Ben Hewitt's Blog, page 39

Just For Fun

Spud Art

As I noted a few posts back in relation to Heather, I take a certain whimsical pleasure in imagining my readers’ lives as I see fit. I mean, why the heck not? Because are they not doing much the same with me? Therefore, it seems only fair that I level the playing field. Without further ado, I introduce:

BeeHappee

BeeHappee is in her late 30’s. She lives on the outskirts of Detroit and has four young children. Her husband words in sanitation and she has an office job, something clerical, without much oversight (how else could she leave as many comments as she does?). She likes hard cheese, black coffee, and lavendar-scented hand soap. She doesn’t stay at hotels often, but when she does, she always cleans out the bathroom supplies, albeit somewhat guiltily. She’s a big fan of Cat Stevens and Van Morrison. She smokes two cigarettes per day, something unfiltered. Camel’s, probably. One in the morning, before the kids are awake, and one in the evening, after they’ve gone to bed.

BeeHappee has overcome adversity, that much is clear. At some point in her late-20’s she made a conscious decision not to succumb to depression. Since then, she has, for the most part, managed to, well, be happy. It is not always easy, but it beats the alternative.

I admire this about her.

Jeff Bird

Jeff has worked hard his entire life and has done well for himself. He is a generous man who believes strongly in his religious faith, his family, and American exceptionalism. He drives a Ford F-Series pickup, but not one of those wimpy half-tons. For Jeff, it’s a F350 Lariat with duallies and a Powerstroke, although like most who bought one of Ford’s recent diesels, Jeff regrets the decision and will probably get a Chevy next time ’round, even though GM accepted the government bailout. He is 52 years old and in good health. He does not smoke or drink, although he does very much enjoy barbecued spare ribs and has a weakness for the strawberry shakes at Burger King.

Jeff often disagrees with what he reads here and is not always sure what draws him to this site. He hopes it is just curiosity, but he occasionally worries that it is something deeper than that, a small crack in his worldview, a slight distorting of his vision. This is sort of exciting but also a little scary.

Eumaeus 

E is 41 years of age. His sleep is often interrupted by vivid dreams involving prehistoric birds of prey.

Ncfarmchick

Nc has blond hair that just brushes her shoulders. When she wants to feel especially pretty, or when she’s feeling blue, she braids her hair into pigtails and ties ribbons around the braids. She has two young girls who adore her. Her husband is in the Navy and is away at sea for long periods of time. This is difficult, but their relationship is strong and they do ok. She keeps chickens and has a milk goat named Bella. She would like to be farming full time, but her husband’s job makes this difficult. She is currently teaching her older daughter (Ida) how to milk Bella. In the evenings, Nc gathers her daughters around her and reads Little House on the Prairie while drinking chamomile tea with goat milk and honey.

She finds tremendous contentment in the commonplace nature of her days.

Dirk

Dirk is a gentle man with a cushy state job. He is about 50 and does not try to hide his expanding bald spot. He has no children and does not want them. He is married to a sweet woman whose name begins with L. He has a strange affinity for 70’s-era punk music – The Clash, Iggy Pop, Velvet Underground, and so on. He drinks regularly, but rarely to excess. On the rare occasions he does drink too much, he finds himself worrying about his future (this explains why he rarely drinks too much). He is six-feet, one-inch tall and weighs 194-pounds. This is closer to 200-pounds than he would like, so he has started to pay closer attention to his diet.

Dirk loves being outdoors. He particularly likes to ride his bicycle and ski. He is not a natural athlete, but through dogged persistence has gotten pretty good at both cycling and skiing. His parents live next door to him. They drive him a little crazy, but his easy-going nature allows him to absorb and deflect their mild senility with enviable grace.

If anyone feels left out, I’m taking requests! 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Right Choice

Coming home

The temperature fell hard overnight, dropping a good 20-degrees in the 8 (ok, 9) hours I spent holding down my pillow. With the cold front came snow and wind, and this morning we awoke to wraith-like spindrifts spiraling across the pasture. The blown air bit hard on my cheeks and tunneled through the gaps between sleeve and glove, jacket collar and hat. It stung, but the stinging felt like winter should feel, and the house was never more than 100 yards away, so I did chores with no particular urgency. The colder I got, the more I’d appreciate my return to the protective cocoon of our home, where I’d have the distinctly rural luxury of choosing between two wood stoves by which to warm myself. If the cookstove, I could lord over percolating coffee and the twin five-gallon pots of bone broth from the quartet of lambs we processed over the weekend. If the Elm, I could stand sock-footed on the fieldstone hearth, feel the irregularities of the coarse stone against my feet, gaze at the unadorned cement board heat shield behind it, and admonish myself (yet again) for its incompleteness, which in turn would only remind me of sundry other incomplete projects. And then the subsequent descent into the inarguable truth of my failings.

