Come join our multidisciplinary celebration of the Santa Cruz River: Music + Art + Landscape
including my essay “River Notes” in a mashup with Prokofiev and other works. Concert is free.
For details and reservations: https://scfpapresents.org/performance/watershed-soundscape-a-music-art-landscape-event/
Patagonia Opera House, Patagonia, Arizona, 6PM on January 25.
UPCOMING MULTIDISCIPLINARY CONCERTS:
November 21, 2024, 5-7 PM | Watershed Management Group Living Lab | Tucson
November 22, 2024, 5-7 PM | Watershed Management Group Living Lab | Tucson
November 23, 2024, 5-7 PM | Watershed Management Group Living Lab | Tucson
January 25, 2025, 6 PM | Patagonia Opera House | Patagonia
Living Lab tours begin at 5 PM • Concert at 6 PM
Join us at the WMG Living Lab for a multidisciplinary concert experience exploring the sounds of our watershed. Before the concert, take some time to enjoy rainwater refreshments and tour WMG’s demonstration site for hydro-local living and watershed resilience. The campus is supported by rainwater for all indoor and outdoor needs almost year-round, and includes extensive rain gardens, a native food forest, a 10,000 gallon underground cistern, art exhibits about Tucson’s history of flowing creeks and rivers, a kids’ play area, composting toilets, and so much more.
This unique event is supported by the 2024-2025 AIR Annual Resilience Theme Award.
HEAR MY CONTRIBUTION TO THIS COLLABORATIVE CELEBRATION OF THE WATERSHED:
The music for Sergei Prokofiev’s Quintet, Op. 39 (1924) originated from a chamber ballet, Trapeze, which he composed in Paris for a traveling troupe of five musicians. Unique in its instrumentation and vibrant textures, the piece has been called “one of Prokofiev’s most radical scores.” In this performance, the Quintet is brought into dialogue with excerpts from a contemporary essay, River Notes (2024), which Alison Hawthorne Deming wrote specifically for the Watershed Soundscape project. Here, Prokofiev’s six movements are unceremoniously excerpted and tossed out of order. Mapped onto the themes and colors of Deming’s prose, the music becomes both illustrator and provocateur, providing sonic commentary on themes of our watershed’s environmental and cultural histories.
GUEST POST BY ABBY DOCKTER
The Thirty-Thousand-Foot View
When I interviewed Richard Collins, retired Southern Arizona rancher, he asked the first question: “What have you read?”
Specifically, he wanted to know if I was a Sand County Almanac fan or a Monkey Wrench Gang member, and where I fell on the Aldo-Leopold-to-Edward-Abbey scale of ideas about wilderness preservation. “I lean much more towards Leopold and people like Wendell Berry,” he said. “Abbey just wanted it all to himself.” Collins, like the writers he admires, believes there is a way for humans to eat and drink and take up space without wrecking too much. He operated a ranching business for three decades in the Canelo Valley, working first for the Sibold family, then buying some acreage along with grazing permits for surrounding state and federal lands. His background was in epidemiology, which, he said, is the ecology of tiny, disease-causing organisms, so he had a handle on ecological principles. Disease is perhaps the prime example of how humans are part of a broader ecology.
Then an endangered species of fish, the Gila Topminnow, appeared in Collins’ grazing lot. The Fish and Wildlife Service wanted all grazing in the Red Rock Canyon watershed to stop, which would have made Collins’ business a no-go. In many ways, it was a classic conflict between a federal agency and private ranches. But this experience with federal regulation prompted Collins to wonder if there was a way to run his business that also addressed ecological concerns. He and his neighbors formed the Canelo Hills Coalition to see if they could insure the health of the watershed just by adjusting their grazing practices. They brought in George Ruyle, UA’s sustainable rangeland management expert, who set up vegetation surveys. They monitored conditions and put up new fencing and water sources to control where cattle could go in each season. And they were considered successful, says Collins, “by the people who evaluate these things. The federal agencies and the university and my peers in the ranching industry.” Not to say the fish.
