How to Cook a Moose (42 page)

“Cruising was such an easy, mellow, fun life,” Shane said. “We sailed off the coast of Florida, to the Bahamas. We drank rum, ate fish we caught, spent almost no money . . .”

“It was perfect, and then I started yearning for land—for a farm,” said Ladleah. “I always thought I was going to be a sailor, not a farmer like my parents. But it turned out I wanted some land where I could grow food, put down roots.”

While Shane went over to talk to Avery, who had just come back, Ladleah took me to the gardens and greenhouse. The planted rows were full of fall vegetables, kale and squash, and tall, stooped, nearly dried sunflowers. It turned out that they were “volunteers,” grown from wayward seeds and not on purpose.

“The birds love them so much,” Ladleah told me. “I never have the heart to cut them down.”

“I think they're good luck, maybe,” I said. “They're definitely beautiful.”

The greenhouse was gridded with vertical strings, from the straw-strewn floor to the curved plastic ceiling, up which twined healthy vines filled with more varieties of tomatoes than I could count: mottled green gumball-size ones, inky-black medium ones, and cherry-red and fire-engine-red and maroon and crimson and orangey ones, of every size and shape.

“I test seeds for an heirloom seed company,” Ladleah told me. “Some are better than others.”

I sampled a few; the best, I thought, were the green gumballs, which were wondrously sweet and burst in my mouth with flavor and tomatoey juiciness. The inky ones were a disappointment; they looked as if they would be amazing, but they had hardly any taste at all.

“Yeah, I know, but people can't get enough of them,” she laughed. “Probably just because of the color.”

“So this is the greenhouse where you sit barefoot in the winter,” I said, admiring its soaring, practical beauty. “It's so big. It's really nice in here.”

“It's always at least ten degrees warmer in here than outside. We insulated it with a double layer of plastic and installed a small fan to inflate the two layers, creating an insulating air space. Sometimes in the winter on a sunny day it gets so hot I'm sweating in here.”

“You built it, right?”

“We designed and built it ourselves, like all the buildings on this place except the house. It sits on tracks, so in the winter we slide it over what's now the outdoor garden and plant our winter vegetables directly in the ground.”

We went outside again. Ladleah was right; it was much cooler outside than in the greenhouse. Right by our feet were several bean plants: Ladleah told me they were black beans, cannellinis, yellow-eye beans, yellow Indian woman beans, and a “mystery Arizona bean.” Yellow Indian woman beans, she told me, had journeyed from Montana via Swedish immigrants; this was her first time planting them.

“I'm really excited to try them; they're supposed to have a great flavor and texture.”

I asked her how she makes baked beans.

“It's important to use at least two whole onions in the bottom of the bean pot,” she said, “at least for flavor, but I love them spooned on top in my bowl. Add plenty of mustard. And piccalilli with it.”

I watched Bucky and Zubi romp around the garden until Ladleah gathered us all up and headed us in a herd toward the house.

I got my backpack and the bag of goodies out of my car and looked around. Next to the house was the garage, poultry coop, and sheep barn, one structure with three separate entrances and purposes. Peeking into the small garage I saw, on the clean floor, a neat stack of four kayaks next to a motorcycle and tractor; next to that was a bin of dried seed pods.

“Shane built the garage and sheep barn,” she told me, “our first winter here.”

In the fenced-in poultry coop were several Khaki Campbell ducks (a heritage breed, prolific layers who give an egg a day no matter what), and a couple of chickens, Buff Orpingtons, which are apparently sweet-natured but stringy to eat.

“There's a lot of fat on them,” said Ladleah, “so they're perfect for stock. I love making stock. There's only two now, because a fox got the rest of them when they were outside pecking around.”

Over the chicken coop grew a vine of squash and another of hops. Ladleah picked one of the little green balloons for me to crush between my fingers; it smelled resinous, richly skunky.

“You can tell they're related to marijuana,” she said.

“Do you make your own beer with them?”

“We do,” she said. “And we make red and white wine out of our grapes; the vines are on the garden fence. And we have lots of fruit and nut trees, too; we planted cherries, pears, apples, hazelnuts, almonds, peaches, and plums. We get lots of strawberries in June. We make cider from a friend's apples. We try for hard cider. Sometimes it's apple cider vinegar.”

Then I saw the beehives in the corner of the yard, at the edge of the woods.

“And you have honeybees, too,” I said with something approaching hero-worshipping wonderment. “Do you make your own cheese?”

“Oh yeah, I used to,” she said. “But I stopped. There are too many amazing cheese makers in the area, and I just don't have the setup.”

I looked beyond the garage to the woods.

“How big is your property? How far back do those woods go?”

“We own about three acres,” she said. “But those woods go back a long way.”

“It feels so remote here, so quiet,” I said. “Even though you're two minutes from the main road, it feels wild here.”

On the little porch were a couple of weathered Adirondack chairs and a bureau and a few small tables. Scattered around were baskets of cabbages (“for sauerkraut”), squash, cucumbers, a couple of different kinds of peppers, turnips, and tomatoes, and two gallon jars of cinnamon simple syrup. Another resinous-smelling vine covered with puffy green hops grew around the porch railing. A healthy ficus sat in its big pot by a small woodpile, and beyond the chairs was an old grill.

We went inside. Their house was shipshape and well-built, with sanded-down old wood floors, a small, efficient kitchen, comfortable old couches around a woodstove, and a mudroom full of work boots and coats. The bathroom had a claw-foot tub.