So I chose the cookstove, and it was the right choice.

 

 

The Truth is Simple Enough

Last ski before the rain

For those of you who are waiting on custom spoons, Rye would like you to know that he is getting close to catching up on orders. He thanks you for your patience. 

If ever one were looking for an excuse to lapse into a weather-related depressive episode, this morning is it. The rain is gathering courage by the minute, and the already too-warm temperature is rising steadily. Snow has slid off all roof surfaces but the low-angle, rusted tin lid of the woodshed, and even that’s not long for this world, as evidenced by the precarious curl hanging from its downslope edge like a wave caught at the height of its unfurling. I gave it wide berth on my way to feed the pigs, let me tell you.

Last night we watched the documentary Rich Hill, which chronicles the lives of three teenage boys in the town of Rich Hill, MO. For any of you inclined to take my advice and see it for yourselves, my only caution is that you might want to wait until after the holidays (or at the very least, until it’s stopped raining). And I do advise you all to see it, although I hasten to add that in some ways, it’s not an excellent piece of film-making; we found it to be a little slow, and the preponderance of night-time scenes ask a lot of the viewer, because there are long periods when it’s a bit difficult to actually see what’s going on.

Still, the power of the movie is not confined to its technical chops, and instead lurks primarily in the honesty with which to portrays the reality of small-town American poverty. It does not attempt to make heroes of its subjects. Indeed, at times it almost begs us to indict these families for poor decision making – for instance, the preponderance of smoldering cigarettes and super-size sodas is almost painful to behold, and in many scenes, it’s difficult to even like these people. They swear at their children. They lie in bed. They smoke cigarettes and drink soda and swear at their children while lying in bed.

But I think it’s precisely because the film is honest that it works. I never felt manipulated; I never felt like anyone was trying to convince me of anything in particular, and therefore I came away from it more convinced than ever that we inhabit a rigged economy. No, not just economy: It’s more than that. It’s a rigged society, where those who are born to parents who know how the game is played learn for ourselves how to play the game, and are thus rewarded. And those who don’t are too often condemned to a life spent in the margins, desperately trying to figure out the rules for themselves.

•     •     •

On a not-entirely-dissimilar note, I was intrigued by the following comment in response to Monday’s post.

In your post you mentioned the ability to not consider your food in financial terms as indicative of three things: a well off luxury, foresight/luck of property ownership and mostly the acquisition of hands on competence and skill building in a “university” that doesn’t formally exist. I would like to know if you think you’d as vigorously and joyfully pursued that university if you didn’t have the well off-ness and property ownership as a prerequisite?

In combination with the aforementioned film, this got me thinking a little more about how we actually ended up where we are, which is at least in part dependent on a chain of events I often describe as being forged from dumb luck.

First, I should probably put “well off-ness” in context, which in our case, is the well off-ness of decidedly middle-class America. There are no trust funds and there is no assurance of a future inheritance. On the other hand, I’m pretty sure that if we were truly in a pickle, we needn’t worry about starving, not merely because our family wouldn’t allow such a thing occur (oh, sure, they might let us dangle a bit, wait until we’re down a few pants sizes and maybe a kidney or two, but I doubt they’d totally hang us out to dry), but equally because we are fortunate enough to have a network of friends and community who possess the resources to care for one another. Not so much in a financial sense – the majority of our friends and neighbors are not wealthy – but in the resources of hand and land that are ultimately what support us all.

Second, I suppose in some regards our property ownership was a prerequisite for us putting ourselves through the School That Doesn’t Exist (STDE… say it out loud… sounds like study, don’t it? Clever, eh?) I mean, so much of what we learned in STDE we learned on this land and from people in this community. This is not to say we didn’t come to this property with some basic skills – for instance, we’d both worked construction, and Penny had spent the past dozen or so years managing field crews on organic vegetable farms. And I know these skills – however crude they were and in some cases, still are – have been an asset. But in all honestly, it often seems as if we’ve had to unlearn as much as we’ve had to learn. Hell, we’re still unlearning all the time.

