“It is true, I came as near as is possible to come to being a hunter and miss it, myself….” (Henry David Thoreau)

I spent last weekend in the company of six heavily armed women at Madroño Ranch.

Don’t worry; we’re not training up a secret army of Sarah Palin clones. No, these Hill Country Dianas were attending “Hunting School for Women,” our first ethical hunting workshop of the new season. Jesse Griffiths of Austin’s Dai Due Butcher Shop and Supper Club decided to limit the enrollment to six rather than the usual eight, since five of the six were first-timers and he wanted to make sure they received as close to a one-on-one experience with a guide as possible.

The weekend was a huge success, at least from our perspective, and while I know I shouldn’t make sweeping generalizations based on such a small sample size, I couldn’t help concluding that most women are more likely to “get” the whole ethical hunting thing, and more willing to listen and learn, than most men. (Of course, if I simply substituted “inexperienced hunters” for “women” and “experienced hunters” for “men,” that statement would be equally true; perhaps the most important factor in making this school so successful was the fact that five out of the six attendees were novices, not that all six were women.) For whatever reason, though, the weekend was as far removed as possible from the boys’-night-out mentality that prevails in some hunting circles, for which we’re grateful.

The ringer in the group was our dear friend Valerie, an experienced hunter and a regular customer of Jesse’s at the Sustainable Food Center’s Saturday morning farmers’ market in downtown Austin. In addition to her hunting expertise, Valerie brought a wicked sense of humor to the proceedings; she was the one who affixed the full-page PETA ad of Sir Paul McCartney proudly proclaiming his vegetarianism to the Madroño Ranch refrigerator, just below the inspirational magnet pictured above.

Helping Jesse and the multitalented Tink Pinkard make sure everything ran smoothly were Morgan Angelone, the phenomenal Dai Due “camp chef”; our daughter Elizabeth, the assistant chef; Jeremy Nobles and Josh Randolph, the trusty guides; and our son Tito, the assistant guide.

As if that weren’t enough of a hunting vibe, we also had two residents at the ranch: Jackson Landers, a hunter/author from Virginia, and Helena Svedberg, a student of environmental filmmaking at American University who is filming him for her master’s project.

It was, in other words, a fairly bloodthirsty group. But as Robert, our redoubtable ranch manager, told the guests, we provide an opportunity for them to hunt; we do not, and cannot, promise them that they will kill, or even see, an animal. In the event, five of the six guests did register kills from our blinds, and all six went home with coolers full of venison and/or hog meat.

All in all, then, we’re happily counting Hunting School for Women as a win. But coming on the heels of our second bison “harvest,” it has us (again) thinking long and hard about our somewhat vexed attitude toward meat eating.

Now, I take a back seat to no one in my appreciation of meat. Morgan’s bison burgers (a Friday night hunting school tradition), Jesse’s charcuterie, Ben Willcott’s pork Milanese at Texas French Bread—these are among my very favorite things to eat. And we happily accepted Valerie’s invitation to come over for dinner once she’s turned the 130-pound feral hog she shot into pork curry or some other delectable dish. But neither Heather nor I is a hunter; the only animal I’ve ever shot was an obviously deranged raccoon, presumably rabid, that we encountered staggering along the road at the ranch at midday on a scorching summer day several years ago.

In other words, while we certainly hope to make enough money from the sale of our bison meat to help support our residency program, and while we understand the need to control the deer and hog populations not just for the sake of a balanced ecosystem at the ranch, but for the good of the animals themselves (no one likes to see the starving individuals that result from overpopulation), we are a little, um, squeamish about doing the deed ourselves. Instead we are, in effect, allowing Jesse and Tink and Robert and the hunting school guests to do our dirty work. Does this make us hypocrites? Wouldn’t it be more honest for us to take rifle in hand and take care of this business ourselves?