Collins reminded me of some of my own family. Retired, but habitually dressed for outdoor work. A busy brain and sturdy opinions. Even his sense of humor and turn of phrase, and the way he pronounced a long period without water “drouth.” But what I liked most about Collins, and so many other people from the Patagonia area that I met during Southwest Field Studies in Writing, was their blend of practicality and idealism. Agriculture is an undertaking with a pretty clear rock bottom. But people around Patagonia think there must be a better way of doing things, and are willing to take a chance to find out.
One evening I wound my way along the Santa Cruz River to talk to Dean Fish, manager at the Santa Fe Ranch Foundation. He situated me immediately: “We’re located about six miles north of the US-Mexico Border, northeast of Nogales, Arizona. The Santa Cruz River bisects the ranch, and so we have what we call uplands on both sides and semi-riparian river valley in the middle. The main ranch is approximately 25 hundred acres of private grazing rangeland and about 65 acres of that is irrigated to provide forage for livestock and wildlife.” He spoke loudly over the hollering goats, and ignored the light rain falling as we sat in front of an adobe wall with peeling whitewash.
Fish is a good communicator, knowledgeable, generous, and extraordinarily nerdy about cattle. Exactly the kind of person you might want at the helm of a foundation that provides not only beef, but also education, a model for management, and even an animal therapy program to the surrounding community. The Santa Fe Ranch Foundation employs people through the Santa Cruz Training Program, which connects developmentally disabled people to opportunities in the county. This ranch is a private business with its own bottom line, but it is operated by people who know how their business fits into something larger. When I asked Fish what principles guide his decisions around here, he talked about “the 30,000-foot view.” From 30,000 feet, this ranch is part of a landscape, these cattle are not the only ones who need the river water, and people who live nearby will always be part of the picture.
I asked Collins and Fish a few of the same questions, and some they answered alike. When asked how they know what to do day-to-day as managers, they both answered, essentially: Go look. Get to know how water moves, how grass responds, how the animals look, and how weather impacts everything. Both Collins and Fish maintained long-term vegetation monitoring programs to make sure they had accurate information for their decision-making. Collins believes “fiction writers and bad movies and songs and all that kind of stuff” that romanticize agricultural life have done real harm to people’s understanding of where their food comes from. But I still find something romantic about this eminently practical, deeply observant experience of a place.
I asked both men what it means for land to be healthy. I am interested in this question both practically and idealistically—the principles that guide decisions, and the practices that create them. I am interested in the 30,000-foot view and the view at the end of a microscope.
Fish said his overarching priority is always to leave the land better than he found it. But he also offered specifics, his picture of ideal rangeland: “I think that healthy land is land that has seen minimal erosion, that has good ground cover and a diversity of plant species on it. And that supports multiple uses: wildlife habitat, livestock grazing, recreation, hunting or camping.”
Collins took longer to answer. He rubbed the back of his neck thoughtfully. “You’re talking about health, and it’s a hard term to get my hands around because it’s so broad and ambiguous.”
“Intentionally so,” I said.
He nodded. “But it does convey the sense that like human health, you have to have all your systems working. At my age they’re beginning to break down a little bit, so I understand. Things fall apart. It has that same sense. But how you evaluate it and describe it is difficult.
“I guess in a nutshell, if you want to summarize my view of land health: It’s got to work for the rancher, got to be able to make a profit. It’s got to work for the health and integrity of the watershed, and that means the plants, the water cycle, and the other animals that are using it, including obviously endangered species. And you’ve got to work very hard to do it. It’s not an easy thing to do.”
“Multiple uses” has a dubious history in the U.S., and there is no hard-and-fast line between use and exploitation. But listening to Collins and Fish, I was imagining an ag industry with these priorities. Imagine for a moment that the economy exists to serve quality of life, and not the other way around.
The University of Arizona Creative Writing Program is pleased to announce the third year of its Field Studies in Writing Program on Grand Manan Island in the Canadian Maritimes, made possible with support from the Agnese Nelms Haury Program Environment and Social Justice and under the leadership of Alison Hawthorne Deming, Haury Chair and Regents’ Professor. This initiative is intended to explore how the literary arts can create humane responses to climate change, environmental, social justice and border issues. The program has launched a companion project Field Studies Southwest this summer in southern Arizona. We will include posts for that project here as well, so stay tuned for portraits of two “border” regions.
