Cottonwood tree, Garfield County, Utah
Exploring the boundary between muted color and B&W. Somehow, 89% desaturation is a sweet spot. Thanks to Guy Tal for dragging me and my camera out of my funk and to a new-to-me location.
Dear local business owner:
I am trying to do right for my local economy and neighbors by spending more of my retail dollars locally. But you are making it difficult. I hear you complaining at the local chamber of commerce about how tough business is in this economy, but I wonder if you have any idea how much harder you are making it for yourself. Here’s 7 reasons why you are losing money, at least from me:
There’s a curious phrase that Utahns often end conversations with: “‘preciate ya!” Here’s a news bulletin: when your actions don’t match the words, it’s the actions (or lack thereof) that count. Every time. So I’d be happy to show my appreciation by opening my wallet, if you’ll do the same by acting like you really appreciate my business.
Pug wearing a clown collar, Wickenburg, AZ
When I teach my intro class, I often put my 50mm lens on my camera and make a portrait of one of my students from less than two feet away, closer if I can without overly stressing their personal space. Everybody in the class is watching me, wondering what’s going to happen. I put the camera down and ask, “was that comfortable?” Invariably the student says no. Then I tell them it doesn’t feel so comfortable on the other side of the lens either, at first. And to get over it.
I don’t really aspire to scare my students, but I have two points. First and best said by war photographer Robert Capa, “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.”
My larger, real point is to make the shot anyway even if you fake the confidence needed to get it done. Confidence comes from experience, not the other way around.
In other words, it’s ok to lie to your subjects. If you messed up the exposure, tell them they look great, you just need to fine-tune some settings. If the camera angle you’ve chosen emphasizes a sagging chin, you can “remember” another look you’ve always wanted to try. You don’t need to convince anyone they look like a supermodel. Just that you mean to do no harm and that you are looking at them with kind, trustworthy eyes. If you exude confidence, even if you don’t feel it, chances are high that a good feeling will be reflected back from your subject.
Here at the ranch, we just grafted our first 50 apple trees. Grafting blades are beveled only on one side; it’s supposed to help get a sharp clean edge. For that to work, you have to wield a new kind of knife with confidence. It helps to sharpen it regularly, but those first few cuts weren’t easy. Cutting timidly didn’t help either, it just shredded the tree bark. Only time will tell if any of my first grafts take. I’m also sure I will get better with practice. But in the moment, it helps to be able to “fake it until you make it.”
Experience is the only thing I know that transforms the fake aura into a working confidence, so second nature you don’t even need to think about it. I wish I could say no trees were killed in our first round of grafting. But I am 100% sure that, no matter how loud a subject balked, fussed or complained, no one ever was actually harmed by taking a portrait. Go ahead, get a little closer.
Seedlings under artificial lights
Even my long-time friends, the ones who know me well enough not to be surprised by much, ask why we have become novice farmers at this relatively late age. Why do we want to work so hard? I ask myself that regularly, when my back muscles are sore from shoveling dirt or worse, when R was hand-digging irrigation furrows by moonlight until 2 am, when the deer rampaging in the orchard almost broke my heart.
It would have been a lot easier to fence off a little section of the pasture for our house, let the neighbors keep running horses on the rest of the parcel, and go hiking every weekend. Loads of people who move here do just that. Even better, if they want that lifestyle, they buy above the ditch, unirrigable land, install minimalist xeriscaping and have more time to play. And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that choice. It’s just not mine.
When I was eight and growing up in Orange County, California, we moved into a new subdivision. That first year, we could smell the orange blossoms at night from the nearby orchards. My mother shopped at a farm stand for strawberries and artichokes in the spring, melons, tomatoes and sweet corn from Fourth of July until fall. Soon more bulldozers scraped the topsoil off the surrounding land and the orange groves succombed to the footprint of yet another sterile “planned community” with its five HOA-approved colors of beige paint.
Even as a child I wondered where our food would come from if we planted houses instead of crops on good farmland. I spent my college years in the Bay Area just at the germination of the locavore food movement. I had no money to dine at Chez Panisse, but I feasted vicariously through newspaper reviews and recipe clippings. My student co-op had a garden. I knew my way around California Chardonnays; picnicked at Ridge Winery; Caymus Vineyards’ founder Charlie Wagner once signed a bottle of wine for me.
