Entry 8: Letting Go

The garden that was bursting with life and good food to eat a short three months ago is now bare in comparison.  From the comfort of the greenhouse, I have been washing pumpkin seeds from a giant “prize” pumpkin that grew to about two feet in diameter.  It sat at the outside of the garden gate as festive autumn décor until the deer chewed a hold through the outer shell.  Each seed from this pumpkin, I’m told, will sell for 75 cents.  I carefully wash the seeds and place them on a screen to dry.  

Turning around, I glance out of the window on the door on the greenhouse as the sun has recently set.  A doe is just outside, nibbling on the pumpkin in the compost pile.  I reach for my phone to see if I can take a picture, but she has spotted me.  She stares, ears perked up, directly at me through the glass.  I stand very still so as not to scare her away.  One by one, I see the rest of them.  A leg or a head moves and I count.  Six deer—all female as far as I can tell—are right there outside of the greenhouse.  I wait and watch, but the big albino buck is nowhere to be seen.

Just as seeds take time to germinate, grow, flower, and fruit, so do other things in life.  As time goes on, I have to remind myself to pay attention to everything else going on around me before it passes me by.  

I have gained an intimacy with this landscape in a short few months.  It feels like I’ve known this place for years.  It reminds me of being back home.  It’s quiet here and spacious.  The houses aren’t stacked on top of one another out here.  There is enough land for people to spread out.  It’s easier to hear one’s thoughts, easier to slow down, easier to relax a bit.  But it's different also.  It's home that I miss.  This surrogate place just makes me miss home all the more.

Through the simple acts of observation and putting pencil to paper, I have come to know Eden Hall on a deeper level than I think I would have just coming out here to work.  Taking the time to watch, life doesn’t pass me by so quickly.  Internal meanderings can cloud out what is happening before my very eyes, transforming this serene landscape into a jumbled mess of thoughts.

It’s better, I think, to let those thoughts go sometimes and just watch.  Watch as the heat of summer gives way to fall’s cool breezes.  Listen as the loud crunch of leaves underneath one’s feet changes to the soft crunch of snow.  Take in a deep breath of air and let it all wash away.  

The deer herd slowly makes their way around the far side of the garden fence and down into the field.  I watch a little bit longer, staring at their dark coats against the beaming white of the snow.

Entry 7: Watching the Dark

Staring out into the pitch black, my eyes adjust slowly.  Except for the few lights on the outside of the lodge and the farmhouse, the rest of Eden Hall campus is enveloped in the quiet, dark void that accompanies nightfall.  Not a car on the road to make a sound, only the steady hum of electricity powering the fog light nearby.  It seems there’s always a distraction out here of some kind, some sort of human creation that’s interfering with my observation of the natural world in its pristine state.

As my eyes have begun to adjust, I walk away from the light at my back toward the garden.  Stratus clouds, blocking out any view of the stars, are visible in the night sky.  If this were a clear night in Gibsonia, this would be the place to do some star gazing.  I imagine that the sky out here would look a lot like it does at home, 450 miles away.  No light pollution to stop the brilliant beaming of countless stars.

Passing through the rear gate of the garden and walking out onto the field, I decide that since I can’t see the stars on this cloudy evening, I’ll wait and look for the albino deer that’s supposed to frequent these open fields.  I’m told that around dusk is a good time to spot him.  But I’m told that you can see him in the dark too, as long as there is a little light to reflect off of his coat.  Even though it looks as if the sun has long set, it’s only six in the evening.  Maybe nature’s anomaly will, by chance, grace me with his presence.

I wait.  In the cold, dry air.  In the dark.  In the quiet.  

Nothing.

Only the thoughts in my mind and my shifting feet on the ground make a sound.  Something about this deer is so compelling, I want to wait longer.  Like some kind of a legend around Eden Hall, seeing the deer is a sight reserved only for privileged observers.  

