The Bucolic Plague: How Two Manhattanites Became Gentlemen Farmers: An Unconventional Memoir (10 page)

And what we couldn’t grow on our own, we picked by the pound at local farms. From the period of 1978 to 1985, my mother pickled, froze, canned, and preserved metric tons of foodstuffs.

At the time I hated all of it.

My friends all ate brown-bag lunches consisting of whatever was the most current prepared snack food being advertised on Saturday-morning television. I, on the other hand, ate raw snap peas and plain jelly sandwiches made from strawberries that I’d picked, washed, and stirred in five-gallon stock pots over a hot stove in the middle of July. I still have a slight hunchback from spending the daylight hours of every summer vacation hunched over, pulling up the crabgrass and stinging nettle growing between the endless rows of green bean plants. When McDonald’s first came to Oconomowoc—which was an unattainable luxury for us—I remember my mother baking breaded zucchini sticks and trying to convince me that they were “just like” the French fries we couldn’t afford.

They weren’t.

Once I moved to New York City—the epicenter of gourmet food markets—I saw that my mother could have made a killing with her elderberry jellies and raw fermented sauerkrauts if she’d only had access to the buyer for Balducci’s. I too had come to belatedly appreciate my indentured green-thumbed upbringing. Maybe it was the first time I forked over seventy-six dollars for a dozen heirloom tomatoes at the Union Square Greenmarket that I finally realized the gifts my parents had given me with our garden.

The garden seemed like so much work as a kid. But now it seemed quaint in comparison to the daily stresses I faced with my job, Brent’s job, and New York City in general. At least at the end of a long row of green beans, I used to have a basket of something to show for my work. What did I have to show for myself now? A reel of television commercials and a tiny two-room apartment that would have fit in the garage of our modest Wisconsin ranch house.

I’d decided that we needed to have a vegetable garden at the Beekman in order for it to be a true farm. It was getting fairly late in the season to put one in. If I wanted to have any kind of harvest this fall, I’d have to start now. Luckily I had the four-day Memorial Day weekend ahead of me to get it accomplished.

“I think I’m going to put in a garden this weekend,” I told John.

“That’s good,” John replied.

I’d learned that John was a man of remarkably few words. Part was due to shyness, but another part was that brevity seemed to be the official local dialect. I am the sort of person who could chat on and on about everything from the war in Afghanistan to the latest in spring menswear. In Sharon Springs, however, I was learning that the art of conversation was less like the rapid volleying of bon mots, and more like playing volleyball with balloons. It was almost as if there was a daily quota of words assigned to the county, so each response was measured and meted out as carefully as candy to a child.

“Can I borrow the rototiller?” I asked.

Part of John’s initial letter to us listed every piece of farming equipment he would be bringing with him. Pretty much the only piece of machinery I recognized was the rototiller. It was certainly the only one I had any hope of successfully operating.

“Sure. I gassed it up yesterday,” John answered.

“I think the best spot is out on the other side of the old silo foundation, out past the raspberry patch.”

“Um-hm,” John responded, sounding neither overly affirmative nor pessimistic.

“Do you think the soil will be good there?’

“Could be.”

“I got some pea seeds down at the Agway.”

“Might be a little late for peas.”

“Do you think so? I was reading online that they could be planted up until the end of May.”

If John were the chuckling sort, I’m sure he was stifling one. I doubted many people in Sharon Springs got their gardening information from any source ending in “.com.”

“If it stays cool enough, maybe,” John said doubtfully.

“It’s been a cool spring,” I said, repeating a tidbit I’d picked up at Agway along with the peas.

“It has.”

“And there was a surprise frost last night.” Another Agway sound bite.

“Yep.”

I could see that John’s daily noun/verb ration was running out, so I wandered over to the tiller, gave it a grunting push, and rolled it out into the sunlight. It was heavy…and stubborn. It took me five minutes to push it a mere twenty yards.

