big choices

What's harder than deciding on your Halloween costume? VOTING. Oy oy oy, there's a lot of propositions on this CA ballot. Mr. Wolf saves the day again by pointing me* to theballot.org, where you can find progressive voter guides created by everybody from "mommapolitico" to the Sierra Club. If anybody knows of — or has created — sites with solid info about elections near or far, feel free to leave them in the comments.

Good luck with you civic duty.
- P

* I was procrastinating researching how to vote, when I came across L's recommendation on the ol' Facebook. Ironies of modern technology and social media.

All Hallows' Eve

....make it happy, make it spoooooky....

bro is good at surfing

http://www.surfpulse.com/photopost/showphoto.php?photo=2885&size=big

Dear Mom,

Well, it's autumn here. Apparently it started in mid-September, but I couldn't tell because it has been an abnormally mild one. Who knew 80-degree days were harbingers of winter?

Yesterday I went into the mountains and for the first time saw the Aspens changing colors. Their little quivering leaves turn a hard yellow; behind them the sky becomes so blue your eye gets lost in it. I'm new to this Fall thing. I thought of Connecticut this time of year, of standing on a ridge and the forest below seething with color, of the crisp air just like the breeze blowing now in Santa Fe. But the aspens have a quality more eerie than anything in New England, something almost alien. I think it's in contrast of the flickering leaves attached to sturdy, white-and-black trunks. Strange movements or currents. Aspens forest are connected underground, making them the largest organisms in the world.

On the path up there, I was also truly cold for the first time in New Mexico. So, this is a roundabout way of saying that I would really appreciate it if you could ship some of my warm clothes. I packed them in the box of things I would need if I stayed here longer. Since I can't exactly recall what's in there, maybe we could talk soon and pick a few things out.

with love,
Paolo

that morning chill

During this morning's chores, I had to wear pants. It's getting chilly. Days still get into the 80s, but the heat doesn't precede the sun any more, and it doesn't linger after sundown, either. Changing seasons in a new environment.

Turn the Garden On

One of my first major projects here was to install a drip irrigation system in the garden. It is just the latest additions to the elegant drip system that J created, which inconspicuously runs throughout the property to water sapling aspens, cottonwoods, and grapevines.


Putting together the system reminded me of playing with Knex or BRIO as a kid, a whole system of tubes, connectors, sprinklers, and drip heads that fit together with an internal logic. It was all very elaborate compared to the drip I was used to from Paradise Valley, just black tape with little holes punched in it. REALLY elaborate compared to the acequia, which we still haven't gotten to work. And it was expensive, all the little plastic pieces five dollars for a bag of eight.

But it works. Over the course of two weeks I rigged the garden, bed by bed. Now, turning one valve and pushing one button lets me water the whole thing.


Or, almost the whole thing. The strawberry plants, planted in one bed at random, defied the logic of the drip and got nothing. I figured I would water them by hand, but once watering everything else became so easy I found myself less inclined to drag the hose back there and give them the moisture they needed. They have definitely dried out. The cabbage's layout, too, was too finicky to irrigate, so it suffered the same fate.



Besides showcasing my laziness, their slow demise demonstrates the importance of planting around the irrigation system, not irrigating around a planting system. To that end, we always punched holes in the tubing at regular intervals (based on a now-important piece of pipe), not individually tailored to the layout whichever plants. This is just one case of preparing for future seasons, perhaps at the expense of the current crop, since the holes don't quite line up with existing squash plants, beets, etc.

Drip irrigation is super convenient, and uses water efficiently. It has also caused me to actually go into the garden less. Before the drip I would go out in the cool of the morning and water, mostly just standing in stillness while a bed filled up. I did incidental weeding, stretched, and noticed the small changes in the vegetables and weeds. Things grow slowly! And it took time to see these things. Noticing is hard.


PS - I turned on the sprinklers for this photo op, but only a fool would actually water when the sun's out. I hear you lose 80% of your water that way.

Sojourn: Chimney Rock

Almost a month ago, Á and I visited Chimney Rock, the northernmost known outpost of the Ancestral Puebloan Indians. They lived in the Chimney Rock area from 850 - 1125 A.D.

The first thing to know about the Ancestral Puebloans is that we know almost nothing about them — definitively. The APs didn't write, so it's hard say anything about their understanding of astronomy, agriculture, masonry, or anything else that fits our academic tradition's standards of legitimacy. But it is almost certain that Chimney Rock was an observatory for people watching the sky.

Approaching from Highway 151, we could see (from right) Chimney Rock, Castle Rock, and, barely visible on the low hump, a fire lookout from the 1950s. The lookout sits beside a Puebloan Great House, a dozen-roomed structure of intricate stonework.

