Into the Woods

March and April were cold. Spring is about three weeks late this year. Not only that, but the long-range forecast shows below-average temperatures through mid-May, with above-average rainfall. This will do no harm to the spring crops. Cabbage, lettuce, onions, etc., love cool, wet weather. I’m a bit concerned, though, that these early crops will mature so late that we’ll be behind getting the summer crops started — tomatoes, squash, etc. We’ll do everything we can to rush the spring crops to maturity. The irrigation system is in place, though it has been very little needed so far.

This year, we’re mulching heavily, hoping that it will conserve moisture and keep down the weeds. Back in 2011, I recommended a book: Gardening When It Counts: Growing Food in Hard Times, by Steve Solomon. In retrospect, though this book contains lots of good information on water frugality, it steered me wrong in some ways. The author is of the opinion that, if you live in an area with enough rainfall to support deciduous forests, then you can garden without irrigation. He also does not think that mulching is very important. I strongly disagree with him. With summer weather like the weather we’ve had here for the past five years, I am strongly of the opinion that having a reliable garden without irrigation just is not possible. Even when there is rainfall, as summer temperatures rise daily to 95 and above, such rainfall as we get is rapidly dried up, and heat stress and water stress become severe. Mulch, I’m hoping, will help keep the soil cooler and conserve water. As a bonus, the hay we’re using as mulch will decompose into the soil, helping to feed the worms.

Ken has worked like a dog in the garden this year. Sometimes when I look out the window from the comfort of the kitchen and see him working so hard, I feel guilty. But Mark Bittman, writing in the New York Times, has reminded me of a very important principle: a garden without a kitchen (and someone slaving in that kitchen) is useless. Every well tended and productive garden must have a kitchen running at full tilt, with someone working in that kitchen who understands what to do with the stuff coming from the garden. We’ve got that process down. Here at the abbey, the garden and the kitchen are a smoothly functioning unit.

Cabbage and onions

Young lettuce. I hope we’re as covered up with lettuce this year as we were last year. I felt as though I spent half the day every day last spring washing lettuce.

Chard

Hay for mulching. We’ve bought it from a farmer near Sandy Ridge for as low as $2 a bale.

Marilyn, Bridget, and Sophia, the 2013 spring chickens. They’re thriving, and their voices are starting to change into hen sounds rather than cheeps. The abbey now has seven chickens.

Tiny peaches

Tiny apples. This is the apple trees’ fifth spring. This year, for the first time, they’ve prolifically set baby apples. I’m hoping for a real apple crop this year.

The first rose will happen soon …

… as will the first magnolia blossom.

Woody Welch for the New York Times

Ken has a longish piece to be published in Sunday’s New York Times. It was released to the web today.

It’s a sort of preview of his book, which will be released May 14.

I canned a bunch of sauerkraut today. It’s a shame to have to can sauerkraut, because it’s a living fermented food. But there was no way I could eat it all before it went bad. It is outstandingly good sauerkraut — all organic from the abbey’s spring cabbage, made with with sea salt.

I’m done canning for this year. My total production was 44 quarts of food — tomatoes, green beans, pickles, sauerkraut, and homemade chili made from tomatoes and onions from the garden. Forty-four quarts is not exactly slouchy, but it’s also nowhere close to a what it would take for real self-sufficiency. Still, it’s a lot of payback from the garden. There’s food put away, plus more than four months of the year when I bought no produce (other than garlic) from the grocery store.

I learned a lot about sauerkraut this year. In the past, I made it with cabbage I’d bought up in the mountains. This year it was my own cabbage. It was in the crock the afternoon after I picked it. Not only was the kraut much tastier, the fermentation process was much cleaner. There was no sign of mold or scum. Freshness makes a huge difference.

One of the authors of the study, Ingram Olkin, has been doing propaganda work for corporations since the 1970s.

When the story first came out on Sept. 3 about the Stanford study that slammed organic foods, was I the only person who caught a strong whiff of propaganda?

At the time, there wasn’t much that a non-expert could say in response. One just has to wait for experts to have time to respond. The unfortunate thing is, the responses never get the buzz that the original propaganda splash gets.

The article, by the way, was published in the Annals of Internal Medicine. You can’t even read it without a pricey subscription. But clearly someone at Stanford made a big publicity push before the article was published, to get highly spun articles into the press, articles like the one in the New York Times.

