Doug Fine: Author, Journalist, Adventurer, Goat-Herder

Given that the Funky Butte Ranch’s apple, peach, plum, pear, cherry and apricot trees are still maturing (though looking great, especially given recent hail), I visited three orchards (two organic) en route to a reading in Northern New Mexico last week. This, in my view, is the world’s best kind of shopping: edible shopping. I came back with four heirloom varieties in as many shades, totaling perhaps 100 pounds. I processed perhaps 80 pounds, and ate perhaps 20 pounds. Can the apple-a-day Health Maintenance Plan be cumulative? If so, I’m good until the second Obama Administration.

Just at the start of the time of year when it’s two seasons every day here in the high desert (winter at dawn, summer by 10 a.m.), I froze the remaining apples via solar power, and now have a sufficient stash until the Funky Butte Ranch apples are (hopefully) ready next fall. Why did I do this? Taste alone would be both a legitimate and truthful answer: anything right off the tree is going to taste better than anything off a store shelf.

Supporting local businesses is another nice answer with some truth in it: a rancher in my valley told me, “One day in the 1970s, the chain supermarkets that used to buy from us decided they needed to unify their produce, so now they only use the same few waxy varieties from California you see in every store.” Never mind that this guy’s un-named heirloom Delicious-esque apples are the sweetest, best-tasting apple I’ve ever had he pleasure of crunching into.

But the real reason I went on an apple field trip is to help save the Earth. Something like 60 percent of our petroleum use comes in our food in the form of Carbon Miles. Thanks to a pleasant, vegetable-oil powered road trip that included camping along the Rio Grande and visiting several art galleries, now my apples don’t have to come from New Zealand in March.

For those new to the concept of Carbon Miles, the reality is this: the average American meal travels 1,500 miles to the plate. Those are many more miles than you drive yourself, but someone is driving (or flying) the distant food to your market, often in refrigerated containers. That’s a lot of petroleum. Come spring, if I want an apple, there it is in my market. But it’s got to be coming from somewhere where it’s fall, like Chile or New Zealand. So now my apples have zero carbon miles year round. It’s win-win for everyone except the cargo shipping companies.

The real winner, of course, is my taste buds. I’m working apple products into every meal this week (from morning shake to evening salad), and foisting them on visitors. Friends who are used to commercial apples – even organic ones – simply can’t believe how good these apples taste. It’s as different from any recent apple experience of theirs as an Apple computer is from an apple blossom. The burst of flavor experienced upon breaking skin on the first bite of these magical, fist-sized, organic, somewhat Jonathan-like rubies I found at a roadside orchard is so intense, the diner’s eyes jolt open as though hearing Sarah Palin complete a sentence grammatically.

Eating local food may also have health benefits. A lot of folks believe, for instance, that if I continue gorging on the honey made by my neighbor’s bees in the next canyon, it’ll keep my spring allergies in check, since I’m be sort of vaccinating myself each morning with the dollop I spoon into my Funky Butte Ranch goat yogurt.

What I’m realizing as much as anything else from this pleasant culinary experience is that local living can be done. Easily. Which is useful in case it ever has to be done. As I mentioned in Farewell, My Subaru, I’ve noticed that less…independent minded folks have of late migrated from considering my local living/sustainable power experiment here on the Funky Butte Ranch Radically Subversive to simply Radically Unfeasible. A collapsing world market and obvious climate change will do that to a former staid, hydrogenated oil-eating cynic. Now I get, “Yeah but I could never do it,” instead of, “What are you, some kind of Communist Hippie Kazinsky Militia Member?”

In fact, when someone these days tells me, “I could never live locally, I’m too busy, I’m too suburban,” I reply, “You can, and pretty easily, too, if you don’t mind wading in a lot of goat and chicken shit and taking your showers in the afternoon in winter.”

I remember when it seemed excessive to me the way my grandparents, who “lived through the Depression,” stockpiled food supplies – from pasta to sugar packets gathered at restaurants. I realize now that they knew an absence of plenty, and spent years doubting its return. This is why I plant fruit trees.

Perhaps the best part of this recent carbon-neutral produce road trip was getting to talk to old-timer farmers. Every chat proved to be a philosophical exchange, a journalistic interview, a history lesson. And, I like to think, an educational exchange for all parties. The one non-organic farmer whose orchard I visited, a septuagenarian third generation good fellow with tons of experience and a gorgeous proto-Macintosh apples, bantered with me about his view that organic labeling is a “license to steal.” He claims that he tracks his pests daily, and that twice during this past season he needed to spray a chemical that “hasn’t grown any tumors on me in 61 years, and I eat about thirty apples a day. It breaks down by harvest time. We farmers aren’t trying to hurt you.”

“I know,” I said, “But the chemical companies are just trying to make a sale.”

“Yeah,” he admitted. “I guess DDT was a mistake.”

This being the Digital Age, we all hear the same CNN sound bites and spin (even me, without a TV), so it’s easier than ever to speak across generations. This is beneficial, because the current crop of crotchety, cynical old-timers in rural New Mexico, unlike previous batches of crotchety, cynical old-timers who believed that the world was going to hell in a hand basket, actually are witnessing the world – in the form of unprecedented weather – go to hell in a hand basket. They are living through Climate Change, which is messing with the rain patterns they once took for granted. It’s turning them Green. They know that if society doesn’t reverse course on carbon emissions, then it’s All Over. Year ‘round streams are turning ephemeral before their eyes, previously unknown beetles are killing entire mountainsides of Ponderosa Pine, and people and animals are dying of incurable staph infections.

But, thank God, some of them kept their orchards thirty years after the supermarkets went to “all waxy, all year long.” And I’m reaping the local living benefits.

Here’s a photo of one of the Funky Butte Ranch’s young apple trees. Hopefully next year’s produce road trip, fun and educational as it will no doubt be, won’t even be necessary for an apple a day.

A side benefit of the sapling-hauling I’ve had to do with the Funky Butte Ranch’s driveway still looking like a diorama of the Grand Canyon (as detailed in the previous Dispatch), is that in the last few days since returning home with Too Much Fruit, I’ve had the pleasure of walking around the Funky Butte Ranch’s meadows every afternoon with the goats, in between working on a magazine assignment and hoisting a porch swing (I’ve already made the sun tea).

The reason I’ve had to shepherd the goats during their “free-range” time is that the new apple and cherry trees (each easily seventy pounds and hauled down in a wheelbarrow as part of my Green Olympic Preparation)are not yet fenced, and when a goat knows you don’t want to eat something, well, that becomes the Ultimate Goal of Goat life.

Shepherding is a good gig. As meditative as any career, and you’re outside. The goats – your musical good friends in this role – are always munching Apache Plume near you. Natalie’s milk, spiced by post-monsoon wildflowers – is unspeakably sweet this season. Yesterday afternoon, the goats dined at a creek-side spot so quiet, I could hear an owl calling in the next canyon, a flapping, on-a-mission raven’s wings overhead, and an individual, late-partying cricket. I set a watch timer and began my daily meditation (my third attempt at this Wal-Mart version of a watch, marketed at the wholesale level as, “for $9, it doesn’t matter if it works, or what dyes go into the band” – affordable retail, in other words.). But this one works, bless it, and I meditated accompanied by a dog, a cat, and two goats munching nearby.

“Mbbah,” I called once during that sit, to make sure the ruminants stayed close. They did more than that. They came closer. Also during that shepherding shift I texted a neighbor a birthday wish. In short, it was a Very Good Day. My mental exercise. With about 400 apples waiting inside to top it off.

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