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Showing posts with label sheep. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sheep. Show all posts

Monday, May 9, 2016

Please Mind Your Manners in the Lake District


Sheepdog in her dreams


The farms and the flocks endure, bigger than the life of a single person. We are born, live our working lives, and die, passing like the oak leaves that blow across our land in the winter. We are each tiny parts of something enduring, something that feels solid, real, and true. Our farming way of life has roots deeper than five thousand years into the soil of this landscape. - James Rebanks, The Shepherd’s Life (NY: Flatiron Books, 2015)

The Shepherd’s Life tells about sheep-farming in the Lake District of England season by season. The reader encounters details and arcane terminology for sheep that are a thousand or more years old. Dogs, too, as should go without saying – smart little border collies, dogs that can make all the difference between a farmer’s success and failure when it comes to gathering the sheep from the fells.

Think you’re not interested in farming? Read on.

Rebanks the farmer and shepherd is a beautiful writer, and whatever subject such a writer chooses is worth reading. My farmer friends (and those, like me, with an inner farmer) will learn from and love this book, but so will my poet friends, world-traveler friends, and anyone curious about the world who appreciates good stories well told. 

Those of us who live, as the author does, in a vacation paradise can draw more particular lessons from the book, because what Rebanks lays before the reader is an entire way of life. This part of England, he tells us, was unknown to the outside world until “discovered” by poets and hikers and made famous by Wordsworth, Thomas West, Beatrix Potter, and Alfred Wainwright. After these people came and fell in love with the region, they told others about it. The Lake District became a famous holiday destination. Outsiders came to buy vacation homes, and these outsiders loved the Lake District in their own way and wanted to “preserve” its wild areas but did not always appreciate livestock on the commons.

Sound familiar?

As a farm boy who had never thought of his home territory “as a place of books or for leisure,” Rebanks one day sat high on a fell neighboring his own family’s land with a Wainwright guide in his hands,
...looking down at the landscape farmed by my father’s friends, and cross-checking it against the guide. It struck me powerfully that there was scarcely a trace of any of the things we cared about in what Wainwright had written. Apart from the odd dot on the map for a farm or a wall, none of our world was in those pages. I am wondering whether the people on that mountain see the working side of that landscape, and whether it matters. In my bones I feel it does matter. That seeing, understanding, and respecting people in their own landscape is crucial to their culture and way of life being valued and sustained. What you don’t see, you don’t care about. 
 It is a curious thing to slowly discover that your landscape is beloved of other people. It is even more curious, and a little unsettling, when you discover by stages that you as a native are not really part of the story and meaning they attach to that place. There are never any tourists here when it is raining sideways or showing in winter, so it is tempting to see it as a fair-weather love. Our relationship with the landscape is about being there through it all. To me the difference is like the distinction between what you felt for a pretty girl you knew in your youth, and the love you feel for your wife after many years of marriage. Most unsettling was the discovery that the people who thought about this place in this way outnumbered us by many hundreds to one. I found that threatening to our very existence....
That’s a lengthy quotation, but I didn’t feel I could cut it any shorter, because it speaks of the shepherd’s life in all its aspects: the farm families, their committed attachment to the place and way of life, the invisibility of that way of life to holiday-makers, and the feeling that the newer kind of love threatens the survival of the older.

Readying Leelanau fields

I am not a farmer, as you know. (Farming is yet another youthful dream path, like music, that my life did not take.) People say, in the Lake District, that it takes three generations to make someone a local. Well, at that rate, I can hardly even call myself American. One of my grandfathers was born in Ireland! My mother was born in California, father in Ohio, and I was born South Dakota, growing up (insofar as I ever did) in Illinois, coming to make a home Michigan only in 1967.

A recent meeting of the village planning commission grew tense when an audience member pointed accusingly to “newcomer” faces on the board, prompting several of those “newcomers” to defend themselves with statements of how many years they’d been “coming up here” (i.e., on vacation or for summers) and how many years they had now lived in Northport fulltime. Native American people make wry faces over such discussions, as well as the common statement, “In America, we’re all immigrants.” I had a customer once in my bookstore looking for a book about “local Indians” but not, she specified, modern-day Indians. She wanted anthropology, history, legend, not current real life.

