Month: April 2022

As Alan and I were working on the cistern today, I was thinking of Alvescot College, in England. Some of the houses in Alvescot had big old wooden, moss-covered cisterns on their roofs and in their backyards. There was no central water there. https://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/oxon/vol15/pp8-17

In 1971, toward the end of my junior year of high school at George School in Newtown, PA, I was offered a scholarship to Alvescot College, a 2-year experimental college conceived by Oxford and Rutgers Universities. It was designed to bring students with certain talents together to learn and work on bringing classic English Lit into “modern” technology, with the ultimate goal of creating new BBC productions. (And it did….the surge of new BBC stuff in the late 70’s were partly a result of Alvescot’s work). Hating George School, and knowing my parents were moving to England in the fall, I jumped at the opportunity. I arrived in mid-April, midway through the “Hilary Term” (spring). Next came Trinity Term (summer).

I was given a lovely suite of rooms to myself at the manor (upper right corner of the picture above). Every other day, a local farmer delivered fresh milk, eggs, butter, cheese and veggies to my room. I lived on salads and omelets. Otherwise, meals were served in the dining hall by a French chef. There were about 25 students and a half-dozen professors, mostly TAs from Oxford. I was one of only 2 Americans. The other students came from all over the globe: Fawaz from Lebanon, Sinclair from New Zealand. One kid was the son of the local Lord. We were all 17-19 years old. My classes included “Classical English Literature and the Environment”, (we did a lot of cemetery rubbings), “John Donne to Music”, and, the best, “Philology and Culture”, taught by J.R.R. Tolkien. Classes were held in the standard small seminar format of Oxford. You were expected to be prepared to discuss your assignment intelligently and thoroughly with 4-6 others. The professor moved things along and added critique and ideas. Wish all education was done this way.

I spent most of the summer walking the mile or so across the village, past the pub, to the classrooms, then back for lunch, then back to class, then back for dinner. Wonderful! Lots of Lager & Limes. I gained 10 beer pounds that summer. The pub was tiny, had a dirt floor and a dart board, and kept its beer in old wooden kegs buried in the dirt behind a makeshift bar.

For our time with Tolkien, his TA drove us to Tolkien’s cottage home not far away, where we sat in the backyard if the weather was nice, or in his study if not. The author was close to the end of his life, and nearly wheelchair-bound, yet was sharp as could be, causticly witty, and demanding of us. We talked about language and how it affects culture, about how and why words matter. Heady stuff. You had to have your comments well thought out, speak succinctly and with a point, or he pooh-poohed you and went on. I was pretty intimidated, but tried to say coherent things. Amazingly, I was the only student who had read the LOTR books (multiple times, even) so could speak to them a bit and that helped. A few topiaries of hobbits and elves (I think) perched in the yard, and his office was a mess of papers, teetering on chairs and bookcases. His son Christopher came by a few times. We always had tea, served by his caretaker; his sister, maybe?

It was the only class I took seriously, although I liked them all. I was into my Jane Eyre/Elven phase and wore a long flowing black skirt, black blouse, black/green cape, black Birkenstocks, and smoked a (real) pipe with cherry tobacco that I bought locally. I never inhaled (!) but loved the smell. I had a beloved baby blue corduroy jean jacket, too. I smoked a lot of weed, and had a crush on one of the instructors, a 28 year-old musician named T. who was the music manager at a popular club called The Troubadour in London (https://www.troubadourlondon.com/).

Alvescot was a stunning place, and I spent hours wandering the fields and hills, walking along the ancient stone walls. I spent a few afternoons helping a farmer rebuild a 300 year-old stone fence for his sheep. I fished on the river, drank illegal Anisette, and drove to London with T. We hitchhiked to Edinburgh for 5 days of fun. What a beautiful city. Still one of my favorites.

