Sou’Wester!

Let me start by saying I do not recognize Oregon this spring. First, we had a couple nice days in April. Like, in the 70s. That happens sometimes; not a big deal. But we usually dive back into overcast misery. Not this year! While it has been snowing in my native Minnesota, in the Willamette Valley we’ve had weeks of unprecedented weather.

A recent weekend was outrageous. It was almost 90 in Portland. It was in the 80s on the coast! It’s never in the 80s on the coast. If you’re not familiar with it, the Oregon Coast is a place where people occasionally surf—in full-body wetsuits. The water temperature hovers in the 50s, or colder. It is a scenic gem, but not the Jersey Shore.

Last Sunday, when my husband Mike and I pulled onto the beach at Cape Kiwanda State Park around 3 in the afternoon, the thermometer in our car read 86 degrees. Cloudless sky. Outrageous.

Doomsday global-warming theories aside, we were pretty thrilled about it

As the wind was huffing from the north, Mike parked the car perpendicular to the shoreline. We set up on the south side of the car: Beach chairs, cooler, wide-brimmed hats. We brought a blanket but since the wind was blowing loose sand in waves like you see in nature films of the Kalahari, it was better to be a couple inches off the ground. Every once in a while, the air would kick up a sandstorm—we would tuck in and wait for a few seconds.

The tide was out, so there was a vast expanse between the shoreline and the dry, loose sand. Everyone was parked more or less in a line, on the hard-packed sand furthest from the water. If you got too far into the soft sand it would be hard to get out without 4-wheel drive. Of course, that didn’t stop people trying. Every once in a while, someone felt a little saucy and purposely whipped around in that loose sand like Jim Rockford. I could hardly blame them; when else does one get to use a Jeep like a jeep? The beach seemed the perfect size to allow everyone to have their own space.

Our lil’ slice of heaven … about 20 minutes pre-Sou’wester

The part of the beach that allowed cars was about a mile long; we drove about halfway down to park. Many cars had gone all the way to the south end of the beach, which required fording some shallow streams. Bordering that end of the beach was Cape Kiwanda, about 1,000 feet high. It made a nice focal point to the scene, towering over the little cars clustered at its base. On its opposite slope was the inlet that houses Pacific City. Further out into the water, Haystack Rock ignored the wind, the crashing surf and everything else.

We ate a little lunch, walked down the beach and back, climbed a bluff to see what was up there (just a road), and sat in the sun. After a while, we got tired of the water being so far away and carried our chairs out to a rivulet that was coming in parallel to the shoreline. It filled and emptied as waves crashed nearby. This water, being in a shallow channel, wasn’t as cold. But still plenty cold. I had to pull my feet into the air occasionally to let them warm up.

Any time the tide is out simply means it is going to start coming in again. As we ate our dinner, the little stream we’d had our chairs in became a river, and then disappeared altogether as the tide crested the small wall of sand that had created it. We’d also noticed a thin line of weather on the horizon. Clouds started piling up in the south.

“Look!” said Mike, who faced them. I turned to see that Pacific City was completely fogged in all of a sudden.

“That’s weird,” I said, and then noticed that fog was starting to pile up in front of the cape and Haystack Rock.

Then, it started reaching over Haystack like giant grey claws.

We gaped in awe; it was as though we were watching one of those fast-forward nature shots. The clouds moved at unreasonable speeds. The wind shifted and started coming from the south; the temperature dropped 20 degrees in an instant.

We wondered if this was how people behaved when Vesuvius erupted—simply staring at it coming, in slack-jawed disbelief. (Neither of us had the presence of mind to take a video …) Haystack was gone. The cars on the far end of the beach were invisible except for their headlights. We looked over and saw that the tide had surged; the water had turned steely and was blowing straight into the air. The egress of the cars on the south end of the beach was under water; they raced to cross at the most narrow point. A neighbor up the beach struggled to get his VW pop-top camper down before the wind ripped it off completely.

Mike ran to the driver’s side to close the windows. Sand stung my shins and face as I finally accepted that our beautiful day was over and this thing was coming our way—fast—and started folding up our chairs. The wind blew everything against the car, so we wrestled with our fold-up lawn chairs to get them into the trunk.

The whole thing happened in about three minutes. Easily the craziest non-human thing I’ve seen in real life.

