The Cabin

   My wife and I just returned from visiting a friend's cabin down in the desert-like setting of southern Utah in the western part of the U.S.  It's a cabin that he had built from scratch, a project still not completed after over 10 years, but certainly much more than I could have accomplished, complete with loft, insulated wood stove, kitchen cabinets to hold the pots and dishes for the propane stove, a huge electric generator and more.  Big oil has come a-looking over the past few years and those shale pumps, the land scraped bare over the drilling "pads," are now everywhere, some of the pumps even pumped out and ready to be removed (the oil companies seem to really take their time with that, he said, that and restoring the land to the way it was which was all according to their agreement to drill).  Some folks down there got $15,000 per month from leasing their land when oil was in its heyday, not bad for a temporary tenant of sorts (the average payment was closer to several hundred for most)...and despite all that, the packs of coyotes amble through.

    What's nice about visiting the cabin of this husband/wife team is the downtime, for signals from everything are virtually non-existant, despite the satellites crossing over in the night sky.  Data Roaming continually appears on one's phone and is continually ignored, for this is a time of conversation and catching up, of dodging the small (but sharp) cacti clinging to the ground as if wise enough not to grow to tall and waste what little water there is (farmers nearby seem to laugh at this as they pump the precious water for hay and alfalfa, greening fields for miles, but recognizing that they themselves are being mimicked as people with money from other states slowly move in and resdesign the landscape even further, placing elaborate homes and lawns in the middle of ramshackle houses and cluttered dirt yards that stood there for generations as working testamonials).  It's a changing world, even down there, although you wouldn't know it from the slow-grazing cattle and the occasional horse, and the occasional hunter, and the occasional visitors...like us.

    Of course, since we visit only in segments, the changes do seem evident.  The wealthy homes are indeed more plentiful as their roofs sparkle on mountainsides, a somewhat futile attempt to blend in with the surroundings since their roof is the only thing different in the forest, all made that much more evident by the devastation the pine beetles have brought, the once-green forests of pines now blending in perfectly with the sparse aspens and scrub oaks whose leaves have fallen for the coming winter, except that the pines, gray and stunningly ghostly, won't be returning.  And the oil pads are growing in number, minimal in the overall scheme of things as seen from the highway, but massive when you get out of your car and walk along some of the pipelines, thick, iron-heavy pipes that comes in sets of fours and fives and stretch for miles and miles, from pump to storage tank to pumping station for the trucks that run 24/7 (we were able to walk along these private "right-of-ways" because of our friends' cabin, but otherwise these roads are private property).  According to our friend, everything is being pumped out but nothing is going back in (normally a common practice in oil drilling, which is to replace the liquid being pumped out with a slurry or slush to fill the empty space).  The land in tough, but how tough?

    So night came, the darkness arriving early this time of year, around 7 in the evening.  Our friend built a campfire to fight the oncoming chill, and there we sat, chatting and yawning and solving the world's problems...and looking up at the darkening sky.  First one star, then three, then before we could laugh at another episode of life, the ribbon of the Milky Way stretched in front of us, blazingly bright from horizon to horizon.  More stars appeared, then more stars, then a shooting star.  And soon, all of our talking stopped and we were simply staring upward.  So few of us have the chance to get away to such a light-free night sky.  But once seen, it is not only humbling, but seared into your memory...for it is unfortunately a rare sight in our busy lives.

    So it seemed a bit of a coincidence that I was reading the oversized book Slow Life in A Tuscan Town by photographer Douglas Gayeton.  His pictures of life in the small town of Pistoia in Italy bring to life the Slow Food movement, still going strong worldwide after starting so many years ago as a simple protest by a group outraged at the opening of a McDonald's in one of Rome's most beautiful piazzas, wrote Alice Waters.  But it was the preface in the book by the founder of the movement, Carlo Petrini, that expressed it best:  Perhaps it is no coincidence that the Slow Food movement was born in Italy.  My generation has been imbued with this type of culture since birth because, until a few decades ago, we were essentially a nation of peasants.  But something was broken, even here in Italy, when the industrialization of food caused us to look at this slow way of life as a legacy of the past, something to be forgotten, along with the poverty that accompanied it.  Many people now look at the existence of these communities as something exotic, as if they were a curious anomaly that endure despite everything else in our fast moving world.  The risk is to react like colonialists struggling with the natives who they wanted to educate: burn everything...Today, however, Terra Madre --the vast network of communities created by Slow Food-- teaches us that in the "old" way of living, with its myriad of rituals and wisdom we are still thriving, happy and willing to share the prosperity that transcends material wealth, that exists as an attitude, a fact of life, a way of looking at the world that embodies those values that the consumerest world wants to deny.  Food is at the center of these communities: a respectful relationship with the land on which you live and the animals with whom you live.  This is a way of perceiving the world in a holistic sense, where everything is a part of something greater, starting from the simplest place.

    Something greater...exactly what we stared at in that dark, dark night sky, the seemingly countless stars creating a reverse satellite picture of sorts of our illuminated cities at night.  A fresh reminder of what we were missing, of how despite all that was happening, the coyotes and deer and moose were invisibly roaming around us, leaving tracks and sounds and scat, but little else.  In some ways, they were like the farmers, their lives turning into a "curious anomoly...a legacy of the past, something to be forgotten..."  But all it took was a look upwards, a gentle reminder of what was always there, even when made invisible by the light of day.  And no matter how many oil rigs or lavish homes arrived to etch this landscape, the stars would still be there, patient, endless, and waiting for others to notice.