Some
three and a half decades ago my wife and I made a major transition
from a city life of professional careers to become rural hicks. It
was a move that we'd dreamed of doing for some time, but were not at
all sure of what we'd be walking into, so we hesitated, while we laid plans
for several years, before making the big move. The fact that we're
still here 35 years later is testimony to our tenacity—either
indicating that we've been successful or that we take a long time to
admit defeat. I'd like to believe that our survival is because we
managed to find the keys to accepting the many vicissitudes that
awaited us out here in the woods and that we found ways to live with
them, rather than seeking ways to defeat them or allowing them to
defeat us.
When
we made our rural transition, it was with the proviso that we leave
behind mainstream society's methods of domination and throwing money
at problems, by seeking simpler, low-cost ways of facing life's
dilemmas. That's a nice idea, but how do you pull it off? We weren't
sure.
Any
major change in lifestyle will find you facing problems that you
never anticipated. Your ignorance and naivete can throw you off
balance and even threaten to throw you off your game plan. I will
briefly describe a few examples of how we encountered unexpected
challenges and pretty much managed to stay in balance, even though we
got knocked out of whack a few times. In each case the obstacle was
subsequently managed, not through warfare, but by learning how to
live with it; certainly not by throwing up our hands and returning
to the city.
The
first example battle was with chiggers. Prior to moving out to the
woods I'd never heard of a chigger. It's a tiny mite that lurks in
weedy areas, waits for a human to pass by, leaps to your shoe or pant
leg, crawls up an exposed leg until it's stopped by an obstruction
like a belt, and then finds a skin pore, into which it injects a tiny
snout (somewhat like a mosquito), sucks up some moisture, and leaves
behind a toxin that will have you frantically scratching for days. I
incurred a few dozen chigger bites on my first trip out to the land
to explore it, to see if it was what I wanted to purchase. The bites
drove me crazy. The experience shortly began to cast doubts on the
wisdom of my choice to buy the land.
A
friend who knew about these biting little buggers advised me to tuck
my pants into my socks the next time out and dab some kerosene on my
clothing below the knee. Chiggers detest the smell of kerosene and
would keep away from me, he promised. I followed his instructions,
but in my enthusiasm did not daub, but generously soused kerosene on
my pants and socks. I returned from my second excursion to the land
with no chigger bites, but the skin around my shins and ankles was
red and raw for several days. In time I found more effective chigger
repellent methods and now rarely get bites... let alone blistered
kerosene ankles.
A
second nemesis that we faced was an invasion of voles in our
vegetable garden. Voles are mice-sized vegetarians who use the
underground tunnels moles have excavated. The moles are no problem in
the garden—they are carnivores looking for worms and beetle larvae.
The vegetarian voles, however, scoot along the mole tunnels until
they come upon the roots of a luscious young plant like young
broccoli. First they chew off the roots and then they drag the whole
plant down into the tunnel, to dine at leisure. We were left angrily
looking at a hole, where a broccoli plant once grew.
Like
chiggers, I'd never heard of voles, so we assumed the problem was
moles, because of the tunnels. We tried several means of defending
our precious garden plants from moles—from growing gigantic castor
bean plants supposedly to repel them, to various smelly deterrents.
Nothing worked. But I got a hint at a solution one day while reading,
that our problem was really voles. An additional critical piece of
information I read was that voles feared the smell of cats and dogs.
I brushed our dog, got a fistful of hair, and poked bits of the hair
down in the tunnels. Within a week or so, the voles were gone. I love
to chuckle at the thought of a vole meandering confidently down a
tunnel, looking forward to another broccoli meal, and suddenly
catching a whiff of dog. “What!? How'd a dog get down here? Run!”
More
on ignorance lessons next time...
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