Night walk in the mist

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

(Wendell Berry)

There it is again, the unexplainable urge to go out into the dark, to step away from the light. Today, some of it probably has its origin in the weather: the mist, covering the trees across the field with a thin veil when I first looked out to the west this morning, stayed with us all day. From time to time it lifted a little, but just when the planks of the deck had almost dried it gathered its folds again, got denser, and evolved into a thin drizzle.

To me, this is lovely weather, gentler even than a sunny summer day. So long has it been dry, and I am thankful for that because we needed sun and wind and low humidity to bring the crops in. Now, however, I feel my whole being open up to this moisture, a quiet presence that touches skin and hair with a loving hand.

This is what calls me outside after a late supper. I put on rubber boots and rain jacket, but push the hood back when I realize it is not really raining: I want to feel the droplets settle on my head and face, want it to cover me like a magic cloak. For the first few moments I cannot see my hand in front of my eyes. I debate if I should use the flashlight I brought, but by the time Leo has arrived at my side my eyes have got used to the dark, and I can make out the contours of the spruce trees lining the driveway. There are degrees of darkness, and the trees are much denser than the sky. The driveway and the road into which it turns glisten from the moisture, but are firm underfoot, not muddy and without puddles.

Leo and I walk in companionable silence for a few hundred meters north on the road. No car, no human being is out, only the faint hiss of the highway two miles over to the east provides some background noise. Here and there a few yard lights in the distance, muted by the fog, try in vain to illuminate the night. Not even the city to the south is more than a dim reddish glow.

I step under the trees at the side of the road and listen. The drizzle whispers quietly among the leaves, their glow, so glorious under a deep blue sky in the sun, gone now: this is a monochrome world, reduced to the bare essence of lighter and darker grey, a world bled of all colour.

A sudden breeze stirs the branches over me, sends droplets tumbling downward from the top leaves, joining others on their way down, gathering into drops that splash on the ground beside me, on my forehead, my hands. Just as suddenly the wind dies down, and again there is only a whisper, the rustle of leaves like a quiet conversation which I don’t understand, but feel invited to listen to anyway.

The dog pushes his head against my knee: it is time to go home, go back towards the light shining its welcome from the kitchen window.

I touch my hair: it is covered with tiny droplets. Like spindrift they will soon be gone, but they will leave my hair as this walk has left my heart: saturated and softened, grateful for this gift.

Gatherings

Amur Maple

September is almost over. I'm standing at the sink, looking out of the kitchen window. It is nine o’clock already, but the sun has not quite made its way to the top of the poplar trees across from where I stand; it is much further to the right, too, than it was a few weeks ago at this time of day.

Robins are out in great numbers on the frosted swaths of grass left from the last mowing. The night brought the first real frost of the season. There are a lot of young birds with still mottled breast plumage and only a hint of red, but they are as big as their parents, and when they fly up to the trees when the dog startles them I see that they are as quick on their wings as the older birds. They have to be: now it is only a matter of time before they start their journey south. Flickers, the red neck patch and yellow tail feathers flashing brightly, are still here, too, and the chickadees’ voices – their winter-feeder voices, it seems to me – mingle with those of white-throated and chipping sparrows. Soon only the chickadees will be left, and the blue jays and woodpeckers, of course.

Yesterday the poplar bluff came alive with a sudden large invasion of crows. Dozens of them gathered on the tall bare trees, dead, but still useful as roosts, riddled with holes that mark the nesting sites of woodpeckers and other cave breeders, and of course a source of food for all kinds of creatures of the forest. Every fall there is a day or two like that when the crows arrive for a visit. No timid knocking on doors: they can be heard from a fair distance. It is not a pleasant sound, drowning out all the other bird song for a while, but I don’t find it threatening either, like one might when faced with such a crowd. Why do they come? Why do they leave again not even a day later? Where do they go from here? Are they saying good-bye to their summer quarters, visiting each site once more before they move on? Already the ravens are showing up here and there, bigger cousins, maybe hardier and more suited to our harsh winters.

