PUSHING THE LIMITS OF SUMMER, & MORE

The end of July this year feels like the end of summer. I’m trying to push the thought back, vigorously! Perhaps it’s just that after intense summer heat and monsoonal rains, the weather is cooler, a hint of autumn in mid-summer? Perhaps it’s that I have not been home for most of this month and was busy and under the gun with deadlines for much of June?

I’m back in Toronto, after a July full of travel and movement.  And I’m glad to be home, with no immediate plans to go anywhere farther than an hour out of town.

As I’ve reflected on the way this summer has spooled away and left me feeling I’ve missed out on it, I’ve come to realise that I think about summer much in the same way that I used to anticipate a weekend. That is, when I visualise the summer, I somehow have a feeling, a magical feeling, that it is of infinite length and contains infinite possibilities. When I worked as a lawyer, a time when weekends of one day or two were sharply etched beacons, on Thursday evening or Friday morning I would have a long loose list of all that I wanted to do on the weekend. And then come Sunday night I’d face once again the dismaying realisation that most of what I had imagined or visualised had not come to pass.

In the same way, summer in anticipation carries the promise of infinite possibility. This surely goes back to childhood, when summer was the liberation from the routines of the school year. And our school holidays were so long that summer did always feel wonderfully “infinitely” long and luxurious. Some part of me seems to expect that still.

Hence my feelings of dismay each year in late July or early August when I realise how much of the summer has passed by…and how little of it remains. It’s not the hot weather, it’s the feeling of long days and infinite possibility that is precious: time not measured out but available in generous dollops to spend with friends or reading books or just in blissful unawareness of its passing.

Yes, I guess I should grow up and stop this magical thinking…but I am rather attached to it. Better to have to face and swallow disappointment each year than to never have the exhilarating feeling that anything and everything is possible.

Speaking of possibility, it seems that some of us do not find it possible to engage with new technology. Those who can are a different species: they experiment with dials and instructions and figure out how to, for example make good use of their smart-phone. This was brought home to me the other day when I was in Maine. I was driving with my friend Nancy in her Prius and wanted to turn the fan off. “I can turn it down but I don’t know how to turn it off” she said. “It’s stupid because I’ve had the car for three years.” Some time later another friend, Ed, was with us in the car, and I suggested to Nancy that she ask him to figure out how to turn off the fan. He fiddled for a moment and bingo! there it was. Solved.

My theory about these things is that Nancy and I and many others like us, mostly not a young crowd, I admit, resist the kind of rat-in-a-maze learning, the trial and error button-pushing, that is required to explore and figure out our smart phones, computer programs, etc. I am happy to play around a little, to take a run at a tech problem. But the process of learning a series of steps that someone has designed? I balk. If someone tells me how to do it, I’m fine. But somehow I resist engaging with the trial-and-error- with-the-machine kind of learning that many people, especially the young, do effortlessly.

It’s lucky for me that I know a number of young people who are generous and tolerant and willing to bail me out of tech impasses. The most recent was a situation where I upgraded something on my Mac desktop and it resulted in my Word and related programs refusing to load. Argh! But there was a rescuer named Thomas, who kindly figured things out.

When I think about the why? of all this, I think it’s an impatience with a situation that requires trial and error but has little or no content or inherent interest to me, except the need to get it to work.

People like Nancy and me would like to be told or shown how to work our tech devices rather than being left to be beginners stumbling along. And because we refuse that process, we get further and further behind, we lose the skill to do trial and error figuring out, we become more dependent on others.

But in the kitchen both she and I are prepared to figure things out and work by trial and error. We both like that process. In the kitchen we are in search of understanding what’s going on, whereas with technology it’s all a blackbox. And so we lack both curiosity and patience for working out the how-to.  

Sorry to be so pedestrian in this post so far. But I've been mulling about these things and wanted to explore them on the page. 

I haven’t talked at all about the fun I had at the Kneading Conference in Skowhegan. I drove down with my dear friends Dawn Woodward and Ed Rek of Evelyn’s Crackers, and they and I and Nancy Jenkins of Camden, stayed with Barbara Sullivan, a wild and wonderful artist, and had loads of great conversations and engaged with each other and many more friends old and new.