We ducked into the car and laughed. It was so ridiculous! It had happened so quickly! But it had indeed happened. And we were not out of danger. The sun was gone; no sky, even—we were enveloped in this crazy storm. The ocean was blowing sideways; breaking in lopsided angles and surging ever closer to our car. All the hard sand was submerged; we had to bushwhack through the soft sand to get out.

As we pulled onto the highway, I checked the temperature. 61. A real, live Sou-wester had gotten us. I imagined experiencing that storm in a boat. Outrageous.

Guest Post: Is Jackson Hole Rural?

My friend Meg grew up in Jackson, Wyoming, and then flew the coop as a young adult to become a world citizen, living in New York; Portland, Oregon; and San Francisco. She returned to her hometown a few years ago. I took advantage of my Get Your Pitchfork On! book tour to visit her last September.

We met when she lived in Portland because we’re both writers, and used to have epic walk-and-talks—we’d go up to Forest Park and cover miles while energetically debating current issues. We were excited last fall to get back to our old routine! One of the topics we considered was comparing “urban” and “rural.” I had referred to Jackson Hole as a rural place, and she demurred.

Hmm, a boardwalk … rural?

“How do you define ‘rural’?” she asked. I thought it was an odd question—I mean, look around! Mountains. Livestock. Moose. However, I was asked twice more during my stint in front of the Valley Bookstore, hawking copies of GYPO and chatting with passers-by. “What do you mean when you say ‘rural’?”

My definition at the time related to population and proximity to an urban area. Jackson is a small, remote town. Isn’t that rural? To me, it has nothing to do with wealth/poverty or “sophistication.” But the question remains: What does “rural” mean, exactly? Here’s Meg’s take:

 

 

 

Is Jackson Hole Rural?

by Meg Daly

At the risk of sounding too relativistic, it depends on whom you ask?

Certainly my friends from unequivocally urban areas like West Hollywood or North Portland will encounter “rural” in all its cow-dotted, mega-cab-truck splendor. But many of us who live here espouse non-rural cultural values and interests one would expect to find in abundance on the funky streets of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. We zip around in Priuses or (gasp) on bikes, listen to Vampire Weekend, and read articles about gastronomy and modern design.

Setting aside definitions of rural and urban based solely on population density and open space, and looking instead at values and aesthetics, then Jackson Hole is actually a little Petri dish of urban and rural in constant state of tension. The town’s main industry is tourism, and in the summer that means millions of visitors from all backgrounds coming through to see “the last and best of the Old West.” In the winter, however, tourists flock to Jackson for world-class alpine skiing, and they want the luxe amenities they’ve come to expect in cosmopolitan settings.

I think it’s a sign of the urbanization of the world. Much like globalization, the landscape is being flattened so that the texture and personality of rural America becomes a commodity rather than a place or way of life. In recent years, my town has endured heated debates about planning and development of the few remaining open spaces. Opponents to development started a campaign called “Don’t Let the Hole Lose Its Soul.” Proponents speak to the need for affordable housing, with the pragmatic view that open spaces tend to get developed eventually so why not do it in a thoughtful way.

Our local debate raises questions about who gets to be the representative of a town’s “soul.” In a little mountain town like Jackson, with severe winters and a super-short growing season, people have only been living here year-round for a century. The town has changed in personality with every passing decade. Why shouldn’t Jackson Hole become a place where skateboarders and cowboys ride?

On our main drag, Broadway, the Jackson Hole Historical Museum (where you can view an exhibition like “Homesteading the Hole: Survival and Perseverance”) abuts Nikai Sushi (where you can sip a Lotus Flower Martini while noshing on a Big Kahuna roll). These kinds of juxtapositions exist all over Jackson Hole. I’m less concerned with whether Jackson qualifies as rural or urban, or whether we lose or protect our so-called soul. I see Jackson the way I think people have always seen it, for better or worse, as a new frontier. The challenge is to be pioneers on that frontier, and to create healthy, vibrant communities living in balance with nature.

Gone Fishing

Sometimes you want a big party on your birthday, and sometimes you just want to get away from it all. This was one of the latter years for me, so my husband Mike and I drove up to Wallowa County, Oregon, to visit our friend Jon and get some R&R.

This is not Jon’s first appearance on this blog—I wrote about his fancy firewood bundles last summer in my value-added marketing post.

