Free Range

We've moved!

2011-04-01T07:09:00.000-05:00

As of Friday, April 1, Free Range: Food, Nature, Place, and More has relocated to the brand-new Madroño Ranch website. We hope you’ll make the trip over and explore the new site, and we apologize for any inconvenience. Thanks for reading!

—Heather and Martin

Tragic waste: some thoughts on the s-word

2011-03-25T06:42:00.001-05:00

Watching the bats from the kitchen stoop at Madroño Ranch the other morning was a little like watching my own thoughts. They swooped in and out of my line of vision, limited by the dawn darkness, more audible than visible.

Actually, my comparison is disrespectful of the bats; their flight is only apparently erratic, driven by the ever-changing location of the insects they were chasing. My thoughts are actually erratic. As the promise of light bloomed into dawn, the bats settled into the bat house, a feat of precision flying and landing almost like none I’ve seen, and I noticed the pile of guano under the house and thought that soon it would be time to collect it and put it into the compost pile.

And so began my musings on shit and the difference between good shit and bad shit. My apologies to the bats become ever more profound.

One of our current projects at the ranch is figuring out how to use the abundant quantities of manure the residents of the Chicken Palace produce. Currently, it’s just collected and dumped onto the compost pile, but we’re working on a plan to get the chickens more fresh greenery to eat, in part self-fertilized (by the chickens, that is). We’re planning to cordon their pasture off into sections and seed the sections with cover crops, alfalfa, rye—whatever the season will grow. We’ll soon have a rainwater collection system in place and will be able to irrigate with it (assuming it ever rains again). Using a portable fence, we’ll be able to rotate the chickens from section to section. We have no idea if this will work, but it seems like a good idea and a fine, closed-loop use of all that poop. We’re also looking to collect buffalo leavings (summer “interns”: consider yourselves warned!) and use them as well.

Perhaps you’ve noticed that I used all sorts of synonyms for shit in the previous paragraph; one of the few I didn’t use is “waste,” because in natural systems, or systems that mimic natural systems, shit isn’t waste, it’s integral and beneficial. Paraphrasing Our Hero Wendell Berry, Michael Pollan notes in The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Mealsthat industrial agriculture has taken an elegant solution—crops feed animals, whose manure in turn fertilizes crops—and “divide[d] it into two new problems: a fertility problem on the farm... and a pollution problem on the feedlot.” Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), the current source of most of America’s meat, produce mountains of manure that becomes toxic to the animals and to the communities around them, and the monoculture farming that produces most of America’s grains and vegetables doesn’t use animals to fertilize the soil, requiring farmers to use chemicals instead. That’s the difference between good and bad shit: when something that could be beneficial becomes useless, even toxic, waste.

In fact, I’m beginning to wonder if a community’s or even a culture’s capacity to endure might not be assessed by how effectively it mimics nature in dealing with its own discharge. I’ve just been rereading T. C. Boyle’s darkly comic Drop City, which begins at a northern California commune of the same name in 1970. The commune’s stated raison d’etre is to provide its residents with a place to escape the confines of bourgeois America and get back to the land and basic values by expanding their consciousness with meditation and drugs.

Of course the place is utter chaos, overflowing with the metaphoric excrescences of abusive sexual practices, racism, child neglect, and rampant narcissism, along with literal shit. The septic system is overloaded and the two characters who concern themselves with the problem get no help at all from the community. Eventually, the county government threaten to raze the buildings because the commune constitutes a health hazard. Because they can’t deal with their own shit on any level, the residents of Drop City abandon what was once beautiful land and move their chaos to the bush country of Alaska just as summer is waning. When they get there, most of them realize that they need to leave or get their shit together so they don’t die.

The problem is that getting your shit together necessitates acknowledging that you are, in fact, going to die. (It’s still Lent, after all. You knew we’d get to this.) Ernest Becker, in his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Denial of Death, identifies the human dilemma in scatological terms: we are the “god[s] who shit.”

Look at man [sic], the impossible creature! Here nature... [has] created an animal who has no defense against full perception of the external world, an animal completely open to experience.... He not only lives in this moment, but expands his inner self to yesterday, his curiosity to centuries ago, his fears to five billion years from now when the sun will cool, his hopes to eternity from now. He lives not only on a tiny territory, not even on an entire planet, but in a galaxy, in a universe, and in dimensions beyond visible universes. It is appalling, the burden man bears, the experiential burden.... Each thing is a problem and man can shut out nothing. As Maslow has well said, “It is precisely the god-like in ourselves that we are ambivalent about, fascinated by and fearful of, motivated to and defensive against. This is one aspect of the basic human predicament, that we are simultaneously worms and gods.” There it is again: gods with anuses.

Human civilization, says Becker, is built on this unease, which encourages us to throw our energies into an “immortality project” by which we deny our smelly mortality; those who confront it with none of the filters an immortality project provides wither into mental illness. Becker doesn’t attempt to solve this conundrum but rather to set some boundaries within which we can wrestle with it with “the courage to be.” He writes in his conclusion: “We need the boldest creative myths, not only to urge men on but also and perhaps especially to help men see the reality of their condition. We have to be as hard-headed as possible about reality and possibility.”

So it was with interest that I watched the video produced by a Japanese media artist to explain to Japanese children why everyone was so worried about the Fukushima nuclear reactor after it was damaged by the tsunami and earthquake on March 3. The video compares the damaged nuclear reactor to a boy with an upset stomach who needs to poop. So far the boy has just farted—smelly enough for everyone around him—but the video assures us that a team of selfless doctors are doing all they can to prevent Nuclear Boy from pushing out his stinky poop.

The video says that the Fukushima reactor is more like Three Mile Island Boy—who just farted—than like Chernobyl Boy, who not only pooped but had diarrhea that went everywhere, likening nuclear waste to a dirty diaper. My first thought after watching it was that Japanese doctors would be overwhelmed by waves of constipated children, convinced that evacuating their bowels might bring their struggling nation to even deeper depths. My next thought moved me to images in last Sunday’s New York Times of the city of Chernobyl in its abandoned state and the interview with one of the guardians of “the sarcophagus,” the concrete structure built to contain Reactor No. 4, and that can’t come in contact with water without risking the escape of highly radioactive fumes. Scientists estimate that an area around the reactor the size of Switzerland will remain affected for up to 300 years. The aftermath of a nuclear meltdown “is a problem that does not exist on a human time frame.” The guardian figures that the work he does will be available to his children and grandchildren.

Using my heavily truncated recapitulation of Becker’s thought, it seems that proponents of nuclear power (which I have sometimes been) are refusing to be “as hard headed as possible about reality and possibility,” are as unwilling to get our shit together as the drug-addled utopians of Drop City. We are as schizophrenic as the video artist who proposes that we just not poop. A few pages away from the article about Chernobyl was a piece by a Japanese astrophysicist who wrote in reference to the Fukushima reactor crisis:

Until a few years ago, power usage in Japan was such that during the summer Obon holidays, when people typically return to their ancestral homes, it would have been possible to meet demand even if all nuclear power plants were turned off. Now, nuclear energy has come to be indispensable for both industry and for our daily lives. Our excessive consumption of energy has somehow become part of our very character; it is something we no longer think twice about.

Now that I’m trying to tie together all these thematic threads, I have to swoop back to my bat-intensive stoop, to the manure-heavy compost pile in the pasture outside the Chicken Palace. May we humans be as useful as Madroño’s bats and chickens as we consider our energy future; may we refuse to resort to the narcissistic chaos of Drop City’s residents, who left their spiritual and literal bad shit for someone else to deal with.

—Heather

What we’re reading
Heather: Karen Armstrong, Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life
Martin: Nicholson Baker, The Anthologist

March Madness: mountain laurels, plastic ducks, and 'roid rage

2011-03-18T06:58:00.000-05:00

I apologize in advance if this post seems unusually grumpy; I’ve been in a lousy mood all week. The arrival of spring in Central Texas always has this effect on me. As the weather turns warm and moist and the redbuds and pear trees burst forth in clouds of colored blossoms, as the mountain laurels fill the air with the scent of grape Kool-Aid, as Heather and the rest of humanity get all goo-goo-eyed over the season of hope and rebirth, of pastel colors and eggs and baby chicks and bunnies, I grow ever gloomier, because I know what the sights and smells of spring really augur: the onset of another brutally hot summer. And in Texas, summer can last well into what would be considered fall, or even winter, in other places. To me, spring is the annual reminder that I’m about to spend six or seven months covered in a thin film of sweat. And did I mention the mosquitoes?

Perhaps it’s because I grew up in a cool, even chilly climate, but after almost three decades in Texas I have yet to acclimate fully to the summers here. Heather, on the other hand, loves hot weather; our personal comfort zones have only about a ten-degree overlap, as once the mercury climbs above 90° I begin to melt, and once it drops below 80° she begins to freeze. Under the circumstances, I think it’s pretty remarkable that we’ve been together for thirty years and married for twenty-five.

Of course hanging over everything else this week is the dreadful news of the earthquake and tsunami that devastated Japan, and the grim aftermath, with threats of nuclear disaster. We can’t yet know the final outcome of these events, but I worry that they may be a harbinger of even more catastrophes to come. A story on Grist.org suggested that climate change might cause more seismic and volcanic activity, as melting ice masses change pressures on the earth’s crust.

That’s scary all right. Equally scary are fears of massive radiation leaks from damaged nuclear reactors. We know that coal and oil and natural gas are all finite sources of energy, and that solar and wind power have limitations; nuclear power was supposed to be a sort of panacea, although we can wonder about the wisdom of building reactors in any place prone to major seismic activity. And then there’s that pesky problem of what to do with all that radioactive waste....

These gloomy reflections fit right in with the book I’ve been reading, Donovan Hohn’s Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them. The light-hearted title and subtitle are deceptive; the book is actually a thoughtful, and frequently depressing, contemplation of the problems of industrialization and pollution, and, most germane to the grim news from Japan, of the unintended consequences of technological advances. Reading it has not improved my mood.

It does, however, tell a fascinating tale. On January 10, 1992, south of the Aleutians and just west of the international date line, a freighter sailing across the northern Pacific from Hong Kong to Tacoma encountered rough weather. Somehow, as the ship rolled and plunged, two columns of containers stacked on the ship’s deck broke free and fell overboard, and at least one of them burst open as it fell, setting 7,200 packages of plastic bath toys – each containing a red beaver, green frog, and blue turtle, in addition to the yellow duck pictured on the book’s cover, but who’d buy a book titled, say, Moby-Turtle? – loose upon the waters. As the toys began washing up in unlikely places, they attracted attention from various news media – who could resist such a story? – and Hohn became obsessed with them.

The book ranges widely, both geographically and thematically: Hohn’s obsession takes him from his home in New York to (among other places) Alaska, Hawaii, South Korea, Greenland, and China’s Pearl River Delta, the industrial zone where the bath toys were manufactured, and he manages to work in reflections on the plastics industry (with a nice shout-out to my old UT Austin American studies honcho Jeff Meikle), the changing definition of childhood, the history of American environmentalism, and more. He writes well and often amusingly, but the overall message of his book is dire: we are almost literally drowning in waste, and we don’t really know what to do about it. Apparent solutions turn out merely to mask, or perhaps exacerbate, the problem; sincerely well-intentioned people disagree violently about what to do. And more and more garbage ends up in the oceans.

There was a time when all of this might have been ameliorated somewhat by the fact that spring signals the return of baseball. “Spring training”! I used to consider those the two most joyful words in the English language, other than “peach cobbler” and “tax rebate.” But that was before the steroid-fueled nightmare of the last fifteen years, in which unnaturally swollen sluggers rewrote the record book and permanently distorted the shape and balance of the National Pastime.

Now baseball is all but dead to me, and spring is when Tito and I fill out our NCAA tournament brackets, an annual exercise which makes manifest the depths of my almost complete ignorance of college basketball. (I usually pick the University of North Carolina Tar Heels to win it all, because I’ve always been a sucker for their baby-blue uniforms, but this year, in case you’re wondering, I boldly picked Duke to beat Kansas in the championship game.)

I don’t know what it will take to pull me out of my annual springtime slough of despond. Maybe the Blue Devils will actually go all the way (or, if not, maybe UNC will pull off an upset). Maybe the endorphins and tryptophan in a megadose of Easter chocolate will jolt me into a more agreeable frame of mind. Or maybe I just need to find more cheerful reading material.

—Martin

What we’re reading
Heather: Karen Armstrong, Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life
Martin: Donovan Hohn, Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them

Lenten reflections: dead trees, bafflement, and submission

2011-03-11T06:45:00.001-06:00

Fittingly, this Ash Wednesday began with a vigorous north wind, the kind that knocks dead branches out of trees and can make you a little leery about walking outdoors. It blew me back to the moment that I first got a glimpse into the meaning of Lent.

I had vaguely thought of “giving something up for Lent” as an opportunity to practice self-discipline and to display a sense of commitment to a “good” life, a sort of spiritual calisthenics that made you feel better, especially when you stopped. The events I recalled weren’t, on the surface, particularly interesting or dramatic, but they allowed me to see myself from a previously undiscovered vantage point; for the first time, I could see I was like a tree filled with dead branches that needed some serious pruning in order to keep growing. Observing Lent wasn’t a way to prove how strong I was; it was a space offered in which I might look at all my dead branches and wonder how I, with the north wind’s help, might clear some of them out, while trusting that I wouldn’t get knocked out by falling timber.

A time for submission—no wonder Lent gets a bad rap. Who wants to submit, especially after a look at the roots of the word: “sub-” is from the Latin for “under,” and “-mit” is from “mittere,” to send or throw or hurl. To submit to something is to hurl yourself under it—“it” presumably being a force much greater than your itty-bitty self, a force like, say, a speeding F350 pick-up. In fact, it might even take some courage to submit to the scouring blast of Lent.

In last week’s post, Martin considered some of the complexities of being from a particular place, ending with a beautifully expressed desire to be here, rooted in this rocky Hill Country soil. Imagine his exasperation when I said last night that I felt like I needed a vacation. My desire to run away (presumably temporary) probably has several sources, but one of them may be an awareness that the idea of Madroño Ranch is taking on heft and weight, leaving behind the dreamy elasticity of fantasy.

I’m reminded of my reaction to our daughter Elizabeth’s first vision test. It had been suggested by her third grade teacher, who had never had a student make so many arithmetic mistakes, especially in copying problems from the chalkboard onto paper. The test results were normal; Elizabeth wasn’t nearsighted, just math-impaired. First I mourned that she would never be an astronaut or an engineer or a mathematician, but then I realized that we now knew more about who she really was; she was beginning to take on her own form, independent of my fantasies for her.

In a lovely essay entitled “Poetry and Marriage: The Use of Old Forms,” Wendell Berry (of course) unearths the kinship between marriage and formal poetry: both begin in “the giving of words,” and live out their time standing by those words:

In marriage as in poetry, the given word implies the acceptance of a form that is never entirely of one’s own making. When understood seriously enough, a form is a way of accepting and living within the limits of creaturely life. We live only one life and die only one death. A marriage cannot include everybody, because the reach of responsibility is short. A poem cannot be about everything, for the reach of attention and insight is short.

Choosing a form implies the setting of limits, limits that appear arbitrary from the outside or at the outset, but that can open into generosity and possibility as they are practiced. Even as they limit, these old forms point their practitioners to a way through self-delusion toward truth, through loneliness toward community. Individual failures are certainly possible, but they aren’t necessarily arguments against the forms themselves. In fact,

“[i]t may be... that form serves us best when it works as an obstruction to baffle us and deflect our intended course. It may be that when we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work and that we no longer know which way to go we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.”

This past weekend we hosted “Hog School” at the ranch, the second in an ongoing series of sustainable hunting/butchering/cooking/eating extravaganzas put on by Jesse Griffith of Austin’s Dai Due supper club. I spent much of the weekend baffled (and not in a good way) by rifle-toting guests scattered across the property hunting feral hogs, by the seemingly effortless magic with which chef Morgan Angelone produced gorgeous and delicious treats from the kitchen (my kitchen, mind you, my philandering kitchen purring in someone else’s hands), by my own mental contortions.

I finally decided to go for a walk where I was unlikely to be mistaken for a hog. Marching through the field by the lake and muttering imprecations against the wind (no birds to watch), the lack of rain (no grass coming up), and the hunters (no long walks available), I decided to climb to the base of the cliffs above me and head back to the house by a new route.

Though they can be steep, the Hill Country hills aren’t exactly the Alps; climbing to the base of the cliffs only takes a few minutes and a lot of grabs at branches to keep from sliding back down in the loose mulch and rocks that just barely hold the hills up. Once I got into the still-leafless trees, I began lurching across the perpetually shifting terrain and found that it was impossible to walk and look at the same time; if I wanted to walk, I had to watch my feet carefully, and if I wanted to look, I had to stop and make sure I was balanced before I shifted my gaze. It made for slow going because, unexpectedly, there was a lot to see that I hadn’t noticed from below.

I found a fine moss-covered boulder that allowed me a new vantage point from which to look down and into the trees and brush I normally looked up at, a posture that causes the painful condition among birders known as “warbler neck.” I quickly misidentified several sparrows, and with an un-aching neck, was able to track down some raucous spotted towhees making rude observations from a clump of yaupons and to lecture them briefly. Staring at my feet as I staggered across the hillside, I found that grasses, indeed, were beginning to sprout, despite the drought. Skidding onto my derriere—it always happens off-roading on these hills—I was able to observe the first blush of blooming redbud tree, closely guarded by the great daggered yucca beside it. And then, as the wind picked up again, the rich thick smell of honey clogged the air. The source? Tiny yellow blossoms nestled under agarita spines—tiny and extravagantly generous and impossible to pick without getting pricked. The wind blew my hat off, and, setting off multiple rockslides, I chased it gracelessly down the hill.

Limits: from dust you were made and to dust you shall return. Bafflement: unexpected forms arising, unforeseen paths opening. Submission: throwing the deadwood of the ego into the flames of the Unnamable One. That’s a lot to wrestle with for the mere forty days of Lent.

—Heather

What we’re reading
Heather: Adam Gopnick, Angels and Ages: A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life
Martin: Donovan Hohn, Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them

Maps and mobility: living in, not on, the land

2011-03-04T06:58:00.000-06:00

I was surprised, while reading Rebecca Solnit’s fascinating Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas, to realize that I probably know substantially more about the history of Texas than I do about the history of my native San Francisco.

Of course, this realization should hardly have come as a surprise. After all, I’ve lived in Texas for more than half my life, whereas I left California at age seventeen, for college, and never moved back. Moreover, I spent more than half of my time in Texas working for the Texas State Historical Association, mostly researching and writing local history.

Still, it was a little bit of a shock. Despite my recent purchase of a spiffy pair of Lucchese boots, I still frequently think of myself as a Californian, not a Texan. Texas is where I live, but California is where I’m from, and that can be a significant difference. Especially in the South (and Texas is in many ways as much a part of the South as of the West), where you’re from—your “people,” your frame of reference—is still as important as who you are. But while I retain vivid, detailed mental and sensory images of San Francisco and the Bay Area—the sights, the sounds, the smells, and, yes, the tastes—I don’t really know how and why they came to be. In Texas, on the other hand, I learned a lot of the stories before learning the places they explain.

Solnit’s book presents both foreground imagery and background narrative. It is a series of maps and essays which manifest unexpected symmetries or contradictions: “Monarchs and Queens,” which simultaneously maps butterfly populations and sites significant in the history of the city’s queer population; “Poison/Palate” (above), which juxtaposes some of the Bay Area’s leading “foodie” establishments (Chez Panisse, Niman Ranch, etc.) with nearby mercury mines, oil refineries, chemical plants, and other sources of toxic pollution; and so on.

In reading and looking at this beautiful book—and it really is beautiful—I have learned a lot of local history, and also experienced that rush of nostalgia that accompanies any return, be it literal or literary, to your homeland. Just seeing the names on the maps, the extant and (especially) the long gone—Playland at the Beach! the Surf Theater! Winterland! Zim’s!—brought on a shiver of memory worthy of a Proustian madeleine. As Solnit writes, “the longer you live here, the more you live with a map that no longer matches the actual terrain.” She notes that the residents of Managua, Nicaragua, long after an earthquake that destroyed much of the city, “gave directions by saying things like, ‘Turn left where the tree used to be.’”

Similarly, my San Francisco is a palimpsest, an accretion of layers and memories, things and people living and dead, real and fictional—Emperor Norton and Sam Spade, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Harry Callahan, and countless others. All of them were and are integral parts of where I’m from.

But that very notion of being from someplace is somewhat vexed. Locals say “I’m from here” all the time, but to me saying you’re from someplace usually implies motion, absence, a sense that you’re no longer there—that you’ve left it behind. In the United States, we have traditionally defined ourselves as an entire nation of people who are from somewhere else. My mother was born in Italy and my father in Brazil (though his parents were born in Scotland and Austria), which makes me about as American as you can get. After all, even the so-called Native Americans who were here before European contact originally came from somewhere else, presumably across the Beringian land bridge in pursuit of mammoth and bison.

In a fundamental sense, then, ours is a culture built on the sense of limitless opportunity awaiting us just beyond the horizon, just over that next rise. We have never stayed put, geographically or socioeconomically: the Louisiana Purchase, Manifest Destiny, the Mexican War, the California Gold Rush, the Civil War, and the Dust Bowl all pushed or pulled the new nation westward, across the continent, and we still seem to believe that, if we really make a hash of things where we are now, we can always pick up and move on to some uninhabited place (traditionally further west) where we can start fresh.

And some astonishing transformations did indeed take place out on that peripatetic frontier: a poor boy from Kentucky by way of Indiana and Illinois turned into Abraham Lincoln, an itinerant river pilot and printer’s apprentice from Missouri headed west and turned into Mark Twain, and so on. Even after Frederick Jackson Turner famously proclaimed the end of the frontier in 1893, our restlessness did not cease. In the twentieth century, the promise of economic opportunity and escape from Jim Crow drove the great migration of African Americans from the South to the north and west. Our current president, a son of Kansas and Kenya who was born in Hawaii and spent part of his childhood in Indonesia, is merely the most recent testament to the persistent power of the American notion of mobility, whether upward or westward.

Back to the Left Coast. In Infinite City, Solnit writes, “A city is a particular kind of place, perhaps best described as many worlds in one place; it compounds many versions without quite reconciling them, though some cross over to live in multiple worlds—in Chinatown or queer space, in a drug underworld or a university community, in a church’s sphere or a hospital’s intersections.” This is inarguably true of San Francisco, or for that matter any city; I would only add that it is no less true of a farm, a rural village, or any place that has borne the prints of generations of human existence. Like, say, Madroño Ranch.

All maps, even ones as imaginative and beautiful as the ones in Infinite City, are by definition reductive. They represent reality in two dimensions; we experience it in (at least) three. Maps, in other words, lack depth, and depth is what makes us and our world real. We don’t inhabit places flatly (though we certainly inhabit plenty of flat places!), but in depth, both geographical and temporal.

That depth is what we hope to gain personally at Madroño Ranch and also encourage in others, but we know we cannot simply will it into being. It grows and accumulates over time, and with care and effort; it is, in fact, a kind of rote learning, going over the same ground again and again, literally and metaphorically, until you have worn a track into the surface. John Muir noted that “Most people are on the world, not in it”; one of our hopes, now that our Austin nest is empty and we’re at the ranch more often, is that we can gradually learn to live and move in, not just on, this small part of the planet.

This is why Heather has grown increasingly ambivalent about travel; the world is full of fascinating places, but we’ve barely scratched the surface of our own. We hope it’s not (or not just) provincialism, but we want to be here.

—Martin

What we’re reading
Heather: Adam Gopnik, Angels and Ages: A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life
Martin: Steven Rinella, American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon

"If you got a field that don't yield": writer's block and the language of community

2011-02-25T06:46:00.000-06:00

One of the many notable gatherings Martin and I participated in this past weekend was the opening of my sister Isa Catto Shaw’s show at the Harvey/Meadows Gallery in Aspen, Colorado. In a series of watercolors and collages, she took the dark, mute burden of grief over the death of our mother and worked it into beautifully articulate packages, in some ways (perhaps) making that grief more easily borne because it is shared with a community of unknown mourners who see the paintings, with the community of artists from whom she has drawn inspiration, and from the community in which she and her family live. As far as I could tell, the opening was a wonderful success, the gallery full to overflowing as Isa and the ceramicist Doug Casebeer, with whom she shared the show, each spoke movingly about the impetus behind their individual efforts.

Knowing that she had been working like a madman for several months, I was glad (and deeply moved) to see the results of her labors. And aggravated. We’ve been talking since our mother died about a collaboration of my poetry and Isa’s art to be entitled “Blessings of a Mother.” Isa’s done her part, and it’s intimidatingly beautiful.

I, on the other hand, have done squat. This doesn’t mean I haven’t thought obsessively about the project or that I haven’t written multiple lists of topics and scraps of lines and stillborn poems. It does mean that I’ve been willing to be endlessly distracted and grumpy about it. I’ve developed all sorts of hypotheses about why I’m not writing and what I might do about it, most of them ultimately involving running away from home. My favorite defense against the terrorism of the blank page is to read, figuring that in doing so I’m in the company of someone else who has faced, at least temporarily, the tyranny of That Which Demands Expression And Remains Unexpressed. Plus, if I’m reading, I can’t write.

So here’s what I’m currently reading to fend off—and perhaps eventually to outsmart—the intimidation tactics of the blank page: Standing by Words, a collection of essays by Wendell Berry, in particular the title essay and its assertion that the primary obligation of language is to connect the idiom of the internal self with the multivalent tongues the self encounters in community, both human and otherwise. When language loses that capacity—a loss currently encouraged by the forces of industrial technology—both the self and its community languish in their isolation, succumbing eventually to a fatal disconnection from the web of love and life.

As always, Berry is defiantly unfashionable, insisting on the possibility of “fidelity between words and speakers or words and things or words and acts.” He believes that genuine communication is possible, even if its processes are ultimately mysterious and unavailable for dissection by specialists. The life of language is rooted in community and by the precision that life in community necessitates: “It sounds like this: ‘How about letting me borrow your tall jack?’ Or: ‘The old hollow beech blew down last night.’ Or, beginning a story, ‘Do you remember that time...?’ I would call this community speech. Its words have the power of pointing to things visible either to eyesight or to memory.” Community speech doesn’t imagine abstract futures; rather, it deals with what IS. It creates a walkway between internal, personal systems and external, public systems. Community speech registers the need to include both objective and subjective experience; it deflects the argot of specialists; it recognizes spheres of being beyond its domain. Says Berry:

If one wishes to promote the life of language, one must promote the life of the community—a discipline many times more trying, difficult, and long than that of linguistics, but having at least the virtue of hopefulness. It escapes the despair always implicit in specializations: the cultivation of discrete parts without respect or responsibility for the whole.... [Community speech] is limited by responsibility on the on the one hand and by humility on the other, or in Milton’s terms, by magnanimity and devotion.

