How to Cook a Moose (36 page)

The Indians had nowhere else to go; they died on their own land from the diseases the newcomers had brought, against which they had no recourse, despite all of their brilliantly adaptive traditions, strength and skill, knowledge of the land and sea, and fierce ability to hold their own in warfare.

“Maine's true natives had lost the coast to newcomers,” Woodard writes. “Now it would be the newcomers' turn to defend their homes from covetous and powerful outsiders.”

And so the ongoing class wars of Maine began, during which generation after generation of scrappy, hardscrabble, struggling Mainers stoically endured and protested against and became resigned to and fought against and were the victims of the incursions of rich speculators and greedy political figures. Now, they're the seasonal moneyed vacationers, at best known locally as “summer people,” or, at worst, “Massholes,” so called in honor of the hundreds of years of a northward-encroaching human tide that seems hell-bent on destroying everything the locals most treasure and love, with their money, proclivities, and demands, even as local economies benefit from and depend on them.

After the fourth Indian war devastated everything in sight from 1722 until 1726 or so, the “Great Proprietors” of Massachusetts, rich land speculators, began casting their acquisitive eyes on the now-desolate, depopulated Maine's natural resources. But their newly hatched plan to become New England's landed aristocracy was foiled by the Crown, who wanted Midcoast Maine for itself. And so the English government, in the person of one Colonel David Dunbar, a proud, ambitious Scotsman from Northern Ireland, annexed the region to Nova Scotia in 1729, seizing it from Massachusetts by right of conquest.

Dunbar's scheme was simple: He needed settlers to repopulate the area and farm the land, and he knew just where to find them: his own homeland. Conditions were desperate for the Scottish in Northern Ireland, who'd relocated there in search of a better life, but had found the same strife and hardship they'd left behind.

The scrappy adaptability of these hardy souls turned out to be exactly the quality that was most useful for the struggle of making a
living out of the earth and sea in Maine. Many of their descendants are still here today, farming, fishing, foraging, and hunting, using methods handed down through the decades and centuries. Others of like mind and spirit have joined them from away, buying a few acres, a trawler, applying for hunting licenses, working long, hard days, year-round, to stay afloat.

These are the true Mainers, the people whose heels are dug into the soil, whose livelihood is tied to the fates and fortunes of the land and its vicissitudes, to the fish, lobster, oysters, shrimp, and crabs who live in the waters along the coast of Maine. These die-hard, self-sufficient survivors proved that it wasn't impossible to survive here, and they served as exemplars for the rest of the country.

In more-recent years, the most famous proponents and practitioners of the “back-to-the-land” movement were a pair of idealistic intellectuals named Helen and Scott Nearing. In 1932, they found themselves broke when Scott was blacklisted from academia for his pacifism. Tired of the struggle of surviving in New York City, they left and bought a farm in southern Vermont, setting out to live an almost entirely self-sufficient life.

The Nearings cut wood from their own trees for heat and cooking; built houses, outbuildings, and walls from stones they dug out of their own land; composted soil and rotated crops for maximum yield and health; tapped their maple trees, boiling enough syrup to sell to pay unvoidable expenses; preserved enough food to get themselves through the winters, always spending half the day in leisure: reading, playing music, writing. Committed vegans, they ate no meat and kept no animals; in their gently and benignly crackpotty opinion, any domestication of animals, even as pets, was a form of slavery (although
Helen Nearing apparently had a pet cat or two that she never wrote about, and she and Scott eventually succumbed to the siren song of dairy consumption). Like Thoreau, they deplored capitalism, but unlike him, they paid their taxes. Their account of their decades-long experiences, a now-famous book called
Living the Good Life: How to Live Sanely and Simply in a Troubled World
, inspired countless young, searching, idealistic people to follow in their footsteps.

In 1952, when the area around their Vermont farm became too crowded and developed, they sold it and bought land in Harborside, Maine, moving their whole operation to the Midcoast region, where they started over. Their Maine farm soon became overrun with followers and acolytes, most of whom wanted to shoot the breeze instead of work, but there were a few who proved worthy of the challenge of farm life and stuck around to become part of the Nearings' world.

Eliot and Sue Coleman, a young, college-educated, well-bred couple who wanted to settle and farm in Maine, took over a sixty-acre parcel of the Nearings' land, which Helen and Scott Nearing sold to them for $2,000, just over $33 an acre, in 1968.

“It was not the dream farm Papa had in his mind's eye during the search,” their daughter Melissa wrote in her memoir,
This Life Is in Your Hands
, about growing up on her parents' farm, “lacking as it did cultivated fields and a pond. But none of that mattered; it was their ground on which to stand, unbeholden to a mortgage or bank, and it was up to them to make it into the dream.”

The Colemans cultivated, enriched, planted, and harvested the land for many years, until they divorced and left Maine. But Eliot Coleman returned in 1990 to the now-renowned Four Season Farm, remaking it into a thriving enterprise that has become a model farm for aspiring farmers.

The Nearings and Colemans proved that organic farming could be done in Maine without any newfangled techniques or equipment.
Their success in providing themselves and their workers and families a year-round subsistence with crops raised on the glacier-eroded, thin Maine topsoil was due to their understanding of time-honored ways of farming that go back to the Wabanaki. They enriched the soil with diligent nurturing, composted and mulched through decades of work with patient ingenuity, layering seaweed and lime, using every bit of cast-off organic matter from the farm. Crop rotations and plantings were designed with painstaking precision every year, and each year's results were recorded in a series of notebooks.

