Trauma Farm (48 page)
HUNTER-GATHERER CULTURES WEREN ’T
any more ecological than us. Their damage was usually only less because of smaller populations and either a cultural rejection of technology or a lack of it. Is that an answer? In my worst moments, I believe we are approaching our ecological destination— scraping the earth’s surface clean of minerals and metals before returning to our hunter-gatherer niche.
You can’t practise “traditional” whale hunting with high-powered rifles and harpoon cannons; that’s the world of shellfish-headed spears, rope, and seal bladders and a few crazily intrepid individuals in a canoe, individuals who could return one day. Cluster bombs will become rocks again, missiles will be spears, and we will revisit the caves and huts where we might belong, gathering roots, perhaps small-farming a slash-and-burn garden patch, chasing a few mammals and lizards about, eating grubs, watching the shadows of our fires on the walls.
MAYBE MY THOUGHTS
go this way because I’m in my decadent tub, and able to enjoy the luxury of the night. The stars are fading as the moon breaks above the cedars. I hear a noise by the back gate and remember the chickens are not locked up. The dogs are in the house with Sharon. I get up, dripping, step into my sandals, and seal the tub, preserving the heat with my homemade double cover. Then I’m padding around the house to the gate. Everything is quiet, the chickens murmuring in their coop. I lift the ramp and drop the latch to lock the coop tight, as the moonlight shafts through the trees in silver bars. My whole world is going primeval again. I exit the outer run, careful I don’t take a slide on any loose mound of chicken shit. I look at the woods beyond, and start to imagine them rustling with dinosaurs, until I hear a clickety-click in the nettles. Oh no, here we go again—and the dogs are inside. I double back to the road behind the coop while the sheep shift tentatively toward the lower field.
It’s magic time.
I guess this sounds as if I often wander naked in the dark. I don’t. However, there are always those inevitable moments when the world goes sideways. We have to respect them as well in this long day of storytelling. Everything in moderation, including moderation. I still can’t see the creature in the silver pouring over the nettle patch by the field, but the sheep are unafraid and have moved up to the soft, shaded grass by the fence. A branch cracks and I sight him. He’s enormous. The big buck that’s been lurking in the woods behind the farm. Last year he startled Sharon and me, leaping out of the salal and across the trail in front of us.
Big-chested with a wide, long rack, uneven, four points on one side, five on the other. Maybe the largest buck I’ve seen on this island of small deer. He skips over the rail fence with the ease of a teenager hopping a mud puddle. I can’t cross the nettles because I’m only wearing my sandals, so I continue down the road and slip through the gate to the lower pasture and back toward the field, where he’s mingled with the sheep, browsing. The animals shine like platinum in the moonlight. I come around the bigleaf maple until I face him barely ten feet away. He’s unconcerned. And I realize with some sadness that he’s joined the herd of deer being fed by my neighbour. This has made him lose his fear of people. Dangerous.
The sheep recognize me and continue eating. I can tell he’s deciding whether to run; then he returns to grazing the lush, early-summer grass, yet keeping his eye on me. I back away. Tonight the field is his.
By now, Sharon will be wondering why I haven’t come for my tea, but it’s warm outside and the moon is upon me in the pasture beside the big, linked ponds, and I feel thrilled. I am being washed clean by the moonlight, all my senses alive, the breeze on my skin, the bats like fluttering shadows, the ripping of the grass by the sheep. I’m flooded with the happiness of knowing that I am here, that I don’t own any of this. I am merely present, linked into the absurd chain that goes back to Gautama delivering his fire sermon to a thousand monks at Gaya Head, and further . . .
O my priests, everything is on fire. And with what is
everything on fire?
The eye is on fire, form is on fire, awareness is on fire,
the eye’s glance is on fire. Also everything that is pleasant
or painful or unpleasant or painless to the glance. They are
aflame with what? They are on fire with the fire of passion,
the fire of hatred, the fire of delusions. I say the mind is on
fire with birth, with age, with death, sorrow, weeping, pain,
grief, and despair.
The ear is on fire. Sound is on fire. The nose is on fire.
Smells are on fire. The tongue is on fire. Flavours are on fire.
The body is on fire. Touch is on fire.
