Dirty Nails, Dirty Wheels

It’s been a while since I posted anything about Okinawa.  These are some more of the pictures I took while I was there; more posts about my time there will come over the next week or two.

A few new bitsies:

+I learned that Tubaru, one of the ponies here, was the dressage champion of Okinawa back in 2008!  Huh?!  Apparently there was somebody working on the farm for a while who rode dressage, and they started riding Tubaru, he got into it, and they went to the prefectural competition.  People with like thoroughbreds and quarterhorses and stuff were laughing, thinking “What’s this Yonaguni pony doing here?” but then they won.  Pretty rad!

+Turns out taifuns, cyclones and hurricanes are all the same thing.  They’re measured a little differently in different parts of the world, but they’re all just regional names for what is technically called a tropical cyclone.  Wow—now I’ve been in a taifun, a cyclone, and a hurricane!  Three for the price of one.  Hrmm.  Interesting for me, deadly in the Philippines.

+I made mochi (rice balls) this morning.  I didn’t boil ‘em all long enough, so some of the insides are still a little iffy, but overall, a success!  A success ‘cause they’re naturally quite bland, so you can put anything you like on ‘em, and they’re super-filling.  Pictures in a minute.

+Three weeks left ‘til I return.  Lookin’ forward to seein’ folks I know and love and can speak with, and vegan cookies and burritos and chocolate and pizza out my nose.

Have a good one y’all,

~Grey

Hey!

Quick update again this time:

+Last week I tried to canter for the first time in probably seven or eight years.  I fell off.  We were on the beach, so I was fine (just little scrapes and a little bruise), but still—I was a pretty atrocious attempted canterer.  But Ma-kun gave me some tips, and today I tried again, and did it!  And it was rad!  And I was riding bareback!  Fuck yeah!

+Taifun number two of my stay (number nine of the season) is coming on Thursday or Friday (it’s Tuesday evening as I write this).  The last one wound up missing us, which was great for Okinawa, not so great for the areas up north that it hit, and not very educational for me.  This time I’m hoping to get educated.

+There’s a longboarder who lives in a tent on the beach not too far from here.  I haven’t met him, only seen him and smiled, but I want to.  I wanna know what his life is like, ‘cause it seems like it would be in turns really rad and really hard, and I’m curious about it.  And I wanna ride with him!

+I saw the raddest fuckin’ bus parked at the beach the other day.  The back of it had been blowtorched up into the shape of the back of an old timey-train car, with a little balcony you could walk out onto.  There were beds inside.  There were stairs up onto the roof, which had a low wall around it so you can hang out up there more easily.  There was a little speaker peeking out over said wall, makin’ music.  I feel like whoever drives/rides that bus probably has a pretty good time while doin’ it.  Rad bus.

+Evan Greer:  good music.  Check out the album Never Surrender.  It took me awhile to get into it, but into it I am.

+If you put your ear up to the ocean here, it sounds just like the inside of a shell.

+I skated a fuckton yesterday!  I’ll write it up for your post-taifun enjoyment.  Likewise a more fleshed-out rundown of all of everything.

Arrrighty, happy days to y’all!

Rock on,

~Grey

Written 25 July:

Okay, so: organic farming, skating, and veganism: is my interest in them coincidental? Mais non! Though I like each for a variety of reasons, there’s one thing that they share: they’re each more-sustainable alternatives to incredibly damaging practices that are currently standard in contemporary industrialized society (and in many cases non-industrialized society, too). Specifically: industrial agriculture, driving cars, and omnivorousness. Like I said, there are definitely other reasons to do each—I’ll talk about some of those later on—but the common thread that runs through all three is trying to get our lives more in line with the carrying capacity of our planet, as opposed to the alternative, which is living like we do right now, and making the earth’s climate patterns unrecognizable, which would kill—at least—millions. And having foreknowledge of probable impending death that you can act to avert, but opting to not act, is some Hurricane Katrina shit. Some leaving the poor locked belowdecks on the Titanic shit. Murder. This isn’t minor business. So here’s my thoughts on these three things.

First: Farming. Farming should be a rad thing. It should be a “Hey buddy, come check out the tomatoes I just harvested from my block’s field! I’ve been tending ‘em real carefully all season, and they’re awesome!” or “Oops, I forgot the carrots! Could you run out front and grab me some?” or “Hey guess what? There was a major global wheat shortage this year, but even though people didn’t have as much bread and pasta, nobody went hungry, because the whole planet is back to complete self-sustaining food sovereignty at a local level. Remember the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries? That shit was fucked up!” That’s what farming should be. That would be so cool! And don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying there should be no world-wide food distribution—a drought is a drought, for one, and aid should be sent in heaps; and mangoes are mangoes, for two, and should be brought (not by plane) to wherever I live—but there’s a difference between world-wide sharing of sustainably-grown food using sustainable forms of transportation and what we have right now.

