Reading hurts

The Fishermen
by Chigozie Obioma
 
I read this literally. It was grim and gruesome and unrelentingly ugly, narrated from the eyes of a boy fascinated with a train wreck, attention drawn perpetually to the scars and stains of lives out of harmony with nature. I hated it and couldn't stop reading it--I needed to know where the suspicion and the fear and the hatred would end...or if it ever would.

it was simply the tale of four brothers, Ikenna, Boja, Obembe, and Ben; cursed by a madman into fear that might devolve into madness. They should have stayed the best of brothers--should have linked arms and fought together--but they didn't know how to love each other as men. The father never taught them--they had to teach themselves.

For all the suffering of the story, the author's uncanny gift with language made me wonder what he might be capable of with a different sort of story. From the first few pages, visuals like "tots of feathers from a richly-plumed bird", "a locomotive train treading tracks of hope, with black coal in its heart and a loud elaphantine toot", "a veil spooled over his all-seeing eyes". Mr. Obioma's people are sparsely drawn but you recognize them from someone in your past, always.

All that aside, I knew at the end that I should NOT have read it literally. Literally it is a well-told tale, unleavened like heavy bread, slow to dissolve and giving you heartburn. 
But the author says,
The Fishermen first came to me as a tribute to my many brothers, and a wake-up call to a dwindling nation-- Nigeria. Then it grew into something much more than that: it felt necessary.

I see that now--it's more than a gritty story; more than a parable; more than madness. It's a road that a nation is walking...a hard road...and it's not coming to an end.

p.s. I could be wrong about everything I just wrote.

Passing along the gifts

Braiding Sweetgrass

Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

by Robin Wall Kimmerer


I felt honored to have been allowed to read this book.

We are showered every day with gifts, but they are not meant for us to keep. Their life is in their movement, the inhale and the exhale of our shared breath. Our work and our joy is to pass along the gift and to trust that what we put out into the universe will always come back.

Ms. Kimmerer's writings remind us that mankind is not always a force of evil--he can restore almost as much as he can destroy. We dwell so often on the havoc man wreaks that we forget, sometimes, the great beauty he can facilitate. The land saved in nature preserves--the silted-over pond that she restores--the salamanders lifted over the highway on a dark night. They are tiny steps but huge--they show what is possible if people work with nature, not against it.

If you want to read only one essay in this collection, read The Teachings of Grass. To her graduate student Laurie, she suggested a thesis project of the study of Sweetgrass.(Hierochloe odorata, if you're scientific, or wiingaashk in the language of the keepers of the grass).  The experiments were designed to determine if traditional harvesting methods could actually benefit the population, when according to modern wisdom, "Anyone knows that harvesting a plant will damage the population."  She would compare two methods of harvest--pinching off the stems one-by-one at the base versus pulling up a portion of the plants root and all.  She also left some plots unharvested, for controls.
After two years,

The surprise was that the failing plots were not the harvested ones, as predicted, but the unharvested controls. The sweetgrass that had not been picked or disturbed in any way was choked with dead stems while the harvested plots were thriving...Picking sweetgrass seemed to actually stimulate growth. 

And both methods seemed equally good.

It is odd that the study was even needed. One only needs to look at a prairie dog town to see that that grass likes to be nibbled.  Look at the grass farmer in The Omnivore's Dilemma--his grass feeds his animals, but the animals keep the grass healthy.  He shifts his chicken cages on a regular, but carefully monitored, schedule, and the grass stays healthy and growing.

Ms. Kimmerer's book is about a lot more than grass, of course. It's about the Windigo, Superfund sites along Onondaga Lake, the making maple syrup at home, rebuilding a pond just because you want to, making baskets from black ash, the author's father, ....  Just a whole heck of a lot of stuff.

This book belongs right up at the top of nature writing, and it's staying on my shelf for sure. And it will come down frequently.

State of the Garden Report, mid July

If you didn't catch it on your own, I'm a liar--that's not my garden. My garden was left to suffer in the 100-degree heat while I went moonlighting in my brother-in-law's garden in north-western Arkansas. He has the biggest yellow squash plants I've ever seen, an acorn squash in the compost pile that looks like Audrey II, and some very healthy blackeyes.

