It wasn’t always easy for me to fit in, either. There was a divide between the summer people and the locals, whose roots went back generations. It was also a division between the haves and have-nots, between liberals and conservatives, between those with fancy educations and those with common sense. Also between the people who worked with their hands and the people who paid them for that work. Despite the small population, they didn’t usually attend the same parties. Town couldn’t always decide which side I fell on, with all the mixed signals I was giving off, a newcomer with city manners but scarred-up, callused hands.
When we first arrived, I was always lost, even though there are not many roads. “How do I get from here to there?” I’d ask. “Oh, you go past Lincoln’s, just before the old Ansen place, turn at the Four Corners, and they live up Bull Run.” These were signifiers without actual signs, not marked on a map, their meaning attached to our town’s collective memory. That system assumes a deep familiarity with the whole community—not only its buildings and geography but its history and its people. To know where Lincoln’s was, you would need to know that the empty steel building west of our farm used to be a feed and hardware store owned by the much-loved, kindhearted, and long-deceased Bob Lincoln. To know Bull Run required understanding that the rise past the south end of Main Street was once the domain of a family of cantankerous brothers. The name referred to their belligerent natures, still in play a hundred and fifty years later. I got this explanation from Jim LaForest, one of our town elders, who remembered hearing it from his father-in-law, who knew the brothers not in his lifetime but through family lore. To know that our hill was called Rogers Hill presupposed knowledge that a farmhouse owned by the Rodgers family used to be at the top, where an empty restaurant stands now. Anyone who’d seen that house with their own eyes, or known the family, was long dead, but the name had stuck to the place.
It was the same with people. Our first winter on the farm, our neighbor Ron came over, bearing a venison pie he had made, its rich meat filling fragrant with warm spices, a perfect ratio of gravy to flaky butter crust—the first of many satisfying delicacies he brought us, and the start of countless kitchen conversations. “Aunt Shirley likes meat pie with a touch of nutmeg, but Danny prefers it without,” he said without preamble. I had no idea who Aunt Shirley was, nor who Danny was, but Ron kept going, dropping more names with every sentence. I decided not to stop him to ask for clarification. I already knew I wanted to belong, and figured it was better to learn these things like a foreign language, by immersion. And eventually, I did. As we wove our lives into the fabric of the community, I learned that Aunt Shirley was Mrs. Shirley LaForest, Jim’s wife, who taught Sunday school at the Methodist church. She was the official town historian, had grown up on a farm nearby, and could tell the history of the local farms and what each family had grown or raised, traced back a hundred years. She knew which farms had specialized in growing trefoil for seed, and which had raised sheep, and which had been dairies shipping butter on the train that cut over the road just west of our farm. All three were agricultural specialties in our region at different times. Now Shirley was watching a new farm grow up on our land, just one in a line of many.
Danny turned out to be Danny Sweat, our mailman, who was also Ron’s best friend, an EMT, and a commissioner for the fire department one town north of ours. He was Ron’s business partner in his sugarhouse and one of his hunting companions. Ron himself was rooted to the town by the weight of nine generations, the branches of his family spread wide through the region. He was a widower, retired from the merchant marine; he had an engineer’s logical mind and a deep love for this place. He also had a sense of duty to the whole community. He’d served at different times as the chief of the volunteer fire department, the town supervisor, and always a volunteer EMT, pulling out of his driveway at all hours in any weather to fetch the ambulance from the firehouse and tend to a neighbor’s crisis. The complexity of all the lines of connection took me years to untwist. Following them all the way to their ends gave me a lot of satisfaction.
* * *
Mark and I came from different backgrounds, had different values, different motivations, and a different perception of the place we’d landed in together, but the farm was the sturdy bridge between us. During the first years of our marriage, we worked sixteen hours a day together to build it. What it gave us in return was the scaffolding for our relationship, for a family, a life.
