See Smaller

Posted on June 10, 2011 by Seonaid

In my ongoing quest for obscurity, I am working here for the month of June (or at least in the building that is out of sight behind me):

It is spectacular, and beautiful, and if I hadn’t followed my staggering path, I never would have found it. I never would have found myself running this boardwalk during my dinner break, and watching the fog roll in over the island, past the lighthouse.

I wander these lands, and I find myself overcome with both awe and grief. Awe because it reminds me that there are places in the world in which the human presence is so small that it can be washed away by a single large storm. And grief because it reminds me so of the place where I grew up.

The beauty is stark, punctuated by rocks and scrubby evergreens.

It is not one of the landscapes that is widely circulated; it does not feel conducive to human life. The houses and people in this part of the world remind me of these trees, clinging to a world that only grudgingly provides for them:

But it’s a life, you know? It still matters, this tiny village of 240, where lobsters rule the sea.

I walked the hall, and looked at the shiny school photos from the 1950′s and the 1960′s and the 1970′s… the classes getting smaller and smaller, until they closed the school and they started busing the kids to a nice new building (the one, it happens, that my kids go to also). Poked my head into the tiny museum. And my heart caught in my throat, as I watched the community slowly sliding into the sea over the decades.

We, from the small places of the world, we grow up, we go to university, we leave. We don’t come back. My existence here is aberrant. It’s like being a semi-anthropologist, an interloper, an alien. “Oh, are you from Sydney?” (45 km away, and what passes for city in these parts. The truth is so complicated, I just claim Albert Bridge and be done with it. I grew up in the city anyway, even if it was a different small city attached to a different small place. The relationship is accurate, if the facts are not.)

***

There is beauty in the small. “To see the world in a grain of sand…” On the edge of the ocean, the vast, there is this strawberry-in-waiting:

But behind it, there is the slipping away. The first afternoon I was at the library, somebody called asking for the phone number of the church, because the ones that they could find didn’t work. I popped into the cafe to ask, because I thought they would have that information… which they did, after a fashion. “Oh, you have to call the priest in [the neighbouring community]. We share the parish, now. There’s no phone at the church any more.” Just a statement, something else lost in the slow dismantling.

Let us not romanticize, here. Rural life is hard. Fishing and farming are dangerous, dirty work, from which people frequently don’t come home. The hours are long and the pay is dreadful, and all the risk is borne by the person doing it, and all the benefit accrues to the rest of us. But it was coherent. It was a Way of Life. And yes, people were oppressed by expectations, and they left, and they became the tellers of tales. But what about the ones who stayed, who wanted this for their lives? They’re bleeding to death, these small places, one lost dream at a time.

We glance at this and turn away, unwilling to see the slow erosion not of the past, but of the present. The traps are coming up empty, they tell me. And what they do catch won’t pay for the fuel to drag them out of the water, or the balloon payments on the boats. The fish are all gone where I grew up, and they aren’t coming back. People want their potatoes for 43 cents a pound even when it cost 73 to grow them. There is no way of making a living, here. Somehow, over the years, the dreams all went to town, and with them went the money.

***

What if you build it, and nobody comes? That beautiful boardwalk next to the sand has dozens of platforms, ideal for a picnic, or maybe a camp-out.

They should ring with laughter, and the long summer evenings of families at the beach. But they echo with emptiness. The grand plans have come to this:

And I cover my heart with my hand. Count my blessings at having been here. And try to encompass the loss.

Filed under: Rural Living | Tagged: | Leave a Comment »

Coal and Wind

Posted on March 30, 2011 by Seonaid

Where we went when he asked for the beach on a blustery day:

The rail car in the front is an old coal car. The windmills in the background adjoin the Lingan coal-burning power plant, the largest power plant in Nova Scotia.

The old schoolhouse is now the visitor information centre, at least in the summer.

The history of Dominion is outlined at this tiny tourist destination.