Everything is readying itself for the long winter. Some, like blue jays and squirrels, gather supplies and build stashes. Some gorge on the rich food supply to build up strength for the strenuous journey south. And then there is the lady bug I found on the counter, brought in with the sunflowers I cut late last evening, thinking it might be the last of the season if the frost hit too hard. There is no getting ready for winter for the lady bug. It simply lives out its life, moving a bit about when it is warmed by the rays of the mild autumn sun, trying to hold on to a swaying leaf when the winds blow in, sitting in one spot, legs drawn under, when it gets cold.

I tend to get caught up in the gathering, picking apples and late strawberries, digging carrots and potatoes, cutting off the long stalks of delphiniums and monk’s hood, iris and lilies, so full of life and colour only a short while ago, but now dead and unsightly. So many tasks waiting to be done, and winter looming ever closer.

Not yet, however: there are still robins and flickers keeping me company, the sunflowers haven’t succumbed to the frost, and the strong winds of the last few days have not yet managed to bare the golden and orange trees.

So today, when I am in the garden doing my gathering and preparing, I will also gather what cannot be stored on shelves and in cellars: birds' voices and glowing colours, the humming of bees on their way from one sunflower to the next, the scent of dill, the taste of a fully ripe strawberry on my tongue, the excitement of watching skein after skein of geese strung out in the sky.

I know that, in the months to come, these preserves will sustain me as much or more as the ones I will dig out from the freezer or pull off a shelf. 




There is beauty even in the humble
Swiss Chard



No days off on the farm

Thursday night

Tomorrow is another day on the combine. I'm tired, and need a shower, though I would like to postpone that till morning. I'm going to sleep outside tonight, just like last night - finally! I've been waiting for that all summer, and at last there are not too many mosquitoes.

Sunday morning

Believe it or not I have the day "off" after a very busy harvesting week: there are more people available and willing to help on the weekend. Yesterday was very frustrating since, thanks to the incompetence of a partsman at the local machinery dealership, I drove to Red Deer and back (almost five hours altogether) to get two parts that turned out to be wrong. The right ones were available here in town all along – imagine!  The joys of farming… 

Although I have the day off there is much to do, especially since I had last night off too and found another 4 gallons of cucumbers (of which I passed on more than half to my daughter-in-law Courtney), 2 gallons of beans, and half an ice cream pail of strawberries. Don't even ask about the apples Maya and I picked at the beginning of the week to prevent them from all being bruised in the fall: there must be a hundred pounds, much, much more than that tree ever produced before.

There are two more trees, one probably just as full, but both ripen a bit later and their apples are a bit better suited to storing. The cold room smells wonderful! But I'm afraid I will have to do something with them, too. What, I have no clear idea yet. So far we are eating as many as we possibly can.

Better change from my shorts to long pants now. It has cooled off considerably and might even rain, quite a change from the hot days we had all through this week. For a little while we could almost be fooled into believing that, as Keats says in his Ode to Autumn, 'warm days shall never cease'.

Amazingly, I read this poem for the first time earlier this year, and since, like some of the German Romantic poems, it so perfectly expresses all that makes autumn my favourite season, I decided to learn it by heart. This, as I found out, is a lot more difficult now than it was when I was a kid, but it was a great exercise. Now, a few months later, I am once again struggling with the last verse - time to review!


                  ODE TO AUTUMN

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness

Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;

To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,

And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;

To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,

And still more, later flowers for the bees,

Until they think warm days will never cease,

For Summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?

Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find

Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,

Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;

Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,

Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook

Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:

And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep

Steady thy laden head across a brook;

Or by a cider-press, with patient look,

Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?

Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,-

While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,

And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;

Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn

Among the river sallows, borne aloft

Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;

And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;

Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft

The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;

And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

Kites

According to the calendar it is still summer, but there can be no doubt that autumn is on its way. Nature has dropped little hints here and there for a couple of weeks already: a spider web drifting by, a certain crispness of the air, giving a slight edge to even the most summery looking day, morning fog lifting from the fields, leaving the slender delicate heads of the grasses bent with their load of sparkling dew drops.

