Watching a bewildering world from the middle of nowhere
Ken, who has been a featured author at the Wigtown Book Festival in Scotland for several years, has written a piece for the festival’s web site about being stuck here at the abbey during the Pandemic. Regular readers of this blog will recognize the characters. Please think of it as an interpretation of the American heartland for European readers.
Who will ever be able to forget the spring of 2020 — the Pandemic Spring? Here in this little corner of the world, the strange weather continues. An arctic incursion brought two late frosts. The tomatoes, basil, and squash are hating it (we covered them), but they survived. The cool-weather crops are flourishing. Mustard and kale have been plentiful. Soon there will be cabbage and onions. A building project has kept us very busy for the past week. It’s a much-needed shed up above the garden, with space for the Jeep, the lawn mower, the tiller, and tools. I’ll have photos when it’s done. The news, in my opinion, isn’t getting much better. And everything having to do with Donald Trump is getting worse. But this strange, slow-moving spring is a huge compensation. Now’s the time for scouting the best locations for picking blackberries.
Click here for high-resolution version.
Last October, I sowed 10 pounds of crimson clover seed in the yard, bought from Amazon for $34.99. Now I can’t bring myself to mow the yard. Next October, I’ll sow at least twice as much.
I caught a virus on the Isle of Harris last summer. This virus causes an obsession with collecting tweed. It starts with one’s first Harris tweed jacket. But it doesn’t end there. Oh, no. Before you know it you’re scouring eBay for more, discovering in disappointment that there are only so many colors of Harris tweed. (If you ever see a burgundy Harris tweed jacket in men’s size 40, or a deep forest green, or a deep midnight blue, please let me know. But I don’t think you’re likely to see one.)
And though it starts with Harris tweed, soon all tweeds become interesting. There are many fine tweeds. My last acquisition — a cream colored tweed made in the U.S.A. — has elbow patches. This is my first jacket with elbow patches. Now I’m afraid I’ll start collecting jackets just for the elbow patches.
I learned from Googling that elbow patches have an interesting history. The elbows of jackets wore out first, so worn-out elbows were often patched with leather. Then the patched-elbow look became popular — even a status symbol — and new jackets came with patches. Elbow patches are sometimes called “professor patches.” Gardening, you see, or shooting, didn’t wear out the elbows. But sitting at a desk did. Hence: professor patches.
It would take some hardcore desk-sitting to wear out tweed elbows, because tweed is very hard to wear out. I feel sure, though, that J.R.R. Tolkien wore out many tweed jackets against the desks and armchairs of Oxford. But the most common type of damage to vintage tweed jackets, from what I’ve seen, are rips and tears in the lining where the sleeve attaches to the shoulder of the jacket. That’s from putting on jackets carelessly and straining the seams. That’s one reason, of course, that the linings of jackets are always smooth and silky: the jacket slips on easily over whatever else you’re wearing. The method that I like to use for putting on a jacket is to reach straight up with both arms after my arms are in the sleeves. Then the jacket falls down onto the shoulders nice and neat.
In Googling for the history of elbow patches, I saw that some guys are worried about whether elbow patches are out of style. Good grief. Who cares whether elbow patches are out of style? How could anything that is good and practical ever go out of style? This is why I collect 7-ounce cups and saucers in heavy porcelain, and that’s why guests are always befuddled when they ask me for a large mug, and I say that, oh dear, I just don’t seem to have any. After making a show of thinking for a second, I heroically reach into a top shelf and just happen to discover one large mug. They are grateful. But those guests who are here at least for a weekend soon abandon the big mug and instead start using 7-ounce cups and saucers in heavy porcelain. It doesn’t take long for them to come around.
These days, for outdoor recreation, “tech” clothing is the thing — quilted coats, and synthetic fabrics that stretch a little and dry quickly. Tweed, which is always wool, is said to smell like wet dog when it gets wet. But I don’t care.
These days, we are encouraged to buy “thrifted” clothing rather than new things, for environmental reasons. Most clothing, though, is not the sort of thing that will last for decades and that retains value. But apparently people can’t bring themselves to throw away old tweed, because after twenty years it may still look new. Much of it ends up on eBay.
One of these days I’m going to find one in burgundy, forest green, or midnight blue.
The photo is from 7:50 p.m. Supper is over, and the kitchen has been tidied up after the wreckage of a wok supper.
I am so lucky not to be cooking for one — or gardening or orcharding for one — during this quarantine. There is a certain reluctance, as suppertime approaches, for those who are not in the kitchen to wander into the kitchen and ask, “What’s for supper?” A better practice, I think, is to pretend you’re a bistro and put out a sign.
Spring continues to slowly unfold in the cool weather. And what a spring it is.
The spiderwort just started blooming.
