Gumbo Filé

The sassafras tree is easy to spot, with its three different leaf patterns (unlobed oval, bilobed (mitten-shaped), and trilobed (three-pronged). It’s commonly seen anywhere east of the Mississippi basin. As kids we would dig up the roots to make sassafras tea. The roots, as most people know, were also the original flavor for root beer, that is, before being banned in 1960 as a possible carcinogen.

When I was growing up in Louisiana, a purchased powder of the leaves (safe for culinary use) was on our kitchen table any night we had gumbo, added as a sprinkled garnish to each bowl.

When I moved to Tennessee in 1984, gumbo filé (FEE-lay) was initially hard to find on the grocery shelf. I would pick up a bottle anytime I visited the motherland. Each jar of the fine powder — which imparts an earthy flavor that some compare to thyme — lasted me a couple of years before growing stale or being used up completely. Since 1999, after moving to the farm, that changed. Here, we have plenty of sassafras trees, so providing my own filé has become an easy option. And, of course, the commercial product is now easily found at any grocery store.

Making filé is straightforward and simple. It’s one of those perfect homestead projects that allow you to step outside of the stream of commerce, for a moment anyway, and provide for yourself. The process is as easy as harvesting the leaves, drying them, and then pulverizing into a powder.

Last weekend I took to the woods a large container that had held a 100-pound protein tub for sheep. In the work of 10 minutes, I filled the tub with leaves and returned to the barn. Taking a plastic kiddie pool (which we had used as a water source for a flock of ducks), I spread out the leaves to dry in the sun. Today I’ll strip the stems, crush the leaves, and then jar the powder. That full tub will yield only a few ounces of filé. Still, it will be more than enough to enhance a couple of winters’ worth of chicken gumbo.

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Reading this weekend: Hogs Are Up, stories of the land, with digressions (Wes Jackson).

Further Up, Further In

Years back I owned a bookstore in downtown Knoxville. The small selection of new titles and magazines was a fairly eccentric mix called, “alternative”. The remainder of the store was composed of used and out-of-print tomes on any number of conventional topics.

It was not uncommon for someone to sidle up to me once a week and say in a conspiratorial whisper, “I didn’t know you were a warlock?” Or, some such assumption, based on the simple fact that I carried a book or had a section devoted to one or more out-of-the-mainstream themes. Typically, these were just hopeful projections by the customer that they had found a kindred spirit.

Writing a weekly blog is a bit like the bookstore, where I stock the shelves and the visitor sifts through the jumble and vague pronouncements and makes a selection and determination. While I personally like that eclecticism of choice, what follows is a small attempt at a statement of intent and clarification on writing about the rural life.

Speaking for myself (not Cindy), my urge and motivation for moving to the farm 17 years back, and the desire to document it, had more to do with wishing to relearn what it was like to be a resident. Or, as Wes Jackson would phrase it, to be native to this place.

Living in a small valley south-west of Knoxville, TN, learning to garden, farm, and to eat more purposefully, has been a great joy. The great pleasure in this work (and, yes, that includes fencing) and the growing sense of being part of a community has been deeply satisfying.

Being part of a rural society is so much different than being part of the community that we left behind in the city. You choose your associations in a city. It provides a structure that mediates the interaction between you and your neighbors. In the country that neighbor is also your partner in a relationship where you repair fences figuratively and literally. You may not share the same faith, or political outlook. But you share the same property line and that makes a profound difference. In many ways a rural community is the more complex, interwoven and direct experience than that of the city. There is no bed to hide under in the country. You are known to all.

As part of this journey I have consciously self-identified as an agrarian, trying to uncover the rules and vocabulary of an ancient language. One that explains identity, brotherhood and sisterhood, the bonds of community, and a more intimate connection to the world in terms independent of contemporary political notions of right and left, liberal and conservative.

In these weekly writings I have strived to use that language to explain the rural life. Sometimes the posts are simply of the mundane tasks of working the land, other times they focus on cultural forces that shape the people in this area.

So, it should come as no surprise to any reader that a blog called The South Roane Agrarian would be somewhat biased towards that life. Which is not to say that I don’t recognize the values of the people, the varied cultures, or the opportunities of the city. After all, that is a call that has pulled on rural peoples for millennia. But, I do think that the rural life speaks more directly to the human experience and offers more hope in an uncertain future.

And, in my modest opinion, the dominant culture always speaks for the city. They need no further protection, justification, or explanation. It is the rural culture that has become the great “other” in our country. The flyover, the drive-by, the dump-on.

So, these posts are written in the hope of being part of a larger project. One whose roots link me with antiquity, our ancestors, and, living in balance with my neighbors and this planet. And, with an understanding that all societies ebb and flow, that climate change will limit our opportunities, that the future of growth will narrow the path, that a couple of centuries of efficient resource exploitation may leave us with millennia of picking through the leftovers; surviving all of that, I maintain, will be largely a rural project.

