Unidentified Avian Visitor

Mystery Bird
Originally uploaded by Carfree Family

I looked out the window this morning to see a bird as bright red as an Eastern Cardinal. Later in the morning, he was still hanging around our back yard. I'm not sure what kind of bird it is -- Scarlet Tanager perhaps? At any rate, I've never seen one like it before. It's good to see a little avian variety in the backyard.

Article on Consumption

There's a great article on the modern history of consumption here.

Here's an excerpt:

Yet we could work and spend a lot less and still live quite comfortably. By 1991 the amount of goods and services produced for each hour of labor was double what it had been in 1948. By 2006 that figure had risen another 30 percent. In other words, if as a society we made a collective decision to get by on the amount we produced and consumed seventeen years ago, we could cut back from the standard forty-hour week to 5.3 hours per day—or 2.7 hours if we were willing to return to the 1948 level. We were already the richest country on the planet in 1948 and most of the world has not yet caught up to where we were then.

It reminds me in part of the thesis of Jim Merkel's book Radical Simplicity, which I highly recommend. If we all choose to live more simply, we could all work less, and with more people working less, there would be more jobs available for everyone. If it were only that simple! People would have to return to feeling happy about going down to the library to read a good book of poems in the afternoon rather than competing to see who had the largest large-screen T.V. on their block.

Fourth Anniversary of Being Carfree!

It's our fourth carfree anniversary today. I had hoped to write a long essay touching on what we've learned in the last four years, but my honeybees are keeping me very busy right now. A few quick comments is all I can manage, then I have to bike off to the hardware store for some more 1 by 10's to build more beehives.

We did not get rid of the car primarily to save money. However -- gas was $1.65 a gallon when we watched our '98 Saab pull out of the driveway, which is now a garden, for the last time. During the past four years, we have rented cars twice, most recently to drive to our canoe trip down the Mississippi. Each time, we have been very happy to hand the car back over to the rental agency. I've always had the feeling, when I filled up a tank of gas, that I might as well take a handful of cash and put a match to it. I guess I never felt that the service rendered -- being propelled along the road without doing anything -- equaled the cash required.

It is difficult to categorize many of the changes in our life as either positive or negative. Naturally, I would say I have a high degree of inertia. We did not become the type of family that goes out and bikes great distances every week. We live, generally, very locally. I'm quite happy about that. The coffee shop and restaurant in the shopping center down the street are very good, and they're right there. There's regular grocery stores in our neighborhood, one natural food store about ten minutes away by bike, and across the street from that store is Home Depot. It is perhaps a BIG negative that I will patronize a place like Home Depot, that is easy to get to, and relative easy to park my bike at -- though they did take away the bike rack, they were required by local law to have -- than to the local hardware store Empire Builder, that is a little harder to get to and requires locking up to a chain link fence across the street. I believe in shopping locally. With a little more effort, I could do more of my shopping locally, but I am in the grips of carfree inertia. We even have to force ourselves into the habit of going to the Farmer's Market. At the end of the summer, the Farmer's Market gets its permanent home in the redeveloped railyard. In the meantime, it's been shuffled around. I'm almost like a honeybee; when it gets moved, I act like I have no idea how to find it. Of course, most of those things have more to do with my personality and habits of living than with being carfree.

My kids, through being my kids, also stay close to home for the most part. We have a local public school that's pretty good, that they ride their scooters to in the morning. They play in the local park, have friends in the neighborhood, and generally live the way kids use to live before they began to be schlepped around by mini-van everywhere. I do wonder, sometimes, if they're missing out. We're not going to enroll them in soccer, because the soccer practice is out on the edge of town. Some friends we don't see often. We don't take trips up into the mountains to hike. Riding the bus downtown is a big thing. Renting a car to take a trip is a really big thing. Are our children suffering for our decision? When I look at them, I don't think so. Maybe a private school across town would be better. But they're learning, and they're engaged in the world independent of what they get at school. They read and look at books. They catch things outside and bring them in to identify in the Encyclopedia. They've adopted an elderly neighbor and spend a good deal of time helping her out. They ride their bicycles and play frisbee in the street. It's not like their lives are unbearably dull because we don't drive them around.