The APs could observe a unique celestial event from the Great House. Each month the full moon rises in a slightly different place, migrating to the south for 9 and 1/4 years, then swinging back to the north for the same amount of time. At each pole of its migration, the bulbous moon will rise in the same place for a three or four months at a time — a total lunar standstill.

At Chimney Rock, the slot of sky between the two towers of rock mark the northernmost point of the rising moon's movement. From the Great House, the APs could watch the moon "stand still" every 18 and 1/2 years.

This unique orientation, a convergence of the geologic forces that shaped the area and the celestial patterns above it, make it more than likely that the APs watched the sky from here. Its exposed position would have given them an excellent view of the sky, and the irregular horizon would have provided plenty of reference points to note the position of rising stars.

Further evidence is found in the Great House itself, which archaeologists have determined was built in two phases eighteen years apart — the same period between standstills. The seam in the construction above is a result of this piecemeal process. Notice the interlaid rocks of different sizes, a style of masonry also found in Chaco Canyon, the center of AP culture 90 miles to the South of Chimney Rock.

In the above view from the Great House, the most distant ridge is a mesa on the northern edge of Chaco Canyon. These lines of site and numerous outdoor hearths on make it clear that the APs used fires to communicate over the vast distances between their settlements. A group of high school students recently recreated these line-of-sight communications by sending messages with mirrors between Chimney Rock and Chaco.

What was the relationship between Chaco Canyon, Chimney Rock, and the hundreds of other AP sites around the Four Corners area? The Great House at Chimney Rock is formed of the same complicated masonry as many of the structures in Chaco, but the eight separate settlements lower on the mountain and on neighboring ridges are of a rougher construction. People lived in them; no one lived permanently in the Great House. Was Chimney Rock a colony of Chaco? An outpost for an isolated priest-astronomer class? A pilgrimage site? (the great house was plastered in white, making it visible for miles) Uncertainty defines a visit to these sites, especially as a white tourist with no cultural connection to the APs.

Another view towards Chaco. Stern signage is another part of the tourist experience. But try as we might to efface our presence, there are signs of modern life everywhere.

Indeed, the "ruins" are kept up for visitors by a crew of trained archaeological construction workers. My friends S and E used the phrase "Preserved State of Decay," which I can't get out of my mind.

Companions on the tour of the lower buildings. Note the blockier masonry, which lacks the contrasting small and large stones of the Great House.

Manos y metatates, analogous to mortar and pestle, for grinding corn.

Signs of life more ancient. Fossilized crustacean tunnels in the limestone.

The people grew squash, beans, and corn in the valley below Chimnery Rock; at the ranger station someone had planted the same crops. The ranger there was the resident expert, clarifying my questions about the site and its relationship to other AP places and to modern Puebloans. I asked him what cultivars the plants were, whether they were the same ones farmed here so long ago. "Nah," he replied. "I got the seeds at the hardware store!" I appreciated his humor, rare in a world of ruin tourism where preciousness and (contrived?) respect are the norm.

The greatest mystery of the APs is why, 800 or so years ago, they decamped to the "pueblos" in which they now reside. (Nambe is one of them, and I drive through two others on my way to Santa Fe). Archaeologists demand reasons: a solar eclipse near the time of their departure; signs of conflagration within the buildings, set by attackers or as purification before exit; changing climate and the Little Ice Age. We don't know.

Our tour guide, Susan, quoted Puebloans on a tour as saying, "What do you mean? They left when it was time to leave."

An unexcavated building site.

____________

Most of this information was from the guided tour and from talking with volunteer rangers, but I looked at the sites below for refreshers:

http://www.chimneyrockco.org/historynew.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancestral_Puebloans#Anasazi_as_a_cultural_label

Jack the Dog

This is Jack, J's dog. Always under foot, sticking his head or rump exactly where you need to be. Moving mattresses we trip over him. Scared of thunder and lightning. Has been described as "clingy." Loyal as hell, though, and strong. Also, he likes me — and he doesn't like many people.

frost

All the weeds were sheathed with ice. Sunday, August 29th -- frost in the night. Made me realize how little I know about gardening. Was this, like, a Frost frost, the kind that gardeners dread? Or was it something else? At 9:00 am I picked and ate a Sungold tomato, already warm in the morning heat. Only time will tell what the damage is.

12,000 words

Acequia - a dry run

When I woke today J was rigging the acequia gate: he wanted to flood the field and water the clover. The main gate was closed, diverting water out of the acequia and into the main channel, which was full. A trickle had begun to run through the system of pipes and secondary channels that fed the field.

When we started, the field looked like this.


In the afternoon, it looked like...this. No change. "This field usually floods in an hour," J said. Where did all the water go?


