Place

Last week we had a record low for that date: 47 degrees, I don't remember the specific date. Today we had a record high for this day, 98 degrees. It's 72 degrees right now and I'm having trouble sleeping because it's too warm. Guess I've adapted.

We had a good weekend. I managed to can a half dozen jars each of peach salsa and crabapple jelly, and a dozen jars of tomato salsa. That's twenty pounds of tomatoes. Can you believe it takes that many pounds of tomatoes to make 12 jars of salsa? Each tomato had to be skinned, cored and seeded. And that's not all, of course. Being salsa, there was a mountain of jalapenos, half a dozen onions, a bunch of cilantro and a few other things in there too. We also made two crabapple pies which, I must say, came out absolutely perfect. We gave one to some friends.

That was Saturday.

This morning, after a sunrise hike, we cleaned the kitchen. Despite our best efforts, there was jelly on the walls, juices, seeds and bits of vegetable matter on the floor and on nearly every surface of the kitchen. There were dishes to be washed, counter tops to be wiped, dish towels to be washed. After that we pretty much took the rest of the day off.

We made an afternoon trip into Denver, just because we rarely go and I think it's good to have a reminder every now and then why we don't live there ("there" meaning "the big city," not Denver specifically which, by big city standards, is actually quite nice.)

We rounded out the evening reading at home. Right now I'm reading A Place of my Own by Michael Pollan. He's the author of some of my favorite food-centric books: The Omnivore's Dilemma, In Defense of Food, The Botany of Desire. A Place of My Own was his first, and deals with a very different topic. It was his quest to build a small, private room in the wooded area behind his house where he could read, write and work. The picture on the cover is what first grabbed my attention. It's a cold blue photo of a tiny warm house in the snow right around sunset, his completed masterpiece. You can see a wall of books through the warm glow of the window. The photo drew me in immediately because it reminded me of my fantasy cabin in the woods: a dark, snowy landscape, cold, beautiful, forbidding, with a cozy, inviting home nestled in the middle of it radiating light and life. See the book here.

The guy is a writer/editor, not a carpenter. In fact he's really not handy at all, as he admits many times. Yet it was his quest not just to have a place of his own, but to build it himself. It's comforting for me to know that I'm not the first or the only person to have the thoughts and desires I do. I'm not the only person who wants - needs - to have a safe, comfortable place of my own removed if only temporarily from the things of everyday life, or who worries about the environmental impact of my actions or who finds joy in discovering new things about myself and the world in my journey to satiate my sometimes inexplicable desires.

Pollan quotes Thoreau a lot. I know Thoreau is not universally loved, and Pollan even made a few remarks about Thoreau's sometimes self-serving or Earth-mother type views of nature. But, as is nearly always the case, one's point of view changes dramatically when one actually walks just a little in someone else's shoes. Pollan was reminded of this on more than one occasion. It was really interesting to see how Pollan moved from dismissing some of Thoreau's words as self-serving to understanding what the man actually meant. Trying something new has a wonderful way of giving one new perspective. I find I've done some of this in recent years myself. Isn't it amazing what age and experience can teach you? The older I get the more I realize how little I know. People are so quick to dismiss or judge the actions or thoughts of others, but who are you to do that? Who am I to do that? How many times in my life have I been so sure I was right only to find out (or worse, to come to the conclusion sometime later) that I was completely wrong - or at the very least, that I was basing my opinion on a woefully incomplete picture? It's a good idea to step inside other people's homes and see the world through their windows now and then.

I also read through another book this weekend. It's a book by the US Forest Service about camp cooking. It's first a foremost a recipe book for cooking in a dutch oven over a campfire, created from 100 years of journals, articles, papers and interviews with Forest Service employees. Secondarily it's a brief glimpse into the life of a Forest Service employee, particularly between 1900 and about 1970. There are samples of letters, statements and interviews as well as a few stories, photographs and some cowboy poetry interspersed among the recipes. Was life really simpler in 1950 or 1900? Probably not. Maybe. I don't know, I wasn't around. I guess it depends on your criteria for what constitutes a simple life. And at any rate, a "simple" life and a "hard" life are not the same things, and needn't have anything to do with one another. But for whatever reason, reading the stories of those old timers just takes me away to fantasy land. Maybe their lives were simpler, in my mind, because they lived and worked in the great outdoors. Sure, they only earned $7/day, but they lived at a time when they didn't have to consider life without medical insurance, cell phones, computers or a car payment. By and large these things either didn't exist in the first place or weren't options for the vast majority of the population anyway. A lot of the Forest Service men had a saddle horse, a pack horse, a dutch oven, a gun, a tent or a teepee and not much else. But they liked it. Actually, they loved it from the accounts I read. They ate the non-perishables the Forest Service provided and supplemented that with wild game and plants. There was no social networking, no daily commute, no techno-gadgets, no reality TV, no TPS reports, no management meetings under the searing hum of florescent lights in a sea of cubes. There were no arbitrary work deadlines, no false sense of urgency, no hordes of strangers living all around you, no college students wearing their pants around their ankles and sunglasses so big they cover half the face, no people standing around ignoring each other because they've all got their faces buried in their iPhones. Sounds pretty simple to me. The work was hard, often dangerous. But the thing is these guys loved it. And they weren't all the grizzly mountain man type either. They just had a passion for a simple life, living close to nature, being under the stars and in the wide open spaces, and for doing work they honestly believed in that had physical, visible, tangible results.

Maybe I romanticize that life too much. But how will I know unless I walk a mile in their shoes?