I remember reading a Daniel Boone biography years ago and one of the most fascinating parts of it was how important, and dangerous, the job of making salt was for the folks living out on the "frontier." I probably remember that more than anything else.
Very nice structure (chiastic?) to start with the personal experience with the slug, move to sauerkraut and salt, and then remind us that we are talking about slugs (oh, slugs and salt!) and the land and where does salt come from anyway? And who can access salt? How are access restrictions that prohibit us from foraging from the land similar to the access restrictions that prohibited the Indians from foraging for salt? Excellent.
On foraging, and converting foraged foods into cuisine, my family made our first successful chokecherry harvest and boiled it down into a sauce. It's been a while since I had a Dr. Pepper, but using the sauce to flavor sodas brings some Dr. Pepper notes, with a whole lot of extra magic. We have to drive for some miles to get the chokecherries, though, despite living in good habitat for them. The city seems to have displaced them. We have the resources to drive to the Beartooths to fish and forage for fun, but those in Billings who would benefit most from an edible landscape won't find chokecherries there. I just learned from Tom Elpel that russian olives are actually edible (who told me that they were poisonous?), but I need to experiment. Within walking distance of my house, I have access to abundant gleanings that last into the winter, and probably sweeten in the cold.
Also, this is my second for This Land. I've been learning so much.
Me, too. JenniferS (below) recommended it in another forum, and I am hooked.
I am saddened to hear of the lack of chokecherries in Billings! We have so many here all around Whitefish. I pick them while I'm walking around, and keep trying to remember I need to pick a bunch for jelly before they go over. The foraging aspect is really big -- when I first started making jam from chokecherries growing down in a town park, it really came home to me what it means to be able to easily forage food without having to drive a love distance or even cultivate a garden. There is a tremendous amount of freedom in that. (We don't have much Russian olive, but I need to start experimenting with Mountain Ash berries, which also grow abundantly here.)
I am sure there's a book about the history of salt but it's kind of fun to muse about it :)
When I first started doing these "walking compositions," I wanted to keep them short -- which I'm failing at -- but they evolved into a kind of triptych style. I'm not strict about how I do the subject, but tend to introduce something related to my walk in the first part, a deeper subject in the second, and then bring them together in the third. Kind of. A friend once told me that my regular published essays have a fish scale structure (I always thought of them as mosaics), so that's somewhere in the back of my mind.
Of course! I remember seeing that on bookshelves when it came out now, but never read it. I think I got a touch burned out on commodity stories after reading a couple histories of coffee. Interesting but always missing the exploitation factor, or glossing over it. I don't know why I felt like Strange Harvests (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/535438/strange-harvests-by-edward-posnett/) did a better job of that, except that he lingered more on the "how do we use/consume things without fully commodifying it and destroying the resource?"
But truly, commodity stories are almost always interesting.
Thank you so much for recommending it. Listening to the first season while reading "Buying America from the Indians" was pretty stomach-churning. The depth of wrongness is bottomless. I'm sure Season 2 will be even harder. But I'm really grateful to you for telling me about it 💔
Season 2 hits me particularly hard because it intersects with my career and all the failings of the child welfare and adoption systems. I will definitely be watching Rebecca Nagel for continued good things.
Oh, yes, I keep forgetting that's your career. I can't begin to imagine the lives and tangled stories you work with every single day. A friend of mine is a public defender, which is disheartening on its own, but your area seems much, much harder.
She has done an amazing job with this. I'll probably listen to any podcast or read any writing from her forever now.
You're reminding me of something I think about a lot, with regret and without much in the way of solutions: when I'm learning a craft (or any physical skill, maybe?), the ideal is to learn it FROM someone, preferably in person. So I can see what they do, do what they do, ask questions, argue, change things, get feedback from someone who can see what I am doing in turn.
And there's more than seeing to it; if there wasn't, we could learn how to build tables and pickle vegetables and make our moms' best recipes over video calls.
We CAN learn that way — you just did! And it's often enough to pick up a skill or refine one, after which our own persistence or aptitude does the rest. But that kind of learning is still a distant second-best for me. It's also what's available to me, almost all the time. So better to do it and learn, even if that learning isn't optimal. The perfect is the enemy of the done — or something like that.
The physical skills I remember, viscerally, are those I learned from a human in real time and space together. Community-based skills, in the sense that I learned them in community. The way they were transmitted was at least partially the relationship itself. I wish I had a lot more of this type of learning, in my past and in my present and future. We don't really build for it, though.
All of this makes me think about distance learning and covid. From a public health standpoint, I believe distance learning is and has been a necessary safety precaution. And also: wow, I really get why it sucks when it's the ONLY method available. It's doable. It just isn't the optimal way humans do.
As a people who got very used to believing the personally optimal is what we deserve, at any cost, it's rough for us to rub up against some of the natural consequences of that assumption.
I totally agree! I initially started doing sauerkraut with a local friend teaching me, but ended up asking Sara advice because I had years of failures. Kind of the last piece of the puzzle in this case.
