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

My neighbor and principal hiking partner KB knew about my tomato crop carnage, which I guess everyone does now, since I documented it in a New York Times Magazine piece a couple of weeks ago, and it’s since been syndicated worldwide in the International Herald Tribune. In short, my burstingly-ready crop of vitamin-packed beauties got pulverized by a freak (or once-freak, in an era of Climate Chaos) hail storm days before harvest. Though his crop is only a few miles up-valley, rather than my frozen BB and golf ball assault, KB got a mere and actually helpful basting for his tomatoes.

So my friend, seemingly (and probably) out of kind-heartedness, has since three times dropped off upwards of twenty pounds of delicious ripe tomatoes. But this in fact suits both of us fine, as KB always finds himself on the receiving end of an artery-clogging number of Funky Butte Ranch organic chicken and duck eggs. My happy birds are laying so prolifically that I sometimes have dreams that involve a world whose ground cover is composed of nothing but chicken eggs (or is it hail?). KB probably carted off fifteen dozen eggs this summer alone.

This is called bartering.

Tomatoes (which add the suddenly missing and much-needed lycopene to my diet) in exchange for protein.

I think technically this ancient, friendship-based local community sharing is now illegal.

Be that as it may, the day after KB’s most recent visit, I sold, bartered or gave away another nine dozen eggs at my valley’s Harvest Festival (to my accountant’s chagrin, I’m declaring all $9 of income). There I met a local who makes mandolins and bows-and-arrows (both valuable skills should there ever be a time without Chinese-stocked box stores). Any future world, globalized or not, will need both the tools of music and of hunting.

And indeed recent world events have me thinking about a time when my backyard might have to be my supermarket. En route to my next hike with KB, two older fellows with battered, workingmen’s faces and driving an equally battered pick-up truck passed us on a back “road” somewhere in the Southwest New Mexico mountains.

“Getting some pinions?” the driver shouted to us across his passenger, assuming that any marginally intelligent Homo sapien would know where to harvest the pine nuts that dangled from pinion pines at this time of year.

“Actually we were going on a hike, cutting some firewood, and maybe throwing the Frisbee,” I thought. But I said, “Um, now we are.”

We were in this guy’s childhood playground. I found, during the fifteen minutes of inextricable biographical conversation that ensues when humans meet in friendly rural environments, that he knew every trail. As a denizen of these kinds of places these days, I think about the value of such knowledge whenever I hear a political proposal that sounds good but comes from what feels a bit too urban of a source (like a think tank media pundit in a suit and make-up).

“OK,” I think as I digest, say, a middle-of-the-road plan for combining off-shore drilling with investment in solar technology, “but have you watched a waterfall of glacial runoff emptying into a whale-filled fjord with migrating salmon underneath, all witnessed by no one but you and your lover? Does that factor in for you?”

Whether someone is aware that he or she is a member of the animal kingdom, living on a physical planet, matters to me for some reason. In fact, it’s one of the first things I check on a psychic resume.

Here’s my dog River, acutely aware she’s a member of he animal kingdom on a (in this case unseasonably cold) physical planet, trying to make her way through the Great Hail Storm of Aught Eight. Myself, I set out in my river-running helmet to check on the remnants of the Funky Butte Ranch garden during the onslaught.

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