The live Hummingbird Wing Alarm Clock sounded yesterday morning at about daybreak (AKA morning goat, duck and chicken feeding time — if I’m a prisoner, I’ve always thought, let it be a prisoner in paradise). I stumbled into the Funky Butte Ranch house’s main room to churn my solar-powered health shake concoction and whoa, once again, I was stopped in my tracks and in mid-thought by this ethereal cacophony as a dozen dueling hummingbirds (Rufus, Berylline and Broad-tailed so far this day) battled for the sugar water hanging in four Chinese plastic and glass containers outside my sliding glass door and around the house. Their wings are their instruments. They appear to need Air Traffic Controllers.
I’ve planted actual live and regional flowers from which hummingbirds, sugar addicts like myself, are said to derive a fix, but they’re just staring to flower, so we won’t see the full benefit until next year. Until then, it’s human-induced nectar for these birds half the size of my fist, some of whom travel from Costa Rica to Alaska. Imagine the amount of jet fuel that would be required to get a human that distance – these miracles of nature do it on a few sips of pollen (or, for now, sucrose). They are hyper-paced but not delicate. I have caught them in my palm when they’ve danced into the Ranch house or yoga studio and they feel solid — as air-worthy as any 767.
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Quieter than quiet, what to the protagonist in an old Western novel would be “too quiet”, something wakes me at the next morning – this morning — at 3 a.m. I could argue, based on that pre-bedtime pomegranate juice binge, that it’s my bladder exploding. But no. The universe’s tummy is rumbling – it’s monsoon season still, moisture is seeping out of the desert’s pores. The Funky Butte Ranch’s Creek, named “Stitzel,” a semi-reliable someone told me, after a Civil War officer who had been given this canyon as severance pay (Google turns up nothing), is running like it’s late. It is difficult to overstate what a blessing moving surface water is in this thirsty ecosystem, in ambient sound alone.
I stumble outside, not anything close to awake, mentally dodging presumed lightning and sleeping dogs and cats, but in fact blanketed in darkness so complete that my home, in those World Light Pollution maps, is one of the few places in North America to actually have Night, and I’m snapped awake not by the usual yucca spines in my thigh, not by a mountain lion waiting in stalk mode behind my cilantro patch, but by a smell. Read more…
As the greening world stretches skyward in rain salutation with the start of this year’s blessedly on-time monsoon season here in the desert, today’s carbon-neutral Dispatch (except for the postscripts) is also an essay that was just published in Plenty Magazine. It represents a triumph! The successful resolution of one of great missions and loose ends in Farewell, My Subaru. Here goes:
Growing up in the Ice Cream Truck era, I didn’t associate the frozen delicacy with patience. In fact, to my truck-chasing child mind, ice cream meant instant gratification, provided I had a buck in my sock. But making homemade ice cream fit for an Organic Cowboy’s strict low-carbon (if not low-carb) diet requires what even the patient would call patience. In my case, several years’ worth.
First I peeled back two entire calendars, waiting for Natalie, the tiny goat kid I got off Craigslist, to produce milk.
That actually was the bearable part of the wait, because Natalie, her sister Melissa, and now Natalie’s daughter Nico (all named after singers I like but think sound a little goat-like, in Natalie Merchant, Melissa Etheridge and the Velvet Underground’s Nico) have been such a pleasurable addition to the family. Or addition to the kitchen, as in last week, when Natalie crept in through the dog door and made herself at home with some lettuce I had left within reach on the counter.
But when it comes to my long (actually 38-year) wait for homemade ice cream, I think without question the hardest trial for my evolving patience muscle were those last four hours, dealing with the ice cram maker a friend had loaned me. Like the Griswalds on their never-ending trip to Wallyworld in the first Vacation movie, there seemed always one more step before I reached my decadent destination. I needed, for example, to chill the inner chamber of the ice cream maker (the freezer can) for several hours (that felt like eons) to prevent plutonium ice cream rocks. This I learned to my dread when I Googled “best organic goat ice cream recipes.” The warning was clear: uncooled ice cream machinery results in petrified ice cream.
With little Nico only half-weaned, mamma goat Natalie is already giving we humans more than a quart-and-a-half of creamy, hint-of-molasses milk per day. So I felt we had enough supply to give a shot at some yogurt. This, of course, is a science experiment that involves intentionally cultivating the kind of microorganisms that refrigeration was invented to destroy. But I figured the worst that could happen (other than my E coli death as Official Taster since my sweetheart Amanda is nursing our son) was a pint or two of wasted milk. Ya know, in the name of local food science. Literal Home Economics. Who knows what we’d create? I mean, penicillin got invented this way. The recipe I used came from a link a friend I call my Fairy Goat Mother recommended and was amazingly simple — it amounted to elevating some goat milk to a steady 108 degrees for 8 hours, with a scoop of yogurt starter culture to get those billions of good bacteria going. I decided to use a Thermos and a candy thermometer. It worked out deliciously fantastic — I added vanilla, granola, some frozen, probably not local blueberries, and some local honey. It was truly the best yogurt I’ve ever eaten (but I have this reaction as a Dominoes raised kid whenever I eat real food not from a store). And despite the fact that I spilled the Thermos as first, tainting my “clean” surface, and probably went both over and under the recommended 108 degree cultivation temperature several times during the yogurt-making process, no negative parasites have invaded my intestines as of this Dispatch. So I presume that the yogurt is doing its job of fighting the floral fight, and I have just taken a few thousand carbon miles out of my diet (not to mention about $15/week in Ranch budget savings). Go acidophilus and my army of microscopic bacteriological warriors! And thank you, Natalie, for the milk that is the building block for my body’s weaponry of mass microbe health maintenance.
As do her mother and aunt, the Funky Butte Ranch’s nubby-horned, ubiquitously-smiling baby goat Nico loves my (marginal) saxophone playing. Like a has-been rock band touring Japan, I’ll take whatever species of fan I can get.