Toward the end of August, T. left me for another, telling me he’d used me as a cover for his gay life. I was heartbroken. I started missing classes, spending my time playing with the darts team at the pub in the afternoons. I never missed a class with Tolkien, though.

In mid-September, 2 local Bobbies, both on the darts team, came to my room and arrested me. I was charged with selling pot. I hadn’t been selling. The seller was the son of the local Lord. But I was a convenient fall-guy, so it was me. The Bobbies apologized and said it wasn’t anything personal, just politics. I was a good dart player and they would miss me at the tournament. They took my passport, and hustled me to Heathrow leaving all my stuff behind, including my guitar. I was placed on the plane and told not to come back.

Once home, well, things went from bad to worse. My parents left for England the following week, on the cruise ship QEII. What happened next is another story. My father managed to get me another passport by Christmas, but the college never let me return, even though they acknowledged that I’d been “framed”.

I think of those few months with great fondness. I may have stayed in England if it had worked out. But maybe not.

For much of the past 2 weeks, high winds have blown in every afternoon. This is normal spring behavior across the southwest, although this year has been especially dust-filled and strong. We’ve had a number of “Amber Alerts” warning us to stay off the roads due to zero visibility from dust. At our home in Bayfield, the wind always came from the southwest and was very predictable. Here at 4Fords, it comes in a swirl of chaos. The direction changes moment by moment: a 40mph gust from the north, followed by a brief lull, then a swirl down-canyon from the east, then around to the west. It’s quite disorienting.

As most people are aware, the presence of so much dust is a result of worsening drought in the West. So much so that NASA has whole programs studying the effects of traveling dust. We know that layers of red dirt from Arizona over high mountain snows in Colorado cause faster snowmelt and increase both spring floods and drier conditions later in summer. Dust captures both pollen and microplastics and spreads them through the air during wind storms.

But, aside from the dust and its evils, the wind is captivating. I can stand outside the house in a dead calm and listen to wind in the cliffs overhead, where it roars like several jets taking off. It has a particular humming sound as it tears through the junipers and pinyons. There’s a different kind of shushing noise when the wind reaches the ground and is going through the sage brush. I especially love it at night, when the turkeys are gobbling in the trees and the wind is howling. I’ve talked about the wind before, and likely will again. It’s a major player here.

The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails.
William Arthur Ward

As a result of all this blowing about, Alan and I haven’t made as much progress around the ranch as we’d like. That said, he got the solar working on the well, which was a red letter day! (As I played with Zane). We now have 2 out of 3 solar arrays up and running. The third is stored in the backyard, waiting its turn. As an aside, we also have 2 solar “suitcases” (small panels that run the electric fences) and 3 solar porch lights. Plenty of sun in the southwest! Might as well use it.

We’ve been expanding a small Zuni Bowl (lined with rocks) to capture the water we’ve been purging from the well (to clear out years of silt). Zane loves water. Clair does not. I’ve seen both deer and turkey tracks around it.

Finally, I helped a neighbor empty her storage unit: a couple of old ladies moving heavy furniture. Glad no one was watching. It was not graceful. No pictures of that.(Alan helped with the biggest stuff.)

Follow your heart wherever it takes you. Nobody knows where the wind blows. No one can say.

Mario Frangoulis

And, of course, no talk of wind would be complete without:

May the wind under your wings bear you where the sun sails and the moon walks.

J. R. R. Tolkien

Right after I turned 21 in 1975, the girls’ father and I bought 20 acres in northern Idaho. We spent the ’74-’75 winter living at Zim’s Hot Springs in New Meadows, Idaho, helping to caretake the property, which was closed to the public. (http://www.zimshotsprings.com). We were what was called “back-to-the-land” hippies, looking for land to homestead. We devoured Mother Earth News and Countryside Journals and talked about ram jet pumps, wind power, and organic gardening.