Tonight isn’t the night.  The cold is forcing me back to the lodge, to the welcoming warmth of human creation.  No matter.  There will be other nights.  The stars weren’t even out this time.

Entry 6: Cold Weather, Warm Hearts

Snowflakes fall gently from the sky as I help a second-year Food Studies student-employee at the organic garden label the perennials planted in the Permaculture section.  Lamium, adjuga, thyme, oregano, Mother’s wart, wild geranium, stinging nettle, sorrel—some familiar, but most I have never even heard of before.  It doesn’t take long for me to associate their names with the distinct colors and shapes of their leaves.  Identifying local flora and fauna is one of many lost arts in our high-tech society.  Low-tech knowledge like being able to name plants is an underappreciated and underutilized skill in a culture that praises any advances that further remove humans from the drudgery of needing to have such skills.

But here I am in the frigid air, the temperature hovering right around freezing in the middle of the afternoon, and there is no classroom I’d rather be in at the present moment.  Practical, useful, applied, fun—call it what you like—learning through hands-on tasks in the outdoors is a method of passing along knowledge that is largely lost in most curriculums at any level of study.  This sort of knowledge does not require a PhD of the teacher, or even a complete high school education—if you know something, you can pass it along to whoever is willing to listen.  It is knowledge that can be used to produce tangible and sometimes immediate results.

Plant something and watch it grow.  Pull up weeds and marvel at the instant results of your efforts—your actions directly and unquestionably create a more favorable environment for food-producing plants by simply yanking some tap roots out of the ground.

Permaculture is more of a philosophy than it is a plan for designing or planting, although the design of garden plots is important as well.  One of the many tenants of Permaculture is to share the surplus harvest.  Weeks ago, when I was busy harvesting peppers before the frost, I ended up pulling more off the plants than anyone knew what to do with.  I froze about ten quart bags for myself and my partner, and other students took peppers home by the dozens as well.  Still, more peppers that I and my peers, busy graduate students, simply didn’t have the time to prepare or process.

I filled a cloth grocery bag with peppers of all varieties, shapes, and sizes.  Picked fresh a mere 48 hours prior, I drove them over to the folks at Jubilee Kitchen.  The fruits of my labor were kindly received by the volunteer staff managing the facility that day.  In the kitchen, I overheard one of the cooks near the walk-in cooler say, “I’m coming to look for something I know we don’t have…carrots.”

And I was learning all the while, more and more, as I drove away, about what it means to grow food.  In the comfort of my car, I glanced to my right and noticed the row of empty raised beds outside the kitchen, empty aside from all the overgrown weeds.  

Share the surplus.

I guess someone had wanted to share more with the soup kitchen at some point before—some materials and soil, seeds for a season and probably some labor too.  But this project was now abandoned.  I guess growing fresh produce doesn’t have the same appeal as salvaging nearly expired baked goods from the Giant Eagle.  But what if the volunteers hadn’t abandoned the plots?  Would the cook I eavesdropped on have had carrots for whatever dish he was wishing to prepare?

As Wendell Berry often writes, a farmer’s job is never dull or boring, but filled with surprise, excitement, and new opportunities for discovery each and every day.  Home from the farm on the frosty day, I notice the lamium planted outside of my apartment building.  The pretty sea-green leaves with dark green jagged outlines not only make for a nice ground cover, but apparently, could make a highly nutritious salad too.  I resist the temptation to harvest my landlord’s ground cover and return my thoughts to the raised beds at the soup kitchen.

Entry 5

Bright red splatter against the cold, hard, stainless steel backdrop.  Blood flows in a steady stream out of the main arteries in the neck of the young rooster.  The steady hum of the generator in the background is disrupted by his violent kicking.  Shaking the shiny slaughter apparatus, the whole earth seems to tremble.  Like a twisted version of minimalist art, fresh blood droplets land on top of older blood, erratically layering coat upon coat of the demented paint.

