The hay fever kicked in this year before I started mowing hay, the lateness mostly due to the rains. They originally said we were supposed to get six inches last Friday, then three inches, then two, and finally we got about 0.2 of drizzle, though I guess it did rain almost an inch as close as Fort Bragg. So I held off on cutting hay. The weather was only half the reason though. This year I decided to get most of the spring vegetable planting and cultivating done before haying, rather than juggling those activities the way I did the last three seasons. One thing I learned over those years was that I’m just not smart enough to concentrate on too many things at once.

The ryegrass and harding grass pollen was blowing in the Boonville breeze sometime Friday. I knew that because I was sneezing profusely, eyes itching, unfortu­nately using my T-shirt for a handkerchief in the circum­stances.

“It’s an excellent protein source,” said a visitor to the farm on Sunday. A few single dads had brought their kids over to pick up kittens, jump on the trampoline, and get hollered at by me for chasing after a couple heifer calves, upsetting them for no reason. Walking through the pastures, one of the dads grabbed a stalk of harding grass and was shaking it, the pollen billowing in green-yellow clouds as he demonstrated that the grass was “procreating,” he said.

I sneezed and cracked a beer. “Protein source?”

The guy was instructing his seven year-old son to shake as many harding grass stalks as he could get his fingers on to catch the valuable protein source in a salad bowl shaped like an old-fashioned satellite dish. “This pollen is really high in protein.”

There it was accumulating in the bowl like the nutri­tional yeast that hippies like to sprinkle on their popcorn. I was sort of thinking that milk and beef are really high in protein, as well, and it was high time to start cutting hay, but as I sneezed the thought occurred that perhaps when the harding grass pollen was blowing in the wind a person could go clean without eating and just live off the mucous. Better yet, I let that one go and followed every­one into the barn.

I had to let go with one hooter of a sneeze.

“Bless you, brother,” said one of the dads.

The whole crew was at the farm on a mission to adopt felines.

Five black kittens were born on a sleeping bag, nes­tled in the cradle between my upturned knees one night in April. I heard their high-pitched meowing the sound of bat screeches at about three in the morning, cursed and wadded up the sleeping bag, lugging it into the solarium and tucking them under the water heater. “Good God,” I said. I’d known this moment was coming, with a preg­nant cat sleeping on my bed every night, but I had pre­ferred not to conceive (sic) the inevitable.

It wasn’t but a few minutes later, just as I was drifting back to sleep, that the mother cat deposited a mewing kitten on the remaining thin blanket between my legs. I had to give up the fight and let her lick and nurse them as she added one by one in my bed, eventually moving them over to the side in a clump of blankets that muffled the racket somewhat. They piped down and stayed up there for weeks without causing too much trouble. I think the momma cat licked up all their excrement because I never detected any until nearly the end of May. Then I moved them down to this futon on the floor, where the kittens actually stayed put.

I know you’re supposed to spay and neuter your cat twice a year or something, but the funny thing is the pro­gram has been so successful in California that there is almost a black market demand for kittens. The mother and tomcat each cost eighty bucks as kittens when my ex purchased them from a Lake County program in 2008. Eighty bucks for a kitten, I thought, the last few weeks before we split up. We never went to battle in court, but if we had I would have accused her of insanity for pay­ing $186 for two of them. That would have been my big beef. It was on the top of my list.

Five in the last litter, and they were all spoken for in days. I just give them away which is probably a mistake. If they’re going for $80 maybe I should charge at least $50 under the table.

“Let me know when they’re weaned,” said about ten people on my answering machine. “We’ll come over, pick one out.”

“Are they weaned, yet?”

“No,” I said on Saturday. “They’re still nursing like crazy.”

The next morning the kittens were darting all over the barn, fighting over cubes of a boiled beef heart. They were shitting everywhere. Their mother disappeared for 20 minutes at a time and returned with a fresh-killed mouse, dropping the rodent off for the kittens to scrap over. She was actively weaning them. She deposited one mouse after another in front of the five. It was almost easier for her to go out and catch a mouse than it is for some single parent to wander around the aisles of a gro­cery store and pass the credit card through to return home with a bag of grub for the young ones.

Well, according to the ad, it is grown on special farms in Idaho “thanks to a more sustainable farming approach.”

Sounds good to me, I thought, I might get some of this Earthgrain bread. But, wait, maybe I should check this out a little more carefully.

What an ad, tailored for those eco libs that read National Geographic: “The Eco Grain Movement is starting small, but with your help won’t stay that way. You’re probably going the store anyway, so why not do a good deed while you’re at it? By simply buying our…. “ “So do the earth a favor…”

I decided to look up this eco grain phrase and found this, from Barry Shlachter at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram:

Sara Lee’s EarthGrains brand has launched an “environmentally friendly” line of bread with a marketing blitz that describes itself as a “plot to save the earth, one field at a time.”

It’s triggered a furor by critics who cite a claim by Sara Lee on its Web site — since deleted — that some wheat in its new EarthGrains Eco-Grains bread is more sustainably grown than organic wheat. It also alleged that organic farming “destroyed undeveloped land.”

While the nation’s second-biggest baker is busy clarifying its position, an organic watchdog group named the Cornucopia Institute blasted Sara Lee for “advertising malpractice” and “greenwashing” — using questionable environmental claims to promote products…..

