Monthly Archives: May 2018

Morning Song

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This late May morning, before the sunrise, the world is clothed in birds. They swoop, argue in the brush, sing and chatter. They are everywhere in sound and flight.

Above my study, under the second-floor eave of the house, for the fifth year a pair of barn swallows raises out its noisy brood. The parents forage nonstop. Upon their return, they rest on a telephone wire forty feet out from the nest, before diving in to drop a beetle into waiting mouths.

Throughout the various barns and outbuildings of the farm, countless other pairs are likewise nested. Together they provide one of my great delights, as they follow the tractor, swooping in elegant patterns, for unlucky and outmaneuvered insects.

At one end of the front porch, a pair of house sparrows nests in a birdhouse Cindy created. On the other, a duo of cardinals has made a home in the crape myrtle, while further out, mockingbirds nest in the muscadine vines.

This season also brings us brown thrashers, bluebirds, blue jays, hummingbirds, with their magnificently constructed nests in the apple trees, mourning doves among the crabapples, bobwhites calling from the overgrown fenceline. And then there are the countless others that only Cindy recognizes: “Oh, my gosh! Out back, up by the blueberries, those are indigo buntings — the first ones I’ve ever seen!” “Look, out the window, quick! It’s … an American goldfinch, a pileated woodpecker, an Eastern kingbird, a Cooper’s hawk. Too late, it’s gone,” she says, both sad and pleased for having witnessed its presence.

Each spring morning, after an hour or two of owning this time, my daily ritual ends. The sun pushes aside the songsters’ trilling and chirping to take up its own dominion. In a sleight-of-hand, the intensity from the early morning is diminished, as if the sun exercises some curious power, by illumination alone, over this sound, moving the birdsong to the background.

This Island Life

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Our young neighbors, using our scalder and plucker to process turkeys.

Ours is a particular kind of small farm. It’s been called diverse, traditional, insignificant, wonderful, productive, inefficient, and a subdivision waiting to happen. We call it home, of course. On it we have miles of fencing, cattle (from time to time), sheep, pigs, chickens, ducks and geese, gardens, fruit and nut trees, beehives, ponds, wine grapes, many species of birds, outbuildings, a sawmill, too many machines, pastures, and lots and lots of trees.

Over these last two decades, our farm has increasingly become an island. In a county where the small family farm model has historically held sway, the diverse home plot has been swept away by the incoming tide of the modern world. Spending time in hard, rewarding labor seems no longer to carry an allure for most. The old-timers have died, and their farms have gone vacant or been taken over by occupants who are never seen except when their cars pull in or out of the drive.

The farm outbuildings have been torn down and burned, still-usable structures deemed unworthy of saving. The fence rows that once provided barriers for livestock and habitat for wildlife have been pulled up for putting greens, trampolines, and larger lawns. We knew in the past that if our livestock escaped, they would wander into the pasture of a neighbor, contained by their fences until we could retrieve them. Now they could amble across untold acres and yards and roads, unrestrained.

For those who think this is a good thing, either a rewilding of nature or an extension of a suburban dream, they would be wrong. It is merely an indication of a dying way of life. A giving way, a giving up on doing for yourself.

Yet, there are hopeful signs in this changing landscape.

This year our longtime neighbor’s daughter, now grown and with husband and two children, moved back to the farm where she was born. She and her family have begun to remake the mostly dormant property into an active hive of small-farm glory. Now, when I’m on a certain hill working, I hear the sounds of roosters crowing, baby goats and lambs bleating, a steer bawling, people on the land, talking, laughing, feeding, building, planting gardens and orchards — all telling the story of love and activity for a place.

All are signs that this land will be more than just another address to shelter a Netflix account. And those neighbors are not alone. Some young friends of ours have recently bought their own small farm to try and achieve a similar dream of self-sufficing. They are now busy replacing old fence rows, emptying and repairing outbuildings, cutting cedars from the fields, raising chickens, and planting trees.

