Tag: Erika Howsare

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Arts Culture

Life among the ruins

Erika Howsare will discuss The Age of Deer at New Dominion Bookshop on January 12, followed by an audience Q&A. Photo by Stephen Barling.

“The loveliness of deer might go without saying, but still, there it is: The more you look, the more they seduce,” writes Erika Howsare in her debut nonfiction book, The Age of Deer: Trouble and Kinship with our Wild Neighbors. Published earlier this month, the book showcases Howsare’s keen journalistic skills as well as her subtle but sharp sense of humor and thoughtful way with words. Filled with graceful reverence and appreciation for the world of deer—as well as the work of those whose lives are lived in close proximity to it—each chapter cultivates nuance in attempting to understand relationships between humans and cervids. Though The Age of Deer is a departure in genre from her two previously published books of poetry, it hews closely to them in spirit. Moments of aching beauty and stark sorrow abound. The thrum of verse inhabits each sentence. 

The book is a detailed examination of an animal world in flux, a record of a multi-generational and multi-species relationship, but it began as a simple question. “I became interested in what we think we’re talking about when we say something is ‘natural,’” Howsare recalls. “When we look at deer, are we seeing wild animals who happen to be here or are we seeing a species that we have deeply affected and that has deeply affected us?”

Growing up in Pennsylvania, Howsare knew about deer hunting. As an adult living in central Virginia, she knew deer enjoyed snacking in her garden. In other words, she thought she knew about deer in the same ways many of us do, as overpopulated pests, tragic roadkill, magical ghost deer, and even internet stars. Howsare decided to test this knowledge, however. Using news alerts about deer to help define the culturally encoded ideas and roles she hoped to explore, she dug in and surrendered to the process. 

Talking with experts in a wide variety of fields—from wildlife rehabilitators and historical reenactors, to ecologists and artists—she peels back layers of assumptions to expose ecstatic depths of complexity. “There was just a huge amount of discovery,” recalls Howsare. “Some of it was very serendipitous,” like Meesha Goldberg’s Kinfolk mural, which she stumbled on at the McGuffey Art Center. Combined with focused research, the breadth and depth of Howsare’s explorations are evident throughout, informed by an MFA in literary arts as well as her longtime beat as a C-VILLE contributor. “There’s no way I could have done this without that experience,” she reflects.

Layered atop this reportage, Howsare generously shares more personal transformations that came out of the project, some of which she describes as, “less an intellectual kind and more an emotional kind … discovering a personal connection to things that I wasn’t really expecting.” She adds, “I went into it really cerebrally and I came out of it feeling like a different person in a lot of ways.”

She describes going deer hunting for the first (and then, second) time in her life. Sitting next to her brother in a tree stand, the unsuccessful (in terms of meat) hunt becomes a meditation: “I felt the aching gladness of being alive and among other living things.” The next outing is more fruitful, and she watches a family member gut one of the deer they have killed. “Dark acres of liver, deep ponds of blood,” she writes, the poet’s voice emerging more fully in this section, rhythmic writing and short bursts of language reflecting peak adrenaline.

She takes part in a primitive skills gathering in North Carolina, carving an awl out of deer bone, and travels to England for the annual Abbots Bromley Horn Dance, featuring millennium-old reindeer antlers. She tags along with officials as they collect car-killed deer as well as deer killed as part of a culling program. She also visits a high-fence ranch in Texas to see farmed deer—“a brazen example of the biology of artifice”—prompting questions about ethical land and wildlife management. 

On the left, Teddy Roosevelt, enthusiastic hunter and early conservationist, posed in buckskins in 1885 to cement his connection to legendary frontiersmen like Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett. On the right, the art of the ancient Scythians is obsessed with deer, especially antlers, even though they were cattle herders and did not rely on deer for survival. Images by Wikimedia Commons.

Though her research roams far afield, Howsare dedicates ample attention to her home range, recounting time spent investigating the meaning of deer at the Frontier Culture Museum, Early Mountain Vineyards, and Little Hat Creek Farm, even inviting readers to join her as she is led to a culvert running under I-64 to the west of Charlottesville that serves as a wildlife underpass—an intervention that has successfully decreased the number of deer-related crashes along that stretch of road.  

