Ah, Peace & Quiet

It’s pretty quiet around our place.  Not literally, of course, but in the sense that not much has happened as of late.  In literal terms, it’s anything but quiet.  Howling huskies, squalling pups, clucking hens, and a babbling baby all conspire to ensure that silence only occurs for short periods in the dead of night.

It’s winter, so our world revolves primarily around … dogs!  A return to more seasonal weather had us headed up the West Fork again, where we found the recent cold snap and snowfall had vastly improved trail conditions.  The dogs all ran well and little Icy got her first taste of the trace.  Paluk’s pups are four weeks old and as cute as ever.  I get endless enjoyment from asking Brandi which one of them she is going to keep.

“So, we can keep a puppy?”

“No.  It’s just a thought experiment.”

“Oh.”

The chickens we got from our smokejumper bro Rogers haven’t been producing any eggs.  They got a little traumatized by the inevitable dog v. chicken encounter which occurred the very first day we had them on the property, but they still offered up an egg a day for a week or so.  Now they aren’t producing at all.  I’ve asked around a bit and it seems they aren’t unique in this.  My buddy Sells’ urban flock in Missoula isn’t producing either.  He is running heat lamps and we aren’t, so that doesn’t seem to be a significant factor.  I should do some more research online, but I will probably just wait until spring when the days get longer and things warm up and see what happens then.

Despite my best efforts, I have more or less come to grips with the fact that the dogs are going to take up a lot more space than I had originally imagined and that their presence is going to seriously hinder our ability to host other livestock.  I’m really none too stoked to come walking out the back door to find four of them hanging from the neck of a shrieking sheep, so abstinence is the best policy there.  I still maintain hope for a couple of weaner pigs and a cow, but I've finally accepted that flora may be more the focus than fauna in the near term.

I’ve been doing some reading about food forests and garden design and I’m pretty excited about planting some fruit trees and berry bushes this coming spring or fall.  I’m thinking about taking a pretty loose approach to gardening this year and basically just throwing seeds wherever there is some bare dirt.  I would really like to put some bulbs and native shrubs in as well, and I’m really interested in starting some hops on the fence around the dog yard.  But as with everything, how much I can accomplish will largely depend on the availability of those two scarcities, time and money.

Keegan turned one last month and has become upwardly mobile.  His favorite thing in the world is taking hold of a pair of fingers and marching back to the bathroom to fetch his toothbrush.  He can crawl, pull himself up on the furniture, and stand no-handed for a half second, but he has a terrible habit of not going all the way to the ball and is always pulling up short and having to reach in.  We’ve been working on fixing that.

A glorious thing about one year old Keegan is that he speaks.  Not English, but a language that is entirely his own.  He often sits there and rattles on to himself for minutes on end.  You can’t understand a word of it, but he knows what he's saying.  I don’t know where he got it but he’s quite the orator.  He loves to spout off some longwinded tale and then finish with Keegan’s patented “I Approve” salute, which is always worthy of a laugh.

So that’s what I mean when I say it has been pretty quiet.  No sonic booms or explosions.  Just a dull roar.

Do They Not Teach Physics in School Anymore?

There is something that has been bothering me, and it isn’t the eight puppies that we need to find homes for, the hitch that I’ve noticed in Isis’ gait, the lack of snow in the Bitterroot, or the fact that JFK, Bobby, MLK, and Malcolm X were assassinated, all in a relatively short time span and all by men with rather dubious motives, simply for trying to, as Spike Lee put it, do the right thing.

In truth, all those things are bothering me, especially the concerns I have about the dogs, in whom I have a vetted interest and over which I have at least some influence, but this is something else.  It’s a simple thing, one that has been a recurrent theme of late, an underlying thread linking a multitude of topics.  I found it in a book on permaculture I’ve been reading, and it bubbles to mind whenever I endure another news story about our faltering economy.  It has to do with attitude, and, when it comes to human endeavor, attitude is everything.

The instance in the book was a passage about capturing rainwater.  The author’s message:  Utilize it.  Otherwise, it simply goes to waste.

Now wait a minute.  If I don’t intercept it, it goes where?  Well, someplace.  And it does what when it gets there?  Well, something.

Likewise, the economy.  According to most, it has gone on hiatus.  Retreated, like a turtle into its shell.  Consumers, the primary drivers of the economy, are no longer spending.  So they must be saving, right?  Actually, no.  Lending?  Nope.  Investing?  No, that isn’t happening either.