In terms of working as a beekeeper, yes, it would be much easier to have a truck. I could move several hives at a time, I could take them out into the country, into apple orchards and organic farms, and so I wouldn't have to worry so much about the bees bothering neighbors here in the city. I would be making more money, possibly, but I'd also be paying more money for the truck and the gasoline, and I would be expanding faster, making even more work for myself. I'm trying to serve as a template for local, non-petroleum (or biofuel, or electricity) reliant micro-agriculture on a neighborhood scale. While I don't like to dwell on doomsday scenarios, we may be heading into a time when neighborhood agriculture means the difference between a rich, well-fed, community life and a life where a group of angry people shoot at each other while fighting over the last bag of Potato chips. Even if (Peak Oil, Global Warming, the Avian Flu, radical Islam, fundamental Christianity, insert your disaster), doesn't bring the world to a state of chaos, neighbors feeding neighbors is a very good way to go.

I am very aware and very grateful of the fact I live in a community that is so easy to traverse by bicycle, that has so many stores, restaurants, cafés, etc within walking and biking distance. I'm grateful to Governor Richardson for pushing for the commuter rail against all the dissent from people who see no point to it. I'm grateful that we have one of the best Farmer's Markets in the nation, and that most of the vendors use organic methods. I am VERY impatient with all the people who say, "It's just too dangerous to bicycle in Santa Fe." Evidently, they haven't tried it. Everyone is clamoring for trails, and while some trails serve an important function -- the Santa Fe Rail Trail cuts right through the city, at least on our end, and would serve Eldorado nicely if they would only pave it all the way out to that bedroom community -- the roads in Santa Fe are fine for riding on.

I don't know how well this way of living would work if we lived in a cookie cutter suburb with high-speed, no shoulder access roads. I know there are people who are successfully carfree in those situations, but it seems it would be both stressful and dull. I applaud all of you who are doing that.

What was most surprising, perhaps, was that getting rid of the car didn't not immediately slow me down. For the first couple of years, if I saw a light turning yellow, I would start pedaling harder to get through it, even if it was much too far away. The programming to speed through a yellow light remained in place for a long time. I'm trying to live a sane, meditative, scholarly, orderly life. Getting rid of the car has helped with that, but I'm still scatterbrained. I get up in the morning with enough tasks on my mind to fill an entire week -- I've got to build bee hives, do some grocery shopping, check that hive that looks like it's about to swarm, write a blog entry, check my email, write some letters, bake some bread, etc. On top of that, I want to read. I want to make some time for meditation. I have a type B philosophy with a type A personality. I set the timer to sit and read for an hour, and after five minutes, I have to jump up and look at the clock. Sometimes I deceive myself into thinking that, if I did have a car, I could get all those errand things out of the way, and I would have more time. Luckily, I'm not stupid enough to buy that argument. I can remember rushing around even more when I had a car. I'm trying to focus on relaxing in my tasks. Unfortunately, I'm just not a task-happy person. If I spend the day engaged in tasks, I look back at the day and think, "I wasted a day doing stuff." If I read most of the day, well, actually, I do feel happier, but then I think "Man, now I have to do twice as much stuff tomorrow." I think that, as I get older, more things are falling into place, either that, or I'm more forgiving of myself.

So happy Cinco de Mayo everyone! Park those cars and walk, bike, or ride the bus. And all you Democrats out there, please contact your representatives in Washington and let them know that, if anything, gas prices are too low, and they need to be looking at spurring conservation and planning for the long term rather than pandering to voters who have not been educated about the real problems and real challenges we're facing. We are all suffering now, it's true, but the suffering is going to be much greater if we don't start reorganizing the way we live right now.

