How to Cook a Moose (38 page)

One of them, Heidi, was a Portland native who grew up here in the 1970s in a house on the Western Prom.

“I went to Reiche Elementary,” she said.

That's the public school a couple of blocks down Brackett Street from our house, whose educational reputation is not the highest, to put it mildly, but whose enrollment is interestingly racially and culturally diverse for such a predominantly white town.

“We were not rich,” Heidi told me. “We lived in an old house, and the Prom was a dicey place. The West End was run-down and gritty back then.”

I laughed. “Really?” I said.

“Oh, yes,” she said. “I know it's hard to believe now.”

Now, of course, the West End, especially the Western Prom where Heidi grew up, is the richest neighborhood in town; Portland has changed a lot since the 1970s, clearly. I've heard that many teenage kids who live there and go to Waynflete, the tony private school on the West End, aren't allowed by their parents to walk home, even in groups, after nine at night because of the “hobos” who might be lurking.

Heidi told me she used to be allowed to walk home alone, at all hours, even though it was such a bad neighborhood in those days. We reminisced about how back then, we kids were all allowed so much freedom to roam at will outside.

Portland's not the only thing that's changed.

At the end of the lunch, after the rest of the guests had left, Brendan and I stayed at the table with Eliot. I was interested to see that he didn't adopt a rock-star persona, even though he was the Mick Jagger of Maine farmers. He was self-effacing, personable, and forthright.

He told us about wintering his flocks of chickens in mobile greenhouses that he would roll through the organic grain fields, ten feet per day. The chickens pecked at the fallen organic corn and wheat and other grain left there, and meanwhile, they fertilized and aerated the soil. So the chickens and the soil took care of each other, according to both the theory and the practice, and by the spring, he had saved a bundle on organic chicken feed, which was prohibitively expensive, and his fields were ready to go. He was trying this method not only for his and Barbara's own benefit, but for the younger farmers who learned from them and turned to them for advice and knowledge about how to make it in organic farming in this climate, with its “Zone 4 winters,” as he called them, and the tricky soil.

While Eliot and Barbara had clearly taken up the Nearings' mantle as the farmer-gurus of New England, dedicating themselves to helping younger farmers make a go of it up here, inspiring and aiding the next generation of Maine organic farmers, Four Season Farm
looked to me like a model of fully achieved success, with its beautifully honed methods, magazine-model apprentices, Tuscan terrace, and bursting-with-health chickens.

But, as Melissa pointed out to me when I told her how amazing Four Season Farm looks to a visitor's untrained eye, every farm has its challenges, including this one, and learning how best to overcome them is the key to making it look easy, even though it's far from it.

Months later, when I asked Barbara what that “sabbatical” summer had been like for her, she told me, “Essentially, we didn't take a sabbatical; we simply put more effort and space into growing crops for the eight-month retail season that goes from mid-September to mid-May. This is the way we operated in the nineties, and into the next decade. We currently sell at a winter market in Blue Hill during that time, as well as to various wholesale accounts. During last summer we managed a full crew (larger than our winter one) to grow those crops. We did a small amount of wholesale business as well—vegetables, eggs, and, in my case, a full-time wholesale business in fresh-flower bouquets which I grew, harvested, and delivered three times a week, along with the eggs and whatever else we were selling.

“The difference was the closing of the farm stand and lack of participation in local farmers' markets. That made it somewhat more restful for Eliot, so that he was able to do a bit more writing and research. For me, it was nonstop work. I plan to continue with the flowers (but perhaps not all those deliveries), and we are adding in some more wholesale summer crops that other summer farmers don't specialize in. But I think we will stick with this emphasis on winter, at least for now. It also gives us a chance to rotate pastureland with both cropland and green manures, for better fertility, thus continuing to fine-tune our system.”

Amazed by the amount of physical labor that goes into maintaining and sustaining even a farm as established as Four Season, I was
curious to see firsthand what it's like to try to get a small, self-supporting organic farm off the ground in the first place. I decided to visit a newer farm with a younger farmer, a seat-of-the-pants, in-progress, scrappy, down-to-earth scenario, so I could find out what a less-established Maine farm looks like.

I first met KJ Grow on a rainy day in the spring of 2013, just outside the glass doors leading into the skyscraper-like building that houses Doubleday, on West Fifty-Third Street near Times Square in Manhattan. She was part of the online media team I was meeting with, along with my editor, to determine how they could help promote my memoir,
Blue Plate Special
. We'd arranged to have lunch. I'd just come from LaGuardia Airport in a cab, having flown down from Maine.

We—KJ, her colleague, her boss, my editor, and me—walked together to a place they'd suggested, and which I'd preapproved, because the restaurant owner, a well-known chef, famously had celiac and was therefore gluten-free. From years of hard experience, I knew well that this was a rare thing in restaurants in New York. And if I had to go back to there again, I wanted a good lunch.

