Living Outside

The days are longer, the first small wildflowers taking their chances. Rain has not deterred the first migrators, from Turkey Vultures to Hummingbirds. This renewal of activity signals the time for gardeners to begin their toil and bloggers to quit procrastinating! Since the last post, our goats have grown, cherry tomatoes sweetened our tongues, cider has been pressed and snow provided fascinating tracking opportunities. Among all this, there is one change that gives me most cause for reflection.

Last December, we moved out of the house, and into a canvas tent under the roof of the barn. Since then we've been living outside day and night. I can confidently say that of all our against-the-grain attempts to find glimpses of a sane life-way, this has been one of the more profound and successful. A little voice in us --as well as several other well-meaning ones-- fretted about cold, winter, damp, rain, wind, and other unavoidable calamities from which the House would no longer have the power to shelter us. It is widely accepted that conditions such as these are undesirable; this is made clear to us at a very young age by concerned and loving relatives explaining that it is cold outside and hats, mittens, jackets, overcoats, thick socks, insulated boots and scarves will be necessary implements for survival today. By comparison, the House is the culturally accepted haven from harm: Home Sweet Home (and never mind that domestic accidents are one of the leading causes of death in our society!).

In spite of this, it has been fascinating to me to notice not only how unharmed I remain from the ostensibly hostile elements, but in fact how much better I feel. For example, rain is usually thought to be an excellent reason to stay indoors, even if this means staying cooped up in a dim, gloomy house. But meanwhile I'm out there enjoying the song of the rain on the roof, leaves, grass, driveway, and myriad other musical surfaces! I'm amused now at the discrepancy between how pleasant it is to experience rain and the gloominess that I felt when I voluntarily limited myself to the house so as to avoid the hardships of being exposed to the rain! The beauty of the sky-water's earthbound journey, the splashes and drips and gathering into pools and rivulets... Rainy days are not inherently dark, depressing occasions, quite the contrary. It is our allegiance to the dark, disconnected house environment that make them seem so.

Likewise for temperature: I have noticed that while a warm spring day feels nice at 50ºF (10ºC), even 60ºC (15ºC) feels cold in a house. This demonstrates to me how psychology and cultural notions of what constitutes an appropriate range of conditions trump our body's inbuilt tolerance levels. Adapting to the cold has not been so much physiological as a mental shift of what I consider "normal". This has taken very little time, and I am very pleased to now feel quite comfortable whenever conditions stay above or near freezing, even without a coat.  If I get cold, I just increase my activity level, which is the best medicine for preventing a sedentary, "couch potato" lifestyle! The hardest step all day is getting out of a toasty warm bed. But then, better get the hardest part of the day behind you first thing, right?

The level of control over our surroundings that the House both symbolizes and demands is a weight I am very glad to have shed. Now, if we accidentally get the floor wet or drop food, it isn't instantly a crisis demanding immediate action before life can go on. In the House, a wet or dirty floor is either a hazard, or gross. Usually both. Yet any action, from eating to removing a book from a shelf, has the effect of moving the House away from its idealized "clean" state. This means that every moment we live in our House, we live in a situation of cognitive dissonance: the way we imagine a House should be is invariably at odds with the way it is. Even the best housekeeper is fighting a losing battle trying to maintain constant "tidiness". It's like fighting windmills! On the other hand, is a forest ever "messy", despite the absence of a dedicated concierge? So why do we design houses according to artificial standards that are only bound to keep us dissatisfied and in a perpetual control-freak cleaning frenzy mode??

In our present life situation, we keep in a reasonable state of cleanliness only that which we need to keep clean: our dishes, essentially. We use an extension cord and a vacuum cleaner once in a while for the carpets in our tent --living in a tent has not meant giving up on all our fancy comforts! (Actually, one of our carpets is a big old oriental rug that was probably made to go in a tent or yurt in the first place!) The floor of our outdoor area, which includes our rustic kitchen and fire pit, is packed earth over concrete, so no maintenance there. The kitchen counter (plywood covered in contact paper) is both fast and optional to clean. The camping stove also. I feel a great relief that my surroundings do not demand constant attention and maintenance. The culturally-defined comfort standards of the House require great maintenance to sustain, and I am learning now that it is all for rather meager and biologically unnecessary benefits, and at the cost of our life-nurturing contact with the elements. The House not only exemplifies the flawed assumption that we can radically control our environment successfully, but places us in the position of having no choice but to try, and repeatedly fail, to do so.