When I was really depressed in New York and had very small children, I started taking rustic woodworking classes and ended up working at a micro-mill that worked only with hardwoods that were usually salvaged or that someone was clearing from a farm. It was only for a year or two, the woodworking thing, but I keep hoping I can get back to it because my hands remember some of the work, and even sanding something brings me right back to those places and with those teachers. Your description here reminded me of it -- thank you! I love this: "rough for us to rub up against some of the natural consequences of that assumption."
I'm a big fan of slugs. I'm horrified by our childhood salt-pouring activities that murdered a few of the little black garden slugs lurking around our yard. The only time I didn't like slugs and snails was when they were eating my vegetable garden, but I no longer have a garden so I'm back to just adoring them. One year I was pulling out the bean plants after they finished producing, and felt a weird tickling sensation on my leg. I looked down to see numerous tiny baby slugs crawling on me! I suppose I had disrupted their happy munching, and they were probably very confused by the sudden appearance of my legs. We're heading to the woods next week for a couple of nights in a cabin, and I'm excited to be on the lookout for banana slugs. And mushrooms - it's going to rain A LOT between now and then.
I caught part of your conversation with Annabel, it was very lovely! I'll have to get my hands on her book.
I almost wrote about how me learning of the salt/slug horror involved a road trip with a then-boyfriend when I was 18, and him suggesting I put salt on a slug at one of our campsites to see what happened. It was horribly cruel, and extra odd because he wasn't (and isn't) a cruel person.
I really did enjoy the book :). A cabin! This seems to be the year of Cabin, and I'm all for it. Hope we'll get photos of slugs AND mushrooms!
I will do my best! There should be something interesting to see out there.
In other news, the pool lives on, though it's been flipped over and moved. It looked like they were hosing off the bottom, but they never moved beyond that point. Grandpa and the screechy girl were playing basketball and moved it so they would have room to properly shoot hoops. Will they deflate it before our first fall storm tomorrow? At this rate, I doubt it... but you never know.
Someone could make such a tremendous novel out of that pool. Someone like Douglas Adams, or Kevin Wilson-quirky. What is the poor pool's winter going to be like???
We've had 1.4 inches of rain since yesterday, and now it almost looks like a normal pool despite being upside down! It's sagging quite a bit with the weight of the water. They just go about their lives now as if it doesn't exist.
I remember reading a Daniel Boone biography years ago and one of the most fascinating parts of it was how important, and dangerous, the job of making salt was for the folks living out on the "frontier." I probably remember that more than anything else.
Oh, that sounds fascinating! That aspect of it, anyway. I'd love to read an essay on that subject.
Thank you, Nia! I'm in the midst of reading Annabel Abbs's _Windswept_ as we speak and am loving it; I'll listen to your discussion with her.
She's a delight to listen to!
Very nice structure (chiastic?) to start with the personal experience with the slug, move to sauerkraut and salt, and then remind us that we are talking about slugs (oh, slugs and salt!) and the land and where does salt come from anyway? And who can access salt? How are access restrictions that prohibit us from foraging from the land similar to the access restrictions that prohibited the Indians from foraging for salt? Excellent.
On foraging, and converting foraged foods into cuisine, my family made our first successful chokecherry harvest and boiled it down into a sauce. It's been a while since I had a Dr. Pepper, but using the sauce to flavor sodas brings some Dr. Pepper notes, with a whole lot of extra magic. We have to drive for some miles to get the chokecherries, though, despite living in good habitat for them. The city seems to have displaced them. We have the resources to drive to the Beartooths to fish and forage for fun, but those in Billings who would benefit most from an edible landscape won't find chokecherries there. I just learned from Tom Elpel that russian olives are actually edible (who told me that they were poisonous?), but I need to experiment. Within walking distance of my house, I have access to abundant gleanings that last into the winter, and probably sweeten in the cold.
Also, this is my second for This Land. I've been learning so much.
Me, too. JenniferS (below) recommended it in another forum, and I am hooked.
I am saddened to hear of the lack of chokecherries in Billings! We have so many here all around Whitefish. I pick them while I'm walking around, and keep trying to remember I need to pick a bunch for jelly before they go over. The foraging aspect is really big -- when I first started making jam from chokecherries growing down in a town park, it really came home to me what it means to be able to easily forage food without having to drive a love distance or even cultivate a garden. There is a tremendous amount of freedom in that. (We don't have much Russian olive, but I need to start experimenting with Mountain Ash berries, which also grow abundantly here.)
I am sure there's a book about the history of salt but it's kind of fun to muse about it :)
When I first started doing these "walking compositions," I wanted to keep them short -- which I'm failing at -- but they evolved into a kind of triptych style. I'm not strict about how I do the subject, but tend to introduce something related to my walk in the first part, a deeper subject in the second, and then bring them together in the third. Kind of. A friend once told me that my regular published essays have a fish scale structure (I always thought of them as mosaics), so that's somewhere in the back of my mind.