The most damning piece of information to come out so far is that one of the authors of the study, Ingram Olkin, has been doing corporate dirty work since the 1970s. He was behind much of the data cited by tobacco companies that denied the link between cigarettes and cancer.

Some in the blogosphere are connecting dots that would link the release of the Stanford study to the campaign against California’s proposition 37, which would require the labeling of genetically modified foods.

There also have been responses from academics at other universities. But these things are slow. It’s going to take more time for all the dirt on the Stanford study to come out. As for the science and statistics involved, I’m not qualified to judge. But keep in mind that the Stanford study did not involve any new research. It was a “meta-study,” a statistical crunching of numbers gathered in previous studies. And it was just such statistical mangling that Ingram Olkin brought to the science on cigarettes and cancer.

One thing is for sure: the ugliness of the outpouring of smugness, self-righteousness and triumphalism from the propagandists for industrial agriculture. The smugness and contempt just ooze from a couple of these essays in the New York Times by Lomborg and Wilcox. I thought it was us organic types who were supposed to be smug.

Political propaganda generally can be shot down rapidly. An exception was the propaganda around weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. It took months for the lies of the Bush administration to be exposed. Scientific propaganda is always slow to be shot down. Science works slowly. That’s why the disinformation campaign about cigarettes and cancer went on for so many years.

In cases like this, it’s important to check back in — in a week, a month, six months, a year. It will take that long for all the dirt to come out about this Stanford study.

Update: How scientists spin the results of their studies.

Projected change in summer rainfall by 2080-2099. See link below to full chart.

Is it surprising that servants of the oil industry continue to deny climate change, even though they aren’t really fooling anybody? A poll last year found that 83 percent of Americans believe the world is warming, including 72 percent of Republicans.

But ask the farmers. They know. Just recently I overheard a group of elderly Stokes County farmers talking about what they used to be able to grow that they can’t grow any longer. In Canada, some polls have found that only 2 percent of the population deny climate change.

But the propaganda is getting results. Some polls have found a slight rise in climate-change denial in recent years. But the most important thing the propaganda accomplishes is shutting down any hope of our having a national conversation about climate change, and doing anything about it. And of course that is their goal.

Meanwhile, as Washington fiddles while the heartland burns, we must each think about our own water security. One of the reasons I gave up on the idea of retiring in California is that the future of water in California looks terrible, particularly to the south of the San Francisco Bay Area.

Here is a link to a chart showing expected changes in rainfall, by season, for the entire country.

Lucky for me, northwest North Carolina appears to be in a bit of a sweet spot. It’s not far enough south to be at high risk of dryer winters and springs. In the summer, it appears that it’s beneficial to be east of the spine of the Appalachian chain. Fall on the east coast is little changed from today’s normal. The models I checked before deciding to buy land in northwest North Carolina showed a slight increase in expected future rainfall, from about 44 inches per year to 46 inches per year.

However, as I have mentioned many times in the past, the summers of 2009, 2010, and 2011 were terrible. In retrospect, I believe — or at least hope — that this was because of an unusual persistence of La Niña. This summer, La Niña is gone. What a difference it makes.

Last September 1, I started keeping very careful rainfall records using a gauge on the back deck. As of midnight last night, I’ve now collected exactly one year’s worth of data. The total comes to 54.5 inches. This is a stunning amount of rain. It probably is never going to get any better than this.

Here are the totals by month:

September 2011: 6.03
October 2011: 3.35
November 2011: 5.35
December 2011: 3.20
January 2012: 2.10
February 2012: 2.15
March 2012: 3.95
April 2012: 2.50
May 2012: 6.65
June 2012: 5.15
July 2012: 6.01
August 2012: 8.10

I have never seen such lushness here. The abbey is surrounded by green. All the young trees have grown like crazy this year. I have a certain amount of survivor’s guilt, because America’s agricultural heartland has been scorched this summer. That may be the new normal. Maybe for winter wheat it won’t be so bad. But the future of corn is not looking good.

Speaking of corn, a few months ago, 25 pounds of chicken feed (which is only partly corn) cost $6.50 a bag at my local mill. It has risen steadily all summer. Yesterday I paid $8. Though the corn in my chicken feed is local corn, commodity prices are global.