And it gave us food. In my old life, food was usually not much more than a need that had to be met every day. Here, it was the center of everything, who we were and what we did. The quality and taste of what we grew was so different from what I had been used to that I felt like I’d discovered a lost continent. Seven years in, I still couldn’t get over it. Seasonality had been invisible to me in the city, where anything was available at any time. Here, every week brought new flavors to perfection, and then they were gone, replaced by others. It was a never-ending cycle of longing and fulfillment, directly connected to our work, and learning to live this way was like hearing a tune I had known once and forgotten. It just felt deeply right. After Jane was born, my happiest moments were in the kitchen, sharp knife in my hand, small child underfoot, taking apart something that, hours earlier, had been warmed by the same sun that was warming me, and fed by the soil under my feet.
All farms reveal your inner self whether you like it or not. Your daily choices shape the soil, fields, buildings, and fence lines, sketch the plants and animals in your own soul’s likeness. Your values are visible in the way a farm looks. Your ambitions, strengths, and weaknesses are there for everyone to see. The farm we made was a physical manifestation of who we were, together.
When we’d arrived, with a measly fifteen thousand dollars in savings between us, the land had been out of regular production for almost two decades. The soil hadn’t been asked for much in that time, which meant it was in pretty good shape. Bringing soil back to health after it has been misused can take years, sometimes generations. We had all sorts of soil types, from gray impenetrable clay to light sand. Millions of years ago, this land was under a vast shallow ocean, and the sea creatures laid a bedrock of limestone, which made the earth sweet. Then came ice sheets a mile thick, pushing down from the north, melting back, leaving rubble and erratic boulders in their wake. The meltwater rushed across our land and filled the basin of Lake Champlain. The lake covered most of the farm, but its edge is now a mile from our house. A stretch from our house to the neighbor’s was a freshwater beach. Clams grew there in abundance, and when the land dried, topsoil formed over them. Occasionally, we find their shells, a half-inch long, bleached white by twelve thousand years underground. They aren’t fossils but actual shells. Mark considers them lucky, and when he finds them, he eats them, crunching them between his teeth. The very best acres were formed when the lake level was six feet above our fields and primordial storm surges roiled the waters. The turbulence dispersed the fine silt that forms clay and left behind the coarser particles so that the soil is not as dense as it is in other places in our valley and is more hospitable to the roots of plants. We have more than a hundred acres of the good stuff in two different places.
The soil was a gift. The rest of it—sagging fences, leaking roofs—was fixable. We spent much of our first year pulling down what couldn’t be saved and patching what could. Over the ensuing seasons, we added enough infrastructure to qualify as a small nation-state: three new barns, a new well, improved roads. Six years in, we dug the footings for a grant-funded solar array to supply all the electricity our farm required then. The solar project was part of our plan to reduce our reliance on fossil fuel. We wanted to try to make a farm that did more good than harm to the soil, the water, the climate, and the community, as well as be productive and profitable, which is much harder than it may seem from the outside.
Mark and I had long talks about this in the beginning. It looked fairly straightforward to me—feed people, be nice, don’t wreck the land—but
the longer I farmed, the more complicated it became. Were we adding health to the soil? Producing what the land could reasonably carry? Protecting the quality of the groundwater? Were we paying our workers a living wage and treating everyone fairly? Were we sequestering more carbon than we released? Were we keeping the farm financially stable? Did we have enough time away from farming to be a healthy couple, a healthy family? Any one of those things alone was a straightforward proposition. The challenge was to do them all simultaneously. Mark wasn’t convinced there was ever a time in the ten-thousand-year history of agriculture when farms added more, on balance, than they took. In his obsession with farming, he worked to figure out if it was possible.
