Viewing Jasper Mountain

                                                      Viewing Jasper Mountain

                                                          Doyu Shonin/Risa Bear






Viewing Jasper Mountain

Risa Stephanie Bear

Copyright © 2004, 2010 risa s. bear and stony run press. all rights reserved.

This journal, portions of which appeared as a chapbook entitled Stony Run: A Gardener's Journal, is composed of blog posts written between 1996 and 2004, lightly edited. Available in a variety of formats from archive.org and in print from lulu.com

ISBN:  0-9645574-6-0






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homecomings

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What To Do About Trees



















January

WE HAVE a handful of garden chairs stacked in the porch area of our country home, and from time to time we lift the topmost two from the stack, dust them off, and carry them through dew-spangled grass to a point below the  fruit trees and above the garden. A vista opens across the neighbor's field to a bluff, or ridge, locally called Jasper Mountain, in the distance.
     The ridgeline has changed shape a bit over the years, due to human activity. There has been intermittent logging over the last century and a half, beginning with the harvesting of giant Douglas firs, some over eight feet in diameter. These were cut by pairs of men with long handsaws known as misery whips; you can still see notches in stumps where the men stood on springboards while making the cuts. Now the cutting is more mechanized. Second-growth or even third-growth timber is efficiently reduced to second-grade lumber and "fiber" by highly capitalized and industrialized systems requiring generous doses of petroleum for their operation.
    A few houses have appeared on the mountain's slopes, no doubt built with lumber hauled from somewhere far removed from the ridge and its sometime groves. These homes are expansive, two or even three stories in height, with cupolas and dormers, with each a large veranda and no doubt a swimming pool in the back. These testify to the power of bundled debt – while that lasted.
    To get to these homesites, roads several miles long were added to the existing network of what were originally logging access roads, removing still more forest cover from the steep slopes. The roads added to the burden of silt in the numerous rivulets working their way down from the ridgeline to the river below.
    The river is stressed -- not nearly so much so as at the Big City, a hundred miles or more downstream, with its three-eyed fish -- but where running water is concerned, such stresses are cumulative over distance. Wherever we find them, it is possible to regard them with interest.
    We can also see changes in the massive promontory that gives the mountain its name.
    The rock there is relatively high quality, a greenish basalt that makes good gravel for roads and construction sites. A quarry has been built into the face of the mountain, and a road, discreetly hidden among the remaining firs and big-leaf maples, provides access for huge dump trucks and wide-bladed dozers with gigantic diesel engines. These we cannot see or hear from our place, but from time to time an explosion gently rocks the valley, and for a few minutes the mountain resembles a small volcano as the powdered stone drifts along the ridge and down to the long line of cottonwoods along the river.
   
  The quarry does not much spoil the looks of the promontory, because from this distance -- or even up close -- it looks like nothing so much as a natural scree slope somewhere in the higher mountains east of here. But this, too, with its road and its heavy equipment, adds to the burden of silt, with trace hydrocarbons and heavy metals as well, in the watershed.

    All too true. And as we look closer to home, watching the chromed and painted monsters passing in front of the house, breathing out their noxious fumes, and noting our own such beast reposing in our driveway, and thinking how soon we will be mowing the grass under these fruit trees with yet another poisonous machine -- and from here we can also see our electric meter with its merrily spinning kilowatt-counting disk -- We're as aware as ever of our part in the curious web of capitalized destruction that has been devised and substituted for what might have been Western civilization.
    And yet we're feeling remarkably cheerful.
    That cheer, we recognize, is hardly justifiable. We're the privileged, an American couple in a not-poor neighborhood, which makes us part of the most massively consumptive minority in history. Nevertheless, the beauty in the scene before us, of sky, clouds, trees, stone, and the neighbors' ewes and lambs, costs nothing in itself; the price of viewing Jasper Mountain, which, with all that has happened to it, is well worth looking at, is zero.

    Now, on the one hand, we have "bought" the right to look; the ad said, "country house with view." On the other hand, when we was younger, and had no land, no car, no family to support, and were living out of backpacks and our feet were our transportation, we saw just such views, and they were just as beautiful then.
    Ownership is perhaps the most overrated concept in Westernism.
    Busy-ness is a close second.
    By sitting here, there are several things that we're not doing. We're (at the moment) not driving to the mall, not shopping, not eating a hamburger, not watching a car commercial. We're not tooling around in an outboard runabout, or on a jet-ski or snowmobile. We're not attending a football game, auto race, or rock concert. I could build quite a list here of "nots," but -- not to worry -- you can think of more of these, and never mind that yes, sometimes we do choose to do some of these things; attend a conference in the Big City, say.
    But we are actively choosing to do fewer things, and less consumptive things, not as avoidance, as in "oh, mustn't do that," but as seeking out activities that have the inestimable value that viewing Jasper Mountain has -- partaking of the quality of being that, because it has no price in consumerism, barely has a name, but which every person in the "third world" who is habitually freer and happier than we -- and there are many -- would immediately recognize.
    Disengaging from the error of capitalized gratification by thinking of it as error, by focusing on the negative, is a project fraught with stresses, pitfalls, failures and depression.
    We're too deeply enmeshed, many of us, to take the bravest positive approaches, exemplified, in recent history, by so few: Mahatma Gandhi, Vinoba Bhave, Peace Pilgrim, Jane Goodall, Mother Teresa. These challenge us, and it's easy to focus on their commitment, conclude it is somehow unachievable for us, and drift back to our potato chips and our cable news, feeling vaguely depressed, wallowing in a gray fog of discontent with ourselves and our little self-defeating ways.
    The good news is that none of them would condemn us for starting out with smaller goals.
    A positive approach is not less positive for lasting for only a few years, or days, or even seconds. It is never a matter of scale.     
    Every moment of viewing Jasper Mountain is its own eternity of getting it right, and no one can ever take that away from you.

                                                                            ,,,

    There is another 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.
    We like to hike to the top, though each year we find the going a little harder. We look about. Below, two rivers come together after dodging round the mountain toward each other. With binoculars we can find, in season, fishermen seeking steelhead and salmon.
    To the north there is considerable urbanization; we can see at one glance the second largest metropolitan area in our state, but it is not unattractive as cities go, and we 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 our interest is generally drawn to the near view.
    At our feet we find 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, we see, are narrow roads along which are some two hundred houses, on properties of anywhere from one acre 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.
    Who here can earn a living from farming now?
    We are an amalgam of loggers, retirees, and commuters. The commuters are of two classes: 1) the professionals -- doctors, dentists, and the like -- and 2) everyone else. These are mostly school teachers, store clerks, office workers, retirees, and the chronically underemployed.
    Regardless of category, almost every household has a garden. We 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; at our place we 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 we greatly admire in my neighbors.
    If, like the people in our valley, you want to grow things, it can be a good idea to first try to get such 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. All this is changing now, but the changes are still slow; the knowledge still matters.
    From the mountaintop we 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 our garden.
    Our 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 we're 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; the water table is very near 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 beneath glittering 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.
    "Beloved" and 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.
    It's January.
    Most of us here have not had much chance this New Year's, to think about gardening. We have had record rains, with some manual gauges registering ninety-three inches. That other river, the one you can see to the southwest from the mountaintop, recently jumped its banks and flooded two hundred homes, making the national news.
    The creek on our place, which doesn't even exist half the year, rose to the foundation of the house and flooded the potting shed, which we'd thought of as standing on high ground. Three fences were destroyed, and tons of earth moved in the general direction of the Pacific.
    But the garden was spared.
    The vetch that we 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 useable, 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. We 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 a promise of sunflowers yet to come. We fall asleep to their frantic cheeping, and dream of green things growing in the sun.

                                                                                ,,,

    This is a good month for clearing the potting shed.
    Ours is the remnant of a decrepit lean-to, which the previous owner constructed out of whatever was handy, and used mainly to store trash and to indulge, with the use of a perilously derelict woodstove, in melting lead for a lifetime's supply of sinkers and split shot. As we stood looking at this structure, which had helped by its presence to bring down the asking price on the property, the neighbor, a stout and cheery farm woman who had befriended us in our first week with a gift of raspberry starts, fetched up on the other side of the boundary fence.
    "You are going to rip down that eyesore, aren't you?" she asked. "First thing?"
    So we felt we had an obligation, but once inside, we found the former owners had used solid beams, each eight inches square and sixteen feet long, for framing the roof. We are no longer young, and the prospect of dismantling those massive rafters dismayed us. Suddenly we thought of the "eyesore" as the "barn and potting shed," and within days began installing walls, windows, and doors. A coat of red fence stain on the barn boards of the walls, and cheery green trim on the window frames, produced a pleasing enough effect that our neighbor has never called us to account on our unspoken contract. At least, that's our interpretation!
    One side of the building, about two-thirds, is given over to Beloved's ducks and her retired show rabbits. We put down straw bedding over the bare earth, and change it periodically; this becomes our favorite mulch and top dressing, as it is rich in duck and rabbit manure but not enough so to burn plants noticeably.
    It is pleasant, every morning, to go hunting for eggs in the tiny barn. The ducks, Khaki Campbells, produce almost an egg a day each, which they never look at again, but they do like to build their communal nest in a different spot each night.

    The other half of the building is the potting shed, which we also call the greenhouse, but that's stretching things a bit.
    To construct this space, so necessary to the garden, we began by removing the south wall and framing in rafters for three sliding glass doors, which had been donated by a friend. These lean against the building and form a kind of large greenhouse window. The east wall, against the duck room, is for tools. Before doing anything else, we gathered the tools, old friends that had gardened with us on four previous sites, and hung them along the weathered gray boards: two round-point shovels, one square-point, one d-ring spade, a garden fork, a hay fork, two toothed rakes, one mattock, two stirrup hoes, a pry bar, a splitting maul, a bow saw, machete, lopping shears.
    A comforting sight, these, lined up, waiting for orders. Even in the dead of winter we sometimes go out to look at them and touch each one.
    The floor was a matter of concern. Former Owner had laid out some of the precious beams directly on the soil and covered them with 1/2 inch plywood. Dry rot and carpenter ants had made of this area a serious ankle trap. We asked our oldest boy and his friend if they wanted exercise. With the pry bar and the maul, they made a joyful noise and large chunks of erstwhile flooring flew out the door for about half an hour.
    At first we considered using the bare earth, but as we knew we would be watering plants inside, we looked about for something more suitable. Bricks were what was wanted, but used bricks go for a dollar apiece hereabouts. I mentioned this, in a woebegone manner, to a friend.
    "Well, I might have just the thing. There is a dangerous chimney on the house I use for an office building, which would cost me a fortune to have taken down by masons. If you can do the job I'll pay you and you can keep the bricks."
    I thought this was a godsend and took our pickup truck and a rented forty foot ladder to the site. This turned out to be, to my horror, a two-story house with a sixty-degree pitch. I'd need the whole length of the ladder to get at the thing -- forty feet doesn't sound like much but just try it sometime -- but the bricks, the bricks!
    Greed overcame good sense, and there I was, a million miles above the earth it seemed to me, plucking bricks from midair (the mortar was completely shot) and tossing them at random over my shoulder into space. They made a lovely truckload, though, and with the aid of our nine-year-old daughter, the next day, I laid them in a herringbone pattern, just like the ones pictured in garden books, and they made exactly the length and width of the room.
    In the west wall we installed wood-framed windows in a row at table height, then dragged a suitable "bench" from the garage and painted it green ( for good luck? Why do we insist on green potting benches?). Using roofing nails, we covered the top of the bench with linoleum. The bench had been a kitchen cabinet once, but had long since lost its doors and hinges. We installed it along the west wall beneath the windows, and filled its shelves with clay pots, green plastic pots of all sizes, and tomato cans. With the addition of a watering can, two trowels, and a couple of bags of potting soil, the shed was done! Beloved ducked out.
    I envisioned opening the door through the years, admiring the herringbone pattern of the bricks, the row of waiting tools, the sun shining in through the greenhouse window on ranks of flats bursting with lettuce, broccoli, chard...ahhh.
    "Hello!" said Beloved, returning. "I need to put the duck feed, the rabbit feed, and the geese's cob in here."
    Excuse me? Three large-size garbage cans? But there's no arguing with fate. Soon other items, large and small, came marching in, like animals into the ark. Boxes, lengths of hose, "white buckets" (even the green ones are called "white"), old pillows (she uses these to kneel on while working in the earth), you name it....
    So now, in midwinter, when it's as dark as an eclipse all day anyway, is the time to clean out. Find out which things can go in the garage instead. Find all the broken plastic pots and move them out. Sort and stack the ones that are left. Take the edged tools, one by one, to the garage to be wire-brushed, filed, oiled, and have their handles linseed-oiled. Slowly the shed will begin to look useful. Even some of the beautiful floor begins to appear. But I don't think I'll ever get rid of those huge trash cans. They have made themselves At Home.

                                                                                ,,,

    In January, here, it can be gray and rainy for weeks, as in December, but often it will clear up and be sunny and almost warm for several days, a condition known as a Blue Hole.
    On such days I sometimes take my little green kayak over to the nearby reservoir for exercise. Unlike large motorboats and sailboats, kayaks tend to enforce a bit of solitude, which can be a good thing, I think.
    At this time of year the lake hosts from hundreds to thousands of Canada geese, mallards, mergansers, and coots. The black coots, with their stubby beaks, are fun to watch, especially while landing on the water. They crash-land, skittering along on the surface tension of the water with their wings folded, until they stall out in their own bow wave and seem about to flip forward just as they come to a stop.

    A few days ago, I came across a dying mallard. I realized, as if I had never thought of it before, that every wild duck, as do all of us, must die sometime.
    She had been paddling, a bit lamely, in the same general direction as I had, but as I came up to her, several hundred yards from shore, she seemed to give it up. I thought at first she might be settling in for a nap. But napping, for a mallard, involves turning one's head about on that long neck and using one's back for a downy pillow. She had her head extended before her, and her face in the water, blowing bubbles, lifting weakly from time to time to inhale. I waited with her, about ten feet away; she showed no reaction to my presence and eventually her head sagged beneath the surface film a last time and the bubbling stopped.

                                                                            ,,,

    Dogen tells the story of Great Master Zhenji, who met with a newly arrived monk.
    "Have you been here before?"
    The monk said, "Yes, I have been here."
    The master said, "Have some tea."
    Again, he asked another monk, "Have you been here before?"
    The monk said, "No, I haven't been here."
    The master said, "Have some tea."
    The temple director then asked the master, "Why do you say, 'Have some tea,' to someone who has been here and 'Have some tea,' to someone who has not?"
    The master said, "Director." When the director responded, the master said, "Have some tea."
    Dogen concludes that "the everyday activity of buddha ancestors is nothing but having rice and tea."
    Here in the West, when we, or at any rate some of us, read this sort of thing, we tend to get very excited by it, and to visualize becoming Buddhas ourselves by trying out this kind of everydayness -- sounds easier than sitting with our legs painfully crossed. But, of course, there's a trick to it, as one might suspect from reading of the long years Dogen put in, sitting cross-legged, before he felt himself to be, and was certified by his own master as, qualified to say something on the subject.
    On the one hand, it's very hard to come to one-pointedness of mind (everyone says so), and on the other, nothing could be easier (everyone says that too -- as one master commented, "here I've been all these years selling water right by the river."). Dogen's genius, though, is that he doesn't try to mystify us by embracing either the difficulties and complexities of practice nor the easiness and simplicity of practice. He demystifies, by telling us to relax and simply do what's next. If you want to be a Zen nun or monk, you may begin anywhere, such as having a cup of tea -- that's a start, nothing to be ashamed of. Little steps. Come, he says, patting the tatami and the seat cushion. Sit.

                                                                                ,,,

I made soup in the crock pot and baked some bread. The soup is rice, tofu diced small, onion from the winter garden, green vegetables, peas, tomatoes, water chestnuts, thyme, basil, rosemary, spring onion greens -- garlic greens too. Threw half the tofu and onions and garlic into the soup, the other half into the mixing bowl ...
   ... to which I added a dollop of oil, tablespoon of salt, sixteen ounces of warm water, 1/4 cup of honey, a small handful each of miso, bran, and oatmeal, teaspoon of yeast, stirred, then added a cup of white flour, and several cups of whole wheat flour, stirring until too thick to stir, then floured up my hands a bit and kneaded, adding flour occasionally, until the dough "felt right." Covered the bowl and set it on top of the crock pot to stay warm and rise. You can flip the glass lid upside down and it's a stable enough warming shelf.
    Looked out: it was raining heavily. Jasper Mountain completely obscured. Went over the supply of seed left over from last year's garden. I have thought that this year I might try to get some greens going early, so last month I cleaned up the potting shed/greenhouse. There's an old radio suspended from the ceiling, tuned to the classical station; it's a soothing place to work.
    I put on a coat, hat, and rubber boots, slither out to the shed, fire up the music (Mendelssohn's violin concerto, I think), pick six old, cracked flats, load them up with potting soil, and spread seeds.  Romaine lettuce, Black-Seeded Simpson lettuce, Red Russian kale, bunching onions,, Detroit Red beets (for the greens, really), spinach.
    Each packet I broadcast round the flat, then cover the seeds with peat, set the flats in the window and dose them with rain water.
    Music off, close door, back to the house, boots, etc. off, check the dough, grease the cookie sheet, shape the loaves, put them on the sheet.
     Jasper Mountain is somewhere beyond the window. External fog, internal fog. Wind, rain, and typos. When the bread has risen some, bake (in this oven) 40 minutes at 350 degrees.
    Have we been here before?
    Have some tea.

February

LAST NIGHT, not content with the flats already seeded, I stepped out to the greenhouse and planted two hanging baskets with cilantro, and a gallon pot with chives. I have been running low on potting soil, so I built up the bottom layer in these containers with sphagnum moss, then a few inches of soil, then broadcast the seeds, then shook all down, then covered seed with a thin layer of peat, then watered gently. I hung the baskets on twenty-penny nails driven into the rafters, sorted pots, then swept the herringbone-patterned floor. I also brought in last year's planter of lavender and trimmed its dead growth; perhaps there's still something doing down in the roots.
    The night is restless; there's a storm front in the area, boiling in beneath the jet stream from somewhere near Hawaii. Waves are undoubtedly smashing a little higher than usual at the cape, and in the mountains new snow is covering the tracks of the more venturesome animals. I find myself visualizing this, then the image shifts to a close-up of blood on the snow: a vole taken up by an owl, perhaps. If I hoped to find peace in the night, well, perhaps I brought my own unrest with me. There are sharp doings in the world; so many of us wishing ill upon so many others.
    I have just finished proofreading Montaigne's essay on "Coaches," in which he strays magnificently into a critical analysis of the Spanish conquests of Mexico and Peru, implying throughout that the Europeans had, by means of technological advances only, conquered a culture equal to or better than their own in almost every other way. He recounts the torture and death of the Inca king:

    The king, half rosted, was carried away: Not so much for pitty (for what ruth could ever enter so barbarous mindes, who upon the furnished information of some odde piece or vessell of golde they intended to get, would broyle a man before their eyes, and not a man onely, but a king, so great in fortune and so renowned in desert?), but for as much as his unmatched constancy did more and more make their inhumane cruelty ashamed, they afterwards hanged him, because he had couragiously attempted by armes to deliver himselfe out of so long captivity and miserable subjection; where he ended his wretched life, worthy an high minded and never danted Prince. At another time, in one same fire, they caused to be burned all alive foure hundred common men and threescore principall Lords of a Province, whom by the fortune of warre they had taken prisoners. These narrations we have out of their owne bookes, for they do not onely avouch, but vauntingly publish them. May it bee they doe it for a testimony of their justice or zeale toward their religion? Verily they are wayes over-different and enemies to so sacred an ende.