Throughout, Howsare weaves in stories of deer as cultural symbols and the subject of myths, Indigenous practices, folk legends, and creative inspirations, from Paleolithic cave art to Leave the World Behind. Deerskins are also examined as sites of social and economic importance for humans since time immemorial, offering warm clothing as well as the cultural production of nostalgia, which Howsare describes as, “buckskin symbolism … invoked at every turn in American history from the Revolution … to Grateful Dead shows.” 

She tells of Awi Usdi, a white deer in Cherokee culture who monitors hunters; the traditional dances of the Yaqui people, accompanied by songs that are “said to have been translated from the language of the deer themselves;” and Eikthyrnir, a Viking stag with oaken antlers who was said to wander Valhalla. “On some deeper level, the process [of writing the book] makes it clear to me that there’s something about deer, for humans, that’s very much connected with mortality,” reflects Howsare. “The way we relate to deer has a lot to do with questions of life and death, and it has for thousands of years. To immerse myself in the topic was to get comfortable with death.”

Tracing the ebb and flow of deer populations, Howsare also examines the pre-colonization abundance of deer in North America (and factors that may have led to that), which in turn led to overhunting and habitat destruction that decimated generations, and eventually to the decision by many states (including Virginia) to import new deer, though this was followed by overdevelopment of their habitats. Yet, the deer abide—for now. 

These days we also know deer as carriers of Lyme disease and COVID-19, both of which can infect humans, but increasing attention is being given to the accelerating spread of chronic wasting disease, a fatal and incurable condition that spreads easily among deer. “One thing that sticks with me as a source of real worry is … how deep and wide of a threat [CWD] is to the deer population we have now,” says Howsare. “I think there are many people who deeply care about deer but have not let themselves appreciate the reality that may be coming.”

Perhaps The Age of Deer will open the door to contemplate more fully what that change could mean—or even how to mitigate or prevent it—even as the book celebrates the species we think we know so well from backyard sightings and popular children’s movies. Howsare writes, “I’m grateful that, after so many large animals have disappeared with the advance of human beings, there is still this one—an exquisite and mysterious creature—that I can see, often, in my Anthropocene life; one that, despite our caricatures, remains a survivor, a supreme example of life among the ruins. And that we can pause … and ask these questions about how to proceed… For now, we still have the chance to encounter each other.” In one future, The Age of Deer may become a eulogy; in another, it is a jubilant call to attention.

A wild aside

As a companion to her new book, Howsare worked with the Virginia Audio Collective to make “If You See A Deer,” a four-episode podcast co-hosted by writer and academic Tyler J. Carter.

Featuring interviews and field recordings, the podcast builds on the book by engaging scientists, hunters, artists, taxidermists, and deer enthusiasts in conversations about ecology, nature, literature, art and culture, and history—all through a deer-focused lens. Together, Howsare and Carter invite listeners to join them in questioning assumptions that exist about the roles of deer in our lives and their impact on the world we share. Poems, songs, stories, and mythologies about deer are also woven throughout, extensively documented in each episode’s show notes for those who may wish to undertake their own follow-up explorations or deep dives into a particular aspect of the research that went into the production. From taxidermy to tourism, the result is a wildly listenable and wholly entertaining podcast that nonetheless asks difficult questions and skillfully navigates divisive topics related to hunting, roadkill and scavenging, and forest health.  

“I have been telling everybody who will listen that this is an amazing and free community resource that WTJU offers through the Virginia Audio Collective,” says Howsare. “We had excellent support from staff who know everything in the world that you would need to know to make a podcast. The audio format is just so rich and has so many possibilities that I have never encountered on the page.”

“If You See A Deer” is available most places you listen to podcasts. Learn more at virginiaaudio.org/if-you-see-a-deer.

Categories
Culture Living

Gathering swarm: Local beekeepers reflect on an unusual spring

It’s been a busy spring for local beekeepers like Brooke Savage, who is hoping to prevent swarming by splitting hives before the bees feel overcrowded. Image: Eze Amos

While we humans have been preoccupied this spring, with pandemic worries and urgent national conversations, the natural world has seen other dramas unfold that most of us haven’t even noticed. Unless you’re a beekeeper, you wouldn’t know that this has been a very odd spring for honeybees.