But as you see from the picture, his tomatoes are only starting to come in, while mine are nearly gone. Only two of my plants are still setting fruit--the rest are ready for the compost pile.  I've already harvested blackeyes--his are just stubs.

What I find very interesting is that he's only 250 miles north of me. But at his higher elevation (Ozark Mountains) makes his climate zone a whole lot different. When I walk around I see mostly the same plants--blackeyed Susan, Queen Anne's lace, that annoying Composite I cannot identify, and wild blackberries--but something is clearly very different. Soil, most likely. The trees show it--his are red maples, hickory, black oak, elm. Mine are box elder, pecan, burr oak, and hackberry. And the eternal osage orange--I've not seen any of that up in the hills. It would be interesting to do a tree census and compare.

As a human, I don't feel out of place up there.  But, clearly, I am out of zone.

The most famous man you may never have heard of

  

The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World

by Andrea Wulf

  

They should call this "A Natural History of Alexander von Humboldt." It's much more than the lifetime of a single man, a long-lived man but still only finite in his bodily form. Intellectually, his roots went deep, his floodplain spread wide--he used to joke that there were so many rivers named after him that he was a thousand miles long. (Note: that's a paraphrase from memory--I lost the exact quote.) His canopy shaded and nurtured all who came after him, and his seeds scattered throughout the world.  And so this biography treats with equal attention Humboldt's works and those of contemporaries who were heavily influenced by his works. Although--to be honest--who wasn't?  Goethe, Thomas Jefferson, Simon  Bolivar,  Charles Darwin, Henry David Thoreau, George Perkins Marsh, John Muir  -- all were marchers in Humboldt's grand parade.

Although I enjoyed the book completely while I was listening to it, only later, when I did a quick Internet search to verify spellings of names, did I realize how much more the book might have covered. On matters scientific and botanical, it speaks at such a high level that you don't learn anything. You come away thinking, What a man!  But why couldn't it be: What a discovery!  What a thought!  What a odd connection of unrelated facts led to this great mind making such a brilliant leap!  And wow.

But that's not the book--it's strictly biographical as to what he did, where he went, who he met and what he wrote. And maybe, just maybe the author fulfilled her purpose...if her purpose was to make me go read Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent, Geography of Plants, Views of Nature,  and of course Cosmos. Or at least the first volume of Cosmos.  To read it all might take the rest of my lifetime.

Travels with shoes. And a shovel.

Come, tell me how you live
by Agatha Christie Mallowan


From the title and brief description, I thought it was going to be more archaeology and less travelogue. That might have been nice, but this was just great! Ticklish funny--and sometimes hilarious about the shoes--it's the story of Christie's travels with her husband on a serious of digs in Syria. When she mentions their finds, it's limited to listings like,

"two beads, a rim of pottery, and a bit of obsidian."

So I don't know if they were after artifacts alone or the advancement of historical knowledge. But that's not important--it's a splendid travel tale.Here's a funny--I'll try not to ruin it--during her baggage inspection by the Turkish customs officials,

Why, they ask me, have I so many pairs of shoes? It is too many. But, I reply, I have no cigarettes, because I do not smoke, so why not a few more shoes?

The explanation is accepted and they move on to the bug powder, which looks even more suspicious.  The real funny comes later, as she then proceeds to buy more shoes and decides not to return through Turkey. It's like one of those mildly humorous scenes that get funnier the more they're repeated.

Here is part of her description of packing for the trip with her husband, Max.

[Archeologists] ....decide on the maximum number of suitcases that a long-suffering Wagon Lit Company will permit them to take. They then fill these suitcases to the brim with books. They then, reluctantly, take out a few books, and fill in the space thus obtained with shirts, pajamas, socks, etc.

Looking into Max's room, I am under the impression that the whole cubic space is filled with books! Through a chink in the books I catch sight of Max's worried face.

"Do you think," he asks,  "that I shall have room for all these?"

The answer is so obviously in the negative that it seems sheer cruelty to say it.

At 4:30 P.M. he arrives in my room and asks hopefully: "Any room in your suitcases?"

