Blessing the Hands that Feed Us

by Vicki Robin

  Moving my weakened body first to Vashon Island, then to Whidbey, brought welcome solitude but unwelcome loneliness—and loneliness revealed a vulnerability I’d never faced before. Activists act. Leaders lead. Now I wasn’t the actor in my own movie. I was being “acted upon” by the cancer and by this surprising instinct to encounter myself by myself rather than merely cure myself in the midst of a supportive community.

  South Whidbey attracts people in need of quiet, healing, and transition. Its curves are feminine—arcing bays, nubs of hills, round towers of gray clouds that all give the feeling of being swaddled, able to rest. Even back in the wild days when loggers came to turn the island’s blanket of cedars and firs into lumber to build the mainland cities, back when Jacob Anthes, Langley’s founder, grew tons of vegetables and potatoes for loggers, back when the streets of Langley were muck and mud, women literally ruled the roost. Local historians say that Langley was the first town in the country to elect an all-woman council, shortly after Congress passed the Nineteenth Amendment, giving women the right to vote. Immediately the new mayor, Miss Helen Coe, and her “clean sweep” of councilwomen began civilizing the town.

  Just over fifty years later, the town of Langley officially became a city, now inhabited by an influx of hippies as well as conservative Christians, all attracted by the cheap land and mellow way of life. One couple who met and married back then were now my landlords in my small over-the-garage apartment with views of the ragged North Cascades.

  Between the time I arrived, paltry possessions in tow, to this “quiet refuge” and the moment I asked for that pint of milk I’d only sipped support from my friends. In my first postdiagnosis year on Vashon I needed them to drive me to doctors’ appointments in Seattle. They sat with me during those two rounds of chemo, but once I was dropped off at the Vashon ferry, I was back on my own. New friends on Whidbey, when I had a second surgery, brought me meals for two weeks until I could descend the stairs of my apartment to fend for myself again. Once mobile, I did just that. Fend for myself.

  Even after my energy was back and knowledge of peak oil inspired me to start Transition Whidbey with some friends, even after joining a choir and volunteering for a couple of good causes, I was still thinking of myself as a loner.

  Until this moment of cul-de-sac neighborliness, though, I didn’t recognize the degree to which I still held myself apart here on Whidbey. I engaged in acts of community but not the fact of community. Tanya’s easy generosity pierced that protective film of separation. There was no rationale about global conditions or philosophy or morality behind the exchange. I wasn’t making something happen self-consciously or courageously. Tanya wasn’t bestowing something upon me with beneficence. We were acting as community simply because we were neighbors.

  My First Score

  At 6.30 P.M., though, you can be sure that I mounted my trusty Europa electric-assist bicycle and pedaled over the highway and through the woods to Belinda and Koren’s worn front porch, skirting their pug-faced, super-big, super-friendly dog to get my half-gallon jar of milk from the little fridge by the door. We’d made this agreement only by phone, so making this milk pickup seemed even more furtive. Rich yellow cream floated on the top, a sticky ring clinging to the jar. I hadn’t seen top cream like that since the milkman delivered to our back door when I was a child. In those days the glass bottles had a bulb on top where the cream floated so you could pour it off easily. It had been only fifty years or so between that local milkman and these milkers. Less than two generations. In that time there had been a near-tragic disassembly of our local dairies due to rising feed costs even as the price of milk was held steady. My first jug of Elsie’s milk gave a glimmer of hope that it might not be too late to restore a more local, low-tech option for dairy.

  My young friends Eric and Britt lived not far from Belinda’s, and I wanted to see how their gardens were growing. It was late and I’d be riding my bike in the dark if I didn’t crank up the throttle on my Europa and speed down the road.

  After all of our—okay, my—harebrained schemes of mortgaging ourselves to the hilt to buy a ten-acre ramshackle farm or a hundred-year-old rural church, we’d each settled into more modest and affordable places. They now shared their three-acre Maxwelton Valley property with a flower grower. I wanted to see how their garden was evolving.

