The Cheapskate Intellectual

A journey through matters of spirit, sustainability, and self-reliance

August 7, 2013

In the country of frac-sand mining.

Yesterday, I took an all-day bus tour (sponsored by and including many Allamakee County Protectors) to see frac-sand mining up close in Trempeleau and Chippewa Counties, Wisconsin.  In our group were filmmakers, writers, lawyers, water-quality specialists, Winneshiek County Protectors, journalists, farmers, geologists, a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation, a long-distance hiker, and ordinary citizens from […]

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July 10, 2013

Cleaning out, again; or, my first yard sale.

As I have written here, getting rid of stuff you aren’t using anymore feels pretty damn good, for so many reasons.  There’s the knowledge you’ve freed up space (and money) for more mindful choices about what comes into the house in the first place from now on, and you have reminded yourself to make that […]

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June 25, 2013

Resilience.

Nine o’clock after my evening writing class in the community arts center and I’m coasting on my bike through the river bottoms, on my way home.  Not a sound but tire-slurp in mud, animals, birds.  Mist rises from the water.  A rustle in the grass becomes a garter snake, a long stripe with a darker […]

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June 20, 2013

MOOCs in Citizenville.

What happens when you use technology to “serve people” by taking people and their physical presence in particular places – and thus their sense of responsibility and relationship to one another and to that place – out of the picture entirely?  One result is MOOCs, or “Massively Open Online Courses,” packages of videotaped lectures and […]

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June 11, 2013

Evanescence on a plate: spring pasta.

The raw ingredients of a simple, overwhelmingly delicious and seasonal spring dinner last week: asparagus, morel mushrooms, and ramps (or wild leeks, which have a delicate, indescribably oniony taste), with perhaps a few cherry tomatoes in for color.  Chop and sautee them in butter, lemon juice, and white wine (or verjus blanc), then spoon over […]

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May 27, 2013

The patient gardener? Labor and humility.

I spent the middle of May — just after classes ended, even before turning in my grades — in a fever of garden work, reclaiming a quackgrass-infested lily bed and moving and spreading a giant pile of mulch and constructing a long-dreamed-of raised bed by hand.  All of this I did by myself, in one […]

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April 28, 2013

Essentializing the animal: owls, war horses, and poetry.

Coming out of my office late this afternoon, I spotted a barred owl up in a tree outside the building, hunched against the trunk, squinching his eyes against the light and stoically standing off a pair of crows who were hassling him. I got concerned, especially when he was still there at dark a couple […]

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April 8, 2013

Creature tracks.

What is it about a swimming animal that is just so endlessly delightful? Don’t know. But biking past the sloughs down near the river yesterday — yes, I did spend the first real sunny afternoon of spring up in the office, grading — I spotted the twin arrows of paddling-muskrat-wakes, heading away.  They spotted me […]

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March 10, 2013

Spring waters.

Blustery raw wind, gray sky, cold.  But I’m glad, because it’s raining.  Not snowing.  Raining. All the gutters and downspouts are trickling, cutting channels through the grungy continents of ice now going soft and grainy everywhere.  Dark and muscular, our river fills its bed from bank to bank, rumbling under the bridge and carrying melted […]

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