Dear Vittorio

Salute' Vittorio!

runningonmpt@gmail.com (Michael Thompson) — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 21:59:00 +0000

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There he is, as always, in my thoughts when I make my morning espresso. I never drank coffee before meeting Vittorio Giorgini, my architecture professor at Pratt Institute. All-nighters were inevitable nearing the end of the semester, building models and drawing our building design projects. He made me a stiff cup of this elixir in his Wooster Street loft studio one evening, and it was rocket fuel for me. Still is. Thanks, Vittorio!
In my daily design practice, the most frequent reminder of Vittorio for me is the "transition", that step between two architectural elements in a large or small scale, that step between two periods of one's life or situation, those steps between the steps, that define our lives, our cultures, and our built environment. It was a simple lesson he gave me, which has served as a key, a reminder that there is always another way to perceive and to approach any kind of problem or challenge, in design and in life, and to see it in the context of the larger nature surrounding us. Thank you Vittorio, for the keys.
My Profesore' introduced me to the Club of Rome's book "Limits to Growth", which has been a beacon for my thinking about humanity's place in the life of our planet. I have always wondered how, and more importantly why, humans are the only species on earth to manipulate and violate the laws of Nature. Vittorio's insistence on "balance" in everything, from economy, to useful combination of functions, artful composition of forms, and harmonious relationship to Nature, has shaped me all my life. I feel him with me when I plant my garden, trim fruit trees, brew beer, bake bread, ride bicycle, fly on skis, and more than all these, when I Design.
Sam emailed me the day after Vittorio died, February 18, 2010. Although his health, especially his eyesight, had been failing him over the last decade, and although he smoked cigarettes all his life, his death after emergency heart surgery still came as a shock. Sam had been closer to Vittorio than any of us from the 70's generation of students, visiting Vittorio and Caroline twice a year for a long time. Sam and Vittorio were like son and father. It gave me great pleasure to see that they meant so much to each other, and that Sam arranged his retirement to include a large sailboat in the Medterranean, where they were able to enjoy great times together.
In the weeks following Vittorio's death, several students from later generations of Vittorio's Pratt Instititue design studio, found this "Dear Vittorio" blog of stories, and got in touch with me. Even our long-lost friend, Vittorio's ex-wife Kathy Boyko, found me here and reached out, to the delight of us all. Sam and Bean offered to host a gathering in Vittorio's honor at their loft in New York. When I realized how many people from several "waves" of students would be attending, I couldn't resist, and made travel plans for New York on March 19. I am glad I did.
We began another blog, on which many of Vittorio's students, friends and family are posting photographs, messages, and discussing ideas for projects, scholarships, competitions. We call this blog "Salute' Vittorio!"
The gathering to celebrate Vittorio's life and work was attended by Haresh Lalvani, Giuliano Fierenzoli, and Brent Porter, fellow professors from Pratt, and by students from three distinct "waves of enthusiasm", our group from the mid-70's, a large group from the 80's, and some from the 90's. Everyone signed into a clipboard, and I placed their names and email addresses on a sidebar on the new blog.
There was a long round of toasts to Vittorio, from each of us around the room, with declarations of the inspirations each of us received from our profesore'. Ideas were floated, regarding scholarships, competitions, improvements to the blog, translations of some of Vittorio's later publications, and re-publication of his book "Spatiology", which contains Vittorio's own design theories, personally written, but very poorly printed in its only publication. Jee Won Kim still has the plates for the book, and has vowed to pursue finding a new publisher. Anyone who can help should get in touch with him. If the re-publication effort does not pan out, we discussed the goal of making Vittorio's work accessible to future design students, using an e-book publication strategy. All of these ideas will be explored and discussed with Vittorio's family.
When I lost my grandparents and my father, I grappled with ways of remembering them in my daily life, without succumbing to the emotional grief that accompanied each memory. Since their departures from my life, I have come to feel their presence whenever I think of them. I have also come to see these wonderful people in the faces, the voices, the memories of the people they loved, their friends and family. Each time I see one of them in this way, it brings a feeling of joy to my heart. I realize I don’t have to miss them so much, because they are always right here with me.
Grandpa once told me that he wanted to “ride on my handlebars” when I was leaving his house in upstate Connecticut to ride my bicycle to Mom’s house on the shore. Ever since he said that, I always think of him “riding along” on any adventure I take. I think the same way about Vittorio, especially when I’m skiing, something he and I enjoyed together a few times. I think of him while I’m making my coffee, or when I’m sharing sips of Grappa with friends. And when I think of him, I imagine that he is there with me, and I get a very nice feeling that lasts a long time, and I know it’s just his wonderful friendship, and I’m glad to treasure it and to be able to share it.

Salute' Vittorio!

