Red Cedar

The picture above was taken the other night, after Brian and I packed the cupboards at the bottom with tomatoes and tomato sauce made and canned over the weekend. At one point, both the pressure canner and the boiling water canner were going at the same time – and we ended with about thirty more filled jars for our basement “pantry”. Last night he made BBQ sauces, and this week I’ll round out the canning with some apples, stewed plums, and pickled beets – thus completing the major cycle of canning that we do each year in preparation for the winter.

For the record, I also did my annual “clean-out” where I remove all jars that are 2 years are old (from 2013 at this juncture). This year that was twelve jars – which I consider exceptionally good since we can about 200 jars worth of food a year (possibly more, I don’t keep good track). I used to have a much worse record of actually using my canned foods which was related to making too much of things that I wouldn’t be inclined to use (I never needed 12 jars of zucchini relish, for example). Over the years we’ve learned to make what we will eat, and eat what we make – an integral part of ecological sensibility around food supply.

I’ve noticed that whenever I post a photo like this out in the world – to Facebook for example – an awful lot of comments come back in the “well I know where to go when the apocalypse comes” variety – allusions to the fact that this looks like prepper behaviour and so forth. So to set the record straight! Though we have developed many skills (hunting, gardening, seed saving, canning, food storage, building small things, sewing, knitting, and so forth) – we are *not* doing it because we believe we will need to survive a nuclear winter or even a really bad drought.

In fact, despite what we were taught as children (my mother, in particular saw learning these skills as somewhat pointless because why bother in the age of mass manufacturing), some of us derive great satisfaction from making our own things, keeping a stocked larder, sustaining our own lives through the work of our hands, wearing clothing made in our own style, and continuing the learning cycle throughout the whole of our lives. At least, that’s my main motivation. I’m not really sure what else is a worthy use of my time either – I mean, I could be watching TV in the evenings or playing video games, but instead I choose to knit, sew, play music and so forth.

Additionally, we economize by purchasing food at its cheapest point in the cycle, and by preparing our own sauces, preserves and so forth – we eat gourmet-quality food all year long without paying ridiculous prices for so-called “bespoke” foods (which are all the rage these days).

I’ve been around prepper behaviour lots in my lifetime – had friends that stockpiled for Y2K (remember that?) and carved bunkers into their basements. For the most part those foods rotted in the ground or got bugs (one of my old roommates brought several bins of Y2K foods into our house and then left them there while they developed moths) – and the culture around prepping was fearful and secretive. That’s not my life, nor the life of my community now – which means that we get to do things just because of the joy of doing them.

The prepper label suggests that those of us who pay attention to what we eat, wear, and make are somehow driven by fear and anxiety – and ultimately slapping survivalist terms on the making of everyday life diminishes the value of what we do and the homes we create. The Urban Crow Bungalow is a place of great joy and love, where we frequently invite people to share at our table in the continuation of our community network. We are not stockpiling ammo and hoarding food – but growing outwards from our own labour in order to support our lives and the lives of those around us. It’s not survivalism that drives us, but love – and nothing more than that.

One of the things that Brian and I did last weekend at the cabin was some trail building. Trail restoring, really – we are working with a long-disused ATV trail (and probably, logging road from the forties though it’s hard to tell that now) – and clearing it bit by bit up and around a moose pond on the crown land behind our place. It’s a short walk up, but pretty steep, and the way is littered with the deadfall of the pine-beetle forest that it winds through. On one hand, it feels like we are making a trail in a dying place – with all the pine infested and black from standing rot; on the other, there is all sorts of regeneration going on – spruce, fir, understory plants once choked by the poor pine replants that happened in the years after the original old growth was cut.  (This was once a healthy fir forest, as evidenced by the few big old guys that remain). As we make our way up the hill, we test each rotting pine to see if we can simply push it over, away from the trail – to ensure we won’t be removing it from the trail next season. It’s incredibly satisfying to push a twenty-foot tree to the ground, if a little unsettling to confront the dying cycle of the forest at the same time.

Because the forest is so rickety, and because our cabin is located in an area prone to heavy winds – things are falling down all the time. In fact, it’s a hazard to be in the woods when they start to sway and from the porch on our cabin we can hear all manner of things fall – large and small – on most afternoons when the thermals pick up. Mornings are pretty calm though, not to mention cool, so it’s a safe bet for getting out with our saw, machete, and trail tape. We are doing a significant marking job up there because I want to snowshoe the area, and once a few inches fall it starts to get pretty impossible to tell what’s going on otherwise.

Trail-building is an endless exercise – with the satisfaction of bringing order to a place, laid alongside the frustration of having to clear the same ground over and over. Just when you get one section done, a tree falls over, or a branch shatters across the clearing – and there is more sawing and lifting to bring it back to rights so as to proceed. We have no illusions about the permanence of this trail, it had almost disappeared in spots before we found it – the connection to the road where the ATVs used to come up is severed by trees which have fallen across it. (We hope no one bothers to come up with a chainsaw – but it seems to have been forgotten sometime ago.) We also want to expand on an old animal/hunter (?) trail around the moose pond so that it becomes possible to snowshoe up and around the pond without getting lost.

As we worked together and talked about our task last week, it occurred to me how much trail-building and maintenance is like meditation practice – the foundation is often laid before us in the form of an old road or animal track – but it is up to us to walk it repeatedly in order to wear it into place. Even as we do that work – walking the pathway over and over – things fall into our way all the time. We get tripped up by a bad emotional reaction, a death in the family, the loss of a job, our own ego struggles – like the dead trees that fall – we must clear them, set them to the side, even allow them to be guides along the way – so that we can progress to the next point in our walk where we are confronted by some more debris that needs tending.

But like meditation, there is no endpoint. There are some views along the way, perhaps a rest by a shaded pond in the deep of the forest, but the trail is never finished – which is both a source of inspiration and the overwhelm of the infinite nature of such ventures. It’s mostly quiet though, and so the very nature of the work is restorative to the soul and the surround, even as the path can be a bit of a slog sometimes.

This was a new thing for us together and I love that we have found this practice up above our land – Brian and I – moving forward along an overgrown trail and learning about our own capacities as we go.