Blue Jays are busy gathering food, robins and flickers, swallows and starlings gather in larger groups on the wires, conversing excitedly, no doubt making plans for their departure for gentler winter lodgings already - winged beings everywhere, even the crimson seed heads of the Amur Maple, proudly displaying fall colouring before the leaves turn and their colour will be no longer prominent, blending in with the backdrop.

The wind, too, has picked up: perfect weather for flying kites! Like so often it reminds me of the first time I lifted a kite high over my head to hand it over to the breeze.

My first kite was a beautiful piece of craftsmanship, built by my dad, with a little bit of help from my three or four-year-old self. He measured and cut the thin wooden frame and tied the crossbeams together so that they formed a cross, then made a shallow groove in each about half an inch from the end and ran a thin, but strong length of string through them that connected the ends diagonally, suggesting the kite shape already.

He then laid this contraption down on a big piece of sturdy coloured transparent paper and traced along the string outline, leaving about two inches of paper all around which he then folded back over the frame and glued it to secure it - voila! there we had much of our kite already. It was up to me to decorate it, give it a face, and also cut smaller pieces of paper that would be tied or glued to the tail - the most important feature, he told me, because without it the kite would never truly get airborne. He attached the big spool of kite string, and off we went to a stubble field on the outskirts of my home village of Goddelsheim. Stooks of oats, rye, wheat or barley were still scattered all over the field, for me to hug - my "brothers and sisters" - and to hide in: I was that small.

At first, however, they were of no interest to me: I needed to help fly the kite! I held it at the angle my father told me to and ran with it ("As fast as you can! Hold it high - yes, even higher!") and felt the wind pick it up out of my small hands. It soared so high that I had to put my head way back to see it hover, the giant orange paper bird now seeming to take its cue from the hawks it shared air space with. 

 I still feel the golden stubble under my feet, the wind tousle my hair, so short then that it didn't even blow into my face, still remember the conviction that my dad could do anything: after all, he could build a kite, and fly it, too!

 What a wonderful thing to be shown at such a young age what it means to soar, and hover, to be carried by the wind, and not have to come down for a long, long time.

 

Surprising encounters

It's almost the end of August, and after a long summer break it is time to return to "Musings from the Farm". I know there is still the open ending of our "escape" from Argentina, and I hope to return to that in time as well. Right now, however, the farm is a lot closer than South America, and here, too, every day can bring a new adventure.

Take yesterday, for example. ...
                                                 
Tonight while digging potatoes for a late supper I saw something crawling slowly across the dirt where I had just pulled a potato plant. As far as I can determine it was a tiger salamander, probably a grey tiger salamander. It's an amphibian found in the northern states, too. I took him in my hand to get a good look at him: his skin felt smooth and cool, and he was about as long as my hand head to tail, dark grey (or maybe dark green) with paler spots, a typical newt head, and the neatest feet: his front feet had four toes, the hind ones five. They looked like perfect little hands, so delicately formed.

I put him right back where I found him, and I suppose he'll now have to dig a new burrow. Of course I felt bad to have, however innocently, destroyed his home. A few years ago I had found a salamander much like him in the garden, too, that time in the strawberry patch which was then about where the potatoes are now. I wonder if it's still the same little guy. I read they can get really old, up to eighty years. Amazing, isn't it?

A bit later.

By now it was getting pretty dark. I took the laundry off the line and saw something fluttering above, doing an elegant dive every once in a while: a small bat on its nightly hunting excursion. They, too, I don't see very often around here, so you can imagine my thrill at watching it. Two in one day - hard to beat that, isn't it?

Right now I'm still waiting for the rye bread to finish baking. At harvest time sandwiches are our staple food, so I decided to bake a bit in advance to not be stuck in the middle of combining.

I read some poetry by Jane Kenyon earlier today. When, you ask, do I have time to read poetry? At naptime - one has to keep sane one way or another! I've liked almost everything I've read from her, and this struck me as particularly poignant in my state of mind this summer:

Not Writing

 A wasp rises to its papery
nest under the eaves
where it daubs

at the gray shape,
but seems unable
to enter its own house.