NOAH

runningonmpt@gmail.com (Michael Thompson) — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 19:41:00 +0000

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Salute' Vittorio!
This week my voice is in the depth of a winter cold, as is the rest of me. I am blaming it on a long backcountry hut adventure with my daughter March and friends, in a windy snowstorm. That's a story for another time, however. Here's a story about a young man who has a sense about the future of his generation:
Noah Wilson is the eldest son of my friend Bice from Pratt Institute, where we attended Architecture school. Noah is an extremely energetic and intelligent guy, filled with enthusiasm for any passion that seems important to him. He spent two years after high school learning to be a professional chef, and landed a job in a restaurant in Vermont. It wasn't long before he saw that he had more interest in learning to grow the food, than in learning how to make the best creme brule' in the world.

He told his Dad that he wanted to redirect his education toward sustainable agriculture and building anything and everything he perceived to be in need of a "new paradigm" for the future of his generation.
Right about this same time, Bice had learned about what we're doing here in Colorado, with our Eco Systems Design, and our Fat City Farmers non-profit, starting up a school to "grow farmers" for an expanding wave of local organic food growing in the Rocky Mountains. I happened to be visiting New York City in March this year, so Bice conspired to have Noah meet me. We settled the next step in Noah's education, a month in Colorado, in early Spring. When I met Noah, it didn't occur to me to ask if his name was part of his inspiration for wanting to study sustainable agricultural systems. Most of the young people I've met in the last half-decade are concerned with the future - their future - and the challenge of high energy costs that are sure to accompany it. They are focused on rebuilding the world with a "sustainable" infrastructure for energy, agriculture, housing, transportation, everything. They are all, in a sense, "Noahs" - seeking to salvage their future from a possible collapse of unsustainable practices.
Noah arrived ready for anything. He came equipped for travel by bicycle, adventure on skis in the mountains, and he came with his own chef's knife and a bag full of exotic spices. This young man, a towering 6'-7" tall skinny guy with dark hair and a funny beard - would become our personal chef and cooking instructor. Before Noah arrived, we thought we knew how to cook.
When Noah made dinner, it was fantastic. Every vegetable was finely shredded with his razor-sharp chef's knife, and sauteed with all kinds of worldly spices I had never heard of: curry leaves, turkish pepper, mustard seed, too many to name. He always made too much food, which pleased me no end, because I am a leftovers freak. After several days of Noah's cooking, I looked in the refrigerator and said, "Hey, we have enough leftovers for a whole dinner! Let's have leftovers tonight!"
My mouth watered at the prospect of revisiting the cuisine of the past several evenings, but when Noah announced that dinner was served, I was surprised to find that he hadn't just re-heated the leftovers, he had completely re-invented them. Noah had re-cooked them with more and different spices, harvesting some early chives and mint from our garden, plucking dandelion leaves from our awakening lawn and sauteeing them with some baby arrugula, also just emerging in my raised beds, volunteers from last year's crop. It was a whole new delightful meal, not leftovers at all.
I thought about secretly hoarding some of these new leftovers in a neighbor's refrigerator while he is away, and sneaking into his house late at night, to revisit some of Noah's culinary delights.
Noah's arrival coincided with a landmark meeting of the "food groups" in our valley, a "summit meeting" of our Fat City Farms, several local farmers, our local chapter of Slow Food International, our Children's Health Foundation, Aspen's Canary Initiative, our local cheese-monger, and a rancher bent on raising a series of milk-producing animals for cheese making. Noah got to meet them all, to listen to our plans for re-creating a local food production network, and to tell everyone why he wants to help create this line of work. Just in the few months since Noah was here, gasoline prices have gone from $4.00 to $4.60 per gallon in our area, and they are predicted to reach $5.00 by the end of the year. It's no wonder we have people planning to grow food nearby.
April is also fruit-tree pruning season around here, so Noah got intensely involved in learning how different species - apple, pear, apricot, plum and cherry, grow and respond to pruning. It was great to have his help, and not just because the work went quicker and with fewer ladder relocations because of his height, but because Noah learns very quickly. After helping me to prune Mo, our apple tree, and Maude, our apricot, Noah became a pruning instructor when we helped two groups of Heritage Fruit Tree adopters at nearby orchards. It was like being in two places at once, listening to him teach someone in a tree on the other side of the orchard, how the tree wants to be pruned, and how it will respond to the cuts they were making. Noah had me include a set of hand pruning shears and folding saw in my next order, and they arrived before he left. He used them while visiting his uncle in California, where he pruned somebody's tree, making his tool investment back, and then some.
We will enjoy hearing from Noah as he travels the path he has chosen, leading next back to college, with a very strong compass setting in agriculture and design. We hope he'll come back occasionally though, to our small home in the mountains, to "guest chef" and help us burn the dinner candles down.

Homebrewers Impasse

runningonmpt@gmail.com (Michael Thompson) — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 05:35:00 +0000

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Nephew James turned 21 last year. He took me up on my offer to live with us for a winter season, so he could be a ski bum – actually, a “rider” bum, a snowboarder-dude. This guy loves to have fun, he makes lots of friends fast, but he pushes the safety envelope a little far sometimes.

