The Dirty Life.On Farming, Food, and Love

by Kristin Kimball

  I found two tools in the kitchen that are so familiar to me now they’re like old friends: a ten-inch soft steel chef’s knife with a very sharp blade and a cast-iron skillet so big I could barely get my two arms around it. I set to work, cutting ribs out of the kale and chopping tomatoes and onions without knowing exactly where the meal was going. I did know that, if the rest of the crew was as hungry as I was, I had better aim for quantity. I heated the skillet on two burners and sautéed onion in butter, adding some diced carrots and the tomatoes and a bit of water to steam the kale. I covered the skillet with something that looked like a manhole cover, and when the kale was soft I dug shallow divots in it and cracked a dozen eggs into the holes to poach. Then I minced some garlic and basil together and mashed it into a knob of butter and spread that on slices of bread I’d found in the cupboard. I put the garlicky bread under the broiler, and just as the crew walked in from the field I pulled the tray of fragrant toasts out of the oven with a flourish, dealt pieces onto plates, topped them with the kale and poached eggs, and crowned each with a spoonful of cottage cheese and a grind of black pepper.

  When we were all seated and served I took my first trepidatious bite, and then sat back. It was, I thought, astoundingly delicious—the kale a fresh, green backdrop to the hot, sharp bite of garlic and basil—and I felt very clever to have made it. I looked around the table, expecting raves and compliments, but there was only the flash of silverware, the purposeful movement of several jaws. “Please pass the salt,” Michael said, eventually. It wasn’t that my lunch was bad, I realize now. In fact I bet they thought it was pretty good. But pretty good is just not that impressive to farmers who eat like princes every day. Food, a French man told me once, is the first wealth. Grow it right, and you feel insanely rich, no matter what you own.

  It was evening again before I managed to intercept Mark’s orbit. Michael and Keena and a handful of volunteers who had been buzzing around the fields had all left for the day, but Mark was still working. I’d begun to wonder if this guy was ever still. Now he was literally running between jobs on those long legs of his, drawing on what seemed to be a boundless reserve of energy. He checked the irrigation in the carrots, jotted notes for the next day, bent to pull a clump of innocuous-looking weeds from the edge of the strawberries, tested the deer fence for charge and then baited it with cotton balls soaked in apple scent, so the deer would get a good, strong shock on the nose. I trotted along after him, juggling a notebook and pen with a screwdriver and pieces of broken hose that he absentmindedly handed me. He talked the whole time, at a pace and with a dexterity that surprised me. I thought farmers were supposed to be salt-of-the-earth-type people, not dumb, exactly, but maybe a little dull.

  He didn’t like the word work. That’s a pejorative. He preferred to call it farming, as in I farmed for fourteen hours today. He did not own a television or a radio and figured he was probably one of the last people in the country to know about September 11. Still doesn’t listen to the news. It’s depressing, and there’s nothing you can do about most of it anyway. You have to think locally, act locally, and his definition of local didn’t extend much beyond the fifteen acres of land he was farming. The right thing was to try to understand how you were affecting the world around you. At first he’d been against just plastic, but he was becoming suspicious of any metal that he couldn’t mine and smelt himself. In fact, when it was time to build himself a house, he’d like to build it with no nails, no metal at all, so that it could compost itself down to nothing after he was dead. He had never owned a car. He biked or hitchhiked where he needed to go. He had recently turned against the word should, and doing so had made him a happier person. He found the market economy and its anonymous exchange boring. He’d like to imagine a farm where no money traded hands, only goodwill and favors. He had a theory that you had to start out by giving stuff away—preferably big stuff, worth, he figured, about a thousand dollars. At first, he said, people are discomfited by such a big gift. They try to make it up to you, by giving you something big in return. And then you give them something else, and they give you something else, and pretty soon nobody is keeping score. There is simply a flow of things from the place of excess to the place of need. It’s personal, and it’s satisfying, and everyone feels good about it. This guy is completely nuts, I thought. But what if he’s right?

