Eating Close to Home

Posted on July 30, 2003 by cmf

Our little farmer’s market is on Wednesday evening and tonight I didn’t buy flowers, because I finally have enough things blooming in my own yard that I can fill the vase under my grandmother’s portrait myself. However, I did buy green beans (because the caterpillars got my bean plants before they could get off the ground), and new potatoes (which I think I’ll plant next year) and gorgeous, fragrant fresh garlic. So tonight’s dinner is pasta with the first zucchini from my garden, with hot pepper flakes, fresh garlic, and basil and mint from the garden.I don’t know how I’m going to go back to eating produce that’s been on a truck after this. And it’s not just me — the dogs each got an egg with their breakfast this morning because my brother decided his eggs are too old. We’ve become so accustomed to fresh eggs from our neighbors that the old eggs go to make the dogs all shiny.

I also bought a jar of black plum jam from a lady who’d set up a card table and was selling veggies from her garden, jams, and beautiful pies. Beautiful hand-made imperfect delicious pies.

There are no answers here

Posted on July 25, 2003 by cmf

I’ve had a slew of emails from sweet readers of this blog lately who seem to be under the impression that I’ve managed to figure out some answer to the ongoing question about how to live, how to live small, how to live in peace and happiness.So I thought perhaps it was time to go on the record. I don’t have any answers. I don’t think there are any answers to that particular question. Like everything else that’s really important in life: love, faith, art, politics — the key term is process. It’s all a process. We never actually get there. We just keep groping our way toward an elusive goal.

My brother and the Nice Girlfriend and I were discussing the whole issue of living small the other day and she just laughed at me (in a nice way) “You live larger than a lot of people I know. When you want something you just go out and buy it!” Which is true. I was hot — I bought a swamp cooler. I needed a privacy fence and so I waited until I got an infusion of cash, then hired people to build it (instead of building it myself, or with my brother, which would have been bad because we would have had a big fight, and probably wouldn’t have built a very good fence). When my powerbook died, I bought a new iMac, and I spend far more money than I probably should on books. It’s all relative. Because of my good corporate job for which I get paid by California standards, I make a lot more money than most people in Montana. Hence I’m living large. However, when compared to my trust funder/yuppie friends in Bozeman who live in the big houses on the big lots in the big subdivisions (that used to be hay farms), I live small. (Quel horreur, I only have one bathroom.)

Here were the choices I made about moving here that were small: I bought an old, small-ish house in town that needed to be fixed up. Small choice #1: I wanted to recycle a house and garden that already exist instead of building a new one, because, well, I think there are plenty of houses out there already. Also, as a single chick with no kids, I don’t need enormous amounts of space. Small choice #2: I wanted a house in town because the virus of the 5-20 acre “ranchette” is destroying what little is left of the West — they impede wildlife migratory patterns, and are a blight across the land. And I didn’t want to contribute to that (and I thought I’d be lonely out there all by myself). Small choice #3: I bought an inexpensive house with a mortgage I can conceivably pay off in my lifetime.

All of which means that the LivingSmall Project #1 now becomes climbing out of debt. And there’s plenty of debt to climb out of — like most Americans, I’ve got more credit card debt than I should, and then of course there’s that hefty student loan — getting a Phd was very expensive. But by choosing a small mortgage, and by moving to a part of the country where my money goes a little further, I’m hoping that in a few year’s time, I can be debt-free. And if you don’t owe money, you have many more options in life … including writing full time.

My model in finding a home I can afford and putting down roots someplace is Gary Snyder. I studied with Snyder at UC Davis, and got to hang out with him some, and he’s the happiest artist I know — it was Snyder and Jim Houston who both told me, long ago when I was just beginning to write that the task was to find a life that will allow you to get the work done. So — it took ten years, and a big fat dose of good luck, but I found a job that I can do remotely, that pays good money, and that leaves me time to write, and then I found a house I could afford, in a community of people who like and support me, and I seem, slowly, to be getting the work done.

And that’s the only answer I might have for anyone, and of course, it’s not an answer, it’s a question (with an embedded quote, at that): how are you going to build the kind of life that will allow you to accomplish your “real work”?

Rain!

Posted on July 24, 2003 by cmf

Rain!