One of the primary fixations our 20-year old nephew had was about beer, and his impending “coming of age” to legally buy and consume it. When he watched me brewing my own, his life suddenly found direction. A compass of sorts. “Teach me to brew beer, please”, he begged. “I want to brew a batch of beer for my 21st birthday party.”
Not just a direction, but an short term goal! I knew I was going to enjoy getting to know my highly motivated young nephew, after all.
Watching him learn to ride a snowboard, and his simultaneous learning experience with telemark skiing, demonstrated James’ amazing athletic prowess. The first day I had him out on skis, he blew past me near the bottom of the run, and did a perfect imitation of the way I ski. “It took me 15 years to learn to ski that well,” I thought.
But James had a wee flaw, which I can only call over-confidence. Being the star player on his childhood baseball and soccer teams had given him a large impression of his abilities. A few minutes after James blew past me on the ski slope, he crossed his tips and fell at high speed, creating a 120-yard long “yard sale”. Unhurt, he stood and waited for me to bring him his gloves, ski poles and his other ski. I was glad helmets are considered cool, but I worry they amplify youth’s natural sense of indestructibility.
We worked out the timing for James’ beer, so it would be ready for his 21st birthday, which would be in late March, approaching the end of the Rocky Mountain ski season. He looked through my brewing log, and decided to brew my traditional holiday recipe, my “Drunken Pumpkin” spiced ale. Fresh pumpkins aren’t to be found in the store in January, so we settled on the canned version.
On brew night, I taught James to brew the same way I teach someone to ski. Take them to the top and shove off. I sat back and gave him instructions, but I let James do everything, right down to pitching the yeast, sealing the carboy and putting it away to ferment. He even cleaned up the mess we’d made in the kitchen.
James checked the carboy only a couple of times while it fermented. He was too busy partying with his Aussie friends, staying out late, drinking. Yes, our twenty-year old nephew had quickly learned that he could get into bars, clubs, even buy rum at a liquor store. He found that he could use the drivers license of a friend from Australia who looked like he could be James’ brother, while his pal used his passport to get in. All James had to do is adopt a convincing Australian accent, which of course he did, with amazing accuracy and grace. His guise worked like a charm, and he never got busted.
This only made him more confident. I could easily envision this coming out all wrong, and I didn’t want to send my nephew home to my brother damaged, or worse. On the other hand, I had told young James and his Dad at the beginning of the winter, that my wife and I were not going to play parents. It would be his responsibility to make his own decisions, and to live by their success, or their consequences.
“I’ll just give you my two Golden Rules,” I had told him, rules by which we had successfully raised our daughters, “the first rule is: BE SAFE. If you come to a fork in the road, and you wonder which choice to take, take the safest one.” I had to add just a little amplification for James, as I suspected this rule needed to be a little different for boys, than for girls. “When you crash, just make sure it isn’t too ugly.” I told him.
I told him the second rule was not so important for a guy on the edge of becoming a man, as it was for teeneage daughters. “Keep me informed of where you are, and where you’re going.” This was the rule our girls had learned to live by. I just told James to let us know if he would not be joining us for dinner, so we could cook less food. He almost never passed up dinner, so we always knew his wherabouts. He was either coming home for dinner, or he was leaving after dinner, to hop the bus back into town and “party hearty” with his pals. The bus would drop him a few blocks away at 2 am, he would stumble home to bed, get up at 6 am and go back to work, helping skiers load onto the chairlift. James could do this day after day for almost two weeks, then he would let a whole day pass while he slept like a stone.
When it came time to bottle the Pumpkin Ale, I directed James as he cleaned the sink and counter area, set up the sterile solution bucket and the bottling bucket, and arranged the bottles and tools for sterilizing.
Our strapping young nephew went into the bathroom to get the carboy of beer, just when the phone rang. It was my wife Jan, calling from a business trip in New York. I told her I would call her back in awhile, when we were calmly underway with the bottling operation.
She just had a couple things she needed to tell me. “Yes, yes, okay, okay,” I said, “I’ve got to go now, okay, I love you too, good-bye. Yes, yes, I’ll call you in about 45 minutes. Okay, okay, good-bye.”
Just as I was getting off the phone with Jan, James came into the kitchen with the carboy by the handle in one paw, holding the airlock bottle in the other, and he was picking up speed as he headed across the room to the counter.
“James, two hands, two hands!” I warned him as he swung the 5-gallon glass vessel up with youthful swagger, aiming for a smooth landing on the countertop.
There was the sickening smack of two massive objects meeting, the glass carboy and the wood countertop edge, followed by the simultaneous crash and splash of large shards of glass and gallons of liquid hitting the floor. A wave of foaming beer moved across the kitchen, splashing up the baseboards. The air was immediately thick with the smell of a delicious spiced pumpkin ale, now wasted.