(Jane Kenyon)


There is one more encounter that, to me, belongs with the other two although it happened very early this morning, simply because it was another surprise from the natural world.

I woke up from a noise in the living room when it was still dark: Stanley, our cat, who had managed to escape detection last night when I went to bed and had spent the night snoring on the couch or one of the kitchen chairs. He has a way of making his presence known at night when he wants out, so I groped around in the dark until I found him and stepped out on the deck.

It was surprisingly mild, and the sky was bright with stars. As always the Big Dipper and Cassiopeia greeted me, and the tiny cluster of light that makes up the Seven Sisters. But there, just above the tops of the poplars in the southeast, I saw three well-known stars lined up: Orion's belt! So it's that time of year again already, time for my favourite constellation to appear in the night sky. I had no idea he was up and about at the end of August already, the companion of my fall and winter nights, and if it hadn't been for Stanley I probably wouldn't have found out for a while.

The difficulty of leaving

Not long ago – though long enough ago that it was still hockey season - trying to watch the news, I was startled awake from a slumber induced by a seemingly endless report on the hockey playoffs: my subconscious, obviously more awake than the rest of me, had caught the words ‘volcano eruption’ and ‘Chile’. It was just a short mention, and by the time I was fully alert it was over, but a check of Google quickly brought me up to date: Puyehue volcano in south-central Chile had indeed erupted, for the first time since 1960.

The photos were spectacular: a 10 km high cloud of gas and ash against a deep blue sky, others with volcanic lightning putting any fireworks to shame. Normally I would have read it with interest, maybe thought briefly about the effect it might have for its surroundings, vaguely relieved that nobody had come to harm, but it would soon be forgotten.

As this volcano, however, is in a region where we travelled not even six months ago, these news touched more than the surface: we had seen this volcano and many others, seemingly at rest, had become aware of their steady presence in the lives of the people of this beautiful yet geologically troubled nation. They have dominated the landscape since long before any humans roamed their slopes or tilled the fertile soil enriched by their ashes, asleep, sometimes for long periods of time, but unpredictable and always there.

 When we saw it last, we were not thinking of the potential danger it could pose; our minds were on other things, and we had just begun to breathe a little easier after overcoming the last hurdle in an unforeseen obstacle course.

In my last South America blog entry I talked about our stay at Gretel and Nikita’s on the shores of remote Lago Vintter in Patagonia. While the last leg of the journey to get there was quite an adventure we had found the bus system in Argentina as well as in Chile excellent: busses were modern, clean and comfortable – and very reasonably priced. For the most part we just went to the bus depot and bought our ticket (this was a bit of a learning process in the beginning, I have to admit, mostly to do with the language barrier, but with every new part of the trip it got easier). Only once we had the feeling that it might soon be difficult to book a ticket for a certain time, and that was right before Christmas when everybody went someplace for the holidays, often using the bus as mode of transportation. Other than that we never had trouble to book a seat, usually had the choice of where we wanted to sit.

With that in mind, and after conversations with other travellers who had crossed the border west of Bariloche where we, too, wanted to cross, we weren’t worried about the last part of the journey, the way back to Santiago. Everything had gone so smoothly, and we didn’t give it another thought. We had bought our tickets from Temuco, where we had left part of our luggage before going south with our friends, back to Santiago for Sunday morning, with enough time to get safely to the airport Sunday night; that we had decided not to leave to chance.

Nikita was going to take their daughter Monica and grandson Jan to Esquel on Friday; they wanted to catch the bus to Buenos Aires from there, and there was room enough for us to come along to this bigger town with good bus connections. Perfect!

We said good-bye to Gretel a little before six on Friday morning, after a last breakfast together. Would we see them again? Last time we were quite as unsure about that, and yet not even two years later we were back. Now that we had eaten the fruits of the Calafate bush we were bound to return, if the Tehuelche legend can be believed.

