The Secret Lives of a Fallow Farm

We don’t have big, long-maned, heritage workhorses to shake their harnesses in the barn.  We don’t have horses at all.  We don’t have dairy cows in the old milking shed along the back of the tall barn, nor goats in the area behind the workbench and tack stalls, where the pigpen used to be. Chickens are all the rage among urban backyarders and back-to-the-farmers. Sometimes when Harry comes for a drink and dinner, or to consult about something, he brings a dozen eggs.  They are lovely; not brown and not white but blue, and pale aquamarine, and a greenish-pastel, and the yokes are a dense, supersaturated yellow.  Sometimes they taste, faintly, of coffee grounds or even melon; the chickens have broken into the garbage again, or the peacocks did, or the coyotes, and the chickens finished the job.

We aren’t growing organic kale or arugula or squash or sweet corn.  When they come into season we stop at Gill’s on 209 on our way into Kingston to get the oil changed or pick up primer at the Home Depot or make a party run at the discount liquor store. Cindy Gill stands at the counter, a flowered apron over her blouse and shorts, and rings up the pile of eggplants and peppers and squashes and beets and the corn and maybe we’ll be eating a roast ear we took from the Igloo that serves now not as a cooler but as a keep-warm and a steam-finisher for the ears that came out of the roaster.  That’s on Fridays and Saturdays and especially Sundays, when the weekenders make it worth their while to fire up the roaster, and the parking lot is full of Audis and Mercedes Benzes and BMWs and Priuses and upscale SUVS, and Cindy looks sympathetically over the heads of those stocking up for a week back in the city, as their children, already restless and viscerally anticipating the long, dreadful traffic jam that is the Thruway down to the Palisades Parkway and the GW Bridge, or to 17 and, eventually, the Holland Tunnel, misbehave in ways that remind you of the travail of parents not quite wealthy enough to have au pairs or nannies from Ireland, but too immersed in their own lives and the life of the City to have yet learned that it is their responsibility to control their children in places where heirloom tomatoes fall easily onto the concrete floor or, if their children commit such indiscretions, that they are responsible for apologizing, for making at least an effort to clean up, for paying for what exploded rich and red or yellow, sweet with juice no one will now revel in, onto the rough stained floor. We look back at Cindy with equal sympathy, and we sometimes break our own rules and get the paper towels from the rack by the onions and mop up the lost treasure and put it in the trash can behind the cash register.

Here’s what we do have. We have a hayfield.  In the late spring and early summer, close to a hundred redwing blackbirds will make their nests there, and they will perch, watchfully, prepared to mob the hawk should it try for the nestlings.  We have the hawk, a redtail, and his partner, whom we see less often, for she, too, is nesting just into the woodlot that separates our land and Harry’s. We have acres of milkweed dense along the edges of the hayfield, and many more individuals interspersed in the tall grasses at the middle, where the slight rise separates one spring flood-stream from the next. We have a snapping turtle who has laid her eggs in the remnants of the old woodpile, where the branches collected each spring after the winter blizzards, and every fall after the hurricane season, pile each year, providing kindling for the fireplaces and, every few years, the necessity of a burn pile, when the county lifts its moratorium, and the volunteer firemen are sure they won’t be overwhelmed by calls from those who can’t seem to understand that a burn should be far from the house and the garage, without dry hayfield surrounding the pile, waiting to carry the flames to woodlot or chicken coop.

We have seasonal visitors, we have sojourners, we have seasonal guests and fulltime residents. In the early spring, the sky darkens with waves of geese moving north. A pair of mergansers nests in the still pool where the creek has moved after the last big hurricane redirected its flow, carved out the swimming hole, and sent chunks of someone’s toolshed to rest atop the rusted remnants of a Model A Ford pickup truck and the inner drum of an old washing machine, back where the skunk cabbage and the ferns and the wild raspberry and rose hide things till the late fall and the scouring of life that leaves only the hulks and hulls and memories of things that come and go or perch or die here with us.

