My hosts for the afternoon’s interview were a huge golden Labrador retriever and a tall, handsome man with salt-and-pepper curls topped by a bright turquoise stocking cap.
David Waters wore denim work pants and a brown plaid flannel shirt under a red-and-black-checked wool vest. His intense blue eyes lit on mine for a nanosecond as he greeted me and then scanned back and forth around the farmyard as we walked and he talked, pointing out the nuts and bolts of the apple operation and the award-winning hard cider he’d staked the business on ten years earlier. Our email correspondence leading up to this visit had established that I wasn’t just politely interested—that I had invested in this trip to learn what I could from a master cider maker.
“What got you interested in all of this?” he asked me abruptly.
I repeated the explanation I’d given Bob Walker and Allen Swift the day before. David stopped and looked directly at me after I mentioned having learned to love hard cider when I lived in England.
“When were you in England?” he asked.
“1988.”
“Where?”
“London and St. Albans, but I spent a fair amount of time in the West Country and particularly in Somerset.” I suddenly cared that he approve of my British tasting credentials.
“We got our first graft varietals after a visit in ’84 to orchards in Somerset and Hereford,” he said. “We planted our first orchard of pure cider apples in ’89.” He stopped as a cell phone went off in his pocket. He excused himself and dug it out, giving me a chance to observe him.
I’m a hand person. I notice people’s hands right away, and I make snap judgments based on what I see. David Waters had great hands: workingmen’s hands that also bespoke grace and class. Mismatched plaids and turquoise stocking cap notwithstanding, this Harvard man had come back to the family farm and made good in the business of growing apples and making hard cider. I knew that for him, it all started and ended with the apple. Growing carefully chosen varieties of apples to perfection and bringing their distinctive tastes directly to the cider he made was his passion, and like any true visionary, he had collected the right people to help him make it happen. His hands told a story of hard work, finesse, and confidence.
“Sorry, I had to take that. Where were we? Right.” He stopped and looked straight at me with a hard expression. “Do you realize how complicated this is? A lot of people are interested in dabbling, but this isn’t a business you can just dabble in. Do you have a source for apples?”
The harshness of this questioning momentarily stunned me. True, I’d asked to take up this man’s time. Perhaps he wanted to test whether I was serious enough to warrant an in-depth look at his operation.
“The person I’m planning to work with has planted a small orchard of Yarlington Mill, Dabinet, Kingston Black, Golden russet, Brown Snout, Galarina, and Medaille. We’re looking to see how they do in Michigan and expect our first full harvest two years from now. It’ll be more like five before we can be in full production.” I was standing my ground. This wasn’t like going up against Steven’s generic criticisms of my lack of business acumen. This man knew what I didn’t yet—exactly what it would cost in time, energy, finances, and expertise to make good hard cider. I wanted him to know that I understood it all started with the apples.
David’s gaze appeared to go inward as he thought. After a moment, he strode toward the cider barn, beginning a rapid-fire tumble of information. I stumbled after him, notebook and pen in hand. “Medaille d’Or is high in tannins and it’ll contribute a strong, fruity flavor. Galarina’s fruiting zone moves out from the trunk quickly; we harvest it here between the Macs and the Cortlands. Honestly, if I were you, I’d look into Esopus Spitzenburg and Calville Blanc d’Hiver.” My afternoon mentor was off to the races, unleashing his expansive generosity and knowledge. I had apparently passed a test.
As I hurried along behind David, I took in the orchards falling away from the stone wall that surrounded the farmyard and bordered the road. Mesmerizing rows of perfectly pruned, mature trees receded into the distance; the still-green leaves set off the sparse remains of bright red fruit, and brilliant orange foliage on the hills in the distance created a stunning backdrop. Steely cloud streams were scattered against the clear blue of the New England sky, but for the moment, the sun shone brightly. As if cued, a lovely young woman drove a vintage red tractor up the path between tree rows, hauling apples to the barn.