Has everyone forgotten that, sunlight and the occasional meteor/spaceflight aside, we live in a closed system?  No matter whether we are talking hydrology or economics, the first law of thermodynamics still applies.  Money and water can neither be created nor destroyed.  They can only be moved around the planet. 

Granted, that isn’t exactly true, especially about the money, but for the purpose of this argument it is.  Those resources are somewhere, and they are doing something.  The real crux of the matter is that, with both sides of the equation being equal, what we do in one place will have a profound influence on things in another.  The question is whether it has a positive net effect (for humanity at least) or whether it sets off a cascade of events the consequence of which we cannot even begin to comprehend.

In the case of the economy, it’s pretty obvious.  Take away the rainwater and the earth becomes a desert. 

Or does it?

According to the International Monetary Fund, in 2009 the gross domestic product of America shrunk at a rate of minus 2.633%.  China’s GDP, on the other hand, grew at a rate of 9.096%.  That same year, the GDP of Afghanistan and Iraq increased by 22.545% and 4.5% respectively.

On second thought, maybe I should start collecting rainwater.  Better than just letting it run off the roof, down the Bitterroot, and across the Pacific to do God knows what.

I wonder, if they could do it over again, whether the Kennedys would keep their mouths shut about Vietnam.  And would anything be different if they did.

Summerdale Smallholding

Recently, while searching for information about raising pigs, I discovered a British term that I really appreciate. Admittedly, I get a bit romantic about the Continent, the Isles included, and, even though I’ve never visited (except on Google Earth) and have no real knowledge on which to base such an opinion, I just sort of assume everything is more idyllic there. Pastoral images of English cottage gardens, Italian vineyards, and rural French countryside definitely resonate with me. A subtle formality can be found in the European rustic form that I feel is missing in most American landscapes. It makes me think ‘that’s the way things ought to look.’ So I’m not at all surprised by my reaction to the term smallholding.

Loosely defined, a smallholding is a small, single family farm designed to provide for and sustain its inhabitants, which is exactly what we are looking to accomplish with our new property. Not agriculture, per se, just us husbanding our little corner of the earth and maybe taking a few links out of our food chain. A process more so than a product, perhaps, but hopefully one that also generates some tangible benefits for the effort.


In keeping with the fine tradition of our good friend Thoreau, I feel inclined to document the entire enterprise, and since this be the medium of our times it seems as good a place as any to do so. Expect to see many more discussions, plans, solicitations of assistance, pictures, updates, trials and errors of this nature in posts to come. Sanctimonious non sequitur will continue to be a mainstay, alongside a running narrative on our smallholding activity.

Obviously, it is quite unlikely that we will ever see any real return on our investment, other than those abstruse benefits reaped from living a pastoral existence. Not even considering capital assets such as land, tractor and existent infrastructure, I doubt the operation could ever break even. But since the validity of that skepticism is something I am interested in substantiating, I will maintain a financial record using Google Docs and will share an other-than-quarterly report from time to time. Seeing as they are our only live stock at the moment, I’m split over whether I ought to include expenses related to the dogs. I tend to think not, though I may throw them in just because.

So far, the only cost has been $13.01 in diesel fuel. Bertha and I spent a day getting reacquainted while we peeled six inches of composted straw and manure from the area where the dog yard is going to be. Bertha has two left feet when I’m at the controls and she nearly foundered herself once when I led her into a particularly greasy patch of gumbo. She was definitely a little overaggressive moving the burn barrel, which she squashed beneath her bucket like an elephant might flatten a cockroach with its trunk. In the end, however, the trapezoid of ground laid out as the dog yard was scraped mostly clean and heaps of rotted straw and manure covered a majority of the proposed garden plot.

I’m not sure what to do about the garden. It needs to be plowed or tilled or all of the above. As with most of my opinions on the matter, I’m inclined toward an animal powered solution, especially since the area in question isn’t really big enough to warrant the acquisition of tractor implements. Currently, I am partial to the idea of getting a couple of pigs next spring and just letting them root up the place. It would mean we’d be forced to wait a season before we could plant, but on the other hand we’d have our own pork and we wouldn’t have to buy a plow or tiller. I haven’t a clue really but I’m banking on the assumption that pigs would break things down to a point that they would be hand-tillable afterwards, which may or may not be the case.

