Tag Archives: Robert Macfarlane

Pro Fitness and Calorie Burning Tips

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Walking a hundred yards while holding a piglet, who is squalling…loudly, from one hand, while opening gates with the other, yelling at the dogs fighting around my feet, is like a bizarro rural form of CrossFit exercise. Repeat it two times for an extra cardio/audio workout and you get an idea of this farmer’s small farm fitness routine.

Not that this post is about fitness. Although, God only knows I need it after eating a collard green gratin on Friday night. (And if you would like to virtually eat it, read on)

  1. Wash, then chop up a pound or two of collards.
  2. Take a large pot, throw in a couple of ounces of butter and 2 tablespoons of olive oil, add greens, cover, and cook over low-medium heat for 30 minutes. Stir occasionally.
  3. In a pan make a sauce with more butter and flour, add slowly 1.5 cup of milk. Salt and pepper and few grates of nutmeg. Bring to boil then simmer for 2-3 minutes and remove from heat. When cool stir in 2 eggs and a dollop of cream cheese.
  4. Stir sauce into greens and adjust seasoning. Transfer to a shallow baking dish. Top with breadcrumbs and add a drizzle of olive oil.
  5. Bake 30 minutes at 300 degrees. Finish under broiler for a few minutes to crisp up the top.

Saturday, although tempted to lay about, I spent the morning working off that gratin, and a pork loin (cooked in heavy cream and Dijon mustard), building a new pig paddock to house those squealing piglets. It was built on the site where the north garden had stood for a few years. Which in turn, stood on the location of an older pig pen, which is in the way of a natural cycle on this farm.

A cycle of a different sort might just be what the doctor ordered, if he knew of that dinner. Unless he saw our highway in front of the farm. Which would appeal more towards the mortician looking to bolster business than a way to extend this life. I could throw my bike, which I don’t own, into the truck bed, which I do, then drive somewhere safe to ride. But that seems like a special hell that attracts a head in the sand approach to maintaining heart healthy activity, especially when twinned with the dimming of our fossil fuel world.

Which, ironically, and stay with me, brought me by pickup truck to the old Galyon’s market, late Saturday afternoon, where the new Indian owner shook his head sadly when I asked for a bag of tortilla chips to go with my homemade Hatch pepper salsa. Supply chains, he said, are fragile. So is the timer on your pizza oven, I replied. He turned and dashed to the oven that was billowing black smoke.

I drove home to make my own tortilla chips, while thinking about the pizza and the owner of the market. It occurred to me that he had just come up with a revolutionary way to burn two thousand calories in less time than it took you to read this post. Which my friends, makes for one impressive fitness regime.

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Reading this weekend: Travels Through South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida (W. Bartram), The Gifts of Reading (R. Macfarlane), Glimpses of the Barren Lands (T. Mallet)

Small Town Resilience (a repeat)

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We have spent a busy weekend making mead, bottling some older mead, butchering chickens, harvesting produce, and preparing to harvest apples and pears. So, I’ll leave you with this older piece on a different kind of resilience.

The aftermath of butchering chickens.

Last week a colleague spent three hours advancing 15 miles in the cancerous landscape of Atlanta.

Around the same time, I was commuting in central Missouri down a two-lane highway through a largely depopulated land of corn and beef cattle ornamented with the occasional red-brick one-room schoolhouse sitting in a grove of trees. The schoolhouses, long empty, were universally well kept, no broken windows, grass mowed—buildings cared for symbolic of the hope or expectation that they might once again serve a purpose.

The housing stock was older, yet well cared for and solid. But it was a lonely landscape of older couples and few children. I drove past the occasional activity of men in distant fields loading hay onto trailers using tractors built to accomplish much, the work done with such little effort as would have stunned even their grandfathers. Little effort and fewer people, freeing up the children and grandchildren to follow the classic road to town and city, a well-worn path since the ancient world, but one accelerated by our fossil-fueled innovations.

I stopped for the night in Boonville, Missouri, on the banks of the Missouri River. Boonville is not a prosperous town. Its trail of empty strip mall architecture dribbles from the outer fringe of the town’s core to the interstate, signaling a raising of the drawbridge, a calculated retreat against a yet unacknowledged enemy. But the core is still vibrant with neighborhoods, small-town hardware and furniture stores, plumbing and electrical businesses, an elegant restored hotel, a diner, and a bar and grill.