Three MFA Creative Writing candidates will participate in each project, spending two weeks in residence to work on research and writing based on site visits, field trips, archival research, oral histories and interviews. The goal is to spur documentary arts project and community collaborations bringing to light new place-based stories.
GRAND MANAN, New Brunswick, Canada
Grand Manan with its 200-year history in traditional fisheries is in a period of radical cultural shift due to the decline of fish in the North Atlantic. This working island with 2500 year-round residents is Deming’s summer home, where she has been a part-year resident since childhood. The viability and sustainability of the local culture is deeply tied to the sustainability of marine life. In recent years the island has enjoyed a bountiful lobster harvest, as the crustaceans move north with warming ocean waters.
2017 FIELD STUDIES GRAND MANAN AWARDEES
Katie Gougelet is an MFA candidate in Creative Nonfiction Writing. She writes about environmental change, contamination, health, and justice. She is currently working on a project to understand the United States’ transition away from coal power, and what this transition means for the long-term health of communities that used to provide this resource to the rest of the country.
Claire McLane is an MFA candidate in poetry, born and raised in Tucson, AZ. The natural world of the Sonoran Desert and the Sky Island region play a critical role in her creative process. Claire’s poems are interested in the unseen structures of self/body, environment, family, economy, memory, and grief. Claire has a five-year-old son whose presence is strong in her writing, as is her experience of motherhood. Claire has been interested in black and white photography since she was a child, and has logged many hours in the darkroom, but hasn’t dived fully into the digital world yet, and would like to explore combining photography with her writing.
Josh Riedel is a fiction writer from Oregon. Before enrolling in the MFA program at the University of Arizona, he worked for eight years in the technology industry, at Facebook and Instagram. He writes about how technology (re)shapes the world around us. He serves as a digital editor for Fairy Tale Review and reads for Sonora Review. He’s taught English in Vietnam and at the University of Arizona and has also operated two Ferris wheels.
NEW ARRIVALS
Joshua Riedel, Claire McLane and Katie Gougelet arriving on Grand Manan V on July 5
POST FROM ALISON
Introducing the island to newcomers is always a pleasure. From Swallowtail Lighthouse to Southwest Head, beauty abounds. At this time of year when the lobster fishing as just ended (except for the Grey Zone) for the season, I especially enjoy seeing work begin constructing herring weirs. In North Head near the fishermen’s wharf, stacks of timbers have arrived, sharpened to a pencil point, that will become weir stakes. The stakes are up to 70 feet long, some a bit longer. They are sugar gum and oak, some spliced with metal collars to attain the needed length for driving them into the ocean floor to anchor the twine.
Weir stakes ready to go
Birch top poles
Herring weirs are a commercial
scale adaptation of the traditional brush weirs built
along the Atlantic seaboard
by Native Americans. They work well at capturing herring
that come close to shore to feed. And they are a beauty
to behold.
The Intruder is a weir built below Swallowtail Lighthouse.
This one is not yet up for 2017, but rumor has it that it will be soon.
Intruder, 2010
We also spent 45 minutes of hard labor helping Friends of Grand Manan Trails lay down asphalt shingles along the boardwalk at the Anchorage Park. With about 20 able workers, a job we thought would take 3 hours was speedily accomplished The boardwalk has been perilously slick in wet weather, so this will make it safe for all such occasions. And it turns out our writers are quite capable with a hammer.
And the job site was certainly no hardship.
Checking out the spreading ground where fresh-picked Dark Harbour dulse is drying in the sun.
Later today we will have a guest post from Raquel Gutierrez who is participating in this summer’s Field Studies Southwest! Much more to come.