I was halfway across the barnyard, alternating between pushing and tugging the reluctant machine toward the prospective garden patch, when John took a break from his own chores. He walked over to me and gave the starter cord on the tiller a mighty pull. It turned over with a roar. He put the machine into gear and the wheels sprang into action. He quickly squeezed the clutch on the handle to keep the tiller from sprinting across the yard. Over the noise, he motioned for me to grab hold where his hand was, and proceeded to wordlessly show me which gears moved the machine forward or reverse, and which activated the tines.

I steered the tiller toward the small twenty-by-thirty-foot patch of grass that I envisioned would supply our multitude of summer dinner parties. Though there still was a spring chill in the air, I was sweating profusely by the time I reached my destination. I tugged at the lever that I thought activated the tines. It did. They began spinning, slowly and determinedly, tugging at the long weeds. At first the tines simply scraped at the surface of the ground as I walked back and forth over my plot of dreams. The grasses wrapped themselves around the axle of the tiller’s blades. By the third pass I’d accomplished nothing more than collecting what looked like a large knotted spool of raffia ribbon.

Just when I convinced myself that I was going to harvest nothing more than hay, one of the tines sank into the hard, clumpy dirt…and immediately kicked up a baseball-size rock that rocketed with great force directly into my shin.

“Fuck! Ow!”

But there, in the concave hole where the rock had just been, was a bare spot of dirt as black and rich as any I’d seen in my Wisconsin youth. I wiped my sweaty forehead with my sweatshirt sleeve and pushed onward, forward, back and forth, up and down what would eventually be the rows of my heirloom vegetable Eden. Each pass across the plot drew new bruises on both shins as rocks, chunks of old fenceposts, and random rusty machine parts shot up out of the earth, as if it kept its own artillery down below.

Strangely, the most common pieces of detritus were bones. Ranging from the size of a thumb to a shin (literally), the ground was coughing up as many gray and stained skeletal pieces as rocks. I hadn’t thought about it, but the number of dead animals that must have been buried this close to the barn over the course of 205 years must have been staggering. And I hoped they were animals. For all I knew, I could just as easily be desecrating an old slave burial plot. If that was the case, I prayed they were gaining some comfort in watching the plantation master sweat his own ass off with bleeding shins.

For the next six hours I shoved, and grinded, and clawed at the muddy ground. Occasionally I’d spot Brent around the barnyard, but I had no idea what he was doing. I was completely focused. I didn’t feel a minute of chill as the sun set behind the hills of Cherry Valley off to the west. By the time I noticed John shutting off the light inside the barn after the evening milking, the purple cloudless evening sky was just barely light enough to keep me from chopping my own feet off. When John appeared in the barn’s doorway, I could see him squinting out into the darkness toward me and the sound of the tiller’s engine. Having been inside with the goats all afternoon, he’d surely forgotten that I’d been steadily hacking away. He stood and watched me for a minute. I’d like to think he was impressed that this city boy had been sweating at his chores for as long a time as he had been.

As he crossed the yard to the small “co-farmer’s” cottage, he avoided making eye contact.

He was probably still thinking that it was far too late in the season to plant peas.

My next three days were consumed with the alchemy of turning my six-hundred-square-foot neglected pasture into an oasis of silken chocolate earth. I arose at the first
HERE COMES THE BRIDE!
and brought my morning cup of coffee out to the “garden” where the tiller waited for me, coated in dew. I’d come to learn its most intimate secrets, from the barely audible squeaking when one of the tines needed readjustment to the complaining flatulence when the gas tank ran low.

Brent came to check on me occasionally, but he’d been with me long enough to know that when I become obsessed with a task, it’s best to stay out of my way—especially if I’m wielding a piece of heavy machinery outfitted with rotating claws.

My only real company was Bubby the Barn Cat. Bubby sat on the fencepost by the garden-in-progress and watched me toil through most of the day. Occasionally he jumped down to glide between my feet as I tilled my rows, defying the spinning tines of death in an effort to get me to pick him up and carry him on my shoulder.

Bubby was another of the animals we’d inherited with the farm. Most of the barn cats I’d known in my youth subscribed to the “good mousers should be neither seen nor heard” philosophy. Perhaps having escaped the weighted-burlap-bag-tossed-in-cow-pond fate of most barn kittens, they felt it best not to tempt further human contact.

