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Month: June 2003

Rodeo Week in Livingston

Rodeo Week in Livingston

Rodeo Week in Livingston

Fourth of July is a big week here in Livingston — the rodeo comes to town, there’s a parade, and everyone I know seems to be having parties. Friday night was the Art Walk, or Art Swill as some of us have come to refer to it — the whole town strolling up and down the street stopping in art galleries and drinking too much cheap art gallery wine. It was one of the first nice warm summer nights, and people had their party hats on.

Then last night was a gorgeous potluck barbecue outside of town, views of three mountain ranges (Crazies, Absarokas, Beartooths) with music provided by the old rancher from next door — he had a great old electric guitar with one amp, and his buddy played the accordian, and they were really really good. It was one of those events that are so swell — good food, nice people, old ranchers playing music, astonishing scenery and great weather — that we all just sort of stood around being grateful and happy in one another’s company. (Plus, my friend Scott McMillion, who wrote
Mark of the Grizzly : True Stories of Recent Bear Attacks and the Hard Lessons Learned
reassured me that I probably won’t run into a grizzly up in Suce Creek where I like to walk the dogs. Which was good, since I’ve been reading all the grizzly books and had gotten a little freaked out. I’m glad they’re there — I’ll lobby for more space for them in a heartbeat, I just really really don’t want to surprise one and get mauled.)

Tomorrow night is Canada Day at Margie’s, then Wednesday is the parade and the rodeo kicks off for three nights. And I love rodeo — I know, I know, many people object to rodeo but I love it all — mutton busting, roping, barrel racing (my aunt was a champeen barrel racer and has the buckles to prove it), and yes, bull riding. If I can find people to go with me, I’ll go all three nights.

So, if we survive all the festivity here at LivingSmall, we’ll let you know all about it.

Eating Local

Eating Local

Eating Local

We have a little local farmer’s market – when I moved here last fall it was pretty much just one good vegetable merchant and a lot of crafts. Well, they’ve done a great job getting new vendors, and Wednesday there was a local family selling their own pork, raised naturally without hormones and allowed to roam outside. Mr. Miller told me they started because they thought the local 4-H kids were paying too much for their weaner pigs, so they raised some weaners, and then when the weren’t all sold, well, they were in the pork business. So I bought some pork chops.

Next to them was a woman with a card table and a couple of coolers selling lamb. Now, I am a big fan of lamb, if I had to choose just one meat, it would be lamb. Her lamb was a little expensive, but well, it was raised just up the road and as I’ve written about before, I’m willing to pay a premium to buy meat that I know where it was raised, and more importantly, where it was butchered (over in Big Timber, at the processing plant). So I bought some lamb chops from her. She also told me that if I need anything during the week just to call, she’s got a clothing shop in town (“Ewe and Me” wouldn’t you know) and there’s a freezer in the back. Which is good because I think leg of lamb is almost the perfect summer barbecue meat. So, I took her card.

I also bought some gorgeous baby turnips from another local gardener with a card table, and found out that the reason I have little bugs eating my garden is that the brassicae family just has trouble around here (chard, kale, broccoli, etc…). It’s not a tragedy — things are growing — they just have little holes in them.

So, last night I had turnip greens cooked a la Julie/Julia (saute some bacon, add a few hot pepper flakes and a big shot of chopped garlic, then the greens. Add 1/2 cup chicken broth, 1/2 cup vermouth, a couple of big pieces of lemon rind and cook until done — in this case, about 40 minutes. Yum Yum), some rice, and a delicious local pork chop on the grill …

So that’s my little tale of local dinner. I ate well. My neighbors made a little money. And we didn’t spend petroleum reserves trucking stuff all over the country.

Summer Snowstorm

Summer Snowstorm

Summer Snowstorm

Not here, but over in Yellowstone and up on Beartooth Pass … the pass is closed because they got 18 inches over the last two days. Glad I didn’t take the Wall O’Waters off the tomatoes … it’s just been gloomy and rainy down here, which is a mixed blessing. The plants love the rain, but it’s been so cold that the beans and zucchini are having a hard time getting off the ground. It’s supposed to warm up later this week.

Not much happening in the garden right now. The lettuce is coming up really well, as are the basil seedlings. The beets, Chinese kale and even the parsnips have sprouted, and I have a lot of radish and carrott seedlings going on out there. The cucumbers aren’t doing so well … too cold, I guess. They’ve pretty much all died. The first set of flageolet beans also keeled over, so I reseeded and also seeded in some Chinese long beans.

As for flowers, most of the peonies have bloomed and they’re all a gorgeous fuschia color. I love peonies and am so happy these aren’t white. Come fall, I’ll have to move them since they’re plunked right in the middle of my front lawn, one on each side of the walk. I want to do a cottage-garden sort of bed down along the front fence (four-foot chain link, sort of ugly but very practical) and I’ll move them when I put in those beds. The roses along the south side of my house also bloomed — they’re very old white rugosas, and while I thought they were going to be boring, they’re actually very pretty. I want to underplant them with a later-blooming dark pink of some sort, perhaps some more Terese de Buget. Again, next year.