Carrie Meslar is the managing director of the Elysium Honey Company, and she says that this year, the company’s beekeepers have reported an uptick in the number of swarms—big groups of bees leaving a hive to seek out a new home base. “They’ve never seen anything like this,” says Meslar.

A swarm happens when bees feel overcrowded in their hive. The queen leaves, taking thousands of the workers with her, and they gather in a bristly bunch on a tree or a fence post. To learn about what happens next is to gain some serious respect for the complexity and intelligence of these tiny and intensely social creatures.

“They send out scouts,” Meslar explains. “These bees go out and look for a good location for the hive.” Upon returning, the scouts communicate through dances about what they’ve found, and then—(get this!)—“a voting process takes place amongst the bees. When they reach an agreement, tens of thousands of bees leave to go and settle in a new place.”

It’s astounding, and on its own, it’s a “natural and good process,” says Meslar. “It means the colony is robust and healthy.” For beekeepers, say Karen and Ken Hall (both officers with the Central Virginia Beekeeping Association), swarming is “largely a management issue”—something to be avoided with proper attention to one’s hives.

“You want to mitigate it because you could lose half of your bees,” says Meslar. The departing swarm not only represents a loss of workforce; it actually takes away quite a bit of honey, transported inside the bees themselves. So, ideally, beekeepers hope to prevent swarming by splitting hives before the bees get crowded.

Ken Hall says there’s no hard data on whether this really has been a big year for swarming, but it’s plausible because of the weather patterns we experienced this spring. Warm temperatures in the first three months of 2020 meant some things bloomed early. “The red maple bloom was 12 days earlier than last year,” he says. But then the weather cooled and later blooms, like tulip poplar and black locust—both major food sources for bees—slowed down. In the gap between those two events, bees were very busy reproducing and gathering pollen and nectar, and hives may have gotten crowded, like a family house that’s suddenly too full of kids and all their stuff.

If bees do swarm, keepers try to capture them by gently brushing the bees into a box. That might sound death-defying, but Karen Hall says bees in a swarm pose very little danger to people. “A swarm has no colony and nothing to protect, so they are really very docile,” she says. Euphoric, even, because they’re full of honey.

The key to the operation is to capture the queen. “We watch the bees,” says Ken Hall, “and as soon as we have the queen in the box we can start to tell she’s there. They produce a pheromone as a homing scent, and the bees have to raise their abdomens high in the air to expose the gland. When we have the queen in, all of a sudden there are a lot of bees around the entrance with their abdomens raised.”

It must be a triumphant feeling for a beekeeper when that happens, but the bees aren’t aware that their colony has just been saved from an untimely demise. “A colony requires human intervention to survive,” says Karen Hall. “Effectively, your feral colonies succumb in about 14 months.”

The murder hornets—headline-grabbing, invasive species with the ability to wipe out hives, currently found only in the Pacific Northwest—are the latest potential threat to wild bees, but Meslar says they aren’t a huge worry for local beekeepers. “There are a number of simple methods we can implement to keep hives safe. The most common is a cage that sits at the exit. The holes are big enough so that bees can come and go, but it prevents the hornets from getting access into the hive.”

A more serious problem is the Varroa mite, a parasite that feeds on adult bees and larvae, making them vulnerable to certain viral diseases. Then there’s the issue of pesticides. Whether sprayed on a large scale over commercial orchards, or spritzed by homeowners onto one dandelion at a time, they can be carried back to hives by industrious bees.

The upshot is that people and honeybees need each other. They pollinate our food crops, and we safeguard their colonies—in an intricate dance, all happening amidst the unpredictability of climate change. “From year to year right now, the intensity of the differences is much more marked than it was 10 years ago,” says Meslar. “None of the years are middle of the road; everything is sort of extreme.”

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Magazines Unbound

10 things I’ve learned about homesteading: Lessons from adventures, successes, and failures on the land

“If you’re thinking about goats for any reason, get yourself a really amazingly wonderful fence. And good luck." Photo: Getty Images

I don’t claim to be an expert on anything in the homesteading realm. But my husband and I have been gardening for 18 years and raising chickens for nine, preserving foods and getting to know our local ecosystem, and we have picked up a few nuggets of knowledge along the way. Here are some of them.

