Intermezzo
Unless your mobile home was blown all over the county on opening
day of the tornado season, this must seem like an interlude of
reassuring normality in the world's convulsive wendings. The IED known
as Greece has not quite yet exploded, loud as all the graveyard
whistling that emanates from Europe might be. Even the invocation of a
"credit event" by the notorious ISDA has seen a first-stage payout of a
few mere billions - though you've got to believe that this is some kind
of stage-managed dumb-show designed to conceal the fact that the whole
credit default swap racket is a network of frauds.
Where I live, in the uppermost Hudson Valley, the peace and
tranquility of the moment is overlaid by sweet spring zephyrs arriving
about a month early. I hope that doesn't portend weeks on end of
90-degree summer heat, but I have the consolation of not being in
Texas, where that would be more like three straight months of
100-degree-plus heat. It must get tedious running in and out of the a.c.
My gardening schemes which fermented all winter are finally going
into action. Yesterday, I banged together the first two of ten raised
beds arrayed geometrically in a forty-eight foot square foot formal
vegetable and herb garden. I've done it before on a smaller scale at a
different house in a different time when nobody except the clinically
paranoid expected the collapse of civilization. I'm going to put in a
not-so-formal patch of corn-squash-and beans outside of that in the
manner of the people who lived here a thousand years ago, really just
to see how it works, and I may also plant a monoculture patch of
potatoes elsewhere.
The "back forty" awaits the arrival
of twenty fruit trees - mixed apple, pear, cherry, plus blueberry,
raspberry and current shrubs - and two blight-resistant American
chestnuts (not absolutely guaranteed blight-free). A mighty effort has
been made over recent decades by valiant arborists to restore the
American chestnut. It was this tree (Castanea dentate) which
made the forests east of the Mississippi so prolific with game in the
time before clocks arrived in North America. My back forty used to be
huge lawn, with an above-the-ground pool decorating the middle of it.
The pool is gone, thank you Jeezus. I'll start with this set of fruit
and see how they take to the soil here, and if they get going well I'll
get twenty more next year. It could add up to a really immense amount
of fruit for one household. There's always cider....
Altogether I have about an acre-and-a-quarter of already clear land to
experiment with. The rest is woodlot. The woods will require a lot of
grooming and brush-hogging to get decades of "trash" out: rampant
honeysuckle, Virginia creeper, box elder. There's a lot of good
hardwood in there otherwise, and I built a saw-jack set up to cut stove
lengths. There's enough in there to be self-replenishing with careful
management. The house I bought last fall has a fireplace with a stove
insert. The builder insulated the shit out of the place. The chain saw
is off in the shop getting its battered old chain replaced. I have to
learn how to sharpen the damn thing now. Cutting firewood is where you
get a really vivid sense of the power embodied in gasoline. A couple of
gallons will get next season's supplementary supply laid in. In the
past, and probably, in the future, this is a job that would be nearly
impossible to do by yourself.
These days, except for
highway repair and oil-drilling, there are few outdoor activities that
require a gang of men working together. In the years ahead, household
composition is going to change hugely for many reasons. It's unusual
these days to have a lot of children - considering population
overshoot, it seems crazy to promote that - but people with something
to offer in the way of skills and labor may have to join forces just to
get the necessary day's work done together. I'm sure that will have its
consolations, even if it means you don't get to have a 3,500 square
foot house to yourself.
The deer-fence installer just
submitted his estimate. It was an eye-opener, but it has to be done and
it's a one-time thing. I could have done it myself in a half-assed way
with plastic netting but this is not a time for half-assed measures. My
place is like a petting zoo, there are so many deer on and around it.
Left open, they would ravage anything I grow like locusts. And they had
the easiest winter in memory - no snow on the ground all January and
February, something nobody around here has seen before. Here it is
March and they are still looking plump and ready to pop out lots of
healthy babies. So I have to put a fence up around the garden and
orchard part of the property, with gates into the woodlots. The fence
has to be eight feet high because the white-tailed deer is a mighty
leaper. It's going to look a little like Jurassic Park.
Of course, if the USA gets into really deep socio-political shit,
it's easy to imagine the entire deer-herd of Washington County getting
exterminated inside a couple of years by hungry, desperate jackers. The
people I play fiddle with on Tuesday night, many of them boomer-age
hippie homesteaders and master gardeners, remember thirty years ago
when you hardly ever saw a deer. We could easily get to that point
again when times get hard.
About a week ago, I stopped
on a country road to take a leak. I stepped into the woods for a minute
and then, stepping out, was horrified to see dozens of ticks crawling
on my pants legs. I took the otherwise unused snow-brush to them. The
really weird part is that it was only thirty degrees that day. Yet they
were already active and right lively. This place is now the epicenter
of the eastern Lyme Disease epidemic. I went to a party not long ago
where at least fifteen people were currently in treatment, or had been
more than once before, for Lyme. Some just couldn't get rid of it. It
is a wicked-ass illness, very difficult to get out of your system, and
debilitating in myriad ways. It, too, was unknown around here thirty
years ago.
I honestly don't know if my own little
homesteading experiment at the edge of this sweet-but-beat little
village is going to work out. I'm pretty confident about growing
vegetables because I've done it successfully before, even in recent
years when I was a renter sitting out the housing bubble. But it gives
you something psychologically nourishing to do while the
turbo-industrial world wends its way into the long emergency. Pictures
to come on my website as the season wends where it will.
Apologies for late posting today...time change and all....