First rosebud!
A very young pear
One of the best parts of my day is the daily walkaround in the yard, orchard, and garden. I don’t always like what I see. A few nights ago, we had a late frost. We may have more frost tonight. But mostly what I’m seeing is a beautiful spring. Because of the pandemic, what we can grow here matters more than ever. The orchard is a particular challenge, because we have to fight insects, winds, blights, squirrels, and raccoons to get any of the fruit. This year the fight will be intense, and it’s a fight I’m determined to win.
These are iPhone photos.
Young peaches
Young apples
Young fig
Frostbitten fig leaves
Snowball bush (Hydrangea, I believe)
New rose shoots, regenerating after old growth was cut back
There’s not much to see it the garden yet, but it’s only April 15
A tiny peach
I don’t often think of so-called scripture. I identify as a creature of the Enlightenment, not as a “person of faith.” Nevertheless, I know an embarrassing amount of scripture, because it was beaten into me as a child and because Old and New Testament were required courses when I was a student. But lately I have been thinking of the 24th chapter of Matthew. In this chapter, Jesus is talking to his disciples about the End Times. It’s the chapter upon which much of evangelical eschatological theology is based. Verse 20 contains the words, “But pray ye that your flight be not in the winter.”
How much scarier would this pandemic be if it had descended upon us at the beginning of winter, rather than at the beginning of one of the prettiest springs I can remember? Things hit the fan right at the beginning of gardening season.
Six years ago, we had made a valiant attempt here to build an irrigation system for the garden that drew water from one of the streams below the abbey. There is plenty of water just 500 yards down the road. That didn’t work, though, partly because we couldn’t find a pump with enough power to get the water up the hill. The water tank sat unused, overgrown with honeysuckle. It was possible to use well water for irrigation, but I’ve avoided that. Well water is pure and precious, and that water pump 305 feet down in the well won’t last forever. I don’t want to rush the day when the pump has to be replaced.
Then, two years ago, a new neighbor with lots of skills and energy worked out a means of getting water up the hill for his garden and for those neighbors who need it, including a neighbor who has a field of blueberries. It’s a heavy four-wheel trailer with tanks and pumps, pulled by his elderly Jeep. We moved our water tank to the side of the road so that the neighbor’s rig can stop in the road and deliver water. Problem solved! We also replaced the old drip lines. I’d swear that the cabbage plants grew an inch overnight after their first watering.
I’m determined to fight the insects, blights, squirrels, and raccoons to get as much out of the orchard as possible this year.
So I have one good thing to say about this pandemic. Its timing was perfect.
Week-old mustard
The water tank. The stream is down the hill at the bottom of the ridge.
The hydrant for irrigation water, gravity fed from the tank
Apple blossom
Lilacs
Carolina jasmine
The day lily bank
Paddington Station, London. Just look how clean it is.
I added up the number of hours of travel required to get from Acorn Abbey in the Blue Ridge foothills of North America to Stornaway on the isle of Lewis and Harris in the Outer Hebrides. It comes to about 28 hours. Of those hours, 25 hours were on a plane, several trains, a bus, and a ferry. Only three hours was by car — getting from the abbey to the Raleigh-Durham airport for the flight to London Heathrow. Can you guess which part of that long trip was the most unpleasant?
Purely by accident on this trip, the ferry was the most unpleasant. That was because storms and gale-force winds off the North Atlantic were blowing into the sea channel between the islands and the Scottish mainland. The ferry, which was not small, reared and bucked through scary wave after scary wave, with seawater crashing against the windows way up on the passengers’ observation deck. Everyone tightly held onto their seats, and there was a great and contagious chorus of gagging and throwing up, which would have been funny but for the exhausting work of keeping one’s eyes on the sea, one’s grip on one’s seat, and one’s lunch down. But, had the weather off the North Atlantic been more placid that day, then the ferry would have been a lark, and the worst part of this 28-hour trip would have been the drive to Raleigh over America’s rude highways.
Even the 6.5-hour flight, on a Boeing wide-body 777 operated jointly by British Airways and American Airlines, was not that bad. Those two airlines have figured out that the best way to keep passengers entertained on long flights is to keep bringing free food and drink.
While the U.S. continues to pave itself over with ever-meaner highways, the U.K. remains a nation of trains. Yes, the trains tend to be crowded. Passengers more than doubled between 1997 and 2014. The U.K. is investing billions to expand and upgrade the rail network. The rail system is a true network, with carefully constructed schedules that usually give you just enough time to change trains when your destination is off the main routes. The British people are brilliant at boarding trains quickly, so station stops are short. Often you meet interesting people. I had planned to sleep on the train from Oxford to Edinburgh, but I ended up having a long conversation with a retired gentleman from York who gave me a good perspective on how people feel about Brexit and the state of the world. Unsurprisingly, most of his questions about the U.S. were about guns and Trump, two facets of American life that Europeans have a very hard time understanding.
