Meet the goats and chickens! Music by Jere Canote on the CD “Uke Life.”
Anthony Vickerstaf and Tierney Creech’s video of the farm!
Farm Photos
You can find pictures of the farm here.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/23804956@N00/
At Peace by One’s Own Hand
Rob Girdis was full of magic! His choice leaves us deeply saddened, and plagued by questions like: “What could I have done to help him find another path to peace?”
The answer is this: You did everything you could, most of the time, and in many ways. You loved him well. You appreciated his work, and were forgiving when your dream instrument was in the pipeline longer than you had hoped. You hugged him back. You allowed him to be quiet at times, even withdrawn. And now you must forgive him for leaving us.
If genius is a blessing, it is the polar opposite of the blessing of peace. In order to work the magic as he did, I suspect he had to wait until the energy was just right and he could turn himself over to the hyper-focus demanded to produce such fine work. It’s not a simple on/off switch that you can flip at will. You have to wait for the moment to arrive, then leap on it and not allow yourself to be interrupted in your process. You can’t force yourself to be there, and when you promise that you will make a guitar for someone you love you are committing yourself to the tyranny of that hyperfocus. It’s thrilling to work that way, but it exacts a toll on your body, mind, and friendships.
So, when you can’t get to that creative place, you feel guilty about making your friends wait, and oppressed by the monumentally demanding task ahead. The flip side is the array of exhilarating rewards when the job is completed. You know the work is good, and the person receiving your gift (purchase is too crass a word) takes it personally, and that’s appropriate!
I’d like to try to explain what that roller coaster ride is like from the inside. I lay no claim to genius like Rob’s, but I know the passion and depression cycle very well. This is not a treatise on bipolar disorder, or any other clinical diagnosis, but more about what that moment is like which makes escape irresistible.
Maybe roller coaster is the wrong image. It’s upside-down. On that ride you climb slowly to the top in anticipation of the rush down the other side, which is most exciting at the bottom when you change directions and head up again. In life there is no guarantee that the climb to the top of the ride will yield the promised rewards. Sometimes that climb takes forever and has many detours. (All of my bad dreams are about the travails of ‘getting to the gig,’ and I never actually arrive before I awake.)
When you touch a hot pot, your withdrawal is immediate and involuntary. Ouch! You pull away. The urge to escape the sensation of despair is that demanding of action. It mirrors the passionate urge to complete the insistent task at hand, except the outlet for the latter urge is to keep working towards the goal, maybe the next perfect guitar. There is no similar outlet to escape despair. You’re stuck with it until it goes away. Some escapes are available at times: playing music, getting drugged or drunk, going to sleep for a few weeks maybe, but they are temporary. After a while you realize that you are always going to go back to that awful place where life is impossible.
You can’t accomplish yourself out of a depression. You can only try to hide from it.
I know many of my own friends were confused by the two of me: the one that hugged them enthusiastically one day, and the one that withdrew and couldn’t meet their eyes the next. Which reaction was ‘real?’ They both were, though I preferred to be the one who hugged.
Calling dances and doing the radio show were extra taxing in the same way. I figured out how to do those things in my hyper moments, but then had to execute them when i was ‘down’ as well. I could still remember what I used to say to make people circle to the left, so I learned to act like I meant it every time, even when I was down. Then, hopefully when I was safely alone, I’d burst into tears for a while.
You don’t get to select when you’ll be hyper/inspired/energized. It’s totally unpredictable. You may have to accept the gig while up, and accomplish it while down. Until I was 50 (!) I didn’t know there were two different conditions running my thoughts: I thought I was the same all the time, and the world just got extra irritating once in a while for no apparent reason. The actual reason? I was down.
The urge to escape the down is greater than any of our automatic inhibitors which insist we be ‘reasonable.’ It’s akin to the opposite passion for ‘real truth’ in its intensity, whether your pursuit be beauty, power or holiness.
Do we enjoy the highs more because there are lows? I don’t think so. The joy is so absolute that nothing else can possibly compare. I’m weary of the agony of the roller coaster. The perceptions of the up and the down sides are equally valid, and the conclusions equally true. It’s hard to say ‘no’ to chasing your dream, even if you are aware of your swings. It can feel like “I know how to save the world – the path is clear.” If you feel like that, wouldn’t it be dishonest to your passion and a denial of our concept of community to decide on a ‘no?’ If you know how to do it, and you think it’s important, you must do it.
