Welcome to Detroit

After basically abandoning this blog since I returned from Nicaragua I have decided to try to revive it. I just moved to Detroit and already feel like there is lots to say. I envision to be a little bit observations about Detroit, a little urban homesteader, a little food blog and little bike blog.

So let's start with bike. I've been for those of you who may not know, my bike looks like this:
















It is a Surly Big Dummy with an Xtracycle rack system on the rear. It is pretty much the best thing ever. I use it for touring and lots of around town riding. I've been a bike commuter for years, but when I worked on the farm in Walla Walla still had to use a pick up truck often for farm errands. No more though. Now that I am living the city life in Detroit it is a different story though. I have zero car and am riding in a completely different environment.

So far the motor city has been good to my bike and I. There is a nice bike lane on my street and I get to go over a pedestrian bridge on the way to work (and the bridge and its street are named after my last name, obviously they knew I was coming). The drivers have been better than I expected as well. Only got honked at a couple times for riding with traffic and many folks went out of their way to give me extra room.

Of course, with a bike like mine I get a lot of comments. Here are some choice ones:
- Guy on a Harley with his girlfriend on the back rode at 10 mph with me for 2 blocks to talk to me about the bike and the possibilities for carrying people on the back.
- Guy asked me if it was homemade. I said I wished.
- Guy in front of CADILLAC PLACE in the MOTOR CITY told me that my bike was "A Cadillac on 2 wheels"
- Guy at the bus stop jokingly asked me for a ride, I turned around and told him I could take him down the block. He said he had to go farther but said he'd catch me some other time.

Food Webs

It is that early morning time, when the dew still hide on the west side of grass blades and the birds are still the dominant sound in the air. This is the time of cutting flowers and picking spinach and checking irrigation lines. This is the time for a cup of tea and a deep brearth of air. This is the time that makes farming the best job on earth.

That time before most people are working is the peak of your day, your rush hour. Before the heat begins to rise and sun to beat down you have to move all the cut flowers into buckets of cold water and coolers. The leafy greens must be picked and plunged into cold water and the peas hidden in buckets placed in the shade. The quality and keeping power of your wares relies on your ability to beat the sun and work with water shade and breeze to preserve freshness and moisture. At the same time you are filled with business and eagerness, the rest of the world is only barely stirring, thinking not of heat and crisp heads of lettuce, but of coffee and starting car engines.

This fails to capture the reason that I love the morning, and also my job though. Perhaps it is that the morning is new and filled with energy. I will never feel so good for the rest of the day as I do the moments after finishing morning stretches and shaking the sleep from my limbs. Maybe it is the anticipation of what is to come, the Farmers Market oohs and aahs at the bouquets, or the crisp salads yet to be cooked. There certainly is much satisfaction in the mother who buys your spinach to make baby food. For the restuaranters, co-op and families that I well to, there is certainly an element of trust, in purity, nutrition and quality, that fills my work with a certain meaningfulness and purpose.

But what is sometimes perhaps even more satisfying is seeing the land that I work, rather that what most people think of as a farmer's “finished product”. Undoubtedly part of the reason that I so love the morning is that I am not the only part of the farm that is feeling most lively first thing in the morning. Beetles scuttle from bark chip to fallen leaf. Pill bugs look for a place to stay wet through the day. Bees buzz happily about my fingers as I cut the flooms that they are hurriedly harvesting from. Robins, starlings, storks and numerous other birds flit in the air, and quails running out of the brush pile as I walk by.

Being able to be a part of this piece of land, finding my livelihood among so many other livelihoods is really what makes the whole endeavor worth while. As farmer perhaps it is best to say that I am the bridge, between a human food web of restuarants grocery stores farmers markets and dinner plates and a wilder food web; of bird eat bug eat bug eat leaf.

Another good reason to deliver flowers by bike

Rather than in the truck:
It is easier for the owner of Graze to shout at you from the sidewalk: "HEY! Are you selling those flowers?"

And of course the answer is "Why yes, yes I am."

Time

Time is such an interesting thing. There are so many ways of marking and so many reasons that it is a good idea to pay attention to it.

I don't mean in the way that most people pay attention to time, the minutes and seconds of the day, the day of the week, how many hours until the next event.

