Any Good Books
July 2011
The Dirty Life: A Memoir of Farming, Food, and Love
Kristin Kimball (2011, Scribner)
In The Dirty Life, Kristin Kimball satisfies us with a story even though we know the ending. It’s the ‘how’ of it that’s so compelling: how did she go from being a city girl, who eats no meat, and thinks she’s fit because she plays a vigorous game of pinball now and then, to a farm wife who makes her own scrapple and tills the fields behind a team of horses taller than she is? It’s easy, in a way: she fell in love with a farmer. She met the farmer in question when she drove out from Manhattan to Pennsylvania to interview him for an article about organic food and the young farmers who were growing it. As an interview, it was sort of a loss, because her subject was too busy farming to stop and chat, but he sent her home with a back seat full of farm food, and a head full of Mark.
She was a Harvard-educated travel writer; he grew vegetables and lived in a trailer on rented land. She enjoyed the night life and the Sunday New York Times; he aspired to a farmhouse built without nails, and home-made buckskin clothing. Right from the beginning, though, Mark’s vision included Kristin, and he’s the kind of person the universe conspires with. He was persistent (to the point of stubbornness), and generous (to the point of unworldliness), and he was not at all surprised when, within nine months of moving in with Kristin (in a suburb neither finds very fulfilling), he was offered a 500-acre farm near the western shore of Lake Champlain, on a year’s free lease.
Essex Farm had been out of production for twenty years or more when Mark and Kristin moved there; the rats in the grain bins, the leaky buildings, and the junk strewn around represented the early stages of a return to nature. But a mature stand of sugar maples stood on the rise to the west of the farmhouse, and the fields by the road were rich, silty loam. Mark could see the possibilities, and Kristin signed on.
The town of seven hundred souls had a wary and somewhat pessimistic attitude: “The people we met kept telling us, with varying degrees of tact, that we’d fail. They said nobody in the area was interested in local or organic food, or even if they were interested, they wouldn’t be able to afford it. And if we did find people to buy our food we’d still fail, because the farm was too wet and nothing would grow.” But, in their country way, they came by the farm to say it, with a little gift of food, and anything else they thought the newcomers could use. Maybe they had some of the equipment to hitch behind draft horses in the fields; some had spare pots and pans, or expertise about metal-working or dairy cows, all offered out of a courteous sense of community that begins to revise Kristin’s world view.
For one thing, farm life put book-learning in its place. She says, “I had come to the farm with the unarticulated belief that concrete things were for dumb people and abstract things were for smart people. ... Did I really think that a person with a genius for fixing engines, or for building, or for husbanding cows, was less brilliant than a person who writes ad copy or interprets the law? Apparently I did, though it amazes me now.”
There’s also the relentlessness of the labor. “A farm is a manipulative creature. There is no such thing as finished. Work comes in a stream and has no end. There are only the things that must be done now and things that can be done later.” Milking twice a day, keeping all the livestock in feed and water, and repairing what is endlessly breaking tended to drive out lesser notions of dusting and laundry (to say nothing of wedding planning.) But early on, Kristin and Mark figured out that they owed themselves at least one good meal from the farm every day, and some time away from farming on Sundays.
And, as the book’s title suggests, she had to embrace the filth, along with the dirt and the soil. “I had never in my life been so dirty. The work was always dirty, beyond what I’d previously defined as dirty, and it took too much energy to keep oneself out of it. I had daily intimacy not just with dirt dirt but with blood, manure, milk, pus, my own sweat and the sweat of other creatures, with the grease of engines and the grease of animals, with innards, with all the stages of decomposition. Slowly, the boundary of what I found disgusting pushed outward.” But food comes from dirt, and compost returns to it. I love the image of the compost pile, “which was seven feet tall and twelve feet wide, and snaked sixty feet across the farmyard.” Its interior was hot enough to kill weed seeds, and to burn Kristin’s hand when she probed a foot below the surface.
You’ll want to give this book to the farm-and-food-minded people you know. The descriptions of meals made from what was in season and at hand are gorgeous. “I watched Mark slice [a deer’s liver] thin, dust the slices with a little flour and salt and pepper, and lay them in a pan of sizzling butter, where a handful of minced shallots had already gone glassy and translucent. He ran out to the field and came back with a handful of fresh herbs...” and so on. Makes you never want to shop in a grocery store again.
The Dirty Life would also be a fine present to the newly engaged. Not that Kristin and Mark did such a bang-up job of wedding planning: early-arriving guests were treated like family and set to work, chopping vegetables or putting flowers in jars for the tables, and they barely had the lawn mowed. But she knows what marriage entails in the way of change, compromise, and loss. “What was I signing up for? Poverty, unmitigated hard work, and a man whom, for all his good points, no reasonable person would describe as easy to be with? Objectively, it wasn’t exactly a good bet.”
Kristin feels a reasonable-enough doubt on the part of her family, who’d never imagined a life so deep in dirt; and she feels the distance she’s come in the two years between meeting Mark and marrying him. “...There was something else, too, and I don't know why nobody talks about it. Marriage asks you to let go of a big chunk of who you were before, and that loss must be grieved. A choice for something and someone is a choice against absolutely everything else, and that’s one big fat good-bye.”
What she said ‘hello’ to has prospered in the eight years since the time of this memoir. Kristin and Mark feed a hundred or so of their neighbors year round from Essex Farm; they have two small daughters; and perhaps best of all, their work crews include both neighbors and apprentice farmers, who come to learn, and move on to build farms of their own. Farming is not easy, not tidy, not simple, but compelling and fulfilling; God bless the people who do it, and who write about it so well.