I’ve wondered if a lobotomy would level things out for me, (not awfully seriously usually). What would it be like to never have to do a ‘low’ and never get a ‘high?’ For one thing, it would be very very peaceful by comparison. Urgency is not a comforting presence, and it comes with both sides of the coin.
I’m tremendously grateful to Rob for his willingness to persist with his most creative self rather than choosing some drugged version of ‘average.’ He generously dared to love us and make perfect guitars for us. It was not easy to be Rob Girdis. So, though I’ll miss him, I have a little warm comfy place in my heart that knows he decided to finally get some real peace. He trusted us to carry on with the things he knew to be important. We all know a little of his message, and in gratitude we each carry our morsel forward so his hard work is not lost.
Swiss Picnic in Frances
Larry and I rode the Counterpoint tandem 7 miles up the road to Frances to the Swiss Picnic at Swiss Park. There were campers, locals, a couple of vendors, a couple hundred people, and at the center of it all, a 3-generation polka band (Bass, piano, accordion and clarinet) on the little stage, and where the dance floor ought to be was a big pile of sawdust. Wrestlers (schwingers) donned heavy canvas shorts over their clothes and wrestled while the band played on. The winner would brush the sawdust off the loser on the way out of the ‘ring.’ Lots of kids running around, river to cool off in, picnic tables, food, and in the evening the big dance. I was glad to find myself in a place almost like Europe on the 4th of July.
Tom Anderson: Synesthete
Tom Anderson: Synesthete
In about 1979 I was playing at music festivals, and spent a lot of late nights jamming with people like The Boys of the Lough. Ali Bain, the fiddler, kept entreating me to meet Tom Anderson, his teacher and mentor from the Shetlands. Tom came on one of their tours, and when we met we played together. Tom said to me (as he probably says to several people every day when he’s on the road): “You Must come visit me in the Shetlands!” I said: “Okay, how about December 10?” and he said: “No, the 19th would be better.”
So five months later, the date arrived, and so did I. I stayed several weeks, over the winter solstice, Christmas and spent New Year’s Day ‘first-footin’ to his friends’ homes. (That’s the first day of the year that you step across the threshhold of your friends’ houses for the good luck of all and for several shots of whisky.)
One of the most interesting aspects of Tom’s playing is that he is a synesthete: his senses cross over, so when he writes music he sees visual images. I discovered the impact that can have while discussing tunes with my sister, Colleen. I played her a guitar tune I’d been toying with, and she responded: “That tune says ‘things are rough right now, but I can make my way through and everything will eventually be fine.’” She was right. Every time I played that tune, that’s how I felt. I think the grammar of the song was related to the grammar of our language, in some ancient circuitry we don’t know we’re using.
Anyway, knowing that her perception of that image seemed language related, I decided to try one of Tom’s visual pieces and see how she reacted to that. I’m not glib on the piano, but I struggled through a simple version of the tune, a slow aire. She saw in her mind’s eye a rocking chair in front of a fireplace. I was stunned. The piece was The Resting Chair, which Tom wrote when he visited his grandfather’s croft on the north island of the Shetlands and saw an old resting chair in front of the fireplace. Now that is a persistent visual image, because it not only survived my clumsy execution, but carried no language related baggage, because english is not Tom’s mother-tongue. He spoke the Shetland dialect of something like Swedish. She saw the chair he wrote the tune about. Wow. Then I really wanted to go visit this man.
I did. Dead of winter way north of Scotland, very long evenings with Tom and too much whisky. One night I asked him about the visual images, and these are my notes:
By Tom [Anderson] on colors 12/15/79 [as told to Sandy Bradley]
Bb is blue, cold, lonely. Freddie’s tune is the blue of the sea or sky
Eb has got a lot of black, dark blue, almost indigo. It’s a despairing key, a virtuoso key. The devil who appears in black.
Cm is wierd: touches of fog & greyness & black. Deep grey, ‘flacid.’
F is silver, like the moon on the water. Moonlight Serenade key
C is grey, colorless: A ghost comes out of the mist and it forms into the shape of….
A is blood red for fighting, strathspeys, pipe tunes
Am is pink which can resolve itself into grey like a cloud over the sun. Sunrise and sunset.
