Tank Man

Dear all,
I am back in Chattanooga after a brief but very full trip to California. The trip home brought into focus the fact that I have just under a month left of this particular season of life in Tennessee before heading back to California. It will be sad to leave this wonderful place and the people here. I plan to soak up the experience in the weeks to come.

In August and September, I will be traveling to Japan and Myanmar with my old friend and Volunteers in Asia founder Dwight Clark and a group of university students he is leading. I will be writing more about that program as the trip approaches.

I mainly wanted to share this link to the "Tank Man" clip from the Tienanmen protests of 1989 that many of you will be very familiar with. I have watched it a dozen times in the past few weeks. There is also a fascinating 8 part video on YouTube called The Tank Man. A truly moving moment of history.

All the best,
Chad

Stories

We were in the Spring garden thinning carrots. It was midmorning and the day had not wasted time in getting hot. My baseball cap was cocked at a ridiculous angle to block the sun. The going was slow, so you put your water bottle ten paces ahead as an incentive and as a measure of progress.

Noah and Daniel were talking about how to deal with flea beetles. Matt and I were swapping jokes. He knew some good ones. There was one about a talking dog and another about thermometers. I vowed to myself that I would remember them, even though I knew I would not. I could only remember one joke. I told it, drawing it out as long as possible, trying to make up in duration what I lacked in quantity.

And then he says, “Where’s that old woman with the toothache?!” I had stopped
thinning carrots to deliver the punch line with added flair. This paid dividends. Matt was down the row convulsing.

You know what I’d love to study? I said. Story-telling. What a beautiful, lost art.

You should hear Jim Pfizer tell a story. I think he does it professionally. Got one those Marshal grants recently to maintain local tradition. Fifteen-thousand dollars.

Really? Never heard of Marshal grants. So he spins a good yarn?

“Jack tales”. That’s what they call them around here, I think. Jack tales.

Jack tales. I like that. We were closing in on finishing the second row of carrots.

My grandpa could tell a story, Matt said. That’s one of my favorite memories as a kid. Just sitting in the living room listening to grandpa talk about growing up in the depression in South Dakota and getting into all sorts of mischief. He could tell a story.

When I try to picture someone in their childhood, I just superimpose their grown up head onto a child’s body. The results are cartoonish and frequently comical. Imaginary Little Matt was particularly comical. Grown Up Matt wears a wide straw hat and a long, bushy, reddish-brown beard. In appearance and temperament, one might suspect that he escaped from either Lancaster County or perhaps the 19th Century. He teaches writing and literature at UT Chattanooga and speaks slowly and sonorously with the precision of someone who makes his livelihood with words.

My dad’s uncle Elmer… now he could tell a story, I said. Nick Harris Detectives. That was my favorite—Nick Harris Detectives. He drove out to Los Angeles from this small town in Illinois, kind of a last hurrah before going to study dentistry. And somehow he landed this job with this Hollywood detective agency for about two weeks of misadventure. I must have heard him tell it six or eight times, and it never took less than forty-five minutes. I recorded it before he died. That and his stories about the Philippines during the war.

We kept on in silence for a while and I thought about television and story-telling and that Wendell Berry quote Noah liked. Something about how we should always ask whether a technology increases or decreases the skill level of the person using it. I wondered what sort of stories I might tell my grandkids and against what kinds of games and gadgets I would be competing for their attention.

A cool breeze was coming in from the south. I finished my section and moved on to hoeing a row of Swiss chard. The ground was hard and caked after the prior week’s rains and the recent heat. The hoe did not slice easily through the soil.

Ashley called us in for lunch just after noon. She had made sandwiches with Matt’s sauerkraut, her own mustard, and a massive block of raw-milk cheese she had ordered from Wisconsin. With some of the limes we had inherited from Ann, she made the best tasting limeade I have ever had.

The food disappeared quickly and we sat around the table, satiated. Chocolate almond butter cookies materialized and life certainly could not have gotten any better.

I sold Anabelle this morning, Ashley said. It was funny; I met the lady in the parking lot at Baylor and the security guard kept giving us weird looks.

Well... you were in the process of selling a goat out of the back of a truck… Noah pointed out astutely. Everyone laughed.

You should have just looked incredulous and said, “What? You’ve never seen a goat deal go down before?” This was Matt’s contribution. I nearly lost my meal.

