Real Economies vs. Fake Economies

Posted on October 8, 2008 by cmf

There’s a really interesting piece in this morning’s New York Times about the town of Hardwick, Vermont and the Center for Agricultural Economy. Hardwick was, like many small rural towns, emptying out — main street was full of empty buildings, and there was no way to make a living. Then a group of local agricultural entrepreneurs got together, meeting monthly, loaning one another money, figuring out ways to share skills and resources so that they all prosper. Their website says that their goal is programs that:

…will recognize that the 21st century food system balance be tipped towards localization over globalization, locally sustainable food systems over long trade routes, and broadened agricultural diversity and biodiversity over intensified crop production

Local systems, local sustainability, local community — look — hippie values back in action, but making money, and building a local economy. It sent me off to the basement library to pull out Gary Snyder, Wendell Berry and Paul Hawken’s books — maybe its time for a refresher course in the economies of sustainability. In the wisdom of old values like thrift, and soil conservation, and organizations based on community.

What I loved about this article was the timing of it. Here we are in a financial crisis caused by a classic crazy bubble — this time it wasn’t tulips, or Web 1.0, but mortgages. If you give people crazy mortgages that they can’t afford, and then you borrow on margins of 60 and 80 times the ostensible worth of those rotten mortgages, well, then I guess you shouldn’t be that surprised when the whole thing blows up. I’ve been just beside myself with anger at all those snotty guys I grew up with who when you asked what they did said “I do money” and then went on to point out that what they did was of course so arcane and complicated that no one but them could understand it. And then they went off and gambled with all of our money and lost it because they decided to pretend that the essential rules had changed when they hadn’t. And now the rest of us will suffer the very real financial consequences.

So in a week when I’ve mostly been livid — it was such a joy to read about the farmers of Hardwick (where my beloved Patrick spent a couple of years when he went to Sterling College in Craftsbury). What I loved about these farmers and ag entrepreneurs in Vermont was that they rebuilt a town by focusing on what is real — real crops, real compost, real products that they can make out of materials they grow themselves. Real cooperation. They banded together. They found ways to buy one another’s surplus and make more products that they could sell. They put money back into the foundation and into one another. They rebuilt a town. The old fashioned way. The way we’ve all been told for the last couple of decades was obsolete in a global economy. They proved that local and sustainable can work.

Ed Abbey called an economy based on the concept of endless growth “the economy of the cancer cell” — it seems to me that perhaps, although it’s traumatic and is likely to be very painful, maybe we’re seeing the beginning of the end of that way of thinking. The traders who were making millions and millions of dollars by trading pieces of paper that held no real relationship to anything of actual value have seen their entire industry disappear (perhaps now they’ll have a little more sympathy for all those steelworkers and manufacturing workers who have been through the same thing for the past thirty years). Although I haven’t gone to the website and read the details, the fact that Obama is talking at every turn about green technologies being a sustainable growth sector and a way we can earn/innovate our way out of this crisis is very heartening to me. And his message is resonating. It’s making sense to people waking up from a fever dream of consumerism and cheap oil and bad processed food that only makes them obese and sick.

Suddenly, the old values, the ones that Gary Snyder and Wendell Berry and Paul Hawken have been talking about for years are being proven true. I was talking to one of my dog park friends this morning who is opening a store this winter — he’s going to sell canning equipment and water filters and mills to grind one’s own wheat. He wants to start some classes for people who want to learn to do for themselves those skills of basic sustainability that we’ve handed over for too long to big corporations. This is one of the main reasons I moved here — I wanted to be someplace where people still know how to do things. There are still a lot of old chicken coops in back alleys all over town. There are gardens. There are ranchers raising animals. There are elk and deer and antelope filling freezers every fall. There’s an ethic of sustainability and self-reliance and there’s also a real community. So maybe, like the good people of Hardwick, we can keep one another afloat.

Everyone’s Downsizing …

Posted on July 10, 2008 by cmf

I always see a fair number of bikes in town in the summer — it’s pretty flat here, and town isn’t that big, and of course, we’re all locked in our houses for six to nine months a year, so once nice weather hits, there’s a lot of biking and walking. But I’m definitely seeing more bikes this summer — more old bikes that have been pulled out of the garage, more bikes with trailers. The bike shops over in Bozeman report that they’ve been slammed this year by people refitting older bikes. All good.