C.S. Lewis had a phrase in his book, The Last Battle, “further up, and further in”. Which pretty much sums up my approach to this little blog, that by focusing small, I will begin to see large.

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As my personal editor is off visiting her family this weekend all grammatical errors and sloppy sentences, regrettably, belong to me.

 

 

Don’t Come Back In Until Dinner

I grew up in a household with strict rules. Foremost among them: Get out of the house. When not in school we were expected to be outside. We spent our days doing chores and fishing, looking for pirate treasure along Contraband Bayou or building forts, swimming in ponds or going to the library. Whether on bikes or on the bayou, that landscape was full of kids. On days spent inside because of rain we would play board games or read, watching TV was off limits.

Today, where our farm is located, in East Tennessee, the countryside is mostly empty. You see the occasional activity outdoors, usually men on tractors. But only once in sixteen years have I seen a kid cross the seventy acres of our farm. Never have I had to yell at a kid for building a fort on our land. No kid has ever darkened the door to ask permission to hunt rabbit or squirrel, or fish in our ponds.

Our companions in this landscape

Our companions in this landscape

There are homes nearby where I have never observed a person outside. Cars appear and disappear in the driveways. But the owners are not once glimpsed. I’ve cut a hay field; long hours, three days in a row and never spotted a person outside a neighbor’s house. A house, I add, that often had four cars in the drive.

While baling that hay on the final day, I saw one of the cars start up and move down the driveway. It drove the 150 feet to the mailbox. A youthful arm extended out of the driver’s window and collected the mail. The car reversed back up to the house.

It would be tempting to ridicule the generation of kids who spend their lives in darkened rooms, zombied in screen-time with their gadgets. But their parents, who by example, are equally to blame. With all of the challenges we face to our civilization and planet, it seems somehow dishonorable to while away one’s life in such an unproductive manner.

That the rural landscape is empty in the very place where hands and eyes are needed is troubling. Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson refer to the benefit of “eyes to acres”. They mean that the understanding and the correction of problems in our landscape begin by an intimate daily familiarity.

In a way, it seems like a modern day Highland clearance; where blame rests partly with forces that have devalued the local in favor of the global, removing those eyes-to-acres. But it is a blame shared by us for our willing collusion in that withdrawal, as passive consumers of this life.

Understanding our land begins with engagement, even if it is just a kid rambling along on an idle afternoon across a pasture and a wooded hill.

Maybe our inner mom needs to say, “Get out of the house! Don’t come back in until dinner.”

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Postscript: Hopefully the weather is finally breaking towards spring. Our final crop of lambs are being born, we have piglets to castrate and potatoes to plant. So the navel gazing tone to this blog should return to more mundane topics of the farm in the coming weeks…or not.

Local Honey

We are, by nature, a peripatetic people, ever since we walked out of Africa, many millennia ago. But, considering our countless generations of mass migrations as peoples, we remain devoted to the idea of home. We aspire to be part of something, as Wes Jackson would say, “native to this place.”

Yesterday, after an extended morning of physical toil, we took an afternoon drive to Spring City. We left our farm for a relatively short drive of 24 miles. Passing the dam on the Tennessee River, in the shadows of the cooling towers at the Watts Bar nuclear power plant, we arrived in Spring City in mid-afternoon.

Word had reached our farm that our beloved Sweetwater vegetable market had reopened, or perhaps always had had, another store in this town. Indeed, it was tucked away on a small back street, with a modest early-spring assortment of plants, seeds and vegetables. I was looking for a local source for a couple of pounds of turnip seed. Cindy was looking for some forsythia. We came away with a flat of 25-50 Red Acre cabbage starts, a few forsythias and a jar of honey.

Last fall, we lost all four hives of bees. We first felt the loss as a failure on our part. And we still do, but the recrimination has been lessened by hearing of countless losses by other beekeepers in our area the past year. Not having bees at the moment has left us without any of our own honey, so we asked the Spring City proprietors if they had any local honey. Sadly they shook their heads, pointing to what they did have to offer, resting on a shelf.

I picked up a jar of honey­–gathered by a beekeeper in Sweetwater, Tennessee, 25 miles away across the valley. In an era of global trade, on our vast continent, in one of our 50 states, in the eastern part, in a large valley, the distance between two small towns that are in essence neighbors, this jar of honey was deemed “not local.” Some might consider that parochial; I consider it hopeful.

In the vast scheme of time, our movements have covered the globe. But our view is still constrained by the horizon and our lifespan. Our needs remain personal and consistent, native to our own place in that history of migrations.

And maybe that is enough.