Micro Sustainability

by Donna Schoenkopf

One of the reasons for me pulling up stakes in California, where my children and almost five decades of friendships are, was to be in the country.

My body yearned to move and bend and twist. My bones and muscles had become frozen from non-use. I had gotten fat. Standing in a classroom for twenty years with eight-year-olds who jumped to pick up my fallen pencil or ran to get the thing I left on my desk, or begged to sweep or mop or put the books up or anything that could be of help, took away the exercise I had gotten when I was a mother and housewife who carried children on my hip, mopped floors, turned, twisted, bent down.

There was not much exercise in the classroom. I was locking up, physically.

Some of the oldest humans live on the island of Okinawa. Not only are they old, but they are very healthy and do heavy duty stuff, like farming and walking to town, all of which require stretching and bending and moving. They eat a mostly vegetarian diet, with a small amount of pork and chicken. I yearned to be like them, in a place where my daily life was comprised of moving my fat ass. I saw myself digging, hammering, planting, building. Carving a place out of raw countryside would limber me up, open up my clogged arteries, prolong my life.

It wasn’t only my physical health that needed mending. It was also my emotional health. My eyes needed to see nature in the raw. My ears wanted the rustle of leaves, bird calls, and just plain quiet. My skin needed to feel merry little breezes. After a long time in smoggy air, lots of concrete, density, I was craving nature and the peace it brings.

Another reason for moving to the country was to live the most sustainable, natural life I could. It was time for me to really act, make a statement with my life, not as a public thing, but as a personal thing. I had limited resources, but I would do the best I could with what I had. It was to be a grand experiment.

So off to Oklahoma I went. And here I am. On thirteen acres of pure, raw nature.

I live life in a micro-macro sustainable sort of way out here. I look at the big picture and make the changes I can—I drive a Prius, I do NOT spray anything, I do NOT fertilize with anything but compost, I built my house so that passive solar energy makes for a gentler footprint on the earth. That was a good start. The daily existence of life in the country is more than that, though.

To begin with, everything in the country eats everything else. There are lots of insects here, and in this drought they are devouring everything in their paths, marabunta-style. I am determined not to poison them. Poisoning them poisons us by poisoning the air and water and soil. It’s all connected.

My apple trees are devastated by grasshoppers. There are millions of the little buggers here at Chigger Lake. When I first moved here I commented on how cute they were . The first spring, sprays of baby grasshoppers would jump from the grass as I walked through. Well, I still think they’re cute, but they are no longer allowed to eat my apple trees down to the bone. The apple trees are now dressed in diaphanous white netting and look like ghosts blowing in the wind. The trees are putting out their first leaves since being stripped bare. Dark green, healthy, happy leaves. No poison.

I wear a carpenter’s apron when I water in the morning. In the pockets I keep a pen and notebook for notes and observations and different nozzles for the hoses. It’s a good way for me to keep track of what’s happening.

I used to use soap nuts for my laundry because I wanted to use my gray water for the lawn and keep my septic tank from filling up. (It takes 40 to 50 gallons of water to wash a load.) Soap nuts seemed like the most natural thing to use. Surely my grass would love it.

But I began noticing that the grass wasn’t growing where the gray water went. I thought at first that the force of the water was washing away the grass, roots and all. Then I found out that soap nuts kills the microbes necessary for plant growth. So I changed to an earth-friendly detergent, but when the grass grew back it was a lighter green than normal and was short and kind of midget-y. There must be something in this brand that’s not so hot.

Maybe I’ll just stop using soap altogether. My clothes are just as white as they were when I was using chlorine bleach. After I discovered that chlorine molecules were responsible for the ozone layer being depleted, I started using Mrs. Stewart’s bluing to whiten my whites. Then I found out it is loaded with salts which kill plants. So I stopped using bluing. This week I’m going to wash without soap. I’ll let you know how white my whites get.