Filed under: Rural Living | Tagged: , , | 3 Comments »

Weekly Photo Challenge: Ocean

Posted on March 26, 2011 by Seonaid

Oooh! Ocean! I have one of those! (You know, the same way that one can have a sky, or a constellation, which is that I can look at one with a reasonable expenditure of energy)

Our ocean is moody and cold:

There is honesty in naming in action, at the Polar Bear Beach. I didn’t get a better shot because it was too windy and cold to go down the cliff face to the beach:

In the distance, we can see the highlands on a clear day… covered with snow for at least a few more weeks of “spring”

Closer to home, we see the result of a winter of spray up the side of the cliff:

And on the off chance that you didn’t believe that this harbour is REALLY the ocean, I turned to the right and saw:

Filed under: Day-to-Day, Rural Living | Tagged: , , , , | 3 Comments »

The Troll and the Farmers Market

Posted on March 19, 2011 by Seonaid

alternately titled: “Be Careful, She Might Have a Blog.”

Today somebody walked up to my table at the market, picked up a jar of my spices, said, “That’s too expensive,” and banged it back down onto the table. This was  the first time that somebody has been that abrupt about it in three years, and I was shocked.It’s one of the things that craftspeople live in fear of: Being told that your work isn’t worth it. “Everything in Cape Breton is too expensive,” he continued. “I could get far more spices than that in Vancouver for half the price.” (In fact, this is sort of true: I purchase my ingredients wholesale. It is a much cheaper way of getting spices. So is the bulk food store. But they are not the same spices in these jars; I am not just reselling those spices, I actually have a set of “products” that I spent several months taste-testing and developing. I cannot sell at cost.)

“Well, Cape Breton is in the middle of nowhere,” I said, trying not to get too upset.

“No, it’s not.” (Given that it is a 5 hour drive to the next urban centre of any size, and another 10 hours to find a million people in one place, I stand by my claim.)

I started out with my normal ‘spiel,’ but you can see how I might have sounded a little defensive by this point. “Well, they’re organic, and fair-trade, and I mix them in batches of 3 – 4 jars at a time so that they are always fresh.”

“Who cares about that? I’m just saying that I could get an enormous quantity of spices for $65 in Vancouver, and from you I would only be able to get 10 jars.”

“Well, I have to pay myself for my time.”

“Why? Why should I pay you for your time?”

He kept going like this for another 15 minutes. I swear to god, every single bit of knowledge I had, every bit of self-respect I carry drained right out of my feet and into the floor. My time was worthless, my knowledge was useless, I was stupid for not knowing that in a capitalist society I should just go out and get a job, buy stuff at Walmart because they had done more for the organic movement than any little upstart cottage industry producer ever could think of… at one point I interjected with the fact that I only was actually making about $2 an hour at these prices, and he told me, in so many words, that I should give up doing something so stupid and go get a minimum wage job instead of starting a business that was overpriced, couldn’t compete in a global economy, and didn’t add any value to the world as well as only paying me $2 an hour. “Don’t you watch Dragon’s Den? You’re not being consistent. You don’t have a consistent story. Why are you concerned about making a job for yourself that will eventually pay minimum wage rather than just going and taking a minimum wage job at Walmart right now?”

I tried. I don’t know why, but I tried. “Walmart can only look like a reasonable business model because every move that they make is subsidized by the fact that they aren’t required to pay a living wage, and society makes up the difference. Besides that, they only can keep their prices so low in the continued presence of cheap oil that allows them to outsource production to the other side of the world, because shipping things around the globe (sometimes several times) is less expensive than actually paying somebody enough to live on. Or even NOT enough to live on.” I talked about the need to re-establish local and regional economies, the incredible risk we are living with when we live on an island with no primary production, the moral and practical difficulties with relying on a global economy in which we only maintain our superior position by taking advantage of people too poor to protect themselves.

What was I thinking? Why did I engage, other than the fact that I was trapped in a corner behind a table, somewhere that the customer has the upper hand?

Partly I wanted to reiterate it for myself, because that Ayn Rand-Fountainhead – nobody is responsible for anybody but themselves – who the hell do you think you are to try and do something for the greater good, you stupid, stupid woman – oh, it’s nothing personal – bullshit can be pretty compelling when you’ve been trying to make a go of it and failing for three years. Throw in the towel and get a job like the rest of us, you idiot.