D is dark red with speckles of white
G is mysterious, it sparkles, like cleaning the blood out of a joint [meat bone] and it runs grey with the water and specks of red
E purples. 4# Shoots up like the aurora. Complex with yellow and purple. Brilliant as 1/2 the rainbow. Like an aura.
Minors are mixed paints to make the shade.
Bach fugues demonstrate this. Duets and trios.
Strathspey in A: blood & adrenalin — war.
End of quote.
I just thought you’d like to know.
Solution to the Mima Mounds
I wasn’t on some kind of quest to discover the source of the Mima Mounds. The information arrived, and I realized the connections. It is also the story of why I’ve becoming increasingly interested in farming over the course of my life. So this is about the ecology of eating well and the history of a geographical feature. Here is a summary of that journey.
We bought a farm near Menlo. The property has four apple trees, four of which are very old indeed. Picking the bounty last fall I had a moment of sadness that the apples I was picking came from someone else’s labor. Then I stopped to remember that I had planted fruit trees everywhere I had lived, my whole life long. By that calculation, these apples are my just desserts. They tasted great.
I’ve grown vegetables everywhere I’ve been, planted lots of fruit, but never really had a significant relationship with another species. Dogs and I didn’t understand each other, and my goldfish displayed little compassion. Then I volunteered on a goat dairy for a year and slowly eased into the job of being the shepherd browsing the woods with the goats. At first it was just me and 25 does just a few yards from their pen. Since they were accustomed to heading straight for the grain bin when the daily feed was offered, it was easy to come to an agreement on where to go for snacks when grazing got boring. The goats and I trained each other, and soon there were 55 of us on a daily nutrition ramble through the woods, maybe a mile or more. Goats and I are a similar size, but I have the height advantage, being on two legs. It wasn’t like I was the leader. We all decided together. As long as I didn’t have a tight timetable or other absurd agenda, we got along fine.
One day we walked to the alder grove. The grass was nice there. Each goat follows his own mouth towards the next excellent bite, so they eventually get spread out over a large area. It appeared that cohesion was about to become difficult, so I got the attention of a few nearby goats and headed down the path. The rest soon followed, and we’re going down a path about two goats wide. Then one of them realizes where we’re going: that great grassy area with extra salal! Everybody starts to trot in eagerness, and I go along with the program. Then I tripp over a root. On the way down I thanked my lucky stars I was not a cowherd, or I’d be hamburger. Getting trampled by a herd of goats could be painful, but probably not fatal, as it would be with cows. I hit the ground hard. When I looked up, they had all stopped running and were staring down at me, apparently waiting for me to get up and run with them again. I did, and off we went.
Goats are good company. They have sweet breath, and they like to sniff you to find out what’s going on in your life. You can lie down among them and be one of the herd, fall asleep in the sun, legs and bodies tangled.
And they never escalate! If one has something to tell you, it will: Baa, Baa, Baa. If you don’t respond, they don’t get insulted. Two hours later it will sound exactly the same: Baa, Baa, Baa. They’re never impatient, never jump to the conclusion that you are neglecting them intentionally.
I love them. I also eat them. It’s a deal our species made with their species tens of thousands of years ago. Goats have been with man as long as dogs have! We are carnivore shepherds of goats, who can digest brush, blackberries, scotch broom, gorse and very efficiently turn them into meat and cheese to feed their shepherds, the carnivores.
We’ve selected which goats to breed for genetic propensities like ‘kid cuteness,’ ‘likeliness to gambol sideways down the hillside implying spontaneous joy,’ ‘does are easy to milk,’ ‘not likely to get hoof rot,’ etc. They’ve selected us for things like ‘dependability,’ ‘knows when to cut the hay for our winter food,’ ‘leadeth us beside the still waters,’ etc.
They have many endearing habits, and some strange ones.
In rutting season, the buck pees on his own face to make himself smell good and to excite the does and make them receptive. It seems to work for them. Goats don’t usually smell bad, just the buck, and just in season.
