In this round hut made of sticks and straw, smoke stirs the smell of a contintent. I’m sitting cross-legged atop a dried goatskin, its hard edges sharp and curling away from the packed-earth floor. A few inches above my head, a rack of horizontal sticks holds the dark bases of kalabasha gourds, the only household items. Through the suspended shelf’s cracks, beyond the gourds, I see the underside of the thatch roof. The blue smoke swirls against it.
The smoke rises from a small wood fire smoldering without flame on six inches of coals piled between three angular rocks, also blackened. The coals heat a round jug of fire-darkened clay the size of a beach ball. Steam curls out of the black hole at the top. The steam comes from the boiling coffee pulled by a ladle into this hut’s twelve-foot-diameter circle punctured by gray, slanting light.
Milio, age 35, holds the ladle, moving it quickly and smoothly through the kettle’s narrow opening and tilting the dark brown brew into a halved gourd that is textured and black like the tops of the father’s hands that take the gourd and turn it up to mouth then place it between bare feet planted on hard, orange-tan dirt at the edge of a goat hide. Two men, both elders, share the skin, their knees bent, wrapped in arms as straight as bone, the dark skin tight across the top and sagging slightly below from gravity and time like damp, fitted sheets on a clothes line. The smoke moves and crosses their faces, dulling the oily glow shining off the cheekbones and foreheads that pull away from the golden-gray eyes in wrinkles like desert geology seen through a plane window.
They drink again from their kalabashas and spray the last bit of saliva and coffee onto my face, their countenances serious and unchanged. I sip my coffee and spray back, attempting the same exaggerated spewing sound. Their faces break and they laugh with straight, white teeth. Milio’s hand keeps moving the ladle, stirring the coffee and refilling gourds. Smoke expands behind her like a white screen of pulled cotton around her head of braided rows that fall like a hundred bracelets of beads colored red-brown and glistening with the rock powder and animal fat paste used as decoration by Hamer women. Her right shoulder faces me with its pattern of small vertical scars in horizontal bands that cross from the back of her arm onto the upper back and over the shoulder blade. She doesn’t smile. She squats, her short goat-skin skirt’s tail blending into the goat-skin mat below her. This is her house and she sleeps where she cooks.
A toddler, naked below a necklace of white shells, crawls over her bent legs, his dusty bottom round, his soft thick legs pumping upward as if climbing an invisible ladder, trying to push the chubby, dust-colored face closer to a nipple that falls low and to the side. The ladling motion disrupts his progress and he slips down then angles for another attempt. His lips grip and his body stills for a few swallows before sliding back down to goat skin and bare feet and blackened gourds and dirt packed with coffee, sweat, semen, corn, cow shit, breath, blood, and ash. All in this ribbed, circling hut that exhales smoke into the world like a breathing fossil in raised relief.
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
Interior, South Dakota
So There I Was…
In the front seat of a jolting pick-up truck bouncing through an immense expanse of South Dakota grasslands. Clint, the slightly hung-over rancher, was driving, one hand on the steering wheel, one on his plastic cup of powdered iced tea. A black calf the size of a Doberman stood shakily in the back seat. Clint had just lasso’d the calf, a stray wandering dangerously behind a small herd of cattle.
I’d arrived in Rapid City, SD twelve hours before on assignment to check out Badlands National Park, one of my selections for a summer story on five lesser-known national parks. Prior to becoming a salaried travel editor with a little company called Time Inc. as a backer, my travel experiences had trended toward the dirt-bag side. The central component to such travel is avoiding the costs of hotels and motels: $60-100 on a hotel room, or use that money for an extra three days of food and gas? I’ll take the extra time everyday.
So when the mandate came down at work to “spend your money like it’s yours” I took them literally. This national park trip would break single-season lows for expense reports.
