The Dirty Life.On Farming, Food, and Love

by Kristin Kimball

  Then everything was happening at once. Close friends arrived, and Mark’s many cousins. Nina and her husband, David, came from California, and my brother and Dani from Virginia Beach. They all looked so foreign on the farm, in their clean civilian clothes, my sister-in-law, the pharmaceutical sales rep, wearing smart matching outfits in primary colors, unscuffed flats. Only my friend Cydni and her husband, Steve, looked at home. Cyd grew up on a ranch outside a town of forty people in Idaho, and at their wedding we bridesmaids had pulled onions from the garden for the potato salad and driven around her home valley in a pickup to collect cut flowers and eggs from the neighbors. Steve trains and shoes horses, and had grown up working drafts, so we put him in charge of the team and the wagon. Somehow, Nina got assigned to help with chicken slaughter, and I have a picture of her with a knife in one hand and a chicken foot in the other. By then she’d stopped asking the questions she’d been leaving on my answering machine for the past year—Have you resolved the chairs? Can you hire a bartender? Do you have a backup plan in case of rain?—and, as at college, had put aside her better judgment for love of me and was riding along, ready to help pick up any pieces that fell off my speeding train.

  My friend Isabel arrived from London, unsure, until the last minute, if she’d be able to come. I gave her the name of a bed-and-breakfast nearby, the only one that still had rooms available. It was a grand place if you were driving by and did not slow down to look too carefully. It was owned and run by a very nice but unstable lady. When Isabel turned up, the lady had forgotten that she was coming. Isabel was the only guest, and the room she was to stay in was thick with dust and cobwebs and reeked of cigarettes. Isabel said the lady gave her a creepy Miss Havisham kind of a feeling that got much worse later that night, while she was taking a shower and the lady, apparently addled, came into the steamy bathroom calling for her mother, then sat down and used the toilet. Isabel is adventurous and loves a good story, but this was too much even for her, and we resettled her in a room adjacent to my parents’ at the rental cabins down the shore.

  The day before the wedding we were still hauling away the rubble from the building we tore down at the last minute, burning scraps of wood, picking up nails with a magnet. Mark’s dad was hammering the last risers into the stairs he’d built to the loft. The farmhouse was filthy with tracked-in mud. There were vegetables to be harvested, washed, and chopped, the sides of beef and pork to be prepared and roasted, the tables—some acquired from a rental service, some borrowed from the church—to be set up and decorated. My mother was moving quickly, her mouth set in a thin, straight line, an expression of dread. The cartoon bubble above her head would have read “Please don’t embarrass me any more than you must.”

  That night at the rehearsal dinner, my throat started to burn and I felt feverish. We’d picked the only restaurant open in our town in early October, a place on the lake decorated with nautical kitsch. The chef there, our friend Andy, created a meal for thirty with our ingredients: roasted young chickens, red potatoes, braised fall greens. The wine flowed freely, which helped my sore throat. Everyone raved about the food. In the next room, I could hear my friends from New York arriving. I peeked out and saw three of my ex-boyfriends together at the bar, ordering drinks. My mother gave a toast, which ended “If this is what makes my daughter happy, so be it.” I was feeling dizzy with fever, and slipped out as early as I could to spend a restless night alone in a cramped and overheated room at the inn.

  I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to go through with it. What if everything that my mother was saying with her facial expressions was right? What was I signing up for? Poverty, unmitigated hard work, and a man whom, for all his good points, no reasonable person would describe as easy to be with? Objectively, it wasn’t exactly a good bet. There was something else, too, and I don’t know why nobody talks about it. Marriage asks you to let go of a big chunk of who you were before, and that loss must be grieved. A choice for something and someone is a choice against absolutely everything else, and that’s one big fat good-bye.

  Our wedding day dawned moody and raw, threatening rain. Nina and David had driven south to pick up the pies we were going to serve instead of cake. Earlier in the week we’d sent south our leaf lard, for the crusts, and a load of our pumpkins, for the filling. The baker, who was doubling as the fiddler for the dance, had gotten behind in his orders, and there were no pies made, and when Nina arrived at the shop, the baker wasn’t even there. It was a grand fuckup, but the kind that happens fairly regularly in North Country culture, to be expected, in the way one expects and accepts perennial lateness in Mexico, or cow-on-car accidents in Mumbai. Nina, though, was frantic on my behalf, and she and David spent most of the day speeding around the region in their rental car, buying every far-flung diner, truck stop, and roadside stand out of pies.