The draft horses were part of the plan, and that was where his obsession and mine intersected most neatly. We’d built the farm around them and the work we could do with them. We had tractors and used them, but we relied on the horses for most of our vegetable work, more than half the haymaking, and the hauling of heavy things that is a constant part of farming. Their presence had shaped the farm in the imperfect look of our furrows, the shaggy headlands where the horses grazed at night, and the small scale of our fields, which ran long and narrow to minimize the time spent turning a team around. For Mark, the horses were an expression of his desire to use the sun in real time: the energy of the sun created the plants that fueled the horses that did the heavy work with us to tend the plants that fed the animals that fed us. For me, the horses were a rediscovery of my childhood, when my whole world had revolved around them.
CHAPTER 2
The roots of my love for horses go as deep as memory. The first: We were visiting my mother’s family in Tennessee in 1975. I was four. We were Yankees and they were Southern. Mom was somewhere in between, assimilated Yankee. She’d keep her rural Southernness well hidden until those annual trips; it had been shamed out of her by the girls she’d roomed with in New York City, when she was a beautiful nineteen-year-old stewardess for TWA, freshly plucked. They would make her repeat things and then laugh at her accent. But on that trip home, with us children, without Dad, I heard her vowels change back to their original shapes; her voice and manners became softer, more delicate.
My brother and I had been coaxed into good behavior on the airplane to Tennessee with the promise of visiting a pony that lived at my uncle’s house. It had sounded like fantasy or maybe a metaphor. As if my mother had told me that my uncle had a benevolent dragon living in his yard and we’d get to see it if we were good. At his house, I became aware that this pony was real. The grown-ups sat around the living room, talking loosely of taking us children outside to ride her. I was full of the small powerless person’s fear that it might not come true, that my great longing to touch the pony might continue to go unfulfilled because of some grown-up snag. I could see that my cousins, my brother, none of them felt the way I did. To my cousins, who lived there, the pony was a chore.
We pulled up to the barn in my uncle’s Cadillac. The Tennessee landscape was a mix of red clay and brown grass. The barn was metal-sided, long. The adults made small talk as we walked in, but I, the family chatterbox, was suddenly hushed. I’d already caught a hint of it, in noises of the barn—the blowing, stomping, shaking of large bodies. The mysterious new smells of sawdust, leather, the horses themselves. Someone lifted me up. I saw an enormous eye. I put my hand between the bars of a box stall and touched the velvet lips of a beast. There was a gust of warm breath from nostrils as large as my fist, and I felt an unnameable physical thrill. I had no word for it then. Now I’d call it awe.
I already knew that animals were more interesting to me than anything else. Partly because of their complexity, partly because they were unattainable. For an afternoon, I’d owned a painted turtle that someone gave me, but his cardboard box blew away with him in a thunderstorm that same day. Once I’d held a spent butterfly with tattered wings. Our old black-and-white cat tolerated me, but barely. I liked to press my face into the fishing-line feel of his whiskers, his pink tongue coated with Tender Vittles, the wet-chalk smell of the pads of his feet. He held no mystery for me, or nearly none. But no one would let me near the large or wild animals that I ached to touch. Here, for the first time, I could, I did, and I knew it was a great privilege.
Emotion is the glue that cements memories; the stickiest stuff is reserved for the deepest and strongest feelings. I have only the smudgiest recollection of the catechism I learned for my confirmation. I have lost every formula I memorized in calculus. I don’t even know what I had for lunch last Wednesday. But I remember in sharp detail the saddle that my uncle pulled out of the shed and placed on the pony’s back that day over forty years ago. It had tooled light-brown leather and a little silver horn. I can see the bridle going over the pony’s black ears, which were fuzzy with winter fur. I stood as close as I could so that I would be first. The saddle was like a throne. The feel of reins in my hands was responsibility, power. Then movement, as my uncle led the pony in circles through the yard and down to Pretty Creek. That rocking, magical movement. I planted the pony’s name, Gaye, emphatically in my memory, knowing that I’d have to survive on pretending, until I could do this again.