Although I would argue with Berry’s assertion that all specialists are without awareness of their place in the “whole household in which life is lived” and thereby exclude themselves from the liveliness of community speech, I hearken to the limits he sets on speech, limits that protect the tender shoots of hopefulness, a crop that can be distressingly rare in an often grief-stricken world.

Forgive me. For an essay that aims, in part, to wrestle with ways to express the specificity and universality of grief, my language is so far distressingly abstract, a symptom, I suspect, of my current stuckness. I just received a note from an acquaintance who recently lost her husband to pancreatic cancer; she wrote that although she and her daughter have prepared for his death for a year, “it is like the bad dream where you show up for an exam without having read the book, in your PJs, totally unprepared.” I was struck by the generosity of the image, by her assumption that, though I have not experienced her particular and devastating sorrow, I could somehow imaginatively engage with it, and that we both belonged to the same community, despite the fact that we’ve only met twice before.

Writing is usually perceived to be a solitary pursuit, and in a very literal way it is. I’m trying to remember, however, that when I stare at the blank page or screen I’m seldom alone. (I’m not referring to the cats who often take naps behind me on my chair.) Trying to remember: trying to listen for the cloud of witnesses, the dead and the unborn, that root us in the past and impel us toward the future. I found Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies compelling after my mother’s death, in part because their language is so rich and their meaning so elusive, like a whispered conversation from another plane of being. In the translation by J. B. Leishman and Stephen Spender, they begin with this lament:

Who, if I cried, would hear me among the angelic
orders? And if one of them suddenly
pressed me against his heart, I should fade in the strength of his
stronger existence. For Beauty’s nothing
but beginning of Terror we’re still just able to bear,
and why we adore it so is because it serenely disdains
to destroy us. Every angel is terrible.
And so I repress myself, and swallow the call-note
Of depth-dark sobbing.

Although Rilke refuses to call on the angels, they soar in and out of the poems, weaving them together, helping create a complex whole from parts threatening to hurtle toward meaninglessness and isolation.

I’m usually suspicious of angel-talk, but Wendell Berry and my widowed acquaintance and my sister all remind me that I am—we are all— surrounded by angels, by community, even when we don’t sense its presence. When we are deaf to its song, we are deaf to our own.

Now if they’d only settle down and write those poems for me. Or at least recommend some nice writer’s residency where I could get them started.

—Heather

What we’re reading
Heather: Wendell Berry, Standing by Words: Essays
Martin: Rebecca Solnit, Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas

These boots were made for blogging

2011-02-18T04:04:00.000-06:00

Cowboy boots are on my mind today. And (heh) on my feet.

Of course cowboy boots come with so much symbolic weight it’s a wonder I can even walk in them. The cowboy is the most iconic, romantic, heroic figure in American history. Lean, laconic, and independent, he represents the way we like to imagine ourselves: tough as nails, self-reliant, unafraid of violence but guided always by a rigid code of honor. Owen Wister and Zane Grey helped establish the archetype, and Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, Audie Murphy, Gary Cooper, John Wayne, and Clint Eastwood, among many others, elaborated it for generations of children (and adults) on screens both large and small. In an increasingly urbanized society the image of the cowboy may seem quaint and anachronistic, but it can still exert a powerful pull.

All of which only partially explains why I just bought myself a pair of Luccheses—NV1503s in waxed and burnished olive leather, if you must know, as in the photo above—and why that’s such an unlikely thing for me to have done. Allow me to explain:

I have traditionally had a sort of ambivalent attitude toward cowboy boots. I have tended to associate them more with a certain kind of urban Texan—plump, loud, razor-cut hair, wearing pressed jeans and a white shirt, driving a too-big pickup—than with the rugged individualist of the bygone frontier. And then of course there’s that whole unfortunate association with a certain professional football team based in Dallas.

Moreover, my feet are famous throughout the tri-county area for their extraordinary width and flatness. They are the Great Plains of footdom. My footprints resemble the round tracks of a hippo rather than the delicately scalloped tracks of most humans.

Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that I have a long and often painful history with cowboy boots. I bought my first pair in London, of all places, at a very trendy boutique on Chelsea’s Kings Road, during our honeymoon many years ago. (I know, I know: what kind of idiot travels from Texas to England to buy cowboy boots? All I can say in my defense is that Heather had just bought a pair, and I didn’t want to be left out. Also, I was young and foolish.) They were a sort of honey-colored suede, with white stitching, lethally pointed toes, and rakishly undercut heels. They were also one size too small, and way too narrow. The shopkeeper—a pox upon his cynical soul—assured me that they would stretch, which was of course utter nonsense. I probably wore them no more than twice, each time suffering horribly while they were on and requiring a great deal of assistance to peel them off my swollen feet, before finally coming to my senses and giving them away.

A few years later Heather’s parents gave me a pair of boots for Christmas. They were made of thick reddish-brown leather, completely devoid of decorative stitching, with squarish toes instead of the classic pointy ones—in other words, they weren’t really cowboy boots at all. They were, however, the correct size. I wore them a few times, usually at Christmas parties and the like, before deciding that they were just too heavy to wear much in Texas.

But these new Luccheses fit my astoundingly wide, flat feet right out of the box, and they are lightweight enough to make me think I might be able to wear them comfortably even when the temperature is above freezing. Moreover, they are quite dazzlingly beautiful: fairly restrained, as cowboy boots go, with decorative contrast stitching on the shaft and more subtle stitching on the insteps, though the toes are sharply pointed.

How often will I actually wear them? I have no idea; I may ultimately conclude that they make me look more like this guy than this guy. Also, we seem to be moving into spring, and my usual warm-weather wardrobe involves shorts, a T-shirt, and Birkenstocks, with a Hawaiian shirt and sneakers for more formal occasions. Still, I like looking at them in my closet, and it’s nice knowing they’re there if and when I need them.

The bottom line is that these boots are a symbol of my willingness to take on the trappings of my time and place. We live in Texas, and we own a ranch; we are Westerners, in other words, and we yearn to partake of the best of that heritage. I’ve made no secret of my loathing for many aspects of contemporary Texas (just ask Heather). Wearing cowboy boots is a step—a small step, perhaps, but a significant one—in my long journey toward acceptance and acknowledgment of who and where I am. This is my life, and these, believe it or not, are my boots.

Next on my shopping list: a Nudie’s suit!

—Martin

What we’re reading
Heather: William H. Eddy, The Other Side of the World: Essays on Mind and Nature
Martin: Philipp Meyer, American Rust

Meat and flourishment: carnivorocity, take three

2011-02-11T07:34:00.000-06:00

Martin’s post last week describing the first slaughter (and I use the word “slaughter” advisedly) in our new endeavor as purveyors of bison meat elicited a comment that urged us to consider the ethical fault line (presumably) running through every conscience, that unsteady place where we find ourselves rationalizing our actions to ourselves or to whatever audience our imaginations conjure up.

Martin tried to make his/our unease clear with the post’s title: Bloody Hands. So I’m wondering once again about the ethics of carnivorocity, as visible and treacherous a fault line as abortion, euthanasia, gun control, climate change, or cloning: when you stand on one side of the fault line, it’s easy to think that the earth itself will justify you when it opens up and swallows the dummies over there, proving that you were on the right side, at which point you can stop worrying all the time, for heaven’s sake, and go on your merry way without thinking about the issue ever again.

As usual, diving into the conversations available on the internet just sucked me deeper into the murk. A defense is available for every possible position and offered with wildly varying degrees of civility: meat-eaters supporting vegans and trashing vegetarians; meat-eaters sneering at any thought of self-restriction; vegetarians and vegans calling meat-eaters all sorts of names; vegetarians acknowledging that some meat-eating is environmentally acceptable; meat-eaters acknowledging that American meat production and consumption is for the most part grotesque. What’s a utopian-minded bison rancher to think?

Serendipity, as usual, is my guide: in chasing internet rabbits down their holes, I found a momentary resting place in a review of Maggie Kozel’s book The Color of Atmosphere: One Doctor’s Journey In and Out of Medicine. After describing a flummoxing patient she had as a second-year medical student, Kozel said, “[I] devoured the answers without asking the right questions.”

Of course, if you’re obsessive the way I am, then you’ll immediately begin worrying about what the right questions are, as in, if I’m “right” then others must be “wrong.” One of the hallmarks of the debate about meat-eating and its impact on the environment or the individual soul is the array of statistics and science that each side has amassed to prove the objective superiority of its argument. I’ve been persuaded by both sides and neither side, depending on the time of day, what I’ve just read, the weather, my most recent meal, and/or the health of my family, among other random criteria.

In other words, I don’t think science and statistics by themselves allow us to ask the right questions, since apparently convincing evidence can be found to shore up either side. Eating is one of those human activities rich with multiple levels of meaning; expecting questions directed at a specific level to adequately address the full range is a little like expecting a monoculture to support the diversity a polyculture allows. Although science poses some vitally important questions when it examines the issue of meat-eating, the nature of its inquiry must ignore other equally pressing but less quantifiable questions, such as, what conditions allow a multi-species community to flourish? Does eating meat (by humans) contribute or detract from our community’s flourishment (a word coined by our friend Hugh Fitzsimons of Thunder Heart Bison)?

I hear the howls of protest even before I finish typing this sentence: how do you measure flourishment? Who decides the standards? Invalid! Too subjective! Well, yes. That’s what makes this a fault-line issue: it addresses the limits of our humanity and so necessarily includes subjective experience. To be honest, I don’t know how to measure flourishment; I suspect you just know it when you see it. And when you see it, you’re moved to describe it, knowing that the urge will be frustrated to at least some degree because flourishment, like all fruit, is the result of such a complex interaction of elements in space and time that any description will be incomplete. And of course it’s not a steady state; it waxes and wanes as circumstances change and sometimes double back on themselves.

In this context, the question of whether meat-eating is ethical can be answered unequivocally: it depends. One of the preconditions for flourishment is a sense of justice, a perspective that includes but also rises above the immediate tit-for-tat concerns of fairness. The scope of justice includes not just humanity but the earth itself—and perhaps the cosmos. It unrolls over the course of history, recognizing that particular injustices sometimes take generations, centuries, or millennia to wither, even with the powerful witness and effort of prophets and their followers. As I said in an earlier post, it may be that vegetarians and vegans are living forward into a time where justice is more fully realized. At the same time, issues of fairness and justice press at us every moment in this world where the lion and the lamb cannot yet lie down together, where predators are a vital part of an ecosystem that has developed in sync with domesticated animals.

Can meat be produced and consumed in a way that encourages justice and, hence, flourishment? I think it can. There are multiple instances of communities and societies that eat meat and live within that delicate balance that looks to the long-term well-being and dignity of the system as a whole, places like Joel Salatin’s Polyface Farm, although there are many, many others. (We’d love to hear some of your favorites.) There are multiple instances of communities and cultures flourishing without eating meat, most notably for the purposes of this post the Hindu cultures whose vegetarian cuisines I eat with great pleasure. (We’d love to hear some of your favorites.)

Likewise, there are communities and cultures that eat meat without flourishing, including most of the industrialized world, where concern for short-term profits and their consequent incitement of unrestrained appetite smother any hope of flourishment under mountains of animal excrement and anguish. Those places that encourage us (in the industrialized world) to measure the value of food in one way only—cheap is best—smother flourishment. Food is at the center of family, of community, of myth, of life. To reduce its essence to a single component is to denature its multivalent nutritional value.

Back to the ethical fault line, that place we stand uneasily, knowing that we may be swallowed: may those of us who recognize the fault line join hands—bloody or not—across the chasm and help each other seek the firmer footing of justice as our foundation. Flourishment will surely follow.

—Heather

What we’re reading
Heather: Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall (still!)
Martin: Rodney Crowell, Chinaberry Sidewalks

Bloody hands: bison harvest at Madroño Ranch

2011-02-04T07:16:00.002-06:00

The very first fruits (though “fruits” hardly seems the right word) of our very first bison harvest are ready to sell, but getting to this point has been a long and sometimes frustrating process. The last stages of that process were both harrowing and, in a dark way, fascinating; squeamish sorts may want to stop reading here. “Meat is murder,” the Smiths sang in 1985, and whether or not you agree with them, it is undeniably a bloody business.

The harvest took place on Monday, January 24. We’d been both dreading and looking forward to it, and planning for it, for months; Robert, our redoubtable ranch manager, had ingeniously cobbled together a refrigerated trailer to haul the dead animals to Mercantile Meat, in Utopia, to be turned into packages of meat, and we had long since chosen the two young bulls, the bison equivalent of obnoxious adolescents, who would be the first to go. Despite all the planning, though, the reality of assuming responsibility for the death of so large and magnificent an animal was more than a little intimidating.

Early on that beautifully clear but chilly Monday morning Heather and I drove up to the flat near Robert’s house, where the herd had gathered. There we met Robert, Meat Inspector Mike, and Robert’s buddies Robert (whom I will henceforth call Other Robert) and Keith (whom I will henceforth call Not Robert), who were there to assist. We all gathered in a circle while Heather read a prayer she’d written for the occasion, which I suspect disconcerted several of those present. Then Robert, Meat Inspector Mike, and Not Robert climbed into Robert’s Chevy Tahoe with Robert’s .270 rifle while Other Robert, Heather, and I kept a safe distance.

A few minutes later, it was over. Two rifle shots shattered the stillness of the morning, and after each, even before we’d finished flinching, 1,500 pounds of bison was dead on the ground. This was the moment we’d been waiting for, and fearing, and the magnificence and sorrow of it were overwhelming. Both deaths were instantaneous and humbling, and strangely intimate; all the world seemed somehow to have narrowed to this short stretch of dirt road; other places, other people, were unimaginable. Robert, Other Robert, and Not Robert worked quickly and efficiently to bleed the first carcass and load it into the trailer, and we turned our attention to the second.

At this point things got really interesting. We knew that bison tend not to scatter when they hear gunfire or see one of their number fall; in fact, frequently the other members of the herd gather around the victim, curious about what has happened to him or her, or perhaps paying their last respects, before getting back to business as usual. But this time, the head bull went over to the second carcass and repeatedly butted and pawed at it, determined to revive his fallen comrade.

This was a problem, since we were not particularly interested in arguing with nearly a ton of angry bison. By yelling and waving, we convinced him to back off a few feet, just far enough so that we could go to work on the carcass, but Robert kept one eye on the angry bull (and on Heather, who had appointed herself the designated angry-bull-shooer). He glared at us throughout the process, but kept his distance.

With both carcasses safely inside the trailer, which had been set to minus-ten degrees, Robert, Other Robert, and Not Robert climbed into the cab of Robert’s pickup and our little caravan set off for Utopia, some thirty miles away.

All had gone about as smoothly as we could have hoped to this point, but we encountered some metaphorical bumps on the road to Utopia. As Robert’s pickup was hauling the laden trailer up FM 337 west of Medina, smoke started pouring out from under the hood: a blown radiator fitting. They limped to the top of the hill, where they found a couple of empty whiskey bottles at the side of the road and, after coasting down the other side, filled them with water from Mill Creek which they poured into the overheated radiator.

Thankfully, the truck made it the rest of the way into Utopia—a little later than we’d planned, true, but it made it. After Robert backed the trailer up to the tiny loading dock we had to drag the dead bison out of the trailer, across the loading dock, and through the tiny door and into the plant—not an easy undertaking, and one which required the combined efforts of Robert, Not Robert, Other Robert, and me, as well as Joe, the owner, and a couple of plant employees. When we were done, I had blood on my hands literally as well as figuratively.

After all our efforts to honor and respect the death of the bison, the way in which they entered the plant seemed disrespectful and undignified. But necessity is a mother, as we say at our house, and it was a tremendous relief finally to have them there.

When we got back to the ranch, we were still a little stunned by the morning’s events. It had already been a long day, and we were still a little unnerved by the magnitude of what we had seen and done (or, more accurately, caused to be done). And we know we still have a lot of work ahead of us; actually figuring out how to sell several hundred pounds of bison meat is way out of our comfort zone. (We’re hoping to sell all of it wholesale, and only in the Bandera/Kerr County area.) But we feel like we’ve taken a major step.

After witnessing a bison harvest at our friend Hugh’s ranch several years ago, Heather wrote a poem called “Sacrifice.” The details are necessarily different, but it still captures some of what we felt:

Ash Wednesday: one year I stood in thick cool
dust along with several others, waiting for
an ancient drama to begin again,
waiting as if I weren’t an actor in it
too. Through the thorny brush the bison
entered, awkward bodies wary, dense beneath
the bulky wreath of muscle draped across
their shoulders. One shook her head—so massive
that her horns looked dainty—watching us with
eyes black as moonless snake-filled summer nights.
We climbed into the pick-up, all except
the shooter, who moved with quiet purpose
as we sat in silence, waiting for the shot
that finally came—shocking, if expected—
and penetrated mercifully, the cow dead
before she finished sinking to the dust.
Another man performed the bleeding when
she was hoisted, limp, still warm, head-down,
carotid artery cascading blood
a color and consistency I had
never seen before, a frothing cochineal
oasis in the thirsty dust. I asked
the shooter if and how he steeled himself
for harvest. Pray two days before, he said,
Sit quietly. We watched the hands prepare
her for the journey, another kind of life.
Her body, treasury of light and grass
and epic wanderings, will enrich
a larger body now, a body more than
body when it knows the incarnate cost—
be it hoofed, winged, scaled or even rooted
life—of nourishing itself. Around us,
bushes burned in lilac, white, and yellow
flames, their incense rising toward the hawks
and caracaras, wheeling in mandalic arcs,
awaiting our departure so to gather
in the dust and then consume the bloody
pool, their bounden duty.

Perhaps subsequent harvests at Madroño Ranch will become more or less routine; doubtless we’ll have a better idea of what to expect, and be somewhat better prepared. (We may even buy a more powerful pickup, one that can pull the trailer to Utopia without overheating.) But I pray we never completely lose the profound sense of awe and, yes, sorrow that attended this first harvest. May we never lose the full awareness of what we do and have done. May we remain humbly thankful for the life—and death—of these magnificent animals. May I always remember the blood on my hands.

—Martin

What we’re reading
Heather: Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall
Martin: Roy Bedichek, Adventures with a Texas Naturalist

Shooting holes in the Constitution: some thoughts on guns and violence

2011-01-28T07:15:00.000-06:00

Recently, like many Americans, I’ve been thinking about the issue of guns in civil society. The tragic shooting in Tucson certainly focused attention on the topic, as did a story on National Public Radio that identified the United States as the source of most of the guns being used by cartels in the Mexican drug wars, a story that aired days before we visited friends whose ranch is just a few miles from the Rio Grande. But other, more personal circumstances also got me thinking, like the three different episodes of gun violence, or the threat of gun violence, occurred during the past semester on the college campuses (2,000 miles apart) where two of our children are students. And all this happened before our first bison harvest at Madroño Ranch this past Monday, in which two 1,500-pound animals were felled by single shots from a .270 rifle.

Full disclosure: I don’t own a gun myself, although we have a gun safe well stocked with rifles and shotguns at the ranch. (They mostly belong to our son.) My grandfather taught me to shoot with a pellet gun, an activity which he oversaw carefully and I enjoyed mightily. I still take pleasure in target practice and found, the one time I tried it, that shooting skeet was a fine way to while away an afternoon. I don’t hunt and don’t expect that I ever will, although I have no objection to ethical hunting. I’ve thought that it might be wise to have a pistol when I wander around the ranch, in case one of the dogs riles up a pack of feral hogs and brings them back to me. My fear of shooting my own dog is sharper than my fear of rampaging pigs, however, and I remain pistol-less.

While there’s been no change in the number of guns I own, my thinking about guns has changed considerably over the last few years, to wit: I’ve concluded that there’s a difference between urban guns and rural guns. (Yes, yes, hold your applause.) A gun is a necessary tool on a ranch or farm. I’m very grateful that Robert, the ranch’s redoubtable manager, is an excellent shot. If the bulls we harvested this week felt any pain, it was less than momentary; they were dead quite literally within a couple of seconds.

And then there’s the issue of self-defense. A friend recently told me about an encounter he’d had on his remote South Texas ranch with an armed and heavily tattooed non-English-speaking trespasser he suspected of being a member of the fearsome MS-13 gang. My friend didn’t have a firearm at hand, but fortunately, after a tense exchange, the trespasser left. “I’ve never felt so naked,” my friend said. I understand: I, too, would have wanted some clothing in that situation.

And yet, and yet... we recently saw and thoroughly enjoyed the Coen brothers’ adaptation of True Grit. That is, Martin saw it; I had my hands over my eyes during several violent scenes. Even so, I loved the movie. At the same time, I made a new connection: imbedded in the myth of the American West is the image of the lone gunman, meting out swift and violent justice. No amount of regulation is going to smother the breathe from that compelling image.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m all for intelligent gun control. I’ve never felt so naked as the day that a student opened fire on the UT Austin campus a block from the room where our son Tito was in class. But I emphatically would not have felt more clothed if, as a bill passed by the Texas Senate in 2009 proposed, his fellow students been permitted to carry concealed handguns. Guns do not belong on campuses. Or in the hands of the mentally ill. Anyone who wants to own a gun has a responsibility to register, and law enforcement agencies should be able to trace every gun to its owner. Anyone who wants to buy an automatic or semi-automatic weapon should have to jump through a lot more hoops than a weekend hunter does. Gun shows should be heavily regulated. But the image of that lone, justice-seeking gunman is more powerful than any regulation. Did I walk out of True Grit disgusted by its glorification of violence? Of course not: I loved it, even as I was distressed by some of it. The story is part of my identity as a westerner, as a Texan.

On Wednesday, as I was wrestling with this post, Martin received a membership solicitation from the NRA. I suspect that the trigger for this unlikely offer must be the fact that he recently purchased from Amazon.com a copy of Jose Ortega y Gasset’s Meditations on Hunting, the introduction of which was written by a visiting professor of environmental perception at Dartmouth College—not exactly a rip-roarin’ shoot-’em-up. If I’m correct, the NRA’s tracking mechanisms qualify as spooky at best, and maybe terrifying, but also revelatory of a mentality that refuses to see any kind of subtlety or gradation of perception.

Here’s the opening salvo of that membership solicitation: “Your constitutional right to own a gun is under attack by hundreds of anti-gun politicians, global gun ban diplomats at the U.N., militant anti-hunting extremists, radical billionaires and the freedom-hating Hollywood elite.”

The letter consistently associates freedom with gun ownership; restricting gun ownership equals restricting personal freedom. “Remember: the NRA is the one firewall that stands between our Second Amendment rights and those who would take our freedoms away.” Freedom, in this view, has nothing to do with national service, with love of country and fellow-citizens, with restraint or knowledge or self-discipline.

I visited the NRA website and found it even more appalling than its fear-mongering letter. Of the assault in Tucson, it says: “Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims of this senseless tragedy, including Representative Gabrielle Giffords, and their families during this difficult time. We join the rest of the country in praying for the quick recovery of those injured.” There was no condemnation of the gunman who perpetrated the senseless tragedy. There was found no call for self-examination. There was no exhortation to the faithful to adhere to any code of responsibility or ethics. I found nothing that encouraged gun-owner restraint or training, or an acknowledgment of the enormous social responsibility that comes with owning a gun.

I did find a persistent paranoia that encourages NRA members and sympathizers to view strangers as threatening and potentially aggressive. I did find—even as someone with a sympathetic view of some gun use—a willful and destructive distortion of that figure so many Americans love: Rooster Cogburn, the courageous gunman who takes the law into his own hands and then rides off into the empty landscape. Many of us love Rooster, yes, but his place is in the mythic past, not in the increasingly urban present.

I know and respect—and even love—individual members of the NRA; my grandfather was one of them. I went to its site in hopes of finding something to change my mind about gun control. But I left loathing the rhetoric the NRA has adopted in recent years. (In this regard, I highly recommend Jill Lepore’s excellent article “The Commandments,” about the way various groups, including the NRA, have sought to interpret the Constitution, in the January 17 issue of The New Yorker, and thank our daughter Elizabeth for bringing it to my attention.) To encourage people to think that their fellow citizens are their enemies is surely to unravel the careful work of the Constitution, which recognizes the precarious balance inherent in a federalist system, a balance requiring trust, self-restraint, and mutual good will among its participants. So while calls for legislation are important in curbing American’s extravagant gun violence, they aren’t enough: we need to call the NRA’s violent distortions of the Constitution to account. Maybe guns don’t kill people: maybe it’s NRA rhetoric that kills people.

—Heather

What we’re reading
Heather: Thich Nhat Hanh, Living Buddha, Living Christ
Martin: Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

South Texas: a fierce and unexpected beauty

2011-01-21T07:10:00.000-06:00

Yum! This week has afforded me yet another in a long—seemingly infinite, in fact—series of opportunities to eat crow. Heather and I returned yesterday from a visit to our friends Hugh and Sarah Fitzsimons’ Shape Ranch, outside Carrizo Springs.

As regular readers know, Hugh and Sarah have loomed large in our efforts to get Madroño Ranch off the ground. Hugh, the dueño of Thunder Heart Bison, is our guru in all things bison; in fact, we bought our original herd of twelve animals (which has now tripled in size) from him three years ago.

But our connections with Hugh and Sarah go back much farther than that. Heather had been buying their meat at the farmers’ market for several years before picking up one of the business cards Hugh happened to set out at his booth one day. When she saw his name, something clicked.

“Did your grandmother live on Argyle Avenue?” she asked him.

Startled, Hugh affirmed that she did, and within a very short time he and Heather had determined that their grandparents had lived across the street from each other in Alamo Heights; that Heather had enjoyed many a snack of milk and cookies in Hugh’s grandmother’s kitchen; and that Heather was “Uncle Henry’s” granddaughter (“uncle” in this case being a term of friendship rather than kinship). They hadn’t seen each other for about forty years, but that shared history was the basis of a new friendship.

Furthermore, Sarah‘s brother sings in the choir at our church in Austin, and, as if all that weren’t enough, we subsequently discovered that our daughter Elizabeth and Hugh and Sarah’s daughter Evelyn were not just cabin mates, but actually shared a bunk during a summer at Camp Mystic, many years ago.

The connections, in other words, are various and deep. But even though Heather had been down to Shape Ranch several times to observe Hugh’s bison operation, this week’s visit was my first. Heather had told me that the place was gorgeous, but Heather is after all a native Texan and therefore not to be trusted on such matters.

Now, you have to understand that Carrizo Springs is in South Texas. Flat, scrubby, harsh South Texas, of course, couldn’t be more different from the hilly, wooded, green Central Texas Hill Country which is home to Madroño Ranch. Never mind that most of my experience of them has been restricted to what you can see from a car at seventy miles an hour; as far as I’m concerned, flat places like the central California valleys, the Midwestern corn belt, and, yes, South Texas are to be avoided, or at least passed through as rapidly as possible en route to hillier, and ergo prettier and more interesting, places: the Bay Area, the Sierra Nevada, the Rockies, and the Hill Country.

On Wednesday afternoon, the landscape grew steadily flatter as we made our way from Madroño down to Carrizo Springs via Medina, Utopia, Sabinal, Uvalde, La Pryor, and Crystal City, and all my old prejudices were kicking in, but I was prepared to be a good sport about it, for Hugh and Sarah’s sake.