Who counts? Who is visible? Whose lives and ways of life matter? 

More than a few locals here in Leelanau County sport bumper stickers that read, “My home is your vacation.” (I think that’s how it goes. I always felt it would be punchier as “Your vacation is my home,” but we all get the point.) I remember a t-shirt from a couple decades back that warned, “Don’t mess with me – I’m a local!”

Bees at work in Leelanau orchard

I live here, but there have been a few winters (we can’t afford to do it every year) when my husband and I have fled to an easier clime. A couple of my farmer friends themselves (one a fourth-generation local) are world travelers. And here’s what I want to say. If we travel  at all – any of us -- wherever we travel (unless it’s to Antarctica, the only continent on earth home to no historical or traditional human culture) we will be visiting someone else’s home. And if we move to make a home in a new place, we’re going to live where other people had lives before we got there.

When the irate local at the meeting called newcomers on the commission “an invasive species, like star thistle,” I touched him gently on the arm (he’s a friend) and said, “That’s me, too. I didn’t grow up here.” “No,” he said earnestly, “you can be a transplant without being an invasive species.” His distinction, as I understand it, is between newcomers who try to fit in and those who try to take over. Like the shepherd in the Lake District, he feels his existence threatened. But those he perceives as a threat felt threatened by his anger and became defensive in their turn. They feel they are helping the local community -- bringing it "up to speed," into the modern world.

Must everyone, everywhere, be goaded into a faster and faster way of life – everything high-tech, “branded,” and magazine-slick in appearance – or shoved off to the side of the road?

It’s a touchy subject.

Not only in England’s Lake District, but in our own country, from Hawaii to Alaska and in all the forty-eight contiguous continental states, everyone’s vacation – or new home – or chosen retirement community – was already someone else’s home. Those who can afford periods (or lives) of leisure bump up against those working for a living. Because wherever you go, there will be people working, or life there would not be possible!

“Respect people in their own landscape.”

That sounds to me like nothing more than a particular application of the Golden Rule. If we think of it that way, it’s pretty easy to understand, isn’t it?

Beech buds in Leelanau woods
Well, I’ve barely touched on the wealth to be found in The Shepherd’s Life -- have only focused here on one of its many topics. Fathers and sons is another major theme. Economic vicissitudes and cycles. Livestock breeding. Schooling as preparation for life – or not. Oxford University. Town, gown, and farm. There’s plenty here for every reader’s interests. After all, the best memoirs present life much as do the best novels – in its particularity and its universality, through personalities never before encountered and yet familiar in many aspects, showing a way of life not experienced by the reader but shared by the writer. And this is one of those best.

I do want to say, lest you be put off by a shepherd’s resentment of invading writers, that James Rebanks came to an appreciation of Wordsworth and others, the more he learned of their appreciation for his way of life. His favorite, not surprisingly, was Mrs. Heelis, who also bred and showed sheep from her Lake District farms. You know Mrs. Heelis by her other name: Beatrix Potter.





Monday, February 1, 2016

The West Continues to Tug at My Sleeve


Arizona neighbors


I have two books to share today, but first I’ll be taking a brief memory trip. By this time last winter, David and Sarah and I were in the high desert of southeast Arizona, bedding down in a small cabin in a ghost town, with mountains on all sides, and as I told David the other day, I think about it more than he would ever guess.

“What do you miss most about it?” he asked curiously. He never fell in love with the area the way I did. 

That kind of question, though, is almost impossible to answer! It’s like asking what you love most about someone you love: features and qualities of a person or place are not discrete building blocks, not elements at all. Everything goes together. But it seemed a worthwhile question to try to answer, so I thought a while and then said, “Maybe the light. The way the sun shone almost every day and the cabin was so bright and full of light.” 