What we have right now is an abomination. What we have right now sees the rainforest burned down on indigenous land in Brasil and replaced with soybeans, which are then sent to China to feed chickens, who are then killed and sent to the United States to feed McDonalds customers, on indigenous land again. What we have now makes the desert bloom, but not through permaculture techniques like catching storm runoff from roadways and carefully planting a variety of species across the contours of land shaped into swales to maximize use of limited resources, no; rather, it makes the desert bloom by turning rivers in other regions into skeletons, by draining underground aquifers faster than they can replenish themselves, by injecting petrochemicals into the earth and calling that soil fertility, even though it’s part of the nutrient-depleting, chemistry-distorting, microbe-killing process that makes the land utterly unfarmable without continuous use of those same chemicals. What we have right now hinges on using the same genetically modified species all over, impervious to pesticides but monstrously vulnerable to disease by dint of having DNA makeup identical to crops filling other fields, so that a disease that could kill one specimen is lethal to every other; and economically perverse, with Monsanto suing farmers into whose fields their Roundup-Ready seeds have accidentally blown—biotech companies hold patents on varieties of genetically engineered plant, patents on life. What we have right now, in short, is bullshit. Yes, it can produce enormous quantities of crops, but pointing to that and deciding it’s a good way to do things is like pointing to rising GDP in a poor country and pronouncing them no longer poor. Just like GDP rises when the rich get richer and the poor get nothing, simply producing a huge volume of corn is not necessarily helpful, when much of it is going to be turned into ethanol (a so-called sustainable fuel that takes food out of the mouths of the hungry and needs more energy input to create than it returns when it’s used—for these reasons, people are moving away from corn-based ethanol, but some are unfortunately turning to cellulosic ethanol, which is likewise no solution) or fed to hogs who will then be eaten by people, decreasing its efficiency by using more land to produce less food (a ton of corn will feed more people than the hogs fed on a ton of corn will, but the land used to farm the corn is still used to farm the corn—plus you’ve got the land, water, transportation fuel, and other energy used for the hogs themselves). And the current system cannot function without continual use of fossil fuels, both to power the machines that are necessary to maintain fields as big as the ones we work with and also in the form of petroleum-derived chemicals applied to the fields themselves. And a system that can’t function without something we’re running out of is soon going to be simply a system that can’t function. Further, when those chemicals run off of fields and into rivers, lakes, cricks, ponds and oceans with the rain, they devastate the ecosystems they pollute there. Add onto that the fact that industrial agriculture is not interested in maintaining real soil health—that is to say, a dynamic mix of minerals and organisms in the dirt that plants interact with reciprocally, consuming and replenishing different components of the system in turn through use of multicrop fields and/or sensible crop rotation—or even in maintaining soil—current practices promote erosion, stripping away what are sometimes the precious few inches of potentially fertile soil a region might have, which generally take an enormously long time to form, and leaving an unfarmable wasteland. Essentially, what you get is an industry that paints itself as being a thoughtful steward of the land, bearing needed staples for the hungry and tasty favorites for the rich, but is in fact turning our arable land into a corpse, our grocery stores into a joke, the farmers who try to fight it broke, and our climate systems into something that no one knows what will look like yet.

That should not be what we think of when we think of agriculture. That sounds like an evil empire out of a goddamn science fiction story. Proponents of this system—people who either, like the heads of Monsanto, get rich off it; or, like the farmers who use Monsanto’s gen-mod “crops,” use it to survive; or peopl who have trusted those first two groups, say that this is the only way to feed the world’s population, that the alternative to this system is mass starvation. That, to borrow a phrase from David Owen’s book Green Metropolis, “is exactly wrong.” Sensible farming— organic and local farming, permaculture, and other techniques interested in the welfare of the earth and its various species and lands—in many cases actually produces a higher crop yield per unit of land farmed than industrial agriculture does. The farms are generally smaller, so any given reasonable farmer’s output will be lower than that of a company shitting artificial fertilizers and pesticides all over vast tracts of biotech tomatoes, but the idea is that there should be more farms than there are now. Smaller scale, greater quantity, greater quality. (The larger number of farms and lower level of mechanization associated with sustainable approaches also mean that there are more labor-hours available to workers in a sustainable agricultural paradigm than in the current one.) Further, because farming that doesn’t use massive chemical input requires that a variety of crops use the same land and keep the soil healthy cooperatively, either through crop rotation (planting different crops each season, and sometimes letting a field lie fallow—unplanted—for a time) or through having different crops side-by-side in the same field at once, you get more crops coming out of the same location, making for greater nutritional balance in all-local or mostly-local diets, and greater food sovereignty (which protects against the risk of being unable to eat because of changes in global food prices) for that area. Which is the bomb. Also, I think sensible-scale agriculture is more fun. I don’t speak from experience, but I feel like operating industrial machines alone for hours on end is maybe not too awesome. Shoveling manure with a friendly coworker, though, is fun. Your boss asking you to come inside and cut—and also eat—strawberries is fun. Prising a 300-pound boulder from a dirt driveway in the rain at just-above-freezing temperatures by utility lights at night with friends is really, really fun (seriously, actually—that’s among my favorite things I’ve done in my life). Eating an organic tomato right off the vine, warm from the sun, is fun and extremely delicious. Riding standing in the bed of a truck with one hand on the rack behind the cab and one hand on the collar of a goat, keeping it from fighting with the other goat you’re also riding with—nervous, but still fun. (The digging-the-rock-out-of-the-driveway thing wasn’t on a farm, but it totally could have been.) Don’t get me wrong: it’s not like some perfect idyll—I really do not like weeding, and weeding is a pretty enormous part of organic vegetable farming; I so do not get excited about grooming horses, but if Umikaze didn’t groom their ponies I don’t think it would turn out well. There’s absolutely plenty of tedium and stress. But the fact that there’s also a lot of great stuff, and the fact that it isn’t bludgeoning the earth, make it pretty solid in the full picture. I know I’m guilty of idealizing farm work when I’m not doing it, and this is my day off, but even taking that into account, I really do feel that small organic farms, functioning around human labor and camaraderie, can be a pretty darn good time. So, in sum, for reasons animal, vegetable and mineral, (and social, economic, climatic, et cetera…) organic agriculture is the fuckin’ shit, and industrial agriculture is fuckin’ shitty.

Second: Skating (feel free to substitute bicycling at will). Automobiles do some great stuff: ambulances save lives, fire trucks do too, cars let people with disabilities be independently mobile and let everyone get to far away places buses and trains don’t go when we need to get there on short notice. But if you’re able-bodied and not an EMT or firefigher, how often do you really need a car? Not how often do you use a car, but how often do you need one? If you’re able-bodied, going to a grocery store five miles away does not require a car. Going to work ten miles away does not require a car. Going to a state park twenty miles away outside your town on your weekend does not require a car. I guess I’m getting a bit outside the realm of standard skateability there, but a forty-mile round trip on a bicycle is absolutely feasible for most people. If you’re too out of shape to do that, driving (or even public transportation) may be part of the problem. (Also, state/national parks are exactly the kind of place where interurban buses should eventually make stops.) Yes, not driving takes more time—often way more time, no doubt about it. A couple years ago, I was living in the south part of Austin, Texas, and working in the north part. I commuted by bus, and depending on when I was shifted, some days my bus ride would be only half an hour each way. But on other shifts, when the bus would have a lot more passengers and be moving through much thicker traffic, I’d have a two-hour commute in either direction—four hours on the bus, eight hours at work. That sucked. It totally fucking sucked, and I hated it. But you know what would have sucked more? Driving. I could’ve taken side streets and not stopped to pick up a soul, getting to work in way less time, but I’d’ve been kicking the planet in the face. And that’s not just an abstractly bad thing: that’s starvation, that’s population displacement, that’s increased warfare, that’s mass extinctions. So a four-hour round trip commute isn’t any fun, but it’s a hell of a lot better than what we’re causing by driving and avoiding it.

