When we’d been engaged for a month, we invited my parents to come for a visit, to meet Mark’s parents. My father is a staunch Republican and an Air Force veteran, and in his retirement his politics have slipped further and further to the right. He doesn’t believe in global warming, which to his mind is a tree-hugger scam or a UN plot, perpetuated, in either case, by the liberal media. My mother is a dozen years younger than he is, the same generation as Mark’s folks, but when she married my father she graduated directly from Elvis and poodle skirts to martinis and easy listening, skipping the Beatles entirely. She would be mortified if you ever caught her without the beds made, the furniture dusted, and fresh vacuum cleaner marks on all the carpets. She has never been seen in public without makeup, her hair neatly styled.
If my parents are what Mark’s parents would call bourgeois, then Mark’s parents are what my parents would call flakes. They left New York City in the late 1960s for a shaley piece of ground in the Catskills and began learning to grow and raise their own food. They lived in a converted barn, and until Mark was born, they didn’t have indoor plumbing. Mark’s father was trained as an engineer, but he became a carpenter, a community activist, and later, a farmer. Mark’s mother is a naturalist. Open her freezer and you’ll usually find a dead woodchuck or some unlucky bird that brained itself against a window, awaiting a recreational dissection. At a party, I’ve seen her pull out her guitar and initiate—with no trace of irony—a round of “Kum Ba Ya.”
At the dinner to celebrate our engagement, Mark’s mom read a poem she’d written in our honor called “Bombs Are Falling in Iraq,” which was met with steely silence from my parents across the table. The bad mood that came over the six of us was as heavy as the bread we were eating. Mark was deep into the No Lights phase, and after dinner my father groped his way out to the car for a flashlight to give to my mother so she could find her way to the bathroom, where she testily flipped on the lights.
Weeks dragged into months, and we were sleeping on a mattress on the floor. Mark didn’t seem in any hurry to make me that beautiful bed, and every time I lay down I felt a little wave of bitterness.
I tried to buoy my sinking heart with the vision that had propelled me out of the city—the farmhouse, the orchard, the pastures full of happy animals—and I decided I might as well use this layover to gain some skills that would be useful to me in that new life. I read books about beekeeping and acquired a hive. Mark helped me create a chicken coop in the backyard, and I combed the livestock section of the classifieds until I found what I was looking for: eight Barred Rock hens, free to a good home.
The flock had come with a rooster, the mean kind. He had the giant spurs of an old-timer, and a crafty nature. He’d been thrown in as a bonus, but he was a major liability. He liked to attack from behind, and once, he trapped me in a corner of the greenhouse and hit me so hard with his spur my shin bled. I got so nervous I started carrying a broom with me every time I went outside. Mark thought this was hilarious. “He weighs five pounds,” he said. “I think you can take him.”
I searched the chicken chat rooms and learned that the only real cure for a mean rooster’s meanness is to convert him to coq au vin. Mark held him upside down and I had the big sharp knife poised at his throat, but the thought of cutting him made me physically weak. When I finally did it, it was with a halfhearted stroke, which made for not such a good death, and I was haunted afterward by the flopping and squawking mess I’d made of the job. If I was ever to do it again, I decided, I wanted to have the skills to do it right. I made inquiries, and found two women in town who were about to slaughter their backyard flock. I asked if I could join them, in the spirit of research, and they agreed.
Jana and Suri were in their fifties, dressed in Birkenstocks and tie-dye, old friends from back in their commune days. They weren’t farmers but had always raised some of their own food. Unlike Mark, who was utterly prosaic about such things, they believed that slaughter is a sacred act and wreathed the whole thing in improvised ceremony. When I arrived, they lit a bundle of sage and wafted its smoke around me. Then they hung a sheet between the chopping block and the coop, so the living chickens wouldn’t be subjected to a preview of their demise.
