Ben Hewitt's Blog, page 37

The Contrast Between the Two

Last night I skied home from chores at Melvin’s on the trailing edge of the storm. The snow was tapering, but the beam of my headlamp created the illusion of gathering intensity, as if I were gliding into the opening maw of a blizzard. And the cold: Zero and dropping, but I carried the warmth of the barn with and in me. I’d fed out a fat second-cut round bale, shoulder-leaning into it with the full force of what mass and muscle I could muster, rolling it down the lane like one pushes a broken car for a jump start. A week-old Jersey bull calf nudged my legs as I worked; he’d been born a week early, tiny, too small to ship for beef, too sweet to put down by hand. So. For now, a pet, future uncertain.

After hay, chop the softwood sawdust with a double-bit axe to loosen it. It is green sawdust, with enough moisture to freeze solid on a winter like this. I chopped a few shovelfuls worth at a time, slowly filled the wheelbarrow. The calf now nestled in the hay I’d fed out. Waiting for his bottle.

•    •    •

My first post on this blog was almost five years ago. It was a begrudging post because it was a begrudging blog, launched in a begrudging response to the notion that its presence was somehow essential to my future as a writer. Ridiculous, of course, and I would never advise anyone to write anything, in any medium, for these reasons. But like most people, I do not always heed the advice I give to others.

I posted sporadically for about two years until, for no particular reason, I decided to commit. I honestly can’t remember why I made that decision. It wasn’t making any money off it. I wasn’t getting enough traffic to having a meaningful impact on book sales. I wasn’t even getting enough traffic to have a meaningful impact on my sense of whether or not my work here was of value to anyone. I guess I just decided not to begrudge it anymore. I think it was simple as that.

I’ve posted a lot of pretty low quality work here. Out of all the writing I’ve done here, I can recall only a handful of posts that I believe qualify as truly good writing, though I realize that I’m not always the best judge of my own work. That doesn’t mean there’s no value in the other posts, since the quality of the writing is only one component of the work I do here, though it might be the component that’s most important to me. And in truth, part of the value of the lesser quality posts is precisely that they’re lesser quality: I’ve come to understand that it’s impossible for me to produce good writing without producing a lot of less-good writing. Which is to say, the latter is part-and-parcel of the former. They cannot be separated. One is dependent on the other, it is the contrast between the two that makes each of them what they are. Like happiness and sadness, I suppose. Fullness and emptiness, coldness and warmth.

I never imagined I’d receive the amount of support I currently receive via this space. It’s huge, it’s humbling, almost overwhelming at times. I’m not talking about money – though I’m not not talking about money, either, and thank you for that. But even more, I mean the kind, thoughtful, generous comments and notes. Some by hand, even. Amazing. And the strangest thing (though it’s actually probably not the strangest thing, it’s probably the most logical thing in the world, it’s just that I’m only now learning to recognize it as such) is that they always arrive precisely when I most need them. I guess what I’m saying is, again, “thank you.”

I am sold out of the new book, but have more on order. I will ship them out just as soon as I am restocked. Another thing to thank you for, all those orders. I guess I can maybe now humble myself enough to say that if you like the book, I would deeply appreciate it if you’d mention it to others. If you have the time and inclination, if it feels right to you, maybe you could write a review somewhere. Yes, even Amazon, though I still encourage you to support your local bookseller when it comes time to part with your money.

It’s probably obvious by now, but this space has become pretty important to me. It is the only truly unfiltered, unmediated public outlet I have for my writing: I write what I want, when I want, how I want. In one sense, it’s risky as hell, a high wire act. But I try not to dwell on the risk, or the self-consciousness that results when I do. There’s already plentiful fear of risk in this world to go around. There’s more than enough self-consciousness, too. I needn’t add mine to the mix.

Anyway. Cold again this morning. Thirteen below. When I came in from chores, Penny had just dropped kefir doughnuts into a pot of the lard we rendered last week. I warmed my hands a bit over the wood stove. I shucked out of my insulated overalls, kicked out of my boots. I thought of that little Jersey bull. I don’t know why.

I sat down with my family. My fingers were still chilled, but the doughnuts were hot, and the contrast between the two felt good in my hands.