Dominance behaviors are another good one: like teens ‘high-fiving’ each other and doing the secret hand shake, goats greet each other by rising on their hind legs and butting heads. No, I don’t think it hurts. The larger or higher animal always wins. The approach is incredibly graceful: they face each other a few feet apart, rise slowly and gently on their hind hooves, pause for up to a few seconds at the top, then aim their head to smack widows-peak head areas with the other animal. The top one wins, it’s over for the moment, and both animals come down hard on their front hooves, a few inches apart, right under where their heads hit. Then repeat, or lose interest and graze.
Goats, sheep, elk, caribou – the behavior is as ubiquitous on that branch of the tree as birdsong. It’s a genetic thing. And these combative goats are the same ones which stopped along the path to wait for me to get up when I fell. I am acquainted with more than one specific gene pool that loves to butt heads.
In the city, information is fragmented. By staring at the urban landscape you might be able to determine that the houses on your hill were built in two different architectural eras, and you might figure out which era was Catholic by counting the average number of bedrooms. You might see that the street used to be brick before it got paved over with asphalt, or that all the holly trees seem to be about the same vintage. Was it a traveling salesman specializing in Christmas greens?
There are things we know about life when we see them in the context of the whole living system. All my life I’ve sought out the Old Growth Forest during trying times. It was reassuring just to be there where everything fit together. The cycles of life, the succession, the continuity! It felt whole, so I did as well. What comfort I found there! Even dying was okay.
Our education is fragmented, too.We’re taught to know things by memorizing them in school using our conscious minds. Other ‘ways of knowing’ are discredited. For years I’ve been trying to remember how to think that other way, to lend credence to my own less conscious thoughts about the world. Most of the garden stuff I know is stuff I never learned. I bend over and reach for a plant in the garden, and I see my mother’s hand in my own, and it informs my actions. I know how to get along with donkeys because of time spent in the field with mom.
And other information is also available. A friendly neighbor brought me his extra currant plants in temporary pots. Now, I had just finished my berry patch, and hadn’t left any room for currants. They seemed to want to be planted in the corner of my front yard chaos flower garden, which was definitely not part of my plan for that area. Every place else I tried to put them just felt wrong, but they needed to be put into the ground soon. Okay. I decided it would be alright to ‘temporarily’ plant them where they begged to be.
(No, I don’t believe plants talk to me, and I have no idea how that message arrived in my brain.)
They did great there! A few months later I read that currents love to be planted near maple trees, because their roots share microorganisms that facilitate the growth of both plants. Wishing I had a maple to satisfy them, I glanced to where they had been planted, and only then noticed they were under the neighbor’s maple tree.
Just for the record. I don’t believe that story either, but it really happened. That is a happy currant plant to this day.
I also love animals for their manure. Walking the pasture picking up piles of poop is like gathering golden nuggets! I feel rich! I used to feel slightly guilty, as the manure had been made from the grass, and should refertilize the pasture, in all fairness. It is of value in the field, but topsoil will form even without the manure. As the grass is eaten, the corresponding roots decay, adding organic matter to the soil, building humus, and increasing the layer of topsoil throughout the whole root zone.
Increasing the layer is not the same as adding a layer. When soil is built it doesn’t just get spread on top of the existing soil. The whole root layer grows in thickness at every level. The cycle of graze, decay, regrow, graze is the builder of prairies. What is getting added? Carbon from the air, captured by photosynthesis to become plant, then humus.
If I were a gardener for hundreds of years, maybe I could get to the point where I could get raised beds by growing the soil. Tramp between beds, cultivate soil in the beds. We have a similar system of sheet mulching a compost between beds, and every four years we take that compost layer and add it to the growing beds. In the pathways we start with wood chips to inhibit other plants from growing there. They take about 4 years to break all the way down, so we follow with layers of cardboard (which sometimes yields mushrooms native to the eastern hardwoods from which it’s made) or grass clippings, it all works.
At this point you know enough to figure out the answer. To address your few remaining questions, I continue.
Early gradeschool drawing class was not my finest hour. I drew the typical rainbow picture on a blue sky, with two hills intersecting in the middle of the paper. It needed a river, so I drew one coming over the top of the hill. It didn’t sit right with me, but I didn’t figure it out until a few years later. A remnant of that conceptual error persisted in my thinking about how floods arrive. I picture a flow of water approaching the farm. But really, it’s not a wall of water from the broken dike, it’s the water table below your feet getting closer and closer to the surface. If you left your hat in the yard, the water would rise through the surface of your lawn and float your hat. As the flood receded your hat would be lowered to exactly where you left it, assuming gentle winds. The flood can arrive from the ground up, and disappear the opposite way: straight down. In some areas things get moved around by water flow, but it’s mostly a flat phenomenon.