Jana yanked a chicken out of the coop by its feet, and before she laid it down on a tree stump and chopped off its head with a hatchet, she cradled it in her arms like a baby. “Thank you, Chicken,” she intoned. “Thank you for giving us your meat to feed our families. We are grateful. You nourish us. Now let your spirit fly up, up to Father Sun.” Whack. Two or three birds went down this way, and then she handed me one. I held the chicken up by its legs, so that we were eye to eye. Its feathers opened, and it stopped flapping and kind of passed out. I cleared my throat. I couldn’t bring myself to commend its spirit to Father Sun, but I could feel the weight of what I was about to do—take life from a healthy, sentient creature that would much prefer to stay alive, if it had a choice—and I felt grateful, sincerely grateful. “Um, Chicken?” I said. It blinked its strange eyes slowly in its rubbery mask of a face. “Sorry about this. I hope it’s quick. Thanks a lot.” Whack.
I did get better at chicken slaughter that day, and Jana and Suri were very nice to me, and gave me the first bird I killed to take home for the oven. I cooked it and ate it with the reverence that comes from understanding the whole picture, an appreciation that can be expressed equally well, I decided, with ceremonial sage or with the careful preparation and enjoyment of an exceptional sage stuffing.
Meanwhile, we weren’t getting any closer to finding a farm. What we needed, Mark said, was a big piece of good land that we could live on, that we could farm exactly as we wanted to, with the possibility of building a permanent home there. He wanted it to come for free. It would come, he explained, because he has had around him, since childhood, this thing he calls a magic circle, a kind of aura of luck that attracts the right thing at the right time. Good things had always come to him, and the farm would come, too. He didn’t think it would take more than nine months, as long as I didn’t dim his magic circle with my practical ideas, my negativity. It was an extremely exasperating situation.
The longer the search dragged on, the more we irritated each other. The first mad flush of love had cooled, and we were discovering how deeply different we were. Beneath my bohemian crust he found I was the fairly predictable product of my middle-class upbringing. I believed in the uplifting nature of manicures or a pair of new shoes. And under Mark’s protean exterior, I was finding layer upon layer of unreconstructed hippie. I learned he’d spent his sophomore year in college, including the entire eastern Pennsylvanian winter, barefoot. I noticed that the unmasked pungency of his armpits made other people roll down the car window. I suspected that if we’d met at a different time in our lives we would have run as fast as possible away from each other.
Two things saved us. I got back-to-back travel writing gigs that kept us on different continents for several months. And then a generous and enthusiastic man named Lars Kulleseid wandered into Mark’s magic circle. He was the father of a friend of Mark’s sister, and by the end of our first meeting, he’d offered us a free lease on a big piece of good land he owned way up north on Lake Champlain. We were welcome to farm it any way we saw fit, and he was open to the possibility of having us build a permanent home and farm there. It was nine months to the day from the time our search began.
We saw Essex Farm for the first time on a blustery day in September. We’d taken the slow train north from Poughkeepsie with our bicycles and camping gear stashed in the luggage car. We bumped along the Hudson, into the Adirondack Park, past Lake George, to the deserted station at Westport, on the shore of Lake Champlain. The leaves in the Adirondack Mountains to the west had begun to turn, and the summer people from New York and Boston had already closed their houses along the lake and returned to the city. We biked along the wooded road north, hugging the shore of the lake, past an eclectic mix of blue-collar ranch houses, modest summer cottages, and opu
lent estates.
Lars was a lawyer in Manhattan and had bought the five-hundred-acre farm as an investment eight years earlier, because, he said, he liked land, and because it touched the boy in him who had spent happy summers on his grandmother’s farm in Norway. Since he’d owned it, it had been tended by a caretaker. He had not been visiting the farm as often as he thought he would. He had been considering selling it when we came along, but our roughly sketched idea of what we might do there had interested him enough to offer us a year’s free lease of the farmhouse, barns, land, and equipment, if we found the land acceptable.
Following Lars’s map, we biked through tiny Essex, past its blocks of 1850s houses that look pulled from a history book, the quaint ferry dock, the old stone library, and the brief row of Main Street shops, all closed up for the season. The farm began west of town, just past the firehouse. Our first glimpse, through the twilight, was of overgrown fields and a stretch of barbed-wire fence badly in need of repair. Some people were furiously cutting hay out there, two tractors racing the dark.