  Finally, I dropped the hose and the screwdriver and asked him to please stop moving and sit down with me so I could focus. I had to leave the next morning, and all I had so far were a few confused scribbles of notes and a sore crotch. He stopped moving and looked at me then, and laughed.

  In the last hour of light we walked through the upper fields, past a pond and into a dense woods where chipmunks scuttled through their end-of-day rounds. We sat together on the trunk of a downed oak and the sudden stillness was like getting off a ship after a long voyage. When Mark tells the story of our relationship, this is the moment he counts as the beginning. Sitting on the log and answering my questions, he says, he began hearing a voice in his head, a persistent and annoying little voice, like a mental mosquito. “You’re going to marry this woman,” the voice was saying.

  He did his best to ignore it. He wasn’t looking for a girlfriend. He’d recently ended a long-term relationship. Moreover it was high summer. He had a farm to run. He had to focus. The last thing he needed was this voice saying he’d been found by a wife. “You’re going to marry this woman,” the voice insisted, “and if you were brave enough, you’d ask her right now.”

  While Mark was considering whether or not to propose, I was considering narrative possibilities. Mark would be an interesting subject. He was well-read and articulate and he seemed to be something of a ham, the kind of natural performer who’d enjoy an attentive audience. He certainly generated a lot of dialogue. He had an original mind. I liked looking at his strong face and long limbs. It occurred to me that, instead of pitching a magazine story about him, maybe I should pitch a book. I’d have to spend a lot of time at the farm, of course, but I could sublet my apartment, find somewhere cheap to rent in the area. Maybe I could pitch a tent in the carrots.

  When it was dark he walked me back to my car. He was talking again about the home he wanted to create. It would make him happy, he said, to haul his own water in wooden buckets, to wear clothes made of buckskin that he tanned himself. “And what does your female counterpart look like?” I asked. I was having a hard time imagining the woman who’d fit into Mark’s future. To me, the buckets sounded heavy and the buckskin repellent. Mark told me later that he’d thought the question was wildly flirtatious. Neither of us remembers how he answered.

  Before I pulled away Mark filled my backseat with vegetables, eggs, milk, pork, and butter, as though provisioning me for an expedition to some bleak wasteland. On the drive home I thought about him and also about the time I’d spent in the fields, hoeing broccoli, raking rocks. It had been hellish, and I wanted more of it. What was wrong with me? I chalked it up to creative energy. I’d mistaken fascination for love a few times in the past, but this was the first time I’d got it wrong the other way around.

  It was past midnight by the time I got back to the city. I double-parked in front of my building and unloaded the crates of food Mark had sent back with me. It was a beautiful summer night, and the bars and restaurants and streets of my neighborhood were busy with young people dressed for a night out. Sitting there on the sidewalk, Mark’s homey wooden crates full of food looked like something out of a different time. A man I recognized from the dog park walked by. Characteristically, we knew the names of each other’s dogs but not of each other. “Wow,” Bear’s Owner said. “Been shopping?” he asked. “Nope,” I said. “Been in the country.” I thrust a dozen eggs at him, thinking of Mark and his idea of generosity. Bear sniffed at my crate of vegetables, and the guy looked confused. “They’re organic,” I said, by way of explanation. He walked away, holding the eggs gingerly. I rolled my eyes and got back in my car to circle the block, looking
for a parking spot.

  I lived on East Third Street, across from the Hells Angels headquarters. My apartment was a tiny studio with good light, and on Sunday mornings I liked to sit out on the fire escape and drink coffee and look down on a walled cemetery with nineteenth-century stones and spreading locust trees. I’d lived there since soon after I arrived in the city, before the East Village was fully gentrified, when there were still lots of junkies around and rent was five hundred dollars a month. The Angels always had a thug or two standing cross-armed, guarding the bikes that gleamed there in a long row. When I walked home past their door late at night, a certain muscle-bound Angel with a Zapata mustache would look me up and down and growl, “Get home safe,” which I found comforting and kind of sexy until I saw the same guy knock a skinny messenger to the street with a baseball bat for bumping into his bike, then lift the bat above his head and bring it down hard. I ran around the corner before calling 911, because I was scared he would see me.