Sure, for the vast majority of us, food comes from the grocery store (unless you are poor and without transportation, when all too often it comes from a convenience store; calories are cheap, it’s nutrition that is expensive. 7-11 doesn’t stock fresh veg). Food for most of our local restaurants in Torrey arrives on Fridays on the Sysco and US Food Service trucks. After each driver unloads his order at the competing hamburger joints on the main highway, they swap parking spaces and unload some more, engines running the entire time. Ever wonder why so much restaurant fare tastes the same across America? It all comes out of the same catalogs, delivered in the same shiny metal trucks, on 30 days credit and a single invoice to pay each month. A very few chefs seem able to improvise from the catalog wares, but I digress.
Rock-hard tomatoes, tasteless factory-raised chickens, strawberries that can ship 1500 miles without bruising or ripening, that’s what our grocery stores have on special each week. As soon as I got my own patch of ground 20 years ago, I started gardening. But I don’t need literally acres under cultivation to enjoy a ripe peach, just one tree. And while I admire the fortitude of those pushing the limits of self-sufficiency and permaculture, I also admire Olympic athletes and Peace Corps volunters without wanting to emulate their lifestyles. So why go to all this trouble?
Here at Stray Arrow Ranch (that isn’t really a ranch), it’s a close-to-sacred belief in stewardship and responsibility to use this land wisely that has motivated all of this work. We have subtracted close to a half acre from potential cultivation for our house. It feels important to intensify the productivity of the remaining arable land.
Recently, I was looking at the grocery store for apple juice and applesauce. Much of the apple juice sold in America comes from concentrates, most likely produced in China (selling last month for $7.00 a gallon in the east coast markets according to the USDA). or South America. The U.S. Apple Association insists imported concentrates are safe; meanwhile the FDA is investigating reports of elevated arsenic levels in apple juice concentrate, most likely from lead arsenate residues from pesticides. I scoured the aisle to find a product grown in the USA and gladly paid extra when I found it. Not that USA-produced is any safer. I’m no diehard locavore–I love my luxuries like imported parmesan cheese, but bothers me to buy staples like fruit juice from halfway around the world.
It’s the Walmart effect, where saving 5¢ on a jar of applesauce trumps all reason. I understand household budgets, but the end result is all wrong. Never mind the environmental impact of shipping food globally, do I really want to eat fruit raised in a third world country with a shocking record of food safety in its domestic supply? Or have we already forgotten about infants dying from melamin-tainted formula? Can I really rely on the U.S. federal government inspection programs (under constant fire from dwindling budgets) to ensure that my imported food is safe?
As far as our national food supply, what concerns me more than the safety risks of what is sold, but food security. Things get pretty crazy in Washington D.C. and the 24-hour news media cartel whenever some oil-producing state decides to disrupt the world crude markets. Think about how disruptive it would be to our economy if were were food-dependent and a rogue state interfered with the global food supply chain. That’s not a world I want to contemplate for long.
I am too much of an optimist to lay in a survivalist’s quantity of canned wheat. But I am going to do my part to “be the change I want to see.” Locally grown food, robust and resilient webs of food distribution, regional culinary delights. We have planted at least 70 varieties of heritage apples in the belief that at least some of them will excell in our climate. I would love it if one of my neighbors started using our apples to produce a value-added product like cider jelly, even better if one of them took up making parmesan.
Even our small house took out a significant chunk of arable land so that we could have the privilege of living here. In exchange, I became steward of the what’s left of our acreage, with the responsibility to make it a more productive and fertile for the long haul. When I’m up before the sun to take our irrigation water turn I remind myself that’s why I’m doing this. I’m grateful to have a partner who shares my willingness to work. And seeing the yellow warbler that flits through the branches at dawn? That’s the lagniappe, the 13th donut in the bakers’ dozen, the gift of a magnificient abundance that renews this earth each spring, if we don’t trash the place up. Be the change.
Copyright 2003-2013 Ann Torrence.
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