Return of the Scorcher

I'm working on an article on helmet use. The movie, Return of the Scorcher, was instrumental in placing me firmly in the middle of the fence in terms of helmets. There's a paradox that helmet use is up, ridership is down, but head injuries have risen. I believe much of this results from our society's having portrayed bicycling as a dangerous activity, requiring the use of special protective devices. We need to get back to the point where it is seen as safe as other forms of transportation. (Automobile accidents are actually the leading cause of head injuries in the U.S. and no one wears helmets in cars). While it is, of course, wise to avail yourself of whatever protection you can, a climate of fear and danger is not going to lead to a transportation revolution. Check out the riders in China and Amsterdam:

Let's All Go Green!!!! :)

I found this video posted over on No Impact Man's blog. A little bit of sarcasm is always worthwhile.

Cost of Groceries

It has been feeling like the cost of groceries is going up, though we're still trying to be frugal, I find myself shocked at the individual cost of each shopping trip. I wondered whether that was simply an emotional reaction fueled by all the stories about the higher cost of living, or if we were, indeed, paying more for groceries this year.

A quick run of a Quicken report shows that we are paying more this year:

2007 year to date: $2643.89
2008 year to date: 3145.92
Increase: $502.03

That's close to a 20% increase over last year. Of course, that's not exactly a scientific study. We were out of town for the beginning of 2007, living on the gracious hospitality of relatives, and we were in town for the same period this year. If I run the report from February 1st, there is still an increase, albeit a 9% one.

We aren't really buying different things. I'm still struggling with the fact that my basic meal is rice with something green stir fried with onions and garlic alternating with pasta and the same thing. If anything, we're eating less meat over last year, though we hardly ever eat meat anyway. Occasionally, the body just wants meat, but I try to buy local organic free range -- all that -- and even hamburger meat is twelve dollars a pound or more.

What's going to happen in the future? We're hedging our bets by replanting our backyard garden this year, after leaving that area to the chickens for the last two years. I'm also trying to learn more about wild foods. Did you know you can stir fry alfalfa? There is soooo much of it growing wild around our neighborhood. We may start substituting a little alfalfa for the $3 a bunch kale we usually use. $3 a bunch! I seem to remember Kale costing closer to $1 a bunch.

And we always have plenty of eggs and plenty of honey. I just need to focus on shifting our diet and doing more with our gardens rather than rocketing down the same path in spite of the rising cost of everything.

It just goes to show that not owning a car doesn't insulate you from rising fuel costs, though there are, of course, other factors contributing to the high cost of food.

(By the way, we did give away our goats quite a while back. They were just too rambunctious for our little back yard. One of our neighbors, however, has a full-sized milk goat, and she wants to start a neighborhood produce co-op, partly centered on the idea that I'm the only at-home-parent in the group who could go over and milk the goat every day. So it looks like I'll be goat milking anyway. That's not bad for local reliance on food).

But speaking of local food production: I have to say that I believe strongly in trying to obtain most of your food as local as possible, but I wouldn't term myself a locavore. I would much rather see the personal transportation area change, and the trucking industry being replaced by railroads. I can much better visualize a future where everyone rides bicycles or walks, and trains bring us our coffee, bananas, mangoes, rice, etc than one in which everyone continues to drive everywhere, but we roast dandelion roots for a coffee substitute and eat only local apples all winter. Don't get me wrong, I believe the local food movement has its heart in the right place, but everyone should also get their butts out of their cars and decide the best way to keep up some form of trade in the face of dwindling oil supplies and global warming. Ideally, I know, we should be riding bicycles AND drinking roasted dandelion root, but I've never claimed to be virtuous. For my epicurean indulgence, I'd choose the enjoyment of a carfree environment, and a little variety in my food. Unfortunately, we don't seem, as a species, to have the wisdom to face such choices in a wise, forward-thinking manner. By and large, we'll probably stumble along the same road until the virtuous life of privation is forced upon us by our inability to prioritize.

Of course, buy local apples over apples flown in from New Zealand, and certainly support your local beekeepers by buying honey at the farmer's markets, but produce that is not raised locally should still be able to travel by reasonable means to reach a wider market. I'll feel a little ripped off if a car-crazed nation does not take my shining example of carfree familyness seriously, and I find myself trying to describe bananas and coffee to my grandkids because consumers burned the last of the reasonably priced oil into the ever-warming atmosphere as they drove around their counties buying locally produced food.

