Back to... the Land

Note: this is #3 in a series of stories of settling in the North Country

Fall and then winter began closing in on the realtors. There were no new offerings hitting the market and we had looked at what was available.

We liked the village and were comfortable. The house we rented belonged to a spry but deaf ninety-year-old widow; she lived in the left side of it and we occupied the other half. She was a great landlord who enjoyed our company and got a kick out of my enthusiasm for learning how to can and root-cellar vegetables, sharing some of her “secret” recipes for old-fashioned sauces and pickles. Our daughter walked to school and had many playmates. It was a safe and convenient place to live, and so we felt no pressure to get on with our plans.

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My husband is a very bright guy who has always had a weird interest in helping people find jobs. In the mid-seventies, CETA (Comprehensive Employment and Training Act) was a federal government program created to fund/authorize job-training programs for low-income people. The local CETA director happened to know my husband’s former boss in Rochester, and based on his recommendation created a job opening. CETA was growing rapidly , and within a relatively short time, my husband was designing training programs geared to the needs of the North Country.

I, on the other hand, was one of those people who preferred NOT to be matched up with a “real” job… I liked dirt. I liked animals. I loved power tools, whether saws or sewing machines. I was never bored at home.

It seems to me (looking back on it) that I secretly wondered whether my husband would really be happy “on the land.” Not that he wasn’t a worker - for despite his intellectual brilliance, he'll slog through daunting, boring, no-brainer physical tasks with steady energy and never a complaint – but it did occur to me that he might not be happy if his life’s work was primarily of a physical nature.

I had also spent my childhood summer vacations in the Adirondacks. I liked farms, but I also loved the woods.

In early December I was browsing the local newspaper and a classified ad caught my attention:
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Hmmm… sugar bush, timber, springs… Not a farm, but something new and at least worth checking… I called and learned that it was in the Adirondack foothills thirteen miles to the south of town, it had a couple of meadows, and the price was reasonable. The next day we drove out to see it, met a down-on-their-luck family, and were led around over hill and down dale through woods, meadows, and streams for over two hours and what seemed like many miles by the long-legged husband. The land seemed remote and very “Adirondacky” to me. It had every sort of natural wildlife habitat, and snow covered the rock outcroppings that might have tipped us off to one of the challenges of the place. By the end of the day, in the same desperate, emotional way I once craved (and then convinced my parents to bring home) a big-eyed dog from the animal shelter, I wanted it.

My husband was less enthused. It wasn’t, after all, a FARM. “But it once was a farm,” I countered, suggesting that we could do a reasonable amount of "farming" there if we wanted to (a totally unrealistic argument). After all, I reminded him, the Nearings grew food; they didn't keep animals. The price was $10,000, the seller willing to hold a mortgage without interest charges.

Maybe he mentioned this and I failed to hear (or register) it, but Husband – who never has found it easy to say “NO” to his pleading wife – rationalized buying it by thinking we could always sell it when we found the farm.

The seller was eager. He had three kids and they had no money to buy Christmas presents. (Should we not have seen through that?!?!)

We bought the land. The timing was such that we couldn’t close until January – after the holidays – and so we also bought an old wood-burning cookstove that the seller had, shoving $125 in cash into his hand the week before Christmas.

We had found our place in the country.

Stay tuned for the next episode: The Owner-built...Mobile Home??

Almost Farmers

Note: this is #2 in a series of stories of settling in the North Country

When I was growing up, there was a large Middle Class. There were rich people, but they were the few and everybody knew who they were: The Rockefellers, John Paul Getty, and some movie stars. Even athletes earned Middle Class salaries in those days. There were poor people – usually Black – and (at least if you lived in the North) you thought of them as that: poor in the sense of “unfortunate”. I saw them in the ghetto near the college or when I drove out past the migrant camps northeast of the city. In the three decades after WWII, it was easy for just about any average, able white person to find a job, and so it was that we made the move to The North Country confident of finding some sort of gainful employment that would carry us until our “farm” was established. Within a couple of weeks, my husband was employed by a County agency just a short walk from our apartment home.

Within days of our January arrival, we met a neighbor whose father was a well-respected organic gardener, and as luck would have it he planned to offer garden plots on his farm about three miles outside of the village. The organizational meeting for this endeavor was to be held the next evening, and we attended. It was our first acquaintance with several people who would become dear friends and my introduction to the man who would teach me the tricks and the know-how that I have used every growing season since the summer of 1975.

