An image of Barack Obama and John Edwards popped up on my screen and I sucked in my breath. Could it be? Did Obama announce that Edwards would be his running mate?

It took a moment for me to adjust to reality - the NYT headline announced only that Edwards endorsed Obama, and of course, it’s still (frustratingly) too early to announce a VP candidate. But in that brief mistaken moment I had a flash of the optimism and inspiration I’d felt in following the Edwards campaign, in large part because I view agricultural policy as a key issue, and Edwards — as the Ethicurean pointed out — had it right.

The night Edwards withdrew I voiced my wish for an Obama/Edwards ticket. The image of Obama and Edwards side by side on the Obama campaign’s website feels like a glimpse into the future — when my wish comes true.

I’m on a fiction jag. More accurately, I’m on a Jane Austen jag. Masterpiece Classics on PBS has been airing “The Complete Jane Austen” and, drawn into the movies, I’ve decided finally to read the books.

My first exposure to - I won’t say experience of - Austen came in high school. As a student, I was focused on getting good grades rather than on learning anything. My report card showed B’s for calculus though I didn’t understand math beyond algebra, and A’s in English though I rarely glanced at the books my teachers assigned. At least, not until it came time to cull quotes for knitting into into long, assigned papers about the books’ themes.

Out of Africa

I’m not sure why I avoided the assigned reading, except perhaps that it was assigned. Even then I read ravenously. High school is when I began reading everything I could by an author I liked. As with my current Austen obsession, a movie prompted my first author-focused reading fit. Unlike with Austen, though, I felt drawn to Isak Dinesen because the movie based on her book befuddled me. I’d seen it in junior high, when my mom met questions about what was going on with “You’ll understand when you’re older.” A few years later, roaming about a used book store, I discovered Out of Africa on the shelves and was attracted to the lingering illicit air implied in my mom’s comment, reading it like other kids read the Joy of Sex found hidden under their parents’ mattress.

I’m not sure yet how far my interest in Austen will take me, though my obsessiveness about an author can get out of hand. Out of Africa lead to a years-long exploration of Dinesen, which included a transfer from my first university in the big hair wasteland of Dallas to the University of Washington to study Danish, Dinesen’s first language, with the thought of becoming a Dinesen scholar.

So far, my interest in Austen has resulted in reading three of her novels and seeing nearly every adaptation of any of her works I can get through Netflix.

I’m troubled a bit by watching instead of, or even in addition to, reading, especially when it comes to my daughter. My foremost objection to watching movies based on books is their pernicious tendency to preempt or supplant my own mental images formed while reading, and I worry that my daughter will likewise be stuck forever seeing Tilda Swenton as Narnia’s White Witch. Though as far as Mr. Tumnus goes, you could hardly ask for better than James McAvoy. And maybe her fascination with the movie’s Aslan, which has so far stretched into months of imaginative lion play, will grow into a love for, or even obsession with, C.S. Lewis once she’s a reader herself.

photo: Steve Ringman for The Seattle Times

I’ll stand with farmers (of the small and sustainable school) in almost any fight, but a recent dust-up – forgive me, but it this case it should really be a mud-up – in southwest Washington’s Lewis county has me puzzled.

Folks there are still recovering from early December floods. A few days ago, our Governor said a recovery task force would study how humans contributed to the mess. She emphasized that finger-pointing wouldn’t bring people’s homes back, but that hasn’t stopped anyone so far. It goes something like this: farmers blame environmentalists blame loggers blame God.

In this case, I think the farmers have it wrong.

If a slope is wholly denuded and that slope subsequently slides into a river, does it have anything to do with the lack of trees?

In a Wednesday Seattle Times editorial a candidate for WA commissioner of public lands said, essentially, “duh”:

The damage to Lewis County clearly was made worse by mudslides from the clear-cuts, building up at the base of the hills, bursting from pressure, and sending torrents of dirt, trees and water across a floodplain already stressed from years of development and pavement.

Since I’ve never picked up a pitchfork I guess I’ll be counted among the “urban environmentalist mafia” — as Robert Michael Pyle put it in Where Bigfoot Walks – who prioritize salmon and owls above people. But that isn’t quite right.

I prize salmon and owls above land-raping corporations and the public bureaucracies that abet and abide them.

The Good Rain

So does Tim Egan. Before he received the National Book Award for his Worst Hard Time about Dustbowl survivors, Egan admired Theodore Winthrop, adventurer and author of The Canoe and the Saddle, enough to wander in Winthrop’s wake around the Northwest.