Well, let me clarify. I say she loves my playing (which is generally badly sight-read Charlie Parker solos or what I like to consider inspired if, shall we say, “free” [of known chord progressions] improvisation). We’re talking solos that frighten the local predators. Think Shofar blowing. Actually, what Nico really loves is my physical saxophone. It tastes great to her. But also she seems to genuinely enjoy the music, dancing, jumping, spinning in mid-air like an adolescent slammer at an early 90s Primus show. Not by accident did those Greeks envision their party god Pan as a goat. Her full grown Aunt Melissa is like a groupie, jumping on my shoulders and decking me like we’re auditioning for a “Wildest Animal Attacks” video.
Music, in fact, is the only way I’ve found to reliably get a mischievous goat (say, raiding your rose bushes) to behave. I’m like the pied piper out there. When I see one of the now three FBR goats acting unacceptable, I moisten the reed, and the transfixed miscreant will follow me, stoned on the beat, back to the corral.
The chorus notes for Nico’s Song, which I composed spontaneously to extract her from the grain bin last week, are GGBB ABA GED (The ABA section is a sort of glissando triplet). You have to hear it with my special, er, tone, you know, “inflection” – it’s kind of a happy funky syncopation. I’m still working out the verses.
In other Funky Butte Ranch news, we collected nettles for tea as advance protection against next season’s juniper allergies (it worked miraculously this past year), and I’m making the first batch of Natalie milk/Funky Butte Ranch yogurt today. I’ll update on the results in the next Dispatch, but I’m already immeasurably excited that the carbon miles are slipping away from my life.
One of the Anasazi Triumvirate: Feeding Artistic Cultures In My Region For 7,000 Years
It is a miracle to me every year (OK, both years, so far) that agriculture works. That it’s in fact preferable in many ways to what’s usually thought of as hunter gathering. Actually I feel like what I do on the Funky Butte Ranch is hunter gathering, only at home with my loved ones. Call it sedentary agriculture if you will, but I’m anything but sedentary. I just don’t have to spear antelope on my afternoon runs. I mean, I throw a few seeds in some goat poop, irrigate it with a super-efficient Israeli drip irrigation system, hope for no late hail, and all of a sudden there are sprouts — in the case of this photo, Anasazi beans sprouted from a discovered ancient strain. This year the corn, tomatoes, onions and peppers are also looking great. (Though it was touch and go as of a week ago — for a couple of days there, I wasn’t sure Natalie would give milk, then that she would give LOTS of milk, and why weren’t the peas sprouting? I mean, c’mon, third graders can sprout peas in “science” class– Gregor Mendel, that type of thing.) As I mention in Farewell, my Subaru, recent DNA testing shows that this diet kept some of my Anasazi predecessors on this land living well into their 30s, so obviously it’s a diet I want to emulate. They say that your blood type can tell you if you’re genetically a meat-eating wanderer or a Tigris/Euphrates-derived, grain eating farmer. Growing up in the suburbs, I was a third type — Dominoes Pizza-orderer. Now I think I’m getting a bit closer to what my genes are asking me to eat and drink.
My tomato goal this year is simple – even with constant, hours-long, meditative grazing all summer and fall, I want us to be so overwhelmed with orange-liciousness that we have to can perhaps 100 pasta meals’ worth of them for the winter. And we seem to be on our way – the drip system is working like a charm. Amanda bought me some planters so a couple of our now hundreds of tomatoes can be transported inside for winter fruit when it gets cold. She came home with the planters, asked me if I wanted them down in the garden, and I said, “let’s just give them some time and a rinse to wash China out of them.” Ah, Globalization in the midst of local living.
Meanwhile, the orchard is progressing. I’m in bliss over the apple blossoms that emerged this week. Growing up, I never understood why we had one plum tree. If it didn’t produce, why not get it a friend? Isn’t the goal of a plum tree plums? Seemed easy enough. Two decades later, you can see why it fills me with such joy to have flowering plum AND apple trees this year…and we just planted them from grafted, organic saplings a year ago. Long live drip irrigation. Especially timer-drip irrigation that frees me to do things like milk goats and not overly worry about watering. Except when there are leaks. Or squirrel-tooth assaults. But that’s not more then thrice a week.
Ah, water in the desert, It becomes valuable like wine. Amanda, myself, and our dogs Sadie, River and Mack ended the day yesterday outside the chicken coop with an exuberant, if clumsy and toothy sunset rendition of the Hebrew Mayim dance, which is basically a single concept, single step appreciation of the liquid elixir of life
Next Dispatch, I’ll wax with full-belly satiation on the amazing milk productivity of Natalie the Molasses-addicted Wonder Goat. Meanwhile, I still very much consider myself to be a novice at all of these agricultural endeavors, though I’m losing my remote control muscle memory in favor of goat milking muscle memory, more and more of my protein is coming from the Funky Butte Ranch, and I’m starting to see the world, from cloud to soil, with Farmer’s Eyes.
And I’ll end this Dispatch with an advertising mock-up for the Funky Butte Ranch (I don’t think we’re marketing anything except happiness, and that’s free). It was made by young Simona Bach of El Paso, Texas, upon her family’s visit to the FBR last week. I think she captured the Butte’s visuals with particular vividness and accuracy, especially in the late day, low angle sun.
Oh, one other note: many of you have asked about seeing my recent Tonight Show appearance. Here’s how to watch the segment in all its Rhinestone Cowboy glory (be sure to follow the steps below the link to get to the right day and segment):
http://www.nbc.com/The_Tonight_Show_with_Jay_Leno/video/episodes.shtml
Then click on May 28, then click on “select chapters,” then click on the fellow with the cowboy hat, second from the right. They’ll make you watch a commercial, then enjoy.
I thought I was just on a relaxing, post-book tour innertubing trip (above), but Amanda’s photo (below) proved that without my knowing it, this was in fact a working trip (we’ll show the photo to the IRS) — I was using wilderness, of course, as inspiration to flush out my next book ideas. Yes, that is my bathing suit in the foreground. There was no one else around (except maybe Dick Cheney the coyote) for approximately 275 miles. And yes, I did suffer some sensitive sunburn as well. It was worth it.
