Chianina

I went for a drive the other night.  I met no one which was part of the plan and I got out for 45 minutes driving roads where I learned to ride a motorcycle. The pavement is desperate in most places, a rippling coating of black that barely suffices for paving.  

Tourism is big here now and some enterprising soul has created a hiking circuit through the “Silent Villages” (I Borghi Silenti) so every now and again you’ll see sweating city folk clumping along the multi-day 55 mile circuit visiting these tiny almost abandoned villages struggling  to make a life among these lonely hills. 

Mechanized, profitable agriculture is tough where so many fields live at a steep angle. You grow a bit of this olives and wheat, and that harvesting wild chestnuts and raising meat…and you learn to work at an acute angle. 

The soils are rocky and thin and the fields are small and oddly shaped. When I was a boy they used cattle to haul stuff and to plough fields, a system that hadn’t changed for hundreds of years and was made possible by sharecropper systems that involved no money exchange. It was poverty farming.

Nowadays these big white beasts are prized beef cattle, raised mostly in Tuscany and Umbria and their meat is highly sought after and expensive. When I was a child they were “cows” and now they’re known by their breed from the Chianti region, Chianina -“kee-an-neena”- because there is no K in the Italian alphabet CH is pronounced hard. 

They are beautiful animals with a thick leathery skin but which is soft to the touch.  This bull below is supposed to go to slaughter soon with 600 kgs (1300 pounds) of meat on him.  He is mean too, shaking his head at me and watching me suspiciously instead of eating. I rather like him but only as long as there are bars between me and him. 

In the picture below you can spot where the metal tubing has been bent. Apparently a Bull decided he’d had enough and he broke out one night and they found him wandering the stable in the morning. 

The cows have huge tongues and large rubbery lips which they will stick in your face to get the measure of you. They don’t like having their foreheads rubbed and their horns are off limits. If you touch those they shake their heads violently. 

There are flies and unless you have Covid like me the place smells of cow shit. They eat all the time so the place reeks of used hay. 

I picked up this description of the White Giants (they are huge animals) online and if you can get past the peculiarly Italian translation it describes fondly the cows from Valdichiana:

They are my only companions day after day as they clank their bars to reach the hay.  One or other of my nephews comes by in the race I h to feed them but otherwise they and I are alone 23 hours a day.

The other morning I was woken up by some insistent mooing and I figured there might be a problem. Instead I saw Dario (38 years old in the green t shirt) directing the trailer into place. 

It was time for three cows to go their summer pasture with the adults on the hillside. They are the lucky ones being kept back for breeding.

The boys and the genetically inferior cows go for meat in a few weeks. Nevertheless the lucky ones didn’t feel so lucky as Daniele (43 years old in a blue t shirt) tried to herd them into the trailer.

Their replacements in the pen started sniffing the walls as though checking for the previous occupants.  The circle of life is pretty small for these animals, most of whom live two years and that’s it. Their meat is so expensive they are very profitable according to Daniele. 

Slowly peace returns as the cows settle back down after the excitement of the extraction of three of their number. 

Dario in the silver pick up is off ahead to prepare the field for the arrival of the three new members. 

Daniele the older brother follows with the tractor and trailer and the three new breed cows. 

Their new life: 

Daniele said his oldest breed cow has produced a calf every year for the past 17 years. “Does she go into honorable retirement when she can’t have any more?” I asked naively. He gave me a quizzical look. “Hamburger,” he said as he got back into the tractor.  I’m too sentimental to be a farmer. I’d put them all out to pasture, profits be damned. 

The Man With Three Senses

“I love the smell of cut grass,” my sister said to me yesterday afternoon as we sat in the shade cast by the farmhouse. 

“Oh?” I was puzzled. “Can you smell cut grass here?” She looked at me in surprise. 

That was the moment I realized the common Covid symptom of loss of smell and taste had struck. 

The day had started suspiciously well with a pleasant dawn walk for me and the vague hope that there may be the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel in this Covid mess. 

Then I sat outside in the afternoon shade cast by the building.  There is landscaping and tree planting planned for these new rental apartments but the details are being filled in between other jobs.  This place is more than a working farm and the complexity of managing a restaurant and a hotel as well baffles me. 

Farming is an unsentimental business. These young bulls will be meat this winter.  The white cattle known in Italy as Chianina (“kee-an-eee-na”) are prized for their meat similar to the way foodies in the US are awe struck by Wagyu. 

