Larch Hanson

Dear Friends in the Circle,

This letter offers a way to end domestic violence and the violence of war in one generation.  I’m not trying to entertain, but if you just want to cut to the kitten pictures, scroll down to the bottom.  They’re ready to meet you!

This letter is written in the evening of Martin Luther King Day. This morning when I opened my email, there was a message from Cyros.  He worked the harvest with me last spring, and he wants to come back.  That’s Cyros on the left:

Right now, he’s taking a gap year before going to college, and he’s teaching English as a second language to children in Nepal. He has encountered a teacher who beats children, and this is what he wrote: “The kids are genuine, friendly, and respectful. It’s comforting being around their innocence. Three years ago the country banned physical discipline. One young government teacher still strikes the kids. Often quite harshly. Across the face, head, back. It was perplexing to witness. I began to see the kids learning in fear of being hit. I find it unacceptable to teach children in such a manner. I gave him 2 days to move beyond his ‘first impression’, to quit showing his strength and power over children to a new Westerner. Day 3, I pulled him aside. Seems to be going better. I am playing a delicate balance as a delegate as well as teacher. I don’t want to create any tension, but I also will not stand idly beside kids fearing physical pain by a ‘superior’.

This brought up memories for me.  As a child, I was bullied.  In elementary school in Minnesota in the 1950’s, teachers hit me.  Later on, in the late 1960’s, I became a language arts teacher in Florida, and I encountered racism, segregation and violence.  Martin Luther King was identifying racism, militarism, violence and poverty as problems we all needed to solve.  I did my part then, and I continue now.  Allow me to give you some verbal snapshots of my life in those days:

To begin with, I taught school in a rural county on the Suwannee River, and there were two towns in the county.  I taught in the small town that was racist, violent and all-white, and the other town had a segregated school system.  The superintendent was elected, and I invited him to speak to a civics class I taught.  The students and I had already identified and discussed racism, and many of the students were getting ready to challenge the inequities…..in fact, they challenged the superintendent to change the system, make it equitable.  The result?  After two years of teaching in that small town, the superintendent said, “You can resign, or I’ll fire you.  Take your pick.”

During those two years of teaching in that small town, my lottery number for the draft to Viet Nam came up, and I was ordered to report to Jacksonville Air Force base for my army physical.  Back in college, one of my roommates was a man who had served in special forces in Viet Nam, and he and I agreed the war made no sense.  Half of my generation resisted, one way or another.  In my case, the day of my physical, I was totally repulsed by the sergeant who tried to get us to bond in common hatred of women by entertaining us with dirty jokes about women.  I didn’t fall for it.  Just before we put on our headphones for the hearing test in which we were supposed to push a button when we heard a tone, the sergeant said to us, “OK, boys, mash that tittie!”
Well, whaddya know?  I seem to be deaf to that kind of talk. I guess I just don’t know how to follow orders.  After taking the hearing test eight times, an army doctor looked at the results, and he asked me, point-blank, “Do you want to go in the army?”  I replied, very matter-of-fact, “No, I’m teaching school.  I’m an educator at heart.  I’ve got better things to do.”  He classified me 1-Y which translates to, “If Congress ever declares war legally, you may be used in some capacity.”  I thought, “Fair enough.  That would be a war on our soil, and I would want to be involved.”

Next I taught language arts in Sarasota FL and I was assigned to teach reading to 7th and 8th grade black boys who couldn’t read.  When I passed out the county textbooks, the boys said, “Don’t give us that Mary Carter talk.” Mary Carter was a brand of white paint used by rich white suburbanites.  I agreed with the boys that the textbooks were racist, and so I developed a different approach.  I built a photography darkroom at the school, and I gave the boys cameras.  “Go home and take photos of your life,” I said, and the boys learned basic photography.  After the photos were developed, I tape recorded them describing the photos, and I converted the tapes to print.  Now we had relevant text, and the boys were interested in learning to read.  The result?  The head of my department evaluated my efforts by writing this line: “He’s our most creative teacher, and that’s his biggest problem.”  Eventually, I teamed up with other teachers who had that same “problem” and we started an alternative school!