Then I soon learned that this is a trend — that my office is the Earth. Here’s little Nico proofreading (do I have to put her on payroll?) as she nurses my pen. I like my employees to multitask. It makes me feel justified for not outsourcing to Bangalore goats.
She’s turning out to be a superlative goat, by the way — friendly but not needy, sweet in disposition, and just mischievous enough. Natalie reproduced well (and nearly identically)! And I’ll even have to give Walt 50% of the genetic credit, even if his stay at the Funky Butte Ranch has given me PTSD.
Oh, one other note in the suddenly almost mundane-seeming world of publishing and book promotion (I’m back into goat-milking, river-tripping and pending fatherhood) — looks like NBC is re-airing the episode of the Tonight Show with Jay Leno wherein I’m a guest. It airs Wednesday, May 28. No word on if it was my, Hugh Laurie’s, or Prince’s performance that earned the coveted summer re-run slot. But I’ll take another fourteen million eyes on Farewell, My Subaru. Which gives me an opportunity to thank everyone so much for their support. You’re the reason I can do what I do.
How many organic cowboys does it take to change a vegetable oil fuel filter? I had to find out the answer to this ancient koan after said filter clogged at 77 MPH on Interstate 25 near Colorado Springs recently. I was on my way to appear as a guest on the etown radio program. For me, this was as exciting as any of the media bookings that have materialized as a result of Farewell, My Subaru, because when I lived in Alaska, radio was all there was. So most folks, myself included, lived the radio schedule the way that I imagine people did with their television programs pre-Tivo. And etown, for several years of my life, represented an hour of American roots music interspersed with interviews that generally broached the loving-kindness and Earth-saving sphere. I didn’t like to miss it as a listener. And now I was going to be a guest.
Except that the R.O.A.T. (Ridiculously Oversized [but carbon-neutral] American Truck, for new visitors to these dispatches) was wheezing in the left lane like someone trying to breathe in Bangkok. I managed to exit at the turn-off for the U.S. Air Force Academy.
Fuel filter changing, I was about to discover, is a disgustingly greasy, if carbon-neutral job. Almost impossibly fortunately (speaking of Alaska), some of my closest friends, who hail from Fairbanks, were in Colorado at the moment of my vegetable clog. Even more astonishingly fortuitously, one of them, Tim, is a union electrician. Let’s not even get into how mind-bogglingly lucky it was that on a fairly large planet, Tim, wife Ariana and their kids Ahnika and Porter were visiting relatives about ten miles from the site of my issue (except to say that every now and then there arise incidents that make me glad I caved and got a cell phone). The whole brood met me at the Colorado Springs’ NAPA auto parts store to dial-in the tangle of wiring that had to be reconnected once I figured out the actual fuel filter mechanism on the R.O.A.T. It was a fine excuse to cross paths with these folks, who as you can see from the above photo are able to change even a car repair nightmare into a kind of fiesta. That’s Ahnika giving her dad an unsolicited back massage while we try to iron out some of the nuances of the filter change. My pregnant sweetheart Amanda is in the background. Ariana, her own infant Porter in tow, took the picture.
Meanwhile, I made it to etown (recorded live in a beautiful theater in Boulder, Colorado) with about an hour to spare, and the show was a blast. Hosts Nick and Helen Forster are serious about trying to nudge society toward kindness and sustainability, and the whole evening was a great time. The show airs on 300+ radio stations. To hear the episode on which I’m a guest, go to www.etown.org. Click “join” and go through the free user name/password routine. Then logon as a member and click on the “listen/access audio archives” link. Search under “Bodeans” (one of the musical guests) or “March 2008″, then scroll to the March 9 show. The whole archive is full of fantastic listening, by the way. Unless you only like speed metal.
So now the hardcover leg of the Farewell, My Subaru carbon-neutral book tour is finished. If the number of pleasure-carrying neurons firing across my nervous system is a measure of how fantastic it feels to be home, to be grounded in Place again, then this period is best described as a spiritual sigh for me. Or maybe a deep intake of breath. I contemplate this from a patch of tangerine desert paintbrush blossoms as drowsy afternoon clouds flank a sun half a day from setting over sandstone canyon walls. I guess in yoga both the intake and exhalation of air are valuable and part of the picture. And speaking of The Picture, in the past five minutes I experienced the specifics of what I only understood in vague terms late in the book tour when I started telling people who asked if I was having fun on the road some version of, “Well, it’s great meeting folks and laughing a lot and eating great food (including an all-local Northern California restaurant with mushrooms in every item on the menu), and, ya know, seeing ecosystems with moisture in them, but it will be amazing to be back to the Funky Butte, too. I like both.”
So I’m psyched because just a I run out of grease on the Farewell, My Subaru Carbon-neutral Book Tour (hardcover leg), I get a call from Danny at an outfit called Plant Drive in Berkeley California. I’m running on fumes at this point, albeit extremely delectable Kung Pao Chicken fumes, and this dreadlocked 40-something offers to sell me 70 gallons of prime waste oil, on almost no notice.
There were only three minor downsides to this stroke of good luck and kindness. One, Danny didn’t have a pump to ease the movement of vegetable oil into my tank, the way you would at a normal gas station (and like I do when I “dumpster dive” waste fryers for my own grease). So when I backed the R.O.A.T. into Danny’s garage and I began dumping five gallon plastic restaurant “cubie” containers of prime grease into my tank, the funnel I was using to (I thought) facilitate the transfer in fact created a massive air pocket in the tank. This, in turn, resulted in a Yellowstone geyser-like spurt of waste vegetable oil all over my clothes, bike, windshield and person in the R.O.A.T. bed as the last bit of oil in each cubie cascaded, temporarily, into the tank.