As spring approached, in addition to planning our garden, we began looking at real estate. Thank God for my husband’s patience and good sense, because I was ready to buy ANYTHING that looked green and rural, and the United Farm Agency sales folks were wily indeed. They easily spotted me as another “back to the lander” and knew how to play that angle. The first thing they showed me was a swamp with a railroad track running through it. I guess they figured I was dumb as well as eager. Still, I dragged my family back to look at it a second time…

We also spent time visiting our friends’ dairy farm and began learning to milk and care for cows. Our 30’ x 30’ garden plot was growing well and we worked to keep it weed-free. We were taking small steps, but important ones, and then in mid-summer, a beautiful old farm came on the market. It was less than five miles from our friends’ dairy, and its 200+ acres were mostly rolling hay fields and pasture. The back of the property sloped down to woods and swamp – a place we could cut firewood in the wintertime. The house was old but solid and charming; the barn was small but sound, a healthy crop of alfalfa was thriving on its gravelly loam soil. Adding to its charm was its location a quarter of a mile back off a paved country road. We knew that jumping into dairy farming there was not feasible at the outset. We would have to enlarge the barn and we had become a bit more realistic about our ability to go “cold turkey” anyway.

I remember this conversation:

.....“Do we really want to milk a herd of 40 cows twice a day, every
.......day of the year?”
.....“How do we know??”
.....“Is there anything physical we’re doing now that we have to do
.......twice a day, every day of the year?”
.....“Brush our teeth? Sometimes I don’t even want to do that!”
.....“You know, that doesn’t even compare with milking ONE cow…”

What suddenly made sense to us was to raise heifer replacements for our friends and possibly for other nearby dairies. My husband would keep his job (although the 15 mile commute was troublesome), and I would do most of the livestock care.

We made an offer on the farm.

The seller countered.

We offered as much as we could.

The seller came down to $2000 above our offer, saying that was his lowest price.

For want of $2000 we lost that farm.

Months later, shortly after we purchased 90 acres of non-farm land in the Adirondack foothills, I was walking along Main St. and ran into the owner of the “lost” farm. He greeted me enthusiastically and asked if we were still interested in his place. “I’ll come down the $2000 if you want to buy it,” he said. But it was too late. Our money was spent, and our course had changed.

That farm did sell to something called “Sealand Restoration”. They were a company hauling toxic waste from downstate that found this remote farm in a town without land use zoning the perfect place to dump their loads. The farm we came so close to buying was eventually designated one of New York’s “Superfund Sites” – one of the most polluted places in the State. Its meadows and stone walls have been bulldozed, its buildings are crumbling. According to the Environmental Protection Agency:

"The Sealand Restoration, Inc. site covers 210 acres. The site, formerly a dairy farm, was acquired by Sealand Restoration in 1977, and was operated as a waste disposal facility. Petroleum wastes were landfilled in a disposal cell near the southern site boundary or spread on the ground surface in the central and northern parts of the site. Three areas are being addressed—a land spread area, an empty drum storage area, and a disposal cell located 100 yards from a wetland. On-site ground water is contaminated with heavy metals and volatile organic compounds including benzene, trichloroethene,1-trichloroethane, toluene, and acetone. Surface water was found to be contaminated with aluminum, iron, lead, manganese, and zinc. Low levels of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), pesticides, phenols, and heavy metals were found in soils in the land spread area. Direct contact with or ingestion of on-site contaminated ground water may pose a health threat.”

If we had purchased this farm, would Sealand have bought a neighboring parcel of land? We went back once and saw the empty drums and the ravaged fields, but my memory of the place is of a sunny day when I walked along the farm lane beside an old stone wall, listening to the singing of birds and feeling that it was the most wonderful and peaceful place on earth. Two thousand dollars changed our lives.

Next: The Owner-built... Mobile Home??
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Funny what a difference a day can make. Got up this morning still with some leg pain, but not too bad. Turned the computer on and discovered a new visitor: Slip. Of course all of you "old" visitors warm my heart, but I was curious to see who this Slip person was. When I checked out his blog, it sure looked like he might be somebody I know (maybe even a friend or neighbor). Or not. Anyway, Slip's enthusiasm for life and the road ahead began to tickle a bunch of memories, and before I knew it, I'd written a blog piece. Here it is, and probably the first of a short series on building a home in The North Country.

Nearing Home

The seventies sound like a long time ago. The Vietnam War officially ended, Nixon resigned and four of his major Administration officials were found guilty in the Watergate cover-up case, by January of 1974 the oil embargo by several OPEC members had gas pumps running dry, and we were all wearing hip-hugging bell-bottom pants.

