the nerves they are a janglin'

I stood there in the road. He had plenty of space to just go on, but I stood boldly, camera around my neck. He stopped. I'm figuring, here we are, no beating around the bush.

I said something. Who knows quite what. Something like "Where are you taking that," referring to his pick up which was fully of siding. He said something back, something like, "What business is it of yours?" At some point I told him that I was a nosy neighbor and he said, squinting his eyes, that I sure was. I fingered the siding, bent it actually, and asked, "Is that aluminum, because if it is you can sell it for a pretty penny. If it isn't, and you are going up the road that way, you better not be dumping it illegally."

Well, it was longer, and more of a dance, there was a lot more all to it than that. But I freaked him out and made him mad. We've reported several illegal dumps, and to the county's credit, they've been cleaned up.

I'm very sorry, but people are just, by and large, stupid. This is why, sometimes, some of us lose hope. I'll stay in my neighborhood. And I'll preface it by saying that we've had three neighbors who have NOT been stupid, so they aren't all like this. One died, one sold at the height of the real estate run up and moved to town, and one lives here still albeit part time. Also, much to my relief, most stupid neighbors don't actually last all that long, so you won't hear about the doctor who moved out here only to decide he really didn't like the country, or the Raytheon yankee who couldn't live here without the overpaid job (or, worse, his mother-in-law).

And you know, I've thought about, what if you, stupid neighbors, actually see yourself in this post? In photos actually? Well, sorry.

So, first up is the neighbor who has never lived here but who periodically (sometimes only every three or four years) comes to mow, or cut something down, and put up some ribbon to hallucinate over a cabin. His latest stupid thing?
This. A fence around a thorn tree. Evidently he thinks some apple tree that he planted some time a long time ago has survived and that this thorn tree is it. I went and looked at this for a really long time. I imagined that, yes, maybe one could look at the bark down low and think maybe it looked like apple bark if one did the un-focus one's eyes bit, but how did he miss the thorns? Or the fact that it doesn't grow like an apple tree. Or that it has no apples, ever. Sigh. His strong point as a neighbor? We almost never see him.

Then there is this one.
Like that? The photos of course cannot do any of this justice. This house was once owned by our best neighbor ever. But he was getting older and his kids worried about him and he gave in and has regretted it ever since. Lawd, let me die here I say. Anyway, it went through several owners thereafter and these latest idiots have lasted longer than most. Long enough to do this:
Yes, that is right, they mowed down a steep hillside of trees. They didn't log it; there was no log-able timber there. They hired three different "guys" to do it, and the last guys left this equipment.
Want to bet it is stolen? The "logs" are, as you can see, stacked up and rotting. These people are paranoid about someone stealing from them, thus the equipment placed on top. Never mind the piles of them they burned. Ok, then they overstocked the cattle and didn't feed them and didn't seed the hillside and this is what they have created. When they finally do crap out (for eventually their source of money will run out and they will go -- unlike us, they cannot live here without an unending input of cash), this will grow up first in blackberries. Give it about a hundred years, maybe two, to recover the soil that used to be on it.

See why I get mad?

Of course, that's not all. There's the water slide (roughly the same angle as the night photo above).
Remember, a wonderful wild creek flows just outside their house and completely through their property. But that wasn't good enough. They cut down the big pretty maple in the front yard and then scalped it, covered it in black plastic, and put in what we call the water slide. Of course, they don't pump enough water to actually flow over the stones.
see the coyote? They did have a bear (a real one) but blamed the damage he caused on humans. If they saw a real Indian, they'd mess themselves in a stinky manner. I'm enough to drive them to distraction for goodness sakes. So, the creek isn't good enough, the wildlife isn't good enough, the stars themselves are not good enough but plastic (or concrete or nylon) crap is.

Sigh. Roll eyes. Say I'm sorry a million times to that hillside they raped.

Now we come to the most troublesome one. This house has only recently been sold and vacated. It is built on a cabin that is over 100 years old. It has been abused.

The guy who bought it didn't even know any of that. He just started cutting stuff down. To "clean out the creek" seems to be a major goal of stupid people. Creeks, people, need to grow up with stuff -- it protects the creek. Then he tore out all the fences. Then he said he wants to put horses there. Without fences. Yep. He lives away from here and hires people to do stuff when he is not here. Like clean out the fields.
See? Important work, yes. Getting rid of that fringe that again is so important to wildlife and that, if you kept livestock would be moved back naturally anyway.