Saying “Yeah, but I live in the suburbs and work in the city—I have to drive” doesn’t cut it. The problem in that situation is not that what I’m encouraging is unrealistic for that lifestyle, but that the lifestyle is unrealistic for our planet (something covered in way more detail in the aforementioned Green Metropolis,a book that I haven’t finished yet, but that so far is really good, except for the author’s assumption that population growth is inevitable). Where we live and work—at least so far as city/suburb questions go—is a choice. Some might think “Well, I can’t just quit my job and/or move to a new place tomorrow, so this is unfeasible.” I’m not talking about doing it immediately; obviously that wouldn’t work for many people. But try realigning your perspective so that environmental sustainability is a crucial criterion when you’re looking at places to work and live, and then start planning the housing and/or career changes you need to make. I don’t mean “need to make” in an “I’m gonna boss you around now” kind of way, but in a “if we don’t make these changes and make them right now, we are lost” way. Because that’s very much the situation we’ve put ourselves—and everyone else—in.

All these arguments hinge on the negative consequences of allowing car culture to continue. But what about the awesome parts of killing it off? They are legion, and they are rad as hell. For me the most basic, most foundational, is the enormous physical pleasure to be found in skating. I didn’t start riding for the planet, I started riding ‘cause it looked fun, and daaaammnnnn is it fun. The scary-giddy rush of hitting a good downhill; the fleshy, exuberant satisfaction of landing a trick you’ve been working on; the peaceful glory of gravity twisting underneath you and the wind flickering over you as you carve down a mellow slope; oh! I don’t know what I’m gonna do in rainy Portland winters. I hope I can find some good parking garages to ride, with big flat parts for street tricks, ‘cause skating is a good time like whoa. And though don’t find cycling quite as excellent, it’s still damn excellent—pressing low and fast into a banked curve through midwestern farm fields, leaves green and sky blue like I’ve never seen elsewhere; jangling stop-and-go down a skinny track in the woods, fingers twitching over the brakes and butt hanging over the back wheel; feeling your body fight and strive and win as you pound your way over a hill; slipping smooth circles in a parking lot, going nowhere but up. Even walking is good!—the freedom to clamber up walls, jump sailing over benches, slide down railings, duck through tiny gaps. There are whole worlds of good times to be had under our own steam.

And that’s just the physical side of it. Wrapped in multiple tons of steel, it’s easy to miss what the places you live in are really like. Skating to a store a couple miles from home, I move slow enough to really take in the neighborhoods I pass through, the people I see and greet. What things look like at five or ten miles an hour instead of thirty or forty, what they sound like how they smell, where the shade is, where I can find a water fountain. Some might say those things are unimportant, but I don’t think so. There’s something significant in having personal experience with your home. Being really acquainted with the land and the buildings and the birds and the trees and the neighbors and the sewer access covers and the people checking the streetlights, you care for the place more and you care for it in a way rooted in direct firsthand knowledge and experience. It would be easy to talk it up into like a transcendent spiritual thing, speaking with Walt Whitman-y rapture about the glory of American vistas and every citizen [editorial note:  it used to say “the average citizen,” but I realized after the fact that that sounded like I was setting myself apart from everybody else, which wasn’t what I wanted to do—so in case you’re rereading and think you remember different language, you probably do], and though I sometimes get into that kind of a feeling, and it can be wonderful, that’s not usually where I’m at. I just think it’s important to really know your location, not simply where you’re located. I haven’t been to as many parts of Lincoln, Nebraska, where I lived for the past six months, as somebody with a car might have. But I bet I know the areas I’ve traveled through on my own more personally and viscerally—and, I think, more meaningfully—than I would have behind a wheel.

And finally, in the good-things-about-human-power-transportation segment of today’s episode, good health is a good thing. It makes you happier, it lets you live longer, it lets you do more great stuff. Why spend time, oil, and money driving to the gym when you can be in equally good shape by riding a skateboard or bike for your day-to-day errands and adventures? Inaccurately assessed short-term convenience. I try to skip that. Skating is radder.

Third: Veganism. As I mentioned in the section on agriculture, eating only plants is a more efficient food practice in terms of land and energy use. If we eat all the plants in a field, we get a lot more meals out of it than we would if we fed the plants to animals who would eat many fields’ worth of plants before we killed and ate them. On top of that you have all the extra energy, labor, time and monetary cost of keeping the animals alive, killing them and processing their dead bodies, which could be applied elsewhere. There’s also the fact that some animals—primarily cows—are actually significant contributors to climate change through the methane in their farts. No joke; that’s really true. We raise so many cows, and there’s so much methane in their farts, that they have a noticeable impact on greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere. Vegetarianism helps: it doesn’t demand that as many animal lives be first created, then supported, then ended for our gustatory pleasure. But dairy cows are still cows, and egg-laying chickens still need time, land, energy, et cetera, and both (as well as other milk- and egg-producing species) are still inefficient uses of potential food crops. And until industrial agriculture is over, vegetarianism still funds killing, because the brothers of young female calves headed for the dairy “farm” are killed for veal, and the newborn males chicks hatched in the production of eventual egg-laying hens are simply killed as soon as they’re sorted out from the females chicks, by methods like gassing and being ground up alive.