But Bubby was different. When he was introduced to us by the previous caretaker’s wife, she’d explained that from the day he mysteriously showed up at the Beekman he’d always been the number-one mouser at the farm. His large size attested to his skills. Back then he wasn’t any friendlier than most barn cats, she told us, but he was the best at his job. He didn’t tolerate anything smaller than a foot long within a hundred-yard vicinity of the barn. He was known to sit high in the hayloft door, watching for approaching intruders in the surrounding fields. Within a split second, he’d run down the hay conveyor belt, leap onto the split rail fence, and race down the pasture, reaching his victim before it even knew it was in a war zone. We were pretty sure it was Bubby’s remarkably bright goldenrod-yellow eyes that gave him his super-feline x-ray vision.

Then one evening a few years ago Bubby was struck by a car on the road in front of the house. He survived till morning. The caretaker and his wife spotted him at sunrise dragging himself toward the barn on his front paws. Even with his back legs mangled, Bubby was not going to miss a day of work. They called the Selzners, the Beekman’s previous owners, who instructed them to bring their chief mouser to the vet and to spare no expense in his treatment and recovery.

Which is how Bubby wound up being perhaps the only barn cat in the world with his hip held together with an intricate patchwork of titanium rods. His nickname was “Bionic Bubby.”

And, as if he knew how fortunate he was, he also returned home from the animal hospital as the world’s most grateful and loving barn cat.

By the time the sun had reached its highest point in the sky on Memorial Day, I’d spent three full days working the rough patch of dirt. It probably wasn’t ready for a
Martha Stewart Living
photo spread yet, but at least I had workable dirt that could sustain life.

“What do you think, Bubs?”

Bubby, perched on my shoulder, carefully surveyed the new garden with me, making sure that I hadn’t unearthed anything mammalian. Along the side of the garden, I’d made one pile for the rocks I raked through and another pile of all the bones. The bone pile was easily three times as large. I picked up a shovel and scooped them into the wheelbarrow, filling it almost to the point of overflowing. I wheeled it through a broken section of the split rail fence and halfway up the eastern pasture. When I reached a spot fifty yards or so from the garden, I tilted the wheelbarrow sideways, letting the various bones slide out into the deep weeds.

I didn’t know if there was an appropriate catchall, reburial service for two hundred years’ worth of mixed remains of Native Americans, slaves, childhood victims of scarlet fever/consumption/measles/etc., cows, chickens, and horses. But as I took my hands and spread the bone pile more evenly across the springtime pasture, I hoped that the past spirits took some solace in my efforts to revive, even on a small scale, a part of what they contributed their lives to years ago.

Now we were a real farm.

Again.

Chapter Ten

“What do I do with this?” Jason, one of the summer interns at my ad agency, asked me. He was holding his mug of coffee in one hand and staring quizzically at the produce dangling tentatively from his other.

“You eat it,” I answered, sweeping up the scattered dirt that had fallen onto the counter in the agency’s kitchen area. A crowd had gathered around the basket filled with the earliest bounty from the Beekman garden. One of the account executives, Julie, was holding an egg with the same perplexed look on her face.

“Don’t you have to
do
something to eggs before you can eat them?” she asked.

“Well,” I answered, “You can fry them or boil them—”

“No,” she interrupted. “I mean, are they
safe
? Do we have to sterilize them somehow?”

It would’ve been easy to make fun of my colleagues’ lack of knowledge about where food comes from, but I was actually quite pleased at the number of them checking out the array of dirty and misshapen produce I’d arranged under a sign with the handwritten words:
BEEKMAN FREE FARMERS MARKET.
Most New Yorkers barely grocery shopped, let alone knew the details of the journey their food took before it reached the store.

“Rinse it off and take a bite,” I instructed Jason. “Go on.”

He held it under the running faucet for a moment, as tentatively as if it were going to wrap around his wrist and climb up his arm. He shook off the excess water drops and took a minuscule nibble with his front teeth.

“What
is
it,” he asked, obviously not quite sure if he liked it.

“It’s a radish,” I answered. He immediately broke out into a wide grin.