As a matter of fact there is a book about the history of salt!
https://bookshop.org/books/salt-a-world-history-9780142001615/9780142001615
Of course! I remember seeing that on bookshelves when it came out now, but never read it. I think I got a touch burned out on commodity stories after reading a couple histories of coffee. Interesting but always missing the exploitation factor, or glossing over it. I don't know why I felt like Strange Harvests (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/535438/strange-harvests-by-edward-posnett/) did a better job of that, except that he lingered more on the "how do we use/consume things without fully commodifying it and destroying the resource?"
But truly, commodity stories are almost always interesting.
This Land is really well done. Season 2 is gutting me.
Thank you so much for recommending it. Listening to the first season while reading "Buying America from the Indians" was pretty stomach-churning. The depth of wrongness is bottomless. I'm sure Season 2 will be even harder. But I'm really grateful to you for telling me about it 💔
Season 2 hits me particularly hard because it intersects with my career and all the failings of the child welfare and adoption systems. I will definitely be watching Rebecca Nagel for continued good things.
Oh, yes, I keep forgetting that's your career. I can't begin to imagine the lives and tangled stories you work with every single day. A friend of mine is a public defender, which is disheartening on its own, but your area seems much, much harder.
She has done an amazing job with this. I'll probably listen to any podcast or read any writing from her forever now.
You're reminding me of something I think about a lot, with regret and without much in the way of solutions: when I'm learning a craft (or any physical skill, maybe?), the ideal is to learn it FROM someone, preferably in person. So I can see what they do, do what they do, ask questions, argue, change things, get feedback from someone who can see what I am doing in turn.
And there's more than seeing to it; if there wasn't, we could learn how to build tables and pickle vegetables and make our moms' best recipes over video calls.
We CAN learn that way — you just did! And it's often enough to pick up a skill or refine one, after which our own persistence or aptitude does the rest. But that kind of learning is still a distant second-best for me. It's also what's available to me, almost all the time. So better to do it and learn, even if that learning isn't optimal. The perfect is the enemy of the done — or something like that.
The physical skills I remember, viscerally, are those I learned from a human in real time and space together. Community-based skills, in the sense that I learned them in community. The way they were transmitted was at least partially the relationship itself. I wish I had a lot more of this type of learning, in my past and in my present and future. We don't really build for it, though.
All of this makes me think about distance learning and covid. From a public health standpoint, I believe distance learning is and has been a necessary safety precaution. And also: wow, I really get why it sucks when it's the ONLY method available. It's doable. It just isn't the optimal way humans do.
As a people who got very used to believing the personally optimal is what we deserve, at any cost, it's rough for us to rub up against some of the natural consequences of that assumption.
I totally agree! I initially started doing sauerkraut with a local friend teaching me, but ended up asking Sara advice because I had years of failures. Kind of the last piece of the puzzle in this case.
When I was really depressed in New York and had very small children, I started taking rustic woodworking classes and ended up working at a micro-mill that worked only with hardwoods that were usually salvaged or that someone was clearing from a farm. It was only for a year or two, the woodworking thing, but I keep hoping I can get back to it because my hands remember some of the work, and even sanding something brings me right back to those places and with those teachers. Your description here reminded me of it -- thank you! I love this: "rough for us to rub up against some of the natural consequences of that assumption."
I'm a big fan of slugs. I'm horrified by our childhood salt-pouring activities that murdered a few of the little black garden slugs lurking around our yard. The only time I didn't like slugs and snails was when they were eating my vegetable garden, but I no longer have a garden so I'm back to just adoring them. One year I was pulling out the bean plants after they finished producing, and felt a weird tickling sensation on my leg. I looked down to see numerous tiny baby slugs crawling on me! I suppose I had disrupted their happy munching, and they were probably very confused by the sudden appearance of my legs. We're heading to the woods next week for a couple of nights in a cabin, and I'm excited to be on the lookout for banana slugs. And mushrooms - it's going to rain A LOT between now and then.
I caught part of your conversation with Annabel, it was very lovely! I'll have to get my hands on her book.
I almost wrote about how me learning of the salt/slug horror involved a road trip with a then-boyfriend when I was 18, and him suggesting I put salt on a slug at one of our campsites to see what happened. It was horribly cruel, and extra odd because he wasn't (and isn't) a cruel person.
I really did enjoy the book :). A cabin! This seems to be the year of Cabin, and I'm all for it. Hope we'll get photos of slugs AND mushrooms!
I will do my best! There should be something interesting to see out there.
In other news, the pool lives on, though it's been flipped over and moved. It looked like they were hosing off the bottom, but they never moved beyond that point. Grandpa and the screechy girl were playing basketball and moved it so they would have room to properly shoot hoops. Will they deflate it before our first fall storm tomorrow? At this rate, I doubt it... but you never know.
Someone could make such a tremendous novel out of that pool. Someone like Douglas Adams, or Kevin Wilson-quirky. What is the poor pool's winter going to be like???
We've had 1.4 inches of rain since yesterday, and now it almost looks like a normal pool despite being upside down! It's sagging quite a bit with the weight of the water. They just go about their lives now as if it doesn't exist.
Every installment sounds increasingly like something from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. That poor pool!