One more example, just for fun:  I had a class of upper middle class children, all white, and the course I taught was called “Freedom and Responsibility.”  It was an exploration of values, and it was designed by people who value teaching by the discovery method.  I set up a real estate office, and on the walls I posted photos of upper middle class waterfront homes, typical of Sarasota.  I paired the students into “married couples” and I gave them all enough play money to buy any home posted on the walls.  One couple was especially bright and popular, something like the typical homecoming king and queen, and without telling them, I discriminated against them when they approached my “office” to buy a home.  I treated them as though they were black, and I played the racist real estate salesman.  When they picked the best home, I said, “Oh, I’m sorry, that home just went under contract this morning, and sale is pending.  I’m sorry, I can’t offer you that home.  Why don’t you come over here and pick out a lovely home where you will be more comfortable……” and I took them into a side room with photos of small homes in the black ghetto of Sarasota.  This couple became angry with me.  All the other children managed to buy beautiful homes. When I finally told them what I had been doing to them, they still remained angry.  It took them several weeks to get over it.  My racism was so blatant, but they hadn’t been able to quickly identify it.  Why?  It was part of their culture, and they realized they were embedded in it, asleep. They hadn’t developed any empathy whatsoever for blacks.  The elephant was sitting in their living room.  They lacked a vocabulary of expression that would serve to identify the pattern of racism.  That was Sarasota in the early 1970’s.

When I came to Maine, I was mentored by Scott Nearing.  Scott was a socialist who addressed poverty and inequitable methods of distribution, and he taught economics at university level. His message wasn’t popular with the feds.  In fact, he was put on trial for “interfering with conscription” during World War 1. He faced serious prison time, but when he spoke to the jury made up of middle class businessmen, he remained a clear educator at heart, and his message went something like this:  “When you hire someone to work for you, you make a profit. Now you have a choice.  You can reinvest the money to improve your own community, or you can take advantage of cheap labor abroad.  When businessmen invest abroad, the next thing they want is an overseas military to protect their investment, and that is the beginning of war process and over-extension of the resources of our country.  Empires collapse in this way.” The jury let him go.  He wasn’t advocating violence, rather he was educating people to become more aware of how their actions affect one’s home community as well as the rest of the world.  We vote with our patterns of consumption and investment.

For a good read, see Adam Brock’s Change Here Now which combines patterns from permaculture with strategies for social activism.  In my own words, this is the question Adam Brock is addressing: “Earth is a spirit garden, a school for souls.  What patterns can we establish on the land and in society that will create a better life for all?”  I was heartened to read the Dalai Lama recently saying that we don’t need to teach religion.  Religions are divisive.  He said that what we need is a secular ethics that involves education of the heart that can be applied to us all.

Here is an example.  Hindus and Buddhists have symbolic hand gestures called hand mudras, and educators of the heart could create a universal hand mudra that signals, “Stop.”  Stop what?  David Deida describes a game for lovers, and he calls it Tussle.
The game has four steps, and I’ll give it to you in my own words as I remember it.  The eyes are the windows to the soul, and in the first step, the couple establishes open-to-the-heart connection through the eyes. In the second step, the couple caresses each other using the right hand.  If either partner feels the other getting distracted or self-absorbed and unable to stay present, the left hand is raised to signal, “Stop touching.  Go back to the first step and re-establish the gaze of love and presence.”

Before I describe the third step, I’m going to digress.  Each one of us comes from a family-of-origin that conditioned and patterned the children to accept some level of biological and emotional irritability as “normal”. When two people get together to form a new couple, there is a collision of these two patterns from the past.  Commonly used words can mean very different things to each partner.  The third step in Tussle is the use of “dirty words”.  If a word diminishes the experience of love for either partner, that person raises the left hand to signal, “Stop talking and stop caressing.  This talk is not affectionate. Let’s go back to the open-hearted gaze……not a staring contest to see who’s going to blink first……but a gaze that communicates love and deep heart connection and vulnerability combined with open spacious humor.”

When the couple gets good at these three steps, to the point where they can say just about anything to each other and not experience a diminishment in felt love, but instead maintain deep heart connection, they are ready for the fourth step, which is actual tussling: wrestling, tickling, poking or pinching……or perhaps some massage and bodywork strokes combined with dance forms from contact improv or partner yoga.  Whatever the couple decides, the left hand can be raised at any time to signal “Stop.  This is too much. This doesn’t feel affectionate or sensual.”  Whereupon the couple stops all actions of contact, stops all talk, and returns to step one.

