Fly Away Home

Since moving from Sunset Park this spring I've lived in four other locations, not counting a few regressive nights on my mother's couch, which would bring the total to five. Certain aspects of moving have become very streamlined for me. Every time I start packing to go to a new place I go through my things and ask myself, When was the last time you touched this object? Wore this shirt? Opened this book? Things have been paring down. Coming to my current roost I had one bag of clothes and a backpack. Of course the weather has completely changed since then and I've been wearing the same long sleeve shirt over and over. I don't know if this means I should have packed more or if I could have gotten away with packing even less. One shirt. Done. Who needs pants? The Man.

Earlier this summer I went camping with some friends in Harriman State Park on the edge of a lake. We took a train to Tuxedo then walked through town and off the road into the woods. I have been looking back on that trip as some of the worst packing of my entire life. I walked into the woods prepared for little more than dying cold and wet in a ditch covered head to toe in ticks. Yet somehow my backpack was so fucking heavy it felt like my collarbone was being gradually pulled apart by the straps across my shoulders. It was a two hour hike to the camp site and this wasn't considering the walk through Brooklyn to the subway then wandering all over Penn Station for the train.

Luckily, my friend Zach lead the way and he loves to camp! It's just camp camp camp day and night with this guy. He has a camp stove, a bear bag (this is where you keep your food not your bears...unless you eat delicious, delicious bear), various tarps, and an extra tent for myself and my pal Robin who would have been sleeping on the dirt with me otherwise. He also had lots of great advice, like "Don't wash your face with the water we cooked pasta in," and "Don't bring berry scented lotion to the woods full of bears".

Some of you (I mean the two people who read this blog) may know how terrified I am of sleeping out of doors. Like most unreasonable fears this one has waned through practice or the 'facing' of fear. I've slept in a tent a few times now without prescription drugs OR a panic attack and though I went to bed that first night startlingly sober (though he packed everything else Zach forgot the bourbon) I believed in the possibility of sleep and not that I would be murdered by an itinerant woodsman.

Fear is not the same thing as discomfort and within the hour both Robin and I were shivering in our sleeping bags. At least that's what she claims. Every time I looked over at her she was calmly breathing out frozen white puffs. According to her she tossed and turned and declared me an 'excellent sleeper'. We'd borrowed our bags from a couple who told us they'd slept on the snow with them. We realized they must have zipped the bags together and cuddled but Robin rejected my offer to spoon. You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it spoon with you.

The next night I thought, if I could just be warm I would sleep like the dead. But the body wants what it wants. It was warmer but there was no peace. You see, I hadn't packed a mat and through the thin texture of my sleeping bag I felt every rock and clump of grass and rabbit dropping held together by the hard hard cold cold ground. My eyes closed occasionally but that was as close to sleep as I got.

Since this trip I've thought a lot about what's the least amount someone would need to live in the woods and though there are many people who actually have the experience to answer this question let me dwell on my suppositions a moment. Fire. Food that wont quickly perish, until you learn to throttle squirrels for soup. Good walking shoes, until you walk them off your feet and develop a thick sole of skin. A tarp. A place to sleep. Well, I seem to be wavering here...because what is necessary to living in the woods depends a lot on how much you want it to be like living in your home. One could slowly shake off what is vital to a civilized life and keep only what is vital to survival. I don't think of that as a romantic idea. Being uncomfortable is hard. And if you're going to live in the woods, well, why not build a cabin? As camping goes we were in a pretty good place, not a cabin but there was a nylon roof keeping the rain and some of the bugs out.



I still don't have a permanent home but when it happens how will I face the flood of...stuff? All the lamps, the mattress, the bags and bags of clothes I never wear, boxes of books to the ceiling, letters, photos, drawings, twenty-five years worth of knick knacks pouring in on me from storage to be sorted through and categorized and valued again. They wont take it well if I say, "Sorry. You're not vital to my survival." Then I imagine myself in a bare room, in a poorly insulated sleeping bag tossing and turning on the floor. But hey, at least I don't have BAGGAGE! There must be a happy medium somewhere.

Wait, before I finish I just want to mention the bugs again. There are a lot of bugs out there. Ticks especially. Zach had a handy little plastic tweezer to pull them out. Robin was covered in them every time we came back from a hike. I never found any on myself but did enjoy mooning her under the pretense of a tick search. The thing about bugs is in the city we think of them as scurrying around the floor, hiding in the dark until we go to bed. It's a war and we think by keeping our homes clean, lining the cracks with poison we'll win every skirmish. But as soon as you go out where there are more trees than people you can see the fallacy in this thinking. Bugs in the woods are not shy, they're not gonna hide and you're in THEIR house. A tent is basically a little air bubble where you can breath without inhaling gnats.

I'm in the woods again, in a cabin actually, and the line where my house ends and the bugs' begin is blurry. There's no heat and the screen doors droop on their hinges. I have to evict squatting spiders and hypnotized moths pretty regularly, ants swim in my honey and this morning I killed a mosquito helping itself to the buffet of blood in my eyelid. Later I was walking along the road and saw a black raspberry bush, the last of the season's fruit glistening on its stems. Falling on it like a gremlin, I ate what was there leaving nothing for the birds or neighborhood children. When I stood up I checked my legs, for ticks of course, but found instead a little red stowaway, a ladybug clinging desperately after what surely must have been a traumatic trip through space.