GUEST POST BY JOSEPH BRADBURY
For Photos and Fog
On Friday, July 15, a group of us visiting from the University of Arizona awoke before dawn to a muzzle of fog settling over Grand Manan. We headed for Seal Cove, to a boat, Island Bound, where Russell Ingalls and Mark Morse would steam a small group out the Kent Island. Aboard, there was a group from the Bowdoin College Scientific Research Station, a couple of tourists, islanders Liam Watkins and Delaney Ingersoll, Peter Cunningham, his partner Ara Fitzgerald, and their friend Paul Kaiser from away. Some of those on the boat had clear interests in Kent Island—research, birds, flora—but for others on the boat, interest in the island dates back almost a century, through the tendrils of a bloodline rooted deep in the heart of that small, cloudy island.
When Peter Cunningham arrived at the dock he propped his hand out to everyone he didn’t know, introduced himself, and then said hi to his already familiar acquaintances. He’s magnanimous and kind, playful in his conversations, and manages to elicit a thoughtful response from anyone who engages. He’s observant and curious, and these are perhaps his most useful traits as a career photographer. On the boat he shows me a new belt holster he got for his camera that he explains makes it much easier for him to tag along the device without the discomfort a neck strap causes. It might seem strange that Peter chose photography as an art and occupation, given that his father, Bob Cunningham, was a long time cloud physicist and meteorologist who performed a fog and atmospheric study on Kent Island for 70 years.
Peter Cunningham chatting with Delaney Ingalls and Peyton Stark on the Island Bound.
I never had the pleasure of meeting Bob, but I have heard some of his stories. On Kent, there is a small 8’x6’ shack, aptly named Fog Heaven, that was built specifically for Bob so that he could stop propping his instruments in the field under a thin tarp draped over drift wood, and sealed at the seams with tar. His curiosity was immense, like his son’s, and Bob couldn’t hide it behind the toothy grin he bares in every photo I’ve seen. In one he’s atop a thin aluminum pole secured to a roof with thin wire, fixing an anemometer, his grin intact, flying one hand at the camera in the undoubtedly chilled air, a ball cap draped on his head. In another, he’s above the cockpit on an old World War II plane securing instruments. He worked all over the world, with numerous companies and organizations, after graduating from MIT, that he might understand the most basic entity of survival: Air.
The group looking in on Fog Heaven.
***
Since the advent of the Industrial Revolution until mid-century, the United States was free to burn coal and wood at factories, send plumes of smoke and steam into the atmosphere with impunity. This was a much different time, I don’t have to tell you, when we didn’t understand that everything in this world is one organism exchanging particles and particulates with other single entities. We didn’t understand global warming, and only had a vague idea about weather patterns and the dissemination of harmful chemicals on winds. I imagine some scientists, and the average citizen gazed into the clear, blue sky and didn’t put stock in what exactly they couldn’t see. This, however, was not Bob Cunningham’s position.
Bob was prophetic in his vision as he was inspired in his claims. After his years at MIT, Bob worked for Air Force Cambridge Research Labs to study the effects of flying through rough weather. He and his crew lit out nose first into hail and thunderstorms. Bob mounted probes on their plane to attract lightning. Their weather-hardened C-130 and its crew earned the nickname, “Cunningham’s Roughriders” and the insignia was painted on the side of the plane. After the AFCRL, Bob directed scientists from all over the world for the UN’s World Meteorological Organization. He traveled the world extensively and studied cloud physics, cloud seeding and precipitation enhancement in every type of climate. All the while he maintained collecting fog and weather samples from Kent Island.
So Bob studied fog on Kent Island. For seventy years. Structures were built on Kent to perform the studies. Where once Bob and his colleagues used large steel drums to capture fog, later there were nets that drain the saturated air into graduated containers. And still atop the radio shack, near where Bob’s cabin stands, an anemometer spins in the gusts and gales.