That evening I walked from the old hotel to the bar and grill, a place called Maggie’s, for dinner. The Midwest small-town bar and grill is unique. It is the genuine third place Ray Oldenburg spoke about. Warm and friendly, with people of all ages and classes: farmers, workers and professionals, town and country, producer and consumer. These gathering spots are spread across the agricultural heartland. They are the glue to the community, providing face-to-face time between neighbors. Time not gained in a traffic jam.

I am not naively asserting a rural idyll, without strife, tension, unemployment, severed families and the ills of too much idle time. Yet the small town is fundamentally more resilient, resilient because of its smallness and its proximity to productive land. Rural communities, with their face-to-face interactions, have provided the template for human existence for the past thousands of years.

Communities within a megacity are a mere echo of that life. They can nourish and sustain in the ascendancy, but their larger host survives only as wealth is pumped in from the outside world. When the pump is turned off, the decline is inevitable and rapid. Consider Rome, from a city of a million to a village of thousands in the space of mere generations. Or the specter of Detroit, reduced by half in one generation.

Perhaps these Boonvilles, these freshly painted one-room schoolhouses, these Midwestern pubs are the starter-cultures for the wort, the yeast for the fermentation required to restart the small farm, small-town life, a way to redirect the human trajectory from the cancerous growth to the healthy organism, from the complex to the comprehensible?

The cities like Atlanta in our landscape offer nothing but a promise of continued sprawl, congestion, and three hours and 15 miles stalled in the present. And if history is the judge, they offer us nothing in their inevitable decline.

For all the problems in that rural Missouri landscape, it is still one of latent hope. The problems it faces are fundamentally local and scalable. And if the survival of our future allowed bets, mine would be on the Boonvilles and rural counties in this land.

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Reading this weekend (2019): Underland (Macfarlane) and iGen (Twenge). The former is another terrific read by the author of The Old Ways (among others). And, the latter is a data driven survey of the generation that has grown up with the i-phone (be afraid, be very afraid).

Nothing To Get All Fussed About

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I wipe the afterbirth and muck off my hands onto my coat, then grab the proffered sandwich and take a big bite. After a few bites, I put the sandwich on a post and go back to the lambing at hand. Such is the farmer’s hygiene, practical and not the least bit fussy.

If we are going out for a social call or dinner, an unthinking assessment takes place in my wardrobe and cleaning rituals. Going to town? I’ll have a good shower, put on fresh clothes and clean shoes. Farming friends? I might have a quick wash and head out with what I had been wearing in the barn. Eau de barnyard at a get-together with farmer friends is common and unremarked, indeed, unnoticed.

Sometimes the farm follows us to other venues. I’m sure I’ve related the story of the pig perfume and the plane. On one particular morning, I got up ungodly early, fed the animals, and dashed off to the airport. I spent most of the day in the close confines of planes before finally touching down. After a long drive to my ultimate destination, I arrived at my hotel and dropped on the bed, exhausted.

It was only then that I smelled the distinctive odor of pig manure. My brain was foggy from a full day of travel, but I was nevertheless able to recognize that there were no pigs in my room. Following the odor, I quickly tracked it down to a large clump of Exhibit A on my left boot. I cleaned it off and chuckled, thinking about the poor bastards stuck next to me on a four-hour flight.

A doctor friend of mine says that the farm kids he’s had as patients seem to be less susceptible to infections or allergies. Just an observation, not a clinical study, he hastens to point out. His assumption is that daily playing amidst the muck, cleaning out chicken coops and horse stalls, eating fruits and veggies straight from the garden — all serve to build up a healthy immune system.

Compare that to the kid who grows up in the city or suburbs. The one who uses antimicrobial spray or wipes twenty times a day. Never goes outside except to be shuttled from home to car to special event and back. Only snacks on foods that have been properly processed, packaged, and labeled. Is it a surprise that kids today seem to have an epidemic of allergies and immunity-related diseases?

Now, I’m not advocating that you adopt the practice of not washing your hands. What I am suggesting is that you consider a little bit of dirt, well, natural. For those of us who live in the country, the smell of the barnyard is simply the smell of life. Nothing to get too fussed about.

Just remind me to wipe my boots when I enter your house.

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Reading this weekend: Landmarks by Robert Macfarlane. A newish and beautiful tome on the descriptive genius of our ancestors for the natural world.