I could feel the history of the day in my body. I had worn a hole in the knee of my thick canvas pants, and the skin there was pink and abraded. My fingernails felt pried up from their beds and tender from scratching in the dry dirt, and my left arm and hip were bruised from carrying the hard, heavy flats. I turned on my side to shift the weight of the baby away from my spine, closed my eyes, and watched the increasingly abstract patterns of the field replay themselves on my eyelids. As I drifted off, my hope for the plants was curled up very small. And then, hours later, I was raised out of deep sleep by the purr of distant thunder.
There was one loud clap, and Mark was awake too, and we got out of bed and ran outside together. We stood in the driveway and looked up. There was a nearly full moon in the clear sky overhead. A cool breeze was rising. We could see thick thunderheads bunching to the north and west of us, backlit by strobes of lightning. We couldn’t tell which way they were moving. If the storm hit us, the plants would live. If it missed us, they would die. Odds looked somewhat worse than even. The clouds rolled and churned like breakers on a reef. Mosquitoes gathered around us, landing on our bare legs. It was past midnight, the next full workday just a few hours away, but we could no more look away from the sky than one could leave the table while the dice are in the air. It was not possible to draw the rain to us with our thoughts, but it was impossible not to try. We stood there in our underwear, moonlit, barefoot, mosquito-bitten, with arms intertwined, and hoped.
The bright forks of lightning and banks of clouds seemed to split overhead and prepare to go around us. And then I felt one fat cool drop land on my foot. Silence. Then another. Another. Then drops were everywhere, raising puffs of dust around us and drumming on the tin roof of the garage until water poured off of it, turning the slope of the driveway into a web of rivulets that joined at the base into a small stream. Mark and I held hands and grinned at each other, and raised our faces to the rain, a vestige of a dance of praise to deities we don’t believe in. We stayed outside until our hair was soaked and we were cold. Not even half a mile away, just on the other side of the road, it did not rain at all that night. But on our fields, it rained seven-tenths of an inch, enough to water and resuscitate the suffering plants, all except for the toasted brussels sprouts, which were too far gone to save.
* * *
That spring was our seventh. We had a burgeoning business and some money in the bank—just enough to pay the bills and feel periodically optimistic. We had signed a mortgage to buy the farmhouse along with eighty acres of surrounding land, some of it very good land, and we owned our livestock, our horses, and our equipment. We had plans to buy another four hundred acres of land around the farm when we could afford it, and we held leases on eight hundred acres of pasture and hay ground to our south and west. The food in our kitchen, and in our members’ kitchens, was bountiful and delicious, an anchor for the whirl of a busy life. We had a child and another on the way. I was thirty-nine—an elderly multigravida, in the charming language of obstetrics—and I knew how lucky that made me. It felt like our dreams and wishes, the things we spent the previous years working so hard together to tend, were coming ripe all at once.
Seven is a number with mystical appeal. A prime. A good roll in craps. It is the number of years it is supposed to take for every cell in our bodies to turn over and renew. This is not literally true—I looked it up—but it was a good metaphor for how I felt that year.. My city self, my old identity, had been sanded away by the daily work, shed cell by cell, and folded back into the soil. My new self was made of the atoms of this place, of its soil, water, sun, and dust, the way Adam came, whole, from the mud of his garden. The farm was my home, my office, my playground. We were so deep in it, we didn’t know where we ended and where the farm began. We had not yet learned to separate our own well-being and that of our marriage from the well-being of the crops and animals. There is no problem with that as long as things are going well, as long as you and the farm are rolling sevens. The trouble comes when the dice go cold.
It is not always easy to see where you are from the ground. There could be a meadow coming, or a cliff. But that year, everything was good.
