The Dirty Life.On Farming, Food, and Love

by Kristin Kimball

  As I patched the barn with scrap lumber, pig-tight but ugly, I was forced to confront my own prejudice. I had come to the farm with the unarticulated belief that concrete things were for dumb people and abstract things were for smart people. I thought the physical world—the trades—was the place you ended up if you weren’t bright or ambitious enough to handle a white-collar job. Did I really think that a person with a genius for fixing engines, or for building, or for husbanding cows, was less brilliant than a person who writes ad copy or interprets the law? Apparently I did, though it amazes me now. I ordered books from the library about construction, plumbing, and electricity, and discovered that reading them was like trying to learn in a foreign language, the simplest things—the names of unknown tools or hardware, the names for parts of structures—creating dead ends that required answers, more research. There’s no better cure for snobbery than a good ass kicking.

  Just before Christmas my friend Nina came to visit from California, to get a closer look at the man I was supposed to be marrying. Nina and I had been roommates our freshman year of college, put together randomly but bonded for life. She and Mark are not very different at core—both whippy-smart, loquacious, high-energy, high achievers, and also unafraid of debate, and generally certain they’re right. I felt an immediate friction between them, two people who loved me but couldn’t quite figure out how to like each other.

  I negotiated a day away from the farm with Nina, and we took the ferry to Burlington. Walking down the sidewalk crowded with people wearing flattering clothes, their boots not caked with manure, was disorienting, like suddenly being thrown back into civilization after an arduous trek through a jungle. We stepped into shops, and I fingered the clothes idly, unable to imagine what use they’d be to me. We looked at wedding dresses, but they were so white I didn’t want to touch them, sure I still had dirt on my hands. We took a table in a café and ordered coffee. She looked hard at me in that way that means she’s about to give me a talking-to. It wasn’t the relationship. It was the wedding.

  Nina and I have many things in common, but in some ways we’re opposites. When I visited her in California, she’d planned a week’s worth of adventure—spas, camping, restaurants, bookstores, wineries—made the reservations, printed out maps and an itinerary, and had them all tucked into a folder that was on the front seat of her car when she picked me up at the airport. I showed up with a duffel bag that I’d packed as the car service was waiting at the curb, wearing flip-flops because I hadn’t been able to find my other shoe. Two years earlier, she and her husband, David, had thrown themselves a fabulous wedding, equal parts elegance and fun. It came off as effortless, as a good party will, but in truth it had taken a year and a half of strategic planning. Our own wedding date was set now, nine months off, and I hadn’t done any of the necessary advance work. From Nina’s point of view I was almost irreversibly behind schedule. She is the most loyal of friends, and she saw that it was time for an emergency intervention. She began gently, interrogatively, but built up steam.

  “Have you hired a bartender yet? And what about save-the-date cards? They really should go out now. People need to make plans. And what about a caterer? Good ones book up a year in advance.” She reached into her purse and pulled out a pen and began making a list. I sipped my coffee and felt my blood pressure rise. “Porta Potties,” she wrote and underlined it. She paused, tapping her pen on the table. “What are you doing about chairs?” she asked. “You are going to need to rent chairs.”

  I had never considered chairs. When we got home and Nina had gone to bed I told Mark, with anxiety in my voice, that we were going to need to rent chairs. The conversations about the wedding, to this point, had been vague and quick, taking place over Delia’s back during milking, or when we ended up in the same horse stall, mucking. There hadn’t been time to sit down and plan. We both claimed to want a simple wedding, on the farm, in early October. We both wanted to avoid the craziness and tension that weddings seem to spawn. We wanted to serve great food that we grew ourselves. From there, our visions diverged. I was thinking small, maybe fifty at most. Mark was thinking somewhere around three hundred people. (On his first-draft guest list, he’d included his middle-school art teacher, a family he’d lived with for two weeks in India, and his pediatrician.) I wanted country chic, classy, maybe with a touch of irony thrown in that alluded to my urban background. Farm lite. Mark wanted real—he wanted to show our guests the farm and the manure—and he wanted cheap, not because he was cheap but because he hated waste, and because, as he accurately pointed out, we were starting a new business, and the bank account was spiraling downward at a dizzying clip.