We have fish in the creek, so Harry assures us, though I’ve never seen one.  What I have seen are the crayfish, who explode from their muddy camouflage when your shadow crosses their habitat. Once a man came around the back and I heard the hollow knock and rattle of the unlatched screen from up the barn, as older neighbors say it, and I came down to see what he might want.  Georgie was still alive then, though old, and her barking had only a shadow of its old ferocity.  He had netted crayfish with his stepfather down there, and it had good memories for him.  Something he said, about learning to trust the new man and his slow, near-silent ways.  Now he had his daughter just on weekends; would we consider letting him bring her down there some Saturday or Sunday to see the place he and her grandpa had come to know, and to know each other?  Of course, I said, and you should bring your net if you’ve got one.  We don’t catch them ourselves; you would be welcome.  It was more than a couple of months, but one late-August afternoon I saw him skirting the house, following the line where cut grass met hayfield, a young girl, maybe eleven or twelve, striding in his footsteps, down to the creek, a net, the sort you might buy in a Walmart or a Dollar Store, in her hayfield-side hand. That was years ago; sometimes we see his truck parked on the side of the road, on the triangle of property the other side of the bridge, orphan land that should by rights be part of Harry’s clover field, but is ours because the properties were platted back in 1780 and the creek ran straighter, its boundary-banks a hundred yards the other side of where we are now. Once, not long ago, I went out to warn them of the poison ivy pressing up against the shoulder of the road, and I saw a teenage girl, tall and shy, sitting in the driver’s seat of the truck now rusted out below the door panels, her father a passenger, holding the nets across his lap.  I walked past without speaking to them; it was a moment close to holy and I wasn’t going to break its spell.

Harm hays the field once a summer, sometimes twice if the later season has good rain and sun.  He could do the first haying early, and be assured of two cuts, but we and he have decided it’s better to let the nestlings have full term to leave, and to allow the other nests and secrets to be undisturbed. The milkweeds in midfield, too, can shelter early Monarchs, leaving greater area for the brilliant yellow and black to flash in the evening light.

Dragonflies and dumb wasps who come into the studio and pound their lives out against the screens until I give up, leave the keyboard or set the guitar back in its case, and go out back to loosen the screen and free the desperate grotesque to fly, dazed and disoriented, out into the hayfield or over to the milkweed patch that crowds the edge of the milkpail room where her studio stands orderly and still. Barn swallows who swoop, dive and disappear into the eaves. Snakes under the barn, under the kitchen, under the library, writhing quickly back into the field from the cut grass where they’ve been sunning themselves on the flat edge of the glacial bedrock that emerges, here and there, across the property. A blue heron who comes and goes.  A bald eagle whose nest is down at Harry’s other farm, above the place where our creek emerges from Pompey’s cave, meanders down the other side of Lucas Turnpike, and loses itself in the Rondout; he comes when Harm is haying, leaving the redtails wary and then if nothing large enough to interest him has emerged from behind the haymow, tenders the field back to the hawks and, a day or so later, the turkey vultures in for the dead snakes and the voles and fieldmice cut, bled and dead at the hands of farm machinery. Their doubly hostile names notwithstanding, they are beautiful in the air, their descents languid and geometric, though once they land their ugliness is quickly apparent to the weekenders who stop along the road above to photograph the rustic scene, Harm’s ancient tractors and the baler still boasting the name of a company long bankrupt, its brand not even valuable enough to merit purchase by some Chinese manufacturer who has taken over the business of making things that are used to make things.

Groundhogs, lumbering, insulted, into the dense growth on this side of the creek down past the Purple Martin house and the new river birches just now establishing themselves. A mink, last year; we thought he was an otter but he was too small, too quick, too inquisitive. That blue heron who takes up for a time, awakening me of mornings with his fatalistic, disgruntled cries as he arises from the nesting area to head for the Rondout where the better fish are found. Gnats, swarms of them, vibrating in the hot air below the eaves of the barn. White butterflies that float and flit above the mulch when she has been watering, or in the well beneath the newly planted river birch that replaces the willow downed in the great storm. Viceroys, miniature versions of the Monarchs. 