State of the Garden report, middle July

A rather hurried report, sorry. Getting ready for a 3-day jaunt to visit the mother-in-law.

Now or then?  On the now front, I have this leaf thing with the purple stem:







Malabar Spinach. I planted six or eight, I got one. But when I found it at the Farmer's Market, I recognized it immediately.  I bought a big bundle, laboriously stripped the leaves and tender stems off the tough stalks, and boiled them up.

But--and I really hate to admit this--I didn't like it. It's not like spinach or even Swiss chard--it's like okra. And that means, slimy.  Or maybe the word is 'soapy'. In any event, the "mouth feel" is horrid.
Maybe a really long cooking or a stir fry would deal with the slime factor.




I also have this absolutely gorgeous salad green that came in a pack of mixed mesclun. I have no idea what it is but I'd love to have it in my flower garden.




And this lovely creature. Plenty of this lovely creature.

A thick and quick tour

Visiting Our Past: America's Historylands
by National Geographic Society

So lavishly illustrated you can use it as a coffee table book, but a lot of good history reading too.  I checked it out of the library in order to build up my list of places to go sometime, which is supposed to give me hope and ambition and make the future seem possible even if not always pretty. It wasn't perfect for the purpose but it was pretty good. For me, they didn't go "off the beaten path" nearly enough.

It's limited in scope to the places where Europeans came, conquered, settled and battled.  The colonies, both northeast and southwest, are well covered; as is the Lewis and Clark expedition, the western migration, and the civil war.  The trail of tears warrants a single sentence, which is a shame because I'd wanted to locate some of the migration routes and walk them, if possible. But the Oregon trail is covered in great detail.  A lot of places that aren't historically significant--to Americans of European ancestry--are passed by. But I'll get those elsewhere.

And the pictures--fabulous!

Start of the Garden Report, almost middle of July

Now that the temperatures are regularly in the 90s, I'm not seeing new tomatoes setting fruit. That confirms what I read. I'm still getting 10, 15 or sometimes 20 ripe tomatoes a day, but those were started over a month ago. I have dispatched them summarily.


Which is fine, and now it's time to think about preparing for the winter garden. But oh, it is hard. If I were one of those morning people who could get out working by sun-up, I could be weeding, composting, and prepping beds with a fury. Yesterday I didn't get out until eleven, and it was miserable.  And don't try telling me it's all a matter of willpower and self discipline. I've tried getting up early and failed so many times that I've come to a truce with my willpower--I won't ask it to get me out of bed early, so long as it's okay when I ask it to tie on my running shoes and head out the door.


Beg pardon for the picture here--I found the most marvelously beautiful dragonfly just trying out his wings for the first time. I wanted his picture but refused to stress him out by making him pose. So this is all we get.








Okra loves this weather, and so do purple hull peas.  And here comes cantaloupe...not. The beauty below, my first fruit, was resting on wet cardboard and it molded underneath. I had to pick it early, and it was sugary sweet but tasteless.  I will watch the others like a hawk!

Farming in the funnies

The Bucolic Plague: 

How Two Manhattanites Became Gentlemen Farmers: An Unconventional Memoir

by Josh Kilmer-Purcell

Be prepared for things to get a little grim.  I don't mean animals dying, other than flies.  I only mean the stress that two wonderful people can suffer over when the economy crashes and they can't afford to live their dream. Can the dream survive?

The cover tells the story--two urban gentleman fall in love with Beekman Mansion and try their hands at part-time farming.  Farming sort of works for a while, then one is laid off from his job at a media company and the other is having to lay off people himself while he works round the clock to try to bring new clients into his advertising agency. The market for their farm's top product, soap, dries up faster than the Rio Grande.

The writing in this part is absolutely heartbreaking. And the rest of the writing is just plain good--funny and honest and about as riveting as a story of goats and heirloom tomatoes and fresh-laid eggs can be.  Which, to me, is very much.  Here is a sample--no--yes--no. I can't find one.  I tried flipping through to find a particularly amusing passage and I started reading and couldn't stop.