The five of us seated ourselves around a high table, perched uncomfortably on high, trendy stools. When I asked the waitress for a gluten-free menu, she looked blank. When I asked which dishes on the menu were gluten-free, she told me the green salad was, if I got it without dressing. Nothing else.

It was a Korean restaurant, and I'd been doubly excited to eat gluten-free Asian food in New York. The heartbreak for the gluten-intolerant or the celiac is that soy sauce is made with wheat, as are many of the sauces, and therefore, almost nothing in Chinese, Korean, or Japanese restaurants is safe, when those cuisines should, technically,
be a gluttonous haven for us. Sitting there, daunted, unwilling to give up, I asked the waitress if the chef could make me a dish, anything, without soy sauce.

She looked consternated. “No,” she said. “He doesn't do anything special for anyone. Sorry.” She seemed, on the whole, not sorry in the least.

Granted, the place was jammed, but I was starving. I'd left home that morning without breakfast in anticipation of the amazing lunch I'd have when I landed, but why should she give a damn that I was ravenous? No reason whatsoever; but in Maine, the waitress would have cared. They always do, in every restaurant.

Welcome back to New York, I said to myself as I meekly ordered the green salad, no dressing. I snarfed it as I watched the apologetic, chagrined Doubleday online media team and my editor slurp and moan their way through pork dumplings and BBQ chicken wings and other amazing things I couldn't even bear to look at because I was afraid I might cry. Honestly, I was a grown-up, and it was only one lunch.

During the lunch, KJ kept looking over at me with an expression of genuine sympathy. I liked her instantly.

On the way back to the Doubleday offices, I fell into step next to her. It was a rainy day, but neither of us carried an umbrella; we both preferred to get rained on. Around us, traffic honked and snarled. We jostled through the lunchtime midtown crowds, keeping pace with each other, dodging umbrellas. She was tall, slender, chic, pale, lovely, bespectacled, and very, very nice. She still felt terrible about my lunch.

“It's okay,” I assured her. “I have time before my flight home to eat a big lunch somewhere. I'm taking myself out as soon as we say good-bye.”

She asked about my life in Portland and confessed (“Don't tell my boss,” she whispered) that she was yearning to quit her job and move up to Maine, work on a farm as an apprentice, and eventually start her
own farm. Her life in New York was just about perfect: She had a great job, a beautiful apartment, wonderful friends, and had made the most of the city since she'd arrived almost a decade ago. She'd experienced so much and had had so much fun.

But she was itching for a change. She didn't like to stay still, and she wanted to farm, as her family had done before her—but not in Montana, like them, but up in Maine. Something about Maine was calling out to her.

I looked closely at her. Her expression held something I recognized in myself—curiosity, impatience with standing still or being stuck, a sense of adventure, a hunger to live as fully as possible. She was a kindred spirit.

I gave her a big hug good-bye and wished her luck. Just before she went back into the gleaming corporate lobby to be whisked up to her office by the high-speed elevator, I called out, “See you in Maine!”

I didn't fully believe she would do it—at least, not so soon, but less than one year later, KJ quit her job, left her apartment, packed everything she hadn't given away, said good-bye to all her friends, and drove the six hours up to Maine with all her belongings.

Shortly after she arrived, she started a blog called Branching Out about her new life at Black Kettle Farm in Lyman, forty minutes southwest of Portland. I loved reading the unfolding story of a young New Yorker farming in Maine so much, I asked KJ's permission to stick a chunk of it in this book. Luckily she agreed, so here it is:

Excerpt from
Branching Out
by KJ Grow

Black Kettle Farm is run by Laura Neale, a kind of farming dynamo, and real community builder in the area. She's young and funky, goes to yoga and spinning classes and listens to reggae, and grows some of the most beautiful and tasty veggies in the area. She raises pigs and runs the farm all on a twelve-acre plot
she purchased a few years ago. She's business-savvy and a compassionate person, and I have a lot to learn from her.

I'm living in a tiny camper with no heat, no electricity, no water. I gave away all of my possessions except what would fit in my car. When this apprenticeship ends in November, I have no clue what I'm going to do. And all of that feels very different and very free.

Last night after I'd moved into my camper, Laura threw a dinner party for the crew and friends of the farm. About a dozen people showed up, decked out in wool sweaters and Carhartts, all ruddy-cheeked and hale-looking. Laura served up cuts of pork from last year's pigs that she'd brined all day. I brought a bottle of Rioja given to me by friends in New York; a sheep farmer brought rum and pineapple and made rounds of Mai Tais for everyone. And despite being the new kid, I didn't feel like a stranger in a strange place. I felt home.

One week in, I am starting to get a feel for the rhythm of the farm and living in my camper. Here's how the days typically unfold: