Ben Hewitt's Blog, page 72

What, No World Peace??

Overheard this weekend:

Fin: “Rye, if you could wish for any three things in the world, what would they be?”

Rye (without hesitation): “A donkey, traps, and a cabin.”

Speleng Bea

Let’s say you’re wicked bored tomorrow night, or just have a charitable bone or two in your body. In either case, come on down to the Kellogg Hubbard Library in Montpeculiar for the inaugural Cabin Fever Spelling Bee. It’s a fund raiser for the library and me n’ a bunch of other VT authors will be in the hawt seets.

 

 

 

 

A Good One

This morning it was 5 degrees and blustery, with a noncommittal snow flurry swirling in the arctic air. It had snowed the day before, too, and what with the snow and the wind, the front hill of our quarter-mile driveway was host to some impressive drifts. I hadn’t plowed the first storm, since I’d yet to replace the lift chain that had broken a few days prior, leaving us with little choice but to scrape clean a mile’s worth of gravel road before pulling into Will’s barnyard. “Hey, Will,” I asked, “Would you be able to run us home?” Instead, he scrounged in his workshop for a random assortment of bolts and washers and chain and we cobbled together a temporary fix that would allow us to traverse the remaining four miles of road that separates our place and Will’s. This is one of the things I so appreciate about living in a rural community populated by resourceful folk: Things don’t stay broken for long.

Still and all, the fix was unlikely to hold up to the sort of thrashing a good plow session delivers, so I’d procured the hardware necessary to effect a more permanent repair. Which is how I came to be bent over the plow at 7 this morning, drilling and wrenching and pushing and cursing, at least some of which required the dexterity of bare hands. By the time I had everything up and running I was as cold as I’ve been in a good long while, and I ain’t talking the life-affirming sort of cold I spoke of a couple weeks back. No, I’m talking a cold so deep and settled I swore my bones hurt. With the plow fixed, and chores finished, I retreated to the house, where Penny had fried up a mess of bacon and a big ole pan of scrambled eggs, and toasted the two remaining sourdough bialys I’d made when we’d had company a couple nights prior. The boys love bialys, which, for reasons that thankfully elude me, they’ve taken to calling “toilet knuckles.”

After breakfast, the boys and I set out to plow, and almost immediately I commenced to dropping the front end of the truck into a ditch at the furtherest end of the driveway. We hiked back and I got the tractor going and puttered out to the truck, whereby I proceeded to extricate it with the log winch. I was warm now, and furthermore strangely pleased by this complication; I have always loved the honest challenge of a stuck vehicle, particularly when I have an arsenal of pulling implements at my disposal. With the truck freed, Rye and I finished plowing (Fin was off to his weekly wilderness skills school), then walked back to retrieve the tractor and there was a moment, with him seated on my lap and me piloting the big beast down the freshly plowed driveway and the sun almost breaking through the clouds that I thought it might be the most perfect morning of my winter. It made no sense and yet there it was. I’d been up since 5:30, gotten both fires going, made coffee, milked and done chores, fixed the plow, gotten stuck, gotten unstuck, scraped snow off the solar panels, and eaten breakfast. It was just a bit after 8 and in many ways, my day had not yet begun.

But already I knew it was gonna be a good one, that even if it somehow turned to shit I’d have the memory of that moment on the tractor with Rye, one of those immersive moments when I am somehow able to harmonize with all the disparate strings of my imperfect life and it feels as if everything is in tune. I love these moments, but am never able to predict or concoct them, and they seem to strike at the most unlikely times.

So I slowed the tractor down a bit to try and draw it out and Rye put a hand on the steering wheel and we rode home.

 

 

 

 

 

The World at Hand

It was warmer this morning than it has been for the past few mornings – the thermometer nudging a balmy 10 degrees above zero – and Rye was up and out before it was fully light. The boy has caught the “fever,” which is the preferred colloquialism for the affliction that strikes a certain subset of the population preparing to spend the next three or four weeks engaged in the blood letting of sugar maples. For the past month, he has been amassing a pile of slabwood scraps off the sawmill, and yesterday he arranged a small stone firepit, over which he intends to boil away the 39 or so parts of water it will take to make 1 part of syrup. Concerned that Fin might beat him to the more productive trees before he got a chance to have at them, Rye marked his territory with strands of yarn. It looked as if the trees wore necklaces around their trunks. The other day, while he and Penny were driving home from his banjo lesson, Penny mentioned that there were times she still wished to travel – the girl can’t quite rinse herself of the last few strands of wanderlust woven into her DNA - and Rye said sure, he’d be fine with that, so long as we were home for his two favorite times of year: Sugarin’ and haying. Attaboy.