The guy is a used car salesman and evidently doesn't plan on getting his fingernails dirty with work on the place. When did we, as a country, as a society, decide that everyone deserved opulence without having to do anything? This translates (by me) into, he's borrowing every penny he's paying people and I just hope he doesn't tear the place down before he declares bankruptcy. His FIL wants him to tear down the cabin and put in a doublewide. Yeah, a piece of plastic crap or a piece of americana? Whadayathink?
On the surface, he claims to be "just like us" -- a family wanting to live out. But he isn't just like us if he doesn't want to work, and I can assure you from having watched him sit on his duff, he doesn't. He isn't going to. You couldn't make him. He claims to want a place to raise his daughters but if they did get here, he'd be taking them here and there into town, or be horrified if he couldn't. He says he wants to raise stuff, improve the place.

Well, buddy (and everyone else in the whole and entire world), when you don't think that "cleaning the place up" is done by cutting nice alive stuff down, come talk to me. Until then, you are just another one of those horrible warnings.

All these stupid people have something in common: lives that require steady and substantial injections of cash. They aren't willing to do things for themselves, or live smaller. And there's a constant external viewpoint they have for themselves; a standard to maintain.

People can live however they want to. But some choices kill us. I have a friend dying of a rare form of leukemia most likely caused because she dyed her hair for years and years. Bad choice. The choice to cut things down and say that is cleaning up is just wrong. The sense of entitlement to a very opulent lifestyle is killing everything; it is killing us with maladies from obesity to purposelessness.

And every now and then I get mad at it. Generally I don't write about it. But at some point, people have to stop being stupid, making stupid choices.

Ok. Well. I want to sooth myself now, and maybe you too, with photos of good stuff.

This is how that mowed off hillside should look, grown up, protected.

This is an overnight piece of wood being sawed with the crosscut saw. The saw is four feet long, for perspective, and that kerf is really wide, but it cuts sweet. It is a piece of maple and it will last all night long.
Supper, the veggies (except for carrots) out of the garden (potatoes, turnips, squash).

Ever Where ya Go, There ya Are

Well, I didn’t get to ride this weekend at the barn. We meant to but it just didn’t happen.

My first day home after a couple days there is always a catch up day. My family does a remarkable job making everything run smoothly while missing a member of their team, but I have a role I play here and without me here there are some things that just don’t get done. The day I’m back home is the day to catch up on those things.

But this week that didn’t quite happen. We meant for it to but it just didn’t happen.

When the girls went to find the equines to take them to graze, our queen goat came to get them and asked them to come with her so that she could show them her new baby! And I swear that is the way it happened. She doesn’t usually come and “baa” at you, and when she does you pay attention. She knew she was due some corn for having that magnificent baby. Sorry I don’t have a photo yet, maybe later. We were trying to figure out how old she is -- I remember seeing her born and I think this year she will be nine. She used to always have triplets, as did her mom most usually. The goats we are due to eat this year are hers and were triplets (we ate one last year so there are only two big boys left). Then one year she had quads, they were small, and it was raining, and they all were dead the next morning. Since then she’s had singles, which is fine with me. She looks good, is in good shape, and the baby had probably been on the ground at least 24 hours when we found him. He has his father’s speckled ears.

So we just got kind of settled down from getting a new goat, which it doesn’t matter how many times it happens, the thrill of holding such a small perfect thing is overwhelming. The equines went to the front to graze and I tried to catch up in the kitchen. But I got a call on the radio -- “there is something wrong with the horse, you better come here now” -- that had that strain of emergency in the voice.

I went to find a hole in my horse’s side. Well, flank, just on the underside of the flank. A literal hole. It was quite alarming at first. But then I got it cleaned up I determined it probably wasn’t so bad. So long as he didn’t get an infection. I don’t like to give prophylactic antibiotics because I want to know if there is an infection, I don’t want to cover it up. It was very scary because it is the sort of injury that could be more serious. He’d evidently found something sharp to scratch on and had scratched this hole in himself. His other flank was scratched too. So we found what we think was the object and removed it. And I cleaned him up and covered his wound with black salve (I went to the black salve school of medicine as I am of the opinion that it is often the treatment of choice, human or equine, although the jar clearly says not for use on humans) and took his temperature and his pulse (both normal) and turned him loose. He was waiting for supper as usual. He ate with his usual gusto. He was waiting for breakfast, impatiently I might add, this morning. His temp and pulse was still normal, as was his gusto.

So there I was, dealing with all that instead of doing much in the kitchen. When it comes down, my family got some supper and I consider that a victory. Life just isn’t always what you plan. Today, I got mostly caught up, and even got to write this, so I’m not doing badly.