July 2011
The Dirty Life: A Memoir of Farming, Food, and Love
Kristin Kimball (2011, Scribner)
In The Dirty Life, Kristin Kimball satisfies us with a story even though we know the ending. It’s the ‘how’ of it that’s so compelling: how did she go from being a city girl, who eats no meat, and thinks she’s fit because she plays a vigorous game of pinball now and then, to a farm wife who makes her own scrapple and tills the fields behind a team of horses taller than she is? It’s easy, in a way: she fell in love with a farmer. She met the farmer in question when she drove out from Manhattan to Pennsylvania to interview him for an article about organic food and the young farmers who were growing it. As an interview, it was sort of a loss, because her subject was too busy farming to stop and chat, but he sent her home with a back seat full of farm food, and a head full of Mark.
She was a Harvard-educated travel writer; he grew vegetables and lived in a trailer on rented land. She enjoyed the night life and the Sunday New York Times; he aspired to a farmhouse built without nails, and home-made buckskin clothing. Right from the beginning, though, Mark’s vision included Kristin, and he’s the kind of person the universe conspires with. He was persistent (to the point of stubbornness), and generous (to the point of unworldliness), and he was not at all surprised when, within nine months of moving in with Kristin (in a suburb neither finds very fulfilling), he was offered a 500-acre farm near the western shore of Lake Champlain, on a year’s free lease.
Essex Farm had been out of production for twenty years or more when Mark and Kristin moved there; the rats in the grain bins, the leaky buildings, and the junk strewn around represented the early stages of a return to nature. But a mature stand of sugar maples stood on the rise to the west of the farmhouse, and the fields by the road were rich, silty loam. Mark could see the possibilities, and Kristin signed on.
The town of seven hundred souls had a wary and somewhat pessimistic attitude: “The people we met kept telling us, with varying degrees of tact, that we’d fail. They said nobody in the area was interested in local or organic food, or even if they were interested, they wouldn’t be able to afford it. And if we did find people to buy our food we’d still fail, because the farm was too wet and nothing would grow.” But, in their country way, they came by the farm to say it, with a little gift of food, and anything else they thought the newcomers could use. Maybe they had some of the equipment to hitch behind draft horses in the fields; some had spare pots and pans, or expertise about metal-working or dairy cows, all offered out of a courteous sense of community that begins to revise Kristin’s world view.
For one thing, farm life put book-learning in its place. She says, “I had come to the farm with the unarticulated belief that concrete things were for dumb people and abstract things were for smart people. ... Did I really think that a person with a genius for fixing engines, or for building, or for husbanding cows, was less brilliant than a person who writes ad copy or interprets the law? Apparently I did, though it amazes me now.”
There’s also the relentlessness of the labor. “A farm is a manipulative creature. There is no such thing as finished. Work comes in a stream and has no end. There are only the things that must be done now and things that can be done later.” Milking twice a day, keeping all the livestock in feed and water, and repairing what is endlessly breaking tended to drive out lesser notions of dusting and laundry (to say nothing of wedding planning.) But early on, Kristin and Mark figured out that they owed themselves at least one good meal from the farm every day, and some time away from farming on Sundays.
And, as the book’s title suggests, she had to embrace the filth, along with the dirt and the soil. “I had never in my life been so dirty. The work was always dirty, beyond what I’d previously defined as dirty, and it took too much energy to keep oneself out of it. I had daily intimacy not just with dirt dirt but with blood, manure, milk, pus, my own sweat and the sweat of other creatures, with the grease of engines and the grease of animals, with innards, with all the stages of decomposition. Slowly, the boundary of what I found disgusting pushed outward.” But food comes from dirt, and compost returns to it. I love the image of the compost pile, “which was seven feet tall and twelve feet wide, and snaked sixty feet across the farmyard.” Its interior was hot enough to kill weed seeds, and to burn Kristin’s hand when she probed a foot below the surface.
You’ll want to give this book to the farm-and-food-minded people you know. The descriptions of meals made from what was in season and at hand are gorgeous. “I watched Mark slice [a deer’s liver] thin, dust the slices with a little flour and salt and pepper, and lay them in a pan of sizzling butter, where a handful of minced shallots had already gone glassy and translucent. He ran out to the field and came back with a handful of fresh herbs...” and so on. Makes you never want to shop in a grocery store again.
The Dirty Life would also be a fine present to the newly engaged. Not that Kristin and Mark did such a bang-up job of wedding planning: early-arriving guests were treated like family and set to work, chopping vegetables or putting flowers in jars for the tables, and they barely had the lawn mowed. But she knows what marriage entails in the way of change, compromise, and loss. “What was I signing up for? Poverty, unmitigated hard work, and a man whom, for all his good points, no reasonable person would describe as easy to be with? Objectively, it wasn’t exactly a good bet.”
Kristin feels a reasonable-enough doubt on the part of her family, who’d never imagined a life so deep in dirt; and she feels the distance she’s come in the two years between meeting Mark and marrying him. “...There was something else, too, and I don't know why nobody talks about it. Marriage asks you to let go of a big chunk of who you were before, and that loss must be grieved. A choice for something and someone is a choice against absolutely everything else, and that’s one big fat good-bye.”
What she said ‘hello’ to has prospered in the eight years since the time of this memoir. Kristin and Mark feed a hundred or so of their neighbors year round from Essex Farm; they have two small daughters; and perhaps best of all, their work crews include both neighbors and apprentice farmers, who come to learn, and move on to build farms of their own. Farming is not easy, not tidy, not simple, but compelling and fulfilling; God bless the people who do it, and who write about it so well.
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