I’m not convinced that owning property is a pre-requisite everyone’s attendance to STDE (and now it occurs to me that the acronym STDE actually sounds like a sexually transmitted disease, and I will thus cease to employ it). I know people who’ve learned many of these skills on someone else’s land. I know of people who’ve learned these skills while living in the city. Conversely, I know of lots of people who inhabit property ideally suited to hands-on, land-based competence who are disinterested in even the most rudimentary of these skills. It’s not that they couldn’t learn them – hell, if I can learn them, anybody can. I think it’s mostly that they just don’t want to. Or that it doesn’t even occur to them.

I thought about this quite a bit while watching Rich Hill. Because it seemed to me as if the families in the film weren’t merely lacking money; they also lacked a particular type of resourcefulness that might have allowed them to prosper in the absence of money. I do not know this with certainty; it’s only a movie, after all, a snapshot of their lives. And even if what I say is true, I do not believe they are to blame for this lack of resourcefulness, which is in no way, shape, or form cultivated by the consumer economy and its insatiable need to make us its dependents.

Anyway. I leave you to your Christmas (or whatever your preferred celebration might be) with this rather long and sober post. I suspect a few of you might wish to have read something light-hearted, something about the beauty of the season, the togetherness of family, the abundance of the table and the packages under the tree. And so on.

I sincerely hope you are in a position to have all of the above. I really do. But in the midst of it all, let’s not forget that the presence of these things in our lives is not a given. Because you and me, we’ve been fortunate enough to do one of two things: We’ve either figured out how to play the rigged game, the one with all the convoluted rules that sometimes have us wondering what our lives might look like if we just said fuck it and stopped playing. Or we’ve been stupid-stubborn enough to make up our own game, and you know what? I can’t promise that even this game isn’t rigged. I can’t tell you it’s all milk and honey.

But no matter how you look at it, the truth is simple enough: Not everyone is so lucky.

Nothing is Worth That

Scouting

A few times over the past couple of years, readers have asked me to discuss the finances of our food production. I’ve always demurred, in part because I’m not inclined to think about our food in those terms, but also because it’s almost impossibly complicated. For instance, it might seem simple enough to put a price tag on our beef and milk: I’d tally up the purchased inputs (hay and minerals, primarily), the cost of slaughter and processing, and attach a marginal wage to our efforts. Maybe a bit of depreciation for the barn, fencing, and tractor.

But what about the value of the fertility? Last I took measure, we had 40-odd yards of compost piled at the height of our land, most of it the byproduct of our cows’ digestive tracts. And what of the value of the exercise we get moving the cows to fresh paddocks each summer’s day, back-and-forth across our pasture, leaning into the steepest rises with armfuls of fence posts and reeled wire? How do I account for that? Do I subtract from the total cost of inputs the gym membership we might otherwise need to keep a lid on our love handles? Do I subtract the medications we’re not on? How do I account for the fact we’re still eating butter from the spring grass flush? It’s almost as orange as the condensed sunshine it actually is.

It is true that we spend very little at the grocery store. I hesitate to offer a hard estimate, because I know it’s changeable according to season and whether or not I’ve got a hankering for a wedge of cheese and a few extra bucks burning a hole in my pocket with which to make it mine. Still, we don’t spend a lot, and much of what we do spend is on items that are not strictly essential. For instance, there’s my coffee habit. There’s the irresistibility of the aforementioned cheese, and of course we are cursed/blessed to live in an area that’s lousy with the stuff. Hell, you can’t swing a $10 bill without thumping into the half-pound of blue it’ll buy. And last spring was sort of a bust for our little sugaring operation, so we’ve been buying syrup from Jimmy and Sara. $45/gallon and worth every back-breaking penny, let me tell you.

But just because we don’t spend much at the grocery store doesn’t mean we don’t spend a lot. We usually drop around $2k/year for hay, not including a pretty significant investment in sweat and soreness. The free-choice minerals we offer our critters run us another $600 or $700. Oh, and soil amendments. Not cheap. In truth, our equipment and infrastructure depreciation in relation to the animals isn’t much; our pole barn was built about 8 years ago for less than $2500, and the tractor hardly counts, since it’s used primarily for firewood and other forestry projects. Well, that, and extracting the plow truck from wherever I’m idiotic enough to mire it. Of course, there’s grain for the meat birds and layers and pigs. Too much grain, frankly. Grain is a chain we’d like to break. Then again, fried chicken is a treat we like to eat. You can see the conundrum.

