by Brian Brett
It’s magic time.
I guess this sounds as if I often wander naked in the dark. I don’t. However, there are always those inevitable moments when the world goes sideways. We have to respect them as well in this long day of storytelling. Everything in moderation, including moderation. I still can’t see the creature in the silver pouring over the nettle patch by the field, but the sheep are unafraid and have moved up to the soft, shaded grass by the fence. A branch cracks and I sight him. He’s enormous. The big buck that’s been lurking in the woods behind the farm. Last year he startled Sharon and me, leaping out of the salal and across the trail in front of us.
Big-chested with a wide, long rack, uneven, four points on one side, five on the other. Maybe the largest buck I’ve seen on this island of small deer. He skips over the rail fence with the ease of a teenager hopping a mud puddle. I can’t cross the nettles because I’m only wearing my sandals, so I continue down the road and slip through the gate to the lower pasture and back toward the field, where he’s mingled with the sheep, browsing. The animals shine like platinum in the moonlight. I come around the bigleaf maple until I face him barely ten feet away. He’s unconcerned. And I realize with some sadness that he’s joined the herd of deer being fed by my neighbour. This has made him lose his fear of people. Dangerous.
The sheep recognize me and continue eating. I can tell he’s deciding whether to run; then he returns to grazing the lush, early-summer grass, yet keeping his eye on me. I back away. Tonight the field is his.
By now, Sharon will be wondering why I haven’t come for my tea, but it’s warm outside and the moon is upon me in the pasture beside the big, linked ponds, and I feel thrilled. I am being washed clean by the moonlight, all my senses alive, the breeze on my skin, the bats like fluttering shadows, the ripping of the grass by the sheep. I’m flooded with the happiness of knowing that I am here, that I don’t own any of this. I am merely present, linked into the absurd chain that goes back to Gautama delivering his fire sermon to a thousand monks at Gaya Head, and further . . .
O my priests, everything is on fire. And with what is everything on fire?
The eye is on fire, form is on fire, awareness is on fire, the eye’s glance is on fire. Also everything that is pleasant or painful or unpleasant or painless to the glance. They are aflame with what? They are on fire with the fire of passion, the fire of hatred, the fire of delusions. I say the mind is on fire with birth, with age, with death, sorrow, weeping, pain, grief, and despair.
The ear is on fire. Sound is on fire. The nose is on fire. Smells are on fire. The tongue is on fire. Flavours are on fire. The body is on fire. Touch is on fire.
Yes! And I guess this is why I could never be a true Buddhist. I love the fire too much that Gautama warns us against. Like Camus, I can only adore the absurd in all its glory—the high-speed run to the inevitable grave—performing the living dance of death—celebrating the river, diving in it, diverting it, flowing in it, lusting naked with my companions in the current. Celebration and struggle. In quantum physics, effect can occur before cause. Time and events are the tangle our minds live within—this eighteen-year-long day at Trauma Farm that stretches back to Babylon and into the future. This is our only victory. The only way I’ve been able to move beyond my desires and distractions is by being immersed fully in the world—by paying attention.
IN On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin writes of the richness around us and how it all arrived.
It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us . . . There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
We go through long periods of self-hypnosis, sandwiched between sublime incidents of attention (awareness) and stupid, boring labours. But existence is a surprise, the real questions we haven’t figured out, so that suggests to me we should learn to treat our planet gently. According to the Dakota proverb, probably first spoken by Black Elk, “We shall be known by the tracks we leave behind.” That said, it’s clear factory farming is dangerous, but it has fed many people economically. We have to learn how to harness it, and reduce our addiction to its defiled products. Traditional farming is good, but it’s caused mayhem as well. We need to find a balance. I don’t know if that’s possible.
Meanwhile, eat your local vegetables and fruits and take long walks every day. After that, everything becomes dicey, especially when we start making laws. It’s difficult not to be ironic if we consider our history of solutions.
I ARRIVE IN THE night with fewer answers than when I began. The most I have learned is that living in these moments, close to the land, is good, and behaving with as much common decency as I can muster is also good. The Tetlit Gwich’in tribe have no word for wilderness. That’s because it was not out there for them until recent years. They were living inside the wilderness. You can know an ecology only if you are inside it. I question all authority and the twisted by-products of reductionist logic, and I rise on a summer morning to the haunting song of a thrush, live with the birds of the day, and sleep to the random vocalizations of the night.
The plaintive call of the killdeer erupts again from the field. She’s on her nest. I almost stepped on it the other day while rounding up the sheep. The male had been doing his broken-wing trick a few minutes earlier, near the pond, but I’d ignored him. The nest is four speckled eggs in a pasture. Hidden in plain sight. They make it most of the time. We’ve seen a few hatches. According to Audubon, people consider the killdeer “a noisy bird and restless,” but I’ve always found it beautiful, and its cry in the night is haunting. A companion to the frog chorus of spring. It’s a noise against the silence of fate.