“OH MY GOD!” I yelled, ‘TOWELS!!” I ran to the bathroom, threw open the cupboard door and grabbed every towel from the shelf, ran back to the kitchen and threw them all on the floor, then dove to my kness and started mopping. James, speechless, followed suit. I grabbed a 5-gallon bucket to wring the beer out of the towels.
We mopped for 20 minutes, until the floor was still wet, but all the free fluid was up. A quick look into the bucket at the gallon and a half we had actually gathered, raised in my mind only one question, “Where’s the rest of the beer?”
I went down the spiral stair to the basement, wondering where the other 3.5 gallons had gone. There was a small puddle under the freezer, which was directly below the “impact zone at the sink counter, but there had to be more. Just then, the forced-air furnace came on from a signal given to it by the thermostat upstairs, where a February night was sipping btu’s away.
Suddenly James yelled, “WHAT’S ALL THIS SMOKE?!?”
The next thing I heard was a house-wide cacophony of smoke alarms, a shrill note drilling holes in my eardrums. I looked at the furnace, a huge puddle still forming around its base, and my eye followed with disbelief, the path of a forced air supply duct to it’s floor boot, right under the counter where James had smacked the carboy and dumped most of our beer directly into the furnace. There a gas-fired flame incinerated the pumpkin ale into our indoor atmosphere, at night, in the middle of Winter.
I hit the shutoff switch and the furnace died. The smoke coming from my ears was masked by the thick cloud that smelled like burned pumpkin pie, as I went upstairs to survey the cleanup job. I had always dreaded this accident, every time I lifted the carboy of beer to the counter myself. With age comes experience, and a certain understanding of potential catastrophies. I always thought I’d be kicking myself for this accident, but it was brought to me by my young, enthusiastic nephew. He was bound to be feeling awful, and for quite awhile. The smoke was gone from my ears by the time I reached the main floor, but it was far from dissipated in the house.
James had the front door open, I opened the back, and went to the second floor to open a couple of windows. While I was up there, I went to each smoke alarm, opened the cover and disconnected the battery backup, then went to the basement to shut off the smoke alarm circuit. I went to the thermostat and set it to “fan”, then turned the system back on to run the forced air system, just to use the filter, not the fire.
When I met back up with James in the kitchen, all I could say was, “I’m glad Jan is out of town. This is gonna take a few days to clean up.”
“I’m SO SORRY.” James said. He meant it.
“I always thought I’d be the one to make that mistake,” I said, “Welcome to the homebrewers impasse.”
“What’s that?” he asked.
“It’s when you mess up, usually by mistakenly contaminating a batch of beer and having to throw it all out, or having your bottles explode, or in your case, having a spectacular accident with a full carboy. You either quit brewing and never look back, or you learn from your mistakes, pick up the pieces and try again.”
“I think I’m gonna quit.” He admitted.
“We’ll see.” I said.
* * * * * *
At my urging, James came directly home after working the ski lifts the next day, no bar-hopping with his pals, ready to clean the furnace inside and out. I had come home earlier, to take the side of the furnace off, exposing the manifolds to be cleaned.
We found the beer. what hadn’t spread out over the concrete floor was contained in the squirrel-cage fan housing, close to a half-gallon. It was still wasted, of course, but I admit to smelling it with a sincere sense of disdain. In the end, we spent one very long evening disassembling and cleaning every beer-touched part of the furnace, re-assembling and running it full blast. It was a good feeling to know that it was all “back to normal” before the Lady of the House came home, a week later. Or so I thought.
Of course I told her the whole story over the phone, soon after it happened. Jan was very glad it had happened while she was away. The first evening after she arrived home, I came in after work to see her standing in the kitchen with all the lower cabinet doors and drawers open, lots of bowls, pots and baking dishes out on the floor, most of them with dry, brown stains inside. “Looks like I’ve found more of your beer.” Jan said.
James and I knew that a fair share of the pumpkin ale had gone into the silverware drawer, seeing that it was right under the impacted edge of the counter, and we had gone in there the next evening, to get a couple of forks and knives to eat the boiled kielbasa sausage I’d cooked for dinner, before cleaning the furnace. The silverware had been nearly submerged in beer. We’d cleaned that up, and the two drawers below it, but we hadn’t looked next door, where most of our serious cooking implements are kept.
Jan was in New York, and we were following my “bachelor program”, wherein I do one massive cooking evening on Sunday, for the whole week ahead, so dinner preparation and cleanup are minimized on work nights. There had been no reason to go into that cabinet, or the one on the other side of the silverware drawer, for any cooking dishes, since before the beer accident.
After our two huge evenings of cleanup following the accident, James and I didn’t think to continue the investigation, to find every last place a drop of the accident had settled and dried.
After all that work, we were quite content to relax, quit worrying, and have a homebrew.