We drove south out of Carrizo Springs on FM 186 and, a few miles after the pavement gave out, turned in at their front gate, and I began to taste that familiar corvine tang in my mouth. The land was not in fact perfectly flat, but softly undulating, yielding sudden and unexpected vistas. And it was undeniably scrubby, but the winter mesquite and sage and rust-colored seacoast bluestem and purple, pink, and yellow prickly pear were undeniably lovely.

And the birds! Heather is the birder in the family, but even I was amazed by the number and variety of the birds we saw: caracaras and pyrrhuloxias and cardinals and thrashers (both brown and curved-billed) and green jays and white-crowned sparrows and one big blue heron and assorted hawks and kestrels and... well, you get the idea.

After driving several more miles of labyrinthine dirt roads seemingly devoid of physical landmarks, other than the occasional oil pump jack, we somehow arrived at Hugh and Sarah’s house, which is shaded by Arizona ash trees (virtually the only real trees on the place). Hugh and Sarah suggested we dump our bags, grab some beverages, jump in the pickup, and drive up to a picnic table that is their favorite place to watch the sunset. We pulled up and found an amazing 360-degree panorama, with the sun sinking low in the western sky. Sarah told us that when the sun sank low enough, we’d be able to see the mountains of Mexico on the horizon.

Sure enough, as the sky turned tropical-drink orange and pink the mountains came into view. And then, a few minutes later, from the opposite direction, we saw the bright orange full moon rising behind the windmill. Then, to complete the jaw-dropping array of effects, the coyotes—at least two different packs—began serenading us. Clearly, the only thing to do was to return to the house and enjoy dinner and conversation, and still more red wine, around the fire that Hugh built on the back patio.

Yesterday a front blew in, cold and gray and misty, while we were on our morning walk with Hugh and Sarah; the sharp, wet wind made the brunch that followed, of scrambled eggs and sausage and sliced avocado and grapefruit and lots and lots of strong hot coffee, even more welcome. In some ways, with its unnerving, disorienting sameness and plentiful thorns and scarcity of water and shade, this is not a particularly gentle or hospitable land, but yesterday afternoon, when Heather and I finally left to begin the long drive over to I-35 and up to Austin, it felt, just a little, as though we had been expelled from the Garden of Eden. And, believe me, those are not words I ever imagined myself writing about South Texas.

Hey, could I get a side of fries with that order of crow, please?

—Martin

What we’re reading
Heather: Jon Fasman, The Geographer’s Library
Martin: Suzannah Lessard, The Architect of Desire: Beauty and Danger in the Stanford White Family

The rising light

2011-01-14T07:26:00.001-06:00

Although it’s sometimes hard to tell, we’re in the season of rising light.

Some of us have a confused relationship with this time of year. The prevailing story, at least in Western culture, has a particular purchase on anyone who’s lived through a northeastern, Midwestern, or Great Plains winter: that story relates the flare of cheer in the Christmas season, followed by a plunge into the long, dark, depressing slog of January, February, and March. People who live in this story yearn for sunlit beaches, skimpy clothing, and drinks with little umbrellas in them, reminding them of what they’ve temporarily left behind. Anyone with aching snow-shoveling muscles in New England after this week’s blizzard will attest to the power of this story of the season. The rising of the light—the lengthening of days—is a promise of kinder times ahead.

Many of us in central Texas long—perversely, perhaps—for this story to ring true here as well. (I’m wife or mother of some of them.) We yearn for a white Christmas, and when the late December temperature creeps up to the 80 degree mark, we moan, “It’s not supposed to be like this! It’s supposed to be cold!” Despite the prevailing story that cold and dark are to be dreaded, in central Texas this is the season to yearn for, the season of dark and (intermittent) cold. For at least some of the year, it’s the light and heat, not the cold and dark, that can be downright unpleasant, almost unbearable. I feel that our winter and spring (so compressed they can be conflated) are the equivalent of fall in New England: tourists come and say, “How beautiful!” but the natives sigh, knowing that what’s just ahead will require some toughness to get through. Here it can be a real pleasure to burrow into the dark; the rising light brings with it a whiff of the (probable) scorching to come.

My musing on light has its roots in non-climatological terrain as well; Martin and I are in a group that’s reading and discussing Genesis: Translation and Commentary, by Robert Alter. Although there’s no particular comment on that most famous of first utterances, Let there be light, I can’t help but think about what it might mean that light is the firstborn of creation, at least according to Jews and Christians. This light is distinctive from sun- and moonlight, which weren’t created until the fourth day, and which seem to be subordinate to the aboriginal light of the first day. As God’s breath hovered over the waters, over the deep, and the darkness, God spoke, and there was light. And God saw the light: presumably this means that God had not experienced light before this moment, although virtually everything I just wrote—God, experienced, light, before this moment—should probably be in quotation marks or resting upon a tower of footnotes. But according to this story, light is humanity’s older sibling, both of them created by that which knew the deep, the dark, the tohu-bohu before they did in a distinctive way: before the light.

I’ve also been lurching my way through Marilyn Robinson’s elegant new screed Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self, in which she argues against what she sees as an absurdly reductive definition of the human brain and mind by some, perhaps many, modern scientists, a definition that refuses to take into account what she calls “that haunting I who wakes in the night wondering where time has gone, the I we waken to sharply aware that we have been unfaithful to ourselves, that a life lived otherwise would have acknowledged a yearning more our own than any of the daylit motives whose behests we answer to so diligently.” This “haunting I,” so profoundly felt, is dismissed by those scientists (or “parascientists,” as she calls them) as mere subjectivity or, worse, evidence of the annoyingly persistent and primitive superstition we moderns call religion.

In one of those serendipitous encounters with my subconscious, as I reread Robinson’s description of this persistent human sense of hauntedness, of leasing interior real estate to someone you recognize but don’t really know, I read the next sentence completely wrong. She writes: “Our religious traditions give us as the name of God two deeply mysterious words, one deeply mysterious utterance: I AM.” Except at first, I read “I AM”—God’s own self-definition—as “1 A.M.”

I AM often awake at 1 a.m., in the deepest dark of the night, the time when most of us know ourselves to be haunted. If you awaken at 1 a.m. with a dream vibrating in your mind, the dream stays with you in ways that it doesn’t when you wake to light. Sometimes you can play with the dream, poke and shape it in ways that make it pop when it encounters daylight. Sometimes at 1 a.m. you can be wide awake and create as complicated a nightmare as any dreaming mind can produce. To stalk the mind at night—at least, for some of us—is to move as close to the realm of tohubohu, of aboriginal chaos, as created beings are able to get, at least without ingesting psychotropic drugs or harrowing the hell of human atrocity.

Despite the categorical confusion it causes, this season may be my favorite, if for no other reason than the blade-bright light of late afternoon, especially as I get to see it from the kitchen window at Madroño. The copper and golden grasses of the pasture in front of the house blaze as the sun drops behind the western hills, each shoot seemingly sharp enough to pierce the chests of the bison passing across it. The bison themselves look like something out of an ancient dream, not the product of my own tiny experiences but arising from some atavistic communal memory. There are those who might pooh-pooh these moments as fanciful or irrelevant to anything “real.” But in this time of rising light, this time between sleep and waking, between the relief of winter and the slog of summer, I’m compelled to remember that light and humanity once inhabited the same chaotic womb, that we rise and fall together. It’s a good season, once you’ve written your thank-you notes, to watch the rising light with gratitude for the family of creation. And with resignation, too: if it’s already January 14, August will be here before we can even blink.

—Heather

What we’re reading
Heather: Cynthia Bourgeault, The Meaning of Mary Magdalene: Discovering the Woman at the Heart of Christianity
Martin: Keith Richards with James Fox, Life

A new year at Madroño Ranch: bison harvests, chicken tractors, hog schools, and more

2011-01-07T07:04:00.000-06:00

Happy new year! The beginning of the year is always a good time to take stock, so we thought it might be appropriate to look back at what we accomplished—and, erm, failed to accomplish—during the last twelve months. Much remains to be done before our hopes for Madroño Ranch are completely realized, though we took what felt like some significant strides in 2010. With apologies for any perceived self-indulgence, here are some of them.

First, thanks to the wonderful and talented Shawn and Susanne Harrington of Austin’s Asterisk Group, Madroño Ranch now has a vibrant, striking, beautiful visual identity—logo (above), wordmark, etc.—which we hope eventually to splash all over actual and virtual reality. (Madroño Ranch T-shirts! Madroño Ranch gimme caps! Madroño Ranch bumper stickers and koozies and belt buckles and....)

Second, we’ve begun to rethink our initial determination to offer residencies only for environmental writers, however broadly defined (poets, philosophers, essayists, whatever). We had initially thought we would restrict our offerings to writers because, well, as a couple of recovering English majors, we felt like we knew writing better than we knew art, and (perhaps more important) we didn’t want to spend a lot of money on infrastructure (kilns, darkroom facilities, printing presses, whatever). Most writers, after all, are highly mobile these days, requiring little in the way of equipment beyond a laptop computer. But it has become increasingly obvious, even to us, that virtually the same is true of many visual artists as well—digital photographers and collagists, to name just a couple. Painters can travel with paints, portable easels, and suchlike. And then there are environmental artists, like Andy Goldsworthy, who use materials found on-site—rocks, leaves, branches, etc. Why should we exclude such creative thinkers from our pool of potential residents?

Third, while we are still a long way from officially opening our residential program for environmental writers (and artists)—we have yet to construct the small casitas we envision as individual workspaces, and we have yet to hire the necessary personnel to cook and care for our residents—we have managed to find a couple of brave souls willing to serve as “guinea pigs.” Melissa Gaskill and E. Dan Klepper will each spend several days at Madroño Ranch in the next couple of months, working, resting, and experiencing some if not all of what our actual residents will experience once we’re fully up and running. We look forward to hearing their feedback, suggestions, etc.

Fourth, our friend Jesse Griffiths of Dai Due came up with a new and exciting way to open the ranch to a wider public through a variety of sustainable hunting, fishing, and cooking “schools” throughout the year. The first, Deer School, brought six guests to the ranch in November, and was a thoroughgoing success; now we’re looking forward to Hog School in early March and Freshwater Flyfishing School in mid-May, both of which have already sold out. If they go well, we’re hoping to make these (and perhaps other such schools) an annual tradition at Madroño Ranch.

Fifth, we finally gained state approval of the label that will appear on the packages of bison meat we sell, which means we can finally go ahead with our first “harvest” (as it’s euphemistically called) this month. (We had hoped, naively, to harvest our first bison in October, but the approval process turned out to be considerably longer and more complicated than we had imagined.)

Sixth, Heather made significant progress in her quest to become a true chickenista, following the example of local legend Carol Ann Sayle of Austin’s Boggy Creek Farm. Our original flock of fifty or so laying hens took up residence in their bombproof (and, we trust, owl- and hawkproof) new coop, which we call the Chicken Palace (pictured below). A few months later Robert’s brilliant creation the Chicken Tractor (actually a mobile coop on wheels) became the home of a new flock of about twenty younger hens. (As of last week, the two groups were just beginning to commingle.)

Seventh, while we still don’t have an actual Madroño Ranch website (though we’re working on it!), we do have an official Madroño Ranch Facebook page. We invite those of you on that ubiquitous social network to check it out, and click the “Like” button if you’re so inclined; until our website is up and running, that will be the easiest way to keep track of what’s happening at the ranch in what we hope will be an exciting twelve months to come.

Perhaps none of these accomplishments sounds terribly important in and of itself, but each brought us just a little closer to our goal. Our hope for 2011 is that we—and you too, Gentle Reader—keep striding throughout the new year, whether the steps be large ones or small.

—Martin

What we’re reading
Heather: Marilynne Robinson, Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self (still—it’s hard!)
Martin: Michael Lewis, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine

Getting to good food

2010-12-31T07:29:00.001-06:00

Happy New Year! This week, sparing no expense as we recover from the excesses of the holiday season, we have once again secured the services of a top-shelf guest blogger. In this post, Tito Kohout reflects on some of the challenges of rethinking our societal infatuation with “easy” foods.

I start feeling self-righteous when I see some greasy, fatty dude walking out of Wendy’s with a greasy, fatty Number 5 combo. He doesn’t know anything about anything, I say to myself as I pedal furiously past him. I bet he voted for someone I find loathsome. I bet his taste in music is as bad as his taste in burgers. I bet he’s the kind of apathetic American who is, every day, moving us closer to breaking the seventh seal and unleashing some kind of very big and very biblical evil on the world. Then my stomach rumbles and I think that it’s only another dozen blocks until I’m home and can slather some Fiesta-brand peanut butter on my Fiesta-brand wheat bread fried in Crisco until it’s moist and crispy and freaking delicious.

Yeah, that’s stupid. Like really stupid. Like Titanic stupid. Here I am, with my refrigerator full of food from my neighborhood Fiesta Mart (which resides at pretty much the opposite end of the foodie spectrum from Central Market), looking down on some poor guy just trying to grab an easy meal. The Earl Campbell sausages I mix with nameless cheddar cheese in my eggs aren’t any better, and I know it. After all, my parents write this blog, and organic, local, slow, humane food—what I’ll refer to as “good food” from here on in—is obviously important to them, although they weren’t always strictly consumers of good food; I distinctly remember frozen fish sticks being one of my favorite childhood dinners.

So where did they go wrong, raising a son who’s dumb enough to eat seventy-nine-cent cans of pork and beans on a regular basis? The answer is nowhere. I know that Fiesta’s meat comes from factory farms and its vegetables are probably shipped in from heaven-knows-where covered in pesticides. I know how wrong that is. But, man, it’s easy.

I’ve got the expenditures of your typical dumb male college student: rent, utilities, rugby fees, beer, and, of course, food in large quantities. To more easily afford these things, I buy the cheapest food I can. I’m not much of a cook—a few days ago, I suffered a pasta disaster of substantial proportions—but even the simple things cost more at the farmers’ market than at the supermarket.

But even more than the financial price, the price in effort puts me off. I could find ways to save money. I could get a plot in the community garden a block from my house. I could put myself out on the tutoring circuit again. I could sell my car, since I barely drive it anyway. I could be a better citizen of the earth, but I know I’ll keep on eating seventy-nine-cent cans of pork and beans as long as it’s convenient.

The other day, my older sister told me that Americans spend a smaller proportion of their incomes on food than the inhabitants of any other country. I believe her, both because she’s generally pretty well informed for an older sister and because it’s believable; I certainly work to spend less time and money on food. The question is, “How do we not only make good food competitive in prices with the other stuff, but make the U.S. of A. and the world realize that good food isn’t some weird and mildly threatening eccentricity reserved for rich, white, liberal yuppies and scary people from the lunatic fringe?”

I read my parents’ blog posts, and this is the part where they generally propose a solution to the problems they’ve outlined. I got nothing. I just know that good food is important for the survival of our species and of many others, and that we—not we the consumers of good food (I don’t include myself), but we the people—need to make good food not just a societal priority but a societal norm. Otherwise, we’re all in deep trouble, and I’m going to keep on eating Earl Campbell’s tasty, questionable, preservative-packed sausages.

—Tito

What we’re reading
Heather: Marilynne Robinson, Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self
Martin: Jane Leavy, The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America’s Childhood

Listapalooza, holiday edition: all-time top tens

2010-12-24T06:51:00.000-06:00

Like Rob Fleming, the protagonist of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, I seem to have a strong taxonomic impulse. Longtime readers of this blog have already seen several manifestations of my obsession with list making, but Heather and the kids will tell you that one of my more annoying habits is my annual end-of-the-year insistence that we all update the Kohout family top ten lists.

Every New Year’s, I insist that the whole family, and whatever friends and innocent bystanders happen to be around, sit down and list their ten all-time favorite novels, movies, and albums. This always occasions a good deal of grumbling, at least from the family, but they usually do it.

Here are the basic rules:

Each list must include ten items, no more and no less, though I’ll cut you some slack when it comes to works in multiple parts (for example, we customarily count The Lord of the Rings trilogy or the Harry Potter series as one entry).
Unlike so many end-of-the-year lists, these aren’t your favorites from the last twelve months; they’re supposed to be your all-time favorites, which is why you’ll always find at least a couple of children’s books on my list.
The items don’t have to be in order of preference; just your ten favorites, in whatever order they occur to you.
Plays count as fiction, as does epic poetry (The Odyssey, Paradise Lost); lyrical poetry does not.
All this is done with the understanding that if you were to do it again tomorrow, you might come up with a very different list.

Since we’re approaching the end of another year, and I’m preparing to crack the whip on the family again, I thought it might be interesting to share my own most recent top-ten lists, even at the risk of exposing myself to the ridicule of our readership. (More so than usual, I mean.)

Without further ado, then, here they are:

Fiction (in alphabetical order by author)
Richard Bradford, Red Sky at Morning
Margaret Wise Brown, The Sailor Dog
Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union
Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows
Dennis Lehane, The Given Day
Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale
Richard Price, Lush Life
William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

Movies (in alphabetical order by title)
Casablanca
Funny Bones
The Godfather/The Godfather Part II
Groundhog Day
Local Hero
A Night at the Opera
Sense and Sensibility
The Third Man
Wings of Desire
Young Frankenstein

Albums (in alphabetical order by artist)
Dave Alvin, Ashgrove
The Cambridge Singers/La Nuova Musica, directed by John Rutter, The Sacred Flame: European Sacred Music of the Renaissance and Baroque Era
Rosanne Cash, Black Cadillac
Manu Chao, Clandestino: Esperando la Ultima Ola
Derek and the Dominoes, Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs
Howlin’ Wolf, The Definitive Collection
Iron and Wine, The Shepherd’s Dog
Mark Knopfler and Emmylou Harris, All the Roadrunning
The Rolling Stones, Exile on Main Street
Jordi Savall, El Nuevo Mundo: Folías Criollas

Bonus List: Nonfiction (in alphabetical order by author)
Brendan C. Boyd and Fred C. Harris, The Great American Baseball Card Flipping, Trading and Bubble Gum Book
Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War
Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln
Adam Gopnik, Angels and Ages: A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life
S. C. Gwynne, Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History
Tracy Kidder, Home Town
Ben Macintyre, Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory
David Quammen, The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions
Henry David Thoreau, Walden; or, Life in the Woods
David Winner, Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Football

To me, one of the pleasures of this exercise, besides the inherently enjoyable experience of summoning up cherished treasures from one’s past, is seeing what’s on other people’s lists, which can be quite revealing. (I, for example, clearly have a thing for lightweight movie comedies and for books about Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War.) They can also bring some worthy books or movies or music to your attention, or inspire you finally to read or watch or listen to that classic you’ve been meaning to read or watch or listen to for years.

So what about you, Faithful Reader? What works have mattered most to you over the course of your life?

—Martin

What we’re reading
Heather: Gail Caldwell, A Strong West Wind: A Memoir
Martin: Elizabeth S. D. Engelhardt, Republic of Barbecue: Stories Beyond the Brisket

Singing in the dark

2010-12-17T07:19:00.001-06:00

The relentless sunshine of the current weather here in Austin might make those in the Midwest or on the East Coast sigh with envy. A photo on the front page of Tuesday’s New York Times shows an Ohio man ineffectually fending off the great whorls of snow around him with an umbrella. His head is bent, his shoulders hunched, his attention presumably forced inward. Strangely, as I bask in the sunshine, I’m the one who’s a little envious.

Not of the cold, certainly—I start getting chilly when the temperature drops below eighty degrees. But what I see in the picture is someone forced by the world to withdraw his attention from it, to shift his focus inward, even if it’s just to check in and notice that he’s cold. He won’t be able to stay out for long; he must retreat inside.

In one of her typically wonderful blogs, our friend Joy recently wrote an homage to darkness, to the gestational, inward gaze of the season of Advent. The punch line is, of course, that great discipline is required to move inside at this time of year, when a blizzard of parties, shopping, and end-of-year scrambling—or of loneliness and loss—assaults us. Frequently, we just sit out there in the cold, not realizing that we can go inside. Another friend of mine, prone to good works, told me that when she was pregnant and people called asking her to do something, she would look at her waxing belly and say, “Sorry, I’m busy,” and then go back to sitting quietly. Even as we attend to the frenetic tempo of this singular season, something beckons us, at least occasionally, to go inside and sit, maybe in the dark.

And what awaits us inside, in the dark? Well, any child can you tell that: scary stuff! Chupacabras (that’s one in the picture at the top of this page, by the way)! Things with too many legs and too many teeth and not enough eyes! With too much hair or not enough, with horns and scales and long dirty nails! The list of monsters gets less imaginative but no less scary as we get older: past humiliations and failures, anxieties about money, relationships, reputation, health, death. All those things wait for us in the dark. (Of course, sometimes they wait for us in broad daylight as well.)

But that’s not all that waits there. Wendell Berry, my favorite grumpy sage, has advice on how to get by the monsters:

I go among the trees and sit still.
All my stirring becomes quiet
around me like circles on water.
My tasks lie asleep in their places
where I left them, like cattle.

Then what is afraid of me comes
and lives in my sight.
What it fears in me leaves me,
and the fear of me leaves it.
It sings, and I hear its song.

Then what I am afraid of comes.
I live for a while in its sight.
What I fear in it leaves it,
and the fear of it leaves me.
It sings, and I hear its song.

Those things we fear, according to Berry, have their own songs if we sit still and listen for them. In this particular collection of poems, A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979–1997, the forest is his place of Sunday worship, where he brings his deepest questions and listens to the forest’s exhalations, to the words made of branch rustle and river rush and birdsong, iterations of the original Word spoken by God in the beginning. Berry is not alone when what he is afraid of approaches him; he’s in the midst of a community he knows intimately.

This kind of trope can dissolve into rank sentimentality and cruelty when those in the midst of the light and bustle use it to admonish those sitting in the sight of what they fear to buck up. But Berry’s language in this collection is rooted in an ancient warrant for the practice of sitting in the company of chaos and darkness: when, as God began creating, God shared space with the tohuvabohu, the formless void, with the darkness, and with the deep. Through them came the words: Let there be. And what came to be was good. It sang.

The fears don’t have the last word in the poem: Here’s the final verse:

After days of labor,
Mute in my consternations,
I hear my song at last,
and I sing it. As we sing,
the day turns, the tree moves.

Only after he labors and rests from his labors, after he sits quietly and listens to the songs of what fears him and what he himself fears, does Berry hear his own song. Only then is he able to join the singing already in progress, a singing that harmonizes with a wider reality (the turning of the day) and the immediate reality (the moving of the trees).

Whether or not you’re observing Advent, the deepening shadows of the season encourage most of us to move inside and prepare ourselves for this inexorable guest, darkness. Some of us will cook, some of us will shop, some of us will wrestle with monsters and despair, some will not pause from our labors or notice anything at all. If possible, go sit quietly among the bare trees. Or sit hospitably at home with whatever invisible reality is leavening within you and tell everyone you’re busy. Then go find your community and sing.

—Heather

What we’re reading
Heather: C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
Martin: John le Carré, Our Kind of Traitor

Meat and unmediated experience: Deer School at Madroño Ranch

2010-12-10T07:03:00.001-06:00

At lunch the other day, a friend opined that too much of what we all think and see and hear—and, yes, eat—passes through various filters (the media, agribusiness) before it reaches us; even our air is conditioned, he added, though I have to say I’m okay with that, at least in the summer. But his larger point is one that’s been in the back of my mind (and take it from me, there’s lots of room in there) for some time.

Unmediated experiences seem increasingly hard to find. We have lost an awareness of the connection between our actions and their consequences, especially when it comes to food, especially when it comes to meat; it’s easy to avoid the stark truth that some creature was slaughtered, blood was shed, so that we might buy shrink-wrapped chunks of meat in the supermarket. The thoughtful (and splendidly named) English chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall writes in his River Cottage Meat Book that “the human act of killing animals for food, once familiar to most of society, has now become so shameful that those who condone it—by eating meat every day—are entirely protected from thinking about it. Food animals are killed and their meat is cut up and packaged far from human eyes. By the time meat reaches the consumer, the animal origins have been all but obliterated.”

Conveniently, this last weekend presented us with an opportunity to escape the shrink-wrap bubble in the form of “Deer School,” a hunting/butchering/cooking extravaganza at Madroño Ranch. Watching the skinned, eviscerated, and decapitated carcass of a 120-pound buck being carved up on your kitchen counter definitely qualifies as an unmediated experience.

The man doing the carving was Austin’s incomparable Maestro of Meat, Jesse Griffiths of Dai Due, and his audience, in addition to Heather and me, included six hunters—four experienced, two newbies, united in their love of food and dedication to the principles of ethical hunting—who had paid to spend a long weekend at the ranch. Four of them live in or around Austin, but we also had a couple who drove all the way from Michigan (!), sleeping in their Little Guy trailer all the way.

In return for their money, the guests were taken on three guided hunts (the guides were Jesse, his omnicompetent buddy Tink Pinkard, and, after poor Robert, our ranch manager, was felled by a kidney stone on Saturday morning, our son Tito) and then instructed in how to make efficient use of whatever animals they shot. They also ate a series of truly spectacular meals prepared by the indefatigable chef Morgan Dishman-Angelone, who works with Jesse.

Their collective haul included five deer and several hogs, though Robert shot the buck Jesse used for his demonstration the day before the guests arrived. As we all gathered in the kitchen to watch Jesse at work on the carcass, I was reminded of Rembrandt’s famous painting “The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp.” A grisly spectacle, but also fascinating, and Jesse’s obvious care and skill were mesmerizing.

True confession: I am not a hunter, though I am an enthusiastic carnivore and have done a good bit of fishing in my time; the only mammal I have ever knowingly killed was an obviously diseased raccoon who was staggering around in the middle of a hot summer day at the ranch several years ago. But we live in a meat-centric state (the Republic of Barbecue, anyone?), and I have come to realize the distance between my life and the realities of blood and bone that hunters and farmers and ranchers confront on a daily basis.

Here’s Fearnley-Whittingstall again: “As I pull the trigger and... the beast tumbles, I feel the gap between me and the quarry, which a moment ago seemed unreachable, closed in an instant.” I think this is really the point of ethical hunting, responsible carnivorism, and eating meat in general: the realization that we, consumer and consumed alike, are part of the same system, much as we might try to deny it. Thus, in a funny way, a hunter—a responsible one, at least—rather than treating the animal he or she kills as an objectified and separate Other, is more likely to understand the profound interconnectedness that binds us all together.

Jesse and Morgan took virtually every piece of meat off that buck and used it for an extraordinary multicourse dinner that night. “We’re going to punish you,” Jesse warned us facetiously, and he wasn’t kidding: six courses, including venison tartare (pictured above, just prior to final assembly), venison paté with Jesse’s own coarse-grained mustard, braised venison flanks stuffed with chorizo, liver with mashed potatoes and apples, venison cutlets with grilled marinated radicchio, and, for dessert, Morgan’s signature Basque cake—salty-sweet crusted cake around a pastry crème center with candied persimmons and apples. It was an unforgettable meal, and left everyone—even Tito!—sated, at least temporarily: the next morning we had breakfast tacos with barbacoa made from the deer’s shanks and neck meat, which had been simmering in a crockpot overnight. Under the circumstances, “holy cow” hardly seems like the right expression, but you get the picture: we ate incredibly well, and that one buck provided enough meat to feed thirteen people twice, with quite a bit left over; thanks to Jesse, we’re looking forward to enjoying even more of it when we go out again over New Year’s, by which time I should be almost ready to think about eating meat again.