I’M OUT WANDERING AGAIN, in the blue warmth of a night silvered by the moon—I am only another maggot laughing inside the ecstasy of my community. The high cedars are trembling in the breeze. Ajax shouts me out from his perch in the maple, while Sharon has drunk her tea and gone to bed. I leave this story as I entered it. Confused and enthralled—in the world—naked again, and still alive. I look around me in the dark and I know it’s a joke, but it’s a good joke. I think I’m home, living on the land. We’re in this together—the wild, the domestic, the wormy, the laughing ones and the weepers, black dogs and Buddhas, all of us divine in our diversity—our orgiastic, gorgeous confusion— all of us dancing in the stream of everything.
SELECTED
REFERENCES
ALTHOUGH A LIFETIME of reading went into Trauma Farm, the books listed here were most essential to its creation. They are also recommended reading. Several of the books quoted in the text are not included, such as the epic treatises of Darwin (along with a great number of reference books and Internet sources), because they don’t make good general reading, although I couldn’t resist including a couple of “difficult” classics in this list. The editions cited are the ones I used, and they are often not first editions. I listed subtitles only where I thought them relevant to understanding the nature of the book, and I have tried to keep to the spirit of Trauma Farm with the format of this unorthodox bibliography.
Edward Abbey. Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness. New York: Ballantine, 1985. A lyric, raucous collection of essays by the naturally rebellious naturalist and author of the original American eco-terrorist novel, The Monkey Wrench Gang.
Wendell Berry. The Unsettling of America. San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1997. One of his many books about rural life. A poet and philosopher of the land, Wendell Berry was among the first and b
est at warning us about the destruction of the rural world and its glories.
Kathleen Norris Brenzel, ed. The Western Garden Book. Menlo Park, CA: Sunset, 2001. The editor calls this “the ultimate guide to Western gardening.” She might be right. A comprehensive list of nursery plants and their requirements that can also be useful to gardeners in North America and England.
Albert Camus. The Myth of Sisyphus. New York: Vintage International, 1983. An adventure into the absurdity of life. Camus was an original-thinking explorer of meaning as well as social behaviour and ethics (especially in The Rebel and Resistance, Rebellion, and Death).
Rachel Carson. Silent Spring. New York: Fawcett Crest, 1964. The book that alerted North America to the dangers of pesticides.
Rosalind Creasey. Cooking from the Garden: Creative Gardening &Contemporary Cuisine. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1988. Pricey but essential for gourmands of the garden.
Christopher Dewdney. Acquainted with the Night. Toronto: HarperCollins Canada, 2004. The joy of darkness.
Jared Diamond. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. New York: Viking, 2005. A recent wordy but impressive examination of the dangers facing human cultural evolution. The chapter on the extinction of the Greenland farming communities is fabulous.
Annie Dillard. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. New York: Harper’s Magazine Press, 1975. A luminous, nearly precious naturalist observes the world around her. A lyrical updating of Walden.
Loren Eiseley. The Immense Journey, The Star Thrower, The Night Country, All the Strange Hours. Any of his books is a poetic adventure. Science meets literature. A “wood child” whose haunted writings are venerated by naturalists worldwide.
Carla Emery. The Encyclopedia of Country Living. Seattle: Sasquatch, 1994. An insanely inclusive ongoing book that started out as how-to newsletters sold at craft fairs in 1970 and a twelve-page table of contents, and ended only with Emery’s death in 2005. A quirky, massive effort, it got very little wrong during a lifetime of compiling traditional knowledge. If you are going to be left alone with one book while maintaining a farm, this is that book.
Ron L. England. Growing Great Garlic: The Definitive Guide for Organic Gardeners and Small Farmers. Okanogan, wa : Filaree Productions, 1991. This book is pretty well what it says it is. For the true garlic fetishist.
Jean-Henri Fabre. The Insect World of J. Henri Fabre. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1949. Everything you wanted to know about dung beetles and more. A collection of essays by the prolific and eloquent nineteenth-century god of entomologists.
M.F.K. Fisher. The Art of Eating. New York: Macmillan, 1990. The high priestess of cookbook writers, a great cook, stylist, and eccentric. Five of her most noted books collected in one volume.
Wayne Grady. Bringing Back the Dodo. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2007. Or just about any of his other books. The former editor of Harrowsmith in its glory days, Grady is a hard-working, no-nonsense naturalist who is always interesting. Graham Harvey. We Want Real Food: Why Our Food Is Deficient in Minerals and Nutrients—and What We Can Do about It. London: Constable, 2006. Sometimes simplistic yet substantial exploration of the effects industrialized farming is having on food and the ecology.
Bernd Heinrich. Mind of the Raven. New York: HarperCollins, 1999. The mind that explores the mind of the raven is also fascinating.
Hesiod and Theognis. London: Penguin Classic, 1976. Hesiod’s eighth-century bc poem Works and Days is the earliest writing on farming I’ve encountered. Most people today would consider his vision of small farming terrifying and unacceptable, but it has its moments of common sense.
Lewis Hyde. The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property. New York: Vintage, 1983. My copy was given to me by a friend. It’s a real gift.
