Why we live this way...

I think most people who have life choices experience the phenomenon that, every once in a while, something comes that comes up that makes you question the life you're living. After all, if you have choices, you have to know about them, or you wouldn't have choices. And knowing about them makes you think about them.

One choice Aimee and I have is to live in Britain instead of the US. I never wanted to become an American citizen, some misplaced loyalty to my buddy Liz Windsor or some such thing, so I remain a resident alien, antennae and all. Actually, since I'm officially an EC citizen, we could choose to live in any EC country, but I doubt we'd want to live in any of them except Britain.

What brought this idea up for me recently was watching the Michael Moore movie Sicko, which we got from Netflix.

Like most American families, we have horror stories from family and friends about the American health care system. Unlike most Americans, we have a back door out of that system. If either of us had a chronic illness like cancer or Parkinson's (which my grandfather succumbed to), and the health care system here let us down the way it lets down our friends and family, we could just catch a plane.

I don't feel bad about not paying UK taxes for this benefit. After all, I was a British serviceman, an "erk," a "Tommy," a member of "the Mob," and put in seven years. I was underpaid and overworked for all of that seven years, and as an RAFMR troop, I risked my life frequently and was frequently injured too. I have two partially torn ACLs, chronic arthritis in both knees, and a frostbitten left pinky to prove it. (Sounds of extremely small violins, especially for the pinky!) Never mind the extreme efforts most ex-serviceman go through to find a life in civilian society, which for me meant four years bumming around in both the UK and the backwoods of America, before settling on a college career. Over here, in lawsuit-ridden America, I'd get VA medical care and a partial disability pension for my minor, but still service-related injuries. I'll settle for my British passport and National Insurance number. One day, that passport might save one of our lives.

Because this is of course, deadly serious at root. People die in this country for lack of health care. We have friends and relatives who cannot get the health care they need. A friend (who some readers will know) who just died of emphesema, was forced to work for very little money towards the end of her life, even though she was capable of earning much more, because to earn more would have put her outside the scope of the government Medicare system. No insurance company would have taken her on. Aimee's Dad is finally now getting the full attention and care he needs for his leukemia because he has been officially recognized as an Agent Orange casualty, and the VA now has him on their roster.

So why not go back to Britain right now? I surely get homesick enough, frequently enough. Last night being just the latest example. Last year when Mum was sick, I went home to look after Dad, and was right back in the amazing British health care system again. What astounded me most was not the dedication of the nurses, or the obviously brand new hospital, but the fact that no-one ever asked me for money, not even at the pharmacy, and that the health and social service visitors could, if mother would allow it, make up to five house calls a day to look after old folks in their own homes. For free. Moore's movie, of course, reminded me of this, which was why I was homesick last night. Something we Brits should be proud of is the NHS.

I think the main reason I stay in this country is not because of Aimee, because she likes Britain well enough and would live there, not because of my (I think) important job trying to make this country more sustainable (violins again), but because of the farm. We both have a very good idea how difficult it would be to get a homestead, or smallholding as they are known over there, in Britain.

A British smallholding is a small, very expensive plot of land surrounded by red tape. There are an extraordinary amount of rules governing what you can and can't build, and probably it's the same for farming. The prices are astronomical, of course, a million dollars couldn't buy a place like ours, because every city stockholder needs their country home for the weekends, and so the smallholder is competing with them for land and houses. And the supply of houses and land is extremely tight because the planning regulations are so strict.

The only way out of this, for most British smallholders, is to become a tenant farmer, or to take a tied house or croft, and thus subject yourself to the landlord. And not just any landlord. The aristocratic peer of the realm, whose duchy, lairdship, or other feudal estate, is the true owner of more than two thirds of British land.

Either the landlord or the government. The devilish aristocrat or the deep blue sea of regulations. The relative freedom we experience here in Jackson Maine, of being able to buy a homestead on an affordable mortgage, of being able to farm it as we want, cut a tree when we need to, build a building when we need one, remodel the house without planning permission, all this is impossible in the UK.

After reading my British history so well and realizing what centuries of oppression my ancestors must have endured; after realizing how all that history put all my grandad's and grandma's stories of WWI, the depression and WWII into context as the catastrophes they were, made far worse than they should have been by the class system, after realizing then for the first time the hardships they endured, and after growing up in the still-class ridden British system of the 1960s and 1970s, after serving in the class-ridden British RAF of the 1970s and 1980s, what would bother me most about going back to Britain would be the loss of our land.

An Englishman's home is his castle. Especially if it's in America. And even if the only safe health care scheme he has is in Britain.

Sheep in the Snow

Mr. Haggis at Attention

Haggis is a dog, named for a Scottish sausage, which I occasionally make myself made from various odd bits of sheep and deer not normally eaten by Americans. This is appropriate naming because he's an Australian shepherd, so there's a kind of circularity of reasoning. We like circular reasoning at the Womerlippi Farm Enterprise.