So far, my spirit has been strengthened by continuous contact with the same forces among which we as a species have evolved. My awareness has grown, from my senses being constantly embedded in a wide and complex landscape, beginning my recovery from the sensory deprivation of the House's restricted and simplified environment. My mental state has improved, and I'll venture that the peak in depression that occurs in winter and is commonly blamed on the seasons can really be attributed to the house-bound lifestyle most people espouse at that time. When I feel the wind on my skin, I take in the sensation and rejoice. I take note of its direction and the implications it has for the next days' weather. In the House, wind is reduced to a draft, a problem, a reason to curse and buy caulking and insulation. When the birds sing, I pause and listen. The Song Sparrow next to our barn has a dazzling array of songs for various occasions. My understanding of bird behavior and my responses to it have deepened considerably. Indoors, I hear nothing but the whirr and buzz of fridge, heating systems, and other unidentifiable nuisance noises. Even the rain, as I mentioned, is an occasion for celebration now.

I believe that part of our biological heritage is a kinship with the elements, animals, changes in the weather. For untold millions of years the genes of our ancestors were shaped by an environment that included bird song, rain, wind, "cold" and "hot", a gentle fade of day into night. Living close to nature then should not stay merely an ideological position but should translate to a physical proximity, indeed, full immersion. The benefits have already shown themselves to be deep and far-reaching, and certainly worth the discomfort of transcending the cultural barriers that make us cling to the House. I look forward to moving away even more from learned symbols of comfort, toward a joyful involvement with the dynamic elements which lies still at the core of the biological expectations of our senses.

Goats

Chris and Idun, Rosemary and Skadi

We got goats! Two nubian doe-kids who we hope will chow down on the ubiquitous "Himalayan" Blackberry, and maybe provide us with milk next year if we decided to take them to a buck this winter. They are incredibly adorable and follow us tenaciously, eating when we stop and calling if we move away (especially if we go in different directions, something they have little tolerance for). The first few days and nights were very stressful though because the kids had just been weaned, and they cried ceaselessly when we left them alone. In fact they lost their voices, and take it from me, a hoarse nubian screaming in distress is one of the most pitiful and heart-wrenching sounds I've heard. Now they're getting used to spending time alone, though they haven't yet gotten their normal voices back fully. Salutations to our neighbors who put up with them, and to bobcat and bear who haven't troubled them, though I'm sure they had a peak through the bushes...

Now we can experiment to see if goats can effectively control the blackberry!

And... we're back!!

Our new home, nestled between prairie and forest.

This is it! I crossed the border upon receipt of my US visa on Thursday, and on Friday was welcomed into our new home, the homestead at a nature preserve in the Willamette Valley, OR. Now begins a whole new chapter in both of our lives, filled with a multitude of adventures which we shall chronicle here. For now, time is to settling in, getting acquainted with the neighbors (tender prairie flowers, melodious feathered dryads, elusive creatures of fur and claw), seeking the Earth's bounty in our garden-in-progress, working with our goats (soon to be acquired) and chickens to manage brush, etc.

The garden into which we pour labor and love!

"Welcome to the USA": the Long-Awaited Bureaucratic Catharsis

Phewww... I just got back from clearing the last immigration hurdle: the interview at the US Consulate in Montreal. It was a quick business, I was in and out in one hour and a half. "Interview" is really a big word; I had been imagining being ushered into an impressive office and scrutinized by a representative of the state with more power than you'd want to shake a stick at for fear of legal repercussions for the next seven generations. In the end I turned in my original documents at one booth, talked to someone in a slightly more private booth about my accent and other niceties and then received my "welcome to the USA" letter. Didn't even have to talk about how we met, what I planned on doing in the US, etc. Great!

Now I will travel back to Vancouver and wait for a package containing my visa documents and passport (which they kept) to be sent by mail. They say I can expect it in less than 2 weeks. Which means I probably won't make it for our anniversary, on the 21st. But soon I shall be on my southward journey, and then on to more thrilling adventures! I hear rumours of bird surveys and natural building and planting hardy kiwis and goumis and other fantastical things... Not long now...

End in sight, and a new blog!