 

 

 

 

The Smallest Steps

It was -10 this morning, so naturally I decided to fire up the smoke pit for the latest round of hams and bacons. By 7:30, in the aftermath of morning chores, I’d shoveled off the tin and laid bare the wire grate that supports the pits’ precious cargo. By 8:00, I’d kindled a pair of small fires (one at either end of the pit for maximum smoke production), and pulled three hogs worth of brined belly and ass through two feet of snow, the buckets of syrup-and-salt infused pork balanced precariously in the utility sled. I thought to have Penny take a picture; as an act of civic duty, I’d offer it to school districts nationwide, fodder with which to put the fear of god into underachieving students. See this? the administrators would say, holding the photo of my sorry pig-pulling self mere inches from their students’ self-satisfied noses. That’s what happens when you drop out of high school! Damn. Even if I sold the photos, it’d have to be cheaper than No Child Left Behind.

Alrighty. Just a little bookkeeping. I now have copies of The Nourishing Homestead in my possession, and if any of ya’ll would like a copy, I’d be more than pleased to sell you one from my personal stash. I can’t match Amazon’s price (I pay almost as much as Amazon sells them for), but I can offer to inscribe your book anywhichway you’d like. If you live in the US, I’ll include postage in the $30 cover price. Hit me up at the Generosity Enabler or, if you don’t do Paypal (and good on ya’), shoot me an email and we’ll make arrangements. Everyone who’s read the book thus far has been real complimentary, and I’d go so far as to say there’s a better than 50-50 chance you’ll like it.

Secondly, as you can see from the above poster, we’ve got a real fun workshop coming up, led by our amazing tool maker and blacksmithing friend Lucian Avery and spoon fanatic Andre Souligny. This is a great chance to familiarize (or refamiliarize) yourself with the fine art of knife sharpening, as well as the use of numerous traditional hand tools and wood working techniques. Come days end, you’ll walk away with a spoon of your very own making. As the supremely talented Alexander Yerks says “metal and plastic sort of set up a dull mood even before you take the first bite.”

I couldn’t agree more, and would only add that revolutions often begin with the smallest steps. Like making your own spoon.

 

 

 

 

Locking Up the Food

In progress

The storm was lesser than forecast. We got maybe three inches of snow, though by this morning the wind had deposited it into sharp-ridged drifts. I pushed through two of them on my way to the barn this morning, both knee-deep, the snow soft and yielding. It was zero, but the early light – thin, uncertain, sunless -made the air feel even colder, and by the time I returned to the house, my fingers stung. I shucked my gloves and held my hands over the hot iron of the cookstove, flipping them every dozen seconds or so until the cold was all burned out.

•    •    •

A few steps of the dance, performed just three or four days a month, enriched their lives greatly and took almost no effort. As here on earth, the people of this planet were not a single people but many peoples, and as time went on, each people developed its own approach to the dance. Some continued to dance just a few steps three or four days a month. Others found it made sense for them to have even more of their favorite foods, so they danced a few steps every second or third day. Still others saw no reason why they shouldn’t live mostly on their favorite foods, so they danced a few steps every single day. Things went on this way for tens of thousands of years among the people of this planet, who thought of themselves as living in the hands of the gods and leaving everything to them. For this reason, they called themselves Leavers. 

But one group of Leavers eventually said to themselves “Why should we just live partially on the foods we favor? All we have to do is devote a lot more time to dancing.” So this one particular group took to dancing several hours a day. Because they thought of themselves as taking their welfare into their own hands, we’ll call them the Takers. The results were spectacular. The Takers were inundated with their favorite foods. A manager class soon emerged to look after the accumulation and stores of surpluses -something that hand never been necessary when everyone was just dancing a few hours a week. The members of this manager class were far too busy to do any dancing themselves, and since their work was so critical, they soon came to be regarded as social and political leaders. But after a few years these leaders of the Takers began to notice that food production was dropping, and they went out to see what was going wrong. What they found was that the dancers were slacking off. They weren’t dancing several hours a day, they were dancing only an hour or two and sometimes not even that much. The leaders asked why. 

“What’s the point of all this dancing?” the dancers asked. “It isn’t necessary to dance seven or eight hours a day to get the food we need. There’s plenty of food even if we just dance an hour a day. We’re never hungry. So why shouldn’t we relax and take life easy, the way we used to?” 

The leaders saw things very differently, of course. If the dancers went back to living the way they used to, then the leaders would soon have to do the same, and that didn’t appeal to them at all. They considered and tried many different schemes to encourage or cajole or tempt or shame or force the dancers into dancing longer hours, but nothing worked until one of them came up with the idea of locking up the food.