David began talking again as we passed a row of picturesque wooden bins filled to their brims with yellow apples tinged with a blush of pink. Some variety of Cox Pippin . . . this late in the season? I thought, but there was no time to ask as we reached the cider barn and stepped in. My eyes took a moment to adjust. In front of me lay a modern, high-tech cider operation, with a vast mill, plastic vats, oak aging barrels, and a stainless steel bottling machine. I snapped photos while workers conferred with David, and we made our way to the tasting room and the refrigeration coolers at the back of the barn. Ten-foot stainless steel tanks with spigots at their bottoms and floor-to-ceiling rows of oak casks filled the cooler.
In the tasting room, benches with test tubes and beakers lined the wall, and I waited as David fielded another phone call and more questions from workers who came and went. In between, he brought me wine glasses with tastes of semi-dry, extra-dry, Roadhouse, and the new Farmyard, one-of-a-kind cider series. They were all delicious; real hard ciders, absent the cloying sweetness that foretold a subsequent headache. Instead, the tastes hinted of the special fruits that had gone into the mix.
After David pointed out the remaining functions of different areas of the barn, we re-emerged into the sunlight and crossed over to the storage shed, where bins were filled with apples waiting to be pressed. The immensity of the process and the expertise required by this man and his team of colleagues dizzied me. I filled five pages of my pocket notebook with names, ideas, and topics to learn about.
I had now taken an hour of David Waters’s time, and he certainly hadn’t signed up to give me a personal seminar on cider making. Even so, I couldn’t make myself leave quite yet.
“What’s your one best piece of advice for someone who is serious and willing to put the work into learning this business?” I asked.
David thought for a moment. “First, don’t spend a lot of time imitating other ciders. It’s a common beginning mistake. Research apple varieties. Do the horticultural job of figuring out what to grow and how to grow it in your soil. Take a course on cider making; the best ones are still in France or the UK. Work to capture the unique qualities of what you’ve grown. Understand that batch chemistry has its own features and problems. Don’t undercapitalize and don’t be overeager.”
I had to laugh. I, no doubt, was both overeager and undercapitalized. “Points taken.” I looked down at the rocky ground, then up to meet his eyes again. “Thanks so much for letting me see how it’s done right.”
“Good luck,” David said.
We shook hands, and I turned back toward my car. Good luck indeed.
Chapter 10
Down the mountain I drove, head full of orchards and cider making and possibility. Lebanon reminded me of a midsize town in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. The commercial strip was repeatable anywhere in a northern climate: wide roads with orange plastic poles already placed to appear above snowplowed drifts during the impending winter, and fast food restaurants, chain motels, truck stop gas stations, and a VFW hall neatly line up at roadside. Blessedly, I’d found a car rental office willing to swap my car out for another. I checked into my motel room, and no sooner had I lain down on the striped bedspread than my cell phone rang. I grabbed it and sat up. Alex.
“Hey sweetie.” I tried to keep concern out of my voice.
“Hey. How’s the trip?”
This was a good beginning. Nothing disastrous.
“It’s been pretty incredible. I’ve been going from one fascinating cider venture to another. I just got back from visiting what I think is the
premier cider maker in America at the moment. The farm is beautiful and I learned a lot. How’re you doing?”
“Check your email when you get a chance. Susan Shear sent me a bit of family medical history.”
“Okaaay . . . Do you want to give me some idea?”
“No, I need to sit down and make some sort of family tree. I don’t quite understand it all yet.”
“Right. I’ll look at it. But are you okay?”
“Yes, Mom. I’ll talk to you later.”
“Okay, love you.” I had learned long ago that when Alex was ready to be done with a conversation, the conversation ended.
“Love you too, Mom.” This recent intimacy Alex had allowed during the period of time immediately after the mess he’d gotten himself into with the young woman and her children. He’d relied a great deal on Steven and me for emotional support, and had finally begun to understand that we really did love him. While we didn’t always agree with his behavior or decisions, we were in it with him for the long haul, even when it wasn’t clear that he was in it for himself.