  “What’s wrong with bales?” Mark said. “Why can’t people sit on straw bales?” I tried to picture my mother and her friends perched on bales in their dresses, straw poking their bottoms. My mother was still spinning from my abrupt departure from the city and our express-lane courtship. She’d gotten glimpses of our lives at the farm, and they’d worried her. What she would want, next to no wedding at all, was something clean, correct, and as normal as possible considering the circumstances, with a big open bar. Not straw bales.

  The fight that ensued was long and loud and ended in a draw. By the end we’d agreed only that we didn’t have time for such fights, and that in the future, if one person brought up something volatile, something likely to devolve into what we were calling a time-loss argument, the other person could say “Chairs!” and the discussion would immediately be put on hold until bedtime, when we’d be too tired to fight anyway. The result was that we didn’t talk about the wedding at all until it was within spitting distance of happening.

  As long as I could pretend I was some kind of exchange student, destined, eventually, to return to my native land, I was fine—more than fine. I felt about the farm the same mix of emotions I’d felt about Mark when we’d met. Fascination, infatuation, exasperation, and love. But the work was so hard, and my circumstances so foreign, I could only live in the present. If I thought more than a day in advance, I’d get shaky. A trip into the outside world would leave me rattled, unsure. At Christmastime, Mark stayed on the farm to milk Delia, and I went to spend a few days with my family, with plans to return on Christmas Eve so Mark wouldn’t have to spend the holiday alone. My parents had rented a house in Florida, and my brother and his wife and my sister and I met them there. It was sunny and clean and warm and comfortable in Florida, and there was a pool, and we all slept late and made easy meals from things we bought at the supermarket. We had no chores or obligations, and in the evenings we’d have cocktails and throw something on the grill and play games and talk. After a few days of this, I felt like a new person, the farm and its difficulties receding in the background. On the snowy drive home from the airport, I allowed myself to imagine a little bit of future, with Mark, on the farm, after things were organized and established and we weren’t working so ridiculously hard. I glimpsed that old warm and painful idea of home. I listened to carols on the car radio and indulged in a bout of longing.

  By the time I arrived at the house I’d worked myself up into a kind of seasonal-nostalgic fervor. I was determined to commit fully, and to create the home I longed for with Mark, out of whatever materials were available. We would have holiday traditions, damn it, and the traditions would start tonight. I saw us cooking a phenomenal Christmas Eve dinner together, the template for every conjugal Christmas Eve to come. I burst through the door, ready to launch into tradition making, only to find the house dark, no fire in the woodstove, nobody home. The milk pail was still in the sink, and there were dirty boots in the hallway that smelled of manure, and there was a cow halter on the dining room table. All at once this place and this life that I’d chosen felt small and dirty and squalid, and I didn’t want to be there at all. I opened the bottle of scotch I’d brought Mark as a present and poured myself a stiff drink and ate cold leftovers with my parka on, too depressed to start a fire.

  Mark came home as I was about to crawl i
nto bed. He was wearing a blanket, belted at the waist, and carrying a nasty, moth-eaten lambskin and a shepherd’s crook. He’d been recruited, last minute, to play Joseph in the Nativity pageant at St. John’s, and he was as lit up from his moment in the spotlight as any actor I’d ever seen in New York after a show. It was not a speaking role, he said, but he’d made the most of it, and he thought his full beard and ungroomed hair had added a touch of verisimilitude. He’d had a great time, made new friends, and he couldn’t believe I was so upset just because he hadn’t thought to leave me a note. We shared a drink in bed together, the clock on the church steeple striking midnight, and I cried on his chest with an emotion that I couldn’t name and he couldn’t understand, but through which he’d gladly hold me.