The America I grew up believing in unquestionably had changed, or maybe my eyes had been opened. I lived in a condominium in a city then, had remarried, and we spent our evenings poring over the United Farm Agency real estate catalog and geography books. My husband and I were convinced that the country was going to Hell, and that the one feasible hedge against that was to go “back to the land” and become self-sufficient.

In 1932, some forty years before us, Helen and Scott Nearing had gone “back to the land” on a homestead near Stratton Mountain in Vermont, built a low-cost house of stone, and raised their own organic food, attaining an attractive (to us) measure of self-sufficiency. We read their book, Living the Good Life, and took their story to heart. Another book, How to Build A Low-cost House of Stone, bolstered our belief that this was something we could do, and in the summer of 1974 we made our first feeble attempt at growing some vegetables in a small plot in my parents’ yard.
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After leaving Peace Corps service in South America, two good friends had taken up dairy farming in The North Country of New York State. We had visited them several times, always awed by the space and quiet and clear skies. We helped in the barn, probably adding to their actual workload, and the smell of cow manure was sweet to our senses.

In early 1975, it was time to make the move. We set out from Rochester on a planned exploratory journey to northern New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, southern Maine, and finally Massachusetts. We never went beyond the first stop. Our hearts had already been won there, and after a small bit of rationalizing about the other planned destinations being “too far” or otherwise unsuitable, we rented an apartment in an old house in the county seat, a small town of less than 4000 residents.

We weren’t the only ones. As we gradually became acquainted with the area, we found a sizable group of like-minded folks, people from cities following the real estate catalog to a place where a young family could still manage to buy enough land to farm. We formed a social network we called “The Rural Life Association,” periodically meeting at one homestead or another for a potluck supper or picnic and the chance to trade stories and ideas. We were homesteaders; we were college graduates from middle-class America, turning away from the path many of our parents had worked hard to put us on. We were poor, and we were happy.

Next: Almost Farmers
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My Excuse

I often write of the beauty of the area in which I live. We still have space and woods and wildlife here, starry night skies unspoiled by city lights, relative peace and quiet. There is, however, a down side to "the North Country," and that is that we have very limited medical care.

There are several small hospitals that compete with each other rather than cooperate, and in their somewhat desperate efforts to survive, they struggle to attract competent medical personnel. In fact, these hospitals throw welcoming arms around some doctors who probably couldn't and shouldn't make a living in their chosen profession. Amidst the boneheads are a few dedicated and excellent doc's, but you have to know who's who.

The closest hospital recently expanded and now boasts bigger offices for it's staff and new operating suites. Paying for this depends in part on billing patients for surgeries performed, and so it was that one local orthopedic doc lost his hospital privileges: he wasn't doing enough surgery... A "new" orthopedic surgeon has replaced him.

I travel more than three hours (one way) to Burlington, Vermont, when I need medical care. Over the years that has saved me three organs and two unnecessary surgeries. A teaching hospital with plenty of patients doesn't have to ferret out patients to cut up. In most instances I feel that I've gotten excellent care there.

The down side of being 125 miles and a ferry-boat ride away from your doctor is the risk taken making the trip. A blizzard stopped me earlier this week, and there have been other times when it is no exageration to say I endangered my life driving to get there or back. Add to that the cost of a hotel if circumstances require more than a one-day stay.

On Halloween I did something to my back. For weeks I babied it and hoped for some healing, but by Thanksgiving it had only worsened. In addition, Husband hurt his back and was barely able to sit upright enough to drive. I gritted my teeth and somehow got myself to Burlington, had an x-ray and was referred to physical therapy (near home). That might have done it, but as I lowered myself into the bathtub for a soak, I sprained my hip. By now it was Christmas season, and doctors everywhere were on vacation.

Until early January I doctored by phone as best I could, convincing the on-call doc that she should prescribe the maximum pain meds and muscle-relaxants. My son-in-law drove me - lying flat in the back of his Subaru - to a chiropractor who eased the hip problem somewhat, but at times I sobbed in pain. Husband and I ate our meals lying on the living room floor, cooking as little as possible, me getting where I had to on crutches.

Eventually, time and rest improved things. I could walk again (albeit carefully), my doc returned from her Christmas holiday, and I made an appointment for last Tuesday. I was pretty certain I could manage the drive, but then the blizzard struck and the trip was off.

