Running for WITS

When my daughter came home from her first day in Pre-K at a NYC public school, I wanted to know all about her teacher, the classroom, and her new friends, but of course the first thing I asked her was what she’d had for lunch. She grew up standing by my side in the restaurant’s kitchen as I’d broken down pigs to hams and chops and bacon. She’d helped me harvest beans and gathered eggs at our farm. She’d eaten snails and duck livers and kale. She knew food as well as she knew anything, so I was surprised when she seemed flummoxed by the question.

After a minute of thinking, she said “I guess chicken-fish? It comes in a little plastic bag?”

I laughed until I realized what she meant–a breaded fish filet, cooked in a microwave and wheeled into the classroom on a cart. The next day’s lunch was no better, and the next, and they went on and on, a catalog of every over-processed and overpackaged food you spend your days avoiding. I grew desperate to find some way to help.

I was lucky to be introduced to Nancy Easton that year, and I was excited by the vision that she and Bill Telepan had for improving the quality of school food and fitness options for schoolkids. For the past 3 years, Egg & Parish Hall have participated in the annual Wellness in the Schools gala benefit, a tasting event to which we bring 4-500 portions of some delicious thing we’ve cooked up to help WITS raise money to improve school nutrition and fitness.

This year we wanted to deepen our commitment to WITS, and and I wanted to show my children the benefits of being healthy and of committing to a goal. Running the marathon for WITS seemed like a great way to achieve all of those objectives.

We work every day at Egg and Parish Hall to expand access to good food to people who don’t have it. For a lot of people, the best chance they’ll get at a square meal is in their school cafeteria, and Wellness does a great job of making sure they get one. I’m proud to run on behalf of the teams of tireless cooks and servers at our restaurants to raise money for a cause we all believe in.

Please help us raise money by supporting my marathon run: I’ll think good thoughts about you for a minute of the marathon for every $10 you commit. Give or take.

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Talk about the Weather

There was a stretch of time a decade or so ago, after cable had exploded into a thousand channels but before the internet had vacuumed up all our idle time, when the timesuck of choice among most people I knew was to sit around blank-faced watching the Weather Channel. It looked like the low-water mark of intelligent culture, and it may have been. It still depresses me to think about Saturday afternoons I spent lying on a friend’s sofa watching update after update on the weather along the Florida panhandle, the tornado watch outside Salina, the dry spell in Hibbing. But it occurs to me now that our obsession with weather was perhaps not as arbitrary as it seemed at the time (like, why weren’t we watching NASCAR instead? or poker?)

There’s something compelling about weather: it’s one of the few things about the world that we haven’t taken under management. We decide just about everything that goes on on this planet, from where the “wild” animals roam to how much of a river’s water reaches the sea. One thing we can’t manage, and don’t seem likely to be able to manage, is the weather. Even with our most sophisticated technology, our predictions are inaccurate to a degree that we wouldn’t accept in any other discipline–just think back to the suprises that Hurricane Irene delivered.

Given that even “wilderness” is wilderness only because we designate it to be so, and it remains wilderness only as long as we decide to allow it to be, the fact that we can’t have our way with the weather is profoundly interesting. When I stepped out of my apartment the other morning and saw a discarded Christmas tree caroming off the walls of the building next door and the wind sucked the breath right out of my lungs, I was in the presence of the wildest thing we ever encounter anymore, the one thing we can’t fully prepare for or protect ourselves from. And it’s a wilderness that reaches us no matter where we are. If there’s an opposite to “nature” in the minds of most people New York City is it, yet we’re just as exposed to the whims of weather as someone sitting alone on a cliff edge in Glacier National Park.

It’s part of what makes farming such an interesting challenge: on the one hand–even at its simplest–it’s the essence of engineering. You buy X seeds for Y feet of croprow and expect a yield of Z bushels. On the other hand, it’s hopelessly unpredictable, and even all the brainpower and dark science of Monsanto and John Deere and the Department of Agriculture combined can’t outwit the weather. Every season, the work of farmers recapitulates in miniature the moment in history when humans carved a pocket of civilization out of an undifferentiated wilderness, and every summer we watch the clouds roll over the hills to the west and wonder what will become of our tomatoes, our seedlings, our ponds.

wind on the east river
Whitecaps, East River

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Civilizing Influences, Part 1

Tent with Catskills
waking up outside

This morning, I read this article on Michael Fay, a loner conservationist who’s decided to hole up in a pair of cabins in Alaska to study wilderness there. He works alone, for months at a time, holding thoughts of civilization at bay by spending his days hiking, exploring, hunting.