Some of it went here, the jungle of clover that had overgrown the secondary channels. But when we hacked through this cover crop to get a look at the water's route, we found it was running down into a system of gopher holes. My first thought was that this could be a new innovation in irrigation: subterranean watering, feeding roots without losing water to evaporation. But the tunnels seemed only to occupy a small part of the field, meaning most of the water was lost. We were wasting serious water, no doubt. Whether the associated drowning of gophers is a good thing (they won't bother our plants any more) or a bad thing (they're dead now) depends on your perspective.


Some of the water popped up through this hole, at the edge of the field.


The pink stone, barely visible in the photo above, plugged one of the gopher holes and got the water flowing in the right direction. But by the time we'd made these adjustments, the acequia was getting low. The day's allocation of water was up.

The Lay of the Land

View out my front step. From near to far: fresh-planted native-grass lawn, a few saplings, "the field," "the garden," the acequia, and the house.

The field.


A few fruit trees — peaches, plums, apple.

Hung my laundry in advance of a thunder storm. Super good call.

I live in a trailer home with a subaru my car.

The garden. Left to right: lettuce, squash, string beans and potatoes, weeds, cabbage, tomatoes, strawberries. Everything's pretty little.

Thus, supermarkets have complex and mulit-layered tensions and associations with the neighborhood, city/town, state, country, and bioregion in which t

A similar feeling -- of being in a familiar place, yet one totally unmoored from the geography around it -- came over me today in Albertson's. To sustain myself for the shopping ahead I had bought two yogurt cups, and now needed a spoon to consume them. As I traversed the aisles the supermarket towered over me, a placeless cavern. For a moment I honestly didn't know whether I was in Bishop, CA (Vons), Pagosa Springs, CO (City Market), or Oakdale, CA (can't remember what type of supermarket it was). The layout, the goods available, the isolation from the outside world: you can barely tell where in the country you are.

But after writing the last paragraphs, I realized that each big-honkin grocery store had some goods that "placed" it. There are various levels to how these goods fit into the overall store. Some were ridiculous attempts at regionality: at a Blanche's in the Navajo reservation I had for lunch something called "The Zuni," a piece of frybread wrapped around two chicken tenders and some iceberg lettuce. In Bishop I bought J a bottle of 395, a beer name after the highway that runs along the eastern Sierra Nevada. It's brewed in Mammoth, CA, with sage and juniper, the signature plants of the bioregion. (Amongst Yosemite ranger folk, the brew is second only to jean shorts as a hot commodity). In Santa Fe I counted 22 brands of salsa (not including hot sauce) and bought tricolor popping corn and blue corn pancake mix for my dad.

Thus, supermarkets have complex and mulit-layered tensions and associations with the neighborhood, city/town, state, country, and bioregion in which they are stationed.

(Note: One supermarket that stands out from the rest is Sprouts, in Phoenix. That place is beatific, a paradise of reasonable prices, free coffee, and unpretentious healthy food. Also they had a barrel of yogurt pretzels. It's like the In-n-Out of grocery stores: if you're in California, Arizona, Texas, or Colorado, make it a priority to get there.)

(Double Note: Above Note is tongue in cheek. Both Sprouts and In-n-Out are of debatable [at best] character as far as ethical consumption. Isn't everything these days? We also might question the limits of the 'vote with your dollars' paradigm).

Words on the Title

"Covering Ground" has multiple meanings.

1) This is a time of transition, of movement. As a young person there is ground to cover, places to go and be. I drove a zig-zag through the West to get here, but my mind takes me back always to the Bay Area, and to Connecticut.

2) A major facet of my education has been Colonialism, which has historically (and is still very much) concerned with land. Agriculture as a geography and an idea has always been a site of colonial encounter. Think of the attempts to 'civilize' American Indians by introducing agriculture and private land ownership, the illegibility of West African agriculture to colonial bureaucracies, or the theft (er, patenting) of indigenous seed varieties by multinational seed corporations.

3) Cover crops are one of the key methods of improving soil: dream in thick beds of clover, high stalks of barley.

Monoculture/My Father's Son

Home Depot and REI -- how many weekends of my youth were spent at these two fine establishments, both of which I visited today? When my parents were together we lived in Cupertino, CA, and my dad worked 9-5. Mom would fit her schedule around his, so weekends found her in the hospital delivering babies while my younger brother and I tagged along with dad on his twin passions: hiking, and remodeling the house. (Socio-historical note: all his renovations were for naught. When we moved, the house and its expensive Anderson windows were demolished so a Silicon Valley McMansion could be erected on the carcass).

When you step through the sliding doors of Home Depot a certain smell envelopes you. Paint, glue, bricks. Dust of concrete, funk of the nursery. Fresh-cut wood and the promises of topsoil. It is the smell of industry mixed with the humility of the single-family home, and every time I smell it I am transported back in time to my youth. Back in time, but not back in space, to Cupertino. Because every Home Depot is the same. In the last two months I've been to Home Depots in three time zones and two countries, and besides small changes in floor plans, the only differences I noticed were in the aisle signs: In Middletown they're in English; in Santa Fe, English with Spanish subtitles; and in Cabo San Lucas, Spanish with English subtitles. Globalizing attitudes about construction and development.

