The Dirty Life.On Farming, Food, and Love

by Kristin Kimball

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  For Mom and Dad

  The

  DIRTY LIFE

  Prologue

  Saturday night, midwinter. The farmhouse has been dark for hours and the crew has all gone home. We light a fire and open two bottles of our friend Brian’s homemade beer, and as I wash up the milking things Mark begins to cook for me, a farmer’s expression of intimacy. He is perfectly sure of himself in the kitchen, wasting no movement, and watching him fills me with a combination of admiration and lust, like a rock star’s groupie. He has chosen a fine-looking chuck steak from the side of beef we butchered this week and has brought an assembly of vegetables from the root cellar. Humming, he rummages through the fridge and comes out with a pint of rich, gelatinous chicken stock and a pomegranate, the latter a gift from my friend Amelia, who brought it up from New York City.

  Mark gets busy, his hands moving quickly, and half an hour later he sets two colorful plates on the table. The steak he has broiled medium rare and sliced thin across the grain and drizzled with a red wine reduction. There is a mix of leek, carrot, and kale, sautéed in butter and seasoned with juniper berries, and next to this, vibrating with color, a tiny pile of this year’s ruby sauerkraut, made from purple cabbages. We are out of bread, but he found a little ball of pastry dough in the fridge, left over from making a pie, and he rolled it out and cut it in triangles and cooked it in a hot skillet, and voilà, biscuits. But the unlikely star of the plate is the radish. Mark went a little crazy planting the storage radishes last summer and put in a thousand feet of them, a lark for which I have teased him mercilessly, but they grew so beautifully and are storing so well that now I see we might actually put a small dent in the supply by the end of the winter. The variety is called Misato Rose. Creamy white with shades of green on the outside, and bright pink on the inside, they are about the size of an apple, and, when you cut them, they look like miniature watermelons. These are a favorite appetizer served raw with a little sprinkling of salt. They look so fruitlike the biting taste is always a surprise, a disagreement between the eye and the palate. Tonight, Mark braised them in stock, which hardly dimmed their brilliant color but mellowed out their flavor. He added a dash of maple syrup and balsamic vinegar, and at the end tossed in a handful of the tangy pomegranate seeds, the heat bursting some and leaving others whole to amuse the tongue. This is why I love my husband: given these opposites to work with, the earthiest of roots and the most exotic of fruits, he sees harmony, not discord. We eat the meal, my eyes half closed in pleasure, and sip the bitter, hoppy beer, and kiss, and before my friends in the city have even dressed to go out for the evening, we slip off to bed.

  I’ve slept in this bed for seven winters, and still, sometimes, I wonder how I came to be here, someone’s wife, in an old farmhouse in the North Country. There are still moments when I feel like an actor in a play. The real me stays out until four, wears heels, and carries a handbag, but this character I’m playing gets up at four, wears Carhartts, and carries a Leatherman, and the other day, doing laundry, a pair of .22 long shells fell out of her pocket, and she was supposed to act like she wasn’t surprised. Instead of the lights and sounds of the city, I’m surrounded by five hundred acres that are blanketed tonight in mist and clouds, and this farm is a whole world darker and quieter, more beautiful and more brutal than I could have imagined the country to be.

  Tonight, curled against Mark’s body under the goose-down comforter, I hear cold spring rain begin to fall. Mark is already asleep, and I lie awake for a while, wondering if any of the cows will have the bad luck to calve in such nasty weather, if the pigs have enough straw in their hut to stay warm, if the horses are comfortable in the pasture or if they’d be better off in the barn. I worry that the rain is melting the snow cover, exposing the garlic and the perennials to the harsh cold that is sure to come back to bite them before the threat of frost is over. These are the kinds of thoughts that have occupied the majority of the human race—the agrarians—for most of the history of the world. And I am one of them now. It’s as surprising to me as radishes and pomegranates.

  Mark and I are both first-generation farmers. The farm we’ve built together could be described as antique or very modern, depending on who you ask. The fertility comes from composted manure and tilled-in cover crops. We use no pesticides, no herbicides. The farm is highly diversified, and most of the work is done by horses instead of tractors. Our small fields are bordered by hedgerow and woodlot. We have a sugar bush, the beginnings of an orchard, an abundance of pasture and hay ground, and perennial gardens of herbs and flowers. We milk our cows by hand and their milk is very rich and the butter we make from the cream is taxicab yellow. We raise hogs and beef cattle and chickens on pasture, and at butchering time we make fresh and dried sausages, pancetta, corned beefs, pâtés, and quarts of velvety stock.

  The food we grow feeds a hundred people. These “members” come to the farm every Friday to pick up their share of what we’ve produced. Our goal is to provide everything they need to have a healthy and satisfying diet, year-round. We supply beef, chicken, pork, eggs, milk, maple syrup, grains, flours, dried beans, herbs, fruits, and forty different vegetables. For this our members pay us $2,900 per person per year and can take as much food each week as they can eat, plus extra produce, during the growing season, to freeze or can for winter. Some members still shop regularly at the grocery store for convenience food, produce out of season, and things that we can’t provide like citrus fruit, but we and some of the others live pretty much on what we produce.

