together in Old Town," she said, looking me directly in the eyes.

I hope that I may live a long time. This is going to deserve much.

-30-

Throwing underhand

So Beloved's chickens are starting to provide eggs -- brown eggs, which means the ones laying are all Barred Rocks, who are a bit older than the Araucanas -- and her garden looks like a rain forest laced with purple beans, green tomatoes, yellow zukes, green zukes, cucumbers, and the like. The corn, sunflowers, and Jerusalem artichoke are just -- really, really tall, and the summer kale is scary. The ears of corn have loosed their tresses to the winds. Garter snakes zip about underfoot, and green tree frogs sing from small ponds in the throats of sunflower leaves.

There have been several days of cool weather with rain -- the summer high is well west of where it usually is, roasting Japan but allowing Alaskan air to mix southwards into our valley all summer. Hence the greenness of the tomatoes.

None of this seems to be a problem for the apple trees, or even the old pear, which have been building larger fruit than usual all summer. Beloved is making applesauce and plum sauce, and freezing blackberries, and what she can't use is being chopped and tossed into the poultry yard, where it is appr