…Sara Lee has launched a TV, radio, print and Internet ad campaign, harnessing Facebook and Twitter, to promote a “movement” where shoppers help the planet with every purchase of a loaf made with “Eco-Grains” wheat, its promotional materials say….

…Eco-Grains is a Sara Lee-trademarked name it gave to wheat grown in Idaho using precision agriculture. This approach includes satellite imagery and computer-guided application of fertilizer, herbicide and pesticide, aiming to avoid potentially harmful over-spraying while boosting yields. It’s a hard white spring wheat sold by Horizon Milling, a Cargill affiliate, that can lighten and provide texture to typical whole wheat flours.

But Cargill said Mickelson and the four other Eco-Grain producers do not use no-till planting, the one precision technique that some soil experts say is superior to organic farming in terms of preventing soil erosion and runoff.

Only a fifth of the wheat in each loaf is Eco-Grains, but Sara Lee says that will increase…

Hoo boy, it’s hard to keep ahead of these corporate lies… Boycott ‘em, I say.

They wanted to exercise their dogs by hitting ten­nis balls, but it was no use because my blue heeler bitch snagged every fly ball for maybe an hour. I pitched to both the boyfriend or the girlfriend, you might call them, blaming my change-up every time they swung and missed. I have the best dog in the world. She played catcher, shortstop, and left field, sprinting at maybe 40mph to retrieve the long ball.

When we hominids had tired of swinging the alumi­num bat, we sat on the lush clover pasture and passed the bottle of cabernet.

“It’s like a day in the park,” said the woman.

The cows and chickens grazed the pasture and encourage legumes like clover and trefoil. As I fur­tively swigged the wine, I noticed a spotted cucumber beetle climbing over clover leaves like a buffalo graz­ing the high plains. The first of the season, maybe. “It’s too nice to be working,” I rationalized.

The next morning my heart was pounding nails into my brains before the sun rose. It was Ash Wednesday. My second ex dropped the four-year-old off at the farm before I was done cleaning the milking apparatus. He was ready to go to work. We sifted soil. I don’t buy potting soil for my spring starts. It is against my religion to purchase dirt. “Farmers should not purchase dirt,” I say. We should produce it. Most of our potting soil is old cow shit that is sort of aged or composted, mixed with ashes from our fireplace and clay.

“Don’t use ashes,” they say, “Because you know all the paper is loaded with carcinogens.”

We don’t use paper, though. You can get these lit­tle propane bottles at the hardware store, fit them with torch ends, and all you have to do is split up some redwood kindling, pile it in a pyramid of sorts, and fire the torch into it for several minutes. In the whole winter you might use half a gallon of propane, and the ashes are about the best soil amendment you could want in these parts, high in calcium, potassium, and phosphorus, plus trace minerals.

My four year-old pretty much cracked the whip, insisting on shoveling the soil over the sifter and rushing to beat me at the punch, encouraging me to have another sip of beer. He wanted me to drink beer so he could monopolize all the work. It was a deal I secretly agreed to, though I outwardly protested. We made perhaps a hundred gallons of potting soil over the course of the day, and the only fingers I lifted were popping the tab on another can. The whole day my spirits were lifted. I was grateful for the help from my youngest son. I have this terrible problem that is probably curable with some kind of pill from Ely Lilly, where I can’t work very well alone. I have evidence to prove it. For some reason I ran Cross Country my senior year of high school. Actually the reasons I ran were mostly on the girls’ team and the way their legs looked in the nylon shorts, but in the course of run­ning I was stuck with trying to keep up with feet more fleet than mine. There were a few evenings in October where I ended up sentenced to detention, missing practice and showing up at 4:30 to run the rest of practice by myself, and no matter how I tried I could not run a mile alone in under six minutes, when normally with the rest of the pack I clocked in at 5:00 or 5:15 or so. I work so much better with a group.

These days I take whatever help I can get. Mardi Gras came on the heels of a get real encounter session with my latest woofer, Diana Winter. I guess she was a little pissed that I’d been writing about our conflicts in the newspaper. It was immature of me, she said. “When are you going to grow up?”

“Might not happen in this lifetime.”

But I don’t think it was so much that. She met this dude from Redwood Valley who moonlights as a capoiera instructor. Now she’s living in Redwood Valley. So much for the apprenticeship, I guess.

]]> http://theava.com/archives/4430/feed 1 http://theava.com/archives/3872 http://theava.com/archives/3872#comments Wed, 03 Feb 2010 21:02:24 +0000 Spec MacQuayde http://theava.com/?p=3872 Maybe a ton of carrots are still soaking in the moist soil. The water on the higher part of the field has abated, but the next wave of heavy rain will probably do the carrots in, turning them to something like carrot juice that has been on the shelf for years. When you pull the rotten ones it looks like you drank the outdated carrot juice and somebody told you a funny one and you laughed through your nose.

It’s been difficult to motivate anyone to help dig the rest of the crop. I think my boys and I are tired of harvesting carrots after doing it two or three times a week for four months.

“Let’s do something else,” they tell me.