We all washed up and thanked Daniel and Matt for coming out. When would we be seeing them again? Soon, they said. They set off to canoe back to the Baylor dock. Clouds were coming over Elder Mountain from the west. I filled my water and shambled back to the field. As I picked up where I’d left off with the chard, my mind was filled with snippets of the voice and laughter of Uncle Elmer recounting his exploits with the famous Nick Harris Private Detective Agency of Hollywood, California.

The Story of Stuff

Dear all,
Here is a 20-minute video on global consumption not to be missed. It's something I would like to have made, only much better researched, articulated, presented, etc. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Thanks to Maribel Andonian for passing it my way!

Take care,
Chad

Ocra in the cove

Dear all,

Yesterday morning I defected from the island and made the 40 minute drive northwest to Sequatchie Cove Farm. Along the way, you dip briefly into Dade County Georgia and you cross into the Central Time Zone. This makes the drive seem more substantial. I was drinking strong coffee and listening to a podcast lecture about the Etruscans and their unfortunate encounters with the Romans en route. It was very close to the perfect morning.

Padgett Arnold and her crew of CSA workshares were planting ocra and tomatoes. It's typically too cold to plant ocra on the central coast of California, so I jumped at the opportunity. We planted 400 bed feet at twelve-inch spacing. That's a lot of ocra.

Sequatchie Cove is owned and operated by the Keener family, of whom my fellow islander Kelsey is the prodigal son (having returned from his stint at UC Santa Cruz). Their land at the cove is immodestly gorgeous. One of these days I will give the property a proper exploration and try to write a thing or two about the place. Until then, suffice it to say that it is immodestly gorgeous and that if you are ever within a three state radius of Tennessee it is worth a look-see.

On the 24th of May, the island will play host to an afternoon of workshops, talks, tours, and a potluck. Rain has pushed back the event date almost a month, but we have a good feeling about the 24th.

On June 7th, I am conspiring with my friends Tim and Amy Andonian to host an afternoon potluck and discussion on vocation (my next writing topic) at their house in Sunnyvale. Details to come. We'll hope to see some of you there.

And finally, here are some new photos from the farm and surrounds. Some are in the beloved sepia and others are in color. And to top it all off, here are three lovely poems by my friend Deena Miller. Deena read these at the March 14 event at the Alan Chadwick garden in Santa Cruz, and I've been meaning to post them ever since. Enjoy!

Chad

Hemingway in Knoxville

Dear all,

Today I skipped town and drove two hours north to Knoxville to explore more of the state and with the hope that a change in venue would help prime the writing pump. As per custom (my own), I parked on the outskirts of town and biked into the city. I chanced upon the lovely market square and continued on to the Old City. A used bookstore caught my eye. I entered and thumbed through a coffee table book on Ernest Hemingway. I have always been and continue to be a sucker for Hemingway. So, here is a journal entry from 2007 that I wrote after rereading my perennial favorite The Sun Also Rises.

“December 10, 2007

Today I finished reading The Sun Also Rises for the fourth or fifth time. What an extraordinary and engaging piece of writing. What struck me this time around was the discrepancy between the tremendous awareness of and sensitivity to weather, language, emotion, etc. that Hemingway had to have had to create such a work (at 26!) and the utterly misguided and bankrupt approach to life his characters take. It is so clear and so tragic how completely caught each character is in his or her desires and delusions. The book could almost serve as a textbook on how to cultivate misery and ensure unhappiness. And yet they’re also so charming and intelligent and sophisticated—and so missing the point. The book also reminded me how disastrous it is when people with money and power and influence fall under such madness. Because of the relative weight of their influence, their misguided decisions have huge ripple effects—just as the tragic actions of our current president have touched nearly every person alive.

And to think that Americans, with all our wealth and power, are acting just as madly as Brett Ashley and company, and that our madness is spreading. How disconcerting it all is. The word that always comes to mind is “thrashing”, as in we are thrashing about for happiness in an evermore doomed and destructive manner. It is a crazed behavior, an addictive behavior. It has made us blind to the subtle yet surpassing beauty of nature, of contemplation, of community.

This madness has always existed, yet never have our actions carried so much consequence, never have there been so many of us, and never have the snares that pull us into ignorance been so virulent, pervasive, and effective.