And there are the other young people who come to volunteer on our farm from every point of the compass and globe. All wanting a more authentic life than that of an avatar in some digital dystopia of our overlords’ making. All with plans of striking out for land with a hard stroke, creating an island life of their own in this modern sea. Not a life lived in isolation. But linked by an invisible thread to those who shared the same dream in the past, who share it now, and who share it in the future.

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Reading this week: The Conquerors: how Portugal forged the first global empire, Roger Crowley. This is a terrific account of how a poor backwards nation of less than a million disrupted an established global order.

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.

Respect Your Cuisine: revisited

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Bedding and manure pile: 50 x 12, 7 high.

We have spent the past couple of days in intense farm work, including the annual cleaning out of the barn (see pic). And, today we are off to a homesteading conference to help staff a table for the local bee club. Where, Cindy will also be giving a presentation on the hive. So, once again, I leave you with one from the archives that relates to last weeks post. I hope you enjoy, it is one of my favorites, from May 5th, 2014.

 

Sir, Respect Your Dinner, Idolize it, enjoy it properly.

You will be many hours in a week, many weeks in the year, and many years in your life, happier if you do.

(William Makepeace Thackeray)

Odd, it seems Southern cooking is being celebrated everywhere but in the South. I’m a bit obsessive about cooking magazines, tending to pick them up whenever I’m in a store. And Southern cooking is always being touted and referenced as the touchstone of American cooking. And it is important, or it was at one time. But its importance does not survive in the glossy pages of a magazine or an upscale restaurant.

Don’t misunderstand me, there are great restaurants in the South. And there are great purveyors of food in the region. But good Southern cooking has always been a home-based cuisine. I tend to think of cooking styles like I do an indigenous music style, like bluegrass. Once it becomes precious, moves off the front porch into a regional music festival it is near death. Much like the ancient language that is down to nine elderly speakers; time to stick a fork in it, it is done. And Southern cuisine will soon be down to those last nine elderly practitioners.

I’ve always thought of Southern food as peasant food. After all, we have been an agrarian culture since Europeans and Africans settled these lands. We brought foods from our homes and we adopted from the locals. And we embraced the tomato, corn and pepper from points further south. There has always been a highbrow component to our cuisine, the cuisine of the planter class. But that was a food culture that, although flavored with local ingredients, aspired to be something else than what was native. A dinner plate designed to make them feel a superiority that could only be purchased.

The genesis, the glory of our food culture was in the garden, the hunt, the field all enjoyed in a warm temperate climate that allowed multiple crops and access to an unimaginable range of foods. My childhood was filled with gardens in the summer, catfish trotlines and duck hunting in the winter, speckled trout caught on the inter-coastal in the fall and Satsuma’s in season and eating so much shrimp that you were sick of seeing them on the table. Sprinkle in crab and crawfish harvests, venison sausage, gumbos, smoked goose, and pork in all its wonderfully varied uses and the Southern cuisine of my youth was worth celebrating.

But today we have given up that rich heritage of the locally harvested for a faux cuisine that has become the precious heritage of food magazines, suburbanites and Brooklyn-ites. The real food of our culture comes from the soil and dirt under your hands. It comes from the muscle ache in your back from working oyster tongs all day and shucking oysters deep into the night. It is the numbness of your hands on a December night as you pull wriggling catfish into the jon-boat. It is figuring out a way to cook okra because it exists.

It is a DIY food culture of butchering pigs and using everything but the squeal. It is staying up late to salt all your cabbage for kraut before it goes to waste. It is a real old-fashioned church supper with 200 competing dishes handed down from mother to daughter and you with only one stomach to tackle it all.

It is not found in a Walmart, a fast food chain, a high-end restaurant or, god forbid, Garden and Gun magazine. It is found on a dinner table with a family connected to the land and enjoyed with a homemade biscuit in one hand and a plate of love in front of you.

We are getting close to knowing those last elderly nine. Get your hands dirty, practice the language.

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Reading this weekend: Localism in the Mass Age, a front porch republic manifesto. A collection of essays devoted to degrowth, localism, and a politics and culture suited to the same. I found it, mainly, stimulating stuff.