Dormancy, Torpor, and Eternal Rest

Where do our bones belong in this unsettled world?

The hogs, in their final paddock, harvest bedding for their nests out among the sleeping clods of thatch that punctuate this slumbering wedge of Missouri sidehill. Clambering through the dense, dry armor of sleeping prairie, they break off sheaves of dormant ocher grass and trot to their hut, lining the inside with soft, insulative bedding. Other than feeding time, they will likely remain huddled and snoring in the hut today, as we’re expecting another bout of cold winter rain, unsettling as this time of year, late December, when deep ice and thick snow should be expected.

The winter here, mild thus far, has been pleasant enough for catching up on tasks like manuring and mulching garden beds, butchering and processing livestock, and collecting firewood, but it has also been unsettling. Sure, there’s an El Niño climate pattern, our first in a few years, that’s ushering in warmth this winter. And we’ve also moved up one zone, per the USDA’s updated Plant Hardiness map, and 2023 is all but officially concluded to be the hottest year on record. The gloom and darkness does little to upend this nagging sense of doom as I look forward to 2024, with ground water reserves still depleted by this summer’s exceptional drought. But where things truly get ominous is when we look at the actions those in power are taking to possibly prevent a climate free-fall.

Another UN climate summit has come and gone, held in the heart of the petrostate of the United Arab Emirates, and we’ve been gifted an accord riddled with loopholes large enough to admit an overturned freight-train loaded with coal. In short, COP28, that is, the Conference of the Parties of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, has made an agreement. The agreement purports to “transition away” from fossil fuel energy, as opposed to the original and “controversial” terminology of a definitive “phase-out” of such energy sources. It turns out that words mean something.* This particular turn of phrase does a lot of good for the corporations plying oil, gas and coal for energy, which is the greatest source of anthropogenic climate change. 

The timeline for a “phase-out” was not agreed to. As a parent to a teenager, I can confirm that without a solid deadline, this won’t happen. Furthermore, in an accord struck at the summit to manage and repair methane leaks in natural gas generation plants, the majority of corporations responsible for these high-impact leaks have not signed on, making it yet another example of platitudinal dogshit. Please folks, hold your applause.

The first day of the summit held promise, based on the headlines. A climate damage fund was created to pay for the destruction and ecosystem loss, felt primarily in “developing” countries, to the tune of $700 million. The actual estimated cost of climate destruction in these communities is estimated to be between $100 billion and $580 billion. Annually.  Building the venue and hosting for the summit came at an estimated cost of $7 billion. Again, hold your applause.

Finally, the summit sought out to address the greenhouse gas cost of agriculture, which accounts for most of our global loss of biodiversity, and is now primarily performed with heavy use of fossil fuel inputs. Discussion and agreements on the future of agriculture all maintained that the World Trade Organization, which has the sole agricultural policy of dictating to the “developing” world that it extract valuable resources and export yields to the global market, be central to global food distribution. Go ahead, and feel free to applaud this non-binding resolution.

Here in the real world, where an estimated 3.6 billion people are considered to be “highly vulnerable” to climate change, myself and the battery system that keeps my space illuminated, and this flow of words making it to you is threatened by darkness. It’s true that this day will be longer than the last, but darkness endures, and I do not believe I’ll have any noticeable uptick in my temperament for some time, just as our hens will continue to lay poorly, or the remaining grasses of the field will not grow or thrive. Folks like to celebrate the Winter Solstice on account of the transition to longer days and brighter futures. Still, we are at the far end of the solar pendulum, one that will not swing back to manic daylight for some time to come. And in the cold, dark, here and now, there is work to be done.

Twice daily the livestock must be fed and maintained, milked and managed, their eggs collected, their winter stalls cleaned of manure. Iced-up hoses need to be purged from time to time, drinking water for our home must be hauled, fallen branches and dry kindling need gathered from the field margins, children require care and educated, fires need lit, floors need swept, and about once a week I must haul a bucket of sawdust and human feces from the outhouse out to yonder compost pile. If I were a row-crop farmer, I could be in Florida, unless the debt I incurred paying for fuel, equipment, and inputs was so extreme that I couldn’t leave this place. Also, give or take a few decades, Florida may well be counted among those 3.6 billion people who are profoundly affected by climate change.

In comparison with many other organisms here, humans are not a particularly dormant element of the ecosystem, though I’m acquainted with a lot of lazy ones. Dormancy, and its associated biological phases, like hibernation, diapause, and brumation do sound nice. A time to rest, reserve precious energy resources, and recoil our most vulnerable above-ground appendages would suit me fine. But as a settler unsettled, a tender of crops and feeder of people struggling to remain atop the wave of an exponentially destructive culture dead set on its own suicide, rest feels as meaningless as a climate accord here in the deep dark of a civilization in its death throes.

Rest is afforded to those organisms who remain in place. Now and then, we try a crop that is just a little outside its comfort zone. These crops could not possibly reserve enough energy for the winter here, at least for now, and they do not rest so much as die. On the other hand is the black-capped chickadee, a bird which is always present, always native, and does not migrate. The black-capped chickadee expresses the trait of torpor, which is rarely found in birds. At day, the black-capped chickadee, steadfast in its resolve to remain in place, flits about and eats what it finds: mostly seeds. But when the winds wail and the groaning cold of deep winter claws at the flesh of everything that lives outside, this bird can enter a state of temporary suspension, dropping its body temp by about 53 degrees Fahrenheitt, ready to awaken and fly again when the cold night air no longer presents a risk of hypothermia. 

Everyone else here, it seems, needs a nice bunch of fluffed up bedding, from the sleeping green plumes of turnip and mustard somehow still available in our garden to the snoring, steaming hogs and shivering goats in their barn. Recently, I have obtained a fair bit of cornstalk mulch for the barnyard, in lieu of straw, which was difficult to obtain this year (because it was too hot and dry for the stems to remain harvestable). So far, I’m a fan of corn-trash mulch.