Perhaps that explains how I ended up in Interior, SD’s Horseshoe Bar looking for something to eat and drink. I’d planned to eat at a tiny cowboy saloon in a tiny town that could hold only one tiny cowboy saloon, but everything in Scenic, SD was closed by the time I arrived. By 10pm I had a diminishing pack of Twizzlers and no water. The place I’d planned to camp, a beautiful bluff overlooking the South Unit of Badlands National Park, seemed a bit dicey with the thunderstorms seen forty miles away threatening to wash out the dirt access road. So I drove through the darkness to Interior and found a grassland lighthouse: three letters shining in bright, fluorescent yellow to spell B-A-R.
That’s where I met Clint. He wore tight, faded jeans, a glittering rodeo belt buckle, and a torn blue button-up cowboy shirt, the kind that sells for 25$ in hip vintage stores. His buddy and the only person in the place other than the bartender and me was Mitch, a Lakota Sioux Indian. Mitch and Clint grew up together, Clint as part of a ranching family and Mitch a member of the Lakota tribe on Pine Island Reservation.
At some point in these random travel encounters I get around to telling the folks that I’m a travel writer. This can have the hit-or-miss effect of opening the door to a myriad of article suggestions, usually centered on “the cutest little Victorian B&B with a fascinating history.”
Tonight Clint offers to show me his ranch, “to see some of the country.” He’s considered opening a horse ranch for tourists and wants my opinion. A half hour later I’m following him in our trucks out dirt roads to the trailer where we stand outside and sip whisky from a small bottle: “Here, you need some of this.” Overhead a domed, moonless ceiling of the thickest blanket of stars I’ve ever seen makes the night look silver. As my eyes adjust to the darkness I make out the soft shape of rolling hills covered in tall grasses. Clint’s long, dark trailer is in front of us as we stand by his diesel pick-up. After talk of property rights and life on a large-scale family ranch, Clint points me to my room then heads to the other end of the trailer to sleep on his sheet-less mattress in the master bedroom.
Morning comes bright in the grasslands. I wake up from my sleeping bag atop the bed and lie still for a few minutes remembering exactly where I am. It’s not that I’d had too much whisky the night before, it’s just that I hadn’t expected to wake up in a bright room of peeling wallpaper with miles of grasslands outside a trailer full of cowboy boots, hats, empty potato chip bags, and a nice man named Clint still asleep fifty feet away.
I wander out the squeaky screen door into the sunlight and sit at the warped, homemade wooden table nearly buried in the tall grasses that extend out over hills broken only by random clumps of juniper trees. Eventually the open door space fills with Clint, wearing the same shirt and squinting into the light.
“Damn, you’re up and at ‘em,” he says. “I’m lazier’n hell this morning. Drank too much last night.”
He goes back inside, pours himself some instant tea mix and comes back out.
“Wanna see some of the country?”
We hop into his truck, the two dogs on the flatbed in back, and head down a gulch and back up, taking the direct route to the edge of the gently rolling grassland plateau. Suddenly the sage and light green grasslands curl under like the lip of a wave seen from behind. Below the curl it’s like the skin has been peeled back from the landscape. Badlands fall out in sharp spires and gullies chiseled by the minimal rain that’s been falling out here for thousands of years. The soft clays and muds wash away easily, leaving slopes of cracked, crumbly grays, reds, pinks, and tans. The mad drip castle of a slope finally levels off into a lush green carpet at the valley floor. In the distance I see the southern edge of Badlands National Park’s North Unit. Between here and there, Clint and his family ranch thousands of acres, breeding cattle and bison and growing hay to feed them. My hamburger last week in Birmingham may have come from here.
As we drive toward the herd of cattle where we’ll eventually pick up the orphan calf, Clint tells me about the ups and downs of the ranching business and life. It’s all he’s known and all he will know, though he has dreams and ideas like the trail horse outfitter service for tourists. I realize I can visit national parks like Badlands and I always will, but I’ll never have the native knowledge of someone like Clint. All I can do is take a chance and go home with an honest drunk rancher offering to show me some of his country.
Clint drops me off at his trailer and drives away to take the calf to his mom’s house. She’s good at nursing them until they can be independent within a herd. I climb into my shiny truck and follow him out, taking a turn at the state road toward Badlands National Park where I’ll look for a story.
