21st March, 2019 Thursday
Vernal Equinox. Its Earth’s Dawning here.
So Dream Kite swished and I know I tried to tail grab before I left the realm of dreams. I could not invoke the Trickster today, that sprite who walks between the realms with missives we might have sight enough to read. Not me today.
But let me tell you of a documentary we went to see last night.
Some of you who have read some thoughts from last September, might remember talk of a Local Thirty Challenge. That one should try to spend 30 days sourcing all the food they consume from a 200 mile radius from where they rest their heads.
This challenge, “Local Thirty”, was brainstormed by Andrea Bemis who with her husband, Taylor started Tumbleweed, a six acre farm, seven years ago here in the Mount Hood area of Oregon. She has written of her journey with earth and veg in her blog “Dishing Up the Dirt” for years and published a cookbook of the same name two years ago.
Andrea has no small part in our choice to move here. Andrea is magnetic. Her open heart shines at all who come into contact with her.
Her brother, Adam, married my Eldest, Rebekah, two and a half years ago in a meadow in Montana. Adam, too, has that magic magnet pulling from the center of his chest. He pulled my Eldest’s core straight to him out in Wild Montana.
Adam and Rebekah had for years been called to this Valley where Andrea and Taylor mined the Earth in between these two volcanoes. Husband and I hankering for less congestion and urban sprawl, more family and that elusive thing called Home, found ourselves, against the logic of it, heaving out of forested suburban Tacoma, Washington, to this five acre spot on the mighty Columbia’s Gorge a little less than two years ago. It was quite the transition.
Immediately, community connection here came through food. The weekly Farmer’s Market where Tumbleweed’s booth hosted tiers of picture perfect veg backdropped by Andrea and Taylor who were always willing to hug was my first dip into community contact here. Their Market neighbor, Tim Jeffries, sells beef grazed on a ranch his grandfather bought 100 years ago. Tim himself has an air of knowing something more than most about what is.
This Local Thirty Challenge was not a leap for me as having moved my stomach here, I who do not live to eat and hate to cook, have always looked for simple when I feed. I had happily fallen into step the year before with finding what food I did consume close to home.
Local Thirty did not find my stomach or my pallete hurting. But if I had been living some place else, where food is grown afar, I would have found this challenge all consuming. More consuming than I felt it worth most likely if I am completely honest.
Andrea, Taylor, Rebekah and Adam committed to the Local Thirty and followed through with game and gusto. I found out somewhere in the middle of the month that a film was being made about their local forage.
The documentary “Local Thirty” released to streaming a month ago and screened at a local theater here in town last night is quite the romantic seductive ride into this uniquely bountiful place on Earth. As I watched my year old homeland and my family so deftly captured by the crew at Modoc Stories, Michael and David Hanson, and their cohort Brett Schwager, so many pangs erupted in my heart.
I am conflicted. I will admit. As owner of a five acre field which has the legal blanket to be farmed no matter the umbrage my neighbors to the West take from their creation of my gall to allow Rebekah and Adam to raise for sale three batches of roasting chickens in my field last year, I have been caught in the snare of the two philosophies I carry.
Our Western neighbors raised unshirted cain at the fact of our using our open field within their view to rotate chicken tractors for four months. They were insulted affronted at our willingness to pay a price so high for property we thought to farm right next to them.
That all is a tale whose full details are not relevant here except to say some people feel entitle to hurl deep ugliness at those who do not fall in line with their world view. This here microcosm is a mirror for our current World.
Their house sits West next door on five acres. It is a lovely buliding which might well belong to many of the previous neighborhoods in which I have been privileged to reside. It brings to mind the gate with guard, the overseeing body anachonymed HOA with its list of allowances and crimes against the cultured eye. The property’s House Beautiful standard screams forth from its ultimately immaculate facade and grounds.
Our chicken tractors moving twice a day up and down the field just East of them would not do for them, oh no. They made it known in writing they believe our living breathing use of these five acres was a deliberated crime against them. Oh My God.
No more detail. Just this.
I have asked Rebekah and Adam to reconsider using my open empty five acre field for their amazing chicken flock which we enjoyed all summer,
My list of reasons are somewhat sourced in the practicality of who will tend the flock as both Rebekah and Adam are full tilt boogie committed to other jobs off farm and Husband and I are focused in other ways.
But part of me wants no more ugly hurled from neighbors in the name of land use ideologic difference. I want the Bully to go away.
But if I am honest, I also hold their point of view. I was raised to use my brain, its fruit had value. This was the evolution away from dependency on the vagaries of Earth’s random acts of Farming sabotage. Brain fruit somehow was perceived to have more certainty. Until Rebekah put chickens in my field, the last generation farming in my family stopped 140 years ago.
It is about this I am conflicted. Its important now at this time on the planet that we hold sacred Earth’s capacity to yield sustenance for our needs. And that cannot happen if we do not support the people who wish to use their brains to Farm.
This documentary, as it romances the act of local foraging for what you use to sustain your pantry by building a network of Farmers who produce sustainably, it also shines a beam right in on this conflicted area of what is land for doing. Late in the film it feather touches the issue that if the fruit orchards in the Upper Valley cease to find ways to stay economically viable, what comes next? “Shopping malls and second homes…?” we hear as the frame encases Andrea sipping fresh pressed cider at one of these 100 year old orchards against the gobsmacking backdrop of Mount Hood’s volcanic sillouette.
As I watched, I felt lucky and guilty at the same time. Lucky to live in such a place in 2019. That this thing called The Local Thirty Challenge was already in my wheelhouse before I even reached for it. How many places in America can offer this kind of local bounty? How rare this place is. How alien to those who live for city?
Guilty because I find it so easy to hold land and love it and not feel the mandate to use it to sustain me or my family other than its projected value at its sale, I come from culture that encouraged use of brain for payment whose gain was used to purchase land for space and peace of mind not farming.
My children of this next generation whose clawing mandate is to reinvent how we walk the Earth in hopes it will not end have brought the mirror up for me.
As Spring unfurls her graceful wares in this place which sleeps so deep beneath Winter, I am feeling Home in ways I had not thought existed here for me. But I am looking at something called hypocrisy inside me. Its important, this reflection.
The film is lovely. Take the ride. You will meet my family and my surrounding home. You’ll ride the ocean, walk the forest, cook over fire, foot press wine, and oggle some of the finest Earth we have.
I say Brava, Bravo team “Local Thirty”.
Tea was Jasmine Green.
Ta.
Tea With Me 