I don’t argue. The first carrots we managed to pile in the field in order to save them from rotting have pretty much all been gnawed on by jackrabbits. I’d always thought it was a myth that Bugs Bunny pre­ferred carrots, but Bugs and Brer Rabbit must have had a convention out there around the carrot pile by the looks of it. With all the clover pastures they had to cross to reach the carrot patch I’d have to say rab­bits certainly are drawn to carrots like cats to catnip or stoners to a smoking joint, which gave me an idea.

“You know, I could use carrots to trap them,” I said to a friend who leans towards vegetarianism but is also interested in the carrot crop because he likes to juice them.

“But I like seeing the rabbits alive,” he said.

“I like rabbits, too,” I said, realizing it must have sounded like I’d said, “I like rabbit stew.”

“I like rabbits, also,” I had to add. “I just think it’s funny they actually do go for carrots.”

Three quarters of the crop has been harvested, and I’m pretty happy with how they turned out. They were planted way back in May. In some ways I don’t really give a shit if the rest of the crop rots, but then it would be nice to load them in a bin and feed them to the cows in the milking stall, as the rest of our best hay has been depleted. We’re down to our last bale of the green stuff, and anyway most of the carrots have split or been gnawed on by gophers, or started to rot.

A big portion of the food produced at our farm goes to feeding the animals. This portion is greater than it would be in a more natural economy. I mean if we really had to produce most of our own grub, car­rots would be worth more. The way things are, cur­rently, most of my neighbors shop for groceries in Ukiah or Santa Rosa, so it is logistically difficult for them to take the extra time to get carrots, beets, or whatever vegetables are in season from our farm. By the time they drove to the farm and got themselves cornered into a conversation about the recent death of J.D. Salinger or something at the farm they could have driven to San Francisco.

Most of my neighbors purchase their milk in Ukiah, as well. If you’ve ever studied grocery store economics they told you that the milk usually is placed in the furthest corner at the back of the store because milk is what people go to the store for. Every­thing else — except maybe for coffee, cigarettes, and beer — is incidental. This is why it is illegal for farm­ers to sell fresh milk direct to consumers. It’s the big­gest reason, anyway. If people were getting their milk directly from farmers, dropped off on their doorsteps, they might not be so motivated to drive to Safeway. Housewives are nearly extinct, but once upon a time many of them appreciated the milkmen, whereas now they never meet the guy who is backing the big rig up to the loading dock at the back of the supermarket. Maybe they’d go ahead and plant potatoes in the backyard instead of fescue, they’d can tomatoes, they’d invite their neighbors over for barbecues and beer on Saturday nights, if only they could meet the milkman.

I can barely sell carrots, and I can’t legally sell milk or meat for human consumption, but I can sell the stuff for pet food. Quite a few local dogs show up daily at our barn to drink fresh milk from the buckets that are perpetually full, and some neighbors buy milk or ground beef to feed their pets. I feed the rest to our dogs, cats, or chickens, so none of it goes to waste. At least I don’t have to buy dog food. Our pups eat better than most people.

Our resident veterinarian, Dr. Larry Chaulk, has been observing the effects of commercial dog food for decades. “Inevitably it results in kidney failure,” he says. “I call it, ’4D Meat.’ Diseased, Dying, Dead, and Destroyed.” I lost the notes I took in our conversa­tion on the subject, but I think Dr. Chaulk stated that pet food is an unregulated industry. Not even the USDA has any nominal authority, and the ingredients are not listed on the labels. Except for Wysong and a few other brands, the majority use coal or petroleum byproducts high in nitrates to raise the “crude pro­tein” levels to 25%, since nitrogen is technically a pro­tein.

Most people didn’t keep dogs on the road where I grew up because it was paved and cars routinely buzzed by at 80mph, getting airborn on the rolling hills. So I never had a dog as a kid, and never pur­chased dog food until my junior year of college.

I was living in an apartment and had a roommate, Dennis Yolkhoff, who had grown up behind the Iron Curtain and only recently emigrated to the States. He was penniless. My friends and I felt sorry for him, initially, and took him in, instantly regretting our momentary generosity. He had no qualms about mooching. He always wanted a ride, drank all your beer, ate up the spaghetti you were saving for later. He was no poster child for Soviet Communism. One time I was going to a movie with a girl. She was driv­ing. Dennis asked if he could go along and then declared “Shotgun.” It was my date, yet I ended up riding in the back and cracking up at his audacity the whole night. Then he proceeded to ask out every girl in our circle of friends, beginning with the ones all the guys thought were the hottest and drooled on at par­ties, working his way from the most desirable down the ladder with no scruples. 

Finally this girl who had what you might call a slim, hot figure and long, blonde hair with pretty bad acne and horse teeth agreed to go on a double date with Dennis and my girlfriend and I. I drove her car that night, with Dennis riding in the backseat and telling his date all about how much he was bench pressing in the weight room. It was the only time in my life I ever drank motor oil. We had no booze, and I got so sick of hearing him boast vainly that I grabbed this fresh quart that was mostly empty that I’d used to top off the motor and was leaning against the emergency brake lever between the bucket seats. I chugged motor oil. It grossed my date out and made me puke, but it caused Dennis to shut up for a min­ute.