We bought the land, which was 6 hours north of Zim’s, because of its price (cheap) and its beauty: a meandering spring-fed creek through lush meadows, mixed first and second growth cedar, tamarack and pine in a small canyon 6 miles north of Priest River. We also discovered I was pregnant, something we’d been hoping for over a year. It was a happy time.

On Easter weekend that year, John went north to Anchorage to work for the State of Alaska. I spent a couple weeks camping on our new land before heading to Alaska myself, getting to know the place, looking for cabin and garden sites. I pitched my tent near the creek, which was bordered by chamomile, strawberries, and mint. Their smells permeated the whole area. There was even a small swimming hole.

A local rancher, Jack W., ran about 30 cattle in the valley. His family had owned the entire thing since the 1800s, but he subdivided and sold the front half (20 acres of which became ours), retaining a section in the upper end of the valley for himself. Idaho, like New Mexico, is an open range state, allowing cattle to roam freely. If you don’t want them on your land, you have to fence them out. They visited my camp site daily, and I had to be careful not to leave stuff out they could kick over.

My only neighbors were a husband and wife, relatives of Jack in their 80’s, who lived in a tiny cabin a mile away. Both suffered from tertiary syphilis, and were quite demented, but kind to a young girl. On Easter Sunday, they brought me tampons and home canned beets. A trio of long-haired Zen hippies from Long Beach were also camping nearby, looking at buying some of the subdivided land further up the valley. They would become good friends in the future.

One morning before dawn I wakened to a cow lowing nearby. I’d been hearing it in my sleep for a while. I got up to look and found a mama cow on her side, heavy into labor and struggling. I watched her for a while, could see she was weakening, and knew something wasn’t right. Having recently read James Herriot’s “All Creatures Great and Small“, I was sure that the calf was breech. With the confidence of youth, I decided that I needed to help. I grabbed some Vitamin E oil I had for my pregnant belly and slathered it on my arm along with vaseline from our first aid kit. Speaking to her constantly in babytalk, I waited for the cow to be between contractions and slid/pushed my arm up inside, reaching around until I had a tiny, soft hoof in my fingers. What a feeling that was: I could feel his heart pulsing rapidly through the hoof.

With my eyes closed I moved my hand and arm around, visualizing how the little guy was situated, not straight up and down the birth canal, but crossways. Her next contraction was so strong it cut my circulation off for a couple minutes. I don’t know how bigger people do this: it was tight. I pulled on the slippery leg, got hold of a second one and was able to feel the face. His little body turned toward me over the next few contractions as I pulled steadily. Another push and his hooves and head slid out toward me. I don’t think he was turned too much, and maybe she would have birthed hm without my help, but I didn’t think so at the time.

He came out fast in the end, a very large bull calf. Knocked me right over onto my back and the umbilical cord broke. Red all over, like his mama and still covered in a caul. She was unable to get up yet (cows usually birth standing up), so I carried him to her head so she could lick him. I helped by rubbing him with some of the mint growing around. It took him a minute to breathe, but he did. She passed the placenta without problem. I offered her a gallon of water from the creek, mixed with some honey I had in camp, and, finally, she struggled to standing.

(An aside: we drank freely from the creek for 8 years. Even with the cows and the large population of beavers, we never got sick from the water.)

Mama cow and the babe did well and they eventually wandered off into the woods. I saw them a few times grazing nearby, but they never acknowledged me. I felt a bit slighted by that!

Why do I tell this story now? Alan and I live in a canyon in a state with Open Range laws. Our neighbor has about 10 cows that wander freely, overgrazing the drought-damaged land. This morning I am watching one large Hereford cow, so pregnant her belly looks ready to burst. I hope she has a healthy birth. Happy Spring. Hoping you have a relaxing, pleasant Easter.