Wikipedia: Prairie refers to temperate grasslands of North America. These are areas of low topographic relief that historically supported grasses and herbs, with few or no trees, having a generally mesic climate. The word prairie is derived from the French prairie (“meadow”,”pasture”).
The first tasty greens of the spring show up on the praries where the sun has the advantage because of the dearth of trees. Migratory patterns track the best nutrition opportunities. It’s not that ‘they go there because the grass is fresh and green.’ It’s that those who didn’t have that propensity and went elsewhere ate something else, maybe even evolved into something else. “Survival of the fittest” isn’t a strategy, it’s a statistical imperative that includes many parts of the web of life, some winners who thrive, some losers who fade from the scene. If ‘eating the prairie’ had resulted in the prarie’s disappearance, the grazers would have shot themselves in the foot short order. It wasn’t a matter of wisdom that they moved on, but a matter of many generations of finding a balance.
The tasty praries drew hungry ungulates from all directions. They came from the Olympics, the Cascades, the Willapa Hills, all headed for the prairie reunion, which is coincidentally in rutting season. Picture the National Geographic photos of tens of thousands of caribou coursing across the tundra. Picture tens of thousands of teenage elk high-fiving each other on the prairie, eager for every last encounter, settling the pecking order by crashing heads.
Now I think you can see it:
Same prairie every year, for maybe thousands of years.
The elk trumpet from higher ground, and a few inches can make a big difference in being heard, and a big difference in who wins the head-crashing contest. A small rise is all it takes.
The prairie is basically flat, but gets torn up by the dramatic landing of the front hooves after the crashing. The landings are all on the low ground, which makes it even lower and which compromises the grass growing there, just like the well-trodden path to the barn. The powerful landing of the front hooves never occurs on the high ground, so the grass there is left to be grazed. Pastures are improved by grazing them. You rotate the grass eaters so that they eat the young very nutritious grasses and move on. Roots and leaves develop in parallel. More leaves means more roots. Eat the leaves (or the blades of grass) and some of the roots die off and rot, adding the humus in all the places where the roots went. Grazing increases the amount of topsoil, and not as a layer on top of the soil, but as an incorporation of organic matter at all the levels reached by roots.
The size of the elk has determined the size of the hillocks. The low areas don’t grow very well and don’t make much new soil. The high areas get grazed, shat upon, regrow, and build topsoil.
The water rises in the flood, but the hillocks don’t erode because the water is moving up and down, not horizontally.
Next year the grass sprouts, the elk arrive, eat, find high hillocks to challenge from, land in the low ground around the mound. Rinse. Repeat.
Our neighbors saw elk crashing in our field. The next day I went to look. There were small hillocks, with heavy hoof prints on the low perimeters.
Now do you believe me?
A Wwoofer’s Tale
Sandy Bradley
Larry Warnberg
Nahcotta Vivero
Five weeks ago this information represented 2 people that I didn’t know and an unfamiliar place. Now these people and this place are a part of me. I fell in love with Sandy and Larry and the lifestyle they live. I decided to spend this year wwoofing so that I could learn how to live more sustainably and grow food organically. I’m chasing the dream of living simply, in a way that will not only benefit me, but my community and the earth. Sandy and Larry showed me that this dream is possible as they allowed me to become a part of their lives. I learned many things throughout my stay, but mostly that the way they live is the way that I want to live.
Nahcotta is a one stop light town. It’s one of those places where you go into the grocery (Jacks) and people know that you’re not from there. It’s a place where you can ride your bike down the road with a cart full of manure trailing behind you and not feel weird. It’s a place where time moves slowly and you could spend your entire day watching the birds fly over the bay and be completely happy. Blackberries are plentiful, the neighbors are friendly and life is good.