 I got more evil after that. I purchased a can of dog food along with the pasta sauce and noodles at the supermarket. The dog food can listed no ingredients except, CRUDE PROTEIN 25%, CRUDE FAT 25%, OTHER 50%. That night I made spaghetti and meatballs, tasting the sauce to make sure it was palat­able. When dinner was done I stuck it all in a tupper­ware container in the refrigerator.

 Later that night I saw Dennis helping himself to the leftovers.

 I showed him the empty dog food can.

You get a lot of time to meditate while milking cows, especially with the machine doing most of the work. I glanced out at the sloping concrete floor of our produce barn that was finally clean and free of clutter, thinking what a blessing Diana Winter has been since she swooped in like Mary Poppins. I was really getting carried away, thinking about how happy I was to be in Boonville where most of my customers are literal neighbors and friends. Everything was falling into place. I was actually considering calling up my dad and telling him, “You know, I hate to say it, but right now it seems like everything is going pretty well. The boys are getting along with each other, they love their puppies, they help when I need it. Maybe I always knew what I was doing after all.”

My poor parents have always wondered what went wrong with me — especially my mom, who can’t even talk on the phone with me without commenting about something she screwed up, raising me. 36 years old with two ex-es and three sons, managing a rinky dink little farm in “Boonville,” fooling around with organic techniques and frequently broke.

Diana insists on pouring the milk, normally, but this time when I carried the five gallon tank into the kitchen. She was at the computer smoking a joint.

“What? Are you doing that Farmville business again?” (“Farmville” is this interactive on-line program where people pretend to be farmers. Diana’s into it.)

“No.”

There I was pulling the empty jars from the dishwasher and lining them up in the sink, fastening the filter in the stainless steel funnel. “Oh.”

“I itemized everything that accumulated on the workshelf in the last week since I quit cleaning up after you and your boys.”

Sure enough, there wasn’t a free spot to set the milk tank on the shelf. I had it on the floor. I call it a workshelf. It’s this magnificent redwood slab something like 20 inches wide and two inches thick, and it’s supposed to be a work station someday when we’re making cheese or canning tomatoes, but for now it works good for setting things down when you’re too lazy to think about where they go, apparently. The egg baskets actually belong there, sort of, even though our hens are not laying at this time of year, but the rest was pure clutter. “What do you mean, itemized everything?”

I guess Diana used this software that is handy for taking inventory. “That stuff must belong there because you put it there, so I thought since it is so valuable it was worth my time to take inventory.”

Now it was on the computer, complete with photographs for each category. You had a wood chisel, an empty jug of bar and chain oil, the Christmas present I still hadn’t mailed to my sister’s baby daughter. There was the ears of white and blue corn from our neighbors that the youngest boys had grown out for seed the last year. They were up there so the puppies wouldn’t tear into them. The same with my rubber rain boots. The puppies had already gnawed a hole in the left one. “You know, Diana, I definitely noticed the difference when you first got here. I was just thinking what a difference you’ve made.”

“I came out here to apprentice on a farm, not clean up after a bunch of slobs.”

Needless to say, I wasted no time cleaning off the work station once the milk was filtered. When the calf was fed, I retired to do some reading, itching at my eyes maybe. I must have been rubbing my eyes a bunch. I woke up at three in the morning and of course the first thing that itches if you’re a guy in the country who got poison oak on his hands without realizing it is your crotch. Lying there in the dark I wondered if maybe the dogs had rolled in the poison oak or something. By six in the morning my eyelids were itching, usually one of the next most sensitive places. By eight o’clock, when I set the milk tank up on our work station, Diana was looking at me funny.

“Holy shit!” she said.

“What? You can’t believe the work station is still clean?”

“Your eyes.”

“Oh. I think I’m coming down with poison oak.”

When I walked into town Saturday afternoon, my friends said I looked like I’d been in a fight. “Maybe go to clinic, get cream to rub on it,” said one of my neighbors.

“This kind of thing happens all the time,” I said. “It’s nothing.”

Sunday morning I woke at 3 o’clock and thought it was awfully dark. I thought it was a goddam power outage, which was weird because we hadn’t gotten too much wind yet. I could hear rain hitting the roof. After a while my fingers reached up and sort of pried one of my eyes open, revealing the light from the stereo and what not. There was no way to go back to sleep. My face was so swollen I had to lay on my back and agonize, more or less hallucinating until morning, when I literally had to pry my eyes open to climb out of bed and get ready to milk the cows. I could only see for seconds in a stretch, and then everything was blurry.

“You look like somebody else,” said Diana, who, along with my oldest son, really pitched in to help finish the chores.

Of course it was Sunday so the Health clinic was closed. Supposedly soapweed, or soaproot, that grows a little like pineapples all over the roadsides, is an antidote to poison oak, so I grabbed a shovel and staggered down Lambert Lane towards a patch of soapweed that I knew about. Luckily I encountered some neighbors who were taking their chihuahua for a walk.

“Your face!” said the lady.

“Poison oak. No bueno.”

“No bueno,” agreed the man.

“We have cream from the clinic,” she said. “I have it for my son so he doesn’t scratch.”

“Oh? Yeah, they’re closed.”

