Not Another Solstice Essay
Manic daylight, red hot anger, roly poly pestilence, and maladies of the flesh
Folks, this is going to be a deeply personal entry in the Almanac– I am suffering from a certain malady of the flesh: chronic butt-sweat. Maybe even chafing. Anyone who works outside in the heat and humidity might relate. And while sweltering ‘neath this dome of pressure-cooker heat here in Northeast Missouri is deeply discomforting and potentially hazardous to my health, I imagine it fails in comparison to the current situation in India. And so, for the duration of time it takes for me to scrawl this latest tome, or at least file this quaint missive, I will be sitting in a folding office chair in the shade and stagnation of hedge limbs, abuzz with flies, my legs kicked up on an overturned bucket, in hopes of perhaps capturing some stale and pallid breeze upon my sweaty and inflamed nether region.
Most of the mulberries have now dropped, leaving piles of plum-hued fruit flesh swarming with flies. The chickens and ducks pick through the nutritious leavings as they follow the shifting shade, kicking up squirming purple-stained larvae and passing seed-laden droppings the color of midnight. The swarms of periodical cicadas, having buzzed and courted and performed bug intercourse and implanted their eggs within the twigs of the woodland edge have mostly died off– the echoes of clicks more or less muted along the draws and bottomlands, their corpses absconded by squirrels and sparrows and fledgling robins, the rotting leaf-mold of the forest floor glistening with their shining wings.
At mid-slope, in a savanna of pin oak and prairie grass lilting in the variable breeze, six cows swat flies with their ropy tails and fling their salivating muzzles in the dappled cover of what could be my favorite tree– a healthy, young and morphologically superior honey locust that, give or take probably less than a week, I have passed by in the duty of my daily chores for the past decade. This year, it is boasting its first crop of sugar-rich pods. In the heat of these long days, not one beast, domesticated nor wild, excepting myself and the flotilla of cabbage moths gracing our kale, can be found out in the piercing sun. Hogs snore on their sides under pin oak, turkeys pant in the dust and duff ‘neath eastern red cedar, and the skies are clear of birds, save for a trio of turkey vultures soaring in circles above some far-off carrion.
And while this day might be better spent mending garden fence as part of my endless conflict with the droves of marauding cottontails, or driving our herd of swine toward the shaded bottomlands, I am temporarily laid up with the embarrassing health condition referenced previously. The human butt and environs is a vulnerable and important piece of our anatomy, and I generally do my best to protect my own shaded bottomlands from the waist-high brambles loaded with ticks and chiggers, which I must traverse regularly in the course of fulfilling my agrarian duties.
While I have watched visitor after visitor arrive here and immediately bust out the shoeless, linen sundress outfit of bucolic naivety, I know damned well that the summertime prairie is an often harsh and hazardous landscape of thorns and skin-burrowing microscopic insects and phytophotodermatitis-inducing plant residues. And so, I armor up in a long sleeved cotton shirt, sturdy boots, and thick, durable pants. In my early years of pasturing, I tried to keep my clothing light, even scanty, resulting in scratches, weeping boils, embedded thorns, and other nightmares of dermatology. And while I will largely continue abiding by my current duty-informed dress code, the pints of sweat escaping my pores, all somehow running to my butt crack, has been a problem.
I first noticed some rawness about a week back, maybe midway down the hog pasture, while I was lifting hauling buckets of sloshing whey. Now, I’m no exhibitionist (in fact I largely prefer to remain entirely unseen if I can help it), but I had devised sort of a hack– arriving at a less hazardous opening of the field that had been eaten and trampled down, I unbuckled my belt and folded the top of my sweat-soaked pants down past my thighs to catch a breeze. But like so many other climate-related problems, by the time the symptoms are noted, it’s probably too late.
Now, a little dab of my Aunt Karen’s cottonwood bud salve does seem to offer some relief, but with summer just officially kicking off, I am seriously considering chaps as a viable strategy in the face of another deadly-hot season.