This leads to the second minor problem, which was that this messy mishap solidified my 1,000 batting average for showing up at my friends Michael and Ali’s place in San Francisco smelling like something horrible and unfamiliar. Last time, for instance, I turned up, shall we say, Organically Redolent after a week of showerless camping and dancing at Oregon County Fair. They took my grease cologne well, as they always do, observing but not judging my scent and offering me their shower generously and immediately. The R.O.A.T, unlike my clothes, was soon de-greased at a (gotta love Berkeley) solar-powered car wash.
The third issue, not really a down side when I think about it, is that Danny’s grease comes from a local vegetarian Indian Restaurant, leading to a new Asian Food addiction to add to my Thai, Chinese and Japanese ones. For the next 1,500 miles, instead of the normal Kung Pao Chicken exhaust, now the R.O.A.T. spouted fumes that had me pulling over for every chance at curry and dal.
There was nearly one more complication from this important tour pit stop on a gorgeous Bay Area spring afternoon, and that was it appeared at first like the Plant Drive bathroom had only the mildest of herbal “hand and body creams” with which to clean the greasy carnage off my hands, face, even feet (I was in open-toed Chaco sandals). I could believe a business purveying waste oil (actually the Plant Drive folks share their space with a bio-diesel cooperative) would have only such non-toxic natural cleaning agents. This was, after all, Berkeley. But then on a high, out-of-favor shelf (the same spot where any of us would stash the products of which we’re less than proud), I found one of those industrial “citrus scrub” abrasive cleansers whose bottles come from the factory already dirty and feature a pump action for your ickiest hands. Meanwhile, that fill-up got me all the way to Seattle without having to stop at a petroleum gas station. Thanks a lot to Danny and Craig of Plant Drive, and congrats to Danny on his new baby.
Postscript: One of the most fascinating components of being on a road trip – albeit a carbon-neutral one – in a time of the highest fuel prices in history, is the eerie phenomenon of no one driving on the Interstates. Their ghost roads, when it comes to passenger vehicles. This shot is typical, taken from outside the R.O.A.T. window on I-15 in Northern Utah.
The freeways all over the American West in April and May of Gregorian 2008 essentially consisted of the R.O.A.T. and a massive train of tractor trailers, their drivers keeping it at a fuel-efficient 65 MPH. (At truck stops when I’d stop occasionally for restroom breaks, more than one trucker saw my “Powered by Vegetable Oil” sticker and asked me in hushed tones if they could convert their engines, too.) Another way to put this is that there are very few American Griswald families on a National Lampoon Vacation this spring. There were some foreigners in RVs taking advantage of the weak dollar, but not many. Which really brings his whole R.O.A.T. project home for me. For all the greasy fill-up foibles, for all the munchies-inducing Kung Pao and now curry exhaust, I have been passing by gas stations from state to state to state, all but immune to the highest petroleum prices in the history of the industrialized age. And I feel fine. Here’s to sustainable Rugged Individualism. With a lot of help from vegetable oil purveyors in places like Berkeley (and later in Seattle – thanks, Matt, for that timely fill-up!). We’re all in this together – even all of us “individualists.”
(Have Your People Call My People — Doing Deals In My Dressing Room. OK, pizza deals, but still.)
So as fantastic as appearing on the Tonight Show With Jay Leno was today (a link to the segment is below), I’m especially appreciative of the eco-friendly shwag bag Jay and the genuinely warm and Earth-interested producers gave me. Made of organic cotton and burlap, it included a compact fluorescent light bulb that I needed when I got back to the hotel room and found the reading lamp bulb burnt out. So that, and 12 million people hearing about
(Jay’s Cue Card — in case he forgot Prince’s name)
Jay asked intelligent questions, by the way, and Prince gave a three song concert after his appearance on the show (which was interrupted by the first ever fire alarm evacuation during a taping of the Tonight Show — I had nothing to do with it, but thought I did, as I flushed the toilet just as the flashing lights went on all over the building. I briefly believed I had won some sort of jackpot, or violated some obscure Southern California water use law. The source was actually an an errant smoke machine at Access Hollywood). The other guest this night was Hugh Laurie, who leaned over and told me, “Great stuff. You did really well,” when my segment went to commercial. This was extremely kind and relieving, as I had no idea what I said. I was too tired (from the long book tour) and nervous (from uncertainty about the fashionableness of my new cowboy hat — the old one had too much goat poop on it for national network distribution).
So, to watch the segment in all its Rhinestone Cowboy glory, (be sure to follow the steps below the link to get to the right day and segment) go to:
http://www.nbc.com/The_Tonight_Show_with_Jay_Leno/video/episodes.shtml
Then click on May 28, then click on “select chapters,” then click on the fellow with the cowboy hat, second from the right. They’ll make you watch a commercial, then enjoy.
(One other note: they only keep the shows up on the NBC site for a couple of weeks, so if you’re reading this after, say, late June, ‘2008′ and want to see the show, try clicking on the “News and Reviews” link on the right side of this page, and I’ll probably have a YouTube link up.)
I just returned to Planet Earth to post this. For me, it’s Leno one day. goat-milking the next. More posts from the carbon-neutral book tour soon, of course, including the greasiest non-fossil-fuel-fill-up in the history of auto mechanical propulsion (and the veggie oil came from a vegetarian Indian restaurant in Berkeley, California, so my exhaust-inspired cravings migrated abruptly from Kung Pao Chicken to curry).
Oh, and here’s the video from a CNN interview I did recently — all of this media stuff will be up on the new “News and Reviews” link in the right column of his page.
Why on earth did the Creator bestow preconceptions on us? To prove how often we can be wrong? This is not the first time that my inspiration for a Dispatch has come from this baffling, seemingly important genetic trait. In the latest drastic example of the preconception phenomenon, for months I had thought that the most exciting element of the first Funky Butte Ranch goat births would be the “zero carbon mile, totally organic FBR Goat Ice Cream” that would magically appear when the kids were weaned. I even have a goat ice cream recipe (and ice cream maker) link set up on this site (see the right column, and indeed it’s been — in this case literally — sweet to see from the response I’m not nearly alone in my ice cream addiction).