I don’t really believe in having dreams for my children, if only because it seems unfair to burden them with the weight of whatever hopes and expectations I might harbor on their behalf. Oh sure, I wish for them to be healthy and happy, although to be perfectly honest, there are times I’m not sure even this is appropriate, if only because I sometimes wonder if a full appreciation of their lives and the world around them might neccesitate a broader range of experience than simple health and happiness (this is not a fully formed opinion on my part, and I reserve the right to live out my days being nothing less than a cheerleader for their unreserved physical vigor and excellent spirits).

But despite all this, despite trying – sometimes rather desperately – to escape the trap created by the sense that my emotional wellbeing is somehow dependent on any particular outcome relating to my children, I can’t help but divine a certain satisfaction from these moments. I look up, out the window above the kitchen sink, the stars still just visible in the brightening sky, and I see Rye tromping through the snow, laden with the implements of tapping, the remedy for his fever: A cordless drill, a hammer, a small bucketful of taps. Or I see Fin, bent over his trapper’s education manual, penciling in answers to the often-inane questions put forth (What clothing will you wear while trapping? We had a good howl over that one, let me tell you) his hatchet and belt knife on the table beside him, and I feel that unique sense of peace that comes from having witnessed your child immersed in something so deeply important to them that their world has folded in on itself.

It occurs to me that while we are socialized to the belief that our children’s lives should be constantly expanding into new horizons and opportunities, could it be that we are ignoring (or simply ignorant of) the value in having their world contract? In short, what of providing them the freedom to immerse themselves in the small experiences of the world at hand, rather than constantly distracting them with the possibilities of the world at large?

This, then, is the dream I can’t kick, and I freely admit it’s a selfish one: Our boys will not chase the infinite possibilities of the world at large, but instead will continue to find fulfillment in the world at hand.

Let Them Fail

This past weekend at the PASA conference, more than a couple folks asked me where I’d gone to school. I get this question a lot, and I love it, in part because I harbor an unflattering degree of antiestablishment pride in having defied the high school dropout stereotypes (well, most of them, anyway), and in part because it is a tremendously convenient jumping off point to a larger conversation about the current state and proper role of public education.

In truth, of course, I didn’t dropout of high school because I had some noble intent for my young life. Rather, I left school primarily because I was disinterested, and could not be compelled to become interested. Well, that, and the fact that school was having a negative impact on the quality and duration of my partying. I mean, really: Even a young man has only so much time and energy. Priorities, priorities!

Let me be clear: I will never know how my life might have unfolded had I stuck it out and followed the presumed path to college and beyond. It might have been great, fantastic, extraordinary. Or it might not have been. Of course I cannot know, and to even hazard a guess seems both futile and pointless. That’s the path I did not walk, and in not walking it, I did not blaze it, and therefore, it leads nowhere.

I do not think that formalized American educational opportunities are inherently bad in and of themselves, and I know darn well that the vast majority of the people working within these institutions have only the best of intentions. But despite this, my view of public education is jaundiced: I see it, in broad terms, as being part and parcel of a particular set of expectations and arrangements that, when taken as a whole, are not leading our society to a very promising place. It seems to me as if most educational institutions view it as their duty to prepare students for the world as it exists (and who can blame them? After all, this is what we demand), without considering whether or not that is really the world we all want to inhabit. I believe that so long as these institutions promulgate the mantra that our children must be groomed to compete and excel on a global stage, in an economy that reveres growth and defines success and security in terms of money and force, a world of true peace and equality will remain forever out of reach. In short, the feedback loops built into the status quo of our contemporary economy will not be overcome so long as we continue to educate our youth in a manner that upholds them.

In my own life, I view leaving high school as having been an enabling factor. Not so much for the doors it opened and the so-called “opportunities” it presented (although given the space, I would perhaps argue that it was beneficial even in these regards), but for having played a role in changing my view of what, quite simply, mattered. Not grades, not money, not winning, but things that are less tangible, that less readily lend themselves to being quantified and therefore, cannot be added or subtracted from GDP or other economic metrics. Connection. Contentment. Feeling.

I realize that I’m probably as guilty of stereotyping the institutionalized educational experience as many are of stereotyping the high school dropout as a so-called “failure,” so I will stop. I will even agree that when measured against the contemporary American definition of success, I am a failure. But the truth is, when I look at what our culture’s definition of success is doing to the world, I couldn’t be happier than to be failing. And frankly, I can’t want anything more than for my kids to fail, too.