In the front seat of a jolting pick-up truck bouncing through an immense expanse of South Dakota grasslands. Clint, the slightly hung-over rancher, was driving, one hand on the steering wheel, one on his plastic cup of powdered iced tea. A black calf the size of a Doberman stood shakily in the back seat. Clint had just lasso’d the calf, a stray wandering dangerously behind a small herd of cattle.
I’d arrived in Rapid City, SD twelve hours before on assignment to check out Badlands National Park, one of my selections for a summer story on five lesser-known national parks. Prior to becoming a salaried travel editor with a little company called Time Inc. as a backer, my travel experiences had trended toward the dirt-bag side. The central component to such travel is avoiding the costs of hotels and motels: $60-100 on a hotel room, or use that money for an extra three days of food and gas? I’ll take the extra time everyday.
So when the mandate came down at work to “spend your money like it’s yours” I took them literally. This national park trip would break single-season lows for expense reports.
Perhaps that explains how I ended up in Interior, SD’s Horseshoe Bar looking for something to eat and drink. I’d planned to eat at a tiny cowboy saloon in a tiny town that could hold only one tiny cowboy saloon, but everything in Scenic, SD was closed by the time I arrived. By 10pm I had a diminishing pack of Twizzlers and no water. The place I’d planned to camp, a beautiful bluff overlooking the South Unit of Badlands National Park, seemed a bit dicey with the thunderstorms seen forty miles away threatening to wash out the dirt access road. So I drove through the darkness to Interior and found a grassland lighthouse: three letters shining in bright, fluorescent yellow to spell B-A-R.
That’s where I met Clint. He wore tight, faded jeans, a glittering rodeo belt buckle, and a torn blue button-up cowboy shirt, the kind that sells for 25$ in hip vintage stores. His buddy and the only person in the place other than the bartender and me was Mitch, a Lakota Sioux Indian. Mitch and Clint grew up together, Clint as part of a ranching family and Mitch a member of the Lakota tribe on Pine Island Reservation.
At some point in these random travel encounters I get around to telling the folks that I’m a travel writer. This can have the hit-or-miss effect of opening the door to a myriad of article suggestions, usually centered on “the cutest little Victorian B&B with a fascinating history.”
Tonight Clint offers to show me his ranch, “to see some of the country.” He’s considered opening a horse ranch for tourists and wants my opinion. A half hour later I’m following him in our trucks out dirt roads to the trailer where we stand outside and sip whisky from a small bottle: “Here, you need some of this.” Overhead a domed, moonless ceiling of the thickest blanket of stars I’ve ever seen makes the night look silver. As my eyes adjust to the darkness I make out the soft shape of rolling hills covered in tall grasses. Clint’s long, dark trailer is in front of us as we stand by his diesel pick-up. After talk of property rights and life on a large-scale family ranch, Clint points me to my room then heads to the other end of the trailer to sleep on his sheet-less mattress in the master bedroom.
Morning comes bright in the grasslands. I wake up from my sleeping bag atop the bed and lie still for a few minutes remembering exactly where I am. It’s not that I’d had too much whisky the night before, it’s just that I hadn’t expected to wake up in a bright room of peeling wallpaper with miles of grasslands outside a trailer full of cowboy boots, hats, empty potato chip bags, and a nice man named Clint still asleep fifty feet away.
I wander out the squeaky screen door into the sunlight and sit at the warped, homemade wooden table nearly buried in the tall grasses that extend out over hills broken only by random clumps of juniper trees. Eventually the open door space fills with Clint, wearing the same shirt and squinting into the light.
“Damn, you’re up and at ‘em,” he says. “I’m lazier’n hell this morning. Drank too much last night.”
He goes back inside, pours himself some instant tea mix and comes back out.
“Wanna see some of the country?”
We hop into his truck, the two dogs on the flatbed in back, and head down a gulch and back up, taking the direct route to the edge of the gently rolling grassland plateau. Suddenly the sage and light green grasslands curl under like the lip of a wave seen from behind. Below the curl it’s like the skin has been peeled back from the landscape. Badlands fall out in sharp spires and gullies chiseled by the minimal rain that’s been falling out here for thousands of years. The soft clays and muds wash away easily, leaving slopes of cracked, crumbly grays, reds, pinks, and tans. The mad drip castle of a slope finally levels off into a lush green carpet at the valley floor. In the distance I see the southern edge of Badlands National Park’s North Unit. Between here and there, Clint and his family ranch thousands of acres, breeding cattle and bison and growing hay to feed them. My hamburger last week in Birmingham may have come from here.