And who knows—maybe the next time we host Deer School at Madroño (and we do hope there will be a next time) I’ll sign up myself. After all, it wasn’t all that long ago that I was about as unconscious a carnivore as there was on the planet, and I’m in as much need of unmediated experience as the next guy. I’m not going to start refusing to eat anything I haven’t actually killed myself; that would be impractical, to say the least. But I do believe that hunting and butchering a deer or other animal for one’s own consumption is probably a useful exercise, and that the world might be better off if every unconscious carnivore were forced to undertake it at least once. A fuller awareness of the cost of satisfying our appetites cannot, I think, be a bad thing.

—Martin

What we’re reading
Heather: Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety (still!)
Martin: Charles M. Robinson III, Bad Hand: A Biography of General Ranald S. Mackenzie

Hosts, guests, and strangers: thoughts on hospitality

2010-12-03T08:15:00.000-06:00

The season of hospitality is upon us, with all its pleasures and burdens. Known in the Christian tradition as Advent, it focuses on the need for preparation, both for the very intimate event of a baby’s birth and for the cosmic birth of a new order. One of my favorite images for the season, if I’m remembering rightly, comes from a series of woodcuts made by a northern Renaissance nun. In it, she imagines herself as a housewife, preparing for the coming company of the Child and the Judge by cleaning the house of her heart: dusting, sweeping, washing, polishing. The images refuse any pretensions to profound theology or high art; they are reassuringly earth-bound and homey. If you pay attention, you can almost smell the baking bread.

“Hospitality” is one of those words whose meaning has changed over the years. In our current culture, it often refers to an industry directed toward travelers or those in need who are expected to pay for its services. If hospitality isn’t a primarily economic exchange, it usually refers to the opening of home and hearth to friends, family, and associates.

In ancient times (or in places that still hew to ancient ways), hospitality wasn’t a service or an option; it was a necessity and a moral imperative. Before the development of institutional hospitality (hospitals, hospices, hostels), vulnerable individuals outside of the normal network of social relations—travelers, refugees, the sick, pilgrims, orphans, widows—were able to rely, at least for a while, on a code of hospitality that brought shame to those who were able and refused to engage it. Christine Pohl, professor of Christian social ethics at Asbury Theological Seminary, writes: “In a number of ancient civilizations, hospitality was viewed as a pillar on which all other morality rested: it encompassed ‘the good.’”

Curiously, the words “host” and “guest” are closely related etymologically, if they don’t actually come from the same source. Even more interestingly, “guest” shares an etymological bed with “enemy,” rooted in the notion of “stranger.” The idea that any of us might move from providing hospitality to needing it—to and from strangers—gives the word a kind of trinitarian energy that caroms from the poles of host to guest to stranger/enemy until the parts are indistinguishable from the whole. I don’t usually feel that charge when I check into a motel, but I think the hospitable artist nun knew that she was a part of that energy, as hostess opening her heart to the Child; as guest and sojourner on the earth; as stranger before the greatest mystery.

One of the reasons I’m thinking about hospitality, aside from the advent of Advent, is that today we’ll welcome seven guests, whom we have never met, to Madroño for the weekend. They’ll be attending “Deer School,” the brainchild of Jesse Griffiths, chef, butcher, and proprietor (with his wife Tamara Mayfield) of the Dai Due supper club and butcher shop. Deer School will include several guided hunts followed by instructions on how to field-dress and use the animal from nose to tail, followed by some really fine eating.

While I’ve been thinking recently about what it means to be a good host (new sheets and shower curtains), I’m also thinking about my role as guest, sojourner, stranger, enemy; after all, they are intimately connected. In last week’s Thanksgiving post, Martin wrote about the hospitable nature of the feast: “On Thanksgiving the acts of preparing, serving, and eating become consciously sacramental; the cook(s) giving, the guest(s) receiving, in a spirit of gratitude that can, sadly, be all too rare at other times of the year....” As one of the cooks this year, I was less attuned to what I was giving than to what had been given to me: the gorgeous vegetables from local farms, the fresh turkey from our over-subscribed friends Jim and Kay Richardson, and the freshly shot and skinned half-hog that unceremoniously appeared on the kitchen counter (and then spent eight hours roasting in a pit) after my brother, his son, our son, and Robert, the redoubtable ranch manager, went hunting early Thursday morning. The astonishing abundance and hospitality of the land was quite literally overwhelming: half a 150-plus-pound sow is a lot of meat.

I’m blundering onto mushy and possibly treacherous literary territory here, I know: Mother Earth nourishing her offspring, big hugs all around. But I’m increasingly grateful for the bounty of the place and hope the same for those who come here seeking community, solitude, rest, refreshment, and, yes, fresh deer meat. We call Madroño Ranch ours by some weird cosmic accident; the more we know it, the more we know that it belongs to itself or to something even broader, wider, more generous. What we hope now is to avoid being the nightmare guest/enemy, the one who comes and overstays his or her welcome within twenty minutes, who demands foods you don’t have, strews clothes all over the house, leaves trash and dirty dishes in the guest room, noisily stays up late, assumes you’ll do all the laundry, and never says please or thank you. Who seems to think he or she owns the place.

We all know places where that’s exactly what has happened; for me, one such place is the stretch of Interstate 35 between San Antonio and Austin, which Martin and I drove last Sunday morning, and which is almost completely lined with outlet malls, chain stores, fast-food franchises, and other such marks of our collective thoughtlessness. Somehow, we’ve managed to promote the idea, especially in the American West and particularly in Texas, that among the rights accruing to property owners is the right to destroy or devalue their property in the name of short-term economic gain. In fact, destroying property may be seen as the ultimate proof of ownership.

I struggled in an earlier post with the idea of land ownership, and I struggle with it still. All land came as a gift at some point. Not literally to its current owner, perhaps, but the land still bears the trace of its giftedness somewhere on that deed. In this season when we prepare for the arrival of guests, giving the gift of hospitality, or head somewhere hoping to be good guests, bringing gifts of thanks, it can be easy to forget that we are also always empty-handed strangers, constantly looking for a wider hospitality than we are ever able to offer or sometimes even to know that we need. We’re only a week past Thanksgiving; this is as good a time as any to thank the land that sustains us. Without it, we can never fill a house with the smells of baking bread and roasting meat—or any of the other things that sustain us.

—Heather

What we’re reading
Heather: Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety (still)
Martin: Ben Macintyre, Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory

Most memorable meals, take three: giving thanks

2010-11-26T09:51:00.000-06:00

“There is a communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine drunk.”

—M. F. K. Fisher

The day after Thanksgiving, when we’re all still riding that tryptophan high, seems like an appropriate time to resume our occasional series of posts on our most memorable meals.

Thanksgiving has always been my favorite holiday, in part because it’s all about the eating with none of the anxiety that gift-giving can inspire. And I love all that traditional Thanksgiving food: the turkey, dressing, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, biscuits, pumpkin pie....

This year, however, Heather announced that we would be forgoing the traditional turkey in favor of one of Madroño’s many wild hogs roasted in a pit—though after that announcement occasioned howls of outrage from daughter Lizzie, Heather crumbled and bought a turkey after all, just for the sake of peace in the family.

Whatever. Thanksgiving is at least as much about the side dishes (dressing, potatoes, biscuits, vegetables) and desserts (pies—oh, my Lord, the pies!) as it is about the turkey. Rest assured that no one in our house went hungry yesterday—that’s an artist’s rendering of us in the picture above, by the way—though I confess that I’m glad to have the turkey, to indulge my annual quest for the Platonic ideal of the turkey sandwich. (We did bury half a pig in coals on Thanksgiving afternoon, however, and dug it up at 10 o’clock last night; looks like we’ll be snacking on turkey and pig sandwiches for a while.)

Even more than it is about the food, though (and you’ll just have to trust me on this), Thanksgiving is actually about the fellowship. It seems to be the one major national holiday when there’s no anxiety about gift-giving, piety, or political correctness to distract or annoy us. We come together around the table with family and friends, and sometimes even with strangers, and we share food and drink and maybe a little football talk, and then we stagger off to the floor or sofa or even bed to lie down and groan for a while, and then we get up and try to sneak back in for maybe just one more little piece of pie.... Okay, okay, maybe it really is all about the food.

But on Thanksgiving that food takes on a deeper symbolic value than it does for most of the rest of the year; on Thanksgiving that quotation above from Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher is truer than ever. On Thanksgiving the acts of preparing, serving, and eating become consciously sacramental; the cook(s) giving, the guest(s) receiving, in a spirit of gratitude that can, sadly, be all too rare at other times of the year, when the exigencies of jobs, schoolwork, the finals of Dancing with the Stars, and other responsibilities make the preparation and consumption of food little more than an afterthought. (TV Dinners, anyone?)

Indeed, the thoughtful and conscious preparation and consumption of food was one of the prime inspirations for what we hope to accomplish at Madroño Ranch: gathering bright, creative people together around the table for nourishment both physical and intellectual. You could almost say that we hope to make every meal at Madroño a sort of Thanksgiving dinner, except that some of us would quickly weigh 300 pounds.

But you’re wondering when I’m finally going to get to that memorable meal, aren’t you? Okay, here it comes. It was a Thanksgiving during college. As I wrote in a previous post, I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area but went to college in western Massachusetts. In those days, largely for financial reasons, I made the long flight to and from home only for Christmas break (which usually meant spending endless hours in Chicago’s O’Hare Airport as winter snows played havoc with flight schedules) and summer vacation.

One of my college classmates was a “townie”; his family lived and worked on a farm several miles from campus, and he invited several of us who weren’t going home for the holiday to Thanksgiving dinner with them.

Honestly, after thirty-two years, I don’t actually remember what we ate that night. It was sturdy, simple farmhouse fare, and I’m pretty sure it included all the usual suspects: turkey, dressing, cranberry sauce, and mashed potatoes, and probably yams, and peas with pearl onions, and no doubt there was pie—pumpkin and perhaps several others—for dessert. I don’t even remember how many of us gathered around that well-laden farmhouse table; I think there must have been about a dozen, what with the family and us temporary orphans.

But I do remember the feeling of being thought of, and taken care of. The warmth of knowing that, while I might be thousands of miles from home, I was still welcome at someone’s table. Every Thanksgiving dinner, when people gather with loved ones, or with strangers, to enjoy the abundance of nature transmogrified by the loving care of heat and spice and assembly, is a homecoming in miniature. At that farmhouse in Williamstown I was, if only temporarily, a part of a family again.

I hope I had the good grace to send a thank-you note to my friend’s mother, but I was a callow and self-centered college student, and I suspect I didn’t. This belated acknowledgment hardly makes up for my youthful lack of manners, but Mrs. Burdick, if you’re out there, I want you to know that your generosity made an indelible impression on me, even if I didn’t properly acknowledge it at the time. I will never be able to give thanks enough for that wonderful meal, or for your kindness in inviting us to share it.

—Martin

What we’re reading
Heather: J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (again!)
Martin: Marissa Guggiana, Primal Cuts: Cooking with America’s Best Butchers

Faith, bureaucracy, and sheep: thoughts on changing one's mind

2010-11-19T06:26:00.000-06:00

In my last post, I decided to postpone my public ululations over the recent elections. As I’ve spent the last week or so in an apparently endless struggle to get the Madroño Ranch bison label approved by the Texas Department of State Health Services, my ululative impulse has caught in my throat. Maybe Republicans and Tea Partiers are right.

I mean, what difference can it possibly make whether the net weight of the package appears on the bottom third of the label (as required), the middle third, or (gasp) even the upper third? And don’t get me started on the “approved” list of cuts, a list whose existence we discovered only after we’d submitted the label, and which has driven our obsessively copy-editing family mad with its redundancies and omissions. Our “Boneless hump roast” was not on the list and so was nixed, but we’re fine if we say “Bison Roast (Hump).” Generously, the state allows both “Bison for Stew” and “Bison Stew Meat.”

It’s enough to make me think Very Ungenerous Thoughts about the government’s regulatory role in business or about authority in general.

Some of these thoughts are just moans, like the ones our dog Phoebe the Fabulous used to make when she was forced to stop on our walks while I looked at birds. Oh, the personal inconvenience! But the issue of authority has, in fact, been in my thoughts recently, to wit: when does authority cease to be authoritative? What makes us change our minds? What would make me stop being a “liberal” (if that’s what I am) and become a Republican, or even join the Tea Party? I’m not talking here about repressive political authority, but rather those internalized authorities to which we bow without really being aware that we’ve made a choice.

In thinking about my own track record when it comes to mind-changing, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s not primarily a rational process, as we often presume. Rather, it’s a supra-rational affair, requiring the willingness and discipline (and perhaps the talent) necessary to learn a new language.

Here’s what I mean: I used to think that all Christians were most likely not just fools—an identity St. Paul claimed—but idiots. Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority began to fill the airwaves when I was about fifteen or sixteen. Not having had much contact with self-professed Christians at that point, my exposure to this most vocal sector of Christians forced me to conclude that I could never be one of them. From what I could infer, they were anti-intellectual, judgmental, and close-minded. Their rhetoric made me think that Christianity represented everything I had been taught to turn away from. (Especially the “judgmental” part.)

Imagine my chagrin when, after a series of unexpected and absurd events, I came to be enrolled as a student at the Episcopal Theological Seminary of the Southwest (now known simply as the Seminary of the Southwest). My habitual place of study was a nearby coffee shop. As I studied, I made sure that any books that had the words “God,” “Church,” or “Jesus” (especially “Jesus”—such an embarrassment) on the cover or spine were face-down and turned to the wall. I didn’t want to be mistaken for one of “them,” one of those stupid sheep who followed an anti-intellectual, judgmental, and close-minded shepherd. Authority. Whatever.

I learned during my years at the seminary—and during my years as a practicing Christian since then—that I had been mistaken in my first ideas about Christianity. I had to change my mind, and, consequently, my self-identity—an anxiety-provoking and disorienting business. This doesn’t mean that I like all Christians. Or even most of them. When I started at seminary, knowing nothing, I had expected to find a bunch of Bad Thinking I could counter and correct.

What I discovered instead was that my initial premise was wrong. I found out that practicing a religion is not the same thing as signing a lease, requiring you to follow a bunch of rules or else be kicked out. Rather, I found that practicing a religion is more like wrestling with a new language. There is a grammar to learn, there are rules to follow. But unless you immerse yourself in it, unless you try to speak it yourself with native speakers—even if you have a lousy accent—you will be just another Ugly American, unaware of your own foolishness.

Having become reasonably fluent in Christianity, I’m trying to learn at least something about the other languages around me. As I learn more about Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, I don’t become less fluent in my own language; rather, I understand it more profoundly. I understand its distinctiveness and thus its limitations. I understand something of its fraught interactions with other religions and have learned the uneasy need for shame and humility. I try not to speak slowly and loudly in my own language when speaking to non-native speakers and hope they will do the same for me. In my limited experience, I’ve found hospitality, not hostility, whenever we try, in our different tongues, to speak with each other.

And so I wait to hear yet again from the inspector at the meat processing plant about the newest version of our label. I know that he’s pleased about the results of the recent election, as are most of my Hill Country neighbors. I’m pushing this metaphor past its limits, but in order to be a good neighbor myself, I may have to have to learn a little bit of a new language. To understand myself better, I may have to be willing to change my mind.

—Heather

What we’re reading
Heather: Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety
Martin: S. C. Gwynne, Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History (still)

A holy fool in “the land of the Philistines”

2010-11-12T07:03:00.000-06:00

Greeks and Trojans, Christians and Muslims, Jews and Arabs, Serbs and Croats, Tutsis and Hutus—the collision of cultures is rarely, if ever, a pleasant sight. The protracted and bloody war between the Plains Indians, especially the Comanches, and the white settlers of Texas is among the most horrifying of all, marked by unimaginable violence and cynical deception on both sides. But even in the cruelest conflicts there can be people who exemplify honor and integrity. Such an exemplar was the quixotic Robert Simpson Neighbors, one of the most intriguing, foolhardy, and tragically heroic figures in nineteenth-century Texas.

Thanks to S. C. Gwynne’s excellent new book, Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History, Neighbors (pictured above) has been on my mind again. (Several years ago I actually thought I might try to write a biography of him, but eventually the impulse passed.) I guess I’ve always had a soft spot for those who try, against all odds, to do the right thing, and Neighbors certainly qualifies.

Born in Virginia in 1815, he was orphaned at the age of four and raised by a guardian. He arrived in Texas in 1836, after a couple of years in Louisiana, and from 1839 to 1841 served as assistant quartermaster and acting quartermaster of the army of the Republic of Texas. He served under John Hays during the Mexican War and was taken prisoner in San Antonio by Gen. Adrián Woll in 1842. After his release in 1844, he became the republic’s agent to the Lipan Apaches and Tonkawas; in 1847, after Texas became part of the United States, Neighbors received a federal appointment as Texas commissioner of Indian affairs.

This was not an easy position. As Mike Campbell, the dean of Texas historians, notes in his magisterial Gone to Texas: A History of the Lone Star State, the federal government was virtually powerless to stop white settlers from occupying land ostensibly belonging to the Indians, because Texas, uniquely among the United States, retained ownership of its public lands when it joined the union; thus, federal law did not apply on the lands where the Indians lived, and the state seemed unable or unwilling to keep land-hungry white settlers from trespassing. As the Penateka Comanche chief Buffalo Hump told Neighbors, with some asperity, “For a long time a great many [white] people have been passing through my country; they kill all the game and burn the country, and trouble me very much.” Neighbors noted in March 1848 that this persistent trespassing “must necessarily and inevitably lead to serious difficulty.”

Moreover, Neighbors’ distaste for violence was out of step with public sentiment. He tried to negotiate the return of Cynthia Ann Parker, the most celebrated Indian captive of them all (and the mother of Quanah Parker), but the Comanches rebuffed his efforts; Neighbors reported to his superiors in Washington that “I am assured by the friendly Comanche chiefs that I would have to use force to induce the party that has her to give her up.” (Cynthia Ann was unwillingly returned to white civilization in 1860, when Texas Rangers under Sul Ross accidentally captured her during a raid on a Comanche encampment on a tributary of the Pease River in north Texas.)

Neighbors, a Democrat, lost his federal job after the Whig Zachary Taylor was elected president in 1848, but was reappointed when Franklin Pierce reclaimed the White House for the Democrats four years later. (In the meantime, Neighbors found time to lead an expedition that established a trail between San Antonio and El Paso, part of which was later used by the Butterfield Overland Mail; organize El Paso County; marry Elizabeth Ann Mays in Seguin; and serve in the state legislature.)

Neighbors was thus part of the vast machinery that slowly but inexorably (and often violently and duplicitously) squeezed the Indians off their ancestral lands, clearing the way for white occupation of the American west. But Neighbors was different from most of his fellow Indian agents: he treated the Indians with respect, and stubbornly defended them against the accusations, frequently fabricated, of land-hungry settlers who coveted the land set aside for reservations.

Needless to say, this was not a popular stand in Texas, and Neighbors made many enemies among his fellow whites. In the mid-1850s, he decided that the only way to end the escalating tensions and violence was to establish reservations beyond the existing line of settlement. He finally succeeded in getting Secretary of War Jefferson Davis to authorize the establishment of two reservations on the upper Brazos. Neighbors hoped to convince the previously nomadic Indians to settle down and become farmers—a shockingly misguided, if not downright stupid, notion, and one that was clearly doomed to failure. As it was, less than five hundred of the Penateka Comanches (only about a third of the band’s entire population) moved onto the Clear Fork Reservation, at Camp Cooper in Throckmorton County. About a thousand other Indians, mostly Caddos and Wichitas, moved onto the Brazos Reservation, south of Fort Belknap in Young County.

And then, of course, the line of white settlement, moving inexorably westward, reached the upper Brazos, with predictable results. Whites who coveted the land began blaming the reservation Indians for the depredations committed by those who had refused to move onto the reservations. The loathsome John R. Baylor, who had been fired as an agent on the Clear Fork Reservation after feuding with Neighbors, became the editor of a virulently anti-Indian newspaper called The White Man and pledged himself to exterminating the Indians; toward that end, he called for, and even organized, violence against the reservation Indians. While acknowledging that the residents of the Brazos and Clear Fork reservations were more sinned against than sinning, the government finally concluded that enough was enough, and decided to end the experiment.

In the summer of 1859, therefore, Neighbors supervised the removal of all 1,500 residents of the Brazos and Clear Fork reservations to a new reservation on the Washita River in Indian Territory. (Among the contractors involved in this trek was the San Antonio freighter James Duff, soon to become a notorious figure in the Hill Country, as I wrote in an earlier post.) In August, after leading his charges across the Red River, Neighbors wrote to his wife that he had left “the land of the Philistines.” Upon his return to Fort Belknap a little over a month later he was murdered, shot in the back by Edward Cornett, a man he didn’t even know but who apparently despised his conciliatory attitude toward the Indians. In The Texas Rangers, Walter Prescott Webb reported the story that a group of Texas Rangers, outraged by Neighbors’ assassination, “went after Ed Cornett, and brought him to justice without the aid of judge or jury.”

I suspect that Neighbors himself, a man of honor and principle who believed wholeheartedly in the sanctity of the law, would not have approved. He seems to have been one of those ostentatiously virtuous men who manage to alienate and offend their fellows while living unimpeachable lives; perhaps the rest of us simply can’t stand being reminded how far short of the mark we fall. In fact, Neighbors may have had more than a whiff of self-righteousness about him. In Empire of the Summer Moon, Gwynne says that Neighbors’ behavior as Indian agent was characterized by “earnest and well-meaning naïveté,” as opposed to the “pure hypocrisy” of many of his peers, which sounds like fairly faint praise. By attempting to stand in the way of Manifest Destiny, trying to turn the Penateka Comanches into farmers, and expecting the government to live up to the terms of its own treaties, Neighbors may have revealed himself as a fool. But we will never stop needing such fools, men and women who are unafraid to speak truth to power even at the risk of their lives, and God help us if they ever disappear entirely.

Jeez. I promise I’ll try to find something a little cheerier to write about next time.

—Martin

What we’re reading
Heather: Wayne C. Booth, Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent
Martin: S. C. Gwynne, Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History

“Sit. Stay. Stay! I said STAY, dammit!”

2010-11-05T06:32:00.000-05:00

Despite the temptation to give myself over to ululations for the natural world in light of the recent midterm elections, I will be brave and strong. In fact, I’ll look to our dogs for clues about how to move ahead in confounding times with good cheer, if not always with a lot of grace, and perhaps with only an occasional low moan or two.

In an earlier post, I considered the change my walking pace has undergone over the years. What has remained constant is the presence of dogs on these rambles. When I’m in Colorado, I usually borrow dogs from my sister or my father. (Walking with my mother’s dogs was often a little demoralizing; she worried aloud that bears and mountain lions might attack them, but she never expressed any anxiety for me.) At Madroño, I’ve walked with a long line of brave and stupid dogs who’ve both saved me from and almost led me to some gruesome fates.

The first was sweet Daisy, a lovely golden retriever/English setter mix and the mildest of dogs—until she was on the ranch, where she became Trained Assassin Daisy, Scourge of Armadillos! I had never known that armadillos had much to say until I watched Daisy in hot pursuit of one at the north end of the property; speedier than it looked, it made a loud whirring noise, as if it were wearing a propeller beanie. Daisy missed that one, but she got lots of others. We decided that she loved them because they were “crunchy on the outside, chewy on the inside.”

One Thanksgiving Day at the ranch, we were all—parents, siblings, children, dogs, friends—walking up the steep hill above the lake when Daisy proudly came galloping up to us with what she must have thought was an unusually hairy armadillo in her mouth. She was delighted until she dropped it at our feet and found that much of it remained in her mouth. (It was, of course, a porcupine.)

Sweet as she was, she allowed us to pull out many of the hundreds of spines in her snout, under her tongue, in her gums, etc., but the job proved to be too much for us. Even though it was a holiday, we tracked down a laconic vet in Hunt who said he wasn’t doing anything but watching football, so sure, bring her on in. When they had gotten Daisy anesthetized and yanked out the remaining spines, Martin said to the vet, “Well, I bet most dogs only make this mistake once, right?” The vet cocked an eyebrow and said, “You’d be surprised.” Thank heavens we haven’t been surprised since then.

A few years later, we found a black puppy with a broken back leg at the gate who turned out to be Phoebe, our now-blind life-guide, about whom Martin wrote admiringly a few weeks ago. Phoebe has been a wonderful walking companion, although one of her chief virtues—steadiness—may very well stem from the fact that her eyesight was never very good; maybe she just didn’t see all those armadillos and porcupines and deer. She did notice snakes, however, and helpfully made little sideways hops to notify me that I should step elsewhere.

But even the admirable Phoebe occasionally caused me dismay. Aside from her tragic and annoying moans whenever I stopped to listen for and look at birds, Phoebe proved to be susceptible to wayward influences like, for example, our next dog, Honey. One day, a couple of months after Daisy died, I was at our neighborhood pharmacy in Austin. A couple of local kids who worked there had brought in a dog they’d found on the downtown hike and bike trail, skittish and covered with fleas. Their mothers had told them to find it another home. I looked and saw a fluff-bomb with an absurdly curling tail who might have had chow and/or golden retriever and/or some mountain dog in her, and maybe a little Ewok too. The kids noticed that I couldn’t take my eyes off her and asked, “Do you want her?” “Yes,” I said, helplessly smitten. Martin said something else, which I can’t repeat here, when I returned home with toothpaste, shampoo, and a new dog, but Honey was irresistible.

She was also, alas, flightier than Phoebe. Once, after the kids and our friend Charles and I had scrambled up a beautiful and nearly inaccessible draw at the ranch, we came upon a herd of aoudads, who were as surprised to see us as we were to see them. Honey got a young aoudad in her sights and went after it, determined to tear its throat out, despite the shrieks and rocks we hurled at her. She backed the youngster into a fence while its mother threatened to eviscerate her with her great curling horns. Charles gallantly gave up his belt to get our darling murderous fluff-bomb under control, as Phoebe valiantly barked encouragement from a safe distance.

Another time, one of my favorite emergency-backup children and I went walking with Phoebe and Honey. We were in the canyon where we had once found a pair of rusted iron bedsteads and a rusted cast-iron Dutch oven, just poking around to see what other inexplicable but suggestive oddities we might find, when we heard a series of distinctively coyotic yips in the dense woods around us. In an instant, the dogs were gone, gone, gone. Despite our most beguiling efforts, Phoebe and Honey yodeled their way up to the top of the draw, and then Dave and I heard something else: snorts. Hogs. The woods were so thick we couldn’t see them, but we could hear them. Lots of them. Close by. Oh, great, I thought. How am I going to explain to my best friend that her sweet gangly son was carved up by feral hogs because my idiot dogs went gallivanting off to be eaten by a pack of coyotes? We all made it back to the house safely, but Phoebe’s irresponsible behavior still galls me.