(I do recognize and pay obeisance to those people who are both carfree and locavores. There are a few of you out there.)

The Mysterious Overpopulation of the Bees

Once again this year, my honeybees are outstripping the confines of their hives. Last week, when I checked the hives, the bees had built comb out almost to the end of four of them. I had hoped I could kick back and take it easy with my eight hives, but it looks like I'll end up the year with sixteen to twenty hives. Next week, I'll start splitting those full hives and bicycling the splits over to one of my new bee yards.

I did make a successful bicycle haul of one medium sized hive to a new yard. I've been nervous about hauling bees around on the bike. What if the comb breaks? Is a bicycle trailer really suitable for moving bees? It helps that I have top bar hives, because they're long and low, and fit nicely on a Bikes At Work trailer.

I started hauling this hive up the hill at dark, once all the bees were back. I wrapped it in a sheet to contain any bees who felt a need to come out and investigate what was happening.

Hauling bees is hard, slow work. Halfway up the hill, my trailer had a flat. The tube is supposed to be self-sealing, but I couldn't get it to reinflate, so I just had to make the rest of the trip with one tire flat.

Boy, I was sure that bouncing around with one flat tire would cause the combs to break from the top bars, but when I opened it up the next morning to transfer it to a bigger hive, all the bees and all the comb was fine.

So it looks like Carfree Bees is really going to work. But it seems that work is what the bees have in mind. They keep expanding geometrically. Eventually, the population has to level off and the hive populations reach some sort of equilibrium. I can't keep building hives forever.

Things They Never Want to Forget

I've been a little remiss in not posting a link to our friend's blog: Things We Never Want to Forget. I went through the teacher intern program at UNM with Nora. She and her husband Jon now live down in Las Cruces, and are doing the good work in trying to live more sustainably. Just take a look at those hydroponic strawberries!

I'm planning to reinstitute the garden this year. It was abandoned a couple of years ago to the goats and the chickens. Most of our vegetable growing was moved out to the front yard, into the reclaimed driveway, but, unfortunately, neighborhood cats like to use that area as a litter box, so I found what lettuce, chard, and kale that was not scratched up, a little unappetizing. I'm planning to go out to the hardware store today to get something to use as fencing, but I hate going to the hardware store, so maybe I'll just rummage around the backyard to see if I can successfully block the chickens out of the garden area with what we already have around.

The bees are doing great. I made it through four hives this week. Only one of them had eggs in queen cups, but they were still just eggs. I put some empty bars into the brood nest, and I hope that will shift their attention to comb building and away from swarming. Once they think it's time to swarm, however, sometimes they're hard to persuade otherwise.

The first of the honey is being put away, and the inside of the hives smell like giant flowers.

Canoeing Down the Mississippi

We walked over to pick up our rental car on Friday, April 28. Driving is not something you forget how to do over four years. That said, I do feel much safer on a bicycle than in a car these days. Every time I make a road trip, I think about taking back roads and visiting all those small out of the way places in America. I tried to program the GPS mapping software to route us through back roads, and it plotted a sine wave of secondary roads centering on I-40. Taking the back roads would have added another 400 miles to our trip. Is it more energy efficient to drive 55 mph over an extra 400 miles or to take the straightest route at 70 mph? We decided to save the majority of the back roads for a future bicycle tour. We stayed one night in a hotel in Western Oklahoma, drove some back roads north of Oklahoma City, and then stayed at the Checotah KOA in Eastern Oklahoma. The kids were very pleased with the KOA camping experience and insisted we stay there on the return journey. The picture above is of me in the double eagle dugout my friend John Ruskey carved with some of the mighty Quapaws, (an after school group he formed to acquaint school kids with the river), Wesley Jefferson, and others. The canoe has been used on the Sunflower River, but currently resides in the children's section of the Carnegie Public Library in Clarksdale. His dugouts are wonderful, but we were to make the trip in a 27' cypress strip canoe he built to specifications used by French fur traders on the Great Lakes.