  By Contrast—Eric’s Garden

  Eric’s permaculture method could not have been more different from my gardening methods carried forward from Rhinelander days. Over tough, established grass he’d laid down manure, then large sheets of cardboard, covering both with straw, and then dug evenly spaced fist-sized holes into the bed, which he filled with compost and vegetable starts. The compost let the plants get established, and by the time the roots reached the manure, it was rotted enough to feed the plant. This was not what we’d figured out in gardening kindergarten, so I wanted to see how it was working. In a word, fantastic.

  Eric plans to write a book one day about his method for growing and selling vegetables. He wants to prove that a young person who dreams of farming can, on less than five acres, support himself. When I first met Eric and Britt their dream was a demonstration and education center for sustainability practices. These beds were the beginning of the realization of the dream. I was so impressed but also dismayed. I had seen how minimalist his and Britt’s living space was. Was how they lived—home and garden—a model for more than a few courageous sustainability-as-extreme-sport people? My little one-month of minimal food miles seemed tame in comparison, but probably as extreme as I ever wanted to go.

  Eric showed me his new setup for taking food to the Tilth farmers’ market. He too had a Europa electric bike, to which he hitched a custom-fabricated trailer big enough to haul his week’s produce to sell.

  “Damn, Eric,” I said. “That is so cool. Me, I’d load up my Honda hybrid and consider myself virtuous.”

  He just smiled in that shy, endearing way that had won Britt’s heart and always melted mine. Britt came out in shorts, tank top, and sun hat to woo the ducks into their fenced compound. Between coyotes, hawks, eagles, and raccoons, people on Whidbey shelter their animals at night or lose them (as I had lost my cat Sophie several years before). Besides being literally a farmer’s wife, a role she wore gracefully if not willingly, Britt was working for the Sustainable Whidbey Coalition, a network of business and government leaders intent on greening their policies and practices. They snapped her up when she moved on from being executive director of Transition Whidbey.

  I met Britt first by phone. My friend Alan had known her in Bellingham and told me she was moving to Whidbey with her sweetheart, Eric—and that we’d love each other. So I called, and I can still remember leaning on the counter in my kitchen, looking out at the mountains and simply “rising” in love with her—her appetite for life, her entrepreneurial drive. It was like meeting a soul sister, and in the years since I’ve often thought of her as older than me.

  I knew she had a big destiny. At twenty-six she seemed like a Great Dane puppy, with doleful eyes, a wiggly body, and huge paws. If you want to know the size of the puppy you are buying, look at the size of his paws. He will grow into them. Britt has, metaphorically speaking, big paws—big work to do. But today, it was the ducks, after which she gave me a hug, and I said good-bye and bicycled home in the waning light.

  I thought about them a bit while peddling past the Long Family Farm on Ewing Road.

  I had believed in them since my first phone call with Britt even before they landed on Whidbey. But I wasn’t convinced—yet—that they could survive on a young farmer’s earnings. This troubled me, and made me want to do more research about the economics of farming. These were my friends. This was my community, and I was beginning to see glimmers of what makes local eating a tough row to hoe—so to speak.

  By the time I hit the stop sign three miles out of Langley, my bike’s electric meter was flickering between yellow and re
d. I prayed and pedaled my way up the hill, and the e-motor still whirred reassuringly all the way into the garage.

  I returned Tanya’s milk with interest and then made dinner, which included some goat chèvre from another neighbor.

  Cheesy

  I’d eaten local goat cheese before, when local goat owners would bring it to potlucks. I found it basically bland and usually went for saltier or sweeter or creamier dishes. In a world where every kind of cheese is available, I would barely label it cheese. More like ricotta, which we all know is edible only as part of goopy lasagna. Okay, so I’m a food snob, but don’t we all act as if grocery store shelves spontaneously generate ten thousand food items? Supporting ourselves in the manner to which we’ve become accustomed requires the whole global production, distribution, and sales system behemoth I’d learn more about as this diet wore on.

  Now, though, the thought of goat chèvre was completely intoxicating, so I was thrilled that a peach-perfect teenage beauty, Nina, offered a weekly half-pound tub of her special blend, topped with her trademark pansy. Nina, of course, is not her real name. Not only is dealing fresh-from-the-udder unprocessed goat milk illegal, dealing “value-added” cheese made in uncertified home kitchens is too.