  The new year began, and Delia’s ears started to stink. There was a big pus-filled crack forming in the base of one of her nubbins, and when I got close to examine it, the smell of it would knock me back. Every morning I’d arrive at the farm with a bottle of warm water and some iodine, tie her to her stanchion with a halter, and swab at the stinking scab, trying to keep it open enough to drain. She would shake her head when she saw me coming, but that was the extent of her protest. The wounds were filling with granulation tissue, the raw, ugly new flesh that is the first step to healing.

  The dairy where Delia had come from called to say they had another cow they could sell us, cheap, because she’d been their daughter’s pet and they didn’t want to ship her for beef, but they couldn’t keep her because her udder was too pendulous and their laneways were very mucky, so she’d come in for milking with her teats all caked and messy with muck. She was half Jersey, and half Holstein, a heavy milker. Her name was Raye. When I was in my twenties I lived in Mexico for a year. I arrived knowing very little Spanish, and, as I was trying to learn, I would often find myself in a conversation with someone, totally lost, clinging to any familiar word that came out of their mouth, trying to piece the words together into something that made sense. When the words stopped and they looked at me like they expected a response, I invariably said, “Sí.” That strategy got me into some interesting situations, but it did move things along. That is the only way I can think of to explain why we bought Raye. We had too much milk already, and too little time, but we were a little lost and easily excited, and when asked a question, our default answer was “Sí.”

  If Delia was to have a roommate, they’d need a bigger room. The west barn had a large shed built onto its west side, with a sliding door. Its framing and the exterior walls were all right, but the cheap pressboard put up on the inside was warped and crumbling. We spent a day pulling it down and packing the soft stuff into a Dumpster, and another day plucking the nails out of the now-bare studs. From the light socket we pulled a fried and desiccated bat. It must have tried to roost there, back when the electricity still worked.

  Raye arrived, and she was Delia’s opposite, big boned, inky, and willful. She bellowed like a tuba. At milking time, she charged out of her stall as I hung on to her collar, about as effective as a flea. When I washed her udder, she’d wave her hoof at me, and for a week she kicked over every bucket I put under her, until I finally learned how to hold the bucket off the ground, between my knees. If Raye had been around when Delia was attacked, I decided, those dogs wouldn’t have had a chance. She bossed Delia from one end of their shed to the other, but Delia was delighted to be with one of her own. When I left the barn in the evening, the last thing I’d see was Delia licking Raye shyly, her rubbery tongue making cowlicks in Raye’s thick winter fur.

  In January, we bought a herd of beef cattle from a farmer who was selling out. They were Scottish Highland cattle, feral-looking things, with wide horns and thick, wavy fur, some red, some black, some silver, with long bangs that hung down over their eyes. More than one person stopped to ask if we were raising yaks. We’d bought the Highlands because they were for sale nearby at a good price, and the breed came with certain advantages that fit well with our situation. They are the oldest breed of cattle on record, their genetics formed under harsh conditions. They are known for hardiness on marginal pasture, for ease of calving and good mothering, and for finishing well on grass instead of on grain. Their extremely thick coats were a benefit, too, during our hard winters. In cold spring rains, they repelled water like sheep. The downside was that they were slow growers, taking two years or more to get to slaughter weight. Also, this herd was wild. When we unloaded them, a bull calf slipped out an impossibly small gap between the trailer and the fence and took a trot all over the farm, while his perturbed mama snorted and tried to knock down a gate. He was white and fuzzy, like a big lamb. We named him Wiley.