The gardens have been a struggle this year– between seedling-devouring Armadillidiidae to the aforementioned gang of rabbits that have nipped peppers and beans, creeping through some unseen break in the fencing, hidden among the encroaching jungle of rapidly expanding weeds at the unmown edge, I will admit to a certain combination of panic and dread upon entering the gates. When panic and dread collide with long-standing, oppressive heat, I can get a little temperamental. It can be tempting as a writer to gloss over these spats and flare-ups of anger, but since we’ve already talked about how sweaty my butt is getting (very sweaty) I may as well acknowledge that I have snapped on more than one occasion, leaving my sweetie (who does not sweat like me, but glistens rather) in the shotgun-range of my expletive growls and curses.
Further afield, I sometimes spend whole mornings carving pasture lanes for our portable electric fencing with my scythe. Trying to take advantage of the natural cooling qualities of our tree-lined draws and old fencerows, I often find myself among considerably expansive patches of poison ivy— again a reason I tend to overdress for our climate. In late June, when the vines of ivy are long, these offending plants tend not to line up in neat windrows like grasses and forbs would, but rather tangle on the blade and occasionally rain down on me as I swing through the brush. In combination with the ticks and chiggers, I begin to feel a bit panicked towards the end of these work sessions, like some unseen force is gradually seeping into my skin, soon to send me into a full-bodied outbreak of weepings sores. After pulling the portable fence, festooned with poisonous vines, through the mowed lanes, and completing the paddock I walk quickly (I don’t run unless there’s hornets or something with its head caught in a fence) to the pond to take a dip.
But, living on a community land trust, with shared infrastructure such as a pond, creates challenges for even the simplest acts, such as washing the urishiol from my skin, are not without complication. It had been my intention to clean off in the nude, not because I’m a pervert, but because it is most effective when cleaning poisonous oils from the skin. Besides, I can barely handle owning socks, let alone a pair of swim trunks. By the time I made it to the swimming hole, one fully clothed person was on the dock, picking up broken fragments of glass, while another person, who I had never seen before, a person whom I had no context for, and who probably wants to see my chapped and sweaty butt about as much as I want to show it off (not very much) was standing near the other access point to the pond. Waiting a few minutes, the awkward stand off did not stop— one person retrieving hopelessly small shards of broken glass, the other still entirely oblivious to the purpose of a swimming hole, slack jawed and peering at the sandy entrance as I contemplated either saying something or just disrobing right then and there.
As an introvert, my normal response would have been to just leave, but I could not do this without washing up to prevent an inevitable full body outbreak of oozing rashes, so quietly fuming a few moments, feeling the prickle of heat and the crawling legs of little ticks, I entered the pond, fully clothed, like a person who had just lost their mind. This is the madness of extreme solstice day length, compounded by the wages of toil, and the challenges of introversion. If only I had the characteristic confidence, liberty and indiscretion of the trust-fund free-love types that sometimes visit this place, instead of being a hot, tired, angry dude in a full-on outfit floating on an oil slick of my own barn filth. Perhaps every body is beautiful, but dermatologically, I am war torn. Angered by this highly awkward kerfluffle, not to mention the disconnect between my necessary hygeine and the leisure of others, I drifted away from shore, allowing the cool water to deafen my ears.
I sometimes wonder if in the unfurling, spiraling breakdown of our global climate, among rising seas and intolerable heat and crop-killing droughts, how anger– personally, culturally, militarily– might develop and metastasize over time. We are already seeing the beginning waves of climate-induced human migration start up, with conflicts over water and access to remaining arable land on the horizon. Political rhetoric from both a position of fearful-denial / economic self-interest, and the understandable fear of a populace grown weary from years of seeing a livable future traded downriver for upfront profits is just one of many political powder kegs being staged here in the twilight-era of an economic system hell-bent on exterminating life on Earth. We know that in this country, violent crimes have a noticeable uptick in the heat of summer’s dog days. How will we interact with one another when there’s no more curtain left to conceal mass-extinction, when apocalypse is laid bare?
