ramblings

I am surely the only person in America right now whose goal is to eat more meat. Yes, you heard that right. More meat.

People tend to assume that I am a vegetarian, although I’m not and never have been.  But it is true that for many years I ate little poultry and almost no red meat.  My reasons were mainly gustatory, as there was little meat that I really liked.  Environmental concerns also figured into the habit: Diet for a Small Planet and the More-with-Less Cookbook were around the house when I was a kid, and I read them.

So why the sudden change?  I have been very, very tired for several months, and the last time I went to give blood I was a little too anemic.  I eat very well and should in theory get plenty of protein from legumes and milk and iron from spinach, but I wondered, since suddenly I started to crave meat more often, if there might not be some crucial animal protein or other nutrient that my body was missing.

The second reason has to do with where I live.  We do not grow a lot of produce in Wyoming, especially at 6000 feet.  What we mostly grow are animals: things that can eat what passes for grass out here, with a side of sagebrush.  I’m not a hunter, so I don’t have a freezer full of elk and venison.  But I do have a store where I can buy local meat.

There are, of course, detrimental environmental consequences to raising cows in the arid west.  But are they any worse than the consequences of Midwestern feedlot beef pumped full of hormones and fed on corn?  And is the carbon footprint of a lamb or cow that came from a ranch within 50 miles of the store really greater than that of the eggplants and peppers and tomatoes that get shipped in from Chile?

I haven’t done the calculations, and so perhaps I’m wrong, but I would guess that it’s about a wash.  So last week I made my great-grandmother’s meatballs.  Tonight I sat down with a lamb chop, some mashed potatoes and parsnips, and some broccoli.  Later this week I’m going to make the dish my mother and I called simply “hamburger-spinach-egg-mushroom.”   And after that, perhaps lasagna.

And oh, did I mention? I’m also planting a garden.

I just upgraded this blog from WordPress 1.5 to the current version, which I believe is 2.3.3.  Yeah, I missed a few in there.  I’m also planning to play around with the theme some, so if you read this from the source rather than via aggregator, you may see some changes.

In other news, on Saturday, for the first time in my life, a candidate I caucused for won.  Wyoming Public Radio feels, for some reason, that telling you about its upcoming pledge drive (which, while very short, is unbearably annoying) is more important than telling you, oh, say, news, but happily NPR and the AP come through with the results, even down to the county.

I got to the caucus site about ten minutes before it started (under normal Wyoming circumstances, that would be early) to find a line to get in.  I didn’t even have to wait in line at the DMV when I got my Wyoming license; I rarely have to wait in lines at the grocery store.  I had a nice time chatting with my fellow registered Democrats, though, and one turned out to be a fellow librarian.  The organizers of this caucus had somehow missed the national press attention that Wyoming was getting in the days prior to the caucus, and they had thus booked a room that holds about 25 people.  There were about 300 people there, and so they had us crowd around the main floor and the balcony of the floor above.

Where I come from, a caucus means getting a bunch of people in a large room and saying, “Okay, if you’re for the woman, go over there; if you’re for the black dude, go over there.”  (And then, because it’s the first caucus in the nation, you get about ten more choices, which as you may imagine is why I have never before caucused for a winner.)  In this caucus, we still heard some speeches and endorsements, but then we filled out ballots sort of like this one and deposited them in a cardboard box with a hole cut in it.   After that, there may well have been more, but I’ve been ill and so I left to come back home and sleep before my week of Missoula Children’s Theatre (brought to you by the Park County Arts Council, of which I am a proud member) and Thinking Ahead (where I’m going to be talking about Radical Reference).

Although it was exciting to have voted for a winner, I am not really all that excited.  There’s enough background about what I think and who I’ve voted for elsewhere on this site.  Suffice it to say that, while the candidates whose positions I really admired have long since dropped out, I am trying to see that having either a woman or a person of color as a major party nominee (and, one hopes, as President) is a major symbolic step for this country and the world.

I did not, as a rule, attend athletic events when I was in high school. I went to the cross-town rivals football game my sophomore year, but since I got into the game by pretending to be a member of the opposing team’s art club, I’m not sure that counts. (The art club was painting faces at the game as a fundraiser, and my best friend went to that school.)