I recited the old rhyme. Ladybug, Ladybug fly away home...and just like that she spread her hard candy wings and fluttered off. It was kind of like magic and I appreciated that she didn't let me get to the grim conclusion...Your house is on fire and your children are gone. Now trying to imagine my future home I keep thinking of the ladybug's scorching tinderbox. The tiny firetruck manned by grasshoppers. Her (many?) eyes reflecting the dying flames and charred remains. She'll have to rebuild.

On our third day of camping we woke up to pouring rain. We shook out our temporary homes, rolled them up and packed them away. When we got off the train we went en mass to a friend's house for showers, a hot meal, Pictionary and a big bottle of bourbon. Damp cold and sobriety has its place...but not at MY place. That much about my future residence I do know.

April is the Cruelest Month...and May Through August

Statistically speaking I dropped off this whole blogging thing at about the right time. Half a year and I checked out. I can go on about the reasons why I did but what's more interesting are the reasons why I'm writing again, which will hopefully not be just another whim. But hey, who knows? Life is long and full of impediments.

Let us take a journey back to April then, that far flung month of Fools and sudden flurries. It was wet, it was cold but Spring had reached out to tap our shoulders and say, "Hey, wait up I'm coming! Don't go without me!" I looked out at the sagging broken bits of my garden and thought, Let's do this thing. Earth was turned, leaves composted, cement swept and the great Craigslist search began. First to build a garden box you need wood and free wood is the best kind.

My roommate Claire and I met up on a desolate street a hair's breadth from Red Hook then followed a strange woman into her warehouse, using a flash light to pick through her debris and find chunks of wood of an approximate size to one another. They were all different finishes, some actual lumber, some just the hacked up drawers of an old bureau, some were lined mysteriously with cloth that no force on earth (barring industrial solvents) could remove. We bungeed what we could to the back of Claire's bike and the rest on a tiny black hand cart and walked the forty or so blocks to our house, with the weight of the wood tipping their conveyances over every ten feet or so. Tenacious C, as I like to call her, urged me on as my shoulders separated and we finally made it, April wind whipping our faces and the clouds rolling over.

Aw, look at this photo. I'm so glad my Nalgene is pictured here. I lost it a few weeks ago at a yoga studio. Never forget!!


When we finally got to hammering all this garbage together we noticed our boxes were perfectly coffin sized, if you were being buried 150 years ago in the Old West.


There was one for me as well but I like the power to the workers tone of Claire's pose here with the hammer and all.

Hmm, now we have boxes. Where to find dirt? Until you need large amounts of it at once you assume dirt is the most readily available commodity out there. I mean everywhere I look I see dirt, right? But no. Craigslist again! This time it lead us to a bar on Fifth Ave. where the proprietor had been digging out his basement, hoping to make the ceiling a habitable distance from the floor. One day it will be a music venue but that particular day it looked like where we were going to be murdered. It didn't help that in the corner sat two hundred partially filled black garbage bags under a caged bare bulb. These turned out to be full of dirt, not body parts, and we started hauling them up the perilously steep basement staircase. Another surprise about dirt-it's pretty fucking heavy! It took the both of us to manage certain bags and when we peaked in one we saw why. This wasn't loamy compost full of rich organic matter. This was red silt, the clay earth of old Brooklyn sitting under the pressure of a building for a hundred years. Not entirely sure anything would even grow in it we loaded down a friend's car until it sagged and drove the bags home to go through another back breaking session of moving them down the long alleyway to our apartment.

Now the fun part! Slashing the bags with a razor blade filled me with glee. Because I'm deranged. Claire upended our compost bin over the red clay, ignoring un-composted bits like corn husks and what we'd just eaten for lunch, assuming it would all work itself out in the end. We mixed the two together hoping to create a hospitable environment for our seeds.

And such seeds. I had it all worked out. I was gonna grow a whole season's worth of food and have enough to can and jar, freeze and dry, and subsist on all winter. I dreamed big, baby. Tomatoes, snap peas, kale, carrots, green onions, potatoes (Including the purple Magic Mollies I'd hoarded in a paper bag all year. When I reached my hand in to get them I shrieked. Their eyes had sprouted and the stems caressed me like antennae), strawberries, five kinds of basil, rosemary, thyme, beets. All of these I planted in peat lined trays and covered carefully with clear plastic. I worried over them like a mother. A negligent, inconsistent mother but somehow they sprouted. I built a trellis over the boxes out of old silkscreen frames for the climbing peas and sat back waiting to reap what I'd sown.

Then the blow! My landlord wanted my house, Tenacious C was moving out and I had to find a new place to live all of which is a saga for another day. I suffered in a few ways, throwing out most of my personal belongings, losing money etc. But the hardest thing was saying goodbye to my garden that I had planted and tended in good faith and which now was reduced to a charge from my landlord. Removal. He trashed it all. All our work in a dumpster just like that.

That's assuming he didn't just charge me and keep the beds in his new yard anyway, which I'd really be glad to hear.

So here I am, in upstate New York again, a part of the world that first inspired me to begin writing about food and the outdoors and growing things. And I said this was going to be a post about why I've started writing again not why I stopped but it seems they're the same story, really. I stopped because my garden was taken away before it could be anything and I'm starting again because writing about food and life and plants brings it back to life, allows it to stretch its tendrils out and climb that trellis where it can unfurl and bear fruit.

Metaphorically, I mean. Because it's actually in a landfill now.