Corn on the cob in a few more days

After several brutal summers, the summer of 2012 is going pretty well at the abbey. While 60 percent of the country is in drought, the abbey lies in a narrow no-drought area of western North Carolina. There was a period in early July when the temperature went over 100 degrees for four days in a row, but after that hot spell let up, friendlier weather followed. It’s been almost a month since I had to irrigate the garden. Rainfall has been doing the job.

Some things are looking a little shabby — whether from heat, the work of insects, or other pests I’m not sure. But for the most part, everything is doing what everything ought to do in summer — growing like crazy. I’m particularly happy to see my young trees growing. Previous years have been very hard on newly planted trees. I could never carry enough water. But the rainfall has been sufficient this year to keep all the young trees growing nicely.

In short, I’m not complaining. The long-range forecast doesn’t look too bad. For those of you who are in parts of the country that are being hit hard by heat and drought, I am very sorry. I know what that’s like.

Muscadine grapes

As the trees grow, increasingly the abbey can hide behind them and look shy.

Some of the tomato leaves are looking bad. The tomatoes will be OK, though.

Four rows of late corn and beans

Green pepper, soon to go into chutney with green tomatoes

I put up seven quarts of dill pickles today. Big ugly cucumbers make big ugly pickles, but they’ll be fine. When I’m canning, I think how nice it will be for Ken to get to eat some of what he planted. He’s in Alaska at the moment.

A shabby rose

Arbor vitae trees, growing strong

Chrysanthemums

The abelias bloomed for the first time this year.

Misty after 1.2 inches of rain fell this afternoon

The first tree I planted here, an arbor vitae. It was four feet tall then; it’s about 12 feet tall now.

Rep. Becky Carney, D-Mecklenburg, who cast the “mistaken” deciding vote to legalize fracking in North Carolina

For months, tens of thousands of grassroots voters in North Carolina have been working to convince the legislature and the governor that fracking is a bad idea. We apparently succeeded. And yet we woke up this morning to find that fracking is now legal in North Carolina. How did this happen?

Well, they say that Rep. Becky Carney, D-Mecklenburg, hit the wrong button when she voted. They wouldn’t let her change her vote (though you can be sure they’d have let her change her vote if the “accident” had happened the other way around). Carney says she feels just terrible about it. Sure she does.

All over the country, state legislatures have been passing laws to prevent election fraud, even though election fraud by ordinary voters is very rare. Now we have a vote by those who make the laws that stinks to high heaven. If you believe this was an unfortunate mistake, then I’ve got a government in Raleigh I want to sell you. They will get away with this. They’ll say, too bad. Get over it. Move on.

Well, we won’t get over it, and we won’t move on.

I have been active in the county and state campaigns opposed to fracking in North Carolina. I have learned a lot. As a progressive, I’ve also seen how the people of this conservative county (65 percent Republican) have learned a lot. They’ve learned what progressives have been saying for years: that our politicians, our Congress, and our state legislatures have been taken over by corporate money and power — Democrats and Republicans alike. The word “oligarchy” is not just a rhetorical grenade. It’s a word that accurately describes American government at the national level and, increasingly, at the state level. More and more, the United States looks like Russia and corrupt countries in South America.

As a progressive, I’ve also learned how sensible conservatives can be, as long as they’re not just repeating what they’ve heard on the TV.

The conservative people of Stokes County have learned other things, too, that are not so bleak. They’ve learned that local government can still work, because the distance between politicians and the people is much shorter. We can actually pick up the phone and call our county commissioners, or our representative in the state legislature. This local process worked. Our state representative, Bryan Holloway, changed his mind and opposed fracking after he heard from the people. And our all-Republican board of commissioners unanimously passed a resolution opposing fracking after it heard from the people. Holloway’s vote alone would have kept fracking illegal in North Carolina, had there not been a “mistake” in our state House of Representatives. Had the “mistake” not happened in Raleigh, it could have been said that we in Stokes County, by raising our voices in good faith and changing the mind of our elected state House representative, turned the tide on fracking in North Carolina. That is the way the process is supposed to work. We followed the rules, expecting our elected representatives to also follow the rules.

But a law is now on the the books in North Carolina that the people clearly opposed and which our governor and legislature claim to oppose. WTF??