Well, yes. Honestly, I don’t think I have a huge problem with the general concept of killing a feral hog, or even a deer, though I’ve been warned about the dreaded Bambi effect. (The bison, I confess, are a different story; they are so big, so magnificent, so valuable, that I’d be intimidated if I were the one required to shoot them.) What bothers me is the possibility that I might not be a sufficiently good shot, despite the numbers of beer cans and paper targets I’ve blasted over the years; I would agonize over the possibility that, due to my incompetence, the animal might not die instantly.

Of course I also understand that for us hunting would be a luxury, as it is for many enthusiastic hunters, and not a necessity; we are lucky to have other people who kill and process our food before we buy and cook and eat it. Moreover, not everyone can, or should, be a hunter; a healthy human ecology requires diversity and balance—vegetarians and vegans as well as carnivores; urban hipsters and rural rednecks; multinational corporations (well regulated, please!) and corner stores; butchers, bakers, candlestick makers. There should be room at the table for all.

That said, however, I believe firmly that every carnivore should, at some level, confront the meaning of meat: the death, blood, evisceration, and butchering that are inextricable parts of the process by which this chop or that sausage ends up on our dinner table. We’ve seen that process up close and personal during bison harvests and hunting schools at the ranch, and at the processing facility in Utopia that turns our bison carcasses into stew meat and steaks. But we haven’t actually pulled the trigger or wielded the knife ourselves—not yet, anyway. Perhaps we never will. But I hope we will always be uneasy about that fact, and thankful for the animals whose flesh we eat, and for those who allow us to do so.

What we’re reading
Heather: The Sun
Martin: Anthony Trollope, The Warden

Fittingly, this Ash Wednesday began with a vigorous north wind, the kind that knocks dead branches out of trees and can make you a little leery about walking outdoors. It blew me back to the moment that I first got a glimpse into the meaning of Lent.

I had vaguely thought of “giving something up for Lent” as an opportunity to practice self-discipline and to display a sense of commitment to a “good” life, a sort of spiritual calisthenics that made you feel better, especially when you stopped. The events I recalled weren’t, on the surface, particularly interesting or dramatic, but they allowed me to see myself from a previously undiscovered vantage point; for the first time, I could see I was like a tree filled with dead branches that needed some serious pruning in order to keep growing. Observing Lent wasn’t a way to prove how strong I was; it was a space offered in which I might look at all my dead branches and wonder how I, with the north wind’s help, might clear some of them out, while trusting that I wouldn’t get knocked out by falling timber.

A time for submission—no wonder Lent gets a bad rap. Who wants to submit, especially after a look at the roots of the word: “sub-” is from the Latin for “under,” and “-mit” is from “mittere,” to send or throw or hurl. To submit to something is to hurl yourself under it—“it” presumably being a force much greater than your itty-bitty self, a force like, say, a speeding F350 pick-up. In fact, it might even take some courage to submit to the scouring blast of Lent.

In last week’s post, Martin considered some of the complexities of being from a particular place, ending with a beautifully expressed desire to be here, rooted in this rocky Hill Country soil. Imagine his exasperation when I said last night that I felt like I needed a vacation. My desire to run away (presumably temporary) probably has several sources, but one of them may be an awareness that the idea of Madroño Ranch is taking on heft and weight, leaving behind the dreamy elasticity of fantasy.

I’m reminded of my reaction to our daughter Elizabeth’s first vision test. It had been suggested by her third grade teacher, who had never had a student make so many arithmetic mistakes, especially in copying problems from the chalkboard onto paper. The test results were normal; Elizabeth wasn’t nearsighted, just math-impaired. First I mourned that she would never be an astronaut or an engineer or a mathematician, but then I realized that we now knew more about who she really was; she was beginning to take on her own form, independent of my fantasies for her.

In a lovely essay entitled “Poetry and Marriage: The Use of Old Forms,” Wendell Berry (of course) unearths the kinship between marriage and formal poetry: both begin in “the giving of words,” and live out their time standing by those words:

In marriage as in poetry, the given word implies the acceptance of a form that is never entirely of one’s own making. When understood seriously enough, a form is a way of accepting and living within the limits of creaturely life. We live only one life and die only one death. A marriage cannot include everybody, because the reach of responsibility is short. A poem cannot be about everything, for the reach of attention and insight is short.