As we drive toward the herd of cattle where we’ll eventually pick up the orphan calf, Clint tells me about the ups and downs of the ranching business and life. It’s all he’s known and all he will know, though he has dreams and ideas like the trail horse outfitter service for tourists. I realize I can visit national parks like Badlands and I always will, but I’ll never have the native knowledge of someone like Clint. All I can do is take a chance and go home with an honest drunk rancher offering to show me some of his country.
Clint drops me off at his trailer and drives away to take the calf to his mom’s house. She’s good at nursing them until they can be independent within a herd. I climb into my shiny truck and follow him out, taking a turn at the state road toward Badlands National Park where I’ll look for a story.
Dolores Hidalgo ice cream
The small town of Dolores Hidalgo is a suggested day trip from San Miguel de Allende. With its classic cathedral-adorned town plaza and a booming community of artisan potters, the town feels completely authentic. The dusty streets have a slow-motion bustle of push carts, bicycles, and taxis; the pottery warehouses double as studios with artisans painting and shaping clay in the back; the food market steams with cooking rice, boiling beans, frying tortillas, and brewing coffee; and on the corner of the grassy, bench-encircled plaza a large wooden cart sits quietly, selling perhaps the world’s best ice cream.
The only advertisement appears on the front of the cart. Hand-painted white letters spell the flavors: avocado, pine nut, rum, rice pudding, tequila, cerveza, cheese, mole poblano, pistachio, lemon, strawberry. We approach, hungry but more curious. The owner of the cart pulls out a handful of little wooden spoons and begins scooping little samples. Each one is perfectly creamy (avocado, pine nut, pistachio) or icy (tequila, lemon, rum). We begin asking questions about who makes it. The cart owner tells us it’s his brother and we can learn from him if we want. His name is Salvador and he lives just up the road from town and may be making some flavors today.
Our personal tour guide rolls his Suburban to a halt on a street a few blocks off the plaza. We’d been told Salvador lived on this block, right hand side. I ask a woman sweeping her patio, “Buscamos a la casa de Salvador Torres.”
“Aqui mismo,” she says, pointing next door to the little house that matches the others on the street: brightly painted but chipping, a little concrete wall, and a front door just a few steps up from the sidewalk. We knock.
A short. lean man in his late 30s answers wearing a pair of old, torn jeans, and a hooded sweatshirt on this chilly morning. We introduce ourselves as visitors who just met his brother and tried his delicious ice cream. Can we ask him some questions and learn how he makes the unforgettable flavors? A smile opens Salvador’s face and a few teeth poke out, not many: a good sign for an ice-cream maker.
“No mixing today, too cold this morning,” he told us. “But you can come in and see the equipment.”
We sat in the recently hosed-down interior patio/living room under an odd pale light diffused through the green plastic panels overhead. Salvador Torres tells us his story. He’s been dancing with ice cream for over a decade. His father began churning after tiring of the risky police work in small-town Dolores Hidalgo of Mexico’s Guanajuato state. Father Torres decided to bring ice cream to the town so he started simple: vanilla and lemon out of a pushcart wheeled through town. He made it well and well-made ice cream is not hard to sell, so he got creative with his flavors. And then he taught his son, Salvador, to dance.
But sitting with gringo guests seems uncomfortable for Salvador, so we ask about the process. His smile returns. He jumps up and shows us the 30 liter steel tubes into which he adds ice, sugar, fruit/tequila/beer/mole, and milk brought fresh each morning from a nearby farm. He brings the tube over to a wooden cask that looks like a Mayflower relic.
“You fill this with ice, put the steel tube down in it and start shaking. After a while you stop, grab the stirring rod and stir the ingredients in the tube. Then you scrape the rod to remove the built-up ice back into the mix. Do it again,” he tells us.