My favorite part of the day was dinner. After working a couple of hours, typically in the morning, I’d spend my afternoons studying. Or at least trying to study, my imagination often stole my concentration. I’d be deep in thoughts or dreams and I’d hear the sweet sound of the dinner bell and quickly leave behind whatever it was I was doing. I’d walk upstairs and spend the next hour or two around the dinner table with food that was always local, most of it coming from their garden and wine, the best being what Larry makes and my personal favorite being the blackberry wine. We often had goat cheese that Larry also makes. I could have wine and cheese and be satisfied at that, but an assortment of fresh vegetables always colored our meals. I spent many nights at that table watching the colors of the sky dance through my mind and waiting anxiously for the appearance of the moon. Although the food and wine were some of the best in the world and the view out the window was beautiful, the best part of these meals was the company. It was here that we shared stories about past travels and experiences. These stories opened up windows inside of us so that we could begin to see each other for who we are and what it is that makes us that way. Sandy is an entertainer and often filled the room with laughter and Larry is one of my favorite story tellers and is a master of many trades including compost toilets, oyster farming, carpentry, cheese making, wine making and gardening! Our conversations ranged from talking about poop to bike trips across Europe.
The work I did could hardly be considered work. I fed the goats and turkeys. Sometimes I’d take the goats out to lunch and spend an hour in the field with them as they grazed. I spent a lot of time picking wild blackberries and then turning them into juice for wine and taking the leftovers and making goat treats. I canned some food and made some jam. I worked on a couple of green houses and a cob wall at neighbors homes. I also spent a week helping Sandy prepare for a community dinner that served about 70 people in the community with a meal that was completely local. The purpose of this meal was to show people that food can be grown on the peninsula and that it’s healthy and tastes good! After the dinner Sandy talked about the importance of being able to grow your own food and how there is a network of people in their non-profit Tilth that would be able to help people learn how do this. Sandy mentioned how one neighbor could grow potatoes and beets and another could grow squash, beans and corn and then they could share! I love the way that this meal brought the community together and taught people that in a time where our economy is unstable they could at least find security in knowing that they’ll never be hungry if they grow their own food.
Sandy and Larry have huge hearts, they truly care for the community and the environment and they are very conscious about everything they do-nothing is ever wasted and everything they do makes sense. They truly make you feel appreciated and I feel that I came as a stranger and left as a member of the family. I know that Sandy and Larry will forever be a part of my life. They have truly blessed me and taught me in all they have said and showed me, but mostly in the ways they silently live out each moment of the day. I am thankful for the knowledge and the love they have given me and know that they have left a remarkable imprint on my heart and helped shaped me more into the person I am becoming.
Goat Treats
Goat Treat Recipe
After making the wine from quince, berries, etc., we have lots of leftover pulp and seeds from the fruit. The plants went to a lot of trouble producing all those bioflavinoids, making protein for the seeds, etc., so i hate to see it go to waste, Don’t want my compost to re-seed wild blackberries, either.
So, I strain the pulp and seeds, add sea salt, and set like drop cookies on parchment paper and keep it over the woodstove or in the greenhouse to dry out crisp. They keep really well when dry, and the goats love them. I add well ground eggshells to boost the calcium in the batch I give to does around kidding time.
We get the sea salt by leaving glass jars of sea water in the top of the greenhouse. We get about 1.5 cups salt per 5 gallons of water. Since sea water has averaged out all the minerals in its brine, the trace minerals should be significant.
What to plant!
Here are some of my notes on what to plant, gleaned largely from Edible Forest Gardens by Dave Jacke. My goals are to make lots of food by keeping the soil happy. Plants noted together complement each other in community.
Apples, pears and comfrey.
Prune, hardy kiwi and coltsfoot.
Ramps and wild ginger in full shade
Asparagus — sunny, not windy
Milk vetch
Good King Henry
Lovage
Frenc Sorrel
Scorzonera (Schwartzwurzel)
goldenrod
Yarrow
Jerusalem artichoke
daylillies
giant soloimon seal
Stinging nettles adjacent to herbs to increase fragrant oils
Galax
white clover
Shitake mushrooms, oyster mushrooms, chicken of the woods
Heather and bees
Lilacs
Willow
Bamboo
Blueberries
Rasp & black berries
Currants and gooseberries
Olive
Lemon
figs
European plums
Red cherries
Pie cherries
Quince (fruiting)
Pear apple
rhubarb
horseradish
This list covers what I’d like to have in the ground soon for purposes of harvest years hence, and to provide a good support community for the surrounding soil. Vegetables in next post.
Vegetables