Now imagine a world where the grownups are proficient at playing forms of this game, and they are educating children to understand the universal meaning of the raised left hand mudra: “Stop”.  Imagine that sexual harassment and abuse are confronted using the left hand mudra, and in the adult workplace there are handshakes, and perhaps groups that decide, when they eat together, to have optional holding-hands-around-the-table in shared silence before meals, a way of expressing gratitude toward life.  Imagine that when Cyros encounters a teacher using harsh physical discipline, he knows that his principal and the children will back him up when he says, “I’m raising my left hand to stop the violence, and I know that the children will, too. I’m also going to use a method from nonviolent communication, staying focused on making statements based on human needs we all have in common: every child has a right to be secure in the knowledge that s/he will not be subjected to shaming or physical punishments and violence.”

When I wrote back to Cyros today, I remembered the time when my superintendent did NOT back me up when I took a stand against racism.  I remembered the time when my department head criticized me for creating relevant text that sparked black boys’ interest in reading.  And I remembered a merciful army doctor who was on the edge of admitting that the process of war is obsolete.

Today I’m capable of going a bit further, offering the world a vocabulary of expression that can be helpful.  When embryologists look at embryos, they see that all embryos are feminine at the beginning of life.  Male is an overlay that develops later.  In other words, life is feminine at core, and sometimes there’s a biological overlay, masculine.  A man can be educated to give his gifts to the world, or he can be indoctrinated into patterns of industrialized warfare that inevitably destroy the feminine, destroy life, and destroy the heart core of that man.  It’s really up to all of us to redesign education.
I’m doing my part, writing, and if you’ve read this far, thank you for doing your part. Now we’re literally on the same page, and please share this image about the left hand mudra.

As for giving my gifts, I’m concerned that I don’t have enough ways to introduce kelp into the daily diet of people living in places like New York City and Miami where there could be incidents of radioactive contamination with no hope of evacuation.  (Both of these cities are close to nuclear reactors that are leaking and failing.) We all need adequate iodine in our daily diet so that when we are exposed to radioactive iodine, we don’t take it into our bodies.  If you are a member of a food co-op in any large city, please introduce the buyers to our Soup Mix.

Now for the fun part:  One of our male kittens has been adopted.  He has a new name befitting an aristocratic coon cat, and his owner plays the violin.  What a life he’s going to have!

We still have two polydactyl double-paw kittens up for adoption, and we hope these two brothers get to stay together.  You get to name them.  Here’s a couple of photos of the smaller one, but don’t be fooled.  He’s very quick and playful.  In human terms, he’s something like a bright boy in second grade.

Note his double paws, something like having an opposable thumb.  He’s great at playing catch!  “You toss it.  I’ll jump high and snag it in mid-air!”

And here’s his brother.  In human terms, this was taken when he was in first grade.

Now he’s in fifth grade, and he looks like this:

What an innocent! These kittens have been trained to be human companions, playful heart warmers.

Rest in the Light, abide in the Heart.

Larch Hanson

Sometimes I will say to a young apprentice, “My longest long-term relationship is with a chimney and a woodstove……over 40 years in the same place.” That tends to scare a young person and brings up a reaction of “Oh, if it gets too difficult, I have options……” Living in one place is something like a long marriage. When the Occupy movement was in full swing, I wanted to say to one of those protesters, “Well, why don’t you just occupy a garden, for a lifetime, and see how that works out? Why not try doing something CONCRETE every day?” I once talked to a man who was in an arranged marriage. “What’s it like?” I asked. “Well,” he said, “at first I didn’t like her. Then in the second decade I not only grew to like her, I loved her. And now, in the fourth decade, I deeply love her, but I have to say that more and more, she is a total mystery to me. I truly don’t understand anything about her.” My first decade in this place was like a love/hate relationship. I would go down to the cove after new-fallen snow and watch the sunset: “She’s so beautiful!” and a minute later the thought would be, “…..and she’s so friggin’ COLD!” What’s REALLY scary for an apprentice is when they get a sense that their longest long-term relationship is with an eternal spark that could be characterized as “conscience” or “consciousness” or “intent, beyond personality”. I’m building a storage building for seaweeds at the moment, because I know the world will continue to need a clear source of dietary iodine to protect against the radioactive iodine being released by so many nuclear reactors, not just the mess at Fukushima, and the words I feel like inscribing on the walls of this particular building are “quietude and stillness, emptiness and clarity, presence and compassion, radiance and light”. That’s the predominant mood of the moment, and I like living with people who are waking up to the fact that they’ve been living life after life in endless moods of enlightenment, in sacred contracts, in endless dream. Happy New Year!