And then another time, the dogs and I were out by ourselves when they, officers of ranch security, uncovered a plot by a couple dozen sows and piglets to disrupt our walk. Much barkage. Much squealing. Much inelegant scrambling by Someone to get into a tree and above tusk-level. Much hilarity in the kitchen after our return to think about Someone sitting in a scruffy little scrub oak for half an hour wondering if the dogs were still alive and if the pigs were really gone. Phoebe got a really scalding series of lectures for that lapse.

Generally speaking, though, Honey and Phoebe were fine walking companions. When Honey died of cancer a few years ago, we realized that she had been acting as Phoebe’s seeing-eye dog, because Phoebe’s deteriorating eyesight meant she was quite literally lost without her. Phoebe’s ranch rambles have ended, but Chula the Goggle-Eyed Ricochet Hound has become my new companion and is presenting all sorts of interesting challenges.

While she doesn’t seem to have Daisy’s and Honey’s ferocious streak (except, sadly, when it comes to chickens), she has a hair-trigger chase reflex and is speedy enough to catch a deer, as we learned to our amazement a few years ago (fortunately, once she finally cornered it in the angle of a fence, she seemed content just to lie there panting and stare at it), or anything else that roams the ranch. (She’s learned to ignore the bison, a fine survival strategy; despite their awkward-appearing bulkiness, bison are plenty quick themselves, and they definitely don’t like dogs.) I’ve started using a shock collar on her, to discourage her from rocketing off after hogs; I heard not too long ago about a woman whose dogs took off after a bunch of hogs, who then turned on the dogs, who then ran back to their mom, who ended up with sixty stitches in her leg from the pursuing porkers. Fortunately, Chula is a total wienie when it comes to pain, and the early results with the shock collar have been promising.

The adventures, clearly, will continue.

—Heather

What we’re reading
Heather: Wendell Berry, Hannah Coulter
Martin: Dennis Lehane, Shutter Island

"The Blackest Crime in Texas Warfare"

2010-10-29T07:03:00.000-05:00

Our usual route from Austin to Madroño Ranch takes us through Johnson City to Fredericksburg via Highway 290, and then down Highway 16 through Kerrville to the turnoff opposite the Medina Children’s Home. Every time I pass the sign for Turtle Creek, an unremarkable little stream just past the turnoff for FM 1273, about five miles south of Kerrville, I am reminded of one of the bloodiest and most controversial episodes in the extraordinarily bloody and controversial history of the state: the battle of the Nueces, labeled “The Blackest Crime in Texas Warfare” by the Dallas Morning News almost seventy years later.

Central Texas is dotted with German settlements dating from the mid-nineteenth century: Fredericksburg, Boerne, New Braunfels, Comfort, Sisterdale, and many more. The German settlers—more than 7,000 of them came between 1844 and 1847 alone—were a diverse group, according to the late Terry Jordan, arguably the leading scholar of European immigration to Texas: “They included peasant farmers and intellectuals; Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and atheists; Prussians, Saxons, Hessians, and Alsatians; abolitionists and slaveowners; farmers and townsfolk; frugal, honest folk and ax murderers.”

Perhaps. But while some German Texans, including prominent journalists such as Ferdinand Lindheimer, defended slavery, and others, like August Buchel, served in the Confederate army, the popular image was, and is, of a relatively liberal, well-educated, and homogeneous group who opposed slavery and secession and remained stubbornly pro-Union. In 1854, at the annual Staats-Sängerfest (state singing festival) in San Antonio, the delegates adopted a resolution condemning the “peculiar institution,” and in 1857, as I noted in an earlier post, Frederick Law Olmsted applauded the abolitionist sentiments he found among the denizens of the Hill Country. It should come as no surprise, then, that many who supported secession and the Confederacy were suspicious of the insular, “radical” immigrants of central Texas.

To make matters worse, some of the more outspoken German Texans organized the Union Loyal League in June 1861, and by March 1862 they were openly celebrating Union victories and had organized a battalion of three well-armed militia companies, with Fritz Tegener, a Prussian emigré who owned a sawmill near Hunt and served as Kerr County treasurer, as major and commander. The militia was supposedly meant to protect the Hill Country from Indians and outlaws in the absence of Federal troops, but its presence, understandably, made the Confederate authorities nervous. Confederate general Hamilton P. Bee, commander of the Western Sub-district of Texas, sent Capt. James Duff, a former San Antonio freighter and founder of an irregular force called Duff’s Partisan Rangers, to take control of the area.

Duff, who declared martial law in July 1862, was later nicknamed “the Butcher of Fredericksburg” for his harsh actions as provost marshal; one historian, writing a century after the fact, noted that “his arrests and depredations on the citizens of these counties seem unjustifiable,” though others say that accounts of his cruelty were a “myth.”

At any rate, an atmosphere of fear, distrust, and confusion had settled over the Hill Country by August 1, when a group of about eighty men, most of them German Texans, met on Turtle Creek, just a few miles north of Madroño Ranch. Sixty-one of them, with Tegener in charge, decided that their best bet was to flee Texas until the hostilities died down—in retrospect, a tragic miscalculation. They determined to try to reach Mexico by riding west to the mouth of the Devils River on the Rio Grande (the site of present-day Amistad Reservoir) and then crossing into Mexico, but Duff learned of their plans and sent Lt. Colin D. McRae, with ninety-four mounted troopers, in pursuit.

The unsuspecting Germans made little effort to cover their tracks, and McRae and his men easily traced them across the Medina and Frio rivers before catching up to them on the afternoon of August 9 on the West Fork of the Nueces River in northeastern Kinney County. A few of Tegener’s men had reported seeing unidentified riders behind them, but the commander dismissed their reports and told the group to make camp in a grassy clearing on the west bank of the river.

The precise details of what happened next are lost to time, but the following seems to be the most commonly accepted version. McRae and his men attacked before dawn of the following day. Around twenty-five of the Unionists abandoned the fight almost immediately and managed to slip through the Confederate lines in the darkness and confusion. McRae’s troops killed nineteen of the remaining Unionists and captured nine others who had been wounded; Tegener himself was wounded, but managed to escape. Shockingly, the Confederates executed the nine wounded prisoners a few hours after the skirmish, shooting them in the head as they lay face-down and defenseless on the ground. As a final indignity, McRae’s men left the bodies of their victims unburied, “prey to the buzzards and coyotes.” The Confederate casualties included two killed and eighteen wounded, McRae among them.

And what of the surviving Unionists, you ask? Eight were killed on October 18, when another Confederate force attacked them as they attempted to cross into Mexico; nine others died in other battles. One man, August Hoffmann, reportedly made his way back to Gillespie County, where he remained in hiding, living on “pear fruit and bear grass,” until the spring of 1863. Tegener himself survived, though legend has it that during his long absence from Texas his wife, assuming he had been killed in the attack, married another man. Haha—awkward! Apparently it all worked out, though, as Tegener himself eventually remarried and went on to become a state legislator and justice of the peace in Travis County.

The encounter on the Nueces almost immediately became what historian Stanley S. McGowen called “one of the state’s most controversial and contentious historiographical events.” The Handbook of Texas notes that “Confederates regard[ed] it as a military action against insurrectionists while many German Hill Country residents viewed the event as a massacre.” Regardless of which side you’re on, it was a terrible thing. In 1865, the families of the men killed on the Nueces gathered their bones and finally interred them at Comfort, where a monument was dedicated on the battle’s fourth anniversary, in 1866. The Treue der Union (Loyal to the Union) monument, pictured above, still stands in Comfort, and historians still debate how best to describe what happened to that group of fearful men who met on humble Turtle Creek on an August day almost 150 years ago.

—Martin

What we’re reading
Heather: Philipp Meyer, American Rust
Martin: C. J. Chivers, The Gun

Barbers, bison meat, and the invisible hand

2010-10-22T04:18:00.000-05:00

I was back in my shiny new persona as salesperson last week, driving out to all the dude ranches around Bandera in hopes of scaring up a market for the hundreds and hundreds of pounds of bison meat we will soon have for sale. Reaction was generally favorable, despite the fact that I didn’t have some basic information at hand, like the prices we’ll be charging.

Aside from feeling like a dummy, a phony, and a bat-brained loony, I had fun. First, there’s very little that I enjoy more than looking at other people’s property. Second, I got to drive down some Hill Country roads I hadn’t been on before and go through the Hill Country State Natural Area, a secluded 5,000-plus-acre park dappled with beautiful blooming grasses and gayflowers, stands of hardwoods, and shining creeks. The third fun thing was getting out and meeting people—not a pleasure my usually introverted self would have anticipated. Our pattern when we go to Madroño has been to get there and dig in, not coming out unless we need something really important, like the newspaper or beer or ice cream or antihistamines. Now, for the first time, we’re starting to meet our neighbors. We’re starting—just barely—to find our way into the community.

I’ve also been rereading Wendell Berry’s Jayber Crow: The Life Story of Jayber Crow, Barber, of the Port William Membership, as Written by Himself, in which community is a central concern. (The book has easily reaffirmed its place on my top-ten favorite novels list.) So this week “community” seems to be the theme that wants to beat me over the head until I wake up and pay attention.

As you might guess from the subtitle, Jayber Crow concerns a small-town Kentucky barber whose life spans most of the twentieth century. Orphaned at an early age, Jayber is raised by a loving great-aunt and -uncle, who die when he is ten. He is sent to an orphanage and finally, a dozen years later, makes his way back to Port William to become its barber, grave-digger, and church janitor. A philosophical-minded bachelor, Jayber watches the community (that’s a map of the whole fictitious area above) over the course of several wars and the encroachment of highways and agricultural technology. Although he witnesses and endures great suffering, at the end he can say truthfully that his book is about Heaven because of the profound love the community bears for itself and for its place, both temporal and spatial.

In part, this love manifests itself in Port William’s economic life. When Jayber returns to Port William, he finds that the town’s previous barber has left, not being able to support his family on his shop’s limited income. Jayber is immediately taken by an old friend to see the town banker, who in introducing himself says, “I’m glad to know you. I knew your mother’s people.” He offers to loan Jayber the money to buy the old barbershop; Jayber describes the terms of the loan as “fair enough, but very strict in what he would expect of me.”

Jayber adds, “You will appreciate the tenderness of my situation if I remind you that I had managed to live for years without being known to anybody. And that day two men who knew who and where I had come from had looked at me face-on, as I had not been looked at since I was a child.... I felt revealed, as if to buy the shop I had to take off all my clothes.” Going into business requires him to become a part of the community, to care about its constituent parts in order to make his own way in the world.

I had imagined that this community might make Adam Smith, the patron saint of free-market economics, sneer: it lives within the limits of the land’s fertility, repairs what is broken, patches what is torn, and remains deeply suspicious of debt. Its citizens are generous to those in need, recognizing that they cannot prosper individually without prospering corporately. The antihero of the novel, Troy Chattam, is an ambitious young farmer who contemptuously rejects the old-fashioned ways of his father-in-law; Troy’s mantra is “modernize, mechanize, specialize, grow.” He goes into debt to buy new machinery and listens to agribusiness experts who tell him to use every bit of soil on the place: “never let a quarter’s worth of equity stand idle.” He seems to be a firm believer in the “invisible hand,” famously posited by Smith in his magnum opus The Wealth of Nations, which supposedly guides markets to produce the highest quality goods for the lowest price to the benefit of both producers and buyers; this is what we used to call the American way. Like that of the city for which he was named, however, Troy’s is not a story with a happy ending.

But wait—why in heaven’s name is Adam Smith suddenly part of this conversation? Because I, despite my shocking ignorance of economics, just read Adam Gopnik’s fascinating article on Smith in the October 18 issue of The New Yorker. In it Gopnik argues that Smith’s real question “was not the economist’s question, How do we get richer or poorer?, or even the philospher’s question, How should one live? It was the modern question, Darwin’s question: How do you find and make order in a world without God?”

Gopnik is ostensibly reviewing Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life, by Nicholas Phillipson, but he is really using Phillipson’s book as a jumping-off point for his own meditations on economics and community. Readers of The Wealth of Nations tend to ignore Smith’s earlier The Theory of Moral Sentiments, but by doing so, according to Gopnik, we “lobotomize our own understanding of modern life, making economics into a stand-alone, statistical quasi-science rather than, as Smith intended, a branch of the humanities.” In order for humanity to live in community, Smith posits the necessity of “an impartial observer who lives within us, and whom we invent to judge our actions.” Without this imaginative capacity, a market economy can’t exist; unless we can put ourselves in the place of our fellows, we can’t imagine what they might need. “For Smith, the plain-seeing Scot,” writes Gopnik, “the market may not have been the most elegant instance of human sympathy, but it’s the most insistent: everybody has skin in this game. It can proceed peaceably only because of those moral sentiments, those imaginary internal judges.”

Unfortunately, those imaginary internal judges recede into the background when producers band together in order to eliminate competition and control prices; according to Phillipson (via Gopnik), Smith believed that “the market moves toward monopoly; it is the job of the philosopher to define, and of the sovereign state to restore, free play.” The market works toward the benefit of all only when it is broadly just—defined (by me) as being in the long-term interests of both producer and consumer. When the scenario Berry imagines in Jayber Crow comes to pass—when economic and business practices fray the fabric of community rather than protect it—then we live in epically tragic times, like those of Troy. When we find communities in economic disarray, then, according to the father of free-market economics, imaginations incapable of sympathy are at the root of the problem.

Of course, this is a pretty self-serving position, since we at Madroño are about to go head-to-head with such giants as H-E-B, who can charge much less for bison meat than we can. But I honestly believe that the long-term health of H-E-B depends on a diverse economic ecosystem in which the building of community—which requires a mutually sympathetic imagination—will rest on the flexible backs of small, dynamic businesses. Which maybe, with the help of our local community, we will become.

—Heather

What we’re reading
Heather: Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow: The Life Story of Jayber Crow, Barber, of the Port William Membership, as Written by Himself
Martin: Bill Minutaglio, In Search of the Blues: A Journey to the Soul of Black Texas

How not to write a book

2010-10-15T07:02:00.000-05:00

Some of you may not know that I am officially a Published Author and therefore—let’s face it—kind of a big deal, but it’s true. And I have to confess that I’ve never really gotten over the thrill of seeing my name on a book cover, which is highly, even dangerously, addictive.

I was reminded of my own importance recently when I was asked to moderate a session at this weekend’s Texas Book Festival. The session is called “A Level Playing Field: Texas Baseball in Black and White,” and features two books about race and Our National Pastime: Our White Boy, by Jerry Craft, and Playing in Shadows: Texas and Negro League Baseball, by Rob Fink. Apparently my friend Dick Holland, the former head of the Southwestern Writers Collection at Texas State University, suggested me as a moderator because he recalled that, many years ago, I had written a book about baseball.

What Dick, and the organizers of the book festival, probably didn’t know is that I was quite possibly the most naïve first-time author in the history of the publishing industry. If there was a mistake to be made in the course of writing and selling a manuscript, I probably made it; heck, I probably made some mistakes that hadn’t even existed before. Even today, the full extent of my ignorance fills me with awe.

Now, I’ve been a baseball fan since childhood, but this particular misadventure started about twenty years ago. After that tirelessly self-promoting cretin Pete Rose was busted for gambling, I became obsessed with an early twentieth century major league star named Hal Chase, for reasons that remain obscure; perhaps I read something comparing Rose and Chase, though I honestly can’t recall. Chase was phenomenally talented, handsome, charismatic, and also, apparently, an incorrigible cheat; in fact, he was accused (though never convicted) of helping to arrange the infamous Black Sox scandal. I decided to write an article about him for The National Pastime: A Review of Baseball History, the annual journal of the Society for American Baseball Research. In the course of researching and writing the article, I began to think that somebody should write a book about Chase, and I couldn’t think of a single reason why that somebody shouldn’t be me.

In reality, of course, there were plenty of reasons why that somebody shouldn’t be me, including the fact that I knew absolutely nothing about the publishing industry. Did I need an agent, or should I try to sell the manuscript myself? Should I write it on spec, or should I hold off until I found a publisher willing to pony up an advance? In retrospect, the story of how I became a genuine published author is filled with missteps, ineptitude, and, ultimately, blind luck. I offer it up here as a cautionary tale to other would-be authors.

I’m ashamed to admit that it took me almost a decade to produce an actual finished book. In my defense, I was working on it mostly on weekends, since I had a full-time job, a wife, and two young children. In truth, though, the research and writing was the fun part; the hard part was trying to figure out what to do if I ever actually finished the thing. Early on, a dear college friend suggested I seek advice from her sister, a big-time literary agent in New York (she represented A. S. Byatt, among others). I had no illusions that she would want to represent me herself—I was a nobody, and besides, she specialized in fiction—but she said she’d be glad to offer some suggestions if I sent her a sample of my writing. I sent her a draft chapter or two, and she wrote me back to say she really liked them and would like to take me on as her client.

Well, heck, I thought, this writin’ business is easy! I had found myself a real agent right out of the box. Piece of cake.

Meanwhile, I was grinding away on my research. On weekends, I’d head to the Library of Congress, where I spent countless hours cranking through film of daily newspapers. I traveled, at my own expense, to Cooperstown and San Jose and Tucson to conduct research and interviews. In 1994 I even wangled an introduction to Ken Burns, hoping to convince him that Chase should feature prominently in his forthcoming documentary Baseball; he listened patiently, and later very graciously put me in touch with Chase’s granddaughter, who was estranged from the rest of the family.

Probably the best thing I did in the course of my research was put one of those “author seeking information” notices in the New York Times Sunday Book Review. Soon thereafter I received a letter from the director of the University of Illinois Press, who said that he had seen my notice and thought my book sounded like one in which they’d be interested; I thanked him and smugly referred him to my big-shot New York agent.

Some time later I got another note from him saying that he had never gotten a response from my agent. Then I realized that she wasn’t responding to my letters and phone calls either.

After a year or so it became clear even to me that she wasn’t actually doing anything on my behalf; I suspect now that she had agreed to take me on as sort of a favor, given the connection with her sister, but (perhaps understandably) I had ended up at the bottom of her list. I finally sent her a polite letter saying that I had decided to end our relationship. (She never answered it.)

So I was back at square one. Illinois was no longer interested, and neither, after an initial flirtation, was Oxford University Press, but I finally found my own way to McFarland and Company, an outfit in North Carolina that published a number of baseball history books. I imagined battling with their editorial staff over word choice and the overall structure of the manuscript, like Tom Wolfe and Maxwell Perkins; instead, they ran exactly what I sent them. They told me that they would publish my book in paperback only, which was mildly disappointing, but I was in no position to argue.

Hal Chase: The Defiant Life and Turbulent Times of Baseball’s Biggest Crook finally appeared in 2001, and as of this writing ranks 1,655,584th in sales on Amazon.com. (Woo hoo!) The nice people at McFarland send me annual royalty checks (typically for about thirty-seven dollars), which allow me to call myself a professional writer. With any luck, I’ll never actually sit down and calculate the amount of money I’ve earned from my book versus the amount of money I spent producing it.

The really scary thing, though, is that I’m sometimes tempted to try it all again. Just this week, while we were having lunch, my son asked me when I was going to write another book, and it got me thinking again about that idea I had several years ago, for a biography of the old R&B singer Chuck Willis....

See? This writing business is just like crack.

—Martin

What we’re reading
Heather: Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow (again!)
Martin: Ingrid D. Rowland, Giordano Bruno: Philosopher/Heretic (still!)

Of mothers and mountains

2010-10-08T07:20:00.000-05:00

I’ve just introduced myself to the pleasures of Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, and Sketches Here and There. Called the father of wildlife conservation in the United States, Leopold heard in the revving of the great American economic and technological engines the death knell of what he called “the biotic community,” in which humanity is merely a fellow-passenger, not the driver. A Sand County Almanac was published posthumously in 1949; more than sixty years later, Leopold’s ability to see where those engines would take us seems eerily prophetic.

Aside from what he says, I love his tone—warm and humble, courteous and scholarly. But what he says is compelling and important. In one essay, “Thinking Like a Mountain,” he recounts an experience he had as a young man working for the Forest Service in Arizona, at a time when land managers “had never heard of passing up a chance to kill a wolf.” One day, from a “high rimrock,” he and his colleagues spotted a pack of wolves, including some pups, and opened fire. Leopold, having shot a female, climbed down and “reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes—something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.”

Over the years, as he watched the destruction of the wolf population and the subsequent explosion of the deer population and disappearance of the mountain flora, Leopold came to understand the wolves’ vital place in the biotic community. He became a passionate, but never strident, defender of predators and other despised or voiceless members of his tribe, like soil, water, flowers, and mountains.

I’m thinking about the mind of the mountains because last week my sister Isa, my brother John, and I walked into what we consider their heart. We climbed up to Buckskin Pass, our mother’s favorite hike, on the first anniversary of her death. We agreed that one of her greatest gifts to us was a deep, abiding love for wild places, especially those in Colorado, a love she shared with everyone she could. I don’t know if she ever read A Sand County Almanac, but I know that she, too, thought about her response to the inner life of mountains and encouraged us to do likewise.

At the end of “Thinking Like a Mountain,” Leopold writes this: “We all strive for safety, prosperity, comfort, long life, and dullness.... A measure of this is all well enough, and perhaps is a requisite to objective thinking, but too much safety seems to yield only danger in the long run. Perhaps this is behind Thoreau’s dictum: In wildness is the salvation of the world. Perhaps this is the hidden meaning in the howl of the wolf, long known among mountains, but seldom perceived among men.”

I was particularly taken with his misquotation of Thoreau; in a previous post I wrestled with my own misquotation of the same line. What Thoreau actually wrote was this: “In wildness is the preservation of the world.” But I love Leopold’s rendering, since the substitution of “salvation” for “preservation” gives the minds of wolves and mountains a distinctly theological dimension. (Coincidentally, I’ve also just discovered Thomas Berry, an ecology-minded priest and writer who proclaimed himself a “geologian.”)

How might the wild minds of the mountains save us? I’m not sure there’s a single answer to that question, especially since the mountains are just as capable of destroying as saving. I remember times during our childhood forced marches when we had to sprint down from above tree line to avoid summer storms that seemed to come out of nowhere, bristling lightning. Even as their come-hither beauty draws me to these high places, their monastic austerity keeps me in my place. My brother John, an alpinist by vocation and avocation, has spent more time dangling in very thin air than most normal people, and he confirms the almost erotic call and implacable heart of the mountains—or at least I feel sure he would if I asked him.

How might the wild minds of the mountains save us? Here’s one answer: in The Solace of Fierce Places: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality, Belden C. Lane recounts the parable of an Englishman visiting Tibet some years ago:

Only as the grandeur of the land drew him beyond himself did he begin to discover what he sought. Walking one day toward a remote monastery at Rde-Zong, he was distracted from his quest for spiritual attainment by the play of the sun on stones along the path. “I have no choice,” he protested, “but to be alive to this landscape and light.” Because of this delay, he never arrived at the monastery....

Most compelling to his imagination was the fact that the awesome beauty of this fierce land was in no way conditioned by his own frail presence. It was not there for him.... Hence he declared, “The things that ignore us save us in the end. Their presence awakens silence in us; they restore our courage with the purity of their detachment.” Becoming present to a reality entirely separate from his own world of turmoil strangely set him free.

As John, Isa, and I descended from the emphatic heights, talking about a strangely controversial effort to designate 350,000 nearby acres of national park as a wilderness preserve, John stopped, turning around to look at Isa and me with his mouth wide open, pantomiming astonishment. Wondering what could possibly astonish someone as unflappable as John, I looked down the rocky trail.

A young man with no legs was walking toward us. Yep, walking, on his leather-gloved hands, up a trail that sucked the breath out of people with legs. His concentration was so intense that he was unable to acknowledge our presence. I recognized him as the subject of a story I had read online a few months before. Kevin Michael Connolly, born without legs, is, at age twenty-four, a champion skier, globe-trotting photographer, and charming smart-aleck, if his website is any indication. He’s also the author of a memoir entitled Double Take.

I’ve never been quite as awe-struck by another person as I was in that moment. Once again, I felt very small, amazed by the community—this time the human community—of which I am a part. So many things, people, and circumstances by which I might be saved.

The things that ignore us save us in the end. They allow us to step out of the endless hall of mirrors we usually inhabit and to find ourselves in a relationship with something outside our fears, fantasies, and projections. This was one of our mother’s great gifts: she showed us how we could step outside our defended little selves for a while. She taught us where to find courage when we need it: in this place where we knew ourselves to be small and helpless and yet utterly at home, at least for a few ragged breaths.

—Heather

What we’re reading
Heather: Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
Martin: Ingrid D. Rowland, Giordano Bruno: Philosopher/Heretic

Lessons from Phoebe

2010-10-01T07:48:00.001-05:00

It’s impossible to think about Madroño Ranch without thinking about its critters, both wild and domestic: bison, feral hogs, chickens, wild turkeys, aoudad, deer, geese, snakes, raccoons, porcupines, fish, and dogs.

On some days at Madroño, when the wind is exactly right, it’s especially easy to think about dogs, since we can hear the cheerful chorus from Kinky Friedman’s wonderful Utopia Animal Rescue Ranch, right next door. We think that Nancy Parker-Simons and Tony Simons, who run the place, may actually be saints, and our kids have always loved visiting them and meeting the dogs they care for so lovingly. But the dog I associate most strongly with Madroño is Phoebe, our elderly black Lab mix.

In some ways Phoebe (pictured above in her younger days) has a better claim to the ranch than any of us, since we suspect she was born near the place. We found her out there twelve years ago, a tiny puppy no more than six weeks old, lying by the side of the road with a broken back leg; we don’t know if someone abandoned her because of the leg, or if she was orphaned first and then injured. Even though we already had all the dog we thought we needed in Daisy, a wonderful golden retriever mix, we brought Phoebe back to Austin with us; she was so small that she spent the trip curled up on a bandana on the back seat. Our vet thought for a time that her broken leg might have to be amputated, but we elected to wait and see, and remarkably it healed almost completely on its own (though now that she’s older it has gotten quite arthritic).

Despite the Dickensian start to her life, Phoebe (or “Little Black Dog,” as we also call her, though she eventually grew to a healthy fifty-five pounds) has proved to be faithful, affectionate, trusting, and resilient in the face of adversity—very like a Dickensian protagonist, come to think of it. When our children were little and we were still doing the family car trip up to Colorado every summer, we used to take her along and smuggle her into whatever motel we happened to be staying in to break up the drive, a bit of skullduggery that always tickled the kids. We also used to stop at a drive-through burger joint and buy her a “plain and dry” hamburger as a special treat, though she was usually too shy to actually eat the thing while we were watching. When we needed to break up the monotony of the long drive, we’d stop at a school playground or public park, and the kids would coax Phoebe up the ladder of the slide; she’d perch at the top, peering down the slide, her brow furrowed, before gallantly sliding down on her bottom. (She even negotiated the twisty slides, though they weren’t her favorites.)

