ON THE MORNING
of February 28, I got up while it was still dark, dressed and kindled a fire. I fed the dry milk cow, put out hay for her and turned her out, then fed the other cattle and the horses.
That is the way most of my days begin, and the way I prefer to begin them. But after breakfast the day shifted out of the ordinary pattern. I shaved and put on good clothes, Tanya and I finished packing, and we got into the pickup and headed for the airport. We were going to spend a week in California—to do some necessary errands there and, we hoped, to get a little rest.
I have traveled a good deal in the last several years, and ought to know better, but now and then I am still visited by the notion that one thing you do on a trip is “get a little rest.” It rarely happens—at least to me. And I am beginning to understand why.
The trips on which I did “get a little rest,” and that I remember with the most pleasure, were leisurely trips by car or train. Those trips were good, I think, because their stories were always about the places I went, and the places I went through to get there. Traveling by car, one had only one’s own schedule to follow. Trains were better than cars, because on a train one was freed of schedules altogether; one simply resigned oneself to a schedule that other people were following or worrying about—as untroubling to a mere passenger as the schedule of the seasons.
Now the stories of my trips tend to be mostly about traveling—about the busy-ness of getting there, and about schedules. One goes to an airport which is like all other airports, boards a plane like all other planes, flies at a remote and diminishing height above the countryside to a city that is apt to be remarkably like all other cities, sleeps in a hotel or motel that is virtually indistinguishable from the last one slept in. And one stays on schedule.
The California trip was different in a couple of ways: we were staying in a lovely place belonging to Tanya’s aunt and uncle; and San Francisco, in spite of massive efforts to overpower it with skyscrapers and freeways, is still unique and beautiful. Nevertheless, we were living on schedule. From the schedule of the airline, we moved into the schedule of the city. We were waking, eating, talking, sleeping on schedule.
I thought again and again of the change that we went through on the morning of our departure. We had begun the day as people who order their lives—or try to do so—by necessities, interests and responsibilities, by times and seasons. We care for our animals’ needs, for instance, as we care for our own—because it is time to and because we want to. And then, as our departure approached, we began to live by schedule; we needed to be in a certain place at a certain time, not or not only because of the convergence of time and need, but because we were expected. One does not make an appointment with a milk cow or a garden, and so one’s care for those things has a kind of margin of convenience: doing the work a little early or a little late makes only a little difference. But the penalties of getting off schedule are immediate and direct: one misses one’s plane or insults one’s friends. Most of us nowadways cannot earn a living except by meeting someone else’s schedule.
And that led me to think how vulnerable schedules are. It is the awareness of their vulnerability that makes us so uneasy. By definition, a schedule can’t deal with the unscheduled. The past winter caused so much trouble because it was unscheduled. The country was prepared to deal with the winter it expected, not the one it got. In traveling from Kentucky to California, we were traveling from the coldest winter on record to the driest winter on record. It was a bad winter in our part of the country for one reason: a few years ago nearly all the coal furnaces were converted to use natural gas. In making this change, householders had unknowingly made themselves helpless—dependent upon a schedule that in unscheduled weather could not be dependably met. Californians had a bad winter—and will have a worse summer—because they have set up their economies on the assumption that the weather is scheduled, that a certain amount of winter rainfall could be expected like the morning paper.
“The Weather’s Just Fine!”
The evening we arrived in California I asked a friend if he was much worried by the dry weather. He replied instantly: “The weather’s just
fine! Plenty of rain for the native vegetation. Not enough for the exotics and the people. But that’s all right with me.”
It was hardly a conventional response, but I thought it a very instructive one. By people, of course, he meant the exotic
people—those, for instance, whose normal average daily use of water is 160 gallons, and whose abnormal daily use during this dry time is still something like 40 – 60 gallons. Such a squandering of water in such a climate is not merely exotic. It is, in all senses of the word, strange. And it is dangerous. It is of a kind with the squanderings of topsoil, fuel, human energy, and other resources that are characteristic of our present life.