But mostly, I was just trying not to scream, “Why the hell are you even in a farmers market??? Just go wherever these mythical cheap spices are and leave me alone. Order your own fucking wholesale products. Just don’t come and attack me, and my work, and my product, and my values, and the mission statement I just helped to write for the market you are standing in to prove your intellectual and moral superiority, you miserable, CHEAP bastard!” Because that probably wouldn’t contribute to the conversation… not that we were having one.

Filed under: Day-to-Day, Rural Living | Tagged: , , , , | 17 Comments »

Little Steps to Home

Posted on February 11, 2011 by Seonaid

Sitting in the lounge at the mechanic’s this morning (don’t ask), I found myself in the company of a friendly sort, an older man who was definitely from here. I know this because as soon as I arrived, he asked me a question, I countered with a book, we chatted for about a minute, and he asked me, “So, are you from Sydney?” “No,” I said, “I grew up in Newfoundland.” He introduced me to the other man who was already sitting, waiting on his car. “He’s from Newfoundland, too.”

It was a long conversation, wide ranging, and it turned out that they are both down-the-road neighbours, a few kilometers away. Eventually, he said, “Oh! I know your house! You’ve got that garden… um… Per-something?”

Our garden is larger than average, and the front lawn sports a giant pair of pants, built as a joke two summers ago. We have garnered attention. But I’d forgotten about the signs. What an opportunity! I shared the story of Demeter, Persephone, Hades, and winter. We called ourselves Persephone’s Garden as an acknowledgment of the winter, and also to proclaim our desire to grow out of season (in the least energy intensive ways, as developed by the brilliant Eliot Coleman.) The first man asked about our floating row covers, what kinds of veggies we grow, complimented us on our free-range chickens, and nearly clapped his hands with glee when I told him about the scythe we use to mow the “lawn”.

The conversation continued, phone numbers were exchanged so that they could introduce me to the other neighbour who is raising milk sheep (milk sheep! one of my fantasy animals!) down the way. It was a very rural conversation. And then he said, “You’ll be staying, then? You’ll have to stay after you put so much effort into tending the land and God’s bounty.”

Now I feel famous!

Filed under: Day-to-Day, Rural Living | Tagged: , , , , | 4 Comments »

Exotic Spices meet Local Food

Posted on January 24, 2011 by Seonaid

Right this moment, I’m waiting for the motor on my spice grinder to cool down so that I can make another batch of curry powder to take to our local farmer’s market. In a much earlier post, I wrote about the challenges we face balancing our desires for local, organic, sustainably produced, and healthy food that doesn’t break the bank. Our part of the world is considered marginal for agriculture. It is cold, cloudy, windy, damp, and rocky. In the summer, everything starts late and finishes early. We get our asparagus in late June, and strawberries don’t come into season until mid-July. For local eating, we’ve got to get creative.

Although I’m a transplant to Cape Breton, I grew up in Newfoundland, an even more marginal, even more geographically isolated place. I lived in a household in which food was very important, and we ate a fairly cosmopolitan diet (by 1970′s standards), but we were limited in our options. This was before Just In Time everything raised shipping and distribution to a dubious art form and January mangoes became standard fare.

All this is by way of saying that, although I count myself among the ranks of the food-curious, my expectations when we arrived were tempered my upbringing. I don’t think I even had had spinach until I was an adult, and I finally realized why when we moved here. By the time spinach is shipped to the east coast of Canada and then trucked across another island, it’s already in pretty rough shape, and might have two days left in it. After a long stint in the ag-heaven of southern Ontario, though, I had become a fan. In our sheltered temperate yard there, the soil was good and  food sprouted in crazy abundance wherever we dropped seed. Spinach only takes 28 days from seed to baby leaf, so I thought I had an easy solution. It’s a cool weather crop, how perfect! (thought I.)

Unfortunately, I didn’t count on our spring weather, which goes: cold, cold, cold, rainy, rainy, rainy, HOT, cold, cold, rainy, HOT, cold… at which point the spinach seedlings whimper in their sleep and bolt to make seed before they DIE. Last spring I swam in the river April 4, right before my greenhouse blew away in a blizzard. Then we had two more months of frost, immediately followed by a glorious eight weeks of summer. Poor, poor plants. They never stood a chance.

