Day: March 17, 2016

Scott and Lisa Carrino have been working on behalf of community almost all of their adult lives, never harder or more successfully than when they started the Round House Bakery And Cafe in 2013. They had been building community at their Pompanuck Farm retreat and environmental center, in their camps and programs for kids, in their passion for making and selling healthy bread and food. Building community in the rural world is their life and work.

They have committed themselves to making good and healthy food, and serving people in any way they could. The Round House Cafe is their life’s dream.

Like so many small towns in rural America, Cambridge has seen a lot of institutions and businesses leave for the new global economy, but few have come in.  The small community hospital is gone,  so is our independent pharmacy and a number of factories and businesses, sacrificed by economists and politicians.

Family farms are fighting for their lives. Good jobs are scare.

Scott and Lisa rented a beautiful old bank building in town and took the leap of faith by opening a cafe in the old bank.  They opened the Round House Bakery And Cafe. Scott is a close friend of mine, as many of you know, and I have watched him and Lisa work brutally long hours and build their community cafe every hard and challenging day. Exhausted, they have never wavered, never lost their good humor and passion for hospitality.

They offer talent nights, music, readings. Local artists can sell their work in the cafe, musicians can play and sing there.  High school kids come to sing, the cafe is the town’s heartbeat now, a place where we can all see, meet and talk with one another. The food is delicious, healthy and widely acclaimed.

The cafe is successful, a minor miracle in itself. It is in just a couple of years the soul of the town, a gathering place for so many people as well as a warm and inviting restaurant. It is central to me and to Maria, it is a lifeline for us. Their warm and wonderful soups have gotten me through several winters.

This week, the cafe finds itself in a crossroads. Their landlord has put the building up for sale.  Scott and Lisa need help to buy it. They always planned to purchase the building, but do not have the funds to buy it right away. They started their business with credit cards and have worked fiendishly hard to build their business and pay down their debt. Cambridge is a small town, it is very committed to the Round House, but there are not a lot of us, and not too many with a lot of money.

Lisa and Scott are at a crossroads,  they need help to buy their beautiful old building, right in the center of town. They will launch a crowdsourcing campaign on gofundme sometime in the next week, they will ask local people and outsiders to help them if they can, and to strike a blow for the idea of community. They are deciding now on the amount to request.

Rural life has been abandoned by the people who run the world and are supposed to serve all, not just a few. Small towns everywhere have been ravaged by globalism, the flight of business, the decline of family farming, the scarcity of good work. Many of you have followed the rise of the Round House Cafe on this blog, some of you have come to meet Scott and see for  yourself. If you believe in community, this is your issue, your fight. The Round House needs to stay.

Our sense of connection and community needs to be saved. So does yours.

We have become a community around this blog, and as you know, I would never endorse a project that was not unequivocally worthy. It is an individual choice, there is no pressure to give anything. But small amounts – $5 and $10 will be as valuable as bigger amounts. If you can give, give what you can.

Crowdsourcing is miraculous in that way. If a lot of people give even a small amount, it can work. It is the most democratic kind of fund-raising ever devised. You get to decide what you will support.

I want to emphasize that the Round House has not failed, it is successful, just about over the rough hump of any new business. Scott and Lisa could not have worked harder, done more, made better food,  helped more people. With the help of other good people, they can do this and so many people will benefit from it.

I endorse this campaign and will do everything I can to support it, Scott is my friend, but I am a devoted resident of this town of Cambridge. It is place that has welcomed me and Maria and nourished us, and we will do anything we can to give something back. Cambridge cherishes community and will fight for it.

I’ll post the details of the project when Scott and Lisa launch it, and I am very optimistic about it, this is a worthy cause. If any of you can help, it would be selfless and appreciated. We all value community, we all need to help one another keep community in our lives, it is struggling almost everywhere.

The Round House does things for community that box and chain franchises will never do. As with book stores like Battenkill, people everywhere are waking up to the need for community, it is the glue that holds us together. This is a universal issue and struggle, not just a local one. Scott and Lisa are beautiful people, they have devoted their lives to serving and helping, they have worked themselves to the bone to get the Round House up and running, and they have succeeded.

It would be a travesty if their work and commitment and good deeds were undone by this sudden and unforeseen circumstance. I’ll post more about it and thanks for reading this. I believe the gofundme will go up next week sometime. Stay tuned.

Fate has adopted the pond in the woods where we walked. She has skated on the ice, chewed on the ice, raced around the pound, pulled chunks of ice out and dragged them around, bitten holes in the ice. This week, the peepers came out in force – the frogs – and they are making a big racket on the pond and popping up to the surface in droves.