 

 

 

Fear Sells, But Who’s Buying?

I flew home from the PASA conference late Saturday night, having been bumped to first class after my regular seat had somehow been assigned to someone else. It was a short flight, and I was tired enough that I wasn’t inclined to accept the attendant’s repeated offers for free drinks and premium snacks, but still I found some pleasure in the absurdity of the situation. There I sat amidst the beautiful people of first class, shod in my “good clothes”: The shirt procured at a thrift store for a quarter, the pants hand-me-downs from a dear, departed friend, so loose around the waist that only my belt (a repurposed cow collar) stood between myself and sheer embarrassment (this simple fact had made security particularly challenging; when the TSA officer ordered me to take my hand off the waist band of my pants before passing through the human microwave, I had to explain that what the ramifications would be and was furthermore forced to admit that no, I wasn’t wearing underwear. He grunted and waved me through), the shoes another thrift store find, and finally, my socks, a product of the annual Darn Tough factory seconds sock sale for a buck-fifty. All-in-all, a five or six dollar wardrobe.

The conference was fantastic. I had the enormous honor and privilege of sharing keynote duties with Charles Eisenstein. If you’re not familiar with his work, I urge you to get thee to your local book seller and demand a copy of his most recent book, Sacred Economics. It will rock your world as surely and profoundly as a digitally remastered copy of AC/DC’s Back in Black turned up to 11. Even better were the conversations that blossomed practically everywhere I went. Although I am often invited to these sort of events to share my perspective, my barely-kept secret is that I almost always return home with so much more knowledge and experience than I arrived with. So, to any conference-goers who might be reading this, thank you.

In my hotel room, on the morning of my keynote, I awoke early. It was partly the result of the inevitable nervous energy that accompanies speaking in front of a couple thousand people, and partly the result of habit. No matter how certain I am that I will sleep in on the rare morning when my chore routine is disrupted, it never happens. So there I lay at 4:30 in the A of M, worrying that my belt would fail in front of the entire conference population, and unable to retreat into slumber. In my weakness, and seeking distraction, I reached for the remote and tuned into CNN, which was embroiled in round-the-clock coverage of Mega-Hyper-Storm Nemo (I hereby proclaim today Windy Monday Wendy), punctuated by repeated clips of the California cop-killer who, it was being said, had transformed southern California into an abyss of fear and rage.

I watched for an hour, transfixed. As you may know, we do not have a television, and the rich saturation of visual and aural stimulation, coupled with the endless mantra of disaster and death, was riveting. Or at least in was in these pre-dawn, hotel-room, keynote-jitters hours.

Finally, I snapped myself out of my stupor and shuffled to the bathroom to rinse myself of both sleep and, I hoped, the toxicity I’d absorbed over the previous 60 minutes. And as I stood there under the hot stream of water, I couldn’t help but think how different my life might be for only that one, simple element. I couldn’t help but think how profoundly I’d been impacted by a mere hour of contemporary television news media. One hour. And I couldn’t help think about how different the world might be if we all just said “no,” if we all resolved to save our attention and emotional space for the people and world at our fingertips, rather than allow them to be hijacked by stories of disaster and tragedy over which we can have no influence.

Yeah, I know: Fear sells. I get it.

So I guess the question I have is this: What if we just stopped buying?

 

 

 

 

 

Jump

I have been working on a story about kids and guns; more specifically, about my kids and guns and all the strange emotional terrain such a combination mines, particularly for two parents who did not grow up with firearms. It is amazing how quickly guns have inserted themselves into our lives. We had a .22 for years, for livestock (or should that be “deadstock”?), but it was a lonely thing, tucked into a dark corner and fired only a couple of times per year. Now, we own a .22, a .22 mag, a .410 shotgun, a .308 rifle, and two .20 gauge shotguns (why so many? Some were gifted to us, the other represent a fairly standard trajectory in firing power, from beer can plinkers, to true hunting weapons), and it’s astounding how frequently I stumble upon evidence of their use. The boys like to hang onto their spent shells, and so inevitably the damn things end up in the unlikeliest places, like the washing machine, or in the case of the .22, between the cracks in the living room floor. Even now, I can look over my shoulder and see the guns lined up in a neat row. Like soldiers, I guess. I used to find them menacing, but not anymore.