1 It all starts with soil

There’s a lot to know about growing vegetables and herbs, but what always comes first is soil health. The most vibrant seedlings in the world, if planted in poor soil, will not flourish. So building soil—its texture, drainage qualities, and nutrient content—is job number one for the gardener.

That’s not as tricky, or as boring, as it sounds. Over the years , we’ve tried various ways to prepare garden beds, from arduous double-digging to lazy lasagna methods (layers of cardboard and mulch on the soil). Finally, we’ve settled on something pretty simple: Remove grass by the roots with a mattock, then add a lot of compost. A season or two later, turn with a spade fork and voila: ready to plant.

You can use any number of methods, but the key is this: As you continue to grow vegetables in the same spot, your soil needs to be renewed. That can be accomplished with regular additions of compost (we like Panorama Paydirt) or manure, or by growing crops that feed the soil. A great guide to this is John Jeavons’ guide to “biointensive” farming, How to Grow More Vegetables. First published in 1974, the book is now in its eighth printing with a foreword by none other than Alice Waters.

2 You can have too many pickles

Years of experience have taught me that, while preserving an abundant crop feels noble and satisfying, not all of that food will necessarily get eaten. I’ve thrown away five-year-old pickled okra, eight-year-old habanero jelly, and 10-year-old green tomato mincemeat. All of these seemed like a great idea at the time. Only trial and error could teach me what we would really use from our pantry.

These days, I’ll still work hard to preserve certain things—tomatoes being the main one. No jar of diced tomatoes will ever go to waste at our house, so it’s worth it to plant scads of Big Beefs (50 plants this year) and stay up late packing and processing them. We make tomato soup, tomato juice, and tomato sauce, too, if we have enough. I also ferment sauerkraut, freeze portions of pesto, and dry bundles of mint and oregano. Those are the foods I know we’ll eat.

3 Chickens are easy (except when they’re not)

People who raise cows sometimes have to help them give birth. People who raise sheep have to shear them or pay a shearer. People who raise bees have to fend off bears and, well, bees.

Compared with all those species, chickens really are easy—they just don’t need much from their humans. There’s an initial investment of time and money in preparing a coop. Any homesteader worth her wattles will put something together with scrap wood and a roll or two of chicken wire from the hardware store. Some basic research will tell you how many square feet you need per bird and what they prefer their roosting and egg-laying places to look like.

After that, it’s as simple as feeding the birds once a day, filling their water maybe once a week (because you were smart and rigged up a large, hanging water bucket instead of buying a little jug they’ll knock over and poop in) and locking them up at night to keep out the varmints. You can do this! Your neighbor can do this when you’re on vacation!

Once in a while, though, it does get real (see above: varmints). Your birds will die. You will have to deal with the mess. Know this going in, and you won’t be so shocked to find yourself adding a dead chicken to your compost pile, or plucking and gutting it when you’d planned on watching a movie.

4 Fruit trees are worth it

“Plant pears for your heirs.” That’s a maxim we didn’t learn until four years after we planted our little pear trees. Wait a minute, we thought—these things will take a generation to make fruit? No, it turned out; we have since gotten a few pear crops. Though they’re slow to produce, they’re not glacially slow.

The point is that the project of growing fruit trees is full of tricks. Some types will pollinate themselves; some won’t, but will pollinate their neighbors. Some need to be pollinated by neighbors of a different variety. You’ve got to consider diseases, insect pests, and placement of your trees relative to forest trees, like cedar and walnut, which can affect fruit crops. (Edible Landscaping is a source for both trees and info.)

But it’s all worth it when you reach up and pick a pear, apple, che berry (also called mandarin melon berry), or sour cherry off your very own tree. The abundance of a healthy fruit tree is practically the definition of paradise.

5 Goats are not worth it

We got goats because we wanted to clear some heavily vegetated land. We purchased two pregnant does, the miracle of birth occurred, and suddenly we were the owners of six goats. We realized that half a dozen goats eat a lot of plants, and the lightweight movable fence we were using to contain them had to be reinstalled about every 10 days to keep them in fresh browse.

