The report on Thursday showed rain through Saturday, as the
cold front continued to move in from the Midwest, slow but steady. By Sunday, it was due to be colder, much
colder, with crystal clear skies through the week. The leaves would be at peak,
and the leaf-peepers would be up from the city, crowding the roads as they
headed from craft sale to self-picking apple orchard to pumpkin stand.
On Friday, the Bushes, Wayne and Wayne, Jr., came by to pick
up the Komatsu excavator. Wayne Senior
was edgy; he’d been waking up nights impatient for the rains to stop. I got
jobs waiting; not just yours, and I cain’t just sit around watching tv and
waiting for something to change. We got
some stumps to pull out on that new house up top the hill—we can do that in the
rain. Later that day, as it cleared off a bit, Ed came with the new propane
tank that the Bushes were going to bury.
After he hooked it and swung it down from the truck and laid it by the
Porta-Potty, we walked around a bit so he could recollect where we’d run the
small propane line to the kitchen wall furnace a few years ago. We didn’t find it, but the line seemed secure
and gas was going to the unit, even if it wouldn’t light. The new one was on
order and he was planning to come in on Wednesday while the Bushes were burying
the tank and cutting the trench for the new line to the little house we were
putting up off the back of the old house. He was planning to do the install and
the hookup and the inspection all that one day so as not to have to twiddle his
thumbs while the Bushes poured the sand and the rough stone.
Charles came over late that afternoon to talk about bringing
in the herd to graze off the hayfield. It’s the last circuit of the year; they
start here, and then cross the creek to Harry’s clover field, then work
counterclockwise from meadow to meadow, as Charles and Francesca move the
electric fencing along with them. Land
around here is way too expensive to make a go of a small herd; Charles
sharecrops the cattle with seven or eight of us, moving his cattle around the
hay-cutting schedules that differ from field to field depending on the
fertility of the soil and the rainfall.
Mike and Clint looked at that extended weather report as
well. Mike said on Monday they’d start
ripping off the old roof on the main house and get it decked so JC could bring
his standing-seam crew in from Connecticut to do the whole roof-and-gutter job
on the next dry spell. As of Sunday, there was a 10% chance of precipitation
for five days out, pictures of sun with a cloud in front of it on weather.com
and Accuweather both.
This morning I woke up to a steady rain, not too hard, not
drenching, but enough to worry its way under the roofdeck and the tarps and
drip down inside the house. Everyone was
off the roof except for Eric, who was looking for the spots where it came in,
so as to save the insulation. The electric fence was on, but the cattle weren’t
coming today. The Bushes weren’t going to do the propane tank and trench or dig
the new graveled ditch to direct the spring floods from the ridge down to the
creek. Ed didn’t even bother to come by
or call to say the hookup was off. Mike
came in to the kitchen to check to make sure Eric had caught the leak.
Last night, Harm left a message while I was out in the last
light splitting firewood and watching Charles and Francesca lay the
fencing. I expect he was worried about
his hay-rights again. We don’t get
anything out of the haying, and each cutting takes another percentage of the
fertility of that soil. He’s right to be
worried. We are looking for a better
plan, pricing manure and talking to Paul up the ridge about having him plow the
full 18 acres of hayfield under so we can plant a nutrient-restoring rotation for
a couple of years. This isn’t great soil
to begin with—it’s clay-based, and it needs the composting of green that
withers to brown around this time of the year.
Out in the field where he was surveying to set the electric
fence, Charles talked to me about survival when you don’t have tourists or
weekenders or contracting or landscaping jobs to sustain the year-round
population. Around here, the builders
have split in two. A few of the small
crews have gone upscale—people like Will Wallace do trendy work for the ones
who will always be rich no matter what the economy: geothermal heating units,
three-acre duckponds surrounded by artfully arranged plantings that include
full-size trees trucked in for $5,000 a tree and fed by drip-irrigation from
the pond using solar-powered pumps.
The bigger crews are pretty much gone, now, bankrupt or
shrunk to subsistence, to a couple of men with older pickup trucks and the
woodworking equipment relocated to the basement of the house, the big compound
with its hardwood kiln-dryer and cabinet shop and fixture showroom and sales
office abandoned, the keys given back to the bank. Mike’s crew here is small.
Dan was a children’s book illustrator.