She’s also quite vocal, and her repertoire includes a startling number of grunts, sighs, and groans. When our youngest was taking piano lessons, Phoebe would sit beside her while she practiced and make odd noises—we were never sure if she was complaining or trying to sing along. And when we return home after an absence long or short, we can always get Phoebe to tip her head back and start howling by saying “Hellooooooooo!” in a sort of Julia Child-like voice.

As the kids grew up, we stopped making those long family drives every summer, which I’m sure was a great relief to Phoebe. After Daisy died, we acquired other dogs, all of them mutts (we’re firm believers in hybrid vigor): first Honey, a fluffy light-brown-and-white Bernese mountain dog/chow mix (or so we guessed) who died a couple of years ago, then Chula the Goggle-Eyed Ricochet Hound, whom we imagine to be some sort of hyperkinetic blend of pit bull and whippet. As Phoebe got older, she began to slow down and her eyesight began to fail, and these younger interlopers frequently drove her crazy. Honey used to like to nip at Phoebe’s hindquarters, apparently hoping to goad her into moving faster. Chula is constantly galloping back and forth, sometimes in pursuit of her woobies, sometimes just for the hell of it, often bumping Phoebe on the way by.

Old age is definitely not for the faint of heart. Now that she’s completely blind, her once-brown eyes filmed over with white, Phoebe never seems to know exactly what’s going on, but she bears it all cheerfully, or at least resignedly. She’s memorized the layout of our house, and even though she occasionally bonks snout-first into doors or chairs or table legs, she never seems particularly bothered, even by collisions that make us wince in sympathy. And we warn her loudly every time she approaches steps, whereupon she slows down and feels cautiously ahead with one front paw until she finds the change in floor level.

I know that Phoebe will feature prominently when Heather writes about her adventures tromping around Madroño with dogs, as she promised to do in an earlier post; Phoebe was Heather’s main walking companion for years, since none of the rest of us could keep up with her. The most heartbreaking aspect of Phoebe’s blindness is that we’ve had to start leaving her behind when we go to Madroño, because there are so many things for her to fall off or into out there. When the sad day comes, however, we will scatter her ashes out at the ranch, the place she has always loved best.

As if her bum leg and blindness weren’t curses enough, she’s also been diagnosed with Cushing’s disease, a disorder of the pituitary gland, and thyroid and liver problems. All these conditions mean that she has a lengthy and complicated regimen of medications, so she gets a slice of wienie larded with various pills twice a day. (We also try to slip her a sedative when we sense a storm coming on, since she’s always been panicked by thunder.)

She has borne the indignities and infirmities of old age with unfailing good humor, and remains a fundamentally optimistic soul, always ready to go on walks (greatly curtailed these days, in deference to her general decrepitude); a few months ago, in fact, as I took her on her morning constitutional, one of our neighbors commented on how much Phoebe and I resemble each other, now that we both have a certain amount of frost on the pumpkin, as the saying goes. Her appetite is still robust; she always cleans her bowl at breakfast and dinner, and she loves her twice-daily wienie slices. She puts up with the occasional overflows of affection from various cats, and occasional body slams from the overenthusiastic Chula, without complaining. She still breaks into what we call the Happy Butt Dance whenever we scratch the base of her tail. She is, in short, one of my real role models as I too edge reluctantly but inexorably into senescence.

She’s still a really good dog.

—Martin

What we’re reading
Heather: Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone
Martin: Michael Pollan, A Place of My Own: The Architecture of Daydreams

Most memorable meals, take two: a lobster tale

2010-09-24T07:55:00.005-05:00

We’re in England and off the grid this week, but we have spared no expense in securing the services of a guest blogger, the lovely and talented Elizabeth Kohout. In this post, the second in what we hope will be an occasional series, Elizabeth relates the chilling tale of her first confrontation with one of New England’s most emblematic (and frightening) foods.

I’ve liked crustaceans (with one notable exception, which I’ll get to later) my entire life.

This initially manifested itself as a deep affection for Sebastian, the crab from the Disney version of The Little Mermaid, possibly because my father does an excellent imitation of him and possibly because he stars in one of the greatest animated sequences of all time. Then, somewhere around third grade, I became the proud owner of a hermit crab, Scout, who liked to clamp herself to my t-shirt while I did homework. This ownership was joyful but brief, as Scout met an ultimately tragic end when a certain mother (who shall remain unnamed) failed to regulate a certain sister (ditto), who thought it would be a great idea to release Scout underneath the stove. We found her shell and her poor, desiccated body (Scout’s, that is, not my sister’s) beneath the stove four or five years later when we moved out of that house.

At this juncture, I began to shift my attention from caring for crustaceans to eating them, a pursuit I have found to be infinitely more rewarding. Our neighbors had an annual mudbug party, in which the entire neighborhood descended on their house to talk, drink coke or beer (depending on one's age), shriek and chase each other around with the live crawfish (not necessarily depending on one's age), supervise the boiling of said crawfish, and eat a possibly unhealthy amount of boiled crawfish. (We also spent a lot of time shooing their enormous dogs away from the food.) Beyond mudbugs, I developed a deep and abiding affection for shrimp (especially from this place), crab cakes, and squid (SQUID!), which I realize is not a crustacean but still falls under the seafood umbrella so I’m including it anyway.

Lobster, however, is a different story. I have a very fraught relationship with lobster. It began when I was quite young and pitched a fit in the grocery store because I wanted to visit the “yobsiss” and my mother wouldn’t comply because she had absolutely no idea what I was talking about. Several years of speech therapy later, I was able to say the word “lobster” like a normal person, but no longer had any particular interest in talking about them. Aside from appreciating the lobster cooking scene in Annie Hall, I think it’s safe to say I didn’t really think about lobsters for most of my adolescence. I certainly didn’t encounter many in land-locked Austin, Texas.

But then I went to a fancy liberal arts college in Massachusetts, where, every fall, the dining halls outdo themselves and cook up a really lovely and highly anticipated meal, the Harvest Dinner. We spoiled-rotten students got to dine on seasonal roasted vegetables, local greens, pumpkin and apple pies, and other edible autumnal delights. Oh, and lobster. That’s right, lobster. My freshman year, I queued up with my friends and picked up a ticket to get my lobster. We all went through the buffet line, marveling at the bounty laid out before us; I turned my ticket in to pick up my lobster and my eyes nearly bugged out of my head when one of the dining hall ladies plunked a giant red beast down on my plate. I lugged my laden tray to the table my friends had staked out, and as I sat down I realized that none of them had picked up a lobster. I had absolutely no idea how to eat the strange animal sitting in front of me and was embarrassed to ask, so I decided to play it cool and slowly ate all the food piled around it. Then I got freaked out by its unwavering, empty gaze and put a spinach leaf over its head when I thought no one was looking:

It turns out my friend Lilly was, in fact, not only looking at me but also armed with a camera phone. She burst into hysterical laughter, which then spread around the table, and captured the moment for posterity (see above). Once everyone had stopped laughing with (at?) me, the conversation drifted into lobster-related eating adventures. I tried to look like I, too, had spent my summers in Maine or other parts of the country where eating scary-looking armored animals is totally normal. Finally my friend Noah realized I was way out of my element and patiently coached me through dismantling and devouring the creature. My memory about this part of the meal is mercifully vague: I know that I squirted Noah and at least one other person in the face with lobster juice and that no one told me I was supposed to get melted butter, so once I finally got to the lobster meat, it tasted like mild, meaty salt water—not bad, but not amazing either. I wondered what all the fuss was about.

After dinner, we walked back across campus to our dorm. At some point, I paused for a moment. The sky was velvety and spangled with stars; the air was fresh and cold, and I thought there would probably be frost on the ground when I went to my English class the next morning. Anticipating the crunch of frozen grass underfoot reminded me again of the puzzling meal I’d just eaten. I thought about how odd New England is, how strangers don’t smile if they catch each other’s eye, how trees light up the hillsides with leafy flames, how even the mildest salsa causes people to whimper and fan their mouths, but they think nothing of boiling alive and then eating what essentially amounts to a living dinosaur for dinner. Then I ran to catch up with my friends.

—Elizabeth

What we’re reading
Heather: Nick Reding, Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town (again)
Martin: Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

Hall of mirrors: the lost art of conversation

2010-09-17T07:06:00.001-05:00

Last week I found myself in a conversation with someone who doesn’t believe in AGW and has written a soon-to-be-published book explaining his position. AGW—which I had to look up—is short for anthropogenic global warming, or global warming caused by human activity. That idea is, he contends, “the biggest whopper sold to the public in the history of humankind.”

Now, I’ve read a lot about people like this: they listen to Rush Limbaugh, watch Glenn Beck, think the Earth is 6,000 years old, vote against the teaching of evolution in public schools, read the Bible literally, and vote Republican or Libertarian. I could probably pick them out in a crowd. They just have this look, right?

Except that this young man has a lot in common with, well, me. We’re both English majors from small New England colleges. Both former (at least on my part) doctoral students in literature. Both rowers. Both writers (although he’s been published in high-profile publications like The New Yorker, while I’ve been published in the Anglican Theological Review). Both voted for Obama. Both believers in “clean” energy, whatever that is. We most certainly don’t have that look.

He gave me the basics of his argument, the science of which I followed imperfectly, as I follow all scientific arguments. He caught and retained my attention when he said this: science relies on narrative. In other words, scientists tell stories about their research. They articulate their theories and findings in a particular way, a way that relies on their own experiences, influences, and personal quirks. Facts are facts, but facts aren’t self-interpreting. How the facts are articulated is essential to the final shape of the story.

So here’s the question: why do I take one set of scientific conclusions as gospel and reject another set? I’m not qualified to evaluate the merits of most scientific assertions, period. On what grounds do I choose one interpretation over another? I have to conclude that I rely on considerations other than scientific ones, just as many people do who don’t agree that climate change is caused by human activity, or that the earth is heating up at all. I tend to judge those people using criteria that I don’t generally apply to myself, a predictably unscientific state of affairs which may tarnish the burnished glow of my intellectual honesty.

According to a recent Gallup poll, Democrats are twice as likely as Republicans to believe that the effects of global warming are underway. All of the GOP candidates currently vying for Senate seats doubt the evidence supporting global warming and oppose government action to limit warming pollution. It would seem that most of us in the debate about climate change—and environmental concerns in general—are driven at least as much by political ideology as by science.

One of my daily reads is Grist, an e-zine that calls itself “A Beacon in the Smog.” Among the stories I read this week is one entitled “Stupid Goes Viral: The Climate Zombies of the New GOP.” Near the top of the story comes a staccato burst of single-sentence paragraphs that reads: “Meet the Climate Zombies. They’re mindless. Their stupid is contagious. And if they win, humanity loses.” While the tone is ironic, even flip, the message is clear: we need to be afraid of the politicians who refuse to acknowledge human participation in the destruction of the environment.

The tone of the story sounds very much like Glenn Beck’s when he ridiculed Nancy Pelosi’s anxiety about the rhetorical strategies of Tea Partiers: “This is how they are attempting to silence the Tea Partiers—they are just so hateful, they are going to get violent. During the Tea Parties, liberals in the media were trembling with fear and shaking in their boots. And they were right—see how scary they look? Oh, the horror! Parents, cover your children’s eyes. Of course, no actual violence ever actually happened at any of the Tea Party rallies. But that didn’t stop Nancy Pelosi from crying about the possibility....” While Beck’s tone is ironic, even flip, the message is clear: we need to be afraid of the politicians who want to curtail our right to speak out.

Although I’m more willing to listen to one voice than the other, here’s the problem: neither set of comments is intended to be part of an actual conversation. Both are speaking from within a hall of mirrors in which each auditor is imagined to be a mere projection of the speaker, or at most, a member of the speaker’s monolithic tribe. I recently read a great blog about the “epistemic closure” in much current conservative thinking—the tendency to accept evidence only when it reinforces preexisting opinions—and this from someone who works for the libertarian Cato Institute! But I find evidence of epistemic closure on the left as well, frequently manifested by a tone that smirks, “If you don’t agree with me you’re a moron, and I refuse to converse with morons.”

Well, this moron wants some conversation. In reading Plurality and Ambiguity: Hermeneutics, Religion, Hope, by David Tracy (very interesting, wretched title, periodically intelligible), I found this meaty sentence: “Conversation is a game with some hard rules: say only what you mean; say it as accurately as you can; listen to and respect what the other says, however different or other; be willing to correct or defend your opinions if challenged by the conversation partner; be willing to argue if necessary, to confront if demanded, to endure necessary conflict, to change your mind if evidence suggests it.”

Of course, you can only have a conversation when all the participants agree to these rules, and the Glenn Becks of the world seem usually to want to talk only to themselves in their own halls of mirrors. But when those of us with passionate feelings about the fate of all Earth’s residents, human and non-human alike, sound just like the conversation-stompers on the other side, then we become part of the problem, not the solution. As frustrating as it is to follow the rules—especially when your conversation partner has his back turned, his arms crossed, fingers in his ears and singing “lalalalala”—it becomes even more imperative to walk out of our own hall of mirrors willing to engage (again and again and again) in the hard and morally vital work of conversation in the open air.

Living as I do in my own little hall of mirrors in Austin, my conversational muscles are a tad underdeveloped. I may have to start with the AGW denier I mentioned above, the one who otherwise looks pretty much like me. I’ll try not to call him a moron and try to be willing to change my mind, to leave my tribe and go outside, if evidence suggests that it’s necessary. Now that’s scary.

—Heather

What we’re reading
Heather: Nick Reding, Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town
Martin: Jimmy McDonough, Shakey: Neil Young’s Biography

Most memorable meals, take one: fire in the hole!

2010-09-10T06:36:00.002-05:00

The other night, inspired by a typically wonderful dinner at Texas French Bread, my Best Gal and I got to talking about our favorite meals ever, and what made them so. Eventually, we decided that it might be interesting to write about some of our most memorable meals. Since it happened to be my turn to grind out our weekly post, I got to go first, but we hope to turn this into an occasional series. Stay tuned!

For the purposes of our discussion, I arbitrarily ruled out meals that Heather, an amazing cook in her own right, had made at home, which knocked out a bunch of contenders: her pork posole, her made-from-scratch pizza baked in the wood-burning oven in the backyard, her weapons-grade ratatouille, her charcoal-grilled bison-lamb burgers with all the fixin’s, and so on.

With those delectable meals off the table, so to speak, my thoughts turned immediately to the tagine we enjoyed on the pillow-strewn rooftop of an inn in Morocco’s Atlas Mountains, and the tortelli at that trattoria (I can’t even remember its name) we blundered into by pure chance near the Duomo di San Martino in Lucca. Less exotically, I remembered wonderful meals at Higgins, in downtown Portland, Oregon; at Delfina and Swan Oyster Depot, in San Francisco; and at Savoy, in New York’s Soho.

Closer to home, I fondly recalled the burgers and Shypoke Eggs (actually a form of trompe l’oeil nachos) at the late lamented Little Hipp’s in San Antonio. And then there was that “Whole Hog” dinner prepared by Jesse Griffiths of Dai Due last year: seven incredibly delicious courses, each featuring some form of pork—even dessert, which was beignets fried in pork lard. (Oops! Please excuse me while I wipe the drool off my keyboard.)

Somewhat disconcertingly for a couple of self-styled foodies, though, we found that we could rarely remember the dishes that made up these meals in much detail. Rather, what we tended to recall was the setting, and the company, and other such trivia. Not that the food wasn’t important, of course; but we concluded that it takes more than merely wonderful food to make a truly memorable meal. When it all comes together, there is something magical about the combination of the flavor and texture and smell of the food, and the comfort of the setting in which it is served, and true ease and delight in the presence of one’s companions (and what a wonderfully evocative word companion is, deriving from the Latin “with bread”—literally, one with whom you would break bread).

Or, alternately, a truly memorable meal might just involve intense pain and suffering, like the one I’m about to describe. Almost thirty years ago, during the summer after we graduated from college, we set off on a 4,500-mile road trip from Massachusetts to San Francisco and then back to San Antonio—all in Heather’s un-air conditioned Toyota Tercel hatchback, nicknamed Pollo for reasons now lost in the mists of time.

It was an eventful journey—in New Orleans someone busted in one of Pollo’s windows and made off with everything we owned, including the all-important cooler full of cold beverages, and in San Francisco each of my parents had an, um, entertaining reaction to my newly pierced ear—but in some ways the high point occurred as we were making our way back to Texas in July.

We’d been following Interstate 40 eastward, but we had an early edition of Jane and Michael Stern’s book Roadfood in which we read about this Mexican joint in the dusty little town of Socorro, New Mexico, and even though Socorro was some seventy-five miles out of our way we decided (ah, youth!) that it would be worth the detour.

We reached Socorro at the height of the scorching mid-afternoon heat and found the restaurant, next to the railroad tracks and surrounded by chickens, without too much trouble. It was almost completely deserted, in that dead time between the lunch and dinner crowds, and as we walked to our table we caught a brief glimpse of an enormous black cast-iron stove in the kitchen, surrounded by a swarm of diminutive elderly women in black.

Heather ordered… I don’t know; enchiladas or something. I ordered the tamales with salsa verde, I can’t remember why; perhaps the book recommended them? We sipped our iced tea while the women in the kitchen got busy; when the food arrived, it looked and smelled fabulous. We both dug in enthusiastically, and almost immediately I realized I was in waaaaay over my head.

The tamales were wonderful, but that verde sauce... oh, my God. It’s still probably the spiciest thing I’ve ever eaten. My body’s alarm bells started clanging, the warning lights began flashing; my forehead, and then my scalp and neck and upper body, started pouring sweat like Albert Brooks in Broadcast News.

Soon my T-shirt was soaked; still the heat kept building. I drained several glasses of iced tea, to little effect. I noticed that all the women who worked in the kitchen had come out to watch me; they stood in the doorway, pointing and giggling, like a gaggle of highly amused crows.

Somehow I made it all the way through the tamales, then, trying to marshal my last shreds of dignity, stood up, marched out to the car, and changed my sopping wet T-shirt. Did the women applaud when I returned? I can’t remember, though they certainly should have. I’ve had many fiery meals since then, but none could compare to that one. Fortunately, my youthful constitution absorbed the dreadful punishment with no long-term ill effects, and we went on our way to Texas.

Yeah, that was a memorable meal, all right. Won’t you tell us about some of yours?

—Martin

What we’re reading
Heather: Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
Martin: Peter Carey, Parrot and Olivier in America

Stubbing the giant’s toe: thoughts on Midwestern agribusiness

2010-09-03T07:29:00.001-05:00

Corn. Soybeans. Corn. Soybeans. Corn. Soybeans. Corn. Soybeans. Corn. Soybeans. Corn. Soybeans. Corn. Soybeans. Corn. Soybeans.

And did I mention corn?

We drove last week from Austin to Gambier, Ohio, to deliver our youngest to college, and then back to Austin. (Empty nest. Delight. Depression.) That this trip was my maiden voyage into the American Midwest was just one of many notable firsts. At about the time we crossed the line from Kentucky to Ohio, it began: fields of corn and soybeans on either side of the road stretching to the horizon, interrupted only occasionally by copses of oaks or by farm houses and barns or by grain storage units. We started to joke about it by the time we got to Gambier, smack in the middle of Ohio. After installing our daughter in her new dorm room, we turned our noses west and drove from Gambier to Clarksville, Missouri, on the banks of the Mississippi River, in one endless, relentless, repetitive, mind- and butt-numbing 600-mile day. The joking stopped at about mile 100.

The landscape wasn’t unpleasant by any means: the apparently unlimited fecundity of the earth was impressive, as was the system that ordered such abundance. The scope of it! And we didn’t even make it into Iowa or Nebraska! No wonder the people behind this astonishing productivity are proud of it.

But there’s another way to see that landscape, and those afflicted with the double vision I wrote about in an earlier post might see the abundance as a tumor, or at least a spreading rash. The economic, cultural, and environmental damage imposed by the efficiencies of agribusiness have been well documented, most popularly by Michael Pollan in The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals and Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal, along with films like Food, Inc. and Fresh. The idea that inexpensive food can be grown only through the use of annuals and monocultures, efficiencies of scale, and heavy pesticide use has been seriously challenged by farmers like Joel Salatin and Will Allen. Along with the steady depletion of topsoil, the off-farm effects of conventional agriculture are also well documented, from depletion of local biodiversity to the rapidly growing “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico.

After spending the night in Clarksville, we drove through another scene of apparent abundance en route to Eureka Springs, Arkansas. Arkansas, of course, is the home of Tyson Foods, which began as a chicken wholesaler in 1935. In the interests of full disclosure, I have to admit that I love chickens for reasons that aren’t entirely rational. Last year, we moved our chickens at Madroño from the nasty old chicken coop to the Chicken Palace and added substantially to their numbers. The Chicken Palace, built by Robert Selement, the ranch’s redoubtable manager, could probably withstand a nuclear attack and has already foiled a whole lot of skunks, raccoons, coyotes, bobcats, hawks, and owls.

One of the great pleasures of a Madroño morning is to let the ladies (one of whom is named Fred, for reasons not entirely clear to us) out of the Palace and into the adjoining pasture and then to throw them the previous night’s vegetable scraps. From the moment they see me coming down the hill, they begin an almost-intelligible running commentary that steadily increases in volume and intensity. (“Can you believe she wears boots with her nightgown?” “God, I hope there’s no fennel in that scrap bowl.” “Hasn’t she ever opened a gate before? What’s taking her so long?”) Anticipation is so focused that by the time I open the door to the yard, and then the gate from the yard to the pasture, there’s a charge in the air that surely rivals the first seconds of the running of the bulls in Pamplona. No, really. Those chickens are moving. And I’m laughing. And very happy to gather (and sell) their marigold-yolked eggs. (For the reflections of a true chickenista, be sure to check out the highly readable blog posts of Carol Ann Sayle, who owns and operates Austin’s wonderful Boggy Creek Farm along with her husband Larry Butler. Carol Ann’s chicken blogs are worthy of a BBC comedy of manners with period costumes.)

Given my tender feelings toward our chickens, seeing a Tyson truck rolling down an Arkansas highway carrying its cargo of tightly packed chicken cages made me tense. When we got to Eureka Springs, with its funky old boutiques and gingerbread houses, we found a restaurant that served local produce and whose waitress told us that she was a “universal soul.” I relaxed a little, enough to start chatting with the friendly couple sitting next to us. As it turned out, the husband was a Tyson chicken farmer. The 16-year-old boy he had hired for the summer was worthless, he said, but the 14-year-old was great. He didn’t have an attitude yet, and never complained about the hours he had to spend each day picking up dead chickens.

I got tense again.

How can something that seems so clearly wrong to one person seem perfectly acceptable to another? How can I have arrived at my advanced age and still be surprised that this is so? Even though we all technically speak the same language—the Midwestern corn and soybean farmers, the Arkansas chicken farmer, and I—there seems to be an unbridgeable perceptual gulf between us.

When I’m feeling this kind of tension, I become almost ridiculously grateful for things like the National Geographic website, which describes the work of young scientists with big ideas that “show a potential for future breakthroughs.” Among the chosen for 2010—and they are a fascinating group—is an agroecologist named Jerry Glover who works for The Land Institute in Salina, Kansas. His field of study, so to speak, is perennial grains, wheat in particular. Unlike annual crops, which need to be replanted every year, drain nutrients from the soil, and allow erosion when they die, perennial crops can be “harvested year after year and maintain excellent soil quality.” Glover doesn’t preach (at least not on the National Geographic website), and he doesn’t point fingers at conventional farmers and say: Bad, bad, bad. He points to the evidence in the soils he works with, which speaks for itself—and in the same dialect as the farmers whose practices I find so confounding.

Seeing the scope of those Midwestern cornfields is sobering. Thinking about the money, time, and corporate muscle they represent is daunting. Reading about the salmonella outbreak in factory farm-produced eggs is appalling. When you buy from your local farmers and humane producers, you’re allying yourself with an entity so tiny it barely stubs the giant’s toe when it gets kicked aside. But that tiny stumbling block gathers a little more heft with each kick. To mix my images, watching this process is like watching a big pot of water boil: just when you think your stove is busted or your water’s dead, you start seeing those tiny bubbles appear and get perceptibly more emphatic—especially when then are young scientists like Jerry Glover working next to the giant and turning up the heat. And if those of us who eat keep asking for it, the giant will eventually be able to put sweet organic (or at least less devastating) corn into the pot and feed the less-eroded world with it. Sounds like a fairy tale, I know, but maybe it’s more of a parable—a story with an unexpected and revelatory twist at the end. Whatever it is, just think of the possible chicken commentary on giants in the kitchen. I’ll bet their footwear choices are even more entertaining than mine.

—Heather

What we’re reading
Heather: Elizabeth Kostova, The Historian
Martin: Eboo Patel, Acts of Faith: The Story of an American Muslim, the Struggle for the Soul of a Generation

My favorite Massachusetts meal

2010-08-27T07:22:00.007-05:00

My friend and former graduate school colleague, Tinky Weisblat, who lives in Hawley MA, asked her many blogging friends to publish a post on Massachusetts food during the week of August 22–28 as part of Loving Local: Celebrating the Flavors of Massachusetts, a “blogathon” celebrating the Bay State’s Farmers Market Week. I highly recommend her blog, In Our Grandmother’s Kitchens: Cooking, Singing, and Sharing in New England and Beyond. Tinky, this post is for you.

My favorite Massachusetts meal of all time is probably one at which I wasn’t even present. It took place during the fall semester of our senior year at Williams College. Heather lived off campus that year, in a funky old two-story house on Water Street that she shared with three housemates, an enormous wood stove, and some unidentified fungi in the upstairs bathtub. I had long since become convinced that she was The Girl For Me, but she did not yet share my conviction. So one chilly winter night when all three of her housemates were elsewhere, she invited our classmate Bill Holt down for an intimate dinner, with distinctly romantic ends in mind.

Bill was actually a good friend of mine—he lived one floor above me during freshman year, and he was a kind, funny, sweet-natured guy—a real gentleman. Cute, too. Heather was in one of her Molly Katzen vegetarian phases, and made one of her specialties—a vegetable pie—for dinner, with ingredients carefully selected at the Slippery Banana, the little organic grocery store on Spring Street. She even bought a nice bottle of wine, by which I mean one that cost more than two dollars. (This was college, remember?)

After Bill arrived, they opened the bottle of expensive wine and chatted for a while, and things seemed to be going according to plan. When they finally sat down for dinner, she placed a steaming slice of pie before Bill.

He took a bite and said, “Wow, this is great! What’s in it?”

With the earnestness that often characterizes youthful vegetarian evangelists, Heather proudly rattled off the ingredients: broccoli, carrots, cauliflower, peas, peanuts for complementary protein, in (naturally) a whole wheat crust.... Bill nodded, patted his mouth with his napkin, and stood up.

“I’m sorry," he said. “It’s really delicious, but I have to leave now.”

Heather was stunned—this was definitely not how she had imagined the evening ending—but Bill was politely determined. She was left with most of a vegetable pie, an almost-full bottle of wine, and a lot of unanswered questions.