  The seeds arrived in February, a whole farm in a box. Of all the mysteries I’d encountered on the farm, this seemed the most profound. I could not imagine how several tons of food could come out of a box so small and light I could balance it on one hand. Mark and I had spent evenings poring over the seed catalogs that had arrived during the darkest week of winter, piling up next to the bed like farmer porn. I decided the glossy Johnny’s catalog, with its four-color spreads of airbrushed produce, was aimed at farmers who are visually stimulated, while the scrappy Fedco catalog, just newsprint and line drawings but with gorgeous descriptions, was aimed at people like me, who got off on words. If it had been left up to me, we would have grown one of everything from the catalogs that year. In the winter squash section alone, I underlined twelve intriguing varieties, including Candy Roaster, Turk’s Turban, Pink Banana, and something called Galeux d’Eysines, which the text told me meant “embroidered with pebbles.” The herb sections made me completely nuts. How could you not order one packet each of saltwort, sneezewort, motherwort, and Saint-John’s-wort, plus a sample of mad-dog skullcap, which the text said was once a folk remedy for rabies? At a buck a pop, how could you go wrong? The whole trick of seed catalogs is that they come into the house in winter, when everything still seems possible and the work of growing things is too far in front of you to be seen clearly. Luckily, Mark knew this and had quietly retrieved my list and crumpled it up, so the box that arrived at our door contained the seeds of edible things that are generally liked by humans, a reasonable number of varieties, and nothing that ended in wort. We sorted through the packets, separating those that would be direct-seeded in the field from those that needed to be started early, in a greenhouse, in a few short weeks. We did not have a greenhouse, but building one was on the list.

  In the middle of February, Mark made a trip to Pennsylvania to collect his sugaring equipment, which he’d stored at his old farm in State College. He came back with the evaporator, a heavy iron firebox called an arch, that looked like a metal coffin, six feet by two feet, capped with a shiny stainless-steel pan. We installed it in the corner of the pavilion near the road and cut a hole in the tin roof to poke the chimney through. We borrowed a two-hundred-gallon sap tank from Thomas LaFountain, who had used it in his own sugar bush until he’d switched over from buckets to plastic tubing.

  The farm was beginning to acquire form, coming together out of disparate pieces. We had the dairy cows, the beef cattle, the pigs, the hens, the seeds, and the equipment to make sugar out of trees. We had the pieces in place now, everything we needed to produce our food and the food of our as-yet-imaginary members. Everything, that is, but the hours we needed to get it all done. Raye’s big udder was much harder to milk than Delia’s neat little bag, and Raye also produced more milk, so no matter how early we started, the sun would be well up before the milk was put away and the milking equipment washed. And then there would be the other morning chores: the horses to be bedded and fed, the pigs to be slopped, the chickens needing to be let out of their coop, fed, watered. The beef cattle were housed in the east barn’s shed, and their hay was in the west barn mow, so every day we’d throw bales to the ground and walk them over, one by one, because we didn’t yet have a cart. We did not have enough hoses, so we carried a lot of water. The days were getting longer, and every moment was
filled with urgent work, and the list of things to do, at the end of the day, was longer than it had been that dawn.

  All the money we spent came from savings. Cash flow was a one-way stream. We ordered hundreds of dollars’ worth of electric fencing, including fence chargers, step-in posts, chicken netting, and thousands of feet of the plastic electric string that we would use to make mobile pastures for the cattle and horses. We needed tools, too—not only carts and hoses but hand tools, and more machinery, and buckets and tanks and hay racks and mangers. Our account balance approached zero. Every night, we revised our to-do list, editing it down to bare essentials. I tried to let go of the desire for beautiful and to settle instead for functional, and I gained insight into why working farms look the way they do. There were three construction projects going on at any one time, and anyone who appeared at the farm was put to work. My friend Alexis came for a visit from New Orleans, where she had just finished restoring a house, and we put her to work rewiring the barns. By the time she left, we had lights. As the days lengthened, we resumed cleanup, trashing three more buildings, carting them away. We had no rhythm to our days then, no routine, and the farm was so full of emergencies—from escaped cattle to frozen pipes—that the work seeped into the hours when we ought to have been sleeping, and still we had more to do.