PART 1 ROOTS
CHAPTER 1
I had spent my twenties in New York City, in a small apartment in the East Village, working in publishing and as a freelance writer. I had never grown a thing and had no particular interest in where my food came from. That changed one summer night when, over drinks, a friend of mine mentioned a young woman he’d met upstate. She had recently graduated from Vassar and was living for the summer in a tent, growing half an acre of vegetables, which she sold directly to local restaurants. I stirred my drink, listened to the ice clink, felt the sweat run down the side of the glass in the muggy evening air. I let my mind construct an image of that tent-living dirt-farming Vassar person—she came to me as a sort of dreadlocked, feral preppie—and it was strange and interesting enough to make me want to know more. Was she the only one?
I investigated. She was not. That summer, I found, there was a string of tiny farms popping up along the Hudson Valley, started by young people with no background in farming, freshly graduated from liberal arts institutions, the ink not yet dry on their diplomas. They were creating new markets for the food that they grew, selling mostly to like-minded chefs who cared about provenance, and directly to a burgeoning sector of consumers who wanted a more authentic connection to the food they were putting on their tables. Two things were immediately clear: the work was hard, and the farmers were happy. The question that remained was: what could possibly be so good about farming to make a person willing to live in a tent in order to do it? Conventional wisdom at the time said that those with the means to get out of farming should do so as quickly as possible. Here was a small but growing trickle going the other way, and my freelancer instinct told me to chase it down.
I’d soon chased it to central Pennsylvania, to a young farmer I kept hearing about, a lanky, loquacious, sharply intelligent, and ridiculously energetic man named Mark. He was a first-generation farmer too, but he had been at it for a decade, apprenticing for some of the most experienced organic growers in the Northeast before starting his own farm, on leased land. He was raising vegetables when I met him, plus some beef, pork, and apples, for a hundred families who signed up for a share of his produce. His single-minded enthusiasm for growing things was virulently contagious. He was an amazing salesman for his food, and also for his vocation, and he was making career farmers out of some of the unsuspecting young people who had come to work for him in what they thought was just a summer job.
I was thirty-one that year, single, and longing for some things I could barely bring myself to name. Those longings found a surprising answer in Mark, and in the work he loved—that alchemical combination of sun, earth, and physical effort. My interest in him and in farming quickly shifted from professional to personal. The shift was exhilarating, terrifying, and irreversible. Taking it back would have been like taking back a lightning strike or a plunge over a waterfall: impossible, even if sometimes I would have liked to try.
When I fell in love with him, I’d been living in the city for almost ten years. I’d traveled a lot, to interesting corners of the world, unhindered, which made me feel alive. I told my sister I thought this man might be my greatest adventure. She took in the larger picture—the dirt, the blood, the work—and asked if she needed to take me to India for a few weeks to help me clear my head. This was the course of action she and I had agreed on years before if one of us saw the other about to make a dubious decision. “No,” I said, “I’m pretty sure.”
In less than a year Mark and I started a new life together on five hundred acres of good soil in Essex, New York. The next fall, at the end of our first growing season, we got married in the loft of our barn.
* * *
From the time he was twenty and discovered his calling, Mark’s inner radio has been tuned to WFRM, all farming, all the time. I don’t know anyone more dedic
ated to anything than Mark is to farming. The farm is his focus, his daily work, and his identity. The word “farmer” makes you think, perhaps, of qualities like sober, modest, plain. Also, I bet, a man of few words. But in order to understand the first thing about our farm, in order to understand our family, and I suppose in order to understand me, you need to grasp what my husband is like. Imagine the energy of a surprise party thrown for a band of uninhibited monkeys. Distill that energy and bottle it into a lean, strong, six-feet-six-inch form. Add a heavy shot of brainpower and stop it with a cork. Now shake hard until the cork blows off and it all bubbles over. That is Mark. When he is not talking, he’s moving: drumming, juggling, chopping, or sometimes shadowboxing at your face. When he has a repetitive job to do—picking peas, say, or sharpening knives—he has a way of pausing first to center his weight over his hips, his body calculating the pattern of least resistance, and then launching at full speed. But usually, he is talking, with words as fast and big and forceful as his hands. He enters a room talking. He talks to your retreating back. Sometimes, if you happen to talk, he interrupts. He doesn’t mean to be rude, but neither does he care very much that he is being rude. Talking is his way to figure out what he thinks. He needs it. And he needs, above all, to connect, to be seen.
