Ben Hewitt's Blog, page 60

The Reward of Being Alive

On Sunday, we put up our annual kimchi harvest, which means that right now, there are 50-odd quarts of vegetables fermenting in the kitchen, and the house is redolent with the fetid odor of dirty socks. If you’ve done any quantity of lacto-fermenting (or been within a half-mile of Fin and Rye when they kick off their rubber boots on a July afternoon), you know exactly the smell I’m talking about. It is one of those smells – like cow shit, or the hot innards of a nice, fat hog – that I used to think of as unpleasant, but now consider emblematic of a very specific time, place, and process and therefore have come to appreciate.

Kimchi is a staple food for us; it is a large part of answer to the question I field frequently: “What do you do for green vegetables in the winter?” We eat a couple quarts of kimchi per week over the winter months; by April this becomes tiresome, which is mighty convenient, since by April we’re grazing the first early salads in the big, season-extending greenhouse off the southwest wall of the living room. It has been many years since we’ve purchased fresh vegetables in winter (which means it’s been many years since we’ve purchased fresh vegetables at all), and while I’m not suggesting anyone emulate this habit, I can report that’s it’s really not so bad. We’ve got the kimchi. We dig brussels sprouts and kale from under the first big snows. Carrots in the season-extending hoop house. Fermented green beans. And of course all the root crops. So, yeah, don’t come here in February expecting a plate of those trendy “micro-greens” or nothing like that. But if you want a big ol’ baked ‘tater with a dollop of summer gold (aka “butter”) and a side o’ fermented-something-or-other, we got you covered.

Our kimchi includes cabbage, kale, onion, garlic, ginger, radish, carrots, and, of course, salt. Penny’s none too big on spicy foods (the poor, deprived girl), so we throw matchbox peppers into a few quarts for me n’ the boys, but mostly, it’s pretty tame stuff. In fact, our kimchi is renown in our small circle of fermenting associates for being particularly sweet, a quality I can only attribute to our soil revitalization efforts. Every since we began amending seriously, all our vegetables have gotten sweeter. And bigger: Crikey but the cabbages we harvested this year. Behemoth things. We’d already planted fewer rows than ever before, knowing our yields were going through the freakin’ roof, but this year topped ‘em all. Pretty soon, we’ll be growing a single cabbage each year, which we’ll harvest with Melvin’s round bale grabber.

Kimchi is one of those seasonal rituals we’ve always tackled as a family, every since the boys had to propped up in a corner to drool and coo and piss their pants. Oh, sure, the boys are prone to drifting in and out of the process, which is understandable, since we chop everything by hand (including, this year, the tip of the ring finger on my left hand, which escaped removal-by-knife by only the scantest of margins. Gonna be a hell of a scar, but Penny’s already told me she digs scars) and by the time it’s all chopped and pounded and jarred and whatnot, it’s a full day’s undertaking. But we’re glad for their help and I cannot deny gleaning a degree of satisfaction from the simple fact that they enjoy participating in work that is so tangibly productive and so essential to the health and well being of our family. And that they know the process so intimately – from the planting, to the tending, to the harvesting, to the processing, to the eating – and are fully aware of their role within it.

A typical scene: Penny working, me leaning against something

I have written before about ritual and about the need for children to contribute to the family and community in ways that are not merely abstract, but result in something both tangible and essential. But of course it is not merely children that need such things, and the older I get, the more I recognize how it is precisely that work which is tied to seasonal routine and results in some fundamental building block of my family’s survival (and perhaps even a handful of people beyond my family) that is most rewarding to me. Kimchi. Firewood. Haying. Sugaring. And so on.

I’m not sure exactly how to say it other than to note that there is something so damn real about these tasks. They are the ones that cost us little in money, but plenty in sweat. They cost us in sore muscles and, as evidenced by the bandages currently gracing my left hand, occasionally even blood. But the return is so much greater than the sum of all these small tolls. It is greater than all those bubbling, stinking jars of winter’s sustenance. It is greater, even, than the simple pleasure of my family coming together toward a common purpose. For me, anyway, it is nothing less than the reward of being alive. 

 

Gimme Shelter

Rye’s latest

The boys are relentless shelter builders. Not infrequently, I’ll be walking in the woods and stumble across one I hadn’t even known existed, some little tucked-away space stocked with kindling wood and made weather tight by spruce boughs and layered leaves. Usually, they go to the trouble to fashion a small stone fire pit, over which they’ll cook some scrap of meat or a fresh-caught brook trout as fuel for the labor of construction.