        I suspect that we, as a culture, have not much improved upon this model.
    I remember that during Desert Storm I overheard two friends discussing their dismay at realizing how little "progress" had been made in building a civil and humane society. They described to each other the behavior of so many of their fellow citizens that had derided and even attacked dissidents in the nearby city.

    Their surprise surprised me.
    Perhaps, I thought, we ought not to expect too much from a civilization dependent upon massive consumption of oil, electricity, metals, plastics, fats; upon television and its steady bombardment of a largely captive population with promises of instant gratification of cynically inculcated wishes.
    My two friends, and Beloved and I also, had spent many years in a small valley in the mountains, among neighbors who had built homes of rough lumber with cedar shake roofs, and with recycled windows through which to view the rain falling among alders and cedars, and watch the deer grazing unharassed in the homeyard. We had had many, many days in which to make our kind of social progress by baby steps, pulling on rubber boots, walking up the gravel road to visit one another over steaming cups of home-grown herbal tea.
    The outside world, rich or poor, in pursuit of its varied manipulative or manipulated agendas, had not had, or given itself, the opportunity to discover that life.
    There is a Paul Reps poem that goes something like: "drinking a bowl of green tea/I stop the war." I remember thinking, when I was a Vietnam War protester, that this was a naive approach. But whom did I convince, with all my activism at that time, to think differently than they already thought? An action taken that is in itself peaceful, on the other hand, is never wasted.
    At times like these I am reminded that Plato wrote the definitive critique of material modernity and its consequences, over 2300 years ago. In the second book of the Republic, Socrates upon having been asked to define justice, does so by describing his ideal of a just state, with its underpinnings of a just culture:  

 Let us then consider, first of all, what will be their way of life, now that we have thus established them. Will they not produce corn, and wine, and clothes, and shoes, and build houses for themselves? And when they are housed, they will work, in summer, commonly, stripped and barefoot, but in winter substantially clothed and shod. They will feed on barley-meal and flour of wheat, baking and kneading them, making noble cakes and loaves; these they will serve up on a mat of reeds or on clean leaves, themselves reclining the while upon beds strewn with yew or myrtle. And they and their children will feast, drinking of the wine which they have made, wearing garlands on their heads, and hymning the praises of the gods, in happy converse with one another. And they will take care that their families do not exceed their means ... (Jowett, tr.)

Glaucon, who has elicited this description, however, seeks a description more like Athens.

       Yes, Socrates, he said, and if you were providing for a city of pigs, how else would you feed the beasts?
       But what would you have, Glaucon? I replied.
       Why, he said, you should give them the ordinary conveniences of life. People who are to be comfortable are accustomed to lie on sofas, and dine off tables, and they should have sauces and sweets in the modern style.

Socrates responds by shifting from a description of agrarian simplicity to one of what is in effect a consumer society:

     Yes, I said, now I understand: the question which you would have me consider is, not only how a State, but how a luxurious State is created; and possibly there is no harm in this, for in such a State we shall be more likely to see how justice and injustice originate. In my opinion the true and healthy constitution of the State is the one which I have described. But if you wish also to see a State at fever heat, I have no objection. For I suspect that many will not be satisfied with the simpler way. They will be for adding sofas, and tables, and other furniture; also dainties, and perfumes, and incense, and courtesans, and cakes, all these not of one sort only, but in every variety; we must go beyond the necessaries of which I was at first speaking, such as houses, and clothes, and shoes: the arts of the painter and the embroiderer will have to be set in motion, and gold and ivory and all sorts of materials must be procured.
    True, he said.
    Then we must enlarge our borders; for the original healthy State is no longer sufficient. Now will the city have to fill and swell with a multitude of callings which are not required by any natural want; such as the whole tribe of hunters and actors, of whom one large class have to do with forms and colours; another will be the votaries of music --poets and their attendant train of rhapsodists, players, dancers, contractors; also makers of divers kinds of articles, including women's dresses. And we shall want more servants. Will not tutors be also in request, and nurses wet and dry, tirewomen and barbers, as well as confectioners and cooks; and swineherds, too, who were not needed and therefore had no place in the former edition of our State, but are needed now? They must not be forgotten: and there will be animals of many other kinds, if people eat them. [Emphasis added.]
    Certainly.
    And living in this way we shall have much greater need of physicians than before?
    Much greater.
    And the country which was enough to support the original inhabitants will be too small now, and not enough?
    Quite true.
    Then a slice of our neighbours' land will be wanted by us for pasture and tillage, and they will want a slice of ours, if, like ourselves, they exceed the limit of necessity, and give themselves up to the unlimited accumulation of wealth?
    That, Socrates, will be inevitable.
    And so we shall go to war, Glaucon. Shall we not? [Emphasis added.]

    War is, says, Plato, the inevitable consequence of consumerism. If this analysis is correct, and we do not wish war, what ought we to do? Would it not be to plan a shift in society away from consumerism?
    One of two things has to happen to Western civilization soon, or it will be superseded.
    The first choice would be to harden ourselves to defend "our way of life," which hardening is, in itself, especially as it involves giving up constitutional freedoms, a contradiction of that very way of life. Yet this has been a very popular choice of late.
    The second, and to me the more rational approach, is to adopt, to the extent possible, the simplicity practiced by Zen monks and by the society proposed by Socrates as most just because least acquisitive.
    Socrates specifically states that the families in such a society must live within their means, and here I elided, but will now add back the end of the sentence: " ...having an eye to poverty or war."
    In other words, if you are consciously doing simplicity you need not call it poverty.

                                                                            ,,,

    The rare sunshine at this time of year always sends Beloved tearing out to the garden to put in peas. She climbs into her overalls, ties a bandana over her hair, grabs a "retired" pillow from the greenhouse, plunks it on the ground in front of the row, and goes to work.
    The neighbor, a tidy retired man who gardens from June to August religiously, finds this behavior distinctly odd. So he comes out to investigate. Not wanting to be obvious about this, he begins on the far side of the pasture, and inspects his fence around into the apple orchard, then, after what he deems to be a decent interval, stops right by her.
     "What the devil are you at in the dead of winter?" he asks politely.
    "Peas! Aren't they lovely?" she extends a grubby palm, with a dozen wrinkled seeds.
    "You don't expect them to come up, do you?" He peers down at the strange-looking, to him, thick straw mulch that has been pulled back to reveal the brown earth.
    "No, I never expect them to come up, but I always hope they will; and I get nice surprises. Sometimes." She grins, and picks up her trowel.
    "Huh! well, good luck to you!" He ambles off, shaking his head at the improvidence of the Bear clan.
    Though we now patronize Seed Savers Exchange, we used to buy a lot of our seeds at the end of summer, from racks of remaindered packets that are made available by our local hardware stores for five to ten cents a packet. Some of these year-old seeds, especially of flowers, seemed to lose a bit of vitality and planting them was a bit like doing your thinning in advance; but the peas always seemed to come up.
    Peas are legumes. We much prefer them to beans, as the whole family has a sweet tooth. We like the climbing varieties more than bush, and prefer sugar snap to the shell-'em-out varieties.
    When the season is at its height, relatively little cooking goes on hereabouts, as we are to be found at all hours simply sitting by the pea vines stuffing ourselves.
    Those that we pick and bring in are not as good after about two hours, though we use them in salads and stir fries, and freeze the rest. If it does threaten to rain too much on the rows or beds soon after planting, cover with a plastic tarp for two days, then pull it off for a day or so as needed. As soon as the plants are up, pull the mulch up around them close, and renew it throughout the life of the plants, to keep the roots cool. I stake them out by making tripods of cuttings from ash, willow, and hazel. Peas are said to dislike being planted in the same spot two years in a row, so we try to rotate them with other crops.
    After the pea crop is gone, I feed the vines to the ducks, geese, and rabbits, who think highly of them.

                                                                            ,,,

    Today the sun came out for the first time since I don't know when. The ground rises to the east of the house, and a morning-coffee glance through the living room window revealed a jeweled world -- heavy dew on the rumpled grass, the leafless lilac bushes, and the apple orchard. Rainbow hues glinted from the drops, and the glow suffused the house like a dream of a better world.
    These lilacs, when they bloom, are of a purple-hued variety, and all the lilacs around all the houses hereabouts are of the same kind.
    The originals were planted by the first family to arrive here, not long after the original pioneers in our end of the valley. They built a post-and-beam two-story house in the midst of three hundred and twenty acres of Douglas fir forest. These trees were large, and there were a lot of them; their shade was dense, and it would be a while before this could be farmland. The men, taking stock of their situation, immediately took on a contract to provide firewood for all the one-room schoolhouses in the area, and fell to work with axe and crosscut. As the clearing around the house grew, the women installed plants they had brought with them: vinca, daffodils, flowering quince, lilacs.
    The original house, and the forest that sustained it, have been gone for decades. The plants remain; the original lilacs form a semicircle around a pile of foundation stones that were used to fill in the cellar, and the vinca and daffodils cover the area. It's part of our neighbors' pasture now.
    Our house was built in the year I was born, 1949, by one of the descendants of the woodcutting family, and his wife grew the  dooryard's lilacs from cuttings off the original pioneer plants. All her neighbors appear to have done the same. The family across the road has a thick, healthy-looking hedge of them.
     When we arrived here, the dooryard lilacs were much in need of pruning back; winds were scraping them against the house. We took out dead wood, crossed branches and the like, and noticed that suckers had formed around the root collars of the ancient bushes. These had been cut back and had re-sprouted innumerable times, thickening the root collars considerably, providing room for more suckers to form.
    We were about to cut the latest ones away, when an idea came to us -- would they form roots if we hilled up earth around them? We brought a barrow-load of dirt and piled it round the bases of the lilacs, and went on to other tasks.
    Weeks -- or it must have been months -- later, we remembered our experiment and went to the lilacs with a trowel to see how the suckers were coming along. Sure enough, they had formed roots. Cutting the main stems away from the parent, we were able to replant a number of them into number ten tomato cans, where they awaited dormancy the following winter. Come winter, in its turn, we remembered them just in time, before bud break. They were set out at the corners of the house. They have all done well, and we are filled with admiration at the hardiness and adaptability of these pioneers of the valley.
    The lilac has long been hybridized and there are now well over 500 varieties. Around here we plant them in fall, or no later than February, with some compost and bone meal in the hole, which should be spacious enough not to crowd the roots. We top dress biannually with compost, then add some pine or fir needles, or other acid material. If  the acidity isn't benefiting the plant enough, there is a trick: add apple parings to the top dressing and stick a few rusty nails (not galvanized) underneath. The iron seems to react with the apple skins in some way the shrubs find appealing.
    Watering for the first year is vital. After that, the lilac should be fairly hardy, and we avoid letting the ground around an established lilac get too soggy. A vigorous plant can sustain plenty of blooms. If it seems poorly, we pick them off so that more of the strength can go to building new roots. The bloom season is relatively short, but while it lasts, the scent on the breeze we dig in the herb bed provides a strong argument that in Heaven it is always spring.

March

ISAAC WALTON'S "Piscator," in the Complete Angler, advises his young friend thus:

    Let me tell you, scholar, that Diogenes walked on a day, with his friend, to see a country-fair; where he saw ribbons, and looking-glasses, and nut-crackers, and fiddles, and hobby-horses, and many other gimcracks: and having observed them, and all the other finnimbruns that make a complete country-fair; he said to his friend, "Lord! How many things are there in this world, of which Diogenes hath no need!" And truly it is so, or might be so, with very many who vex and toil themselves to get what they have no need of. Can any man charge God that he hath not given him enough to make his life happy? No, doubtless; for nature is content with a little. And yet you shall hardly meet with a man that complains not of some want; though he, indeed, wants nothing but his will, it may be, nothing but his will of his poor neighbour, for not worshipping, or not flattering him: and thus, when we might be happy and quiet, we create trouble to ourselves.

    It's quite all right to garden and bake, and read, and sing, and nap, and patch clothes, and to regard all this as a life, in other words.
    The trouble comes in when we get ambitious, as Plato said, for more -- that more which sets us at odds with neighbors and neighboring countries.
    I have gone to the greenhouse; found the two flats of lettuce satisfactory, and the peas, and found the beets acceptable, but little else has responded to what heat has come in through the fogged, rain-streaked glass. I have found some unremembered packets of -- yes, still more lettuce -- and corn salad, chard, and some white radishes, and dedicated still more space to the hopeful flats.
    Sigh.
    And swept the floor, mindful of the importance Zen nuns give to tidying up round the buildings and gardens.
     Afterwards, baking.
    I took up an almost-empty jam jar, added warm water from the tap, a small spoonful of baker's yeast, put the lid on, shook the mix a bit, and removed the lid right away. In experiments of this kind, you don't want pressure building up under that lid. The beasties liked the jam and started multiplying right away. The jar is a sixteen-ounce size, so that's perfect for about a pound and half loaf.
    In a large mixing bowl, I put about a tablespoonful of salt, and threw in a handful each of miso, wheat germ, and oats. Rooting through the current supply of veggies, I came across a green onion that needed using, diced it small, and added that to the bowl. A dollop of honey and another of molasses, and now, with the salt buried under all that, it didn't shock the yeast too much when the starter was thrown in.
    We keep whole-wheat flour in sacks in a thirty-gallon galvanized can, and dole it out with a hand-sized bowl.
    After three bowls, I stirred, and keep stirring steadily, adding flour, till the batch "rose up off the bowl," which is the expression we use for when the lump achieves the right consistency -- cleaning all residual flour off the bowl into one lump that's not too sticky when touched, yet not too hard and unyielding. At this point I turned the whole thing out onto a chopping block that had been lightly floured, and shaped it into a round loaf.
    No two batches turn out exactly the same.
    Earlier in the week, the "extra ingredient" was raisins; this time it was the onion.
    I don't really do much kneading, and only have the patience to let the loaf rise once. The cookie sheet with the loaf on it rested on the corner of the dining room table nearest the wood stove, then, as I got hungrier, moved onto a trivet on the stove top, then into the oven on "warm." When the loaf was finally tall enough to bake, I simply cranked the oven to 350 and checked the clock. Back in an hour.
    Bread this loosely defined can be used to keep a lot of food from going to waste.
    The watery whey from tofu or from draining a batch of pasta can be useful here.
    Got soup stock?
    Veggie stock?
    Leftover rice?
    Breakfast cereal?
    I'm told, though, I should leave out the coffee grounds.

                                                                            ,,,

    I didn't care for gardening when I was growing up. I much preferred to spend my Saturdays lounging around the house with a book, or exploring the small wilderness across the creek that bounded the suburban lot we called home. From a hill across a meadow in the wild area, I could look back over the creek valley and see the backs of the row of new houses, set down in pastureland during the explosive growth after the second World War, and in the large back yards the men could be seen, each in his own realm, restoring order to the landscape the bulldozers had crushed and tumbled.

    Some planted a few pines, all planted grass.
    My father, almost alone among them, planted fruit trees, grapes, figs, and row upon row of vegetables. He owned a walking tractor, the remote ancestor of today's tillers, and I could hear it singing to him, dinka-dinka-dink, as he plowed.
    He made the earth yield tenfold, twentyfold, an hundredfold, all of which he brought to my despairing mother in brimming bushel baskets. She had no inclination for canning, drying, and freezing, and would surreptitiously slip the produce, as much as she could reasonably expect would go unnoticed, into the trash.
    Frankly, I shared her point of view.
    I didn't like squash or spinach fresh, let alone reconstituted in the dead of winter, so why bother?
    He failed to make a convert of her, and had worse luck with me. I was enlisted to barrow ripe manure from place to place, to hold trees upright while he mixed compost, water and earth gently round the roots, to unroll bare-root tomato plants from their damp newspaper wrapping in my own shade, safe from the sun, then hand them to him, one by one, while he dug and poured and tamped, talking and explaining the whole while.
    But my mind stayed resolutely elsewhere; perhaps with Dickinson or Austen. My father sensed the futility of his efforts, and with a sigh released me to my own world, taking up the tomatoes from his shade with one hand and pouring water into the holes with the other, alone.
    Years later, needing to earn a living on my arrival in Oregon at the height of an unemployment crisis, I signed on to a tree planting crew.
    The foreman showed us the basics in setting out a two-year-old Douglas fir seedling:
    "Y'open the hole with the hoedad at the bottom by pulling up on the handle, see? Then the top by pulling down. Now yuh've got a hole twelve inches deep and four across all the way down. Right? Now take yer tree and dangle the roots down; give 'em a shake so they'll hang loose and won't get caught upside down, see? 'Cuz roots upside down don't work -- they'll die on yuh; if all the roots are upside down the whole tree'll die. They only work one way. Keep it out of the sun, too, and don't hold it out in the wind too long. All that sun and air'll kill yer tree. Now yuh pack the dirt around the tree with yer hoedad blade, once, twice, like this, so there's no air pocket in the ground -- that air will kill a tree in the ground just like it will in yer hand. Now press down with yer foot, but not too close to the stem and not too hard. There's hair roots, yuh can't see 'em, on every root yuh can see, and if yuh get rough you'll strip those off at the base, and they'll die, and there goes yer tree. O.K.? now on to the next spot."
    About halfway through the lecture I realized I already knew all this; it was the tomato lecture!
    Shade, air, and hair roots. This foreman might not know his Jane Austen, but his rough approximations of physical geography and botany struck me as admirably educated, and at that moment, with a flash of insight, I understood gardening not as a weird masochistic hobby but as a vital branch of knowledge.
    Hand planting of tree seedlings is carried on in the winter hereabouts, beginning when the rains have penetrated about ten inches into the soil. Our crews worked in the Coast Range until March, then fanned out across the Cascades and the Rockies, finishing up usually about the end of May, somewhere in Montana or Colorado.
    Summer was the off season.