He's about six years old, and was raised by the Amish. This, we suspect, made him a little pious. His main piety his his extreme diligence. Being a shepherd, he has to have a job. If shepherd dogs are not given a job, they'll make one up for themselves. Before Haggis had sheep, he would spend hours rounding up chickens, which is actually very counter productive, because chickens hardly ever need to be, and never want to be, rounded up. Chickens are well behaved without needing a sheepdog.

So we had to get him some sheep. Getting a sheepdog before getting sheep might be putting the cart before the horse, but we knew we wanted both, and had a vacancy for a dog before we had facilities for sheep, so it all made sense to us.

The are a lot of things that make sense to us that don't make sense to others.

Haggis's job now is actaully threefold, which makes him very happy, to be so important. He is hired to be 1) the somewhat boy-scoutish, over-eager leader of the Womerlippi dog pack, 2) to guard the house and land, 3) to ride to the hardware store in the pick-up truck (this is actually his favorite job, and he takes it very seriously, sitting to attention in the passenger seat the whole way) and finally, 4) to assist in rounding up sheep.

I say assist, because at six years old, and even with his extensive prior experience in chickens, Haggis has yet to get the full hang of being a sheepdog. He can move sheep, no problem, get them running with one quiet word. Very satisfying. He just doesn't know where to put them. Not so satisfying.

Most sheepdogs know instinctively that the sheep have to go through the gate. That's how they work. There's a big field, the farmer stands by an open gate, which goes to the pen, to the lane, to the next field, or to the barn. The farmer is actually just the helper. All he has to do is operate the gate. (If operating gates were hard, sheepdogs would have to do it.) The dog is the main worker. He runs out and around, gets the sheep going in a nice tight herd, moves them towards and through the gate. The farmer then does his part. He shuts the gate. That's really all there is to the sheepdog job. Sheep. Gate. Farmer close gate. Done. Time for dinner.

What Haggis tends to do is have the sheep circle the field a few times. After a while, they find the gate themselves. This can be really disconcerting right in front of the house, where the road makes a turn-around loop. Haggis will happily chase the sheep around this loop a couple of times before they make a break for the gate.

He's really pretty good at the important case of One Loose Sheep, a special and perennial case in the sheepdog portfolio. One loose sheep is easy, because the sheep really wants to be back with the herd. All Haggis has to do is go move the lone sheep, and the sheep will come back and go straight through the gate.

Very helpful, Mr. Haggis. Time for dinner.

Warming up

The back of the cold broke this morning as the sun rose. Warm air came up from the south. They say we're heading for our annual January thaw. 40 degrees. Positively tropical. Here's our sunrise today. Still well to the south of east, of course, but that will change soon when the days begin to race. Here in Maine, "racing days" coincide with rising sap and syrup season. We don't make syrup, but other folks around here do, and the students make it at the college.

I went over to old Larry W's dairy farm to get a round bale for the sheep yesterday while it was still cold. He had a Holstein down with mastitis, old "Sag, he called her, was waiting for the vet, very sad she would have to be put down, keeping her comfortable until her time. I asked him why he didn't shoot them himself. (I shoot our fat lambs myself, with the 30-30.)

He can't stand to do it, he said, all rheumy-eyed. (He's had a stroke or something like it, there's a tremor there.) I said I could see why, I hate doing it myself, but for meat there's not much choice. You either shoot them yourself, or you must drive them this awful drive to the slaughterhouse. Aimee would rather I shot them. The drive is too stressful.

There's no keeping animals without death. The layer hens eventually fall off their perches, the old ewes pass on, dogs die or are put down. And there's no sensible farming in New England without animals to complete the fertility cycle and keep the forage from becoming rank brush. Without manures, fertilizer comes from a factory, and is made with fossil fuels, lots of natural gas goes into making nitrogen fertilizer. Farmers can, if they work at it, make enough fertility with rotation and non-animal input compost, but why, when there's so much forage land that can't really become arable land, and when animal manure is so good for fertilizer?

Larry is a nice guy, who loves farming. He asked about the sheep. He was sad about his cow. Larry composts his dead animals. There's no knackers yard around here anywhere, so no use for an dead Holstein milk cow except fertilizer.

Ashes to ashes. The sun keeps rising, though.

Stayin' Warm?

Zero degrees again. the goose egg.

Stayin' warm? That's what Mainers ask each other this time of year, when they meet neighbors and friends at the post office, the hardware store, or the Brooks "general." The standard greeting.