I don’t know where my affinity for horses came from, but my uncle had it too. He had discovered it against all odds. My grandparents did not have it easy. Their years of raising children were rocky. My granny had an eighth-grade education; when she was sixteen, she went to work in a shirt factory. She was working there when she met my grandfather, who was running a restaurant in town. My grandfather had finished only sixth grade, and early on in the marriage, he drank. He would disappear on drinking binges a few times a year, until my mother turned ten and asked him to quit. He abruptly did. They moved often, worked seven days a week at service jobs or their own small businesses. For a while, they had a small motor inn with a beer joint. Granny weighed ninety pounds in her prime and was tough as flint. We went to see her every year, except the ones she came north to see us. Oh, how I loved her. I kept her stories and the sound of her voice in the same place I tucked the silver-horned saddle. Once a man wandered drunk and threatening into her house at the motor inn while she was alone with her children. Granny gave him a chance to turn around, and when he didn’t take it, she grabbed her loaded pistol from her dresser drawer, held it in two trembling hands, and backed him out of the house.
They were not people who had room in their lives for something as frivolous as horse fancying. But my uncle walked into a barn full of beautiful horses when he was a young man just out of the navy and did not leave that world for the next fifty years. He became a world-class rider, then a famous trainer of champion Tennessee Walking Horses. I think he recognized what horses did to me, and sent me a subscription to the Walking Horse Times. By the time I was a teenager, I knew the famous Tennessee Walking Horse stallions like other girls knew the pop stars in Tiger Beat. I cut out newsprint pictures of the champion horses and taped them to the back of my bedroom door.
Maybe the affinity is genetic, but it skipped my mother completely. Neither she nor my dad was a horse person. My interest wasn’t shared by them or even understood, but it was, when possible, indulged. They were not wealthy, but they used some of their limited resources to grant my singular wish. As a parent now, I see what that was. Pure love.
* * *
I perched next to my mother, watched her flip through the Yellow Pages for “Stables.” I was seven. I listened to her arrange my first riding lesson, setting a day and a time. “And what do we do in case of inclement weather?” she asked the person on the other end of the line. I put that unfamiliar word, “inclement,” into my brain, in the same place I had put Gaye’s name, because if it had to do with horses, it was important.
For the next several years, the best hour of the week began at four-thirty p.m. on Thursdays. I used to pray that I wouldn’t get sick on a Thursday, and for the weather to stay above 15 degrees in the winter, because when it was colder than that, the sweat would ice on the horses’ chests a
nd we could not ride.
The barn was full of horses and ponies of all shapes and sizes. Everyone rode English. We all learned to jump. The names of those long-dead horses are still alive in my head. Not the people—they are all a blur—but the horses. There was fat little Daisy, the Shetland, on whom I learned to tack up. She was temperamental but quick-footed, and she lifted me over my first crossrails, introduced me to flight. Goldie the draft cross gelding; Vicky the bay Morgan; Chips, a chestnut cob; Big Satin, Thoroughbred; and Little Satin, a fierce small black gelding saved from the kill auction and reformed into a school horse by Judy, the instructor. Judy was the exception to the blur of people at the barn. I cared very much about what Judy thought of me. She was powerful. The horses knew it and so did I. I remembered every single thing she told me, and did my best to please her. She seemed to understand that small children on horses were not cute, that for me this was serious business.
Days other than Thursdays were tolerable, because if there weren’t horses, at least there were books about horses. There were instructive texts on equine diseases with antique names like poll evil; books on conformation, breeds, and the finer points of equitation. And there were narratives. The Black Stallion, Misty, Black Beauty. Later, Xenophon. I read them all.
When I turned fourteen, my parents bought me my own horse, Vicky, the bay Morgan mare from Judy’s stable. We boarded her at Smith’s Last Chance Farm, a barn a mile from our house. It was very much a barn, not a stable. Smith kept heifers, pigs, and sheep in there, along with my horse and his daughter’s. Most of my teenage years were spent in that barn or galloping through the fields around it. The horse absorbed what I needed her to absorb, which was a combination of obsessive love and physical energy, at an age when those things can be dangerous if pointed in the wrong direction.
Good Husbandry Page 3