The other thing I’ve seen in town, that I haven’t seen anyplace else, is that a lot of folks have pulled out their ATVs and are driving them for short haul trips. And motorcycles. And scooters. But there are more ATVs on the streets than I’ve ever seen before. Fine by me — I’d rather have them here on the streets than running me off the trails.

Rodeo Slack

Posted on July 2, 2008 by cmf

Independence Day is a three-day event here in Livingston, and the centerpiece is the Livingston Roundup Rodeo. There are so many rodeos in this part of the country over the holiday that they call it “Cowboy Christmas” — most of these riders will do two, three or four rodeos over the weekend chasing the bonanza of prize money available that might just get them through the rest of the season. It’s easier for the rough stock riders (bucking events) to do a lot of rodeos because they don’t have to haul livestock with them — often three or four guys will hire a small plane to hop between Livingston, Red Lodge, Cody, Great Falls. But the folks who ride timed events, team roping, bulldogging, barrel racing, tie-down roping, they have to haul their horses with them, and so, many of the top competitors in the timed events show up in Livingston the day before the rodeo for the Slack Competition.

I have no idea why it’s called the Slack, but it’s my favorite part of the rodeo here. For one thing, it’s really just rodeo people in the audience, and as I said to the nice group of roper guys I wound up sort of sitting with (listening to them bitch about their wives was pretty amusing), it’s the only time I get to really watch without having to explain what the events are, or that the calves will really be all right. None of my friends here really grew up around horses, and none of the people with whom I’m going to the rodeo tonight (to hear our Sophie sing the national anthem) or on the Fourth really follow rodeo at all. To them it’s a strange, and possibly barbaric form of entertainment and a lot of them are really just there for the social scene and the fireworks afterwards.

I’ve written before about how rodeo was a thing that Patrick and I did together, and it’s always difficult to be there without him. I got a little teary sitting up in those bleachers by myself, but after a while, as I wound up surrounded by that group of ropers, as I watched the little kids running up and down the bleachers like Patrick and I did during our childhood at horse shows, as we all watched Trevor Brazil, who is leading the standings for all-around champion this year, sign a hat for one of those kids (a kid whose ears seemed to be the only thing keeping that hat above his eyes), and chat with some of the older guys in the stands, as I sat there and ate my hamburger, and had a drink, and watched a lot of very good roping, and bulldogging and then some barrel racing, well, it felt okay. The last couple of years I’ve gotten too sad, and I’ve had to leave, and it makes me mad because I really like rodeo. I’d still rather not be there by myself, but this was the first year I had a good time. It was an odd good time, but the ropers were nice, and explained to me why they don’t like roping in our arena (something about how there’s not enough room, and when they push the calves out of the chute they tend to drive them over into the corner). It was companionable, and fun, and although the bucking events are spectacular, and exciting to watch in their own right, it was fun to watch the timed events, which take a whole different set of skills while surrounded by folks who don’t just think the timed events are the boring filler between the bucking events, to be surrounded by guys who frankly, would rather be out there in the arena than sitting up here in the stands.

Unexpected Visitor

Posted on June 22, 2008 by cmf

We had an unexpected visitor yesterday — it was early, about seven, and I was making tea when my dogs rushed the back fence, barking. I went out to shush them because it was early, we have neighbors — and who did I see on the far side of my back gate but Jacques!

I let him in and looked down the alley, but there wasn’t any sign of the Mighty Hunter. That was weird. So after I got the three of them to stop barking, I got on the phone. Jacques has been known to go on walkabout every once in a while, and apparently that’s what he’d done. We don’t know if he got following some of the many folks on the levee who had come down to watch the bridge collapse, or what, but somehow he went from the MH’s house on Tenth Street all the way across town to mine on C street — there are some big streets to cross along the way.

