48 acres and not a mule in sight

To quote a scrap of doggerel remembered from my youth:

Spring has sprung
Fall has fell
Winter has come
It’s cold as hell.

I’ve often heard that term, cold as hell, which makes me question the general understanding of the concept of hell. But that is a different topic. It’s not been unusually cold here this winter in a historical context, just a normal December with a fair amount of ice and snow. Low temperature was about 5 below. The first winter after I returned to the farm, 1984-85, was the coldest I remember with at least one low of –22 Deg. F. If hell were indeed cold, that would be how cold it would be.

Winter is progressing nicely, I am keeping up with the woodstove, burning almost all hedge wood. I’ve got a few more years worth of wood still on the ground from the ‘04 storm and the hedge will last until I get to it. The power was off here during the ice storms, but never more than a half day. We didn’t suffer at all, but every time that happens I resolve to make better preparations for the next one. We seldom lose power out here in the sticks, mostly because the power companies have sense enough to trim the trees near the lines. Rather I should say that the rural residents have sense enough to let them do the cutting. There are a lot of power lines running smack through the middle of trees in most towns. I assume that is because city dwellers are reluctant to allow any trimming of the only tree on their lot. To briefly channel the Byrds;

For every outage.
(Trim, trim, trim)
There is a reason
(Trim, trim, trim)

I kind of like winter long as it doesn’t get so cold I can’t go out without my face hurting. The sky is spectacular when the air gets cold and still and the moon is higher in the sky than in summer. A full moon over snow is better than a milkshake (such a stupid comparison that I am going to leave it in.) One of my favorite sunsets is a clear evening with snow when the western sky has an orange rim fading to deep blue overhead and the black skeletons of trees are outlined against the last light. That sight on a cold evening when I am walking to the house from cutting wood ranks right up there with pumpkins in the corn.

The whole wood heating thing, in addition to the favorable economics, is a set of rituals have been part of my life from childhood except for a few years in the central heated ghetto of Hutchinson, KS. There is a deep satisfaction in getting the wood and stacking it in a safe place, knowing that it will keep me warm and comfortable, a payment in kind that transcends the cash economy. The fire itself becomes like a migratory house pet, something that must be fed, watched, and cleaned up after daily. The temperature in the house moves to some degree in unison with the outside and puts the dwellers in direct touch with the hard edge of reality. All this stuff is worth more to me than all the cash money that can be printed and piled up, but I know I will forever be a freak in that respect.

Still, time moves in a hurry and spring will soon be re-sprung. I got my 20 x 20 hand garden spaded, ashed, and mulched with leaves before the cold hit. I am going to cover half of it with a hoop house made of PVC pipe and 6 mil. Plastic, so should be planting something not much after Feb. 15.

As I think I have previously noted, our family did a division of the ancestral farm such that I now actually own 48 acres as opposed to owning 2 acres and holding arguing rights to 140 more. For a number of reasons, I have been contemplating what level of productivity I would like to reach with that 48 acres. I have no doubt that that much land in a temperate climate such as north Missouri could provide several people with food, shelter, clothing, and enough spare change for at least minimal self actualization. (Maybe self-actualization comes later on the list, if so, apologies to Maslow or whatever the hell his name was.) It would require a good amount of work, a minimization of needs, and maybe a little patch of weed out in the brush. (Just kidding about the weed, you ATF folks can go back to scanning email from the Muslims. (I wish I didn’t make so many parenthetical comments.))

Deciding what to do with the 48 acres sort of ties in with preparing for power outages. I sometimes think about the possibility of our society going completely in the crapper to a degree that would put us all back in some sort of survival mode. It has happened to almost every such society throughout history, including several in the last 100 years. There have been a vast array of predicted catastrophes over the last 40 years or so, a couple of which were instrumental in my move to the farm. In the late 70’s there were very sincere promises of the following:

1. Total depletion of petroleum and natural gas. I remember one article written by a respected academic of the time who stated that gasoline would be nearly gone before the cars currently on the road were wore out.
2. A major worldwide depression brought on by massive inflation of the currency as the government desperately tried to keep up with deficit spending.
3. A rapidly approaching ice age, as industrial pollution entered the atmosphere and reduced the incidence of solar energy at the surface of the earth.
4. Worldwide famine and massive starvation extending to all the major industrial nations.

I was younger and more gullible in those days, and I believed a certain amount of all this. Thus I decided to move my family to the farm, build an earth-sheltered house, start gardening and farming, and in general hunker down for the coming catastrophe. Of course none of it happened, at least not yet, and we are two or three decades downstream from the predicted dates. The folks who made all those dire predictions are still at it and astonishingly, are still being listened to by several people.

There are those on the other side of the discussion who think that we have reached a level of sophistication and knowledge that will prevent our civilization from ever suffering any sort of disintegration. There are also folks who are waiting for little green men to descend to earth and take them up to the mother ship. I say to all the predictors and waiters in a loud clear voice “Bull Hockey.” Nobody knows what is going to happen, and I strongly suspect that the worst problems that we will face are those that we do not remotely anticipate at present. Anything that anybody is talking about can probably be planned for and dealt with.

So what could cause a real deal societal catastrophe which would put us all in survival mode and leave the streets strewn with corpses?

Anything that took out a significant portion of the electrical power grid could likely do it. Wiping out a major portion of the gasoline supply certainly would. Our society is completely dependent on the machines for food, water, heat, medical care, and everything else that keeps us alive on a daily basis. If the lights went off, water quit coming out of the faucet, and food couldn’t be delivered to the grocery store, people would be fighting to the death for those items in a couple of days, maybe less. I suppose that is would be possible for a relatively small, dedicated group of suicidal attackers to knock out enough power generation and gasoline refining capacity to bring about such an outcome. Potatoes in the cellar would be a very good thing to have in that case.

Thus I sometimes fret that I am in a position to be able to prepare for various catastrophi, but I’ve done no such thing. I’d feel really bad if the worst came to pass and some of my starving friends came crawling to the door and I had to tell them that I just live here on a farm, I got no food either, so let’s ‘rassel and see which of us gets to cannibalize the other. Add that to the fact that I would consider it good clean fun to actually have a working farm in place here. I really ought to do a little more about it.

So that’s the thought train that is running through my mind these days as the sunsets get a bit later. I will continue in a future posting.