The quest for spinach was the first step on what I am considering my Absurdly Slow Food diet. If I want something locally grown that isn’t on the normal list, first I need to learn to grow it. Four years in, I have mastered Shanghai Bok Choy and the use of floating row covers to protect brassicas from the ravenous cabbage moth. We have harvested a wide range of greens, and have learned to substitute baby chard (or that frilly one that I don’t know the name of) for spinach in most recipes. I have divided black currants, thus quadrupling the harvest. We have coaxed two strawberry plants to generate babies, and last summer had enough for a snack of one berry per person every night for about 2 weeks. We have great hopes for our strawberries this summer, involving shortcake and jam. I have pruned apple trees, planted three rounds of asparagus, and drowned about 1000 market-bound cilantro plants when I miscalculated exactly how much standing water there was on this property. This much:

At least my kids can play in the canals. And the tomatoes never dry out.

In various fits of optimism and extreme season-extension, I have planted dozens of plants of okra, watermelons, cantaloupes, and chili peppers. From that list, I got three okra pods and 2 chili peppers, on the plants we kept in pots in the house. In the summer of ’09,* in my second year of trying, I managed to get five fennel bulbs, but it took about 150 plants. Sigh.

I had grandiose plans of growing herbs and spices, raising bees, and making soaps and lotions with the fruits of my labour. But before we can plant anything we need to truck in compost, decompact the soil, solve drainage problems, and build raised beds. It’s incredibly labour intensive. (Here’s a hint for free: don’t try to start a farm in a swamp.) Here is our year three garden:

It was wonderfully abundant, and we still have snap peas and green beans in the freezer. There are beehives, but one of the two was empty the last time I checked, and we still have yet to score any honey for our efforts. As you can tell by the story so far, if we had to eat what we can grow, we would have starved to death several years ago. Which brings me back to the spices.

Another thing that exists in abundance in southern Ontario is Asian grocers. Oh, how I looooove the smell when I step into an Asian grocery store, of whatever denomination. While I was touring the world in a teacup that is Toronto, I fell in love with all things spicy. I never met an “international” food that I turned back. Jamaican Jerk Chicken, Goat roti, gongura pickle, all things Thai, things made with more than one variety of dried mushroom, and/or more than one kind of seaweed, injera with 9 kinds of Ethiopian veggies… I even ate the chicken feet and the tripe at The Perfect Chinese Restaurant. I was, in short, spoiled rotten. And then I moved back east. The nearest Asian grocer is now 500 km away. (That’s about 300 miles, for my American friends.) Forget the restaurants. For a woman of my persuasion, it is to weep.

Enter the internet, stage left. Specifically, enter the ability to access wholesale organic fairtrade spices at Mountain Rose Herbs. They have a really nice discount if you order many, many spices. Spices by the pound.** You might be able to see where this is going, and it ends at the farmer’s market, being “the spice girl”***. I consider this part of a three pronged approach. 1) Figure out how to grow as many things as humanly possible, given reasonable constraints of effort and energy. 2) Add in the lightest ingredients that don’t grow well, if at all, without extensive inputs. 3) Make it possible for lots of other people to do the same thing.

Yes, structural change is necessary. Political action. Go for it. The regulations I encountered just trying to slice a tomato to make into a sandwich to feed to somebody else floored me, and eventually made me give up. I cannot jump those hoops. But here are some things I can do to help right now: grind another batch of curry powder. Put up another greenhouse. Make sure that the fairtrade items make it here. And, last but not least, teach somebody four more things to do with potatoes.

* Please secretly read that as aught-nine, in whatever accent your grandfather had. It would please me.
** You will never, never, never use a pound of bay leaves, just in case it is a question that keeps you up at night.
*** That’s not what I call myself, but it is apparently how I am known around town.

Filed under: Home Skills | Tagged: , , , , | 1 Comment »

Water, Water Everywhere

Posted on October 15, 2010 by Seonaid

This post was written to participate in 2010 Blog Action Day. Today the world is writing about Water.

 

 

Let me start with position. I live in a swamp (or possibly a marsh, according to one of my regular commenters). The photo in the header was taken in my back yard.

My front yard looks like this:

It's not quite as exciting as it looks: the river is tidal and salty.

I am water rich. Never mind irrigation; we had to build raised beds to keep our plants from drowning.