I’d be lying if I said that Sandy Hook didn’t cause some misgivings regarding the sudden influx of guns into our home. Yeah, I know, guns don’t kill people, people do. It’s a comforting enough platitude, and maybe it’s even true on some level, but still, it’s also true that people don’t just walk into schools with their bare fists and punch 26 people to death. At least, not in my experience. So maybe it’s more accurate to say “guns don’t kill people, people with guns kills people,” but of course that’s not right either, because the fact is, the vast majority of people with guns don’t kill people. You can see why it’s such an emotional topic.

Like everyone I know, I was profoundly affected by Sandy Hook. It was a tragedy that revealed such enormous sadness, and I wonder if some of the mourning was and is not only for those who died, but also for a society that has devolved to a place where such a thing can happen in the first place. Sandy Hook was a tragedy that does not fit our view of ourselves and that exposes something we’d rather not have to face. There are so many other ways in which people’s lives are cut short in this nation – in car accidents alone, almost 100 per day – and we mourn these people, of course, but it’s simply not the same, in part because when you die in a car crash, whether you’re an adult or a child, you die in accordance with our cultural acceptance of the risk automotive travel entails. We have not accepted that merely by sending our children to school, we are exposing them to risk of death by gunfire.

In the days and weeks after Sandy Hook, it felt to me as if our country stood on the brink of something amazing. It felt as if we had hung our toes of the edge of a cliff and looked down, and below us, we could see what we could be, if only we might cling to that sense of what mattered, what truly, deeply mattered, and let ourselves fall into it. And it would be that easy, I think, if only we could stop resisting. But in a way, this does not fit our view of ourselves, either.

Then came the other cliff, the fiscal cliff. Then came the NRA, calling for armed guards in all schools. Then came Christmas and the New Year. Then we pulled our toes back. Maybe it felt too risky, or maybe we just forgot. Maybe all the information we absorbed – about the fiscal cliff, about Syria, about taxes, about this and about that – distracted us and somehow diluted the poignancy of the moment.

Even as I write these words, Penny and the boys are heading outside for target practice. For now, I feel ok about my children’s relationship to guns. I believe it is possible for them to both have a relationship to guns, and to that view I spoke of, of what the world could be if we could just hang on. Not to grief, and definitely not to anger. But to that sense of what truly matters. Of what connects. 

I suppose if I could articulate any one hope for my children, it would be that they will be of the generation that doesn’t just tiptoe up to that cliff and glance briefly into a vision of what their world can be, before retreating. Nah, I want them to be of the generation that tiptoes up to that cliff, looks down, and jumps.

 

Lazy

I liked how the sun was hitting these loops of baling twine

Seeing as how I’m still putting the finishing touches on my keynote for this weekend’s PASA conference, I’m going to post a couple of short excerpts from some upcoming projects.

We quickly settled into a rhythm: I’d reach through the open gate of the wagon, pluck a bale off the pile, and place it on the elevator, which is little more than a revolving row of large metal teeth set into a steel frame. Leaned up against the barn from ground to third story haymow, the elevator looked a bit like a ladder, albeit one tilted at a worryingly shallow angle. The upward churning teeth sunk into the soft underbelly of each bale and carried it up, up, up, until it plopped off the high end at Rye’s feet, at which point he would grab the bale by its twin loops of twine and muscle it into the growing pile behind him. Since we couldn’t hear each other over the elevator’s racket, Rye and I communicated by hand signals. He raised his arms and shook his hands in an imploring motion; at first, I assumed he needed a break, but the motions only became more imploring, and I realized he was asking me to place the bales closer together, so there would be less down time between each one.

Within an hour, we had the majority of the bales unloaded, and Melvin had finished milking. He emerged from the milk house and we all set to moving them from the big pile Rye had made, carrying each bale a hundred or so feet along the length of the loft floor, to where we could stack them neatly along the back gable wall. Melvin and Rye stacked the low bales and, being by far the tallest of the bunch, I stacked the top rows. In the vast, open space of the barn the stacks looked almost inconsequential, and I knew it was maybe three days worth of feed for his small herd of cows. Three days out of the 200 or so days they’d need to be fed hay over the year, and for a moment I thought about all of the essential work that happens that most of us never see, that goes unheralded and unnoticed. Unappreciated.

The three of us stood for a moment in the broad opening to the haymow, and for a second, I wished to see us from below with our silhouettes visible against the barns great, yawning mouth. I thought about how, as much as anything else, I wish to instill in my boys a quiet appreciation for precisely the sort of work we’d just done and for the people who devote their lives to it. Such work and people are rare things, I think, and getting rarer, in this era of mechanization and industry built on artifices of productivity: Money made from money, and not to meet any immediate need, but for the sake of nothing more than mere accumulation. 