We gave a tandoor workshop that was fun and oh-so-interesting for us as well as for those who came. So many people put their hand into the oven to slap a bread on the hot wall.  So many people gained confidence.

If you have an interest in sustainable agriculture, bread, milling, oven building, etc, then you should seriously consider coming to the Kneading confernece in Skowhegan next July, or else travelling to northern Washington State for the Kneading Conference West in the Skagit Valley this September. Being immersed in grain-related talk and learning is so satisfying. And grounding too.

Once you’re in Skowhegan, or in the Skagit Valley, you’re so close to sea coast and wonderfully beautiful natural environments (and great wild-gathered food), that it would be a pity not to take an extra day or two to explore. We ended up eating lobster at The Slipway in Thomaston Maine on Friday night – worth every minute of the long drive back the next day.

That’s the answer of course to the summer problem: just extend yourself, take risks, pack in as much fun and interesting activity as you can. Do not pace yourself. Don’t be sensible, if you have any choice in the matter. And suddenly summer becomes elastic, full of rich events and fruitful possibilities.

SELF-SUFFICIENCY NEAR TWO COASTS

The birds are tweeting and twittering in the forest that surrounds the clearing here where I sit. I'm in Maine, staying at a beautiful charming house outside Skowhegan. Barbara, the artist who is putting me up, along with some other visitors, makes engaging art, three dimensional painted hang-on-the-wall sculptures as well as paintings. Everywhere I look in the house there is beauty and engagement. And here outside, the woodpile is aromatic and the birds subdued but continously making themselves heard.

I'm here because of the Kneading Conference in Skowhegan. It's the fifth annual, a two day event at the Skowhegan Fairgrounds (site of the oldest coninuously operating ag fair in the USA, quite incredible). On Saturday there's a Bread Fair, when ovens are fired and bread and cheese etc etc is sold.

Yesterday, the first day, I went to a clay oven workshop. We worked all morning mixing clay and sand, making forms (working in loose teams of four or so; altogether the course made six ovens) of wet sand, packed domes. Then we built up clay-sand-mix walls around the sand form, finally enclosing it under a dome. I know I'm not being very clear, but if you find the book by the guy who taught the course, Stu Silverstein, you can learn all about it. The last steps were to cut a front hole, pull out all the sand of the form, then light a fire on the fire brick base. In a couple of hours the colour of the oven changes from damp grey to pale, dried out grey clay and hey presto! there's a working oven.

It always feels magical and empowering to build a tool, and what more amazing tool than an oven built of earth? Lovely to work with unprocessed material (as opposed to manufactured bricks etc), which I've done only once before, when I made a large tandoor oven over nine days in Udaipur about eight years ago, and learned so much. There, in Udaipur, Sangana Bai's material was clay mixed with plenty of dried horse manure and then wetted with water. It was a coarser lumpy blend. For this oven we had sand and clay, so it was smooth rather than lumpy. But I imagine that the horse manure and straw with clay would also work for these domes. hmm A woman from Arizona who was a wonderfully engaged member of the team said that adobe there is made with straw or hay and clay, and I guess some sand too.

By the way the proportions are 1 part clay to 3 parts fine sand, or two parts sand if it's coarser. The trick is to add a minimal amount of water so that the mixture is stiff rather than soft. If it feels good in your hand it's too wet, is a good way of thinking about it.

This Skowhegan junket (eleven hours in the car from Toronto, sharing the driving and conversation with the wonderful Danwthebaker) is my second trip in a week. Here I'm almost at the east coast; the Atlantic is just an hour's drive or so away. And last week I was almost at the Pacific, well, close enough...

I flew to Kelowna (or as non-townies call it Kelownifornia) and drove north past cherry orchards dripping with fruit. At Vernon I turned east and came eventually to my cousins's gorgeous piece of land high on a green hillside. His house, newly built and still needing finishing touches, is beautiful, light and airy, and off-grid. And that's where my aunt, my long-dead mother's identical twin, is now living. Her ninetieth birthday is coming up, and what better place to see out her days than a green fastness, with horses (Icelandic ponies in fact) and dogs and hummingbirds etc all around?