    Having nothing else to do that first summer, I took up gardening. After tilling a suitable patch of ground, I went out with a round-pointed shovel, a bucket of compost, a bucket of water, and a flat of tomatoes in two-inch pots (I have not seen those bare-root "field-growed" tomato plants since my childhood).

    With the shovel, I dug a hole about the depth of the blade, threw in some nice wormy compost, turned up a seedling and gently lifted off the pot, set the root ball quickly into the earth (working in my own shade), slopped in some water, backfilled soil up to just above the root collar, tamped gently with the heel of my palm, and measured to the next spot by simply laying down the shovel and noting the place where the end of its handle reached to.
    I didn't think about it at the time, but later realized, while admiring the nicely laid out grid of fresh greenery, that I had absorbed, albeit unknown to me at the time, every move of my father's method. The conversion was complete.
    When my parents eventually made their way west to visit, they caught us at the end of a pretty good harvest. My father looked over the rows of corn, the squash patch, the bean trellises, and the fall bed with its broccoli, lettuce, chard, and kale seedlings, and shook his head.
    "Where'd you learn how to do all this? " But he knew the answer, and I could tell he was deeply pleased.

                                                                            ,,,

    The long rains are back, with the occasional snowflake.
    In March we do most of our gardening sitting around the table playing with pretty packets as if there were a game called Seed Poker. To Beloved a pair of Sugar Snap Peas and a pair of Broccoli is a really good hand; but I prefer a full house of two Blue Lake Pole Beans and three Bodacious Corn.
    One wants something to do, even if it calls for a full suit-up of rain gear and gum boots. So at about this time of year I usually do the garlic roundup.
    The previous occupant of our place enjoyed garlic, which I never liked, but luckily his choice was elephant garlic, which has made me a convert. This stuff grows six feet tall, produces interesting flowers that are fun to have around and are also great scissored off for salads. It develops a bulb the size of a softball, with great soft cloves that are a cook's delight. These can be chopped fine and tossed into the pan with whatever's doing, from stir-fried vegetables to roast lamb, adding a subtler aroma and flavor than the more common varieties.
    When you lift the plants, there are a myriad of filbert-shaped bulblets, like small potatoes, that are easily left behind in the soil, sometimes eight or ten inches deep. These become first-year plants of what appears to be a biennial. Because of the depth from which they often grow, the bulblet plants make a fair substitute for leeks. Or if you leave them alone, they come back the second year as the highly productive six-foot beasties.

                                                                            ,,,,

    Another sunny patch.
    We cut and stacked wood and shredded the leaves and hay that have been lying heaped about the garden. Then planted tomatoes -- in flats in the greenhouse.
   Hung Tzu-ch'eng, writing about 1600, said that "Mountains and forests are scenes of wonder. Once they are frequented by people, they are debased into market-places. Calligraphy and paintings are things of beauty. Once they are craved by people, they are degraded into merchandise."
    The trick, unless we hope to move to a desert island (which would, as Hung could point out, immediately devalue the island), is to work primarily on one's mindfulness, to become not a merchandiser, nor a buyer of merchandise, at least where Jasper Mountain is concerned. It should simply be there, as it has practically always been, of interest to us yet not possessed by us.
    There is always the hope of extending this non-possession to a wider and wider range of experience.
      Example: a supermarket is a dreadful combination of market forces, the use of bright lights, activity, noise, and the arrangement of goods to tempt us into buying more things than we need, more expensive things than we need, and more processed things than we need. Yet we can enter and buy rice, tofu, pok choi, green onions, mung bean sprouts, a zucchini, and a bell pepper, pay for the items, and walk out again, leaving the vast array of very bad items, nutritionally speaking, un-bought and unconsumed.
    Choices.
    Hung says: "To concur with a web of circumstances is to dismiss it, and is like the harmony between flitting butterflies and fluttering flowers. To accord with an event is to nullify it, and is like the perfection of the full moon as round as a basin of water."
    When I had my mid-life crisis, I lived briefly in what is known around college campuses as a "quad." For my $240 a month I had the exclusive use of a breezeway, a mailbox, a porch light, a locking exterior door, a twelve by fourteen room with a sliding window, curtains and blinds, a table, two long bookshelves on the wall, a bed, two chairs, a nice vanity with a round sink, hot and cold running water, a closet, several drawers in the built-in vanity cabinet, an overhead light, a telephone jack, and three sets of electrical outlets.
    Heat, light, power, and water were included in the rent. A lockable interior door led to a corridor with three other such doors, a bathroom, and a small kitchen with four cabinets and two refrigerators, for the shared use of four residents.
    I was within walking distance from my job, groceries, laundry, entertainment, and public transportation. Add a bicycle, a few blankets, books, changes of clothes, a laptop with CD player and headset, toothbrush, soap, a clock, and a few dishes and utensils, and I was set.
    My eating habits in this environment became so simple that I seldom met my neighbors, as I pretty much used the kitchen only for storage. On my small dining room table stood a rice steamer with a built-in timer, bought new for under $25. With one of these, you can add a few cups of water to the inner tank, and about a cup and a half to the rice dish, pour in a cup of rice, and set the timer for 35 minutes.
    After 20 minutes, snap a stem from your pok choi, trim the greens, and dice up the stem. Take about an inch off the end of your tofu and dice that up as well. Throw these, minus the greens, into the steamer. Take about three inches off the end of a small zucchini and dice that up, leaving a bit of the peeling on each chunk. Throw that in. Dice up some bell pepper and do the same.
    With five minutes to go, chop some sprouts up a bit, and throw them in along with the pok choi greens and some onion greens. Add some basil flakes from a spice jar. When the steamer's bell rings, uncover and serve.
    Have a glass of water with your dinner.
    Leftovers can go toward breakfast or lunch.
    For a vanishingly small grocery bill, this regimen will give you enough calories and nutrients to sustain you reasonably well for a long time, and you will be much the healthier for it, too.

April

A FEW years ago, we felt we should reduce our "acreage" in the main garden, so we took an iron rod, set it up in the approximate middle, and with a rope attached to the rod, made a circle about sixty feet across, planting garlic to mark the edge as we went. The garlic is up now, and we can see the size of the garden-to-be.   
     Beloved looked over the circle.
    "Whoa! That's way too small! ... where do the brassicas go?"
    "Right here."
    "Uh-huh. And the squash?"
    "Sort of over here."
    "Right. And the cucumbers, -- and -- and -- where does the pumpkin patch go?" Her voice seemed a bit stressed at this point.
    "Right back here...no problem, really! Honest!"
    "And your corn, beans, tomatoes and potatoes?"
    "Uh, well, I thought I'd revive my old beds up in the orchard."

    "I thought we were going to have a 'smaller' garden!"
    "Well, that's what I remember us both saying, so I've cut this one in half. Bu I can always go back there. And the trees will need watering anyway, so I might as well..."
    Etc., etc. Gardening can be complicated.
    I figured, with all the quart jars of tomato sauce still in the pantry, I can get by on only four tomato plants this year. But I've already got a flat of two-inch pots.
    If they all make it, that's ... thirty-two plants.
    Who's going to kill twenty-eight of those little lovelies?

    But let me tell you about our first year here.

    We had a big tiller at the time, and dug up not one but three gardens. Beloved got the well-draining little one for spring and fall brassicas and peas, I got the orchard one, and we both got the big one. I decided to put out four kinds of tomatoes: Romas, Better Boys, Sweet 100's and some Sungold cherries.
    So I did a flat of each, figuring on some die-off. Nope. They were all very happy. This was early in February, as I was having some kind of light-deprivation fit and had to grow something. So I spent the spring mostly repotting and repotting until the tomatoes were shoving the lids off the cold frames.
    After giving away the plants that anyone who knew me would take, I still had seventy-two tomato plants. So I put them all in the ground. I had forgotten to lime, so there was some blossom-end rot, but not much, as it had fallowed a few years. There were tomatoes, tomatoes, tomatoes. Big ones, little ones, round ones, pointy ones. I gathered the pointy ones and sauced till I dropped.
    The pantry shelves groaned.
    I chased the kids through the cherries and Sweet 100's and told them that was their dinner for tonight -- and all month, same menu. I sliced the big round ones and added them to every conceivable dish. But more kept coming.
    One day, late in August, I picked a perfect one-pound Better Boy and looked at it in misery and disgust. A surfeit of your favorite things will, sooner or later, turn you against them, and with a kind of strangled cry I pitched the tomato as high in the air as it would go. It came down in the middle of the duck pen with a satisfying splapp! of water-balloonish disintegration.
One of the ducks ambled over to see what the fuss was all about. Idly, almost absentmindedly, she nipped at the remnants of the once-proud Better Boy. I could almost see, from across the creek, her small eyes widen.
    "Eureka!" she shouted in Duckish; we know that's what she said from the way the others appeared out of nowhere to finish off the mess.
    Ah, said I to myself. Duck food! I threw tomato-balloons into the sky with abandon, and as three were coming down among the ducks, three more were launching into the air.
    At about this moment the neighbor, a stalwart citizen of some seventy-two years, decided he had better investigate.
     "So, uh, what are we doing today?" came his voice, from right behind the merry balloonist's back.
    "Oh, hi, Mr. T.! Feeding the ducks!" I launched three more balloons. The ducks, who by now had gorged themselves, showed no further sign of appetite and were mostly just dodging the "incomings."
    "Right. Feeding the ducks. Well, nice weather, huh?" He watched me closely for signs of more erratic behavior, but none was forthcoming; my arms were tired.
    Every day until frost, though, I fed the ducks. It was good for my pitching arm, they clearly liked tomatoes a great deal, and were good for about fifteen Better Boys a day.
    The next year, I put in thirty-two plants.
    The year after that, sixteen.
    This year, four for sure.
    Well, maybe eight?

                                                                            ,,,,

    I used to despair of ever getting the garden tilled. Here in western Oregon it generally rains, rains, and rains until about the fifth of July. Throughout this time, if you pick up a handful of "dirt" and drop it, like the tilling manuals say, it will hit the surface with a wet splapp!! -- just like a Better Boy tomato -- thus failing the ready-to-till test.
    So, what's a gardener to do?
    We have weeds like nobody has weeds. We can hear them growing at night. Neighbors like to lean on the fence, shake their heads, and say, "Oh, my. Need some herbicide in there!" Well, thanks but no thanks; we had a serious run of birth defects among tree planters' families back in the seventies, including ours, and it turned out to have something to do with the 2,4,D that was used to keep the forest clear-cuts free of brush. I figure the big chemical companies owe our family about forty thousand dollars so far, but for now let's just say, no herbicides on this place, thank you.
    So, ok, what to do? We learned, some years ago by trial and error that with a long-handled garden fork we could "spade" wet ground: the tines don't seem to compress the soil the way an actual spade does. We turned the clumps upside down, and the roots of sod and weeds, ripped by the fork rather than cut off cleanly by a spade, stood upside down naked in the sunlight, rapidly drying up, a satisfying scene of mayhem. But the earth itself remained stubbornly cold and damp, even for peas.
    Something more was needed.
    During one hot, dry summer not too long ago, I tried to water my plants from little irrigation ditches, as I had seen done in a garden book somewhere, but the plants were drying up anyway, because the rows were too far apart for the ditches to have any effect.
    A little exploration with a spade taught me what most of you old-time gardeners already knew: most of the water goes straight down.
    You have to water the roots of a plant to do any good. If the water is hitting the ground just a little outside the reach of the plant, it may miss the roots entirely on its way to the aquifer.
    Hmm.
    If I can water only straight down, said I to myself, then I can also dry straight down. As with sun and shade, you can manipulate water levels by opening up or blocking paths for water -- or rain!
    The next winter we bought some stuff we had been avoiding: sheet plastic. 4-mil black and clear. We experimented with both, spreading them over various areas of the garden, and found that the clear plastic seemed to actually encourage weed growth, though it did dry out the soil enough to till.
    The black plastic seemed superior. Every green thing underneath it died, though worms did not seem to be at all discouraged. I've since heard that the clear does work, but it has to be tucked under the earth around all the edges -- absolutely all -- in order to deny air to the weeds and get enough temperature to kill them and their seeds. The black plastic seems much less effort.
    When we don't have enough to do the whole surface of the garden (which is always), we spread out what we've got, and three weeks later, go back, pull all the plastic away, till the dry spot, and spread the plastic over the next space for the next three weeks. Thus there is always some earth dry enough to work, even in constant rain.
    Meanwhile the clear plastic does come in handy. In  prepared ground, we can plant whatever rows or hills of seeds interest us at the time, let it rain on them one night, then cover the rows with a sheet of clear plastic for three to six days so the seeds won't drown, then remove. And voilá! A garden up and running, even as the cold rainwater keeps up its endless drumming. Where there is a will, I suppose, there is almost always a way.

 

May

IF WE pick up a pebble and look at it, we see one thing. If we pick up another pebble, and look at it, we see one thing. Without an observer, these things would lie there, until moved by wind or water, or diminished by these, and by the action of sunshine, until they become sand. They are not appreciable as two things of the same kind unless observed by an entity capable of categorizing.
    Plants, and relatively simple animals such as hydras, do seem to be capable of categorizing, though we don't tend to think of this (when they do it) as intellectual activity.
    Plants, and animals lacking a central nervous system, categorize by means of immanent statistics.
    Some survive, some don't, and those that survive may pass on their genes, with the result that the continued existence of those genes is in itself a record, passively, of there being sets of circumstances favorable to such passings on.
    It's not that the fittest survive. It's that those whose circumstances did not happen to finish them off survive. You may not be the fittest, but if you're still here, well, cool.
    But a common denominator for a lot of survivors is the utilization, whether accidentally or purposively, of something like set theory: the successful organism found or avoided "like" things, such as a certain species of predator or annual temperature extreme.
    The next stage beyond passive information gathering is active information gathering. A trout can experiment with sensory data; the object fluttering on the surface of the water, refracting light as it goes, may be a protein-rich insect. If, however, the object, in a number of instances, proves to be a small wad of chicken neck feathers wrapped on a sharp-tipped bit of wire with thread and glue, the trout, if it successfully shakes these off, may in time come to be an old and wise trout.
    So, as I am a creature with active information-gathering systems, and the ability to compare, I look at the pebbles and see them as two pebbles.
    I categorize.
    I note differences, which is what senses are for, and if the differences are sufficiently minor I take the intellectual leap of concluding that for my purposes the pebbles are "the same."
    I can gather like pebbles, bore holes in them, and string them on rawhide to make a necklace. I can draw a face in the sand, put the pebbles in the face on either side, and mean them to be taken, by another observer, as a representation of eyes. I can count them: "one, two." These are complex activities, not easily described in all their implications.
    Without this capability to recognize, no complex animal would live long enough to pass on its genes. There would be no language, no speech, no writing, no art, no political process, and none of what we call spirituality.
    And yet, at its root, recognition embodies a bit of falsehood.
    This pebble, after all, isn't that pebble.
    "There are no 'generals'," asserted William Blake in the margins of a copy of Reynolds' book: "only particulars!" The leap of metaphor is a momentary fiction, which is the fiction that makes possible for us all the discovery of what we call truth.

    As I sit for a moment, watching the mists (which I "recognize" as mists) clearing away in the light of a rare sunrise from Jasper Mountain, I wonder where this speculation leads. Many conclusions are possible. One of them is that I could probably stand to be a little more tolerant of the fictions others live by, having so thoroughly rummaged through my own myths, and discovered their so tenuous hold on verifiability.

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    The eight tomatoes didn't pan out. I hovered over them with the mister till they keeled over, no doubt with damping-off. I shall have to go to the garden store and surreptitiously acquire replacements.
    I put out peas and then got sick and couldn't cover them during the heavy rains, and they rotted.
    I put out corn -- I know, it's early -- some people never learn -- and it's been snowing in the mountains and hailing here, and I'm sick again and didn't go out and cover the corn beds, and now I can hear the seeds drowning even as I write.
    Gardeners are a masochistic lot -- or sadistic, depending on whether you consider their feelings or those of their seeds and transplants.
    I stood by the window and howled, or rather croaked: "my seeds are rotting! My garden is drowning!"
    Beloved looked up from her easy chair, smiled beneficently, and replied ever so sweetly. "My garden is in the greenhouse, safe and snug."
    It's true; that's where her whole garden is, including the pumpkin patch and the sunflowers, waiting for real spring, which as anyone around here knows, starts sometime between June 1 and the 4th of July. She can do this because she's mastered the art of repotting.
    Even in this weather, the greenhouse, which is nothing more than three sliding glass door panels mounted on frame lumber along the south side of the potting shed, is cozy during the day.
    She kneels on her feed sack pillow, trowel in hand, and repots from two-inch pots to four-inch, from four-inch to eight-inch as needed, while her garden grows. I always manage to wait too late to do this; eventually I'll unpot a veggie only to find that the roots have grown about sixty feet long, or maybe a mile and a half, winding round-and-round the soil plug like thread on a spool. The effect on the growth of the plant is not unlike that of creating a bonsai tree by removing its taproot. I can produce little teeny tomato plants and little teeny zinnias this way, and probably should enter them in the County Fair -- in the contest about how not to garden.
    Take a tip from Beloved and repot early.
    She takes up, say, a flat of broccoli, thirty-two of them in two-inch pots, and makes sure she has nearby not two but four (try the math!) unoccupied flats and thirty-two four inch pots. A sack of potting mix rests close at hand. It has been mixed in a wheelbarrow at the rate of three sacks potting soil to one of steer manure and a bit of powdered limestone. A number ten tomato can makes a fine cheap scoop.
    She takes up a canful of mix, slings some into the bottom of the first four-inch pot, turns a broccoli upside down, taps two sides of the two-inch pot, lifts it gently off the soil plug, rights the plant into the four-inch pot, shakes mix in on all four sides, and tamps it down a bit for a snug fit. (Roots abhor two things: air and light.) The top of the soil meets the root collar of the broccoli and is bear a quarter inch from the top edge of the pot. She sets it in the new flat, and on to the next one.
    This is much faster and simpler, really than the description, and the rhythm of it all is quite relaxing. I prefer doing this with Mozart or Bach in the background. She's more a Golden Oldies girl, but I've never heard Herman and the Hermits in the greenhouse; only the chuffing of the tomato can as it bites into the rich brown surface of the mix.