Yes! And I guess this is why I could never be a true Buddhist. I love the fire too much that Gautama warns us against. Like Camus, I can only adore the absurd in all its glory—the high-speed run to the inevitable grave—performing the living dance of death—celebrating the river, diving in it, diverting it, flowing in it, lusting naked with my companions in the current. Celebration and struggle. In quantum physics, effect can occur before cause. Time and events are the tangle our minds live within—this eighteen-year-long day at Trauma Farm that stretches back to Babylon and into the future. This is our only victory. The only way I’ve been able to move beyond my desires and distractions is by being immersed fully in the world—by paying attention.
IN
On the Origin of Species,
Charles Darwin writes of the richness around us and how it all arrived.
It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed
with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the
bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms
crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these
elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other,
and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have
all been produced by laws acting around us . . . There is grandeur
in this view of life, with its several powers, having been
originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that,
whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed
law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms
most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being,
evolved.
We go through long periods of self-hypnosis, sandwiched between sublime incidents of attention (awareness) and stupid, boring labours. But existence is a surprise, the real questions we haven’t figured out, so that suggests to me we should learn to treat our planet gently. According to the Dakota proverb, probably first spoken by Black Elk, “We shall be known by the tracks we leave behind.” That said, it’s clear factory farming is dangerous, but it has fed many people economically. We have to learn how to harness it, and reduce our addiction to its defiled products. Traditional farming is good, but it’s caused mayhem as well. We need to find a balance. I don’t know if that’s possible.
Meanwhile, eat your local vegetables and fruits and take long walks every day. After that, everything becomes dicey, especially when we start making laws. It’s difficult not to be ironic if we consider our history of solutions.
I ARRIVE IN THE
night with fewer answers than when I began. The most I have learned is that living in these moments, close to the land, is good, and behaving with as much common decency as I can muster is also good. The Tetlit Gwich’in tribe have no word for wilderness. That’s because it was not out there for them until recent years. They were living inside the wilderness. You can know an ecology only if you are inside it. I question all authority and the twisted by-products of reductionist logic, and I rise on a summer morning to the haunting song of a thrush, live with the birds of the day, and sleep to the random vocalizations of the night.
The plaintive call of the killdeer erupts again from the field. She’s on her nest. I almost stepped on it the other day while rounding up the sheep. The male had been doing his broken-wing trick a few minutes earlier, near the pond, but I’d ignored him. The nest is four speckled eggs in a pasture. Hidden in plain sight. They make it most of the time. We’ve seen a few hatches. According to Audubon, people consider the killdeer “a noisy bird and restless,” but I’ve always found it beautiful, and its cry in the night is haunting. A companion to the frog chorus of spring. It’s a noise against the silence of fate.
I’M OUT WANDERING AGAIN
, in the blue warmth of a night silvered by the moon—I am only another maggot laughing inside the ecstasy of my community. The high cedars are trembling in the breeze. Ajax shouts me out from his perch in the maple, while Sharon has drunk her tea and gone to bed. I leave this story as I entered it. Confused and enthralled—in the world—naked again, and still alive. I look around me in the dark and I know it’s a joke, but it’s a good joke. I think I’m home, living on the land. We’re in this together—the wild, the domestic, the wormy, the laughing ones and the weepers, black dogs and Buddhas, all of us divine in our diversity—our orgiastic, gorgeous confusion— all of us dancing in the stream of everything.
A
LTHOUGH A LIFETIME
of reading went into
Trauma
Farm,
the books listed here were most essential to its creation. They are also recommended reading. Several of the books quoted in the text are not included, such as the epic treatises of Darwin (along with a great number of reference books and Internet sources), because they don’t make good general reading, although I couldn’t resist including a couple of “difficult” classics in this list. The editions cited are the ones I used, and they are often not first editions. I listed subtitles only where I thought them relevant to understanding the nature of the book, and I have tried to keep to the spirit of
Trauma Farm
with the format of this unorthodox bibliography.
Edward Abbey.
Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness
. New York: Ballantine, 1985. A lyric, raucous collection of essays by the naturally rebellious naturalist and author of the original American eco-terrorist novel,
The Monkey Wrench Gang
.