I followed the couple to their house, as I staggered like I was drunk. My equilibrium was a little screwed up. Not only were my eyes swollen shut, rendering me functionally blind, but my ears were inflated like balloons and vertigo was setting in. I was in the midst of a miserable moment and didn’t make a lot of small talk there on the porch as they quickly handed me the tube of steroid cream. When I returned to the farm there was Diana with a few packets of Benadryl antihistamine tablets, and she’d even dug up a soaproot for me. That stuff burned when I rubbed it on my cheeks, so it must have done some good. By two in the afternoon the swelling had diminished around my eyes so I could walk around without having to pry them open, though more then a few minutes of this effort gave me a headache. Things were turning out okay, sort of. So far.

“Go ahead,” I told them. “Tell them you’re getting the beer for me.”

“We can’t do that,” said my youngest, who is four. “They’ll put us in jail.”

“Okay, so maybe we’ll stay here the rest of the morning. Anyway, the commercial fart bombs you get at the store aren’t half as disgusting as the rotten eggs in the hay stack.”

Our hay stack began in late April of last year with the barley, then more than a thousand two-wire bales of meadow hay were stacked over the course of months, some still tarped off on the sides of pasture and awaiting my lazy ass to retrieve it. The barley hay turned out to be the sweetest, so I emptied the back corner of the stack first, leaving a gap. The stack has migrated as it dwindles, and the chickens occupying it have abandoned nests in the face of catastrophes that for them were the equivalent of the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius. Every now and then we pull down a bale covered with a dozen or so cannisters of putrid sulfur, baby chicks in various stages of development.

All three of the boys ran off for the hay stack as if soldiers on a mission. I was kind of hoping to spend the morning working on the greenhouse, getting ready for planting starts, but this was also the day we were separating a cow and calf, so both were bellowing back and forth across the fence.

“What are you going to do about the calf?” Diana might have asked me. Something like that. It was hard to hear anything with the calves and the puppies, the boys hollering from the hay stack.

The reason she was asking was that I wasn’t sure. Earlier in the morning, I’d tried taking a bottle of fresh warm milk out and coaxing the heifer to me, but she’d run off. She was born at Christmas and was now two weeks old, shy and well able to elude me. The first year of milking cows I’d separated the calf after maybe two days, stuck it in our stock trailer as a pen, and bottle fed it since. Everything had worked until April of ’08 when I had the brilliant idea of purchasing a few unwanted bull calves from a big dairy farm for $25 each and feeding them the extra milk. Of course they’d all developed scours — extreme squirts of diarrhea, and then this gorgeous heifer calf from one of our own cows had caught the scours from them and died on my birthday, in spite of all efforts to tube feed her with electrolytes. I blamed myself for having separated the cow and calf, felt like a real jerk. Friends from Mexico said they remembered the calves always got the shits if they were bottle or bucket fed, but that they just leave some milk in the udder and let the calf nurse after the milking in the morning or evening, everything was okay. No sqirts.

So I tried everything besides bottle feeding after that horrible experience with the heifer. I tried letting the calf nurse on the cow until it was taking five or six gallons and was growing about ten pounds a day, it seemed like, at which point the calf would be wild and difficult to manage. I tried bringing the calf in and out after milking in the mornings and evenings, but it was too often a circus.

Then we’d gotten this three titter cow from a homestead near Willits, and her left rear quarter had abscessed and was so disgusting that I didn’t want her around our milk cows, so I tried separating her from her massive calf and substituting it with the one that was just born. That way, I thought, this otherwise ruined cow might be able to serve us. She could be a nurse cow. However, she’d kicked the new calf away for a day so I’d given up on that idea. A week or ten days later, and now I was trying again with the same results. To the apprentice it probably appeared that I didn’t know what I was doing, when really I told myself I was just exploring the options. It was hard to do much mental exploration with the cow and calf bawling, though.

I heard my six year-old son screeching from the hay stack where evidently he’d tripped on some baling wire and fallen on a pallet. We stacked the hay on pallets to keep it from wicking up the ground moisture in May and June, but now the hay was gone and it was just pallets.

The screaming was mostly from the perpetual conflict between the six and twelve year-olds, not any injury, but Diana couldn’t help noticing that here was a covered space that would be perfect for keeping the calf in so we could tame it down.

“I usually use the stock trailer for that,” I said, staring at the pallets covered with baling wire strands and loose hay that would make perfect bedding, and at the roof overhead. Meanwhile, the cow and calf were lowing like the world was ending.

“Oh.” Stock trailer, I thought. “But you know we could use those pallets, wire them together, kill two birds with one stone.”

The materials were all right there. In a matter of minutes we had a sheltered 15 x 30 area, and we’d cleaned up a god-awful mess. It was the perfect calf pen. Job done, except for sending the calf in — probably a piece of cake.

There is a basketball goal mounted on a post at the end of the hay barn, and Diana picked up the ball, couldn’t resist taking a shot. The next thing you knew, my boys had joined her on the court which is sort of the thing the people at the local natural building community, Emerald Earth, call “cob.” It’s like adobe. They mix clay and cow shit and straw, stomping it barefoot. We stomp ours coming down from the rebound and dribbling the basketball. All this time I’d been trying to keep a professional relationship with Diana, but here they dragged me into the game, and what was a little awkward for me was that she was actually playing. I mean most of the time around here, these days, all people do is shoot around. They don’t try to go for rebounds or block shots, or anything. Actually boxing out for a rebound was a little more intimacy than I was comfortable with, but there was no way to back out of it. Basketball is considered a contact sport, and this was barnyard style for sure. It was hard to say whether I was sweating more from physical exertion or blushing.