    Abner, our White China gander, watches her angrily through the "lights" as she works, and when she reaches for the pots nearest him, tries to nip her through the glass, with a thump that's kind of pleasing to hear if you've ever been bitten by a goose.
    The glass is stout enough to resist anything that Abner might contemplate, but there are situations that it was not built for. George, a sheep that lived with us for a while, made this point very clear by escaping from his pasture one fine day. We got him surrounded, and he retreated into the greenhouse, from whence we thought to lead him on a bit of rope. He had other ideas, and sailed through the double-paned safety glass as if it wasn't there, scattering rainbow shards twenty feet in all directions.
    Not a scratch on him, either.
    And all this time the greenhouse had faced into the pasture. Made us think long and hard about which animals to put where. (The freezer, for example, turned out to be the best place for George.)
    Working in the greenhouse pays dividends, though, in opportunities to watch the critters that we own and some we don't own. I've looked up from potting to see a mallard drake and his mate looking in on me from the goose pen, and I enjoy watching the swallows zipping up under the eaves to their nests not three feet from my head. And beyond, in the yard full of dandelions, there are the goldfinches.

    Many people in our area prefer the word "lawn" to "yard" and every year they wallop their dandelions with a herbicide-laced fertilizer. So we're a kind of dandelion island in a sea of miniature golf courses. Goldfinches seem to love dandelion seeds above all else at this time of year, so we get to have all the goldfinches as our guests.
    They descend upon the yard in troops of twenty, fifty, a hundred, eating, arguing, making love. A goldfinch will land on the seed stalk of a dandelion, barely bending it, and sweep the head clean of the tiny white parasol seeds in moments, then on to the next one. The males are dazzling, and I find myself moving from window to window to get a view of their plumage from a few feet away, empty pot in one hand, chard seedling held forgotten in the other.
    It's a fine way to spend a Sunday afternoon, it really is.

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    Dad's "tiller" was a big machine like the front end of an Allis-Chalmers tractor; it had water-filled tractor-tread wheels that were as tall as I was, and pulled a small but quite real single-share moldboard plow. It lasted for two decades.
    Our first tiller, bought from a hardware store in 1977, lasted just two years shy of two decades. We practically farmed with these machines, as none of us seemed to know when we have enough ground in cultivation.
    Our second tiller, however, we used for about twenty hours, and then it died of a heart attac. I know the sound of a piston rod giving up the ghost, but I'm old enough to remember that I should be hearing that sound after three or four hundred hours or more, not twenty.
    Our old chain saw, a 1979 Husky, gave good service for over twenty years.
    The new saw, on the other hand, lasted two weeks.
    We think we see a pattern here, and it's one that encourages us to rethink our original reaction to Wendell Berry's advocacy of farm horses and scythes.
    There comes a time when plunking down good money for gadgets that look like labor-savers but ain't -- because they are going to refuse to do said labor -- begins to look like money spent foolishly.
    Pick up a garden magazine and the bright ads rave at you about the labor you will save with this machine or that machine, but in the end, Thoreau was right.
    He said: "...I start now on foot, and get there before night....You will in the meanwhile have earned your fare, and arrive there sometime tomorrow...if you are lucky enough to get a job in season."
    If you have to work for two days, or, ten, or twenty, to earn a tool and it lasts you two, ten, or twenty days under normal conditions, well, you really ought to have investigated the corresponding hand tool and saved half your time!
    Yes, yes, the woman's new tiller is busted and she has taken to philosophizing as she turns over the garden with a hay fork and blisters her soft hands: sour grapes we used to call it, per Aesop and his fox.
    But the blisters heal, the hands toughen, the body begins to slim down a bit, and if there's any sunshine to be had, some vitamin D into the bargain. Hopefully, she begins to look like one who one understands work
    Meanwhile we're beginning to see articles hither and yon about the disproportionate share that tillers, lawnmowers, chainsaws, edgers and the like have in the despoiling of the air we breathe.      
    Perhaps -- just perhaps -- we're onto something.
    We live inverted sods resprout at the first hint of rain whether tilled or spaded; the rain comes almost daily this time of year. So we took to spreading black plastic to kill sods. And leately we use carboard with straw piled on top, which really seems to bring on the worms and their rich castings.
    Technology shouldn't be regarded as either our savior or our nemesis; the key is to use as much of it as necessary to get done what needs to be done, and no more. Now would be the time to rant about skimobiles and power boating, but I'm going to presume that the gentle reader would regard this as preaching to the converted -- take it as a compliment to your good sense.

    As our power tools fail us, one by one, we become more appreciative of our hand tools, and abuse them less and less. We have several hammers, a straight 22 oz., a curved 16 oz., a tack hammer, a ball peen, a masonry hammer, and a couple of sledge/maul monsters. We've become aware that these are not all interchangeable, and discovering why a tool is shaped a particular way is very pleasing.
    Our brace-and-bit, plane, bench vise and bench grinder are all over fifty years old and going strong. The grinder is electric, but it's an old electric, sealed, never needs oiling, perfectly balanced. It can heat up an edged tool very quickly, and we've learned to keep a can full of water handy to sizzle things in, so they won't turn into butter.
    The bench vise and grinder are rather large. As women, this was a deliberate choice. Not having the same upper body strength as the guys, we needed bigger stuff because the equipment's strength or weight made up for what we lacked in personal leverage. We keep pipes of varying size and length to slip over handles like the one on our vise so as to give the handle that little bit of extra torque that the he-men provide with their shoulders.
     As time passes, we use the grinder less frequently, instead locking tools into the vise and leaning over them with a sharp bastard file, knocking the file against the bench from time to time to shed filings. A file takes a little longer, but it won't destroy temper and we can keep a clean eye on the angle of the cut.
    We keep five shovels. There's a round-pointed long-handled shovel for digging and ditching, a square-point for scooping up loose material from a flat hard surface, a d-ring-handled tree planting shovel with plates welded to the step for heavy-booted work, a more delicate d-ring shovel with an eighteen-inch blade, suitable for bulb work, and a British spade -- a cheap imitation actually -- but useful for light sod-cutting and for mixing things in the wheelbarrow.
    One finds, after time, the point of balance with which a shovel can be wielded all day without undue fatigue. After more time, one becomes aware of the subtleties, such as when it's time to file the blade, or how one can put more pressure on a handle that has been linseed-oiled in the last year than can be put on one that hasn't. One begins to take the trouble to carry a shovel to the shade when not in use, on discovering that sun damages the handle faster than rain.
    Different people have different tool preferences for different techniques.
    Beloved carries around a feed sack with a pillow in it, upon which she kneels to work in the garden with her ever-present trowel. I use the bulb spade and a t-handled dibble stick, which I made from the pearwood handles of a defunct pair of grass shears.
    She marks her rows and hills with little stakes and yards and yards of string, and sows by hand. I do beds without rows, dropping seeds down a four-foot length of PVC pipe, from a standing position.
    I get a lot of use out of a pair of pruning shears, thirty years old -- a cheap brand, too -- and a heavy duty pair of limb loppers that have outlasted their wooden handles. I drove the tangs into two three-foot-long three-quarter-inch galvanized pipes, and on these iron legs they have walked with me over the land many times.
    To draw out the rolls of stock fencing that have languished for fifty years in the blackberry patch, we use a pair of double block pulleys over a hundred years old, with a hundred foot length of rope looped back and forth from block to block, giving us our own strength four times over. This thing beats a modern "come-along" for speed and distance, if power is not all that's wanted. The rope is new, but that other rope lasted until this year; a mysterious thing, made in a rope-walk, of true hemp fibers, then soaked in creosote by hands long vanished from the earth.
    Though it was no doubt toxic, we hated to give it up.
    There are two footbridges on the place, as a seasonal creek divides it right down the middle, end to end. Across these we go, summer and winter, with the wheelbarrows. A wheelbarrow is an amazing device that can hardly be improved upon. It will negotiate tiny gaps while carrying hundreds of pounds with ease. We bring straw from the barn a bale at a time with them, feeling our way with our feet, unable to see round the vast loads.
    A wheelbarrow imposes a stately gait that adds dignity to any laborer's demeanor.
    We bought a five-cubic-foot model at the same time as our old tiller, in 1977, for forty dollars. It has done far more hours of work than the tiller did, and looks fair to outlast us.
    The other one came with the place.
    Well, actually, we didn't know it was here at the time, and the former owner probably didn't either -- it was deep in the blackberries. We dug it out, bound up its wounds with bailing wire, and found a wheel for it. The thing has handmade handles built for a grip larger than ours, and it wobbles a bit as it goes, but it's still a wheelbarrow, and it does honest labor daily.

    Every family should have two wheelbarrows. We pass, sometimes, Beloved and I, like ships in the night, laden with our disparate treasures.

June

WHEN YOUNG, I went west, and made my life in the woods with two dozen good friends who were always on the move.
    We followed the melting snow from west to east, making the grand spring tour from range to range. Winters we worked within sight of the gray Pacific, or anyway in its rains, which bent the dark firs and cedars left and right, and tossed their heavy branches down, sometimes, at our feet. Rocks and logs rolled anytime, bounding and bumbling among us, and we hid behind stumps, cursing and praying our gods.
    By March the Olympics opened, and in April the Cascades. May brought the Wallowas, and June the high Bitterroots.
    We traveled in strange caravans of old trucks and buses, tipi poles tied to our roofs, and rolls of canvas. Arriving at Shelton, or Big Creek, or the Clearwater River, we circled our wagons and set up our poles, and tipis, and yurts, and trailers, and campers, and spread out seeking for firewood, or springs of good running water.
    By the light of a lantern, and warmth of the glowing camp stove, we swilled weak coffee, and told the same old stories, bending the truth a little, but only enough for enjoyment; the truth in our lives was better meat than fiction, and anyone could say: hey, remember the time at Alsea...
    ...when the rain was running sidehill, and the government hid in their truck, and it seemed like the end of the world? And then the sun came out, and right in the hole in the clouds there were seven bald eagles swirling around in the light? You remember that?
    ...yeah, and when we forded the creek down at Coos Bay, and the creek was all salmon from bank to bank, and Trooper caught one, and put it in Steffi's's tree bag, and along came the government, and asked had we seen any fish? And we said yes! We had! Hadda line on both sides of her with that tree bag flappin'.
    ...or when the Three Stooges did acid and went down to Shelton to talk to the government, and Len demanded more money because of the swamps? "Gators! Alligators in them swamps!"
    ...uh huh, and that night when they got back to camp, it was no camp, but six feet of river, and we'd moved off to high ground! Had to put up the yurt by our headlamps, and the wind picked it up with nine people attached, and set it back down.
    ...or the time when it sleeted all morning, and hailed us into the crew rig and down hill to Mapleton, and we sat in the shop eating four dollar sandwiches and drinking hot cocoa, and the government all thought we'd call it a done day, but we rode up to Grayback and worked in that blizzard till evening? Two hundred and twenty-two dollars each one of us got for that day.
    ...Yep, yep. And remember the heat up at Pierce, and the work done by moonlight, the sleeping all day and working again in the evening?
    And we'd tell these stories like old-timers, not one us thirty, yet each knew of death, of pain beyond bearing.
    This was the work: each carried a sack of gray canvas, rubberized well to hold moisture, and hung from a web belt and buckle. The sack held young trees. Fir seedlings, most often, Douglas, or nobles, or grands, or pines such as yellow or lodgepole. Depending on age of the trees, one person might carry a hundred, two-fifty, five hundred, at a single bag-up. Some lifted the bags with a grunt, and buckled the belts on, while others might lie on the bag, buckle on, and lie helpless, turned turtle, and wait for a hand up. Those tree bags were heavy!
    Each of us carried a hoedad, or dag, with a three-foot handle smoothed by years of gloved handling, and a curved blade of four inches' width of steel, fifteen inches long, at right angle to the handle, a cross between shovel and hoe, and sharp as an axe.
    The "goverment" came for us in clean clothes, in their green pickup, and led us in darkness or dawn to some high place, always high up, where the sunrise might catch fire to a wide plain of white cloud tops, or the mists might divide to show frost burning in sunlight below us, deep in the draws of an east face, glittering danger.
    With our hoes we scattered along the steep roadside, and stepped off in line, talking, or singing, swinging our tools first broadside, to swipe the soil clean, then straight down to open the hole for the tree roots. Buried in earth to its first branch, each tree would be packed in with boot heel, and tugged once to check for looseness, then on to the next spot and repeat.
    Each day, five hundred to a thousand or more times, each one of those planters did this, without boredom. The weathers, the dangers, the beauty, the friendship, the honor we saw in restoring some green to the mountains, where mile upon mile of stumps stood mutely in mourning of glory, all kept us returning to this work from elsewhere, like salmon returning upriver, or wild geese to their wide silver wetlands. Our homes were our camps in strange valleys, with the nights and the stories.
    We had a way to hold meetings: one would sit with a clipboard and take names, crossing us off as it came our time to speak. By the clock, we would say our piece, and with a stern warning from the clipboard: "Ten more minutes on this, and we will call the question." There would be a motion, amendment, vote on the amendment, vote on the motion. At the end, criticism-self criticism. A good orator would know how to wave a half-greased boot for emphasis, or throw a log into the red-hot yurt stove for punctuation. For some the yurt was home: they might spread a sleeping bag before the fire, and their dreams would dodge our arguments as we stepped over their heads, brushing crumbs and hay from our shirts and braids.
    My own house was a flatbed truck with dual wheels, floored with smooth maple, and hip-roofed with cedar all hand-shaked, with a stove and stove-pipe, and a lantern, and books, and a bunk, and bacon.
    I had also a dulcimer of four strings, tear-drop shaped, of birch wood, and a harp with twelve chords, which I carried to campfires, where the guitars and mouth-harps were playing, and the singers kept up the bright fire and their voices from sunset to midnight, and the sparks from the firebrands rose up with the music and were lost amid thousands of stars.
    I once woke before dawn, and walked with a friend to a high cliff for the sunrise, and we brought a drum we had made, and drummed there and sang the sun up, and really we half thought we had made the world.

    I would go, now, to the woods, with a few things, and go walking with my pack, and my cup, and my rain gear, and go thinking of all the green bones I had found when I worked in the woods. Deer are not buried in boxes, you know; they drop where they stand when the running is over.
    The coyotes come, and the others, a cougar, perhaps, or a bobcat, and last come the ravens.
    The bones are scattered about where the tree-roots spread and the sword-ferns silently bend in the long rains.
    I like to find the bones, green like the ferns, but still hard, still looking as though they have lots of time, which they do. I set them on stumps so they can see better.
    
    I will walk to a place with a high cliff, and camp by the lake there at evening, and study the grand firs and the nobles reflected in the water made still by the evening. I will sit by the fire and consider, and lie down to count stars, and sleep, and in sleep dream dreams of green bones.
    When the morning arrives, gray and cold, I will rise and walk to the high place, bringing with me a drum I have made, and a song for my scattered people.

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     When we survey the acre of land with which we have surrounded ourselves, the oak and ash trees, rhododendron, hollyhock beds, barn, and house, we turn upon all these things a critic's eye, and keep ready to hand the pruning knife, fence hammer, and trim brush.
    We shape the trees to our own pleasure. But so do children, for whom trees are for climbing. So do birds, whose need is nesting; so also carpenter ants, who must bring nectar to that vast colony somewhere in our eaves.
    We knew, long ago, that we would come to such a place, with its diverse longings, so we called for a document to mark the beginning of our life together. Such a thing could be bought, but we both said, " oh, no, it must be hand made." We could see it as clearly as if it were already done.
    Each could describe it to the other, and to the other it was the describing of a thing already seen. The young student who volunteered, who shaped our wedding scroll, our fractur, with its brave words, was commissioned also to frame it with a house and trees, flowers, birds, a sense of place in a clearing amid woods.
    I think she understood this commission, this designing of a dream, that it was our weaving of a spell to catch our future, to make a future. And all who signed that Quaker wedding certificate, thirty-nine in number, understood: hope made visible. This is what art is, though we are living a time when it is not fashionable (at least among the intelligentsia) to say so.
    We get, occasionally, a visitor who signed that document twenty years ago. There is a pause as we come, in the "tour," to the wedding certificate in its place above the mantel, and there is an almost invariable recognition. The trees, the house in a clearing, an unimpeded view of a mountain, a circling raptor. They smile.
    "You were headed for this place the whole time, weren't you?"

    Such a dream is a lot to put one's name to, so we owe our thirty-nine witnesses much.

    I didn't know then, and maybe I don't know now, what the painting meant to those gathered round to hear our vows and sign their names. But it's enough to know they liked it, and still do, and so easily make the connection from it to our present life. Their approval leads me to believe, a little, in my own and Beloved's wisdom: that we could see a way forward, and say so; then having said, follow through. This is prophecy, the oldest art, which also called simply the art of living.

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    Every gardener is an artist in this most ancient sense.

    The seeds and starts, balled trees, piles of rocks, and bags of soil amendment are pieces of a vision already seen, to be brought together with a willing toil and persistence.
    Even when the planting and placing of the elements of this vision is done, the vision is not yet attained: what was once seen is still a future glory, which the reality must yet grow into. My hollyhocks just now are two to three feet high, and my vision of them towers over me; in my mind's eye they are seven to eight feet, dropping blooms like small ladies-in-waiting among the clumps of spearmint at their feet. These hollyhocks-to-be, hovering in the air above the current scene, are in a sense the real garden, the garden of the mind toward which the outward garden is progressing.
    The two gardens will not come together without labor. We intervene by fighting slugs and removing grass and dandelions, and by watering.

    Watering is a different ritual with every gardener-artist.
    Some set up their summer sprinklers right away and leave it all to a timer and the available water pressure; those who can afford the initial outlay may invest in a drip system, with the tiny tubes running along every bed, stopping to weep only at a hill of zucchini or at the feet of each of the rhodies.
    We're a low-budget outfit, so our tools, especially early in the garden year, tend to be labor-intensive. At each end of the house is a spigot, low to the ground to prevent freezing in winter, and to these we have attached enough lengths of cheap garden hose to reach the ducks, the geese, the upper garden, the lower garden, the orchard garden, and the various fruit trees and flower beds.
    Beloved does the animals, the upper garden with her lettuces and brassicas and strawberries, and the Front Beds, which are mostly poppies and marigolds this year -- wherever she can tear out enough mint and oregano.
    I do the rest.
    This involves a constant war over nozzles.
    She really only likes one, a greenish fan-shaped thing that hits exactly the right width at four feet to sweep a garden row in one slow pass. She bought it over twenty years, ago and it has spent enough of that time sunning itself on its coils of hose to have faded in color, and it even seems to have lost weight, as though the years of water rushing through have eroded the plastic from within till we handle it like a blown egg. I dread the day that it falls from some unheeding hand and cracks.
    I like the sweep nozzle, too, for the first two minutes, but then I get restive. It hasn't enough reach, and I'm one of those who stands in one spot dispensing favors near and far. So I generally wind up removing the sweep and hanging it in the crook of the nearest lilac, and put in its place an old-fashioned brass nozzle. Antique ones are well made; get one of these. With the brass nozzle you can produce a fine mist eight feet across, or a brave fire-fighter's blast that fans out, forty feet away, just enough to water a distant tree without accidentally digging it up. There's really no better tool for demonstrating the phrase "all-purpose." The only disadvantage to the old brass nozzle that I can discover, but it is a very real one, is that if one removes it to switch to another attachment, and lays just about any old place, with luck one may find it – years later.

