The people we met kept telling us, with varying degrees of tact, that we’d fail. They said nobody in the area was interested in local or organic food, or even if they were interested, they wouldn’t be able to afford it. And if we did find people to buy our food we’d still fail, because the farm was too wet and nothing would grow. And if we managed to grow something and sell it, well, then, it was only a matter of time before we’d fail, farming being farming. Some people said these things aloud to us, and others intimated them, and either way I’d feel a little jangle of anxiety that I would try to suppress until Mark and I were alone. I had no expertise in what we were doing, and no perspective on whether I should trust in Mark’s optimism or the general pessimism. If we did fail, I had no plan B. It was not like I could just walk back into my old life. I no longer had an apartment, for one, and I wouldn’t have the money for a deposit, since we were spending everything we had on things like cows. Once, an elderly neighbor, Trudy, came over with a box of extra pots and pans and gadgets she’d gleaned from her kitchen. They were good enameled cast-iron pots, and we accepted them gratefully. Later, another neighbor came by and asked if Trudy had brought us the pots and pans. “She thought you were poor!” he said, cheerfully. “She thought you were, you know, needy. I tried to explain to her that you’re needy by choice.” That exchange depressed me for days. I kept seeing the kids in my grade school who were labeled “needy,” kids with drawn faces and crusty snot mustaches and clothes that didn’t seem fresh, and I’d look in the mirror and compare.
When we would talk about our future in private, I would ask Mark if he really thought we had a chance. Of course we had a chance, he’d say, and anyway, it didn’t matter if this venture failed. In his view, we were already a success, because we were doing something hard and it was something that mattered to us. You don’t measure things like that with words like success or failure, he said. Satisfaction comes from trying hard things and then going on to the next hard thing, regardless of the outcome. What mattered was whether or not you were moving in a direction you thought was right. This sounded extremely fishy to me.
This conversation played out many times, with me anxious, Mark calm, until once, as we sat together reviewing our expenses, I was almost in tears. I felt like we were teetering over an abyss. I wasn’t asking him to guarantee that we’d be rich. I just wanted him to assure me that we’d be solvent, that we’d be, as I put it, okay. Mark laughed. “What is the worst thing that could happen?” he asked. “We’re smart and capable people. We live in the richest country in the world. There is food and shelter and kindness to spare. What in the world is there to be afraid of?”
He traced this opinion of his to a very specific moment. He was twenty-one years old and had just graduated from Swarthmore with a degree in agricultural science, a major they did not offer but one he’d put together for himself out of classes in biology, chemistry, and economics. He wanted to see what farming was like across America, and to see what rural life was like, and he wanted to see it up close. He set off from his parents’ house in New Paltz, his bicycle loaded down with a tent and a change of clothes, and rode west. It was summer, and he told his grandmother he’d spend Christmas with her at her home in California.
He took very little money with him, partly because he had very little money at the time and partly because he had a sense that money would insulate him from his adventure. The first week of his trip he rode two days through a difficult patch of construction in New Jersey, feeling frazzled by the noise of trucks and by the heat bouncing off the asphalt. Late one afternoon he saw a biker coming toward him on the other side of the road, loaded down with gear that looked a lot like his.
His name was Carl and he’d come from Seattle, biking the same route that Mark was just setting out on, but in the opposite direction. Carl told Mark what an awful trip he was about to have, what an awful country America was, rife with mean-spirited people and patrolled by bully cops who were just looking for an excuse to give you trouble. Then they went their separate ways, Carl pointed east, with Mark’s parents’ address in his pocket, and Mark pointed west.