We arrived late Saturday. Tucked into a corner of our guest room was a work table laden with shiny streamers and baubles, tools and small drawers—a fly-tying station. Jon is an avid fisher—and why wouldn’t you be when you’re a short drive (country-short, at least) from dozens of pristine mountain rivers? He promised to take us to a friend’s ranch on the Imnaha on Sunday and give me a fly-fishing lesson. The last time I fished was in about 1978. I barely remember it.

The next morning, we packed a lunch, fishing gear and the dogs into the pickup and took off.

Getting to Imnaha is a commitment—it’s 45 minutes from Enterprise, nearly on the edge of the state. As we drove into the Wallowa Mountains, snow flew. I looked out the back; the dogs were unfazed by the crust they were acquiring. Mike and I looked at each other. This was going to be some chilly fishing! But by the time we passed between Inmaha’s two buildings we had dropped a couple thousand feet. The sky had cleared and the temperature had risen at least 15 degrees.

But we weren’t there yet. We turned north for about ten miles, following the Imnaha River, until we ran out of pavement. Then we drove another ten on gravel. This road twisted up and into the mountains, around blind hairpin turns that revealed incredible views of the Imnaha River valley. We were so remote that we came across two bighorn sheep in the road! The dogs had already shaken off their snow-jackets and ran from side to side in the cab, anxious to explore.

Eventually, we wound down to the river’s edge. Jagged peaks rose up all around the narrow, grassy river valley we were in. The Imnaha ran hard and fast, swollen with spring snowmelt. Jon jogged down to survey the water and returned to get the gear. I would have drowned in his hip waders, figuratively if not literally, so I fished from shore.

Scouting from the bank

What we were hoping to coax out of this cold, turgid river were steelhead. These rainbow trout act a bit like salmon—they swim hundreds of miles down the Imnaha, then the Snake, then the Columbia, all the way to the ocean, and then fight their way upstream all the way back a couple of years later to spawn and die. Jon works for a rafting outfitter and has documented a number of his catches. Did I mention that he is a great writer?

First Jon introduced me to the fishing gear. I had already declined the waders, but was totally fascinated by the little box of flies he’d tied.

“You’re basically trying to drop something into the water that looks like food,” Jon said. Fish look for sudden movement, and dark and light patterns. The nymphs had shiny bits to catch the light, and fuzzy bits that would clump in the water and look like little insect bodies. He said that pink was good during spawning season. “Mine are showy,” he said, pointing out the features of his nymphs.

This one was made with deer hair

Jon explained how the fly rod works, a different technology from a standard rod-and-reel. Of course, the rods themselves are much longer, to aid in casting. Instead of relying on lead weights to give the hook loft, the line itself has weight. And there are little weights that you can put on your hook, called “heads.” Even with a head on your hook, it doesn’t weigh much, which is why fly-fishers actually get in the water on a wide river. (Plus, it’s fun to stand in the middle of a river.)

Some of the differences are purely aesthetic—the floating, round ball attached to the line that you watch to see if it dips into the water? “A bobber!” I said, proud that I knew something. “A strike indicator,” Jon corrected, and then proceeded to call it a bobber anyway.

Next lesson: Where to cast. He explained that fish like to hang out in calm water that isn’t too shallow; they avoid the strong current and the edges. What we were looking for, he said, was “soft” water, called the “seam.” Looking out, I could see a place where the top of the water smoothed out for about 20 feet. The seam.

The method of casting differs as well to accommodate the lighter bait and longer rod. The fly-fisher is nearly constantly in motion. Some people consider it an art form. Dry flies actually rest on the surface of the water to emulate flying insects landing. Even wet nymphs need to move often.

But Jon is a pragmatist; if there’s no need to do it fancy, don’t.

“Have you ever seen A River Runs Through It?” he asked me.

“No.”

“Good.”

Subsequently, I was not being taught to whip the line around in the air like a lariat.

As Jon explained the timing of pulling the nymph back for another cast, Mike, who was observing from further up the bank, yelled, “Your bobber!” While I had been looking downstream, following Jon’s illustration, a fish hit my fly. But the fish recognized the fly wasn’t food and, since I hadn’t pulled up to set the hook, spit it out.

I kept casting, trying to focus on my form. After a while, Jon joined me—and then his rod snapped in two.

