I didn’t find the old sugarhouse foundation until the third or fourth summer we lived on our land. Unlike so many things I don’t do, or don’t do until much later than one might expect, this was not due to laziness; after all, we were building a house at the time. For a while there, strolling in the woods was not particularly high on the priority list.

The foundation is tucked into a stand of mature balsam fir, a handful of which have grown up inside of it, towering high above a roofline that is visible only in the mind’s eye. The sugaring rig is still there, rusted and listing, slowly returning to the rich soil like the bones of some great beast. There is no evidence of the wooden structure that once stood atop the stacked fieldstone, but I can imagine its rough form, the beams and boards hewn by the stroke of the broadaxe and stained by the sweat of the task.

It was for the syrup – or the money the syrup would bring – that someone gathered and arranged those hundreds of stones. It was for this that someone felled the trees and shaped the wood, hung and gathered the buckets, cut and piled the sugaring wood, stoked the fire in the big rig, sat up late as steam rose high into the night sky. What might they have been thinking? Of the morning chores that would come all too soon? Of what they’d buy with the syrup money? Surely they wondered over the weather, hoping for another sap run or two before the maples budded out and the season ended as abruptly as it had begun.

Our house is built now, or close enough to it, and so on occasion I walk down to the foundation and perch myself on one of those stones. It is a luxury, I know, to take this time. But I do not sit for long: Ten, maybe fifteen minutes. Just enough to sense that depth of history, to be comforted by the knowledge that someone worked this land before me. Enough to be reminded that all the things I experience – the quiet satisfactions, the dispiriting setbacks, the occasional whooping joys – are nothing new to this place. It has seen them all, time and again, and the record of mine will merely be added to the records of those that have come before me: A tumbledown fieldstone foundation, almost lost to the forest. A farm implement, broken into pieces and half buried at the edge of a field. A rusted metal chair perched at the height of a wooded knoll: Who put that there, and for what?

I want to live my life honestly. Not only in my relationships to other humans, but also in my relationships to the animals and land around me. For as much as other people, they are what sustain me, and they deserve nothing less. Indeed, I deserve nothing less. This seems if nothing else an obvious truth, a clear and necessary path, and yet it is too often lost in the hurried, day-to-day rushing from chore to chore.

So every so often I walk down to the old sugarhouse foundation and sit. And I feel the unshakable integrity of those stones, stacked by hand, pulled by the hoof of some loyal beast. I imagine I can see the structure that has long since fallen away and been consumed by the forest, and I consider the work of it all: The saw blade back-and-forth, back-and-forth, the bit of the axe rising and falling, again and again and again. The buckets of sap heavy and sloshing, 30 or more gallons to make just one of syrup, most of it to be boiled away, rising into the air as if it were nothing at all.

And at the end of the night, with the fire gone cold and the March sky a cold blanket of stars, all that will remain is the sweet distillation of these efforts. The honest return on an honest investment.

Apparently, blogging is not my forte, and particularly during the height of summer, when the days are longest but feel the shortest, disappearing in a haze of animal husbandry, berry picking, fence line clearing, firewood cutting, garden tending, and so on.

Yesterday I was picking blueberries at 5:50 a.m., and again at 8:30 p.m., both time marveling at the spectral quality of light on the cusp of darkness. The blueberries are early this year, and the raspberries are still going strong; at times it feels as if we are burdened by berries. This is of course ridiculous and it is a feeling I get over very quickly.

First pick

Taped a segment with Jane Clayson of Here and Now (WBUR Boston).

Here’s a link to the show, which airs Monday 7/19

First butter of the season. Last year I made 100 pounds. It wasn’t enough. Shooting for 150 this summer.

Pigs hot. Cows hot. Chickens hot. Boys hot.

Coupla recent bits:

Story in the LA Times

Podcast interview with Tom Philpott

Oil on the water, smoke n’ bombs in Times Square, death by protest in Greece, and a capitulating stock market.

What, me worry?

Photo by Rye, age 5, during deer butchering

We’re selling our Subaru. If you’ve been waiting for the perfect opportunity to go green, here’s your chance.

Only $700, with parts car. Which is, admittedly, missing some parts.

How do you know something’s really, really bad for you?

When the producer starts running ads claiming it’s “part of a healthy diet.”

Last week, I went with Melvin to the equipment auction at the Pines Barn in Barton. This is a sample of three overheard greetings between farmers.

“Hi Tommy. How ya’ doin’?”
“Not bad.”
“Hanging in there, eh?”
“Yuh. Ain’t movin’ very fast.”

“How you doin’?”
“Not too bad.”
“They let you out, eh?”

“Nice day, ain’t it?”
“Not bad. I seen worse.”
“Better’n last week, anyhow.”
“Suppose so.”

This is Melvin. He's a great neighbor

I wrote this after a night of dumpster diving with our friend Erik. We found lots of good things to eat, including a fresh roadkill deer. An edited version of this piece will appear at zesterdaily.com in the coming days/weeks.

“What’s that?”