We had last driven this road on our way to Lago Vintter in February of 2009 with our little rented Opel Corsa, and it had taken us forever: ripio, the Argentinean version of gravel roads, is very hard to negotiate with a small car. With Nikita’s ‘Rodeo’, a kind of SUV, it seemed to be a lot easier, and this time I actually got to enjoy the beautiful lush landscape instead of keeping my eyes on the road the whole time: Nikita knows this stretch of road like the back of his hand, and big rocks sticking out in the middle of the road pose no problem to him.

A little before ten we arrived at the spacious modern bus terminal in Esquel, and while Monica and Jan got ready to board their bus Johann and I immediately checked which bus companies went to Bariloche, our last stop in Argentina from where we would take the bus west across the border, to Osorno and from there to Temuco. There were several, as we found out, so we had a good choice and could compare prices.

This was not going to be our main focus for very long, however; soon we would be concerned with more basic matters. To Bariloche? Yes, at about four in the afternoon, the lady at the first bus company told us.  And from there? Monday afternoon. Monday afternoon?! This didn’t help us at all, and we went on to the next company’s counter. This time, however, it was even worse: the next bus with available seats would leave on Wednesday. By then we had planned to have overcome our jetlag already! No more luck anywhere, it turned out: we could get to Bariloche, but not across the border to catch our flight home.

Now what? Which options did we have? According to Nikita there was a flight service available; he had used it a few years back. When I checked it out online it turned out that this airline wasn’t operating any longer. LAN, however, was, and when Nikita inquired on our behalf they were very helpful: of course we could get a flight from Esquel to Temuco!  Big relief – until we found out that we had to fly to Buenos Aires first and from there to Temuco, for a lot of money and much too complicated.

What next? Nikita’s sister Nina lives in Bariloche, four hours north of Esquel, and he thought she might know of more bus companies. When he talked to her on the phone she named several we hadn’t tried yet, but upon inquiry they, too, turned out to be booked out. Also, Nina said, Bariloche was full to the brim with tourists, hotels totally booked out, and she, too, had no room in her house because she had visitors. She called several friends with hotels or B&Bs, but the same reply everywhere: no room in the inn.

What were we to do? We were getting ready to call Air Canada and postpone the flight till the middle of the week, trying, without real success, to get enthusiastic about extending our holiday: as much as we liked it here, mentally we were now homeward bound. Once again I got a booth at the locutorio, the internet place, and was in the process of opening the Air Canada site when Nikita received another call from Nina.

This time there finally were some good news: Nina had found a way for us to cross the border. It turned out that there is a taxi service specializing in this endeavour, where a taxi and driver are hired for a certain distance – in our case to Osorno on the Chilean side – for a set price. These taxis, while expensive, were available for the next morning, and she had also found two beds in a hostel in Bariloche, another difficult feat, as we had found out. Thank goodness!

We booked the bus ticket to Bariloche for four in the afternoon, Nina made arrangements with the hostel and the taxi company for us, and we said goodbye to Nikita early in the afternoon. How fortunate we were to have such helpful relatives! This would have been very difficult without them.  

(To be continued)

Morels

A few days ago I received a phone call from people I had met earlier this spring through our friend Ben. This couple, a retired vet and his wife, live about three quarters of an hour south-west of us in a beautiful forested area, and they talked about gathering morel mushrooms right around their place early in the spring.

Morels? I was much intrigued: while I had heard about them growing up – in German they are called “Morchel” – I hadn’t ever seen them except in pictures. I had eaten them, however, although nowhere in our northern climates, but in Patagonia at Gretel and Nikita’s. They, too, gather them in their beech forests in the spring and dry them for later use. Gretel, who could perform amazing feats on the wood-burning stove in their little cabin, had served them in a cream sauce with a huge trout caught in Lago Vintter, and I thought I had rarely tasted anything that good.