The troubles of Lewis county, “a declining economy based on logging and mining”, would have fit right into his 1990 book The Good Rain describing slowly dying resource towns – those places built up to exploit and export the wealth of the Northwest.

Egan has the talent to keep readers engaged and encouraged even as he laments the clear-cutting, damming, and over-fishing that strips the Northwest of its characteristic elements.

If only Lewis county could become less dependent upon logging, a shift Egan traces in nearby places, such as Hood River, Oregon — once a timber town, now a windsurfing mecca. It would require identifying what is uniquely Lewis county and using that to grow its material wealth while preserving its natural wealth.

That would be resourceful.

So, it’s not just food and farm books in which someone does something (or does without something) for a year. An upcoming memoir about a father and son who watch three movies together each week as a condition of the son’s dropping out of school is also wrapped in the one year ribbon. I learned about the book from an oldish post on the NY Times book blog. Its author is as done with the device as I am. And tellingly, though his real-life example is not, his dreamed up illustration of the cliché is from the world of food — loosely defined:

Like everyone else I know, I’m bone-tired of stunt books of the “Year I Ate Nothing But Gummy Bears” variety.

Perhaps we are now at the end of the year of the year. Too many writers recently have taken on one-year projects of deprivation or exploration and learned about themselves and the direction and purpose of their lives. Often the products were interesting, but the trope itself has become a bore.

Are food and farm writers more inclined in this direction than others? Or is it present in every subject area, and I just read more food and farm writers?

Happily, Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle was a delight to read, as is most everything she writes. I don’t know about Plenty by the 100-mile-diet couple, as it has yet to migrate from my list of candidates, but I hear good things.

The Year of the Goat, though. Eh. It was fine, I guess. The author was eager and naive, traveling around the country to learn from people raising goats for dairy, fiber, or meat. I read, wide-eyed and hopeful for and with her. But somewhere along her year-long journey with her fiancée, the author’s project and writing were sidetracked by wedding plans. I wish she’d stuck with the goats.

Sometimes I wonder if my interests are esoteric, and then along comes a popular book about goats and I wonder if instead my interests are overly trendy. Generally I hope that more people will care about things like farming, and local food, and the other things that excite me, but I have my cranky old bastard side, too (or whatever the female version of that is). She shows up at the farmers’ market, where I’m glad for the farmers and the planet and the future of the species that crowds are lining up on drizzly Sundays for wintertime produce from farms a few miles away, but then I’m irked that I’m not the only one at the table.

I guess the books that focus on farming and eating and ecology and community in year-long bits are inspiring others for longer spans of time. If they’re going to keep writing year-long books, though, could someone publish “My year of not stepping on the toes of heavily burdened women carrying young children, and other kindnesses at the farmers’ market”?

I live on an eensy city lot. The front yard contains little more than the steps to our door and a path to the back. The back isn’t a yard at all. Half of the space is filled with a deck, and the other half with a garage.

Still, I think I can farm here. The garage is a new, sturdy structure, designed by the architect prior owner to hold a roof-top deck where he could entertain and barbecue. He planned to use it as a place to cook food with friends. I’d rather use it to grow food with family.

My vision includes vegetable beds, bee hives, and a chicken coop. Hundreds of Seattleites raise laying hens, but given my daughter’s egg allergy, I’m more inclined toward broiler chickens.

In investigating the feasibility of a roof-top garden, I’m encouraged by the growing number of “green roofs” like the one that tops the Ballard library. I still need to learn more about how to get my garage to shed water and bear weight.

So I felt delighted to read the line “Grow Food on Your Roof” on YES! magazine’s winter cover. Sadly, the piece inside wasn’t the “how to” feature I imagined — just a photo of a Bremerton family’s rooftop farm and a brief caption — but it was inspiring to learn that they “grow enough produce to feed themselves and to stock their stall at the local farmers’ market.”

Flat Stanley

Flat Stanley visited us this week. He’s a children’s book character who inspired a literacy and geography project for elementary school classes.

Larry Gets Lost in Seattle

Our visitor arrived from LaRue, Ohio, home to my cousin Natalie’s family. Her daughter Avery sent Stanley to visit my daughter Meg. We took him on a tour of Seattle inspired by the book Larry Gets Lost in Seattle.