It rained last night! Glorious thunderstorm about seven o’clock … with some actual moisture content as well — big raindrops falling on my garden. Glorious thunderstorm which cooled everything off a little, broke the relentless heat wave a tad, and has left my gardens looking perky and refreshed.

I missed thunderstorms when I was in California. There are many nice things about California, and many people like the mono-weather. It’s dependable. It’s reliable. You rarely have to worry about what the weather’s going to do, because if it’s May-October it’ll be sunny and dry and if it’s October-May it will probably rain. Oh, and you might have morning fog. When my grandmother moved to Burlingame in the 1930′s she says her house got very dirty because she kept waiting for a rainy day to clean. And it seemed a shame to spend a perfectly beautiful day cleaning when you could be out playing golf or riding. But here, we get afternoon thunderstorms, which I love … and since we’re not actually in the mountains here in Livingston, but up on a bench sort of looking over the mountains and out toward the plains, you can see the thunderstorms coming. Then they do, and the air changes, and it just feels like everything’s going to be a little bit better for a while ….

Heat Wave Continues

Posted on July 21, 2003 by cmf

It’s still hot here in Montana. Ninety-five to one hundred every day. The mornings are pretty nice still — it’s usually about 65 or 70 when I get up, and doesn’t really get hot hot until about 1:00 or so, but after that, it’s over. Too hot to think, too hot to move, too hot to do anything but hide in my house with my portable swamp cooler. Which I feel bad about. As a kid I was always being dragged out of whatever cool corner I’d found indoors, where I was happily reading a book, and thrown outside, having been told that it was a beautiful day and I should go out and play. (Sometimes, especially if we were at our grandmother’s house the variation was “go outside and play and don’t come back until it’s dinner time.”) So, as an adult, I’ve been feeling very guilty about spending so much precious summertime indoors, but it’s just too hot out there to do anything. (The tomatoes like it though.)The big solace is an afternoon dip in the river with the dogs. They’ve become absolutely obsessed with retrieving tennis balls, this, after years of dissing the retreive by the older of our two dogs. I think it’s sibling rivalry; the puppy is maniacal, and very good at retrieving all the way — that is, actually bringing the ball to you and not just dropping it somewhere in your general vicinity. It wasn’t until the puppy came up with this skill that the older dog showed any interest, but now, toss a ball out into the current of the dropping-but-still-mighty Yellowstone, and out they both go, swimming like champs, swimming so hard their front ends rise from the water like motorboats, and after a brief scramble for the ball, the big dog usually gives it to the puppy to bring in, and then they stand there, with that maniac dog look, just waiting for you to do it again. So, in the heat of the afternoon, we’ve come up with a variation, which is I stand waist deep in a big eddy and throw the ball, then while they’re retrieving, I take a little swim. Confuses them a bit, they’re not sure what I’m doing in the water without a clear goal like a ball to retrieve, but we all get wet, and cool off, and the evenings are much much more pleasant.

Love my swamp cooler

Posted on July 18, 2003 by cmf

Love my swamp cooler

I can think again — the portable swamp cooler is a gem. Holds about 5 gallons of water, has a big old fan, and cools the house down just enough … because it just evaporates cold water and blows the slighly cooled air into your room, the swamp cooler doesn’t have that harsh refrigerated edge to it that air conditioners give off. And it’s pretty energy-effecient since it’s just a big fan with a water pump. It’s 95 outside, and currently 79 degrees inside my house. This I can live with. Now I can think.

Weather is hot, Blogging is Slow.

Posted on July 17, 2003 by cmf

Weather is hot, Blogging is slow

I am not a hot weather gal. One of the things I loved about living in Telluride all those years ago, is that it was almost never hot (not at 9000 feet, it wasn’t). However, it’s hot here in Montana. High 90s by midafternoon, and since the sun doesn’t set until almost 9:30 — it stays hot. Now, I realize this isn’t someplace really brutal like, say, New York City (where I sweltered away two summers of my 20s, too poor to afford a summer share, just sweating in my tenement), but nonetheless, the thermometer goes up and my brain shuts down. I’m off to Bozeman today in search of a portable swamp cooler … should I succeed, I’ll try to give you all a summary of my recent reading — I’ve read a bunch of good stuff lately, and have been meaning to blog about it.

