Urban Myths

A few weeks ago I overheard someone lamenting the fact that they were unable to purchase their tomato seedlings because of the salmonella crisis. Apparently the recent discovery that our food chain isn't foolproof caused a rush on the greenhouses of the world. Then I walked into my local Agway to replace my wheelbarrow tire and heard a guy at the counter explain that the customer's order of chicks would be late, as there'd been a surge in people buying chickens this year. High food prices, you know. My mind's eye immediately envisioned a high-rise, one-bedroom apartment-cum-jungle with dying tomato plants and chickens running off the balcony. Hopefully, in reality, these sudden chicken owners know they will both have to feed the chickens and then butcher them when the time comes. They're not like tomatoes, though they may taste good in cacciatore. Even tomatoes take time, effort and some modicum of experience. If they didn’t, most gardener catalogues wouldn’t devote whole pages to growing them.

This year we’ve expanded our vegetable garden once more, since we needed a place to plant potatoes and we wanted to grow more corn. The time we spend tending the vegetables is squeezed in between the time we’ve spent planting the blueberries and the time we haven’t yet spent bringing in our wood for the winter. We’ve thought about raising chickens as a source of protein, but now realize we don’t have the time. Maybe next year.

Homesteading in the modern world isn’t as easy as buying a few chicks or planting a few vegetables. There’s some effort involved in buying local produce rather than going to the local Super Shaw’s. It’s a lifestyle change that isn't terribly difficult to absorb, but there’s sacrifices you have to make; I no longer have the leisure time to play softball every few days. Sometimes we have to go without fresh lettuce until the next Farmer’s Market is open. The garden needs weeding and tending rain or shine. If there’s a choice between relaxing of an evening with a glass of wine, or having wood split and dry for the dead of winter, the wood really needs to prevail.

Most importantly in this venture is that you don’t start out of desperation; the reality is that buying a few chickens won’t make your food bill go down. Not immediately. Maybe not ever. Over time, once your vegetable garden is established, and you’ve figured out what you can and cannot grow and even more importantly what you will and will not eat for days on end—over time the venture might begin to pay off. But going out the day after the news stands have made public the rising cost of bread to buy a breadmaker isn’t really going to solve your problem. If you haven’t been noticing the steady upward slide of fuel, if you haven’t paid attention to where your food comes from, if you are just now noticing the cracks in the whole interconnected debacle of our modern Western civilization, you have a long way to go before you can become truly self sufficient. We have a long way to go, and we started years ago.

Even though we live in what most people might term "the country," most of our neighbors didn’t grow up in it. In fact a majority of them have only recently decided to move out into the wild greenery of the world, to foresake their urban/suburban origins and move to where things are "simpler." They quickly discover issues they hadn’t had before, like dust settling in on their lawn from the dirt road they live on, or the fact that at night a heavy darkness falls on the land so thick they need a flashlight when they go out. They buy generators when the power goes out for the first time, unable to bear the silence created by the absence of the noise caused by refrigerators, microwaves, computers, the television. They learn there are bears in the woods, and coyotes too, and their fear leads them to buy guns, or fence their yards, or not go out at all. They discover that there are bugs which bite; black flies, mosquitoes, and ticks. They read in the media that bad illnesses can result from these bugs. But they can’t tell which bug is which, so they hate them all. They call in to their local congress-person and lobby for spraying. When they would go out to tend their gardens they find they can’t distinguish between a weed and a peonie. To make sure they don’t get them confused, they hire a landscaper.

Suddenly it costs alot of money to live in the country.  So much for simple.  Maybe these are my would-be chicken owners.

As the country holds bewildering elements to the city-born, so the city endlessly astonishes me; not so much the high rises and the sidewalks and the ever present night-life, but the fact that nature persists there anyway; contained as it may be within buckets or surrounded by asphalt or confined to an empty lot.  I walk the streets in Keene, NH for a half hour every day, and though by no means is Keene a large city, still the houses sit on cramped half or quarter acres, the lawns neatly compact and miniature.  I wonder how one negotiates the plumbing; where does yours end and the city's begin?  How do you tell yours from your neighbor's?  How do you negotiate the delicate politics of a dangerous tree limb, bellowing out from  a tree which does not belong to you?  And more importantly, how do you stand the never ending daylight caused by street lamps and passing cars, the never ending noise, the psychological cramps caused by too many people in too little space?

We live a good half mile from Route 31, a small, rarely traveled highway.  But I still hear it.  Lionel, who grew up in New York City, hardly hears a thing.  The road which goes by our house is gravel, but constantly traveled, at least by my standards.  If I had my way, we'd live even more nowhere than we do now.  Still, I've learned to live here and tune out the highway and the nosy passers-by, if only by brute mental repetition (at least its not Nashua).  And really, the noise offered by the highway is the only downside.  The night skies are still clear, unobscured by street light or by ski resorts.  The space is wide, wide open.  There are bear in the woods, and coyotes too.  It's not a simple life by any means.  But the reward is greater for the hard work and the extra long commute.