Since I moved to Meeteetse, though, I try to go to a few games. As a result, as I frequently tell people, I have gone to more sporting events since I moved here than in the entire thirty prior years of my life combined.

Basketball is my favorite sport to attend (a good thing, since it’s one of the few offered here), probably because it moves quickly and I even sometimes have some notion of what’s going on. I hadn’t been to a game yet this year, though, and I heard that tonight’s game would be a good one.

Games are well-attended here–I’ve only seen larger crowds at funerals. People quickly drop attending concerts and plays once their kids have graduated, but many of them still show up for games. Never having been to games elsewhere, I can’t offer much by way of comparison, although I imagine they are a lot the same–people yelling advice to the players and cursing the refs from the sidelines, teenagers clambering over one another and rearranging themselves according to complicated and esoteric teenage pecking order rules, little kids trying to see the action, parents trying to keep track of their little kids, and so on.
During half time I chatted with my neighbor from down the street, who asked if I’d made the cheese soup yet and said to come knock on his door if I needed a bottle of beer for it. He’s also trying to organize a moonlight ski for next month, but sadly I’ll be in Salt Lake City at a library conference.

The superintendent, one of the old school board members, and a couple of other guys are always standing and leaning against the wall with their arms crossed at these events. I told them at the school concert back in December that I was going to buy them all white t-shirts and packs of cigarettes to roll in their sleeves. “It’d send the wrong message about smoking, but it’d be such a great photo op,” I said. And I suppose the 50s image is appropriate for these small town moments and small town games.

We started out strong but lost by 11 points. There are a few more games to go, though–perhaps I’ll even make it to another.

How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings. Luke 13:34 [partial]

I had thought to do a little blogging of the Lenten study we’re doing at my church (which does not have a website–it doesn’t even have a computer) but hadn’t gotten around to beginning. What follows is only marginally related to our actual Lenten study.

The Hermits have of late been considering biology and humanity, sex and gender, topics which lend themselves to diverse pursuits–scientific inquiry, theological reflection, and, of course, the taking of online quizzes.

The Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion, meanwhile, have been considering similar questions, although in a somewhat graver and larger fashion. (Background via Google or the NYT, if you are so fortunate as to have a subscription).

Today I heard the following opinions expressed:

• gays are sinners and should be punished appropriately
• gays are sinners and need to be saved
• gays are children of God just like the rest of us
• gays choose to be gay
• gays have no choice about being gay (and, in an interesting variation, 3/4 of gays have no choice about being gay)
• gays are gay because of a birth defect

Despite my years of regular church attendance, I am the sort of person that Ann Coulter would doubtless describe as a godless liberal (although I usually tell people I’m a communist–why not go all out, I figure?). In the course of my eastern education and upbringing (remember, anything east of Cheyenne is “back east”), I had never heard the last of these before.

I mentioned that I did not think that gay people were defective. The speaker said they were not defective (what with all being God’s children and all), but they were not perfectly formed in God’s image in the same way that people with birth defects are. I said that it seemed to me that since we are all part of God’s creation, God probably intended for us to come in a variety of configurations and sexual orientations and so on and so forth. I’m not sure how that went over.

It has occurred to me lately, though, that when we say that gay people are gay because they can’t help it, because they have no choice in the matter, we are doing them something of a disservice. Saying “you have no choice” is not quite the same as saying “you have a birth defect” (and, I should note, this whole discussion is probably doing an enormous disservice to people who have birth defects, who are also no less human than the rest of us), but it implies that you are to be pitied, that you are, in some way, a less than perfect example of God’s creation–sort of like saying that if you are female, you are somehow less able to relate to God, since in his human incarnation he was male.

Last week in Lenten study our lesson was Luke 13:31-35. I noted at some point that I thought it was either interesting or nice or both (I can’t recollect which adjective I used) that Jesus chose a feminine image in the bit quoted above–the mother hen gathering in her young.  I have for years–for as long as I have been thinking about it–believed that humanity encompasses male and female and indeterminate and in-between, heterosexual and homosexual and bisexual, and, in general, more things in heaven and earth than we can dream of.  Is there any reason that God should not also encompass all these?

