Culture – Page 51 – Into the Woods

Rolling back the clock … if only for a summer

Ken Ilgunas with the chickens, June 2010

Summer is over. Ken went back to school yesterday.

One of the disappointments of getting older is that most young people care so little about how the world used to be, or whether in some ways it might have been better. I have often said that I will measure my success at Acorn Abbey according to how well I can roll the clock back to 1935. How many young people would understand what I mean by that? Young people are transported by J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, both the book and the movie. But how many of them grasp that the Lord of the Rings is a critique of industrial society or that the Shire is a representation of the Late Victorian England in which Tolkien grew up? Tolkien was born in 1892.

Ken is the only young person who has ever asked me, why 1935? What was it about 1935 that is worth going back to?

I see 1935 as the peak of a sustainable American economy, with a healthy mix of industry and agriculture. In 1935, Americans’ level of consumption was reasonable and sustainable. In The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, Wendell Berry talks about how our homes have become centers of consumption, where nothing is produced. We leave home to work. In our homes we consume astonishing quantities of energy, food, gadgets, and throwaway stuff and produce a similarly astonishing quantity of waste. In 1935, it wasn’t like that. Homes were centers of production as well as consumption. Non-city households were able to produce most of their food. Most people worked at home.

Modern homes can’t even produce their own entertainment. It comes in on a wire. People used to have pianos. Piano ownership peaked around 1930. Everybody had to have one. In 1930, the most expensive item people bought other than their house was their piano. By the end of the 1930s, that had changed, and cars displaced pianos as the most expensive item other than the house.

During the boom of the 1920s, there was a huge migration of young people off the farms into the cities. In the 1930s, this reversed, and young people went back to the farms. [Rural Poor in the Great Depression, Bruce Lee Melvin, et al.]

I was not alive in 1935, of course. I was born in 1948. But most of my earliest memories from the 1950s have to do with the places in which my relatives lived. These were family farms in the Yadkin Valley and the Blue Ridge Mountains, all of which had been running at full tilt in 1935. In the 1950s, many of my relatives still kept cows and churned their own butter. They had chickens, pigs, mules, tractors, pastures and fields. I saw how it all worked, and it must have fascinated me as child, because those images of productive households are burned into my memory.

I was born 56 years after Tolkien, so my witnessing of the industrialization of the United States picks up five or six decades after Tolkien’s witnessing of the industrialization of England. As The Lord of the Rings Wiki says, “The industrialization of the Shire was based on Tolkien’s witnessing of the extension of the Industrial Revolution to rural Warwickshire during his youth, and especially the deleterious consequences thereof. The rebellion of the hobbits and the restoration of the pre-industrial Shire may be interpreted as a prescription of voluntary simplicity as a remedy to the problems of modern society.”

During the course of our lives, we our all blown around, sometimes even battered, by economic forces and economic trends, but we rarely pause to think about it. We are no less battered today than the young people who moved off the farms in the 1920s, only to move back again in the 1930s. In the 1950s, I witnessed how my father moved his family away from a small-farm lifestyle to a more suburban lifestyle. When I got my first job in the early 1970s working for a newspaper in Winston-Salem, N.C., even though I didn’t fully realize it then, the economy that supported that newspaper (not to mention the economy that supported old Southern cities like Winston-Salem) was based on manufacturing. By 1991, when I moved to San Francisco, manufacturing was dead. Winston-Salem was in decline. Whether I knew it or not, it was an economic wind that blew me to San Francisco, during the trough of a recession. Lucky for me, the California economy started to roar again by 1995. When I worked for the San Francisco Examiner from 1995 until the Examiner closed in 2000, we were riding the dot-com boom. After the dot-com boom, San Francisco rode the housing boom. When the housing bubble broke, I didn’t particularly want to stick around San Francisco for the lean times. Instead, I read the tea leaves: Just as in the 1930s, economic winds were blowing me back to the farm.

But I didn’t have a farm. Most of those we once had have been lost.

