The Bucolic Plague: How Two Manhattanites Became Gentlemen Farmers: An Unconventional Memoir (11 page)

“Oh
yeah
! It
is
!” he responded, as if he was finally able to reconcile the sharp taste in his mouth with his memory of a salad. “I’ve never seen a
whole
one!”

Within minutes the basket was empty of the Cimarron lettuce, French breakfast radishes, Freezonia pea shoots, baby Bloomsdale spinach leaves, and the few tiny Scarlet Nantes Half-Long carrots I’d picked early because I was too excited to let them mature. By the time I returned to my desk, I had a dozen e-mails asking me for more details about the garden. What else was I growing? What was I holding out from them? Did I have beans? Potatoes?

I’d grown to relish my role in the office as a sort of rural conquistador. It was like I’d opened up a trade route to far-off mysterious lands. Excursions for many of my colleagues meant weekends in the Hamptons, shopping at the same high-end stores and eating at restaurants manned by the same chefs as in Manhattan. By comparison, my three-hour weekly trek to Schoharie County was practically the Silk Road. I’d already advised one colleague about how to plant tomato plants on her Brooklyn fire escape, and another one was considering buying a couple of chickens for her Bronx backyard.

Over at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, Brent too was enjoying his role as gentleman farmer. On rainy weekdays, he’d taken to wearing the shiny black rubber barn-mucking boots he bought at Walmart to his work. The fashionistas there loved them, and he’d already had to bring back several pairs in women’s sizes.

The only downside of our new nomadic life was how long the week seemed in between the weekends. I hadn’t expected to feel so at home at the Beekman as quickly as I had. We’d purchased it as a second home, but it was already easily winning our affections over our home in the city.

We’d also made many more new friends in Sharon Springs than we’d expected. The sudden rash made me realize how many of my friends in New York City were colleagues. All of them, really—just another indication of how my career was beginning to completely define me. In Sharon Springs, our new friends seemed to have no real interest in the advertising and marketing world. The Stewart’s Shops convenience store at the village’s only stoplight didn’t carry
Adweek
magazine or
PR News
. It was surprisingly much more rewarding to spend five minutes talking about the weather in the Agway parking lot than at a three-day seminar about the future of digital direct marketing. Okay, maybe it was just surprising to me.

An additional bonus of having a new social circle in Sharon Springs was that they never made me feel uncool. New York City sometimes seems like one large competitive cocktail party. From the moment I chose an outfit to wear each morning to the moment I chose which new restaurant to eat at in the evening, I felt as if every choice I made was being evaluated by my friends and colleagues. Was the new belt I was wearing stylish? Or at the very least, ironic? Should I risk eating at that new Indonesian take-out place that had just opened in a warehouse basement near my office? It was recommended by a popular blogger, but there was clearly a rat’s nest behind the stairway leading down to the entrance.

Like most advertising agencies, the average age of the employees at mine seemed to hover around twenty-four. Most of the people I worked with were born just around the time I was busy being uncool in high school. It felt as if I’d had a brief moment of inexplicable popularity sometime in my twenties, mostly attributed to my drag queen escapades, and ever since I’d been slipping back toward geekdom or worse—complete irrelevance. I only knew a handful of successful advertising colleagues who managed to be gainfully employed past forty-five. The rest, I was convinced, were shipped away to the Midwest after they showed up to work one day wearing the wrong shade of denim. Hell, I didn’t know if “denim” was a word anymore.

But none of that mattered in Sharon Springs. I could show up at the Agway wearing my high school prom tux and the person behind me in line would still just bitch about the rain.

To celebrate all of our new “uncool” friends, and to thank them for all their help in getting the Beekman back up and running, we decided to throw our very first party a few months after we’d moved in. Brent had planned for it to be an old-fashioned Fourth of July picnic, Martha-style, with bunting on the porch, grass-fed hamburgers, sparklers, and, to top it all off, a cherry pie from the cherries of our very own tree.