During college, on April Fools’ eve, he led a daring (and, over the years, growing) cohort in acts of campus disruption. The first year it was predictable stuff, like rearranging the university president’s office furniture on the lawn. But as each year passed, the pranks became bigger, more imaginative. By the fourth year, the group numbered in the hundreds, and the keystone prank was the midnight relocation of his college’s prized Calder sculpture, a priceless behemoth that they hoisted to the top of the tallest building on campus. They created cover for themselves by putting up posters all over town, advertising a purely fictional event: “A Multicultural Perspective on Modeling in America,” a lecture by Fabio.
The memory of those nights still makes his face light up. I’d heard about the escapades for years, but it took me a long time to work out the parallels between that time and our life on the farm. The pranks always included enormous challenges, an element of physical danger, a cavalry of willing workers, and a transgression of tacit rules. Mark was the charismatic leader of a large band of subversives. As more people came to work for us, the farm began to take on a shape that resembled a perpetual replay of April Fools’ eve: a lot of people doing radical things under his direction, quickly. This was sometimes a lot of fun and at other times incredibly stressful.
Mark is as strict with his own rules as he was loose with others’. His favorite philosopher is Marcus Aurelius. Peel away the outer layers of jester and hippie, and what is left is a powerful stoic. Two or three times a year, he begins a new self-improvement habit. One winter, he read every historical play in the Yale Shakespeare. He took up meditating and, unlike me, stayed with it; he hasn’t missed a day in over six years. He fasts twice a week, runs wind sprints at dawn on Mondays, and ends every shower with a sixty-second blast of ice-cold water, because he read that those things are good for his mitochondria. He is left-handed but believes there is virtue in being physically balanced, so he forces himself to use his right hand for daily tasks exactly half the time. He has recurring dreams about saving strangers from mortal danger. When he dreams of falling, he pulls himself out of it and makes himself soar.
I used to think that what delighted him most was feeding people. But now I think that food is the portal to something bigger. The idea of a farm is so simple: catch the sunlight, hold it where it fell, and use it to meet human need. On our farm, we ask the sun to meet as many of our needs as we can: food year-round for all of us, but also sugar from the trees, soap from our animal fats, electricity from the solar panels, wood to heat our home. The sun is a currency, the world’s first and most basic, endlessly convertible to other forms. You can take it in cabbages, carrots, or corn. You can take it in grass or hay, in milk or meat or timber. Give it several million years and you can take it in oil. But managing the conversion takes effort. What makes Mark ecstatic is the work itself, which is the connection between the sun and all life. “We’re sun brokers,” he likes to say, which brings to my mind an image of Mark as Apollo, in French cuffs and a power tie, hustling sales of pure light. But that sense of powerful magic is what Mark runs on, and food is just the way to reveal it to people.
Once, on our way to New York City with a delivery, we stopped to pay the toll at the Tappan Zee Bridge. Our old Honda Civic was so stuffed with boxes of food, I was occupying a body-size cavity in the passenger seat, immobile. It was late, we were behind schedule, I was tired and increasingly claustrophobic. “Looks like you’re moving,” the toll collector ventured through the window as Mark dug in the cup holder for change. “No, we’re bringing some food from our farm down to the city,” he said. “Oh, you have a farm?” she asked pleasantly, which, I knew from experience, was exactly the fish he was angling for. As he began to describe it in enthusiastic detail—the acreage, the animals, the season, the harvest—cars lined up behind us. I buried my head in my hands and stuck my thumbs in my ears to block the noise of the horns. Through my fingers I saw him reach behind his seat and pull out a dozen eggs, a jar of maple syrup, a bag of spinach, ears of corn. Each item passed from our car into the tollbooth and was met with a peal of surprised laughter. When we finally pulled away, he turned to me, beaming. “She was so happy. She’s going to come visit. She’s awesome. You’ll love her.” That goes a long way toward explaining what motivates Mark and why we have so many visitors.
