Quarter Year

The most unexpected part of holding the fowl was that it was warm. I guess I don’t know what I expected, but the feet felt like human fingers. It’s kinda like when you imagine kissing a person, but you forget to imagine saliva, and it totally changes everything.

City boys have written about killing their first chickens before, so I won’t go into it. It wasn’t an emotional experience for me. But as we were plucking the feathers I told Didier how amazing it was that I’d only killed my first fowl after 30 years.

“I got a good education in high school and college, I’m happy about what I learned and it was relevant for what it was… but it wasn’t…”

“…essential.” He offered.

“Yes.”

“The root of the word ‘essential’ is ‘essence’ or ‘truth.’ You weren’t educated about the truth…”

“… of how our bodies mix with the earth.” I said.

“Exactly.”

Didier and I were on the same page a lot, some of his rants could have come from my mouth. The ones about how companies have a stake in keeping their employees powerless, how it’s good for capitalism that people be vaguely afraid about the future, and so on.

When he taught us about the medicinal herbs in the garden I took tons of notes, but I had a hard time accessing what I’d been taught. I’d look at a plant and look closer at its leaves and compare it to my notes and would be too unsure to declare it Citronelle! or Lemon Pepper! or whatever. I said this time and again, and I’ll repeat it here:

“Learning to identify plants is like learning to read for the first time.”

People ask us often, “So, the kids could leave school at 15? How did he educate them?”

I was curious about this too. One day we went for a ride with Didier and his oldest son. They sat in the front seat, we sat in the back. As they drove, Didier pointed to the sky and talked about the movement of the clouds. He pointed to the hills and talked about the rock formations and the fossils. He talked about the fields that the neighbors were sowing. His son pointed to a sea gull that was out of place here. His son talked about the history of some old structures on their land. His son talked about planting by the moon and how it was a good guide but not the last word. His son talked about finding fennel by looking for a larger reed, because fennel grows at its feet.

Azure with her wild salad.

In other words, Didier taught his children about the land and the plants and the weather and the animals and natural systems and Catholicism. He taught them the things that he considered essential.

They might not know a lot of the academic stuff we consider foundations of knowledge, but they’ve learned how to have a relationship with the earth, and I think that’s fundamentally healthy.

Azure dancing in a field of shit.

Luckily, Azure and I were there to help shovel the chicken shit that fertilized the potato bed. We probably helped them catch up by a full day or two (it was a lot of shit – six inches deep over about 1000 square feet), and once the manure was on the ground they were ready to plant.

Azure also followed up to help cover the accidentally exposed potatoes.

Didier drove the tractor while the three oldest kids planted. The thing they were sitting on would split the row, the kids would drop the potato into a little shaft (all at the same time, so the rows would be neat), then another piece of the equipment would cover the row back up.

Leon covering the potatoes.

Because the manure was mixed with hay, sometimes the machine wasn’t able to push the soil back over the potatoes completely. Leon, one of the twins, followed behind and did quality control by hand.

They were pretty focused on this task. It’s important to do it right – Gabriel said they get 1.5 TONS of potatoes every year.

Riding.

Didier wants to get horses or oxen or something to pull the equipment so they don’t have to rely on oil to farm. The only opposition I have to large families is that there’s already too many people on this planet and our modern lives are already seriously straining the natural systems. But this family of ELEVEN – combined – puts a much smaller strain on the environment than even one person living in the modern fashion.

Alice always managed to find the sunlight.

When all was said & done, it didn’t take them long at all to do the actual planting – well under half a day. It was the manure that took the longest. Suzanne said that if it bothers you to work with manure then you can’t be a successful farmer – it’s the most important link in the cycle.

Ah, Johann.

So he set up a ladder that didn’t QUITE reach its intended destination, and he managed to reach to the low end of the beam and grab it, hands only, feet dangling. This was all part of the plan. He hung from the beam with the pulley system in one hand and a chronically bad shoulder attached to the other. He would walk, hand-over-hand, along the beam to the peak of the roof, hanging the whole time, then after the rope was attached he’d walk himself back down to the ladder. Right?

Wrong. It turns out he wasn’t as strong as he thought, in fact I don’t even think Siren from American Gladiators could have done it. His hands quickly gave out and he and the ropes crashed onto a lower beam and then crashed again to the ground, where he landed on his head and hip. There was blood everywhere. In shock, he got up and dragged his broken body to the house. Through the gate, past the table, he managed to open the door. He saw the family in the living room and explained, “!wosdln;lksir.”

Suzanne saw the blood and called the ambulance.

After a couple days of blissful country living, skirted children and dinner prayer songs, quiet family meals and hand-picked salads, quiet nights with talks about religion, a helicopter roared into the valley. A few sturdy-looking paramedics jumped to the ground with a stretcher in their hands and ran to the house, putting out their cigarettes on the way. In the meantime the well-endowed pilot hopped down from the cockpit wearing a single-pieced jumpsuit that unzipped from his neck to his thigh, and he lit up his own cigarette.