Sad fisher man

Since I was the only one doing anything, I practiced my cast a few more times and then called it quits. We went back to the rig and ate lunch in the sun. The scenery was so spectacular that is was difficult to leave.

Picture, do the talking

Jon was disappointed that we didn’t catch anything; I wasn’t. I completely understand the notion that going fishing can just be an excuse to be outside all day! It was exactly the kind of birthday I was hoping for.

Behold, the Cow

Get Your Pitchfork On! came into the world a year ago. And what a year it’s been! I spent most of 2012 traveling around to promote the book, which gave me an excuse to visit family and friends.

It was important to me, while writing the book, to make it not about me. I wrote it for you, the reader, and your dreams of living in the country. In spite of that, I sometimes found it difficult to completely divorce myself from the emotional ties I still have to that little parcel in Washington. I learned the hard way that if I read the line from the book’s introduction, “Our beloved dog had been killed on the highway bordering our property,” I’d choke up if there was someone in the audience who knew her.

Reading the introduction to the Land section, in which I describe the most wonderful features of living in a remote, natural area, had a similar effect. I often dug a fingernail into my thumb to keep it together.

Despite this, and despite peppering my presentations with cautionary tales of cats being eaten by coyotes and homesteaders putting their arms in wood-chippers, I tried to keep it fun! One of my efforts in this regard has been the menagerie of farm animals I’ve set up on the podium in front of me. These plastic toys have been a big hit, to the point that I’ve had to keep an eye on children passing by my table at book fairs—they hope they’re giveaways.

These animals came to me in the best possible way, just a couple of months before GYPO hit the bookshelves. I was at a Portland bar known for its fantastic Happy Hour—cheap and delicious food, and an always-changing champagne cocktail special. My friend Anmarie and I met there and ordered the special, which was some crazy thing involving elderberry liquor from Switzerland or something. To our delight, the bartender had topped each flute with a farm animal; mine sported a goat and Anmarie’s a horse. Naturally, we had to order another round, and scored a cow and a chicken. Anmarie graciously surrendered hers when I decided that I would bring them to every book event.

My first reading was, appropriately, in the Columbia River Gorge, where Get Your Pitchfork On! was born. I traveled all around Oregon and Washington, and even made it down to Los Angeles and over to Wisconsin and my home state, Minnesota. These were wonderful opportunities to see many dear friends of past and present all at once. And I also got to have great conversations with people I’ve never met, and will probably never see again.

As you can see from my schedule, I did not stick solely to bookstores! That first reading was in my friends’ restaurant, Solstice Wood Fired Café (with support from Waucoma Bookstore). I set up a table at a plant nursery in Salem, Oregon, a winery tasting room in Jacksonville, Oregon, and a feed store in Portland. I had a lunch talk in a little diner in Waupaca, Wisconsin. I read in bars in Portland and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I got to share my stories with a couple dozen relatives—and my high school prom date’s parents!—in my dad’s hometown of Appleton, Wisconsin, on his mother’s birthday.

Hawking my wares—a great way to spend a day outside

I signed a post-it note for my friends Betty and Rich’s e-reader

My Grandma insisted on letting me horn in on her birthday cake

Not everyone gets to sit in the Red Chair of Wordstock

In January of this year I was part of a panel discussion put on by Laura Stanfill, who had interviewed me after GYPO came out, and then included that interview in a book about writing called Brave on the Page. At a long table at Powell’s, as per usual, I set out my farm animals.

The panel’s moderator, author Joannna Rose, handled the group expertly—she asked great questions and threw in the right amount of humor. At one point she interrupted herself to ask me, “Why do you have those animals in front of you?”

Later, Laura sent me some photos she had taken, including this one, which she titled, “Behold, the Cow”:

“Behold, the Cow” by Laura Stanfill

What a fun year! Thanks to publisher Adam Parfrey and Process Media’s staff, particularly Carrie Schaff and Jessica Parfrey; publicists Mary Bisbee-Beek and Sheepscot Creative’s Dave and Bethany; blurbers Mark Wunderlich, Kim Barnes, Corinna Borden, Monica Drake, and Frank Bures; designer Gregg Einhorn; and the chapter-readers and everyone else noted in the book’s acknowledgements. And everyone who’s come to an event and/or bought a book.

Happy First Birthday, Get Your Pitchfork On! May you have many more—there are lots of people I still need to visit!