To say that Bob’s studies on Kent Island were impressive would be an understatement. His work there may be the single longest, continuous scientific study by one person working in one place. Ever. This alone is worthy of tribute. But for Bob, that study and his work out there meant something. And while recording information is useful, its interpretation is key. Bob saw something in the air that you and I can’t. It was clear it was there because over on Grand Manan trees were stripped of leaves and ground vegetation couldn’t thrive. What Bob discovered was that factories in the Mid-west were dumping particulates in the air that were catching a ride on the jet stream and dumping acid rain on the northeast. This discovery, as would be later noted by President Lyndon B. Johnson, was absolutely integral to passing the Clean Air Act of 1963. Not only did this new law force regulations on the factories in the Mid-west, this began a long history of citizens fighting for environmental rights, air quality, and higher emission standards that are still applicable, and improved upon today. From that boggy little island just a few miles southeast of Grand Manan, Bob Cunningham veritably changed the world, forever.
Bob “Fogseeker” Cunningham fixing the anemometers.
***
Bob fascinates me because Bob is fascinating. Peter intrigues me because he’s kind and talented and goads conversations with innocuous, playful tactics. I can see his charm in every one of his father’s photos, in that smile. But this is not the only time when photography and cloud physics overlap. A photograph records a moment in time on the infinite spectrum of before and after. In that small segment of recorded data, reproduced as an image, there is a multitude of stories, and my guess is that Peter knows the stories behind every one of his photos. He points and snaps, shutters a bit of light to record and memory. And then that experience is opened up to endless translation and human understanding. In this way photography is a language as universal as mathematics and as applicable as any science. While all those years, in front of all those instruments, Bob was there recording other moments of time, noting the numbers, calculating their relevance, and translating their patterns into a language the rest of us might understand: love and human preservation.
It obvious to assume that interest is the foundation of love. Thus, Bob’s interest was in documenting the sky and this can be interpreted into a love for humanity. That is a kind of generosity and pureness of spirit I can only imagine, and one, on the daily, I try to assume. It’s no wonder that Peter is a Buddhist who finds such genuine pleasure in observing and interacting with the people and landscape of this place, that his favorite walk on earth is on Kent Island, through a field of thigh-high grass and wind-stripped conifers to the south shore where the breakers roar on the tempestuous tide. It’s no wonder that he chose to record data, much like his father, and it’s no wonder that his quiet and modest expression holds all the love and spirit of his father.
Last Friday, Peter took his favorite walk with his partner Ara. As he returned he stopped to see his father who still remains on the island, even after his death in 2008. Before catching the boat home, Peter opened the door to the Fog Heaven where his father slept and studied, where Bob’s ashes still remain. Peter took the hat he was wearing off his head and exchanged it for one resting on the box and said, “Thanks for the hat, Dad.” He turned around, smiling, and walked out the door toward the dock.
The walk, headed south, on Kent Island.
July 17
GUEST POST BY DANIELLE GELLER
To collect, preserve, and make accessible: If you read enough archival mission statements, you’ll see these words again and again. As a former almost-archivist—one who received her degree but left the profession before earning the full-fledged title—I’ve read quite a few, and I knew before I even arrived on Grand Manan that I wanted to visit their archives. With rain and cold weather on the forecast, there was no better time.
The archives are housed within the Grand Manan Museum, in an addition that was built in 1997—the same year Ava Sturgeon assumed the title of Archivist. Though not formally trained in archives management, Ava learned all she could from Gleneta Hettrick, the former archivist, who also worked as a librarian and history school teacher on the island. The position itself is only a part-time position, funded largely through donations (by individuals and local organizations like the Rotary Club) and matching provincial grants.
Ava Sturgeon stands in the “vault,” the archives’ storage space. Plastic sheets are draped over the shelves because the Museum’s roof is leaking, and they are trying to raise the funds to repair it.
As is true for almost all archives, funding is always a high concern. It’s never certain how much funding the archives will receive, or when, but Ava has learned to be resourceful. When they needed shelving for their new storage area—which could have run thousands of dollars—Ava asked around town. A boat-building company had just replaced the shelving in their warehouse and left the old sitting outside in the elements, but Ava hauled the shelves to the archives, sanded off the rust, and repainted them herself.