In truth, they don’t spend much time in their shelters, and I often wonder what need or desire the act of building them fulfills. Perhaps they fantasize of escape, or maybe like Penny and me they derive an inherent satisfaction from the work itself. I don’t know, and I don’t ask. Nor does Penny. The shelters are theirs in full.

I’m glad the boys like to build shelters. So much of what children do and learn these days – hell, so much of what adults do and learn these days – is built on abstraction. It is relevant only to the extent we grant it relevance. Don’t get me wrong: Fin and Rye get plenty of this learning, too. That is good, because life can much, much more than what is strictly necessary. And besides, who’s to say what’s strictly necessary, anyway?

Still, I believe it is valuable for kids to do and learn in ways that are not abstract, that involve the body as well as the mind, and that result in something real and tangible and perhaps even better, of service. A shelter where once there was none. Food in a freezer that was previously empty. Or even just a piece of clothing mended by their own hand. Interestingly, this is precisely the sort of learning that is rapidly disappearing from public education in the wake of diminishing budgets and immersion into the the abstraction of technology.

One night last winter, in a January storm, Rye and I overnighted in one of his shelters. It was tight squeeze, but we slept well, and in the morning we awoke to six-inches of fresh snow. We made hot chocolate over a fire, and sipped it in the falling snow. Then we packed up our sleeping bags and skied home.

Morning Chores

Not Sorry

Perpetual Butter Machine

Almost forgot: I’ll be in Montpelier tonight, speaking at this event. Come on down! 

Every so often, I get letters from folks who read this site. You know, on paper, in the mail, with a stamp, the way folks used to correspond across long distances before telephones and email and texting and Skype and whatever else all those crazy kids are doing these days. (I love saying stuff like “whatever else all those crazy kids are doing these days” because it makes me sound older and grumpier than I actually am)

I like getting these letters, if for no other reason than it’s rare enough to be an occasion – I think I’ve received maybe a total of 6 – but also because folks don’t generally make such an effort unless they have something nice to say. So I get the novelty, and I get to read something complimentary. Maybe someday I’ll get a nasty letter, and that’ll be ok, too. I already know what I’ll do with it: I’ll use it to start a fire in the woodstove.

I got a letter yesterday, and it was very nice. I was struck by this line: “You seem to sneak in vague apologies on your blog about how you have chosen to live your life  – these thoughts need not be repeated because as I see it you and your lifestyle are to be commended.”

At first I was a little puzzled: I don’t think of myself as apologizing for how I have chosen to live my life. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized how one (Susan is her name; Hi, Susan!) might get such an impression and where it might come from.

To be clear, I do not feel the need to apologize for how I live my life. But I do feel the need to acknowledge, perhaps more often than is strictly necessary, the reality that so many people do not enjoy the same freedoms and privileges my family and I do. The reasons for this might be circumstantial, or they might be self-inflicted. It might just be because they did what they believed was the right thing to do, and now they find themselves trapped by obligations – most often, to the unforgiving master known as debt – that seem insurmountable.

I do not think that everyone wants to live like we do, nor do I think they should, but I do believe that some people are not able to live as they want to, and that bothers me. And I see how so many of the factors that enable us to live as we want to live could be chalked up to simple good luck. Don’t get me wrong: We have worked hard to craft this way of life. We continue to work hard. But even that hard work and our inherent love of that work is our privilege, our damn good luck, and understanding it as such makes me feel a certain empathy for those struggling to align their ideas for what defines a meaningful life with the reality of living that life.

I suppose that what Susan perceives as apologizing, I perceive as simply acknowledging the truth of all the privileges and good fortune my family and I enjoy. I think it’s important to acknowledge these things; for starters, they are not invulnerable. I ain’t seen much, but I’ve seen enough to know that the world is a fickle place, and that what may seem certain today could be uncertain by tomorrow. Or even sooner. There’s a part of me that guards against taking anything we have for granted, even though there’s another part of me that doesn’t really want to spend all my waking hours reminding myself to not take anything for granted, if only because that could get sort of exhausting.

Anyway, thanks for the letter, Susan. I intend to write back. Or maybe I just did.