Ours is not a farm, though we call it that. We have no fantasies of a hardy, self-reliant life, in which we might reclaim some romance-novel picture of a homesteader or pioneer, tanning the hides of the cows too old to offer milk, cutting patches for the old shoes or panels to be sewn into capes and pantaloons. Our lives are devoted to the opposite of self-reliance, to mutual dependency, to trading and buying, to diversity and a healthy respect for the specialties and vocations of others.  Cindy Gill and her family, and the Davenports closer in to town, and the Sheehans, and little Amy with her organic stand selling just three or four things:  these are the people who provide us the greens and the squashes and the corn too sweet to be tender, requiring that we find the toothpicks after the last ear is done and the cobs are in the bag to be tossed with the other cuttings and leavings, down in the growth by the little willow, at the creek’s edge. Young Bush, Wayne Junior, hunts our property in the season, and sometime in late fall he brings us venison cut and wrapped in butcher paper, the contents scripted in wide magic marker:  Stew Meat. Steak. Burger. Charles Noble has 70 head of cattle who migrate across the open meadows of the wealthy weekenders, people from the city, in financial, who are charmed by the lowing and the sight of the small herd seen on a Saturday morning from the back porch. To get from one pasturage to another, he has arranged to cross our hayfield, and the herd stays overnight down in the lower reaches, where Harm doesn’t hay.  In the spring, after the slaughter, he or Francesca stop by with the charmingly packaged cuts, vacuum-packed and frozen, their brand, Moveable Beast, perfect for sale in the Manhattan farmers’ markets where they make their money, and the locavore restaurants down in Red Hook and Brooklyn and up in Harlem, where the population’s hip enough, and rich enough, for their particular culinary braggadocio.

What do we offer in return?  Buffer, recompense, reparation, even penance. Across the Rondout, on the Schoonmaker’s farm, the cropduster whines and roars; to make its runs, it must return across the edge of our woodlot, where, each first time of the season, we are sure it is too low and will clip the tall oak and crash. That sweet corn is better than the ears we get, or at least more tender, if a bit less sweet.  Like Charles’s tenderloin and Amy’s organic arugula and the Davenport’s tiny, misshapen eggplants of brilliant and unexpected hues and patterns like snake-skin or butterfly wing, like the Gills’ heirloom tomatoes and Peter Lundgren’s honey, these crops will make their way down to the city to feed the fashionable and the fickle. The big farms have sequestered areas for organic growing, and they are far more careful with what they spray, and where, and when, on the rest.  But this is still farm country, where ploughing edge-to-edge, where draining a wetland, where growing to the demands of market and not the ideals of diversity can be the difference between an economy-class winter cruise to the Caribbean and a bankruptcy sale in the equipment shed by the highway.

Five years ago, the barn was filled with bats.  In the twilight, they would emerge, black clouds against the deep azure of the near-dark sky, racing along the grass and above the meadow and down by the creek, erasing the air of mosquitos. They are all gone, now. Three years ago at this time, the milkweed patches were thick with Monarchs; yesterday I saw my second of the season, or perhaps the third.  Each year we look, a bit fearfully, for the ungainly first landing of the heron, listen pointedly each morning for the drumroll made by the pileated woodpecker on the hollow of the dead tree where our woodlot meets Harry’s.

The bees are back; Peter Lundgren is secretive and a bit smug about his cure for Colony Collapse Disorder; he should be, since in this scarcity economy he can charge goldbug prices for his wild honey. Our clover, our wildflowers, cacophonies of color down at the edge of the wetlands, are noisy with his bees on the right afternoon, in the right month or week.  He brings us a tub of honey when he comes by to argue Puritan theology with me after the harvest season has begun to wind down and before the deer hunting season has begun.  There’s a few weeks in the late fall when he comes by not often, but more often, the old pickup packed with beekeeper’s equipage piled disorderly from bounding around in the fields between hives and colonies, pulled into the driveway, while he waits to see if I will emerge from the house or studio, having time to talk of theological precisions few others could tolerate.  I was at one time a scholar of the Mathers and the Winthrops and the others who defined a steely intrepid way of conceiving human life, in New England.  A boy of ten, I received my own Bible from Reverend North in the nave of the First Congregational Church in Guilford, Connecticut, the prize for memorizing all the books of the Bible, plus two long passages, one from the Old, one from the New Testament, and reciting to the Sunday School class four separate Psalms, one each Sunday for a month, assigned to me by the assistant minister, a theology student at Yale who came out to train and who, while kind, remained unmemorable.  His name is lost to me, but Reverend North’s is not, for he preached the old Puritan way: uncompromising, with no effort at rhetoric, building his sermons on a logic so clear and so unyielding that all of my writing since has been made to construct its opposites.  I write not like the iron law of the Heavens but like the unruly vines that keep the dog from marching unimpeded through the undergrowth down to the fast and dangerous part of the creek. 

