The Joys of Autumn
He came round the corner of the house into the yard outside my window, wearing a squashy sunhat and a goblin beard, and his friend, taller, clean shaven, with a satchel over his shoulder, followed him. ‘We’re poets,’ he said, in case I hadn’t guessed.
I hadn’t guessed.
We don’t get many poets round here, so I don’t know what they look like. But I guessed they were American.
‘You’d better come in’, I said, ‘and have a cup of tea’.
We sat down and drank tea. We got on, as they say, like a house on fire. Perhaps I should have avoided that phrase, because it turned out, when I got to know them better, to be rather an unfortunate one.
I have various stereotyped notions about American poets. The one that most appeals to me has them living in upstate New York, or, better still, Vermont. They most likely chop wood, and talk of woodchucks, and, like Thoreau, they call lakes ponds. Birds called loons live on the ponds. I think of Robert Frost, and Wendell Berry, and sheds in the woods for boiling the maple syrup.
As it happens one of them lived in upstate New York, and the other in Vermont. And before I go any further I have to say that of all the BnB guests I have ever had these may well have been the ones I liked the most, and if there is any note here of mockery it is not of them.
One of these poets, years ago, moved to a patch of ground among the woods alongside a colony of Amish neighbours. The Amish live as they did when they first arrived, with old-time dress and old-time values, and they farm, by and large, with horses. And no, I don’t know what it is like to be a young woman brought up among the Amish, so I can’t judge that either way, but I incline to think they form a powerful and often supportive community – something of which I feel the loss round my neck of the woods, where many of the villagers hardly know each other and only live here because moving to ‘the country’ seemed like a good idea.
So the poet wanted to build a house, and couldn’t afford it. One of the Amish neighbours came to see him and they got to talking about houses and suchlike, and the Amish guy said ‘Those cherry trees there might make veneer logs. We’d could sell them, and fell them yellow pines back there and run them through my mobile saw, and we could build you a fine timber house. I reckon we could do that for about $30,000, and the cherry veneer logs might cover some of that. And if y’all can’t pay right away, maybe we can spread the payments. After all, we’ll know exactly where you live!’
I see him now, as his pine house mellowed and the timbers and the joinery turned golden, getting up at half past six to do a bit of writing before going on to wrassle with woodchucks and log-splittings. Unfortunately I also see him, coming back home to his timber house late one night after a poetry reading, to find it a heap of glowing embers.
He told me much of the kindness of the community. But one act outdid all the ordinary acts of fellow feeling. The Amish came back round, looked at the ruins, and set to work to build him another house. They swarmed around framing and sawing and hammering, until they were ready for the raising, when they all came up with food and drinks and claw hammers and raised up the sections of the new house. I hope they played fiddles and danced a bit too, but my poet left it to me to imagine some of that as I compared it with the sense of community round here.
Some of my neighbours only come out of the house to mow the lawn, walk the dog or get in the car. This doesn’t give my sense of community much to work with, but the other day it inspired me to pick some mushrooms for the landlady of the local pub. We have in common that we don’t like the Colonel. She dislikes him because he is rude, self-opinionated and dismissive of his wife; I dislike him most of all, I suppose, because he is one of the 0.8% of the population who chose our last two Prime Ministers, and may be looking forward to choosing a third. Nothing is said, but the landlady and I exchange a wink now and again, and I know she likes wild mushrooms. Doesn’t compare to building her a house, but then she has one already.
My favourite mushroom place is on a local hill where you can look down on the floodplain of the Wye. After the floods you can see water lying in all the ancient meanders left by the river, snaking in slow motion through the centuries across the meadows. The grassland on the top of this hill has been pasture since the war, and is a good place to pick field mushrooms. The slopes were never ploughed, and there among the thorn bushes and the rocks you can often find the small red and yellow waxcaps that give a sharpness to a fry of fungi and bright colours to homemade antipasto.
I was on my way there when I saw, in the corner of a field alongside the road, so many mushrooms that I stopped there instead. I picked a basket full, and was just leaving when the farmer drew alongside. ‘I wouldn’t eat those’, he said, grinning aimlessly.
‘Why not?’ I said.
‘Well’ he said, me resisting the temptation to write ‘Well, sez he’.. ‘we just sprayed it off.’ ‘What with?’ ‘Roundup and 2-4-D,’ he said.
‘I ‘spect I’ll be alright’ I said, mischievously. ‘You farmers reckon these sprays are pretty harmless, don’t you?’ I was guessing that he was one of those who say, of pesticides, that ‘they never done me no ‘arm’, but he was uncomfortable enough with the idea of poisoning the neighbours to say that he thought it was a very bad idea to eat them. I might have thought it was just a bit of farmer fun, an alternative to chucking me off ‘his’ land, but I had noticed a spray machine parked in the field two days before, so I dumped the mushrooms. Dealing with the possibility that wild fungi might be poisonous is one thing; that they might have been actually poisoned quite another. I had some mushrooms at home already, but the landlady had to go without. And when I went past the next day he had picked up the mushrooms and taken them away. Either that or someone else is unknowingly risking cancer or endocrine damage.