Eliot Coleman is, by any standard, a genius of a farmer. His methods and ideas are widely admired and applied by many younger farmers, to whom he is a kind of guru, a major rock star in a state where farmers can achieve that kind of legendary status—and with good reason, since farming in Maine is such a tricky, arduous, heart- and backbreaking undertaking. Even now, Maine's climate is a challenge to the most seasoned farmer.

Mary Pols and Meredith Goad wrote about the struggle in the
Press Herald
's Source section in April 2014:

Maine farming may never return to its heyday in 1880, when 64,000 farms were spread across 6.6 million acres. But the state is not just adding young farmers; it is adding acreage. Eight percent more of Maine's 19.1 million acres are farmed now than were in 2007.

Numbers like these suggest Maine is headed into a future that may resemble the state's deep past, a time when a family's very survival depended on self-sufficiency and constant adaptation, now aided by new technologies and wisdom gleaned from two full generations of back-to-the-landers.

Maine is bucking national trends by attracting younger farmers. The average age of farmers nationally is 58, according to the 2012
census. But from 2007 to 2012, the number of farmers ages 34 and younger in Maine increased a whopping 40 percent, a federal census found. Farming has become hip.

From all indications, the concept of eating fresh, local foods as a means to build not just bodies, but economies, has gone past trend and is here to stay.

In August 2013, Brendan and I persuaded Melissa, now our friend, to invite us up to Four Season Farm in Harborside for a night. Having heard and read so much about the place, I was excited to see it firsthand, and to meet Eliot.

We drove up the coast on another perfect summer day. After winding down the cape on a two-lane road, we turned in at the Four Season Farm sign and beheld a vision of a farm: lush late-summer rows of vegetables and flowers; sturdy greenhouses and chicken pens; fields stretching back to dense woods. Beyond the first field, back toward the forest, was the farmhouse. The late-afternoon light was golden, with a fine veil of ocean mist hanging in it.

After we parked and got out, we found Melissa's nine-year-old twin daughters, Heidi and Emily, swinging on the rope swing over the pond, fighting over whose turn it was. Whoever's turn it wasn't was distracted from pummeling her sister by the little frogs their mother caught in her cupped hands, then let go. Next to the pond was a hand-built wood-burning sauna; Melissa told us that a few friends sometimes gathered here to sweat naked together. It reminded me of my adolescence in the 1970s, when my mother and her artist and hippie friends would do that very thing in Jerome, Arizona, down in the Gulch at a sculptor named Gary's place, and I would either stay
at home or reluctantly go and keep my clothes on and get teased for my prudishness.

It turned out that the idea of a communal naked sauna still elicited the exact same response in me now, all these decades later.

Melissa brought us up to the farmhouse, where we met Eliot, a wiry, bright-eyed, handsome man who looked like a French movie star, and his wife, Barbara Damrosch, slender and dark-eyed, at first glance obviously fiercely intelligent. They were both in their seventies, but they had the energy and youthfulness of people many decades younger.

Evidently, we were all going out to dinner at a nearby farm and pizza bakery rather than eating produce from the farm, cooked in the farmhouse kitchen.

“We're taking the summer off,” Eliot told us with puckish cheer as we walked out to the cars. “Our farm stand is closed for the first time in ten years. It's a sabbatical for us and for the farm.”

“Not for me,” said Barbara, laughing. “I'm not taking a sabbatical.”

Several miles up the peninsula, we parked in front of a rambling barn and walked through Tinder Hearth's long bakery room with its enormous wood-burning brick oven.

The young owner, Tim Semler, was baking pizzas.

“Who built your oven?” Brendan asked him.

“We built it ourselves,” he said.

“Where does your flour come from?” I asked.

“Mostly organic farms up in Canada,” he said. “We use a variety of flours, some spelt, some winter wheat, and some heirloom varieties of wheat.”

Tinder Hearth is renowned throughout Maine and beyond for its bread in particular, considered by many to be perfection in loaf form. Given the provenance of the flour, I had a strong feeling that I could probably eat this pizza without getting too bad a reaction, but no
matter how tempted I was, I didn't want to take the chance. If I got foggy-brained and crabby now, it would ruin the whole visit. So I decided, reluctantly but without allowing myself any regret, to abstain.

We sat out back at a wooden picnic table. The pizzas looked delectable, the crust charred and crisp, the toppings generous—kale and basil, sausage and mushroom. Brendan, who ate six or seven slices in all, confirmed that they were indeed spectacular, but I still didn't eat any; it wasn't worth the price I'd have to pay for eating gluten.

Instead, I dismantled the head of celery Eliot had picked as we drove out of the farm. I dipped the stalks in the almond butter Eliot had fished out of their fridge, feeling like a special-needs child but not really caring. The fresh-picked celery was peppery and crunchy and fibrous. The almond butter was rich and nutty. I was fine, I told myself as Brendan moaned his way through another piece of pizza.

We adults drank wine out of plastic cups, a Rioja we'd brought from Portland and a bottle of the organic red Eliot likes.

“No sulfites,” he said. “Doesn't keep me up at night. No hangover the next day. At my age, that's a good thing.”