a small paper for a small planet
September 29 – 30
“Bonjour. Parlez vous Englais?”
Well, damn. How could we have forgotten to bring a French-English dictionary?
The information officer at the Gare de L’Est train station shrugs and says “I speak African.”
I blurt “good!” Africa is the mother continent of humanity. Surely he’s the right person to help a fatigued family find our way to rest in Paris. And he does, although my response of “good” could mean many things or nothing to a stranger who doesn’t know me from Adam.
Recorded sounds of rural alpine life were broadcast over the audio of the airport tram that goes between the arrival concourse in Zurich and baggage claim. Pleasant folk greeting, traditional singing, the evocative sounds bovine mooing and cowbells.
We pick up our four backpacks and re-arrange belongings that will keep us as snug as turtles for five weeks. The folks in customs barely take note of us as we walk out into our first European day.
It’s no small task to leave a farm, bookshop, and midwifery practice to go on a 5 week trip to Europe with a family of four. Sitting in the Boston airport, waiting to depart, I’m hoping we planned well and didn’t forget too much.
We left our Nehalem, Oregon home in the stewardship of poet Travis Champ. He’s got his manual typewriter set up at a desk that looks out a window toward our garden. Overhead are drying bunches of Jennifer’s lavender. Hope it’s a good place for him to work.
I know I’m not the only bloke who’s fond of the harvest season. Four years ago, writer Matt Winters penned a robust tribal toast to these “prized weeks of plenty” (“We all have dirt under our fingernails,” Daily Astorian, 9/21/07). His ode to the bond of harvest is worth rereading at this time every year.
“After painfully scraping past the starvation gap, the warm but barren months between the depletion of winter stores and arrival of a new summer’s crops, at last this was the time of frenetic gathering, of reaping whatever rewards could be had from strong-hearted prayer and soul-bending labor.”
Way back when, this season marked a time of relative abundance in which our agrarian ancestors could kick up their heels. “At our core, we all are peasants,” writes Winters, and it’s true that humanity is rooted to an earthy cycle of subsistence.
P.O. Box 1096
Cannon Beach, OR 97110
Send an e-mail