Making Amigos Along the Road, Headed Home.

Plus a Gratitude Feast invite.

The above photo was taken by Farm artist-in-residence

K. Annie B.

, through the rain-wet window of the minivan as we sat waiting out a downpour before attempting to load thousands of pounds of rolled-up plastic tarps. Notice that the outline of the distant tree-covered hill peeks over the ridgeline of plastic-covered corn silage. The photo’s meaning will come into view if you decide to read this week’s string of stories. Every once in a while, someone writes to tell me that their reading of these weekly epistles has encouraged them to labor on behalf of the gift of life in their own home place. It never ceases to amaze me. I’m not sure how I would make it through the week without a morning spent remembering the miracle we call being alive in words. To hear from a few people that these stories have been of service elsewhere seems an astounding side benefit. If you’d like to help this work find its way out into the world, you might consider pressing the heart button, leave a comment, or share this post.

Block print image by Annie Bingham.

Greetings Neighbors and Strangers,

Neighbors stop by in ones and two throughout the week.  Heron lands heavily on the soft upper arms of White Pine while his companion hunts at the River’s edge below.  Some neighbors come to the Farm looking for something to eat.  Others to drop off an old wheelbarrow.  A gift for a Farm that gives gifts.  Others don work gloves and a mask and linger a while in the old garage and workshop, sorting through the dusty leavings of long-gone lives.  We pause before filling the dumpster, to give thanks aloud.  For the weightiness of the work of deciding what to hold onto, and what to throw away.  For Henry, his brother Adgate and his parents Caroline and Giles. 

Henry Adgate Schermerhorn lived out his final years here without human companionship.  He tinkered and tended, looping a length of wire through a pair of shelf brackets or door hinges, sorting nuts of the same size into a tin can, bolts into a plastic pill bottle.  Henry’s hardware collection fills a whole wall of homemade shelves in the workshop we’re turning into a second guest cabin.  “Henry, we will tend to this place differently than you did, but please know that you are always in our thoughts and on our tongues.”  I say that quite literally.  The firewood Henry stacked before he died, which then sat slowly curing for nearly two decades, now heats the wood-fired oven where we will roast the food for Sunday’s Gratitude Feast.  Each bite of lamb will be kissed by the slow smoke rising from Henry’s labors.  It’s downright poetic, no?

There are at least two reasons bacon converts so many vegetarians: salt and smoke.  This is deep ancestral memory at work.  Wood smoke carries the aroma profile of the surrounding forest, and yet it becomes impractical to burn fires in modern kitchens.  People go wild for the taste of lamb cooked next to fire.  Rewilding is all the rage these days, but I don’t often hear the phrase applied to eating smoked meat or vegetables.  At every Feast, I imagine Henry nodding in satisfaction as he watches the unforeseen pleasure his labors set in motion, so many seasons on.

Henry died in his sleep in the old Farmhouse, after a final day that surely included hauling water from the stone-lined well.  Seventy feet deep.  A marvel to all who contemplate what it took to build such a thing.  The word well is related etymologically to the word will, describing the push and pull of human endeavor upon the landscape.  But really, a hole dug by hand seventy feet deep, kept open and then carefully lined with a circular, dry-laid stone wall three feet thick?  I’ve yet to find someone who can describe the process in detail.  Three years ago, when I walked this Farm for the first time, I found the old well beneath a thick tangle of vines, including Henry’s bucket and rope, hanging just as he left them, seventeen years prior. 

Lest you tire of the story, I’ll tell it here again.  A white-haired, retired historian of the built landscape, upon walking through the old Farm buildings for the first time and hearing in my voice the ecological grief that underwrites this Peasantry School project, distilled our hour-long conversation into one sentence.  Steven looked at me a said, “There were people who lived in this very place just a few generations ago whose ecological footprint was almost immeasurably small compared to ours today, and yet it seems that we would rather cover the world in solar panels than imagine there is anything worth remembering about how they knew how to live.” 