We're woken up by what sounds like someone performing Wagner's wedding march on Model T car horns. ...rather than the old standard COCK-A-DOODLE-DO, the song stuck in this rooster's head was the classic bridal theme. A few seconds later, he was joined by another rooster greeting the day with "It Had to Be You." They were quickly backed up with choruses of "Papa Don't Preach" and "The Little Drummer Boy." Our farm sounded like a bad cover band.

So, first half funny. Second half honest. Whole thing?  Great.

The Author in the Dog House

The Man in the Queue
by Josephine Tey

This entire review is marked Spoiler Alert.  So stop now if you don't want it ruined.

It was a mystery that just kept getting better.  On page 164 (out of 254) I guessed the murderer and then raced through the rest, waiting for the magical moment when Inspector Grant figured it out for himself. Such a clever guy--I quite adored him--with a pretty turn of speed when the chase demanded it. Over hill, over dale, over water and maybe even through water, if he didn't make the jump across the creek.

But he persisted in his pursuit, and in his blindness--until finally the author had to bludgeon him over the head with the evidence.  Okay, I said, disappointed that he hadn't figured it out for himself.  But I kept on reading as he went off with the evidence to trick a confession out of the murderer, thinking that at the least there were two potential murderers who would have had both means and opportunity and a closely related motive.  Who would it be?

So off to the unveiling!  Which fell as flat as ever an unveiling can tumble.  It wasn't either of them, at all.  And next thing you know, in the walks the real murderer to confess--and it's a brand-new character with absolutely no connection to any of the other suspects.

What a cheat!  Yeah the inspector was a great guy; the 'police procedural' tidy and sensible; with little or no contrived 'accidents' except finding the evidence at the end.  The location was grand and the writing very good with only one disconcerting perspective shift.  But...the ending stinked, stank, stunk, and I'm not sure if I can stomach another of her novels.  I'd like to try--there was so much to enjoy here--but can I face another disappointment?

A short rant

I'm not on a campaign for strict seasonal cooking, but just now, with my garden spitting vegetables and the Saturday morning farmer's market booming, I begin to notice just how out-of-whack our recipes are. From a recipe I saved awhile back in the winter, here are the vegetable ingredients:
    scallions, ginger, garlic, sugar snap peas, corn, kale.

You could go in any grocery store and get them all. But if you were living off the products of a certain North Texas county in America, here is when you'd find these things:
    scallions - late spring, late fall, maybe early winter
    ginger - seems to be hard to grow and does not store indefinitely, but probably summer and early fall
    garlic - all year if you store it properly
    sugar snap peas - late spring
   corn - summer
   kale - spring and fall, possibly winter

So if you were really lucky, you might possibly harvest some very late corn, very early kale...?  Nope. It just doesn't work.  I can't fit them all into the same season at the same time.  The only hope is if you plan ahead and stock your freezer.
Incidentally the recipe's author clearly intended it to be a wintertime dish. If she'd subbed carrots for the corn and planned ahead carefully, she could maybe do it. But it's sad to think, sometimes, about how spoiled and out-of-touch our cuisine has become.  It makes me really appreciate cooks like Marcella Hazan, who tells you how to cook fresh ingredients when you ought to cook them--when they're fresh.

State of the Garden, Ending June and Beginning July

 Typical summer temperatures, but atypical rainfall . Highs in the mid-nineties (36 C), lows mid-seventies (24 C), but with the exception of one tomato plant, everything is still green.  What's with all the rain? Not complaining.

My cover crop of three-year-old blackeye pea seed is pea-ing. (Fruiting? Seeding?)  That wasn't supposed to happen--I expected them to die from drought--but I'll live with it. And eat the peas.









This broccoli which any sane gardener would have pulled up and composted months ago is still making tiny heads.  I feel bad, thwarting its attempt to reproduce itself, but I still cut a dozen of them for my salad. If the plants stay healthy, I think I'll just leave them in the ground and see if they produce again next spring. I've had that happen before and I made a lovely stir-fry--then a herd of cows came through and ate the plants to the ground.




The rest of my story is all complaints. I planted a lot more cucumbers than I needed--I'm harvesting about one per day and each one would feed a family of four for a week.  (I think they call that hyperbole, but it exactly expresses my attitude.)  And this thing here:








Horseradish.