We’d watched all spring as the old cherry tree in the backyard grew heavier and heavier with ripening fruit. Two weekends before the Fourth, I followed the advice of someone I’d met in line at Agway (of course, where else?) and purchased a large roll of black plastic bird netting. It wasn’t easy to cover the twenty-foot tree, but Brent and I finished it late the previous Sunday evening. We knew that by the time the holiday came around, the tree would be laden with jewel-red fruit, unscathed by the flocks of birds that called the Beekman their home.

“I think we should crank our own ice cream to put on the cherry pie,” Brent mused on the train trip up to the Beekman that long holiday weekend.

“I don’t think we’re going to have time to make our own ice cream,” I said. “The cherry tree is loaded. Most of the weekend will be spent picking, pitting, and freezing them.”

“Oh, that can’t take more than a couple of hours,” Brent said.

“Look at my palms,” I said, holding them out for his inspection. “See how white they are?”

Brent, not knowing exactly where this was heading but equally certain that I was about to make a pointless point, rolled his eyes.

“They were permanently bleached from pitting sour cherries, day after day after day, when I was a child. One tree will give buckets and buckets of cherries.”

“Your hands were not permanently bleached,” he sighed.

“They’re awfully white, aren’t they?”

“Yes, you’re suffering from a very rare case of reverse melanoma.” In his capacity as house doctor, Brent frequently diagnosed me with terminal cancer just to get me to quit complaining. When I do finally die, I plan to do so writhing in pain and bleeding from all orifices, simply to spite him.

“Plus this is the weekend we said we’d clean out the hayloft, weed the flower garden, and trellis the beans,” I said. “By the time the party rolls around, we’ll be exhausted. Let’s just buy ice cream.”

“That’s not very Martha Stewart Entertaining,” he said.

“I think two gay city boys trying to light a grill will be entertaining enough for them.”

First thing Saturday morning, having been awoken to the usual Wagner/Madonna/Sinatra rooster medley, we grabbed two buckets from the barn and headed out to the cherry tree.

“Wow. It’s loaded,” Brent said. The branches were bent to the ground, weighted down with the most beautiful sprays of ruby red globes. Brent reached through the netting, picked a cherry, and popped it in his mouth, then quickly spit it out. “They’re not ripe yet,” he said. “They’re still really sour.”

“They’re supposed to be,” I explained. Having grown up in the South, Brent was used to sweet cherries. Where I lived, only sour cherry trees would survive the winter. “They’re sour cherries. For pies. And jellies. You can’t eat them raw.”

“Blech.” He spit out the remaining unchewed pieces.

“I read online that they’re one of Martha’s favorite pie varieties,” I said, completely lying. “Now help me get this netting off.”

He walked to the other side of the tree and began tugging at the black netting. We struggled for a good half hour before the netting finally landed in a tangled heap of snagged leaves and branches on the ground next to the base of the tree.

And then it began to move.

Random corners of the billowy netting were flapping and fluttering at our feet. I lifted up one of the moving corners to investigate.

“There’s a bird caught in the net,” I said.

“I know. There’s one over on this end too.”

I dropped to my knees and began trying to unravel the terrified sparrow. Each time I managed to free so much as a tail feather, it spasmed and flapped and became even further entangled. I shifted my position to get a better angle, and wound up kneeling on something soft. Moving my knee I found a corpse of another bird, this one long dead. It must have become tangled earlier in the week and starved.

“There are dozens of dead birds!”
I called out. Brent realized the same thing at his end.
“Go get me some scissors.”

The rest of the morning was spent creating a sort of triage on the yard. The dead birds were put in one pile, the mostly dead birds were wrapped tightly in kitchen towels so as not to further injure themselves, and the healthiest freed birds were set underneath the nearby mock orange shrubs with a saucer of water where they would hopefully recuperate from their shock.

Bubby, of course, had to be continually shooed away. He and the other barn cats circled the scene like leopards at a watering hole.

We finally extricated the last bird around noon. The few of them that had survived limped and flapped their way to their own private hiding spaces in the flower garden.

Bubby, perhaps sensing our crestfallen exhaustion, moved in closer and rubbed against my shins while eyeing the bounty of the fallen battleground all around us.

“Go on,” I tell him. “Just make it quick.”