The U.K. trains are nicely tied in with the Internet. You can buy tickets with your smart phone. While you’re on the train, the Trainline app will use GPS to show you what train you’re on and what stations you’re approaching.
Where the trains don’t go, the buses will get you. Even on the remote western side of Lewis and Harris, the buses out of Stornaway dropped us off a short walk from our Airbnb accommodations.
In the U.S., it’s just a given that conservatives hate trains and love to kill them off. George Will once said, “the real reason for progressives’ passion for trains is their goal of diminishing Americans’ individualism in order to make them more amenable to collectivism.” Liberals’ love for trains is often attribued to “Euro-envy.” I enthusiastically plead guilty.
Note: I’ve had a number of things to attend to and haven’t yet had a chance to work up my photos and video from this trip. I hope to get that done within the next week or so.
I wanted this burger to be a world-rocking experience. But unfortunately it was not. It was a perfectly decent burger. But yes, I could tell the difference. But recognizing that it wasn’t real meat wasn’t the problem. The problem — at least for me — was that the Burger King Impossible Whopper, like the burger from Beyond Meat, contains some sort of mysterious seasoning that is intended to make it taste like meat. I just don’t like that taste. It tasted artificial. I think this would make a much better burger if it was creatively seasoned to taste like what it is — a vegetarian burger.
Still, it’s not about me. It’s about what products like this can do to reduce the consumption of meat and to convince people that meat substitutes can be good.
Meanwhile, the world is waiting for a proper meatless hot dog.
Vintage Harris tweed jacket bought in Stornaway
The Scottish island of Harris is remote, windswept, rainswept, and underpopulated. How, then, did it become so famous? For Harris tweed, of course.
First, a technicality. The usual way to refer to this place in the Outer Hebrides is “the isle of Lewis and Harris.” That raises the question, are we talking about one island, or two? It’s actually one island. The northern part of the island is Lewis, and the southern part is Harris. Mountains form the geographical (and, to a surprising degree, cultural) boundary between the two places.
I have never particularly been interested in textiles. But what struck me about Harris tweed, as I learned more about it, is what an incredible model Harris tweed provides for a sustainable cottage-based industry. By law, Harris tweed comes only from these islands. All Harris tweed is woven by hand by the local crofters, at home in their cottages. (A croft is a small farm with its cottage and outbuildings.)
The production of Harris tweed peaked in 1966. But there are signs that it’s making a comeback, and production is expanding. The Wikipedia article gives a good brief history of Harris tweed. Crofters have been weaving it for their own use for centuries. In the 19th Century, it was discovered by the English aristocracy, and soon everybody wanted some. Everything came from the island’s own resources — wool from blackface sheep and dyes from wild local plants. Local mills spun the yarn. Once the cloth has been woven in the crofters’ cottages, the mills inspect, wash, and press the cloth.
I walked into a Harris tweed shop in Stornaway and was shocked at the prices. For handmade products of such quality, that is not surprising. Men’s jackets started at around £400 ($500). Even simple waistcoats started at about £140. I left the shop reluctantly, priced out of the market.
But fate stepped in. Upon returning to Stornaway some days later to catch a bus to the south of the island, a local man in a coffee shop struck up a conversation with me. He was wearing a Harris tweed jacket and waistcoat. After we had talked for a while, I complimented him on his jacket, saying that I’d love to have one but that the prices were just too steep. He told me where I might find a vintage jacket for much less. In fact, the shop was right nextdoor. In the shop I found a long rack of men’s jackets. The shop’s owner helped me try them on. The one I liked best fit me perfectly. The price was only £59, so of course I bought it. The cut is remarkably smart and modern, though the jacket was made in the 1960s or 1970s for Dunn & Company. The jacket is now at the cleaners, getting its buttons tightened up, along with a good cleaning and pressing.
To the men of this island (and elsewhere), where even in summer nighttime temperatures dip into the Fahrenheit 40s, a Harris tweed jacket is a year-round, everyday-casual item. I realized that, to be properly warm, the jacket should be worn with a waistcoat and scarf. I won’t hesitate to wear it to the grocery store this winter. I wore it to dinner at Oxford.
There’s a pretty good market for vintage Harris tweed items on eBay. I plan to look for a waistcoat there.
My post on Donegal tweed, September 2020.
A Hattersley loom. It’s probable that my vintage jacket was woven on one of these. Wikipedia photo.
Blackface sheep near the village of Ardmor.
A crofter using a Hattersley loom, c. 1960. The weavers are men as often as women. Wikipedia photo.