Honestly, this is the most I’ve thought about our food in financial terms for a very long time. I think that’s a huge luxury. Huge. For one, it’s indicative of the fact that we’re well off enough to not have to think about our food in financial terms. For another, it’s indicative of the fact that we had the foresight (read: dumb luck) to buy the right piece of property at a time when the right piece of property didn’t require a lifetime of debt servitude. No small thing, that, and I try not to forget it, but of course from time-to-time I do.

But even more so, I’d like to think it’s indicative of the fact that we’ve spent the past 20 or so years putting ourselves through the university that doesn’t actually exist, the one where they teach the simple-but-elegant skills necessary to transform the aforementioned inputs into real food. Not just how to grow and cook, but how to build a barn, to run a chainsaw, to drop a tree. How to shoot a gun, to cut a pig, to sprout a seed, to prune a tree, to string a fence. To mend your pants, even.

It’s funny, but I can’t even talk about something like our food budget without coming ’round to education, and the ways in which, from my stilted point-of-view, our contemporary educational system fails us, because of course it teaches none of this, or even that such things are worthy of learning. It assumes instead that we are all for the better to rely on industry. It assumes that efficiency and economy of scale are more worthy than the emergence of seedlings, the arterial blood of the hog, even the simple barn we’ve relied on for all these years. It’s no one’s idea of beautiful, that barn.

Not true: It’s my idea of beautiful.

For those who wonder what it costs us to grow the overwhelming majority of our own food, the only honest answer is a lot. Thousands of dollars and thousands of hours each and every year. Are we saving money in the long run? Heck, I don’t know. I really don’t, and I cannot in good conscience encourage others to follow a similar path simply for the purpose of saving money, because I suspect the disillusionment will come fast and hard. The money saved will never amount to enough, and the bitterness of that realization will mask the simple sweetness of the work.

And nothing is worth that.

 

 

 

 

 

 

She’s Back

You know, I kind of wish I could meet this woman. Enjoy.

So Begins Los Angeles and I am NOT Kidding:

Okay, so like last night? We finished mall shopping and I got this OMG TOTAL RAD and SUPER CUTE acrylic purple-sparkle sweater and wore that bitch home, found parking for my enormous (rad) car around midnight and for reals, the soothing mercury vapor lamp bathing the plastic fibers of my entire ensemble in its glow made me look like I was on fire. And I am on fire, okay? Meaning my life is BLOWING UP it’s so rad.

Now I’m online ordering multiple plastic figurines for each of your blog followers, just a small token of the TOTAL LOVE and jealousy, hostility and aggression I feel for people I’ve never met in person but who are all, oh, dude, my cow is like, so friendly it gives me milk and my sheep are knitting things and can you SMELL ME? PLUS! LOOK AT THIS HOUSE I BUILT! Oh my god. Hello, do you know what renting even IS? It means more time for shopping and TEXTING OBVIOUSLY. Oh my god. OKAY.

Anywho, so I am totally ordering stuff online PLUS I’m also reading about Hollywood celebrities and for real, who would date that guy because he doesn’t even make movies anymore plus? That girl is like, old. Oh my god. I just texted my friend all about that PLUS I’m maybe ordering takeout, plus TOTALLY updating Facebook and chillaxing in general. Also, OMG, so cute this cat video! SO FUNNY! Okay, listen to this goat. It’s screaming! WTF? I am dying.

Across the room the kids are TOTALLY staring at their multiple screens and game consoles and I could feel the unbridled joy of zombie-darkness coming off them in waves. “Aren’t you tired, girls?” I inquired. No reply. They are SO into it! SO CUTE! “Aren’t you tired, girls?”

“Shut up, mother,” they flipped me off in unison. “Thanks to your decision to liberate us from the tyranny of coming up with our own agendas, we just can’t get enough of this game: Kill All The People Dead with Deadly Weapons II.”

OMG, motherhood, AM I RIGHT?

In the kitchen, my boyfriend was making Molotov-Midori shots with melon liquor and gasoline. Edited to say: okay, dude? I don’t even know what dew IS and I can’t even parody that paragraph because WTF is he talking about? Oh my god. Anywho, we had green drinks and ciggies for dinner because I am totally losing weight and getting into my skinny pants. So over being big fat size two. WTF. YO. Also YOLO.

This morning we had MENTHOL cigarettes and coffee (with hazelnut-gingerbread-pumpkin spice non-dairy fat-free creamer) for breakfast and the coffee made itself because I went and got it at Starbucks. I was still wearing the purple sweater from last night and if you don’t know how HOT that is, that is HOT.