    Our current compromise is the "pistol-grip." You can get a quite good visible one, bright yellow, American-made, too, for only three dollars. Be absolutely sure to get the one that is garden-hose threaded for attachments. The thing is highly functional as is, but once you learn what the threading is there for you'll be pleased.
    There is another gadget in this category, and that is a water wand, the kind that is about three feet long with a valve at one end and a nice aluminum rose at the other, on a slender crooked neck. I like the wand very much, at least when working with young plants, because of the so-tiny droplets it produces without choking back the volume of water the way the brass nozzles do.
    The secret to the wand is to hold it "upside down"; the rose should tip up like a flower (a rose), facing the sun, and its drops should rise into the air and fall by force of gravity alone, gently washing the mulch at the feet of your seedlings. The idea is to imitate, not rain, but a long-necked watering can of the English type, with its brass rose. I drape the hose over my shoulder and wander along, visiting plants and offering them the wash of life at their feet, where it's wanted. It's very meditative, using the wand, because there is no backpressure in the hose.
    There are times when you want the rain effect of the sweep or the mist of the wand, without losing the flow control offered by the pistol grip mechanism. Because you've bought the one with the threaded barrel, you can simply attach the other nozzles as needed, creating the right tool for the job at hand. I've become fond of attaching just the rose from the wand to the pistol grip nozzle; this results in a gadget that seems exactly what's wanted for perennial herbs and berries.
    When I walk about, watering with these various implements, it is generally evening. Direct sun will evaporate much of any water offered at mid-day, and in the mornings I'm off to work. Evenings are good for water economy and good for me. I fall into the routine, still noticing weeds that will need attention, or transplants that have stayed overlong in shock, but mostly I'm able to relax and look around.

    Beloved tucks a bit more straw around her newly transplanted lettuce. Canada geese pass overhead here any time of year, though they are at their most spectacular in autumn; we have also mallards who travel in pairs, one green and one brown, and put down in our goose pen to steal cob and talk to our Khaki Campbells across the fence. A swallow sits on the clothesline in his green dinner jacket and scolds me for getting too close to the birdhouse on the potting shed wall. The moon rises, sullen and red-faced at first, then brightens as night comes on, and the last of the sun sweeps up the face of Jasper Mountain and disappears where there will soon be stars. It is altogether restful to water a garden by hand if you have the time.
    Take your garden's advice: forget the evening news and the sitcoms. Make the time.

July

AS THE winter rains subside slowly across the coastal and inland valley landscape, and days are sunny but nights still cool, my neighbors pile up accumulated garden and yard debris, leaving it for a few weeks, perhaps under a plastic tarp. As soon as it's dry enough out, but not dry enough to get them in trouble with the fire warden, they torch off the lot. From a mountain top nearby, one can see this activity as a kind of Civil War reenactment, with the smoke of the guns drifting from various parts of the field. Filbert farmers are prone to set off a lot of piles at once, so that their places look like some corner of Shiloh.
     When we first began to accumulate such material here, we started to build such a pile, but then remembered reading a book by a maverick Japanese organic farmer. He said that he had no way to fertilize a hillside orchard until he hit upon the idea of gathering wood and spreading it around on the slopes to rot. His trees thrived. We've begun to emulate that basic idea.

    Since we still use wood heat, we do try to saw up larger branches for the woodpile. The natives are ash and oak, so their smaller branches are useful for the small barbecue pit we inherited with the place. Finger-sized trimmings of oak, ash, bigleaf maple, blackcherry, and cottonwood go into low places on the land, to help build soil. When there is a lamb, much of this goes to stock feed -- cottonwood is a favorite -- as does the abundant Japanese knotweed festooned with morning glories.
    Himalaya blackberry, our region's equivalent of kudzu, we leave where it drops when cut. The lawnmower will eventually chip up the drying stems. Some of them we may use for bushing peas.
    We have let too much mint grow in too many of the beds, and what we can't use we pull -- and pile around the feet of the fruit trees for mulch. Old squash vines, sunflower stems, hollyhocks, zinnias, cornstalks, "mother" strawberries, and old-growth chard or broccoli plants we chop up with a machete and leave in place to be mowed and perhaps eventually forked in. Of course all the kitchen waste goes straight to the garden.
    We save our dishwater, add it to some other choice "household wastewater," and feed this to fruit trees, grape vines, and flower beds. After we've done the woodcutting for the year, the driveway accumulates a layer of sawdust and chips too small for gathering up for the woodstove. This material is gathered up with a square point shovel and wheelbarrow, and added to the blueberry row.
    With all this activity, we find there's nothing left over that belongs in a bonfire, so we've never had to have one. In fact, we import whatever we can find. We buy tremendous bales of straw at a few dollars apiece, each weighing about the same as the Titanic, and huff them up to the barn to spread around under the bottoms of the ducks and rabbits. The resulting fertilizer is highly prized for projects all over the farm.

    In November of every year, I scout around for bags of leaves left curbside. Last year I brought home some twenty-five of these.
    Some of the bags were big-leaf maple, which is said to be a no-no in the vegetable garden, but they're fine for the "low spots" and around rhododendrons and the like. Some were oak, which can be sweetened with rock lime and used wherever you like. Some were more of a beechy-sweetgum kind of thing, and these were sheet-composted on the garden.
    This seems to work so well that we question the usefulness of a compost heap. By the time the pile, of whatever humongous size at first, cooks down, there's so little of it that it has to be rationed to the neediest (usually tomatoes), and the rest go hungry.
    At a Hutterite commune where I was a baker, I set up a bin behind the bakery, made of three sheets of metal roofing, and while waiting for the seventy-five pound lump of bread to rise indoors, shoveled whatever I could find into a big chipper. Sawdust, mule (yes, mule) manure, kitchen wastes, grass clippings, and whole piles of cleared vegetation, including a half-acre of high-nitrogen kudzu, went into the machine, in alternating batches, so that there'd be an even mix in the bin. As soon as the bin was full, I added another one, and when that one was full, I added another. The half-acre garden, which had been in ryegrass over the winter, we tilled in, and after the crops got high enough to mulch, we sheeted the whole area with the contents of the bins. The chippings served as compost, mulch, and pathway alike.
    We would show visitors the garden, and on learning that it was organic, they would invariably ask where the compost heap was. "You're looking at it." We never bought fertilizer, except for some organic mixes for the nursery, where a more controlled acidity was called for.

    I remember the nurseryman, now a famous organic truck farmer who lives in this area, did sometimes have to fight white flies, the bane of greenhouse operations whether organic or not. He set off pungent smoke bombs that were very effective. I asked what was in them. He grinned. "Nicotine. The stuff's an organic insecticide, invented by tobacco plants to kill any bugs that try to eat the leaves."
    This gave me an idea. I bought a pouch of chewing tobacco (which raised a few eyebrows in the store), and make a pomade of chewing tobacco, chips left over from old soap bars, and rabbit manure, all tied up in a cheesecloth, and left the "teabag" in the watering can overnight. The resulting tea could be used in the greenhouse, on flower beds, and throughout the young garden, and fed plants yet insulted bugs effectively.
    You can put a similar mix into a hose-end sprayer, but it doesn't seem to me that the resulting dilution, even at the highest ratio, has enough kick. Just keep the solution making daily in the watering can, and use it wherever it's needed most. I leave the can in the greenhouse, where the heat from the sun during the day and radiating back from the brick floor at night can "solarize" the tea. The warmth seems to be preferred by the plants over cold water, and I would do this routine of leaving the water in the can overnight even if didn't have the teabag in it.

    Once you've made yourself responsible to a lot of plants, every good habit helps.

                                                                            ,,,,

    We have always been admirers of Ruth Stout, a rural Connecticut gardener who one day decided to plant without plowing. Her method was to put down hay of such thickness that weeds could not come through (this is 8 to 12 inches, my dears) and pull back the hay to work, in hills or rows, in what amounts to sheltered trenches with walls of hay. She triumphed over the dubious agricultural scientists by showing off her crops, often no more spectacular than those of her more conventional neighbors, but no less, and achieved with minimal watering and no fertilizing at all. The hay rots and/or feeds worms at the bottom, creating, she felt, a balanced diet for her plants).
    We used to mention Ms. Stout to our friends, and they would respond: "Yes, but that was back East. Here the soil stays too cold when you do that, too many slugs live in the straw, it sprouts a lot of grass, and the plants tend to go yellow on you from lack of nitrogen, etc."
    As time went on, we found that there was something to these objections.
    Rows of beans or whatever cannot be planted as early in deep mulch as in bare earth, as there will be poor germination due to the clammy conditions. Slugs move in, in huge numbers, as they dislike crawling over bare earth but love hay. Our "hay" is straw, but weed seeds do live in it, and they do sprout, especially if you run low on straw for a year. And, sure enough, give the plants only a straw diet and they do seem starvish, especially if it's the first year.
    We found, though, that we could modify the system and get some benefit.
    We do turn over the garden with a fork, and then cover it with black plastic for six to eight weeks. This gives sod (which can form here even in winter) a chance to die, even in the rainy season, and kills a lot of weed seeds. It also raises the temperature of the soil. Then we strip off the plastic and immediately throw on the fresh straw. If it's over six inches deep there seems to be little to fear from compaction, so we've abandoned trying to maintain raised beds and paths -- with the straw, it's all one raised bed.
    Meanwhile, the whole garden, except for peas, which can be direct sown, and white radishes ditto, is sprouting in two-inch pots in the greenhouse.
    Along about Memorial Day, if we've managed to wait that long, we move the whole garden out to the garden, so to speak -- annuals to the beds, veggies to the round garden -- even the corn is grown in pots or flats to about five inches high, then moved out. Pick a spot, trowel down through the straw, pop in the plug, tamp, grab another pot and move on. The relatively cool earth is good for the roots, the straw protects the root collar and supports the stem, so there's little need for hardening off or even of flooding the transplants. There's very little shock, and the high reflectivity of the fresh straw provides plenty of strong light to the leaves from above and below, for good growth. The plants will still need nitrogen, though, so our next move is to top dress around them with rabbit or duck bedding, and provide a drink of one of our watering-can teas. After a week or two of this, the garden will be virtually maintenance-free right through harvest, just as Ruth Stout said it would be.
    Oh, slugs. Yes, lots and lots. We have big brown leopard slugs, five to six inches long, medium-sized orange thingeys, and little tiny gray ones. There are also snails in stunning numbers, a mottled variety of very pretty appearance and quite large when full grown, as much as two-and-a-half inches in diameter. Of all these only the tiny grays do any harm, but they do enough for all -- more than the spotted cucumber beetles, which are numerous yet only a nuisance.
    Beloved says the grays are babies of the orange ones, but I don't know how she knows that. Both turn up by fork or spade, from as deep as eight inches in the ground, in distressingly large numbers. And both are very, very fond of the straw.

    I have tried the beer trick, and, yes, they like beer, but it's a tiring sort of work.
    And the slugs don't care to travel far for their night of carousing, maybe because the ones on the far side of the garden haven't arrived yet when the dawn patrol kicks in. I have had success with slug bait, but it only seems to be potent for a day or so, so it's addictive, and not especially cheap.
    And I suspect the stuff. What's in it? Aluminum sulfate? If I wouldn't eat it from a spoon, should I be spooning it over the garden?
    I hate to admit it, but it took us a long time to notice that we have the ultimate answer to slugs right here. I was rooting around the foundation of the house a while back, and came up with one of those giant brown mottled snails, which I suspected of munching the flowers, and in a fit of pique threw the little beast over the duck fence.
    The commotion that ensued was alarming.
    The ducks were chasing one another in circles, with one duck in front trying to gobble the snail down while five other nipped and bashed at her in an effort to get her to drop the morsel. Aha! I ran into the house and did a bit of research. Yep. The preferred duck food above all foods, snails – and slugs. Another good reason to keep ducks. I immediately herded them to the garden, where they, hardly believing their good fortune, stayed busy for the next half hour. I would have kept them there longer, but they began eying the plants. There I drew the line.

                                                                            ,,,,

    For years, we were bamboozled by the term "fall planting." It conjured up an image of late September afternoons, dew on orb-weaver spiders' webs, and pumpkins taking on that golden sheen. The problem with putting in seeds for winter harvests in the fall is, of course, that the days are already too short for proper growth.
Eventually, perhaps in our reading, or just stumbling around in the garden, we caught on. Fall planting is done in high summer. Everything should put on height and weight before the short days. The trick is not to let the heat "bolt" things -- cause them to run to flower and try to set seed.
    We've hung a shade over a bed, made from re-purposed burlap bags, and we'll hope that helps some.
    I cut through the newspaper/straw mulch in one of the beds with a right-angled trowel. I'll make an opening in the mulch about seven inches in diameter. She spreads a handful of compost/potting soil mix on the spot, shake out a mix of seeds from my shaker -- beets, spinach, kale, chard, lettuce, kohlrabi, radishes, turnips, bok choi -- and spread a bit more potting soil over them, lightly, before moving on to the next spot. Later, I'll bring the watering can and soak each hill gently, with the rose of the can at ground level. With luck, in a month or so I'll get to thin the hills.
    This isn't a perfect procedure. Lettuce, for example, really likes a bit more sunlight than this for sprouting. But we find that splitting the difference works okay, and gives us fewer things to have to think about. One size almost fits all, so to speak.
    The resulting bed, as a rule, after thinning, has enough variety of plant life to confuse plant predators and to share space with different root systems going after different nutrients. The word for this is polyculture and we are trying it more and more.

    92 in the shade ... head for the house.

August

AS I rose this morning and carried a cup of English Breakfast to the east porch, I found Beloved already there, with her big mug of coffee, admiring her surroundings wistfully.
    "Fall has started," she said.
    This was a shock. The really hot weather has only just begun, and we've become full-time waterers.
    But I knew immediately what she meant.
    The air smelled differently, somehow, than the previous morning, and a golden glow on the wall behind us, the telltale September glow, which I associate with Canada geese going up the river, suffused the whole porch area with sadness.
    Where did the summer go, so soon, that we had waited so long to begin? And we have so little to show for our work, so far this year...

    The brassicas went in too late to avoid the flea beetles, which are the current plague. We only did one small bed of peas, rather than the usual four in succession. The tomatoes have barely set fruit. We've just picked the first zucchini, and there's no crookneck squash yet.
    Granted, we did get a crop off the early sweet corn, but the late variety should have tasseled by now and hasn't even reached waist high yet.
    The second-year red onions were our only real show crop, making juicy bulbs six inches across. We took most of these to the Friends Meeting House, where there is a tradition of leaving surpluses for all comers on the back porch, but that looks like it will be our only contribution for the year.
    There were no plums, and few apples; the Asian pears are too young to count, so there's just the one crop on the lone Bartlett to represent the orchard.
    One thing we have a lot of, this year -- from our point of view, anyway -- is geese.
    There are in the core flock two White Chinas, Abner and Amanda, and two beautiful gray Africans, Auntie One and Auntie Two.
    Last year there were about 140 goose eggs, with Amanda producing about as many as the other two together, albeit smaller ones. Of these we left two to be hatched, which produced a couple of fine looking White China goslings, both of whom, however, died not long after fledging, from causes unknown.
    This year, there were about 100 eggs, of which we left enough in the nest that seven hatched. These came in waves, so to speak.
    Auntie One took over the brooding early on, hissing if Amanda got anywhere near the nesting box, and hatched three goslings which she took to be her very own. She was willing for Auntie Two to babysit them, or proud papa Abner, but Amanda was not to come near. If she even tried to share in bathing and drinking at the common pools, Auntie One drove her off with hisses, snake-like threatening movements of her long neck, and beating of wings.
    
    It got so that poor Amanda was getting dehydrated, and we had to spread the various pools and "white buckets" over a large enough area that Auntie One couldn't cover the entire territory, making it possible for poor Amanda to jump off the nest, run for a drink, and run back. For Amanda had chosen to take on the remaining eggs, and stayed with them day and night.
    Eventually four new goslings appeared, which seemed to us smaller at birth than those Auntie One was rearing. Three of these were larger than the last, whom we called Junior. It was now Amanda's turn to go on the offensive. Keeping the new babies close to her, she interposed herself between them and Auntie One at every possible moment, occasionally rushing over to give Auntie One a smashing peck in the back, between the shoulder blades, whenever she seemed to threaten to come too close.
    We were impressed with Amanda's motherly courage, Auntie One having considerably more reach and strength, and about double Amanda's weight.
    The children grew apace, but came a morning last week when I counted six at feeding time. Had Junior fallen down a missed post-hole somewhere, or had there been perhaps a fox raid? I searched, and before long came across his stiffening corpse -- neck broken -- he'd been severely pecked between the shoulder blades.
    Amanda?? Oh, surely, not.
    I elected to weed the upper garden, which is close to the fowl pens, and keep an eye on goose society for a bit. Amanda and her remaining three were cropping weeds and sipping water in one pool cluster, Auntie One and everyone else, including Abner, were doing the same in the other area.
    Then Amanda, going for some stray bits of cob, was momentarily distracted. Instantly Auntie One, who had apparently been single-mindedly on the lookout, dashed across the invisible line of motherly enmity, and gave a slamming peck to the smallest remaining gosling, right at the base of his neck!
    I must intervene.
    Leaping over the fence of the duck pen (to the mild astonishment of the ducks), then over the goose fence, I chased Auntie One through the pool areas, overturning buckets, slipping in mud, rounding Auntie One in ever-tightening circles. We bowled over non-Auntie-One geese and goslings in all directions in our epic chase, which seemed to go on for a long, long time, though it was undoubtedly over in a couple of minutes. I held Auntie One's sleek, almost expressionless face close to mine, my fingers wrapped round her downy neck, and pronounced sentence: "Okay, you – in with the ducks." And dropped her over the fence.
    The ducks scattered, goggle-eyed and squawking, then went about their business, which was mostly chasing flies.
    At that moment I got the feeling one gets when one is being watched from behind. I turned. Abner, Auntie Two, Amanda, and the six goslings stood together in an amicable group, regarding me with mild curiosity. And just beyond them, our neighbors Mr. and Mrs. T. leaned on the fence. They had thoroughly enjoyed the chase.
    Auntie One began treading up and down along the fence across from her three darlings and the rest of the flock, calling to them, and trying the wire at every possible point. The others, after getting over the discovery that the madwoman was not planning to kill them all, simply went back to grazing.
   Auntie Two was the perfect aunt, spelling Amanda as needed in raising the six goslings, who from that moment looked to Amanda for all orders.
      Beloved was away at a family reunion during all this. On her return from the Midwest, she got my report on goose events of the preceding week, then went out to survey the crime scene. I made tea, and brought it out to the shady side of the "veranda." Beloved returned, took two quiet sips, and said, "You know what? Every one of those babies is a White China!"
      The three that Auntie One had fought so hard for, and been willing to kill for, were all Amanda's.