I am thinking more of passage of the earth through the cosmos and the rest of the cosmos around each other as well. I can't say that I am very good at paying attention to these things, but the cards imply that I should pay more attention.

As a farmer, I already pay attention to the sun more than most. I know the times that it goes up and down, and how that will change as the seasons do. I know how it passes through the sky during the day, much lower in the winter, barely rising above the large trees in the front of the property. During the hotter months it will stary behid the eastern trees only until 8 AM, and then start to make the spinach wilt.

I wish I knew more of the stars and the moon though. The constellations of the zodiac which I plant by, but rely on a calendar to tell me what they are doing. I can't pick out more than a few, and don't recognize a single planet. I can usually remember if the moon is waxing or waning, but not whether it is falling or rising.

These are the things I need to know if I really want to understand time. Time means nothing without movement, and the movement of the large things is important to understanding that.

I also hope to see the movement of the smaller things as time passes, but that is a series of thoughts for another day.

Green

Recently there has been much talk of targeted sanctions against the Revolutionary Guard in Iran as a way to help bring about positive political change in that country, both to help our own interests of keeping Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons and also to assist the growing pro-democracy opposition movement in the country. In the interest of helping the opposition movement there in particular, we might look to the factors that helped precipitate the Islamic Revolution that brought the current regime to power.

One large factor in any popular uprising is the support of a majority of the people, and in almost all countries that means the necessary help of those in the working classes. While a regime still has substantial resources it is easy to keep the people content by engaging in pork barrel type spending, that while not addressing the root causes of their unrest (in this case, a lack of democracy in recent elections) takes care of basic employment needs and essential bribes them into supporting leaders who do not have their best interests at heart. The current regime in Iran under President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is particularly adept at this, and has plenty of money to do that (and to buy bullets for the Revolutionary Guard to continue to put down those that do dare protest) because of their oil resources.

As long as the world continues to use oil at a stable or increasing rate, Ahmadinejad and the Revolutionary Guard will have an easy time keeping protest at a controllable rate. The Shah was in a similar position in the '70s, with oil prices especially high during the oil embargo (in which Iran did not participate). It was only when oil prices fell after the embargo ended that the Shah's regime started to falter, as the economic fate of the poor urban masses fell apart after having been good for so long. It was this economic crisis, along with a drawdown of western support and the charismatic leadership of Ayatollah Khomeini that finally drew enough protesters to the street to end the tyrannical monarchy in Iran.

A similar drop in oil prices, this time brought about by a “green” environmental movement in the western world that could bring victory to the Iranian “green” democracy movement and an end to the military tyrrany of Ahmadinejad.

"Junk"

I know that it is a little cliche, but I feel as if I am constantly being reminded that one person's trash is another person's treasure.

My friends Dana and Ishai just moved in with me this week to help farm this spring. Being new to town and having moved all their belongings in a total of 8 small to large size suitcases there were of course a few things we had to pick up for them, including bikes. We first hit up the thrift stores, and though we were able to find plenty of things such as pillows and lamps, a good bike still eluded us.

We headed off to the bike shop, to pick up gear and see exactly how expensive a new bike might be, mainly thinking to check Craigslist and/or classified ads later. As Dana and Ishai were finishing looking at bike hemets I was waiting by the door when a guy came in to ask the guy at the front if they were taking bike donations for a local cycling program. When he mentioned that they were just out in the back of the truck I just had to ask "Would you be interested in selling one of those bikes to my friends over there?" So we went out and took a look and one of the bikes was a beautiful (though in poor repair) Schwinn 10 speed from the '70s. In need of new tires and a lot of lube, but otherwise a beautiful machine. Dana and Ishai mulled it over and offered him $50 for that one bike, and he accepted and threw in the mountain bike for free.

Obviously these bikes were worth very little to him at this point, but the Schwinn will get Ishai all over Walla Walla this spring. Just like when I am drowning in Tomatoes in September and do all I can to push some off on friends, or trade laundry services with my neighbors for some Anaheim peppers or applesauce. An item of very small value to one becomes something of great value to another. It is why I love to trade things, every one feels like they have made out better than can be expected, or as if they got the best deal.