* * *
Our farm sits a mile from the tiny village of Essex, on the shore of Lake Champlain. Every generation before our time contained enterprising newcomers laying plans for when the wider world would discover the town’s charms—the quaint ferry dock, the restored Greek Revival homes along Main Street, the view of the Green Mountains to the east, the High Peaks to the west. It is tucked into the majestic landscape of the Adirondack Park, where zoning prevents sprawl and development, and much of the land is constitutionally protected, forever wild. On this sure-seeming bet a few real estate deals are done each decade, but then the town sleeps again.
The lake divides New York from Vermont. It is also a boundary between two different economies. Our side is one of the most sparsely populated regions in the United States. Demographically, it has more in common with empty stretches of the American West than with other regions of our own state. Jobs are hard to come by. The public school district that our children attend consists of one school: a two-story brick building built in 1932, where the elementary students occupy the first floor and then, in a scripted rite of passage, move upstairs for middle and high school. The total number of students is a little more than two hundred, and the graduating class sizes range from ten to twenty-four.
Across the lake in Vermont, not three miles as the ferry runs, things are different. The town where the ferry lands is casually genteel. The clapboard houses are carefully tended and occupy plots of expensive land. The public school system is well funded. The city of Burlington, visible to the north, has a university and a teaching hospital. On our side we have a tampon factory, now closed, and a mine that brings out most of the world’s supply of an asbestos-like mineral called wollastonite. When the sun sinks into the mountains to our west, our side goes dark, and the lights of Burlington shine like new coins along the eastern shore.
The year-round population of our village at the last census was less than seven hundred and has been in a steady decline since a shipbuilding boom in the 1850s. Nearly all of the houses on Main Street were built during those years. Most of them are restored, and many belong to people who live in them for only a few weeks in summer. In winter, they stand dark and empty, the stores and restaurants on Main Street closed.
When I moved here from Manhattan, the ferry, and its promised connection to the city on the other side, made the transition seem possible. But we had a string of cold wi
nters in our first years, the lake froze hard, the ferry stopped running, and our tie to the larger world on the other side was cut. In the hours not filled with farmwork, we went skiing or skating and kept the farm pond clear for hockey games that ended in early evening, with headlights pointed in. By the time the weather pattern shifted and the ferry ran all winter, the lights across the lake held no appeal. We crossed once or twice per year, but our lives were firmly planted on our side.
In summer, people arrive to occupy their houses, bringing motorboats and money to spend. The restaurants put out their signboards, the ice cream shop hauls the chairs and tables to the sidewalk, and the antique store puts new price tags on the shabby-chic merchandise. There is a palpable feeling of urgency every Memorial Day weekend. There is hustle. The financial success or failure of the year, for most people, hinges on what can be made before Labor Day. From our fields we watch the pulse of traffic go by as the ferry deposits summer families and fresh visitors.
There’s always been room in Essex for a few eccentrics, especially friendly ones, but it’s not easy to jam a big personality like Mark’s into a very small town. When we arrived, people generally decided he meant well, and accepted him. Sometimes, though, Mark went too far. He was too tall, too pushy, or far too immodest. In his own way, about farming, he was too ambitious. It’s not in his nature to notice social cues, but people let me know when a line had been crossed, through second- or thirdhand comments. “Your husband…” they began. And I’d brace myself for what was coming next. It might be about the crooked row of rusty equipment he left parked at the end of the driveway, where it was convenient for him to hitch to when he needed it but an eyesore for everyone who passed. Or the trio of slaughtered pigs, open-necked and dripping blood, swinging by their hind legs from the bucket of the tractor that he drove through the village at the height of tourist season because it was the most direct route between the pasture where he’d killed them, and the butcher shop in our farmyard, where he would gut and skin them.
Good Husbandry Page 2