When she next saw Bill, on campus a few days later, he immediately apologized for his abrupt departure. In the course of the conversation, he grudgingly let slip that he had actually gone straight from her house to the college infirmary, where he had spent the next three days recovering from a severe anaphylactic reaction. Turns out he was deathly allergic to peanuts—she’d almost killed him with that vegetable pie and its complementary protein!

Bill was hardly one to carry a grudge, but the romance between them never blossomed. As for me, I knew an opportunity when I saw one. I spent the next several months discreetly and repeatedly reminding Heather that I, unlike some others I could name, had no food allergies. That spring, perhaps intoxicated by the scent of the lilacs, she finally succumbed to my many charms, and the rest, as they say, is history; we were married four years later. But who knows how our lives would have turned out had Bill Holt not been allergic to peanuts?

Heather’s vegetarian phases seem to be behind her; we still have a well-thumbed copy of Katzen’s Moosewood Cookbook on the shelf, though I don’t think Heather has looked at it in years, and she has permanently retired that vegetable pie from her repertory. Perhaps that disastrous romantic dinner remains a little too memorable for her.

—Martin

What we’re reading
Heather: Oscar Casares, Amigoland
Martin: Peter Fish (ed.), California's Best: Two Centuries of Great Writing from the Golden State

“A cup of tea, a warm bath, and a brisk walk”

2010-08-20T05:22:00.012-05:00

A path is little more than a habit that comes with knowledge of a place.
—Wendell Berry

If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again; if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man; then you are ready for a walk.
—Henry David Thoreau

I’m an enthusiastic walker and believe firmly in walking’s spiritual, psychic, and medicinal benefits. Whenever our kids were feeling puny, they were usually told that a cup of tea, a warm bath, and a brisk walk would put them in order—one of the reasons my family nickname is “Deathmarch.” “We’re DYING,” they’d moan. “You’ll feel better after a walk,” I’d respond. After tugging a drooping daughter on one particularly frustrating foot-dragging outing, we discovered she had mono. But I’m sure the walk did her good.

Both nature and nurture have gone into creating this momster that is me: my mother used to frog-march my three siblings and me up the mountains around the Roaring Fork Valley in Colorado, hoping to create the conditions for quiet evenings in the little cabin we stayed in every summer. “It didn’t work,” she admitted. “The four of you never got worn out, but I sure did.” (That’s a somewhat older me walking in Colorado in the photo above.)

So whether it’s genetics or training, I walk, and Madroño has been—and surely will continue to be—a treasure trove of most excellent walks.

When we first started going to Madroño, when our youngest was a wee babe and the other two not much older, sneaking out for walks made me feel both guilty and liberated: for a brief time, at least, I was free to look at, listen to, think about, or not think about whatever I wanted, without interruption. Now that our youngest is leaving for college, I still feel that solitary walks are a guilty pleasure, albeit one about which I’m increasingly less apologetic, but I still feel the sense of release that comes when I head out the door with at least one ecstatic dog who’s noticed I’ve put on my boots and my hat and picked up my binoculars. (Walking with unbelievably brave and stupid dogs will be undoubtedly be my next blog topic.)

For a long time, I went for what my dear friend Ellen calls the yodelaiEEoo pace of walking: trying to cover as much ground as quickly as possible, preferably headed up or down steep inclines. This is a really dumb way to walk in the Texas Hill Country, especially if you’re not on a road and even if you are. First of all, if you’re off-roading and going uphill, there’s not a lot of purchase, given the rocks, leaves, and cedar detritus that cover the heavily wooded hills. There’s even less purchase when you’re coming downhill, which can look a lot like skiing, especially if you’re a really spastic skier. But off-road descents can be easier than on-road ones: once, when our youngest was about five or six, I bullied her into walking down the steepest road on the ranch with me, after we had driven up. She was so little that her relatively slight weight couldn't overcome the force of incline + scree; the final equation was an extremely sore little heinie from having her feet shoot out from under her every three steps or so.

Aside from the falling down problem, when you’re moving at the yodelaiEEoo pace, it’s very easy to miss all the Interesting Stuff to be found—or to run straight into it when you’d really rather not. I was walking on one of the roads on top one morning in June many years ago at a yodelaiEEoo pace only to find myself entangled in an enormous—no, I mean ENORMOUS—spider web. After shrieking, dancing, frantically patting my head, pulling my clothes off, etc., I slowed down enough to notice these spiders. I still don’t know what kind they were—maybe golden orbs? As I walked along, twitching and squinting with every step I took, I saw their webs everywhere. Some of them spanned fifteen- to twenty-foot gaps. How had they done that? Parachuted? Hailed taxis to drive them across? Not only were the webs huge, but they were invisible until you were two inches away from them. They taught me to slow down AND to limbo.

Once the kids got big enough, we went for what we called scrambles, which involved walking up and/or down one of the many mysterious draws that pepper the ranch. Walking with children, of course, cannot occur at a yodelaiEEoo pace, at least not until they’re bigger and stronger than you and you start calling plaintively: “Guys? Guys? Hey, wait for me!” But while I was still bigger and stronger than they were, we loved to go poke around in the draws, especially with some of our family’s emergency back-up children. (We haven’t actually outgrown this.) The kids were the ones who found all the Interesting Stuff: the rocks that looked like Swiss cheese or hearts, the iron bedsteads alongside a cast-iron Dutch oven, the fossils, the arrowheads and stone tools, the tiny flowers and ferns hiding in the shade, the little caves, the really weird bugs, the secret springs. And the snakes.

I must say a word about walking and snakes. I’ve climbed up, fallen down, and poked through a lot (though not nearly all) of the property, and I’ve concluded that snakes don’t want to see me any more than I want to see them. I try to be sure I can see where I’m putting my hands and feet, and dogs (at least the smart ones, if any such exist) are often helpful, hopping sideways to let you know that you shouldn’t step on that spot. Robert, the intrepid ranch manager, sees them all the time, but he does things like drain and dig around in the bottom of ponds. I’ve been lucky so far, with one notable exception.

One warm November day my then-fifteen-year-old son and I went walking to the back of the property. For some reason, he had brought a shotgun, and as we were walking through a patch of tall grass, he stopped and said calmly but urgently, “Mom. Snake.” And one step ahead of me was the fattest, longest, ugliest water moccasin I had ever seen. As it slithered off, he shot it, securing his place in my heart (and my ankles, where I probably would have been bitten had he not been there) as a hero.

As I've become more interested in birds, my yodelaiEEoo pace has become a thing of the past, for a couple of reasons. One is the difficulty of trying to track the little boogers through thick live-oak canopies or heavy underbrush. Another is having to stop and listen to them over the clatter I make. Our beloved old black Lab Phoebe is too blind and creaky to walk with me now, but back in the day she hated these stop-and-listen moments; if I paused for more than a minute or two she commenced with a low and pitiful moaning that wouldn’t let up until we started again. Phoebe liked the yodelaiEEoo pace. But even she was stilled into silence that February day when we turned into a usually still canyon only to hear the voices of what turned out to be literally thousands of robins and cedar waxwings, feasting—and maybe drunk—on cedar berries. The noise level was on par with I don’t know what: maybe a middle school hallway after the last class of the year, but considerably less smelly.

In fact, much to my family’s astonishment, I’ve learned to walk places and then just sit, at least sometimes. Chula the Goggle-Eyed Ricochet Hound walks with me now that Phoebe can’t, and Chula is fine with just sitting. (She has other issues that will be revealed in my walking-with-dogs post.) Did you know that certain grasses snap and crackle when the sun first hits them on cold mornings? I must have spent twenty minutes on my hands and knees one morning trying to figure out what was making that noise. Bugs? The little creatures in my head? Nope, it was just the grass talking. We had a lovely conversation, while Chula looked on, quietly concerned.

Perhaps, finally, it’s time for a new family nickname.

—Heather

What we’re reading
Heather: Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster
Martin: Ellen Lupton, Thinking with Type: A Critical Guide for Designers, Writers, Editors, & Students (still)

Listapalooza: top ten Austin restaurants

2010-08-13T08:13:00.004-05:00

Yep, another one of those crazy lists. This one, of my ten favorite restaurants in Austin, was a real toughie. The one clear choice was Texas French Bread (pictured above), our absolute number-one favorite dinner spot. After that, however, things got a little murky.

A few disclaimers: Austin is a pretty good eaters’ town, but I tried to restrict myself (for the most part) to restaurants that feature local and seasonal ingredients, which narrowed the field somewhat. Virtually all of the places I’ve listed are in central or north Austin, because that’s where we live and spend most of our time. Heather’s list might look somewhat different than mine, though I trust there’d be a healthy amount of overlap. I’ve included only one barbecue place, which may strike some Austinites as sacrilegious. And there are a number of other places I’ve tried and enjoyed immensely, but haven’t managed to return to often enough for them to make my top ten just yet.

But enough stalling; here’s a first attempt at a top ten, in alphabetical order.

Café Pacha, 4618 Burnet Road: a great spot to feel that inimitable Austin groove, with fair trade coffee, smoothies, empanadas, sandwiches, omelets, etc., most of which are organic, and a vaguely South American vibe.

Changos Taqueria, 3023 Guadalupe: wonderful tacos (and enormous burritos), made to order with fresh ingredients. We’re partial to the aguas frescas, too, especially the horchata.

Eastside Café, 2113 Manor Road: a longtime Austin favorite, with a beautiful organic garden perfect for strolling before or after dinner.

Fino Restaurant Patio and Bar, 2905 San Gabriel: a pan-Mediterranean place with a great bar, and the sister of Emmett Fox’s Asti Trattoria in Hyde Park. We really go for the small plates and tapas.

Julio’s Café, 4230 Duval: a funky little Hyde Park neighborhood favorite serving wonderful Mexican food. The chicken enchilada plate with green tomatillo sauce is one of my very favorite dishes in Austin.

Ruby’s BBQ, 512 West 29th Street: genuine pit-smoked barbecue (the all-natural brisket is my favorite), terrific sides, excellent tacos and Cajun dishes, and signed memorabilia from a variety of blues, R&B, and rock and roll legends who played at the now-relocated Antone’s when it used to be next door.

Salvation Pizza, 624 West 34th Street: great thin-crust pizza. The #5 (white pie with chicken, prosciutto, dried sage, and fresh garlic) is our family’s favorite.

Somnio’s Café, 1807 South First Street: the dining room feels like your grandma’s house, with mismatched furniture and an informal feel, but grandma never cooked like this: fresh, locally sourced, organic, even some vegan options. BYOB.

Texas French Bread, 2900 Rio Grande: fresh, locally sourced bistro food; reasonable prices; casual ambience; BYOB – what’s not to like? If you live in or near Austin and haven't had dinner there yet, you need to do so as soon as possible.

Vino Vino, 4119 Guadalupe: this wine bar-cum-restaurant is not the place to come for a quiet, intimate dinner, but we love everything about it – the food, the incredible wine selection, the wonderful and helpful staff – except the decibel level.

So there you have it. Now we’d love to hear about some of your local favorites, in Austin or elsewhere!

—Martin

What we’re reading

Heather: Robert McAfee Brown (ed.), The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr: Selected Essays and Addresses
Martin: Ellen Lupton, Thinking with Type: A Critical Guide for Designers, Writers, Editors, & Students

Cleaning out the mental refrigerator: Niebuhr, McKibben, and Band-Aids

2010-08-06T07:58:00.003-05:00

I’ve been surveying the multitude of leftovers in the refrigerator of my mind. When was the last time this thing was cleaned out? Jeez. Prodded into further examination of my last post by subsequent emails, conversations, and readings, I’ve concluded that my thinking is a little moldy and needs either to have the fuzz shaved off or be thrown out. Caveat lector: slightly smelly smorgasbord on the way.

Fuzzy thought number one: Chiding me for a Band-Aid approach to life-threatening environmental crises, a friend emailed this: “I actually think democratic control of the world through political action must be established. For me that means crushing the power of corporations.” On the one hand, I agree fully. The sheer, concentrated force of most multinational corporations is flabbergasting: the fact that British Petroleum still enjoys reasonable financial health despite the costs of the oil spill cleanup beggars the imagination. That much money is as good as a private militia, if not a private nuclear arsenal. Like anything powerful and willful, corporations need constant skeptical scrutiny.

Fuzzy thought number two: Bill McKibben, environmental prophet extraordinaire, was the first speaker a few weeks ago in a new annual lecture series endowed by my father in my mother’s memory at the Aspen Center for Environmental Studies. Martin and I were unable to attend, but my sister told me that the evening was beautiful, the talk was inspiring, and McKibben was a passionate and humble witness to the planet- (and therefore self-) destructive path we’re currently running down. (A few days later he gave a more formal version of his lecture at the Aspen Ideas Festival; either version is very much worth the time it takes to watch.)

Likening the scope of climate change to the devastation of nuclear warfare, he says that Americans “have so far failed to imagine that the explosion of a billion pistons and a billion cylinders each minute around the world could wreak the same kind of damage on the same scale.” Contributing to this failure of imagination are national inertia (we like the way we live); the divide between wealthy and poor nations (how do we tell others not to do what we have done when we are so comfortable?); and, unsurprisingly, the defensive position of the fossil fuel industry, which has hefted its mighty bulk directly on top of anything that might derail profits as usual. Imagine the public response to a campaign by the munitions industry downplaying the effects of nuclear warfare; one assumes that most of us would be thunderstruck. We should be as horrified by an industry that uses “the atmosphere as an open sewer for the effluent of their product” and makes more money than any industry in the history of money. But apparently we're not. Yet.

Fuzzy thought number three: corporations aren’t going away, nor should they. They (can/should) provide the infrastructure that local and sustainable economies need to thrive. The problem comes when mighty corporate bulk squishes the little guys flat, which is what usually happens. Governmental regulations meant to restrain the mighty corporate bulk often squish the little guys even flatter. (That’s about the most sophisticated economic observation I’m capable of producing, so I hope you enjoyed it.)

Fuzzy thoughts numbers four through six, which come from the very back of the bottom shelf: when faced with complex, apparently insoluble problems, my tendency is to go for a walk. Or pull out Band-Aids. Or make a big messy meal requiring lots of cleaning up. (Martin, as chief dishwasher, gets tired of this one.) But having spent the week reading Reinhold Niebuhr, one of the great Christian theologians of the twentieth century, and listening to Bill McKibben, I must sadly conclude that mine are inadequate responses. Writing with the stench of World War II still in the air, Niebuhr rebuked those Christians who had concluded that the only response to evil in the world was pacifism, trusting in power of human goodness to convert evil. Nor did he allow those who act against evil to trust fully in their own righteousness. Rather, he said, we need to be acutely aware that “political controversies are always conflicts between sinners and not between righteous men and sinners. [The Christian faith] ought to mitigate the self-righteousness which is an inevitable concomitant of all human conflict. The spirit of contrition is an important ingredient in the sense of justice.” As tempting as it is to preen, when we choose to fight the bully power of corporations, we need to be clear about our own implication in the tangled web of environmental injustice.

Add Niebuhr’s words to these: McKibben, a mild-mannered science writer, published a column titled “We’re hot as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore” on the TomDispatch.com website this week that immediately went viral. Furthermore, our mild-mannered hero writes specifically about the refusal of our political leaders even to consider climate legislation last week: “So what I want to say is: This is fucked up. The time has come to get mad, and then to get busy.” This from a Methodist Sunday School teacher!

The organization he started in 2008 with seven recent Middlebury College graduates—350.org—was a ragtag effort to organize a worldwide response to climate change. The results of that effort were astonishing. It turns out that the term “environmentalist” does not apply just to a bunch of over-educated, effete white Americans; in fact, the rest of the world—most of it brown, young, poor, and powerless—knows something we Americans still aren’t willing to confront: climate change, driven by fossil fuels, has crippled the regularity of the natural order we rely on for everything. Everything. Everything.

Through 350.org, we have an opportunity on October 10, 2010—10/10/10—to tell the powers that be that we’re hot as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore. We should still walk through our neighborhoods and chat with our neighbors. We should still introduce people to the profound pleasures of eating locally and according to the seasons. Acts like these will give us sustenance for the battle ahead, especially those of us who don’t feel much like fighters, who don’t want to crush anyone or anything, and most especially those of us who don’t want out clean out our refrigerators.

—Heather

What we’re reading
Heather: Dan O’Brien, Buffalo for the Broken Heart: Restoring Life to a Black Hills Ranch
Martin: Warren St. John, Outcasts United: An American Town, a Refugee Team, and One Woman’s Quest to Make a Difference

Listapalooza: summer reading

2010-07-30T07:56:00.004-05:00

It’s the end of July (or, as we call it in Texas, “late spring”), so I’ve been thinking a lot about summer reading, which has almost become a sort of cliché. There’s a lot to be said for curling up with a good book on a cold, wet winter day, of course, but nobody talks about "great winter reading.” No, it’s summer reading that gets all the press.

For some, summer’s a time to dip into a book we would only read on the beach or in the vacation cabin, the literary equivalent of comfort food—meatloaf, say, with a big pile of mashed potatoes on the side. Thrillers and mysteries tend to fall into this category.

For others, summer’s slower pace is the perfect time to tackle the classics, those monumental books we’ve always felt we ought to read but have never quite gotten around to. Reading these books can feel a little bit like eating several helpings of healthy vegetables, instead of doubling down on the meatloaf and mashers; but that, of course, can make you feel very virtuous indeed. Proust? Sure! Tolstoy? Bring it, baby!

As for me, certain books will forever conjure summer in my mind, and I can’t even tell you why. Here’s my (very) personal top ten, with brief annotations, in alphabetical order by author:

Brendan C. Boyd and Fred C. Harris, The Great American Baseball Card Flipping, Trading and Bubble Gum Book. What could possibly be more evocative of an American summer (if you’re Of a Certain Age, that is) than a book of color photos of baseball cards from the 1950s and 1960s, accompanied by wise-ass commentary? Samples: “Earl Torgeson’s two favorite activities were fist-fighting and breaking his shoulder, both of which he did whenever he got the chance.” “Albie Pearson would have been, had he been only six inches taller, almost 5'11".” And so on.

Richard Bradford, Red Sky at Morning. In this coming-of-age novel, teenager Josh Arnold and his high-strung Southern belle mother move from Mobile, Alabama, to the mountains of New Mexico during World War II and try, with mixed success, to adjust to a new culture and climate. Perhaps the funniest book I’ve ever read, and also one of the sweetest and most moving.

Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. A brilliant examination of how Lincoln shrewdly and gently won over some of his bitterest political enemies. In particular, I found the depiction of William Seward’s change of heart—by the time of Lincoln’s assassination, Seward worshipped him—profoundly moving. Goodwin is a wonderful writer, capable of making the familiar feel new: while I was reading this book for the first time, Heather came home one day to find me sitting in a chair, the book in my lap and tears running down my cheeks. “What’s wrong?” she asked anxiously. “They just shot Lincoln!” I sobbed.

Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows. Probably my favorite book when I was a boy; I don’t know how many times I’ve read it, but it must be several dozen by now. The adventures of Mole, Ratty, Mr. Toad, Badger, and all their friends turned me into a lifelong Anglophile, and the drawings by Ernest Shepard (who also illustrated that other English classic, A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh) are masterpieces. Nothing evokes the gentle pleasures of an English summer like this book. Oh bliss! Oh poop-poop!

Tracy Kidder, Home Town. I love just about everything I’ve ever read by Tracy Kidder, who I think is perhaps the finest nonfiction writer in the nation, but this is probably my favorite: a close-up of Northampton, Massachusetts, through the eyes of native son Tommy O’Connor, a cop who loves his hometown and touches a diverse (to say the least) cross-section of its citizenry. Highly recommended for anyone who’s ever felt a deep connection to a place, or anyone who’s ever wanted to.

Dennis Lehane, The Given Day. This historical novel interweaves the stories of Danny Coughlin, a young Irish-American cop, and Luther Laurence, a young African-American fleeing criminal violence, in Boston at the end of World War I. Actual events (the flu epidemic, the Boston police strike, the Red Scare) and characters (J. Edgar Hoover, Calvin Coolidge, and, most notably, Babe Ruth) lend the book the texture of reality, while Danny and Luther and the women they love attempt to survive against long odds.

Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove. I confess I can no longer read this without thinking of the miniseries—Robert Duvall, Tommy Lee Jones, Diane Lane, et al.—but the book itself is wonderfully suited for reading aloud on summer road trips, as we’ve proven repeatedly over the years while driving to or from Colorado and New Mexico.

J. K. Rowling, the Harry Potter series. Well. What can I say? We all loved all these books. Some of my favorite summer reading memories with the kids involve rushing out (to our neighborhood Randall’s, of all places) to buy multiple copies of the latest Harry Potter book on the day it came out, and then the hush—not quite absolute, but punctuated by occasional snorts and gasps and “How far are you?”s—that fell over the house as each of us burrowed immediately into his or her copy.

Alexander McCall Smith, The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series. Not really mysteries, despite the title, but the wise and gentle adventures of the sweet but determined and “traditionally built” Precious Ramotswe, the first woman private investigator in Botswana; Mr. J. L. B. Matekoni, her suitor and the proprietor of Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors; Grace Makutsi, Mma Ramotswe’s hyperconscientious assistant; and various others as they confront a succession of quiet moral and ethical challenges.

Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose. A heartbreaking novel about the American West and the people who struggle to live in it, and the most harrowing and realistic fictional portrayal of a marriage I’ve ever read. Framed by the narration of a retired and embittered history professor, the novel is really the story of his grandmother, a refined nineteenth-century Easterner who marries an ambitious young mining engineer and embarks on a peripatetic life of frustration and accommodation.

So there you have it: ten of my seasonal favorites, right up there with fresh peaches and gin and tonics. Won’t you tell us yours, Dear Reader?

—Martin

What we’re reading
Heather: Ellen F. Davis, Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible (again)
Martin: A. J. Jacobs, The Know-It-All: One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World

Double vision: prophets, tribalism, eugenics, and the environment

2010-07-23T07:07:00.002-05:00

As I dog-paddle through the sea of books threatening to drown not just me but the overwhelmed shores of my bedside table, I found these sentences: “For those who draw near and offer themselves before God, satisfaction of hunger is neither an end in itself nor a wholly ‘secular’ event.... [E]ating is a worshipful event, even revelatory; it engenders a healthful knowledge of God.” When I read this, I thought, “Ah, I am a member of the tribe that believes this.”

I briefly met Ellen F. Davis, author of Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible and professor of Bible and practical theology at Duke Divinity School, when she spoke at our church about ten years ago, and I immediately developed a helpless intellectual crush on her. The crush is not diminished by the fact that Our Hero Wendell Berry wrote the foreword to the book and is quoted at the beginning of each chapter.

Davis’s basic claim is that the fertility and habitability of the Earth—and particularly of Israel—are the best indices of the health of the covenant relationship between God and his people. She writes beautifully about that stickiest of words in Genesis 1, when mankind is given “dominion” over the earth. Made in God’s image, we are meant to exercise dominion as God does, and in Genesis 1, the way God exercises dominion is to exclaim in delight over the goodness of his work, and then to declare a day of rest for his delightful creation. Reckless topsoil depletion, toxic pesticides, and Confined Animal Factory Operations, among many other current agricultural practices, would probably not pass the Delight Test.

I read all this with a double vision: on the one hand, I underline passages, write notes, and spray exclamation points in the margins. On the other hand, I think about my neighbors in the Hill Country, many of whom are very conservative Christians, and I wonder how they would react to Davis’s scathing comparison of pharaonic agricultural and economic policies (the ones that made God really, really mad) with the practices of American agribusiness. I’m not sure the book will get a lot of traction here. (Well, or anywhere; the book’s title is so unsexy it might as well be wearing a suit of armor.) And yet it seems to me so clear that Davis’s analysis is Right and needs to be broadcast.

So how do you convince someone you’re right? Well, here’s how not to do it: the way the American conservation movement sounded its earliest notes, at least politically. The current issue of Orion magazine carries a feature story entitled “Conservation and Eugenics: The Environmental Movement’s Dirty Secret.” Charles Wolforth, the author, links Teddy Roosevelt’s New Nationalism, with its emphasis on patriotism and conservation, to the propagation of “higher races,” as opposed to Native Americans, Eskimos, and other "lower races."

Wolforth writes, “These ideas had been developed at Ivy League and other universities, at museums of natural history and anthropology in New York and Washington, in learned societies and in scientific literature. When... world’s fairs focused on the West, the link between natural resources, morality, and racism was drawn ever more explicitly.” Pointedly, Wolforth quotes from Roosevelt’s New Nationalism speech, arguably the launching of the modern conservation movement:

“Of all the questions which can come before this nation, short of the actual preservation of its existence in a great war, there is none which compares in importance with the great central task of leaving this land even a better land for our descendants than it is for us, and training them into a better race to inhabit the land and pass it on. Conservation is a great moral issue, for it involves the patriotic duty of insuring the safety and continuance of the nation.” It also, apparently, involved practicing eugenics.

Awash in my sea of books, I am a descendent of this tribe. No wonder it’s hard to convince many people I'm right.

When I walk through my beloved Austin neighborhood, I’m often beset with the same double vision I have when reading the prophetic environmental writing I’m prone to read. I walk through my neighborhood pleased—delighted—with my wonderful neighbors and their well-tended homes and gardens. As I have mentioned before, walking a couple of blocks can take forty-five minutes or more, depending on who else is out and about and what news needs to be exchanged, which dogs need to be admired, whose children are doing fabulously or exasperatingly nutty things. How can this be a bad thing? And yet I can’t help but be aware of the multitudes of cars, the endless whir of air conditioners, the trucks bearing pesticides that fertilize lawns, the lights that are on all night, the sprinklers running even as it rains. (We, too, are guilty of some of these.) How do you convince people without double vision that the goodness they’re seeing in their way of life is resting on something destructive?

In the fruit of the American environmental movement there is a noxious worm: a sense of righteousness that often gnaws its way into self-righteous tribalism. The ways in which we eat and live are often markers of who we are; when told (or bullyragged) to change these ways, it can seem as if something essential in us has been condemned, most particularly when judgment comes from outside the tribe. Like triumphalist Christians who refuse to acknowledge the ugliness and violence that comes bundled with the hope and beauty of Christian history, triumphalist environmentalism will foment ill-will from people whose health and livelihoods could be enhanced or saved by its message.

Every movement must have its prophets. Traditionally, prophets haven’t been the sort of people you want to invite home for dinner; they eat locusts, dress in skins or nothing at all, sit in cisterns, moan a lot—that sort of thing. The true prophets get listened to not because they're scare-mongering but because they always have an accurate sense of their tribe’s history, an acute awareness of when it has fallen away from its original goodness. They include themselves in their judgments. Despite their very visible eccentricities, there is an essential humility to them. When I pull up behind a pickup truck with a bumper sticker that says “Drill Here Drill Now Pay Less” (along with a Rick Perry sticker) and my first impulse is to jump out of my car and bash in the windshield, I know I’m no prophet. We’re both driving, after all, and I need that gas as much as the other driver does. I’m not passing that humility test.