For a long stretch of my life that was what I imagined adulthood would mean for me, and I couldn’t wait to do it. At first, when I was 10 or so, it meant circumnavigating the globe solo in a sailboat and flying bush planes in Alaska to provide medical care to people isolated in the backcountry. When I got older I figured I’d get a job teaching English at a college close enough to a wilderness area that I could live out of a tent and commute to the school on bike or by foot. I envisioned grading essays by lantern light, keeping only the books I needed and relying on the library for everything else, stacking up papers neatly to store in a plastic bag so they’d make it back to school dry even if the skies opened overnight. I didn’t see any reason this fantasy couldn’t work, as long as I was happy being single (I wasn’t and couldn’t imagine being so, but I didn’t let that get in the way of the fantasy).

I started camping in high school and chose my first college based on this prospect: studying ancient Greek and reading Thucydides on weekdays, hiking arroyos and camping on mountaintops nights and weekends. For months when I was between schools I slept on my parents’ lawn rather than in the perfectly good bedroom they had for me because I wanted to wake up outside and feel the contrast between the warmth inside my sleeping bag and the cold dew-soaked air on the outside.

The longer I spent in school, though, the less accessible these fantasies, and these ways of living, seemed. I never shared them with my friends or my family because every hint of it that I dropped in front of the people I wanted most to impress–my advisor, my smartest friends–caused eyes to roll. I began to see them as childish dreams that needed outgrowing, a course through life navigated only by hippies whose ultimate destiny was a claustrophobic cul-de-sac of handmade moccasins and irrelevance. By the time I graduated from college and managed to spend a few blissful months camping and vagabonding around the northwest with my girlfriend, I’d become sophisticated enough to make fun of myself every time I got too excited about spending the night on a cliff’s edge or sleeping in the back of the car by the ocean.

And then I got to graduate school in the eminently civilized city of Boston, where I was studying poetry in the storied and civilized program at Boston University. In one sense I felt I’d made it: I was studying with Nobel laureates, great writers and thinkers who were clearly enriching and extending a literary tradition that went back hundreds of years and shot right through the very room we sat in for our seminars. But I’d made it, I felt, by eschewing any thought of living alone under a tarp in the woods. I still allowed myself to enjoy the outdoors, but it helped my enjoyment immensely if I found it in some culturally saturated place: swimming across Walden Pond, where words dripped from my hands as plainly as water.

It was at B.U. that I came across this poem by Philip Larkin, which I thought of this morning when I was reading the article on Michael Fay. I read the poem now and I can’t quite make out Larkin’s attitude: resignation? irony? mockery? self-loathing? I think when I first read it what I thought was, right, the notion that life is elsewhere–that you could find happiness, or at least something happier, if you just “cleared off”–that’s a fantasy of the soft-headed. An adult who understands that life is a series of choices also understands that any life he leads is necessarily provisional and limited–one choice made among many–and he makes the best of the one he’s chosen (intentionally or not) without pining for another life.

And so I tried to outgrow the fantasy of a life in the woods. To some extent I measured my maturity by the distance I travelled from that fantasy, and I treated any longing for a night under the stars or a month in the mountains as a warning sign of relapse. I took some comfort in movies like Grizzly Man and Into the Wild that seemed to confirm the notion that wilderness lovers are intellectually undeveloped and socially stunted. And the Larkin poem felt like a strong vaccination against developing wilderlust.

But I still can’t give up on the idea. Almost daily I work consciously to adapt to the life in front of me, and almost daily I’m tempted by the thought of retreating to a remote cabin in the woods to be alone and away from people (or most of them). Maybe the struggle makes me better: I’m aware that my life in the city is a choice I’ve made, something I’ve intended; I don’t take it for granted. And on the rare occasions I’m able to get out and away from roads and jets and trail signs, I see with the stunned vision of someone who’s been waiting endlessly for his reward and finally receives it. Or maybe the struggle is a kind of disorder–a dangerous romantic yearning that leads us away from engaging here and now. Maybe it’s something I should continue to struggle to overcome.

There’s a lot I want to say about this, and I want to keep thinking it through. I also want to say some of it in public. The changes we’re trying to make in the food system often rely for their emotional force on the image of a rural life less complicated than life in the city, and the language we use to talk about that rural life is almost always the language of time travel: a return to a simpler time, and so on. But on that chronology wildness stands even further back, and in comparison to it agriculture looks like Babylon.

Here’s the poem:

Poetry of Departures

Sometimes you hear, fifth-hand, as epitaph:
He chucked up everything
And just cleared off,

and always the voice will sound
Certain you approve
This audacious, purifying,
Elemental move.