At least my kids can play in the canals. And the tomatoes never dry out.

It would be easy for me to be blasé, to consider this Water thing somebody else’s problem. Certainly many of the solutions that I see regarding water don’t ring true for my situation. There doesn’t seem to be much point to a rain barrel, for example. On the rare occasions that we water the garden, the lift is only 8 feet, and we put it back on the ground about 200 feet from where it started . The water doesn’t travel kilometres before or after it arrives in our house. Just metres.

It’s different having a self-maintained rural water system. We can’t use so much water that the septic is overwhelmed, because we certainly don’t want to contaminate that glorious river. We are in charge of making our own water potable with a UV filter. Our most pressing problem is that when the power goes out, our water system (including the filter) shuts down. Even in the middle of this abundance of water, if we lose electricity, we have nothing to drink. And it gives us a moment of pause to remember that for a large fraction of the world, this is always the case.

It is a useful reminder. We think nothing of drawing a glass of water, drinking half, and then pouring the rest down the sink. I caught myself doing it yesterday.  We aren’t “wasting” water in this case, because we’re drinking surface, not ground water. We are wasting the power that moved it, but the water itself is just fine. The problem arises because the water we pour down the sink is now merged with the water we flushed down the toilet. In this situation, it is not how much water we are drawing that is the issue. The issue is how much water we are contaminating. The water that flowed into my house clean is flowing out dirty. And the same thing is happening in (almost) every house in North America.

This casual use of water in water-rich areas extends to our industrial processes (including farming). We produce effluent, manure lagoons, tailings ponds, leachates, pesticide runoff, and oil spills. We inject water into old oil wells to get more out of them. We irrigate from aquifers at rates beyond their replenishment and put golf courses in deserts. Overuse and contamination are woven into the fabric of our culture. We use water as though it were… um… water. But, you know. The way we used to think of it. Infinite. Abundant. Free. We even have a proverb about spending money as if it were… water.

In the part of the world I live in, as long as the power is on, we usually just don’t think about water. It surrounds us. It falls on our heads for days at a time. It magically appears at the touch of a button, or the turn of a tap. The biggest problem many of us have is keeping it out of our houses. The possibility that we could destroy something that is so prolific, or even more inconceivable, run out of it, is beyond our ability to imagine.

So I call upon those of great abundance to imagine. Imagine how to be responsible, how to recognize our extreme fortune. Imagine how to appreciate the blessings of water, and recognize it for what it is: nothing less than life itself. Water is not disposable, something to be bought, sold, and poisoned. It cannot be somebody else’s problem. There is no somebody else… there is only us, joined by the water that flows among and between us.

 

 

circleofblue.org documents the world water crisis in all its glory:

For more information about access to clean drinking water, check out charitywater.org:

Filed under: WorldView | Tagged: , , | Leave a Comment »

Well, That Blows

Posted on April 17, 2010 by Seonaid

Today’s post: a little more with the practical, a little less with the dilettante.

Yesterday morning was entirely consumed with attempting to rescue the greenhouse from the dying throes of winter. Despite nigh-Herculean efforts, we were not successful.

My Flat Greenhouse

However, I think we kept our cool throughout most of the situation, and I was able to remain on top of my emotions, ranging only as high as disgruntled, with a brief foray into demoralized. I went to the farmers market this morning; this is the market at which I sell my wares when I have them. I told my sad tale to my two farming friends, and the first one said, “Oh, yeah. That’s why mine is attached to my house.” The second said, “Yeah, we’ve lost three.” And when I told him that it was only staying in place while the car was parked on it, he told me that’s how they keep theirs from blowing away also. I came away feeling somewhat better, and preparing to once more tackle the greenhouse problem… after my farming partner returns from Ontario. Clearly the hoop-house is every bit the problem I expected it to be in a climate that experiences gale-force winds on a bi-weekly basis. In the meanwhile, I will plant what I can, and pick up some of the smaller jobs that have been lying about neglected.

