people of the south wind

I wonder, as the wet fall weather settles over Washington, how much of homesickness can be attributed to a physiological response to climate and geography. A friend described how her sense of direction was distorted when she left behind mountains and trees; I, on the other hand, haven’t yet learned to read the shifts of elevation and shade in the Northwest, the microclimates introduced by angle and exposure.

After living so long in one place, my eye is not yet accustomed to the unyielding green of Washington’s forests, nor my ear to the sound of wind approaching over mountains and water. Life on the plains is all about the sky, and the mingling of air and moisture over an open expanse of grass. The smell of the weather comes in on the wind: the heavy damp of a gathering thunderstorm, the dull bite of snow-laden wind. The red-gold of fall prairies dulls, by November, to a grayish-dun, under skies a paler, more opaque blue than the brilliance of September and October. One also marks seasons by the wind, and November is when it begins to hurt.

The joke is that Kansans always talk about the weather, and this is often true. We talk about it because tornadoes, blizzards, and adequate rainfall are nothing to be trifled with, but also because it is easier to talk about the weather than to talk about what weather does to us. Farmers remark on the hundredths of an inch that last night’s rainfall left in rain gauges or mention in passing the abnormally hot summer day, but such comments are voiced mainly as statements of the obvious. There is many a Kansan who follows a strict calendar for the use of heating and air conditioning, the observance of which is so ingrained as to become almost a moral code. Living in Kansas tempers expectations; one does not expect routinely fine weather any more than one would hope to find mountain splendors.

Often, when the tug of homesickness sets in, I find myself wishing not that I’d never left Kansas, but that I’d left it long ago, before the place had a chance to take hold.

i'm an animal, you're an animal, too

“Did you lose a dog? A little black one, near the entrance to the trail?”
“Um, yes?” We respond uncertainly, eager for information about the dog we have in fact lost, but wary of the accusatory tone that lies just beneath the friendly concern.

“Lose” is not, however, the most appropriate verb. We began the hike with two dogs, but Lupe, being Lupe, ran off shortly after we’d started. We called for her, but when she didn’t show up, we continued hiking, not knowing whether she was ahead of or behind us. We thanked the couple, also dog owners, and walked away sheepishly. It is surely a nearly universal sentiment among pet owners that at such moments it seems that yours is the only animal so poorly socialized, so egregiously disloyal as to flaunt in public behavior that could only stem from inadequate care. Bad dog; bad, bad owner.

By all objective standards, Lupe and Marcos lead privileged lives. They are well-fed, well-loved, and well-traveled. There is no doubt, though, that Lupe would in some ways be better suited to another lifestyle. As the cliché goes, dogs love unconditionally, but when does our loyalty to them become selfish? As we hiked without Lupe, I told myself that if she were running with a pack of dogs and got separated, the consequences would be on her. Dogs discipline each other, keep order within the pack, and life outside the pack therefore keeps its own order, too. But Lupe isn’t wild. She’s a domesticated animal, one with whose care we are charged. By choice.

Dogs thus offer perspective on our uneasy relationship to nature. They live in our homes; increasingly, they frequent restaurants and go on vacation with us. They calm psychological distress and lower stress levels, at least when they’re on good behavior. Dogs remain animals, however, governed by their breed and temperament at least as much as by what we manage to teach them. Dogs blur the boundaries by which we distinguish “nature” from “society,” the biological and instinctual from the artifice of human interaction. Although absolutist ideas about how human society should interact with nature make for pithy bumper stickers—“meat is murder,” “eat beef”—they conceal the thornier issues regarding our place in the natural world. The way we treat domesticated animals can be unimaginably inhumane, but abruptly ending our relationship with them would likewise be unethical. Dogs, cats, cows, chickens, and pigs have struck an evolutionary bargain with us, which, as Michael Pollan argues in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, has often been to their benefit. Thousands of years of genetic fiddling and co-adaptation with certain species place upon us a responsibility for their care. Yet even as we shirk the implications of this cultural co-dependency—abandoning farm animals to the cruelties of industrial agriculture, or conversely, to an existence in which we are no longer their caretakers—we increasingly humanize our dogs and cats. It is no longer viable, in most circles, to think of humans as masters of the natural world, but the implications of this shift haven’t yet been worked out, even among those who accept evolution, for example, or the need for sustainable agriculture. The arguments of vegans notwithstanding, when it comes down to it, how much more ethical is it to force human behavioral patterns upon a pampered dog than it is to raise and slaughter an animal for food? Maybe we can’t help but think of ourselves as “special animals,” but we’re not so special that we can remove ourselves from an ecosystem without consequences. Although sometimes, dammit, it would be nice if the dog just came when she were called.

it's alive!