  When I think of it now, I can see that our wedding day was exactly like our marriage, and like our farm, both exquisite and untidy, sublime and untamed. What I knew even then, though, in the middle of the chaos, was that the love at its center was not just the small human love between Mark and me. It was an expression of a larger loving-kindness, and, when I remember it, I have the feeling of being held in the hands of our friends, family, community, and whatever mysterious force made the fields yield abundant food. It is the feeling of falling, and of being gently caught.

  As people arrived, they went to work, cutting flowers, chopping the vegetables, tending the barbecue with its side of beef, the hot smoker full of pork. In the loft my parents’ close friends hauled bales of hay into a decorative stack, a backdrop for the fiddlers, and a makeshift aisle, strewn with flowers. They wrapped the rough rafters in strings of white lights. Someone had gone to the field and cut scores of the sunflowers, in their tall, full glory. Mark’s sister has a way with flowers, and she had tied bundles of them to the loft posts. On all the tables, she’d placed Ball jars stuffed with cornflower and zinnia and purple-blue statice. The wide and dusty space looked magnificent, like a rustic cathedral. From below came the good smell of clean straw and horses, and the sound of their soft nickering, their heavy hooves.

  An hour before the ceremony I was lying down in my bedroom, alone, in my dress, a cold washcloth on my feverish head. My friends Nina, Cydni, Isabel, and Brian appeared at my door. They had a bottle of Polish vodka, ice-cold from the freezer. The fiddler had not shown up in time, so I pressed Brian, a professor of French and the best singer I know, to perform an a cappella version of “Amazing Grace” at the end of the ceremony. We all took a shot, for old times, and for courage.

  Mark and I were married in the barn in deference to the rain. It was early afternoon, and the gray light pushed weakly through the dust. My sister thrust a bouquet of bloodred zinnias into my hands, and someone had brought a dog, a big, floppy Labrador who wandered among the crush of guests. We promised to take each other for richer or even poorer, and slid the gold Burmese rings onto each other’s fingers. The judge pronounced us married. Mark picked me up and kissed me, and the loft erupted in applause and laughter. Brian sang “Amazing Grace,” and we walked back into our crowd of friends as husband and wife.

  In the wedding pictures I have a farmer’s tan, dark on the face, neck, and forearms, and white on the newly muscled shoulders, the décolletage. That look pretty much spoiled the effect of the dress I’d splurged on in New York. My sister had helped me pick it out, at Dosa, a hand-stitched, gossamer thing of cotton and silk, the lightest shade of lavender gray. I’m wearing my grandmother’s silk wedding shoes, from the twenties. I’m smiling maniacally, and clutching a Ball jar of hard cider; my hair, which I’d hastily plaited into two braids in a last-ditch attempt at irony, is slipping loose in pieces. Mark looks like his usual self, only cleaner, in a new white cotton shirt and gray pants, his blue sweater tied around his neck. His smile is unforced, jubilant. Next to me, his arm looped around my waist, he is so much taller than I am, we look like different species.

  We recruited guests to tend the b
ar and pour glasses of beer and hard cider and wine. Mark’s father had made a chicken-liver pâté that impressed the New York crowd, and his mom arranged slices of perfectly ripe tomatoes between basil and our farmstead cheese. There were platters stacked with sliced roast beef and barbecued pork, and loaves of fresh bread and our butter, a heaped tray of roasted root vegetables, and salads of greens and arugula. All of it we’d grown or raised. There was a whole table of Nina’s pies, a spectacular collection, creams, fruits, and meringues. Friends bused dishes back and forth between the barn and the kitchen. My throat burned, I was still running a fever, and I drank too much, so the rest of the day is a blur. I do remember that the rain stopped and Mark hitched the tractor to a wagon and towed the guests around the fields, showing them the crops, the new piglets on the pasture, encouraging everyone to pick vegetables and flowers to take home. I remember the little kids from both sides—some in overalls, some in dresses—running in and out of the chicken coop with a basket full of eggs and catching the barn kittens for some forced loving. The rats were making their last stand in the older pigs’ pen, in the barn, and every time someone peeped over the door the rats scattered and the people exclaimed. I remember the fiddlers finally arriving, and looking for Mark when it was time for our first dance, and not finding him, because he was downstairs in his good clothes, milking the cow.