                                                                            ,,,,

    You may be interested knowing in what to do with a hundred goose eggs.
     Last year, Beloved kept them in the refrigerator for, oh, all the way to this year. I asked about that.
    "Well, we are going to blow them out and make holiday decorations out of them and things like that...and sell them."
    We?
    "Sure, it's easy; you'll just punch a little bitty hole in each end with a little bitty nail and blow it out into a little bitty cup or something."
    Me.
    I tried the technique as described, and after about five minutes of blowing, had one egg in the cup and a severe headache.
    A hundred and thirty-nine more eggs waited quietly on the table. I sat and thought for a bit, then went to get the high-speed mini-drill, and stopped by the sixteen-year-old's room.
    "Got a pump and a basketball needle?"
    "Uh, yeah, but what do you want 'em for?"
    "Trust me, you don't want to know."
    I selected an egg, and, using a cone-shaped grinder bit, opened one end and soften the other (the skinny end). I punched the needle in ever so gently, then pushed down the plunger, slowly, so as to avert an explosion, while holding the needle-inserted egg in the other hand above the cup.
    The egg emptied itself in about three seconds.
    Visions of a cottage industry danced in my head. I made quick work of the pile of eggs, emptying the cup after each one into a mixing bowl (this is in case you find a bad egg), in which the eggs would be later blended and moved into freezer bags -- when thawed, the batches are good in baking recipes that call for eggs.
    But as far as cottage industry goes, well, we've never sold one yet. But after two years of this our Christmas tree looks splendid, and so do those of just about all of our friends....

September

THERE IS in an obscure Emblem Book by one Henry Hawkins, dated 1633, a tribute to one of the garden's great flowers:

    The honour of our Gardens, and the miracle of flowers at this day, is the Heliotropion or Flower of the Sun; be it for the height of its stem, approaching to the heavens some cubits high: or beautie of the flower, being as big as a man's head, with a faire ruff on the neck; or, for the number of the leaves, or yellow, vying with the marigold, or, which is more, for al the qualities, nature, and properties of the Flower, which is to wheel about with the Sun; there being no Needle, that more punctually regards the Poles, then doth this Flower the glorious Sun.

    In the spring, Beloved set aside the packets of sunflower seeds that had accumulated, and announced that she would build Sunflower Houses.
    "What are those?" asked I.
    "They are sunflowers planted in a circle, so that children can play in the middle of them in high summer, and make believe that they are houses. It's an old tradition."
    I went to my books to look this up. I didn't find any sunflower houses, but a favorite writer, the gentle Sharon Lovejoy, tells of Hollyhock Houses, which seems to be the same idea. She plants hollyhocks in a circle, and then when they are tall, ties them together to form the rafters of a kind of tipi.
    Beloved took her packets to the greenhouse, filled three flats of two-inch pots with potting soil, and poked one seed down a bit over a quarter of an inch into each one, humming a song about Mistress Mary.
    The long rains went on, and the circle of elephant garlic came up, a green and pungent Fairy Ring. I explained how this would work.
    "This is a circular garden; the rainbird in the middle will reach exactly to the garlic, all the way round, and this gap here is the entrance. Plant your tall things near the perimeter, and your short things, like squash vines, near the middle, so that nothing is in any thing else's rain shadow."
    "Okay. And where do the sunflower houses go?"
    "What sunflower houses?"
    Patiently she explained again.
    I furrowed my brows. "Won't some of them keep the water off the rest? I was kind of envisioning a row, sort of all the way or half way round, then corn further in, then tomatoes, like a sort of staircase."
    "I want sunflower houses."
    "Umm, okay, how about evenly spaced, though, around the perimeter?"
     "Sure, I'll put one here, and here, and here, and here..."
    It was to be the Year of the Sunflower.

    For in the morning it beholdes his rising; in his journey, attends upon him; and eyeth him stil, wheresoever he goes; nor ever leaves following him, til he sink downe over head and eares in Tethis's bed, when not being able to behold him anie longer she droops and languishes, til he arise: and then followes him againe to his old lodging, as constantly as ever; with him it riseth, with him it falles, and with him riseth againe.

    The sunflowers did not appear only in the circle garden. Another sunflower house came up in the hilltop garden, menacing the lettuce and onion beds.
    Many of these were along the east side of the house, and followed the sun until midday, then continued staring straight up, as though wondering what had become of their lord and master. Eventually they became too heavy with seed for this myopia, and drooped daylong, no longer befriended of bees but increasingly frequented by birds.

    Nature hath done wel in not affording it anie odour at al; for with so much beautie and admirable singularities, had there been odour infused therinto, and the sweetnesse of odoriferous flowers withal, even men, who are now half mad in adoring the same for its excellent guifts, would then have been stark mad indeed, with doting upon it.

    On a hot day in August, I went to the circular garden to look (vain hope) for a reddening blush on the hundreds of green tomatoes, and as I sloped along, parting branches, ran headlong into a massive flower head, dangling on a stem bent double with the weight, and a good eighteen inches across. Such a plant demands attention, and will bludgeon you if it doesn't get it.
    I growled and pushed it away, and it came swinging insistently back across my path. Involuntarily my eye followed the stem into the thicket from whence it had sprung. Oh, yes! Sunflower houses. Well, there's such a thing here, I suppose, except it's awfully weedy in there; no child has had a go this year. I went looking for Daughter.

    But Nature, it seems, when first she framed a pattern for the rest, not being throughly resolved, what to make it, tree or flower, having brought her workmanship almost unto the top, after a litle pause perhaps, at al adventure put a flower upon it, and so for haste, forgot to put the Musks into it. Wherupon, to countervaile her neglect heerin, the benigne Sol, of meer regard and true compassion, graced her by his frequent and assiduous lookes with those golden rayes it hath. And as the Sun shewes himself to be enamoured with her, she, as reason would, is no lesse taken with his beautie, and by her wil (if by looks we may guesse of the wil) would faine be with him. But like an Estritch, with its leaves as wings, it makes unprofitable offers, to mount up unto him, and to dwel with him; but being tyed by the root, it doth but offer, and no more.

     Daughter at first was dubious. She had after all, recently seen Little Shop of Horrors. But mothers are still to be humored, until one reaches a certain age. I rummaged about in the garage and came up with a couple of large scraps of carpet. By throwing one onto the grassy floor of a Sunflower House, I was able to make it instantly homey -- and she took over from there.
     "I'll be right back," she said, and before I knew it, my weeding was over for the day. Daughter returned with a wagonload of dolls.
    "You move into that one over there...and you'll be new in the neighborhood...and we'll come over and see you -- oops, not enough room -- so you come and see us, and we'll invite you in to tea."
    In this fashion are afternoons of Important Grownup Work lost forever.

    It is surprisingly cool in the Sunflower House, while the sun's rays are broiling the homeyard only inches away, and shimmering the landscape near and far. One can play for a long time in such a space, and forget the approach of evening. When we gathered our tea things to retreat to our "regular" home, we found the shadows long, and the air golden, and a massive flock of Canada geese skimmed over us, low enough for Daughter to hear the wind their wings made, and for even me to hear the talk among them, heading for the river and the gleaning of the wheat fields there.
    Beloved met us at the door, and she, being the artist that she is, knew not to break our wondering silence. She only smiled to see that the web of Sunflower Houses she had woven months before had made its catch.

    It's thus an old tradition becomes a new one.

    It is like the Scepter which the Paynims attribute to their Deitie, that beares an Eye on the top; while this flower is nothing els but an Eye, set on the point of its stem; not to regard the affayres of Mortals so much, as to eye the immortal Sunne with its whole propension; the middle of which flower, where the seed is, as the white of the eye, is like a Turkie-carpet, or some finer cloth wrought with curious needle-work, which is al she hath to entertaine her Paramour.

    Friends came, from far away, to visit. Adults sat round in the shade of the east front, stirring their cups. The screen door banged. Daughter and Daughter's friend and the dolls headed for the garden.
    We will remember the Meteor Night in winter, when the leaden clouds, heavy with Pacific rain, shut out Orion and his gleaming belt. We will remember the tomatoes, Better Boy, Cherry, Brandywine, and Golden Jubilee, when their poor cousin, the frozen tomato soup, is brought from the freezer to thaw. But most of all, as the huge seed heads are plunked, face up, on the well-house roof to gladden the hearts of the shivering juncos and chickadees, we will remember the Sunflower Houses.

                                                                            ,,,,

    I have been kayaking on the reservoir again. It has been a good bird year; I’ve watched eagles steal fish from ospreys, and vice versa. The cormorants are back, along with grebes and herons. Plenty of geese and ducks around , and thousands of coots wintered over on the reservoir. There’s a bald eagle sitting, day after day, on a nest about two miles from the house.
    We're eating trout fairly regularly, something that can’t be done everywhere these days, either due to depleted stocks or too much mercury in the water. This fish goes well with a salad and a glass of water with a sprig of mint. Since I've walked two or four miles with a boat on my back to get to the fish, the calorie count seems to come out about right.
    I’ve become rather obsessed, lately, with the notion that obesity is not a disease, as everyone seems to be calling it, but, in most cases, a symptom of a disease --- one that has no name that I can discover. Call it proto-diabetes, perhaps, since diabetes can be one of the full-blown consequences of our poor eating habits.
    "Poor eating habits" may down to simply this: insulin shock. It's not whether we eat carbs and fats, it's how and when as much as how much. If we eat more slowly, more raw and uncooked, less processed, avoiding not only sugar but sugar substitutes (which often produce extra hunger as does sugar itself) we can slow and/or lessen the impact of our food choices on the pancreas, which is really what "improved digestion" means.
    Take spaghetti, for example. Diet fads have often targeted spaghetti or any pasta. But you might consider making only enough that there can be no "second helping." And cooking it less, which results in what Europeans call al dente. This is a little harder to chew and digests more slowly.
    Now add your own home-made sauce, made in a small enough quantity that there will be no leftovers. Make fresh, eat fresh.
    Dice very small some zucchini, green onions, pok choi, and, if you like it, tofu. Blenderize a tomato with a chili pepper. Mix all these. No need to cook the sauce. You could put it all in the blender, but I like texture.
    Drain the al dente noodles, put them on a heated plate, pour the sauce over them, and add two more ingredients: a sprinkling of  basil flakes and chopped allium blossoms (in season).
    Serve with a simple three-lettuce salad (Romaine, Simpson, iceberg). Skip the Ranch and use a vinegar-olive oil dressing made with your own hands. Doesn't need to be too fancy; just add your favorite spices, along with a garlic clove, to a bottle of your choice of vinegar, and when you're ready for the dressing (don't try to make ahead) combine one oz. of the vinegar to one oz. oil in a four-ounce bottle and shake.
    If you're dining alone, the above should work, or multiply quantities as needed for two or for guests.
     For drink, try serving water or a very small glass of red wine, or both. You can do all this in a half hour. Spend another half hour lingering over dinner and chatting. For dessert, go take in a nice sunset.

    This can all be part of a daylong plan: cup of oatmeal with diced apple, or one egg on one piece of toast for breakfast, snack on carrots, salad for lunch, celery for snack, and now the one-helping pasta dinner. I know that sounds like starvation to some people, but, really, that lunch salad can be sustaining if you build it yourself in the morning.
    Example:
    Take a pair of scissors and go to the garden for a handful of leaf lettuce, some pok choi, spinach, leaf of red cabbage, snow peas, red bell pepper, and those ubiquitous elephant garlic blossoms. Dice up a firm small ripe tomato or halve some cherry tomatoes. Toss. Heat up some diced pok choi and red chard stems in a small nonstick frying pan, lightly oiled (virgin olive, which is good for you). Add cubed tofu and mushrooms. Now add sesame seeds or sunflower seeds, and some basil. When it looks ready (pok choi beginning to soften, but mushrooms not yet shriveled) take off the heat to cool, then add to the salad. Toss again. Seal in a container and take to work in one of those nylon cooler bags.
    If you like eggs, try dicing up a hard-boiled egg instead of the tofu and mushrooms.
    This works! And it takes only about as long as standing in line at the canteen while the three people in front of you get their espresso mocha thingies made.
    Trust me, you'll make it through the day. Drink lots of water between times, though. Not "diet" pop, that will set off the insulin rush, same as sugar, and then you'll be hungry. Same for most anything else they will sell you at the canteen. It's all either salt or sugar (usually corn syrup), or it's a sugar wannabe. Don't go there. Leave your spare change at home if you have to.
    Or, drink unsweetened mint tea. Consider growing the mint. If you can grow nothing else, you can grow mint. It takes over, like bamboo, kudzu, vinca, or ivy. You can wash a bouquet of mint and simmer it in a pan till the water darkens, or put it in a gallon jar of water and leave it in the sunshine. I'm kind of hard core, I like to take a multi vitamin and grind it up in a mortar and pestle and add that to the tea. I pretend it's that stuff the marathon runners drink.
    To convince yourself it's exactly that, join a walking group. Take your tea with you. If you like to chat with your friends and sip tea, there's no reason not to get in some of your 10,000 steps a day at the same time!

October

IN ARID regions, the wise seek out plants that require very little water, the use of which is called "xeriscaping" -- whereas those who own a bit of marsh look for attractive water plants: lotuses, sedges, perhaps a bit of cress. Most gardeners in temperate zones, however, have a wide range of choices and possibilities. Accordingly, some will try everything -- from cacti to Louisiana irises -- and insist that the local setting bend to their will. Plants that have no business in northern climes are fussed over ad infinitum, wrapped against chill winds, covered, uncovered, covered again, and finally cursed for disloyally losing their green fingers to frostbite.
    On any homestead, the wise seek out plants that augment the site, not merely visually, but using what we know of sun, shade, soil, wind, and water, to enhance the lives of those living there and of lives yet to come. When they consider a tree or shrub, they look around them and think. They see not only the height of the plant and its breadth, but also the effect of its presence through time, of its youth, middle age, declining years and inevitable death. How will each affect its surroundings? Many times, the answers will be considerably less complicated to sort out if you will stick with the native species.
    Every landscape, and every homestead, has a history, and from this history, if it is known or can be discovered, we can learn something about the site's present and future requirements. Our acre began in the distant past as alluvial deposits at the upper end of a vast glacial-era lake, which once lay, hundreds of feet deep, from here to where our river ends, over a hundred miles north.
    When the lake drained away, leaving the river and its tributaries to collect the annual runoff in its place, billions of small round stones from the surrounding mountains, mostly of slow-weathering basalt, lay packed together in a matrix of clay particles for miles in all directions. Seeds borne in by wind, water, and animals quickly took root, and a forest sprang up, but one adapted to extremes of wet and dry, of shallow, nitrogen-starved soil, of major disturbances by fire and flood.
    The dominant forest types were a mixed conifer forest of hemlock and western red cedar on the damp northern slopes, and Douglas fir along the ridges. On southern slopes, hot and dry in summer, an oak-madrone forest thrived, with an understory of poison oak at lower elevations, and of manzanita higher up. In the bottoms, a mix of cottonwood, ash, black cherry, and willow showed where the water ran along the bedrock, deep in the ground in summer, or became a surface torrent in winter.
    The valley was popular with humans from their first appearance here, as a place to live and hunt. From the very first, though, they could never resist altering it to suit their needs. Fire was the agent chiefly used; the resulting clearings increased the supply of grasses and fruiting shrubs, which led to an increase in game both small and large.
  
   Our acre, however, remained forested -- part of a vast tract of Douglas firs that survived in the upper valley until the first Europeans arrived with their steel teeth.
    A family of settlers, late arrivals, staked out three hundred twenty acres, and dreamed of putting in, as so many others who had staked out the ancient clearings, wheat -- but didn't have the manpower to clear great swaths of the fir forest at once. So they went into the woodlot business, always whipsawing enough cordwood to meet the bills -- they contracted to provide all the fuel for the one-room schoolhouses for miles around -- but never quite enough to put in wheat.
       It took almost three generations for the land to be anything but a stump ranch, and by then farming had become something of a luxury occupation. Filberts could make money, or grass seed could, but it took money to get started, and these were a people too proud, or too honest, to gamble with other people's money. Bit by bit the old home place was broken up, first into four farms, then eight, then twenty. Fences were built along boundary lines, and along the fences spread, first blackberries, then trees. Not firs; though they love sun, those do not usually travel far into open pastureland. These trees were the Oregon ash, black cherry, willow, and cottonwood of the river's edge, working their way uphill along the margins of the annual floods. Also there were, and had always been, patches of great California black oaks, bearded with moss and lichens like live oaks in the hammocks of old Florida.
    The ashes, however, predominated. There were second growth ash trees until recently over much of the property, all about two feet in diameter, with the broad growth rings of open-grown timber. The last owner before us, however, fell upon hard times, and felt obliged to convert them into firewood, following the precedent of the pioneers.
    Upon our arrival we found all the good shade -- oak, maple, and ash -- on the north side of the house, where it would do least good. To the south and west, where shade would be needed when the summer sun reached the nineties, were mostly stumps.
    All was not lost. Oaks, when cut, will not regenerate, but ashes will, and the stumps to the west were all ash. I cleared away the blackberries and the burned cans and tire-wire loops left over from bonfires that the stumps had been subjected to, and watered the stumps. My neighbor Mr. T., ever alert, was not long in stopping by.
    "Morning, ma'am." He watched the water pouring over the stump. I tried to distract him.
    "Good morning, sir; lovely day, yes?"
    "Mm."
    "Have our geese been too noisy for you yet?"
    "Mm? Naahh."
    "I have noticed your roses, sir. They're coming along nicely."
    "Aaahh, I dunno." He gazed steadily at the stream of water coursing over the blackened stump. I could already envision him going back into the house, shaking his head the whole way, and telling his wife what her neighbor was up to this time, but I was forgetting that he had been raised in the family that planted the old lilacs. He looked at me sharply.
    "Ash, huh?"
    "Yessir, ash."
    "Might work." And then he went back in.
    The stumps eventually put out shoots, though one of them waited three years. I chose the strongest shoot from each stump, and flagged it, cutting back the others with pruners. One of these shoots is now over twenty feet tall. Ash is a quick wood, quick to rise but also quick to fall, as trees go. But I won't live to see the end of this.
   On the south side I would have to be more creative. But I had something going for me.
    The northwest corner of the property has been allowed, over time, to go native, and is the haunt of wild things: ferns, quail. Someone had planted a bigleaf maple, a generation ago, by the northwest corner of the house, and some of its seeds had helicoptered into the protected zone and flourished. The bigleaf (acer macrophylum) is a native and can be found all along the river and on the mountainsides, too, mostly at lower altitudes. It's also fast growing, and though short-lived compared to, say, an oak, like the ash it's an ideal tree for a short-timer like me who needs shade in her own lifetime.
    I flagged a few of the likelier saplings and waited for winter.
    On a stormy day after leaf drop, when the maples had gone to sleep, I stole into their sanctuary with a shovel and dug about beneath their feet. One by one, I lifted them, with what little soil would cling to their surprisingly skimpy roots, into a wheelbarrow, and carted them around to the south side of the house.
    You can't do this with all trees. I have awful luck moving oaks of any size; the acorn puts a taproot down to bedrock as soon as it awakes, and woe unto her that disturbs it at its dinner. Oak seedlings will die if you so much as look at them while carrying a shovel.
    The bigleaf maple is much more generous.
    Make a hole, stick it in.
    Well, it's a good idea to keep the sod back, to add some peat, to stake it for a year or two, and to water generously the first couple of summers, but once it's established the bigleaf will make itself at home --
     -- so much so that if you plant wisely, you will want to put it twenty feet from the house.
    Pretty things, though.
    And while they aren't shading the wall yet, on a hot day we can go out and lie contentedly in their shade -- sort of.
    