 

This past week during the full moon tides, alaria has been uncovered, and it’s in prime condition.  Dulse is also coming on.  Dawn and I scrabbled all over these rocks and down into the surf-filled crevices in order to find the darkest red dulse (it needs shade in order to develop deep colors), and I discovered some alaria in the surf that dried very black.  Pigments = minerals!  Good health to you!

Dawn and I decided to pick dulse as close to the open surf as possible.  This is where the most vital plants are found.

Dawn is fearless when it comes to working in tight places while the surf flows in and out.

Sometimes it’s a bit of a stretch…..

Notice the kelp in the deeper water below.

That’s alaria with the yellow midrib growing in the zone just below the dulse.

Scrabbling for a living?  Well, sometimes.  It’s a bit like rock climbing on slippery rocks, and if you’re lucky, you fall in the water when you slip.

See why nori is considered to be labor intensive?  Plants are small, few and far between!

Nevertheless, I wouldn’t trade this work and my “office” for anything!

People ask, “What’s it like to be an apprentice seaweed harvester?  The Crew and I recently worked in a tide pool that is like a big touch tank, and they were quite literally fully immersed in the discovery of it all.  I decided to give you a collection of photos this time.

Beyond the necklace of islands at the mouth of my bay, the sea opens as the Gulf of Maine, a system unto itself.  Bounded on the land by Cape Cod, stretching northwards around the New England coastline to the Maritime Provinces, then bounded 200 miles offshore by underwater mountains (the Outer Banks that come close to the surface), the Gulf of Maine largely circulates as a closed system.  Here in Downeast Maine at the edge of the Gulf of Maine sits an island that benefits from the upwelling nutrients of the Gulf, and as the surf comes over the front ledges of the island at low tide, a tide pool community of creatures and plants is at home.  We work in the pool for a few hours, knowing that at high tide, the pool once again will be joined to all the rest.

As I survey the pool, memories of other times come flooding back to me.  For instance, see the barnacle-encrusted ledge directly behind me in the photo below?  I remember a day when I was working in the pool with my sons, Jay and David, and a helicopter landed on that ledge.  A man got out of the helicopter and approached me while the rotor still turned.  “I film Maine from the air,” he said.  “Do you mind?”  I replied, “Go ahead!”  He returned to the helicopter, and he and the pilot swooped very low over us a couple of times and were gone.  Somewhere, we are recorded in his archives.  One time a WABI-TV reporter in a rubber raft interviewed and filmed my sons and me while we worked in the pool, and we ended up being reported on the local evening news.  Another time, I took a house guest with me to the island.  He was a tai chi instructor, and while I worked in the pool, he danced his art on the ledge where the helicopter had once landed.  This is the joy of forty years of work, returning to the same place over and over again.  Today my apprentices are seeing the pool for the first time, and I delight in watching their discovery process.  At the same time, I am seeing in my mind’s eye a helicopter, my boys, WABI rubber raft, and a graceful tai chi dancer.  It is all in the past.  While the memories play, I return to the breath in the moment, my connection to The Beloved.

Maduma, too, is surveying the pool, but for the first time.  He’s a natural hunter-gatherer. A hunter-gatherer circles in an ever-tightening spiral, and finally settles in a place to accomplish the day’s work.  My choices when I awoke at first light included options that encompass two bays and a string of islands.  I have already tightened the spiral by choosing this pool. The tides will not go out very far today.  We are between the new moon and the full moon. But the pool offers a sheltered situation, always available, always at a constant level while the tide is out for a few hours.  Now the task remains for the Crew to tighten the focus even more. We have landed in two punts, two little eight foot rowboats.  The are pine and oak, oiled for 30 springs with raw linseed oil, and they have turned black with age, like old salad bowls.  Today the bowls will be filled, again and again, until we have 40 bushels of kelp, about a ton.  This ton will be lifted several times before actually being transferred by punts rowed out to the container boat.  Then we will tow it all home, and lift it a few more times from boat to trailer to platform to drying lath to final hanging spot in the seaweed dryers.  Four people.  Together we will accomplish many tons of lifting, in a cold marine climate, a slippery wiggly ever-changing world.  It’s no wonder I find the ancient technique of paying attention to the breath to be a stabilizing process.  In the apocryphal gospel of Thomas, the disciples ask Jesus, “Give us a sign of the Father.”  He replies, “It is a movement and a rest.”  Watching the breath is like that. The sign of the Father is always there, helping me learn to deepen my Presence, coming into more coherent alignment with the greater Presence.  It’s something like knowing which way the currents are flowing, and rowing with the currents.  Just allowing the mind and body to follow the breath, to come back home to The Beloved….that is a happy situation!