And so my friend’s comment referred to a truth that is exactly as important as it is unpopular: these so-called crises of the weather are no such thing; they are revelations of a crisis of culture. An arctic winter in Kentucky, a two-year drought in California confront us, again, with the question: Is our life native or exotic? Or, to put it another way, do we belong where we are? That this is a question of the greatest seriousness is also suggested by what my friend said, for he was alluding to an inflexible natural law that is only a little less inflexibly a law of culture: the native species survives; the exotic parishes. The native thrives by adaptation to its place. The exotic lives on a schedule. That is to say, people can’t survive in California on the assumption that they live in a rain forest. People can’t survive in Kentucky on a fuel supply that would be ample in Georgia. Finite supplies cannot support infinite appetites. And it must never be forgotten that this question is political. Exotic people are dependent people. Dependent people are by definition unable to help themselves in times of crisis. And when people are helpless, what does it matter if they are free?
Toward the end of our stay in California, Gary Snyder took us up to his place on San Juan Ridge in the Sierra foothills. The drive up there, after the superficiality of airplane travel, gave us the sense of deepening into the continent. We went from interstate to state road to back road to track, and stepped on the ground finally at Gary’s beautiful house in the woods—a place made human by care. And here began the second theme of our trip: the possibility of responsive and responsible local life, a life that lives by looking around where it is, discovering what is available there, and making appropriate
changes in itself as well as in the place. The other life, the life of freeways and airlines, never looks where it is. It imposes
its exotic schedules and demands, and expects the place to conform—rather like Simple Simon, who went fishing in his mother’s pail.
Our arrival at Gary’s place—welcomed by his wife, Masa, and his boys, Gen and Kai—was an emergence from schedules. It was like coming out of a tunnel. We were with the people we had come to see, and for a day and a half had no appointments. Natural and human events took place around us because of their own necessities—a kind of generosity in that, permitting rest. We had the deer stepping unafraid through the clearing, the windy light shimmering in the pines, good food, fire, laughter, the company of friends. Later, we slept in the new guest room in the barn.
In the morning, Gary and Masa took us on a walk around the neighborhood. We followed a path through the Manzanita to a place from which we could look down into a long, forested valley. A golden eagle was circling high over the ridge tops, the sunlight flashing off his wings as he tilted on the air currents. He soared awhile on the updrafts, loafing in the sky. And then purpose seemed to come to him. He began to slide swiftly down the air on a long straight slant to our left. It was only when he was almost out of sight that we saw his mate in the air beneath him. She dodged as he came near, and they disappeared together. The unscheduled! There is really nothing else to expect: “Doth the eagle mount up at thy command . . .?” A little later we heard geese, and looked up to see a large flock flying over us, heading north. The unscheduled—and the necessary.
But we were also walking through a human settlement, coming at intervals into clearings where there were houses, outbuildings, fenced gardens and fruit trees. Here in a region until now only cursorily used by white people—partly devastated by the hydraulic mining of a century ago, logged, randomly grazed—are finally the substantial beginnings of a settlement.
The houses are small, built so far as possible out of local materials, of excellent design and construction. They combine modesty and excellence in a way rarely seen in our civilization, and that I found extremely attractive and moving. In the face of public values that have customarily held modesty in contempt, this association of modesty and excellence can have come about only by great intelligence and seriousness of purpose, and by an understanding of ecological limits that, among us, is new. Here is a sizable number of Americans living by choice in a place of narrowly limited resources. The valuable minerals and the best timber were taken out long ago; the ground is not fertile; the summers are dry. These circumstances made the place available for settlement, and they have forcibly imposed modesty upon the settlers. One must garden intensively on a small scale because that is the only ambition the water supply will support.
This is a settlement still in its pioneer stage. Large ecological, economic and social questions hang over it. What insights, skills and materials will it need in order to survive? How will it acquire them? Intelligence, vision, several years of experience are already there, awaiting the issues of time, endurance, weather and luck. But I see in what is already there a substantial gain in what one could call the refined national product. These people are living off schedule. They are learning to live within limits that they have troubled to understand. They will never again be silly about the weather. The whole country needs to know what they are learning.
*Originally appeared in Organic Gardening and Farming (August 1977), 44-51.