The field was a pasture field, with grass tightly grazed by sheep. Ploughing a field used to be enough to bury all the plants, but the fashion now is to kill them all with a deadly mixture of Roundup (Glyphosate) and 2-4-D before ploughing and after ploughing, before the crop starts to show. You can’t use sprays like Glyphosate when the crop is growing, because it kills everything, crop and all. That is still true here, because we have resisted Genetically Modified (GM) crops so far. In many parts of the world you can plant GM maize or soya, or whatever, that has been genetically modified to tolerate these chemicals. They tried to tell us that this meant you would need less weedkiller. But they were lying. You can use it as much as you like on these genetically modified crops, and they do. Based on evidence from the US, it has been predicted that the introduction of GM glyphosate- resistant sugar beet, maize and soybean in the EU could lead to an 800% increase in glyphosate use.
I really don’t want to bore you with the details, but if you are minded to look up these two chemicals on Google, you will find that the first websites thrown up, by the power of the algorithms paid for by the vested interests, will tell you how useful these chemicals are and how safe. Some will even explain to you how important they are as part of the environmentally-conscious agricultural regime of the EU. If you look further down you will eventually come to pages from respected scientific journals that marshal the evidence for both these chemicals being carcinogenic and harmful our endocrine systems as well as being very damaging to the environment. Some sites report court judgements from the US or scientific opinions from European research institutions to the effect that the manufacturers use underhand methods to produce ‘scientific’ reports that suppress evidence of harm. I don’t want to bore you and I’d much rather you looked this stuff up and bored yourselves. For me just now, feelings are uppermost, not facts.
Because I have been enjoying the autumn here, brevetting about like an old peasant or maybe Mrs Tittlemouse, filling my store cupboards with sloe gin and dried mushrooms, damson jam and blackberry and apple jelly, quince chutneys and pickled pears. For these few weeks the countryside of my home place has seemed full of ripeness and fruits and productivity. The bees are bustling about filling their winter stores from the ivy flowers, looking, with the yellow bags of pollen on their hind legs, as if they’ve been shopping in the supermarket. And I was off to enjoy another feed of mushrooms, so magically here today and gone tomorrow that I feel they are there for everyone, and plentiful enough to share with a neighbour in a gesture of friendship and community.
And then I find the fucking farmer has poisoned them. Once again, as Aldo Leopold said of those with an ecological education, I am shoved brutally back by a grinning farmer to where I was before the harvesting lifted my spirits, living ‘alone in a world of wounds’, wondering what else in my larder contains traces of these fiendish poisons. They get everywhere – recently a Roman bowl buried since the late Iron Age at a depth of 16 inches was found to have been corroded by pesticides that were banned 50 years ago and are still widespread in agricultural soils. (https://interestingengineering.com/science/the-effects-of-modern-pesticides-on-a-roman-bowl-from-the-late-iron-age)
Optional extra
Glyphosate is the most widely used herbicide in the world, and since Monsanto’s patent expired much of it has been made in China. (You may remember that the worst industrial accident maybe of all time was at a pesticide plant in Bhopal in India, in a subsidiary of the US firm Union Carbide).There is a powerful industry lobby arguing that Glyphosate is safe, and some EU literature even explains how its use can fit in with the EU aspirations to protect the environment. But there is also much scientific evidence that it may be very harmful to human health and to the environment, causing various types of cancer, for example. The other herbicide 2-4-D – you do have to wonder why they choose to use two herbicides at once - was the main component of the infamous Agent Orange used in Vietnam, and there are strong suspicions that it causes non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma and also sarcoma, a type of soft-tissue cancer. It may also be an endocrine disruptor, which interferes particularly with the normal actions of oestrogen, androgen, and most conclusively, thyroid hormones. Much of the scientific ‘research’ used to argue that these chemicals are safe is phoney and paid for by the manufacturers. In 2015, the WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) concluded that glyphosate is probably carcinogenic to humans. Pesticides that can cause cancer must be banned, according to EU legislation.
And yet, in 2017, such is the power of lobbying, after two years of controversy and scandals, Monsanto’s glyphosate weed killer was granted a re-approval by the EU, albeit only for five years instead of the usual fifteen.
In the US, in the meantime, landmark court cases were taken against Monsanto (based on the IARC’s opinion) by thousands of cancer victims, and Bayer (the new owner of Monsanto) was forced to pay billions of US dollars in damages. Evidence obtained during these court cases showed that Monsanto actively undermined the science regarding the harmful effects of glyphosate, which is widely to be found in human urine samples.
In December 2022, the EU permit for glyphosate will expire. Luckily I, and the landlady of my local pub, not having eaten those mushrooms, may not! It is by no means certain that the use of glyphosate will be banned in the EU, and you can bet your bottom dollar – the most appropriate currency when these giant corporations are concerned - that it will continue to be used in the vast wheatfields all over Ukraine and the USA.