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