Temperament

I’m not sure that I have a farmers’ temperament. I’m not sure that I actually know what it is, insofar as I’ve not known any real farmers since I was a teenager, and even then I just knew them in passing—someone’s dad. Reading novels gives me the idea that they are patient, enduring, adaptable, and accepting because their occupation is uncontrolled by them and uncontrollable by them. It usually rains after you plant seeds, but some years you plant the seeds, they germinate, and then you have a flood and they’re all washed away. Or there is no rain and they all dry up and blow away. I grew up in a high desert where there wasn’t much water and where winter wheat was the main crop. If you were going to grow something else, you had to irrigate. And that was before those big irrigation pipes that make the crop circles you see when you fly over southern Idaho, Utah, and parts of Colorado.

As a result, I’m an unlikely farmer in the Northwest where there is essentially too much rain and too little sun for my kind of crop farming. Mostly, I don’t do much growing of edibles because our schedule is too variable for me to take care of them. But when we bought the house next door, it came with a full farm—or maybe farmette: 3 apple trees, 3 plum trees, 2 pear trees, a huge cherry tree, 1 walnut tree, 1 fig tree, a grape vine, and a pecan tree. The last three don’t do anything reliably, but the apples, plums, cherries and pears provide us with a lot of fruit most years.

This year, though, I’m a little concerned and thinking about patience, endurance, and acceptance. Normally, the cherry tree starts first, blooming in the second or third week of April, quickly followed by the plums, and then the pears and finally the apples. There’s some overlap, but the entire process usually ends by mid-May. And with that length of time, there's bound to be at least one of the crops that gets terrific weather when it needs the bees. This year, though, it all happened at once, but not until the first week of May. And now, the cherry is already finished and the apples are going to be getting to that point within the week.

Fortunately, it started with sun, but by the time every tree was in full flower, it started raining, it got cold, and there was no sign of a bee for four days at least. It’s still too early to tell whether there was any pollination, but the cherries don’t look too promising. Here’s where I demonstrate my patience. By next week, I suspect I will be working on acceptance. And by August I’ll be full into endurance and looking to neighbors with different varieties who had different conditions than we did and thus have some fruit to share.

Nevertheless, a cherry tree in bloom, an apple tree in bloom, a pear tree , a plum tree in bloom: very close to being as much as you can reasonably ask for from a plant. How's that for adaptability?

Fear Not!

Yesterday, I received an email from an old California friend who moved to Whidbey Island about six months ago. We’ve been trying to find a time to go visit her, but it’s been hard what with one scheduled event or another. She writes that they will be in residence in December unless they have called a moving van by then, responding to their neighbors’ warnings of fearful power blackouts and gray skies and relentless rain. I doubt if she is actually thinking that there will be any call to the moving company or is fearful of gray skies or rain because she is a stalwart trouper, but I think that is how people feel that city people are likely to respond to life in the rural (or sort of rural) northwest. It is true that there are regular power outages, it is true that the skies are really gray in these dark months, it is true that it rains a lot (this morning, for example, when it was hard to believe that anything but staying in one’s pajamas, in one’s bed, in one’s bedroom, with one's engaging novel ought to be happening, never mind those scheduled events on one’s calendar.

Still, you can buy a generator if you are too worried about losing power; and you can put up some cheerful LED light strings and buy sunlight-corrected light bulbs to fend off the gray days, and you can buy a nice raincoat or a sturdy umbrella for the rainy days. It’s not like living in, say, Minnesota in the winter after all. It’s not dangerous. Hardly anyone I know has a generator, when it comes to the fact. A friend who lives on Salt Spring Island just bought one because there, he says, they have periods of a week without electricity, and if it’s going to be a week, you are going to lose whatever is in the freezer. That’s a reason not to live on Salt Spring Island, maybe, but it’s not a reason not to live on the mainland, where the power, at least in my 16 years up here, has never been off more than 48 hours, which a refrigerator/freezer can manage if you are not opening it all the time. In neither Point Roberts nor on the Sunshine Coast are we in danger of flooding from excess rain because everything runs very quickly into the ground, down the ditches, and into the ocean. We don’t have local rivers that overflow. (Flooding can (and does) happen from the ocean, of course, if the tides are high and the wind is strong and from the wrong direction, but even that is pretty much restricted to houses proximate to the beach. And that’s a reason not to live too close to the beach, I guess.)

Overall, however, there’s not much to worry about, or at least not much that is within one’s control (as contrasted with, say, earthquakes). I don’t know what will be the effect on the northwest if the Big Three auto companies fold, but I don’t suppose that any of us has much to say about that outcome. But this is life in the time of fear, which has become the U.S. brand; but it’s also life in the time of a big belief in personal control of one’s life. We’d be better off it were Life in the Time of Stoicism. The Stoics thought that the goal of life was to live in agreement with nature. I’m pretty sure that would include gray skies, lots of rain, and power outages. Californians! City People! Be Not Afraid!

Little Dark Days

Wednesday was the coldest June 5th in historical records (which means that the lowest temperature for every other June 5th was higher than this June 5's highest temperature) here in the northwest corner. For the third time, we have un-turned off the pilot light. At least one can say that hope springs eternal. Not only has it been unusually cold, but it has also been very cloudy and dark and it has rained almost steadily from Monday evening until Thursday noon.

It has not been an easy three days because we have just gotten to the point where we are thinking that warm weather is our natural right. But the sun came out today in the late afternoon, many large slugs were trying to find darker corners to hatch new plots and new slugs, and the people are once again looking forward to a good day.

In the meantime, if you can find the June 9/16 New Yorker, read Haruki Murakami's wondrous essay on how he became a novelist and how he became a long distance runner (unfortunately, not available on the web). It showed me with absolute clarity why it was that I didn't become a novelist, didn't become a long distance runner. I wish I'd read it when I was 16.