Hello World! With great --though still somewhat reserved-- pleasure, I can say that my forced exile is coming to an end soon. I have the date for my interview, which is the last step in the immigration process. This will be on June 15th, after which I have to wait a few days to receive the visa package; I hope to be able to be in the US for our anniversary, June 21st!

In the meantime I will go to France, to visit my folks. Then back to Montreal, for that is where the interview is happening. And when that is over with, bus trip back to Vancouver to wait out the last few days until the restrictions on my freedom to travel are lifted!

In the meantime I will be staying sane by walking in the tracks of deer, inhaling the intoxicating sent of newly burst Cottonwood buds and erupting elderberry flowers. I have started a new blog to record these experiences and reflections on my journey into nature awareness: http://chroniclesofthewild.blogspot.com/. So in the future, I envision gardening adventures and other concrete life projects (which will be plenty once our lives are allowed to go on) being posted here, while my blog COTW will record the events occurring in the natural world and thoughts on my place therein.

Be well, and if you're in Montreal or in France at the same time I'm there, drop me a line. Smell them Cottonwoods??

Chris

Yet another long-awaited update

Oh my goodness, where to start? So many new things to write about, although one thing remains the same: six months later and Chris is still in Vancouver, though we’re starting to see a hint of a glimmer of the light at the end of that tunnel. That “approve” we got back in January was a big step, but we didn’t really know at the time that we still had a long way to go. Now the last batch of documents has been sent in, and we’re waiting for them to be approved (by a different agency than the previous one) so that an interview date can be set…  but then the interview could be anywhere from a month to three months away, so we hear. Oh, and Chris is going to have to go back to Montreal for the interview, because apparently that’s the only place in all of Canada where they process this particular kind of immigration request. Once the interview is done, however, he should be able to cross the border! So that’s the gist of things for the moment. I’ll let Chris write more about what he’s been doing, if he feels up to it!

As for me, I suppose the biggest news is that I’ve moved to this magical fairyland that has been alluded to in previous posts. Some folks call this place a nature preserve. Some call it Shambhalla. I have yet to discover my special name for this place, but it’s starting to become home. This 270-acre paradise is, in technical terms, a land trust managed by an environmental organization. They acquired the land a few years ago, mainly because it is one of the few areas with a relatively healthy population of the Kincaid’s lupine, which is relied upon for survival by the Fender’s blue butterfly. Both lupine and butterfly are considered endangered, and both only occur in the Pacific Northwest, and at that, mostly in the Willamette Valley. There are a few patches of this symbiotic flower/pollinator pair around, and now this one, at least, is protected, with plans for habitat expansion.

Aside from this, the land is quite varied, although typical of the Willamette Valley: oak savannah, dense douglas-fir forest and younger douglas-fir plantation, broad-leaf maple, some ponderosa pine, open prairie filled with grasses whose identity I do not yet know, a creek lined with water birch and willow, and of course invasives such as Himalayan blackberry and scotch broom. Among the more mobile, the four-legged, that is, we find numerous mule deer, a herd of elk, coyote, fox and bobcat, and their lunch, rabbit, at least one each of black bear and cougar (I have not yet seen very many of these with my own eyes yet, though I see their tracks and scat often). As for the winged, some nights I hear great-horned owls calling back and forth to each other. There are the usual suspects: jays (scrub and Stellar’s), crows, ravens, robins, juncos and chickadees, sparrows and kinglets, sap-suckers, towhees, kestrels, red-tail hawks. And the occasional unusual suspect, such as the Townsend’s solitaire I saw a couple weeks ago. Beautiful little thrush, likely just passing through.

So, how did I get here? Well, on this land is a house. A house and a barn. And some surrounding gardenable land, totaling a couple of acres. This is considered the “homestead area,” and on it live people who caretake the land in exchange for a place to live, and now I am one of those people. The other folks here are A and W, and their on-the-verge-of-crawling baby, C. I met them last fall through mutual friends, and when they told me that they were looking for more people to come live on the preserve, I almost jumped for joy. It’s pretty much everything Chris and I have been looking for: a place to live close to the wild, to do the kinds of work we love, and to live in community with others. And it’s in the part of the world that I have always called home. The only thing that’s missing now is Chris!