In my family, there is a precedent for starting a small farm from scratch. It was around 1935 when my father’s family’s home in the mountains of Virginia was destroyed by a fire. My father would have been about 18 then. Rather than rebuilding there, they moved to the Yadkin Valley and acquired about 10 acres of land from a relative. They built a small farm. I spent a great deal of time there when I was a child. I can still see clearly every inch of ground. I can still see the house and each outbuilding in detail. I can remember my grandmother’s cow, which she once let me try to milk. I can remember gathering eggs for her, and carrying in wood for the stove. I can remember what everything smelled like.

Ken Ilgunas is the only person who ever asked me about that little farm and what kind of infrastructure it had. Ken is the only young person I’ve ever known who has shown any curiosity about the economics and routines of family farming. I can walk around my grandparents’ farm in my memory and find answers to the question: What was considered essential on a family farm in 1935? There was a small house with three bedrooms, built from local logs and wood from local sawmills. There was a wood cookstove and a coal-fired heating stove. The house had a large, floor-model Philco radio for entertainment, though no piano. The enclosed back porch was a sort of laundry room. The front porch was where you went to cool off when the weather was hot. Attached to the back of the house was a concrete platform with a well and an insulated well house. Water was drawn from the well by cranking a windlass and raising a bucket with a rope, a chore I loved to do for my grandmother. The well house was where milk was kept (jars were immersed in a trough of cool well water) and where canned foods were stored. These were the outbuildings: a small barn with two stables and hay storage in the loft; a tobacco barn for curing tobacco; a woodworking shop (my grandfather was a carpenter); a woodshed; a large chicken house; a granary where animal feed was stored; a garage. Most of the 10 acres, except the fields and garden area, was fenced for a pasture. There was a small orchard. There was a wood-fired outdoor stove made of brick that was used for heating water for laundry. This was a small, newly built farm. The nearby farm on which my mother grew up was much older and larger, around a hundred acres. My mother’s family farm had the same kind of buildings, though larger and with the addition of a smokehouse for curing hams.

On Ken’s blog, some commenters sometimes accuse Ken of being somehow fraudulent for his determination to revisit and rethink, in how he lives his own life, all the givens of industrialization. This revisiting and rethinking is not an easy project. By default, most young people don’t much question the world they were born into. What’s not to like about a life of consumption? Quite a lot is not to like, of course, such as enslaving ourselves to buy things or indenturing ourselves with debt.

I’ve known a lot of brilliant young people. But I have never known a young person other than Ken who was willing, even driven, to rethink everything before putting on the heavy harness and stepping onto the treadmill of industrial (or post-industrial) life. How did he do this?

He did it by reading and thinking, and by seeking experiences that wouldn’t interest most young people, like working in Alaska for several summers. Instead of becoming a creature of popular culture, Ken has, through his reading, kept company with some of the greatest minds of the past and present. He is a sterling example of why a liberal education is of such great value, though it won’t help you make money on Wall Street. From talking with Ken, it’s clear that this project of reading and rethinking has been going on since he was a boy. His graduate studies at Duke are a continuation of that process.

His summer at Acorn Abbey also was part of that process. I don’t think it necessarily means that he’ll become a monk or a farmer. His intense need for exploration and adventure will produce a lot of creative tension with his cloister instinct. But Ken realized that, by the accident of when he was born, he lacked certain experiences that industrialization has robbed us of: how to start a farm, how to grow at least some of your own food, how to build things, how to fix things, how to use hand tools. Ken also got a taste of the cloistered life, because we lived like monks, with much silence and much reading along with the labor. I told him that it’s a shame he can’t get course credit at Duke for what he learned this summer.

Ken’s hard work at Acorn Abbey this summer brought this place much closer to becoming the productive tiny farm that I want it to be. The work he’s done here will be visible for many years to come. It’s amazing what two adults working at home can accomplish. All my grandparents made their livings at home and still had time to sit on the front porch and smell the gardenias.

And I’ve added a second way to measure my success, in addition to how well I’m able to roll the clock back to 1935. That measure of success is whether people like Ken Ilgunas want to be here.