Easy As Breathing

I walked back up the field this morning in that strange, milky light of predawn, the empty slop bucket slapping my knee with every step. Behind me, the pigs slurped milk and jostled for position, doing their good, greedy meat-making work. Ahead of me, spread out panorama-like, I could see my family going about their respective chores. Penny was on her way to collect Apple for morning milking, striding the cow path the way she strides, the sun just beginning to illuminate the eastern horizon behind her. I could see Rye walking toward the goat pen, the implements of his task dangling from his small hands: The pail of warm water for washing Flora and his little quart milking jug. Behind him, Fin carried a flake of hay and bucket of drinking water. It was 6:50 or thereabouts, and for a soft moment, one of those small pieces of time when everything seems to coalesce in a way that answers some unasked question, I just stopped to take it all in.

How do your children learn? I hear this with some frequency, and it used to puzzle me, because of course it is like asking someone how do your children breathe? My children learn by learning. They learn because there is no other choice. They learn because to not learn is to not be alive.

But I’m beginning to understand something I probably would have understood a long time ago, if only I wasn’t quite so dense. The question how do your children learn is only half of the question; there is another, unspoken half. How do your children learn the things they’re expected to learn? Somewhere along the way, these two things – learning, and what children are expected to learn – have become conflated, as if the very act of learning can be defined by the subject matter it contains.

It is interesting to me how many assumptions are imbedded in our society’s expectations for education. Here’s another question I get every so often: What about all the things they’re not being exposed to by not being in school? The snarky reply might be yup, that’s precisely why we don’t send them to school, and there’s some truth to that, but the more honest and thoughtful response is what about all the things school children aren’t being exposed to by being in school? We seem to suffer under a societal delusion that the only worthy things a child can be exposed to are found in the fluorescent glow of a classroom.

What we all need to acknowledge is that no child can be exposed to everything; no child – no person – can learn everything. We all make choices – some conscious, some not – every minute of every day to absorb one thing and not another, and all of us who are parents make these choices for our children. We seem unwilling to admit this; we are stricken by the delusion that we can provide boundless opportunity for our children, that we should try to expose them to as many things as possible, hoping that one or two of them actually stick.

I don’t know exactly what my children are learning by doing chores with their family every morning. Oh, I could prattle on about responsibility and hard work and commitment and so on, but let’s be real: There are myriad ways children come to imbue these qualities (or to not imbue them, I suppose). Likewise, I know full well that the choices we have made and continue to make – about how we live, about where we live, about how we pass the hours of each day – are in some ways limiting choices, if only because they are by default not other choices. We have given our children chores, haying with neighbors, hunting and trapping. We allow them to roam and provide them the freedom to roam. We have taught them to use tools, slaughter a chicken or pig, drive the tractor, run Melvin’s bale wrapper. Often, we expect them to simply be.

Still, the things we have not taught them and the opportunities we have not provided are too numerous to mention. Will my children be lesser for not having been presented these lessons and possibilities? Will they in some way be defined by those lessons and possibilities they are offered? Perhaps. No, not perhaps: Certainly.

But the truth is, no parent can say otherwise.

Food, Money, Life

Rainy day

From Tonya in yesterday’s comments:

I know it is worth every penny to be eating good, healthy food grown sustainably but there is a cost and the money to pay for this has to come from some sort of income.  This is a balance we talk about a lot – how much do we have to earn versus how much can we grow/make for ourselves and how to keep the costs down so we don’t have earn as much and instead spend more time growing and raising and making.

Funny you should mention this, Tonya, as I’ve just been thinking about how I’ll address this in the new book. Perhaps by tackling it here, I’ll get a better handle on it.

Straight away, I should say that we rarely think about money/cost in relation to raising our own food. Actually, that’s not entirely true: We do think about the cost of inputs/stock we want to purchase and make decisions based on those costs. For instance, right now we’d really love to be planting a bunch of nut trees, but it’s not the best time from a financial perspective, so we’re not. Right now, we’d love to spread another 20-tons of rock dust on the pasture, but again, not the best time from a financial perspective, so we ain’t.

But in regards to the food itself, we rarely if ever think of it in financial terms. I know that raising so much of our own food saves us a whole passel of money compared to what it would cost to purchase this food – no question about it. But does it save us enough to “justify” the time and energy expended? In other words, might we be better off financially to simply find jobs that enabled us to purchase the food we’re currently raising? I don’t doubt it for a second.