Busy with seeding at what I assumed to be prime morel time I had put them out of my mind: maybe next year I’d be able to go out and hunt for them. Then came Linda’s phone call: she wanted to let me know that they had just found a good supply of morels not far from their home, and she thought I might quite well have success finding them in our own poplar forest. What did I have to watch for, I asked her. Were they easy to see? Did I have to scrape away any leaf litter? No, I was thinking of truffles, of course, and oak forests, and pigs, underground mushrooms that bear a certain likeness to potatoes ...  Morels, she said, are not hiding where they grow; they poke out of the ground, their hats dark grey or brownish, their stems cream coloured. They could be anywhere – or not.

Thus Carl and I struck out later that evening and made our way through the bush across the house, aided by Leo, our now four-month-old German Shepherd puppy who is always eager to embark on new adventures. It was near dark already, however, and our mission ended without finding one of the delicacies.

The next day I managed to escape Leo – he is not always helpful and tends to bring a certain element of unrest to any situation – and entered another piece of poplar forest, this time a little further away from the house. Hunting for morels, of course, is yet another excuse to walk through the tangled wilderness that goes as forest here, and I am very happy that not everything is ‘tamed’ for grain farming. While it would be nice to have walking paths like the ones I remember fondly from my childhood in Germany there is a certain attraction to bush left to its own devices.

I entered the bush following a narrow path coyotes and deer seemed to use, but soon it got lost among the thick underbrush. Climbing over tree trunks fallen so long ago that they were soft and spongy under my feet and sometimes didn't bear my weight anymore I tried to find another opening to continue my quest. Progress was slow, since I was scanning the forest floor for signs of the elusive fungus. I knew I had to look for something resembling an elongated honeycomb wrapped around a stem, and that morels love old leaf litter. There was a lot of that, admittedly, and it was wonderful to walk on that soft underground, so unlike the clods of earth in a newly cultivated field. 

The sun slanted through the tender green canopy, a few lazy mosquitoes whined around my head, and a deeper hum drew my attention to a wild gooseberry bush covered in star-shaped blossoms: a big bumble bee clung upside down to one of them, obviously enjoying the sudden feast after the table set so meagerly for the first weeks after the long winter.

There was more to come: wild black currants, pale yellow clusters of blossoms just opening, joined by the darker gold of bracted honeysuckle, while the showier twining honeysuckle was still holding off. A purplish leaf, rolled tightly, caught my attention, and soon I found others open already, glossy, not quite green yet, a thin stem topped by a tight cluster of buds: wild sarsaparilla, a member of the ginseng family. The name, to me, seems to carry magic, evokes a good old wizard. It is quite prominent in spring, unlike its ‘evil’ relative, Devil’s Club, spiked with poisonous thorns and not frequent in our area.  

The strong, glossy leaves of wintergreen kept company with sweet-scented northern bedstraw, its leaves arranged in loose whorls spaced along weak creeping stems. ‘Waldmeister’, it is called in German –Master of the Forest- and for many years I have thought to gather it and make a refreshing spring punch popular in Germany, the so-called ‘Waldmeisterbowle’.

Carefully I bent hazel twigs away from my path, set a shower of white petals falling when I tried to evade a Saskatoon bush, and, slipping off a big trunk I tried to use like a balancing beam, took hold of the first twig that stretched my way, which unfortunately happened to be a wild rose. I’d have to pull out the prickles later.

Dogwood bushes, too, were now fully covered in leaves, but that couldn’t hide the fact that many of them were neatly trimmed: moose love them, and ample amounts of moose droppings showed that they had given sustenance to these great beasts during the long, hard winter.

I was getting quite close now to the other side of the bush, and the mysterious half-light started to brighten as the sun could reach in better from the edge. And there it was, one of my favourite woodland sights in the spring: the delicate blue and pink bells of the lungwort nodding on long tender stems rising from hairy leaves.

In spite of careful searching I still had not found a single mushroom – but who cared! I had spent a wonderful hour in the forest. Who could ask for more?

As for the culinary delight we were going to have to do without: maybe I could replace it with another, and finally make a Waldmeisterbowle, now that I knew where to find the sweet-scented bedstraw. All I needed for that would be some dry white wine and a bottle of champagne, and I certainly wouldn’t have to look long and hard for that!