Rodeo Wrapup

Posted on July 13, 2003 by cmf

Rodeo Wrapup

I’ve been meaning to blog about last week’s rodeo, but it needed a little time to sift its way through my consciousness (that and there was a big fat literary party last week that kind of threw me off my center for a few days — those things always make me feel like Sally Field at the Oscars — I still can’t believe the French editor had read my book, had remembered it, and had liked it. Of course, it would have been nice if he’d published it, but perhaps when the next one comes out).

So anyway, the rodeo. It was, without a doubt, the wildest rodeo I’ve ever seen — and I’ve been to a lot of rodeos. The stock was incredibly rank — the bawling calves kicked themselves loose and invalidated most of the calf roping, the steers mostly either stopped short or outran the ropers and bulldoggers, the bucking horses (both bareback and saddle bronc) defeated the vast majority of the riders, and the bulls allowed only one or two successful rides per night (yeah, I fess up, I went all three nights). The bucking horses were completely out of control — climbing the bucking chutes, going down on the riders (and often coming back up with them still on). In one case, after going down on a rider, then stepping on him hard coming back up, a bucking horse managed to elude the pickup riders long enough for them to get the hurt cowboy out of the ring, then as they were herding this still-bucking horse out of the arena, it somehow managed to flip himself backward over the gate by the buldogging chutes, nearly landing on the cowboy he’d just hurt and the two paramedics who were treating him (the paramedic was quoted in the local paper as saying “I ran one way, and my partner and the patient ran the other). The ropers were all on that end of the arena since their event was next, and it took 15 or 20 ropers two whole minutes to catch that horse. Two minutes is a long time when you’ve got a freaked-out horse with its bucking strap still on running loose.

And then a horse broke his leg. It was terrible. The ride was clearly all off from the beginning, and then the horse landed and its right front leg bent the wrong way and came back up with the leg dangling and the whole arena got really quiet. The pickup guys managed to get the rider off, and get the horse calmed down, then a swarm of guys who must have come from the bulldogging chutes got him to the ground, strapped him to a gate and carried him into the trailer. They took him out of the arena before the local vet put him down. The whole thing took maybe three or four minutes. There’s nothing you can do with the image of a horse’s leg dangling like that. And as much as I love rodeo, and as much as I know that animals get hurt all the time — as much as I know that a horse can break a leg in the pasture, or the show jumping ring, or when you’re out on a trail — there’s a culpability in knowing that that horse, that really really rank horse, broke it’s leg for our entertainment. Unlike the many cowboys who got the shit kicked out of them over those three days, that horse couldn’t choose to be there — and that’s where it seems, we’re collectively responsible for that broken leg.

And then the rodeo went on, and a 41 year old guy was in the chutes, and that horse came out and that man did the most impressive piece of riding I’ve ever seen. The horse nearly went down twice, and shifted directions at least three times — this was not the buck-buck-buck-buck rhythm a rider hopes for, this was utterly unpredictable riding, and that horse wanted that guy off him. And that guy, that old guy (not in regular life, but to still be riding bucking horses at 41?) kicked into some other zone — it must have been sheer muscle memory and he rode that horse. It was astonishing. It didn’t in any way make up for the horse with the broken leg, but it was one of those moments where you see someone perform some amazing athletic feat and it reminds you why people do these things at all.

And that’s what I mean by the wildest rodeo I’ve ever been to. All sorts of things happened, most of which were pretty much out of the control of the human beings involved. There was that one moment where that older guy got up there and rode the wildness, but he wasn’t controlling it, he was just somehow synched up with it for a few seconds. As much as I’ll always feel partially culpable for that horse with the broken leg, I’d also hate to see rodeo get too tame, too safe, too tidy. It’s like having predators here to deal with — it sucks that I can’t hike alone because there are grizzlies and mountain lions and wolves, but it’s important that there are things out there bigger than we are, and that we have contact with them. Thoreau’s dictum was “In wildness is the preservation of the world,” a phrase so opaque that it has fueled a thousand doctoral exams (including mine), but it’s what I’m arguing for here — leaving some wild space, some space unmediated by regulations designed to protect us from disaster, some space in which the truly wild ride can occur.

LivingSmall

Life, Literature, and the Subversive Power of Living Small

Monthly Archives: July 2003