Brief aside: I am not actually vegan for environmental reasons. Those are like added bonuses to me. I’m vegan because I don’t believe in enslaving, torturing and murdering other beings because their corpses or byproducts taste good. To arrogate [thanks for correcting my misuse of “abrogate,” Carolyn—the original wording has now been abrogated] to ourselves the right to control and end the life of a once-free or would-be-free animal displays at once a frightening lack of compassion and a terrible hubris, both of them often-unexamined. I’m vegan because the rights of non-human animals matter and should be respected, and I could write a whole ‘nother post from that angle, or a super-mega-hyper-post from every angle that matters to me that talks about things like how I think we should eventually phase out the domestication of almost all animals, but this post is about environmental sustainability, so for right now, that’s where I’m focusing.

A further benefit of veganism, one that ties in with the transportation section, is that often—certainly not always, but often—veganism is healthier than omnivory. It can absolutely be done wrong, and I’ve heard awful anecdotes about well-meaning but nutritionally-ignorant parents malnourishing their children with unhealthful vegan diets, and there’s the story I head from my mom about the Romantic poet Percy Shelley feeling moved by compassion to not harm animals, but knowing so little about what his body needed that he would “eat nothing but lettuce for two weeks and then pass out,” which is unfortunate for Percy but a story I like all the same. But if you eat good, healthy, balanced food, veganism can be excellent for your body, delivering the nutrients you need without unhealthy aspects of animal bodies and products. Let me here mention that there are some people who have to eat meat out of medical necessity—there are certain things (I say “things” ‘cause I don’t know the specifics—I’ll find out what, exactly) that their bodies cannot create or process only from plants. That’s real, and it’s a bummer, but despite my convictions about non-human animal rights, I will certainly cop to being a speciesist insofar as I’d rather have those humans who need to eat animals be healthy, even at the expense of a small number of non-human animal lives. There are not many people like this, though—in twenty-two-and-three-quarters years I’ve met four—and for everyone else, veganism is definitely a way to meet our bodies’ needs. This connects with transportation—and sustainability—because the better-nourished you are, the more able your body will be to do things like skateboard and ride a bike to get where you need to go. So though the primary beneficiary is you, the planet and all life on it also get a bit of a boost from veganism’s healthiness.

So that’s (some of) why I’m into organic agriculture, skateboarding, and being an herbivore. These things are all quite doable, and though they are not in and of themselves a solution, they are steps towards one. And we have never needed a solution more direly than we do right now. So give ‘em some thought, please. You will find, or you already know, that doing them doesn’t make life worse. It makes it better. Not just in the big-picture sense, but in the little-picture sense too. It’s more fun to have walked on the land where your dinner came from. It’s more fun to skate and know what the neighborhoods between home and work are really like. It’s more fun to eat food that didn’t require suffering. The book No Impact Man, by Colin Beavan, makes this point clearly and repeatedly: the idea that living sustainably means we have to be cold and eat bland food and not do fun things and miss out on life, just sitting around being self-righteous and bummed out, is nonsense. Life is richer, life is more exciting, life is more satisfying, life is more fun the more we do this stuff, by and large. So, like MC5 put it, let’s kick out the jams!

Hey: if you have questions, comments, and/or corrections, I really want to hear them. If I can help you learn more, I want to; if you disagree with my positions, we should talk about it; and I care a lot about this stuff, but I am drastically far from being an expert, so let me know if I’ve gotten something wrong, and I’ll be glad to know more and to edit this post.  And to read stuff that is from experts, check out the Energy Justice Network.

Furthermore: I know there’s plenty of hypocrisy in here. I got to Japan on a plane, a ton of my stuff’s made of petroleum products, I’m using a computer, et cetera. Obviously I’m not living without negative impact. But we’ve gotta start where we’re at to work towards somewhere better.

Lastly: I wrote this whole thing in one go, without many revisions, ‘cause I’d been on-and-off hacking around on an earlier draft for almost three weeks and wanted to finally get these ideas up on the blog, and it’s great that they’re here now, but I may’ve left out big chunks of my own motivations and beliefs. If I realize that after the fact, I’ll mention ‘em in a subsequent post. Also, there were some really nice turns of phrase in that draft post, and I’m gonna try and stick ‘em in upcoming things, so get ready! It’s gonna be rhetorically rhapsodic comin’ up here!

Written 22 July:

So, my day-to-day routine:

7:00 am—wake up. Usually eat leftovers (rice and vegetables or udon and vegetables) plus maybe some fruit for breakfast. Put on sunscreen and clothes before…

8:00 am—leave for the farm. If there are goats being kept at the trailer house, I check on ‘em, give ‘em new water, untangle them if they need it, make sure they’re still tied up. Then I skate to the farm, where work starts at…

8:30 am—boro tori. That means “manure getting,” more or less, and is my first task in the morning, cleaning up horse (pony, technically, but everybody here says horse) and goat poop. Then I brush the horses. Everybody’s tasks are supposed to be finished by…

10:00 am—customers arrive. Folks come, usually with kids, to pet and feed the ponies, to go on rides around the field, to have little lessons. A couple times a week there regularly scheduled group classes, where the same kids come each time to really become better riders, as opposed to just getting the exposure and cool experience of riding around a while. Some of ‘em seem quite good! There’s a break or two in there, and morning work with customers wraps up by around…

12:30ish or so pm—lunchtime. Ma-kun usually cooks something, and it’s pretty much universally tasty, although I’ve yet to get into this Okinawan vegetable called goya, which is supposed to keep your energy up in the heat (awesome!) but has a severely bitter aftertaste (totally not awesome). Most of the food I like quite well, though (I think I’m gonna write a post about food at some point). After lunch I generally do the dishes (‘cause I don’t speak Japanese well enough to be much help cooking, unlike Hime-san and Mari-san), and we get back to customers by around…