Erik leaned forward to peer through the windshield. It was night and a searing cold wind swept snow across the roads, turning patches of Vermont’s Interstate 89 to ice. The landscape looked lunar and foreboding and deadly. Already, barely 20 minutes into our quest, we had passed a Toyota truck lying on its side, reflecting the flashing lights of emergency vehicle. A few miles later, we passed an overturned sedan, its nose pressed against the ice-rimed surface of a rock face. I thought I saw one of its wheels still spinning; the passenger door hung open.

I followed Erik’s gaze. Ahead of us, illuminated by the wash of our headlights, a deer lay crumpled against the guardrail. Erik turned to me, and although I did not know him well, I knew him well enough that I didn’t have to guess what he was thinking.

Our car shimmied on the ice as we came to a stop at the highway’s edge. We stepped into the glacial air, our breath pluming into the dark. I bent over the deer and tucked an ungloved hand into the fold of fur where leg met body. Still warm. This was a fresh kill, a coveted prize. We grabbed legs, Erik at the front and me at the rear, and hoisted the deer into the back of my car to lie atop a pair of jumper cables and a rusty tire iron. “What a blessing,” Erik said as we slipped back into the car and its welcome cocoon of warmth.

We had our meat. It was time to find some cheese.

When my friend Erik Gillard first revealed to me that nearly half his food came off the roadside or out of dumpsters, I was intrigued. It wasn’t so much that I needed the calories; despite three consecutive years of sharply declining income due to the recession, my family is in a better place than the record 38 million Americans who currently receive food stamps. But I couldn’t resist the opportunity to get a glimpse of a thriving global sub-culture known as “freeganism.”

I was born to ’60s-era back-to-the-land parents, and reared in a two-room cabin with neither running water nor electricity. It was an upbringing that imbued me with a certain degree of anti-capitalist tendencies, though I should note that I’ve got nothing on Erik: In 2009, he happily grossed less than $6,000 and is intent on earning even less in 2010.

I’d long been aware that 40% of food produced in America is discarded — , a 50% increase over the past quarter century. Indeed, Americans throw away a shocking 1,400 calories per person, per day, which is almost enough to sustain the average Haitian, where the national, pre-earthquake allotment was a mere 1,730 calories. If the wealth and hubris suggested in such statistics is a national embarrassment, I’ve seen little evidence of it.

Our nation is currently mired in the worst economic downturn in a generation. In a single year, from 2007 to 2008, the number of Americans living in food insecure households rose by nearly 13 million, to 49.1 million. The statistics for 2009 won’t be available until later this year, but given the torpor in the economy, it’s unlikely they’ll show any improvement.

What does it say about our nation, about our culture, about us, that we throw away nearly half of our food in the face of these numbers? How do we reconcile our overheated garbage disposals with the sad fact that nearly one in six of us struggles to get enough food to meet the basic needs of good nutrition? If there’s a silver lining to any of this, I suppose it’s in the fact that it’s not food we’re lacking: It’s will. But to me, that lack of will is the saddest thing of all.

On that frigid January night, Erik led me on a circuitous loop of his favorite dumpsters, where we discovered cheese, butter, organic strawberries and salad dressing. “I love condiments,” Erik told me unnecessarily, after wedging four boxes of Italian Vinaigrette between the deer and the dairy. To the committed freegan, taking more than one needs is anathema, so Erik would keep only enough to sustain him for a few days. The rest would be distributed among a small circle of friends whose devotion to gleaning or simple need overwhelms any lingering fear that perhaps there was a good reason someone had tossed a few dozen pounds of brie.

It would be disingenuous to suggest that dumpster diving and freeganism in all its forms (which can include bartering, or simple gifting) present a viable, large-scale solution to issues of food waste and misallocated resources. It certainly does nothing to address the cruel inertia of our habits. For all kinds of reasons – fear of food borne illness, fear of altercations with the law, fear of stigma – it will likely remain the province of a few, some out of necessity, some to make a statement, and some for cheap thrills.
I suppose I fall somewhere between the latter two, yet, I found myself inspired by my friend’s commitment to sustaining himself on other people’s waste. There is something willful in it, a purpose that suits our times. And I was roused by his devotion to sharing. Just a few weeks prior to our outing, Erik had liberated more than 30 new-but-blemished winter coats from a nearby dumpster. He’d sent the bulk of them to a friend in Philadelphia, who had distributed them to the homeless.

Admittedly, there is sticky juxtaposition between Erik’s disdain for capitalism’s inevitable waste and the fact that it enables his coveted low-on-the-hog lifestyle.

“It is important to me not to get so attached to the trash that I don’t want to bring the system down,” he told me the next day, as we butchered the deer on his kitchen table. Parliament Funkadelic thumped from a pair of high-end Advent speakers he’d found in a dumpster a year prior. They buzzed only a little.

That sounded noble, and I nodded my head. But the next day, as I pulled a chevre-crusted roast of venison loin from the oven and placed it before my family, I wasn’t thinking in such virtuous terms. I just wanted to hit the trash again.

Erik and me cutting our score. Photo by Rye