I can’t begin to thank all the people who made this event possible. From the moment we made the offer to host the get together I received nothing but encouragement, and enthusiastic support from all over this country from people we had never met before. As I lay in bed in those days after the fall, feeling like a complete failure for letting my family down, for wrecking my foot, for having to rely on my already overworked wife and children to do the things that were my responsibility, the idea to do this popped up.
Leaving on our 6 hour trek to New Hampshire, so no posts until tonight and sporadic over the next few days. Looking forward to meeting some TBPers at Hardscrabble’s annual shindig. I hope I won’t be required to slaughter my meal. 🙂
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It has been several weeks since my accident and in the aftermath of the operation to repair my badly damaged foot I have been confined to a bed on the first floor of our home. I had recently repainted it and put in a bed for guests without realizing it would serve as a my residence for next three or four months while the bones and flesh healed. The doctors were honest with me about the prognosis, considering my age and the severity of the injury and over the last few days I have emerged from the haze of perpetual anesthesia and come to accept my fate.
About a year after we moved here my oldest son and I built a tree house in one of the big maples in the front yard. It was a giant, healthy tree that has stood in that spot for a good 200 years or more and it was shaped almost perfectly for the platform; four massive leaders spreading out like a human hand held palm up, fingers bent at ninety degree a angle. It was the first maple I’d ever tapped, On a warm, late Winter day in 2009 I’d drilled a single hole in the rough gray bark, tapped in one of the antique spiles that came with the farm, and I hung an old galvanized bucket from a hook and watched as the first drops of sap fell.
Last week my youngest son and I decided to take a trip to visit family in the midlands of Virginia. The intention was to convince my Aunt and Uncle to move up north to live with us, an idea we had been considering for some time now. We’d decided to make the trip an educational opportunity for our son, but it was, for me, a way to see that the decision I’d made ten years earlier to step away from the rat race had been the right one for our family.
I’d kept close tabs on the direction of our country over those passing years, but from a safe distance. There was a time when I’d lived on the roads of U.S, travelling the highways and the back roads of each state in order to make my living. I’d built a career on my ability to adjust to each region, to either speed up or slow down my delivery depending on whether I was performing in a remote location or a major urban center. I knew my way around not only the country, but the people as well.
I was aware that a decade, particularly the one we’d just come through, had wrought some changes not only on the landscape of America, but the population that inhabited it. We arranged it so that we would visit our old hometown and family in Princeton, New Jersey for the first leg of the trip and arrive in Washington D.C. on the day of the midterm elections. We had additional plans to visit some historical sites that had a family connection in order to better understand our own place in the fabric of the American experience.
Over the weekend my son and I decided to take a break and watch a couple of episodes of a show called The Carbonaro Effect. It features a young magician that pulls a Candid Camera style set of tricks on unsuspecting people using magic as it’s hook. If you haven’t seen him before it’s fairly entertaining in a fashion the first couple of times, but as we watched it became evident that what he was doing wasn’t very popular with the people he was fooling.
Anyone who came away from that thinking that the woman was credible are simply incapable of sober judgement, INCAPABLE. Can I prove she’s lying? Of course I can’t, but I don’t need to be an MD to know if one of my children has the flu, or a degree in meteorology to know that a thunderstorm is approaching. During the 70’s I distinctly remember when the word “prejudice” became synonymous with “bigoted” despite the fact that the two words are different. I am prejudiced to snakes with rattles, roaring infernos, angry mobs with weapons in their hands running down the street, but that doesn’t make me a bigot, it makes me sensible, observant and a survivor.
“First learn the meaning of what you say, then speak.”
-Epictetus
I’ve been writing these essays about the farm life for almost ten years now. Before that I posted a lot of work anonymously in numerous forums, and before that I wrote under my own name; short stories, articles for third tier publications, jokes and two aborted attempts at The Great American Novel that occupy the better part of an old cardboard banana box and the hard drive of a Compaq laptop that hasn’t been turned on in over a decade. Looking back at the body of work I’ve produced has been a revelation of sorts. All that time and effort to turn thoughts into words, and for what exactly? The old cliche about insanity- doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result- comes to mind, but I think that all the hours has had a much different effect.
When I was 10 years old I recall vividly coming home from school one day in the middle of Winter and writing a dirty limerick on a bedside notebook I’d gotten as gift for Christmas. I don’t remember where I heard it and I know that I didn’t fully understand what it meant at the time, but something propelled me to put the words down in pen and ink on paper. The opening lines are as memorable to me now as they likely were then, “In days of old when knights were bold…” and even as I wrote it I felt a weight lifted off my young shoulders. My mother discovered the childish scrawl the following morning and confronted me to my shock and embarrassment and then forgave me for that act of…what exactly? I certainly didn’t understand then the power of those words in my unformed mind, or the release of getting them out of it, if only symbolically in crooked letters, but it has stayed with me all these years.