  At this point I was willing to be grateful for the cheese and keep my lips buttoned about who made it. Later I would connect the dots and see another piece in the jigsaw puzzle of why local food is expensive and relatively scarce (beyond the three-beet farmers’ markets), and why local market gardeners and family farmers are battling their way into the marketplace against a tidal current of industrial food.

  I’d met Nina when she was a thin shadow trailing after her strong-minded mother, Sandra. Now she was ripening into a young woman. She and her folks, Sandra and Hal, have a little homestead out toward Clinton where Nina loves making cheese from the family’s extra goat milk.

  Nina found out about my 10-mile diet from the crackling grapevine here on South Whidbey. Whidbey is fundamentally a rural community where word of mouth is still the most efficient medium of communication. Nina, perhaps with Sandra’s prompting, stepped forward. And for the month of the experiment she chose to put a gift cardboard tub by the door each week for me to pick up.

  Hometown Cooking

  As I scooped a few teaspoons of chèvre onto my stir-fry that evening, I reflected on how the generosity being served along with the food I was eating—Tricia’s and Nina’s food, Tanya’s milk loan—gave a new meaning to home cooking. I was cooking food from my hometown as well as cooking food in my home. Not only that—these people were treating me like family.

  We don’t charge our families for dinner. We contribute to the common family good out of some blend of love and duty, but not for money. I call that our “circle of we,” those we consider our own, our kin. We are living in a time when the bonds of family are looser than ever, when children live far from parents, where our “communities” might be online, not next door, where—as Robert Putnam called this alienation in his book Bowling Alone—we now “bowl alone,” not together in leagues. We have lost a sense of community. It is a great feeling to receive care just because I am there. I relished this budding sense of belonging to others through my 10-mile experiment as I salted my meal, wishing for soy sauce but happy anyway.

  It seemed to me that in those idealized bygone eras, people shared their plenty freely. I wondered about what was now not just “the” island but my island, so after dinner I pulled out Lorna Cherry’s two-volume local history, South Whidbey and Its People. The first volume was actually typewritten double-spaced! The second was typeset but still clearly homegrown. I’d gotten them when I first arrived and read through with the curiosity of a tourist. Now I wanted to know what my people ate fifty to one hundred years ago.

  Island of Plenty

  In the first volume Lorna reports an abundance of food when the first settlers arrived: berries grew everywhere. Deer, bear, elk, wolves, squirrels, mink, otter, weasels, raccoons, beaver, rabbits, and foxes lived in the dense old-growth forests. In the open fields and along the shores, ducks, geese, grouse, and pheasants made homes. The sea too offered huge bounty—clams, crabs, mussels and clams, halibut, herring, flounder, octopi, and, of course, salmon.

  The plenty bred a spirit of generosity in the Coastal Indians who camped here in the summer. The potlatch started in the Northwest—the gifting ceremonies where the powerful could share their bounty with the poor because hoarding in a land of plenty made no sense.

  In nature, plants store but do not hoard. They grow thick roots to store sunlight. They grow storage vessels—husks and fruits and shells—to protect seeds. But in nature, hoarding throws ecosystems out of balance.

  Once, sitting next to a tree in the Amazon rainforest, I seemed to hear it tell me: “Everything in the community of life gives back to life 100 percent—except the humans. We are the species that hoards.” The novelist Daniel Quinn in his award-winning novel Ishmael calls us—the people who enter the lands of others to confiscate their resources—the “takers.” A century ago, settlers on Whidbey took these lands as their own, displacing the tribes who had roamed here, feeding on the plenty.

