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.