If you are not "stayin' warm" then that's a very big problem. Something went wrong with your efforts to ensure heat for the winter. You don't have enough firewood. You can't afford oil or propane or kerosene. The furnace is "out" and you can't get a furnace guy to come look at it. To some extent, this is definitely your problem, not your neighbors. Particularly if you are a responsible adult, you're the one that must make the plans, get in the firewood, buy the heat oil, put in the insulation. This is rock-ribbed, formerly Republican New England, after all. But if you're old, or sick, or just pathetic, and not "stayin' warm," someone will like as not take pity on you, and deliver a truckload of free wood scraps, or put plastic on your leaky windows, or loan you their back-up heaters and fuel. They'll do their best to shrug off the good deed. Charity is demeaning, we understand up here, even when it absolutely genuine and comes from the heart.

So no-one will make a big deal of any such good deed. Charity is not something you wear on your sleeve, like the millionaire who gives money to the church and is celebrated loudly. That was all over Georgia when I lived down there. Up here, charity is an underground phenomenon. But surprisingly widespread, especially among older men, the most competent and silver-backed (and modest) of whom often have three or four shut-ins they very secretly keep an eye on. Even their wives may not know that for years they've been helping some old lady out. When it gets cold.

Mainers also like to have "back-up for back-up" when it comes to heat. We like wood stoves because they keep going in power cuts, which always come with ice and wind storms. Power cuts are a norm, not an exception. We like to have back up generators and inverters, to run furnaces and well pumps and light bulbs. A big old oil or coal furnace, even if you don't use it much because you heat with wood, is never a bad thing to have. It's even worth having three or four of those 110 volt electric radiators, because having one for each room you actually use will keep you from the utter misery of not "stayin' warm." We also have elaborate back-up systems of heat tape and strategically placed light bulbs to keep pumps, well, and pipes from freezing if furnaces quit.

If all else fails, one of those stand-alone kerosene heaters, where the fumes go right into the house, will be a life-saver. All your liberal ideas about health and air pollution will go out the window. You'll happily breathe those foul fumes, pull your chair right up to the heat, suck it down, just to stay warm.

If, for some reason, you are defeated in this fight, and the quiet charity of your neighbors fails you, the cold will creep into your house like an icy blight. The walls will feel cold to the touch, the floor will hurt your feet, there won't be any place to get comfy. Reading a book, watching TV, eating dinner, sleeping, all these normal activities will become hard to do because you can't concentrate enough to do them, not even sleep, because the cold will nag you. You'll feel miserable. Your hands, feet, and nose will become numb. You'll find you have to keep moving. If you're old, you won't be able to, and your body core will cool down and you might die. If no-one comes to see you. But someone will.

If you leave, and go somewhere warm, like church, or the cinema, or work, you'll suddenly feel safe, and then happy, a little giddy with comfort, and then you'll begin to fall asleep.

Or, especially if you're younger, you'll become a little frantic, like a worried beaver or squirrel, and you'll run errands to the hardware store, perusing the heating appliances, counting your pennies, trying to find something that will make you warm again that you can afford. You'll troll through "Uncle Henry's" trying to find dry firewood. If you know your forest trees, your dendrology, and have land, you'll take your chainsaw, or even a bucksaw, and you'll cut down ash, and burn that, the only life-saving tree that will burn when green.

And our students say dendrology is silly, not useful. They've never been cold.

Don't worry about us. We're keepin' warm.

Brass Monkey Weather

Yorkshire folk have a saying "cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey." This is one of those sayings whose origin is thankfully lost to history. It's pretty much "brass monkey weather" out there right now.

Kitchen wood stove went out overnight and so I had to get up and start it anew. In the meantime, to protect the pipes, I turned up the thermostat for the oil burner in the basement, from 55 to 61 degrees. So far this winter, we've used only 30 gallons of oil, and the beast in this photo is why. Not particularly efficient, but effective, this "Englander" forced air wood furnace drives away the chill with a vengeance. Together with the kitchen stove, it will consume about five cords of wood this year. It also heats my shop, which means I can work in the winter on carpentry and other projects.

Arguably, because we have 15.5 acres of combined woodland and pasture, growing roughly 10-15 cords of wood a year, this heating system is sustainable. Except for the 30 gallons of #2 heat oil.

Oh well.

Snow Daze

What a lot of snow we've had already! The climate deniers will be rampant. How few of them understand that additional precipitation accompanies global warming, though. Showing their ignorance. But our little tractor, and neighbor Hamilton's Dodge plow truck, have been busy. Would that real life was like Thomas the Tank Engine, where the machines happily do the work by themselves.

Yesterday, before the latest big storm, I cleaned out a bay in the barn and put a gate on it in preparation for piglets, who will come from a local supplier soon after lambs are born. Tootsie, who with Tilley is co-CEO of the Womerlippi sheep herd enterprise, was a little out of sorts, off her feed, and so if we'd had to isolate her, the new bay would have been good. (She seemed better last night.)

It will also be good come lambing time, as a lambing"jug." Mothers who don't want to, or don't know how to feed can be isolated with their offspring in a confined space, where the lambs have a better chance of starting the feeding process. Watch this space for lamb pictures in March and April.

Today, I guess I'll be moving snow again.