  Lorna’s second volume about Whidbey documents these years of growth and development. South Whidbey, where I live, had thinner, rocky soil. To this day gardeners pull out rocks along with weeds year in and year out as ever more of the glacial till flows to the surface. Farther north, though, where the island is nipped in as if by a corset and the land lies low, farmland with topsoil several feet deep drew the early settlers to edge out the natives (with some violence on both sides) to grow wheat. No wonder that in 1919 Whidbey captured first, second, and third prizes in the national wheat contest in Philadelphia. Whidbey had the world record—117.5 bushels of wheat per acre! Island County promoted itself to new settlers with a pamphlet called Whidbey Island, World Beater—because of our wheat. In the late 1930s an article in the Whidbey Record proclaimed, “Whidbey Is the Best Farm Locality In the World; Climate, Soil, Markets, Best Suited For Agriculture.”

  In the century between then and now Whidbey had gone through similar transformations to those across the United States—a slow shift from rural to urban, from homegrown to industrial-grown, and from large families to small to many choosing the single life. The “World Beater” title would sooner go to a big box store than a wheat crop.

  A century ago 66 percent of all households in the United States had more than five people.1 In 1930, 25 percent of the U.S. population lived on 6 million family farms.2 Farming families were a built-in circle of we. Sharing was the unquestioned norm. When did we change? Why do nearly a third of us now live alone in tight little circles of me, myself, and I?

  As noted earlier, some say that the longest journey in the world is the soul’s twelve-inch migration from head to heart. Culturally I believe the long walk to new patterns of sanity, security, safety, wealth, and happiness will be on a road called “from me to we.” In the years ahead it will be natural for ever more of us to metaphorically put on our robes and slippers and trot across the cul-de-sac from our “single person living alone” status and join at least with neighbors, if not with housemates, husbands, or entire blended families.

  Just a Bite Before Bed—Not

  It was late by then. I had read and mused for several hours and was ready for bed. More like ready for one more eating hurdle. The bedtime snack. Or, more honestly put: the bedtime minigorge. Ask me my favorite position and I’d have to say, “Facing an open fridge in the dead of night, spoon in hand.”

  Grrr. The NPD (formerly National Purchase Diary) Consumer Research Group issued a report in 2008 called Snacking in America.3 In it they called snacking “the fourth meal of the day.” For my other three meals in the days ahead I was able to eat frittatas in the morning, salads at noon, and stir-fries at night and wax poetic or at least self-congratulatory about the experience. Now I was facing despair and deprivat
ion.

  How could I shovel any of this food—grown, and given with love—into my mouth like a pacifier? The desire for crunch, for volume, for bending my elbow in service to my mouth, met the commitment to an experiment in hyperlocal eating. Overeating isn’t just abusing my body. Now it is abusing my farmers. Wandering Tricia’s garden, watching her pull stray weeds and tuck tomato vines back into their wire supports, you can’t think of her food as merely fodder for her bank account. It is her love making vegetables sweet. And I’m going to eat all the snap peas in a five-minute orgy of chewing? I don’t think so.

  The only parts of me that went to bed satisfied that night were my virtue and wisdom. I lay down with my grrring mind and growling stomach flouncing around petulantly and soothed them with “It’s only a month.”

  That world-beater wheat was a century in the past. Any grain, in fact, was a month in the future, since it all grew up there on the prairie, twenty-five miles as the crow flies from my mouth. I felt like a poor kid on a December night—her face pressed against the plate-glass display window at FAO Schwarz with the finest toys in New York inches away, solidly out of reach.

  What’s Local

  That Saturday I went to the Bayview farmers’ market to see what else I might find—whether farmers to chat with or 10-mile treats.

  Like so many farmers’ markets, the Bayview one sprouts each Saturday like mushrooms after rain—a full-blown festival of food, crafts, and music in a parking lot. Ours is between the old Bayview Community Hall and the old Cash Store, renovated to a high-sustainability standard to house shops, offices, and a restaurant. It’s been hallowed community ground for a century.

  There you’ll find Dorcas and her son James selling spicy African food and vegetables, plus there’s often kettle corn, barbecue, and tastes of cheese from Vicky Brown, bread from Tree Top Bakers, and a paper cup with a bit of brown rice topped with Mr. Mobley’s irresistible secret-recipe sauce, served by Neal Mobley himself. You can get fresh-cut flowers, fresh-spun yarn, and to-die-for pies. Oh, and lots of vegetables from island farms.