To process the archives’ collections, Ava relies heavily on volunteers—often, retired members of the community who are invested in preserving the history of the island. When we arrived on Monday morning, two women from the genealogical society were seated in front of a computer, transcribing names from New Brunswick’s census. As is also true of many archives, genealogical research is one of the most popular areas of study. But skimming through the available finding aids—located in a three-ring binder and complete with collection descriptions, scope and content notes, and container lists (even down to the folder!)—offered research opportunities ranging from the history of churches and local businesses on Grand Manan to scientific research conducted on the neighboring islands.
I wanted to read about birds.
The Grand Manan Museum houses Allen Moses’ Bird Collection: eighteen cases holding over three hundred species of bird found on the island. In addition to being a prolific taxidermist, Allen Moses was instrumental in the preservation of the Common Eider, whose nests were plundered for eggs and down, leaving the eiders close to extinction in the Bay of Fundy. The Grand Manan Archives is in possession of many of Moses’ papers and correspondence, and there are additional collections that include reports of bird sightings and populations on Grand Manan, Kent Island, Machias Seal Island, and others across the bay.
Joseph and Peyton spent the morning digging through the archives, too. Joseph rifled through a box of black and white photographs and tintypes from the 1860’s and 1890’s. Peyton looked through the collection of books that lined the shelves—and even found a book of recipes (for birds!) that we’ve yet to try.
One of our best finds, though, was a poem about a puffin, shaped like a muffin, who hadn’t anybody to play with at all. I won’t spoil the ending for you.
GUEST POST BY PEYTON PRATER STARK
sea to steamers to soup
Among my many goals for our time on Grand Manan Island, catching, cooking, and eating seafood was at the top. Growing up in Denver, with a rising interest in eating locally and a budget that rarely included lobster and shellfish, I always loved ocean cuisine, but rarely took part. So, when Michael Brown offered to take us clamming, I was immediately in. Michael Brown is somewhat a legend on Grand Manan. I heard about him from last year’s U of A Field Studies participants, who were offered a similar lesson in clamming. When we arrived on the island, I heard rumors about this eighteen-year-old fisherman, a recent graduate of Grand Manan Community School, who spends his time balancing successful business ventures in the dulsing, lobster, and clamming industries.
When we pull up to the shore in Grand Harbour to meet with Michael, he is slinging bright blue lobster traps from one giant stack to an even taller stack. He waves hello, and explains his recent discovery that he can stack the traps – each weighing around seventy pounds, each heavier than I’d like to carry – seven high. I believe him because he proves it, all while describing to us how lobster traps have developed over the past ten years. After this brief lesson, he grabs the clam hacks and we make our way to the beach.
I am giddy and hardly trying to hide it. Michael explains the art of clamming as though anyone can do it. Step one: look for holes in the sand. Step two: dig the hack – a tool similar to a garden hand rake, only infinitely cooler than the hand rake that we brought along – into the sand, then leverage it to pull up as much as possible. Step three: look for clams and put them in the bucket.
Easier said than done. I struggle with step one, finally realizing that if I can’t see any holes in the sand, I just have to pick a spot and start digging. Which I do, and it works! Behold: the first clams I ever dug.
Michael has a clamming license, which is necessary for him to sell his wares. Otherwise, he explains, one can dig 100 clams a day for personal use. Together, Danielle, Joseph, Alison and I dig up maybe 50 clams, well below our collective limit of 400, but enough for a nice meal, and enough to make my hands start to hurt.
Pictured left: Master clammer Michael Brown, showing us how it’s done. Right: me with a clam hack.
As we head back to the car, Michael talks us through the current market for sea products on the island, intel that I aim to commit to memory as I begin to imagine my post-grad school life as a full-time clammer. Michael explains that he used to make all his money clamming. Now, he spends part of his time collecting dulse, nori, and sea lettuce, depending on the price, in addition to his lucrative job lobster fishing.
I wave goodbye and head with our team, and our clams, back to Alison’s house to begin what I view as an equally crucial part of the clamming experience: cooking. My seafood culinary skills are fairly limited, as in: I can grill salmon. I have never cooked with clams, so I hover around Alison as she demonstrates the process.