That’s one thing on open pasture, but again, we’re talking about heavily vegetated land—so clearing new fence lines was a major job. And speaking of the fence, one morning the goats effortlessly jumped it and trotted briskly into the distance. It took several days of walking the woods, calling, and banging feed buckets to get them back. (The sheriff got involved too. Not even joking.)

After a bunch of other shenanigans, we gave our herd back to the man who’d sold us the does in the first place. And that’s how we learned that—for us, at least—goats just ain’t worth the hassle.

If you’re thinking about goats for any reason, get yourself a really amazingly wonderful fence. And good luck.

6 Gardens are food, and not just for humans

Gardening humbles you. Drought and hailstorms and flooding will do that, of course, but what can really bruise the ego are creatures: everybody from vine borers to voles, all the various hungry eaters that will somehow find their way to the crops you were sure you could successfully raise.

Butterflies lay their eggs on your kale, and soon their larvae are chewing the leaves to skeletons. Hornworms strip tomato plants overnight. Squash bugs run around on your pumpkins. And deer—don’t even mention deer.

There are things you can do to prevent all these problems, but the main strategy is to accept it up front: You won’t be the only one eating your garden.

7 Hold on. Write that down!

Where do we turn when we wonder how far apart to transplant our cucumbers, or which salsa recipe from the Ball Blue Book we liked last time, or which month we usually seed parsley? We ask our garden journal.

Stained with soil and missing both covers, the journal records both essential information (planting dates) and entertaining oddities (a bear in the yard). It contains a map of the garden with numbered beds, and brief entries for almost every time we’ve planted or transplanted something. A lot of the harvests get recorded too, along with canning projects. Sometimes we wax poetic about the weather or the progress of spring.

The important thing is not the writing down so much as the looking back. It’s the closest thing we have to a family autobiography.

8 Eat from the wild

We heat our house with scavenged firewood—free warmth all winter. The world is full of resources, we’ve found, including apartment-dwellers and even restaurateurs who will donate food scraps for your home compost pile. Another amazing resource: the plethora of wild edible foods that are yours for the taking, if you know what to look for.

There are the glamorous and elusive morel mushrooms, of course, but there are many others that are easier to find. Wineberries and blackberries want you to notice them. And your yard is likely home to any number of wild greens: purslane, lamb’s quarters, violet, dandelion. But don’t take my word for it; there are real experts around here who can really get you up to speed on wild edibles. Check out the Living Earth School for starters.

9 There’s nothing silly about safety

Over the years, I’ve gotten a little smarter about those ounces of prevention appropriate to outdoor time: hats to keep from boiling in the sun, boots to prevent a snakebite when wading through unweeded beds, and a watchful eye in general. Once I found a black widow spider living in my marigolds. Other times we’ve seen copperheads in our wood pile and behind our shed. This year, a nest of yellowjackets appeared near the fig tree. There’s no need to be fearful, but a little awareness goes a long way.

One of the worst risks, for my money, are ticks. It’s easy to miss them and they can really mess up your year, or even affect your health in the long-term. Do the nightly tick checks: It’s annoying but important.

10 Add fresh herbs

I know people who can tell you exactly which herbs they grow for their wintertime teas and how exactly to make a tincture. I am not one of those people, but I certainly respect all that knowledge—I’ve been known to simply pour boiling water over some mint leaves and call it a party.

Herbalism, I’ve surmised, is a complex endeavor, the kind of practice you can hone over a lifetime. For those who want to embark on that journey, Sacred Plant Traditions is a local hub of knowledge. The rest of us can start small. Plant some mint, oregano, rosemary; use them in your cooking. If you want to get fancy, add some yarrow—it’s a medicinal that can help stop bleeding. At least that’s what I’ve heard.

Categories
Arts

Travel guidance: Erika Howsare channels a late Victorian explorer for her new book

Erika Howsare’s work serves to jostle answers to two of her most pressing questions: “How can you take a journey and make a document of it that’s a work of art?” and “Can the journey itself be a performance?” Photo by Meredith Coe

Author Erika Howsare first made acquaintance with Isabella Bird as an undergrad, while sifting through a reading assignment. Bird, a Victorian British traveler, had lived and written nearly a century and a half before Howsare sat studying; still, she felt akin to the historic figure, making note of their mutual affinity for travel. Years later, Howsare would render their relationship tangible, etching Bird onto manuscript pages as her imagined travel partner in an escapade out West.