Michigan winter

Continually overcast winter skies in Michigan are much harder to bear than snow and cold, although with the beginning of February our days are already significantly longer, and, I say happily (on a good morning), “Spring is only two months away!” Here at home, our beloved old farmhouse is divided into small rooms in the way people built in the old days in northern Michigan. Also, the gracious, windowed front porch, where we spend so many evenings in other seasons but which is unheated in winter, forms an insulating barrier along the front of the house, as does the woodshed in back, meaning that our central room, the one where we do most of our winter living, has no exterior walls and is thus protected from cold winter winds. Evening coziness is the room’s strong suit. During the day, however, it is almost as dark as tiny-windowed Basque stone farmhouse in the Pyrenees.

Contrast that with --

Dos Cabezas sunrise


Light comes in!
The ghost town cabin in the high desert was basically one large room, with uninsulated plywood walls and lots of windows. I was up every morning before or as the sun’s first light broke over the mountains to the east, and as the morning progressed I moved between my writing table and the cabin windows, with pleasure and satisfaction at the routine, first lost in working and then called to adjust, once more, the slant of the blinds. The idea was to close them against the night cold of the desert when darkness fell in the evening, open them slightly for the first morning light, open fully once the sun’s warmth became available, and then, later, angle them half-closed again to keep the cabin air from becoming uncomfortably hot. The regularity of light and darkness governed the hours of the days and nights.

I could go on at this point and start listing other things I miss, but my main point at present is only that the desert and mountains carved a place for themselves in my heart, so now I read books set in the West with greater interest and feel a personal sympathy that landscape and culture did not call forth for me before our time there.

One heart-rending book I finished reading last week was Dead in Their Tracks: Crossing America’s Desert Borderlands in the New Era, by John Annerino, and I wish I’d known about this book when Trinity was choosing to read on the subject of migrant workers from Mexico. The author’s research went further into the dangerous experience of border crossing than anything else I know or can imagine. At one time he and the four Mexican immigrant workers he was accompanying on their desperate bid to find work were out of water and facing death. His book, in fact, documents as many as possible of the lives that have been lost over the years in this dangerous crossing.

Art at border crossing
Annerino pursued his story mostly in northern Sonora, Mexico, and southwest Arizona, U.S. My little cow town in southeast Arizona, Willcox, was mentioned only two or three times in passing, Dos Cabezas (the ghost town) not at all. The low “killing fields” desert of saguaro is not the high desert of cows. Still, my single experience of being overcome by sun and heat in the Dragoon Mountains -- the part of the hiking story that I left out of my online account -- gave me some small sense of what those crossing the desert must encounter.

(One question: everyone stresses water, but no one, in either movies or books about la frontera, seems to mention electrolytes. I had plenty of water on my hike with a friend in the mountains – water, food, sunshade, sunblock – but it took me many months later, in conversation with someone who has spent years in Africa, to realize that as perspiration and breathing wicked moisture from my body, I was also losing salt and that water alone was doing nothing to replace the salt. I think, in fact, that the more water I drank, the faster I was washing out and depleting my electrolytes, because gulp as I might, I kept having spells of dizziness when my entire field of vision became nothing but buzzing light, and I had to sit down to keep from falling. Not many times in my life have I felt life’s fragility so keenly. So what about salt tablets? Does anyone carry them in the desert? If not, how do they manage without them? If so, why are they never mentioned?)

My head is spinning, my body is convulsing with chills and nausea, and the ground is heaving at me in dizzying waves of sand and rock when Marcelino first sees Interstate 8: “Mira! La carretera!” (Look! The highway!)
Some would fault -- have, I’m sure, faulted -- Annerino for lack of journalistic objectivity, but I have no criticism of his book on that count. Here is a writer who walked way more than “a mile” in the shoes of his subjects – and walked with them for miles, too. Is an objective account of such an experience possible? Where is another journalist who has had the guts even to undertake such an experience, let alone attempt to write about it dispassionately? Besides, any reader is free to dismiss or skim over the writer’s pleadings on behalf his subjects, and still the bare, unadorned, hard facts remain, facts that must give rise to urgent questions demanding answers.

