Why Am I Doing This?

 

 

 There is one word that definitely does not describe my new life here on the farm, and that word is "convenient." Things are very inconvenient here.

I am 26 miles from the nearest Taco Bell, about 10 miles from the nearest dinky grocery store, and 83 miles from the office of my doctor in Dallas. The nearest fast food is the Dairy Queen in Cooper, about 10 miles away. However, unlike most fast food in Dallas, their food is good, abundant and cheap.

In order to get my mail I have to hike a football field's length through waist-high weeds. I bought snakebite leggings because I once saw a 5 foot long snake here at close range, not quite as big around as my wrist. I didn't identify the type. When I get larger Amazon deliveries, which surprisingly I can get here, I have to truck a wheelbarrow over the overgrown path to the mailbox in order to convey it back to the house.

I poop on a custom-made toilet frame, under which lies a bucket with a lid. When the bucket fills up, I take it out to the compost pile, dump it out, rinse out the bucket and let it dry in the sun. When it is time for it to go inside again, I put grasses or hay in the bottom and it is ready to go again. No plumbers needed. ;)

When I need to do the dishes, or take a bath, this involves hauling buckets of water in from the only faucet out front and heating the water on the stove. Baths can take me 4 hours sometimes. Because my sinks are as small as those used in RV's, I have a big metal washtub to soak the dishes in. Dishes however are way easier than LAUNDRY. I do laundry in a big igloo icebox, scraping the clothes against an old-fashioned washboard, squeezing them out, rinsing them out with a hose attached to the one faucet out front, and I hang them on a clothesline slung between two trees. Out there with the wasps and the beautiful butterflies and the giant spiders and the dragonflies the size of small birds.

If you want a convenient life, I can say emphatically THIS IS NOT IT.

If you want a free life however, this is it. I am very free. My life is remarkably free of bullshit.

There are several interconnected reasons why I am here. The most basic, practical and direct reason is, I do not get along well with people. I am not well adjusted to society, which I am arrogantly inclined to think of as more society's fault than mine. If you want to do well in the cities, you need money and lots of it. This means that either you need to charm and persuade people to give you work because you are such a likeable person, and/or you need to have skills that are in constant demand. And the funny thing about skills in demand are, people tend to catch on that certain skills pay better and so they try to gain those skills too. Also, skills in demand have a talent for suddenly not being much in demand at all. So you can find yourself moving from being a technical brahmin to a nobody with remarkable ease. Urban life is inherently unstable. Since I am the inverse of charming and view persuasiveness as virtually a sin, and don't have skills so remarkable as to make people overlook my prickly exterior, I am sitting on my savings and growing vegetables and living spartan. Not to mention the fact that once an employer gets a good look at my politics and theology, they are going to welcome me into their corporate family about like they would welcome contagious leprosy.

There is another interconnected set of reasons relating to the malignant influences of urban life. Cities have been considered wicked since biblical times. I believe they are, in general terms, bad for morals, bad for human life, bad for raising children, and bad for the planet.

Back when I used to bike to visit my mother in the nursing home, I would always pass by a certain liquor store. In front of the liquor store there was a certain patch of grass between the parking lot and the highway; a very sad patch of grass. It was not unkempt, if only that were the case it would have been less sad. It was mown regularly, and between the sun beating off the parking lot and the heat radiating off the highway it was very sad and lackluster. It was living in the worst of both worlds: nobody would take care of it (in the holistic sense, doing what was good for it) and neither would they leave it alone to take care of itself. It was a small thing, but to me it radiated the same meaninglessness and alienation as the rest of urban life did. There was no love, no care for it. Not even Nature was allowed to care for it.

I know it was a small thing, a patch of ground. But to me it was The City in a capsule. Hatred of meaning, hatred of life itself, all in a patch of scorched earth. Hostile to Nature, hostile to G-d Himself.

I am sure I have spoken elsewhere about how bad industrialized agriculture is for the planet, so I will just drop that in under the category of being bad for the planet. Here on my land, either I am taking care of an area or Nature is being left alone to take care of it. And as a result, life is extremely abundant. More so, than any place I have ever seen. It is the opposite of that sad listless patch of grass.

Bad for human life? There are so many dimensions of this, but just for starters, instability is bad for human life. Nothing is keeping you from losing your job or even everyone or mass numbers of people from losing their jobs. Humans are replaceable by machines in many cases, and more so each day. And then without work you starve, or almost as bad, you make the run of soup kitchens and homeless shelters while experiencing the worst that urban life has to offer. A real and hopeless hell. That ain't good. That is very very bad.

One of my favorite parables about the instability of human economics is that during the Great Depression, apples still grew on trees, chickens still clucked on the grass and laid eggs, and wheat still grew in the fields. The Earth may have taken a knock in the Dust Bowl, but on the whole the country was still able to feed us. It was the human system that failed. And it can fail again, at any time.