Peter’s bent is different; he came here from Minot, North Dakota to train as a poet at the college, and somewhere the language of the Bible possessed him fully; now he is the rebbe of a tiny congregation replicating the church of the first years after Christ’s death. He accuses me of Antinomianism or, worse, pantheism; I suggest certain fallacies in his doctrine; we talk of our grown or near-grown children and the perils they will face. Then he starts the old black Dakota, and all the tools, the hoods, the gloves, the boots, and the spare screens and the roll of wirenet and the pruning shears rattle and shake in the back till the carburetor steps back from the precipice of vapor-lock and the engine steadies, and he lets in the clutch and heads for home.

The bees are back, but the bats are not, and each year the Monarchs have shown fewer and fewer.  We are, I said, recompense and reparation; not just us, but many others up here, for whom the land is not a picturesque escape or a romantic folly-in-the-making or simply scenery to be photographed from the side of our road, Harm’s old tractor on one side of the frame, balanced on the other by the loom of our tall, asymmetrical barn and, beyond it, the low outlines of the old house with its red metal roof an appropriate contrast to the deep blue of the summer sky. Paul and Sarah at the top of the ridge, his hammer echoing across the valley as he repairs the ancient barn, her screen door slamming as she goes out to dump the garbage in the composter; Harry with his vineyards and his clover fields, great swaths of his property  left to scrub or meadow, slow-emerging woodlot and untouched riverbanks unvisited by the dangerous unpredictability of human tourism. The bald eagle is back, after forty years. The mink is perhaps a harbinger.

I don’t know what it is I do here.  I have little to show, if wild honey or the venison or the eggplant are the particularities against which I must measure what I make.  Perhaps it is enough to witness; perhaps it is enough to listen hard and stare relentlessly and seek faithfully to do honor to the waves of wind across the hayfield, the bowl of the night sky and the torn curtain of the stars. It’s all I have, and so I offer it.  

Big pickups, wood-burning fireplaces, and the Hawk Above the Hayfield

Last Friday they forecast a storm of the century, but our little valley was right in between the two big storms that collided over Connecticut and Massachusetts to devastating effect.  The Old Man, who’s living with us now, was worried she wouldn’t make it out of New York before it hit, remembering with his long view the time she spent three days in a rest stop in Ohio, and the time she ended up on the floor of some airport for a couple of days.  She made the last bus out—at 3:30 pm.—and was home by 7.  The next day I shoveled for three hours, clearing a path for the EMT ambulance in case the Old Man took a turn for the worse.

Yesterday started with a frozen rain that coated the piles of snow with a crust of ice. Today a warm burst from the south pushed the clouds aside for tears of blue that ranged from pale pastel up to the east on the ridge, to a brilliant saturated Technicolor over to the south.  Tomorrow it was supposed to plummet back down ahead of a new storm, but now it looks like sunshine for the next week. 

This is normal winter weather here in the rural stretches of New York a couple of hours north of New York City.  Down there, though, where the coastal regions whip up winds and froth the weather with salty air, floods and freezes, high winds and surge tides aren’t giving up. Out in the Midwest, in Chicago where we used to live, there’s been almost no snow at all, and the temperatures have been wildly off their averages.

I’ve been reading back copies of Life magazine—starting with its first issues in 1936 and ending up around the moon mission. Weather is a favorite subject for American obsession, and sensational picture journalism loves to ramp up the rhetoric.  But Life started publication two years after what had been the hottest summer and hottest year on record in the United States.  1934 seemed to confirm the dour predictions that the Dust Bowl was not an isolate phenomenon. After that, though, a long stretch of temperate weather led us back through the rest of the Depression and the war.

Actually, Life had a hard time with the weather for its entire active lifespan—the climate in the U.S. seemed pretty temperate all the way up into the ‘70s.  There were tornadoes in Tornado Alley, always good for a sidebar, and local news photographers made a little cash with time-lapse pictures of the twisters eliminating barns and false-front Oklahoma and Kansas towns. There were hurricanes in the late summer and fall. Typhoons and floods and earthquakes hammered the rest of the globe, but Life didn’t have the best luck with freelancers in places where they took place.