By the time we were exhausted from shooting hoops, the cow and calf had quieted down. Somehow the calf had managed to find its way under the woven wire fence and was now nursing. It was pastoral tranquility but there would be no milk in that cow tonight.

When the chores were done, Diana and I sat around the fire and shared a bottle of wine. She told me about how her parents had met at this Halloween party at a Lutheran church in Detroit back in 1982 or ’83 or something. Evidently they’d both been dressed as Ronald Reagan, complete with the suit and tie, the rubber masks that were popular back then, and they’d first danced to a tune by Kool and the Gang. She told me her dad had been a cab driver so he’d worked nights and weekends and she’d hardly ever seen him, especially after her parents split up when she was seven. Her mom had been a nurse and worked sixteen hour shifts and wanted to sleep and watch television on her days off, but her mom’s parents had sort of a produce farm east of Michiwaka where she’d spent the summers and gotten experience with crops like apples and strawberries.

The warm weather over the weekend had my woofer, Diana Winter, all excited to get the greenhouse ready for planting stuff like broccoli and cabbage. Coming from Detroit, we get a few warm days the first week in January and she thinks it’s time to drop it into high gear. We could be planting radishes and peas out in the garden, she says, if only I’d move the chicken trailer out to pasture.

“The rains, the winter, have barely started,” I tell her. “Hopefully.”

Diana has hooked up with some of the key people involved with the local foods movement. Some of those folks are fairly radical, bluntly noting that the economy is about as stable as a horse on a tightrope. You can see the effect this kind of thinking has on her. When I see the energetic gleam in her eyes I have to reach for a can of beer. I know how she feels. She can’t believe the piles of apples and walnuts going to waste in this valley. “There’s so much potential here. I just don’t get why more of the pot growers don’t use their land to produce food for people.”

“Some do,” I told her. “But they’re the exception. I know ten people who want to grow food but every summer about the middle of August they say, Oh fuck it, and let all the vegetables bake like pizza in a brick oven. All the available water goes to the high-value buds. We’ve had three dry years in a row.”

“But, like, if you had some kind of incentive program. A collective where people all chip in to encourage growers to plant food along with pot…”

Meanwhile I was fumbling around, trying to roll a joint. I was starting to think that somehow it had been a work of genius to have the woofer come out in the middle of the winter when there was nothing to do. That way she could spend a couple months decompressing, getting acclimated before we started in with the spring planting. She’d be chomping at the bit by the first weeks of March, when we would still have about as many months of frost danger ahead of us as they do in Detroit. By then she might have grown accustomed to the slow pace of farm life around here.

A lot of people think that farmers work really hard, and it is true that jobs like stacking hay will tend to make you sweat. However, it is not the hard work that usually sends the woofers flying away like migratory birds before the crops are even planted. It is the monotonous stuff like planting and weeding, the generally slow pace that drives most people crazy at first. They hear the frogs chirping from the swamps, the roosters crowing, the cows calling over the fence to their calves, and they go nuts. It’s all too slow.

So when I heard that Diana had played volleyball at a Lutheran school in Detroit up through the 8th grade, I connected her with the folks who get together at the Anderson Valley High gym somewhere around 4:30 on Sunday evenings. They’ve been playing volleyball for decades, back to the days when it was outdoors and mostly hippies who played the feral sort of game you might expect to find in the inner city, complete with the fights, the 40-ounce bottles busted over skulls. They’ve mellowed over the years, they say, and pretty much welcome anyone willing to play.

Not more than ten minutes up Highway 253 out of Boonville, my 12 year-old son got a text message from one of his friends who claimed to have seen three of our puppies in downtown Boonville.

“That’s impossible,” I said. “Where did she see them?”

“I don’t know.”

“Call her!”

“It won’t do any good. She’s all the way in Navarro by now.”

“That means she was in Boonville 15 minutes ago. We were still at the farm.”

“All I know is she said she saw them.”

We were on the part of Highway 253 where cellphone reception is fragmented. By the time we got to Ukiah I was imagining these ugly scenarios in which Animal Control was swooping down on our puppies and hauling them away, maybe even pressing charges for negligence. “How many did she see?”

“Three,” my son finally said as we were driving up South State in Ukiah. “One white, one brown, and one black.”

That didn’t sound like our pups. We had three white and one black. If it hadn’t been for the extra coffee I’d sipped along the way, maybe I could have avoided venturing so close to an ulcer. A phone call to a friend in Boonville confirmed that the puppies had not chosen our departure as an opportunity to roam the streets, and my son admitted that the source of the hypothetical crisis might have been texting simply for the sake of sending a message.

Any excuse to visit the Frey winery is legitimate to me. They operate the only working class winery that I know about in Mendo. I mean they keep their cabernet and zinfindel competitive with a twelve pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon. “Our reaction to the recession was to lower the prices,” said one family member working in the office. “Our customers are in it with us, so our gross sales are down but our wine sales are steady.”

