The Memoirs of a Survivor

"that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny"

Doris Lessing won the Nobel Prize for literature this year. She has me shaking in my farmhouse over a cup of chamomile tea at 10:41 pm. An hour I haven't seen in a long time- what with waking up everyday at 3:48 am (a scant 5 hours from now). I just finished reading The Memoirs of a Survivor.

The only thing hopeful about this novel is the title. She Survived? She wrote Memoirs? Wasn't killed by the hoards of 4-year wild cannibal "kids."? Come to think of it at this late hour-- she probably was making some kind of analogy about how little kids can sure eat us up-- time, energy, emotions. Hmmmmm. I've got a few of those running lose around my house too. But in the book the hoards of subterranean wordless children actually kill people and eat them. They don't just confine them to playing Pinky Pie My Little Pony tea time with Hot Wheels action for the Little Ponies (when all I REALLY want is a nap-- because I've been up since 3:44 a.m.).

Ok-- so WHO told me to read this book? I forgot who you are but remind me why you said that this was a tale of hopeful survival in the face of collapse and apocalypse? Why did I rush into Borders to buy this book on your recommendations that it would buoy me in the face of the other apocolyptic books on my night stand? I know you are someone I respect because I bought the book immediately upon your suggestions. It helped that there was a new little "Winner of the NOBLE PRIZE in literature" sticker on the front. Please write me and let me know what you found redeeming.

The book wasn't really scary until the end-- until all of the people had left the city and the author (Doris says this is as close to an autobiography as she has written) and the young girl/woman character are left alone in the city with the cannibal children in the stories above them. It was them being alone in the city that scared me. It was even more frightening just now when I walked down my pitch black stairs looking out the living room window on acres and miles of dark, empty land. I knew-- just 10 minutes ago-- that I could not stay on this farm alone. I can't be here without Mike, Alma, Jens, and Lake. What would I do without Mike? And Happy. If Happy started to bark now I would be terrified-- not just scared. The other thing that scared me was that there was no place to escape to:

"...where would we be going? To what? There was silence from out there, the places so many people had set off to reach. No word ever came back.... And what of all those people who had left, the multitudes, what had happened to them? They might as well have walked off the edge of a flat world.... news from the east: yes, it seemed that there was life of a sort down there still. A few people even farmed, grew crops, made lives. "Down there"-- "out there"-- we did hear ofd these places; they were alive for us.... But north and west, no. Nothing but cold and silence"

Looks like I'll keep writing.... if interested you can click on Continue reading.

And maybe that is an analogy for my own escape from the city. Nothing but cold and silence. Both in terms of reporting back to my friends and in real terms with my surroundings. Mike reminded me in the mosquito free autumnal bliss of September to "hold that feeling through November." Perhaps he should have said to hold it through December or January. It is so quiet, so dark, cold.

I had to get out of the house two nights ago (inside for a few days with 2-3 sick people to care for-- flu, pink eye, etc...). Alma and I walked down the 1/2 mile driveway at night. It was so dark when we got outside the halo of the yard light-- so quiet-- so alone. Alma chatted happily holding my hand and skipping on the packed snow. I was wary, nervous. Stopping to listen, to look around. It was so alien to me to be so alone in the world. Nearest inhabited house 1.5 miles away. I saw the tail light of a snowmobile on the ridge some miles away and stopped in my tracks-- not comforted. Standing solitary with my little girl in hand out on the prairie-- without even reflective clothing in the dark. But it was more eerie than that. What are we on this prairie without our warm houses to run back into? What are you as a person, a mother, out here raw and exposed? There is not clan or tribe around me here-- I mean physically around me, around us. I stood there on this cold, dark (not even a star-- I longed to see just the light of a star), empty prairie with my little girl holding my hand. "Let's turn around now Alma." "No-- let's just go farther mom." She didn't know I was afraid-- we kept walking out into the darkness.

So back to The Memoirs. It is an illusion, isn't it?
"I had, in fact, often wondered if a certain family I had known in north Wales would shelter me. They were good farming folk--yes, that is exactly the measure of my fantasies about them. "Good farming folk" was how safety, refuge, peace--utopia--shaped itself in very many people's minds in those days."

That is how it shapes itself in my mind too-- this whole moving to the farm thing. Good farming folk. December is long and dark-- that is why, I guess, we gather for hymnsings and coffee at Eidskog Lutheran afterall. Why we light the night-- why we gather across the prairie miles to sing together. This is so typical -- I always leap to the positive (ok-- so the students in the Philosopy course will be surprised to hear that). That is not what I really meant to say. Enough on the hymn sings.

We (humanity) can't survive a collapse without community. Without each other. Alone on your farm is societal suicide -- like the vignette in The Road where father and son come to a barn and go inside to see three people hanging from the rafters. Those farmers, to my mind, could not bear to live in a barren and burnt world. We need strong communities- people who respect and treat each other as equals and share like equals. You need cohesion. Where does that come from?