  I’ve learned many things in the years since my life took this wild turn toward the dirt. I can shoot a gun, dispatch a chicken, dodge a charging bull, and ride out a runaway behind panicked horses. But one lesson came harder than any of those: As much as you transform the land by farming, farming transforms you. It seeps into your skin along with the dirt that abides permanently in the creases of your thickened hands, the beds of your nails. It asks so much of your body that if you’re not careful it can wreck you as surely as any vice by the time you’re fifty, when you wake up and find yourself with ruined knees and dysfunctional shoulders, deaf from the constant clank and rattle of your machinery, and broke to boot. But farming takes
root in you and crowds out other endeavors, makes them seem paltry. Your acres become a world. And maybe you realize that it is beyond those acres or in your distant past, back in the realm of TiVo and cubicles, of take-out food and central heat and air, in that country where discomfort has nearly disappeared, that you were deprived. Deprived of the pleasure of desire, of effort and difficulty and meaningful accomplishment. A farm asks, and if you don’t give enough, the primordial forces of death and wildness will overrun you. So naturally you give, and then you give some more, and then you give to the point of breaking, and then and only then it gives back, so bountifully it overfills not only your root cellar but also that parched and weedy little patch we call the soul.

  This book is the story of the two love affairs that interrupted the trajectory of my life: one with farming—that dirty, concupiscent art—and the other with a complicated and exasperating farmer I found in State College, Pennsylvania.

  Part One

  Leaving

  The first time I laid eyes on Mark, we were in the run-down trailer that served as his farm office and his home. I had driven six hours from Manhattan to interview him for a story I was pitching, about the young farmers who were growing the kind of local organic food that more and more people wanted to eat. I knocked on his front door during what turned out to be the after-lunch nap. When nobody answered, I let myself into the kitchen and called out, and after a minute the bedroom door banged open and Mark strode down the hallway, buckling his belt. He was very tall, and his long legs propelled him toward me with a sort of purposeful grace. He wore scuffed leather work boots, blue jeans gone white at the thighs, and a devastated white dress shirt. He had lively green eyes, a strong and perfect nose, a two-day beard, and a mane of gold curls. His hands were large and callused, his forearms corded with muscle and wide blue veins. He smiled, and he had beautiful teeth. I smelled warm skin, diesel, earth.

  He introduced himself, shook my hand, and then he was abruptly gone, off on some urgent farm business, the screen door banging shut behind him, promising over his shoulder to give me an interview when he got back that evening. Meantime, I could hoe the broccoli with his assistant, Keena. I recorded two impressions in my notebook later on: First, this is a man. All the men I knew were cerebral. This one lived in his body. Second, I can’t believe I drove all this way to hoe broccoli for this dude.

  That first night, instead of doing an interview with him, I helped Mark slaughter a pig. I’d been a vegetarian for thirteen years, and I was wearing a new white agnès b. blouse, but he was shorthanded, and being on his farm without helping felt as unnatural as jumping into a lake and not swimming. I’d never seen an animal slaughtered before, and I could not look when he shot the pig—a sow named Butch with black-and-white spots, like a porcine character in a children’s story. Once she was still I regained my equilibrium. I helped hoist the carcass on a gambrel and make the eviscerating cut from breastbone to belly, holding the steaming cavity open while Mark cut the organs free from their moorings. I was not disgusted but enlivened by what we were doing. I was fascinated by the hard white purse of the stomach, the neat coil of intestines, the lacy white caul fat, the still-bright heart.

  After the carcass was halved we hauled it in a cart to a walk-in cooler near the road. One hundred yards from us was a development of grandly scaled houses on small lots. They had carefully clipped lawns, and geraniums in pots at the ends of the driveways. In the falling dark Mark draped the now-headless pink half body over his shoulder. It was bulky and heavy and awkward to carry, just like dead bodies on TV. I held on to the slippery back trotters and helped get the pig into the cooler and hung on a hook from the ceiling. The cars zipping by had their headlights on by then, and the lights were coming on in the houses across the road. I wondered if anyone could see us, and if they would call the police.

  I stayed at a chain hotel in town that night and soaked the pig grease off of me in a bathroom that seemed shockingly white and sterile. I felt like I’d been on a long trip to a very foreign country.

  The next morning I got up at dawn and went back to the farm. Mark’s crew was gathered for breakfast: cornmeal pancakes and homemade sausage drizzled with warm maple syrup. I ate a double helping of sausage, and that was the end of my life as a vegetarian.

  Mark disappeared again right after breakfast, the pig in the back of a borrowed Explorer, off to his Amish friends’ butcher shop. He’d be back in the afternoon, he said, and we could conduct a proper interview then. In the meantime, I could rake rocks in the tomatoes with his other assistant, Michael.