Mark made it across the border into Pennsylvania that day, and by evening he was in a little town on the Delaware River. He looked for a place to camp—wary now, and on the lookout for cops. He saw a park with a basketball court, where two young dads were shooting hoops, their toddlers playing in the grass. Mark asked if they thought he could camp there, and they said they didn’t see why not. He pitched his tent next to a copse of trees, and he was among the shadows of those trees stripping off his clothes to wash himself down with a quart of water he carried for that purpose when he looked up to see a man walking toward him, carrying something. Mark is nearsighted, and his first thought was that it was a cop, and there he was naked in the shadows with toddlers in the vicinity, and he was probably going to get arrested and charged as a sex offender. By the time he had his pants on he could see that it was not a cop but one of the dads who had been shooting hoops and he was carrying a plate loaded with fried chicken and sweet corn, and a big glass of iced tea. “Thought you might be hungry,” the dad said.
The rest of the trip was exactly like that, full of good people offering food and shelter and kindness, genuine kindness. At the end of his day of travel Mark would look for a certain type of farm, one with a garden, not too big and not too polished, but in good repair, without the whiff of desperation. He’d knock on a farmhouse door and ask if it would be all right to camp somewhere on their place. He was never refused, not once. Nine times out of ten the door would open and the next thing he knew he’d be saying grace with a family at their dinner table, and soon after that he’d find himself tucked into a bed in the guest room. He’d often spend a day or two working on the place, and in this way he saw all sorts of different farms and met all kinds of farm families. He saw feed lots and citrus plantations. He hoed beans on a small-scale organic vegetable farm and rode a combine through a thousand acres of corn, the corn pouring out of the machine like a smooth gold river. He stopped to get maps at a Chamber of Commerce in the middle of the country, and the man at the desk went out to his car and came back with a pack of new socks. “Here,” he said. “You always need good socks on a trip like this.” He stayed four or five days with a family that grew corn and beans in Indiana; the wife, Connie, ran a beauty salon, and after Mark was fed and rested she took him into town and sat him in her chair and washed his hair, twice, because the water was still brown after the first washing, and then she gave him a haircut. Connie still sends him Christmas cards, pictures of her grandkids tucked inside. I’d seen them, so I knew it was true.
That story became the counterbalance to my anxiety. That, plus the one dissenting voice in the neighborhood. Shep Shields lived just over the hill from us and had been farming all his life. He was a short figure on legs so insulted by decades of labor they hardly bent at the knee at all. He propelled himself with a kind of side-to-side motion that made him look like a mechanical toy. His hand, on the end of his walking stick, was knotted up with arthritis, and he still fed a herd of beef cattle every morning. He told me he loved draft horses, dogs, and pretty women, not necessarily in that order. He blamed the state of his body on the fact that he’d worked too hard as a child, hefting ninety-pound milk cans onto a truck from the age of ten. When he heard our plan, he didn’t say he thought we’d fail. He didn’t say we’d succeed, either, but he gave us a nod of encouragement and told us we were on the right track. He’d seen eighty years of change in agriculture, the arrival of the tractor, the milking machine, the bulk tank, all the chemicals and medications and devices that grease the gears of large-scale farming, and he’d thought about all these things, and seen their effects. If he were a young man just starting out, he said, he’d do it with horses again, and keep it simple and small, grow things you can eat, with maybe a handful of good Jersey cows, milked for butter or cheese. Keep it local. Feed yourselves, feed your neighbors, the way it had been done when he was a bo
y.
The days turned so cold the snow went squeaky, and heavy steam rose every morning from the channel the ferry kept open on the lake. Inside our cold house, the frost line in the basement sank deeper every day. We wrapped the pipes in heat tape and kept the woodstove stoked, but it warmed only a shockingly small circle directly in front of it. For a week, the thermometer on the outside of the house never broke into double digits. At the farm, the hens’ combs went black with frostbite, and the “frost-free” hydrant froze solid. We hauled water in buckets from the pump house, careful to keep our hands dry. I learned the weight of water, a little more than eight pounds per gallon, forty pounds per bucket, eighty pounds for every full and balanced load, the handles cutting deeply into my hands despite my thick gloves, my shoulders thickening and rounding with new muscle.