  The guests and the family cleared out slowly, and we finally collapsed into our bed, which my friends had festooned with streamers and sexually suggestive objects. The day after the wedding, the weather radio warned of a freeze, so while I coordinated the good-bye breakfast for our guests, Mark rallied a crew to harvest pumpkins. They formed a brigade, chucking pumpkins from person to person, field to wagon, and Mark got hit square in the forehead with one, and it left a set of scratches, so that, for the first week of our marriage, he looked disturbingly like Charles Manson. The frost did come that night, and the next day the sunflowers, tomatoes, the peppers and the basil and all the other tender plants were dead. What I felt was relief. No more tomatoes to pick, no more beans. Then Mark came down with the sore throat and fever, and I was still sick with it, and for several days we did not move much, only dragging ourselves out for chores and to milk Raye’s bottomless udder.

  We might have had a marriage of celebrity-level brevity. When everyone was gone, the presents opened and admired, the fevers broken, I had nothing left. I was empty. And I was cold. We hadn’t installed our woodstove yet, and the furnace wasn’t working. The guidebook publisher I’d worked for before called and offered me a last-minute gig, on Maui, and I took it. I dialed the phone with cold fingers, arranging for an apartment, a car. We’d been married a month, and I’d be gone for two. I was leaving the whole weight of the farm on Mark’s shoulders, a weight that I well knew was too much even for the two of us. I told myself that it wouldn’t be so bad for him, now that frost had come, and that the money from the book would make whatever he might suffer worth it. Mark joked that I was going to Hawaii for my solo honeymoon, but it was a hollow joke. I think we both knew there was a real possibility I wasn’t coming back. I imagined my friends would sigh, say it was just like me, that they’d expected it all along; my parents would roll their eyes and forgive me for putting them through all that drama, and debate the proper thing to do with the wedding gifts.

  At the center of my attachment to travel had always been the belief that indeed there is such a thing as escape. You can change everything with one slim ticket. The last time I’d been in the Maui airport, I’d been a girl, twenty years old, and as I walked toward my luggage, I wondered if I would find my free, young self waiting for me there among the airport greeters with their leis, or if I’d murdered her by getting married to a farmer and a farm. I supposed I would find out. Travel tends to grant clarity. Remove all that distracting context and you find yourself staring at cold hunks of truth.

  There is no place on earth as far from a struggling North Country farm in November as Maui, where the warm air strokes your cheek and the fruit hangs low on the trees. I’d rented a little apartment on the ground floor of someone’s very normal house, on a cul-de-sac, in a very normal subdivision in Pukalani. It was fully furnished, complete with toaster, so by the time I hung my clothes up in the closet it felt like I’d taken up a new life. That’s how easy it is to leave, I thought. Nothing complex about quitting.

  I commenced to do my job, which consisted of inspecting hotel rooms for island charm, tasting pupus, and trying to come up with new ways to describe white sand beaches. It was very lonely. The luaus were packed with newlyweds, faces burned pink, swaying together to the mournful sound of the slack key guitar. They looked fake to me, in their bright clothes, like extras on a set. On my restaurant rounds, I’d sit at the bar, jotting notes, and some single man would glance at my aloneness and then move away, deflected by the flash of my brand-new ring—which I’d had to cut, after all, to be resized. Maui had changed so much since the last time I’d been there. There were so many more people, and long rush hours, and not enough parking. The ocean, though, was unchanged. I walked Baldwin Beach at sunset. I rented a longboard and strapped it to the roof of my car, so I would be ready when I worked up the nerve to paddle out to the throng of people bobbing in the middle distance, waiting for the next set.

  For a while I was just stunned, almost frozen, but, when I recovered from that a little, I found that what I missed first was not Mark, not the animals, but the dirt and the work. I felt, in some deep way, unnourished, like I was getting lighter, like I might just blow away.