I wander the stable making portraits of the condemned and am struck by how for once their shit really doesn’t stink. Thank you Covid. 

To live in a world without a sense of smell and no ability to taste anything is, I have discovered, quite bizarre. 

Everyone loves Italian food - not me, not anymore. The last plate of pasta I got from my sister was a container of tagliatelle in a cream sauce with mushrooms and it was delicious. The next day I could taste nothing anymore. 

The cherry preserves are gone, the eggs laid a mile away and fried in home made olive oil, the home cured pork products, all so much cardboard. My empathetic friend the doctor consoled me with the thought I might at least lose weight. Gee thanks. 

I suppose it’s churlish to complain. So many have lost lives and long term good health to Covid and we all sat through months of restrictions and job loss and uncertainty. 

I hope my lost senses come back and they usually do. To live the remainder of my life with no sense of taste or smell would require some adjustment though. 

So you can’t taste and you can’t smell anything.  

You can see and touch and hear. I can see the colors in the hedgerows. 

I can still hear the cicadas creaking in the fields, the sounds of summer throughout my childhood. The males rub their hind legs together to attract a mate and they do it during the hottest months: they are indefatigable. 

I can feel the cool breezes blowing through the valleys on these hot afternoons. 

For now this will have to do. 

Quarantine

Five years ago I spent three months in the hospital, much of them immobile with only the use of my right hand. That seemed like a cruel irony given that I am left handed but I learned to hold my iPhone over my head and painfully tap out one letter at a time. If I dropped the phone and it fell to the floor I was screwed till some ambulatory staff member popped by and could restore my connection to the outside world. Natalie helped take care of me. 

I learned not to disparage the value of an internet connection. This was brought home to me again inside my splendid baronial farmhouse with walls three feet thick where I have been recovering from Covid. You say I exaggerate? 

So far I have not heard of anyone capable of getting a cell signal inside the fortress and this feature has proven slightly inconvenient. Otherwise my recuperation has been a delightful interlude of solitude and pastoral silence interspersed with headaches, rashes, bouts of chest wracking coughing and bizarre changes in body temperature. It is weird to be chatting with your nephew standing six feet away and suddenly as he sweats copiously under the Italian sun I find myself shivering uncontrollably with my teeth chattering so loudly it sounds like I’m doing it on purpose for effect. I thought I would never feel warm again but then of course I started sweating so badly the bed felt like a hot tub. This virus is irritating.

The farmhouse at San Pietro (St Peter) has been in my family for hundreds of years.  My brother in law was born here and grew up here with no indoor plumbing or heating and minimal kitchen facilities. He does not recall the period with any sort of romantic nostalgia as using the cattle shed for a toilet on a rainy winter night would in any civilized society be considered inhumane. And my family were by his reckoning the kind bosses unlike others of a more sadistic bent.

Nowadays the sharecroppers are gone and the old farmhouse is being converted into rental units as a part of the main bed and breakfast operated at the central farmhouse a couple of miles away and I am the first non paying tenant. My toilet I am pleased to say is splendid, there is in the Continental fashion a bidet and endless hot water from the shower. But of cell phone signals not a one.

In the throes of fever and temporary clarity the pursuit of distraction cannot be satisfied by an E-reader which demands concentration. I lay in bed my mind spinning unanchored from the world around me. 

I had time to reflect on our good fortune where what we take for granted was once a luxury cruelly denied and what we expect in services isn’t always available even in 2023. And I was in no fit state to sit outside for a signal except for a few minutes at a time. Layne in California and I, both suffering from Covid, spoke briefly and telegraphically before one or other of us became exhausted. I have long held, especially since my motorcycle crash, that there is no dignity in ill health.

Monday night I didn’t sleep a wink, Heaven knows why so Tuesday morning (local time is 9 hours ahead of California so - most confusing as this blog publishes on Eastern time…) I took a walk to work up some exhaustion. The first thing I saw was a porta potty next to the cowshed. The times they are a-changin’.

I walked across the stubble left by my nephew’s harvesting two days ago. When I was a child the harvest involved a squadron of machinery clanking between farms accompanied by a platoon of field workers. I got this photo off the web as we had no dedicated photographers in those days, but aside from the faces the business of threshing the wheat was identical.

