I woke early to the sound of gunshot – CRACK CRACK! Then – POP! – from the other side of the house.
It was barely dawn. I popped open the iPhone and it said 6:37 am, and “freezing rain”.
Really? We’re goose hunting in the dark, icy rain?
Yup.
The gun thing around here is pervasive. They’re everywhere. I’m not startled anymore to see men with shotguns walking along the road. Yes, it’s a rural county, and certainly, the local culture is deeply rooted in the land and in local food. Waterfowl, deer, fishing and trapping. Next month, Dorchester County celebrates the great outdoors with a giant muskrat festival culminating in skinning competitions and a beauty contest. Really. And after five years, I’m still not sure I’m ready to see it. Oh, I love the idea, but each year, even though it’s on my calendar, I never seem to get in the car to go.
Why?
Intellectually, I’m all over this local food thing, believe in eating from our own foodshed, supporting local fisheries and local agriculture. I’ve been involved forever, helping build gardens on vacant land in cities, even sitting in the USDA’s first food security conferences way back in the early 1990s, when people were just starting to talk about CSAs and GMOs and urban food deserts. I’ve sat in combines with local farmers and climbed aboard Chesapeake deadrises at o-dark-thirty to go for the day’s catch.
But I’m a product of suburban American culture, and even though I have a master gardener certificate and raised beds in my yard, I only take personal responsibility for a tiny fraction of the food I eat. Yes, I sautéed greens from the garden this week and ate some oysters from the creek, but my frig is mostly filled with cheese from God knows where and vegetables from the other side of the nation and South America. I still like those frozen industrial black bean burgers you can buy in big bags at Sam’s Club, even though I hate Sam’s Club.
And the idea of watching how fast someone can skin a muskrat…
…oh, dear.
What a confusing contradiction!
I’m so full of it.
BAM-CRACK-POP!
At least somebody’s eating locally tonight.
Tracey Munson says
Great blog post! They’re popping all over near St. Michaels harbor right now also. Cold, cold, rain.
Deborah Colborn says
Kathy, I loved your essay. So true…here we have to take the good with the bad but , hey, isn’t that life!!
If you find a stray goose wanting a good home send him my way, skinned and deboned of course.
Deborah
Bill Mattimore says
Kathy,
Like you, I, too, am a ‘come here’. I have lived in one of those 400 plus home communities designed to attract folks from all over the country who are enthralled with the quaintness and charm of the Eastern Shore for the past 4 1/2 years.
What pisses me off is when people like you get settled in and then start bitching about the many of the very things that made the area quaint and charming, like the hunting, the farming, the oystering and fishing, etc. You seem to think it’s time for the ‘born heres’ to begin acting more civilized like the folks back wherever you came from.
Why don’t you do us all a favor and go back to wherever that was.