As Brent and I gathered up the netting to carry to the Dumpster, I realized that in pursuit of perfectly unblemished, Martha-worthy cherries, I’d murdered at least a dozen songbirds. This fact probably wouldn’t have bothered most farmers—like the one at Agway who’d originally given me the netting tip. I wasn’t naïve enough not to realize that death and farms go hand in hand. But what bothered me was that I would’ve been perfectly happy with a few pockmarked or missing cherries. I’d only been planning on using them in pies anyway.

I’d been selfish. I hadn’t yet realized that the true goal of organic farming wasn’t harvesting crops in
spite
of bugs, pests, and predators. It was about harvesting crops
alongside
of them. It was about planting more than the amount we need. And it was about making sure there was enough extra to go around for everything that made its home on the farm. For every sparrow I’d killed, there would be millions of fewer seeds spread over the fields from their droppings and millions of uneaten bugs, which would in turn attack our vegetable garden. We’d be paying for our unblemished cherries in some way or another for the rest of the season. Sure, we hadn’t sprayed chemicals all over the cherries. But we’d been just as deadly.

It took Brent and me the entire rest of the day to pick all of the fruit off the tree. We ultimately wound up with twenty-two full baskets. It was gratifying to know that after pitting and freezing our haul, we’d have our own fruit to eat all winter. But I cannot tell a lie. They tasted more bitter than sour.

We spent much of the rest of the weekend pitting cherries and preparing for our picnic. My preference was still to host something similar to the Fourth of July parties of my youth, when someone in the neighborhood set up a buffet on a picnic table in the garage, and others would bring all manner of red, white, and blue–themed foods, generally involving Jell-O. But Brent was insisting on a Martha-style holiday with hand-cranked ice cream, meticulously “informal” floral arrangements, and three different varieties of lemonade. If we had an extra day to prepare, I was sure he’d have us taking trombone lessons for a parade in front of the house.

Even though we had a long five-day holiday break to prepare for the party, we’d barely put a dent in the list of chores Brent had wanted to accomplish. The evening before the Fourth found us frantically weeding the formal flower garden well after the sun went down.

“It’s too dark to see. I’m going inside,” I said, brushing a mosquito off my forearm. I couldn’t help but think that I wouldn’t have needed to if I hadn’t killed so many birds in the netting. “I can’t tell the difference anymore between the crabgrass and the stinging nettles. My hands are on fire.”

“Just put your gloves back on,” Brent answered. “All there is to do inside is read or go to sleep.”

“Precisely. It’s a holiday. That’s the definition of
time off
.”

“There are no holidays for farmers.”

“I’d hardly call manicuring peonies ‘farming.’”

“You would if you were a peony farmer.”

While I too wanted to make a good impression on our new neighbors, I had a higher tolerance for imperfection than Brent did. Even though I worked to make sure that my ad clients always put their most seductive foot forward, Brent’s job took things a step further. Being surrounded by perfectionist Marthabots all day gave one a warped sense of reality—or perhaps a perfectly smooth sense of a warped reality.

“Okay. That’s it,” I said ten minutes later. “I’m going to bed.”

Brent stayed crouched over in front of me, his butt crack gleaming in the moonlight.

“Okay. You can always get up early tomorrow to finish,” he said.

It took all the willpower I had not to shove a stinging nettle down his pants.

“Happy Overt Nationalism Day!” came a booming voice from the driveway. It was Doug and Garth from the hotel, and Michelle, our realtor. The three of them were best friends, and we’d rarely seen them when they weren’t all together. We’d learned that Michelle also resides in the village, next door to Doug and Garth. She lived alone—except for her two giant Bouvier dogs—in an incredibly huge stone mansion at the top of a hill overlooking the valley. She’d come dressed in a stunningly stylish outfit—a polka-dotted vintage dress that flared out just above the knees.

“We brought you some wine,” Doug said, and then gestured toward Michelle. “And also the spinster on the hill.”

“And I brought some beer and the fags from the dell,” Michelle responded. She looked around the yard. “Martha isn’t here yet?”

We laughed, assuming she was joking. But by the confused look on the trio’s faces, we realized she wasn’t.

“No, Martha’s not coming,” Brent said. “Did someone tell you she was?”