From My Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn. I highly recommend it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Thing That Really Helps

Snowshoeing to evening chores

The truck died on Saturday, and I suppose it could have been worse, as I was no more than a mile from home. Of lesser convenience was the fact that it sputtered to a halt while towing the tractor behind it, and furthermore just as I was entering the arc of a blind corner on a main road. To put it in the mildest of terms, it was not a great place to be stranded with so many large and unyielding pieces of equipment.

I retrieved Penny, unloaded the tractor, decoupled the trailer, wrapped one end of a chain around the truck’s plow frame and the other around the tractor’s drawbar, and began towing the truck to safety. The boys are ever eager to bear witness to such antics, so they rode in the cab of the truck with my wife, and I must admit it improved my mood considerably to glance over my shoulder at my family, shoulder-to-shoulder across the bench seat of our old Ford, me pulling them up the road at 14 mph in search of a plowed lot large enough to navigate a change of direction. Some families go to the movies or to an amusement park, but not us. Oh, no: We go jaunting about in our absurd conveyance of malfunctioning machinery.

Once the truck was situated, I rigged up the trailer ball on the tractor, hitched up to the trailer, and pulled that to safety. And then, to what I’d like to think is my great credit, I almost relaxed. Everything and everyone was out of harm’s way. True, the truck was broken. True, by the time I’d fiddled with it enough to realize it needed a new fuel pump, which necessitates removal of the turbo assembly, which therefore punts it beyond the realm of repair work I am willing to tackle in our snowbound driveway, I’d lost the majority of the day. True, it will cost multiple hundreds of dollars to put the old belching beast back on the road. And true, at the frantic apex of my stress level, which coincided with the moment I first stepped from the driver’s seat to appraise the whole sorry situation, I dipped briefly into a morass of self-pity. If not for the soothing support of my family and the view of them riding high in the truck’s cab as the tractor chugged us all up the road, I might have dwelled there.

I sometimes think that people who want to live this life (or some version thereof) place far too much emphasis on the hard skills it demands. Truth is, nothing we do here requires an exceptional degree of skill or cleverness. I realize I should not admit this, what with a certain book to sell and whatnot, but hey. I’d be lying if I said otherwise. Now, I’m not saying there are no hard skills involved, only that none of these skills ask for much more than a bit of dogged persistence and the occasional guiding hand to acquire. In my experience, it’s not expertise that enables this life. Perhaps expertise eventually develops, but only as an afterthought. Only as the result of human resourcefulness and simple curiosity, so basic as to be available to all. Or most, anyway.

Oh, and there’s one other thing that really helps: Equanimity. And along with it, an ability (or is it simple willingness?) to find mirth in the small, frequent absurdities of our days. I remember a few years ago, when Melvin had a long extension ladder leaning against his barn. A gusting wind had blown the ladder sideways, so that it leaned at a compound angle. It remained that way for multiple days, and it finally occurred to me that perhaps I ought offer my assistance in righting the ladder, for as any of you who’ve wrangled extension ladders know, height is of tremendous advantage. I am six-foot, three-inches tall. Melvin is… well, not that tall.

One afternoon, I asked Melvin if he’d like me to help straighten the ladder. Nope, he said. I like it that way. It reminds me not to take life too seriously. 

You know what? I was sort of sorry when he finally took the ladder down.

 

 

Buckets

It has been consistently cold for a few weeks now, and though we’ve had few large storms, the small fallings of snow have accumulated. The skiing is magnificent. We glide down the tractor road, through the copse of balsam I’ve been cutting, into Melvin’s woods, past the old hunting camper ten years unused or more, and finally across the high mowing. We tilt our faces to the strong winter sun, heedless of surgeon general’s warnings. One midday, high-sun ski and already I feel better in a way I hadn’t realized I needed to feel better in.

Back in time for chores, lesser now that all the pigs have been dispatched. One’s on the kitchen counter this very moment, as a matter of fact: We let it hang outside overnight and it got colder than I’d realized it would and now the meat is too stiff for cutting. But the fires are burning and the sun is coming strong through our south-facing windows, and soon the flesh will thaw.

I need to find more piglets. The spring freshening cycle is soon to begin, and the buckets we leave in Jimmy and Sara’s milk room will be filled over and over again with the thick colostrum that cannot be pumped into the bulk tank. I leave four 5-gallon buckets at a time; Jimmy calls when they are full or I stop in if I’m passing by, grab what there is. I carry the full buckets two at a time to the car. They are heavy and if I step wrong, they thump against my legs, not painfully, but hard enough to remind me of their worth.

•     •     •

The Shameless Commerce Division is again open for business, this time for a single, limited production item, courtesy of our oldest. Happy shopping.

 

 

Rumblestrip

Winter camp.