Rebekah Hart and I had a wonderful and affirming conversation last night about how to go about “the work”, both personally and in community. We face many of the same questions—whether to engage “within the belly of the beast” or to position ourselves somewhat outside the fray so as to nourish ourselves in the aim of nourishing others. She spoke of her experience with Joanna Macy and her “work that reconnects” pedagogy. What I found most interesting was that the workshops begin with a time to explore and acknowledge the grief we feel at our disconnectedness with nature and the destruction we have brought to the environment. This seems to me a very wise and necessary step to truly begin to address the bigger issues of our time.”

From the archives: Ubud, Bali

Dear all,
Here is a journal entry I wrote four years ago while visiting the island of Bali in Indonesia. I was in Indonesia for one week while working with Volunteers in Asia. I plan on doing some writing on that experience in the near future. Until then, here are some thoughts I scribbled while saddled up to the bar.


"April 3, 2005
Ubud, Bali

Here at an ex-pat bar, smile wide, chummy with Balinese bartender simply for not being as rude and brusque as some other patrons. I certainly wasn’t planning to land myself in this scene, but for some reason this is just right. Tonight I am a fly on the wall—or at the bar—of another manifestation of the inherently out-of-alignment clashing of 1st and 3rd (or 2nd?) worlds. A cultural train wreck, to borrow a favorite term from my good friend Brian Penrose.

I wish I could read the minds of the bartenders and all the Balinese selling their art along the pleasant streets of Ubud. I wonder what they think of these clunky, ponchy white folks who they supposedly depend upon. I imagine we seem arrogant and ridiculous, yet somehow powerful and alluring. We see ourselves this way, too, I think. Every time we pass another white face along the road, we put on our unfriendly look—somehow thinking we can transfer our guilt and discomfort into coldness towards those who most resemble us.

Realizing this, intellectually at least, I sit with this Buddha grin amongst my fellow bundles of guilt and abandon. I am the fly on the wall. I am outside the fray and therefore have the luxury of observation without participation. I am the book critic. I am the historian. If life were always this relaxed and enjoyable, it would all be a lark. But we all have to participate, sometimes in very nasty circumstances. Some of us have to participate in nasty circumstances from the get go, and we never have time to stop and breathe and ponder life and its marvels. Some of us are born into despair and are given precious few resources to extricate ourselves.

Some of us are lucky, and we have the leisure to sit at bars in Bali and muse about these things. Some of us are lucky, but we lucky ones tend to squander our good fortune on television and alcohol, trinkets and the pursuit of wealth. We’re not always so lucky after all.

I read Vonnegut feverishly today. He invokes great sadness, cynicism, humor, and compassion in me. He sees all too acutely what is happening, what is going on in this crazy world. His response is to tease us, to chide us, to nudge our slumbering conscience. He leaves me feeling just like him—cynical and pessimistic, yet tender towards our flawed and eager selves.

And here is an ugly scene. Insistent German woman with whole self focused on obtaining a cocktail. Uncomprehending Balinese bartender performing for the crowd. Dark skin on one side of the bar, light skin on the other. It is sad and done and poisonous. I think that word—poisonous—applies to so many of our relationships, so many of our interactions. Sometimes we bring the poison, sometimes our ancestors’ ancestors have supplied it without our knowing. We just inherent the bitter aftertaste and the vague idea that something is amiss."

New photos / first letter

Dear friends,

Sunday has brought rain again to Chattanooga, but Friday and Saturday were warm and presented a narrow planting window. We worked until dark planting tomatoes, beans, basil, herbs, onions, leeks, shallots, and lettuce. I woke up with aches, but the type of aches made palatable by satisfying work. Here are some recent pictures from Williams Island Farm and from out and about Chattanooga. I hope you enjoy.

I am also sending along via email the first of the Cracks in the Pavement letters in two parts. The letter is titled Underpinnings of Health and asks the question - Are there underlying characteristics common to healthy people, communities, institutions, and ecosystems? I hope you will find something in the letter that sparks a thought or a new line of inquiry. I still consider this an early draft and plan on revising all the letters before self-publishing them later this year. So if you catch any grammatical errors or typos, feel free to let me know. I can benefit from a multiplicity of eyes! On the topic of editing, my sincere thanks go to Maribel and Amy Andonian for their input and assistance thus far.

Take care,
Chad