Sometimes it seems the only sensible response is despair and futile anger. How in the world can those of us who care, those of us who bother to be informed, stand up to the hordes who don’t care, to the lazy ignorati whose views are based on mass-media blather? How can we stand up to corrupt politicians, or to politicians like Becky Carney from the ugly, money-grubbing city of Charlotte who is either stupid enough to hit the wrong button or stupid enough to think we’ll believe it was a mistake.

In short, how can honest people who believe in the American system of government take back their own government?

One of my moments of greatest despair came when representatives of the Stokes County “Tea Party” joined the Facebook group set up by county people opposed to fracking. This Tea Party person posted a message in the No Fracking group inviting people to a meeting to talk about fracking at the same public library where the No Fracking people met. The “Tea Party” people, of course, believe the propaganda from the oil and gas industry. They think fracking is marvelous and squeaky clean. We raised no objection to their posting an invitation in the No Fracking group. We believe in free speech, and we believe — or do our best to believe — in the democratic process.

A couple of No Fracking people went to the Tea Party meeting. As expected, the Tea Party people knew nothing and simply recited gas-industry talking points. When the No Fracking people spoke up to challenge this misinformation, they were told that the meeting was a closed, private meeting. The Tea Partiers were so wrongheaded about the way American government works that they don’t understand that you can’t have closed, private meetings at the public library. They think government is their own private stick to use to beat down the people and views that they don’t like.

The people who think you can have closed, private meetings at the public library also got the fracking law they wanted — even though they had only a small following and they changed no minds.

And there you have it. There are people in this country who think that our supposedly democratic institutions are their private club. To disagree with them is tyranny. If the democratic process doesn’t give them what they want, they will simply take what they want. And why not? They always get away with it.

I don’t know what the hell we are going to do about it. But here’s a suggestion for getting started: Go to your local election board right now, whether you’re a Democrat or Republican, and change your registration to no party. Let’s ignore the party machines that have betrayed the people and sold out — Democrats and Republicans equally — to big money. Let’s turn off our televisions, talk with our neighbors, think for ourselves, and remind them what democracy is all about.

After this post was written, we learned that Rep. Susi Hamilton, a Democrat from New Hanover County, sold her vote on fracking for a budget amendment that gives $60 million worth of tax breaks to her pet industry, the film industry in Wilmington. As always, corporations get the profits, taxpayers get the bills. In this case taxpayers even paid for a $60 million bribe.

Above: From an Armistead Maupin status update on Facebook

So Armistead Maupin is leaving San Francisco. For those of you who have read his books (Tales of the City, More Tales of the City, Further Tales of the City, etc.), this is a big deal. That aura of myth and magic around San Francisco was partly created by two very important writers, both of whom published in the San Francisco Chronicle (from which I retired in 2008).

The other writer, of course, was columnist Herb Caen, who died in 1997. Both Maupin and Caen loved San Francisco passionately. Both wove webs of magic around San Francisco’s places and people. Armistead Maupin’s magic was a more personal magic, contained in the lives and loves and heartbreaks of the characters he created. Caen’s magic was more extraverted. It was largely to be found in places — bars, eateries, hangouts — often lurking in the fog. Caen once said, “One day if I do go to heaven, I’ll look around and say, ‘It ain’t bad, but it ain’t San Francisco.’” Caen’s magic was easier to find. Even visitors could find it, just making the rounds, living well, soaking up the atmosphere. Maupin’s magic was much more elusive. For Maupin’s magic, you had to have a life, even if that life wasn’t what you always thought it would be. And you had to have people in your life who understood how to help each other create magic out of everyday materials.

The center of the universe

I have thought a great deal about a magical power that writers have. They can cause the center of the universe to move. Pick a setting, any setting. It might be San Francisco. It might be a shack in Mississippi. It might be a beat-up old car rolling down a highway in Tennessee. It could be a hospital room. It could be a back yard in suburbia. It could be an imaginary place, out among the stars. But wherever that place is, if a writer can tell a true and beautiful story in that place, then that place becomes the center of the universe.