And, from the keynote itself…

I believe there comes a point at which more information might actually be counterproductive, when the flow and volume of all those facts and numbers becomes little more than a distraction, an almost impenetrable logjam between ourselves – not just our intellectualized selves, but our whole selves – and the world around us. I realize that this view is antithetical to our contemporized relationship to information, which the Internet and so-called “mobile devices” have driven to new levels of codependence. We live in the “information age” and we are told that the ability to beckon Siri at a whim, to have her call forth in her stilted, digitized voice any small bit of trivia we find ourselves tragically bereft of, is one of the great perks of the 21st century. Perhaps more worryingly, this view is antithetical to our contemporized expectations for our children who, we are told, must be groomed to compete on a global stage. To do so, we are to believe that they must be armed with the standardized information that will allow them to vanquish their peers and return the United States to its former glory. To this end, last year five states voted to increase the amount of time their children will spend in school by as much as 300 hours annually.

  At this point, it is probably important to distinguish between information and knowledge. And while there are many ways to explain this difference, perhaps the most succinct is to point out that knowledge – true knowing – depends on experience. It depends on doing. It is, more often that not, a curator of skill and, in so much as those skills must be learned from others, knowledge is also a curator of relationships. Knowledge demands patience. It demands investment – not in money, but in the true currency of our lives: Time. 

 

Poor In the Head

I grew up in Enosburg, Vermont, which, as some of you may know, is far enough north that an Enosburgian might rightly enough consider someone from Cabot a flatlander. We lived in a two-room cabin: No running water, no electricity, no plumbing. The cabin sat a good quarter-mile or maybe more off the dirt road. This was before the Subaru era and, true to type, my folks drove a VW beetle. So in winter, we skied in. That’s how I learned to ski: Not as sport, but as transportation. I’m glad for it now, but I can’t say I was particularly grateful for it at the time.

My father wrote poetry and edited poetry anthologies and probably did some other odd jobs that don’t come to mind; for a while my mother milked cows on a farm up the road. I played in the dirt. There was very little money. We might have even been poor, although I certainly wasn’t making such distinctions at the time.

Then my father took a job down in Montpelier and we moved. This was beginning of my family’s ascent into the middle class, and when I say “middle class,” I mean the real middle class, not this bullshit idea that someone making a quarter million bucks a year is somehow middle class. At least not in Vermont, they ain’t.

Now there was a bit more money, although again, it wasn’t something I was thinking about or perhaps even aware of.

I mention all this not so much to tell my tale (although, if you’re at all interested, you can read more about this history in SAVED), but to briefly consider how my current relationship to money was forged by my childhood.

The truth is I am grateful for having grown up without a lot of money. This is not to say I did not grow up privileged, because of course I did. I grew up with the skin color of the majority race of my nation and I grew up speaking the majority language of my country. I was raised in a family that provided me the freedom to explore my boundaries. All of these things have likely provided opportunities for me that might not have been there for me otherwise. Indeed, in a strange way, I consider the fact that I did not grow up with much money to also be a sort of privilege; I suspect that such an upbringing impressed upon me that money is only one way of meeting my family’s needs.

A while back, when the so-called fiscal cliff was dominating the drivel that passes for news, I heard a segment on NPR in which they were interviewing folks of varying income levels, trying to determine what constitutes “middle class.” One of the interviewees, a pleasant sounding fellow from (if memory serves) California admitted to pulling down $450,000 annually. Did he think of himself as middle class, the interviewer asked? Why, most certainly, he said, and furthermore, he often felt as if he didn’t have nearly enough money, in large part because no matter where he looked, there were people with more. So much more. He chuckled as he said this, as if even he knew it was ridiculous. But still, he said it.

For a just a moment, I am ashamed to admit, I felt a flash of anger. 450 large per year and you want more? What a selfish, ungrateful asshat.

But then I realized something: This man wasn’t wealthy. Not even close. He was poor, and he was poor in the most self-destructive, tragic way possible. He was poor in his head. And once I realized that, I didn’t feel anger anymore. I felt sympathy.

Fix It

If any of ya’ll in the northeast want to see what sort of stock I sprung from, you need only watch the Superbowl this coming Sunday. My pops, Geof, is starring in a regional Bond Auto commercial. He’s the guy in the funny hat.