Blog o’ Gnosis

For the past few days, there has been something very foul-smelling under the house. It was most noticeable in the hallway from the garage, and especially in the basement under the ritual room/music room/dream studio. Each day I monitored the smell and dreaded the inevitable search for what had died and begun decaying. If it were a small rodent, say a mouse, the smell would peak after a few days and then start to recede as the little mousie dried up. But this odor was not receding, it was getting more rich and complex each day. So today Ross and I finally undertook the basement search to find and dispose of said visitor.

Our basement is somewhere between a crawl space and a full room in height. It is a storage area for construction materials as well as lots of furniture that didn’t have a home once we moved in with Rosses dad last fall. Up until about a year ago it had been our nephew Alex’s bedroom for five or six years, so it was chock full of old stuff Alex had left behind, dressers and bed frames, antiques, plumbing fixtures, dollhouses, bags of mortar — in short, a place any sickly rodent would love. As we walked in the door, flashlight in hand, and were greeted with the first waft of smell, the thought that popped into my head was, “I’m so glad I’m not in New Orleans. I’m so glad I’m not in New Orleans.”

Following our noses toward (as it turned out) a dead rat cozied up in the insulation was gross, but I can’t even imagine wading through streets and houses filled with water, looking for corpses that have been fermenting for days in order to get an accurate count of the dead. This is among the many horrors coming out of New Orleans and the surrounding areas that I don’t want to imagine (although I do all the time), and that I believe no one should have to be actually living through.

Like most of the rest of the country, I have been watching the tragedy unfold in New Orleans and been absolutely sickened on so many levels. The days of unmitigated human suffering; the failure to act immediately after the levees failed; the lack of preparedness in the days leading up to the hurricane — this caused so much near-term horror that could have been largely avoided. The inability of the federal government to fund wetlands restoration programs that would have protected the city; the yearly reduction in funding for FEMA nationwide; the Iraq war that has drained our first-response resources and all of our money — that is a national tragedy that is all the more wrenching now for having been sickening to watch over the past five years with W at the helm of our country. (Although here’s a good piece suggesting that restoring the wetlands might not have helped New Orleans this time around. I don’t know if you can access the article without subscribing to Salon.com, but if you really want to read it and aren’t able to, email me and I’ll send you the text.)

Anyway, faced with such a national tragedy — and a national disgrace, let’s admit it — it’s hard to know what to do. Like so many others, I walked around stunned for several days, glued to the news, sending money, praying for the dead, the living, and the land. It has caused me to take a close look at how prepared we are here for an earthquake. The Loma Prieta quake in 1989 had the net effect at our house of breaking a mirror we had leaning against a chest of drawers, and sloshing water out of our redwood hot tub. Oh, the trauma of Californians! But if a Big One hits (why does everyone say *The* Big One, like there’s only going to be one?), it’s going to be more than a minor inconvenience. So I’m getting serious about being prepared for when California’s luck inevitably runs out. Everyone else who lives here should do the same, immediately.

The other thing the hurricane/flood has done is that it’s made me appreciate simple things. Right now, my favorite simple thing is goats. Goats are very intelligent, wonderful animals, and they will eat blackberry vines down to the nub! The blackberries around here are running rampant, so we borrowed the neighbor’s goats and within weeks the berries were decimated. Having a goat of our own might be the best way to keep the vines in check.

Fish is getting way expensive, as is (good, organic) meat of all kinds. In the absence of animal protein I tend to eat more cheese, but I have a hard time digesting cow’s milk cheese. Goat cheese, on the other hand, is easy to digest and absolutely delicious. The other day I found some goat gouda from Holland that was absolutely heavenly, and there’s some great local businesses that make mouth-watering cheeses from goat’s milk. Cypress Grove has lots of varieties that I’m sampling very slowly, as does Redwood Hill Farm and Bodega Goat Cheese. A big part of my simple pleasures campaign is feeling gratitude for living in a spot that has such wonderful food as I stroll leisurely through the cheese section of our local markets each week.

But I’ve saved the best for last. My absolute favorite — only for special occasions, because it’s hideously expensive ($7 a pint!) — is La Loo’s goat milk ice cream. Oh man, the flavor and texture of this stuff is out of this world, plus their recipes are incredible. Fig ice cream, strawberry that has a little sweet and a little balsamic vinegar taste, molasses ice cream, a deep rich chocolate… I could go on, but you get the idea. It’s made nearby in Petaluma, which deserves all good things from its recent renaissance of nice river-district development plus the way it’s becoming the center of so much fabulous specialty food production.

This is how I am surviving these difficult times — being frugal, working a lot, getting prepared, and every now and then having a little taste of heaven on earth. I highly recommend it. With so much of our national manufacturing capacity being dismantled and our economic dependence on other countries getting increasingly scary, it’s nice to know that even our little indulgences can help support local businesses, and encourage the creation of jobs that won’t disappear if (Gods forbid) calamity strikes nearer to home.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 4th, 2005 at 5:27 pm and is filed under General, Society. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.