1:30ish pm—afternoon work. Some days it’s pretty much the same as morning work, except hotter (and the morning’s pretty hot already), but on somedays it’s in the motherfuckin’ ocean! If a customer has scheduled a ride in the sea, I change clothes (swimsuit and marin shyuzu as opposed to pants and boots) and we load up the baunsha, which I think roughly means horse-carrying-vehicle (it shares the kanji for “sha” with ichirinsha (“one wheel vehicle,” or wheelbarrow), jitensha (bicycle, though not “two wheel vehicle”—I don’t know what the literal rest of the meaning is), densha (train—also don’t know the rest of the meaning), and kuruma (which is car, and has a different pronunciation of the character and for which I again do not know what the rest of it means). It’s a truck that the horses ride in the back of. I ride back there too, usually! I like riding in the backs of trucks. So we go to the beach (usually Hyakuna beach, though there’s a program they do sometimes for people with disabilities at Sun Sun beach as well); the customers ride; the customers hold the ponies’ tails while Ma-kun, Hime-san and Mari-san ride (I got towed like that for the first time yesterday; it’s way cool); I serve as maritime borotori technician, chasing horse poop through the sea with a net and then running it to the bushes on the beach; and sometimes at the end I get to ride around a while too. I like it. Then it’s back into the baunsha and back to Umikaze by, I’d reckon, around…

4:30 or so pm—clean up. We hose off the saddles and the rest of the tack; do another round of borotori; brush the horses; wash up rags, buckets, brushes and stuff, and I usually head home between…

5:00 and 6:00 pm—outta Dodge time. I skate home, maybe pick up some food (fruits or veggies, sweets, PB&J), and get back to the cozily warm trailer house. I don’t often head back out again, though sometimes I’ll make a food run later in the evening. Generally I write, listen to music, clean, cook, play guitar, shower, sew, and/or wash dishes and/or clothes until about…

12:00 midnight—sleepytime. I’ve gotta tweak that a bit earlier, ‘cause seven hours of sleep is not an adequate recharge after a day of physical work in the summer. But since it’s been my habit so far, it’s on the schedule.

Variations: Day off—no schedule! Do whatever! Skate! Play guitar! Hang around in my underwear ‘til after noon! Like today! Alternately, on some work days, there have been uncommon things to go do, like going to the port in Naha right after I got here to help with a pony in transit from Yonaguni to Chiba, or these recent trips to Iejima and Okinawa City. Also, sometimes there aren’t any customers around and we do more maintain-the-farm-type work, like moving old hay and grass and sticks into a pile to be burned (not too sustainable, for sure, but on the other hand, the farm’s got a composting outhouse as its only toilet, and that’s pretty sweet).

So, that’s what I do. So far it’s reinforced the twin facts that (one) I like outdoor physical labor a lot and (two) I don’t think I wanna be a farmer. I could do it and be decently happy, I’m sure, but I don’t think it’s what I want most. Not that I came here under the impression that it was, but still, the fact that it isn’t has been pushed further home by this experience. Rocking is what I want to do most, and starting in October, we’re gonna be turning it up to twelve in the northwest. (Which is to say, October’s when I’m moving to Portland and me and some serious rockers are starting a band.)

See y’all folks later!

~Grey

Written 22 July:

Oye Rocker@s,

What’s up? ‘Round Okinawa way, things have been goin’ interesting. Since last we convened this sacred order, I’ve been to Iejima island (that’s kind of redundant; “-jima” is the suffix form of “shima,” which means island), where Ma-kun met with folks to discuss plans to expand the branch his benevolent equine-education empire that’s there (he said the meeting went well, woo!). He brought me along to use as a demonstration subject/assistant in a small class he was teaching for other people who work with animal-assisted education and therapy. It was on nonverbal communication, and the idea was that since I speak terrible Japanese and the students speak terrible English, we’d have to figure out nonverbal ways to ask each other questions, but we wound up mostly muddling through with our terrible language skills, meeting in the middle where we each ran out of vocab (more on that in a bit). During that class, I also learned a little bit about Japanese homophobia, when one of the students, at whose house Ma-kun and I were staying the night, as a joke asked me why I was there with Ma-kun, and was I his homodachi? The Japanese word for friend is tomodachi, and apparently some folks have taken the prefix homo- and added the two together to make an unfunny joke. Perhaps it’s a perfectly common and not-rude term for a gay lover here, too, I don’t know, but that certainly wasn’t this guy’s intent. The class laughed. Hmm. I didn’t want to offend Ma-kun’s friend, and our host, so I didn’t say anything. Under other circumstances, I would have.

Less shittily, later that evening at a restaurant we all went to after class, I was given an impromptu lesson on the sanshin, a traditional Okinawan fretless three-stringed instrument that sounds a little like a banjo. (Its name, I was told, means three lines—san being three and shin being line—in reference to its strings.) That was pretty cool. I wasn’t very good at the song I was being taught, but I improv’ed some stuff I thought sounded okay, once I’d found some spots on the neck that sounded good (I’m not very accustomed to fretless instruments; they’re cool!). Too, Iejima is a pretty beautiful place. The morning of the second day we were there (of two days) Ma-kun and Kuro-chan, who works on the horse farm on the island, took me around to some particularly striking natural spots. There was the spot partway up the mountain in the center of the island, which has a couple names, but I only remember Tacchu; there were the cliffs dropping into the sea, lush with plants and looking like something out of a time before humans existed; and a spot where the volcanic rock that makes up the island is exposed at the seaside, spiky and scalloped and crashing with waves. Apparently during winter storms, the waves at that spot hit twenty meters high. That’s a high fuckin’ wave! (I don’t mean they’re twenty meters high as they roll in toward the land, but rather that when they hit the rock they smash water that high up into the air—I don’t think you could surf them.)

