“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

Happy new year! The beginning of the year is always a good time to take stock, so we thought it might be appropriate to look back at what we accomplished—and, erm, failed to accomplish—during the last twelve months. Much remains to be done before our hopes for Madroño Ranch are completely realized, though we took what felt like some significant strides in 2010. With apologies for any perceived self-indulgence, here are some of them.

First, thanks to the wonderful and talented Shawn and Susanne Harrington of Austin’s Asterisk Group, Madroño Ranch now has a vibrant, striking, beautiful visual identity—logo (above), wordmark, etc.—which we hope eventually to splash all over actual and virtual reality. (Madroño Ranch T-shirts! Madroño Ranch gimme caps! Madroño Ranch bumper stickers and koozies and belt buckles and….)

Second, we’ve begun to rethink our initial determination to offer residencies only for environmental writers, however broadly defined (poets, philosophers, essayists, whatever). We had initially thought we would restrict our offerings to writers because, well, as a couple of recovering English majors, we felt like we knew writing better than we knew art, and (perhaps more important) we didn’t want to spend a lot of money on infrastructure (kilns, darkroom facilities, printing presses, whatever). Most writers, after all, are highly mobile these days, requiring little in the way of equipment beyond a laptop computer. But it has become increasingly obvious, even to us, that virtually the same is true of many visual artists as well—digital photographers and collagists, to name just a couple. Painters can travel with paints, portable easels, and suchlike. And then there are environmental artists, like Andy Goldsworthy, who use materials found on-site—rocks, leaves, branches, etc. Why should we exclude such creative thinkers from our pool of potential residents?

Third, while we are still a long way from officially opening our residential program for environmental writers (and artists)—we have yet to construct the small casitas we envision as individual workspaces, and we have yet to hire the necessary personnel to cook and care for our residents—we have managed to find a couple of brave souls willing to serve as “guinea pigs.” Melissa Gaskill and E. Dan Klepper will each spend several days at Madroño Ranch in the next couple of months, working, resting, and experiencing some if not all of what our actual residents will experience once we’re fully up and running. We look forward to hearing their feedback, suggestions, etc.

Fourth, our friend Jesse Griffiths of Dai Due came up with a new and exciting way to open the ranch to a wider public through a variety of sustainable hunting, fishing, and cooking “schools” throughout the year. The first, Deer School, brought six guests to the ranch in November, and was a thoroughgoing success; now we’re looking forward to Hog School in early March and Freshwater Flyfishing School in mid-May, both of which have already sold out. If they go well, we’re hoping to make these (and perhaps other such schools) an annual tradition at Madroño Ranch.

Fifth, we finally gained state approval of the label that will appear on the packages of bison meat we sell, which means we can finally go ahead with our first “harvest” (as it’s euphemistically called) this month. (We had hoped, naively, to harvest our first bison in October, but the approval process turned out to be considerably longer and more complicated than we had imagined.)

Sixth, Heather made significant progress in her quest to become a true chickenista, following the example of local legend Carol Ann Sayle of Austin’s Boggy Creek Farm. Our original flock of fifty or so laying hens took up residence in their bombproof (and, we trust, owl- and hawkproof) new coop, which we call the Chicken Palace (pictured below). A few months later Robert’s brilliant creation the Chicken Tractor (actually a mobile coop on wheels) became the home of a new flock of about twenty younger hens. (As of last week, the two groups were just beginning to commingle.)

Seventh, while we still don’t have an actual Madroño Ranch website (though we’re working on it!), we do have an official Madroño Ranch Facebook page. We invite those of you on that ubiquitous social network to check it out, and click the “Like” button if you’re so inclined; until our website is up and running, that will be the easiest way to keep track of what’s happening at the ranch in what we hope will be an exciting twelve months to come.

Perhaps none of these accomplishments sounds terribly important in and of itself, but each brought us just a little closer to our goal. Our hope for 2011 is that we—and you too, Gentle Reader—keep striding throughout the new year, whether the steps be large ones or small.

What we’re reading
Heather: Marilynne Robinson, Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self (still—it’s hard!)
Martin: Michael Lewis, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine

At lunch the other day, a friend opined that too much of what we all think and see and hear—and, yes, eat—passes through various filters (the media, agribusiness) before it reaches us; even our air is conditioned, he added, though I have to say I’m okay with that, at least in the summer. But his larger point is one that’s been in the back of my mind (and take it from me, there’s lots of room in there) for some time.