Out of sight to the right was a tractor usually on tracks set at high idle to run the power take off to turn the belt to make the machinery separate the corn from the chaff. Nowadays my nephew does the harvest all by himself. 

He parks the trailer at the edge of the field and when the combine harvester’s tank is full of wheat he empties it into the trailer and just keeps moving. Unromantic and efficient.

I get to watch and ponder and remind myself how glad I am I got away and lived my own life in California when I was a youngster. Farming is a tough life and for me it was even tougher as I had absurd notions of travel and trying to unravel the mysteries of the world. Those were propositions not appreciated by my family which was rooted to one spot. Later this summer we will drive across the corn fields of Iowa and I shall be reminded of all this. 

I walked for a while my head filled with memories, breathless slightly but glad I had the strength to be alone in the woods again. 

I used to ride my bicycle through here but like so much else what was open space is now overgrown. The men who walked to work with machetes or tended their cows in the fields are gone and if mechanization won’t work, the land is lost and reverts to nature. 

I wondered which of my sister’s two boys was wandering around the field doing I know not what in the distant tractor. I knew my own wandering had to stop but it felt good to be out for a bit. I wish Rusty were here. He’d teach the locals dogs make great indoor companions in a society that prefers them tied up outside. Another reason I couldn’t live here; I am just too eccentric for country living. 

My sister asked me anxiously, and she always speaks to me in English when we are alone and I have no idea why, “What about fleas?” she said after she had absorbed the idea that I lived in a van like a gypsy. Gypsies are not well liked in local lore: they steal children. I’d be happy to steal dogs, not children. 

I explained the once a month flea and tick pill and she looked surprised that science might have addressed the problem. She was too polite to suggest I might occasionally be laying down with fleas aboard GANNET2 because that’s what happens, the proverb says when you sleep with dogs. Her dog is tied up outside. Shades of Mexico and I sigh. 

Every farmhouse had a water supply and while most rural artesian fountains are drying up my nephews have refurbished this one to its original glory. The water is clear cool and delicious. It used to be you could find these fountains scattered all over the place and they were also critical for shepherds and their flocks or farmers moving cattle or humans walking to and from a distant job. Dolores collecting water for her family in the village. I have no idea who had the camera or who used it. I wish they’d done more. I must have been about five at the time. 

As a child I knew where all the fountains were as hot summer days made of them great wading pools. We’d drink all we needed and dangle our feet in the water to cool off after hours spent in the fields playing and stealing fruit. No one knew how to swim and I wasn’t going to show off even after I learned how not to drown. 

They have a particular design. The first basin is for the animals to drink and it has straight edges. The next basin the edges slope inwards and here you rinse your laundry (!) because the last basin also with a sloped edge is where you soap your laundry. And also hit the clothes on the edge of the fountain to get the dirt out. The protocol was important and strictly adhered to so everybody could get the most from the water. If you soaped up every basin animals had nowhere to drink and the rinse basin had to be less soapy than the soap basin!

Like everything there is nowadays a better way: 

I suppose I have to accept that growing up here in the summers while going to school at Hogwarts in England gave me a perspective on life but to spend nine months as a magic-free Harry Potter and the rest of the time to run free in these hills was, I think, bound to sew the seeds of cultural confusion. America offered me a third way and I am so glad I took it. 

Positive

I have Covid. 

I got a call from Layne in California who passed on the good news that she and a friend in Santa Cruz have it. I feel like I have a low grade fever now and I am staying isolated in my splendid isolated converted farmhouse. 

Covid apparently has also brought out a ferocious eczema in me  that I last suffered from thirty years ago and I suspect it has been let loose by the Covid auto immune demons. I’d include a photo of my ravaged thighs and arms and stomach but you too might get ill. 

Before jumping to conclusions it’s worth noting Layne has it in Santa Cruz and never got on a plane. I wonder how many people I infected and that thought makes me even sicker. Meanwhile no touring Italy for me. 

I have another test scheduled with the village pharmacist next week meanwhile I take my pills. She did say, after looking at the test results I appear to be on the downslope of the infection. I hope that is true. 

It’s not deadly at least if you are fully vaccinated and I suppose it’s little more than a nuisance for most people but if I hadn’t got it I’d be happier. 

“Vaccinations kill” that graffiti I saw a few days ago after I got off the plane rings with irony now.  

Take care of yourselves; you have nothing to prove.