Two books on Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello

As a Southerner (not to mention as an American) I have long been curious about Thomas Jefferson. The excellent HBO series on John Adams (available from Netflix) greatly increased my interest in Jefferson, and I resolved to read a bit about Jefferson as soon as I could get my hands on the right books. I asked an old boss of mine (thanks, Charlie) who loves that period of history for some recommendations. Ken Ilgunas recommended the same books, and Ken even picked them up for me at the Duke University library. They are:

American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson, Joseph J. Ellis, Knopf, 1997

Twilight at Monticello: The Final Years of Thomas Jefferson, Alan Pell Crawford, Random House, 2008

Though, to my surprise, I think I would have agreed more often with Adams than with Jefferson on the political issues of the day, still Jefferson shines through these biographies as an incredibly nice man, an idealist, a product of the Enlightenment, a Southerner’s Southerner, an American’s American.

In the epilogue of Twilight at Monticello, there is an unexpected section on the decline of Virginia, and, along with Virginia, the decline of the South. This decline started around the time of Jefferson’s death. Southerners brought it on themselves:

“By the late 1840s, Virginia’s decline had become a matter of public comment, though little was done to arrest it. Before the Revolution, the Richmond Enquirer reported, Virginia ‘contained more wealth and a larger population than any other State of this Confederacy.’ By 1852, the Old Dominion, ‘from being first in wealth and political power, ranked below New York, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and Ohio.’ These states, except for Massachusetts, were ‘literally chequered over with railroads and canals.’ …

“Intellectual life was almost nonexistent. Virginians published few newspapers and few books. Almost all literary works came from the North. The well-to-do refused to be taxed to pay for the education of their poorer neighbors, and the great majority of young people, white and black, received no formal schooling. A result was the almost complete absence of an educated middle class. There were only land-rich, cash-poor gentleman planters at the top, a somewhat larger group of lawyers, doctors, and merchants just below them, and then poor whites and free blacks at the bottom, followed by great numbers of slaves. Costly in itself, the presence of slaves discouraged the immigration of white laborers, denying Virginia much needed skills and enterprise.

“With discussions of slavery prohibited [by an act of the Virginia legislature], and the mails opened to confiscate abolitionist literature sent from the North, the entire society came to operate under censorship. Slavery, under increasing attack from the North, was passionately defended.”

By the time, about 110 years later, when I started becoming aware of the world, and the South, I’d been born into, not much had changed.

Old Southern house trimmings

Much of the South’s old rural housing stock is falling into ruin. This is the case with the Yadkin Valley house that my mother was born in. It was built by her grandfather. The house, and most of the land the house sits on, is no longer in the family.

I’m considering salvaging a tiny bit of tradition by duplicating the trim on the front porch posts of my mother’s childhood home. My brother did this. He copied the pattern and used it for the front porch of his house, which is about 25 years old.

Though the pattern is not exactly Gothic revival, I’m thinking that tradition may trump strict adherence to the Gothic revival style of Acorn Abbey.

The methods of 100 years ago

Here is a link to a scanned copy of Henley’s Twentieth Century Formulas, Recipes and Processes. The book, which is in PDF format, is more than 800 pages long and covers just about everything a self-sufficient American in 1914 might need to know — farming, shelter, tools, homemade cosmetics and medicines, preserving food, and so on. The PDF file is more than 100 megabytes. Everything is arranged in alphabetical order.

Stilton

Note to myself: Those glass plates don’t photograph very well. I need to go to some junk shops and find some photogenic dishes.

Blue cheese and garlic are the best of friends. Though I love a good Roquefort, I prefer a good Stilton. I suspect this is because the Roquefort (sheep’s milk) is richer than Stilton (cow’s milk). Blue cheese loves onions, too. The Fat Ladies, every ounce of them English, in one of their cooking shows, made a Stilton and onion soup that I made at home a couple of times, and it was good. The dressing on the salad in the photo contains a whole head of garlic. What a great peasant supper — a garlicky salad, Stilton, and a loaf of homemade peasant bread.

Rural England is a dairy culture, and they make great cheeses. Last time I was there, they still home-delivered fresh milk in bottles. Friends in Wales once served me for dinner a whole array of English and Welsh cheeses, including the Welsh Caerphilly, which you can sometimes find in American stores.

As for the Fat Ladies, one of them (Jennifer Paterson) is dead now. Netflix has the DVDs of their cooking show. Their show is extremely entertaining and rich with ideas for those of us who respect peasant food.