We have finally completed bottling the syrup we made this year and the first shipments have already gone out. For the rest of this week we will be assembling the boxes and filling the order and making the run into town to visit the Post Office so that the things we have been working on in our small corner of New Hampshire will be enjoyed by people thousands of miles away. In the past few years we worked on the honor system where you emailed or phoned in your order and we put the names on a list and sent out the syrup with a note tucked inside and waited for the return mail to come…
It was like a second Christmas for us, the checks and FRN’s tucked into envelopes with addresses from all fifty states and the kind notes thanking us for the syrup and even for the writing. On occasion there would be extras tucked in with the payment; homemade preserves from Indiana, honey from Florida, Coffee from Texas, pine nuts from New Mexico, dried herbs from a garden in California, a beautiful German steel knife from the Pacific Northwest, the complete poems of Emily Dickinson from South Carolina, handmade note paper from Minnesota, arrowheads from the Ohio River valley.
I came to it later in life after trying- and doing fairly well at the so-called American Dream life of high income/big house/more stuff lifestyle. Living a life dependent on other people to maintain your home, teach your children, look after your health, clean your house is a form of bondage. It’s bad for your body, your family, your soul and the better you do the more people around you envy what you have. You don’t inspire them to new heights, but to drag you down. And because you don’t want to lose what you have you make compromises in what you say and how you act and what you wear or drive, the list is endless.
The entire media as well as the combined forces of social media are going all out in an effort to drown the crisis actor baby in the bathtub before it goes full blown Fake News on them. Deleting hundreds of thousands of accounts, flagging posts, de-listing and banning posters on forums and message boards and calling everyone with a pulse and an IQ on the right hand side of the bell curve a tin-foil hat wearing conspiracy theorist for even suggesting the entirely plausible based on the evidence suggestion that people aren’t genuine but rather contrived mouthpieces of an agenda seems a bit, I don’t know, overblown.
When it snows up here I plow a route for a friend. There’s a dozen or so places at various points around the lake, most of them tricky with steep, winding driveways, and difficult approaches. it may be why he’s given them to me instead of the other, younger drivers who plow the big parking lots and the commercial properties around the lake. He knows that I take my time with each one, that I am by nature a cautious man who likes to leave things just so and he knows that no one will call in to complain about the narrow paths shoveled to the door or some bed of flowers that’s been accidentally driven over.
I mark out the route in the Fall before the ground freezes by driving wooden stakes into the edges of the driveway that let me know where I can pass safely and I write my notes about things like fuel tanks and access to the generators that all the big places have these days. I drop off five gallon pails of granite dust and sand to spread along the sidewalks, concrete aprons and porches. I rarely speak to the homeowners, most of them live somewhere else during the Winter months, but if I do happen to see one I make it a point to ask their preferences and make sure to jot it down.
One of the first things I did when we moved up to the farm was to build a swing set for the kids. My oldest son was 11 years old at the time so I had him help me with the project. I bought some rough-sawn eight by eights and dug holes four foot deep into the eskar in front of the house. We cut the seats to length and drilled holes through them for the anchors. He learned to use a belt sander and then an orbital to take down the grain to a soft finish, we painted them bottle green, three coats to stand up to all the use they’d see over time and then we measured the lengths of chain and attached them with clevis yokes to the cross bar at the top.
The suicide rate for farmers is more than double that of veterans. Former farmer Debbie Weingarten gives an insider’s perspective on farm life – and how to help
The other night I was invited to sit on a panel and talk about modern farming practices in New Hampshire. There was a great crowd, the other presenters were articulate and knowledgeable, the venue was warm and festive and it was a great experience to share the things I’d learned over the past eight years with an audience of attentive and intelligent adults. Our experience has been a very positive one despite the setbacks and losses.
I raise beef cattle, my friend has a nice herd of dairy cows. I trade steaks and ground beef for raw milk and cream. I appreciate his herd, he thinks well of mine. Both of us spend a lot of time with our livestock and have good relationships with the animals in them- I could tell you the month and the year of each one’s birth, their relationship to each other, etc. and I know he could too, so we have a solid handle on both the personalities and temperaments of each as well as the herds collectively.
I would not even dream of trying to milk one of my cows though I am sure it could be done and I know that while he could probably eat one of the Jerseys if he had no other options, it would be a distant second choice to one of the T-bones that come off my Herefords.
In the past few weeks America has been given a chance to examine it’s pathological descent up close and personal. Knee deep in a growing pile of human wreckage that is the opioid epidemic additional bodies have been heaped upon the charnel pile. First in Las Vegas and then in Hollywood, two towns that personify our ever increasing addiction to debauchery and dissolution. Cities built, not on an ethic of hard work and sincerity, but rather on fantasy and falsehoods.