All REIs, on the other hand, are not created equal. I went to the Santa Fe store to buy a stuffsack for my sleeping bag, which I couldn't do at home because the REI in Marin was out of stuffsacks. Out of stuffsacks!!!!! Who are these people? "Hey everybody. Um, so, sorry but -- yeah, we're going to have to call off the K2 idea. No more stuffsacks. Our bad!" Sheesh Louise. But the moment I pushed through the REI Santa Fe doors I knew there would be stuffsacks -- and so much more. This was an eden, with fabrics made of difficult-to-pronounce-but-xtremely-functional chemicals glistening in pastures to the horizon. I was so taken that my internal monologue even ceased, the one that usually goes, Psht! These people. REI is just another place for wussy yuppies to blow more of their endless money on their once-a-month road bike or a fancier yoga mat. Gear is just bling for the granola set. Ooooh! I could use a new headlamp.....NO! Shit, just grab the stuff for the sandals you're making to prove you're even crunchier than these posers and GET OUT OF THERE!

But this time (with apologies to Allen Ginsberg):

Aisles full of sleeping bags! Wives in the
base layers, babies in the performance outerwear! -- and you, Edmund Hillary, what
were you doing, down by the quickdraws?

I wandered in and out of the brilliant racks of thermarests...
tasting clif bars, possessing every style of
climbing pant, and never passing the cashier.

Ah -- Never passing the cashier. In the end I couldn't take up my father's mantle. For him, one of anything is never, ever enough. Socks should be not only technically sophisticated, but copious. This extra pack/strap/pair of rainpants will come in handy at some point, for someone. We say he even keeps up an informal wilderness outfitting operation: "Kitchen Sink Travel: Why Leave Home Without It? You CAN Take it With You." Back in the day he set records for gear fit into a Camry station wagon (may it rest in peace) and friends came to count on his excess. "Why bring gloves?" a fellow traveller said, "S will have three extra pairs."

To my shame, I walked out with only what I'd come for.

Who What Where Why etc.

"I come from a family of journalers and letter-writers. One year I tried quiting the practice but I found my thoughts became boring and repetitive." So said Dalva, lead of a novel by Jim Harrison. Mr. Harrison is a moving novelist of the rural experience in the norther Plains and the Upper midwest; I don't know what he'd think of applying those words to blogging. But a few farming friends (Thanks P!) planted the idea of this web log in my mind, where the soil was already rich from exemplary blogs kept by friends (see the sidebar. Also, soil/plant metaphor count: 1).

After working as a day laborer for two summers at a farm in Paradise Valley, Marin, I am now the hired hand on a one-and-a-half acre plot of land in Nambé, New Mexico. This farm (garden?) is a side project of a couple who work full time, so I am here to do whatever I can to make the soil more healthy and grow some food. An inexperienced farmer -- never managed a farm, only ever done what I was told on a given day -- I now get a birds-eye view, thinking about this plot of land in time as well as space I count myself very lucky and blessed for the opportunity.

So this blog a place for ruminating, gestating; chewing cud or the fat; composting things (thought that's just about the most overused simile in the whole food discourse. I'll put up the epic Gary Snyder passage that actually does it justice). A place for applying those good Wesleyan critical faculties to lived life, and for comparing and contrasting a new place with other homes I've had.

The first night I spent here I felt very lonely, but the more I have worked and thought here, the more connected I feel: to home, to history, and to people important to me. This is a way of sharing those connections.

Water

In 1848, the U.S. appropriated from Mexico the lands that would become all or parts of present-day California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Texas. Agriculture and cattle ranching continued in “occupied” Mexico under a race-based caste labor system — Anglo owners, managers, and foremen; Mexican cowhands, miners, and manual laborers. One of the most important “Mexican jobs” was digging irrigation ditches, “bringing water from rivers and streams to parched areas. Some of the irrigation methods had originally been developed by the Moors in Africa before the tenth century and had been brought to the Southwest by the Spanish. Other techniques had come from the Pueblo Indians, who had developed irrigation systems in the region long before the arrival of the first Spaniards. Mexican laborers would level the land, then divide the fields into squares with low embankments to hold the water. After soaking a block, they would make a hole in one of the walls, permitting water to flow into the next square. This method of irrigation came to be know as ‘the Mexican system’” (Takaki, A Different Mirror, 176-185).

Here at Nambe we irrigate our fields with the same system: the photo at top is of the acequia, the communal canal that J’s ownership of the land gives him the right to use. The acequia is a tool, a way of watering to complement the well and the rains. It is an idea, reaching across at least 50 generations and three continents. And it is further evidence of how we are connected, through our histories and through the land.