Vashon, while certainly not uninhabited, only has streetlights in the town center. The rest of the island streets are not lit and the houses tend to be off of the road, well set back for privacy. Although walking the twenty-minute route from the bus stop on the highway to my new home would not have been impossible, it would have been difficult and not what I had in mind when I came up with the plan to take the local bus to work. I would have to learn to drive and buy a car.
I spent the next few weeks scrambling to make my new life possible. After quite a bit of effort, I got a driver’s license and a friend offered to sell me a small truck. I would’ve settled for a little car, but thankfully my friend knew what I did not: that a truck was going to be a necessity. That pickup truck was the first of many such trucks.
Weeks later I moved into the small shack on the property. Built as a chicken house in the 1930s, it had a low ceiling, cracked foundation and was long and skinny. I still was looking at the property through rose-colored glasses, convinced I was living on the most beautiful place on the planet. Christmas came a week after the closing of the deal. As this was the first time I had bought a house and I was, as they say, house-proud, I invited my family to Christmas breakfast. Unaware as to what they were getting themselves into, they agreed, and on that wintry morning twenty years ago, my mother, my sister, her husband and their very young son journeyed out to the island to see what I was so excited about. I too had to ride the ferry from Seattle, as I had yet to move into the new home.
Little more had been done to the small chicken-coop-cum-house than to remove its rotted gold shag carpeting and three utterly unnecessary doors in the five-hundred-square-foot space. Immediately outside the large front windows was a pile of junk. In the week between the closing and Christmas I had heaved all of the rotten carpeting, greasy kitchen cabinets, moldy Sheetrock and rat-infested insulation out the front door. I wasn’t sure how I would dispose of all of this, but I knew I needed it out of the house.
The floors were cracked linoleum on a broken, unleveled foundation. I had hooked up a small wood stove and had given the house a cursory cleaning. I had lit a fire in the small wood stove in a vain attempt to cook a pot of oatmeal with brown sugar and golden raisins. The fire never quite roared in the small chamber, the water never came to a full boil and the oatmeal resembled a muddy paste much more than the Scottish country breakfast that I’d had in mind. Undeterred by my family’s lukewarm reaction, I persevered, convinced that this frigid, moldy chicken coop, situated in the middle of four acres of blackberries, was a bucolic dream reminiscent of the many pastoral British period films I had seen.
The next week I set about disposing of the rotting hulk of garbage in front of my new home. I had recently met a friend who had grown up in the rural part of the county and taught me many of his country skills. I assumed that I would need to load the large pile of rotting shag carpet into my truck and haul it to the garbage dump, at great expense and effort. He found my naïveté charming and proceeded to help me dispose of the pile by burning it. As it was winter, and had been raining in the weeks since I had pulled the carpet, the Sheetrock, the cabinets and the insulation from the house, the pile was quite damp. It would take a great deal of effort to incinerate this soggy mass. With a new burn permit from the local fire hall and a small tank of gasoline, we began my first lesson in country living. Looking back, I’m horrified by this environmentally irresponsible act committed on my own property, but at the time it seemed perfectly appropriate.
After a thorough dousing with gasoline, the pile eventually roared into flames, the sky above my rural retreat blackened by the toxic smoke the carpeting and plastics emitted. We continued on through the afternoon, throwing into the fire anything we could find from the area surrounding the house that needed to be disposed of. Oddly, my excitement was never dampened by the great noxious cloud above or the pernicious pile of ash remaining the next morning. I reveled in the grand fire and its ability to consume the detritus of the past. The farm was mine now.
Two
Growing the Farm
If I had planned this farm from the outset, it might have looked different, perhaps more deliberate. As it happened, the circuitous route of development gave this project a more “organic” style of growth. Through successes and failures the farm took shape and now reflects my interests and skills, the nature of this soil and the climate here.
Raised in a small, quiet family, I turned to reading early for direction and inspiration. I spent long, lazy summer days, weekends and afternoons after school lying on the plush rugs of the living room poring over books, dreaming of Europe and lands far off. Although I would have greatly preferred the idyllic family life that I saw on the sitcoms of the era, it was this isolation that contributed to and created my character. Books were my friends, my inspiration, my mentors. No one encouraged me, yet no one corrected my outrageous and unrealistic views of the world.
This upraising led me to this farm. I bought this land, moved here and transformed it because no one said that I couldn’t. No one warned me that small farms never succeed financially. No one let me know that this junkyard of a plot would never be a rich, productive parcel of land. Granted, I created a farm that resembles the images I saw when I was ten or fifteen or twenty years old. I had never seen a farm up close. My visions of farms were from Green Acres, or from French cookbooks of the seventies and Time-Life books on the rural American South of the sixties. My goal was to re-create those photos from the large picture books laid out on my bed growing up. No matter that the photos in question were of Versailles, or Giverny, or a large plantation in antebellum Georgia.