How Is Travel a Folded Form? is the published result of Howsare’s invented intersection with Bird, whose book, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, deeply influenced her and is sampled throughout her pages. Howsare, a poet who writes frequently for C-VILLE, can still recall the cross-country road trip at age 19 that launched her own relationship with the American West.

In her new book, she weaves her own experiences with Bird’s quoted notes. What ensues is an experimental poetry-prose hybrid (Howsare cites this “formal playfulness” as the text’s standout strength), a purposefully incomplete travel guide, and an intergenerational conversation.

The guiding premise for Howsare’s paperback dates back to her girlhood. As a child, she created poems and tiny homemade books in her Pennsylvania home, often wondering what it would be like to walk and work alongside her literary hero Laura Ingalls Wilder. As an adult, she found a more resonant connection with Bird, who was also a pilgrim “passing through” spaces rather than settling down—an insatiable explorer propelled by “recreation…and curiosity.”

Howsare’s passion for nature is central to her life in Nelson County, where she lives with her husband and children. They often venture through the woods, to the creek, and into the garden in an attempt to establish an unfiltered, multi-sensory relationship with the neighboring ecosystem—to move away from screen time and tired, pixelated landscapes. Even so, Howsare says it’s almost impossible to shirk the pervasive influence of modern technology. “The line between nature and technology is very blurry in the era of climate change and many other conditions that we are all living with, whether or not we spend a lot of time on Twitter,” says Howsare.

Howsare’s published works range from delicate poems to investigative prose pieces, from architecture-based articles to ruminations on groundhog songs, and she derives pleasure in mashing numerous written forms together. “I’m always interested in mixing genres,” she says, “…bringing history and quotations from biographies and theory and philosophy into poetic work.” How Is Travel a Folded Form? is a testament to that artistic tendency.

She also expresses her artistic prowess in a performative sense, pursuing walking as a live art form. As a college student, she trekked across the state of Rhode Island, jotting notes, logging measurements, and taking photographs. Similar trips followed in New Mexico, where she completed a residency and an art installation, and along the Lewis and Clark path. Her work serves to jostle answers to two of her most pressing questions: “How can you take a journey and make a document of it that’s a work of art?” and “Can the journey itself be a performance?”

Howsare’s and Bird’s journey is equal parts inviting and unpredictable. Boxed-in pages, whose headers are scrawled in Howsare’s own curling handwriting, “are meant to be the notes that Isabella and the narrator are gathering.” A waffling between fonts and Howsare’s unprocessed inscriptions distinguish different registers within the book and signal “a messy, unfinished space” akin to the inner folds of a travel journal. The manuscript is incomplete, Howsare sometimes leaves out entire chunks of text, replacing them with fillable blanks and inviting the reader to participate.

The book also grapples with travelers’ expectations and impressions of a place. “So much of the language of tourism is about stepping into another time or place, and promising that experience of getting out of yourself and in to some other era or some other person’s experience,” Howsare says. “There isn’t one truth and the experiences we’re having are…mediated by the experiences of people who have been there before and have told us what to expect.”

Different definitions for the words “circle,”  “line,” “form,” and “reflection” cycle through the pages as footnotes. As travelers, Howsare notes, “we think we’re traveling in a line, but really, we’re often moving in circles.” Progress—both historical and personal—is not linear. “There’s always myths that are informing our experience in the moment, and none of that can ever be really codified. It’s always fluid. This book is trying to just dwell in that space for a period of time.”

The book offers an indisputable truth in its display of female fortitude. “We often think of so many generations of women who came before us as having lived very constricted lives, [so] it’s heartening to discover a 19th-century woman who seems to have commandeered considerable freedom.”

Howsare is a female trailblazer herself. She is set to expand her current list of published works, including a full-length collaborative poetry collection and multiple chapbooks, by wrapping up an investigative project on architecture and global interpretations of homebuilding. Her pen is scurrying as quickly as her wandering feet, and shows no sign of stopping.

Erica Howsare will read from How is Travel a Folded Form? at New Dominion Bookshop on October 13.