Category Archives: Staying Put

Staying Put

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Our new herd sire

The bluegill were popping the surface of the pond, loudly glopping up insects knocked off the tall grass at water’s edge by the rain. Becky, our English shepherd, was nudging a box turtle crossing in front of the log where I sat. I called her off, and she settled into the wet grass to wait me out.

After a long week away from the farm, I was exercising my favorite spiritual practice, staying put. I had just come off spending time in one of my least favorite cities, Seattle. Apart from a dramatic setting, good beer, and good food, it is much like most cities in this country: too many people, too much concrete, too many drivers — too much of everything — and too little civility. But, lest you think I’m picking on Seattle, let me confess that I just don’t like cities. Give me the chance of spending time in New York or London and I’d turn it down for the same time in a small rural city or town.

I appreciate and understand appropriate scale. I spent a night on this trip in McMinnville, Oregon, visiting with my niece. A small city of 20,000, McMinnville is relatively compact and accessible, surrounded by rich agricultural land. The vineyards, nurseries, and orchards that surround it keep the land prices high enough to fend off the encroaching growth of Portland … for now.

My niece and her husband are both employed in the wine business. They are definitely my kind of folks. They are hands on about all aspects of their lives, from the crawfish aquaponics to the raised garden beds, from the handmade staircase banister made from recycled oak staves to the sweat equity invested in renovating their modest home. They get the importance of community, family, food, and work. And after a few peripatetic years, they are now staying put.

Staying put fosters both conservation and conversation with place. It spares resources and allows us to become invested in protecting and being a part of the land, the community, and the people.

Moving about, on the other hand, translates into waste and disconnection. It’s a form of consumer capitalism that encourages a callous disregard for our planet’s resources and cohabitants. It removes the connections of kith and kin from our experience. It’s turns us all into emigrants and immigrants of the world, both spiritual and physical nomads from heart and hearth.

As someone who travels frequently for a job, I know the occasional enjoyments of travel. But I’m also all too aware of the impacts and demands I place on the earth in doing so. Like footprints on a fragile landscape, each trip we take, whether across the country or to the corner store, leaves an indelible mark.

Remaining in place certainly doesn’t solve all problems. But, as I got up from the log, I resolved to be more like the bluegill, the soil, and the fruit trees on our farm, staying put as if I didn’t have a choice.

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(This piece was first published in 2016 with the title Becoming Bluegill. If I may say, since I wrote it, I still like it, touching as it does on some recurring themes in this blog. It was however, one of my least read pieces and resulted in zero comments. But I’ll take the risk and put it out again. Enjoy.)

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Reading this weekend: still slogging through the blood and guts (and there is a lot to wade through) of The Iliad (Homer). Also, just finished, Giving Up the Gun: Japan’s reversion to the sword, 1543-1879 (N. Perrin).

A Rural Tale

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The old mill

“And, now we have cities of 20 million that are environmentally sustainable.” “Rural people are never innovators; the great innovations are always made in the cities.” So says the host of a new podcast called American Innovations. The first claim is over-the-top grandiose and utterly indefensible, only by the credulous to be accepted without question and as fact. The second is embraced by someone who celebrates the peripatetic life, the empty life of the consumer, the illusive mastery over the natural, the machine.

To the host and his ilk, I offer no defense; their ears and minds are closed.

Last weekend we had just pulled onto our road and headed out to meet friends at their nearby farm. We had rounded the curve below our property and passed the old mill, when we came upon a scene that was just unfolding. We were a few hundred yards down the road before we realized what had happened. A car with a crumpled front end was parked in front of the mill. A woman was sitting in the driver’s seat, red-faced and sobbing. A deer, gasping and unable to stand, lay on the other side of the road. We slowed and turned around.

Cindy immediately approached the driver. She had been on the way home from work when a deer appeared seemingly from nowhere and leapt in front of her older van. The woman was far more upset by the injured deer than by the damaged car. I, meanwhile, approached the large doe. She held her head upright, but blood trickled from her mouth and she was dying, slowly. Somewhere, in the nearby woods, would be a fawn. We could only hope that it had been born early enough to now be able to forage on its own. We discussed what to do. Cindy stayed with the distraught driver while she called her husband, and I headed back up the road.

After first checking with a neighbor for a rifle, I returned with my own .30-30. It took two shots to make sure the doe was dead — an act of mercy that was captured on a cellphone by a spectator in a Prius, for what purposes one can only speculate.

Once the van driver’s husband arrived, we left for our scheduled appointment, the rifle behind the seat of the farm truck. At our friends’, we helped them review plans for a cattle chute. We walked around afterwards, admiring the growing gardens and the newly built brick raised beds as we caught up on the day’s news.

We passed the old mill on our return home. The van was being loaded onto a tow truck. The deer was now hanging from a makeshift hoist on a tractor in our nearest neighbor’s yard, already eviscerated and in the process of being skinned.

Back on the farm, we tended the livestock and enjoyed a satisfying dinner, then sat on the back deck and watched the night deepen over the ridge.

There’s a 100 Percent Chance of Weather

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summer gardens 2

My garden…just not this year.

4:45 this morning and a neighbor maybe a half-mile away is shooting a rifle. Sounds like a .22, so he is probably potting raccoons or rats raiding his cattle feed. Or perhaps he is a man who likes to annoy the world. Regardless, I roll out of bed and make a pot of coffee.