The girls didn’t come with me because they were on the seventy-third level of Dead People Dead and they shot everything they could because YO. Also YOLO.

So I get back and the girls are like, YO, MOM, what is for breakfast? And I’m all, um, I don’t know. Do I look like your servant? Am I supposed to go out and GATHER YOUR EGGS FROM THE STORE BY HAND? OMG, RUDE! I was all, YO, can’t you open a box of sugar cereal? And they are like, YO. And I am like YO. And then the older one said, your sweater is rad, Mom. So I go, I KNOW.

But then her sister is like, COME ONE I WANT TO GO TO THE DEADLY WEAPON SHOP AND RELOAD, FOOL, and I said, DO IT. YO. And I sat there losing weight with my coffee and watched my girls blow up this whole crazy rad building or country or SOMETHING on the shooter game and you are probably saying like, NO WAY but I am writing on this comment section to tell you: WAY. They did it. I swear to GAWD and LOL it doesn’t get any better.

So begins another day.

 

So Begins, a Self Parody (inspired by Miss Fifi)

I finished knitting another cage-free alpaca sweater around midnight, the soothing candlelight bathing the soft fibers in its glow (I’m making a sweater for each of my blog followers, just a small token of the love I feel for people I’ve never met in person, and oh the joy I find in the task and the small clicks of my fair trade knitting needles, like the sound of pure gratitude). Across the room, the boys were digging into a trigonometry lesson, and I could feel the unbridled joy of learning coming off them in waves. “Aren’t you tired, sons?” I inquired. “Oh, no, father,” they piped in unison. “Thanks to you and dear mother and your decision to liberate us from the tyranny of school, we just can’t get enough advanced mathematics.”

In the kitchen, Penny was making tea from dehydrated morning dew siphoned from clover leaves in the pre-dawn hours back on the summer solstice. We dry it atop the matts she wove from artisan hemp fronds. The dew doesn’t have many calories, it’s true, but ever since we’ve become utterly independent of the modern industrial economy, we don’t need as much food. (Can’t afford it, either, but that’s a story for another day)

This morning, while the cows milked themselves (if your cows don’t milk themselves, it’s probably because they’re not of the proper heritage breed and because you’re not moving them to a fresh grazing paddock every twelve-and-a-half minutes), Penny and I stoop hand-in-hand at the height of the land, watching a rainbow shimmer (if you don’t see rainbows in winter, it’s probably because you work in an office and feed your children boxed cereal). The boys had already completed the remaining chores, spent three-hours tracking a moose, which they decided not to shoot with their self-made long bows because “he just looked so magnificent and we felt such great respect for him” and were hitting the trig yet again. “I really want to help Rye understand these unit circle inverse functions before I fill the woodbox, do the dishes, and gather shed alpaca hairs for tonight’s sweater,” replied Fin. “Will that be ok with you, sweet Papa?”

“Of course, my son,” I said. “But please don’t forget the 8-page handwritten thank you letter to your Grandmother for the dime she gave you yesterday.”

“Actually, I wrote that last night after you and mama went to bed,” he replied.

So begins another day.

 

Not Mine to Understand

Cozy

Too warm this morning, 40-ish and spitting rain. The snow, which just yesterday was ideal for skiing, that elusive combination of glide and yield, has gone to mush underfoot. What more, it has been gray for more consecutive days than I have fingers to count, and while I suppose I could remove my socks to facilitate the math, I don’t like cold toes. So let’s just say we haven’t seen sun for at least 10 days, and let me keep my warm toots, ok?

This morning I noticed a spike in traffic to this site; ever curious, I followed the spike back to Heather’s page, where she’d linked to this page. I like Heather; she’s been incredibly supportive of my work, and furthermore wicked generous with her insight and experience. She strikes me as a thoughtful and gentle person, though of course I know her only at a distance, and this allows me the luxury of imagining her in a manner that’s entirely inconsistent with that impression. I’m thinking pack of Pall Malls perched on the corner of a chipped formica counter, something raunchy on the juke (Skynyrd? No, wait, I got it: Skid Row!), post-breakfast Bloody Mary in hand… damn, I better stop, or she’s never gonna talk to me again.

Anyway, my only-partly-latent narcissism couldn’t keep me from reading the comments pertaining to her post, which included the following statement: I can’t help but feel a bit judged when I read Ben’s work. I might’ve passed it by, but it’s an issue that’s been on my mind; a while back, someone (can’t remember who, and I’m too lazy to go looking) commented on this page that what I write here sometimes makes them feel inadequate. 