A pest that doesn't belong in a garden.  We planted it ten years ago and it still comes back every year, every where.  I let this one grow, hoping it will eventually morph into that white stuff that comes in squeeze packets.  Hopeless?






 One weird thing you'll learn from growing a garden is how astonishingly mobile plants can be.  Only a non-gardener would think that a plant stayed where you put it, but I did.  I've got sunflowers laying down on cucumbers, cantaloupe climbing up sunflower stalks, and tomatoes in the bean patch. And just where does this squash think it's going?




Best answer wins a prize!  And the prize is two, not one, but two, foot-long, home grown, cucumbers!

A tall tale, pun unintentional

Feet in the Clouds
A Tale of Fell-Running and Obsession
by Richard Askwith

It appears that there are a bunch of old-timers in England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland that call mountains 'fells' and run races on them.  Who'd have thunk  it? Not me.

But so there are. After reading Born to Run, I thought the Leadville Trail 100 ultramarathon was the height in human idiocy. You go out in the morning, run all day and through the night, ascend to the top of a mountain and down again.  For a belt buckle.

But it ain't shucks to the feats these Brits get up to. They've been doing it a long time, too--in the old days they called them Guide Races and the people undertook them unsupported, for the most part, and unknown to most of the world.

The obsession in the book's title appears to be the author's own obsession--to finish the Bob Graham Round, 42 peaks in the Lake District, in under 24 hours. His quest is not a big part of the narrative, but it drives the book's finish and I'm glad I stuck it out until the end. There is obsession in many of the fell runners' stories, but his is the one that grabbed me. Where did this guy come from, what made him want to do this thing, and what drives him to keep on trying? It's his story and it's all the stories, all as different as right from rain, and all, strangely, gripping.

Confession: I did get tired of the book, about halfway through, but that's more my own personal failing rather than a jab at the book. I'd still recommend it.

Most interesting to me, personally, as an aging would-be runner, is the sheer durability of these guys. And gals. Mr. Askwith describes the Wasdale, a race over 25 miles of rugged mountain terrain, as having sixty-eight starters with only twenty-six under forty. Do the math--68-26=42. 42 runners over forty years old. Is the sport aging out?

He isn't sure, but he does think the reason for such a large proportion of older runners may be that the old are fitter and healthier than ever and fell-running enthusiasts tend to stay fitter and healthier.
Stamina tends to improve with age anyway. So, for many of us, does technique, as experience refines our feet's mastery of rough ground. Mark Hartell says that, at thirty-nine, 'I feel my age in terms of having to stretch a bit more, but in terms of speed I seem to be getting faster. It's amazing.' And when Wendy Dodds, just turned fifty-one, recently did an extended BG of fifty-three peaks, it took her less time than her original BG, twenty-three years earlier - 'and it felt far easier - I just sailed through it.' (It would have been fifty at fifty but for foot-and-mouth; then it was going to be fifty-one at fifty-one, but she added two more 'just for fun'.)

My biggest question was answered near the end--did the runners ever stop and enjoy the scenery? 

[Bob Graham] once remarked that if you spend a minute on each peak enjoying the view, you're added forty-two minutes to your time. 

From this, I'd say the answer is 'no'. So what did they do it for?  Why not just run up and down the same mountain all the time, if you're not going to look at the view?

Well, they might respond, why do I think the only thing to do with a beautiful view is to look at it?  Oscar Wilde said, 'It seems to me that we all look at Nature too much, and live with her too little.'  The author quotes this and agrees--

...if you're not cold, or wet, or lost, or exhausted, or bruised by rocks or covered in mud, you're not really experiencing the mountains properly. The point is not the exertion involved: it's the degree of involvement, or immersion, in the landscape. You need to feel it, to interact with it; to be in it, not just looking from the outside. You need to lose yourself -- for it is then that you are most human.

I think he has a point. In the same way that looking at a mountain isn't shucks to walking on it, running it may be "a step up" in man-mountain interaction. And while I think walking, sleeping, sitting, crawling on your hands and knees with a magnifying glass in front of your eyes, or even living on a mountain is a pretty fine thing, running it? I'll leave that to the magnificent fell-runners. I bow to you all.