  Michael did not look optimistic about my work capacity. I had traded my white blouse for a vintage Cheap Trick T-shirt, tight jeans, and a pair of thrift-store Dingos with chunky little heels. It was the kind of ironic-chic outfit that worked well in the East Village but looked strange and slightly slutty in a field in Pennsylvania. I thought of myself as extremely fit and, as I phrased it to myself, strong for my size, which was a slight five two including the heels on the Dingos, even though my most vigorous exercise at that time came from regular games of pinball. I was already sore from the previous day’s exertions, but I am cursed with a physical competitiveness that goes beyond reason. I inherited this trait from my father, who, by way of example, detached a hamstring attempting to muscle his way through a standing dock start while waterskiing at the age of seventy-three.

  Michael handed me a hard-toothed rake, and we set off in adjacent rows. Penn State was just down the road, and Michael, a film major, had graduated that spring. He’d begun volunteering weekends at Mark’s farm to see if, as he put it, hard work would make him a man. When he graduated, Mark had hired him full-time. Michael’s father was an accountant and his girlfriend was about to start law school and the lot of them had a fairly dim view of farming and were hoping that Michael would soon get it out of his system.

  I asked a lot of questions, to cover my puffing, and took every opportunity to lean on the rake in a pose of intense listening. The July sun stung like a slap on the face and raised up around us the sharp, resinous smell of tomato. The plants were as tall as I was and heavy with fruit, held upright by twine and oak stakes. To a person used to growing nothing bigger than herbs in a window box, they seemed vaguely menacing. The soil between the rows was dry and clumped and heavily studded with rocks. Michael told me to ignore the rocks smaller than an egg and rake the rest into piles, then shovel the piles into a wheelbarrow to be dumped in the hedgerow. I was shocked by the weight of each shovel full of rocks, and I flipped the wheelbarrow on my first trip. Rake, shovel, dump. Two interminable hours passed in this way, until it occurred to me that, if this went on much longer, I’d seize up entirely and be unable to depress the clutch in order to drive myself home. In desperation, I offered to go in to cook lunch for everyone. I tried to make the offer sound casual. I couldn’t quite believe how much damage I’d done to myself in so short a time. There were blisters rising between my left thumb and first finger, I couldn’t fully straighten my back, and my crotch, imprisoned in the tight jeans, felt chafed beyond repair.

  I wasn’t much of a cook back then. I appreciated good food, but I didn’t have a steady relationship with it. Food was more like a series of one-night stands, set in front of me at a restaurant or delivered in little white cardboard containers by a guy on a bicycle. I wasn’t sure the oven in my apartment was functional, since in the seven years I’d lived there, I’d never used it. The refrigerator worked, but in my small studio it was more valuable to me as storage space than as a kitchen appliance. I kept the dog’s kibble in there, and a Brita pitcher of water, and, bookshelf space being dear, the Manhattan phone book, which in my memory of those years will always be heavy and cold. The freezer held a tray of shrunken ice cubes and a bottle of Polish vodka.

  Mark’s kitchen took up half the trailer and reminded me of a market in a third-world country. It was stuffed full of colorful and unpackaged things, the smells of milk and meat and dirt and vegetation mingling together i
n an earthy perfume that was strong but not unpleasant. I opened doors, peered cautiously at the high shelves. The cabinets held gallon jars of black beans and dried apples, wheat and rye berries, small, dry ears of corn. The cupboard above the stove was full of bundles of herbs and unlabeled bottles of some fizzy, amber liquid. I opened the refrigerator and found an uncovered pot brimming with soft, bloody things I recognized as Butch’s internal organs, and a wire basket of scuffed brown eggs. In the crisper were Ball jars of butter and cottage cheese, a pile of golf ball–looking things that may have been turnips, and some carrots, unwashed.

  I quickly shut the refrigerator door and grabbed a basket and a knife and went back out to the field where Michael had finished raking rocks and was now busy mulching the rows of tomatoes with bales of half-rotted straw. I looked at all the food that was there for the picking. New potatoes, broccoli, lettuce, herbs, peas, beets, and blackberries. There was a cow grazing with her calf, a flock of hens pecking away at some compost, another pig rooting through a pile of leaf litter. Everywhere I looked, there was plenty. I felt some ideas moving around in my head, big and slow, like tectonic plates. This was only a six-acre plot, the size of a large playground, but there were vegetables here for two hundred families. It all seemed so much simpler than I’d imagined. Dirt plus water plus sun plus sweat equaled food. No factories required, not a lot of machinery, no poisons or chemical fertilizers. How was it possible that this abundance had always existed, and I had not known it? I felt, of all damn things, safe. Anything could happen in the world. Planes could crash into buildings, jobs could disappear, people could be thrown out of their apartments, oil could run dry, but here, at least, we would eat. I filled my basket with tomatoes and kale and onions and basil, calculating in my head the hefty sum all those vegetables would have cost at the farmers’ market in New York City, and went back inside hoping to do them justice.