Lonesome Still Mornings and Collective Survival

...or how to perform a Sysiphean task without fossil fuels

The chickadees and juncos are the only things outside that stir the stillness of a rare morning of sun. No wind tickles the accumulated layer of plucked duck down festooning the frozen mud and mulch out where we have harvested bird after bird this season. The woodsmoke of a fresh lit fire rises, steady and thin, and excepting for a few far-off roosters, the sunrise silence is unpunctured. The earth expands and contracts on these days when the temperatures rise a bit above freezing and return below at night, forming small cracks that will admit the dropped seeds of prairie grasses stripped from stalks by darting birds. The brittle pods of partridge pea have shattered and their far-flung leguminous seeds are working their way down in the frigid embrace of dirt, alongside coyote-scattered femurs and shredded tufts of rabbit fur. 

Pulling on my boots and heading out to haul water from the spigot, the near lifeless dawn will be broken by the shuffling of paws among the tallgrass thatch as my dog clops out from whatever bramble patch she’s been sleeping in for her customary morning walk up the road. Her quiet, supportive and somewhat aloof companionship will suffice for the morning. She doesn’t ask questions or share opinions that I feel compelled to consider. She is a very good companion.

The sun is welcome, as our solar-electric power system has been undercharged for what seems to be weeks now, and our small strawbale home performs best in winter when soaking up rays on the south side, but the sun also brings mud, and so I will take time today to transport cut corn-stalks, pitchfork by pitchfork and cart by cart to the expanding mire down near the pigs and poultry. The top of this ridge is lined with large, round bales of prairie hay and cornstalks. They were placed here with a neighbors’ tractor, but we ourselves lack the mechanical advantage afforded by large machinery requisite in moving said bales, one by one, to where they belong. A big bale of hay will last our cows about six or seven days, and so weekly, we must call in help from neighbors in our dairy cooperative to roll another one into the loafing yard.

On a good day, and under the right conditions, three or four people can press their body weight against one of these bales, develop the proper kinetic momentum, and deliver it to its destination. The bale is eaten and digested, and then we must again haul the resulting manure, plop by plop, to the compost pile. On the face of it, the bale rolling is a minor Sisyphean task, and the manure, decidedly Augean. But the work is incremental, and punctuated with dozens of other tasks and responsibilities. On my own, straining against the weight of a cartload of corn trash, it feels like my hope for a marriage to land and place has given way to imprisonment; but the camaraderie of cooperative bale rolling does provide some balm to the exhaustive and depleting acts I perform in solitude.

In breaking our dependence on fossil fuels, we’ve come to rely on collective human energy to raise food, at least in some of our projects. Perhaps this is the trade-off. On occasion, we still utilize fossil fuels here: we have a chainsaw that runs through two or three gallons of gas a year, a diesel truck for transporting heavy materials and pulling our poultry wagons and trailers, and, of course, many of the luxuries of modern manufacturing, like PVC buckets, rubber boots, and factory-made roof metal. 

The myth of modern homestead independence is largely predicated on the replacement of communities with machines. Take a look at the advertisements in Mother Earth News. These folks would have you believe that self-sufficiency is only afforded to individuals by reliance upon an extracted resource that by and large cannot be produced on the homestead or community scale. I wouldn’t label that as self-sufficiency, and I largely do not believe that self-sufficiency exists. Communal sufficiency, however, might be a possibility.

Our praxis concerning fossil fuels is basically as follows: do not rely on fossil fuels for system maintenance, just system leverage, and replace fossil fuels as practicably as possible with cooperative human kinetic power and human spirit. A practical example: we are in the process of building (rebuilding, actually) a cooperative outdoor kitchen. This kitchen will feed at least a dozen folks from April through November, year after year, with a zero fossil fuel budget. All cooking will be performed through wood and solar energy, and refrigeration generated by renewable power. As we tighten the input circle on our agriculture, the increasing majority of the food served will be produced by our own collective labor. But to make an omelet, we’ve got to break eggs, and so we have utilized gas chainsaws and diesel equipment to implement the initial build. This is an implementation import, and not a maintenance import. Once the structure is complete, it will not need any additional fossil fuels to operate, and so several households which would previously have had to rely on fossil fuels to eat those months of the year will no longer need to do so. This is the strategic and careful application of inhuman energy sources to build something in the world that can take people out of such extractive systems. 