Choosing a form implies the setting of limits, limits that appear arbitrary from the outside or at the outset, but that can open into generosity and possibility as they are practiced. Even as they limit, these old forms point their practitioners to a way through self-delusion toward truth, through loneliness toward community. Individual failures are certainly possible, but they aren’t necessarily arguments against the forms themselves. In fact,

“[i]t may be… that form serves us best when it works as an obstruction to baffle us and deflect our intended course. It may be that when we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work and that we no longer know which way to go we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.”

This past weekend we hosted “Hog School” at the ranch, the second in an ongoing series of sustainable hunting/butchering/cooking/eating extravaganzas put on by Jesse Griffith of Austin’s Dai Due supper club. I spent much of the weekend baffled (and not in a good way) by rifle-toting guests scattered across the property hunting feral hogs, by the seemingly effortless magic with which chef Morgan Angelone produced gorgeous and delicious treats from the kitchen (my kitchen, mind you, my philandering kitchen purring in someone else’s hands), by my own mental contortions.

I finally decided to go for a walk where I was unlikely to be mistaken for a hog. Marching through the field by the lake and muttering imprecations against the wind (no birds to watch), the lack of rain (no grass coming up), and the hunters (no long walks available), I decided to climb to the base of the cliffs above me and head back to the house by a new route.

Though they can be steep, the Hill Country hills aren’t exactly the Alps; climbing to the base of the cliffs only takes a few minutes and a lot of grabs at branches to keep from sliding back down in the loose mulch and rocks that just barely hold the hills up. Once I got into the still-leafless trees, I began lurching across the perpetually shifting terrain and found that it was impossible to walk and look at the same time; if I wanted to walk, I had to watch my feet carefully, and if I wanted to look, I had to stop and make sure I was balanced before I shifted my gaze. It made for slow going because, unexpectedly, there was a lot to see that I hadn’t noticed from below.

I found a fine moss-covered boulder that allowed me a new vantage point from which to look down and into the trees and brush I normally looked up at, a posture that causes the painful condition among birders known as “warbler neck.” I quickly misidentified several sparrows, and with an un-aching neck, was able to track down some raucous spotted towhees making rude observations from a clump of yaupons and to lecture them briefly. Staring at my feet as I staggered across the hillside, I found that grasses, indeed, were beginning to sprout, despite the drought. Skidding onto my derriere—it always happens off-roading on these hills—I was able to observe the first blush of blooming redbud tree, closely guarded by the great daggered yucca beside it. And then, as the wind picked up again, the rich thick smell of honey clogged the air. The source? Tiny yellow blossoms nestled under agarita spines—tiny and extravagantly generous and impossible to pick without getting pricked. The wind blew my hat off, and, setting off multiple rockslides, I chased it gracelessly down the hill.

Limits: from dust you were made and to dust you shall return. Bafflement: unexpected forms arising, unforeseen paths opening. Submission: throwing the deadwood of the ego into the flames of the Unnamable One. That’s a lot to wrestle with for the mere forty days of Lent.

What we’re reading
Heather: Adam Gopnick, Angels and Ages: A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life
Martin: Donovan Hohn, Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them

I spent last weekend at the ranch planning a new garden—or, rather, watching our dear friend Glee Ingram, an Austin landscape designer; Steve Diver, a horticulturist with Sustainable Growth Texas; and Robert Selement, Madroño’s redoubtable manager, plan a new garden as I poked at bugs, stared at the sky, and occasionally said, “Huh?”

Despite me, we made good progress. Using Glee’s initial design, we flagged the perimeter of a beautiful labyrinth-inspired shape. We thought about armadillo-, feral hog-, bison-, and raccoon-proof fencing (ha!); permaculture; gates and traffic patterns; rainwater collection; hoop-house placement; compost systems and leaf corrals; how to integrate the activities of the residents of the adjacent Chicken Palace; planting fruit trees as wind barriers; and soil and amendment ratios. We (well, some of us) got really sunburned. We felt that we’d really earned that cold beer on the porch as we watched the afternoon light turn golden while scores of swallows dove and swooped around us.