But ice cream (this will shock some readers) is actually just the icing on the cake (again literally). In truth, I was so relieved that Natalie safely gave birth to two already-mischievous kids at 8:30-ish p.m. the other night, that I realized immediately the best part of goat husbandry is my love of the goats. They’re part of the family. That’s no secret to anyone who has read these Dispatches over the last year and a half (and for blog newbies, you can read through and search all the previous Dispatches).
In short, I was a relieved father. I mean, Natalie is an animal I raised since before weaning, bottle-feeding her with a shotgun in my lap like a modern-day Elmer Fudd so the local coyotes didn’t treat her as low carbon-miles buffet. As she had no epidural options, I had been more nervous than I realized about her well-being during delivery. In truth, it was a piece of cake (not literally this time).
Since I’m currently on the Farewell, My Subaru carbon-neutral book tour, I leaned this from my friend and ranch-sitter Ken, who called me and left the following message on my voice mail: “Um, Doug, I noticed something strange in the goat corral: your number of goats had just doubled.”
He had fed Natalie and Melissa at 8 p.m. (two hours late because a squall had come in during normal feeding time). Nat ate voraciously as always, showing no sign of labor. She was round as a weeble-wobble from her five-month pregnancy, but that was normal. When he checked on them at 9, he said, “There were two extra goats in the straw.”
So I’m in bliss and even though the book tour is going fantastically and I’m having a great time, I CAN’T WAIT TO GET HOME TO SEE THEM. And, of course, soon after, to get overwhelmingly steamed at them for eating, stomping or accessing something I don’t want them to on the ranch. Welcome to goat husbandry. Above is one the first photo Ken emailed me. Mother and future pains in the asses are doing great. Thanks so much Ken, for midwifing so successfully – even if it just meant giving Natalie some space.
So ice cream is the last thing on my mind, contrary to my expectations. The fact is, there are far more important things going on in my heart. I swelled with paternal love, for example, to learn that Natalie immediately took to mothering, cleaning off the kids and nursing immediately. Evidently some first time mothers don’t.
Most of all I’m just glad she’s through any labor pain. I feel the pride any new father feels. Even an interspecies one. It is fantastically more intense than any pride I’ve felt before. And all I did was pick up two goats off Craigslist two years ago. But I am not embarrassed about my pride. I am a goat dad. And it almost make Walt the Scimitar-wielding Billy Goat’s Visit worth it.
The kids don’t have names yet, by the way, but in keeping with the singers-who-sound-a-little-goat-like motif (Natalie Merchant and Melissa Etheridge so far), I’ve already gotten a suggestion that I should name the male Bob (Dylan). I’m open to suggestions for the female.
On no sleep and trapped on the wrong side of the River during the worst (and pretty much only) snow storm of the winter, I waited in Silver City at 1 a.m., (where Billy the Kid and now I were briefly imprisoned, 120 years apart), for my childhood friend Jason Ensler to literally skid into New Mexico with his cameraman on a spur-of-the-moment jaunt from L.A. He’d told me how much he believed in the Farewell, My Subaru project, but when the guy – a supremely talented director, as you’ll see in this film, and in a new NBC pilot he’s directing called “The Man of Your Dreams” – showed up in a blizzard that had even grizzled locals worried about our prospects for getting across a 6,000-foot mountain pass and home to the Funky Butte Ranch alive, I knew that this was going to be a special endeavor. He was even driving, yes, a rental Subaru. The car company’s choice. Karma appeared to be with us.
I recognize that this film must have been shot, because there I am hanging from windmills and delivering progressive-but-I-hope-not-preachy-dialogue about how anyone can get off petroleum if I can, but I have little memory of it. I was that tired. All I can say is, 1) it tells the story of the carbon-reduction project documented in Farewell, My Subaru remarkably well, 2) the snow is incredibly atypical in an era of Dramatic Climate Change, and added a great cinematic touch since the grid power went out and the Ranch still had solar-powered juice, and 3) I’m really appreciative to Jason Ensler for coming to shoot it – the writer’s strike had just ended, and he had to dash back the next day to start the pilot for NBC (Don’t miss it — Jason also has directed tons of films and television programs including “Andy Barker P.I.”, “West Wing” and “Scrubs”). So click on play above to see the Farewell, My Subaru film – the first, five-minute one, I should say.
(Photo By Jason Ensler)
Been swept away by the current wave of organic rural songwriting yet? Modern country music, the real stuff, not rural Britney, is almost invariably progressive, because the folks going back to living on the Earth are tending to try to live in sync with it (in fact they’ve only recently converted from “people” to “folks”). The commercial country song about farm and apple pie of recent decades is coming across as fake — down to the contrived twangy accents of the manufactured McArtists — because there ain’t no farms and apple pie no more in much of the heartland. Just strip malls and McDonalds. And the occasional GMO factory and manure lake. The form remains, but the lyrics are imaginary. Except where the acoustic roots revival is hitting its stride.
And nothing can stop it. A physical place makes its music – this is why gangsta rap didn’t originate in, say, Iceland, and why after two years on a remote 41-acre ranch I am involuntarily shopping for a mandolin or a banjo after growing up in a suburb that didn’t even have a country station, let alone the John Prine cult I find to be a feature of any healthy subculture. And it’s also why, when I try to coax the Funky Butte Ranch goats away from whatever mischievous situation they’ve gotten into on a particular day (eating my roses, dancing on the roof of the Ridiculously Oversized American Truck), I generally find myself humming bluegrass (or roots reggae). The goats Natalie and Melissa’s favorite song, by the way, is a slightly lyrically modified version of Bob Marley’s Them Belly Full, which I sing to them as I trot (or in the very pregnant Natalie’s case, waddle) them back to the corral after a morning of foraging the Ranch’s abundant Apache Plume bushes:
Them Belly Full
But They Hungry
A Hungry Goat
Is Every Goat
Music, as anyone who has spent a endearingly frustrating hour around the caprine mind can attest, is the only thing that will make a goat behave. Natalie, as you can see in this photo, actually smiles when I sing to her. Not by accident is the drunken music-loving Greek god Pan represented as a goat. The Athenians country music stations were real.