Heritage Fruit Trees - Tracks of the Settlers

runningonmpt@gmail.com (Michael Thompson) — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 06:45:00 +0000

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Salute' Vittorio!
In the late nineteenth century, the city of Aspen was discovered for it's silver ore deposits, and was quickly settled and exploited for this precious metal. Twenty miles away in Basalt, homesteading farmers settled, irrigated and fenced their farmland. Most of the early homesteaders were Italian immigrants, and they settled here to raise food for the large mining camp in Aspen. Basalt is elevated 2,000 meters above, while Aspen is nearly 2,400 meters above sea level. At our latitude of approximately 39 degrees north of the equator, there is a significant growing season difference between Basalt and Aspen, about a month earlier in the Spring and a month later in the Autumn.
When the settlers moved west in their wagons, they collected everything they thought they would need to carve out a living in the wilderness. Their journey usually took them by barge down the Ohio River from the eastern states, arriving in St. Louis, Missouri, to buy or build a wagon, and to acquire tools and animals to start their farms. On the Ohio River portion of the trip, they met and bought smaller provisions from vendors, among which were farmers selling small fruit trees, mostly apple trees, and selling seeds so the settlers could plant their own trees, if the potted ones did not survive the journey. Seeds had a few advantages, in that they were far more portable and space conservative than potted trees, and required no watering on the journey. It was well understood among 19th century American Farmers, that a good, productive apple tree was worth a great deal. They knew that there were few taverns, and even fewer people producing alcoholic beverages in the homesteaded lands. In order to have alcohol, which many people thought of as a safer beverage than water, settlers would have to grow fruit trees, build presses and root cellars, and brew and store their own hard cider. A hard day of work and a long Winter were two of the most compelling reasons to produce your own alcohol, and everyone made this a high priority when they settled on their new land.

Today, there are a few hundred surviving apple, pear, apricot, plum and cherry trees from this era in our valley, aged between 110 and 140 years, which are still producing fruit. Jerome and I began studying these trees five years ago, with the express intention of finding the best fruit, and propagating these trees through the art of grafting, or "cloning" them, essentially taking a piece of the tree and inducing it to live in a new place, producing the exact same fruit. When an apple tree grows from a seed, it's genetic variability, multiplied by the bee's gift of pollen from another tree, makes each tree grown from seed, unique. Sometimes it will create a unique variety of apple that is superb, sometimes one that is terrible, or anywhere between these extremes, and it will take ten years to find out. A grafted apple tree produces exactly the same fruit as it's tree of origin, and it will begin to produce within 5 or 6 years. Pears also don't grow "true from seed", but their DNA variability is not as wide as that of the apple. Most of the stone fruits, apricot, plum, cherry and peach, DO "come true" from seed, but they are also faster to production when grafted. With all this good news, we've come more than two centuries, Europeans more than two millenia, cultivating fruit trees, and by grafting, we have precisely replicated and quickened their fruit to market. The bad news is that by grafting, we stop the evolutionary progress of that fruit variety, while it's pests hone their evolutionary talents with impunity.

So we are doing both, grafting and growing from seed, and a hybrid approach we call "Frankensteining" an apple tree. This means we grow it from seed until it is about our own height, with many branches, before we graft a new branch or two on it, even a couple of different varieties, which will then begin producing well before the original tree displays her unique wares. If the new and unique fruit is very good, we can prune the tree to favor it, and if not, we can prune to favor the grafts.

About 12 years ago I gathered a few neighbors with apple trees, and coerced them to join me in buying a cider press. Since then they have all moved away and willed me their share. This machine is almost entirely built of strong maple wood and metal, and it is manually operated, with a big crank wheel to grind the apples into a large basket, where a large vertical press screw presses a large wood plate don on the apple mash, until it releases its nectar of cider into a bucket at the bottom. This simple machine is a very popular device in the Autumn, and I love gathering the people and the fruit, helping them to get the cider from their apples. I always end up with plenty of cider as payment, and all of the apple mash. The mash is great material for many things. It can be layered into my sheet-mulch composting system, to feed the worms and make new soil for our vegetables. It can be fed to Jerome's rabbits, turkeys and chickens. It can be femented with a very high gravity yeast and some water, then filtered and distilled to make an apple grappa. It can also be spread over fertile ground, mulched, and allowed to winter over and become a bed of seedling trees in the Spring.