I have to admit, he did look, well, hangdog about it all. He sat in my kitchen looking like he’d had a slightly larger adventure than he’d meant to — I knew how he felt. When I was about seven, and Patrick was five (were we really that little? we didn’t feel like we were that little, we felt like perfectly capable people) we were stupendously bored. We lived on a farm then, and we’d been away for much of the summer so we couldn’t find our bikes, and the woods were full of mosquitos, and our parents were busy. So we decided we’d walk to Gigi and Shelley’s farm to play with them. It was always fun there. They had a pool. So we sneaked out the end of the driveway and started walking. It was August. It was hot. What took seven or eight minutes to drive was really far away. We got all the way to the corner where you turned off our road to go over to the one they lived on, probably 3 miles or so, when we gave up. We stuck out our thumbs and decided to hitchhike like the hippies we’d seen on TV (this was the early 70s). Of course, when that big, low-slung American car screeched to a halt we dove into the weeds. Suddenly it all seemed a little scary, especially when a heavy-set black lady came wading into the ditch to retrieve us. What are you two doing out here? she scolded. Where’s your parents? Where do you live? I’m going to give your mother a piece of my mind for letting the two of you out here on the side of this road. Anyone could pick you up. What are you thinking? Patrick and I looked at eachother and I lied. I told her we lived at Gigi and Shelleys. I knew that their mom wouldn’t be as mad at us as ours would be, and maybe we’d get to go swimming. So this nice lady and her son, who was driving, took us to the H’s house. When Mrs. H. came out, she looked at the two of us, in this car with these strangers, who were black (it was not a colorblind society that I grew up in) and sent us into the kitchen. The woman who picked us up just laid into Mrs. H, who was sputtering that she wasn’t our mom, and that yes, she thought we’d made an unwise decision. Mr. H came out as well, and with his famous Australian charm managed to calm this nice, apoplectic woman down. We sat in the kitchen, eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, knowing that despite the awe with which Gigi and Shelley were currently looking at us, we were in such big trouble.

That’s sort of how Jacques looked sitting in my kitchen yesterday morning. He was panty. He was a little freaked out. He seeemed very releived to be back inside a yard he knew, with his packmates. The MH left him with me all day as he had a tile job anyhow, and Jacques and I had a long discussion, much like that one in the H’s kitchen 35 years ago, about how he is always welcome at my house, but he has to tell someone where he’s going, and he can’t cross all those big streets by himself.

Hail and Voting

Posted on June 3, 2008 by cmf

So, here we are, the last primary in the nation. Although I’ve been an Obama supporter for months, I’ve been lying to the campaign. They (quite rightly) have been encouraging people to vote early, especially since here in Montana you can register any time, including on election day, and you can vote right when you register. The Bozeman Chronicle had a photo on the front page this morning of a line of early voters snaking out the door of the courthouse over there yesterday. But I’ve written on this blog before about how I love to go to the polls and so, although I told the Obama folks that I voted early (so they could move on and call people who really were undecided) I didn’t. I waited until today so I could go to the polls. And it turns out I’m not the only one who likes to go vote in person. My friend Scott McMillion did a piece on the Lehrer News Hour (which I still think of as McNeil-Lehrer) last Friday about how he loves going to the polls here because he sees all the older ladies who knew him when he was a little kid. It’s a great piece about how the town has changed both for the better and for the not so better. You can watch the streaming video here. So, off I went on my bike a while ago to go vote, and although I don’t know all the older ladies, I saw several of my friends, and it felt like a civic event.

In garden news, we had a little hail yesterday afternoon, along with several bouts of pelting rain. While the 2 kales (Gallego and Laccinato) seem to be okay, and the chard looks a little battered, and even the broccoli transplants held up fairly well, the Regina di Maggio lettuce didn’t fare so well. I’m giving it a couple of days to see if it will recover, but poor things, they just look beat to death. The spinach is finally coming in, as is the broccoli rabe, and my other oddball favorite from Seeds of Italy, the Rapa da Foglia senza Testa. The description says that this is a turnip green — all I know is that I love it. It’s bitter, without being too bitter, and grows like mad, and is absolutely delicious sauteed with a little olive oil, garlic, and lemon.

Lamb!

Posted on May 13, 2008 by cmf

I just had a terrific little visit with Barb Marshall of CrazyWoman Farm. She brought me 18 pounds of lamb — about half a lamb — a nice big bag that included a whole leg, a whole shoulder, a bunch of chops, some kebab meat and some ground lamb. She delivered even, all for six bucks a pound. And she’s really cool — we had a nice little chat about my urban farming — turns out she used to live on the next block over.