As I look at everything I’m watering I notice how valuable shade is. Everywhere I look I see plants—grass, wildflowers, seedling trees—thriving under shade and scorched under the full sun. The earth retains its moisture in the shade. The dogs love the north side of the house, the shaded side, because of the coolness of the wet ground there and the lushness of the grass and what used to be the ferns.

As I water I notice the dog poop deposited on the “lawn.” It’s Joe Biden’s. No, not that Joe Biden. My dog Joe Biden.

I look closely at his poop because I see little white flecks in it. Worms? No. It’s styrofoam. Abby, the neighbor dog, still goes back to her official home and steals things like styrofoam and plastic solar outdoor lights and Smitty’s fish and brings them back here to chew on. The styrofoam goes right through those dogs. Yep. There it is. Styrofoam lasts 500 years. Styrofoam cups make up a quarter of our trash. If it is burned it gives off over 90 different hazardous chemicals, including benzene and dioxins. It’s found in all our bodies and the breast milk of our mothers.

I hate styrofoam. Seriously. Buy a damn travel mug, for crying out loud, and USE it, everybody! Use it everywhere. Wash it and put it back in your purse or by the back door or whatever you do to remember to take things with you when you leave the house. When you walk into Starbucks or pull up into a hamburger place, tell them you want to use your own mug.

I’m come around to the other side of the house. I look at the heap of papaya peelings, apple cores, wilted lettuce, watermelon rinds, which eventually turn into leathery things the dogs carry off to chew under the shade of the elms and red cedars. Much better than plastic solar lighting. All my vegetable matter is just dumped on the ground because the dogs have leaned against the screen that was supposed to contain my compost area and broke it down. I have decided to take my two lidless plastic garbage cans over to Neighbor Jim’s and ask him to saw off the bottoms so I can have some kind of containment for my nutritious garbage. I tried to cut off the bottoms myself with my little D saw, but it just bounced off that hard plastic.

As I walk through my tall, lush grass I realize I need another dog. A terrier type. A snake killer. The long grass reminds me that snakes might be in there, and with the proliferation of frogs this year, I’m pretty sure they are in there. YIKES! I hate snakes. My current three dogs always back up when they see anything that even vaguely looks like a snake—like the rubber hose of my shop vacuum. They backed up and eyed it warily when I left it lying on the floor the other day and wouldn’t come in the house.

I could get some pigs. They are notorious snake killers. But they are a lot of trouble. Pens and troughs and muck. I could try guinea hens again, but that ended up being too sad. (We shall not speak of that episode.) So will I have to have four dogs? Sigh. But it is the sustainable way to deal with snakes.

I continue watering and see that all the grasses, so many exquisite species, are tassled now. Their golden heads are about to release their seeds. They sow themselves. I don’t have to do a thing. Isn’t nature wonderful?

I check my cottonwood carefully. One large branch is covered with huge, dark green leaves, but a few have begun to wither. And still nothing on the rest of the tree. It is a goner. In September I will have a ceremonial tree cutting. We will all say good-bye and love it and thank it for its shade and then it will come down. We will use its long, thick trunk for a bench. My heart aches for it.

I water my willow tree. It’s a transplant I got from Shawna at the Sustainable Shawnee booth at the county fair. Her dad dug up a bunch of seedlings and she brought them to the booth to give away. I see droplets of sap on the bark and large red ants drinking/eating it. Some mud daubers come by for a sip, too. I saw black ants there yesterday. The sap does not bode well for the willow. Beetles again? They weren’t satisfied with the cottonwood? We’ll see.

I hear splashing down at the pond and turn to see all three of my dogs slogging through the mucky pond to get cool. Eeeew. Angela Davis is drinking that horrible water. I see a large fish jump three feet out of the water. How in the world has it survived in that hot muck? It is really hard for living things to die.

I walk over to my orange water pump, turn off the water, and survey my crazy, wild, natural piece of land. Everything is busy eating everything else. It’s all being born and dying. Everything is everything.

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