So where does that leave my tribe, the irritable non-prophets of the environmental persuasion? As an oldest child, I always like to have the right answer to pass on—and enforce, whenever possible. My tribe is frequently stymied. But here’s one thing: invite someone over for dinner, someone not of the tribe. Feed them something that’s beautiful, that’s grown in accordance with the revelatory economy of food kindly produced. And think about this passage from one of Wendell Berry’s Sabbath poems:

Leave your windows and go out, people of the world,
go into the streets, go into the fields, go into the woods
and along the streams. Go together, go alone.
Say no to the Lords of War which is money
which is Fire. Say no by saying yes
to the air, to the earth, to the trees,
yes to the grasses, to the rivers, to the birds
and the animals and every living thing, yes
to the small houses, yes to the children. Yes.

—Heather

What we’re reading
Heather: Thomas Perry, Strip
Martin: Russell Shorto, The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America

There and back again: a geobiography

2010-07-16T07:19:00.002-05:00

We recently led a seminar on Madroño Ranch as part of the annual Summer Literary Festival at Gemini Ink, a writing center in San Antonio. The theme of this year’s festival was “What Would Nature Do?” and in our seminar we read and discussed works by Wendell Berry, Annie Dillard, Michael Pollan, Ellen Davis, Lewis Hyde, and Mary Oliver. We also asked the participants to write a brief “geobiography” (as “A Native Hill” is described in the collection The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry), a statement of how they consider themselves rooted in a particular place. Here’s a slightly modified version of what I wrote:

I am a native of the Bay Area, a place that everyone thinks is among the most beautiful in the world. I was born in San Francisco and grew up in Marin County, just to the north of the city across the Golden Gate Bridge; I lived amid the winding hillside lanes and towering redwood and eucalyptus trees of Mill Valley, beneath Mount Tamalpais, until I was eighteen, when I went off to college in Massachusetts. There I met the woman I would marry, a native Texan, as I recounted in an earlier post; she had a job lined up in San Antonio after graduation, I followed her there, and I never lived in California again.

Why did I so thoughtlessly, even eagerly, put California behind me when I left home? In part, I realize in retrospect, I was hoping to escape some not particularly unusual or interesting adolescent angst and family tensions, and to redefine myself as a brighter, happier person in a new setting, among strangers. (I say nothing of the futility of such an effort; I was young and foolish.) Massachusetts, and then Texas, seemed like blessed opportunities, and I clutched at them desperately.

Only… almost despite myself, I continued to count as my closest friends two men I had known almost since birth. Brad and I met in kindergarten; Hans came a few years later. The three of us went all the way through elementary and high school together, and all three of us headed east to college, Brad to Harvard and Hans to Yale. (Both, I hear, pretty good schools.)

After college, I ended up in Texas, while Brad and Hans returned to California, to Los Angeles and San Francisco respectively. Last year we all turned fifty, and Brad decided we should celebrate the milestone together. So, after much back-and-forthing (all three of us are married with children, with all the scheduling complications that implies), we arranged to meet in San Francisco in March and spend a day in Marin hiking along the California Coastal Trail, six miles from Tennessee Valley to Muir Beach and back again.

It was a beautiful day, we had a wonderful time, and we agreed to make this little reunion an annual event. This year, again, we gathered in March and spent the day hiking in Marin, this time at Pierce Point Ranch on the northern end of Point Reyes National Seashore. Next year we may meet in L.A., in deference to Brad; the year after that, perhaps we’ll meet in Texas.

One of the wonderful gifts this time with Brad and Hans has given me is the opportunity to reconsider my relationship to California. My father was something of an outdoorsman, and when I was a child we went camping and hiking in Marin County, in the Sierras, and even up the coast to Oregon and Washington. For various reasons, I never really enjoyed these trips as much as I should have—or so I thought. But hiking to Muir Beach and at Point Reyes with Brad and Hans forced me to confront an unexpected and long-suppressed truth: I loved this land, and felt comfortable in it in a way I still don’t in Texas, even though Texas is now home. I gloried in half-remembered vistas, in the way the glittering ocean and the crepuscular redwood forests and the rolling dairy farms butted up against each other; in the cypress and eucalyptus and madrone and laurel and manzanita, and in the blooming flowers whose names I’d never learned; in the cool, salty air; in the fog banks drifting in over the Pacific.

I felt as if a long-shut door in my head had been wrenched open again, and I could look out, for the first time in years, onto the bright green hills of a place I’d forgotten, or almost forgotten—a place I knew at once, with an almost literally breathtaking shock of recognition. I now realize that, having grown up amid such gentle but dramatic beauty (the suggestive, if erroneous, local legend has it that Tamalpais means “Sleeping Lady”), I came to believe that the world is an essentially beneficent place, and that the land is an unfailing source of pleasure and comfort. (I might have reached a different set of conclusions had I grown up in, say, Orla, Texas, or Barrow, Alaska.)

Mostly, however, I realize how much I took for granted, and how unbelievably lucky I was (and am). Over the years I’ve wasted a lot of time and energy in attempting to deny or at least rewrite my past, but now I feel as though I’ve been given a second chance to connect, to learn this land—not as the place I live, perhaps, but as the place I’m from, the place that formed me.

—Martin

What we’re reading
Heather: Kathryn Stockett, The Help
Martin: Dan O’Brien, Buffalo for the Broken Heart: Restoring Life to a Black Hills Ranch

Made for you and me: thoughts on private property

2010-07-09T06:55:00.001-05:00

Last week I went to Woody Creek, Colorado, to visit my father, sister, and brother and their posses. Among the many pleasures I find at the family place are my early morning walks up a trail that runs behind my sister and brother-in-law’s house through Bureau of Land Management land. Known locally as the Buns of Steel Trail, it gallops up a southwest-facing slope dotted with scrub oak and sage. The soil is so red (colorado in Spanish) that if you wear white socks, you may be sure that they’ll never be white again, even after repeated washings. From varying elevations, you can watch the entire Roaring Fork Valley unroll below you and note the stately procession of the valley’s grand guardians, from the hulking Sawatch Range in the east to the ethereal Elk Mountains to the south to the comfortable bulk of Mount Sopris to the southwest and down to the gentler terrain (relatively speaking) toward Glenwood Springs. Because of bears, it’s wise to walk with dogs or other noisemakers, but your heart can be stopped just as effectively by a flushed grouse as by the appearance of a bear. Sometimes you walk through waist-high lupines, which can give a Texan a complex; even in a fabulous spring you can’t walk in bluebonnets, first cousins to mountain lupines, any higher than your shins.

I came to the familiar circle of scrub oaks where I usually look down on my father’s and sister’s houses about a thousand feet below and then, delighted with the world, turn to go back down. Just imagine the oceanic depths of my outrage when I saw a sign that said “For Sale: Cabin Site." For SALE? Whose foul idea of a joke was this? This wasn’t private property: it was communal, open to all who would admire it and dream away the hidden bears.

My sister set me straight: we have been trespassing all these years, the fence marking the boundary of BLM land having fallen into disrepair several dozen yards before the turn-around spot. The dirt road next to the turn-around spot wanders for miles through the back country and is accessible to the public, but the relatively new owners of the land around the road (including the cabin site) regularly patrol it to be sure that what few walkers there are don't step off the public way onto their private property.

Still incensed the next evening as the dogs and I took our postprandial constitutional, I encountered a young man on a four-wheeler driving onto our property, which is at the end of Little Woody Creek Road. “Can I help you?” I asked. “Oh, no, ma’am,” he said politely. “I’m just going to check my water. I do it twice a day.” My eyebrows at my hairline, I said, perhaps not quite as politely, “YOUR water?" “Yes, ma’am,” he said complacently.

I almost slugged him. In the politest, most Christian way, of course.

My sister explained (do you detect a pattern here?): Colorado’s water laws are so Byzantine and obtuse that they make those in Texas, shockingly, look almost reasonable. (In Colorado, whichever property has the oldest claim to the water controls it, regardless of how many times that property has changed hands.) But water laws aren’t really germane here. What I was struck by—and almost struck out in defense of—is my sense of what constitutes private property, especially when it comes to land that I love. I was furious to find that A) land I thought was communal was, in fact, privately owned (and NOT by my family); and B) land I thought was privately owned (by my family) was, in some respects, communal.

Having recently moved Lewis Hyde’s The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World to the top of my nonfiction top-ten list, I can’t ignore the profound complications of ownership, especially of something like land, which clearly comes to humanity as gift. We did not make it, and yet somehow we (some very few of us) have come to claim it as our own—initially, at least, through arrogance and (often violent) appropriation. This makes me sad and uneasy, because I love the land that my family and I “own.” And I hate those quotation marks, but I think they’re a useful discipline for any landowner.

When I got back to hot, scruffy, sweaty Texas from cool, elegant Colorado, I found a book waiting for me: Ellen Davis’s Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible. (Insert punch line here.) In the book’s first line, Davis writes: “Agrarianism is a way of thinking and ordering life in community that is based on the health of the land and living creatures.” Those may not sound like fighting words, but they are. Davis claims that the Bible is grounded in agrarian thought and practice, in which possession of the land—Israel—is dependent “upon proper use and care of land in community.” The great irony is that America, steeped in the parallels between its own westward expansion and the Hebrews’ crossing the Jordan to the Promised Land, has completely missed the point by ignoring the holiness of the land given (and received by its first residents) as unmitigated gift. Buying and selling land for rapacious personal profit, poisoning it, cutting down ancient trees in order to build highways, polluting waters, killing for sport, abusing the animals given for nourishment, leaving the land for dead – these behaviors were and still should be open to emphatic prophetic censure as clear violations of the spirit in which the Earth’s tenants were given such gifts, and clear invitations for divine retribution that included (and still includes) such weapons as whirlwinds, drought, flood, and famine.

In his introduction to Davis’s book, Wendell Berry writes, “We have been given the earth to live, not on, but with and from, and only on the condition that we care properly for it. We did not make it, and we know little about it. In fact, we don’t, and will never, know enough about it to make our survival sure or our lives carefree. Our relation to our land will always remain, to a certain extent, mysterious. Therefore, our use of it must be determined more by reverence and humility, by local memory and affection, than by the knowledge we now call ‘objective’ or ‘scientific.’ Above all, we must not damage it permanently or compromise its natural means of sustaining itself.”

As seriously as I take Wendell Berry, Ellen Davis, and the Bible, though, I can’t ignore that very noisy part of me that wanted to deck that polite young man on “our” property checking on “his” water. The part of me that understands ownership as power isn’t going to disappear in a puff of high-mindedness. Nor am I sure it should; I don’t know of any compellingly desirable alternative to private land ownership as it currently exists. The government? Don’t think so. The Church, whatever that is? Ditto. Communal ownership? Only if I have my own bathroom. And while well-thought-out policies are a necessary component of land stewardship, they can’t force the conversion experience that moves our relationship with the land from that of owner and chattel to that of respectful, fruitful, loving partnership. How do we become married to the land?

By this point in most of my blog posts, I’ve managed to tie myself into emotional knots: dear God, there’s no way out of whichever mess I’ve decided needs fixing this week. So this is the time I usually go outside and stew about it. And I’ll start pulling weeds and notice a volunteer melon plant spilling its way out of the pile of compost I forgot to spread. And I’ll see one of the crowd of long-armed sunflowers fluttering and waving under a dozen investigative goldfinches so bright they look like flowers themselves. And I’ll watch the power plays at the hummingbird feeders, and listen to the mockingbirds make fun of the wrens. I’ll find that damn grasshopper that’s been eating my basil. (We shall say no more of him.) I’ll find a really cool-looking bug I haven’t seen before, or maybe shriek a little shriek when I come upon one of those terrifying large and harmless (oh, sure) yellow garden spiders. I’ll hear a chuck-will’s-widow emphatically tuning up in the draw behind our house. And I’ll tell someone how much I love “my” garden, how lucky I am, how lucky we are to live on this earth. Isn’t that how converts are made?

—Heather

What we’re reading
Heather: Ellen Davis, Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible
Martin: Tom Killion and Gary Snyder, Tamalpais Walking: Poetry, History, and Prints

The literary environment (with apologies to the Williams Alumni Review)

2010-07-02T06:51:00.003-05:00

Confession: I consider myself a loyal son of alma mater, but I usually just skim the quarterly Williams Alumni Review before tossing it into the recycling pile. A story in the June issue, however, caught my eye. “The Literary Environment,” by Denise DiFulco, is about the director of the college’s Center for Environmental Studies (CES), a Spanish professor named, confusingly, Jennifer French.

The article notes that a lot of people have asked French how a Spanish professor came to be named the director of the CES. The answer involves her first book, Nature, Neo-Colonialism, and the Spanish American Regional Writers (2005), which examined early twentieth century Latin American literary responses to European economic hegemony in the region. Or something like that. Explains French, “Often those writers, including Horacio Quiroga and José Eustasio Rivera, made central to their narratives the deleterious effects of agriculture and other industries.”

Sadly, I know next to nothing about Latin American literature, and I’d never heard of Quiroga or Rivera, but another quotation from the article really struck me: “At their best, environmental history, philosophy, religion, literary studies, and the like engage the underlying assumptions of environmental policy and environmental science.”

Exactly! I thought. This is a view that resonates profoundly with Heather and me—we are, after all, both English majors—and when we eventually begin accepting environmental writers for residencies at Madroño Ranch, we hope to cast as wide a net as possible.

Say the words "environmental writer" and I suspect that most people think of folks like Bill McKibben or William Cronon or Michael Pollan or David Quammen (all of whom happen to be heroes of ours): essayists or historians with a biological or agricultural bent. They, and many others like them, are among the most important writers we have, and we would be thrilled—thrilled—to have them, or their peers, as residents at Madroño. But we also hope to attract novelists and poets and philosophers and theologians and playwrights and screenwriters and memoirists and perhaps even (what the heck) bloggers—pretty much anyone who’s thinking and writing in creative ways about the land and those who have their being on it, and how they affect each other.

Think of the fiction of Wendell Berry, who (much as William Faulkner did in Mississippi) has created a complex and compelling imaginary landscape in Kentucky. (Apparently the American South is particularly suited to this sort of exercise.) Think of the novels of Willa Cather—Death Comes for the Archbishop is still my favorite—and Wallace Stegner, which depict the varied experiences of humans confronted with the vast spaces of the American West. Think of the poetry of Mary Oliver, in which the animal and vegetal and geological is a constant, almost sentient presence, and W. S. Merwin, described in the New York Times as “a fierce critic of the ecological damage humans have wrought.” Think of the economic writings of Paul Hawken and Woody Tasch, critiques of modern industrial capitalism’s obsession with short-term, bottom-line profit at the expense of just about everything else. Heck, think of David Winner’s odd little book Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Football—one of my personal favorites—in which he examines how landscape has affected the style of soccer played in the Netherlands.

Closer to home, think of the gracious and elegant memoirs of John Graves and Roy Bedichek, two of the foundational texts of the environmental movement in Texas; or the beginning of The Path to Power, the first volume of Robert Caro’s epic three-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson, which is still the best short history of the Texas Hill Country I’ve ever read; or even Witold Rybczynski’s magisterial biography of Frederick Law Olmsted—not a Texan, but an astute observer of the state—which is a wonderful narrative summary of nineteenth-century American thought about nature in urban and suburban settings. Each of these works, I believe, has something original and important to say about community in America, community in this case defined as (to crib shamelessly from Pollan’s website) “the places where nature and culture intersect.”

We’d be pretty surprised to receive applications from Faulkner, Cather, Stegner, or Bedichek, since they're, well, dead. But would the rest of them want to come to Madroño Ranch? Well, why not? We hope that the offer of beautiful and rugged surroundings, free from distraction, in which to ponder and dream and focus and unfocus (and eat well, of course; let’s not forget eating well) and bounce ideas off peers, will prove irresistible. Are we aiming high? Of course; but if you don’t aim high, you’ll just keep hitting the ground, right? Who knows—maybe Jennifer French herself will want to come. According to the article, she’s already working on her next book, a study of how memories of the War of the Triple Alliance (fought between Paraguay and the combined forces of Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay from 1864 to 1870) have influenced attitudes toward land use in Paraguay. Wouldn’t that be cool?

—Martin

What we’re reading
Heather: Laurie King, Touchstone
Martin: Paul Hawken, The Ecology of Commerce: A Declaration of Sustainability (still)

The gift economy

2010-06-25T07:55:00.002-05:00

Martin’s last post about our entertainingly (or so we hope) ill-prepared entry into the marketplace has got me thinking. (Martin says the most terrifying words in the world are “Honey, I’ve been thinking...” when they come out of my mouth. Reader, beware!)

In preparing for the seminar we’re going to lead at the Gemini Ink Summer Lit Fest in San Antonio next month, I’ve been rereading Lewis Hyde’s The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World. The description of our seminar asks all the Big Questions about our hopes and plans for Madroño Ranch. I’m not sure what prompted me to look at The Gift again, but whatever it was, it was, well, a gift; Hyde beautifully untangles many of the ideas knotted in my head about those hopes and plans.

He begins by identifying the two distinct economies in which a work of art exists: the market economy and the gift economy. While a work of art can exist without a market, it cannot exist without a gift. Harlequin Romances, for example, follow guidelines set by market research and sell very well. But are they works of art? Probably not. While writing one requires a certain level of competence, a Harlequin Romance probably doesn’t have a foot, or heaving bosom, in the gift economy.

Hyde develops a theory of the gift, which of course has multiple levels of significance. Its economy is marked by three related obligations: to give, to accept, and to reciprocate. Gift exchange is what one early theorist called a “‘total social phenomenon’—one whose transactions are at once economic, juridical, moral, aesthetic, religious, and mythological.” Gift exchange is an issue in medical ethics as well, especially with reference to organ transplants: what is the status of body parts? Is it appropriate to commodify what has traditionally been regarded as a gift? What are the consequences when something moves from the gift economy to the market economy—when worth and value are confused?

Hyde cites the case of the Ford Pinto, a car that had a tendency to spill gas in low-speed collisions, a defect that killed at least 500 people. An easy fix for this defect existed, but after a cost-benefit analysis which valued a human life at $200,000, Ford decided that the costs of fixing the Pinto exceeded the benefits. While the decision may have made sense from a market perspective, it ignored the fact that most of us participate in another economy as well, one in which the gift of life cannot be assigned a dollar value.

One of the marks of a gift is that it is always in motion, transferred from one individual or community to another. It must be consumed (i.e., eaten, immolated, thrown into the sea) or given away; otherwise, it ceases to become a gift and becomes mere property. A true gift is the antithesis of personal property. Hyde says that “a gift is consumed when it moves from one hand to another with no assurance of return.... A market exchange has an equilibrium or stasis; you pay to balance the scale. But when you give a gift there is momentum, and the weight shifts from body to body.” Gift economies generally operate in relatively small communities like families, brotherhoods, or tribes; market economies tend to emerge at the limits of gift economies as a means of negotiating with outsiders. While my truncated description makes gift economies sound primitive, they aren’t; Hyde cites the (ideally) unrestricted flow of ideas within the scientific community as an example. When ideas become remunerative for an individual or a portion of the community instead of free to the entire community, the gift economy dries up and the spirit of the group evaporates. The gift of ideas ceases to move.

Gift economies foment community; market economies fragment it—another iteration of the endless wrestling match between the Many and the One. One of the great benefits of a market economy—freedom from bondage—has significant limits. Where “the market alone rules, and particularly where its benefits derive from the conversion of gift property to commodities, the fruits of exchange are lost. At that point commerce becomes correctly associated with the fragmentation of community and the suppression of liveliness, fertility, and social feeling. For where we maintain no institutions of positive reciprocity, we find ourselves unable to... enter gracefully into nature, unable to draw community from the mass, and, finally, unable to receive, contribute toward, and pass along the collective treasures we refer to as culture and tradition.”

So here's what I’ve been thinking, honey: industrialized nations have converted the gift properties of nature into commodities. Any aboriginal people could have told us that disaster would ensue as a result of buying and selling what was pure gift, something not earned but given to us in abundance that the gift economy demands we pass on to our children in its original abundance.

I’ve also been rereading Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature, in which he quotes the journals of the early American artist, writer, and wanderer George Catlin. Riding north to the Missouri River, Catlin found a campsite “in one of the most lovely little valleys I ever saw, and even far more beautiful than could be imagined by mortal man... an enchanting little lawn of five or six acres, on the banks of a cool and rippling stream, that was alive with fish; and every now and then, a fine brood of ducks, just old enough for delicious food and too unsophisticated to avoid an easy and simple death. This little lawn was surrounded by bunches and copses of the most picturesque foliage, consisting of leafy bois d’arcs and elms, spreading their huge branches as if in offering protection to the rounded groups of cherry and plum branches that supported festoons of grapevines with the purple clusters that hung in the most tempting manner over the green carpet that was everywhere decked out with wild flowers of all tints and various sizes, from the modest sunflowers, with their thousand tall and droopy heads, to the lilies that stood, and the violets that crept beneath them.... The wild deer were repeatedly rising from their quiet lairs, and bounding out and over the graceful swells of the prairies which hemmed it in.” McKibben comments, “If this passage had a little number at the start of each sentence, it could be Genesis....”

So with Hyde and McKibben in the front of my mind, I was stunned to read of Judge Feldman’s recent injunction against President Obama’s moratorium on offshore drilling, which just proves that I live in a lovely little bubble along with fairies and elves and a herd of unicorns. I do not argue against the fact of the market economy any more than I argue against the changing seasons. Nor do I argue against the gravity of depriving tens of thousands of Gulf Coast residents of economic stability. But those who value the treasures of the Gulf through a market-driven cost-benefit analysis need to remember that they’re operating in a gift economy as well, and that there will be an audit.

Back to Gemini Ink and Madroño’s mission. We hope that Madroño will operate in a way that recognizes the beauty and necessity of both markets; after all, I’m out there hawking the virtues of bison meat. But I hope that in producing that meat we recognize the gift of abundance it brings us, that we honor that gift, and that we pass it on to our children and to the community in and around the ranch.

—Heather

What we’re reading
Heather: Bill McKibben, The End of Nature
Martin: Paul Hawken, The Ecology of Commerce: A Declaration of Sustainability

Adventures in Business-Land

2010-06-18T07:40:00.002-05:00

This week, during a solo trip to Madroño, Heather spent much of her time knocking on doors in Kerrville, Bandera, Medina, Tarpley, and vicinity, hoping to convince chefs and restaurateurs to buy locally raised, grass-fed bison meat from the ranch. Our initial herd of fifteen animals has grown to thirty-six, including a couple of young males who have already, by their obstreperous behavior, nominated themselves as the first to be harvested this fall.

I’m not particularly objective, of course, but I think she could make a pretty compelling case to those potential customers. To wit:

Bison meat generally has more protein, iron, and nutrients than beef or chicken;
Bison meat is lower in fat and calories than beef or chicken;
Our bison spend their lives ranging freely on Madroño’s 1,500 acres, and never set foot on feedlots;
Our bison are never injected with or fed growth hormones, steroids, or any other supplements;
To ensure the quality of the meat and reduce stress on the animals, our bison will be field-harvested on site under the supervision of a licensed inspector from the Texas Department of State Health Services.

Another point we hope to emphasize is that, since we’re a small-scale, local operation, our customers will also be our neighbors, which means we’ll be accountable and responsive to them in a way that Big Agriculture isn’t. It also means that every penny our customers spend on our meat will stay right here in Central Texas.

Our hope is that the sale of bison meat, eggs, and produce from Madroño will (eventually) provide significant financial support for the residential center for environmental writers we hope to open at the ranch. We know there’s a growing market in Austin for fresh, local, sustainably raised food, but we’re not planning to sell in Austin—too complicated and expensive logistically, plus we wouldn’t want to compete with our friend and mentor Hugh Fitzsimons of Thunder Heart Bison—so we’re hoping to find a comparable demand in the area right around Madroño. (And based on Heather’s schmoozing this week, the early returns are encouraging.)

Make no mistake, though: going into business—especially the business of turning a creature into a commodity—presents all kinds of challenges for a couple of recovering English majors. Virtually all of my adult work experience has been in the nonprofit sector; shifting to something that is explicitly designed to make money, no matter how noble we believe the cause to be, is a bit of a shock. (A couple of years ago we were told that the mother of one of our daughter’s schoolmates referred to us as “just a couple of old hippies.” She did not intend it as a compliment.) As entrepreneurs, we are babes in the woods.

I imagine our first bison harvest will be quite an adventure, as will the processing and distribution that will follow. We’re already moving out of our comfort zone—I’m pretty sure Heather never imagined herself as a salesperson—and confronting a couple thousand pounds of dead buffalo will move us even farther into unknown territory. I mean, business plans? Financial projections? Balance sheets? Puh-lease!

Of course, it’s probably good for us complacent old hippies to be forced out of our comfort zones occasionally; we just have to hope that we don’t make a total cock-up of it.

On the other hand, maybe we don’t want to get too caught up in this whole mercantile thing. I’ve been reading Ian L. McHarg’s influential book Design with Nature, originally published in 1969. McHarg, an expatriate Scot who pioneered the field of environmental planning in the United States, writes witheringly of the prevailing view in his adopted homeland: “Neither love nor compassion, health nor beauty, dignity nor freedom, grace nor delight are important unless they can be priced. If they are non-price benefits or costs they are relegated to inconsequence. The economic model proceeds inexorably towards its self-fulfillment of more and more despoliation, uglification and inhibition to life, all in the name of progress – yet, paradoxically, the components which the model excludes are the most important human ambitions and accomplishments and the requirements for survival.”

Of course, McHarg is hardly the first thinker to decry a fixation on financial gain. In the sixth century BCE, Lao-Tzu put the same sentiment somewhat more pithily: “Chase after money and security and your heart will never unclench.” In a similar vein, I Timothy tells us that “the love of money is the root of all evil.” (I Timothy is also the source of the phrase “filthy lucre,” by the way.) Jesus himself reminds us, in Matthew’s gospel, that “You cannot serve both God and Mammon.”

And yet, and yet... we live in a fallen world, and money is an intrinsic part of it. The love of money may be the root of all evil, but money itself is not necessarily evil. (Or, as Peter J. Gomes writes in The Good Book: Reading the Bible with Mind and Heart, “Wealth is not a sin, but it is a problem.”) The trick, obviously, is to learn money; to use it; to see it as a means to an end, not an end in itself. I mean, why can’t Madroño become an example of enlightened capitalism, a model of a countercultural way of thinking about commerce—a way that emphasizes the small-scale, local, sustainable long term, instead of the bigger-is-better, metastatic, smash-and-grab short term? I think we’ve all seen enough of the latter way of thinking, and its consequences, to last us a good while.

Of course, it’s easy for me to preach self-righteously about the corrupting dangers of the profit motive; we’re unlikely to make enough money selling bison to threaten the state of our souls. Indeed, just breaking even seems like an ambitious goal right now. I'm sure we’ll be writing more about Heather and Martin’s Adventures in Business-Land in the weeks and months to come. In the meantime, pray for us – and our bank account.

—Martin

What we’re reading
Heather: Richard Powers, The Echo Maker
Martin: Ian L. McHarg, Design with Nature (still)