  My building was an even mix of rent-controlled tenants who’d lived there forever and the youngish artists and hipsters who are the harbingers of gentrification. A middle-aged woman named Janet was ensconced on the second floor. She wore elaborate wigs and dresses left over from her glory days as a nightclub singer, and she lived at the window, our Argus, her pack of white toy poodles yipping in the background. Nothing came or went from our building without her comment. I found her vigilance comforting, too, but when the elevator was broken you’d walk past her door and the smell of poodle would waft out along with the sound of her shrieking at the dogs to shut up and you’d think of the word squalor.

  I was dating in a way that can best be described as haphazard, shuffling drinks and dinners and movie dates with a filmmaker, an art collector, a political writer, and an ex. I assumed all of them had their own shuffles going on, too. We were all very busy and we were all very cagey about our feelings. If there was a chance for love, nobody was talking about it. Least of all me. I’d withstood a few heartbreaks by then, and I’d gotten the idea that emotional needs were unattractive in a woman, especially after the age of thirty. Safer, I thought, to play it tough and elusive.

  Meanwhile I was trying to stave off an ache I’d developed. I noticed it first at the airport, coming home from a trip. There was a crowd on the other side of customs, holding flowers, the little kids dressed up and excited, waiting for their loved ones, who were returning home. I hated walking that gauntlet of waiting people, because none of them was waiting for me. I stood in the cab line and felt the weight of my aloneness come down on me. I unlocked the door of my apartment, where the only movement, while I was gone, had been the light moving across the walls from morning to evening and a scuttling roach or two, and the air inside smelled like loneliness. The ache eased a little the next day, after I’d picked up my dog from my sister, gotten sucked back into the slipstream of the city. But only a little. And soon it spread, until the word home could make me cry. I wanted one. With a man. A house. The smell of cut grass, sheets on the line, a child running through a sprinkler. This humble wish seemed to me so impossible. It was so different from the life I was living, and no one in my circle had those things, or wanted them, or would admit it if they did. I thought I could acknowledge the ache and learn to live with it, the way you learn to live with the pain that lingers long after you’ve broken a bone, the kind that foretells a shift in the weather.

  I was busy the rest of the summer, writing ad copy, teaching a class, cobbling together freelance jobs, just scraping by. I was caffeinated and frazzled and worried about money, and, like most everyone else in New York, I accepted that as normal. The exception was the time I spent thinking about Mark and his farm. That place made me calm. I wanted to learn everything I could about what he did. I bought Wendell Berry’s The Gift of Good Land and read it on the subway, scribbling notes in the margin. What does a harrow look like? What is a Southdown? By September I had decided I wanted to sublet my apartment, and spend a year in Mark’s fields, and write about it. Then he called and left a message on my machine.

  In the hours I’d spent writing and thinking about him, he’d become more a character than a person to me. His real voice took me aback, because it sounded higher than the voice I’d been hearing in my head as I wrote. I had to play the message twice to register the gist of it, which was that he was inviting me to join him for a weekend at a real old-school, hoity-toity resort in the Catskills. The whole thing seemed criminally out of step for the ascetic and gritty farmer character I’d written, and my first thought was that I’d have to make some revisions.

  Then I thought about whether I should accept. He’d said he had a free weekend for two coming to him, everything included, because the year before he’d taught a winter survival class at the resort. They were hosting a symposium of chefs and farmers, which he thought might be useful for my research. It did sound like a good opportunity for research. I wasn’t deaf to the subtext. I was old enough to know that, when a man invites you to spend the weekend with him at a hotel, he’s pretty much obliged to make a pass. Not doing so would be like bringing a gun out onstage and never shooting it. But Mark was so weirdly different from every man I’d ever met that I thought he might be an exception. And if not, I was from New York. I could handle myself with a farmer, for God’s sake. I didn’t want to blow all my plans with a fling, and clearly the last thing I needed was a long-distance relationship with some wing nut who didn’t believe in nails. For insurance, I packed frumpy, old underwear and did not shave my legs.