And I’ll get to ride eventually. But I’ve thought about what if I don’t. If I don’t, I don’t. When I’m cleaning out a stall, it may be a bit of drudgery by the 10th one or so, but I get to take a break and kiss a horse’s nose instead of a person’s butt and I like that difference. It is also a great chance to think through some things.

Like how no matter how much is going on, it is always possible to add another thing. Eventually I guess something “suffers” but I think more accurately, things get re-prioritized. I remember a woman I knew who started milking goats and the first thing she said to me about how it was going was, “Gee, that’s an hour out of my day, and it isn’t like I don’t still have everything else I had to do before I was milking.” I knew what she meant because milking and handling the milk does take some time. That I’m not by myself in doing this helps a whole lot. But when the horse started losing weight and I needed to add feeding him to my list of things, that was more time out of my day that just didn’t exist. And yet, I’ve been feeding him, morning and night, for some time now and that’s become one of my favorite times of the day. He makes noises like a dinosaur, he minds so well, he is so personable. The goat tries to come and steal his grain and he doesn’t mind at all. He bonded with her when he first came and she was the only other hoofed animal we had and she was scared to death of him and he would follow her around. But he will chase the cow out. The cow will chase the donkey. And I sit there and watch and keep the goat from eating too much and thoroughly enjoy myself. I don’t have the time to do that, but I do it anyway. I still make all the bread, all the cheese, we still cook from scratch, we still do dishes by hand, we still don’t have any water. When I am away, we plan ahead, I make ahead, my family takes magnificent care of me making sure I get fed. I milk but they take care of the milk. That sort of thing. I sit and watch the horse eat, at least sometimes. I know how precious a baby goat is so I sit and hold him while his mamma eats some corn.

I guess what I’m saying is, it is ok if everything doesn’t happen NOW. Because everything is happening now anyway.
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In a complete change of tone, did you notice the Saudi’s didn’t increase production again? It is because they can’t. The age of oil is over. What are you going to do without your own personal oil? Three dollar gas hasn’t changed people’s behavior. I suggest that that is a measure of addiction. What will the DTs be like? I can solve the mortgage crisis too. Folks, you bought insane McMansions you can’t afford. Get together in your neighborhood and two of you who can’t afford your houses, move in together and make that one mortgage payment instead of the two. I'm so tired of the whining. And for gawd’s sake, grow a garden.

Values & Priorities

Potatoes, hilled
Originally uploaded by Contrary Goddess.

I have probably told this story here before. But my maternal grandfather was a Free Will Baptist preacher, a carpenter, and a farmer. When he got too bad off to put out his usual seven gardens, we went over and planted a garden for him as he only lived about a half hour away from us. Of course, we didn’t tend it at all like he had always tended his. But when it came harvest time my mother called her father over to just have a look at the potato she had managed to grow. It was a huge and pretty potato, and we really did have a good yield. My grandfather looked on at our harvest and said, “I wasted my life hoeing.”

Not that I think he really meant it.

So hilled a lot of potatoes this year. With a hoe. And every time I do it, I feel like I am my grandfather in some important ways, or like I am channeling him, or something. My grandfather always had pretty gardens, and right now those potatoes are pretty. Right now a whole lot in the garden is pretty.

But I know it may not stay pretty. We could fall behind. We almost certainly will fall behind in at least some things, if not in a lot of things. But then again, you don’t hill potatoes to make them pretty. You hill them because potatoes by hilling you increase the yield. And so I hill away, knowing they may not get hilled again, that weeds may well grow up, but that as of right now, I’ve given them an advantage.

I can see where a beginning gardener could fail to see how a body could ever actually feed himself gardening. If a little lettuce, a few beans and some tomatoes just for the summer are this hard to grow, this subject to damage by infertility, fungus, bugs, caterpillars, reptiles and marauding mammals, how could one possibly feed oneself year round? People are so accustomed to having everything all year long that they don’t realize that you can eat seasonally -- that some things store in the cold and some things don’t -- that some things grow in the heat and some things don’t. And then, people are used to having only as much of something as they think they can use right then, and not a surplus they could store for later use. I still remember the year we had an entire truck bed load of october beans and we shelled so many for so long that I would see them in my dreams.

And yet it was just in my grandfather’s generation that it was normal to feed one’s self, one’s family. It is only my parent’s generation, and my own and my children’s, that it became abnormal. How did my brothers cop the attitude that there was nothing in the mountains for my uncles or for them, that they were somehow better than that? What is it that they think is so special about the dirty, stinky, crowded anthill cities they live in now? How do people convince themselves that working for wages is better than hoeing in freedom? Why are strangers preferable to family?