Lately, we’ve been listening to the conversations at Rumblestrip Vermont. Great stuff, whether you’re a VT’er or not.

You might even enjoy this one.

 

 

Two Swirls

Over the past two days we slaughtered and processed two of our three pigs, a task that to me is always more daunting in anticipation than action. We have now killed and processed enough pigs that the process is etched in our thoughts, emotions, and bodies. I know the particular anxiety I will feel in the moments before death. I know the certain fatigue of six straight hours spent cleaving the carcasses into chops and roasts and sausage trim. I know even the small sorrow of leaving one pig alive, and I wonder how that it is for her. She exhibits no distress, nor displays any change in routine that might be interpreted as such. But still. How can she not miss her mates, if only for the warmth of their bodies at night? Or perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps she’s glad for all the extra space.

I have written enough on this site already about killing animals for meat, so I will add only this: After so many years, it has gotten easier. Maybe I should not admit this, but it has. For better or worse, we have accepted and acclimated to our role in the conversion of others’ flesh into our own. It’s been a humbling process, and this humility feels right to us. There is peace in this humility. I cannot tell you exactly why, and I would never have anticipated such, but we have found it to be true.

On Sunday, after we’d finished dressing the hogs, I washed my hands at the kitchen sink. I’d nicked myself earlier in the day, and now I removed the bandage I’d applied to stem the cuts’ flow. As the water ran over my hands, I watched two distinct swirls form in the sink basin: One my own, the crimson-blood shade of a shallow extremity wound, and the other the russet-red of the pigs’ arterial reserves.

In seconds, drawn by the drainward slope, the two swirls became one. I turned up the water and the blood soon disappeared.

Relevant

Sorry for the double post, but I just remembered this essay of Charles’, which seems relevant to the past couple posts and subsequent discussion. Thanks to Marie for bringing it to my attention in the first place!

Bound Together

Spalted maple spoon in progress

January 15. Six-below. The light comes noticeably earlier now. I always have the sense at this time of year that winter is too short. I like feeling this way. It helps me appreciate the cold while it’s here, though I know it’s a fleeting appreciation. Come late March or early April, and the inevitable late season arctic front, or the final heavy snow before the first spring rain, my gratitude will have soured. We’ll be down to the last row of firewood, the last stack of hay, the last frayed vestiges of our current delight at the unique beauty of mornings like these: Trees frosted, early sun glinting off branches, the cows and their frozen whiskers.

We had a heifer wander last night, tracing the boot trod path from house to barn back to house again, and even now I like thinking of her out there in the dark, walking that narrow path while we slept. This morning, I found her lying in the barn, waiting to be returned to her kind. I led her into the paddock and walked back to the house. I could feel her hoof prints through the soles of my boots.

 •     •     •

I had an interview last night with a woman who writes a parenting column for the Washington Post. She has at least one school going child, aged seven. She wanted to know how our boys learned to read. She seemed surprised that they learned without being told they must. Without being told how and when they must. She seemed surprised that they enjoy reading so much. Speaking of her own child, she said I keep asking the teacher when the love of reading will come.

It’s hard to love something you’re forced to do, I said.

Actually, I didn’t. But I sort of wish I had.

•    •    •

Thank you for your feedback relating to yesterday’s post. Something I failed to mention is that it won’t actually be us doing the majority of the teaching; our desire is primarily to act as the catalyst, to create a gathering space that facilitates the sharing of these skills, so many of which can be better demonstrated by others. Certainly, we’ll lead some classes, but as I wrote in The Nourishing Homestead, if we specialize in anything, it’s in being generalists, not specialists. Fortunately, we have a fair number of incredibly talented friends who are excited for the opportunity to share what they’ve learned. In many cases, what they’ve dedicated their lives to learning.

The non-profit vs for-profit structure is a conundrum, for sure. My experience with non-profits – both as a long-serving board member and as friend to many who have headed non-profits – suggests to me that we are not well suited to the bureaucratic and structural constraints they impose.

On the other hand, I acknowledge their might be a perception problem with declaring ourselves a for-profit business, which in short is that we’re in this to grow the business and make a bunch of dough. Nothing could be further from the truth; while we are adamant about instructors being justly compensated for their time and experience, and while we will have to earn something to cover the basic costs of overhead and time invested, we do not view this as a profit generating venture.

Anyway. I realize that no one can make these decisions for us, but I do appreciate hearing others’ experience and insights.

