You might wonder why I’m putting this story here in the middle of a bunch of “Back to the Land” tales, but it provides some background for the post that will follow. I also ask that you accept that our actions were “noble” ones. The devil is in the details, and I hope you know me well enough by now that you can accept that there were reasons – too long and complicated to go into here – for believing that Daughter would be better off without close contact with her biological father. We also did everything humanly possible to make this transition a positive and happy one for her. Some affirmation of this came after the move: the "neutral" pediatrician involved in the court ruling sent us a personal letter containing her congratulations and best wishes for us in our new home.

A Child Lost, A New Life Begun

In the summer of 1974, after making the decision to leave the city, I put my condo apartment on the market. My wasband, exercising his rights of visitation, came to take our daughter one Saturday, and upon their return, spotted the “For Sale” sign.

Five days later, the man in the rumpled suit rang our doorbell, said my name with a question mark, I answered “Yes?” and was handed legal papers stating that I was an unfit mother, that my current husband was attempting to sabotage Wasband’s relationship with his daughter, and that the child’s father was a far more suitable custodian. After all, he had a larger income and a larger house near an elementary school. Somehow the petition omitted mention of his mental instability and drinking problem. In these papers he looked like the hero of “Father Knows Best.”

At that time I was a little more than three months pregnant. Maybe it was a bit of a rush on our part (or was it that we were just careless?), but already having a five-year-old, Husband and I were thrilled to be expecting a baby.

In divorces in those days, a biological father almost never was granted custody of a daughter of kindergarten age. It only seemed to happen in the rare case where the mother was so unfit as to be in jail or otherwise institutionalized or perhaps a known prostitute or sexual offender. The law was definitely biased toward the belief that the place for a little girl was with her mother. And yet this “rule” was not set in stone, a fact weighing on any mother facing a custody challenge. I came apart at the seams.

The custody petition was served on me on a Thursday. The next day I began to bleed, and despite bed rest and a great deal of love and reassurance from Husband, the bleeding became hemorrhagic, and our unborn child was lost. My body had traumatically aborted, unable to deal with its sudden awareness that a child loved can also be a child taken away.

We removed the “For Sale” sign and resigned ourselves to fighting the court battle ahead of us.

I’ll spare you the gory details. Six months later, on December 31, 1974, the judge – on his final day on the Family Court bench – ruled that Wasband was to pay unpaid Child Support, seek mental health counseling, and continue the responsibility of visiting the child one day of any weekend in the county of her residence wherever that might be. That last phrase was hand-written into the margin of the document on the morning the case went to court, and it was what we needed to be able to make our move to the country.

There was one problem: There is nothing to prevent a person from filing a lawsuit at any time. Had Wasband thought we were going to move, he could have filed his petition again, and we would have had to defend ourselves again. He could have stalled our plans and obtained an intolerable (to us) visitation agreement. The only way we could move without risking that was to do it under the cover of darkness. That meant keeping our plans a secret, even from Daughter.

On a Thursday less than a month later, the court denied a scheduled Saturday visit by Wasband because he had not yet complied with the order to seek mental health counseling, nor had he paid the owed child support. The next morning we explained to Daughter that we were going to move, rented a 20’ U-Haul and began loading everything we owned into it. Our friends joined in the frenzy of piling dishes, piano, toys, bedding, books, and even canned food into about 1200 cubic feet of truck. We worked well into the night, loading all of our worldly goods, leaving nothing behind, and if that truck’s storage area had been a cardboard carton, the whole thing could have been accurately labeled “MISCELLANEOUS STUFF”. The next morning we were driving east on the Thruway, on our way to a new life.

I have written about our first year in the North Country, searching for and finding land, and a couple of the trials and tribulations involved in beginning to settle on it. Most of this was a joyful time, a relief from the stress of on-going wasband battles, and it was the beginning of an adventure. There was, however, one unhappy fact. During that first year, I was having some medical problems, and in that summer of moving the trailer and putting up the pole, I was diagnosed sterile. Husband and I would have no children.

Next: Water, water everywhere...
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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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