If this makes Madroño sound like Paradise and us like laborers in Eden, well, that’s what it felt like. At the same time, however, these things also happened: I watched a hungry red-tailed hawk flying low over the Chicken Palace, hoping for yet another carry-out chicken dinner. I awoke at dawn’s first glimmering to operatic squawking from the Chicken Palace but, unable to find a flashlight, had to wait until it was light to investigate. (Robert has killed more rattlers this spring than in his seven previous years at the ranch combined.) In fact, there was a dead hen, but we’re not sure what killed her; she may have been egg-bound. During my morning perambulation on the road above the lake, a dozen buzzards wheeled just overhead. I couldn’t smell anything dead, nor could I see the focus of their activity, but I remembered the shrieking white-tailed doe I’d heard at this same spot last spring. It was a heart-stopping noise. I glimpsed her thrashing through the underbrush on the cliff below me but was unable to find her again when I returned with reinforcements. Paradise it may be, but Madroño’s beauty is woven with the warp of nature’s potential and actual violence.

A good friend emailed me after my last post, saying, “I have read that if all the ants were eliminated from the planet it would cease to exist. My thought is that if all the humans somehow disappeared the earth would flourish.” I’ve had that thought as well, but I also think that, with or without us, earth’s flourishing has always involved violence and suffering. Predation, disease, floods, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, tornadoes, and drought preceded human enviro-tinkering and will continue once we’re gone.

Given that humans are part of the natural order, it’s also a given that we will engage in violence. My definition of violence is idiosyncratic and personal: I define it as existing on a spectrum involving the imposition of one being’s (or group’s) will on another being (or group). So when you order your lollygagging child to stop staring at the ceiling and put on her school clothes, you are, according to my definition, moving into the realm of violence, albeit at the lowest possible vibration. If, as in this case, the imposition of said will is done to enable or assist the flourishing of the one imposed upon, maybe you get a free pass. I’m not sure about this. Nor am I sure how to word my definition to include violence against self, surely as invidious and terrible as violence against another. And of course violence is not restricted to the physical realm, nor is it directed only against humans. Our species’ casual, thoughtless violence against the natural world is relentless.

Unique to humans in this violent world, however, is the capacity to restrict the reach of our violence. Christians and Jews have been commanded to do so in no uncertain terms (as have the followers of virtually every faith tradition; it’s just that I’m most familiar with those two). Repeated several times in the Pentateuch is the phrase “an eye for an eye,” often misunderstood as an incitement to violent retribution. In fact, the point of the phrase was to minimize violence, not incite it; the loss of an eye could not be redeemed by murder. Leviticus 19:18 is even more to the point: “You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself….” Jesus thought this a good enough line to use in the Sermon on the Mount, and reinforced it by instructing his followers to rein in their violent tendencies even more tightly: “If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also” (Matthew 5:39). Human violence against nature is less of an issue in the Bible, as the capacity to inflict permanent damage on our world wasn’t ours at that point. But scripture does specifically address the correct treatment of animals; they were considered part of the community and were to enjoy a Sabbath rest (Exodus 20:10).

Restricting the reach of violence requires recognizing its ubiquitous footprint. I see its size 7 1/2 tracks all around me: in my sarcasm, in my imperious demands that things be done my way, in my constant consideration of my own comfort, in my need to have reality ordered in a particular way. Having spent the last couple of weeks in my garden at home, I’ve become aware of the arbitrary nature of life and death: what have those cute little flowering clovers ever done to me that they should be so unceremoniously yanked up? And don’t get me started on pill bugs.