The first two rabbits that came into the hoop house to browse the new seedlings were trapped and set free a half mile outside our agricultural activities. Having skinned and gutted many rabbits in the past, I can’t say this course of action was directed by any moral imperative. We have a pet bunny in the house that I kinda adore, and these first two were small and cute enough to garner some remainder of my sympathy. The third, rattling in the confines of its trap this morning was lankier, tickier, somehow in my mind more deserving of death than the other two. Coming back to the trap a few moments later after finishing getting vital water to the livestock, I found the cage barren– I now have a rabbit educated in traps. Of course you know, this means war.
Defeat and butt-sweat and red hot anger: these are the fine flourishes and important details that mainstream homesteading media seems to largely ignore. Sure, consumers will get some of the more marketable tragedies– untimely livestock deaths, devastating storms, burnt down barns and chronic illness– things which I would, and have, felt compelled to recount myself at the relevant time. But it is the slow accumulation of small, every day torments– spending 45 minutes in a bramble patch herding lost turkey poults in the burning sun, a wasp sting on the hand while weeding a neglected garden bed, finding out my favorite water bucket has a hole in it while halfway down the hill with my dilapidated wheelbarrow, the sweat collecting on my back and like tears, channeling down my spine and towards, well you know…
If the anger-provoking, ass-rotting heat weren’t enough, we must also contend with the absurdly long days. The stacked hours of daylight, so vital in which to work and grow food, keep me in some state of mania, enhanced by what has recently become an inadvisable level of caffeine intake. With no alarm, I awaken at 5 now, working early for some hours before perhaps having a sit-down at 10 or 11. I rarely eat more than snacks until dinnertime, and then work after dinner, in the garden ‘til sundown, which arrives far too late. Perhaps the near future will hold the possibility of taking an afternoon siesta, but this has not materialized for me in the past week. Sitting here, my feet on a bucket, in the fly-ridden shade, recording my observations for you, dear reader, is as close as I’ll come to some respite for now.
The heat and light exhausts, but regardless of escape artist cottontails, nefarious pill bugs, and my largely self-perpetrated butt rawness, I’ve got some hope in reserve. Faith is another matter altogether. My own personal loose distinction is this: hope is faith with personal agency. Watching the tide rise, I don’t have a lot of faith that any deity, technology, or status quo political reform is going to solve the problems at hand. I do however, am willing to invest some precious hope in mine, and your ability to persevere and create the changes necessary to reset the course we’re on. Some.
Out back, a canopy of feral sunflowers stretches high and straight, motionless in the still and musky air. Ducks laze in the cool earth at their feet, stretching and shitting as the sun makes its widest arc across a sky stuffed with stagnant air and 426.83 ppm carbon dioxide, as of today. From the chicory-lined gravel frontage road on down to the poison ivy twined stands of walnut and sycamore down in yonder creek bottom, a landscape of beasts lies in repose, each flock and herd at rest in leaf shade. Sometimes, the groups of young pullets will squabble over a cicada, and the pigs will squeal argumentatively in the search for the deepest shade and coolest dirt. Goats challenge one another for the best spots to catch a breeze, and the cattle, even while deep in rumination, wage a constant battle of tail swats and ear-flicks against heat-crazed fly hordes.
But in spite of these little flare-ups of anger, perpetrated by ducks and swine and even myself at times, the world has not gone mad, yet. Not here. Far still from the brink of calamity, warm-season C4 grasses (see this previous entry for more) take advantage of the extreme heat, nourishing the stock which nourishes us and our community. Honey locusts, the unsung champions of these oppressive savanna temperatures stand strong against the sweltering calefaction, their roots holding that thin skin of hope, living dirt, in the face of fiercer storms ahead. Faithless, but perhaps not without hope, the complex community of living things, this landscape which has evolved to endure dustbowls and biblical floods and little ice ages and far spreading wildfire remains– and with some investment of the hope we guard, humans might just find a new path where feeding ourselves and supporting and regenerating the existing ecology are not two concepts at war, but seen as they are: two necessary objectives in the enterprise of saving and preserving life on earth. But it won’t be a path without discomfort— I recommend wearing something loose fitting and breezy.
I appreciate your definition of ‘hope’. I too hope we can collectively find the way through.
This may be the best post about butt-sweat I have ever read!