For 1.5 – 2 hours Salvador shakes, stirs, and scrapes. Then the product is complete and he begins another batch, usually working eight-hour days. In the states we’d call the operation a work/live situation; we might even feature Salvador as a Cottage Industry in this magazine. We ask him about modernizing the operation. Has he ever wanted to hire helpers or take advantage of mechanical aids or electrical mixers?
Not really. Salvador is a one-man show partially because he is an admitted control freak (he won’t make avocado ice cream if the local open-air market does not have ripe avocados) and partially because his former assistant ran off after meeting a lady and his one-time-assistant nephew ran off to start his own ice cream cart. It’s no competition, says Salvador, because the kid didn’t learn the art of the process. We asked Salvador if he ever thought of using a hand crank or an electric shaker. No, electric stuff breaks and, frankly, he likes the activity of it all, the dance.
We leave with a carton of strawberry and one of vanilla, a bag of hand-rolled sugar cones, and a heap of thanks for coming to his house and sharing in his passion. We thanked the greatest ice cream maker on earth and drove away.
The only advertisement appears on the front of the cart. Hand-painted white letters spell the flavors: avocado, pine nut, rum, rice pudding, tequila, cerveza, cheese, mole poblano, pistachio, lemon, strawberry. We approach, hungry but more curious. The owner of the cart pulls out a handful of little wooden spoons and begins scooping little samples. Each one is perfectly creamy (avocado, pine nut, pistachio) or icy (tequila, lemon, rum). We begin asking questions about who makes it. The cart owner tells us it’s his brother and we can learn from him if we want. His name is Salvador and he lives just up the road from town and may be making some flavors today.
Our personal tour guide rolls his Suburban to a halt on a street a few blocks off the plaza. We’d been told Salvador lived on this block, right hand side. I ask a woman sweeping her patio, “Buscamos a la casa de Salvador Torres.”
“Aqui mismo,” she says, pointing next door to the little house that matches the others on the street: brightly painted but chipping, a little concrete wall, and a front door just a few steps up from the sidewalk. We knock.
A short. lean man in his late 30s answers wearing a pair of old, torn jeans, and a hooded sweatshirt on this chilly morning. We introduce ourselves as visitors who just met his brother and tried his delicious ice cream. Can we ask him some questions and learn how he makes the unforgettable flavors? A smile opens Salvador’s face and a few teeth poke out, not many: a good sign for an ice-cream maker.
“No mixing today, too cold this morning,” he told us. “But you can come in and see the equipment.”
We sat in the recently hosed-down interior patio/living room under an odd pale light diffused through the green plastic panels overhead. Salvador Torres tells us his story. He’s been dancing with ice cream for over a decade. His father began churning after tiring of the risky police work in small-town Dolores Hidalgo of Mexico’s Guanajuato state. Father Torres decided to bring ice cream to the town so he started simple: vanilla and lemon out of a pushcart wheeled through town. He made it well and well-made ice cream is not hard to sell, so he got creative with his flavors. And then he taught his son, Salvador, to dance.
But sitting with gringo guests seems uncomfortable for Salvador, so we ask about the process. His smile returns. He jumps up and shows us the 30 liter steel tubes into which he adds ice, sugar, fruit/tequila/beer/mole, and milk brought fresh each morning from a nearby farm. He brings the tube over to a wooden cask that looks like a Mayflower relic.
“You fill this with ice, put the steel tube down in it and start shaking. After a while you stop, grab the stirring rod and stir the ingredients in the tube. Then you scrape the rod to remove the built-up ice back into the mix. Do it again,” he tells us.
For 1.5 – 2 hours Salvador shakes, stirs, and scrapes. Then the product is complete and he begins another batch, usually working eight-hour days. In the states we’d call the operation a work/live situation; we might even feature Salvador as a Cottage Industry in this magazine. We ask him about modernizing the operation. Has he ever wanted to hire helpers or take advantage of mechanical aids or electrical mixers?