The initial framing for our outdoor kitchen.

In maintaining vegetation, we largely employ grazing, scything and burning instead of machine mowing. These are maintenance activities… if a person were to manage vegetation through fossil fuel means, they would be locked into that pattern in perpetuity, because grass does not cease to grow here. Yet. But to perform this work effectively, one person or a small family would find themselves worn out and stretched thin. And so for us, this management work is performed through a cooperative model. 

A well-functioning cooperative model is easier than going it alone, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. Operating a tractor takes some physical skill and mechanical understanding. Operating within a cooperative takes more. Like it or not, it’s a labor of the heart. Any cooperative needs to start off with some basic shared values, but these must be balanced with diversity, or else nobody will call out poor judgment or short-sightedness within the group. No successful collective endeavor was ever without conflict, but there’s a limit to how much human shittiness is acceptable. I have worked with a handful of human beings that probably should have been replaced with fossil fuels. Still, there ought to be plenty of room for divergence and autonomy in a well executed collective model. 

I think what ultimately makes collective models viable is what would make anarchism viable: the mutualized survival of those involved. Of course, whether purposefully or circumstantially, capitalism often intercepts the mutuality of survival. Our ability to meet our survival needs independently and competitively disrupts our vision of the common good. 

I have some nice spots for hanging out by myself.

I wouldn’t say that I don’t like people, but I do value aloneness. A frozen morning by myself, a solo tromp through the draw for kindling, a quiet home to rest inside, these things are somewhat necessary for my well-being, in spite of the very real ways I rely on a larger community. Without living on a land trust I would not have access to these same instances of autonomy and healthy solitude. Without the weekly bale rolling meetup I would either require a large tractor and its associated costs and inputs, or still be straining against the weight of hay. I recognize that my own fantasies of self-reliance and solitude are as inextricably bound to communities of mutual survival as those common fantasies of independence, as illustrated in glossy magazines and sparkling media, are bound to the unceasing depletion of resources and consumption of fossil fuels. And that particular extraction is one which further decimates communities, both specifically human communities and larger ecological ones.

For 2024, this almanac will continue to fixate on death, shit, and ecological farming, as it always will. Doubtless, I will keep on offering observations on simple and seasonal living, sidebar histories of agrarian labor movements, critiques of broken and unjust food systems, and increasingly bleak outlooks on a future made moot and void by corporate agri-business.  But I hereby also intend to focus on the potential for functioning, community-based systems of mutual survival, liberation, and generation. Because, I suppose, the world might need that. But, I reckon I’ll still largely focus on shit.

It’s damn near eleven, and the sun is still bright and high. I have pet the cows, doted on the goats, greeted dogs and fed the pigs. I haven’t seen a human yet, and that’s fine. The morning cold drives them in. Freeze has become thaw, and the contracting earth admits more and more seeds out on the sleeping fields. Still, some seeds will remain on the surface of the soil, vulnerable to sparrows and mice. Others may end up lodged too deep in the muck, unable to sprout when their time comes. The lucky ones will end up in that sweet spot, between total exposure and intractable isolation, perfectly placed to root and thrive on some future spring day, poised to grasp the light through the warp and weft of thatch and become part of the great mosaic of mutual survival that is tallgrass prairie.

Post-Script: Earlier this week I put the finishing touches on a printed compilation of the first year of the Fox Holler Almanac, edited for grammar and with a brief foreword. I will be reaching out to all annual and founding subscribers to see if you would like your own physical copy. A fine addition to your outhouse bookstack, and thick enough to hold up a fairly wobbly table leg.