It’s one of the things I really love about living in this particular rural place. I know how lucky I am — not only do we have a lot of ranchers, but we have small slaughterhouses and organizations like the Corporation for the Northern Rockies helping farmers and ranchers market their stuff.

So, looks like lamb chops on the grill tonight — yum! And time to start thinking about a party — goodness knows I can’t eat a leg all by myself …

New Fence

Posted on May 7, 2008 by cmf

They finally came yesterday and finished my new fence. Every time I’ve gotten a fence put in, it’s the hardest part — living through the three or four days when the posts are in, but the fence isn’t in — last weekend was like that. I could see how the fence was going to be, but it wasn’t a fence yet — until yesterday. Now both sides of my backyard match, and it’s peaceful and private out there.

After yesterday’s funeral, which was as lovely as a funeral for someone who died too soon and too suddenly can be, it was so pleasant to come home to my quiet, private garden. Six hundred people packed into a church that held four hundred, and then a reception afterwards at the Elks club. It was a long day and as sad as it was, it was good to have a chance to repay some of the enormous kindness that came my way four years ago.

But I was exhausted by the time it was all over, and it was such a relief to come home to my lovely garden, and to sit on the little couch our there with the dogs, and read a magazine in the peace and quiet for a couple of hours.

How Not to be Useful …

Posted on April 24, 2008 by cmf

So, it’s snowing again this morning — and although I’m quite tired of snow, it’s a lovely soft morning — bit fat snowflakes, no wind, not too cold. So off for our morning dog walk I went — I’m babysitting the MH’s dog while he’s gone to Arizona for a couple of days and it was good to have 2 dogs with me again.

So we get to the dog park and we’re coming around the edge of the bluff and there’s another couple coming toward us. She’s on the phone, and he barely nods hello. I don’t recognize them, and they have that sheen of self-importance that we can all get. Whatever, we all pass and I can hear her loudly talking on her phone for a ways. But it’s a lovely morning and the dogs are romping in the snow and I just sort of wonder idly who the yuppies are. But as I come around toward the parking lot, there’s an SUV sitting there with the engine running. Again, it’s a car I don’t recognize, and as we pass one another on the backside I ask them if that’s their car that’s running. They tell me it is. I ask why. The woman tells me “because we were freezing.”

Now, here’s where I failed in this exchange. “Totally uncool,” I told them. “Thanks for polluting our dog park.” The man made some crack about his car being the least of the dog park’s problems and I sort of stomped away feeling all angry and stupid about the whole thing. But it made me mad. It’s bad enough to drive a big vehicle like that, but to just leave it running? Now those people knew better, I saw it in her eyes when I asked her why her car was running. But where I failed in the whole exchange was that I was annoyed by them in general. My inner Thoreau was outraged. I wanted to say that maybe if she put down the phone and looked at the lovely morning, maybe if she put down the phone and took two laps around the dog park that would warm her up, maybe if she put down the phone and turned off her car and was actually present that maybe we wouldn’t be in this fix we’re in, but no, I just made a snotty comment to the annoying yuppie types and missed the whole moment. Henry David was spouting bromides in my ear about chopping wood warming one twice and the false economies by which men value success, and frankly, my knee-jerk reaction was that I didn’t like these people and what were they doing in my park when they clearly didn’t know how to behave?

And so I got snotty. Not useful. But I do worry. These are the kinds of people who are supposed to know better than to leave their car running. These are people sort of like me — well educated, well off, professional. These are the kind of people who are supposed to be a part of the solution. And if as a society we can’t get over our own sense of self-importance to make even that kind of small change, to turn the car off, to pay attention, then what hope is there?

Michael Pollan asked exactly these quesitons in last week’s NY Times Magazine, in a piece called “Why Bother?”

Why bother? That really is the big question facing us as individuals hoping to do something about climate change, and it’s not an easy one to answer. I don’t know about you, but for me the most upsetting moment in “An Inconvenient Truth” came long after Al Gore scared the hell out of me, constructing an utterly convincing case that the very survival of life on earth as we know it is threatened by climate change. No, the really dark moment came during the closing credits, when we are asked to . . . change our light bulbs. That’s when it got really depressing. The immense disproportion between the magnitude of the problem Gore had described and the puniness of what he was asking us to do about it was enough to sink your heart.