The Death of Thrift-Store Shopping

Growing up, my family didn’t have a lot of money. We’re innate treasure hunters. And Catholics.

This all added up to a particular tradition from my childhood: On the way home from Mass, my mom, sister and I would zigzag across the western suburbs of Minneapolis and hit every yard sale we could find. It was a win-win: my sister and I felt like we were getting new things; my parents spent a couple bucks, max. I still have a small train case that I bought for 25 cents.

When I got older, thrift shops became a Thing with my friends and me. Even though we went to an upper-middle-class high school and could have shopped at Benetton, Laura Ashley, or a new store called The Gap (I had a waitressing job by then and could buy my own things), it was the mid-1980s and we were into New Wave music. We preferred the punk rock aesthetic of military surplus and second-hand clothes from the ‘50s and ‘60s.

Some thrift shops were in church basements, some in flagging strip malls. The coolest option was a sort of combination military surplus and vintage shop called Ragstock. My friends and I spent hours there, trying on cardigan sweaters and combat boots. We could score embroidered bowling shirts, old men’s plaid golf shorts and Navy pea coats—all super-cheap. Our parents were aghast that we sought out their parents’ fashions … on purpose.

Twenty-five years later, I still love to scour yard sales for good deals. The trouble is, the good deals are becoming harder to find. There are two factors at work: taste and quality.

Mid-century people owned a few, quality things, and they had “Sunday best.” They also dressed up more, generally. Have you ever seen a photograph of a crowd at a baseball game in the 1960s? Men wore hats (I mean HATS, not baseball caps). Women wore them, too, as well as dresses, gloves and heels. My grandfather wore a tie every day, even when he never left the house. Blame the pantsuits of the 1970s; fashion has become increasingly casual. Nowadays, some people even go out in public in pajama bottoms and extra-large t-shirts.

Another factor is the plain old passage of time. In 1987, there were thousands of ‘60s shirts in existence. Decades later, they have simply been worn to pieces. No new ones are entering the thrift store stream. Subsequently, what ends up in thrift stores is not pristine Pendleton wool shirts and pleated skirts. Those things now end up in vintage shops.

Vintage and thrift shops used to be basically the same thing; now they’ve split so that those high-quality pieces of yore are not just old clothes, but also rare and unique clothes. And because of Internet sales, discarded clothes don’t stay in their community; they’re scooped up by jobbers and resold everywhere. So, now you find things for sale like this $200 cape.

Even Goodwill high-grades their designer labels. So, you might find an Armani suit there for $150—still a bargain considering it’s an Armani suit, but also still $150.

I knew a guy in Hood River who’d made a deal with estate sale managers in Eastern Oregon—he got the first go at everything they ended up with. He happened upon a stack of 1950s brand-new Levis from the storage room of an old outfitter and, instead of selling them locally, posted them on Ebay, where he said Japanese shoppers were laying down $300 per pair!

Many modern thrift stores also buy batch lots of cheaply manufactured, new clothing from wholesalers, which is why you might see six of the same shirt on a rack. Or, this new leather jacket. $165.

New jacket in a “thrift” store

There is still the occasional exception. During my two-month writers’ residency in 2010 in Harney County, Oregon, I happened upon this beautiful wool, fur-collared coat at the thrift shop.

“Oh—you didn’t!” “Merry, Christmas, Honey. I got a good price on the cattle this year.”

It was most likely a very special gift from a rancher to his wife. She most likely only wore it for Christmas and funerals. It’s in perfect shape, and I paid five dollars for it. Five.

Urban vintage shops are usually run by people in their 30s, and guess what they think is ironic and cool—‘80s stuff! Not what my friends and I had, but actual things sold in the ‘80s. The dresses my teachers wore. The neon sportswear. The foot-torturing pumps. I’m just waiting for shoulder pads and those face-shield eyeglasses to come back. For they will.

I traveled a bit last year to promote Get Your Pitchfork On! and hit thrift shops wherever I could. Proof that I am, deep down, an optimist: Every time I approach a new thrift shop I think, “THIS one is going to be awesome!”

But they never are anymore. I went to Los Angeles and thought: Okay, movie stars must dump their fabulous clothes. They do, it turns out. But those thrift shops sell things for triple-digits, and the women’s clothes are tiny (anorexic-tiny, not short-tiny). I went to Jackson, Wyoming and thought: Okay, these people are rich! But even rich people wear regular clothes, apparently. I tried remote locations, such as Appleton, Wisconsin, and Hermiston, Oregon, in hopes of some old-school quality. Same deal.