I’ve spent many hours wondering about the phrase, “how they knew how to live.”  Certainly, the work of radical re-localization—or homemaking—will be helped along by certain agricultural techniques and practices: handmade wooden barrels for sauerkraut and cider, for example.  Cooperage, or barrel making, might come back into vogue as an honorable career path once the grocery stores stop having food on the shelves.

But something else has come into view this week as we somberly, and soberly, fill a roll-off container with fifty years of accumulated stuff.  When the Adgate ancestors built this old farmhouse and barn back in the early 1800’s, most of what they used to stay alive—furniture, clothing, cookware, farm implements, etc.—could be composted after the final mend or repair.  Rusted metal might have been melted down and refashioned. 

It may seem obvious to say it, but the arrival of trash as we know it today is an extremely recent occurrence in the arc of human experience.  I wonder if the psychic consequence of the trash-ification of human life has been adequately acknowledged. 

Henry appears to have saved every one of his aluminum cans and plastic pill bottles.  We might call it thrift or hoarding today, but I wonder if Henry’s practice of re-purposing of every single-use container hints at something just below the surface. 

Years ago, after fasting for two days in a ridgetop clearing accessible only by deer trails, I scribbled the following down in my journal: “Radical re-localization amounts to a willingness to live alongside the consequences of our living, and then to respond meaningfully in the ways we choose to live.”  Imagine if we re-defined privilege as a form of insulation from consequence, and then set into the humbling, collective work of dismantling, or divesting ourselves. 

In regards to those people with “almost-immeasurably-small ecological footprints compared to ours today,” “how they knew how to live” must have included this emotionally-daunting work of making home with our consequence.  Having a roll-off container bound for the landfill here at the Farm brings the distance from here to there into high relief. 

Tomorrow, we will drive to a large dairy farm nearby to drop off Feast invites for some of our new friends who work there.  The owner of the Farm was kind enough to ask his hired men to set aside used strips of silage tarp for us.  If you look at the photo at the top of this newsletter, you will see that the dairy farm has acres of chopped grass and corn in piles covered with single-use sheets of plastic.  We use the tarp pieces to turn perennial grass pastures into gardens without need for a tractor or tiller.  On my first trip over there I asked the man I encountered how they would otherwise dispose of the plastic.  “We bury it at the edge of one of our fields,” he replied.  The momentary flash of horror I experienced upon hearing this has been echoed in the reactions of everyone I’ve told since. 

I’ve been wondering this week whether it might be a particularly modern reaction, this moral aversion to keeping our consequence close to home rather than exporting it to someone else’s backyard. 

The second time we pulled into the yard at that big dairy, a short, dark-haired man climbed down out of the massive tractor he was driving and walked over to greet us with a warm smile.  In broken English, he made it clear that he would like to help us load the extremely heavy bundles of tarp into our minivan.  “It be easier if I help,” he insisted.  The man’s unexplained kindness stayed with us for the rest of the day. 

The following week, a Spanish-speaking friend drove with us to pick up more tarp.  She learned that this kind man hails from southern Mexico, and invited him to join us for the next Feast.  The following week, we brought printed invitations to the July Gratitude Feast, translated into Spanish, and encouraged him to bring his amigos.  We offered to send someone to pick them up on that day, but he told us they had access to a car. 

Well after the Feast dishes had been washed and put away, and the dance begun, a group of seven Mexican immigrants arrived.  Luckily, a couple of folks at the Feast spoke enough Spanish to welcome them.  It takes a remarkable amount of courage to show up at an event in full awareness that you will be an outsider there.  Their courage has been travelling with me over the past weeks. 

After “this food is offered as a gift to anyone who is hungry for any reason,” the second-most important tagline for the work here might be: “this is a story of longing for home in a displaced time.”  Which makes a decent through-line for this week’s string of stories.  We started with the old man who left a bucket hanging in the well, a woodshed stacked with firewood and a workshop filled with plastic pill bottles and tin cans full of nuts and bolts.  Then came the dumpster bound for the landfill and the plastic silage tarps slated for direct burial, and the amigos we’re meeting along the road as we wonder what it looks like to make home in a displaced time. 

Many blessings to you and yours,

Adam