Books |
The Dirty Life: Farming, Food, and Love
Kristin Kimball
By
Published: Oct 14, 2010
Category:
Memoir
Ruth Fecych, one of New York’s best book editors, handled a friend’s manuscript so deftly I asked her if we could possibly work together. Time passed. I was sure she had forgotten me. Then she called to ask if I’d be interested in working with Twyla Tharp on The Collaborative Habit. Twyla and Ruth? I couldn’t say yes fast enough. So when Ruth told me that she had stayed up until 2 A.M. with a new book and couldn’t wait to pick it up again in the morning, I knew that “The Dirty Life” was a Head Butler selection. The wheel turned: This time it was my great pleasure to ask Ruth to write it up. Was there a lot of editing involved? Oh, please.
Eight years ago, Kristin Kimball was a vegetarian who never cooked. She lived in a studio apartment in the East Village and stored dog kibble in her oven. While working on a story on organic farming, she drove to State College, Pennsylvania to interview a farmer who — of course —- turned out to be very tall, very handsome and very intense.
That evening the farmer, Mark, told himself that he was going to marry this woman and if he were brave enough, he’d ask her right now. For her part, she spent the day hoeing broccoli in her white agnes b. blouse, and as dark fell, she helped him slaughter a pig. She drove back to the city the next day feeling like she’d been to a foreign country, but she was fascinated, and she wanted more.
I trotted along after him, juggling a notebook and pen with a screwdriver and pieces of broken hose that he absentmindedly handed me. He talked the whole time, at a pace and with a dexterity that surprised me.. He did not own a television or radio…still doesn’t listen to the news. It’s depressing and there’s nothing you can do about most of it anyway. You have to think locally, act locally, and his definition of local didn’t extend much beyond the fifteen acres of land he was farming…He liked to imagine a farm where no money changed hands, only goodwill and favors…there is a simple flow of things from the place of excess to the place of need. It’s personal, and it’s satisfying, and everyone feels good about it. This guy is completely nuts, I thought. But what if he’s right?
“The Dirty Life: Farming, Food, and Love” is the story of how right he was — and how right she was to vote for his vision. [To buy the book from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.] Six months later, she says goodbye to Manhattan, its 24-hour takeout and manicures, and she and Mark lease 500 acres on Lake Champlain, where they embark on an audacious experiment: to build an energy-independent organic farm that will feed their community. Theirs will be a whole-diet CSA—that is, a food coop not just for vegetables, but everything: meats, eggs, dairy and grains.
Soon her giddiness at the adventure is matched by waves of fear and bitterness. Her family considers her decision hasty; their neighbors tell them they will fail. She has no expertise in farming, no Plan B, and they have spent all their money on cows. But Mark tells her that there is nothing to be afraid of, that they have already succeeded because they have tried to do something hard.
In the spring of their first year, Kristin and the draft horses harrow a field:
….a killdeer…was flopping around with her wing out, close to the ground. I guess we’d wrecked the bird’s nest with the plow the day before. I tried for a minute to imagine a way of eating that involves no suffering and came down to Thoreau next to the pond with his little patch of beans. Then I remembered that he walked to his mother’s house in town every day for lunch….When I stopped, the ground felt springy underneath my feet, like a giant trampoline… the horses stood and blew, and the sweat dripped from their bellies onto the raw earth like a balm or a blessing.
There is no end to the shimmering quality of her observations. When their Jersey cow, Delia, gives birth, Kimball stops by the barn after sun up to meet the new calf:
She unfolded her front legs cautiously… and wobbled there. Her focus seemed to shift between this new world and the quiet one within. She was still only tenuously connected to our side, to light and time, air and gravity. At births, I find that it’s this, and not the slip and splash of delivery, that gives us a glimpse of mystery. Newly born creatures carry the great calm of the Before with them, for minutes or hours, and when you are close to it, you can feel it, too.
Today, the Essex Farm feeds 1,500 people, but “The Dirty Life” contains no sermons on organic farms or the locovore movement—Kimball doesn’t even mention the term. She worries that what they’re attempting is insane, the sheer physical labor is unending, the winters are so cold that for months she never removes her bottom layer of clothing, loss and deaths are constants.
Despite the speed and passion of her love affair with Mark, she offers no simplistic epiphanies about men or romance, either. A month after their wedding, she bolts for Hawaii when her old boss offers her a last-minute assignment there. “It wasn’t Mark or the farm or the marriage I was trying to shake loose from but my own imperfect self, and even if I kept moving, she would dog me all the way around the world, forever.”
Returning home, she digs in. Spring comes. “The town is unknowable, marriage unknowable, the farm—just a single tablespoon of its soil—is a confounding mystery. But as the weeks ticked into months, into seasons, as I slowly became a farmer, something else emerged, and it was something to hold on to, something less slippery than knowing.”
The other day, while I was raving about the book to a friend, she said, “I didn’t know you were into farming.” I wondered about that, too. My grandfather had a dairy farm, but there was something else at work here besides the welling up of my happy childhood memories.
It rang true when, early on, Kristin confesses, “I still harbored a little of the urbanite’s hubris, the feeling that with my education and worldly experience something as simple as farming couldn’t possibly tax me that much.” She wasn’t doing something I could barely imagine, like swimming to Antarctica, but still — why would I read far into the night about rat infestations, compost piles, and potato harvests? Because funny, self-deprecating, unsentimental Kristin Kimball understands, as the great nature writers do, that the natural world on which we rely is at once seductive, demanding, cruel, and thrilling.
You finish this book with a full heart. It isn’t packed with answers, just with truth.