Not really. Salvador is a one-man show partially because he is an admitted control freak (he won’t make avocado ice cream if the local open-air market does not have ripe avocados) and partially because his former assistant ran off after meeting a lady and his one-time-assistant nephew ran off to start his own ice cream cart. It’s no competition, says Salvador, because the kid didn’t learn the art of the process. We asked Salvador if he ever thought of using a hand crank or an electric shaker. No, electric stuff breaks and, frankly, he likes the activity of it all, the dance.
We leave with a carton of strawberry and one of vanilla, a bag of hand-rolled sugar cones, and a heap of thanks for coming to his house and sharing in his passion. We thanked the greatest ice cream maker on earth and drove away.
Finland, MN
So There I Was…
Sitting at the Abazs family dinner table in their hand-built home in the North Woods of Minnesota eating penne pasta covered in a chunky tomato sauce made from ingredients harvested from the fields outside the living room windows, now brown and gray, ready for winter’s snow cover. The steamed cauliflower on the right quadrant of my plate has been frozen since its harvest a few months ago, again from the land outside. The red potatoes came out of hiding in the root cellar and their topping of ketchup is homemade from the same tomatoes as the pasta sauce. Finally, I wash it all down with goat milk from a mason jar. If I look out the window at the right angle I might see the goat near the barn.
The independence and self-reliance of it all is overwhelming. I taste it in the potatoes, smell it in the wood-smoke from the stove heating the house, hear it in the easy, honest, stress-free conversation around the table, and see it in the fields and barns outside the window.
This isn’t my kitchen in Birmingham where the ingredients for the ubiquitous evening quesadilla travel as far as Willy Loman in a year to get to my neighborhood grocery store: flour tortilla with wheat from North Dakota, cheddar cheese from a dairy farm in Vermont, tomatoes from north Alabama, an avocado from California, and hot sauce from Louisiana. Instead, I’m at the home of Lise and David Abazs and their two boys, Colby and Tremayne in Finland, Minnesota. It’s December, thus the fields awaiting snow, and I’m working on a Try Your Hand story about making balsam wreaths for the holidays. Lise and David are instructors with the North House Folk School located an hour up the nearby western shore of Lake Superior in Grand Marais, MN. Tomorrow a group of fellow wreath novices will arrive and we’ll spend a half-day collecting materials and assembling our wreaths from the woods of northern Minnesota. I came by a day early to check out the scene and Lise and David invited me to dinner with them, as informally as if we were old friends.
David and Lise’s story begins like many married couples: meet in college and decide together where to go upon graduation. However, that’s about where the similarities end. Rather than move to the best job offer in a big city or choose the transient lifestyle of seasonal work while figuring things out, David and Lise got married and took their honeymoon on a research farm in New Mexico. The couple researched places to live that would allow them to eventually be completely self-sustained – no grid connection to public utilities, very little need for trips to the grocery store, and a stimulating and safe place to raise the children they planned to have. Lise’s family lives in Minnesota and David, after looking at maps and books, decided the Sawtooth Mountains of the Finland area would be the spot.
“Sawtooth” might be a bit of a misnomer for these mountains that border the northwest shore of Lake Superior. Relative to the gently rolling, glacially subdued surrounding terrain and the vast expanse of Superior water, perhaps the sub-1,000 foot mountains do warrant such a striking name, but the landscape is more subtle than sublime. The 40-acre Abazs farm, as do most things built with care and quality, began slowly. This part of the country is deeply rooted in Scandinavian culture, plus it gets real cold so the first thing the Abazs built was the sauna. The couple lived in a small cabin as the farm expanded to a stone and timber frame barn for the goats, sheep, and other livestock, then a stone chicken coop, a woodshed, and finally construction of their current house – Abazs children were appearing.
After almost two decades of late 20th century homesteading, including a recent conversion of their shiny new Volkswagon coup into a biodiesel vehicle, the Abazs live that rare life of progressive regression: new technology such as wind and solar power, enhanced through a purely modern system of batteries and converters allows them to live simply, pulling energy from passive sources like the sun and wind and pulling food with their own hands from the ground around their home.