Even the good parts of urban life can be bad. Comfort, convenience, is bad for human development. Everyone likes a little comfort and convenience sometimes, but when it becomes a way of life it creates human beings who are unable to stand up to or stand up FOR anything. Molluscs who have no principles greater than their pillows. Humans must be many things, but one of the things they must be capable of being, is warriors. In physical, intellectual or spiritual struggle, strength develops through DIScomfort, and to be a warrior either literally or against the things we must struggle against in this life, is uncomfortable. Wrestling with the natural world makes us strong. Comfort makes us weak.

Bad for children? Well, only if gangs, drugs, alcohol, fast food, diabetes, public nudity, alienation, porn and nihilism are bad for them. Regular exposure to nature on the other hand promotes good qualities. Independence, wonder, curiosity, confidence.

Bad for morals? It seems that the more humans are separated from nature and natural life, the more deviant they become, inventing new degenerate ways of life all the time and holding them up as paragons of progression. In nature, life and energy are the currencies and every living thing seeks to expand its life and increase its energy. In the city, money is the currency and experiences are the things to be desired. Even if the experiences, like drug use, are destructive to oneself, others, or the planet.

Another reason I am here: I believe that evil has consequences. In the Bible this is usually described as G-d's wrath, such as fell on Sodom and Gomorrah, or fell on the Kingdom of Israel and later on the Kingdom of Judah. But whether you consider it G-d's wrath or natural law, I think we are long overdue for a "reset," and not the kind the World Economic Forum has in mind. Economic or civil or natural or political catastrophe. I think that is far overdue, that Covid is barely a down-payment on it, and if it happens in my lifetime, the last place I would want to ever be is in a city.

And so here I am, a hermit in the country. If I am not quite John the Baptist eating grasshoppers, I am not that far off either. ;) It is not convenient or comfortable, but it is good.

 

 

 

Keyhole and farm plan changes

Well, live and adapt. This land is going to be way too soggy, especially in the Spring, to do the kind of no-till garden I was originally planning. I imagine it dries out towards summer, but by then I already need to have stuff going.

What I am going to do is build a series of keyhole gardens. They will be composed of wire mesh set into the ground with PVC stakes (because I happen to have both things on hand.) Because I don't want to dig the quantity of soil that would be necessary to fill the approximately 2-3 foot tall by 10 foot in diameter garden bed, I am initially going to fill the whole thing with "hay." The quotes on the hay are because what I am actually talking about is whatever dead vegetation I have around here, which is mostly grass but also weeds and such. I would just order a ton of hay, but I have learned from experience that such hay is often grown with herbicides which aren't good for growing other plants in. Hay is grown to feed horses and cows, not grow plants. So to be certain that my hay is herbicide-free, I have to gather what is here, which is grass and weeds and whatnot but definitely nobody has been spraying chemicals on it. This is however rather labor-intensive and requires a number of sunny dry days so I can cut the "hay" with an oversized hedge trimmer, and sunny days are in short supply around here lately.

Now, plants grown in hay alone isn't going to work too great. So once I have the bed entirely filled with hay and it has had a chance to tamp down (and maybe more hay added,) when I plant I am going to make a hole in the hay around each seed or seed cluster and fill said hole with Miracle Gro garden soil.  Then I plant the seeds in it. Over time I add more organic matter until voila! The whole thing is basically soil. The cardboard (weed blocker) underneath the keyhole gardens will break down with time, giving access to the nutrient-rich clay beneath, and meanwhile the grass and weed roots underneath the cardboard will have died and broken down, creating channels for my crop roots.

The immediate problem with this plan is that it is a lot of work and it depends on sunny days for cutting hay that I don't typically have a lot of now. So I might only get a couple of these gardens done in time for spring planting. I am wanting to have many such, but it may be next year before I fully colonize my gardening space with the keyhole gardens. The long-term problem is that the garden walls are made of steel mesh, which will rust over time but I don't anticipate a huge problem with repairing them. Just slap some new steel mesh around the outside. The contents of the garden might also ooze out through the mesh over time: I will be using cardboard initially to help the mesh hold in the contents, but I can anticipate that not lasting a super long time. However the loss of structural integrity of the cardboard can also be a bonus: I can plant stuff like strawberries into the side of the garden on the south-facing side. I have enough of this fiberglass cloth stuff (that was also just lying around on the property) to line one of the garden beds, but not enough for more than that and I am really not wanting to buy more to line the beds.

I have one of the keyhole gardens built and partially filled with hay, but at this point I will be lucky to have it done in time to plant corn in it, especially if the wet weather keeps up. I can get started on the second one at any time since building the wire mesh framework is not weather-dependent, just filling it is. I also have some snow peas starting in a no-till bed but they may get waterlogged.

Live and adapt to the land, that is the ticket.