Water, water, everywhere, and not a drop to drink

It’s over, punk rock children of the ‘80s. We’ve had a good run. Thanks for the memories!

Agriculture and the Media

Friday morning, I biked to Portland’s EcoTrust building for a conference that I learned about just last week at a Friends of Family Farmers event: Food+Agriculture Media Project. The idea was to get food and ag journalists, editors and researchers together to talk shop, meet each other, and maybe learn a few things along the way. I did all three!

The keynote speaker was from American Public Media’s Marketplace program, Adriene Hill. She talked about the challenge reporters face in trying to keep issues like organic food and global warming fresh to a weary audience. If a story about global warming leads with the subject itself, no one hears the story—the people who agree with the idea pat themselves on the back and turn off the story, and those who don’t agree curse at the radio and turn off the story. But, she continued, if the story begins with the price of chocolate going up everyone listens, even as the cause is identified as global warming.

Food, Hill noted, is uniquely suited to lead into any number of topics. “Everyone eats,” she said, “so everyone can relate on some level.”

After a few presentations about storytelling and the necessity of multimedia platforms, a panel convened to discuss the subject of raising and eating meat. The panelists considered a number of angles of meat production, discussing the cost of raising and processing grass-fed beef and compassionately raised poultry, and how that cost consigns the farmer to meager profits and precludes many from being able to afford it.

They also talked about the utter failure of the federal Farm Bill to meet the needs of mid-sized farmers and ranchers. Microenterprises and, especially, corporate industries fare much better, in the latter case to the detriment of vast swaths of land as well as people. A rancher from Eastern Oregon remarked that if direct subsidies from the Farm Bill were reinvested in conservation efforts, the landscape would “change overnight.”

What was sort of amazing—exciting and daunting at the same time—is how clear everyone is about how no one has all the answers, and they’re also not sure how to collect and assemble them. The Big Picture, it turns out, may be altogether too big for any single person to comprehend. As I contemplate future projects in the world of agriculture and rural life, it’s both a challenge and an opportunity.

Guest Post: From Field to Table

Ed Battistella’s greatest achievement, as far as I’m concerned, is that in 2012 he made up and posted a new English word every day on his Twitter account, @LiteraryAshland. In September of last year, he interviewed me about country living and book-writing for his blog, Welcome to Literary Ashland. Ed teaches at Southern Oregon University and is working on a book about the linguistics of apology.

From Field to Table

By Ed Battistella

Reading the section on animals in Get Your Pitchfork On (and especially the chicken idioms on page 136) got me to thinking about the way we refer to animals and food, and reminded me of this recipe for giblets from a 15^th-century cookbook:

Take fayre garbagys of chykonys, as þe hed, þe fete, þe lyuerys, an þe gysowrys; washe hem clene, an caste hem in a fayre potte, and caste þer-to freysshe brothe of Beef or ellys of moton, an let it boyle; an a-lye it with brede, an ley on Pepir an Safroun, Maces, Clowys, an a lytil verious an salt, an serue forth in the maner as a Sewe.  *translation below

Recipes like this give us some clues to Middle English relationships with food and animals, and our own. The word for giblet was garbage, a precursor of Modern English, and in Old English (no e on Olde!). In Old English, mete meant food (as in sweetmeat, mincemeat and nutmeat) and the word flæsc (flesh) was used for animal-tissue food (check out your handy Oxford English Dictionary). And people ate animals, not meat: they ate picga (pig), sceap (sheep), cu (cow) and cíecen (chicken).

After the Norman Conquest of 1066, many French words were borrowed into English, resulting in the possibility of more than one way to say things. The French introduced words for the cooked forms of animals: pultrie (poultry), porc (pork), motoun (mutton), boef (beef), and veel (veal), as well as garbage and gysowrys, both meaning the edible entrails. The two levels of vocabulary allowed speakers of English to eventually separate the farm from the table—the cooked form of animals, the product, was rendered in French, while the field form was from Old English. But throughout the Middle Ages and beyond, boef and motoun were used as terms for the animals as well as for their meat (of flesh). The distinction between French terms for food and English terms for animals doesn’t get fully baked in until early Modern English (Shakespeare refers to the “flesh of Muttons, Beefes, or Goates” in the Merchant of Venice) and modern ranchers still sometimes refer to cattle as beef.