November

JASPER MOUNTAIN has been on view a lot this fall; we had week after week of warm, sunny weather, so that I had tomatoes still ripening on the first of November. This was one of our most neglected gardens ever, and the number and variety of weeds that sprang up were astonishing and overwhelming.
     To look for beans or cucumbers was an adventure akin to exploring an equatorial rain forest. And yet the veggies were there, in profusion, holding their own. I brought out the juicer my eldest son had sent me last Christmas, and ran it for two or three hours every Saturday, putting fruit juices and soup stocks into the freezer in every available container of whatever variety. Outside, the sunsets on the mountain became redder and darker each week; I turned on the kitchen light and juiced into the evenings.
    The soup stocks I use in several ways.

    Once thawed, they can be poured into a crock pot, and diced vegetables and grain thickeners can be added to taste, to create soups with those overnight flavor blends.
    Or, they can be directly served hot or chilled as a vegetable drink.
    Or, they can be used in bread. If I were doing pot roasts, which I’m not lately, the soup stock would be just the thing to add to the pan and used in basting.
    When we get tired of the soups, we can whiz them in the blender and use the resulting paste in bread as well.
    The bread lately has been of two sorts: round loaves raised and baked in stoneware plates, or rolls cut from the dough, rolled into a ball and plopped onto an oiled baking tin nested in another baking tin. Choice of wheat or whole wheat or spelt, honey, molasses, sorghum or sugar, and throw in anything that takes your fancy: oats or quinoa, for example.
    My last two batches included a paste made from pie pumpkins.
    The pumpkins were volunteers and roamed about the garden at will, investigating the tomato vines and trying to smother the lettuce. I gathered about fifteen (they’re quite small, under three pounds each) and hoarded them away from carvers until safely after October 31, then scattered them round the house under the guise of setting the tone for Thanksgiving.
    Each week I take one, halve it, scoop out the seed pulp into a colander, and simmer the halves until they’ve softened but not fallen apart. I drain the simmer water and use for bread or let it cool to water plants or farm animals. The halves peel easily. They’re now ready to smash up and use either in bread, as a winter squash dish, or, if you insist, pie.
    I run well water through the seed pulp and rummage all the seeds out into a bowl, salt them lightly, and toast them on top of the wood stove.
    The seeds are habit -forming and, to my mind, better than popcorn. The seed pulp goes into bread, where no one objects to it.
    Everyone here professes to hate pumpkin so I simply serve the mashings with cinnamon and nutmeg as winter squash, under which name it is quite popular.
    As the weather cools, I’ve taken to gathering acorns. There are massive English oaks in front of my place of work, and these usually produce bushels of long, dark, mahogany-toned nuts which are very popular with the local squirrels. I understand from the literature that plain fresh acorns are inedible for humans due to the high level of tannins in them, and that one wants to shell them, grind them, leach the flour by running water through it for hours, then bake with it.
    Being an impatient sort, I’ve tried them raw, keeping company with the squirrels, and aside from a puckery aftertaste found them palatable. The two basic varieties of oak in our town have either toothed or rounded leaves. Supposedly the toothed kind is more acid than the rounded kind and is to be avoided.
    The English oaks are decidedly superior, but we have some large, handsome black oaks here (from the Eastern U.S., I think) which produce another large and handsome acorn that seems almost as good. They have sharply toothed leaves. Our native oaks, which produced the acorn meal famous as the staple diet of the peace-loving California Indians, have round-lobed leaves.
    I have tried roasting these and also the English ones and I think they all roast well. The flavor changes to something between a parched peanut and a black olive. I haven’t noticed any adverse effects at all, except to my waistline; these things pack a calorie count comparable to peanut butter.
    Why anyone with two legs and a pair of good hands would starve in a country of oaks, I don’t know.

                                                                            ,,,,

    We have dug up and divided the perennials, given the grass a last mow, picked and eaten the last tomato (in November!), and tasted a first frost in the steamed greens. We regret, however, that we did not manage to save seed this year. My target seeds were scarlet runners and sweet peas. Last year's scarlet runners were a big success. We had two kinds, the true runners and a bush variety, which you're supposed to mass, like salvia, for the red blooms. I built a pole tripod for the runners and planted the bush variety around its feet, resulting in a display in the vegetable garden that rapidly became the centerpiece that drew the eye of the visitor, whether human or hummingbird.
    Somehow I managed to save the big purple beans, in spite of a week of rain at the end of that season, and in separate lots too, though there was no difference between them to see. I put them in clay bowls for safekeeping, one kind in each pot, and gloated over them through the winter. Occasionally I would stop by, plunge a hand into each bowl, and run my fingers though the beans like a miser bathing in gold.
    On a day in May, with a week to go before planting, I went to look over the beans, only to find that one of the bowls was empty, while the other was twice as full as it had been.
    "So, um, what's happened to my beans?" I asked Beloved.
     "Looks like one of the kids has been having a tactile experience," she calmly replied.
    I was so unnerved that I went out and planted the lot indiscriminately in a cold flower bed, a week ahead of schedule; only about ten came up, which were all vining runners. These ultimately produced beans, but my heart wasn't in it, and they are languishing now among the year's dying calendulas and zinnias.
    The sweet peas are more of a success story. We have a spectacular variety that grows here along fence rows and right-of-ways, which with patience can be captured. Three years ago, with this in mind, I rambled into a field which I remembered seeing a brilliant display of pink blooms. I looked over the available plants and their pods (there were about fifty to choose from) and selected three healthy specimens which I discreetly marked with flagging tape. Each week thereafter, on my lunch hour, I dropped by and checked the pods. These will turn brown and become dry and rattly, then begin to twist into a corkscrew shape. You want to get them just after they dry and just before they twist. I was able to do so, and brought home about 100 pods.
    "What are those?" asked Beloved.
    "Sweet peas!" I began shelling them into a bowl.
    "May I suggest you transfer them from that bowl into an envelope at your earliest possible convenience? And label it clearly?"
   "Sure...uh, how come?"
    "Well, it's good practice generally, but I notice you tend to leave your experiments round the kitchen -- and these happen to be poisonous."
    "Yes'm." So I've been told, and now you have too.
    Not knowing the viability or germination rates for the peas, and having a shortage of two-inch pots, I elected to put all of the peas in the ground by the corner of the front fence, in spring.
    Nothing happened.
    Mr. T. dropped by later that summer, presumably on his annual inspection of all the painting and glazing we haven't done (he built the house, after all), and during the course of a tour I showed him our dismal fence corner.
    "Oh, those; you plant them in the fall. Takes 'em a long time to get going, too."
    Oh.
    So, more as a matter of maintaining a faint hope than anything else, I kept the little spot cleared and gave it a drink or two over the course of the summer, then eventually gave up.
    The following spring, I discovered three wimpy six-inch-tall pea vines amid the dandelions.
    Aha!
    I cleared around them, gave them sips (not much; these are supposed to do fine in our summer droughts), buried them in leaves for the winter, and crossed my fingers.
    This year, I have sweet peas.

    They've taken over the fence corner, and bloomed all summer long, right behind the mailbox with its wagon wheel, for all the world like a calendar photograph. There were well over a hundred seed pods, too, ready for harvesting; but life has been cruelly busy. When I went out to collect the pods for shelling, they had done their thing. Each pod had dried, twisted into a corkscrew shape, and exploded, dumping peas near and far. If some of these come up, two years from now, perhaps I'll be able to write about transplanting them. Otherwise, I'll have to wait for next fall to write "sweet peas -- poisonous" on a manila envelope.

                                                                            ,,,,

    I frequent abandoned farmsteads, where I hope to find enough apples and pears not yet worm-eaten to stay ahead of our pantry requirements till the new orchard gets into production. It sometimes happens one comes across irresistible items, lost and forgotten in the shifting tides of homesteading. I remember coming home four years ago with a small duffel bag absolutely stuffed with roots.
    "What's all this?" asked Beloved.
    "Well, I was out at this old place picking apples, and there was all this comfrey and I couldn't resist...."
    "Comfrey!" Eyebrows.
    "Why? Doesn't everybody have comfrey?" I could remember clearly that in a valley where we had long lived, all the communes and homesteads had comfrey all over the place.
    "Comfrey was big in the seventies, but they found out it has poisonous alkaloids! And it spreads like the dickens and never goes away. You grew up in Georgia, don't you remember the kudzu?"
    Yes, I remember kudzu.
    But our kudzu here is the Himalaya blackberry, and we've learned to coexist with that -- just check our freezer.
    But I had a plan. "Look, I'm only going to put it in the orchard, on the other side of the creek. I'll watch to make sure none of it ever comes up over here."
    "But what do you want it for?"
    "Pigs. Gonna feed it to pigs. Heard it's high protein and doesn't bother them."
     Well, I got away with that one. The comfrey, that is. Our pig barn, in case you're wondering, is the shed up on the hill that's full of all the trash we've pulled out of the blackberries. So that's a project for another millennium... meanwhile the comfrey is a raving success, but to keep it from spreading across the bridge, I harvest the stuff three times a year, before it goes to seed.
    Makes splendid compost.

December

WHEN THE snows came, transforming the landscape (which happens rarely here nowadays), Jasper Mountain took on that hoary aspect which I associate with those Japanese woodblock prints set in winter - such as Hokusai's print of hunters warming themselves by a damp bonfire.
    My poor little boat has been used only twice in almost a hundred days, and I found myself numbingly cold on both occasions. Floods have destroyed one of the creek bridges and shifted the other off its foundation. I found one end of it bobbing in the current, the other snagged in a tangle of blackberries. The weather so penetrated my bones on this short outing that I left the bridge in the creek for the next three weeks.
    With personal energy and initiative out-of-doors so circumscribed, I turned my attention indoors.
    Shelving for books, some forty-eight lineal feet, was needed. The usual approach, nowadays, is to acquire pressboard cabinets, knocked down, from a giant discount store. These are tolerable painted, but are often left nakedly wood-chip-ish in appearance, due to the difficulty of finding a moment in which to upgrade them, all the available labor time having gone into tapping the tiny nails into the shelves through the sides and back, and cursing as the nails curved in the unpredictable "grain" of the glued and pressed sawdust. The "finished" product then spends its tenure in the household squatting in the darkest available corner, where no one can look at it directly or acknowledge its existence due to its irredeemable ugliness, and the whole time it gives off unhealthful vapors.
    The alternatives are: "steel" shelving, ugly, cheap, sharp-edged, and bendy; or expensive cabinetry, which, if sufficiently sturdy must be built-in, at tremendous cost if hired done, otherwise consuming time one doesn't have, and requiring tools one cannot afford, if undertaken by one's self.
    Early in our tenure here, there was a surplus of used planking and even beams, and these were put to use for what we cheerfully called "vernacular" architecture. We built walls, ceilings, shelving, tables, and cabinets utilizing found materials which could stand either to take a deep brown stain or a coat of daubed spackle, followed by a coat of flat white paint.
    The effect is cheering and calming, and visitors often use the word "cozy," and if this sometimes said in a tone which we might take as patronizing, we don't mind, as we have done what we could with what we had, a satisfying activity.
    This year I ran out of the old materials and of time to cadge old materials from others. For the new shelving, then, I would need new material, which, to match the interior style of the house, should be wood, painted white. I found that pine boards cost much more than I expected, but I could live with that; an abused resource should cost enough to reduce the demand.
    In the old days, I would have put all the bits together with fourpenny box nails, but we now have the self-tapping "wallboard" which are a blessing. In a way, I hated to paint over the attractive built-in pine bookcase I'd created, but it ran the length of a long, dark hallway, and the white would help prevent further loss of light there.
    As soon as the drop cloths and tools were put away, I stood in the hallway and admired my (admittedly a bit crude) handiwork for some time. I hadn't chosen the least expensive or least difficult solution for my project, but I had chosen one I found satisfactory; so much so that I couldn't tear my eyes away. It looked as if it belonged, and would last perhaps as long as the house.
    Beyond my time. A statement.
     As a civilization, we of the West have begun to lose this capacity for the average person to make statements. I'm reminded of that moment in Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano when the protagonist's car breaks down, and a crowd of the great mass of unemployed gathers, which he views with suspicion until one of them wistfully says, as nearly as I can remember it from a distant read: "Maybe I could look at it for you. I used to be pretty good with my hands."

    The generation just arriving has mostly not read E. F. Schumacher, which is a sad fact. Our copy of Small is Beautiful (Perennial Library, 1973) is thirty years old; it's a crumbling paperback, yellow and a bit musty, that has traveled with us, long un-reread but treasured.
    If we thought Schumacher's views were important then, we should read him now. Everything he found urgent has become more so.
    Samples:

....one of the most fateful errors of our age is the belief that the problem of production has been solved. This illusion ... is mainly due to our inability to recognize that the modern industrial system, with all its intellectual sophistication, consumes the very basis on which it has been erected .... it lives on irreplaceable capital which it cheerfully treats as income. (20)

and:

An attitude to life which seeks fulfillment in the single-minded pursuit of wealth -- in short, materialism -- does not fit into [the] world, because it contains within itself no limiting principle, while the environment within which it is placed is strictly limited. (29-30)

    By "limits" he means three things; fossil fuels, natural systems with their feedback loops, and human limitations (that they can tolerate only so much of a life that is functionally no more than slavery, or consumerism, or both). He believes if he can prove his point with any one of the three, he has made his case.

    Economics, as practiced by industrial society, is in Schumacher's view fatally fragmentary: the society's judgments

…are based on a definition of costs which excludes all "free goods," that is to say, the entire God-given environment, except for those parts of it that have been privately appropriated. This means that an activity can be economic although it plays hell with the environment, and that a competing activity, if at some cost it protects and conserves the environment, will be uneconomic. (43)

    Thus you have the strange condition in which extraction of oil from the ground is an activity that can be rationally charted, while leaving it there so that we can breathe, avoid being roasted by climate change, and survive as a species cannot.
    One effect of the fragmentary view of the world encouraged by industrial economics is that agricultural work is regarded as of little value; since agriculture is seen in this view to be simply another kind of factory, and no "profit" can be extracted from it unless it is practiced on an industrial scale, more farming must be done by fewer and fewer people and the rural population is displaced into the cities to look for work there, adding to the enormous problems of social disintegration and grinding poverty that appear in urban settings.
    The subtitle of the book is "Economics as if People Mattered." Schumacher was Catholic, and regarded St. Thomas Aquinas as the underpinning of his understanding of science. He knew that much of his audience would be unwilling to hear him if he made much of this at the time, so he devised a clever and famous chapter, "Buddhist Economics." A discussion framed in Buddhist terms served his immediate aims just as well as one framed in Christian terms, for his point was that economics ought to serve humanity and not the other way round; and economics cannot serve humanity on its terms, for that which makes us human is unquantifiable in dollar amounts.
    What is desirable to the materialist economist is undesirable to the Buddhist economist and vice versa, so that their aims in the short term are diametrically opposed. This is because the Buddhist economist has an interest in the long term, which is an interest that is unquantifiable in the industrial economist's system.
    Buddhism is concerned with the alleviation of suffering so that one can focus on understanding one's self and the universe better, with the aim of right living, of choosing a path that promotes one's own well-being and that of all others: what are called "sentient beings" in Buddhist lingo. So the way of Buddhism trends toward peace and the way of a materialist system trends toward the opposite:

As the world's resources of non-renewable fuels -- coal, oil and natural gas -- are exceedingly unevenly distributed over the globe and undoubtedly limited in quantity, it is clear that their exploitation at an ever-increasing rate is an act of violence against nature which must inevitably lead to violence between men .... Before [materialists in Buddhist countries] dismiss Buddhist economics as nothing better than a nostalgic dream, they might wish to consider whether the path of economic development outlined by modern economics is likely to lead them to places where they really want to be. (61)

    All well and good; but as with almost all liberals, one might expect that at this point Schumacher will rest on his laurels, having simply noted that what we are all doing is a Bad Show. But, unlike others, he has a specific set of proposals toward what might be a Better Show.
    Schumacher notes that when local people produce local goods for other local people, the relationship, the bond, between them, that sense of well-being for which industrial economy can find no place in its equations, is strengthened.
    Hence what are called "economies of scale" -- nation-states, multinational corporations, mass production, and export -- are false economies because they encourage bankruptcy in those three things, the state of the planet, of its non-renewables, and of the well-being of its beings.
    Whereas local economies, inefficient as they are in those equations, tend to conserve the Three Things.
    It's true, notes Schumacher, that in what are called Third World countries, there are what might be called one-pound (or, say, one-dollar) workplaces, and life is marginal and sometimes prey to drought, disease, etc. But the cure proposed by the industrial economy is to bring in one-thousand-dollar workplaces, which cannot be justified economically except though extractive export strategies that ultimately only benefit the industrial chieftains in the developed countries.

    Local people, on seeing the implementation of these impressive workplaces, often give up (and forget how to return to) their own one-dollar strategies, expecting full employment, except that the one-thousand-dollar solution, due to its capital cost, cannot be emplaced quickly enough to provide this. So from marginal existence a great many of them go straight to a starvation existence.

    Schumacher proposes an intermediate solution.

    Devise the one-hundred-dollar workplace, using technologies that can be built and managed locally, to produce a higher standard of living by marketing the product locally.
     To the objection that local people from a one-dollar background have no buying power, he answers that with the ten-times-cheaper-than-industrial-scale one-hundred-dollar workplace, you can do ten startups simultaneously, with the goods from one workplace affordable to the workers in one of the other nine.