I’ve continued to be able to go up to Vancouver once a month, for five or six days at a time. Last time I was there we spent a lot of time planning gardens (there is ample gardening space on the homestead area, and much of it A and W have already been gardening in the two years they’ve been here, but there’s more useable land, and there will be more people to feed this year, so expanding the gardens is a priority.) Those of you who read our blog during last year’s growing season may remember how we tend to plant lots of different things that we have never heard of before. Well, we’re trying to scale that back a bit this year (a tough task for Chris, who has already had me get the likes of cinnamon vine and Queen Fabiola something-or-other). What we’re getting more into now, though, is native plants, and I’ve already got quite a collection of fruit-bearing native trees and bushes, such as serviceberry and high bush cranberry, and the fruit-bearing-but-not-palatable-to-humans such as twinberry and Indian plum. I’m sure there will be a lot more to write on this topic once these wonders start going into the ground.

Another exciting project just beginning to take shape is a kids’ outdoor summer camp that I’m helping organize and at which I will be one of the facilitators; Chris will likely become a part of this once he’s down here as well. It’s still in the early planning stages, but it will be a whole mix of science, gardening, awareness and experiential exploration, art and more… We’ll have some more solid information soon, so let me know if you have (or know of) kids ages 6-13 looking for something fun and amazing to do for a couple weeks in July or August! It will be held on some amazing land right at the edge of McMinnville.

So that’s it for now. It’s been hard to keep up with the blogging thing, and I know we always say that we’ll do better next time. Who knows. We’ll be sure to tell you once things start to pick up in terms of immigration though! And, you know, once Chris is here and we’ve got the garden going, I’m sure there will be lots more posts about that!

Oh, and if you are so inclined, we would really appreciate your energy/prayers/rationally-based thought processes for a speedy approval and interview! Hope you are all doing well, and no matter how strange you may be, don’t be a stranger!

An update, with good news in it!

Rosemary here, to tell you the good news that USCIS has approved our application for Chris to get permanent residency! We didn't have any real doubts that it would happen, but the wait has been long and torturous at times, not having any way to know where they were in the process, if they'd even started looking at our application yet, or how much longer it would take. So now we're waiting for instructions on what to do next, because this doesn't mean that he can cross the border quite yet, just that the longest part is over. Still have more documents to turn in, and the application now goes to the National Visa Center for yet further processing... not sure exactly how long that will take but from what we hear it shouldn't be too long. So we're very happy at least that things are moving along, and hopefully my next trip up to visit Chris will end in me bringing him home with me finally!

Aside from this, I have long been planning on writing a blog post with an update on things in general, but had been procrastinating as I always do (the reason why most of the posts are written by Chris). But this good news has given me motivation to write!

Just over a week ago I returned from another wonderful trip up to BC. I've been able to make it up to visit Chris for a few days every month, which would make this my fourth trip. Each time I've gone up, we've managed to get in a bit of camping, and this last trip took us out to Vancouver Island, where we camped along a logging road a few miles inland from the western coast, a bit south of Tofino. We spent both the last day of 2010 (which was Chris's birthday) and the first day of 2011 on a beautiful beach, catching some much-needed sun through our many layers of clothing, for it was also very cold!

You can see more pictures from our recent adventures in the new album to the left: Adventures in BC!

Aside from spending time up north with Chris when I can, I've been busy back in my hometown in Oregon, busy making connections and getting started on my new journey of midwifery. I've connected with an amazing living opportunity for us once Chris gets down here... but I will refrain from writing more details about it until it actually happens, for, as I have recently experienced, things don't always go as you plan and sometimes a last-minute wrench can change your direction entirely. But hopefully this one will work out!

It has been nice being back in my home region, which I have missed ever since I left it in 2003. I like that it rained on Christmas, and that the temperature these days is hovering around freezing and a few degrees above: it's cold, but not the bone-chilling, eyelash frosting, icy windy frigidness of Montreal at this time of year. And it's getting close to pea-planting time already! And bulbs are already poking their new shoots out of the ground. Oh, and I saw a furry white pussy willow last week! Though I'm thinking that pussy willow might be a bit confused, since we have had a very mild winter so far. I remember pussy willows normally being more of a February finding.

I hope that the new calendar year of 2011 is treating you all well so far! And I hope that I get around to writing more often here! Certainly once our new plans are in motion, we will share them with you...