And as for the organic song in my head today (I almost always have a soundtrack in my head, and it is usually telling me how I feel), it’s How Mountain Girls Can Love. If you are reading this while living in a demographic where there’s still no John Prine cult, this is a Ruby Rakes number that always sets me – and the goats – dancing in the organic equivalent of a sufi trance slam dance. Check out the Stanley Brothers’ version. Even if trapped in city walls, suburban sprawl or office cubicle, you might find you’re more of a knee-slappin’, yee-hawing, straw-in-your-teeth mauve-neck than you realized. I know I am.
Of necessity, we summarize events. The world, via this blog and soon from the book Farewell, My Subaru, knows that I drive on Vegetable Oil. That’s the label. I’ll wear it proudly. But like all labels, it doesn’t tell the complete story. We don’t have time for all the details. They cloud the message. Bob Marley wasn’t a great refrigerator repairman. It just doesn’t affect his musical legacy. Only very, shall we kindly say, “detail-oriented” biographers delve so deeply into such biographical nuances.
Maybe we should delve a little, if only to show that there is almost always more to the story behind the mainstream talking point. This is why for the sake of that behind-the-scenes feel that only the truly honest blog brings the late night reader, I will disclose the story of the R.O.A.T. (Ridiculously Oversized [but carbon-neutral] American Truck that you won’t see me telling big media.
Here it is: even on vegetable oil, a diesel engine is loud. Exact decibels I can’t say, but about as many as distract a quarterback in a domed visiting stadium. It’s to the point that I’m worried about the long-term effect on my hearing. In fact, it’s beyond the fact that I have heard myself saying, “What? Stop mumbling! What are you trying to tell me?” to my dog as she barks wildly next to my face to alert me about the gaggle of coyotes after our chickens. The other day at a stoplight in Silver City, the guy in the Chevy Malibu next to me was bobbing and lip syncing, clearly in sync with my iPOD music (Moe’s first album.), which I hadn’t thought was overly loud. I opened the window, as he nodded a greeting in rhythm.
“Grsc snmmgk,” he said appreciatively.
“What?” I screamed. “I can’t hear you over the music.”
Then he either said, “I love this song” or “It’s too bad Stoned Wheat Thins started using partially hydrogenated oil.”
I needed to establish something before the light changed. “You can hear my music? Speak loudly – my engine is a V-16 or something.”
“Hear it? I can feel every note. I can hear it in stereo!” he hollered, adding, “My car’s shaking.”
It was true. When I reached the bike shop, my destination, I kept the engine idling. The music didn’t seem so loud. Then I shut off the engine, overriding the “purge” process (see March 28 Dispatch), kept the music on so I could allow my ears to adjust, and went to pick up my tuned-up bike. After a sign-language exchange with the bike guys, I came back to the R.O.A.T., which I now realized, on top of all its towing capacity, goat restraint functionality (see November 15 Dispatch) and other features, could also in a pinch serve as a sound system for Madison Square Garden.
The message? Diesel engines are loud. Actually not as loud on vegetable oil as they are on Diesel fuel, but cacophonous nonetheless. In many ways this Dispatch is a plea for help. I realize in my honest moments that I can’t wear the soundproof construction site earphones that my petroleum-free ride deserves, because that would mean no music. So my only consolation is I don’t drive much these days. Except when I do.
So my only hope is that medical science, by the time the Moe generation reaches senior status, will have developed completely bionic replacement ears. It doesn’t seem like that big a task. Just make our ears like really, really good stereo speakers that can also record on demand.
It’s almost a month past Solstice, and even in the Funky Butte Ranch’s high desert ecosystem, nothing other than conspiratorial political ideas is really growing yet, not outdoors. So after a pleasant, pretty much carbon-neutral visit with the aquatic mammals of Old Mexico (I drove on veggie oil and brought my own kayak), I came home with an understandable craving to continue my all-burrito road diet.
What did I find in my larder? Anasazi beans I grew. In the freezer? Green chiles from the famous and nearby Hatch Harvest. Tortillas made in the nearest town and tomatoes growing on my inside vine rounded out the meal. I found I was an unintentionally winter locavore. For a couple of nights, anyway. I expect almost no petroleum in my meals in the summer, but in winter? This was as pleasant a development as non-pre-ordained candidate winning a primary.
So now, the mission, should I choose to accept it, is “make all my meals this way.” Protein from the Funky Butte Ranch is once again looking promising after a devastating summer coyote attack on my poultry left me wondering why it took four decades for the cartoon version of this Genuinely Smart Canine to catch one brainless roadrunner. And if Natalie the Goat is indeed pregnant (I think she is – see the November 15 Dispatch), it will be looking great.
She’s due in the spring. Stay tuned for a forum on this site dedicated to free, uncensored exchange of yogurt, cheese and goat ice cream recipes. As for now, it’s the Anasazi beans that have me the most excited. Back in October, I harvested about twelve pounds of them (enough for the winter) from the FBR garden. These are the exact beans cultivated by the folks who lived here before the Americans, Mexicans, Spanish and Apache. Literally – someone found them in some buried pottery, and they sprouted, a Millennium later. Now they’re in every crunchy co-op.
I hulled and jarred them at harvest, and the first batch is soaking as I write. Amazing what a little drip irrigation and some appropriate seed choices can do. No wonder humans lived in my valley 1,000 years before Wal-Mart — in greater numbers than they do today. Thriving without high fructose corn syrup, some of these folks were healthy enough to have lived well into their thirties. As the photo shows, this is a beautiful, Pinto-like bean whose psychedelic surface swoosh reflects the art of the culture that cultivated these genes (they disappeared with the 13th Century equivalent of the oven on the last time the climate got weird). The soil must be meant for this stuff, if I, a decided agricultural amateur, could reap such a bounty in my first effort. In politics, it’d be like a C-student, alcoholic business failure winning the Presidency.