The cider we receive from all the apple trees also has many uses, beginning in our kitchen. Last Autumn I fermented and bottled about 50 liters of "champagne cider" from three different trees. All the bottles of this beverage are aging in boxes in the basement, the yeast still consuming sugars, carbonating the champagne. They will be ready to drink right about the time Spring has sprung, the snow has melted and the new plants are emerging. Treasure in the basement, awaiting it's many moments of enjoyment. When I visited Sam and Bean for their New Years Eve Party, I left one bottle of each of the three trees I harvested for champagne, in their refrigerator with a suggestion to await its best moment.
Our new cider discovery this Winter came from an essay I read on the internet, an essay written by Henry David Thoreau, the Colonial American who wrote "Walden Pond", in 1862. Titled "Wild Apples" Thoreau described the use of this fruit by the westward moving settlers. He wrote that when a homesteading family's seedling apple tree began to produce fruit, they did not judge it too quickly. If the tree produced apples that were too small, maybe hard and with very little liquid in the ripe fruit, they would leave the fruit on the tree, to wait and see. When the Winter had begun to set in, and the apples remaining on the branches had frozen hard and thawed several times, the apples had turned brown, and when thawed, were soft, appearing to be rotten, they would finally be harvested and pressed for cider. The settlers knew that this state of a young tree's fruit was its final test, the final determination of whether the tree was destined to be a provider of fruit, or a provider of firewood. Upon reading this historical account, I began to see these old apple trees in a new light. The very large, overgrown trees with small apples, began to seem like they might have a value we had not previously recognized. Prior to this, we had focused only on the trees producing large apples we could peel for pie, applesauce, and apple butter.
Since they had very little liquid when the other apples were ripe, we had ignored these little fruits, instead wondering how the trees had managed to escape the axe during their early years. The hint from Thoreau almost 150 years ago has actually shown us the reality, which is that these seemingly worthless trees are treasure in disguise. One of the trees I harvested for champagne cider was one of these mysteries, and after several freeze-thaw cycles, the fruit provided us with the sweetest cider of the season. We harvested about 45 liters from this one tree. I gave a quarter of it to the friends who had helped me with the work of harvesting the apples and pressing the cider, I prepared half of it for fermentation, and the last quarter I risked in an experiment to see if I could boil it down to the consistency of maple syrup, to replace this nectar we import from Vermont. The results were stunning, and agreed to by all of my friends who tasted it, as a resounding success. The result was nearly as sweet as maple syrup, and it had a distinctively "apple" flavor. Moreover, the "carbon footprint" of this discovery is an almost miraculous comparison. Vermont maple syrup is distilled by heating from 40 parts of tree sap, to one part of syrup. From our sweet apple "ice" cider, we found a syrup of similar consistency and sweetness, boiled from 6 parts of cider to one part of syrup. In one of several experiments I conducted on this, by error I was distracted, and ended up distilling the cider down from 8 parts cider to one part syrup, thicker than honey. When we tried to pur it on pancakes, it held the shape of a ball, not spreading out like a syrup. A little more thought revealed that this extremely thick foodstuff is actually a good way to store cider, if you don't want it to ferment, and you don't want to refrigerate it. Next week our youngest daughter March will come home, and I will take her and a number of her friends on a hut trip into the backcountry on skis. We will bring a small jar of this super-thick sweetener with us, to reconstitute with boiling water, into fresh-tasting, hot cider, using snow melted by the wood stove we fire up to heat the hut.
Finally, I wanted to tell you about a discovery I made after using a pruned fruit tree branch as a Holiday tree, decorated with tiny red lights. I wanted to use the naked apricot tree branch because I thought it was beautiful in the living room, as the centerpiece for our family gift-giving a couple winters ago. I had placed it in an old christmas tree stand, and as a matter of habit, I filled the water basin in which the base of the branch was mounted. Three weeks later, the fruit buds on the entire branch began to open. I looked into the water basin, and the water had all been sucked up into the branch, so I filled it again. Over the next two weeks, that branch produced apricot blossoms all over, and filled the house with their perfume, "winter blossoms" we call them, and they are the best encouragement I've ever seen, to trim our fruit trees every year.

Ciao, Vittorio!

Drawing Circles

runningonmpt@gmail.com (Michael Thompson) — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 05:11:00 +0000