I’m not sure exactly what to say about the sentiments expressed, except the only honest thing, which is that they make me feel pretty bad. I know that wasn’t the intent, but of course intent and outcome do not always align. I also know what it’s like to feel judged myself; if you have a spare, oh, 5 hours or so, scroll through the comments pertaining to my Outside article. There’s no shortage of judging going on over there. The obvious difference, though, is that I sort of ask for it. I mean, I put myself and my story and my views out there for the world to see and dissect and critique. Over the years, I have developed a fairly thick skin, though of course it’s not without its cracks. I don’t exist in some sort of evolved state of consciousness where nothing anyone says about me matters. Which is why I suppose the comments about my work making people feel judged or inadequate bother me in the first place.

Ok, I’m figuring out what to say. The first is this: If what you read here makes you feel lesser in any way, shape, or form, please don’t read it. I mean, I want you as a reader, don’t get me wrong. But not at the expense of your self-worth. Or at least your perception of your self-worth, which I suppose is pretty much the same thing. I realize this might sound sort of cold – if you don’t like it, don’t read it - but that’s not how I mean it. What I sincerely mean is that if my work does not hold some positive value for you, find someone’s work that does. There is so much great writing out there; there are so many interesting stories. But far as I’m concerned, none of them are worth feeling shitty over. Conversely, if what you read here somehow makes you feel superior to us, well, you might want to think about that, too. Because that’s its own form of self-deception, is it not?

Second. My intent is never to suggest that our way of life is the best, or that I’ve got it all figured out. We are constantly reevaluating, making changes, tweaking, thinking, talking. In my view, the moment you stop asking questions, not merely of others, but of yourself, is the moment self-confidence tilts toward arrogance. And maybe I am guilty of this at times. I hope not, but maybe so. I know I feel strongly about many aspects of our life, about many of the choices we have made. Truth is, you can’t make these choices and not feel strongly about them, because many of these choices are not widely supported in our culture. I would like to think that through my work, I do not offer answers, but rather encourage people to ask questions. The answers they come up with might be entirely different than the ones we come up with, and that is exactly as it should be. Why? Because they’re not us, that’s why!

Ok, one more thing, and then I’ll shut up. We do thing things we do, the things I write about, because they align with our version of a meaningful life. We do not grow most of our food to meet some arbitrary goal for how much of our food we can grow, or because we’re trying to uphold a moral code. We grow most of our own food because we like it. Because when we wake up in the morning, we get to wake up excited for what the day will bring (well, ok, maybe not today, what with the rain and all). Because we like the feeling of dirt under our fingernails. Because I like to sing stupid, made-up, ad-lib songs to the cows as I go about chores, about love and fur and hay and milk. (If I get $1000 in donations today, I’ll make a podcast of one of these songs. It’s like one of those NPR fund-raising challenges, except the reward is actually a punishment)

Someone once said something really smart to me, and I try not to forget it: I cannot control how people perceive my work and what they take from it. I think this is true, because of course my work is not entirely mine: It inevitably crashes against and into the experiences and perceptions of those who read it. This just now occurs to me, but it’s like the rain that’s falling this very minute. It’s mixing with the snow, it’s becoming something entirely different, one into the body of the other. And the outcome – the final result – is not mine to fully understand.

 

 

 

Exactly The Opposite

Barn window

Sometimes I think I should write more about food. I know a lot about food, I really do. For instance, I just finished making a shepherd’s pie. I cooked up burger from one of the cows we killed back when. I tossed in some sausage from the last batch of pigs. I diced up an onion and a bulb of garlic. Grated a couple of carrots and a half of one of Penny’s monster beets. Thyme and oregano. Chopped a whole bunch of lacto-fermented green beans and mashed a half-dozen potatoes, added a splash of fresh cream and some of our own butter. The only boughten ingredients in the whole mess were salt and pepper. Oh, and some fennel that was in the sausage. I like me some fennel sausage.

Last night I made a soup. I sautéed onion and garlic. Carrots. When those were ‘bout done, I dumped in a couple quarts of beef bone broth. We make a lot of bone broth. I browned ribeye and blade steaks (no particular reason I chose those; they just happened to be on top of the pile of freezer beef) in lard and chopped ‘em up pretty small. Still bloody. Tossed ‘em into the mix. I rehydrated some dried chanterelle mushrooms. Lacto-fermented green beans again. Splash of tamari. Pepper. Crumpled in a few handfuls of dried kale. Real handy, that dried kale. Real handy.