We drove up to Memphis to put in. Originally we hoped to do 100 miles a day on the river to get us down to Vicksburg. The Mississippi is at its highest level in six years. Here are the kids at the bank of the Mississippi. Yes, they are wearing life jackets and wet suits under those ponchos. Some concerned citizen at the river front park on Mud Island called the Memphis police, who gave me a stern lecture on taking kids out on the Mississippi at such a high water level. I explained to them that we were all experienced boatmen, and that John had been guiding trips on the Mississippi for ten years. They looked disconcerted and ended by saying "we can't tell you what to do with your children."


Jerry, who is the subject of the film Nobody, met us at the putin. He had disappeared down in New Orleans after the film was made, and no one was sure where he was. He had drifted over to Biloxi and rode out Katrina in a tent. He's back in Memphis. The boat ramp at Mud Island was closed because the water was so high. In order to launch the canoe off the trailer, we backed it down over the curb through the grass of the park. We did not, by the way, damage the grass in any way, but whoever enforces the rules in the park was not too pleased with our launching from the grass and is threatening to fine John. There's an article about the launch, and the high water, in the Commercial Appeal here. Curiously, they did not mention my children's being on the trip at all. After launching, we were approached by two Coast Guard vessels who asked us a barrage of questions about radios, charts, intent of the voyage, etc. A little farther down the river, we were approached by two other Coast Guard vessels who asked another set of questions. Finally, they had to admit we were prepared for the trip and left us alone. It's hard to say whether they were just nervous about the high water, or if the concerned police at Memphis contacted them. There were barges breaking loose and crashing into the bridge at Vicksburg, and there was a report via cell phone that there was a break in the levee on the Arkansas side, but I didn't hear any more about that.


Here's Zeb at our first camp. We made about 50 river miles the first day, putting us just below Tunica Mississippi. Look how wide that river is! It was almost like paddling down a flowing lake. The surface of the water was not as turbulent as I thought it might be, though that, in part, was due to John's excellent guiding. Where dykes had been built in the river bed, whirlpools swirled, and there were some violent exploding boils in the river, but these were all avoided. Though the surface of the water was relatively placid, you could feel the force of all that water moving inexorably toward the Gulf.

I'll have to finish with the rest of the photos on Flickr. Blogger only allowed me to upload four photographs.

Second Camp

Second Camp
Originally uploaded by Carfree Family

The second day, we had lunch on the levee in Helena, Arkansas. After lunch, soon after we passed beneath the Helena Bridge, it began to rain, and it rained most of the afternoon. Sadie made a little tent out of her poncho and was happily singing and whistling away on the back of the canoe. Zebediah, however, was huddled up behind me, mumbling, "I wish it would stop raining" repeatedly. His favorite thing was playing with the campfire every night. Here are the kids at our second camp on Island 63.

Kids in Flooded Meadow Island 63

Kids in Flooded Meadow Island 63
Originally uploaded by Carfree Family

Here are the kids wading in a flooded meadow of Island 63. We had planned to stay out one more night and two more days, but the weather forecast was for severe thunderstorms, 20-30 mph winds, and possible tornadoes. We had considered just hunkering down on the island for the day, but the other two members of the expedition felt that we should go ahead and take off the river the third day. I believe we made about 120 miles altogether.

John Ruskey, Zebediah and Sadie Back Channel Island 63

John Ruskey, Zebediah and Sadie Back Channel Island 63
Originally uploaded by Carfree Family

Here's John Ruskey, Zeb, and Sadie in the stern of the canoe. We paddled upstream from our second camp, part of the time through the flooded forest of the island, to get to the channel that runs behind Island 63. Paddling upstream was not as hard as it sounds, because much of the time we were being swept along by an eddy.

Misty Morning Third Day

Misty Morning Third Day
Originally uploaded by Carfree Family

The morning remained misty, but the thunderstorms never materialized. A small group of deer ran and swam along beside us for quite a while, keeping pace with the canoe. I was surprised that they did not turn inland, or simply stop and wait for us to go past. The back channel along Island 63 was very calm. We drifted most of the way.