I lay back on the bed for another moment, closing my eyes and summoning a deep, cleansing breath from the high orchard I’d left earlier in the day, trying to ignore the stale motel room air. Then I slipped my shoes back on, grabbed my room key and laptop, and found my way to the lobby and Wi-Fi.
The day’s emails poured into my inbox. I scanned until I saw the forwarded note from Alex.
Susan Shear, Alex’s birth grandmother, had recently responded to Alex’s request for contact. Alex had told Steven and me about this but hadn’t shared any of the specifics. From the email, it was clear they’d corresponded a number of times, and also clear that Alex had asked Susan about family genetics and illnesses. I looked at the address bar and saw that Alex had also forwarded this email to Steven.
Within the first paragraph, Susan, apparently close to my age, revealed that she had worked in a special education preschool and liked to knit and garden. With a loose and irreverent tone, she quickly got down to the business of the email. One after another, she listed names, genetic connections, and diseases: bipolar disorder, developmental delays, allergies, and alcoholism. My chest tightened. Susan had no direct contact with her daughter, Alex’s birth mother, but another family member reported that she’d struggled with obesity, neurological problems, and other unnamed medical issues. She had married and had five children.
We’d never been apprised of this medical history in the home study done during Alex’s adoption. Stunning information should not be delivered in the faceless lobby of a Days Inn. Plain papered walls, metal breakfast room furniture, and the ubiquitous breakfast bar, sadly empty in the gathering dark of an October afternoon, provided me no place to anchor my attention or look for inspiration.
I reached for my cell phone and texted Alex: WOW . . . un-f—ing-believable! What are your thoughts?
He responded a moment later. Need to map out family tree and re-read some emails. It’s all a little confusing to be honest. I’m thinking about the weight problem.
I sat back. Weight problem? That’s what he’s worried about? I was thinking about his years of highly charged anxiety, and his superhuman efforts to focus his talents and intelligence in positive ways—the mixture of successes and defeats he’d experienced.
The cell phone rang and I fumbled to answer it. Steven’s, not Alex’s, name appeared on the screen. More than likely, he had just read the email too.
I tried to answer, but the weak phone signal caused a failing connection. I texted him that I’d call when I was en route to Boston in the morning, and stumbled back to my room.
I phoned Steven as soon as I started toward Boston.
“Where’s he going with this?” Steven’s voice held concern and irritation in equal parts. “I mean, I can understand wanting to know a familial medical history—”
“That’s exactly where I think he’s going with this. He wants to know where he came from. Really. It’s not Toledo this time.”
“Toledo” was shorthand for not telling a child more than he wanted to know. It came from a joke about a little boy who asks his mother where he came from and the mother gives him the whole birds and bees lecture, after which the child says, “Yeah, but where did I come from, Mom? Timmy comes from Toledo.” I hoped Steven would at least smile at this, but if he did, I couldn’t feel it over the phone.
I resisted the urge to fill his silence by saying any more. Instead, a memory slipped into my thoughts like a little parable. When Alex was six, a scheduling snafu had resulted in his having to come to a school meeting with me. It was a deposition on a child custody case involving one of my students. Adoption had been an issue. I’d set Alex up with crayons and paper at a table across a partition from where the adults sat, and he’d been good as gold. In the car afterward, I’d thanked him for being so patient, and after a moment he’d abruptly asked me, “Am I ever gonna meet the mother whose tummy I came out of?” Apparently, he’d understood more of the content of the meeting than I’d realized. There, on the highway circling town, I’d launched into a carefully crafted explanation of a future time when Mommy and Daddy would help him find his birth mother if he wanted to, and we could go to the people who helped us adopt him to get information, and on and on. When I thought I’d assured him, I looked over to his seat and he was fast asleep. All he’d needed to know was that it was okay to ask.