In that same vein, I’m divided as to whether a permanent chicken coop or an ark is a better bet. I’d rather avoid store-bought feed; the most organic, fundamental solution is what I’m after. And I don’t mean ad campaign organic either. I’m referring to the unadulterated interpretation of the word: of developing in a manner analogous to the natural growth and evolution characteristic of living organisms; arising as a natural outgrowth. Basically I’d like to see all the farm animals on the Summerdale smallholding subsisted strictly from the fodder at hand, and even though I realize that is highly unrealistic, I still think it a worthwhile goal.

As well, there is the question of weed control. We have a proliferation of thistle in our little pasture out front and the corral around the barn is thick with some kind of insidious invader. I immediately thought of sheep or goats, but research and nagging fear of the inevitable Siberian on sheep encounter makes me wary. In the end we’ll probably get some anyway, if not for any useful purpose then just for the fun of having them around, for a little while at least.

Betty's Isis of Bydog

In the meantime, I have been plenty occupied with our, or as Brandi puts it, MY new puppy. A lot of the motivation to buy a house out of town was born from our desire to greatly expand our kennel, and we wasted no time getting started along that path. I have been searching far and wide for a female Siberian pup with features similar to Kona and Blue, and I finally gave into temptation and bought a dog from a breeder in North Carolina that appeared, at least in pictures, to exhibit many of the same attributes.



Blue and Kona



Tensaw in repose

Now that she has arrived, I can see that Isis tends to be a bit more characteristic of Tensaw and is missing some esoteric quality that the other girls possess. It seems her coat is smoother, like Tenny's.  If nothing else, she certainly shares his gift for song, a fact she is quite willing to demonstrate.

Our other objective with the kennel was to acquire a command leader from a proven bloodline that could guide our green dogs and get us started toward building a real sled team. In particular, I was interested in Anadyr dogs, as I had helped handle the purebred Siberian team of J.P. Norris at the Tok Race of Champions and I knew the quality of his line. After months of detective work, Brandi sleuthed out a sled dog operation in Pray, Montana, called Absaroka Dogsled Treks who, as luck would have it, had a command leader and an Anadyr brood bitch they were willing to offer us. Our plan is to travel east early next month to check out these dogs and hopefully acquire what would be an exceptional foundation to our kennel.

aerial view with planned improvements

Before we can do that, however, there is the little matter of fencing the dog yard. I called Ken at Bitterroot Fence and made tentative arrangements for his crew to set posts some time early next week, but with four inches of fresh snow and the truck thermometer reading 6 degrees when I left the house this morning I would not be surprised to hear that they were running somewhat behind schedule. Ah, the glory that is winter in Montana!

the Homestead

Funny how things come back around.  You see it in fashion all the time.  Children grow up, become consumers, and their collective buying power forces the revival of whatever stylistic elements were in vogue when they were young.  I saw a kid at the post office and couldn't help wondering if he knew he had raided the wardrobe of a John Hughes film.  I’m sure the girls will start pegging the legs of their jeans any day now.  I’ve even heard that mullets and cheesy mustaches are on their way back.

When I first arrived in the Bitterroot Valley, my brother Jeb sent me an email informing me that our Great-grandfather Spencer (my mother’s mother’s father) once had a ranch here.  The story is he also had a hunting cabin up the Rattlesnake north of Missoula.  Later the family moved to Southern California because they thought the climate there would be better for the children's asthma. Jeb suggested I go hunt up the old homestead in the Ravalli county records.  I figured I could do one better.

Skip ahead three generations, and history repeats itself.

You can’t really call it a ranch, since it is much too small and has no livestock.  Yet.

But there will be.  My hope is for a Holstein heifer, a few sheep, a handful of chickens, and possibly a pig.  Brandi is leaning toward goats and a wee donkey.

Regardless of what shape the hoofed residents take, there will definitely be more of these.  The latest addition, our new puppy Isis, arrives today.

The thistle crop in the front pasture isn't very pretty but we enjoy the rest of the view.

Bertha likes hers too.

 

                Reverse angle.

Now pull back

It's not the old Spencer place, but it will do.

We're gonna put the dog kennel here.  Bertha and I will be plenty busy this weekend peeling back that layer of compost and moving it to the garden.

Looking east toward the Big Ditch.  Gravity flow sprinklers irrigate the pasture on Kona's side of the fence.

We know it will be tons of work but we love our little spread.

a New New Deal

Stuff has been happening at a breakneck pace. It’s already two weeks into hunting season and I’ve been out exactly once. I just bought tickets for the Banff Mountain Film Festival’s annual World Tour stop at the UM Theatre. Halloween is gone and Thanksgiving is looming. Snow is an almost permanent feature in the sweeping panorama that now greets us every time we turn our eyes west.