The Freys are among the few wine producers in our county who are actually farmers. Farmers are resourceful and frugal, according to my definition. They repair what is broken before they purchase new. They make gradual upgrades that are consistent with their annual profits. Most of the tanks the Freys use to age their wine are not uniform—they are welded rejects from other wineries where workers have rammed forklifts into tanks and punctured them, much like old blue jeans from the Goodwill store. Dogs and grandchildren ramble in the gravel parking lots under the oaks and redwoods. While we were out there pulling the trailer with the bull past the winery, dozens of people were involved in the bottling line, most of them family members or neighbors. On our way to the destination, we encountered Daniel and Molly Frey with their son, Osiris, followed by about ten milking goats that were grazing the cover crops in the vineyards. “It’s dual purpose,” said Daniel, “because I’m doing child care the same time I’m watching the goats.”

Watching the goats follow them in a scene too pastoral for our times, I had to wonder if maybe I should have gotten into goats instead of the shorthorn milking cows that respect me and my dogs but certainly don’t follow me around. Anyway, there is a demand for bull service, so cows must not be totally obsolete.

Unloading the bull was easy enough, and we returned home with a generous case of zin. I was grateful to have some wine to offer to my woofer, Diana Winter, and was only mildly surprised to see that the cow, Lula, the mother of the bull whose services we’d transported, had dropped a heifer calf.

That night, Lula showed up in the milking stall without being called, without trying to murder me. In this way she sharply contrasts from the other cows. Shorthorns are notorious for protecting their young, a quality that is amplified by the season of perpetual muck. The other cows would have been in mortal combat.

Last summer I spent some time on the telephone with a couple friends back in southern Indiana who are still farming. Tom and Ruth have four children and are managing thousands of acres of corn and soybeans, feeding steers and heifers out in the winter, but Ruth grew up on a dairy farm. For a few years she tried to get Tom to raise cows and calves on their sandy hills, keeping the soil in pasture, but one of the cows dislocated Tom’s hip when he tried to rope the calf for castrating. “I’m a finishing man, not a cow-calf man,” Tom told me.

Ruth laughed when she heard I was keeping shorthorns. “Nobody believed me in 4-H when I said I had blue cows, but we had the blue roan shorthorns,” she said. “They’re real protective of their calves.”

“You’re telling me,” I said. From the middle of May until sometime in October I was unable to sleep without propping several pillows in different positions to compensate for the shoulder I’d blown out when a mad cow had knocked me to the dust, and the middle finger on my right hand was broken for half the year. The only upside of the broken middle finger was I started using the backboard more when playing basketball because I lost all finesse. The backboard is a higher percentage shot. Also, with a broken middle finger it was easy to say goodbye to all my exes.

The Great Matsutake

The matsutakes are emerging along the ridges. If you know where they are you are finding them. If you don’t, you probably won’t. A person with deeper local roots than I have has been schooling me on the subtle art of spotting the slightest puffs of fir down on tan oak leaves, pouncing on them for the dirty white gems.

My biggest motivation for going along on a mushroom gathering foray was that my woofer — “Diana Winter” and I have been cooped up in the barn with four puppies. Cabin fever is setting in with the long nights. Things have really changed around the barn and I don’t know if I can ever relax again. Every time a puppy shits on the concrete floor Diana jumps from her seat at our primitive office desk to remove the crap and scrub the floor with bleach. I always thought it was easier to let it dry out a little first. The trouble is that she’s already caught up with most of the cleaning chores. I’m starting to feel like I have to crumple the beer can immediately after killing it, deposit the scrap in the recycling, or she’ll give me a dirty look, like before you know it she’ll be suggesting I take my boots off before entering our living quarters.

“You have a high tolerance for slovenliness,” she told me. At the moment she was referring precisely to the impromptu computer desk I’d fashioned with plywood and redwood two-by-six that for some reason refuses to plant itself firmly on the sloping concrete floor. Something about the four points of contact causes it to rock when you type. Its crude plywood was finished with spilled coffee, tea, or beer mixing with cigarette ashes, which I never noticed, but now it’s Diana’s new work environment. In addition to tidying up the barn, I’ve asked her to take over as a sort of secretary and straighten up all the paperwork that’s been accumulating for two seasons.

“Anyway, Spec, I was supposed to be an apprentice. You’re supposed to be the one in charge.”

“Shit, Diana. At this point you’re an accomplice.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I was just kidding.”

“I never know when to believe you. Can we just drop this whole conversation?”

She keeps accusing me of making loaded statements, and last night she told me she knew what I was thinking when I was chuckling, that I was ridiculing her in my mind. Her Detroit accent kills me. I had her do the answering machine message for our farm just for kicks. People already think she’s totally in charge, telling me what to do.

The thing is that Diana virtually has more experience as a farm manager than I do. I never would have believed this, but there is this interactive, alternative reality deal on the internet called “Farmville,” where people operate virtual farms. They fertilize the fields, plant the crops — I don’t know what all they do, exactly, but it evidently eats up a world of time for some people. Lots of people are doing it. My first ex is now virtually farming in her free time, even after ridiculing me for years that I was wasting my time *actually* farming and not making real money. Supposedly the participants get excited about purchasing a new tractor. Are they signing their life away on virtual mortgages? I don’t know. You’re welcome to research this business on your own. I’m afraid to delve into it, for fear it would trap me and suddenly I’d be more inclined to harvest carrots in cyberspace than out in the mud.