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Salute' Vittorio!
When I was a child, I enjoyed drawing circles in the sand. I still enjoy drawing circles, but now I draw larger and more interwoven circles.
In our garden, I draw circles of fertility with a moving sheet-mulch compost method that builds rich soil by feeding worms, and I paint over this soil with large brushes made of the seed stalks of greens and vegetables we grow and eat. In the Spring, soon after the last snow has melted from the garden, tiny green leaves find their way through the matt of straw and leaves I spread over my seeds last Autumn, all of them edible. Our salad bowls are daily filled from this small garden, from May through October. There are several months of excess enough to share with neighbors, but not enough to preserve for the Winter. Our garden is only four meters by six, and also has a large apricot tree I planted there in 1984, a plum tree I planted just six years ago, now in it's third season of fruit production, and a lawn just big enough to pitch a tent. The rest is for growing nutritious food, but we need more than just this to sustain us.
Inspired by frequent reports of unsafe food coming from our super-industrial food manufacturing system, and by your example, Vittorio and Caroline, of an occasional visit to your local winery to refill your large glass jugs with local, delicious house wines, direct from the vintner. I have followed your example, and sought out growers of vegetables and greens, raisers of chickens, turkeys, lamb, cattle, even yak. They are expensive, sometimes nearly twice the cost of supermarket meat, but the taste of the local meat and vegetables is so superior, I am quite satiated after eating half a measure of it. Still, the cost is prohibitive, but I have found a way around this:
I trade with these farmers my homebrewed beer, in limited edition batches, each labeled with special graphics I design, print and apply. I have learned to brew well, and have found sources for high quality grains and hops at reasonable costs, so I have come to brew rich, flavorful beers in the 8% alcohol range and champagne ciders in the 13% range. My favorite rancher serves his bottles of my beer only when he has guests for dinner, and he relishes the presentation of it, about which I've heard from his guests. I make a big deal about him also, when I serve a yak roast from his ranch to a table full of close friends. More circles.
My business partner Jerome, has greenhouses and gardens full of greens and vegetables all summer long, but much of this he feeds to a constant stream of interns and students, and twice yearly the permaculture design certification courses, when dozens of people will be camped around his half-hectare hillside forest garden, all sustaining themselves from the food he grows. When they have all gone away, and Autumn is upon us, Jerome has excess greens, root vegetables and fruit to share with me, in exchange for the bread I have been baking and giving him all Summer, when my own garden sustained me. Jerome is the source for a good share of our Winter vegetables, and another circle I have drawn.
I fell in love with rustic European breads first in your loft on Wooster Street, and again when I went with Jan to Paris in 1978. A year after that, we moved to Colorado, and there was no source for artisan bread. Everything available here then was factory-bread, lifeless. I did determine to learn how to bake my own bread, and as my daughters will tell you, I succeeded very well when they were growing up, and my loaves made our house a gathering place for our daughters and their friends, allowing us a coveted view into the lives of our town's children, and the feeling that we really had a large family at times, with intertwining circles among the families of our children's friends.
Right about when our daughters asked me to please reduce my bread baking, because they were becoming weight-conscious teenagers, the first commercial artisan bread baker opened in Basalt. It was just a few months later, January of 1999, that I began brewing beer, and buying my loaves from the baker. When that baker went out of business five years later, there was barely a brief time lapse before another baker moved in, and life seemed back to normal, for another four years before the second one gave up. With a one week warning before door-closing day, I ordered twenty loaves of my favorite breads to freeze, because the manager told me they had no prospective bakers to follow them, and the equipment would be sold. "Now what?" I pondered.
The old 1940's gas stove in our kitchen had been giving us trouble baking pies, taking two hours to finish. Inspired by a potential new romance with bread and pie baking, we bought a new stove, with five gas burners on top, and two electric ovens below, one large and one small. It wasn't long before I had created a new bread yeast culture, bought two 23-kilo bags of organic white bread flour and whole wheat, cut some marble slabs to fit the large oven, and was baking once a week. When I began trading with Jerome for his greenhouse greens, it was with my bread, because he doesn't drink beer.
Now I'm baking twice a week, trading beer and bread for fresh roasted coffee beans, locally made bars of soap, and locally raised and cultured goat cheese, in addition to the meat and eggs I described earlier. The circles are all interweaving together now.
Suddenly the collapse of global financial markets doesn't seem like such a life-changing calamity, if I am grounded in a community, exchanging services and raising foods to exchange with each other, in a sort of "local gift economy".
The simple act of planting a seed, nurturing its growth and harvesting its fruits, seems to me a good metaphor for a good life. Every kindness given, every seed planted, bears fruit later.

Ciao, Vittorio.

Life in Uncertain Times

runningonmpt@gmail.com (Michael Thompson) — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 20:17:00 +0000

PLAY AUDIO

Salute' Vittorio,
Our great friend Sam always keeps me up to date about your life in Florence, and especially likes to tell me about times when you came to his boat. I always wish I could have been there, and promise myself to make the effort to visit again, to see you, and maybe to get on Sam's boat for once, before he lets it go.

I did make an effort to visit the east coast for this past Christmas and New Year holidays, visiting family and attending Sam and Bean's now-famous New Years Eve Party, my first time. As you can imagine, it was really fun. Sam's friends, Bean's friends, quite a sampling of New York City people, all delightful, as one would expect, since they have all won the friendship of our best friend Sam. There is a man so full of life that he binds us together like the strongest glue.

Tony Argibay performed very well in his standard role as Champagne Bartender. Tony is a very well-loved man, and he wears life with confidence, wisdom and humor. It is always a pleasure to see him. We enjoyed an early dinner on New Years day, Tony Sam and I, with our ladies chatting up the other end of the table, and we reminisced about you and toasted to your health, and we talked about the quickly changing world around us.

Before dawn on Saturday, January 2nd, I slipped into a taxi on 14th St, leaving my sleeping wife in her warm bed in the apartment upstairs, and flew home to Colorado. Jan worked another week in the Victorinox Swiss Army Manhattan design studio, before she came home to the mountains.

Fresh snow and bitter cold weather awaited me at home. The day after I arrived was a fine day to be skiing, sunny with 30cm of fresh, fine powder snow. I have a little "gig" I perform for the skiing company, once a week on Sundays, I don a uniform and provide guided tours to guests on Aspen Mountain, as well as provide other helful services for them. For this, I receive an unlimited pass to ski the lifts on all four mountains. You would think I'd be out there every day, but I barely ski more than half a dozen extra days a year, because I have too much else going on.