So to end this whine, Wednesday I was able to drive myself to Vermont. I stayed overnight in a motel, saw the doctor yesterday morning, then drove home. I'll be having an MRI close to home, and then will see what that shows. My toe is still numb, but the muscle spasms have stopped and I am comfortable (finally) sitting here at the computer.

If there's a point to all of this it is that I am feeling very far from inspired and creative right now. Even Wizards get the blues.

I hope to get out soon and take some photos. We're buried in beautiful snow right now, and I'm frustrated with being housebound. I did snap one on my way to Vermont: an Amish field of corn shocks (see below). Not a great photo (I took it from the car window), but a nice taste of our North Country winter.

Thanks to all of you who have stopped by and commented on my
(s)assy Christmas card. Your comments brightened my days, and I wish you all the best in the coming year. I'll be back. I'm just not sure how soon.




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Happy holidays to you and yours from Wiz and Mr. Wiz. 'Hope to see you all soon!

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This is an old picture and an old wish. There is not absolute peace in the woods or in Nature, but the violence there is born of need: need for food for sustenance in order to live and mate to continue the species. In these quiet woods, the fisher kills the porcupine, the coyote kills the rabbit, the muskrat who dislocates his jaw starves to death and becomes food for the scavengers. All of this is part of Nature's plan.

May humans realize that we are no different than all of Nature's other children. Our basic needs are for enough food to eat and a place of shelter from the elements. We could live in peace without oil, money or power if we chose to value wisdom and peaceful survival over greed and war.

Imagine all the people, living life in peace.
You may say I'm a dreamer,
But I'm not the only one...

Join me in the hope for peace on earth.
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The Great American...... -.Off .

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For the past couple of weeks, our little local food co-op has been having a run-in with Corporate America. I could tell the tale, but perhaps you'd like to click on this link to hear what the NATIONAL NEWS COVERAGE has to say.

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I couldn't help weighing in, nor can I resist sharing my thoughts with you, dear readers. What follows is a copy of my letter to the heads of General Mills and Pillsbury:

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Dear Mr. Sanger and Ms. Chugg:

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Regarding the recent unauthorized use of your Bake-Off trademark by the Potsdam (N.Y.) Community Co-op and the subsequent threat made against them by your legal department, I say a resounding GOOD FOR YOU!!!

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Just because these country rubes want to have a baking contest to raise money for a local food pantry does not give them the privilege of using your time-honored and esteemed trademarked phrase. Corporate America must stand tall, General Mills must protect itself, and I am happy to know that your legal team is on the ball and ready to throw all of their expertise in the way of this shameful usurpation of your brilliant trademark.

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Even more disgraceful than these simple folks trying to make a few dollars to help the needy (obviously at General Mills' expense) is the fact that even though your attorneys have succeeded in intimidating the Co-op into changing the name of their annual charity bake-off to a Baking Contest, they have not been able to control the sentiments of the many residents of northern New York who have taken to calling the event The General Mills Fuck-Off! Have they no shame?

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I am buoyed by my belief that the noble cause shall win in the end. General Mills must stop the Co-op's use of your sacred, patented phrase. Failure to do so will cause a domino effect: first the Co-op; next, the local 4-H Clubs will be Baking-Off; and then - heaven forbid - the local Humane Society will be doing it. From there, your sales will slump, your profit margin narrow, and your stock will begin to tumble. Had your legal team been less vigilant, it would be frightening to consider all of the consequences.

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For your courage and nobility, you will be in my thoughts each time I gaze lovingly at a frozen tube of Pillsbury cookie dough. Fight on, Mr. Sanger and Ms. Chugg, and God bless America.

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Sincerely,

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And here is a photo of the business posing the terrible threat to Mr. and Ms. Doughboy: Go ahead and click on the link below the picture for a more intimate look at the Bake-Off.

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......................The Potsdam Co-op

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Here's something I wrote last summer but for some reason never got around to publishing. It seems somewhat timely now that a couple of degenerating vertebrae are keeping me away from my computer chair.

Age

Time has its subtle ways of letting you know you aren’t as young as you used to be. The jeans get harder to button, the joints begin to complain when overworked, and there’s the thinning of hair north and south. So you work out a little more, take aspirin, content yourself with the notion that your hair always was a bit thick and unruly. Old? Me? Nah.