The farm was locked down with the cold. It had been years since I’d experienced a real winter, and I couldn’t stay warm, no matter what I wore. My feet became insensible blocks and my hands ached. Between milkings and chores we retreated to the house in town, shedding our stiff clothes at the door, and eagerly stoked the fire. The bed was beyond the comfort of the woodstove’s heat, and in the morning I’d vault from under the covers to the woodstove, clothes in hand, wincing at every step on the freezing floor. Mark read East of Eden to me at night before we went to sleep, tucked under three blankets, wearing thick hats and wool socks.
There was plenty of work to be done indoors. We needed to tap into the local farmer network, because, despite their reputation for independence, farmers are by necessity interconnected, exchanging among themselves labor, machinery, expertise, commodities, and information. Along with his tools and his tractors, Mark had left behind in Pennsylvania all the friendly connections he’d built with his neighbor farmers, the kinds that are vital when you need a part welded during harvest season or when you run out of hay at the end of winter and need a decent price on bales to get you through to spring. As with all else, here we’d be starting from scratch. Mark spent long hours on the phone, making contacts, arranging visits.
At the same time, we were looking for a team of horses. Mark called his Amish friends in Pennsylvania for advice. They told us we wanted a specific sort of team, calm and easygoing, well-broke to all kinds of farm machinery, horses who had seen a lot of work but still had a few good years in them. Geldings would be preferable to mares, all other things being equal.
There are two kinds of trouble in a search for a team like this. First is scarcity. The market for draft horses is small and specialized and not nearly as rich as it is for light horses. Whatever money there is in drafts is in the showy end, the kinds of horses you see hitched to wagons in parades and at county fairs, or the massive horses you see at horse pulls, where teams compete to drag enormous weights over short distances. Breeders produce the type of horse they can sell, so most horses on the market fit one of those two types. The former are leggy, high-headed, high-stepping, flashy horses with a lot of nervous energy. The latter are muscular and explosively powerful, but they tend to be ill-broke and physically damaged, and are not always well-treated, a combination that makes them unpredictable and potentially dangerous.
Calm, experienced, healthy drafts were scarce, and almost never for sale. An Amishman or a serious horse farmer who wants “using horses” will make them, not buy them, and if he makes a good one, he’ll hold on to it, and use it for as long as possible. If a horse like this is for sale, it’s usually because there is something wrong with it—an unstable temperament or poor health.
A few dozen phone calls had rendered one promising lead, a dealer across the lake from us. We took the ferry to Vermont and drove to the Coopers’ farm. They ran a large dairy, but they’d always dealt in horses and had a reputation for integrity, a rare trait in horse traders.
It was snowing when we pulled up to the Coopers’ farmhouse, a low ranch on a dirt road that was overshadowed by the long red barn next to it. Jim Cooper came out to greet us in plain clothes, flat hat, and those curious Mennonite whiskers. He walked us into his barn, which was full of the biggest horses I’d ever seen, their muscular haunches protruding from straight stalls into the central aisle, black, brown, and roan, all of them higher than my head.
His son, in his early twenties, had a colt in the crossties, a Percheron, well-built and fit with a black hide that shone like a pair of new boots. He was wearing a bridle over his halter, and the lines were buckled into a bitting rig, a strap of leather that encircled his barrel. The horse mouthed the bit, chomping up and down, ears half back, not nervous but not completely at ease. Jim’s son unsnapped the crossties and led the colt past us, to the paddock where a few horses were loafing. Jim explained that this was the way he started his young horses, by turning them out in a bitting rig and letting them get used to it on their own time, in the comforting presence of their herd mates.