Daniel Imhoff and Jo Ann Baumgartner, eds. Farming and the Fate of Wild Nature: Essays in Conservation-Based Agriculture. Berkeley: University of California Press, Watershed Media, 2006. A fine collection of essays.
Verlyn Klinkenborg. The Rural Life. Boston: Back Bay Books, 2002. He’s also written the lovely Making Hay and other memoirs. According to a review in the New York Times this book is “luminous . . . a brilliant book.” The review is correct.
Brewster Kneen. Farmageddon: Food and the Culture of Biotechnology. Gabriola Island, B.C.: New Society, 1999. A well-wrought rant against the green revolution and globalized farming and its technology.
Aldo Leopold. A Sand County Almanac. New York: Ballantine, 1971. “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” The master naturalist and his greatest work. This is the book where he first observed how the removal of a keystone species can wreak havoc on the entire ecosystem in what’s now known as a trophic cascade.
John A. Livingston. Rogue Primate: An Exploration of Human Domestication. Toronto: Key Porter, 1994. Chilling thoughts from an incisive thinker.
William Bryant Logan. Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth. New York: Riverhead, 1995. An enchanting exploration of soil.
Barry Lopez. Of Wolves and Men. New York: Scribner, 1978. A book that is informative not only about wolves but about our relationship with the “wild.”
Konrad Z. Lorenz. King Solomon’s Ring. New York: Mentor, 1991. Animal behaviour innovatively examined.
Richard A. Nelson. Heart and Blood: Living with Deer in America. New York: Random House, 1998. By the author of the much-admired The Island Within. This landmark study is the definitive book on how the deer plague is remaking vast swaths of the North American environment.
Andrew Nikiforuk. Pandemonium: Bird Flu, Mad Cow Disease, and Other Biological Plagues of the 21st Century. Toronto: Viking Canada, 2006. Nikiforuk is a penetrating researcher into environmental issues.
Raj Patel. Stuffed and Starved: Markets, Power and the Hidden Battle for the World’s Food System. Toronto: HarperCollins Canada, 2007. For those who like their agriculture buttered with statistics. An ominous picture of food economics and market manipulation.
Angelo Pellegrini. The Unprejudiced Palate. New York: Macmillan, 1984. A deliciously prejudiced and opinionated memoir about growing up with real (though scant) food, and then relearning the art of its preparation.
Michael Pollan. The Omnivore’s Dilemma. New York: Penguin, 2006. A classic work on the modern diet. His In Defence of Food is also a must-read.
Irma S. Rombauer (with Marion Rombauer Becker). Joy of Cooking .New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964. After my first copy fell apart I practically had to fight three people off to buy this eclectic, supremely sensible collection of traditional recipes at a garage sale. The 1975 edition is reputedly the best. The New Age Heart Smart “professional” revision of 1997 by hired authors is a notorious disaster in book publishing. I believe the newest edition returns to many of the traditional recipes and original voice of Rombauer.
Candace Savage. Curious by Nature. Vancouver: Greystone, 2005. A charming collection of naturalist essays by one of Canada’s hardest-working environmental writers.
Eric Schlosser. Fast Food Nation. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001. A devastating book about the fast-food industry and the monopolistic monstrousness of the new American food empires. Required reading (along with Michael Pollan) for those who care about what they eat and what their children eat.
E.F. Schumacher. Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered. New York: Harper & Row, 1975. A groundbreaking book on reverse thinking.
John Seymour. The Self-Sufficient Gardener. Garden City, ny : Dolphin, 1980. The best book on wide deep-bed gardening. Straight-talking, succinct, common-sense gardening, and highly recommended.
Scott Slovic. Seeking Awareness in American Nature Writing. Salt Lake City: University of Utah, 1982. Thoreau. Dillard. Abbey. Berry. Lopez. A collection of essays on five great American naturalists.
Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon. The 100-Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating. Toronto: Random House Canada, 2007. The rallying cry for the champions of local food.
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Steve Solomon. Organic Gardening West of the Cascades. Seattle: Pacific Search, 1981. A somewhat New Age West Coast organic text, but also full of common sense and straightforward gardening advice that would apply worldwide.
Don Stap. Birdsong. New York: Scribner, 2005. Charming. A look at birds and their songs. Packed with engrossing trivia and important information.
Robert Sullivan. Rats. New York: Bloomsbury, 2004. A fascinating obsession for the writer. Full of facts though a little too obsessive for this reader.
Jiro Takei and Marc P. Keane. Sakuteiki Visions of the Japanese Garden:A Modern Translation of Japan’s Gardening Classic. Boston: Tuttle, 2001. Includes a translation of the Sakuteiki (Records of Garden Making). Written a thousand years ago, it begins with the evocative phrase “the art of setting stones” and works its way through the garden. Only for those compulsive gardeners interested in the arcane and deep Japanese aesthetics.
Henry David Thoreau. Walden, Journals, etc. Almost everything he wrote. After young Thoreau accidentally set the local woods on fire, he made it his life’s work to understand the world around him, and did a mighty fine job of it.