The Missouri River flooded nicely in 1955, and Margaret Bourke-White did her trademark fly-around yielding a flood of aerial views of the spreading waters. There was a good flood in Texas in ’53, and Life’r John Dominis got a great shot of a man astraddle a homemade raft made out of three inner tubes, some scrap lumber, and an orange crate, floating in the midst of a fruit orchard with only the tippy-tops of the trees showing in neat rows. In ’53, Life got some official pictures of a flood in the Netherlands—dull, but serviceable, and one or two even showed a picturesque Dutch windmill. ’52 was a hot year, thanks to some very picturesque flooding of Venice, enabling the return of the ever-popular gondola moorings, this time with some newsworthiness.  Kansas also had some good flooding, and Life got a man out there to show the U. of Kansas students heroically piling sandbags. ’47 was good because both the Mississippi in the U.S. and major rivers in the U.S.S.R. flooded, providing a we’re-all-in-this-together counterpoint to the Cold War rhetoric of the moment. Oddly enough,1938’s great flood of the Huang He River in China, a location dear to the heart of publisher Henry Luce, didn’t get any photo-play at all, probably because the magazine hadn’t yet set up a sufficiently wide net of stringers in the backcountry there. But ’37 had sent superstar Bourke-White down to Kentucky for some heartstring-tugging images of pitiable victims of the floods there.

‘53’s North Sea flood, though, is worth returning to, because it’s the one that drove the Dutch to invest billions in a flood control system that’s now being touted for the New Jersey-New York-Long Island coastline that was devastated by Hurricane Sandy in 2012.  The Delta Works, begun shortly after the ‘53 flood and still being modified today, has so far cost each Dutch citizen 16 Euros—not a bad price, but wildly outdated. Building it today would require something more like 100 Euros per capita. Doing the same to the East Coast of the U.S. would cost, at a low estimate, a hundred times the Delta Works cost, and it would take decades to get into service, even as it deflected the floods and troubles elsewhere. Staten Island doesn’t have much of a future;  nor does the Jersey shore, or the Far Rockaways, or much of the coastline of Long Island. The Outer Banks of the Carolinas won’t be there long. Georgia, Florida, Texas…

Not that we need to worry about that here in the Rondout Valley. Yet. We have the Shawangunk Mountain ridge to our east, and the Catskills to our west. But every river and stream running through here takes its source up in the mountains, and every year the flooding has shocked oldtimers and flooded houses and barns dating to the 1600s and 1700s.  Two years ago, we got a swimming hole where our property abuts Harry’s.  Last year, it filled in again. The farmers are losing their ability to predict a year’s season; Hurricane Irene left the Davenport’s farm almost entirely underwater, and the Gill’s up 209 toward Kingston was pretty much a washout, too. Rumor had it, if they’d had a buyer, both families would have packed it up.

This year the price of firewood plummeted as the devastated woodlots of Irene’s winds came in the market fully seasoned.  Propane hasn’t moderated, and heating oil’s still high and going higher.  Natural gas prices have dropped quite a bit, but that doesn’t do a rural dweller much good, since the nearest pipeline is all the way up in Kingston, 20 miles north. A lot of wood is being burned this winter.

Around here, there are three classes of people when it comes to climate change, and all three of us are contributing to the problem, all three of us have our heads in the sand and our short-term interest driving our daily actions.  There are the non-believers. Kurt, Jr. up the hill has a top-end 4x4 pickup—long bed, double-cab, flare fenders, the whole bit. He’s put stacks behind the cab with glass-packs and when he downshifts they make a lot of noise.  At night, you can see the flames popping out the top.  God only knows how he gets the thing to pass state inspection.  Last year and the year before he and his friends used to smoke pot and drink beer around a campfire they’d build in Harry’s clover field and then when they were ready, usually around 10 at night, they’d fire up the Snowmobiles and race around the field doing figure-8s before crossing the stream to run an obstacle course set up in our hayfield, then hit it up to Paul and Sarah’s, then onto the Rail-Trail for a little illegal drag racing. Somebody talked the Staties into running a few patrols, and that led to some DUIs and some trespassing charges and fines and safety school stints.   This year the Snowmobile crowd has tiptoed quietly along the edge of our woodlot before ducking into Harry’s  and heading for the rail-trail.