For every few pitchfork-fuls of corn trash, there is an ear or two with gleaming yellow kernels. The poultry relish finding it, keeping them not only occupied, but also productive. They kick through the thick piles of stalks, helping to spread them evenly as I lurch through the barnyard and deposit them. The pigs also find nutrition in the ears and leaves, but the coarse nature of the stalks themselves do a better job of standing up to mud and trampling than straw or hay bedding. The dogs dig out dry caves in the piles of corn trash, just as I do in my own bedding once I climb in. If we are lucky, we are all afforded some necessary rest, some place to retreat, some accepting earth to hold our roots and maintain our survival in the face of the depletion and darkness of the world turned away from the sun.

And if we’re privileged enough, that rest becomes something of a lifestyle. Rest is a necessity for all, and it would seem, a lifestyle for the privileged few. The body and mind unravel without it, and winter does bring most of us some additional rest we could not afford six months back in the long heat of summer. In certain circumstances, rest can even be a radical concept, in a world where labor is exploited and the shadow of oppression and injustice touches most all of us.  Myself, I’ve been able to score an extra hour of sleep lately… and because I don’t immediately wake up and do fuck-all for the rest of the day, I’m okay with that. With the privileges I have I’ve got to think that there wouldn’t be anything radical in taking time for myself. But to earn that rest, that deep dormancy, we will need roots suited to this soil. I sometimes wonder, as a settler unsettled, if I can ever truly become part of this place. Will my bones truly rest here? Or become another strata of cast-off trash that the dominator culture has left in its wake, when all resources have been extracted, all pre-existing organisms extirpated or made extinct? 

I suppose this desire for rootedness among the landless, this longing for the kind of nativity where our bones become the earth that feeds our future kin is attractive in a disparate world of near instantaneous travel and relocation. Landless and without meaning, ungoverned by the seasons in climate-controlled 9 to 5’s, we so often leave as we arrived, with some bureaucratic documentation, our impact unfelt on the landscape beneath our feet, yet ruinous further abroad among the drill-sites and strip mines feeding our cloistered and disparate lives. I admit to not knowing how I will earn my place in this dirt.

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Yesterday, I paused my writing to handle my afternoon chores, and found myself in one of those truly awful farm scenarios that occur from time to time. I have slain a good-sized boar out of necessity, and the kill was not clean. In a decade of doing this work, I’ve had a handful of similarly terrible moments. There was the summer we lost several goats to strangulation. The uncounted scores of chicks and ducklings that failed to thrive and needed immediate euthanasia, the animals we’d attempted to nurse to health and should have offered a similar mercy toward, and the countless varmints I trapped, stalked, and killed prior to utilizing working dogs as a wildlife friendly control measure. The shortcuts I’ve taken, the habitat I’ve ruined, and the fear I’ve caused when I wasn’t handling animal husbandry in a calm and thoughtful way, and all the resources I’ve wasted in pursuit of this project; sure, they have all been learning experiences I suppose. But I question why they continue to happen.

There are limits to what I feel like saying about this, and I suppose that in a life spent farming a lot of folks come up against these limits. It might harden some, or break the more tender-hearted. I don’t know quite where I am on this spectrum, other than that I nonetheless remain committed to performing my work with compassion. I am still raw from how it happened. To give a brief account, and to recede like the sleeping forbs of the field and remove as much vulnerability as I can,** a sexually aggressive young boar broke into a paddock with some young gilts. If they ended up getting bred, they would be too small for farrowing, and likely die in the process of giving birth. I tried to get the boar separated and could not, and made the judgment that he needed to be put down. The first shot I took ricocheted off his skull, and for what felt like hours I stalked the angered boar, bleeding, salivating, popping his tusks, taking several more shots before I was finally able to still him.

I’m not proud of how it went down, but my pride does not figure into the sadness I feel, knowing that I did not deliver a quick and humane kill. As I’ve certainly said before, the notion that well-kept livestock raised for meat only have “one bad day” is bullshit. Death must come without fear, pain, or knowledge. Sure, I’ve learned from this, perhaps at the cost of the gradual hardening of the heart that I see so often in the veteran farmers around me. 

Today, I will perform my duties, as I do every day. I will water, and feed, and mulch, and haul wood and prepare food. And I will drag the carcass of this boar to a place of rest, rolling his stiffened form into the tallgrass thatch, that dormant nest which holds the roots and bones of so many organisms living and dead. The unseasonable warmth and undue stress has rendered the boar’s meat inedible for humans. I will lay him out and open his body for the dogs and coyotes and eagles, and then I might find some spot to lay and rest a moment. I don’t know that I’ll ever truly come to be in place here, try as I might, but for just a moment this short, dark day, I hope to sink into the sleeping dirt and dry, wind-rattled grass, and reckon with what place my bones will belong to, once the light fails to return. Sunlight, obscured by winter fog is barely tracing out the silhouette of leafless trees. The roosters have begun their morning chorus, and if I am to keep up my end of the bargain with this place, my rest my end and my work must begin.

Deep in the dirt and dark,

BB

*We’re all readers and writers here on substack, and so I’d like to think that we all believe that words have power. This is why the cop-out at COP28 matters, and also why it matters that substack is in the business of platforming, and profiting from nazis. Luckily for me, this means that my speech is as protected as theirs, so when I say things like neo-nazis should follow their leader  that should be fine, right? 

**On a personal note, there’s quite a lot tied up in this, regarding some management mistakes we’ve made in the past regarding our swine program that we are still paying the price for. It is perhaps esoteric, boring stuff that I haven’t found a way to address in a captivating way as a writer, yet.