I feel that I’ve crossed some sort of line. A few years ago, my best friend bought me a copy of Sally Fallon’s Nourishing Traditions. The book is unabashedly confrontational: the front cover boasts a challenge to “politically correct nutrition and the diet dictocrats.” I was on board with her central message, which is that eating minimally processed foods is healthy, but I found other ideas a bit off-putting, such as her chirpy proclamation that an avoidance of vaccines enhances the benefits of eating lacto-fermented foods. It seemed to be a bit of a totalizing proposition, that things would start out with homemade ketchup and then I’d be compelled to home-school my kids and weave clothes out of hemp fibers I’d grown and processed myself. I’m all for self-reliance, within reason. I enjoy the challenge of preparing complicated dishes from scratch. I’m crafty, I sew, I plant things in dirt. I enjoy the transformation of raw materials into finished product. But realistically, I also enjoy living in a world where the division of labor and mechanization allow me not to spend my days procuring food and garment by stalking prey and tanning hides. I don’t particularly enjoy washing clothes by hand, nor would I last long on a diet of, say, fish I’d caught myself. There are problems with the current system, but I’m not sure a whole-scale, back-to-the-land movement would solve them. After all, things like vaccines and industrial agriculture, despite their unintended consequences, came about as a means of mitigating the risks involved in living.

One thing that Sally Fallon and I do have in common, though, is a love of fermented foods. Bread, cheese, pickles, kefir, miso, tempeh, beer, wine; there’s something almost miraculous about foods that are alive and that use that life in the service of creating more complex flavors and, often, increased nutritional value. (Another thing that proponents of fermented foods seem to share is an evangelical tendency regarding the purported virtues of their favorite foods.) Until recently, my forays into the realm of fermented foods had involved bread and kefir. I have now made sauerkraut, and it was good. About a month ago, we helped Kendall’s parents crush grapes they’d grown themselves and bottle the juice for wine; a few days later, Kendall and I made lacto-fermented pineapple-cilantro chutney for fish tacos. Thus, it would seem, I have leaped willy-nilly into the world of fermented foods.

I’m not sure what any of this says about my political leanings, but I’m not alone in this. People are making jam, building yurts, raising chickens in their backyards; a friend of mine quit her job and is devoting a year to investigating food and farming around the country—on her bicycle! Some point to the recession, others to frustration with the pre-fab, have-it-now nature of contemporary life. There is pleasure in work well done, certainly, but there is also a weird sense of nostalgia, even luxury, now attached to tasks that were once considered drudgery. Maybe the days of industrial civilization are numbered and my pleasures really are as guilty as they sometimes feel. Maybe the economics of green jobs really will pan out, and we can somehow have the best of both worlds. Or perhaps what we should hope for is something on a smaller scale, so that as more people bake their own bread and do their own laundry and grow their own food, we’ll start properly valuing the labor of those who do these things for a living.

fishing report

November has been too full of student essays and visits from friends to do much fishing, but I did finally purchase a pair of waders at Swain's General Store the last time we were in Port Angeles. (As if access to Olympic National Park, the Coho Ferry to Victoria, and in-laws weren't reasons enough to visit Port Angeles, Swain's puts it over the top.) My waders are a very lady-like shade of pale blue, with pink lettering on the chest. Although Swain's does indeed have almost anything you might need for almost any kind of activity in which you might engage (Logging equipment? Check. Polish pottery? Check. Dog toys? Check.), they did not have wading boots in my size. So my waders wait, a little forlornly, at the bottom of my closet. Winter steelhead fishing, perhaps?