It’s clearing up a little this morning, so I’ll have to go out and see what’s been going on out there during all this rain.

Solstice Hailstorm

Solstice Hailstorm

Solstice Hailstorm

Well, summer came in on a wave of dark clouds, thunder and lightning, a litte hail, and two days of steady rain. This morning my brother came over and said the Nice Girlfriend reported ice on her windsheild when she went to work, so I went out to check and it looks like the only things I lost were a couple of plants that got dried out last week when it was hot, and didn’t like the flip-flop to cold weather. Oh well, it’s Montana after all, things are going to run hot and cold.

“You mean in America they eat dead fish?”

“You mean in America they eat dead fish?”

This question was posed to my friend Wendy when she was in China adopting the darling Scott. Wendy had been describing something to one of her Chinese hosts about eating in America, and this woman just couldn’t believe that we bought fish dead in the grocery store. Who knows what you’re getting if you can’t see the whole fish — how can you tell how fresh it is if you can’t see the eyes or the gills? Better to buy your fish live, out of a tank, like sensible people, no?

I got thinking of this because my garden is ruining me for regular vegetables from the grocery store. How long has that zucchini been dead? What’s with that lettuce — it came all the way from Mexico and now I’m supposed to eat it? What am I going to do all winter (I sense experiments with cold frames ahead)? I know, again with the Swiss Chard, but it’s up and ready to go and having never really been a fan of Swiss Chard before, it’s a revelation. Cut it, carry inside, rinse in cold water, cut up and sautee with a little garlic until it wilts, add some chicken broth and a little wine and let simmer while the chicken cooks on the barbecue. Yum. Fresh greens from my very own backyard. And if you grow it yourself, you can eat it young, when it’s a little more tender than those enormous leaves you see in the store.

Speaking of greens, I went back to Seeds From Italy and ordered some more greens — some lettuces, a radicchio/chicory mix, and nice Bill McKay who runs the site sent along a packet of an escarole-like lettuce. I can’t say enough about these seeds — the arugula was fabulous, the basil is coming up really well (and I’ve had bad luck with basil in the past — which is odd as it’s supposed to be so easy), and I’m looking forward to more authentic Italian greens. Plus, he sends along some good cooking tips as well. Great site, great product, nice guy. Go check it out.

Requiem for a Bear:

Requiem for a Bear:

Requiem for a Bear: R.I.P. Number 264

A couple of weeks ago I blogged about watching our friend Bill Campbell’s documentary Season of the Grizzly on Animal Planet (I’d give a link to the blog entry, but Blogger seems to have decided this morning that all of my archives are unavailable. I’ll have to work on that.)

Bill followed bear Number 264 for almost a year and got amazing footage of her and her cubs (although, according to Shannon, the Yellowstone bear biologist who lives two doors down from Bill and Maryanne, Number 264 wasn’t a very good mommy, she kept losing cubs to male bears and accidents). Apparently, Saturday night someone hit Number 264 with a car — she darted into the road, which she was wont to do, and someone hit her. (This alone seems like a good enough reason to me to get rid of all the damn cars in Yellowstone — put people on trams. Also in Yosemite.) Now, I can’t imagine what goes through your head as a driver when you realize you just hit a grizzly bear. It’s not a deer. You can’t get out of the car and go peer into the ditch to see if it’s alive. I mean, you wouldn’t want to be anywhere near a wounded grizzly bear. So then what? I imagine the mad scramble in the car through all that literature they give you when you enter the park — the map, the newspaper-like thing that tells about events and recycling — where’s the damn number for calling someone about a wounded grizzly bear? And why can’t I get any cellphone coverage?

At any rate, the authorities did come, and hit her with the tranqilizer gun and took her to Bozeman where xrays showed she’d broken her back. They euthanized her early Sunday morning.

It just sucks on so many levels. The fact that we’ve got cars in the middle of their habitat, and idiot people like the one mentioned in this article who think these aren’t wild animals so it’s okay to go up and touch their cubs, the fact that we’ve so reduced our actual wilderness that we’ve got grizzlies being run over by cars … it’s ridiculous.

So, in memory of Number 264 — go check out Doug Peacock’s
Grizzly Years: In Search of the American Wilderness
, or Scott McMillion’s
Mark of the Grizzly : True Stories of Recent Bear Attacks and the Hard Lessons Learned
, or for a fascinating philosophical meditation on the meaning of wilderness itself, there’s Jack Turner’s wonderful book, The Abstract Wild (a book I can’t say enough good things about, a book that rewards re-reading).

A Plug for the Ruminator

A Plug for the Ruminator

A Plug for the Ruminator Review

The latest issue of the terrific Ruminator Review arrived the other day and I’ve been devouring it. This issue is devoted to “Cultivation: Rural Lives, Global Issues” and contains interviews with such thinkers on the subject as Gretel Ehrlich, Verlyn Klinkenboorg, Scott Russell Sanders and Maxine Kumin. (This issue also contains a small review of a childrens’ book by yours truly.)