Preparedness

Me preparing for a Seven Degree Fahrenheit day outdoors

 

The farm in the snow

 
As many probably know, Texas is digging out from a once-in-a-lifetime winter storm. For someone who preaches preparedness, I was not as prepared as I would have liked, but it all worked out in the end. My water stockpile was not filled to capacity when the water went out, but fortunately I did not have to use all that I had. I had maybe a gallon of gas on hand for the generator. Fortunately the power stayed on, for the most part. My footwear proved inadequate to the cold even with two pairs of socks, but now I know and I improvised.

 I had no busted pipes in the house, because all the pipes in my house are already busted and the water cut off from them. I get my water from a faucet out front, which did freeze up but since I left it running, it did not bust the pipe. My toilet did not become nonfunctional because my toilet is a homecrafted toilet frame into which a bucket filled with straw is fitted into. Once filled, it goes out to the compost pile. Low tech is good, lol. My floors may be dirty from the damned ubiquitous clay here, but they aren't flooded. 

If anything I am about to have a hay/straw emergency, lol, but once the roads are more passable I am going to order a big bale of hay, which I am going to need for the garden beds anyway.

Food, I never lost power for long so I have all the food that I would have anyway. Had I lost power, I have an alcohol camp stove and alcohol fuel stored away.

Had the power gone out, heating would have been my Achille's Heel. I didn't have hardly any gasoline stored, and my generator could have handled only one of the two portable heaters I needed to keep my bedroom at tolerable temperatures. The rest of the house has no heat: there is central heating but last time I ran it I got unacceptable heating bills so I assume that the vents in the roof are exposed. In the bedroom, I put in extra insulation but not in the rest of the house. The bedroom was always going to be my bunker if extreme heat or cold occurred anyway. I also put a spring on the bedroom door to keep it closed, otherwise my cat Mango would leave it partway open and all the heat (or cool in summer) would leak out. Fortunately I DID get that done a couple weeks before the storm hit.

Washing hands on the coldest days was a real problem: my water is stored in plastic "watercubes" and if left out in the ambient temperatures would be ice cold when I needed to wash my hands. On some days I heated water on the stove to use for hand washing. On others I just gritted my teeth and endured the icy water on my hands.

I have, ahem, not bathed in quite some time. Bathing is quite a chore when there is no indoor water. It involves heating up a lot of water on the stove and pouring it into the bathtub. Fortunately for 99% of the time there is no one around to experience my, I am sure, overwhelming fragrance, but getting a bath is high on my priority list once temperatures warm up at least into the sixties. Let me tell you, stepping out of the tub into a freezing cold bathroom is an experience you won't want to repeat any time soon.

I stand a good chance of being marooned here for awhile, not because of the ice, but because of when it melts. There's 350 feet between my house and the County Road, and under wet conditions that becomes a mire, a chunky soup of mud. I am going to have a driveway put in once I find a contractor to do it.

On the whole though I have been very blessed. In some ways the worst day of the crisis was today. Once the faucet thawed yesterday, I filled up all my water cubes to put into storage, and also went out and filled up all my gasoline containers, and did a grocery run, and as a result of all that exertion my glutes... my ass, if you will pardon the expression... is so sore that it is painful to walk. The day I melted snow and all the greasy goop from the vent-a-hood got rehydrated and started dripping on my stove and into my snowmelt was bad too, I had to pour out the water I was melting and clean out the pot and rinse it with snow, that kinda sucked.

On the whole though it was a cakewalk. I just stayed indoors and played Skyrim all day. ;) 

I think the conclusions that I have drawn from the experience is that I was not as prepared as I would like to have been (very little gasoline, water cubes not full when it started,) but also that being low-tech or at least being prepared to go low-tech has very great advantages. No toilet pipes were going to bust, I do my #2 in a bucket. When I first moved here, I didn't have water hooked up so I had a full water purification setup going to purify pond water. When I first moved here I ran on generator power, so I have the generator with a power cord that runs from the outside to my bedroom, and gas cans (though I didn't think to stock up on my gasoline.)

I also need a generator that is twice as powerful as that one, 2000 watts is not enough to fully heat my room at temps around zero Fahrenheit, and it is not enough to run the window AC in the bedroom full blast in a heat wave, so I need to order a 4000 watt generator once the roads thaw and I can get deliveries from Amazon again.

Another conclusion: the Ark is a BEAST. :) After sitting and freezing in sometimes below zero temperatures, with 100,000 miles on the odometer, when I went to go drive to the store it just turned right over. Chevy Express vans: don't underestimate em.

On the whole I was blessed by the Lord my G-d and didn't have a particularly rough time of it, and learned many important things from it. I also am in awe of how large 3 acres is and how many resources are in this land to help me. I feel like a king of my own domain here, though in fact G-d is king and I am just a thankful tenant. :) The land is G-d's: I just get to use it.