Bon appetit.

I love me some cíecen … I mean pultrie …

*Translation of above in Modern English: “Take good garbage of chickens, as the head, the feet, the livers, and the gizzards; wash them clean, and cast them in a good pot, and cast therein fresh beef broth or else (that) of mutton, and let it boil; and bind it with bread, and (add) pepper and saffron, maces, cloves, and a little verjuice and salt, and serve it forth in the manner as a broth.”

Welcome, Spring!

I have been on vacation this week, so my message is simple: Welcome, Spring! Glad to have you back.

The gate to our beautiful garden in Washington!

Field Trip

A few months ago, my husband Mike and I were traveling to Bend, Oregon, so I could give a reading at their beautiful public library. I was looking forward to seeing old friends, walking among Ponderosa pines, and going to Big R.

What—the local ranch supply store? Yep. No trip to Eastern Oregon is complete without it.

Where I grew up, in Minnesota, it was Mills Fleet Farm. Pretty similar, but with less ranching and more ice fishing. But either way—where else can you get work gloves of any description, fencing, live rabbits, and a meat bandsaw in one trip?

Man-sized safe? Check

Country-themed home décor? Of course

Pink camo jackets and country-themed lingerie? Natch

Chainsaws and accessories? Even a video showing a lumberjack competition!

In an earlier post about raising rural children, I used a few photos from the toy section. The children’s weaponry is all practically minded—hunting rifles and six-shooters. No flamethrowers or grenade-launchers. There is a bit more diversity in the real-gun section, but it’s still mostly oriented toward hunting. I would say the “adult” gun section, but country kids typically learn to shoot a gun before they’re ten …

The horse section is also spectacular. Bridles and ropes of every color. Mineral licks. Y mucho mas.

Toys for pastured horses

Bling is the thing for today’s horsewoman

 

If you want a crash-course in rural life, walk the aisles of one of these stores. You might even pick up some new garden boots, like I did.

No, not these!

Spring Planting

Spring! Depending on where you live, March might be time to plant tomatoes and cantaloupes (Southern states) or to cry into your seed catalogs as yet another snowstorm rolls through (Northern states). It’s by no means balmy in the Pacific Northwest, but nice enough to plant heartier things like brassicas and greens. And so I did.

As many of you know, my husband and I are currently in what I like to call “exile”—in a rental home in the city, trying to regroup for our next strike into the country. There are no vegetable garden beds on this property, so I am making do by sneaking in a few things along the flowered fence line. My motivation when picking things to plant is: What can I grow in not-perfect conditions that is expensive to buy in the store? Lettuce, dill, arugula (rocket), parsley and basil.

Parsley seeds need to soak for 24 hours; dill doesn’t transplant well so it will go straight into the ground. The rest go in pots.

Soaking parsley seeds in wet paper towels

You do not need to buy fancy seed-starter kits to get some plants going. Whatever you use just needs to be sturdy and to drain. I have seen people twist newspaper into little cups but have never tried it for fear that, once they’re wet, they will fall apart. (Plus, where does one get newspaper anymore? Ha.) Instead, I took a few empty yogurt and sour cream containers and punched holes in the bottom with a box-cutter—et voilá!

Cutting drain-holes

If possible, use starter mix; to save money I just bought regular planting soil. The reason for starter mix is it’s sifted to keep big chunks of vermiculite and organic matter out. A pea-sized hunk of bark wouldn’t bother a grown plant but it could stop completely the development of a tender seedling. So I go through and pick out the biggest chunks.

Clearing growth-hazards

Getting starts moisture is tricky; you can’t just dump a stream of water on them or you’ll uncover the seeds or knock the seedlings over. The best is to use a spray bottle (preferably a bottle that has held drinking water). Lacking a spray bottle, I held my fingers over a glass and forced the water to drip out slowly. Until the seedlings have roots there is no need to water the entire pot of soil; just the top inch is fine.

Some of you experienced gardeners may be saying: Basil? In March? Indeed, basil is a very tender plant that doesn’t take kindly to anything under 65 degrees. Never fear; I’m going to keep those pots inside—probably for three months!

Before ….

After!