On Salaries, Salt and Soldier-Making.

How did things come to be as they are?

My mother took this photo on her recent visit. Hank and Giles, learning where the good stuff comes from.

From the bottom of my heart, I offer thanks to all who gathered around the fire of this work and chipped in different amounts of money to cover in full the Sand River 2025 Summer Budget Request. The final gifts came in by mail. With a deep bow, I will head back out to the fields and gardens.

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Greetings Neighbors and Strangers,

I could write a whole newsletter about the two adorable rust-red calves, three-quarter siblings, who we are beginning to walk alongside. These are the well-matched pair of boys for whom I offered a prayer in a newsletter story a few weeks back. I have them tied in the barn side by side, fresh pine shavings beneath and soft hay in the manger. They take their bottles well, and are learning to walk on the halter, ‘get-up’ for go and ‘whoa’ for stop. Naming is one of the first important tasks of the would-be teamster. ‘One syllable’ says the ox training book, and can’t rhyme with one another or any of the basic commands, including ‘gee’ for right and ‘haw’ for left. As I hemmed and hawed—so to speak—I remembered that this old place is alive and listening. With that awareness, the names arrived.

I’ve written about the last resident of this Farm, a man named Henry who mostly kept to himself, tinkering and tending until he didn’t rise from his bed some twenty years ago. His father, named Giles, was the last full-time farmer here. So Henry becomes monosyllabic ‘Hank’. And Giles becomes the name for the second rusty calf tied just to Hank’s left. Imagine how many times Old Maple and Old Barn have heard, “Giles, come quick. The cows are out.” or “Hank, why do you have to be so stubborn?”

But that’s not the newsletter that begs to be written just now, as the possibility of our shared life seems to be closing in around us at a rate difficult to describe in words.

Of all the gifts laid upon my listening ears by elder and teacher Stephen Jenkinson, one question rests most heavily. I love the word burden, as in ‘the weight we learn to carry so that others may live’. Stephen’s question carries that kind of gravity: How did things come to be as they are now? The past isn’t a problem to be solved. It isn’t fixable, but it is learnable, and it is grieve-able. How we proceed today will become the unfixable past inherited by our grandchildren.

A friend of mine works in middle-management at a nonprofit organization that aspires to build the foundations for healthy human communities. This friend was offered a promotion, a salary increase of $5K/years accompanied by additional responsibilities. But the idea of it began to make him uneasy. Where was the money going to come from? What are others in the organization being paid? What about the folks who work under him? Why can’t the money picture be made visible to all? Transparency didn’t fit upper-management’s vision of community building. To their surprise, my friend politely declined the promotion.

In order to begin carrying this question, ‘How did things come to be as they are now?’, Stephen leans heavily upon the trail of breadcrumbs we call etymology. I looked up the word salary, and, like magic, the outlines of a path came into view.

Soldiers in the Roman Empire could be imagined as the early template for modern consumers. Ripped from webs of local provisioning and neighborly life-sharing through military conquest and forced relocation, they relied upon the distant abstraction called “Rome” for access to the basic necessities of life in order to fuel the work into which they had been conscripted: to enforce the Roman Peace—itself an early template for the globalized market economy—at the tip of a sword. Salt was, and still is, one of those life necessities, and the soldiers’ weekly salt allowance was known as their ‘salarium’, from which we derive the modern English word salary. Similarly, the word soldier comes from the same root: sal.

Two millennia after Roman soldiers built forts around the native British salt springs, a pesky native of occupied India known as Gandhi led his people to the sea as a refusal to accept the salary deal on offer by the British military. Why would you work for money to buy salt when you could walk to the sea and make it? Market economies emerged by violently separating native human people from access to the wellspring of their lives—the original gift. Our modern word salary carries threads of that story.

Back in the barn, I notice the older calf Hank licking the lime that I’ve spread on the floor beneath him. I place a bucket of salt and minerals in the manger and he begins eating from it right away. Like us, cattle cannot live without salt. Of the $20K we spend here at the Farm, a portion of that goes to purchase salt. Fascinated and a bit horrified by the etymology of salary, I ask the internet how the wild ruminants in this landscape access salt. Just like Gandhi and his gang, they walk long distances to naturally-occurring salt and mineral deposits. Presumably, they pass on this indigenous sourcing knowledge to their young.

Domesticating Humans

Making salt from sea water requires a whole lot of work. I know someone who participates in a salt-making weekend on the coast some hours drive from here, and the efforting boggled this person’s imagination—think cars full of firewood and endless hours of bucketing and fire-stoking. It’s not all that different from boiling maple sap for syrup. The group shares the small amount of precious salt made over the weekend among all in attendance. When I say “The gift doesn’t have a price tag on it, but it also isn’t free” the examples of hand-made salt and maple sugar might help bring this into view.

To this day, many small-scale sugar makers in these parts share the syrup they boil as a gift rather than sell it. Cheap salt and sugar for sale at the store are the opposite of precious. In order for something to be viewed as ‘free’, it must first be made into a commodity by restricting access behind the locked gate we call a price tag. In order for something to be viewed as ‘expensive’, the effort required to make it, and the consequences of that effort—both social and ecological—must be obscured through a process of separation from source.

Breaking calves for work involves separating them from their mothers and controlling their access to the necessities of life. This orients them toward the humans who bring them a bottle and exploit them for labor. Remember those Roman soldiers as templates for modern consumers? Replacing working cattle with combustion engines doesn’t solve the moral dilemma, it simply pushes the relational power dynamics neatly out of view. I am head over heels in love with working cattle, but it seems important to call a stone a stone here.

One of the primary differences between humans and, say, deer, is that each individual deer must walk to the salt deposit to receive the gift of life. None of them are allowed to pay. All must walk through their days shouldering the burden of gratitude.

Humans have the unique capacity to make pouches and other carrying vessels, including the clay pots used for boiling saltwater by the pre-Roman-conquest residents of the British Isles. Each pot had to be smashed to access the resulting lump of precious salt. With such pots, only a few people from any given household or village or tribe had to make the trek to the sea or other salt deposit. Humans have the unique capacity to open up a distance between us and the original gift, which bestows upon us the unique responsibility to cultivate rituals that help us remember the mind boggling generosity of Life.

On the day salt goes up for sale, a domino quietly falls in the forest of human culture. We might remember that domino with the word salary.

How did things come to be as they are now? We won’t be able to carry the weight of that question alone. I am grateful for your companionship.

With care,

Adam