But Kurt, Jr. hasn’t forgotten. He knows who made the calls—hell, we all told his dad, Kurt, Sr.  Every time he comes past the house now, he downshifts and hits the accelerator, hard. He’s my alarm clock. He does the same in front of the Baker’s up the hill—God knows what crime they committed to deserve it, but there it is. In the summer, Kurt, Jr. races dirt-track Modifieds over in Accord.  He’s got a few other toys too—an ATV I seem to remember, and a dirt bike. 

Kurt, Jr. doesn’t believe in Global Warming.  It’s too inconvenient.  Everything that gives him pleasure contributes to the problem. By contrast, his father, Kurt, Sr., has worked for the Ulster County roads crew for thirty years or so.  After Irene, he and his crew had to repair just about every culvert and county-road bridge, and he knows damned well that things are changing.  He also knows damned well just how much money it’s costing the county and the state with every disaster.  Our county’s small enough in population that you can see the effect on your property taxes and it’s not pretty. He’s got a fair amount of land, between him and his wife and his mother, and like a lot of people he’s gone over more and more to woodburning stoves and furnaces as the taxes eat at the heating oil budget.

Around here, a month’s propane in winter runs you $500 or more—and that’s with a well-insulated house and a habit of keeping the thermostat low.  Heating oil is worse. So the winter mornings are aromatic with the smell of woodsmoke, just as the clear fall days are a symphony of chain saws and mechanical splitters and tractors dragging the sledges full of split wood out to be covered and allowed to season for a year or two. 

It’s a romance of the senses, especially for the weekenders who like to think they’re embraced in the bosom of the rural life. But most of the wood stoves and furnaces around here are old-school, which means each one contributes the equivalent of four of Kurt, Jr.’s 4x4s worth of climate-change pollution.  Moreover, the trees being cut down for firewood aren’t being replaced at nearly the same rate as they’re being depleted.  This is an area full of forests dating to the years after the great blueberry burns of the early 20^th century gave way as blueberry farms made wild blueberry picking uneconomical.  The good burning trees, like oak, are at full maturity now—a century or so later.  If they’re replanted one-to-one, they’ll be back to soaking up CO² in the early 22^nd century.

Meanwhile, the weekenders drive up from New York City on the Thruway, doing 80 and 85 to get here sooner, stuck in interminable traffic jams down by the city where they idle and inch, idle and inch for sometimes hours.  Their houses with the picturesque huge stone fireplaces ablaze on Friday and Saturday nights and all day Sundays are paid for by hard corporate labor, long hours, and lots of travel—air travel. A single New York-L.A. round trip contributes about as much to global warming as a year’s worth of driving a moderately new car. A weekender doing two round-trip flights a week makes Kurt, Jr. look like a Sierra Club eco-hippie.

The sun is setting on the hayfield, turning the snow shades of pink and red. The hawk is perched in the top of the ash tree that will soon be dead from the devastations of the Emerald Ash Borer, a virulent parasite brought to the U.S. from Asia by international trade in the ‘90s. The creek is rising as the snow melts up in the Catskills and by tomorrow it will have overflowed its banks, depositing small icebergs within the treestand that separates Harry’s clover field from the hayfield. The trees are already compromised; the rise and drop of the creek so accelerated this last decade has undermined the old ones, leaving them to topple into the water where they capture the branches and logs and scraps of old farm structures during the spring thaw, making dams that push the creek up over its banks. The old outhouse, once far above flood stage, has listed to the side and will probably collapse this spring.  I didn’t have time to shore it up this year;  I was too concerned with getting culvert and French tile and working with the Bushes, Wayne and Wayne, Jr., to dig drainage swales in the hayfield and between the house and the barn so the dirt could hold topsoil and nutrients. All summer, all fall, the hawk watched as we did this work.  Now he has the hayfield to himself, except for the evenings when Kurt, Jr. and the boys run the Snowmobile caravan along the edge of the woodlot, duck onto the old timber road, and head out into nature.