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

Welcoming New Members to the Interspecies Neighborhood and Simultaneously Discovering That One’s Muscular Rotations Are in Sync With a Larger Rhythm

 

It both sounds and smells like spring in my canyon already. Now that’s what I call a good length for a winter. Particularly after living in Alaska for years, where you’re supposed to learn quickly that a March thaw is simply an invitation for Chechakos to have their barely-defrosted hearts broken in a week.

And unlike my annually unlearned-from mistake in the Far North, I’m pretty sure this isn’t premature equinox fever. Returning songbirds are my alarm clock, and if I’m wrong about spring’s arrival, so are they. In fact the grosbeaks and finches emptying my birdfeeders and darting flirtatiously overhead while I meditate with the goats overall serve the purpose here on the Funky Butte Ranch that cathedral bells do for small old European towns -– telling me which delightful ritual is up next: ah, so it’s time for meditation, writing, ranching, siesta-ing, milking, weeding, anything-ing with the family? Great.

And lest there be any doubt about which season we are in here at 5,700 feet and 32 degrees north latitude, the owls are back, noisily nesting in their favorite crack in the Butte. One nest-tender is watching me now as I write, sitting on the goat milker with a quart of New Mexico’s creamiest leaking on to my leg.

If spring fever is a disease, I don’t want the cure. Even the compost looks pretty at this time of year. I recently solved a problem with a neighbor by looking at it (the goat poop mixed with straw and the issue) honestly and coming out with the resolution. Weird things happen when you believe the universe intends things to be good for you.

Indeed, I got motivated this morning to scythe. Man, that’s one of those declarations that makes me realize I’m living a lifestyle that no guidance counselor trained in the Western World has ever been taught to suggest as a career choice. As in, “This line of work often offers the opportunity to wallow in goat poop before sunrise. Pay is minimal. Smell nearly impossible to wash off.” But it is the prepare-the-soil time of year.

And I enter it surging with primavera optimism due to factors beyond my control. Time and again I get the message that God revives us now and then so that we keep appreciating, keep reproducing, and keep having fun with the other DNA replicates. But if I have to ascribe specific sources to my recent default jocularity even when engaged in what might be objectively called mundane acts, I suppose I could say that it’s partly because El Nino has thus far kept the dreaded juniper pollen atmosphere, normally toxic to oxygen-breathing organisms like me, minimal this year. And I guess I could claim I’m smiling at this very moment partly because the seedlings I started indoors this year, from tomatoes to brussel sprouts, are surging and are almost verbally asking to be transferred outside (they do this through major window leaning). But mainly it’s because of my journalistic pleasure at Confirming a Story At the Source. Particularly the Best News of the Past Year.

Here’s how I received this news that proved the chief imbuer of my Optimism Bug. It’s worth recounting, I think, because I didn’t realize its import nor feel its intoxicating effect for months. And for some reason it feels like a lesson resides in that.

At first, when my neighbor and hiking buddy KB stopped me in the local food co-op late last Gregorian solar year and told me, in his typically genuine reply to my polite, “What’s new on your end?” inquiry, that he in fact had the Best News of 2009 to relay to me, I thought he was just doing a parody of those inevitable End of Year Look-back media time-fillers that so distract us from actual news like Darfur and healthcare. He knows those piss me off.

“There’s a beaver building a dam at my crossing,” he told me. Meaning the treacherous river-crossing that leads to his land, a few miles downstream from the treacherous river-crossing that leads to the Funky Butte Ranch. Normally reserved, KB was beaming. I could tell that he wasn’t kidding, but the news didn’t register there in the dry goods aisle. Not as a Best of Year local news bulletin, that’s for sure. I had tortillas to buy. The local fauna I had on my mind, I recall, were the new nesting pair of falcons, which had eaten two of my chickens in the past week, not long after we lost one of our chicken-protecting dogs to old age.

Three months passed. El Nino settled in. I trimmed goat hooves, wrote chapters, and gave talks in the Portlands and Cincinnatis of the world. Then, last week, I saw it with my own eyes –- the beaver dam — and I saw immediately why this was indeed such an important news item, for any year. I mean I grokked it instantly. Beavers don’t set up homesteads downstream from industrial waste dumps. They can’t live where the riparian habitat is disturbed by cattle or human over-development. They are what’s known as an Indicator Species.

I have another neighbor, Knute, who likes to lambaste protected land as being “taken away,” that is, from the logging work from which he derives his income. In this viewpoint he has allies in the region’s justly floundering, nonsensical commercial cattle industry, which is simply not appropriate in my desert river ecosystem.

The cattle, bless them, just do what we all do, namely, try to find a good meal and make more cattle, and in so doing have transformed the riverbanks of the Southwest by eating the riparian vegetation (thus causing ecosystem-altering water temperature rises) and pooping in the water (thus imparting off-the-charts fecal coliform blooms). Nothing against cattle as an animal –- the desert just isn’t the place for them, especially in commercial operation quantity. Biologists and geologists have realized this since the dawn of the Twentieth Century.