I think the sewing machine will figure prominently in the remainder of the day. I have a pair of PJ’s that is only waiting for the sleeves to be attached, and I have to get started on some summer clothes for the girl-child. The older boy-child has kindly turned out to be the next size down from one of the other farm-kids hereabouts, which means that pants may be in our future. I am all about the hand-me-downs… except that I do like the score of a sweet pair of jeans from the thrift store. (I’m wearing a pair now.) I also have two sweaters in mid-knit, and a door to install on my studio. (exterior door with window – large garbage pick-up) The living room needs to be painted, but first needs some drywall touch-ups. I did finish reading my most recent “By Its Cover” book, so a review is in the offing. If the wind ever stops, I do need to pick up the cover from the greenhouse. And I was going to work on some query letters. Gee. I’m tired just reading that list.

Oh, well. One thing at a time.

Filed under: Family, Rural Living | Tagged: , , | Leave a Comment »

Local Buying

Posted on December 1, 2009 by Seonaid

I have been lying awake trying to solve the economic problems of the island I live on in my head. I did this all day also. This is not a new activity; I grew up in Newfoundland. I spent rather a lot of my youth on this issue.

Here’s the problem in a nutshell: Every dollar that we spend importing things needs to come from somewhere off the island. All three major industries of the area have closed down over the last 30 years, leaving call-centres and tourism as the only real sources of revenue. (The call centres are starting to close as well.) We have an abundance of land, water, wind, a deep harbour, forests, and a fair amount of skilled labour (from the previous industries). And we don’t seem to be able to get anything started. Half the people I know with university degrees (including graduate degrees) are doing volunteer work, farming, manual labour, or staying home with the kids because there’s nothing else for them to do. The major issue that faces the area is outmigration, particularly among the young, and particularly among the young and educated.

It’s so, so, so hard to say to people that are trying to just make a go of it… “Actually, part of the reason that there is no work here and your children are leaving is that you are shopping at Walmart/SuperStore/Home Depot.” It’s so, so, so hard to get anybody to listen to that. If you used to have forestry products made at home, and you start buying all your forestry products from off shore, the people who used to make them have to go somewhere else now. Contrary to what the economics textbooks tell you, they don’t just stay and think of something new to do. (They try, they really do. I’ve seen SO many retraining programs and make-work projects. I see so many people just scraping by, hoping that things will get better.) They also don’t go off to bigger and better things. These are not people that were yearning to get away; they left because they had to. We lose our community, our family connections, our sense of history, and our sense of place when we leave because we have no choice.

This isn’t a purely economic question; this is about community and connection. This is about our buying choices. But we need to look at the thing in our hand, and see the tendrils of connection that come off it, joining us to the people that handled it before us. Their life force connects to our own through the exchange. And maybe if we start to reconnect with those people, we can start making sure that some of them are people that we have looked in the eye.

Filed under: Essays and Musings, WorldView | Tagged: , , , | Leave a Comment »

The Beauty of The Beach

Posted on July 11, 2009 by Seonaid

Yesterday was the first really warm day of the summer. Since we are primarily occupied with looking after children and growing plants, we usually spend the nice days trying to get the children to help us grow plants.

Yesterday, however, we took the day off to go to the beach. It’s such a traditional summer activity, yet it has such beauty in it. This day was particularly fine, as we are fortunate enough to live within a two hour drive of Ingonish Beach which has a sandy ocean beach on one side of a rock breakwater, and a shallow sandy freshwater lake on the other side. This makes it an ideal place to go with children of different ages. The oldest can body surf with one parent while the youngest paddles in the shallows of a calm pool.

We had more small joys yesterday. We got to the beach in a new (to us) car, using half the gas of our minivan (which *I* have outgrown even if the family hasn’t… in fact, it was a compromise necessary to get us through the two years of three carseats, from which we are now blessedly freee. [sic]) My smallest son found a friend and spent the day splashing with another toddler, whose parents turned out to be interesting enough that we exchanged phone numbers. There was biology class going on courtesy of Parks Canada. We purchased our annual Parks Pass, by which we will have countless trips to the National Park, plus the Fortress of Louisbourg. (If you live in Canada, or just vacation here, this is one of the best deals going. $165 for the year for unlimited use of all the National Parks and Historic Sites. This gives us our summers. Sweet.)

I am singing the songs of summer (literally).

Wishing you small joys!

Filed under: Family, WorldView | Tagged: , , | Leave a Comment »

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 271 other followers