There was a green prepper with grandkids
Who stir-fried green peppers through Covid
When asked for her views
On political news,
She said she preferred living off-grid.
 ---Alan

Alan loves green peppers. Especially on pizza. I prefer mine a bit riper, more in the orange to red stage. But in the Rocky Mountains, the growing season is barely long enough to get any peppers, much less succulent blood-red ones, so I settle for small yet tasty green ones. At the end of the season, I have a lot of them and end up canning and dehydrating them for winter. Canned green peppers are a treat in stir-fry in the winter and I took great pleasure this morning when I found a jar from 2019 hidden in the back of our coldroom.

Does having this jar mean I’m a prepper? I’ve had conversations recently with neighbors about the meaning of “prepping”. Most people assume that being a prepper involves a kind of paranoia about the future and our government’s lack of ability to keep us fed and safe. To them, prepping requires keeping a year’s worth of dehydrated food or MREs in barrels in your secret underground vault, along with plenty of guns and ammo. It means putting up huge steel gates and fences around your property so “they” can’t come and steal from you. I read lots of post-apocalyptic books that lean on this theme and quite a few of our (wonderful) neighbors practice this mindset in reality.

But can being a prepper have a different meaning? Something more positive and life-enhancing? How about the simple joy found in caring for your family? Without being paranoid or needing to carry a weapon at all times? How about the pleasure in sharing your bounty with others? How about just disliking shopping so much that you’d prefer to only have to go to a store once a month? Or, how about caring about quality of food over cost, which makes having a garden or buying in bulk sensible choices?

I strongly believe that paying the actual cost of quality, organic, non-GMO food rather than relying on the wheat/beef/dairy subsidies that prop up our cheap food industry is an important way to change the agricultural-industrial harm being done to the planet. It’s a cost I’ve always been willing to take on, although it means we have less cash for luxury items. I offset this expense by growing as much food as possible and storing it. And by buying bulk.

This is why Alan calls us Green P(r)eppers.

I haven’t been online much recently because high winds have made our internet unreliable. That’s now a thing of the past as we now have StarLink! Averaging about 50-200 mbps. (That’s about 50 times faster than before). Yahoo!

And we brought Pippin home from storage, so we can run it on her solar panels. With gas prices hovering at $5/gallon, running the generator is a pricey business.

Spring has sprung, and Alan and I have spent much of our days outside. I’ve got 2 small gardens about ready to plant. The greenhouse has salad stuff growing.

And the well is working! Looks like about 5 gallons/minute. The water is silty, so we have to purge it by running it a lot over the next week or so, then we’ll get it hooked up to the filter and plumbing and get it tested. Very exciting! A real shower is in our future.

Right now, the wind is blowing about 60 mph, with sleet coming down horizontally. Probably the last winter storm of the year. Wolf Creek Pass should get 8-10″. Maybe it will fill our cistern a bit more.

Alan and I celebrated our 33rd anniversary on March 29th. He was the one who remembered it this year. Generally, neither of us think of the day until sometime in May.

The Knot says that: “While amethyst is the contemporary anniversary theme for celebrating 33 years of marriage, textiles are the traditional gift.” (www.theknot.com) I have plenty of textiles, thank you, and don’t need any more knickknacks, even lovely purple ones. We didn’t do anything for the day.

33 years ago, we spent our honeymoon in NYC, at The Pierre. We did the usual city stuff: plays, museums and great food. Then we spent a week with my mom on the Jersey shore, going for long runs in the sand and looking for glass on the beach. Subsequent anniversaries were shared in similar fashion: we would spend a weekend at some luxurious or interesting resort or hotel: The Stanley in Estes Park, the Broadmoor in Colorado Springs, Ojo Caliente, the Strater in Durango, La Fonda in Santa Fe. Those were fun getaways, as weekend escapes generally are. Eventually we devolved into taking camping trips in late March (often to Comb Ridge in Bluff, Utah). While grand hotels are wonderful, these rougher getaways were and still are our favorite way to honor the years passing by.

Since living here at 4Fords is rather like an extended camping trip, maybe not doing anything for our anniversary was the best celebration we could ask for!