•     •     •

Finally, a quick word about the “ironic bind” of encouraging people to go out and buy something, even as I extol frugality. There is, of course, some truth to this. I think most of us who endeavor to thrive on our own terms are thus bound to some degree or another by an economy that depends on us not thriving on our own terms. Indeed, this is one of our primary motivations for launching Lazy Mill Living Arts in the first place: To cultivate the skills necessary for becoming less bound.

That said I admittedly feel a bit defensive when someone points to my own ironic bind, and particularly when it’s someone who reads this space regularly. I put a lot of time into this blog and I demand nothing in return. I am able to do so only because enough (and just enough) people find value in my work and are furthermore in a position to place a number on that value. They are, in effect, paying the way for those who cannot or simply will not compensate me, either via donation or buying my books. My guess is that most of them are happy to do so.

I guess what I’m saying is this: Yes, I recognize the ironic bind (or is it a hypocritical bind?) inherent to selling my work. Maybe even to raising money for a community-based project like LMLA. I feel this bind. But to those who read my work for free (and don’t get me wrong, I encourage you to keep doing so), I caution you against becoming blind to your own ironic binds, including the fact that others are paying to ensure this space remains free for you.

Still, I think the ultimate solution lies in all of us looking beyond our personal ironic binds – acknowledging them, yes, but not dwelling on them and certainly not (as I have done here) wasting precious time and energy defending them  – and simply rolling up our sleeves to do what we can do to lessen their grip on us all. Because for better or for worse, like it or not, we’re all bound together.

Thank you.

We’ll Just Have to be Ready Now

Final spoon orders. Rye thanks you for your patience.

I plumb forgot that the bio attached to the Yankee magazine essay I linked to yesterday included a mention of Lazy Mill Living Arts, a fact that did not escape the attention of at least a handful of particularly observant readers.

We were sort of waiting for the website to be complete before a formal announcement (believe me, I’ll let you know when it’s ready for public consumption). Maybe even more so, I suspect we were also waiting until we plain and simple felt ready, passing mention in the Yankee bio notwithstanding. I guess we’ll just have to be ready now, eh?

We’ve been kicking around this idea for a good long while, and last year, we hosted a handful of workshops. A test drive, if you will. We liked it. We met great people. We had fun. Most importantly, it felt right, a natural evolution of our life with the land, something we can offer that is tangible and – we’d like to think – meaningful. Specific to me, it feels like an analog extension of my written work, a way to connect and share that transcends the inevitable distancing of screen and page. It bothers me, this distancing. But you knew that.

None of which explains exactly what Lazy Mill Living Arts really is, which is perhaps best articulated by the brief description I wrote for the website-in-progress:

Lazy Mill Living Arts is dedicated to reviving traditional skills of hand and land. Lazy Mill was founded on a single tenet: That with the benefit of simple tools and basic knowledge, we all have the capacity to shape our world as we imagine it.

At Lazy Mill, we teach skills that are at once practical, beautiful, and necessary to the art of providing for one’s self and community. We are motivated by the thought of our students returning to their home towns to disperse these skills like seeds, restoring vibrancy, resiliency, and the unrivaled satisfaction of honest work.

What are these skills? They are as basic as honing a pocket knife or planning a garden, as emotionally and physically difficult as slaughtering and processing a hog, as pleasurable as carving a spoon from a limb of apple wood, as gracefully intricate as weaving a black ash pack basket, and as crucial as making medicine from plants. They are skills that emphasize production over consumption, and that honor the complex web of relationships comprising the natural world and our place within it.

There will be much more to say as this project evolves and unfolds, and of course I will keep you updated as things progress. Oh, one other thing I can mention now: Children. Yes.

•     •     •

One aspect we’re struggling with right now is funding, pertaining mostly to the need for workshop space. We have been kicking around the idea of crowdfunding, but I’ll be honest: We can’t quite decide how we feel about this option. Partly this is because we’re just not sure we have what it takes to sufficiently humble ourselves to the process (as a friend of ours who ran a successful crowdfunding campaign put it to me: “It’s like walking around with your pants down”).

But it’s also in part because we can’t figure out how to feel about crowdfunding in general. I’ve heard it referred to as “Internet begging,” and while that seems a tad harsh, I can’t deny the vague sense of aversion I feel every time the subject comes up. Then again, perhaps that sense of aversion is nothing more than my resistance to humbling myself, to standing up in full view with my pants ‘round my ankles, saying, in effect, this matters to me and I need your support.

Anyway. I offer this because I am interested to hear your thoughts on the matter, both in regards to the project itself, and the funding dilemma. Thank you.