We found the dirt driveway between two curving stone pediments, the eastern one supporting a faded green sign that read “Essex Farm.” The driveway was bordered with maple saplings, their leaves turned red, and the grass was neatly trimmed, but the farmhouse, a quarter mile in, had peeling white paint and a sagging roof. The front window was cracked, which made the house look like it was blind in one eye. We paused in front of the house to get our bearings, and suddenly a muscular black pit bull shot out of the garage, followed by a pair of white shepherd mutts. The pit bull hit the end of his chain and flipped backward, revealing a giant pair of testicles. The white dogs seemed less homicidal and cringed and circled around our legs. We could hear a television blaring football from the open upstairs window, but nobody answered our knock. We continued along the long drive, lined on both sides with buildings on the verge of collapse. Just off the driveway, a school bus stuffed with old plastic bread crates was sinking into the dirt.
We wheeled our bikes into the granary. The floor was two inches deep in old grain, and when we opened the door the light cut through the dust and sent a battalion of rats scuttling for their exits. We left the bikes and walked east, back toward the lake. We were on a slight rise and could see that the farm was a mosaic of open fields and stands of nursery trees—spruce, pin oak, linden, and red maple—planted in straight rows. The land was flat, and some of it tended toward swamp. We pitched our tent among a bunch of arborvitae. The white dogs had followed us, begging for attention.
By the time the tent was pegged down it was nearly dark. We retrieved our bikes and retraced the last part of our ride, back into the village of Essex. I was bone tired, and still jet-lagged from a recent trip to Asia, and the only thing I wanted more than sleep was food. For some reason we’d failed to bring provisions, and my blood sugar was dropping below the level required to keep me sane. I wanted food like a wolf wants food. I wanted food so bad I was angry about it. I sat on a bench outside the town hall while Mark went to explore our options. When he returned he sat down and put his arm warily around me before delivering the bad news: the only place to eat was the Inn, and they wouldn’t take us, despite the empty tables I could see through the window, because we didn’t have a reservation. There were no stores, and the next town was a five-mile ride away, mostly uphill. It was fully dark by then, and I didn’t think I could make it back to the farm, let alone the next town, without something to eat. I seethed, hating every quaint corner of a place so small and stupid you could actually starve to death in it. I hated the farm at that point, too. It was a dump, and it was swampy, and in the summer you’d probably be eaten alive by mosquitoes. I considered whether or not I’d be arrested if I were to sleep on the bench and decided I wanted to be arrested, because they’d be required to give me a ride to the jail in a car, and feed me. It’d probably be something perfectly acceptable, like peanut butter sandwiches. The only traffic light in town blinked endlessly to an empty street.
We were fixed in that tableau of misery by the glare of a pair of headlights pulling into the parking space in front of our bench. A man with silver hair got out, carrying a covered casserole dish. He smiled widely at us, noted our bicycles, asked us where we were from and where we were going. Mark told him we’d come up from Poughkeepsie and were camping at the Essex Farm. “Well,” he asked, “are you hungry?” Even in my desperation, I could feel the “No, thanks,” on the tip of my tongue, the city habit of distrust toward any show of unsolicited kindness. But Mark had already accepted on our behalf, and the man led us across the street to the basement of a big stone church and opened the door onto the sounds of clattering silverware and chatter and laughter rising up from a sea of gray hair.
It looked like we were crashing some kind of geriatric mixer, but I didn’t care, because I had caught sight of the long tables against the wall, crammed with food. I could see plates of sliced ham, baked beans, mashed potatoes, and bright-colored Jell-O salads studded with fruit and topped with blobs of pastel Cool Whip. The man who’d brought us asked for everyone’s attention, and fifty lined faces turned toward us. He introduced us as traveling long-distance bicyclists who wouldn’t mind some dinner, and the room erupted in applause. The next thing I knew, someone had me by the elbow, guiding me through the crowd toward the tables laden with calories, placing a plate in my hands, pouring me a glass of iced tea. I wondered briefly if I was stuck in a dream, if this was some kind of cruel mirage, but soon I was seated and eating. It was the kind of food that grandmothers make, the kind invented to fill the stomach of a ditchdigger or a farmhand. I ate biscuits and gravy, green beans with slivered almonds, a drumstick of fried chicken. There was an urn of hot coffee, too, and an entire table dedicated to desserts.