Stanley wrote a letter to Avery, telling her about his tour. Here’s the letter:
Continue Reading »

Protecting the Gift

We arrived late for our movie, and the lights already were down. We were new at going by ourselves and didn’t know the etiquette. Afraid of disturbing others, we slunk into back-row seats at our local movie house.

Once our eyes adjusted, we noticed a man one row in front of us. He wore a beige Members Only jacket and had dark, shiny hair, possibly combed over. He might have been in his forties.

We probably wouldn’t have been aware of him, except that he turned around and started whispering to us. I don’t remember what he said, except that it was vaguely sexual.

He gave us the creeps.

We didn’t know what to do. Nobody ever warned us about inappropriate attention from grown men, or what to do about it. We weren’t assertive. We were 12.

We decided to leave, and went to the worn red lobby to ponder what to do. Our parents were unreachable. We didn’t think it made sense to tell the popcorn seller, and didn’t know what to say anyway.

So we sat, expecting to wait out the whole movie in the lobby. A few minutes later — probably just long enough for him to decide that we’d be back already if we’d just headed to the bathroom — the guy walked out and gave us an easy farewell. We went back in and watched the show, and met my parents out front afterwards.

Once I saw rage sparkle in my dad’s eyes I understood that our actions were understated and wrongheaded. My dad’s actions — driving us around town trying to find the guy — were overstated and wrongheaded. I still didn’t know the proper response.

That wasn’t the last sexual assault my friend and I experienced. A couple of years later, she survived a rape attempt. A coworker attacked her at her school bus stop, slashing her throat with a box knife as she fought him off. In high school, I sat frozen in a passenger seat as a college lifeguard I’d recently met pulled off the road on the way back from our first (and only) date and maneuvered to lie on top of me.

Not until college did anyone offer tips for dealing with predatory behavior, and then it was only to advise repeatedly what I came to call the “don’t-rape-me walk”: hold your head high and look passing pedestrians in the eye.

As the parent of a daughter, I’m responsible for preparing her for the possibility of violence, including sexual assault. It’s not easy to think about, but avoiding it puts her in greater danger.

Gavin De Becker’s book Protecting the Gift addresses what dangers our children might encounter, dispelling worry in favor of preparedness.

Though De Becker advises that one of the most powerful words a girl can learn is “No,” I would have been prepared to deal appropriately with that guy in the theatre (and the creeps who came after) if I could have said “yes” more than once in response to his Test of Twelve, a tool that helps evaluate a child’s readiness to be out alone. I want my daughter to be able to say no to the creeps, and yes to every question on that test.

Low Stress Food

I wrote yesterday that pre-slaughter stress in livestock impacts meat quality. Today, I received my Stockman Grassfarmer (why yes, I am a farm geek) and learned of a new book proposing that when we eat meat from stressed animals, we experience “second-hand stress.”

As antidote, the author of Low Stress Food suggests that in restaurants, we ask how our meat is raised. Which may only seem funny if you’ve read this.

Selling meat requires USDA inspection, both of the animals and the facility where they’re processed.

There’s an exemption to this requirement if instead of cuts of meat you’re selling live animals. In that case, you can custom slaughter for the buyer under state regs instead of federal ones.

The live animals slaughtered under this exemption aren’t inspected, but the processing plants are. I’m not sure why. Perhaps if you own the animal, you are presumed to know whether it’s healthy, so the state just concerns itself with sanitary handling procedures.

Custom slaughter has at least one major advantage — it can happen on the farm.

This is less stressful for the animals, which don’t have to be trucked long distances. It conserves resources such as time, fuel, and money that would spent on getting animals those distances. It keeps offal on the farm for composting, which contributes to the farm’s fertility without requiring external inputs. And it produces higher quality meat.

But selling a live animal means selling the whole animal. Buyers can share it, but this generally means each person gets a substantial amount of meat all at once. And most buyers don’t have freezer space for a side of beef.

That’s why we participate in a meat CSA, from the same farm where we’re getting our heirloom turkeys. A CSA is a community supported agriculture program where the members pay in advance for a share of the harvest. By buying steers and hogs on the hoof, we get meat from animals that die on the land where they’re raised. And by buying collectively with more people and arranging multiple deliveries, we get manageable amounts of meat for our freezers.

So what does that have to do with reading? Well, by way of a couple of my favorite blogs, I’ve discovered this farm blog (you should know before you follow that link that there are lots of pictures of hog carcasses). The farm raises hogs with care through their whole life cycle.

If I wasn’t already in for a quarter of a hog through our CSA, I’d be looking to find friends who wanted to share some pork.