If you are an American, whatever your views on immigration and border control, you should read this book.

My only disappointment with this book was technical, in that the copyediting left a lot to be desired. For that I do not fault the author, however, but the publisher, the University of Arizona Press. The editing buck always stops with the publisher, as I see it. So what gives here? I expect any book from a university press to have regularity of pronouns and agreement between nouns and verbs. I do not expect to find infelicitous, badly chosen adjectives or confusing syntax. When my inner editor has to work as hard as it did with this book, more than one someone has seriously fallen down on the job.

I’ll zero in on one very specific criticism, too. With any obscure technical jargon or regional idiom, i.e., in this book, “cutting sign” -- a phrase that appears as early as the introduction and repeatedly through the book, sometimes as frequently as two or three times on a single page -- I expect the first instance to be accompanied by a definition for the uninitiated reader. In context, we gradually figure out that “cutting sign” has something to do with tracking, but is it different from tracking or just another way of saying the same thing? If different, in what way? Informing and being mysterious are mutually incompatible goals.

Still, read the book. Read the book. Read the book! Too many people with strongly held and very loud opinions about the border know nothing of its reality in the lives of desperate men, women, and children.

From the borderland, my reading next took me northward to Nevada. Sweet Promised Land, by Robert Laxalt, first published in 1957, is now considered a classic of the American West. Where Dead in Their Tracks informs readers about the present and challenges them to envision a better future, Sweet Promised Land looks backward to the rough frontier days of Nevada in the early 20th century, open range, cattlemen vs. sheepmen, towns not yet come into their own, and immigrants who came primarily to make money, perhaps also to learn English, with always the dream of returning home to their native European villages as self-made American success stories.

Such is the time and setting of Sweet Promised Land, but that description tells you nothing of the reading experience. Part memoir, part biography, with much necessary history woven in, it is a book that rises above genre, but not with fireworks or the least pretension. A small book, only 158 pages, it begins modestly and proceeds quietly. You take it up with mild curiosity and find yourself drawn into another world – another life, that is, stretching between two very different worlds – and you are reluctant to have it far from your hand when you stop to do something else for a while.

“My father was a sheepherder, and his home was the hills.”
How does that simple sentence cast such an immediate spell? It reminds me of Isaak Dinesen’s “Once I had a farm in Africa” and also puts me in mind of the story of a nonbeliever who demanded of Hillel that he explain the Torah to him while he was standing on one foot. Hillel's response? “Love your neighbor as yourself. The rest is commentary.” In a very real sense, the life of the author’s sheepherding father in America, Basque origins in the Pyrenees, the long-delayed visit home to aged family back in that mountain range between France and Spain, and the realization of father and son that Nevada, not the Basque country, was now their own family home – all is contained, in seed form, in the book’s perfect opening sentence.

First the son tells of his own childhood and the relationship of his largely absent father to the family. While their mother managed family businesses in town, the father was in the mountains most of the time in his sheep camp, not a fixed abode but one that shifted as the sheep were moved to new grazing. All the Basque sheepherders talked of going back to France “next year” to visit families, but very few ever made the trip. But with Laxalt’s aging sisters back in the old country longing to see him again, Robert and his brothers conspire to arrange for their father to take, at last, the long-delayed trip.

And with that we leave the modern world behind altogether. In the Basque villages, following two world wars, nothing in the way of life had changed since Dominique had left:
...There was a little boy in a beret and short trousers, and under his arm a loaf of bread that seemed as long as he was. There was a crude, wooden cart pulled by two oxen, whose nodding heads kept rhythm with the gay fringes on their horns. There was a girl in a scarf and bright peasant dress....
Men still wore wooden shoes to work outdoors, and women still cooked in huge iron pots hung in fireplaces. Nothing had changed -- except the man returning to the country and everyone he had left behind almost half a century before. Years that left stone buildings exactly as they were had left their mark on human beings. Dominique would see a familiar face and think he recognized an old friend, only to learn that the friend was dead, and this was the friend’s son.