When my peripheral vision returned and I could speak again, I learned that we’d stumbled into the centennial celebration of Essex’s Methodist church. There weren’t many young families in Essex, it turned out, and they were Episcopal. Everyone in that basement knew one another intimately, and most were in some way related. Many of the people I met that night would become important in our lives. The man who found us on the bench was Wayne Bailey. A few years later his wife, Donna, would knit a pink sweater with white piping for our infant girl, with a little cap to match. The small and wrinkled woman we sat next to was Pearl Kelly. She told us that night that she loved bicycling, and until she turned ninety and could no longer get her leg over the bar, she’d bike from her house to the ferry, for a joyride across the lake. Three years later I was milking a cow when her daughter-in-law came out to our barn to tell me Pearl had died. She had farmed all her life just down the road from us. Her vegetable stand is still there, paint chipping, its ridgepole succumbing to gravity.
We went back to the farm that night fed and warm in all ways, carrying pieces of cake wrapped up in napkins. I was entirely unused to that sort of common kindness. I didn’t think that communities like this were supposed to exist anymore, in a country isolated by technology, mobility, and work. This was a place where neighbors took care of each other, where well-being was a group project, and I felt, again, that teary sense of safety I’d felt when I’d first looked out at Mark’s fields full of food. It was a sappy and unironic feeling and a vestigial part of me protested against it, and then gave in.
We set off the next morning through a cold drizzle, with a shovel we’d found in the pole barn. For someone accustomed to living in a three-hundred-square-foot apartment, with a line of sight limited to the width of an avenue and whose largest ready unit of measure is the block, five hundred acres is unimaginably vast, not a farm but a fiefdom, a nation-state. On Lars’s map, the property was a big square bordered by roads, each side a mile long, with chunks and bits cut out where land and lots had been sold off over the years.
As we walked, I fell into a dark mood, which I tried to blame on the weather and the fact that I hadn’t yet had any coffee, but the truth was I’d gotten my hopes up, and the farm, under th
e filtered morning light, was disappointing. It didn’t match the farm I’d imagined at all. It was supposed to be moderately hilly, with patchwork fields and well-kept buildings. It wasn’t supposed to be nearly this big, or this remote. And it was definitely not supposed to be swampy.
We walked north first, our feet leaving wet impressions in the saturated soil. We climbed a rickety fence, crossed a scrubby wood, and found ourselves in the fifty-acre hayfield that had been cut the night before. I could feel coarse stubble pressing up through the bottoms of my boots. Mark stepped the shovel into the ground, and the soil under the sod was pure clay. I knew enough to recognize that this was not good. In a wet year it would drown roots, and in a dry year it would crack and harden into something resembling concrete. Soil that heavy would compact under the weight of machinery, squashing out the oxygen. Mark’s mood drooped down to meet mine.
We backtracked to the two main barns, hulking red structures with cavernous mows. The main floor of the east barn had a low ceiling, and Mark had to duck to miss hitting his head on the beams. The west barn was airier and roomier, its heavy beams hand-hewn. Both barns were fitted out for dairy farming, the west one for milking, the east with tie stalls for calves and young heifers. There hadn’t been animals there for decades, but the dairy records were still in a box in the milk house, a stack of cards with the names of long-dead cows penciled across the top in careful block letters. Kicking through piles of dusty hay in the west barn’s mow, we found caches of empty beer bottles and faded, old packs of Kools. The roofs were tight on both main structures, but there was a large cement-block addition tacked on to the west barn, and its metal roof banged loosely in the wind, and the rain trickled through in several places, making a series of sad little waterfalls.
The Dirty Life.On Farming, Food, and Love Page 4