I was so pleased to see her happy, mobile (after a broken hip and cracked pelvis in the last year) and now able to be on horseback, her preferred mode of travel.

There's a connection between the people in these two far-apart places. They tend to be self-sufficient, physically capable, and creative problem-solvers. They live far from the large population centres and from monied communities, and prefer it that way. But here in Skowhegan they are VERY far from prosperity. And that's why this Kneading Conference got started, as a way to try to revitalise farming here. It hasn't died out, but people are struggling. Now there's a grist mill about to reopen in town and a sense of bustle and purpose. There's also some very good baking happening. So as Skowhegan and northern Maine generally bootstraps its way into new patterns and increased viability and confidence, it makes those of us at the conference aware that food issues at the producing level: the farm and the small producer and processor, whether it's a baker, a cheese-maker, or whatever, are a good solid way to generate new life.

I'm hoping to come back here next year... and if you have a chance, do try to come. I've learned a lot, about bread and farming, and I've met some remarkable people. It's a rich opportunity to connect with a culture of self-sufficiency.

TO AN ISLAND AND BACK WITH THE SCENT OF THE SEA

The green green Ontario countryside is unrolling outside the window as this train I'm on speeds toward Toronto in the golden late-afternoon light. The half-full moon is up and there are wispy trails of cloud gauzily draped across the blue sky, catching the late light.

I've been on the island of Grand Manan this week, a completely transporting trip to another world, it felt like. The drive across small roads in Quebec's Eastern Townships, huge swoops of hills, was great, and a reliving of drives I took as a kid with my parents, though now those roads are paved, not dirt. Northern Maine is as pine tree-lined and dark as ever, with beautiful salt-box houses and outbuildings, sparely elegant. But it was Grand Manan, with its steep sandstone cliffs on the west coast, and curving small harbours on the other side that was the new pleasure.

My friend Lianne and her husband have a small house just near Castalia Marsh, on the north end of the island, with a view due east across the water, Nova Scotia out of sight across the blue of the Bay of Fundy. The tides weren't as huge as usual this week, because the moon is not full, though they were still remarkable compared to the tides in most places. The weather was changeable, so skies were dramatic.

On the food front, we went each day to the terrifically good (we have nothing near this quality in Toronto) artisanal bakery, North Head Bakery, not far from Lianne's house. The St John's River breads, multigrain, au levain, with a wonderful crust, were stunning, and so was the Old French Raisin bread (even though I don't usually love raisins in bread). The bakery alone is worth the trek to Grand Manan, seriously. (It's open from May until Canadian Thanksgiving, in October, five days a week.)

We had other luck too: there were fresh scallops at the Kwik-Way one evening, so we bought a pound of them and cooked them lightly and quickly in a little oil with some fresh local garlic. We ate them over fresh rice, with tender salad greens and yellow cherry tomatoes from a wonderful local garden in Whale's Cove. Instead of salt, I sprinkled my rice and tomatoes with dulse flakes - a great condiment from Grand Manan. Lianne and I are hoping to do a three day immersethrough session at this time next year on Grand Manan, probably the week after Labour Day. Now I've seen for myself how much food and culture there will be to explore with people. ANd then there's the whale-watching too....

We stopped in at a dulse-selling place and learned a little about how dulsing works, and about the other seaweeds/algaes that are gathered in Grand Manan. Talk turned to the perils of fishing: a few days ago a scallop boat with four aboard went down in the Bay of Fundy. There's no explanation for it, but the boat has gone. The men at the dulse shop talked about another boat that went down suddenly recently: something important (I don't remember what, the rudder? or?) broke or popped, making a large hole, but in that case the men were luckier, there was a lifeboat and they realised in time to get it launched and save themselves. I had thought that weather was the big risk, but really, it was a reminder that nothing can be taken for granted when you depend on the sea.

My small bag of clothes from the trip is impregnated with sea-aroma, the taste of the wild deeps, for I've brought bags of dulse back with me to Toronto. That haunting iodine-iron-salt-and more scent brings with it the reminder of our fragility in the face of mother nature's power. And it also reminds me of our ongoing debt to those who fish and grow and gather food for us.