We don’t ascribe to any particular diet. We pretty much eat what we grow and call it good. I guess you could call it a “whole foods” diet. Or maybe “traditional,” assuming one associates tradition with region. Which we do. I mean, otherwise it’d be pretty confusing, would it not?

There are few foods we avoid. We don’t eat much, if any, highly processed, multiple ingredient prepared foods. We rarely have pasta. Maybe once a year. We consume relatively few grains, but not because we’re paleo or anything. Not because we’re afeared of gluten. Mostly because we’re too lazy – our habits are such that it’s easier for us to cook with vegetables, meat, and diary, that’s all. We eat hardly any dried beans. I’d eat more, but Penny hates ‘em. The only food we might be a little dogmatic about is sugar. Oh, and soy. Sugar because it’s sugar. Soy because it’s loaded with phytoestrogens. Well, that, plus it’s disgusting. (yes, I know that soy is the primary ingredient in tamari. But it’s fermented, and that’s a whole ‘nother dealeo)

We aren’t foodies. We don’t talk about food in exhausting detail (although, like most of you, I’m guessing, we are sometimes exhausted by food). Our kitchen is simple, and usually pretty cluttered. We spend waaaay more time growing and processing our food, than actually preparing it for the table. But of course growing and processing is preparing it for the table, so maybe that’s a ridiculous distinction. We try to make the most of the animals we slaughter; in addition to using many of the hides, we eat a lot of organ meats. We make a mean liver pate, and pate on warm sourdough crackers with a side of kimchi is one of our favorite meals. In fact, yesterday we polished off a pint of pate in no time flat.

My general sense is that a lot of people are really confused about food. My other general sense is that the dominant food industry likes us to be confused. And maybe a little afraid. It likes us to think we’ll die of some horrible disease if we make a batch of sauerkraut or butcher a pig at home or drink unpasteurized milk. It likes us to skip from one diet to another, because each skip represents an opportunity to sell us more things we don’t much need.

I also suspect that the first step toward eating a truly healthy diet is to listen to whatever government nutrition professionals tell you about eating a truly healthy diet.

And then do exactly the opposite.

PS: Andrea posted an interview with me. Check it out if you’re interested. 

To Your Heart’s Content

Four straight days of accumulating snow. It is dense with moisture, the poverty snow I wrote of Wednesday, and moving through it calls to mind the heavy-limbed feeling of running in water I remember from childhood. So much effort expended for so little progress. Our yard is a spiderweb of beaten tracks – to the barn, to the hydrant, to Rye’s goats, and finally, deep into the woods where the pigs reside. I’d intended to bring them closer to home for the snowy months, but things intervened, and I am now shackled to my own stupidity as I ferry the sloshing five-gallon buckets of milk-water-grain slurry to the hogs and their insatiable hunger, each lurching step a down payment on the debt created by my procrastination.

Yesterday the power flickered on and off and on again intermittently, and the boys were perplexed. It was our first significant outage since we grid-connected way back in September 2013; prior to that, we were immune to the vagaries of utility power, and they’d never experienced such a thing. Truth is, we own a generator, and thus could have brought ourselves back online with only a modicum of effort, but could not determine a reason good enough to do so. The animals’ water troughs were full, and both wood stoves were radiating waves of delicious heat. Our refrigerator is powered by cold winter air, and the chest freezers’ frigid cargo would hold for days. So we stuck a pot of leftover squash soup on the cook stove, lit a few candles, and went about our business in the soft light of those small flames.

Then the candles burned down and we went to bed.

•     •     •

Inspired by Penny’s rousing success with intricately folded strips of birch bark, and seduced by the sweet corruption of material wealth, the boys have been in a frenzy of making. As such, I humbly offer this link, where they have posted a few of their wares, each and every one crafted with exactly zero assistance from Penny or myself.

Go ahead. Corrupt to your heart’s content.

A Notion of Relief

Feeding out before the storm. I like how the cows are watching the bale in anticipation.