Gardens are great places for contemplating unsolvable mysteries. How else are you going to keep your mind occupied when pulling weeds? But I think there’s a deep and distinctive link between restricting our carbon footprints and our violence footprints. When we accept that our flourishing always comes at the expense of someone or something else’s flourishing, it’s hard not to be humbled. What better place than a beautiful, infuriating garden to watch such a serious drama play itself out?

What we’re reading
Heather: Matthew Scully, Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy
Martin: Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science

As we approach the end of the year (and decade), we thought a look back at what we’ve accomplished and a look at what lies ahead for Madroño Ranch: A Center for Writing and the Environment might be of interest.

This year was a significant one for us. In 2009 we both turned fifty (or, as Heather put it, celebrated our joint centennial); in addition, we experienced both great personal loss and also tremendous excitement and optimism about Madroño Ranch.

We spent much of the year networking—sort of a new thing for a couple of reclusive nerds like us. In February, we attended the Alliance for Artists Communities’ conference for emerging programs in Charlotte NC. Meeting and talking to Caitlin Strokosch and Russ Smith of the Alliance, and the other attendees, was a galvanizing experience—so many bright, creative people! So many great ideas! So many things to think about!

The Alliance’s annual conference in New Orleans in November was perhaps even more inspiring. Not only did we reconnect with some of the friends we’d made at the Charlotte gathering, we met many more fascinating and brilliant people, some of whose ideas we plan to rip off shamelessly.

But so many questions remain to be answered…. For example, while we highly esteem the visual arts and those who work in them, we’ve been assuming we’d only accept writers as residents at Madroño, on the theory that they require less in the way of infrastructure (i.e., kilns, darkrooms, printing presses, etc.). Now, however, we wonder if we shouldn’t rethink that decision. What if we were to invite, say, sculptors and environmental artists to come out and create place-specific, perhaps ephemeral, works?

And what about size? We’ve agreed that, at least initially, we should restrict ourselves to two or three residents at a time. But should we aspire to more? If so, how many more? Six? Eight? Ten? And how long should they stay? Two weeks? Four weeks? Longer?

The answers to these questions will obviously drive many other basic decisions, such as the center’s physical layout. Our working idea is to provide a central facility with sleeping, cooking/dining, and library facilities, etc., and smaller “satellite” structures (sheds, cabins, pods, whatever) which would serve as secluded places for the residents to work in solitude and quiet.

At first, we assumed we’d build this central facility from scratch, tricking it out with all kinds of cutting-edge off-the-grid technology. Now, however, we’re wondering if, at least initially, we can repurpose the ranch’s existing main house, which is, alas, very much on the grid; doing so would require some structural modifications but would still be significantly cheaper than building from scratch. (Presumably we’d still need to build the satellite workplaces.)

Another fundamental issue to be resolved is what the center’s governance structure should be. A nonprofit? LLC? Foundation? We’ve been talking to various leaders in the nonprofit and small business sectors, in hopes of figuring this out, but at this point it’s still an open question.

And then there’s the whole food thing. (Those of you who know us know that food is never far from our thoughts.) Madroño Ranch is teeming with sources of protein—our herd of twenty-seven bison, our trusty chickens, uncounted feral hogs and deer—and we hope to begin distributing some of it in some fashion. Our first bison harvest will take place in the spring, though we haven’t yet figured out what to do with the meat: give it away? Sell it to restaurants in Kerrville, Fredericksburg, and Bandera? And the meat is only one part of a larger scheme. What if we go into small-scale farming—say, pears, peaches, and apples—and set up a CSA to distribute the produce, with the proceeds (if any) helping support the residency program?

And—here’s an idea we heard in New Orleans and really liked—what if we set up a culinary residency as well, whereby a chef who wants some non-restaurant experience comes out to the ranch and helps develop a truly local cuisine, using only foods grown on the ranch or nearby, while cooking for the other residents?

And how about engaging the local community in some meaningful fashion? Could we offer classes or workshops on the ranch? Invite the ag students at the local high school out to gain experience in organic farming?