So Fate, of course, has begun obsessing with them and trying to grab one or two. This involves creeping into the water – it is deeper with the melt and the rain – and she only ventures in a few inches, and diving her head in when she sees a frog or hears one. Like chipmunks, it’s all about the chase, not the kill. I doubt she will catch one, but she will have a riotous time and totally unnerve the frogs in the pond.

Kim is our gentlest sheep, our most fearful and vigilant. She never lets us get too close to her, she is even wary of Maria and she is always tense around the dogs. She is not too afraid of Fate, who she butts and chases at random, but she is a beautiful creature with beautiful wool.

Ed Watkins and his crew finished building our new pasture gate, it is made of aluminum so it cannot be eaten or chewed by equines, it is easy to open and shut, it does not shift or swell in bad weather. Ed did a huge amount of work here. He and Chris and a helper  re-stacked the wood in the woodshed, cleaned up the yard and the big barn, fixed the broken glass in the barn window, trimmed and pruned the big apple tree.

His bill that two days of work plus two cords of wood (which his workers will unload and stack is less than I spent on medications in one visit to the pharmacy last week (coverage gap, hole in the donut).

A farm is, in some ways, defined by its gates and windows. We try and keep up with ours. Ed is a find, he is a good and genial man and a hard worker.

The animal rights movement, which has so often overreached and abused it’s mandate, won a deserved victory today when Sea World announced it was eliminate it’s killer whale shows and would no longer replace it’s Orca’s once this generation dies off in captivity.

To me, the great danger facing domesticated animals is the growing movement to take away their work and remove them from human populations. The animals rights movement is killing many more animals than it is saving, but the Orca’s at Sea World have always been in a different category, an indefensible exploitation of a species that is not domesticated, has not worked with human beings easily or safely, in many cases, and is living completely unnatural lives for no other reason than human profit.

The animal rights movement can be a force for good when it does its homework and understands the animals it is trying to “save”; it is a nightmare in the hands of unknowing ideologues who can’t tell a draft horse from a killer whale.

I have written for some time of the danger facing animals like Asian elephants and carriage horses. These animals are very different than the killer whales displayed in Sea World and other aquatic theme parks. They are domesticated animals, they have worked with people for many thousands of years safely and well, they powerfully attach to human beings and trainers, and face slaughter or extinction if they are separated from the people who work with them and care for them.

They have been bred for work,nand they need work.

There is no evidence that Ringling Bros. is currently abusing or mistreating any of its elephants. Unlike Sea World, Ringling Bros. decided not to fight endless legal battles not because they didn’t have a case, but in spite of that. Even if they won almost all of the cases against them – and they did –  and refuted most of the charges, the legal conflicts and harassment simply became unbearable and costly.

The elephant trainers know that many of these elephants were content and treated lovingly,  there is not place for all but a handful of these elephants to go when they leave this and other circuses. It is traumatic and cruel for these animals to be ripped from their human connections and routines and sent to languish in preserves. Most will be dead soon enough.

Sea World shows me that the animal rights movement can still do good if it is selective and informed in its targets, rather than being blindly obsessed with removing all domesticated animals from their work and lives in the world. Orcas will never be seen again by most people, but that is perhaps a good thing, a natural thing.

Carriage horses are animals that have lived among people and in cities for thousands of years, they have never lived in the wild, never fended for themselves, their musculature and biology requires steady work in order for them to remain alert and healthy. Biologists have found the big horses are the most domesticable animals in the world, the best suited to be in urban environments. That is not true of killer whales. Trainers and biologists say one of the great crises facing horses – and certainly, many dogs – is that they have nothing to do, no work that keeps them healthy and engaged and alert.

The Orcas are different, their lives in captivity are a cautionary tale of corporate greed and unthinking animal abuse. Their history with trainers is too often frightening and tragic.  It took Sea World a long time, and the story of the Orcas reminds me that the future of animals is complex and nuanced. All animals are not the same.

There are many different sides to understanding animals and their future.

Domesticated animals won two big victories this year – the effort of animal rights groups in New York City to ban the horses and cripple the carriage trade failed miserably, and no more Orcas will be taken from their natural environment and exploited by Sea World so thoughtlessly for human profit.

The Asian elephants, many ponies and other animals are not so lucky. Scores of them will be leaving the circuses soon, and the road to hell is certainly paved with good intentions. There is no place for most of them to go.