Her method is fairly simple. First, we soak the clams in a bucket of fresh water. Apparently, if you do this for a while, the clams clean themselves out. We are slightly impatient, and hungry, so we skimp a bit on this step. We boil a bit of water in a huge stock pot (a true kitchen staple on this island) and dump the clams in to steam. Then we melt a whole lot of butter.
That is about it. When the clams open up about five minutes later, we strain them onto a tray, which we plant in the middle of the table. We saved some of the clam broth so that we can give them a good bath (an easy fix if you just don’t have time to soak them) before dousing them in butter.
No more than a half hour after we leave Michael Brown, I find myself sitting around the table eating the freshest seafood I have ever enjoyed. This is the definition of eating locally, knowing where your food comes from. As our bellies fill – as we shift from eating the clams, to simply talking about how much we adore the clams – Alison makes another one of my dreams come true.
“If we have clams left over,” she says, “you can take them home and make chowder.”
Since arriving on the island, I have been sneaking away to read recipes from the Grand Manan Cookbook, a collaborative publication compiled by the Grand Manan Hospital Auxiliary. Alison has two editions – one from 1979, and a newer edition published a few years back. Just earlier than day, I scored a reprint of the 1952 edition from the Grand Manan Museum. Among delicious recipes for lobster stew, lobster curry, baked fish of all varieties – and two delightful recipes for cod tongues, which I have yet to track down on the island, is a recipe for clam chowder.
So, I decide to do it. I am going to follow a Grand Manan recipe. I am going to make chowder with Grand Manan clams. The recipe was contributed by Maud Harvey, and reads as follows:
CLAM CHOWDER
1 pint potatoes sliced; 1 onion sliced; 1 teaspoon salt.
Cover with water and cook till potatoes are tender.
Add 1 pint shelled clams; 1 can evaporated milk; 1 large teaspoon butter; little pepper and a little more salt if desired. Add milk last and do not let boil.
I resist the urge to add the dulse flakes that were given to us the day before. I resist the urge to chop up the garlic scapes I bought at the farmer’s market. I trust Maud and I do what she tells me. I read the recipe twenty times and obsess over in which order, exactly, to add the milk and clams. And then, twenty minutes later, I pour a steaming bowl of chowder and marvel at the consistency. I wander out to the porch and savor the salty essence of ocean’s clams, how it mellows with the richness of milk and butter.
I thank Maud for her simple, yet inarguably crucial contribution to the Grand Manan Cookbook. I thank Michael Brown for his detailed lesson in clamming. I am currently busy planning my future. As Michael diversifies his products, maybe, I think, I could dig for clams, make chowder, sell chowder. I want desperately to belong in a food system such as this – where one digs the food from the earth, combines it with as little as possible, follows recipes integral to a community, and shares it with friends.
I have no illusions that I could step into the tradition of clamming and sustain a reasonable business right away. But I can learn! I can study! Perhaps Michael will take an apprentice? I realize that, first off, my plan requires a few simple life changes.
Step one: buy a clam hack.
Step two: move to Grand Manan.
Danielle Geller, Peyton Prayter Stark and Joseph Bradbury on board the Grand Manan V heading for the island for a two-week visit.
These three writers from the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Arizona kick off our second year of this project, supported by the Agnese Nelms Haury Program in Environment and Social Justice. The students will work on research and writing projects during their visit, as well as mentoring Grand Manan high students on their projects, whether that might be a poem, essay, photo-essay, video or oral history. Together we are working to create a portrait of this unique place, its history as a fishing community and its shifting economy with herring and ground fish on the decline and lobsters on the rise. What forces in nature and culture have shaped this place and what forces will shape its future? How do writing and other art forms help us to understand this time of change on the island and the ways that climate change is likely to shape its future? Our Arizona students arrive with eyes and notebooks open to learn all they can during their visit, and we welcome Grand Manan students to help be their guides to understanding what it feels like to be coming of age in this remarkable place of beauty, hard work, stories and self-determination.
Stay tuned for posts here on our new website www.fieldstudiesgrandmanan.com as the adventure unfolds.