My inner editor lay back, mental pencil hand idle, while I lost myself in Sweet Promised Land. The effect of beautiful prose is to carry a reader effortlessly forward, its only drawback that the end comes too soon!

Besides nonfiction categorization and Western subject matter, the third commonality of these two books, and the most important, is the American immigrant experience. In both stories we as readers encounter the hopes of immigrants and the new land’s promise of a better life, if the newcomers only have the determination to work very, very hard to conquer poverty, overcome prejudice, and win a place for themselves in the sweet promised land.

Determination, willingness to work, and, it must be added, the good fortune to see their adventure through. One of Dominique’s fellow immigrants was not lucky. Many of those whose stories Annerino tells are not.


Poverty in Agua Prieta

And I want to dedicate today's post to my dear friend Helen. She will understand why.

Thursday, February 26, 2015

Well Within Reach


Why is Sarah so excited?

Dog and Cats: A friend from Michigan is traveling the West with two cats. When Karen turned up in our yard, Sarah, who loves company, was very happy. Realizing quickly that there was at least one cat aboard (the other stayed out of sight), Sarah was fascinated. But since the cats go everywhere Karen goes, when she and I took off the next day to see the cranes, Sarah had to stay home. A dog and two cats in the vehicle? No, thank you!



Sheep: On our way to Whitewater Draw, we stopped to sheep, the first I’d seen on that road. Did they only arrive within the last couple of days? At the sheep stop, we could hear cranes overhead and were finally able to spot them in formation but flying much too high to be visible as cranes. I could only identify them by their calls.

Cranes: We were not disappointed at the Draw, our day’s #1 objective. There were fewer people than when David and I visited in January and, thankfully, not the fierce wind we’d experienced there. Cranes were gathered in two major areas, one near the parking area and another group out far beyond the paths and water. We went all the way out to the end of the farthest path to see the latter group, highly satisfied despite the fact that no flocks wheeled overhead.







Douglas – and Lunch: Next, the restaurant I’d promised Karen along the way having been closed on Wednesdays, we agreed to drive on to Douglas, a new destination for me, an American town on the Mexican border. Douglas turned out to be quite a lovely town, full of beautiful architecture and palm trees and many houses with that hipped style of roof I so loved years ago in Georgia. There was also a street parallel to the border with small, old-looking adobe buildings that I want to take David back to see. That street looked like the 19th-century beginnings of a town that did not become a ghost town but grew “inland.”

We found a beautiful restaurant, and lunch was inexpensive and delicious. One of the taco plates, called “cabeza,” featured chopped onion and cabbage, so of course I had to order dos tacos cabezas, in honor or my winter digs – but then forgot, in my hunger and eagerness, to photograph them for the blog. Rats!






Karen wanted to walk across the border to buy a bottle of tequila, her #2 objective of the day. Initially I’d said I’d wait for her in the vehicle, with the cats. I had my passport with me but was a little nervous about going across. Then at the last minute I changed my mind. Lots of people were walking across, including plenty of kids, and my friend, a retired airline attendant, is one of the most experienced travelers I know. So why not?

Mexico: The first building that caught our eye was this one. Is it a nightclub? Wow! Talk about an eye-popping façade!



“But this is nothing like Nogales,” Karen said on the other side as we looked up and down the street for a liquor store, not seeing one anywhere in sight. “In Nogales, it’s liquor store, dentist office, eyeglasses, liquor store, dentist office, eyeglasses.” No, Agua Prieta – at least, as much of it as we saw -- is nothing like that. There were several pharmacies just inside the border, which I pointed out as likely destinations for medical tourists (I only photographed this old, closed pharmacy; others looked bright and lively), but other than that, most places looked run-down and faded. We had to watch our steps carefully, too, for changes in sidewalk elevation and crumbling curbs. There were no hordes of tourists in t-shirts, for sure -- maybe no tourists at all? I was the only person I saw carrying a camera -- and no rows of stalls selling tourist items. This was a poor border town, spritzing itself up here and there (one very pretty hotel; another big building going up a block or two away) and struggling along everywhere else.



