Tag Archives: homesteading

An American Adventure: Part Fourteen

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Down by the Green River, where Paradise lay…

Well, this isn’t that Green River. That’s in Muhlenberg County, Kentucky, and I have been there. This is the Green River in Utah that carved out part of the Morrison Formation and exposed many of the geologic layers of the past 150 million years.

The river was running high and fast from snow melt.

Memorial Day boaters were finding out just how cold that water was, and I had to see for myself. It sure felt good after a couple of miles on the desert trail!

On Memorial Day itself the National Monument campground was not completely full, as many travelers were headed back home. We decided to spend two nights. Federal sites command a higher level of respect, I find, and despite the number of families with lots of gear and gadgets, the place was quiet and clean and people were well behaved.  Being in a Park campground means that you get opportunities to hear Ranger talks in the evening. We heard a presentation about Mountain Men of the area. The Ranger was dressed in period clothing and had all the gear and accessories that the kids clamor for: a coyote skin hat, a rifle, a beaver pelt and traps, a flint & steel pouch, a bear claw necklace and a big knife. He told the story of Hugh Glass’s experience with General Ashley’s company exploring the Green River…the story that Leonardo di Caprio acted out in the movie The Revenant. Later that evening, we drove out to the homestead at the end of the road where Josie Bassett Morris lived for more than 50 years. She had divorced three husbands, been widowed once and came out to this spot with husband number five to build her own cabin. Soon he was asked to leave as well. She hosted her four children and numerous grandchildren throughout the years, finally suffering a broken hip while at the cabin in 1963 and dying of complications the following year at the age of 90. 

This homestead offered another version of human habitation in the desert to ponder. Josie was part of a wild bunch of outlaws in her younger days, and when she settled, her community lived in town, many miles away. Her cabin was built right next to a spring, which still runs with fresh, clear water. She brought in a lot of material to make the place “home”. This represents a much more modern version of life than the Pueblo communities we’d visited days before, but is still a sharp contrast to life in the campground we had just left that night.

Which causes me to wonder, what is a “sustainable” lifestyle in this place? What is “enough” to live in a desert? Or in any landscape? How has the idea of “enough” changed in my lifetime? What do I think is “enough”?

Harvesting Hope

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I have just finished reading a very informative book by Jane Goodall on the subject of Food.  Harvest for Hope: A Guide to Mindful Eating has led me to reconsider the way I buy and cook and eat food.  Much of it is based on common sense and natural practices (What would a chimp choose to eat?  Have you ever seen an overweight chimp in the wild?), and much of it exposes the insanity that is our factory food production here in the “civilized” world. How civilized is it to cram thousands of chickens together in a cage, remove their beaks so that they can’t peck each other to death, pump them with antibiotics and force them to cannibalize their own kind by giving them non-vegetarian feed?  And then to slaughter them, ship their polluted flesh over thousands of miles burning fossil fuels, and eat it?  I was not thinking about that when I bought Super Saver packages of chicken breasts at my local super market.  I think about it now.

And here is the surprising gift of hope: my children have been thinking about this for years.  I didn’t lead the way. 

Here is another arena of hope: reclaiming, salvaging and recycling living space.  My daughter and her fiance purchased a home that had been severely water damaged and mold and mildew infested.  The inhabitants had moved out to hospice care and died; the house was abandoned, but the water wasn’t shut off.  In the winter freeze and thaw, the pipes broke and flooded the place.  What a mess!  But Joe comes from a family line of carpenters and construction wizards.  He has completely re-worked the house: plumbing, electric, heating, floor plan and surfaces.  He’s gotten neighbors, friends and family involved in the labor and in donating fixtures. The final step will be relocating the back yard garden.  You see, this house is just a few doors down the street from the one they’ve rented for the past 3 years.  So, by their wedding date one year from this month, they will have their own home and garden.  They are marvelous role models for sustainable living, and I am so proud of them! Yesterday I went down to visit and take pictures.  They sent me home with a bunch of produce from their garden.  I am so grateful and awed by how life unfolds.  The next generation is certainly capable of taking responsibility and working hard in a sustainable direction.  Let’s just hope many of them choose to!

The Griessler House
The back porch
The bathroom tile looks great even if the photo doesn’t
The basement with shiny ducts and pipes
Joe & Becca

Inheriting a Homestead

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I spent several hours today in the homestead that I will demonstrate and interpret for visitors to Old World Wisconsin.  Tomorrow I will learn to light a fire in the cookstove and the bake oven and actually cook something.   The house and land was purchased by Adam Schottler, an immigrant from southern Germany who had a larger farm nearby.  He rented the house out until his son Matthias was married, and then he gave his son and daughter-in-law the property.   The Wisconsin Historical Society acquired the house and a few other buildings from the period, and assembled them together to form a homestead for the museum.  The restoration date targeted is 1875.  At that time, Matthias and Caroline Schottler had 2 children.  They had 11 children total during their marriage.  Here’s a photo that shows the zigzag fence, the granary and pig pen, the barn, the summer kitchen (or bake house), and behind it, the house.  The granary, summer kitchen, and house are all one behind the other in this photo, so you can’t see much of them.  The wooden crossbar frame standing outside is for butchering hogs (which we’ll do in the fall).  The green field in the background is planted with rye.  I am supposedly going to help make a rye straw basket, and to raise dough in it for rye bread, which I will bake in the bake kitchen oven…an oven that holds 24 loaves at a time!

 

I will also be busying myself chopping wood and gardening in order to prepare food in that summer kitchen.  Today I saw rhubarb and asparagus and currents and thyme and sage and rosemary and lemon balm and dill and horseradish already growing in the garden.  All of this produce is to be used on site during the season.  I don’t get to take any home, but I do get to help use it.  I have been wanting to learn more about how to “live off the land” for a while now, and this is going to be a great introduction, I think. 

Right now I’m learning all kinds of logistics to interpreting this area for school groups beginning a week from today, but I think of the feel of the sun on my cheeks and the 13-stripe ground squirrel that peeked into the kitchen today, and I imagine moments that I will have simply soaking up the homesteading life, pondering the way of a woman who worked hard, raised 11 children, and knew the land around her intimately.   What will I learn from her?  What appreciation and meaning will take root inside me?  Gratitude, a sense of life rooted and grounded, a hope for my own children to live honestly in the simple abundance of the earth?  It’s a connection that I’m eager to explore.

I apologize for leaving out a poetry challenge for today, but I am too sunburned and tired to concentrate on that today.  Tomorrow I have another early day out at the site.   I am looking forward to sleep!  And to getting my costume….more to come!