Fifteen minutes later they loaded Johann into the chopper. The neighbor took pictures. The family watched in unison as the helicopter rose into the air and took off for Montpelier. Didier prayed for his idiot son; in the helicopter’s downdraft the women’s skirts flapped at their ankles.

It was a culture shock. Azure was shaken out of the trance of this peaceful valley by one of the paramedics who looks like her cousin Todd. “These are our people,” she thought. What are we doing here pretending to be anything like the family when our lives are much more like those of the paramedics? And tonight they’ll go home and tell their wives or husbands, “You’ll never believe this weird place we went today…”

We decided to give the family some space, so we took off for the afternoon. It was a good excuse to check email in town.

The next day we had a little surprise: an ambulance pulled up to the chalet and unloaded a morphine-soaked Johann into our living room. It was unbelievable that he was out of the hospital so fast, let alone that he wasn’t still in ICU. And now here he was being wheeled into our little candle-lit bubble. Would he turn on the lights at night? OH NO! Would he bleed on our food? At first we thought he was going to take our room, and we balked, so instead he was carried into the neighboring room. He groaned as the paramedics – with help from the family – set him on the bed. The paramedics took off and we were left with a roommate who couldn’t move, who would need help going to the bathroom and whose head was partially shaved and sewn like the ass of a sick cat. But we all know what it’s like to fear we’re a burden, so I sucked it up and broke the ice with a smile, “If there’s anything you need…”

It turns out – miraculously, really – that he didn’t break any bones, not even his skull. They think he has a concussion, but if that’s the only chip in his enamel then he’s incredibly lucky.

We helped him walk that first afternoon. He couldn’t believe that this happened to him when he had so many horses to shoe the next day, not figuratively. He said he smokes 50 – FIFTY! – cigarettes a day, and now he’d gone two full days without.

“Every crisis is an opportunity,” I chirped.

He looked at me with knowing eyes. “It is, it really is.”

Johann cried in the hospital, apparently, he cried about his life and how nothing ever really seems to go right for him, how he screws up good things. His dad said, “Johann had everything here ten years ago – he had this farm, he had his horses, he had family and he had God, he had good food and a quiet life. But he wanted to ‘see the world’ so he threw it all away….”

(From their little paradise the outside world looks like a mess, it looks like an ocean of people who take comfort in other people’s weaknesses to justify their own addictions: identity, status and craving, not to mention the more obvious daily addictions of narcotics, processed foods and mindless spending.)

Anyway, Dad continued his thought: “In the ten years since he left the farm he’s gone from crisis to crisis, he’s crashed 22 cars. He’s no longer a practicing Christian, he’s lost.”

The night I said the crisis/opportunity thing, I popped into his room to ask him a question and then backed out quietly: his room was candle-lit and he was in the middle of the bed on his back, counting rosary beads on his chest with his eyes closed. His legs stretched thin and fragile under the sheet.

Later that night he sat with us at the table, slumped. “Do you know where my car is?” he asked.

“No, we haven’t seen it.”

“It was up on the road but when the paramedics came they parked it over by the horses, it’s a little white car,” he said. I could sense where this was going.

“Oh, really? No, I don’t think I’ve seen it.”

“I have two cigarettes in my backpack in the car. I just know that if I can get them I’ll be able to sleep tonight.”

I changed the subject.

I was astonished to watch him find a pair of jeans and start to put them on. Then he scared up a pair of shoes and painfully fit his feet inside. He winced as he put on a jacket. This guy could hardly walk, he’d just been airlifted out of the valley, and here he was getting ready to drag his broken body into the unlit night just for two cigarettes. He limped across the room and opened the door.

“Wait!” I said.

He paused and looked over his shoulder as cold air tumbled in. I walked to within arm’s-length and handed him our flashlight.

Didier, the father, said, “I don’t want any part of this modern world,” which was amazing to hear because it’s almost a direct quote from Claude, the proprietor of the last farm we were on. I guess we find people who have something in common. He believes that when every Jew accepts Jesus as the lord, he’ll come back and create a heaven on earth for the believers. I think I got that right. For him it was like Christmas to have a Jew show up at his house who was eager to learn and listened to every word he said, even taking notes. A lot of people have a knee-jerk reaction to call people like him crazy, but I think that our job as travelers is not to paint with broad strokes, but to listen, to try to understand what are the core values of the people we meet and how do those values shape their lives. To them, their lives are consistent with their values. Everyone looks crazy to someone else. Frankly, I don’t see how their beliefs are any crazier than – say – someone buying their food at Safeway. :)

Enough of that.