Offshore, the tow boat and the container boat are anchored for the time being.  In the distance beyond the boats, Petit Manan peninsula stretches out on the horizon as an underwater bar that surfaces once again as Green Island and Petit Manan Island which holds a sliver of a lighthouse.  That lighthouse is actually 220 feet tall, the second highest on the coast of Maine.  I once rowed out around that lighthouse, just to see what my daily range could be.  The fishermen watching me at the time thought I was crazy.  My rowboat was only ten feet long.  The sides were 14″ high.  Nowadays I go to sea with only one motor, but I have a string of four wooden boats, each with a pair of oars, and it’s not crazy to know one’s capacity, should the motor quit.  (Likewise, my capacity for resisting hypothermia is just a few hours in the water while wearing a wetsuit, and perhaps a day or two if I were to become stranded on an island.)  It’s best to know as many styles of rowing as possible, both pushing and pulling the oars, and sometimes alternating first one arm and then the other so that one doesn’t get tired using the same set of muscles repeatedly. I say to the apprentices, “Have you ever seen a dog trotting along a road while on a long journey?  Sometimes the dog’s hind end seems to be coming ’round and leading the way, almost going sideways.  That dog is simply using a different set of muscles for awhile, giving the main set a rest!”

As I survey the pool, I realize that the red zone of seaweeds (dulse and Irish moss) is looking strong. These plants prefer warmer temperatures, they uncover during the summer at low tide, and our bay is warming up.  Still, we have plenty of cold-loving saccharina and digitata kelp.  The full range of diverse life forms is abundantly present.

Saccharina kelp has ruffly edges.  Digitata kelp has ribbon-fingers, “digits” coming from a central “palm”.  Digitata has the highest iodine content.  Digitata’s alginate content is very high, too, and it nourishes and softens our skin every time we work with it.

Soon we are all busy, hand-selecting the best plants.  There are so many choices!

Paba rows while her brother Maduma cuts and hauls.  The pool is five feet deep in its deepest parts.  Digitata prefers surf and deeper water, and so it is found in the areas of the pool that encounter more turbulence as surf waves crash over the front ledge and pound down into the depths.  Saccharina prefers quieter water, and it is found in the shallow and warmer areas of the pool that are in back, away from the surf.  Nothing that I do to the pool seems to change this balance.  It always comes back to the same distribution.  In the background, ascophyllum nodosum, rockweed, totally covers the boulders.  When the pioneers kept sheep on the islands, this is what the sheep would graze in the winter time.  A sheep that was introduced to rockweed early in life would prefer it to pasture.  The sheep’s wool would grow wiry, nurtured by all the minerals in the seaweed.  In winter time, an animal like this could survive, unsheltered.  Shepherds have described to me how they go out to an island in winter time and look for the breathing hole in the snow drifts, indicating that the flock is safely nestled below.  This, too, is memory, held in place by the storytelling of Maine shepherds.  What are people for, if not for holding a memory of place…..a memory that stabilizes humans in community with nature?

Maduma has just pulled in a fine saccharina kelp.

Sharing this world with each other, we are at peace.

 

Know the depths of The Beloved.

Paba creates ripples of peace and clear intent wherever she goes.

A lumpfish with a sucker plate on its belly clings to Paba’s cheek for a moment. Seeing this photo brings up another memory of a time when an adult lumpfish, bright orange, swam toward me in the pool, and for a moment I swooped my basket underneath it, and we gazed at each other.  Another time, a lobster trap had washed into the pool during a storm, and there was a live codfish inside the trap.  That day, I played the benevolent jailer, releasing the prisoner back to the open world.

This crab had its underwater picture taken by Dawn before it was brought to surface for a portrait close-at-hand!

Dawn found saccharina, yes, digitata, yes, and mussels for supper, too!  She is an excellent forager and gardener!  She managed to take this photo with the Go Pro camera that was half above, half below:

The work accomplished, the crew is ready to load up and go home.