If you plow driveways for a living, there are exactly two kinds of snow: Money snow, and the sludge that fell last night, which might best be described as “poverty snow.” That’s because most plow guys charge by the job, not the hour, and a storm that consists of four or five-inches of cold, low density powder, the sort of stuff that practically leaps from the path of the truck as if in anticipation of contact… well, that, my friends, is money snow. That’s the sort of snow you can plow with a hot coffee wedged into your crotch and a sugared doughnut on the dash, with the radio tuned to 107.1 FRANK FM, with your foot to the floor – 20 mph on the straights, the snow pillowing and billowing into the weeds, a $30 driveway done in 8 minutes flat. A bite of doughnut, a sip of coffee, Aerosmith’s Sweet Emotion, and onto the next. You could plow forever.

But this stuff? This stuff is the reason you don’t take money snow for granted. This stuff is the reason you keep a shovel and a bag of sand in the bed of your truck. This stuff is the reason you think about charging by the minute, rather than the job.

This stuff is the reason our truck is current stranded in middle of our driveway with a pool of hydraulic fluid beneath the raise/lower cylinder of the plow. Ah, well. So it goes. At least I needn’t wonder what I’ll be doing later this morning.

•    •    •

Part II of my interview with Andrea.

BH: I would like to hear more about your family’s days, the first thing you do in the morning, the last thing you do before bed, etc

AH: Get up. Place fire in the stoves. Make coffee. We have slow mornings. We get to have slow mornings. We never had that before. Work: fetching water, doing the dishes, chopping wood, feeding the animals, then working on some building (right now a sauna) or a book (right now a book about the old norse poem called Voluspá). We used to have a lot of animals but we don’t anymore because it was a bit much work for us (we are still somehow- but not as much as we used to- in the process of BUILDING and creating, our homestead is not a fully functioning operation yet, still lots of things we need to learn and do). Food plays a large role in our lives and I spent a lot of time preparing the food, baking or making dinner. In the wintertimes we don’t do a lot, we go into hibernation, we drink hot cocoa, read books, we don’t lift a finger- in the summertime we work until very late in the evening, we work all of the time. Our lives changes all the time and I think this is very healthy- what made us sick before was the fact that there was not time or space to actually be tired or go into hibernation and there was not time or space to do the opposite, we had to live a life of constant productivity and our lives in the forest is not like that. The days are extremely varied. Depending on factors such as weather or mood.Work. Lunch. Work. Dinner. Internet. Books. Music. Last thing we do: fill the stoves with firewood. Sleep.

BH: If you could do it over again, what are three things you’d do differently? 

I think it’s a good thing we didn’t have a backup plan. We invested everything. We didn’t have any money. If we wanted to go back we could’t because we had nothing to come back to. I think this was essential because in the hardest of times I would have used the backup plan if we had one.
So I really would’t do anything differently. We needed everything that happened. I only wish I hadn’t been so fearful and afraid but I was and this was a part of it as was doubt.

BH: You write about despair pretty regularly. Can you talk about the role of despair in your life? 

AH: I believe that we, as modern people and me in specificality suffer from a notion of relief, a longing for a paradise state of eternal bliss free from disappear and hurt. Since moving into the wild this notion has changed a bit. I have had moments of joy and grace, so much joy and so much grace in nature that I will never be able to find the words to describe it. Absolute total bliss. More than bliss. More than joy. More than grace. I call those moments for “the happiness moments”. They have been so hard to describe, much harder than the disappear and also I have tried not to rub it in peoples faces too much- if I describe that joy and that grace people might want to do like we have done. They will be deceived by a notion of paradis. A tale of perfection. But the TRUTH about this tale and the TRUTH about the happiness moments are that they are equally balanced by moments of total and absolute dispair. And you have to take that despair. You have to go through it. You have to into it head first because you can’t escape it… and lately I’ve come to think that maybe you shouldn’t. Maybe we shouldn’t fear the ugly so much and maybe we shouldn’t fear depression so much and maybe we should’t fear despair so much. Maybe it’s totally interconnected with the grace and the joy? The more you seek to protect yourself from moments of hopelessness…. the less hope you will feel?

It’s something I’ve been thinking about.

And I’ve been thinking about it because our despair was good for us. It was GOOD that we were so frustrated and unhappy and had so much dispar because if we had´nt acknowledged that these were the emotions we were feeling… then we might not have REACTED.

The despair made us ACT.

So that´s what I think about that.


BH: Ok. I think that’s probably enough, don’t you?


AH: Never. I think what is most needed in our culture, more needed than anything, is that we begin to TALK to each other. Share experiences. Open up. I believe in open source- of the mind. Let’s share experiences and doubts, lets connect without the pretentious and without the taboos.
That’s it.