It is about values, you know. What do we value? Family or stuff? Roots or convenience? A false type of independence wherein one does not have to take anyone or anything into account, or relationship. Yes, it is about relationship: Relationship with the earth, with the potatoes, with each other.

It really is about values. We have to NOT value stuff, and having more and bigger stuff. We have to value that enough to not have those things, to even look down on people who do have those things like you would look down on someone who threw trash out the window. Love is not stuff. Security is not stuff.

And frankly, every little bit doesn’t help. In the first world we have to reduce our average consumption (and thus pollution) by 97% (my own calculations). But know this -- the first 10% is easy. Cut your budget by 10%, gosh, that’s pretty easy.

Imagine looking around your house and keeping 3 in 100 things. Taking 3 in 100 trips in your car. Etc. Imagine it. And imagine that it is a BETTER world. Imagine the 97 moments during which you now have time to be

My favorite bumper sticker is

My Child Is

The photo, btw, is old. Those potatoes have largely made themselves (they are early ones), having grown about waist high with the tops beginning to die back now.

Self-Righteous or Pre-Destined

I got a letter from my best friend Laura. She says: “I know how you feel about most things, but I can’t help but feeling that with the gas crisis you have become extremely focused on doom and even more self-righteous than usual.”

Even more self-righteous than usual.

Well now. Ah, but that is what best friends are for.

No, really, I mean it. I used to say that I didn’t consider anyone a friend until they’d told me I was an a** at least once.

She’s right of course. Although I don’t consider it a “gas crisis” but the beginning of the peak oil down slope. It feels to me like the whole world is on a rollercoaster that is poised at the top of the big hill, just about to go over. I’m strapped in. Most people are not. There is already a die off in Africa. More grain is being consumed than grown. Cutting back your driving a little just isn’t going to get it at this point.

Just so those of you who haven’t known me forever know, I wasn’t a Y2K person -- husband was in computers and we knew there was nothing but hype and profit behind Y2K. I’m not a second coming person either. I have in fact sat happily through the foreseen time of several second comings. I’ve always said, hey, everyone since Paul thought Jesus was coming back next day. Personally I think the “second coming” is not what Christians think it is anyway.

I think it is undeniable that something big is happening and happening right now. But I don’t think of it as doom. In fact, I get a little impatient for it sometimes. I’m glad for it. What is there of this culture worth saving? It is better that it go, and homesteads will be the monasteries, the Edens, the places where skill and learning and craft and art and life can continue, and all will not be lost. I get a little impatient and I try to foresee the paths it will take. People will not change their behavior much, not in any meaningful ways.

When do you think oil & gas will become like aviation fuel or nuclear fuel rods and people just won’t normally have access to it? At that point, it will be reserved for some agricultural and transportation uses. What isn’t taken by the military that is. I actually think base food, grains and beans unprocessed, will remain affordable, at least to those of us who know what to do with them, for those of us with some skill to trade for money. People will accumulate in cities and go to gruel kitchens for a meal a day and the country dwellers, the pagani, will likely remain unmolested. Unless the government molests us like it did in the Soviet Union. I just hope the government is otherwise distracted with everything else going on so as not to much notice us.

I suppose it is self-righteous of me to look at people and wonder or ask them, How do you plan to survive, to help your children survive? It is self-righteous of me because mostly they have no plans. Their heads are in the sand, distracted, wars, terrorists, Angelina, Prudhoe Bay, $4 gas and a $6 burger & a shake. Of course, I talked with one person who said she didn’t mind dying, or her children dying, so long as they could be Jesus in this world while they are here. I got nothing’ against Jesus, but I ain’t going with you there. “It isn’t this world that is important, but the next,” she said. I’ll be born again one incarnation at a time, thanks.

It is food, shelter and clothing folks. And it is as simple as how do you provide this (food, shelter & clothing) for yourself without exploiting someone else? I think that would be a good challenge anyway, and a good and meaningful and righteous life to be lived, but if the peak oil down slope is here, being able to do that may mean that you (and your children) don’t die.

I guess I can get self-righteous about life and death coming to a neighborhood near you. But more, I guess it seems self-righteous that I don’t see it as a tragedy. Or even as an inconvenience. I see it as destiny.

Q: What is the single greatest survival skill (according to me)?
A: Joy, practiced like meditation, chosen like desert, danced amidst the obligations and toils and sorrows that simply are

And just to make a note of it, I milked in the rain for the first time in a long time. Rain is good. But I should have put that new tarp on that milking shelter before now.

I also note that I actually wrote and sat on this post for awhile. I guess it sounded too self-righteous or something.