And they are right, I think.
We all hate home
And having to be there:
I detest my room,
Its specially-chosen junk,
The good books, the good bed,
And my life, in perfect order:
So to hear it said

He walked out on the whole crowd
Leaves me flushed and stirred,
Like Then she undid her dress
Or Take that you bastard.
Surely I can, if he did?
And that helps me to stay
Sober and industrious.
But I’d go today,

Yes, swagger the nut-strewn roads,
Crouch in the fo’c’sle
Stubbly with goodness, if
It weren’t so artificial,
Such a deliberate step backwards
To create an object:
Books; china; a life
Reprehensibly perfect.

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Slow Money

In October, I went to San Francisco to present our business in the Entrepreneur’s Showcase at Slow Money’s National Gathering:

You can find some of the other presentations from the gathering here

I went for a run yesterday morning, my first after the hurricane. I took my normal route, along the waterfront in Williamsburg and Greenpoint, along streets that had been underwater 36 hours earlier. I stopped in at our paper supplier’s to see him jacking up pallet after pallet of ruined coffee cups, paper towels, and shopping bags, taking pictures for his insurance company, wondering how far back into the warehouse the damage had reached as there was an amazing selection of antique swords in the back. I ran past the home of one of my oldest friends and employees, who finally fled her apartment mid-storm when the water in her living room had come up to her knees. I ran to Newtown Creek, which had flooded and washed the neighborhood with some of the most toxic water in the country, but where this morning the sailboats that are always moored there were still moored there, peacefully reflected on the creek’s surface as though nothing had happened. I ran laps around the track at the park, unaware–as were the dozens of other runners taking laps–that the park was closed.

That was the last run I’ll take before the marathon this Sunday.

Over the years I’ve had flickers of interest in running the marathon. Usually they last as long as it takes me to count to 26. This year it just so happened that the flicker caught on another thought I was having about our work with Wellness in the Schools, who work to improve school food and fitness programs. I remembered that they fielded a marathon team every year.  I happened to be sitting at my computer, so I wrote to see if they had an open spot on their team. They did, they accepted me, and within 24 hours I was registered to run and desperately searching the internet for a training plan for under-prepared middle-aged knees.

It’s been a lot of work. It’s taken a lot of time and energy–both physical and mental–to prepare. Frankly, if I were doing it for myself alone, I almost certainly would have backed out weeks ago: I don’t have that much time just to devote to self-exploration. I kept going because I committed to Wellness in the Schools, because I knew that the work they did was important and my run would help bring attention to that work and the needs that it serves. I couldn’t have justified the sacrifice of time, and I wouldn’t have had the motivation to beat myself up for it, if I hadn’t known that I was doing it for a cause I believed in.

I can’t pretend that I wasn’t also excited, though. Without question, I’ve enjoyed the training, enjoyed the focused work that a goal like the marathon made possible. I’ve never felt more capable of rising to challenge and persisting through discomfort than I do now. Running long distance has changed me, as it does everyone who gets up off the sofa one day and decides to do it.

We’ve suffered an enormous blow this week, and we need all the resources we can muster to get power back where it’s out, food to people who are hungry, clothes and shelter to people whose lives washed away.

We’ve also suffered an enormous psychological blow, one whose effects I feel in strange ways, like the feeling of annoyance you get when the news talks about something other than recovery, like that feeling of dread you get when you look at the blacked-out city, like the feeling of guilt we have as we enjoy having power and food knowing we’re just across the river from people with neither.

I love this city and how it absorbs and overcomes disaster. As horrible as 9/11 was, it was amazing to live here in the days following, even though we had no power, even though our apartment and our offices were behind barricades, even though we were breathing toxic air and cut off from everyone we loved. It was amazing to live here through the 2003 blackout, to walk through the streets of the lower east side unable to see the fingers of my hand but to feel no fear.

As someone who’s made New York home, when I think about what it will feel like to run through every borough, following a course that literally links the city together, I get excited at the thought of being part of the psychological recovery that the run will, I believe, represent.

As a business owner whose own business is boosted every year by the marathon running right past his restaurant’s front door, I get the importance of the economic energy–300 million dollars, I’ve read–that the marathon injects into the city. God knows we need all the economic energy we can stand right now, you can also start a business and here are several ideas for online business.

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Tag Cloud for the Blog I wish I Had

cooking, conservation, Thomas Jefferson, Emerson, Thoreau, NOLS, Edward Abbey, Aldo Leopold, Robert Smithson, Richard Serra, Fukuoka, Eliot Coleman, Andy Goldsworthy, Storm King, Rock City, Charles Wright, Charlottesville, Wallace Stevens, the Hudson River School, farming, Thich Nhat Hanh, Walter Benjamin, Cormac McCarthy, John’s Island, Louisa, rural life, urban life, church, Thomas Merton, foraging, Thomas Keller, Ferran Adria, Wrightsville Beach, Bill McKibben, Maine, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Catskills

And, I suppose, Brooklyn.

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