Friday Grief and Other Notes

Yesterday (Friday) was a day of grieving for me: grieving for the poor soil, for the land that, though soaked with 50 inches of rain a year, cannot absorb the rain. So what could be a source of great good becomes a source of erosion and destruction.

And I grieved for the “experts” who have no clue how to help. I mentioned the results of the soil sample to Rachel Bush, including the calcium levels being about 10% of what they should be. She has learned much from various cooperative extension courses, and expressed surprise: “Our calcium levels are so high here, we’re not even supposed to put egg shells in the compost!”

If that’s what the experts are saying, no wonder the raw milk I tasted was noticeably poor quality. And when I measured it with a brix meter, it was not 12 like the grocery store milk, and not 16 like a quality milk, but 10.6—the lowest brix I’ve ever seen. (A brix meter, for those not in the know, is a little device that measures the sugar content in the juice of foods. Higher sugars mean more nutrients; also, higher brix foods don’t spike insulin levels and, obviously, contribute more to health. Different foods have different optimal levels of brix; a cherry would have a higher brix reading than a cabbage. There are charts to help figure out where on the range of nasty to excellent your food lies.)

The expert advice isn’t going to help get the raw milk more tasty (milk needs calcium). It’s not going to keep an apple from tasting watery (as did a local apple I had not long ago).

At one point, I was so sad for the land, I started to walk the slopes and weep and pray over it. And little Abraham, playing cars or Little People in the tent, said, “Wait, Mommy, I’ll go with you!”

It is hard to be sad with a sweet 3-year-old hand in mine, so we walked down to the creek with the other boys, too. I figured out how to get the jewelweed to help my poison ivy, I think. I had been chewing it a bit, then laying it on my tortured skin. I think it works better to just crush it between my fingers, then rub. I pulled up a little plant by the roots, hoping to transplant it into a pot at the campsite, but as I held Isaiah and Abraham’s hand as we walked back up the slope and Isaiah helped me carry the plant, the stem snapped, so I don’t think it is long for the world.

Lethal Lykosh count: 40 strawberry transplants; one jewelweed; one oregano.

The cat owner never called me. I think our complete lack of knowledge of feral cats scared him off. Rachel Bush gave a different perspective on the snakes and mice and cats: a cat would upset the natural predator/prey balance, and kill not only unwanted rodents (all of them are unwanted here), but birds and little lizards and skinks and such. She prefers to just have knowledge of snakes, knowing that a copperhead is not aggressive but scared, living in the woods, trying not to bother anyone. And knowing that a copperhead is the only kind we need to worry about here in Albemarle County. (No rattlers or moccasins, thankfully!)

So no cats for the moment, I think. And it is rapidly growing too late for baby chicks or guineas; I’m hoping to buy some almost full grown. Guineas will also upset the natural predator/prey balance, but I think something needs to make a dent in the tick population. Poor Isaiah had 65 ticks on him after our forest excursion—41 on one leg alone! (Good thing the boys now take tick removal in stride.)

I am stretched beyond my comfort zone on many fronts. I needed to pick Phil up on Friday night. The boys fell asleep, and I was reading, when a terrific rain storm began, about two hours before I needed to leave to get him. It was a deluge—so much so that when the tarp between the trailers finally released from the water pressure, it sounded like a gunshot, and the sloshing of the water in the tarp against the side of the trailer momentarily made me wonder if we were afloat. It sounded that much like the sea on the side of a ship.

The deluge kept going. When it let up a bit, I gathered the dog and the four boys into the car, almost got stuck in the mud backing out of our driveway (the Bessettes don’t know what a hysterical phone call they DIDN’T get, had the car got stuck in the mud then!), and then drove slowly down the dirt road to get Phil. Adverse weather is not something I enjoy driving in, but I did it, and I didn’t crash, despite hydroplaning a bit for the first time in my life, and experiencing near black-out conditions at times.

On a completely different vein, Michelle mentioned that one night while they were living in their basement, before their house was built up above them, something bit her. She flung it across the room and woke the next morning to find a dead 5” millipede. Yuck! While I was feeding the baby in the night, I felt a slender, worm-like creature on my side and, wondering if a worm (or a mini-snake! Eek!) had somehow found its way in through the hole in the floor, I did my best to fling it away.

Only to find that it was actually the drawstring on my pajama bottoms. I bet that, should you wake in the night, you do not worry that a snake or a worm is slithering over you.

When I woke in the middle of the night, I read a bit of Bradford Angier’s How to Stay Alive in the Woods, originally published in 1956. He’s a famous “survival skills” writer, filling his pages with beautiful prose: “A good rule is not to pass up any reasonable food sources if we are ever in need. There are many dead men who, through ignorance or fastidiousness, did.”

However, I’m skeptical as to the ease with which I might be able to actually support myself off the game of the land. For example, he makes catching rabbits sound ridiculously easy: “In the spring particularly, those years when rabbit cycles are near their zeniths, the young lie so fearlessly that a dog will step over one without scenting it, and all an individual has to do, if he wants, is to reach down and pick the youngster up.”

So if you are wrestling with too many rabbits in your garden, you might try his tip: just reach down and grab it.