    There is thus no need to export, eliminating the need to carry on in the extractive and eventually bankrupting manner to which the West is addicted. Also, rural populations, by recovering a measure of independence and self-worth locally, are then not so easily driven to the urban ghettos, which reduces the strain on the megalopolitan cities which our industrial economy has created.
    This sounds Utopian, but in fact Schumacher's approach has been extensively tested. To show what would be examples of intermediate technology, applied to local economies by the local people themselves and not by well-intentioned but locally ignorant strangers, he formed, with other scientists and interested parties, a barely capitalized organization called the Intermediate Technology Development Group (ITDG).
    They still exist, thirty years later!
    ITDG, now under its new name Practical Action, with little real cooperation and much disdain from the developed nation-states and megacorporations, has for three decades doggedly kept up its mission of demonstrating the economic and scientific principles of E. F. Schumacher, and carried out numerous local initiatives, always sharing the lessons learned with anyone who seeks them out.
    In the field of local energy development, they began with the obvious: people in developing countries depend on biomass for energy, and open fires waste energy. Practical Action designed low cost cooking stoves to reduce impact on the forests and other vegetative cover, as well as the tremendous labor expended, usually by women and children, in going farther and farther to strip the landscape of available fuel.
    When a locality is ready for more, Practical Action is ready with more: micro-hydro plants, small scale wind generators, solar lanterns, biogas.
    A serious bottleneck for local production, which cannot easily reach even local markets in rural areas of undeveloped countries, is transportation. Practical Action offers expertise in locally controlled construction of cycle trailers, improved ox and donkey carts, and efficient low-technology road building.

    I refer those interested to Practical Action 's website to grasp the scope of their activities. None of the ideas described are vaporware; they have applied them all in the real world and have the testimony of local communities where the projects are being carried out.
    One might think that Practical Action would have an extensive Peace-Corps-style volunteer program. That's not the case. They seem to be a low-overhead operation, focused on getting information into the hands of the rural populations that will apply it, critique it, and adapt it, rather than bringing in mysterious expertise as if from some "higher" realm, deus ex machina, to carry out projects little understood by those they "help."
    This is not your patronizing World Bank here.
    What Practical Action brings is accessible knowledge, created not for but in cooperation with rural populations in Third World, countries, the kind of knowledge that takes root in the heart of the woman or man who says, "yes, I can do this."
    When I hear of current events in the Near East and elsewhere, and the continued world-bankrupting goings-on that he so articulately warned us against, I think of Schumacher.
    We all owe him another read.
    And we should support the activities of Practical Action, one of the few Good Shows still happening.

                                                                            ,,,,

Populations of any species explode when the limiting resource becomes, in effect, unlimited. More phosphorus in a lake, more algae. There's an exponential increase, then when the limit of the phosphorus is reached, the algae suffers a catastrophic crash.
    It's the same for civilizations. Ours craves energy and has discovered that the most economical (under rather carefully engineered circumstances) form of energy is petroleum.
    Petroleum is due to run out soon.
On that, find the June 2004 National Geographic, "The End of Cheap Oil,'" pp. 80-109. If you read nothing else in the next while, read that, and especially study the chart on pp. 90-91. After that you'll understand pretty much everything that's being said, and carefully not said, on cable news channels: about politics, prices, stocks, warfare, terrorism, all of it. There's little chance of our escaping the future foretold in the article without global change in our habits and intentions.
    How do you think that's going to go?

    This year, Christmas fell into what around here is called a "blue hole," that is, it was a sunny day, producing shirt-sleeve weather which I felt I might as well enjoy as not. For awhile, sitting on a bench in the sun with the row of Douglas firs to my back was pretty enchanting, at least as long as the tea lasted. But, as often happens, the beauty of the view consisted in part in knowing what things ought to be done. The guests hadn't arrived yet, and I had done my indoors part in preparing for them, so I set down my cup and wandered up to the barn. Lots of straw here, full of the stuff that straw fills up with when it is called "bedding." Time to get that down to the garden. I went for the wheelbarrow, found its tire flat, rooted around in the garage for a tire pump, found one, pumped up the tire, collected a hay fork, and mucked out the barn. This made nine wheelbarrow loads.
    I do enjoy putting the gardens to bed for the winter. There are hoses to be drained and rolled up, tomato cages to stack and file away, tools to organize, pots to sort, disposing of those too badly cracked to save another year, and passing Canada geese to be listened to as they go over their itinerary for the trip south.
    This year the warmth has stayed very late indeed. The grass is growing, and smells of spring when cut. The daisies have sent up several December blooms, and Beloved's nasturtiums, calendulas, and miniature hollyhocks have done the same. We still have cosmos, though these are finally on their way out. I have gone round to check the lilacs and the trees, and the filberts are perilously close to bud-break. The green spikes of elephant garlic, which I usually see in February, are already a foot high. There are flies, and bees, and the air is full of songbird noises such as one might hear on a June morning. So much warmth is lovely but it is also disturbing.
    El Nino? Global warming? A few years ago the creek went almost a hundred feet wide, hauling tons of our soil away to the Pacific, and shifting our well-house on its foundation. Several people in our area died that night in mudslides. This, too, I'm told, was a sign of global warming, a type of immense storm front known as the "Pineapple Express," rolling up from the waters off Hawaii, dumping six, seven, eight inches of rain at a time in various canyons of the Cascade Range, overwhelming the might and pride of the region's vast network of flood-control dams and levees.
    Global warming, I've read somewhere, doesn't especially produce hot, sunny summers. It produces cloud cover, an increase in precipitation, an increase in wind, and records: record tornadoes, record hurricanes, record blizzards: spikes of hot and cold, fast and slow, all over the record books and the insurance company ledgers.
    News anchors will rehearse the "the most" this, and "the biggest" that. And the most and the biggest of anything to do with weather will get our attention when we're out in it, or even when it comes knocking at our door.
    I once tenanted a house built of oak, half-timbered in the Tudor style. A storm came in the night and threw a two-hundred-year-old oak tree against that house, oak bone against bones of oak. The house stood the blow, and the tree rolled down the steep pitch of the roof's edge, shredding slates and pitching them over a quarter of an acre.

    I awoke in time to see an enormous branch punch through the bedroom window, pass within inches of my face, and withdraw again as suddenly as it had come, leaving the empty window to fill with night and a moaning wind. If we are causing an increase in events of this kind, it's time to seriously consider our actions.
    It's my understanding that while climate swings are unavoidable, there is evidence that the current one, if not caused by human activity, is influenced by it. The principal ingredient of that influence is the increase in what are called greenhouse gases, and the major component of these is carbon in the form of carbon dioxide: one carbon atom and two oxygen atoms per molecule, to the tune of millions of tons of these molecules in the atmosphere.
    Carbon dioxide is in fact a principal ingredient of life; plants have to have it, in order get hold of their primary building block, which is carbon. They throw away the oxygen, which is how we animals get our free oxygen molecules to breathe. When plants die and rot, or when they burn, which is a normal and frequent event in nature, they release nearly all their carbon back into the atmosphere. So one might ask: how is it carbon dioxide is a problem? Can there be too much of it if all the plants return it to the atmosphere all the time anyway, in a natural cycle?

    A way to understand the problem is to use a banking metaphor. We make a certain amount of money a year, and we spend most of it to maintain our lifestyle.
    We have a checking account.
    All the money in the checking account will be spent eventually; but there must be a minimum balance today or we'll start bouncing checks.
    Perhaps we also have a savings account, and we use its funds to cover our checks, to prevent our overdrafts from ruining our credit.
    If we've been abusing the checking account's minimum balance, and if we use up the money in the savings account, we won't be able to support our current lifestyle.
    Where the carbon went is into limestone and fossil fuels.
    At the bottoms of the seas and peat bogs of the world, for perhaps billions of years, carbon has been taken out of circulation that would ordinarily have been exhaled into the atmosphere in the normal rot cycle. Most of this went into the limestone, but a lot of it is crude oil and natural gas, a buried and compressed soup of molecules with long names, nearly all of which contain carbon atoms. There are billions of tons of carbon in this savings account.
    Our checking account of energy is sunshine and the flows of energy that are directly the product of sunshine: wind, water, wood, animals, farms, gardens, alcohol, natural rubber, hydrogen. Direct deposit.
    Our savings account is the stuff from beneath the earth: coal, diesel, fuel oil, gasoline, synthetic lubricants, synthetic rubbers, and plastics: vinyl, polyethylene, nylon, polyurethane. Capital.
    We spend this account at a furious rate, because we cannot live as we wish to live on our income from the sun. There are too many of us, with our real needs, and of us there are too many with artificially inflated needs.
 
   We are perhaps at a point where bankruptcy is inevitable; where our tenure on earth has become untenable and we may soon be forced to give up the lease. Other tenants will come: perhaps the cockroaches, and perhaps this will be a good thing.

    But I do love my children, and I feel I should have something to offer them. This is not about their holiday wish list, it's about seeking to stabilize my finances, my planetary-bank-account finances, on their behalf. I wish to offer them a tenable hold on our lease.
    I well understand this is a project fraught with hypocrisy.
    I'm a middle-class American, and Americans, about five percent of the world's people, are producing over forty per cent of the drain on the savings account. I'm going to drive in to work tomorrow, and there will be only one of me in the car. Circumstances have dictated this.
    But, there are things that can be done, small gestures which, multiplied by millions of slightly changed lives, will slow the pace at which we're running toward bankruptcy, and give our children a bit more time for making more satisfactory changes. None of this need involve chaining yourself to a tree and screaming at some poor logger; just a few things here and there to keep the kids alive, on the off chance that there's more to this universe with people in it than without. Now, you've heard all this before, but let's just go down the checklist one more time:
    First, consider the automobile. What's the mileage? Carry more gas (petrol to some of us) at a time, to prevent evaporation loss, get regular tune-ups, check the tire inflation. Trade down in size to better mileage: there are vehicles that do fifty miles per gallon, and this is more significant to your kids' future than the prestige that big one gets you. Get more passengers, and carpool. Be a passenger. Leave the car home and ride the bus, the train, the subway, the ferry, the monorail, the light rail, the taxi, or the bicycle. No light rail? No bike lanes? Write and call the local planners and city fathers; lobby relentlessly. Push hybrid; push electric. Sell the $*#!!! thing. While you're at it, sell the motor home, the motorboat, the plane, the skimobile, the jet ski, the go cart, and the dirt bike. You don't need 'em; if you do find you need one once in a while, don't buy, rent. Telecommute. Lobby for a shorter work week, then spend the long weekends, the holidays, and the vacations at home (working in the garden!).
    Second, consider the home. Why have a big one when a well-planned small one will do? Insulate, turn the heat down a bit, put on a sweater and a lap blanket, get rid of the air conditioner and plant shade trees on the south side and a windbreak on the north side. Make things out of rocks or used bricks instead of concrete. Use hand tools. No time? Turn off the television, you'll have more time. Look for low-wattage entertainment. Try romance. Romance can be cheap; instead of diamonds and sky-line restaurant dinners, try being a good listener. For music, play an acoustic instrument. Read. Read E. F. Schumacher. Reread E. F Schumacher. For lighting, go with sunlight through a skylight, or low-wattage fluorescent or LED. Paint the walls and roof white; you won't need as many watts. Replace the hot water heater, refrigerator and the freezer if they predate the energy-saving models. Oe even do without; most people in the world do so. Install a ground cloth in the crawl space. Sort, reuse, sew, mend, repair, recycle, compost. For the furnishings, when possible make your own or buy locally made. Tear up the lawn and put in ground cover, fruit and nut trees, and fruiting perennials, on a schedule that will prevent your having to buy a new gasoline lawnmower when the present one gives out.
    Third, consider the food. Cigarettes? I won't even tell you, you know better. Drink less alcohol and more water. Eat less meat and more fiber. Eat less prepared food and more fresh produce. Cook less, check out raw. Use double boilers and steamers and avoid frying. Don't send out for pizza; pizza sends for you, and what it wants from your arteries you should want to keep. Audrey Hepburn said the most effective diet is to share your food with the poor. Clean out the cabinets and put the stuff in the food drive bin. Find out who's offering organic produce in your area. Find out if what they're offering is really organic. Find out what "organic" is first, if you don't know, and don't depend on the television to tell you. Patronize local organic cooperatives, merchants and farmers. Raise your own food. Avoid those patented hybrid seeds from large corporations; patronize farmers, merchants and cooperatives providing heirloom varieties. Use hand tools. Garden organically. Plant fruit and nut trees. Preserve your own produce. No time? We already talked about that.
    Fourth, look at your clothes. Buy less frequently, go for longer lasting, and think cotton and wool and natural dyes. Most clothing now comes directly from the planetary savings account, and "polyester" should become an embarrassing word in your wardrobe. When possible, make your own or buy locally made.
    Fifth, think about your work. Are you working to get your kids out of planetary debt or deeper into it? What are your living expenses? If you're a couple, consider cutting those expenses until only one of you has to work or both of you can work half time. Give the earned time to increased quality of life for the children, or, if you've wisely refrained from contributing to the disastrous population curve, to your friends and neighbors. If you're in the mining, manufacture, distribution, transportation, sales, advertising, or application of planetary-savings-account items, from autos to herbicides, re-career as soon as you feasibly can. Think small. We're not talking communism here, just common accountability, with the following: the outlawing of for-profit corporations, with retention of nonprofits, cooperatives, partnerships and sole ownerships as the only legal entities for commerce, would all by itself go a long way to fixing the drain on your kids' planetary savings. Think about that when you're looking for work. Or looking to buy, for that matter. Or about to vote.
    Sixth, and I'll stop here, what about that vote? If you don't have the vote, be careful who might be reading this over your shoulder, and start working on what it will take to get the vote. For this, your life will not be too cheap a sacrifice for your childrens' future. If you have the vote, think about what you're allowed to vote on. Is it just big political party versus big political party? Or nuclear versus solar? Roads versus light rail? Agribusiness versus sustainable farming? Clear cuts versus forest maintenance? Or to put it more simply, corporate greed versus life? If your vote can't access reality, if it isn't patching the holes in the planetary savings account, change that. Campaign finance reform would be a place to begin. Get the vote, keep the vote, use the vote; get the real issues up for a vote; inform the electorate. Perhaps you won't see results on this in your lifetime. But consider the alternative.

    Whew! OK, I know, I haven't done maybe a hundredth of that stuff. But I chip away at it here and there. I'm aware, particularly and painfully, of the cost of the infrastructure that maintains the glorified suburb that in our neighborhood passes for country. It takes six times as much of the planetary savings account to establish a rural home as it does for a comparable urban row house. I've elected to be a creature of privilege, and I don't care to look too deeply into what the mirror says about that. But in some things I can give back something of what I have taken. One way is to learn from the past, to gain pre-fossil-fuels skills, and to apply them, redesigning this acre of the landscape to produce food, shade, and windbreak in ways that do more good and less harm than was done here previously, and to share the knowledge gained, as best I can, with others who also care to learn.

                                                                            ,,,,

    It was a good year in the house, and a reasonably good year in the garden. But I'm also grateful for the times I was able to spend at the high mountain lakes. The high point of my year, I think, was, as is so often true for me, at the height of summer. So I'll return to that memory for a moment, to round out this memoir.
    While I was in the boat, the sun set, and as I knew a full moon was coming, I stood out from shore to the middle, and watched the last brilliant solar rays deepen in color, turning the tops of the Douglas firs and mountain hemlocks first golden, then red, and then almost purple.
    Planets and stars winked into view, and I found myself surrounded by bats, more than a dozen jittery shadows that flicked across the star field in tight circles. They seemed interested in my fly rod, which stood up in the bow, supported by the gunwale of the cockpit, and would zoom toward it and away, missing my face by a few feet each time. I could feel the breath of their wings.
    A small something briefly touched the shaft of my kayak paddle and fell into the water, but struggled back into the air unseen. I thought at first it might be a bat, which seemed odd, as they don't, in my experience, land on or thump into such things.
    Then a small night bird, dressed in cream and gray like a swallow, landed on the front deck of the kayak before me, smoothed its feathers a bit, then sputtered off into the darkness. Mystery solved: the paddle had been mistaken for a branch, but its inorganic smoothness had defeated two tiny sets of claws.
    It was then that the yellow moon rose, so hugely majestic that it seemed to me to invade the companionable darkness we creatures had peopled. I retired to my campsite, landing with the aid of a flashlight, and, lighting a candle in my tent, read Kingsolver while, outside, the unobserved bats and birds carried on their moonlit escapades.
    In the morning, I took to the boat again to chase the first available sunlight and warm my bones; then, when day had reached camp, set about emptying the fire pit, which was filled with unappealing trash, especially broken glass. I've never really been one to pick up after others, even in the woods, but this time I took a personal interest and wound up 'policing' the entire site. My pack was already heavy and I had four hundred feet of elevation gain ahead of me, but I had been getting stronger of late and knew it would not be any trouble.

                                                                            ,,,,

    I once spent some time with a teacher of Zen and asked him about beer cans in the wilderness. "If I see it and it offends me, I pick it up, but I've been disturbed by the offense I've taken. But in Zen, it seems I should simply observe it and not be offended, but that seems to reduce my motivation for picking it up. And it does seem that Zen takes some of the activism out of those whom I've seen practicing Zen."
    The teacher said, "Well, we should just either pick it up or not. It depends on the flow."
    I must have seemed puzzled by this.
    He added, "Observation is its own reward, but that neither adds to nor takes away from right action. We can think of some good reasons to pick up the can; trash is harmful to wildlife, and so on. And a natural setting, once cleaned up, is more conducive to contemplation for others. But there is no need to think about all that; you may have a tendency to speculate about whoever 'threw away' the can, and such thoughts lead to unnecessary problems. Right action begins in seeing the can without looking into its past. The can itself has had no motivation or intent and we cannot know exactly how it got there."

    I tossed the contents of the wilderness firepit into our kitchen trash can and dropped the lid. Looking out the window, I could see that Jasper Mountain was wearing its winter coat, dusty green patches of second-growth fir trees alternating with the brown of frost-burned mountain meadows. This time, I thought, I might be able to see the mountain without too much fear of becoming bogged down in thoughts of who has done what to it.
    It will outlast us.
    That's the key to peace, I told myself. Clarity of mind comes when you deal in the things before you.
    If it seems there are not enough trees, plant one. If there are a lot of cans around and you'd like them picked up, pick up one.

    This can be extrapolated, if you have the energy, to planting schools and clearing minefields, or writing a check for those who do. But remember, while planting and picking, to look up.

    The mountain will be there.






https://risashome.blogspot.com/p/sources-and-citations.html

Doyu Shonin/Risa Stephanie Bear, a retired forester, farmer, printer, and librarian, practices zazen in a repurposed tool shed. She holds the M.A. in English and M.S. in Arts Management from the University of Oregon. She edited and compiled the pioneering e-text website, Renascence Editions.