I turn my gaze downward to my hand, holding the knife.  The knife that slit the throat in one clean, seamless, purposeful motion.  It took a second, maybe two, to render lifeless the chicken, which just a few days prior I had taken food and water to.  I had helped this chicken live, and now I made it die.  I stare at my hand almost in disbelief.  Yet it doesn’t shake, doesn’t falter at all, it’s as steady as if I had merely chopped an apple in half.  It’s as if my brain can’t process what my limb has just done.  

I am officially an animal killer, separate from the majority of meat-eating Americans who generally let others take care of the life-to-death stage in an anonymous, far-away facility.  Meat arrives in the fridge packaged in neat and tidy parcels—fresh, frozen, or precooked—very few cuts resemble the actual animal from which it came.  Those omnivores are killers too, just in a more round-about, distant way.

I move to the next cone on the line.  Sue retrieves my second victim and places him upside-down, his neck sliding through the small opening at the bottom. 

“Remember to keep breathing,” she says.  

One solid, determined swipe of the blade.  The minimalist painter adds another layer to her canvas.  Another bird I had cared for dies at my hand.  Down the line.  Rooster three, four, and five.  Each time I feel less appalled, hear less commotion from the kicking aftershocks, feel less cruel, and somehow seem more human again.  I can’t tell if the forest surrounding me is silent or not.  The white noise from the generator masks any observable change.

It’s the smell that overpowers everything.  It sticks with me.  I can’t shake it; it’s in my hair, in my nose, clung to my skin and clothing.  The smell of fresh blood, of recent death pervading the air.  I am a meat-eater.  I’ve now paid my full karmic price.

Entry 4: Autumn Weather Arrives

Even a discerning eye can mistake the color of a pepper for that of its leaves.  Crouched low to the ground, I snip and snap peppers off the plants, looking closely for the fruits that so deceptively blend with the rest of the foliage.  Tiny drops of rain speckle my clothing.  Despite the cool autumn temperatures today, the light drizzle feels nice.  It’s easy to warm up when one’s body is constantly in motion.

I’m working against nature’s clock.  Showers will pick up this afternoon.  Have to get the peppers pulled before the first frost comes Sunday night.  The tree-lined horizon is telling us it’s time for the heyday of summer to end as the leaves mark the last fantastic display.

Quiet envelops me.  Aside from the occasional car traveling down Ridge Road, which bisects the old construction and the new, I am thrilled to hear next to no sounds indicating human life.  The construction equipment, stationary on the other side of the road, stands like skeletal re-creations of dinosaurs—so still and silent compared to the grand ruckus that one emanated from those same bodies.

Green grass lies heavy with water on the rolling hills just outside the garden.  If the sun would poke through the clouds, the grass would glisten.  The groomed field doubles as pasture for the chicks and the local population of wildlife.  I haul water to the young roosters whose time on earth is nearly up.  I side-step around a small pile of kibble-sized excrement—rabbit?  The hundreds of acres of forest, adjacent to the field and garden, must be teeming with critters—some more adventurously bold than others, some quite skilled at remaining hidden.

***

I stared at a chipmunk last week and it stared back at me.  I was by the goldfish pond, up the hill from the garden and flush with the lodge.  There’s a plaque situated at the outermost point of the human-made pond, in memory of Sebastian Mueller.  I go there to catch a glimpse of the frog that quickly dives to safety beneath the water’s surface as I approach.  Glimpses are all my eyes can catch.  But the chipmunk is more curious than cautious, it seems, and its gaze locked with mine for a few seconds before it scurried away towards the woods.

***

The chicks are being moved to fresh pasture every day now so the water haul proves to be quite the workout.  Their coops have been rolled further and further down the grassy hill away from the furthest edge of the garden.  I breathe in wet air, the smell of grass, the smell of cold, the smell of rain sans thunder and lightning—milder, softer, and tamer rain, the smell of fall.