Last month we met with a couple of graphic designers to talk about getting a logo to use on business cards, a website, brochures, and letterhead—and (why not?) also on T-shirts, coffee mugs, water bottles, etc. But even that turns out to be more complicated than we’d thought. For one thing, do we need a logo, or two (one for the residency and one for the farming operation)? Or more? Until we figure out how all these ideas and moving parts fit together, coming up with a visual “brand” will have to wait.

Sigh. Sometimes the tasks still facing us seem overwhelming. But we hope to keep forging ahead, slowly if not always surely. Perhaps our first and most tangible accomplishment to date was starting this blog, which we conceived as a way to spread the word about Madroño Ranch and keep our friends and other interested parties abreast of our progress. The fact that you’re reading it now suggests that—what do you know!—it’s working.

Obviously, we still have to do a lot more thinking about all of this. But on the theory that many heads are more likely to produce wisdom than one or two, we’d love to hear your thoughts and suggestions on these and other issues.

What we’re reading
Heather: Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge
Martin: Dylan Thomas, A Child’s Christmas in Wales

I sometimes find myself feeling a little defensive about the Texas Hill Country. Martin, a San Francisco native, and I drove across the country via Texas after we graduated from college in Massachusetts. Somewhere around Bastrop, I said, “Well, we’re at the eastern edge of the Hill Country.”

“Really?” he said. “So where are the hills?”

Okay, so our hills are a little stumpy and our landscape a little scruffy, and most of the fauna (and much of the flora) will scratch, sting, or bite you. But at least we can proudly boast that nobody’s got more feral hogs than we do.

Hogs are always lurking in the background of life at Madroño—and frequently in the foreground as well (and yes, those are some of our very own hogs making their way across a creek in the photo above). They’re smart, secretive, social, fierce, and remarkably fecund; a sow can have two, and sometimes three, litters of eight a year. Robert, the ranch manager, figures that his wife Sherry shot the Madroño heavyweight title holder, which tipped the scales at about 400 pounds, and they can get significantly bigger than that. They have no predators other than humans, whom they generally leave alone. Dogs, however, they consider fair game. These hogs are expert at slashing their tusks in an upward arc, where they can easily intersect a dog’s jugular or stomach with deadly results.

One fall day a couple of years ago, my brother-in-law Daniel and I, along with his doughty dog Mojo, were walking along the top of the property. Mojo is an unspecified breed, maybe part wolverine, low to the ground with a long heavy coat, and utterly fearless. The minute he heard porcine snorting in a nearby cedar brake, he charged, even as Daniel and I screamed for him to stop. For the next few heartbeats of eternity we yelled and listened to the invisible fight as it receded down a draw. Sure that Mojo was a goner, we trudged sadly downhill to break the horrible news to my sister Isa—Daniel’s wife—and their young children.

So when Mojo popped out of the brush halfway down, he received an ecstatic and extended hero’s welcome. His ruff was stiff with pig spit; his thick fur had saved him from what were doubtless multiple tusk slashes. Many dogs aren’t so lucky.

Here’s one good thing about hogs: they make delicious sausage. Here’s another good thing about them: they’re omnivorous, eating even snakes. Here’s a(nother) bad thing: they love grubs, especially if those grubs are under wet grass. Carefully tended yards can look like a demonic rototiller has let loose its evil fury after a rain or a watering, the grass torn up and plowed under in great sheets (see below). Robert once got so furious at the persistent destruction of the lawn he’d tended so carefully at the lake house that he vowed to sleep there until he’d hunted the culprits down. After four nights and increasingly plaintive appeals from the family he’d abandoned, Robert admitted defeat. “Those pigs outsmarted me and whupped my ass in the lake house yard,” he said ruefully. “It was a humbling experience.”

Clearly, hog tales running the gamut from slapstick to philosophical will be a recurrent theme of this blog. Share your hog tales with us—and check back for more.

What we’re reading
Heather: Graham Swift, Last Orders
Martin: Brad Meltzer, Rags Morales, and Michael Blair, Identity Crisis

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