The Fat Ladies (YouTube)

Le Cordon Bleu in Paris

Serving English cooking. The photo is about 10 years old.

If you saw Julie and Julia, in which Meryl Streep plays Julia Child, you saw the film version of what Le Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris was like in the 1940s. It’s been 10 years since I was in Paris, but I came across these photos recently while pulling files off an old computer.

The event in the photos is an international buffet cooked by the students at Le Cordon Bleu. They make foods from their native cultures. A friend of mine was a student at Le Cordon Bleu at the time, and he took me to this event. I was not surprised to see that the Asian students’ tables were mobbed, while there was only a small group around the English students’ table. That kind of snobbery is a shame, because the English students had cooked an amazing example of an English Christmas dinner.

Le Cordon Bleu does these international buffets several times a year, I believe. They are mobbed.

Serving Asian cooking…

I’ve eaten in lots of places — Bangkok, New Delhi, London, Ireland, Denmark, and all over Mexico and the United States. Paris is not my favorite food city. Parisian food is just too rich and meaty to appeal to me, so I found myself going to Asian restaurants or to this vegetarian restaurant near Notre Dame, Le Grenier de Notre-Dame. The vegetarian food there is only so-so. Americans do vegetarian food much better. The cities with the best vegetarian food, in my opinion, are New York and Los Angeles. The food in Ireland is about a million times better than the food in England, especially outside of London.

I don’t aspire to, or fawn over, haute cuisine or trendy food. To me, it’s all about honest foods skillfully prepared. I’ve been asked a few times to name the restaurant that I’ve most enjoyed. That’s pretty easy: Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Alice Waters‘ restaurant.

The awful 14th century

Pieter Bruegel, the Triumph of Death

I have written previously about the dark and miserable era that followed the fall of Rome, starting in the 5th Century. Here’s another: Europe in the 14th Century.

In 1978, the historian Barbara Tuchman, who won a Pulitzer for her history of World War I, published a book that also became a best-seller: A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century. This book caused quite a stir when it was first published, and I had long meant to read it. I finally did, after I found a copy of it in a junk store in Madison for 75 cents.

Centuries before, the ideal of chivalry had provided a little light in the darkness of the Middle Ages. But by the 14th Century, chivalry had fallen into decadence. The nobility lived as parasites off the labor of the peasantry and gave nothing to speak of in return. War and extravagant consumption, it seems, were all the nobility lived for. Wars went on and on from their own inertia, though no one even remembered what they were fighting for.

The church too, in centuries past, had preserved a tiny light of order and learning in the darkness of the Middle Ages, but by the 14th Century the church was as decadent and corrupt and parasitic as the nobility. Everything was for sale: the sacraments, annulments, dispensations, pardons, offices, emoluments. The church also was torn by schism. There were two popes, one in Rome and one in Avignon. Torture and Inquisition were highly refined and ruthlessly practiced.

The peasantry was miserably poor, lived in filthy hovels, was racked with disease and saddled with crushing taxes. Up to two-thirds of their children did not live to be adults. Several times during the century, there were peasant revolts. But always those revolts were put down as quickly as the nobles could rally enough men on horseback to cut the peasants down.

And if that wasn’t enough, there was the Black Death, which killed up to 60 percent of Europe’s population. There were no longer enough people to till the fields, further increasing the misery for those who survived the plague.

By 1415, French chivalry was in ruins, with thousands of nobles dead in the mud at the Battle of Agincourt. Those ruins of the fortresses and abbeys of the Middle Ages that we see today: Much of that was not the result of centuries of gradual decay. Rather, it was destruction caused by the wars, raiding and pillaging of the 14th Century.

A saint was born out of this ruin: Joan of Arc.

Why is this relevant to a relocalization blog? Because human nature doesn’t change. We would do well to not forget how thin is the veneer of civilizaton, or how fragile the rule of law. No matter what the cost of war, we humans never seem to learn. Elites, glorifying war, have the same tendency to become ever richer and to make ever greater wagers to increase their wealth and power. Again and again we find that the times of greatest luxury for elites are the times of greatest hardship for those who actually do the work.