This gets tricky to talk about, because I see how raising food and pretty much everything we do on this piece of land has become part of an economic ecosystem that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense when measured against the broader economy (actually, I believe our little economy is the less narrow, but you get what I mean). And I know that not everyone has the privileges we do – to have me working at home, to have purchased land when land was relatively affordable, to possess the skills necessary to build their own house and thus largely avoid the debt trap, to have one partner be enormously skilled at raising food and the other, while in many regards a bumbling, half-useless, self-absorbed fool, at least occasionally capable of hard physical labor.

Here is what I know to be true for us: First, we place tremendous value on eating real food. Not “organic,” not “sustainable,” not even “local.” Which is not to say that any of these things are wrong or unimportant, just that in our minds none of these labels really say a whole lot about the true nutritive qualities of the food itself. We have invested tremendous time, energy (and yes, money) into building and revitalizing our soils, and the results are striking. In regards to our critters, we know precisely how they are raised and how they die; when we make sausage, we know exactly what goes into it and what the process is. We make our own butter solely from raw grass fed cream produced by animals that have never so much as tasted grain. I guess what I’m saying is that even if we wanted to, we couldn’t buy the food we raise. A facsimile thereof, perhaps, but that’s about it.

Second, we are in love with the process, as much – if not more – than the outcome. Honestly, we can no longer imagine living any other way, and the benefits of the work we do to raise our food reverberate through our lives in ways that have little to do with the end product. Friendships. Physical, emotional, and spiritual wellbeing. Our relationships with our children, and their immersion in the natural world, the lessons they’ve gleaned from haying with Martha or slaughtering pigs or harvesting garlic. The way that raising food and learning the skills inherent to raising food provide common goals for our family to coalesce around and work toward. The small, simply luxury of walking down the field at twilight on my way to collect eggs. On and on it goes. As I’ve written before, it sometimes seems to me as if the end result of our efforts – the literal fruits of our labors – is merely a bonus, and the investment of time and energy and sweat and intent is not a merely a means to an end, but the end itself.

I understand the balance and struggle Tonya writes of. I understand that not everyone can afford to view raising food in a similar manner. On some level, they need it to pencil out, and I can’t honestly say that I know how to make that happen. I can’t honestly say I’m certain that strictly from a financial perspective growing your own is always the most logical solution (although if you really care what you’re eating, it just might be). I can only say that for my family, at least, raising food has enriched us in ways that simply cannot be measured in numbers. It has afforded us a life that, clichéd as it may sound, simply cannot be bought. At any price.

The truth is, every sacrifice we have made to ensure we can afford to live this way – and there have been very, very many – has been worth it.

Owed Millions

Rye is 9 today. Penny made him a felted wool vest. Fin made him a yo-yo. I made him a card.

Back from Tampa, a whirlwind of a trip in which I gave three presentations on three different campuses in one day, met many wonderful and well-tanned people, and observed with silent dismay that 1) judging by from the number of billboards advertising the potential for litigation based on injury, the good people of Tampa have terrible luck and 2) America’s smart phone addiction grows unabated. I’m sure I’m just a bitter ole curmudgeon in this regard, but damned if a part of me doesn’t question whether these devices actually benefit our society as a whole. Coming from a town where it’s pretty rare to see someone yammering on a cell phone, much less playing it with their thumbs, it was hard to not be struck by the proliferation of said activities.

Ah, whatever. Who, really,  am I to say? Hell, I’m just a bassackwards hill farmer occasionally thrown into the lion’s den of urban America, a man so thoroughly lacking in wisdom and panache that he still considers this a pinnacle of musical achievement. I mean, it ain’t like I’m particularly sophisticated, or anything.

I return to a rather full plate of homestead goings-on – ambulatory beings that must be transitioned to their afterlife as sausage and chops, ‘taters that must be dug and bagged, firewood that must be split and stacked, oy, I could go on like this for quite some time – coupled with two book contracts that must be fulfilled. The first of these books I believe I have mentioned before; it is a book for Roost about our decisions around education and living a life connected to this particular piece of land (“living in place” seems to be the contemporary term of choice, but I’m still not sure exactly what that means). The second of these is a departure for me: A book for Chelsea Green about many of the practices we employ on our small-holding, particularly in relation to the raising of nutrient dense foods and the incorporation of numerous “techniques” (permaculture, silvacuture, agriculture, wild crafting, etc) in order to achieve the small-farm eco-system we are drawn toward. I am enormously grateful to be working on both of these, and the experience thus far has been nothing short of revelatory. The editors on both books are engaged to a degree I’d come to assume only happened to other writers, writing other books.