  I wandered into the health food store in the hippie surf town of Paia and searched out, in the back, a table of fresh, locally grown greens, a little pile of fruit. There was a hand-printed sign above it, with the farm’s name and a phone number. I copied it down and carried it back to my apartment and dialed it, not even really knowing what I wanted. The farmer answered, and I just started talking, which is not like me. I told him about our farm, and what we grew, and the horses. I asked questions about his land, and the season, and which crops were doing well and which were not. I could tell he was busy, and I was keeping him. I felt like a lonely exile, talking to a compatriot. Just before we hung up, he said he was in a bind. His wife had left him, and they’d started this CSA thing together, just that year. He had his members to feed, and he was suddenly on his own, swamped by the work. Was there any chance I could come by to help him with harvest? He couldn’t afford to pay me money, he said, but he’d send me home with some food. One could consider the parallels between his situation and Mark’s, and find humor, or not.

  I pulled up to his address the next morning at dawn. The mist was rising from the ground, and for a moment I thought I was in the wrong place. It looked more like a garden than a farm to me, carved out of a developed lot, surrounded by houses. A few feet away, the neighbor walked to his SUV, dressed for work in a uniform that marked him as a security guard or a cop. There was a coop of hens—a mix of white leghorns and Barred Rocks—a small grove of citrus, and a red quarter acre of rototilled clay. There was a hedge of guava, and several decorative palms. It all seemed impossibly small.

  The farmer gave me a quick tour of the four miniplots that made up his vegetable operation. I could see that the problems he dealt with were different from ours. He didn’t have the intense pressure of fast-growing weeds that we faced in our short growing season, but he did have a steady buildup of pests, of fungus, of various melting rots, with no cleansing, frozen break at the end of the season. No seasons, really, to speak of, only a little more wet or a little more dry. His objectives were different from ours, too. We had all the land we could possibly want, and we hedged against disasters and mistakes by planting extra and giving everything plenty of room. We had our horses for traction, which made our long rows and the sheer amount of space we kept under cultivation seem manageable. He had only this finite sliver of very expensive island, and he needed to maximize what he took from every square inch of it. His bolt-resistant lettuc
e mix was planted in thick patches instead of rows, in one-week successions. He did all his weeding by hand, leaning into the centers of the beds. I plucked hungrily at a leaf of peppery arugula, a sprig of spicy mustard. He handed me an orange from a tree, and I stuck my fingernail into the peel to savor its tingling smell. As dissimilar as our farms were, it was the same miracle, wrapped in different packaging. A small part of me was whispering furtively, saying, If you don’t go back, you could do this, too, simple, small, get a plot, grow some food.

  The farmer, though, he looked like he’d seen better days. His shorts hung on him, as though he’d recently lost weight, and he wore a badgered expression and exhaled a lot through clenched teeth. He had ten members coming to pick up vegetables that morning, he said, so we’d better get going, before the sun got too hot. He laid out coolers of ice, to chill the harvest, and two small baskets. He showed me where the collards were and told me how much he needed. I took a basket and a harvest knife and set to work.

  I had been trained by Mark to work like a maniac. On our place, harvesting is not a meditation, it is a race. We take no prisoners. On his bicycle trip across the country, Mark had worked for a week with a Latino crew in New Mexico, harvesting hot peppers, and that’s where he acquired his basic style. He was fascinated by their speed, and he watched carefully, to see how they did it. He saw that they worked both hands equally, favoring neither the right nor the left, always looking one step ahead, so that even before the hand dropped the pepper, it knew which one it was going to grasp next. They also sang a lot while they worked, big, lively folk songs from their home countries. So Mark became ambidextrous and learned to look ahead of his hands, and to sing those same lively songs in the field. He is the fastest worker I have ever seen. He’s got preternaturally good hand-eye coordination, and that extraordinary wingspan, and his single-minded intensity. When he is really flying down a row, he looks like a living cartoon, arms and produce a peachy green blur. He collected more lessons in speed and efficiency over the years from other tutors and expanded on them, and he transmitted them all to me. After a year of harvest mornings, I could hunker down on my haunches and duckwalk along a row, my sharp knife flashing. Greens go in the bin by the armload, peas in a shower.