This view from the dam of my new neighbor Bertram the Beaver, which is being shrewdly built across a tiny stretch of our river that was protected from cattle less than a decade ago, looks as different from both the upstream and the downstream properties’ riverbank as Avatar looks from The Hurt Locker. Truly, it is impossible to overemphasize the disparity between the verdant riverside vegetative cover that invited the beaver’s return, as compared to the apocalyptic, cattle-induced nightmare of the stripped stream bank a half-mile in either direction.

A beaver dam, in short, can only be good news, ecosystem health-wise, soil health-wise and water health-wise. Which means my-and-my-family’s health-wise. At the very least, Bertram’s excellent real estate decision (and during a weak market!) means that when I breathe next to the creek and it smells good in my ‘hood, it really is good, and not openly or secretly toxic from the effluent of some bovine or industrial Mordor upstream. Beavers can’t handle a polluted river, and neither can I.

Best News of the Year, indeed. In truth, the beaver dam might be among the Top Ten Local News Stories of the Decade -– it provided a dose of much-needed mid-winter endorphins for those who grasped its significance sooner than I did. And now it’s yet another source of overall planetary optimism for me. It was not, as I had initially and so cynically believed, a parody of the inevitable and useless media year-end countdowns. To his credit, KB didn’t give me a single “I told ya so.” It’s not in his nature.

We do live on a durable planet, and it’s not too late, should we immediately start to take care of it on an Earth-wide level, to allow our species to survive for the next couple of dozen generations at least. More immediately, if sustainability is integrated as a fundamental tenet into a Twenty-First Century renewable economy, it will help ensure that the nations shrewd enough (like the local beaver) to embrace its precepts rise to (or stay at) the top of this Millennium’s power bracket.

So let’s so you’re an, oh, let’s just pick one nation — let’s say you’re an American, and you’re a patriot. First step: Green the Grid. Put the nation to work (utilizing, among other engines, the already-existing and currently largely mothballed U.S. automotive factory network) migrating the nation profitably from a coal-fire economy to a solar- and wind-powered one. Once you have that dialed in, I firmly believe, a lot of the rest of the economic elements will fall into place. Coal has to go. It may take time to transition. But it’s killing us.

But enough macroeconomics. As for me and my planned morning of scything (I use a machete, for lack of a solar-powered weed whacker), I better get at it. I find it a lovely, almost Yogic exercise — muscular rotations that feel in sync with a larger rhythm. And I find working outside is a great way to keep a strong overall spiritual vibe going, or even increasing. And I call that health maintenance.

Biologically, as a father, patterns in my fight-or-flight mechanism (particularly “fight”) have been triggered just as uniquely as my sweetheart’s baby-feeding system switched on after three decades of dormancy. Whether I fight more like Muhammad Ali or Larry David remains to be seen. But any undeniably positive development in our watershed means I can feel like my son is being raised in a healthy place. It helps calm me from “fight” mind, not to “flight”, but to instinctive Belief in Myself at equilibrium.

That’s a key part of my personal Wellness program as well, (along with meditation with goats and conscious appreciation of every possible moment of this blessed life). You only need to watch any National Geographic Special to understand why I favor this kind of medical care over, say, ‘Flu shots. The narrator inevitably speaks of the tiger or the sea horse’s “fierce” behavior in defense of its young. Um, let me tell you, humans are fierce, too, ideally. Equally. And when parenting reveals that I am at not just my most self-confident but also acceptably humble, love-seeping, creative and relaxed, well, I’m not too proud to thank dam-building rodents (conveniently, also just being their best selves, and in my backyard).

From the way folks seem to be getting along here in my valley lately, the surge of optimism provided by the beaver is contagious, and even applies across species. Drenched during a freak downpour the other day while goat milking (even the owls called off their own evening aerial feeding and bolted for the nest), I reflected, maybe El Nino’s rains and this early, wet spring will allow my otherwise climate change-affected young fruit trees to establish a toe-hold in the orchard (or more literally a root hold). Their early (and hopefully not too-early) budding sure looks promising this year.

I’m starting to envision a universe in which everyone and everything can win, and no one has to lose. Except maybe the Republican-financed public relations firms that created the fake Tea Baggers. Perhaps we already live in such a place. Even the cattle are welcome to move to more appropriate climates, where they will no doubt be appreciative, too. Personally, something feels very right about coming in for lunch after laying down a machete and removing goat poop-covered boots to a family that is happy to see me. But maybe I’ve just got spring fever. Makes me wonder if in some cases the medical textbooks have got “well” and “sick” mixed up. I mean, I’ve got some kind of fever, and yet I feel very, very healthy.

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