If there’s a downside (and there is), it’s that these sort of books don’t command the advances I’d become accustomed to. This is ok, at least for the time being, particularly given that I’m more interested in writing what’s important to me than writing what pays. But let’s be brutally honest: What’s important to me might not be important to enough other people to justify my continued existence as a professional writer. Or – and this seems equally possible, if marginally more difficult to accept – maybe I’m not a talented enough writer to write about what’s important to me in a way that’s compelling enough to justify my continued existence as a professional writer.

The upshot of all this is that I am seriously considering how to navigate this reality, if indeed it should come to pass (because, hey, you never know: Every single one of you reading this might decide to buy 100 copies of each of my books and I will be immediately liberated from such concerns). Increasingly, I am coming to understand that it might not be long before writing becomes just one of the monied means by which I support my family, although as of yet, I’m not exactly certain what the others might be. Which is not to say I don’t have some ideas. But ideas are easy. It’s the implementation that gets tricky.

The other thought I had was maybe I should head back down to Tampa and suffer a work-related accident. Because if those billboards are to be believe, I COULD BE OWED MILLIONS!

Going to See What’s Happened

Something about this photo makes me really happy

Forgot to mention I’ll be down in the Tampa, FL area for the next couple days, speaking at this event.

So I won’t be spouting in this space as usual. You can thank me later.

David, if I find out what’s happened to America, I’ll be sure and report back.

 

 

 

One Reason Only

Suddenly, it is fall. Not so much the temperature. It is still eerie-warm, the morning fire more luxury than anything else (and why not? We’ve got the wood) – but the trees laid almost bare by a fast-moving storm, the wind and rain furious enough to justify putting off evening chores for an hour or so, just until things died down. And now the gray of everything but for the few survivor leaves, clinging futilely to their perches out of habit more than anything else. They won’t last much longer.

God, I love it. Used to hate it, but that was so many years ago I cannot fathom how or why I might have felt that way. Thought it drab, I suppose, or bemoaned the shortness of daylight, how you can feel dark creeping up on you the whole day through. Or maybe it was what I’d been taught, those common utterances down at the village store: “It’s coming” or “summer short enough for ya’?” or just a shake of the head. But even those more banter than complaint, I think, and perhaps masking the same thing I feel now: Ahhh.

Maybe it’s just that now I know how necessary it is, what a gift it is. We cannot go year round the way we do April to November. Or perhaps we could, but at what cost? Our physical vitality? Our emotional resiliency? Our love of this thing we do, whatever you want to call it? It’s coming near time to shut it down a bit – not completely, of course; there will still be chores and projects that linger and next year’s firewood and whatnot – but enough to feel something like rest. Enough to slip into bed at 7:30 with a book, enough to turn off the light at 8:30 and lie there for a bit with Penny looking at the stars and feeling the cold sneak through the window, cracked just an inch or two so we don’t forget our small place in this world, the tendrils of cold telling us something about what it means to be alive, something I can’t quite put words to but is real nonetheless. Then drifting into the sweet, deep sleep of winter. Asleep before 9:00: An aging couple’s pleasure if every there was one.

This winter we’ll be making plans. We’re changing things up a bit; nothing radical, just tweaking and revising, determining the places where concept has presided over observation. Where we have allowed concept to prevent us from observing. It’s funny the things you pick up without having expected to; this whole notion of conceptualization vs observation having come to from Mark Shephard’s talk some weeks ago. I like it, perhaps because it fits my view of how I wish to pass my days: Not bound by ideology and willing to humble myself to natural forces beyond my control. Of course, both are easier said than done, but that ain’t gonna stop me from trying.

I realized that some people must view our lives as being routine, even static: Hell, we rarely even leave this town anymore (as our old friend David said a couple weeks ago when he stopped by for lunch: “If you guys ever left Cabot, you’d see what’s happened to America”). And there’s a certain truth to that view, I suppose. But it doesn’t feel that way. We are constantly experimenting, learning, shifting, in ways that are both visible and invisible, in ways I can articulate and those I cannot, perhaps because some things should not be fully understood.

I hope this is always the case. I hope that if it’s ever not, it will be for one reason only: Because we’re dead. And even then, well, who can really say?

Number Four

Harvesting wild choke cherries

Stop thinking of yourself as a steward of the land. That’s the same old, tired story of humans over nature.

Instead, think of the land as the steward of you. And treat it with the respect your caregiver deserves, dammit.