Legumes, though they feed most of the world most of their meals, only go so far for an epicurean palate like mine. And I knew even before winter meandered in that until Natalie’s giving gallons of daily goat milk, I had to figure out other options for protein. So last fall I traded 60 pounds of the local green chile harvest for a share of the year’s wild Alaska salmon run with my friend (and fishing partner when I lived in the Last Frontier) Rafe. I justified this long-distance exchange by remembering something a Tlingit canoe carver told me one time in the sub-Arctic. I was marveling at all the indigenous skills I didn’t possess, wondering how I ever would have survived before, say, Fed Ex and Thai take-out.
“You know, there was always trade,” he said. “We carved, and the folks further north rendered the fish oil. Not everybody had to know how to do everything.”
In fact, there is a long precedent for dividing labor in indigenous communities that predates box stores. This mind-blowing fact of vibrant, segmented, pre-Western economies helped me live at peace with the reality that I couldn’t personally perform every task necessary to thrive at the Funky Butte Ranch. Once Natalie kids, maybe I’ll be able to trade some goat milk for, say, shoes, should Asian slave factories go away. There’s more to living local than just food.
For now, though, my belly is happy, and here’s at least part of the reason why — this is a homemade sushi shot — a meal made from my salmon bartering. OK, so the Anasazi didn’t necessarily eat sushi with regularity. They did import macaw feathers from Central America. And the way I see things, it’s not healthy to live in the past.
In an earlier post I promised to tell the story of my unintentionally-ceiling-fountain-sprouting, mattress-destoying (and eventually successful, even in winter) attempt to install a homemade solar hot water system at the Funky Butte Ranch. Well, it turns out that anecdote made it into the book (Farewell, My Subaru, which comes out March 25). So I’ll keep that one fresh for book-readers, and instead herein recount my equally shocking (in this case literally) effort to bring solar power into my home (and, unfortunately, into my body).
It was first time I had tried to use the sun to harness electricity, I did it on my own, and I wound up with a Sid Vicious haircut and a house so unsafe I still feel some of the shocks. All so I could charge one measly laptop. This was two years ago, back in 2005, when I was living in the off-grid straw bale shack I rented before moving to the Funky Butte Ranch. If there’s one thing the experience taught me, it was that tiny electrons are as immensely perilous when shot all over my body by the sun as they are by grid electricity.
The event started, as so many near-electrocutions do, with a stolen cigarette lighter from a 1970 Cadillac. A car that was manufactured thee year I was born, but with a driving lifespan just longer than a fruit fly. The shell of the three-block long vehicle lived in my neighbor DL’s yard.
You won’t read that in any biography of Edison or Tesla, but this is one way to produce electric current in your home. Read more…
Despite enjoying more than enough opportunity to recognize the danger of preconception in any facet of life, I had thought that the crucial thing to take care of when preparing for the arrival for a billy goat would be securing the perimeter. It wasn’t totally my fault. All goats are escape artists, and the one thing the human bestower of Walt, the world’s only moose-antlered goat, told me was suspiciously paradoxical, like a sphinx’s riddle. She said, “He’s never had an aggressive day in his life (pause to pull long piece of grass out of teeth)…is your corral very secure?”
This raised a flag, and I doubled the corral’s height from four to eight feet, laid stones around perceived weak spots along the ground, and did everything short of mining the gate. Already, well before breeding time, I noticed that I spent much of my waking life these days fruitlessly trying to fence out goats, from the orchard, from the garden, and, most of all, from my roses, evidently filet mignon to the caprine palate. That battle is ongoing and now part of a long comparative study in goat versus human intelligence being sponsored by NASA: the primary question, as it was phrased in the federal funding request, is, “when there’s 41 dang acres of delicious wildflowers to eat, why do the goats go straight after Doug’s four rose bushes?”
Anyway, on the day of Walt’s arrival, I secured the corral to a height that seemed beyond (non-steroid) goat high jump Olympic records. I threw up whatever I had to create the illusion of fence height and integrity: chicken wire, surveying streamers. It worked.
But worry about keeping a billy goat in a pen with an attractive female turned out to be a classic case of the Wrong Way Of Looking At The Problem. More apt, in terms of foreshadowing, turned out the the fact that the night before Walt’s 10-day infestation of the Funky Butte Ranch, I was at a Halloween party (dressed as a goat), at the Ranch adjacent to Walt’s. The conversation was worrying. “Hey, I got chased for a mile on my bike by a weird goat with crazy horns,” a demon told me by the punch bowl. “It was life and death for a while there. I was sure that if he caught me, he’d have killed and eaten me.” Read more…
I am bloodied and in pain as I write today. Not because of billy goat attack (that will be detailed in an upcoming post – Natalie the nanny goat is dating as we speak). Not because of any psychological bruise recent foreign policy decisions have inflicted upon me. But rather because everything is sharp in this ecosystem at this time of year.
I am essentially a seed transport mechanism for tiny, painful Chinese stars that leave my dog limping and mandates socks for me. Socks are a strange garment in the desert. And not just socks: disposable socks. Think really strong Velcro.
That’s because all the prettiest wildflowers recognize they need to get nasty in order to survive in a desert/alpine forest transition zone. The stars come from a yellow daisy-like beauty in late summer that makes the desert, horizon to horizon, look like a sunrise and drives half the human and canine population mad with allergies – choking their respiratory system from sinus to lungs (it doesn’t bother me, thank God, though Sadie gasps half the night and the vet prescribed Benadryl). I could look up the scientific name for this flower but that would be an academic exercise. Allergy sufferers across New Mexico know the plant as FYF. That is, (Expletive deleted) Yellow Flower. Even some allergists call it that. I love the flower’s effect on the Funky Butte Ranch’s panoramic palate as much as I hate its seeds and the way its potent pollen tortures people and other animals close to me.