We promise you rain, tomorrow: For a man who gets up so early, it is amazing how late I am in getting to haying this year. It is the perennial struggle to find just the right week between cooperative weather and work schedule. Driving back from Sweetwater yesterday, I observed that almost all the fields were either cut, raked, baled, or a combination. I have been holding off for one more good rain, but apparently all the moisture continues to dump on Texas. Meanwhile, our Roane County forecast is an ever-shifting horizon, the moisture always promised in another three days.

Beware the nine-banded armadillo: On yesterday’s drive back from town, just past the big hog roast in progress at the Luttrell community center, I spotted the distinctive and familiar remains of an animal ­on the road. The sighting was commonplace to me on the backroads of Louisiana growing up. Later that night at dinner with friends, we discussed what I’d seen. Our friend remarked that, coincidentally, she could’ve sworn she’d seen the same kind of animal a few days before, but she decided against it, since the critters are not known to live in these parts. But, sure enough, a quick bit of research and we found that the nine-banded armadillo has arrived in East Tennessee.

Busy little bees: In the immortal words of Margot Channing, “You are in a beehive, pal. Didn’t you know? We are all busy little bees, full of stings, making honey day and night. Aren’t we, honey?” Frantically painting more supers and putting together more frames, Cindy has struggled to keep pace with this spring’s exponential colony growth. The number of our hives has doubled to four, and the girls (all worker bees are female) seem unusually productive. Cindy keeps slapping on supers, and they keep filling them up. We look for a bountiful honey harvest come end of summer: I see horns of mead aplenty and a rereading of Beowulf in my future.

Let’s not go there: I fixed some chicken sausage gumbo last night. “Cindy, when you go out to feed, grab me an onion from the garden. There are three rows of weeds before you get to Petunia. Buried in the last row are the onions.” Typically, the dry years like this are the years the garden looks the best. So I really have no excuse … except the fencing. That massive project of closing in the ravine for the pigs was a time-suck this spring. Sigh.

Who cares why you crossed the road. Where are my damn eggs? After raising speckled Sussex almost exclusively for 16 years, we are going to make a change. We ordered 20 brown leghorn chicks, which arrived this week. They are the foundation bird for the modern leghorns and an egg-laying machine, purportedly. Our dual-purpose meat-and-eggs Sussex are too irregular in the latter department. So, unless the governor calls (and why would he?), the flock will go in the pot. We look forward to endless bowls of coq au vin, chicken paprikash, and gumbo.

Well, with coffee and the blog now done and the eastern sky alight with the approaching dawn, it is time for me to go dig holes and plant grapevines. One must take advantage of the coolness of the morning and reserve the afternoon for a siesta.

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Reading this weekend: The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: a southern girl, a small town, and the secret of a good life by Rod Dreher. A tribute to a sister who stayed put while her brother pursued a career and moved away from home. She died young at forty. A fascinating, emotional, look at family and small town culture.

Becoming Bluegill

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Leap Day 012

Becky at rest

The bluegill were popping the surface of the pond, loudly glopping up insects knocked off the tall grass at water’s edge by the rain. Becky, our English shepherd, was nudging a box turtle crossing in front of the log where I sat. I called her off, and she settled into the wet grass to wait me out.

After a long week away from the farm, I was exercising my favorite spiritual practice, staying put. I had just come off spending time in one of my least favorite cities, Seattle. Apart from a dramatic setting, good beer, and good food, it is much like most cities in this country: too many people, too much concrete, too many drivers — too much of everything — and too little civility. But, lest you think I’m picking on Seattle, let me confess that I just don’t like cities. Give me the chance of spending time in New York or London and I’d turn it down for the same time in a small rural city or town.

I appreciate and understand appropriate scale. I spent a night on this trip in McMinnville, Oregon, visiting with my niece. A small city of 20,000, McMinnville is relatively compact and accessible, surrounded by rich agricultural land. The vineyards, nurseries, and orchards that surround it keep the land prices high enough to fend off the encroaching growth of Portland … for now.

My niece and her fiancé are both employed in the wine business. They are definitely my kind of folks. They are hands on about all aspects of their lives, from the crawfish aquaponics to the raised garden beds, from the handmade staircase banister made from recycled oak staves to the sweat equity invested in renovating their modest home. They get the importance of community, family, food, and work. And after a few peripatetic years, they are now staying put.

Staying put fosters both conservation and conversation with place. It spares resources and allows us to become invested in protecting and being a part of the land, the community, and the people.

Moving about, on the other hand, translates into waste and disconnection. It’s a form of consumer capitalism that encourages a callous disregard for our planet’s resources and cohabitants. It removes the connections of kith and kin from our experience. It’s turns us all into emigrants and immigrants of the world, both spiritual and physical nomads from heart and hearth.

As someone who travels frequently for a job, I know the occasional enjoyments of travel. But I’m also all too aware of the impacts and demands I place on the earth in doing so. Like footprints on a fragile landscape, each trip we take, whether across the country or to the corner store, leaves an indelible mark.

Remaining in place certainly doesn’t solve all problems. But, as I got up from the log, I resolved to be more like the bluegill, the soil, and the fruit trees on our farm, staying put as if I didn’t have a choice.