Then Jim’s son backed a fleshy roan mare out of one of the straight stalls at the end of the aisle, and Jim brought out her mate, another mare, so well-matched I had to look for ways to tell them apart. They were Belgians, eight years old, well-broke, Jim said, and well-mannered. “But horses are horses,” he said, “and there’s no such thing as bombproof.” He and his son went over them with brushes, lifted the collars over their heads and settled them on their shoulders, all their movements spare and calm in that horseman’s way of hurrying that keeps the horses at ease. “Had a man once,” he said, “who wanted to get into drafts. His wife was nervous about horses, so he wanted a bombproof team.” He pulled a heavy leather harness from its hook next to the mare’s stall. “I had a pair of geldings to show them. A real steady team. Kind of horses a child or a woman could drive.” He hefted the hames above his head and settled them gently into the groove of the collar, and laid the rest of the harness along the mare’s back, where it balanced in an incomprehensible tangle while he stepped in front of the mare to buckle the hame strap. “Man came out to see the team. These were good horses.” He walked behind the mare and pulled the harness over her haunches, the tangle of leather falling neatly into place. He pulled her bobbed tail over the britchen and then buckled the bellyband. “Hitched them up to the wagon and we started across the road.” He had a bridle by the headstall. The mare dropped her nose, and he slipped the bridle over her head, buckled the throatlatch, and hooked the curb chain under her chin. Jim’s son had the other mare harnessed, and he brought her up next to her mate and they buckled the lines to the bits. “Got to the other side of the road and a bee stung one of the geldings and off they went at a run. Man got so scared he jumped off the back of the wagon. Hit his head on the edge of it and died. Just like that. These were good horses, never gave me any trouble. Yep. No such thing as bombproof. Step up, mare.”
The snow had stopped falling, and the air had turned sharply colder. The wind picked up the new snow and blew it in twists across the open field. The mares seemed to take on its nervous energy and pulled at their bits. Jim stepped the near horse over the pole of a heavily built sled that was waiting in the driveway, and his son snapped the neck yoke to the harnesses, placed the pole in its ring, and then hooked the tug chains to the evener. Jim had the lines in his hand, and when we were all settled in the sled he spoke to the horses and they stepped out eagerly. The driveway was icy, and the mares scrabbled to keep their feet.
Across the road, the field was deep in snow, and the mares had to work to break a trail. Jim whoaed them, and they danced in place, pulling hard at their bits. “Drop that mare down,” he told his son, who jumped off the sled and waded to the off mare’s head. He unbuckled the lines from the ring of her bit and rebuckled them halfway down the bit’s arms. I knew from riding horses that this would give Jim the leverage to pressure the mare’s tongue and bars between the bit and the curb chain. I looked at Jim’s sturdy frame and wondered how in the world I would be able to control this much horse. We struck out again, but the mares didn’t settle. Instead of a walk, they minced along at a nervous trot. “They haven�
��t been worked since fall,” Jim explained. “If you wanted them, I’d work them for you every day for a couple weeks, get them sharp.” And then, after a few more minutes of struggle, he whoaed again, exhaled, and said, “You don’t want these horses. Go see Gary Duquette. He’s got a team for sale that he bought from me a few years back. They’ll be what you’re looking for.”
And they were. The team was hitched when we arrived, an eight-year-old boy neighbor of Gary’s up on the wagon like a bowsprit, holding the lines. It was a hardscrabble hillside farm, a few cattle lipping silage behind a single strand of high-tensile wire. Gary was in the listing barn, tending to a tiny calf that was sick with pneumonia, gaunt-sided and struggling for breath. He said with regret he’d have to take it behind the barn and shoot it later on. We mounted the wagon, and he spoke to the horses, and they set off at an easy walk. Half a mile along the frozen dirt road, Gary said, “You gonna buy ’em, you might as well drive ’em,” and I took lines in my hands for the first time. It was like holding live things, a pair of tame snakes. Riding, you have your whole body—heels, legs, seat, weight, and hands—in communication with the horse. Moreover, you’re on top, a position of power. When you’re driving a team, all that communication—the whole intense conversation—takes place through a few inches of leather running across your palms, your connection to the horses’ mouths. And there are two of them, blind to everything but the road in front of them. And they weigh a ton each. And you are strapped to them from behind, your fates bound. I guess I’d imagined draft horses would be boring compared to the horses I liked to ride—the hot, wild type that will move off your heel like drag racers—but I glimpsed that day how wrong I was.
The Dirty Life.On Farming, Food, and Love Page 7