I followed Ladleah down to the basement, to the sweet guest room next to the laundry room, whose shelves were laden with put-up produce, jars and jars of various glowing jewel colors.

“I just made piccalilli and chipotle salsa,” said Ladleah. “And I made elderberry liqueur and jam, and two kinds of relish, zucchini and cucumber.”

She opened the big storage freezer in the corner to show me what was inside: packages of frozen homegrown heirloom-variety corn, cut off the cob (“The corncobs make great vegetable broth”) and backstrap, sausage, stew meat, and flank steaks made from Shane's Newfoundland moose the year before.

“And we have some Maine shrimp in here,” she said. “Maine shrimp are the best in the world. They're so small and sweet, you can eat the whole thing, heads and shells and all. Just cook them in butter and that's all they need; they're amazing. They're almost fished out, and the quotas are seriously reduced. The last time they were available, we bought twenty pounds. Now we're savoring the last few pounds.”

I left my backpack on the guest bed and we went back upstairs to wait for Shane. We were all going out for a drink, and he had an errand to run on the way; then we were coming back here for dinner.

The house used to sit down on the ocean, Ladleah explained. It was a 1920s beach cottage that was moved up to this land in 2000, seven years before they bought the place. They weatherproofed and insulated it, renovated the kitchen, refurbished the floors, and opened up the upstairs so it's one big, airy room with a long L-shaped desk in the window alcove, where they spend forty-five minutes every morning, side by side on their computers, drinking coffee. (Ladleah pays bills, catches up on Facebook and e-mails and reads the news of the world or the latest food gossip; Shane looks at kayaks, hunting guns, motorcycles, and boats. “And then we go outside to work, and we're off the computer till the next morning,” said Ladleah.)

Beyond the desks was a big iron bedstead (“We found it by the side of the road for $50”); a cat dozed on the coverlet, among the pillows.

On our way to Belfast, we passed by a field strewn with big, round bales of hay.

“That's my hay,” said Ladleah. “I'm obsessed with it! I've called them a few times about buying it, and they won't call me back. I really, really want that hay for the sheep this winter.”

We stopped to see a friend of Shane's; evidently, Shane was buying his kayak. Ladleah and I waited in the car and watched the transaction: Shane and another earnest, thoughtful-looking young man conferred with their heads close together while they looked at the small boat, then they tied it onto the roof of the car together.

“Shane has this whole group of friends he goes white-water kayaking with,” Ladleah told me. “They're all really nice guys, really
excited about kayaking. Shane is almost philosophical about it. He thinks a lot about it; it's like poetry to him, an art form.”

“You would never guess that guy works for the prison system, would you?” Shane said when he got back into the car.

“He looks like an English teacher,” Ladleah said, laughing.

“He does,” I said.

The Three Tides bar sat on a wharf right on Belfast Harbor. There was a brewery right next door, with many kinds of fresh local beer on tap. We went to the outdoor bar and got drinks, then sat in a booth on the edge of the water. Behind us was an open-mouthed woodstove with a good fire in it, and there were couches and tables scattered around. My Dark and Stormy, made with Gosling's rum and local ginger beer, was spicy and sweet and delicious.

Belfast Harbor was a tidy little cove, filled with moored sailboats, ringed by shingled houses and small local businesses that appeared to be thriving. There was a lobster pound near the brewery. But it used to be a very different place, Shane told me. Until a few years ago, the fancy yacht-repair place on a hill above the bar was a chicken-processing plant. The water of the harbor was covered in feathers and a layer of chicken fat.

“Schmaltz,” I said. “The essential ingredient in Jewish cooking.”

“The sharks loved it,” said Shane. “So did the crabs and fish. Then Perdue drove them out of business and the harbor fell into moribund decay until that boat-repair place opened. Now it's clean again here.”

The Three Tides, which opened about ten years ago, was named after the legendary manner in which law enforcement used to dispatch the bodies of pirates they'd caught and killed: They let them dangle from the wharf for three tide cycles, during which the water rose and
receded, and each time it rose, crabs would eat the corpses, and then when it fell, the townspeople got a good look at what would happen if they ran afoul of the law, themselves. An effective warning and deterrent, it sounded like.

As the sun went down, we moved to the couches by the fire.

I asked Ladleah about her childhood, her background and Shane's. Ladleah and Shane, both thirty-five at the time, were born six months apart, he in 1978, she in in 1979. “He likes to think he's older and wiser,” said Ladleah, “but he's really just older and grumpier.”

“What was your childhood like?” I asked her.

“My parents were hippie, organic, back-to-the-land farmers,” she said. “They moved up from Massachusetts in the 1970s. I was born in Dixmont, Maine, on Peacemeal Farm, in a farmhouse with a river around it—hence my name, which means ‘by the water-coursed meadow.' That's where I grew up. It was a diversified vegetable farm.

“But I was always going to spend my life and make my living on the sea, not the land. I worked as a sternman through high school for Larry Moffatt, who's a lobsterman and a painter. He teaches at the Haystack School from time to time. Then I went to the Maine Maritime Academy and studied biological oceanography where you qualify for a two-hundred-ton captain's license. I graduated magna cum laude, in three years instead of the usual four. So I graduated a year early, and I was planning to go to law school in the fall. I got a job with the Hurricane Island Outward Bound School when I was twenty-one, and that summer turned into five years. That's where I met Shane.”