A day later, perfectly dried saccharina.  The fans have done most of the drying.  The temperature in the dryer has remained moderate, below 85 degrees F.  The old man knows his art, when to open the exhaust vents in the dryer, when to close them down and finish the drying.  There is an economy of motion in this dance, moving a ton of wet seaweed from the wilds, and a day later, packaging it as 200 pounds of perfectly dried nutrient-dense kelp.

Meanwhile, on the land, Nina is recording the miracles around us in the gardens:

Bleeding heart, an essence developed at the height of Lemurian mental horticulture when plants were created through creative visualization and meditation, is a fine remedy for stimulating and harmonizing the heart and the heart chakra.

Johnny Jump Ups bloom in unheated greenhouses throughout the entire winter.  They flourish in the garden in summertime.

Lupines, close up.

Chive bud, ready to open.

Chives in full glory.

Comfrey, bringing the pollinators.  After the comfrey has bloomed, we will cut the comfrey down and interlayer it with seaweed in the compost pile.  The fibrous stalks help introduce air into the pile.  The comfrey will grow tall again, giving us a second cutting in the fall.  Comfrey essence is a powerful tonic for the nervous system.  It invigorates the activity of the synapses between nerve cells.  It was developed in early Lemuria when there was a need to develop the physical body to increase telepathic abilities.  This allowed neurological tissues to act as grid or screen for receiving information through the transmission of the physical body’s biomagnetic field.  This is a secondary form of telepathy, and I use it when communicating with plants.

Comfrey blossoms, close up.

The Egyptian walking onions are dancing wildly.  Plants are sentient beings, a form of consciousness.  They embody the realization that life is a dance, an unfolding process.

On the land, it’s lilacs beginning to bloom, and in the sea, bladderwrack is getting ready to release gametes, male and female, which will unite in the water outside the plants to form a zygote, a fertilized ovum which will settle and attach to the granite sea floor of the Gulf of Maine, part of earth’s great sea-womb.

In other words, spring is dancing all over the place, and I want you to see some images from Nina’s photography so that you can appreciate what is happening. These are perfect examples of what bladderwrack looks like when it is harvested at the proper time of the year and air-dried properly.  Notice the dark green colors.  Pigments are minerals!  This plant is also a source of iodine. The standard in my business for preserving these nutrients is “bone dry within 48 hours of harvest, at temperatures below 85 degrees F.” That sounds simple, but try doing it with 40 bushels of bladderwrack!

And why do we do this?  Because sometime this year, a woman will call me up (like an 85 year old granny did last year), and she will say, “My hands and feet are warm again! Thank you!”  That makes it all worthwhile for me to do the rowing, the gathering, the lifting, and come home cold.  After all, MY body warms up!  But a person with a hypothyroid condition feels cold all the time.

Iodine deficiency is the most common cause of hypothyroidism worldwide.  Some individuals who have enough iodine suffer from Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, an autoimmune disorder that is aggravated by gluten.  Before you conclude that bladderwrack is for you, see www.thethyroidbook.com  Bladderwrack is not for everyone, but when it works, it is sometimes possible to wean off synthetic thyroid hormones.

This time of year, a seaweed harvester’s dreams are likely to look like this:

Speaking of dreams, we have installed fifteen tent platforms, complete with tents, in Middle Heaven, the forest beside the sea where you may stay awhile (July is wonderful!), discovering for yourself the source and spirit of all that nourishes us in the sea, the gardens, and in our hearts.

The rock by this tent is like one of the little planets from The Little Prince, a world unto itself, complete with a little forest of moss and ferns growing on top of it.

Here’s a close view:

Everywhere one looks, another new plant.  The goldenthread is blossoming today.  A tincture of goldenthread works like goldenseal.  So much to notice!

The tent by the deer path is dreamy:

The tent called Overlook is at the top of a basin that drains to the cove.

Just walk downhill (you can’t get lost) and you will come to the water.

The Cozy is close to all paths, a good choice for a child or a first-year camper.

The Family is a larger tent for a group.

Paba and Zippy the Cat and I had a good time leveling the platforms.

See how precisely Zippy’s tail is laid out straight?  A carpenter wouldn’t have anything less in a cat.

And a cat wouldn’t have anything less than this fine apprentice, Paba.

Love to you all.  See you this summer!