Also, on the drive up north to where we boarded the ferry for Iejima, Ma-kun and I stopped at the Churaumi aquarium, which was rad. We saw enormous (enormous) lobsters that would make me scream and shit myself in terror if I saw them up-close while swimming, even though they don’t have claws. We saw jellies, drifting like sleepy ravers too tired to keep liquid dancing for anything but the downbeat on the one, pulsing themselves across the deep-sea dancefloor. And we saw jimbei same: whale sharks. Kujira means whale, so I’m not sure what jimbei means (same is shark), but regardless of nomenclature, damn. They have three in this huge tank along with lots of rays and fish and I think other sharks and stuff. I was told it’s the biggest tank I the world, I think? Maybe I was told it’s the biggest aquarium in the world. It was Itchan telling me, and a fair number of our conversations end with a long pause during which we weigh whether or not it’s worth it to continue, then giving up and nodding and hoping we understand each other. Anyway, there are these three jimbei same and a bunch of other folks in there, and we happen to be in front of the tank as whale shark feeding time approaches. So we stick around. Perhaps you’re already aware, but whale sharks, the biggest sharks in the world, reaching lengths of about forty feet (I think), just eat tiny little stuff that they strain through their baleen-like teeth (baleen is the stuff some whales have that they strain food out of the water with). Maybe whale sharks’ stuff is called baleen too, I don’t know (it sounds like the word baleen might be whale-specific, though—the Spanish word for whale is ballena). Anyways, the aquarium workers scatter some cloudy, particle-y, bits-and-pieces-y mix of food out over the surface of the water, and the sharks basically lean back, so they’re close to vertical, as if they’re standing up on the tips of their tails, heads angled up towards the surface, and then they inhale. They move water like I’ve never seen water move. It’s like a plug is being pulled on an enormous bathtub, and the drain is the whale shark’s mouth. It’s like flushing a toilet. It’s like a vacuum cleaner you might use to clean out a whole valley, except it’s underwater and it’s a gigantic shark. And the jimbei same just turned these slow, dreamy, beautiful circles, swhoooshing up mouthful after cascading mouthful of water and food, all the unswallowed stuff billowing out through their gills after each draw. We were standing just above the bottom of the tank, and it’s gotta be like minimum fifty feet deep, so we were looking up at all this going down. You know how if you get the right angle on a fishtank, or maybe even look up at the surface of water you’re swimming in, it’s like a mirror? Not transparent but reflective? That was the sort of angle we had on the water the whale sharks were sucking in. It was surreal, hard to make sense of for the eyes, awesome. Silent, enormous, mellow beings, eating in this crazy and mystifying and beautiful way. I liked it.

Elsewhere at Churaumi, there was a tank where you could put your hand in deep-sea temperature water, I think somewhere between ten and twenty degrees Celsius maybe? I thought, Aw, that’s not that bad—that’s a fair ways above freezing. No, dude. Take it from me: that shit is cold. I put my hand in and thought Oh yeah, this is fine, but in less than a minute it was totally painful, and it would’ve been numb not long after. Water: colder than air, even when it’s not. They also had a reproduction of Megalodon jaws. The largest shark believed to have ever lived, now-extinct Megalodons could pass fifty feet in length and decidedly did not strain minithings out of the water with anything akin to baleen—they’re believed to have hunted whales. Like, whales. I could have walked through these jaws like a doorway. Into the worst house ever. Another exhibit had sea turtles—they’re really big! Much bigger than the dead one I saw on the beach a couple weeks ago! They’re pretty cool. Also, during the more-educational prelude to the leaping-and-splashing dolphins show that we stopped at on our way out, a trainer tapped on the male dolphin’s underside ‘til he stuck his penis out. Does that happen at things like this in America? I feel like it doesn’t.

On the ferry ride to and from Iejima, I saw flying fish! I always figured they just had long fins and kinda hopped out of the water for a second or two, but no, these dudes really earn their name—they fuckin’ rip! They spring out of the waves and zoom along for, at my highly unscientific estimate, sometimes as much as like seventy feet! They turn, they clip the water with their tails, they zip right across like birds! Very cool.

On the drive back south, returning from our trip, we stopped at the farm of a good friend of Ma-kun’s, on Hamahiga island (accessible by bridge). He’s got some Yonaguni ponies (the kind Ma-kun primarily works with) and a couple goats. One of the ponies is super-old, and she’s so skinny she looks like a snake when she moves. One of the goats had the raddest fuckin’ beard! It was like a horse’s mane, but silkier and on the bottom of his neck! Beautiful. As a fellow beard enthusiast and haver, I appreciated it very much. (My beard’s gradually gettin’ long again, after a mournful stint of needing-a-job shortness. I’m hoping that I’ll get to Portland—where I’m moving after getting back to the states—and find it blissfully obvious that there will be work available to me without cutting it short again. We’ll see what happens. Here’s hopin’!)

Ma-kun’s friend’s farm shares its entrance with someone else’s, and that person is a fucking hateful douchebag piece of shit asshole. They had about thirty goats in a pen about forty feet long, with only two stripped-bare branches left for food, and no water—they were drinking each other’s urine as they peed they were so thirsty. What has to happen inside a person to make them able to do something like that? In some senses it’s no worse than usual omnivory, but I think that a lot of people’s omnivorousness hinges on (willfully) not seeing the acts of torture and murder committed on the animals they eat (that is, as some people admit, if they witnessed the killing, they couldn’t bring themselves to eat the animals being killed)—but this farmer sees these goats every day they show up on the farm. And some improvement to the situation would not have been difficult—there was a spigot like ten feet from the fence—if you’re really so lazy you can’t be bothered to tend to the animals you’ve decided to keep captive, run a hose through the fence into a trough or a big bucket and leave the water running at low pressure, and if you can’t afford the water bill then maybe you can’t afford to be keeping thirty goats either, fucking piece of shit.

On a lighter note about goats: They are pretty dumb. I thought of them as kind of keen and crafty before coming here—something about their expression, and nimbleness of foot, and the fact that they have beards. Having only ever seen them at 4-H fairs, where they were in small pens without much to do but get petted by people walking around, I had figured they were the type to always be slipping out of enclosures or getting into feed when farmers didn’t want them to, that kind of thing. Basically, smart and mischievous and sneaky.

That ain’t goats.

For animals that spend as much time tied up with rope as the ones here at Umikaze do, they have no clue how rope works at all. Tied to a tree, they’ll walk circles around it ‘til they’ve got all of two feet of rope left to work with, and will not unwind themselves, but rather just pull. Tied to a fencepost, they’ll hop through the fence a couple times ‘til they’ve effectively tied themselves to the next post in the fence as well, halving the length of their rope. When Besu (Beth, named after Queen Elizabeth, to whom Hime-san thought she bore resemblance because of her elegant self-carriage) and O-chan were being kept here at the trailer house, Besu pulled the stake she was tied to out of the ground (sounds crafty), but then tangled her rope up with O-chan’s so thoroughly they were both stuck with about six feet apiece. One of them, I forget who, pooped in their own water bucket. They knock their water over pretty regularly. They do some stuff that fits with my earlier perception of them—Rasukaru (Rascall) jumped up into the ponies’ feed trough to eat their food, for instance—but overall, not the snuggest girths on the wall.  All that said, I like them a lot.  They’re stubborn and adventurous and jump and climb and run.  Much-admired qualities in my book.