There is a wonderful line in George Lucas’ Star Wars. Luke Skywalker is a bored, dreamy teen-ager, living with his step parents, doing chores on the desert planet of Tattooine. One day two droids show up — R2D2 and C3PO. While Luke is repairing the droids, C3PO says, “As a matter of fact, I’m not even sure what planet I’m on.” Luke Skywalker replies, “Well, if there’s a bright center of the universe, you’re on the planet that it’s farthest from.”

To feel ourselves far from the center of the universe contains more existential pain than we ever admit.

But what Luke Skywalker doesn’t suspect is that, at that very moment, he is at the bright center of the universe. That is because a true and beautiful story is being told — Luke’s story, partly — but Luke doesn’t know it. It’s a secret for only the storyteller and the reader to know. But a good storyteller also knows some things about the reader that the reader doesn’t know.

It has been my good fortune to have known lots of good writers. One writer I knew back in the 1980s, at the time he published Ender’s Game, is Orson Scott Card. He used to say that the key to the best stories, to the truest stories, is that the storyteller is telling the reader’s own story. But the reader, who is unable to tell the story himself, doesn’t know it.

That was certainly true of Armistead Maupin’s stories. Maupin showed people a whole new way to live — simple, sweet, kind. He taught people how to not be too hard on themselves, or on each other. In his stories, the most ordinary events could contain a world of meaning and bring us to tears. His stories changed people’s lives.

When we are the center of the universe, we feel happy. We feel that life has meaning. Orson Scott Card would say that this is why people are so hungry for stories. Stories — good stories, at least — help us find our place in the universe. When we can’t do that, we become depressed, miserable. It’s hard to find meaning in our lives.

A friend from my San Francisco days now lives in Sacramento. He has to deal with a recurring sadness: He is having a great deal of difficulty creating magic in Sacramento. He pines for San Francisco. As any writer knows, settings do make a difference. Some kinds of stories just can’t be told in some kinds of places. A shack in Mississippi is the natural setting for only certain stories. The same is true of San Francisco. Stories certainly could be told in the suburbs of Sacramento, but to find that story may require a very difficult existential struggle. When we feel ourselves beaten down by that struggle, we instinctively turn to storytellers for help.

Most psychologists would say that living too much in the imagination is not healthy, that human beings function best when they are well-adapted to their actual environment, that excessive mythologizing can even be kind of dangerous. Maybe. But I don’t think so. I have long understood that I was happiest when I felt surrounded by magic, even when sustaining that magic required a certain level of delusion. That was one of the reasons I moved to San Francisco, more than 20 years ago. I could no longer sustain a sense of magic where I was. I needed a change of setting if there was to be any hope of finding magic.

To leave San Francisco is frightening, in a way. One has fears and dreads about what kind of magic — if any — exists outside of San Francisco. I remember telling my sister, when Acorn Abbey existed only in my imagination, that I wanted a place that felt as though magic was possible there. Settings matter. One feels one’s setting in one’s everyday life. Other people might feel it too. It’s possible to create magic alone. Magic also can be a co-creation. Even groups can create magic, though group magic is likely to be unstable, because people change, and people come and go. San Franciscans have created a powerful magic, as a group. But in 1997, when Herb Caen died, a powerful source of that group magic was lost. As my friend Rob Morse wrote in the San Francisco Examiner the day after Caen died, “We’re on our own now.”

And now San Francisco must make its magic without Armistead Maupin.

Just don’t forget: The center of the universe can be absolutely anywhere. It’s all in the story you tell.

Postscript: Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game is being made into a movie starring Asa Butterfield and Harrison Ford. It will be released in 2013.

Watch this first, to better understand where I’m coming from

Once upon a time, the gods were in your own back yard. To get an idea of how that might have felt — the wonder and magic of it — watch the video above. Or think of the world of fairy tales. Fairy tales, of course, are some of the very few remnants of that old world. In the West, it was Rome, and the Catholic Church, that stamped out that world. I don’t claim to know a great deal about this period of history, but one area of this history in which I have done some reading is in the history of my ancestors, the Celts. The Celts, of course, held some of the finest real estate that the Roman armies took — much of Spain, all of France, the British Isles, and Ireland.

After the Roman conquest of the Celtic lands, it literally took centuries for the church’s priests to exorcise the old gods from the woods and fields and rocks and streams. There were special rituals for it, and there were severe punishments for any peasant who was caught in the woods communing with the old gods. Even in Joan of Arc’s time, in the 15th century, there were still fairies in the woods. At Joan of Arc’s trial before the Inquisition, much was made of charges that she, like the other children, had danced around the fairy tree in some magical woods near her childhood home. In the remote highlands of Scotland, the old ways actually persisted into the 19th century. The localization of religion had come to an end.