We have moved into our new home on Summerdale Road. Stress that had been building throughout the cumbersome process of purchasing the foreclosed home from Fannie Mae culminated in a mad dash snatch and grab mission to Lincoln County for the tractor. It was done in classic Pintok fashion. In, out, down to Corvallis, and back to Missoula in less than 24 hours. The high cost of renting a trailer meant that I had little time to spare.

Fortunate for a trailering rookie like me, all went remarkably well, meaning no major catastrophes, unlike the infinitely less dangerous undertaking of picking up our trash bin from the alley behind the old place, which cost the truck a rear bumper and quarter panel.  I did have to get a little NASCAR in the pits when a sheet metal screw flattened my front tire at the gas-n-go outside of Noxon.  No thanks to the trailer aficionado who talked me up through the entire tire change without lending a hand, I still made the cabin and had the tractor loaded by the time night fell, which was my goal. I even got the binders on her right in only two tries. Properly securing a heavy load like our old Ford tractor is paramount to trailering success, and seeing as it is something I had never done before I felt pretty good to have the job all wrapped up by the time my brother Calen arrived to visit me.

Calen lives full time in the home country, working as a surveyor. Money there is scarce and, financially speaking, he could probably do better if he took his skills elsewhere, like when he moved to Texas and went corporate. But a poor day in heaven is still better than a good day in hell, so he prefers eking out his existence in the nicest place no one can afford to live, cultivating cynicism with the rest of the valley’s economically woeful population.

Its tough being destitute in the most affluent country on earth, and living so encourages a certain mocking contempt for the Haves amongst the Have-Nots. The biggest Have of all, everyone knows, is the government, and in no place is this as evident as this place. The only people with a steady income are the teachers, road maintenance workers, postmen, Forest Service employees, and the contractors working for the Superfund operation in Libby.

Once, industry here was extraction. Resources were hacked and pulled from the land in dirty, ugly, bottom line motivated ways. Now those resources are gone, played out or no longer profitable. Only their messes remain.

The biggest offender in the area, at least the one recognized as such by the US Environmental Protection Agency, is the W.R. Grace vermiculite mine outside of Libby. Around the turn of the century, high incidences of lung-related illness and death in and around Libby gave experts cause to investigate, and lingering health concerns bequeathed the site with Superfund status. A clean up operation is on-going, to the tune of some $500 million dollars.

“They spent three hundred thousand dollars cleaning up the Rod and Gun club,” Calen tells me. “Said the whole place was full of vermiculite. Found it six feet deep in the ground.

“Hell, that place isn’t even worth three hundred thousand. They say that it’s a good thing, that it stimulates the local economy, but it doesn’t. Give me three hundred thousand dollars and I’ll clean that place up. I’d burn it to the ground, build a new one. Put a dozen people to work.

“Paying to clean up a trailer park? I mean, c’mon. I’d burn all that, build some nice apartment building that’s energy efficient with sustainable blah blah blah. Tell the people, you want some place to live? I’ll give you a place to live, hell, I’ll pay you to build it, but I’m not gonna waste a bunch of money cleaning up a trailer park. I’d just tell ‘em, you can’t clean up a trailer. There’s no more of that in this valley.

“So they’re gonna dig up all the ground out at the Rod and Gun. I’m like, what? To do what with it? Haul it someplace else? It’s six feet underground, for Pete’s sake. I mean, where do they think the stuff comes from in the first place? What, are they mining vermiculite?”

I’m paraphrasing here, but I was laughing so hard at the time that it’s difficult to quote him exactly. His scorn was sincere but so was his rationale. It echoed a theme I had been pondering earlier that day on the drive up there.

Government can’t create jobs, only private entrepreneurs can, I heard some politico say on NPR. Maybe, if we’re talking about random nonessential niceties. But massive, capital shifting changes in the paradigm? Only government has the horsepower to motivate that kind of thing.

As Calen points out, they say that they’re trying to stimulate the economy, but they’re not. A cursory survey of economic history demonstrates that America only prospers when we’re changing, when there is an ushering of a new era. If the government really wanted to encourage things, they would rouse the slumbering beast of transformation. They would lead us from the desert to the watering hole.

We need a new New Deal. We need a new Industrial Revolution. We need to begin construction on the next incarnation of transcontinental railroad or interstate highway system. We need to embrace the prospect of progress, the challenge of change. Because it is when this country is moving forward that the world is at its best.