He still needed to know that, but now he wanted the content as well.
At last Steven spoke. “I’m worried this could derail him. What did he sound like to you?”
“A little tense. I think he’s shocked. It would have been nice if we’d known all of this when he first had to struggle with his own stuff.” Another silence returned the high-speed highway noise to my attention. No traffic to speak of yet.
“You can say that again.” Steven said, his tone more gentle. All the years of coping with Alex’s intensity, his need for structure and for scaffolding to support his discomfort in social situations, though he masked it well with his charm, intelligence, and ability to talk to anyone one on one—it all flowed into the car with me, and another silence told me Steven was being similarly visited. We had done our best from situation to situation as Alex had rocketed between wonderful successes and abysmal disasters. He had often chosen relationships to save others, forgetting, at times, to save himself.
In a well-practiced short-circuiting of the painful descent into which Alex’s problems could plunge me, I visualized the windswept beach of the Lake Michigan. I summoned the rosy horizon of a winter twilight defining the slate blue of the lake, a steady wind carrying a gull in the fading light, the white noise of rhythmic waves calming my spirit.
“I just don’t want him to go down another hole,” Steven said at last.
“I know,” I said. “I think he’s actually in a pretty good place.”
There is a comfort in sharing the distinctive trauma of a child’s trouble with the one other person who is also forced to reckon with it, even when the burden has at times commandeered the relationship. Steven’s gentleness, and the depth of his essential warm-heartedness, mitigated the old weariness of having to represent our son’s position to him then defend it, whether I agreed with it or not. I punched the seat warmer switch and drew in a protective breath.
We knew few other people whose children had run afoul of the law, or of the commonly accepted values of our upper middle-class existence—or who had ricocheted between opportunities, accomplishments, and disasters in quite the spectacular way that Alex had.
“I know,” I said again. “He’s done a lot of work, Steven, and maybe this all has to be a part of it.”
“If he would only talk to me about it, I could help him understand.”
This was an old complaint and we both knew it.
“It’s not the help he needs from you right now, Steven. He has to make this his own territory, you know?” I focused on keeping my voice gentle. Steven bristled when I edged int
o advising him on what to say to his sons—something I did frequently. I wished Alex would say these things to his father himself. Then it occurred to me that perhaps he had.
A sliver of moon appeared in the afternoon sky as I approached the outskirts of Boston. I was still twenty miles away from the airport. I longed for a cold black night sky by the lake with this very moon vying with a million stars for attention. Soon enough.
“I’ve got to go, hon, or I’ll lose my way,” I said. “I’m getting close to Boston, and you know I hate driving around Boston.”
“You haven’t told me anything about your trip!” Steven answered. “I want to hear.”
“It’s been fascinating. I really learned a lot. I’ll tell you about it when I get home.” Asked and answered. Though I knew Steven’s interest didn’t match my own in this endeavor, and that I should focus what I said on the evidence of my increasing expertise, he did have a very good head for business, and I hoped he would hear me out on all that I’d learned.
“Okay, well, I have to finish paying bills and then I have a meeting.” Steven often ended a phone call with a recitation of what he needed to be doing that our conversation was keeping him from. I no longer assumed he was chiding me for keeping him on the phone. I recognized that he had to orally organize himself by listing tasks, and all that was required from me was to wait for him to finish.
At the pause that meant a switch from looking at the calendar on his computer to checking email or a stock quote, I said, “I’ll be home around seven. I’ll see you then.”
“Okay, have a good flight,” came the distracted reply.
I’d scored a window bulkhead seat for the flight back to Detroit and I settled into the corner formed by the seat and the window frame, neck pillow in place, eyes closed, drifting off to sleep in the roar of the plane gaining altitude. I didn’t want to think about Alex, but in twenty-seven years, I hadn’t mastered the ability to park my worries about him at will—especially when a small kernel of undefined dread rolled in my gut like a hot marble, as it did now. I always knew when there was something I didn’t know . . .
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