It’s impressive and refreshing though I’m not getting carried away; I don’t plan to return home and plant a row of potatoes, two of corn, and tie a goat to the little dogwood tree behind my apartment building. But even in Birmingham, as in most cities and towns, I can find food that requires far less transport than the average 1,500 miles an American meal travels before reaching our plates. A good friend here, in fact, manages a 4-year-old urban farm with two sites, both less than a mile from my downtown loft. I can dump my compost in the Jones Valley Urban Farm’s pile then stop by the outdoor food market on 29th and 2nd, right in the heart of the half-abandoned industrial/railway zone of downtown Birmingham. With pocket change from the week, I spring for a bag of arugula from the Jones Valley, or a basket of tomatoes as red and shiny as Christmas ornaments from one of the numerous growers who bring their fresh produce from surrounding farms to this Saturday market six months a year.
Almost every town I’ve visited, and I travel frequently as the travel editor, touts their seasonal produce markets and many places now have revived the food co-op institution in which local food producers and growers have an outlet to sell their wares year-round (see the Web sites below to locate one near you). Of course, buying from these local markets lacks the all-in-one convenience and year-round food presence of the average grocery store, but it has more character and reality to it. So maybe I don’t get squash in May; it tastes better in October anyway. The tomatoes definitely aren’t the same in February as they are in July, so I’ll wait on those. Like the excitement of pulling out the wool sweater on the first day of fall or feeling the sun on your legs for the first time in April, the seasonal changes in food keep life interesting. A slow walk through an outdoor market or community co-op, just like a slow-cooked and enjoyed meal with family and friends, can be a giant step in developing a sense of community.
As I mop up the last of the tomato sauce with a cauliflower leaf I can’t help but laugh at the apparent paradox of the Abazs lifestyle. A 21st century family living such an independent, slow-paced life seemingly devoid of all the technologic advances of the common house. Yet technology is the reason they live this way. That and hard work, dedication, creativity, and a committed sense of responsibility to leave a small footprint on the earth. It seems so old-fashioned and radical on the surface but on a daily scale who wouldn’t want ultimate freedom (from utility demands, bosses, fluctuating energy costs), leisure time to wander in the Sawtooths, travel to the Rockies, enjoy a Friday night matinee in the living room, and an enduring self-reliance founded on diligent, quality work. Isn’t that the American dream?
For info on locally sourced food and where to find a market near you, check out:
www.foodroutes.org
www.localharvest.org
Sitting at the Abazs family dinner table in their hand-built home in the North Woods of Minnesota eating penne pasta covered in a chunky tomato sauce made from ingredients harvested from the fields outside the living room windows, now brown and gray, ready for winter’s snow cover. The steamed cauliflower on the right quadrant of my plate has been frozen since its harvest a few months ago, again from the land outside. The red potatoes came out of hiding in the root cellar and their topping of ketchup is homemade from the same tomatoes as the pasta sauce. Finally, I wash it all down with goat milk from a mason jar. If I look out the window at the right angle I might see the goat near the barn.
The independence and self-reliance of it all is overwhelming. I taste it in the potatoes, smell it in the wood-smoke from the stove heating the house, hear it in the easy, honest, stress-free conversation around the table, and see it in the fields and barns outside the window.
This isn’t my kitchen in Birmingham where the ingredients for the ubiquitous evening quesadilla travel as far as Willy Loman in a year to get to my neighborhood grocery store: flour tortilla with wheat from North Dakota, cheddar cheese from a dairy farm in Vermont, tomatoes from north Alabama, an avocado from California, and hot sauce from Louisiana. Instead, I’m at the home of Lise and David Abazs and their two boys, Colby and Tremayne in Finland, Minnesota. It’s December, thus the fields awaiting snow, and I’m working on a Try Your Hand story about making balsam wreaths for the holidays. Lise and David are instructors with the North House Folk School located an hour up the nearby western shore of Lake Superior in Grand Marais, MN. Tomorrow a group of fellow wreath novices will arrive and we’ll spend a half-day collecting materials and assembling our wreaths from the woods of northern Minnesota. I came by a day early to check out the scene and Lise and David invited me to dinner with them, as informally as if we were old friends.