I don’t consider the people whom I listened to today to be intolerant, on the whole.  But sometimes it’s very clear to me that I come from a different place.  We have a gender neutral restroom at our church, but we don’t call it that, and I don’t know that anyone thinks of it that way.  But I may start to think of it as such–to be happy in the knowledge that there’s a place you can go around here where you don’t have to choose a label.

Last month I didn’t have water for a week, and I decided to write something about it for Writers on the Range. Since they don’t seem to want it, I thought I’d post it here. If you find yourself fascinated with my water situation, rather than that of the larger west, you can read more on Vox.

I am happy to report that next weekend, I’m moving to a house, where, I have been told, the pipes never freeze.

——-

“The West begins,” Bernard DeVoto wrote, “where the average annual
rainfall drops below twenty inches.” The Conservation District where I
live recently released its figures for 2006: we got a total rainfall
equivalent of 6.71 inches. We are indeed in the West, going into the
eighth year of a drought.

You know that simply from looking around at the brown fields, the low
muddy reservoir, the dust that blows through your screens in the summer.
But I don’t think you really appreciate it–at least I didn’t–until
you have in some personal way gone without.

During a recent cold snap, my pipes froze, and for the past four days I
have had no water in my house but what I have brought into it. I called
my landlady to tell her about the situation and mentioned that I had, as
she suggested, left a couple of taps dripping. “Not dripping,” she
said. “Dripping won’t do it; you’ve got to leave them running.”

“Well,” I said, “it’s a good thing I don’t pay for water by the gallon.”

Yes–you heard me right–in a place that got fewer than seven inches of
rain last year, I get all the water I want for $35 a month. Granted,
it’s horrible water, much too alkaline to drink. If you water plants
with it, they shrivel up and die. But you can flush toilets with it,
and shower in it, and wash your dishes in it.

I suppose, though, that my water situation is no more ridiculous than
those of Phoenix, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas, cities that owe their
existence to the water they repurpose from western rivers, many of which
start up here in the Rocky Mountains. We know that the desert is not
made to support such a large human population, and that it is only
through the considerable intervention of human beings in the natural
world, mostly the damming of rivers, that so many are able to live there
(and, for that matter, grow lawns there). Even the biggest proponents
of growth in the desert southwest are beginning to admit that it may
face an end. The Christian Science Monitor reported last month that
the Central Arizona Project has said that current water supplies will
serve the nation’s fastest-growing state through 2030 and projected
water supplies through 2045. After that, according to a CAP planning
analyst, growth will depend on “possibly available supplies” and, after
a certain point, “uncertain supplies.”

It is hard to remember when you stand in the cold rushing waters of a
mountain river, nothing like the slow, meandering rivers of my
Midwestern childhood, that you live in a land of little rain. It is
harder still when there is water there, all you want, when you simply
turn on a tap in your home. But of course the plentitude of water is an
illusion, like the mirages you see on the highway on a particularly
sunny day.

In the past few days, I have been thinking about how much we take water
for granted, and about how much water we take for granted. I’ve been
doing dishes in a sink only a few inches full and flushing my toilet
only once a day. I have not wiped down my counter tops or cleaned my
bathroom sink or mopped the kitchen floor. I haven’t made pasta or soup
for dinner. Yesterday I took up a friend’s offer of a shower, and it
felt positively decadent to let all that water run over me and down into
the drain.

I believed when I first moved here that I was becoming more attuned to
my use of water because I had to haul in all the water I wanted to
drink. It was not until my pipes froze, though, that I realized just
how much water I use that I don’t even think about–washing my fingers
off after I’ve cracked an egg, wetting a sponge to wipe off a counter,
rinsing my toothbrush.

In a few more days the temperature is supposed to rise above freezing,
and the water in my pipes will flow again, and I’ll do loads of laundry
and make spaghetti for dinner, and when the temperature dips down again
I’ll leave my faucets running. And I will think, well, it’s not potable
water anyway, and I don’t pay for it by the gallon, but at the same time
I will wonder about water and waste, about human progress and human
fallibility.