Having returned from Iejima, the next day (yesterday, as I write this) we went to Okinawa University, in Okinawa City, where Ma-kun was teaching another class, this one much bigger (and made up of college students), and used me in a demonstration again. He used Hime-san too this time, and had tweaked his plan so that there would be no talking. Students volunteered, and he gave them a set of written instructions they had to get me and Hime-san to perform without any speech. It was fun, and me and the students got to ask each other questions afterward (they were shy!). Afterwards, we came back, did some rockin’ Umi Uma Asobi (riding ponies in the ocean), then went into Naha for dinner with Sano-chan, a member of Ma-kun’s staff back on Yonagunijima. The restaurant we went to was a buffet a lot of vegan food, and all their deserts were vegan. I ate until my stomach frowned at me; it was awesome. Today’s my day off, and I’ve been hanging out in the sweaty trailer house (I’ve only used the air conditioning twice here so far, but the more I use it the more tempting it becomes…) and writing. Plans for the rest of the day: go to the farm to use the wireless and post this? Skate to the beach? Just skate? Get some more PB&J? Play guitar? Tsukishiro and the nearby areas are my vegan oyster substitute.

Last thoughts: the horse farm on Iejima reminded me of the California coast, which I like. The Inevitables were a totally rad fuckin’ band (Oberlin Ohio, 2008-2009), as are the Bucketkickers (Oberlin Ohio, not sure when they started but apparently transcending time itself). I’ve got a working washing machine! Fuck yeah! Now I just have to figure out what its (many, many) settings mean. On Iejima we stayed in a traditional Okinawan house, which was pretty cool; I’ve only slept on tatami once before, when I was fifteen. Tacchu, the mountain on Iejima and a holy site, bears scars in its surface from World War II. Saw a lot of American military on the way up north—it was weird. Fighter jets fly over the farm sometimes; it’s a strange enough feeling seeing military folks and equipment in the states—it’s stranger still seeing them in another country and thinking “My tax dollars keep my country’s armed forces in your country.” It’s not as if I’m not aware that’s happening all the time, but I haven’t seen it right up-front and in person like this before. Not sure where my head’s going with that yet.

Until next time, stay dirty.

See ya,

~Grey

ps. Sorry if the inconsistent treatment of foreign words irks you—sometimes I use italics, sometimes I’m put ‘em in quotes, sometimes I just let ‘em be. I make the decision based on what seems to convey most accurately the way I’d inflect the word in speech, not based on any uniform protocol.

Hello folks!

So, this one’s gonna be just a point-by-point list, ‘cause I’m in a touch of a hurry, but here’s the rundown:

+Dropped my sunglasses in the composting toilet.

+I’ve been bitten by a horse and a goat so far.  Up next is a snail.

+I’VE FUCKING RIDDEN PONIES IN THE OCEAN FUCKING THREE TIMES!  Jeez!

+I was crazy-lonely here at first, but it’s mostly better now.  But holy shit, was it bad at times at first.  Traveling alone for long stretches:  not my bag.

+I found PEANUT BUTTER AND JELLY AND OREOS at a shop near my trailer.  I bought all the peanut butter, two out of three jars of jelly, and three out of four packs of Oreos.  I would not normally get some of this stuff (the Oreos or the peanut butter, which is Skippy), on account of their horrible production practices, but Holy My Goodness I thought I wouldn’t taste peanut butter or sweets this intensely unhealthy until September, and my mouth is smiling.  My stomach is looking at me dourly, though.  Probably good there’s not much left at the shop for me to get (not much terrible American stuff, that is).

+My totally rad, totally expensive sandals that I got just before leaving to use when we work at the beach have proven to actually be not so useful—rocks and bits of coral have a very easy time getting in under my feet, but a very hard time getting out again.  So I got some marin shyuzu, or marine shoes, which cost about a third as much but do the job much better.  I’m sure the sandals will still be kickin’ years after the marin shyuzu have frayed apart, but still—a hundred bucks compared to just over three thousand yen.  Eeeh!

+Are there beaches in skating range from my trailer?  Yes.  Yes there are.  Day after tomorrow’s my next day off, and you can bet I’ll be packin’ marin shyuzu when I set off.

+I went out skate-exploring on my day off last week and, as I trekked back up this long loop of highway udon, utterly without shelter of any sort, the clouds finally cracked open and poured prodigiously.  I was totally soaked and my bearings got fried, but daijobu.  (That’s nihongo for “it’s all good,” mas o menos.)

+My shower has hot water now!  FUCK YEAH HOT WATER.

+I’m gonna get to build new steps for the trailer house!  I love doin’ shit like that.

+This weekend or next week, my first taifun is gonna hit.  I’m pumped.  By which I mean nervous but pumped.

+I found out the big complex of buildings that makes up my across-the-road neighbor is a prison.  The only one on Okinawa, actually.

Arrrighty, that’s all for today.  Upcoming posts:  my day-to-day tasks around here and a sort of explanation of purpose for the blog and its topics.  Hope everybody’s doin’ well!

Rock on,

~Grey

At Umikaze Horse Farm

Written 4 July:

So hello!