Unmediated experiences seem increasingly hard to find. We have lost an awareness of the connection between our actions and their consequences, especially when it comes to food, especially when it comes to meat; it’s easy to avoid the stark truth that some creature was slaughtered, blood was shed, so that we might buy shrink-wrapped chunks of meat in the supermarket. The thoughtful (and splendidly named) English chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall writes in his River Cottage Meat Book that “the human act of killing animals for food, once familiar to most of society, has now become so shameful that those who condone it—by eating meat every day—are entirely protected from thinking about it. Food animals are killed and their meat is cut up and packaged far from human eyes. By the time meat reaches the consumer, the animal origins have been all but obliterated.”

Conveniently, this last weekend presented us with an opportunity to escape the shrink-wrap bubble in the form of “Deer School,” a hunting/butchering/cooking extravaganza at Madroño Ranch. Watching the skinned, eviscerated, and decapitated carcass of a 120-pound buck being carved up on your kitchen counter definitely qualifies as an unmediated experience.

The man doing the carving was Austin’s incomparable Maestro of Meat, Jesse Griffiths of Dai Due, and his audience, in addition to Heather and me, included six hunters—four experienced, two newbies, united in their love of food and dedication to the principles of ethical hunting—who had paid to spend a long weekend at the ranch. Four of them live in or around Austin, but we also had a couple who drove all the way from Michigan (!), sleeping in their Little Guy trailer all the way.

In return for their money, the guests were taken on three guided hunts (the guides were Jesse, his omnicompetent buddy Tink Pinkard, and, after poor Robert, our ranch manager, was felled by a kidney stone on Saturday morning, our son Tito) and then instructed in how to make efficient use of whatever animals they shot. They also ate a series of truly spectacular meals prepared by the indefatigable chef Morgan Dishman-Angelone, who works with Jesse.

Their collective haul included five deer and several hogs, though Robert shot the buck Jesse used for his demonstration the day before the guests arrived. As we all gathered in the kitchen to watch Jesse at work on the carcass, I was reminded of Rembrandt’s famous painting “The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp.” A grisly spectacle, but also fascinating, and Jesse’s obvious care and skill were mesmerizing.

True confession: I am not a hunter, though I am an enthusiastic carnivore and have done a good bit of fishing in my time; the only mammal I have ever knowingly killed was an obviously diseased raccoon who was staggering around in the middle of a hot summer day at the ranch several years ago. But we live in a meat-centric state (the Republic of Barbecue, anyone?), and I have come to realize the distance between my life and the realities of blood and bone that hunters and farmers and ranchers confront on a daily basis.

Here’s Fearnley-Whittingstall again: “As I pull the trigger and… the beast tumbles, I feel the gap between me and the quarry, which a moment ago seemed unreachable, closed in an instant.” I think this is really the point of ethical hunting, responsible carnivorism, and eating meat in general: the realization that we, consumer and consumed alike, are part of the same system, much as we might try to deny it. Thus, in a funny way, a hunter—a responsible one, at least—rather than treating the animal he or she kills as an objectified and separate Other, is more likely to understand the profound interconnectedness that binds us all together.

Jesse and Morgan took virtually every piece of meat off that buck and used it for an extraordinary multicourse dinner that night. “We’re going to punish you,” Jesse warned us facetiously, and he wasn’t kidding: six courses, including venison tartare (pictured above, just prior to final assembly), venison paté with Jesse’s own coarse-grained mustard, braised venison flanks stuffed with chorizo, liver with mashed potatoes and apples, venison cutlets with grilled marinated radicchio, and, for dessert, Morgan’s signature Basque cake—salty-sweet crusted cake around a pastry crème center with candied persimmons and apples. It was an unforgettable meal, and left everyone—even Tito!—sated, at least temporarily: the next morning we had breakfast tacos with barbacoa made from the deer’s shanks and neck meat, which had been simmering in a crockpot overnight. Under the circumstances, “holy cow” hardly seems like the right expression, but you get the picture: we ate incredibly well, and that one buck provided enough meat to feed thirteen people twice, with quite a bit left over; thanks to Jesse, we’re looking forward to enjoying even more of it when we go out again over New Year’s, by which time I should be almost ready to think about eating meat again.

And who knows—maybe the next time we host Deer School at Madroño (and we do hope there will be a next time) I’ll sign up myself. After all, it wasn’t all that long ago that I was about as unconscious a carnivore as there was on the planet, and I’m in as much need of unmediated experience as the next guy. I’m not going to start refusing to eat anything I haven’t actually killed myself; that would be impractical, to say the least. But I do believe that hunting and butchering a deer or other animal for one’s own consumption is probably a useful exercise, and that the world might be better off if every unconscious carnivore were forced to undertake it at least once. A fuller awareness of the cost of satisfying our appetites cannot, I think, be a bad thing.

What we’re reading
Heather: Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety (still!)
Martin: Charles M. Robinson III, Bad Hand: A Biography of General Ranald S. Mackenzie