My architectural practice has undergone a large shift, one that has finally brought balance to my life. I have started a new company with an old friend, a farmer and permaculture guru, here in Basalt. His name is Jerome Osentowski. He is of Polish descent of course, from a family that homesteaded farm land in Nebraska during the nineteenth century. Jerome inhabits a small body, which he keeps in near-perfect health, by growing all of his own food, on a small pice of mountainside land he bought for almost nothing 30 years ago. Three kilometers and 200 meters above Basalt, Jerome has a ramshackle home with an attached greenhouse, in which lives a 25-year-old fig tree that gives him two crops between July and Octber every year. He also has two other greenhouses, one attached to a cabin he rents out, and the third a large - 9 meter by 20 meter tropical house. This largest one is home to tomatoes, greens, basil and many other herbs, and a diverse array of tropical and mediterranean perennials, such as banana, mango, pomegranate, pineapple, papaya, guava, passionfruit, jujube, and grapes. Surrounding all of his greenhouses is an acre of hillside landscape Jerome calls a "Forest Garden", in which there are fruit and nut trees, berries, vegetables, greens, herbs, nitrogen-fixing plants and trees, a pond, numerous enclosures for chickens, turkeys and rabbits, all surrounded by a tall deer fence, and guarded from within by a very smart dog. All of Jerome's greenhouses are heated and cooled by the intelligent and low-energy storage of solar gain. Here in the mountains, we have a lot of solar gain. When the sun is on the greenhouses, fans pull the warm, moist air off the top, and store it underground through a network of perforated tubes arranged in layers and buried in compacted soil before the greenhouse was built. This storage cools the greenhouse during times of solar surplus, and it warms the greenhouse during dark, cold nights. An example of the most extreme we've seen the greenhouse handle without backup heat, the indoor temperature falls to 10.C, while the outdoor temperature falls to -15.C, for a relative delta-t of 25 degrees celsius. If the outdoor temperature falls lower than -15.C, Jerome starts his backup heater, a wood-fired sauna, which will keep the indoor temp at 10.C, until the outdoor temp falls below -30.

Jerome's paradise is called the "Central Rocky Mountain Permaculture Institute", where he teaches classes in high altitude, perennial polycultures for sustainable food production. He uses only natural organic inputs, and the flavor of the plants and meats he produces there are unsurpassed by anything I've ever tasted.

When Jerome first asked me to design a greenhouse for one of his garden clients about six years ago, he taught me the rudiments of this underground heating storage system, which I have since named a "Climate Battery". After a couple of these small projects, with which clients were delighted, Jerome and I received a land planning commission to help design a new small development, with edible landscaping, waterways and pathways, as well as an orchard and a community garden/greenhouse. We started this company called "Eco Systems Design, Inc", and as the work increased, I left my other committments with other architects, and have been doing all my work in this new firm for the past two years. While all the larger firms I have worked with are losing people to this global economic malaise, we are getting more and more work designing greenhouses, forest gardens and solar homes, and are hiring some of the architects who have left the larger firms. The design fees we are receiving for this work pale in comparison to the fees we saw for large, custom "trophy homes" in Aspen for the world's wealthy, but it is very good to be designing energy and food producing environments for a healthy future.

So here we are, a growing band of building and landscape architects and a permaculture visionary, designing small and large projects, both private and public, to help create a local educational infrastructure and curriculum for teaching small organic agricultural practice, and to help people create their own energy and food production infrastructure. We hope this will lead to a more vibrant local economy, like yours in Florence, where we trade with a local vineyard for our wine, or in our case, for our eggs, meat, vegetables and salad greens. I will write more about this emerging local economy later.

For now, Vittorio, I will wish for you the best, and a promise that I will arrange a visit this year to you in Florence, and to Sam on his boat, wherever that may be.

Ciao, my friend.

Dear Vittorio - stories for my old friend

runningonmpt@gmail.com (Michael Thompson) — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 23:33:00 +0000

Dear Vittorio,

I decided to make a blog for you, where you can listen to stories and essays I write, record and post here. As you recall, I was doing this for a long time for my grandparents, and I will continue it for you. I am making you the hapless victim of my need to organize thoughts, so I can discipline my perception of the world to be wide awake and open to everything. So you see, this is also a selfish pursuit.

I'll post a new piece once a week, on Saturday my time, so you'll see them on your Sunday mornings.

Caroline can click on the place in the blog where each story has a link titled PLAY AUDIO, then she will need to click STOP when it ends, or it will play over again. I haven't figured out how to fix that. Hopefully, you will be listening with headphones, so you can simply remove them if Caroline is not available to stop the playback on the computer.

I wish you well, my good friend, and I hope to see you again soon.
Story Ideas:
Introduction - Life in uncertain times;
Drawing Circles - gardening, baking, brewing, relationships in a "gift economy";
The Heritage Fruit Tree Project, winter blossoms, "apple nectar";
Homebrewers Impasse - Nephew James and a spectacular brewing accident.
NOAH - A young man with a sense of his generation's future.
Tenth Mountain Huts, Adventure with Daughters & Friends

Old Farts Club, winter backcountry adventure with old pals.
Roaring Fork HAMS Homebrewers Club;
Raisin' Ladies - Haley, March and the Umbrella Table.