When I talk about what I am doing out here it is to Resettle Big Stone county. I need neighbors. But it is more than that. And who knows-- maybe it is already here.

Time for a couple Tylenol PM and I'll take this train of thought back up in May or June.

Christmas bling

Maybe there was this much Christmas all around me in St. Paul but I was oblivious or my attention dissipated by so many other distractions. I went to church in St. Paul -being among the social justice side of the religious left. So it's not like I found church in Big Stone County. But I will tell you that there is something refreshing about the lack of self censorship here. An innocent indulgence in the spirit of Christmas among grown ups and kids.

We drove out our driveway and three miles into the dark prairie-- through the low marshlands to the south and up to Eidskog Lutheran church. As isolated as any prairie church could be-- not even the occasional farmstead light along the way. We parked on the road and crunched through the night snow. We walked into the church ablaze with light and the smell of coffee coming from the basement fellowship "hall." The smell of coffee permeating from the very walls from 120 years of egg coffee brewed by generations of sturdy old world women. There were over 200 people seated in this isolated country church. We sang and listened to Christmas hymns and heard people's stories and memories of the songs they offered up. Then we moved downstairs in a rush of talking and laughter for coffee, sloppy joes, pickles, and Christmas cookies. Can you smell it?

No offering asked for.

That was the first of three hymn sings I've been to close to our farm. Aside-- in St. Paul I wasn't even asked to audition for the choir. Here a couple people told me I had a lovely voice. It's a fair, alto voice-- but here I join a choir a bit more scant. And I try very seriously to blend in remembering the women from out of town singing soprano solos amidst the congregation-- their lovely lilting voices lifted to God and the enjoyment hearing themselves standing out.

Browns Valley-- in my bones

Photo of the Couteau des Prairie. This does not do it justice. This place begs for some photographers and artists to capture the images.

I drove yesterday north and west from our farm through Browns Valley, Minnesota on my way to NDSU. This is a magical place. Magical. It is the continental divide between the Gulf of Mexico and the Hudsons Bay. I was so distracted driving here-- the landscape changes dramatically from flat corn and bean fields to a valley with boulders, grasses, and the couteau across the valley rising up in the Dakotas. Other worldly, haunting, soul touching, lovely. It feels safe and sheltered. The wind was howling-- shaking my car along the road. I felt that if I were here hundreds or thousands of years ago I would feel safe. I had the sensation that I had roots here-- ancient roots. I felt it in my bones.

The earliest people on this land were drawn here. About 9,400 years ago the ice dams broke loose and waters flowed to the north-- the Red River. How dramatic that must have been! And people made this their home shortly after that. I looked it up when I got home and found this history of the region

"The area has seen human presence for thousands of years. A Paleo-Indian skeleton now know as "Browns Valley Man" was unearthed in 1933, under circumstances which suggested death after deposition of the gravel but before creation of significant topsoil. Found with tools of the Clovis and Folsom types, the human remains have been dated approximately 9,000 years b.p.[4][12]

The Traverse Gap was used by Native Americans, who recognized its geographic significance. Two buffalo skulls were placed on the continental divide, where travelers would stop to smoke a pipe to mark the place where the waters divided."

As you pass through here you can sense that something significant is happening on this landscape. One can almost feel the continental divide.

Six weeks- one car

photo credit Chris Long
[an entry from October]

Took Alma and the boys (in burly) out for a bike ride-- 6 miles in total, about 4 miles on blacktop. After about 3 miles Alma says to me "There are no cars at all. It's kind of creepy." We rode all 6 miles without being passed by a single car. It's not creepy to me. What a change from our house in St. Paul where we couldn't let them ride bicycle even on the sidewalks. Strangers and neighbors constantly pulling into driveways and turning around. We saw a little girl on our block riding on the sidewalk get hit by a car turning into a driveway. She was ok, but her bike was crushed.

We lived here for 6 weeks before I saw a car drive down the gravel road at the end of our driveway. Alma and I were riding bike up the driveway and I looked to the north and saw a truck coming down the gravel road. I actually said out loud "what is that?!" Six weeks -one car.

That was in mid-October. Then the harvest started and hunting season and the world came alive with men. Tractors, trucks and combines all night long, all around us. You should have seen the harvest moon and the men out working the fields. I drove home to the farm from the Cities-- looking at the suddenly populated acres that had been sitting so still and quiet for the first six weeks we had lived here. The moon so bright-- it was enchanting.

And hunters everywhere. One of Alma and my last bike rides we were on our way back home when a truck of hunters approached slowly and rolled down the windows. The urban alertness in me made me feel really frightened. Alma and I were in a completely isolated area with a truck full of men approaching. We were wearing blaze orange and the men laughed and asked us if we were hunting. They said they were from the Chokio area and waved goodbye.