Note: Others were open, but I couldn't resist photographing this wall

Karen kept apologizing. “It’s too bad this is your first experience of Mexico. You’d really like Nogales. It’s nothing like this.”

Okay, I’m sure it isn’t. On the other hand, having expected a completely tourist experience, I didn’t mind at all seeing an ordinary, more work-a-day town. “It feels more like a real place,” I told her. “I’m not disappointed at all.” And I wasn’t – not in the town or what I was seeing there. The only thing that disappointed me was my own memory! I felt tongue-tied, and my distracted brain kept fluttering with excitement and going into spins as I tried to remember my most rudimentary Spanish. My friend Laurie would have been very disappointed in me, I’m afraid! What, for example, is the verb for ‘to buy’? Karen doesn’t speak Spanish, and I would have liked to be able to say “My friend wants to buy tequila.” No could do.

Two men in a little party store (looking like any little U.S. party store, by the way) spoke English, however, and gave us directions to a liquor store. A block that way, another block that way. Okay, we did it. Then, tequila purchased and in the bag, we were ready to start back north.



Colorful tiles greeted us on the American side of the customs desk, and a fascinating, surprising picture greeted our eyes as we drove away from the border area: dozens of school children, loaded down with bags and backpacks, were streaming towards Mexico. They were born in the U.S., Karen explained to me, so they have the right to attend school here, but they live with their families in Mexico.


Pirtleville: The day included one more surprise, a colorful Arizona cemetery that looked as if it could easily have been in Mexico. We stopped, and I walked around with my camera but could not feel satisfied with the results. Like the desert and the mountains, it is the overall vista that is so impressive, and there was no way I could get my images close enough, far enough, wide enough, and big enough – all at once – to convey the impression of the reality.





Cows: On the way back to Dos Cabezas, we stopped to see some pretty-faced cattle in a feed lot. Sweet though their faces were, I was not moved to outrage by their plight. Why not? Am I becoming insensitive to animals, the more attention I pay to the challenges of farming and ranching, or was it the scenes of poverty in Mexico and those children crossing the border every day in hopes of a better life that had my mind more focused on human struggle?




Coyotes and Deer: It seemed that the excitement of the day was behind us as we reached the north end of the Kansas Settlement Road and turned onto Hwy. 186 toward Dos Cabezas. Then Karen exclaimed, “What’s that?” Something had run across in front of us, up ahead. Then another one! By the time the third one was crossing, we were close enough to see clearly that it was a coyote. No one behind us, so Karen stopped, and we could see all three there beyond the road, looking back at us. They look smaller and brighter in color than our Michigan coyotes. But did they wait for us to pull out our cameras and focus? They did not! Well, anyway, we saw them. “That was great!” David and I have heard coyotes here many nights, but these were the first I’d seen, and I was pleased to be able to add three coyotes to my list of six roadrunners, two mule deer, two javelinas (dead), and many Southwest birds. Then, “Look!” To our left, running along the base of a low mountain, parallel to the road, like animals in a safari film, were a herd of half-a-dozen deer. Mule deer? Whitetail? We were past them, and they were out of sight before I could be sure.

Home and Cat and Dog: David had spent most of the day at home, reading and drawing and painting, enjoying a rare day of solitude but eager to hear about our adventures. Karen and I put together a big taco spread for supper and told him all about it.

Frankie
Sarah stuck to my side like a burr all evening. “She missed you,” David said. I missed her, too. I kept thinking she was in the van with us and then remembering we had only Karen’s cats with us. (Friendly little part-Siamese Frankie was in and out of my lap all day.) But here’s a question: did Sarah simply want to be close to me that evening or to Frankie’s tantalizing scent, as well?




P.S. Look here for the weather we had on Tuesday evening....