To quote Barbara Tuchman:

“Chivalry, the dominant political idea of the ruling class, left as great a gap between ideal and practice as religion. The ideal was a vision of order maintained by the warrior class and formulated in the image of the Round Table, nature’s perfect shape. King Arthur’s knights adventured for the right against dragons, enchanters, and wicked men, establishing order in a wild world. So their living counterparts were supposed, in theory, to serve as defenders of the Faith, upholders of justice, champions of the oppressed. In practice, they were themselves the oppressors, and by the 14th century the violence and lawlessness of men of the sword had become a major agency of disorder. When the gap between the ideal and real becomes too wide, the system breaks down. Legend and story have always reflected this; in the Arthurian romances the Round Table is shattered from within. The sword is returned to the lake; the effort begins anew. Violent, destructive, greedy, fallible as he may be, man retains his vision of order and resumes his search.”

A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century. Barbara W. Tuchman. Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1978. 720 pages.

Family dairies, R.I.P.

Small, family-run dairy operations used to be very common all across North Carolina’s Piedmont and the nearby Blue Ridge Mountains. They are gone. I doubt that very many of them survived much later than the 1950s. Like all small family farms, the dairy farms had to deal with competition from the larger, more industrialized operations. There also were health regulations to deal with. If I remember correctly from what a dairy farmer told me many years ago, to sell top-grade milk required that the milk be chilled to a low temperature — 34 or 35 degrees, as I recall — within minutes of coming from the cow. Small operations couldn’t support the cost of this refrigeration equipment.

This old dairy, on Mountain Road near Danbury in Stokes County, was typical. The building in which the milking was done was usually made of concrete blocks. This was because the building was constantly being hosed down and washed.

The smaller room to the right, with the sink, is the clean room where vessels were washed and where the milk was brought. The larger room to the left with the cow-sized door is the milking room.

The sink was for washing the milk cans and other vessels.

Recommendment: Lark Rise to Candleford

BBC: The hamlet of Lark Rise

I wonder if the BBC is making a particular effort to make more period pieces that reflect the lives of ordinary people, rather than aristocrats. For example, BBC Films was involved in the making of Bright Star, which is about John Keats. Keats and those around him were middle class, not aristocrats. There also is the excellent BBC television series Cranford.

In 2008, the BBC came out with Lark Rise to Candleford. This is about the people in the tiny hamlet of Lark Rise, and the more prosperous people of the nearby village of Candleford. These are honest stories based on the realities of village life — gossip, family trouble, poverty, and social jostling. The series is available on DVD, and from Netflix.

Let's hear it for the chickens

March 4: four eggs. There are three nests in the henhouse, but they always share and take turns.

My four chickens have averaged slightly better than three eggs a day all winter, and it was a cold winter. Even though it’s still early March, they’re already starting to return to their four-eggs-a-day standard of productivity. They have only ever broken one egg, and that was when they were young and inexperienced. I myself have accidentally broken three or four.

They are content, yet demanding, always hoping for treats, which they get, every day. Sometimes the best I can do is cut up some raw potatoes or carrots, or maybe apples, or pluck the outer leaves from a head of cabbage. Their favorite treats are kitchen scraps — peelings and leftovers. Pasta drives them wild. They seem to think it’s worms. On cold mornings they relish a warm breakfast — cracked grains mixed with leftover gravy or soup. During the summer, finding treats for them is easy because the kitchen always has lots of summer produce. During the winter, treats are more of a challenge. They always have laying mash in their feeder. But it’s treats that keep things interesting.

Newspapers and magazines are full of stories about backyard chickens these days, but here’s one of the best pieces I’ve come across. Peter Lennox, an academic, waxes philosophical on the keeping of chickens:

Watching chickens is a very old human pastime, and the forerunner of psychology, sociology and management theory. Sometimes understanding yourself can be made easier by projection on to others. Watching chickens helps us understand human motivations and interactions, which is doubtless why so many words and phrases in common parlance are redolent of the hen yard: “pecking order”, “cockiness”, “ruffling somebody’s feathers”, “taking somebody under your wing”, “fussing like a mother hen”, “strutting”, a “bantamweight fighter”, “clipping someone’s wings”, “beady eyes”, “chicks”, “to crow”, “to flock”, “get in a flap”, “coming home to roost”, “don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched”, “nest eggs” and “preening”.