I didn’t intend to grow this home into a farm. The more honest history is that I spent the years working here on one project or another, making decisions that felt right on a day-to-day basis. Only years later would I be able to walk out my front door and realize that my goal was a farm; that each day’s decisions led up to a farm. From the start I wanted the property to look good, I knew that, but I wasn’t really sure what its function would be. My recollection is that I wanted it to look like a park. Large flat lawns, specimen trees dotting the landscape, long curving paved driveways, that kind of thing. As I began to work on the property, all I had as a blueprint was this phantom park.
My first task was to deal with the ubiquitous blackberries that held the majority of the land hostage. These vines were Himalayan blackberries, an invasive nonnative species. In 1885 Luther Burbank introduced the Himalayan blackberry plant from India to the United States for commercial berry cultivation. I envision one single half-dead plant showing up wrapped in brown paper, tied with a bit of string, a handwritten label glued to the side and shipped from the mountains of the subcontinent. This blackberry ran wild, breaking out of its commercial farms and running rampant across the Pacific Northwest. It is now the most notorious weed of this region.
Complicating the matter is the simple fact that the berries are delicious: thumb-sized morsels packed with juicy sweetness. The strong, thick, prickly canes can grow twenty, thirty feet in a season with adequate water and are not affected by the temperate northwestern winters. Each year they spread their empire, building on the prior year’s unchecked growth.
These monstrous, albeit tasty invaders had colonized my entire plot of land through the benign neglect of the previous owners. The house lay in the very center of the property, the edges of the land shrouded in the tall vines. I could see no neighboring houses at the time, my view obscured by Rubus armeniacus.
The result, for the first few years, was a sense of physical isolation. The route from the main road was a tunnel of these blackberries that clung to the high cherry trees lining the driveway, their ever-growing tendrils scratching my truck as it plowed through them, my daily traffic the only thing that kept the blackberries from completely sealing off the route in and out of the property. Once inside the property, I could see no other homes, no neighbors.
Although Vashon has since started to catch up to th
e present day, when I first arrived the island was stuck about thirty years behind the rest of the country. Moving to Vashon in 1990 felt like going back in time to the 1960s. The stores were small and simple, three taverns as restaurants lined the main street, a large lumberyard, a few real estate agents, a Sears store, the Beauty Nook. The era of coffee shops, chain stores and art galleries had yet to arrive. The only glimmer of modernity came from the banks, although the people working in them had an attitude of disdain for the rules of their corporate offices, easily bending the rules for their neighbors.
I was still commuting to work in the city, but on my days off I would hole away in my small chicken coop of a home, heating with the wood stove, enjoying the evenings when the power went out and believing that I was living in the wilderness, the harsh elements just feet from my door. I picked up a kerosene lamp and an ax at the local thrift shop, where the pricing was also stalled in the sixties. I believed, mistakenly as it turned out, that I could chop my own wood, heat my small, poorly insulated house with that wood and live by the kerosene lights when the power dimmed.
I came to my senses rather quickly when I discovered that a chain saw I bought from the local Sears store cut the wood more efficiently than my dull ax. As it turned out, the dull ax that I attempted to chop wood with was in fact a splitting maul, its job to simply split logs and not in any way designed to chop wood. The trees that I attempted to chop with that maul I later determined were willow, certainly the worst wood for heating, as willow is soft and spongy and it puts out little heat when burning. A bit of scrounging through the woods, and I eventually found cherry, birch, fir and alder—all better suited to heating my small house than the willow. The chain saw even made it a fun task.
The seed was planted in my head, though. I searched through old Foxfire books, looking for ways to live off the land. In these then-twenty-year-old books were methods and recipes for living in the backwoods of North Carolina Appalachia. They referenced a way of life that had little in common with that of my suburban tract, but I picked up the odd idea of curing hams, raising chickens and churning butter, ideas before then unknown to me.
As I began to cut down the blackberries that covered the ground, I found that some of the larger, taller stands of brambles were actually ancient apple trees that the blackberry vines had climbed through in an effort to gain more sunlight. As the property was part of an original homestead, it included fruit trees, among them many large apple trees and the occasional Bartlett Pear. I hacked away at the vines and found fruit trees, very much alive if a bit tired. I quickly discovered that the few fruits that did manage to bloom through the cover of blackberry leaves were quite tasty. Although the trees were of course not labeled, I think the varietals included Red Delicious, Braeburn and Winter Banana. Week by week, month by month, I hacked away at the brambles, finding the apple trees, large piles of galvanized irrigation piping left from the greenhouses, concrete foundations from buildings long gone and a 1963 powder-blue Ford Ranchero, missing its engine and most of its tires.
I began with a pair of small pruning shears, quickly moving up to large loppers until I discovered an old riding lawn mower was most efficient at clearing the land, at least until it repeatedly hit protruding bits of pipe, bending the blades and putting the mower out of commission for that day until I could replace them, only so they could be damaged the next weekend. With time, I would need larger equipment to maintain my property.
With the apples and a few hazelnuts picked from large old nut trees found in the woods, my interest in food from this land was piqued. As I freed a bit of land from the blackberries, I would plant a pear tree or a walnut or a plum, without much plan, but knowing that I liked the fruits or nuts pictured in the shiny photograph on the tag dangling from the bare-root trees that I bought at the local nursery.