Ethan is a kid, an apprentice who does the pickup and carries for Mike,
setting up the scaffolds and working the compressor. Eric shows up in his van
at 7 every day. It’s a few years old,
and it still has the signage from when he worked for himself. Eric
Rose Contracting, it says. Roofing
Siding Painting Flooring. Like a lot of the guys who were doing ok before
the bust, he keeps the company name, though he’s working for Mike now. Mike
himself is 64; some days it’s just him on the job, because Clint has another
job somewhere and it’s smarter to pull the crew for a few days than lose the
work.
Charles has heard me talk about my son. Taylor is something close to a freegan, a class of people, mostly
young, who have rejected the economic system and vowed to live outside its
cash-and-credit market. Freegans live by
barter and by exploiting the wastefulness of the dominant economy. They don’t live on the land like the commune
people of the old counterculture. They’re
urban, and usually well-educated. They majored in music, and literature, and
philosophy, but also political science and economics and sociology. Instead of moving into advertising, or video
game orchestration or consumer-desire polling, they went to Americorps or Teach
For America, where they were thrust into the bowels of American failure—places the
comfortable and the conservative—their parents, often—can’t even admit
exist. On the West Side of Chicago where
he ran the computer lab for a middle school that had consistently failed the No
Child Left Behind criteria, Taylor heard from the kids that he was the first
white man they’d ever talked to who wasn’t a cop or a social worker. On
standardized testing day in the spring, the teachers at schools like that one
look out at a classroom in which perhaps a quarter or a third of the students
started the year there. They’re being
judged on the performance of pupils few of whom they’ve taught for more than a
month. The kids have cycled in and out
of sometimes three schools in a year, as their families moved, or were evicted
from place after place, or as they themselves were passed from relative to
relative, foster home to foster home. It’s hard to be immersed in that world
for even a few months and keep believing in a brighter, shinier America where
freedoms are extolled and the heavy arm of government regulation is loosened so
a new crop of bright and shiny entrepreneurs can lift the economy to new
heights.
Working at Americorps, Taylor started rooming with a group
of musicians and computer hackers in a drug-dealer’s block at the edge of
Humboldt Park, where rent was cheap and the three-flat was surrounded by vacant
lots from burnouts dating back to the riots of the ‘60s and ‘70s. Dave, and Aaron, and Taylor and the others had given the dining room over to rows of humming servers-- Macs and HP and Lenovo machines that ran day and night. They were tied into a global network of
open-source software programmers who were building apps that could run on
crank-powered laptops linked to the internet via cellphone networks in places
like Malawi and Somalia, Laos and Mongolia. Everybody did overflow-work to get by,
living on the froth that cascades down the outside of the craft-brewery glass poured for a financial
analyst whose Audi is parked outside the tastefully rustic or factory-themed
restaurant.
I was thinking about
your son, Charles said, as the last light was dying in the hayfield and the
fences were set, their neon-blue cabling glowing over the green and brown
grasses. You know, before I ran cattle,
everyone I knew was a refugee from the city. The locals around here—they’re the ones I spend my time with now. They’re used to living on the edge. They’ve been living on the edge around here
for generations. The Schoonmaker’s down
209—you know them. They’ve been here
since 1650, and it’s never been safe. The locals—they worry about the weekenders
and the city people; they can see that these are people who don’t know how to
get by, don’t know what to do. I know what he means. I’m returning to skills I grew up learning—woodworking,
furniture repair, housepainting, plumbing. We’re looking for crops we can trade
off with others, the way Charles trades the organic grass-fed freerange beef—beef
whose organic grass freerange is our hayfield, and Harry’s and Paul and Sarah’s.
We can look for niche-crops to drive down to the locavore
slow-food restaurants that are all the trend in Brooklyn and Chelsea and the
Lower East Side. Taylor advises against
it, and Charles is on his side. They
share a sense of doom, though from different angles. Charles sees the fragility of that market and
the system of faith that lies behind it. What do you do when all you’re
harvesting is thyme and rosemary and heritage tomatoes, but there’s no
banker-bonus epicure to support the restaurants that have been supporting
you? For Taylor, it’s more a matter of
ethics admixed with radical politics. He
believes it’s wrong to participate in a morally bankrupt system. No, not exactly. It’s wrong to contribute to that system.
It’s right to participate by siphoning off its excesses to support the project
of building the tools for a different system.
In the now-dark field, I stand by myself as Charles drives the muddy Toyota up Old King’s Highway, done for the night. The stars are emerging, as the weather
reports tell us they will emerge every night for days, after cloudless
afternoons loud with the rattles of activity:
the setting of the propane tank, the buzz of the jigsaw, the pop of the
pneumatic nailgun. But I don’t think so.
I am looking at the cloudless, starry night and waiting for signs of the storm.