David and Lise’s story begins like many married couples: meet in college and decide together where to go upon graduation. However, that’s about where the similarities end. Rather than move to the best job offer in a big city or choose the transient lifestyle of seasonal work while figuring things out, David and Lise got married and took their honeymoon on a research farm in New Mexico. The couple researched places to live that would allow them to eventually be completely self-sustained – no grid connection to public utilities, very little need for trips to the grocery store, and a stimulating and safe place to raise the children they planned to have. Lise’s family lives in Minnesota and David, after looking at maps and books, decided the Sawtooth Mountains of the Finland area would be the spot.
“Sawtooth” might be a bit of a misnomer for these mountains that border the northwest shore of Lake Superior. Relative to the gently rolling, glacially subdued surrounding terrain and the vast expanse of Superior water, perhaps the sub-1,000 foot mountains do warrant such a striking name, but the landscape is more subtle than sublime. The 40-acre Abazs farm, as do most things built with care and quality, began slowly. This part of the country is deeply rooted in Scandinavian culture, plus it gets real cold so the first thing the Abazs built was the sauna. The couple lived in a small cabin as the farm expanded to a stone and timber frame barn for the goats, sheep, and other livestock, then a stone chicken coop, a woodshed, and finally construction of their current house – Abazs children were appearing.
After almost two decades of late 20th century homesteading, including a recent conversion of their shiny new Volkswagon coup into a biodiesel vehicle, the Abazs live that rare life of progressive regression: new technology such as wind and solar power, enhanced through a purely modern system of batteries and converters allows them to live simply, pulling energy from passive sources like the sun and wind and pulling food with their own hands from the ground around their home.
It’s impressive and refreshing though I’m not getting carried away; I don’t plan to return home and plant a row of potatoes, two of corn, and tie a goat to the little dogwood tree behind my apartment building. But even in Birmingham, as in most cities and towns, I can find food that requires far less transport than the average 1,500 miles an American meal travels before reaching our plates. A good friend here, in fact, manages a 4-year-old urban farm with two sites, both less than a mile from my downtown loft. I can dump my compost in the Jones Valley Urban Farm’s pile then stop by the outdoor food market on 29th and 2nd, right in the heart of the half-abandoned industrial/railway zone of downtown Birmingham. With pocket change from the week, I spring for a bag of arugula from the Jones Valley, or a basket of tomatoes as red and shiny as Christmas ornaments from one of the numerous growers who bring their fresh produce from surrounding farms to this Saturday market six months a year.
Almost every town I’ve visited, and I travel frequently as the travel editor, touts their seasonal produce markets and many places now have revived the food co-op institution in which local food producers and growers have an outlet to sell their wares year-round (see the Web sites below to locate one near you). Of course, buying from these local markets lacks the all-in-one convenience and year-round food presence of the average grocery store, but it has more character and reality to it. So maybe I don’t get squash in May; it tastes better in October anyway. The tomatoes definitely aren’t the same in February as they are in July, so I’ll wait on those. Like the excitement of pulling out the wool sweater on the first day of fall or feeling the sun on your legs for the first time in April, the seasonal changes in food keep life interesting. A slow walk through an outdoor market or community co-op, just like a slow-cooked and enjoyed meal with family and friends, can be a giant step in developing a sense of community.
As I mop up the last of the tomato sauce with a cauliflower leaf I can’t help but laugh at the apparent paradox of the Abazs lifestyle. A 21st century family living such an independent, slow-paced life seemingly devoid of all the technologic advances of the common house. Yet technology is the reason they live this way. That and hard work, dedication, creativity, and a committed sense of responsibility to leave a small footprint on the earth. It seems so old-fashioned and radical on the surface but on a daily scale who wouldn’t want ultimate freedom (from utility demands, bosses, fluctuating energy costs), leisure time to wander in the Sawtooths, travel to the Rockies, enjoy a Friday night matinee in the living room, and an enduring self-reliance founded on diligent, quality work. Isn’t that the American dream?
For info on locally sourced food and where to find a market near you, check out:
www.foodroutes.org
www.localharvest.org
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