As I began to live on the island and work on the property, I still ran my restaurant. By this time, in 1991, I had grown my original four-table bakery into a much larger twelve-table café. The restaurant was open seven days a week, year-round, opening at seven in the morning and serving breakfast, lunch and dinner until midnight on the weekends and six o’clock during the week. Although I didn’t work at the café every hour it was open, I kept up a feverish schedule to pay for my new home on Vashon. I was obligated to pay a high interest rate—at the time twelve percent—because the banks that I approached for a loan felt that this property was a poor bet. With most of the value of the property tied to the land and not to the structures on it, I couldn’t get a standard residential loan. The banks couldn’t even believe that I intended to occupy my little chicken coop; they were sure I’d tear it down and build a more customary house. It was not until years later, after I upgraded the property tremendously, that I was able to rewrite the loan to a lower and more standard interest rate.
Thankfully, the café was financially successful. Selling light lunches and dinners in addition to baked goods helped. It was the popularity and the profitability of espresso coffee that made my business so profitable. I was very lucky. I opened the first café in 1986 at the onset of the espresso culture. Seattle was the epicenter of the craze and my business benefited from it immensely.
In 1994, after four years running the twelve-table café, I sold it to buy a large, full-service restaurant. The full-service restaurant was on a busy street in a different part of Seattle and served full breakfast, lunch and dinner seven days a week, and included a cocktail bar and sidewalk tables during the warm summer months. My financial success depended on maintaining a high volume of business. The goal was to keep as many of the one-hundred-plus seats as possible filled from nine in the morning till midnight every day of the year, including Christmas Day.
Without realizing it, I had entered into a financial trap. I wanted the excitement of running a large, vibrant restaurant. I envisioned a packed house every night, every table seated, the bar filled with drinkers. Profitwise, the restaurant wasn’t doing as well as my two prior, smaller businesses. I was terrified that if I didn’t improve my balance sheet, I might lose my business and, by extension, lose my refuge: the small farm I was growing on Vashon Island. Local and seasonal became far less important than the bottom line.
Anyone who runs a restaurant is used to seeing volumes of vegetables, meat, fish and fruit. Chicken breasts are a staple of a restaurant menu. They can be ordered from meat suppliers in nearly any size wanted: three, four, five ounces and so on. They arrive folded into an oval shape and nestled each in a plastic dimple, four across and five long, on a plastic flat. Each cardboard case has a couple of these flats in it. They are delivered frozen, and then the cooks flip the flimsy plastic flats upside down into buckets to defrost. Very much like ice cube trays, racking them just so, so that the ice cubes pop out into the ice bucket for your cocktail. After a day in the cooler, these chicken popsicles defrost into a slimy chicken product. Hour by hour, day after day, they are pulled from the buckets and placed on the grill to make chicken Caesar salads and the like. The unknowing clients at the pretty little tables are looking for a healthy, low-fat diet and have come to the idea that skinless, boneless chicken is their best alternative. They order chicken Caesar salads, chicken sandwiches, pasta with a grilled chicken breast on top or simply a chicken breast grilled and served with vegetables and mashed potatoes on the side.
We went through cases of these chicken breasts. The deliverymen would come through the back door of the restaurant two and three days a week with a hand truck stacked high with flat cardboard boxes filled with plastic trays of chicken breasts. I never thought about where the rest of the bird was, where the chickens were raised, what they were fed. I just knew that I could raise the price of a salad from $8 to $11 if it had a grilled piece of meat on it. I had a lot of rent to pay, plus a mortgage; I looked away when I needed to.
Over time, I began to think more deeply about food. Chicken breasts were the first thing on my menu that I stopped eating. I doubt if anyone noticed. The cooks had worked for me for year
s and knew me well, but probably never noticed that I hadn’t eaten chicken breasts in years. I never touched one of the flaccid pieces of meat in the last five years I was there, letting the cooks grab them and place them on the grill. The wet slippery white fluid on the meat never felt right.
Soon I started to think similarly about the pork loins. The restaurant was known for schweineschnitzel—a pork loin, thinly sliced, pounded flat, dipped in egg and flour and then fried in butter. Served with lemon wedges and garlic mashed potatoes, it was a filling meal. If pounded very flat and well cooked so that the breading was light and nicely browned without drying out the pork, it was a tasty dish and therefore sold well.
The pork was delivered in a way similar to the chicken, a twenty-four-inch-long loin Cryovac-ed in plastic. After the meat leaves the packinghouse completely sealed in thick tight plastic, it starts to weep. By the time it reaches the restaurant the pork is swimming in pork fluid inside the bag. The bag is cut open and the liquid drained out before the pork can be broken down to size. Since those days, I have butchered many pigs, prepared many pork loins. There is no pork juice to drain off of them.
Little by little I came to be unable to eat at my own restaurant at all. I told no one, especially not customers. It was a humiliating position to be in. I couldn’t see the possibility of changing the restaurant into a more health-conscious business—the financial pressures were too great. The guy who sold hot baked goods from a tiny storefront had been replaced with a restaurateur disgusted by eating at his own establishment. My relationship with food had been shaken, and by proxy my own image of myself.
Growing a Farmer Page 2