Less subtle than time are children. Today I spent three hours at the playground with my five-year-old grandson. When there were no kids his age, I played with him, climbing up through the wooden maze, sliding down the slides, being a witch or “Queen of the Playground” as he dictated. I felt pretty smug that at 62 I could keep up with him. As I stood at the end of a wooden tunnel near the top of the grand structure (catching my breath), a new entrant on the scene, a six-year-old grinning the fanged smile of a kid missing his two front teeth, burst from the tunnel on all-fours and sounded a fierce roar. I jumped in faked terror, and the kid gleefully rose to his feet and shouted for all the playground to hear, “MOM! I just scared the crap out of this old lady!”
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Go away kid, ya bother me…
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Art Appreciation


..........................................Smaller Than Life (please click on the photo)

I spent the Thanksgiving holiday in New York, taking only one break from "family" activities (most of which revolved around food...) to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Tripods and flash exposures were not allowed, so the shot was hand-held using available light. The child is unknown, but I couldn't resist snapping this charming expression of art appreciation. The man, turning his head to view a large painting hanging higher on the wall, stepped into the picture just as I clicked the shutter.

Since returning home, my back has "gone out" and left me searching for some position that affords pain relief, so I will be taking a short - I hope - break from the blog until comfortable sitting is again possible.

I hope everyone had a good holiday week filled with many things to be appreciated.
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In Harmony

It's a struggle to get Grandson into a bathroom in any of the Ottawa museums because their thrones are all watched over by The Electric Eye, the master of the great, sudden, sucking, high-decibel, child-devouring flush. Grandson is absolutely terrified of those automatic toilets.

I can get him to go with me into the Women/Femmes - when he gets desperate enough - if I use a combination of reassurance ("I've already been in there, and they really aren't that loud") and a bite of the reality sandwich ("You're dancing, you have to go, and if you don't go pretty soon, you're going to wet your pants"). Once convinced/strong-armed, we get into a stall and I shut the door. This is when it gets dicey. Imagine being contained in a 3 x 4' space with a kid who is suddenly startled and sent into terrified flight... a kid who has a running garden hose he can't let go of. Sometimes I get the monster to flush immediately (as soon as the door is locked and he can't escape and before he gets his belt unbuckled) so as to prove that the automatic flush isn't as bad as he imagines, but that tactic undermines future trust in Grandma.

Exacerbating the whole matter is the fact that the ever-diligent Electric Eye can't seem to figure out what to do when it detects the movements of two people in the stall. Like the ass-kisser that it truly is, the E.E. invariably flushes more than once, making the point that it is never lax in its duties.

Our last museum visit was to what Grandson calls "the dinosaur museum" (otherwise known as The Museum of Nature). We had a great time and managed to survive the one and only toilet encounter, then we found an Ethiopian restaurant for dinner. To his great relief, this eatery was in an old building with an old bathroom...

The meal was spicy and very good, and eaten with your fingers: small mounds of food are placed on a large crepe-like injera. You tear off a small piece of the injera and use it to pick up a "pinch" of one food or another, so no silverware is needed. Grandson enjoyed it and seemed completely oblivious to the fact that we were practically the only white folks in the place.

After dinner we began the drive home, and as we traveled along the four-lane I turned to the back seat and said, "You know, we all have fears, things we're afraid of." Grandson was quick to reply, "I'm afraid of flushing toilets and the boiler." (The boiler "lives" in our mudroom and has terrified him irrationally since he was very young). I said, "Yes, I know you are, and I wish I could take away your fears."

A beat of silent thought; then, "Well I'll talk to Jesus about that."

I answer that sure, that might be a good idea, and I sound like I mean it. His parents take him to church, and apparently he's soaking up the message. Okay, I think, I used to believe in Jesus. And Santa Claus. And the Easter Bunny. If it gives him comfort in this world, that can only be a good thing.

A minute later I start to say something and he says, "Be quiet, Grandma, Jesus is whispering in my ear." (!) I obey, wait another minute, and then ask, "So what did Jesus tell you?"

"That these fears are okay for me to have."

"Well, that's good," I say, and Husband and I suppress amazed giggles.

A day later, it was Husband who made the musical connection. We had been listening to a Lucinda Williams CD on the way to Ottawa that morning. One of her songs, Lake Charles, contains the lines:

Did an angel whisper in your ear
Hold you close
Take away your fears
In those long, last moments

There is a game Husband and I sometimes play. We'll be discussing some event or topic, and he'll say, "Okay Wizard, what's the song?" I then quote a line from the lyrics of a song that succinctly sums up the point of discussion. (I know a lot of songs). Without realizing it, I had borrowed the third line from Lucinda's chorus when I told Grandson I wished I could take away his fears. What warms this grandma's heart is that apparently he remembered the lyrics too, and his reply made use of the first two lines.