I’m in Japan now, specifically Nanjo City, Okinawa. Working as a volunteer at Umikaze (sea wind) Horse Farm, where visitors can come to learn about and ride ponies from Yonaguni island. I live in a trailer about 15 minutes’ skate from the farm, which I have all to myself on account of the trainee who was gonna share it with me left before I got here. (He left some things behind. We have divergent tastes in porn.) Two of the farm’s goats do live in the brush nearby, but the trailer itself is just me. It’s pretty nice: a main bedroom/kitchen/living room, with a shower and a toilet (separate from each other) in rooms at one end. The stairs up to the front door are gone, but it’s only a short hop up to and down from the porch. I cooked for myself the first time since arriving this evening: udon noodles with soy-sauce-sauteed okra, red bell pepper and some kind of mushroom. I don’t figure it’s very related to anything in traditional Okinawan or mainland Japanese cuisine, except for the fact that the ingredients are all from a supermarket near here—it’s inadvertent fusion cooking: Japanese/young-American-who-cooks-like-a-college-student. However… it was good! Really good, in fact. All the mushroom’s gone, now, though. I’ll see how the onions I’ve got are next time I cook. I got an avocado too (more accurately, my link to the world, the excellent-English-speaking Hime-san (nickname; means princess) got an avocado for me) that I might try to combine with my next wild adventure on the the rolling waves of the single electric burner. I might just eat it straight, though. That’s what I got it for.

So, having mentioned Hime-san, lemme introduce the rest of the folks: there’s the guy who started the farm, Ma-kun (Maa-kun? Not sure; my ear for how long sounds are held in Japanese is not very good.). That’s a nickname too—the suffix -kun is almost exclusively used for people younger than yourself, usually kids I think, but he uses it despite being about 60. He’s very dedicated to working with and caring for horses, and treats them with kindness and respect. Next there’s Mari, the third of the three permanent workers on the farm, and Itchan (Spelling? No idea; if I heard right her given name is technically Itsuki, but everybody on the farm’s got a nickname.) who is an intern working here for a few weeks. I don’t know either of them too well yet, since one of my first two days here was their day off, but they both seem friendly and cool. The dog’s name is Jonathan, after a French WWOOFer who was here a while back, and the cat’s name is Tom. I haven’t learned the names of the horses, goats, chickens or duck (Ducks? Not sure how many there are.) yet. I call most animals “amiguito,” and that’s been workin’ so far.

Yesterday evening I helped brush down the horses and clean their hooves, this morning I scooped up manure and helped take it down to a compost heap and then cleaned some buckets. Then Ma-kun and I drove into Naha, the city I flew into and the biggest city on the island (I think) to help with the process of transporting a pony from Yonaguni island (where this kind of pony—Yonaguni Uma, or Yonaguni horses—is from) to Chiba, not too far from Tokyo, where a couple who have a farm want to start raising horses. The couple are cool—the husband is originally Brazilian, and he speaks pretty good Spanish, so we got to talk that way, which was really nice (the degree to which my Japanese totally sucks is enormous, and so far I bounce gently between wishing Hime-san could always be around and feeling bad about putting that burden on her while she’s got plenty of other stuff to do—more on the language muddle to come). The pony in question had come from Yonagunijima (-jima is the suffix for island, which when used as a noun by itself is shima (I’m just gonna phrase the things I think are true about Japanese but haven’t carefully verified as if they’re true—if you see a mistake, point it out and I’ll publish a correction with an expression of regret for the error on behalf of the editorial staff)) by ship, and will be heading on to Tokyo by ship as well, so all this transport business was handled at the port—I’d never been to a port! But I spent several hours hanging out at one this morning, chatting in Spanish-Japanese-Portuguese-English mishmash, shoveling hay, acting as a horse for part of Ma-kun’s demonstration to the couple of how to train horses, and at one point peeing behind a shipping container. And I saw a fish of some kind leap out of the water—I saw it for only a moment, so I can’t be sure, but it looked like a ray of some kind. Do rays do that? Thoughts on ports: ships are large. Really big. I bet if you wanted, you could base a large portion of global goods exchange on their ability to carry huge quantities of stuff. Sizeable, they are. And so are the forklifts that move shipping containers. They’re like Blastoise to a regular forklift’s Squirtle. Even so, I saw one tip momentarily off its back wheels when lifting an especially weighty container (It wasn’t that one, but there was at least one container with the label, in a little yellow warning triangle, “SUPER HEAVY,” which I liked. There’s a band called Super Heavy Goat Ass, I think. Maybe they sponsor shipping containers.). And they go on quite a ways (ports, that is). Most of my impressions had to do with matters of size. Specifically, bigness. The other thing that surprised me was how chill the horse was with hanging out in a shipping container that was being forklifted around the port. He just stood there while a huge noisy machine drove up and drug his little box up into the air. Just hangin’ out.

Later, back at the farm, we ate lunch, and it was tasty. This noodles-with-ice-so-they’re-cold-‘cause-it’s-summer thing is new to me, but I like it. I think I’ve seen it in pictures. Now I’ve eaten it, and the pictures don’t lie: it exists, and reflects visible light.

It’s also very tasty.

The folks here are being super-kind about me being vegan. Ma-kun drew up a list to use when cooking (he really likes to cook) of things I can eat, and Hime-san took me grocery shopping today to stock up the fridge here in the trailer house, and she paid! I had my wallet out, but she waved her credit card in a dismissive spiral and set me up with tasties. When I’m on my own, though—that is to say, when I’m out rambling by myself and have no way to understand food labels (if you think I’m bad at speaking and listening comprehension, you should see me try to read anything in kanji)—I just guess and hope my way through. It seems like I’ve got a pretty consistent friend in convenience store onigiri (rounded pyramids of seasoned rice), which are both tasty and filling, if not especially nutritionally balanced. Anpan, or buns with sweet beans inside, are also friggin’ delicious, and I hope they’re actually vegan, too; Ma-kun bought me one on the way to the port this morning and I didn’t want to wade into the two-pronged hubbub of vegan label-checking and a beefy (ehehehe) language barrier.

Anyways, it’s gettin’ late, and so I’m gonna wrap it up here for now. (If you run into weird disagreements between references to what time it is, or verb tenses or anything, it’s probably ‘cause I’ll likely be doing most of my writing here at the trailer house, but actually posting things the next day from the farm, where I hear tell there’s wireless, but there could well be editing going on at the farm too, and I might inadvertently slip into self-time-correction every now and then, like writing something so it’ll sound as if I wrote it on the day I posted it, rather than the previous night, when it was actually written, or something like that.) Be aware: coming up soon, prepare for a rundown on some of the raddest skating I’ve had the pleasure to skate, which included enormous bats. Like, the flying mammal. Huge ones. For cereals.

Bye bye!

~Grey