I’ve come to think that all human weapon innovations, from grenades to poison gas, have derived from personal desert experiences by vindictive people. All is fair, they say, in love and war, and in the realm of desert seed dispersal the two seem to mix. I mean, literally interbreed. Conceptually. And so my mind wanders to the way concepts come to manifest themselves in the physical world. The photo I’ve posted here displays just a few samples of the Chinese stars that, in the billions, are the bane of life here while folks elsewhere can enjoy autumn in the more traditional areas of changing colors and cooling temperatures. We get those, too, but I don’t notice because I’m hobbling around, pulling spikes out of my spine.
Local Living seems to be coming of age. Or returning to Age. That is to say, returning to how it’s been for most of human agricultural existence. Maybe the apparent critical mass in community-based eating and goods-exchange is about cost, global environmental and human rights awareness, or a sense that the petroleum fueled cheap produce era might not have long to go. Maybe, as it is with me, it’s about health – so called “conventional” produce is almost always in some way poisonous or at least dangerous due to pesticides, growth hormones, flavor additives, partial hydrogenization, or corn-fed animals that are supposed to be grass-fed. But I don’t really care about the reasons. I’m just glad it’s happening. And I hope folks read Michael Pollan’s classic The Omnivore’s Dilemma to get a sense of not just how dangerous the industrial “food” chain is, but how iffy organic but non-local food is, in terms of community and planetary health. Organic asparagus from Chile is better than poison asparagus from anywhere, but better is to grow it yourself or get it from a community member. If the latter, you can ask the grower yourself to make sure that sustainable, soil-building and healthy growing practices were used (as opposed to the absurd pesticides and fertilizers forced upon the world over the past three quarters of a century).
This photo is from the recent Mimbres Valey Harvest Festival, where community members decided that all the apples, veggies, crafts and artwork made in our remote New Mexican valley but deemed (in the case of the delicious heirloom apples) un-marketable in an age of designer, waxy, tasteless, homogenous food in most large distribution supermarkets, should be exchanged and enjoyed. It tastes better, in the case of the food, is fresh, and studies show, is higher in nutrients than food grown far away in monoculture-degraded soil.
This was the first year I was an (albeit tentative) producer in my community, selling carrots, zucchini and kombucha. Next year, if all goes well with Natalie’s upcoming breeding, it’ll be goat milk, yogurt, cheese and ice cream as well. I’ve been offered a neighbor’s billy goat, but for reasons anyone who’s had to spend five minutes within a half mile of a billy goat will understand, I don’t want to keep him after he and Natalie have dated. But, also for reasons anyone who’s had to spend five minutes within a half mile of a billy goat will understand, I haven’t yet found a taker for this fellow Walt, who seems like a relatively docile creature. Operative word “relative.” I’ll certainly post updates here.
Anyway, almost zero carbon miles accrued on all the healthy food exchanged at the Harvest Festival. Hope these kind of things (and farmers markets and the Community Supported Agriculture model) catch on world wide. Or return to being the obvious way of doing things.
It can be profitable. I think I grossed almost $14 that day. And ate a lot of carrots.
Ever since a mystical experience in Alaska ten years ago in which a hitchhiker (who later disappeared along with his entire cabin) gave me a dozen duck eggs as thanks for an 18 mile ride in freezing rain, I’ve been a big fan of protein from the Anatidae family. Duck eggs are not just large-yolked and tasty, they’re…different than your basic incredible, edible egg. It’s like foraging for dinosaur ova. So the FBR got its first half dozen day-old ducklings from the local feed store a couple of weeks ago.
The real surprise about duck raising so far has not been how friendly, energetic and aware they are, nor even how funny their webbed pads sound slapping across the kitchen floor, but rather has come in the form of a general parenting foreshadow. On the day this photo was taken, I was all excited to give the ducklings their first post-incubator “swim” in a small washbasin a friend had left as a gift after ranch sitting recently. They’re ducks, right? They’ll love the opportunity to get out of the heated box and hit the water.
Not so much. After I bestowed upon them dunkings that resembled unintentional baptisms, the ducks cowered, shivering, in my lap. Their looks said unmistakably, “More incubation, please. Or possibly a return to the egg.” It caused me to vividly envision the first time I get all thrilled to take my eventual human children on, say, a camping trip. Thanks to the ducks, I realized that the event will likely prove much more fun for me than for the kids. (Haven’t we all seen this phenomenon in action at various zoos, puppet shows and produce aisles?) Though, as the photo shows, the ducklings dried into clean, fluffy beauties when parading on some FBR produce (and as they’ve grown they’ve become more traditionally aquaphilic). The pictured rouen duck is named Pilar, by the way. Meanwhile, next time I practice Interspecies Parental Projection by imposing genus roles on the ducklings, I’ll have to ask them if Fernando is right in his famous philosophical treatise, “It’s better to look good than feel good.” Ideally, I suppose, one aims for both.
The hardest part of conducting essential ranch chores is not biblical floods, ravenous poultry-snatching predators, or contractors who live in time warps (though all these exist), it is the mischievousness of the ranch non-humans. In the picture-is-worth-a-thousand-words category, here Melissa hitches her usual ride in the wheelbarrow when I try to cart her rich, dungy compost to the garden. A new study indicates that the Funky Butte Ranch economy loses 732 hours of productivity annually due to pain-in-the-ass goats alone. But then the same study indicates Netflix causes at least that much laxity.
When it comes to the wheelbarrow rides, in the end, Melissa simply likes to have fun. This is an admirable quality, is what I tell myself, when she snakes in through the pet door and leaps up on to my bed, all 70 pounds of her, sometimes while I’m losing productivity via Netflix.
Note the need for the Chaco sandal company to market a cowboy boot (or, as my friend Dee put it, at least a pointier toe) to suit Western lifestyles and protect against increasingly heavy goats.
Also note the need for Chaco-wearing cowboy to inflate wheelbarrow wheel. This happened, thanks to Melissa’s tire check, moments after this photo was taken.