The work of keeping religion centralized, where it can be controlled by its priesthood and milked for power and income, is never done. Why, if there were gods in the rocks and trees and stars, then anyone could commune with them for free, and no one would be able to skim a profit from that, or claim to speak for such local gods. And it isn’t just the Catholic church. In the U.S. today, there are a host of protestant preachers who fly around in corporate jets, live taxfree in multiple multimillion dollar homes, and suck in millions of dollars from people who see god in the greasy, unctious preacher on their television screen rather than in their own back yard.

As I go about my daily business of sifting for information about the state of the world (I’m trying to stop calling it “news,” because “news” is a centralized corporate product), it’s alway enormously fun to come across pictures and quotes from the old fools in dresses who run the Catholic church. Just this weekend, for example, we learn that some American nuns, who have gotten in trouble with the Inquisition for acting like Jesus and actually caring about the poor, have been called to Rome to be scolded by Cardinal William Levada, who currently heads the Inquisition (formally called the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith — very centralized, you know). And let’s not forget that the current pope was the head of the Inquisition before he became pope and the title went to Levada.

Cardinal Levada, with the nuns he’s about to scold

A couple of days ago, driving back from a trip to town, I passed five or six acres of woods, newly bulldozed. It’s now a gash of red dirt and gullies. The church next to it, which has the words “Living Waters” in its name, apparently has outgrown its prefab building and is building something bigger. To them, the woods mean nothing. There are no gods in the woods anymore. And besides, what could gods be worth anyway, if they’re free? No, those folks need a building, and a praise band, and lots of taxfree contributions, and someone paid to shout at them about their centralized god.

Who is crazy? Them or me?

Probably me. I do know, though, that I would go crazy if I didn’t have a tiny refuge from a world raped and globalized and delocalized to the breaking point, a world in which ridiculous old men in Rome, wearing dresses, are outraged that not everyone — even nuns! — will do as they say.

But really there is no escape. Ken reports, after a four-day hike in the Smoky Mountains, that visibility from those mountaintops is ruined by smog and haze, and that the park service has posted signs explaining that the smog and haze is pollution from Midwestern and Southern cities. As for my tiny refuge, the corporate puppets in Raleigh, thanks to money from the oil and gas companies, are about to make it legal for corporations — not the government, mind you, but corporations — to take my land if they say they need it, to drill underneath it, and to inject poisons by the millions of gallons into the underground aquifer that feeds my well and upon which all the life around me depends.

Sometimes I’m afraid that this is hopeless. They have won. There is no local anymore. There isn’t anything they can’t take. They even claim the gods. We let them do it. And every step of the way, they said it was for our own good, and we believed it. They threatened us with hell. It’s odd that they can so vividly imagine such a place, but can’t imagine themselves in it. I can.

I shouldn’t act as though it’s some kind of feat to can food, because of course people have been doing it for years. But today was the first time I’ve ever tried it. It also was the first time I’ve ever had a good enough garden to support canning.

These were red beets, mixed with chioggia beets, which are striped. That’s why the color varies. And for whatever reason, the beets lost color in the pressure cooker. Something the vinegar does, maybe? I pulled all two rows of beets from the garden. The voles had ruined a third of them. Ken is already tilling the now-empty rows that the beets were in to plant more beans and corn. Later on in the season, I plan to can as many green beans and tomatoes as I possibly can. I’ll freeze the corn.

Strangely enough, the canning itself is not the most tedious and time-consuming part of the process. It’s the preparation — pulling the beets, hosing them down to remove the dirt, washing them again in the kitchen sink, boiling them for a while so that the skins will slide off, and then, finally, skinning them and slicing them. From the time I started pulling beets this morning until I took the cans from the pressure cooker was about six hours.

To keep the heat and steam of the pressure cooker out of the kitchen, I put it out on the deck, using a propane-fired cooker. The temperature hit 90 degrees today, and the air conditioning still hasn’t been used so far the season. So keeping the heat out of the kitchen really helps.

Now I just hope they all seal properly…