That’s sort of how I felt when I saw that car running this morning. On the one hand, it was just one car, it was only a few minutes, really? how much damage was it doing? Why bother saying anything? Why bother worrying about it? But in the article Pollan makes a good argument that yes, individual effort is worth the bother, and that even small gestures, when aggregated, can make a difference.

But I don’t think that was my motivation. I was just pissy. Somehow, the combination of the running car, and those two people who were so not present on a beautiful snowy morning beside the Yellowstone River really got to me. They filled me with despair. They annoyed me. I probably saw something of myself in them. And instead of reaching out, and perhaps effecting some change, I failed by indulging in self-righteousness and anger, which allowed them in turn to retreat to defensiveness and to dismiss me as some weirdo hippie (sort of funny, actually). Which does make me wonder how we’re ever going to manage to reach across these divides and effect some change if we can’t even have a civil conversation about a running car at the dog park on a snowy morning. Sigh.

RIP Very Old Man

Posted on March 27, 2008 by cmf

My Very Old Man has died. It was in the paper yesterday. His name was Harold Busby and he was 88 years old. I haven’t seen him in about a week — I pass his house while walking the dogs and I usually stop to pet his Very Sweet Brown Dog and to wave at him behind his picture window. I don’t know what’s happened to the dog — I’ll have to ask his neighbor Lynn, who has been taking care of Harold for the past couple of months. I’m sad about my Old Man — I liked seeing him and waving to him. But after what sounds like kind of a hard life — raising all his brothers and sisters and then living with his mother until she died in 1991 — I’m glad the old man met his end after having been taken care of so well by his neighbors. Lynn was feeding him 3 meals a day — taking them over and sitting with him while he ate because apparently the Meals on Wheels person didn’t stay, and Harold didn’t eat. I like to think he knew at the end that people cared about him. And I hope someone nice took that dog — that is a sweet sweet dog.

More on Reviving Lost Skills

Posted on February 27, 2008 by cmf

Funny the way synchronicity works — I’ve been thinking a lot about how skills like learning to knit, or sew, or garden, or cook — skills some of our mothers (or in my case, my grandmother) discounted as being the kinds of skills that keep a girl tied to a domestic existence that stifles other opportunity — are for me a fulfilling way of refusing to cede control of my basic lifeskills to the corporate behemoths that seem to have taken over our lives. If I can sew a skirt, I’m not entirely beholden to clothes made in factories. If I can knit a sweater, I am not entirely beholden to some corporate entity for personal warmth. If I can put up my own pickles, I’m not relying on Clausen any more … none of this negates my existence as a cyber-worker, as a person who bought a new car a couple of years ago, as a person who still shops in stores and is in no way living off the grid. I just like knowing that if I have to, I can take care of some of my basic needs myself.

So this morning I pull up the SF Chronicle (another wonder of technology — I can read five newspapers a day) and Georgeanne Brennan has a really fabulous piece about how traditional pig-butchering celebrations are becoming, if not common, at least less of an anomaly than they once were:

The “day of the pig” also has renewed meaning now, when many people are concerned with the source of their food and with humane treatment of animals. Yes, there would be a slaughter, but it would be done with respect for the animal and the food it provides. Using every part of the animal – or as much as possible – would also show our respect for the life given. We would try not to waste a thing.

There’s a real value to keeping all these older skills alive, and in the case of the DIY crafts movement, to re-inventing them and making them hip and alive again. Skills like these brign us into contact with one another — there’s a reason knitting shops have become centers of community for many women (and some men) around the country. Keeping a garden gives me something to discuss with the folks at the farmer’s market in the summer, and because I produce more than I can eat, sharing food brings me into my community in ways I might not experience if I was simply buying all my food at the supermarket. Industrialized food production has been so successful at divorcing most of us from the animal and vegetable nature of our food that it’s no surprise to me that in much the same manner as the absolute conquest of wild nature caused Americans to go back and re-evaluate their relationship to and how they valued wilderness, that the success of industrial agriculture has spurred many of us to go back and re-evaluate our relationship to our food sources.

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