One of the unexpected pleasures for me of moving to this small town in Montana is how interested people are in food, in the origins of their food, and in eating close to the source of production. People eat a lot of meat here, but it’s meat that is known, that is, it’s not strange meat from the supermarket, meat that comes from who-knows-where. I was at a barbecue this weekend discussing how oddly comforting I find it to wander into Matt’s Meats, our local butcher shop, and see a pig up on the back counter, Matt himself taking a look at it before cutting it up. It’s the kind of sight that would have totally freaked out most of the people I work with in California, but I thought it was curious and interesting. The only startling thing about the dead pig was how raw his eye socket was, but of course, you don’t want any hair on your meat, and eyelashes are hair. But there it was, a nice small-ish pig, and Matt was taking the time to examine the cavity, and about to start cutting it up, it wasn’t being sped through some horror-show of a factory abbatoir being hacked at by frantic workers. This isn’t the kind of discussion you can have a lot of places, but you can here, and you’ll also get a lot of good info about buying a freezer, and about butchering and keeping wild game. Like I said, people eat a lot of meat here, but it’s meat we know.

And then there are vegetables. It’s early yet, but Deep Creek Gardens is harvesting, the Farmer’s Market is starting up, and I’m learning to like Swiss Chard because it grows really well in my garden. I’ve discovered how nice young Swiss Chard is, picked straight out of the garden, sauteed with a little garlic.

Anyhow, if you’re interested in these sort of issues that are central to the LivingSmall experiment, the Ruminator Review has some great essays, reviews of a lot of interesting books on the subject, a few of which I had to go order myself (as if I need an excuse to order more books).

Breakfast of Champions

Breakfast of Champions

Breakfast of Champions

Not to sound like an Alice Waters clone, but my breakfast these past few days has been local farm eggs (1 yolk, 2 whites, extra yolk makes dog very happy — it’s good to share), scrambled with some arugula out of my garden and eaten over toast with a little goat cheese crumbled on top. It’s so good that yesterday, when I was out of eggs, I found myself cranky that the local natural foods store (which always makes me grumpy because they seem way more concerned with supplements than with food — eat real food people!) was still closed, as was Matt’s Meats where they also carry local eggs. So I had to settle for diner breakfast at Martins, which was fine, it’s always the same, which is what one wants from a diner. But this morning, there are eggs, there is arugula straight from the garden, there’s a happy dog who liked his extra yolk, and glory be, there’s even a nice steady rain falling on my garden.

Vacation in the backyard was a spectacular success. My yard is really coming together … I mowed and weed-whacked the other day, and despite never having been a lawn person, I was quite pleased with how nice it looked. Although I’m sure lawn-purists would criticise the diversity of plant life that makes up said lawn — no weed and feed for me. If it’s green, and mostly grass, I’m happy. In fact, this fall I’m going to seed with Nichols Garden Nursery’s Dryland Ecology Lawn Mix which contains a mix of grasses, clovers and some tiny wildflowers like chamomile. I like a mix in a lawn, and anything that will allow me to mow less often is a good thing.

Eventually I’d like to get rid of much of the lawn and replace it with perennial beds. Now that the fence is up, I have a long bed to work with, a bed that unfortunately, thanks to the happy workers’ feet is sort of a tabula rasa, but six feet by thirty is a fun space to think about. I’m hoping the big scarlet poppies and the iris will recover, but if not, well, I’ll just plant some other fun stuff. And for the back corner, where the sacred rhubarb grows, I’m thinking about raspberry canes, and asparagus — things I’ve been wanting to grow but which I don’t have room for in the regular garden.

But for now, it’s back to the day job, back to trying to make progress on the new book, back to watching, miracle of miracles, things grow in my vegetable garden (gardening is good for those of us whose faith in things working out okay wavers … you put in those seeds, nothing happens, nothing happens, and then there are sprouts, sprouts that grow into real things. Amazing.)

Summer Vacation in the Backyard

Summer Vacation in the Backyard

Summer Vacation in the Backyard

I have this week off from my Big Corporate job, and I’m having an old-fashioned summer vacation … it feels just like when school let out and you’d get to hang around the house for a few days doing nothing (we went to camp every summer for eight weeks, which was wonderful, so I never had enough time to get really bored with summer, a week or two at each end lying around the house reading books and eating popsicles was usually plenty for me). They finished my fence yesterday afternoon, and I am now free to hang out in my own backyard, in fact, I’m typing this from the table underneath one of my apple trees. It’s astonishing what a difference a little privacy makes … the fence was hardly up when, despite the racket from the air compressor, nail gun, and five people building a fence in my backyard, I began to feel myself really relax. I wish I was the sort of patient soul who could have put up with poor old bored Betty next door, but it’s incredibly nice to be able to hang out in my own yard without feeling like I’m the entertainment for the day.

So, as part of my vacation-at-home (which, considering what the fence cost, will probably be the first of many), I went out and bought a bunch of fun summer books, including three by Jamie Harrison who lives here in town. I’m not a mystery fan, but these are great fun … especially as Blue Deer, the town in which they are set, is a very thinly veiled version of Livingston. Plus, Jamie is both a fabulous gardener and a cook, so there’s food and plants and local gossip galore. They’ve been the perfect summer reading … check out the Current Reading section for links …