  I hit traffic on my way out of the city and arrived four hours late, nerves a-jangle, and found Mark tipped back in a chair near the reception desk, snoozing, with a giant straw hat over his face, the same one he wore in the field. The hat was stuck with turkey feathers and was truly enormous. This was more in keeping with the character I’d written, and I felt relief, followed quickly by mortification. In retrospect, I believe the hat may be exactly why I decided to order a second martini at our first dinner together, which led to the historically accurate fact that, despite my best intentions, I was the one who made the pass at him.

  That night was the beginning of a profound and delightful education about lifestyle choices. Mark, I discovered, had never smoked or gotten drunk, he’d never tried drugs or slept around. He’d eaten wholesome and mostly organic food, and he’d spent most days of his adult life doing some kind of arduous physical exercise. He was the healthiest creature I’d ever laid eyes on. Some people wish for world peace or an end to homelessness. I wish every woman could have as a lover at some point in her life a man who never smoked or drank too much or became jaded from kissing too many girls or looking at porn, someone with the gracious muscles that come from honest work and not from the gym, someone unashamed of the animal side of human nature.

  After that I stopped pretending I was doing research and recognized that some big life shift was under way. I scrapped the book idea and spent long weekends at Mark’s farm. No heels, no notebook. Two new worlds were opening up to me. One was the work. I collected eggs and fed the chickens, exhausted myself with field work. I’d been all over the world as a travel writer, done all the things that people spend their money and their vacation days to do, and I couldn’t think of anywhere I’d rather be or anything I’d rather be doing than pulling warm eggs out of a nest box.

  The other new world was the food. Mark could cook. Hell, anybody could cook with the ingredients he had on hand—vegetables with the earth still clinging to them, herbs growing at arm’s reach, a quality of eggs and milk and meat that you can’t buy in any store. But Mark could really cook. When he was eleven his mother got sick of hearing the family complain about whatever she’d made for dinner, so she went on strike, and Mark and his little sister began cooking for the family. In the beginning there were failures, nights of clumpy macaroni with ketchup or wretched conglomerations of leftovers. But at that age Mark was weedy, hyperactive, and growing in spurts that could be measured in inches per month. He was c
onstantly ravenous. Hunger is a great teacher, and Mark applied himself. He read Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and the more he succeeded the more ambitious he got. He became obsessed with rolling perfect sushi, and when he had a crush on a girl in middle school he cooked her a seven-course dinner. Eventually he ditched cookbooks and went freelance, adhering to a few simple principles: keep your knives sharp, taste everything, and don’t be stingy with the salt. His love of food was part of what eventually led him to farming. The only way he’d be able to afford the quality of food he craved, he said, was to become a banker or grow it himself, and he couldn’t sit still long enough to be a banker.

  So there I was, eating haute cuisine in a mobile home. He cooked for me as seduction, as courtship, so that I’d never again be impressed with a man who simply took me out to dinner. And I fell in love with him over a deer’s liver.

  It was later that fall, before the first frost but far enough along in the season that a clear night would come with a strong chill on it. There was a moon rising, but it was only a sliver, and I was so fresh from the city that the stars standing out on a deep black sky were a novelty. Mark locked his dogs inside the trailer and pulled his rifle down from a high shelf. I had never held a rifle before, and the heft of it surprised me. I ran my hand over the smooth, dark wood of the stock and shivered.

  Going for a walk at night is profoundly different from going for a walk at night with a gun. We crept along the path next to the strawberries, where the deer had been grazing, bringing our feet down softly, barely breathing. The air around us felt charged with danger and expectation. The deer population was high that year, and they’d been getting into his fields, despite the elaborate electric fences and the two dogs. He had nuisance permits that allowed him to hunt out of season, and also at night. Mark didn’t hunt for the fun of it. He hunted to protect the plants, and for meat.