We stayed in a little house on their property that’s reserved for guests, so we had an awesome bedroom, fireplace and kitchen, then a bathroom that didn’t have running water. We collected all the water we used doing dishes and used that to flush the toilet. To wash, we boiled some water and added it to a basin, then mixed cold water. I loved washing (my upper half) outside in the morning with the sun coming up through their olive trees, the guinea fowl squawking everywhere, the water steaming in the sunlight… I don’t think I got very clean, but whatever, I don’t have to smell myself. It was a wonderful way to start the day.

There’s so much to write about…

One day Gabriel, the 17 year-old, fired up the tractor and loaded five of us (me, Azure and three girls) and the family dog in the bucket. He drove us high into the hills. We hopped out, followed a path between bushes and up some rocks, then found what we’d come to collect: a wild-growing weed called Rocayrol – I believe it’s Shepherd’s Purse – that grew between the rocks on the south-facing slope. We each took butter knives and dug them up by their roots and tossed the whole plants into a basket. It was sunny, there was a breeze and there were old stone walls crossing the hillside. The girls sang songs from Church with tunes that reminded me of serious medieval music. The girls braid each other’s hair and wear ankle-length skirts.

We filled a basket with the salad then headed down the hill in the bucket of the tractor. On the way we passed a pine tree and the 11-year-old grabbed a branch and ate the little pine cones growing at the tips. We copied her : they were sweet but full of resin. At the bottom of the hill we got out and picked more wild greens that went into the salad, another plant that I wrote in my notes (which aren’t at hand now).

It’s a polyculture farm, which means that they grow many different things. This is opposed to monoculture, which is what you see on large for-profit farms. Their primary purpose in farming is to feed themselves, and they only sell something if there’s a surplus. He said several times, “We farm to be free.” They also practice permaculture, which is the idea that each thing they grow has multiple purposes and everything supports everything else. For example, the chickens are for eggs, their poop is for compost for the potatoes, the leftover potatoes are fed to the pigs and chickens, and so on. Of course everything is completely free from artificial pesticides and herbicides.

Each night Azure started the fire with old grape vines that had been pulled up and are sitting in heaps around the property (many vineyards here are switching crops because the wine prices are dropping). She’s a skilled fire starter – most nights she managed to start a full roaring fire with a strong core without even using matches or a lighter, just the leftover coals and some branches. At the same time I’d walk down to the garden and collect greens to flavor the salad – spectacular wild celery leaves (people: our whole lives we’ve been lied to about celery), tender fennel fronds, peppermint, lemon balm, lima bean leaves, thyme, comfry, cauliflower leaf, spinach, chard and so on. None of these were actually growing in the beds – they were the “voluntary” plants that grew between the beds.

We decided not to use any electricity at night, so we often found ourselves putting together the end of the meal by candle light. We sat on the couch in front of the fire in the dark, we read and wrote by candlelight and we went to sleep around 10pm – 9pm their time (they don’t change their clocks on the farm).

There are so many other interesting stories…. An older son (from another marriage) fell on his head from 25 feet and had to be airlifted out by helicopter; we killed guinea fowl for the market; we went to the cathedral on Sunday for Mass; we had a traditional Cassoulet; they sang before every meal… and so on.

Anyway, Azure has uploaded a bunch of pictures from this week – at our Flickr account.

1 – Use no electricity after sundown.
We found that we adjusted quickly to the rhythm of the day when we used candles for our light. The only exception we really made was when we had to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, as it’s kinda important to see what you’re peeing on. (It’s hard for me to enjoy the day’s rhythm when I see how sad it makes Azure to clean up my pee.) We’d also make an exception if we cooked on an electric stove.

No electricity means no phone, no computer, no tv, no recorded music, no light bulbs. Let the night close your eyes, let the sun open them.

2 – Stop paying attention to the news.
The primary function of the news is to reinforce cultural myths, one of which is that we have something to fear. The news is a distraction from what’s real. It is an unnecessary injection of fear and mistrust into lives that are – in reality – pretty darn peaceful almost all of the time. Have you noticed how peaceful your life is? Any news worth knowing will come from another person’s mouth. Forget the news, except maybe tomorrow’s weather.

3 – Decide what you’re going to eat tomorrow night based on what you have today.
Look in your garden and build your meal around the ripe veggies that are begging to be eaten. Use tonight’s leftovers (and trimmings) as tomorrow’s flavor. Take out of the freezer what you’ve been saving and give it 24 hours to think about what it can become. Make a slow meal your day-long theme, and include your loved ones in its preparation.

(OK, since everyone is going to ask, that last picture is “Cassoulet,” a traditional dish in southwest France, as prepared by Didier. Duck meat is salted all night, then the next morning it’s cooked in its own fat. In the mean time they’re cooking white beans with carrots, onions, sage, laurel, sausage, bacon and sea salt. Then serve with brown rice and place the duck on top. Voila!)