Diana, for instance, was harvesting wheat with her combine on line when I mentioned that it would be nice if somebody brought an armload of firewood in. “You think Farmville is dumb,” she said.

“Well, I just—Anyway, guess I’ll go get the firewood.” I’d only mentioned getting some firewood because I’d wanted a chance to check my e-mail in private, see what other potential woofers might have contacted me, just in case things don’t work out with Diana. I fear that the novelty of our mild winter might wear off when the storms set in, if they ever do. And she’s growing increasingly suspicious that I had some ulterior motive for inviting her out here to work. I guess I’ve made a few comments to her in the evenings that might have been taken the wrong way, but I only meant to be flattering. I mean I’d said her earthy brown hair was beautiful, which might have sounded like a come-on, but I’d said that because she’d mentioned going to Ukiah for a day and cutting her hair short, bleaching it, dyeing it red or blue or something, because it was so hard to manage her hair in the crude conditions. Why was I making comments like that in the first place, though? I wanted her to go to Ukiah and leave me alone for the day. “Think I’ll just get the wood myself.”

Instead of getting a load of firewood I sort of wandered off into town for a cup of coffee where I ran into a friend who was planning to drive up Mountain View Road to hit a few primo matsu spots.

Part of the reason I was happy to have the vet over to vaccinate the pups was that it allowed me to cancel the idea of moving more cows up to the hillside pastures. The first trip up Deer Meadow Road above Boonville was uneventful until the last hill before the gate, when the light front end of the International tractor literally lifted off the ground. I guess the ancient stock trailer with three thousand pounds of flesh bouncing around was a little too much as the hill got steeper, and I had to back the whole works down the hill using the left and right brakes with the front end floating.

Maybe part of the problem was that the weights fell off the front end of the tractor while I was cutting hay in June. It was the second time they’d fallen off. For some reason they are fastened to the frame with nothing but two half-inch bolts. The first time they’d sheered, I’d drilled the bolts and used an E-Z-out to remove them, but this time one was stuck and the E-Z-out just bent. Since I don’t do any heavy pulling, I just decided to screw it and leave the weights off.

But that was the sort of thinking that led to this Deer Meadow predicament. Fortunately the trailer stayed on the road as it pulled the tractor, inch by inch, skidding and rocking the whole way.

A neighbor from further up the hill stopped to help. After some discussion, we decided the thing to do was let the cows out and drive them up the road the old-fashioned way, walking behind them and grabbing their tales. They were all pretty tame. The reason I’d chosen them first to go up the hill was they were easy to work with.

Tuesday was one of the coldest days Anderson Valley has seen in years. The condensation accumulating in the vacuum line on the milking machine froze, clogging up the works, and I had to siphon hot water in to melt the ice in order to milk the cows. Needless to say, it was a long morning.

Making the mundane more difficult, I was still working on breaking in the new “woofer” who has recently moved to our farm from her home in East Detroit, Michigan. “Diana Winter” is not her real name. She graduated from Cleveland State several years ago with a bachelor’s degree in English Literature and Anthropology, and has been working at Home Depot since receiving her diploma, barely making her rent and car payments and unable to make payments on her student loan. It’s over $100,000, growing monthly, so she signed on with the popular “willing workers on organic farms” organization as a means of living beyond the books, so to speak. Her financial future is bleak.

For several years I’d received a phone call or two every week from young people around the country who were interested in coming to Mendocino County to work on farms, and I’d consistently turned them down, having concluded that any work that needed to be done should be done by locals. There are complications that arise when young people from outside the area come to work and live. For one thing, they tend to be psychologically dependent on the farmers, with no loyal friends in the community at large. But so many jobs were piling up at the farm. There was the dishes, the laundry, the perpetual mess that follows the antics of my three sons, and I just couldn’t keep up. So when Diana arrived with her backpack off the Greyhound in Ukiah, I had to spend a few days helping her adjust to life on our farm.

“Unless you have experience as a mechanic, most of the work in the fields and pastures is going okay,” I told her, handing her a book of essays by Wendell Berry: Home Economics. “What our farm needs is someone who can keep the kitchen tidy, keep the laundry folded, and put dinner on the table.”

“But I came out here to do farm work.”

“Here, I have this bag of trim,” I said, handing Diana about a pound of shake buds that some local grower had kicked down to me. “It’s yours.”

“Wow!”

“Don’t mention it.”

Having grown up in southern Indiana, I knew what it must feel like to hold a pound of pretty good smoke that somebody had just given you for free. We smoked a little around the fire that night, passing a bottle of whiskey and getting better acquainted. I guess Diana was involved with the robust urban gardening movement in Detroit, a role model for other cities. Vacant lots left and right have been transformed into market gardens, with urban gardeners selling mustard greens, chard, turnips, beets, zucchini, etc. Things are so bad in Detroit that the people are turning it around, for good. It was due to this phenomenon that Diana was inspired to get some experience on organic farms, to bring her skills back. Unfortunately, this time of year there isn’t a hell of a lot to do out in the garden. The carrots and beets are sitting in a veritable refrigerator, chilling out in the cool soil. Several times a week I harvest. Other than that, there’s nothing to do but listen to the rain hit the galvanized roof and fetch firewood from the pile.