I excel at digging holes. Those which, once dug, I am unable to climb out of. The latest occurrence of my metaphorical excavation was no exception. I was sitting, late one summer’s afternoon, with a friend on the patio of her house on the Island of Bainbridge, a small dollop of glacial moraine plopped into Puget Sound by the Vashon Glacier as it retreated some ten-thousand years ago. Bainbridge, though separated by only a few short miles from the major metropolitan area of Seattle is a world apart. It is a place of few subdivisions and apartment complexes; its residents deciding, on the whole, to live in less crowded confines. The island is inhabited by some twenty-three thousand commuters, cast-offs, trustifarians, circus performers, and aging hippies who do nothing but grumble that they have to go all the way to Seattle to score their medicinal hemp. It is, in short, my kind of place.
I briefly considered moving here when I visited Seattle this past December. I saw Bainbridge Island sparkling like an emerald jewel through the crisp, clear, winter air. It looked so inviting. But I couldn’t find the ferry terminal so Bainbridge, for me, remained a mystery.
Until recently.
Things being what they are, my life conspired to get me to Bainbridge via a more circuitous route which is how I came to be sitting on the aforementioned patio one sunny afternoon and worrying that I didn’t have enough sunscreen on. I went inside to retrieve the SPF 70 glop – I know you don’t believe my take on the weather here but, really, I never used more than SPF 30 while sailing in the tropics and that only sparingly – and happened past a bookcase. A title caught my eye: You Can Farm: The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Start & Succeed in a Farming Enterprise, by Joel Salatin. I looked more closely at the shelf and saw that Mr. Salatin’s massive tome was surrounded by at least a dozen others. Knowing my friend, I was somewhat taken aback as I had not yet encountered this particular facet of her interests.
Mr. Salatin, with whom I gained familiarity through the writings of Michael Pollan, is the owner of the Polyface Farm in western Virginia and a self-described “trans-organic” farmer. His theory, in a nutshell, is that if you manage the land well and support the growth of grasses then you can sustainably raise all sorts of animals with minimal chemical and feed inputs. You let your animals go do things like play in the fields, root around in the mud, or peck at bugs; basically anything that is in their species’ nature, until such time when you take them out back, hit them on the head, and convert them into cutlets. You end up with excellent nutrition from animals that, up until the last five minutes, were having a really good time.
My friend had always impressed me as being a gentler soul.
I continued my quest, slathered on the sunscreen, grabbed a cocktail, headed back outside, sat down and took a sip. Which is when (I think) I picked up my figurative shovel and began digging.
“What’s with all the farm books?” I cast first shovelful over my shoulder.
“I was thinking about doing some farming.”
“How much land do you have?”
“About three-quarters of an acre.”
“Oh.”
“I know it’s not much room for a farm. But I took all the classes and decided it wasn’t for me.”
“How come?”
“It seemed to be more about actual dirt and worms and stuff,” she looked at her highly polished fingernails, “than about the pretty pictures they show in the books to lure you in.”
“What did you want to do?”
“Oh, just some vegetables, a couple of fruit trees, maybe some flowers.” No mention of the violent deaths for what would be essentially pets destined for the freezer.
Making stuff up where nothing exists is something I’m pretty good at, hence this whole fiction thing. I took another sip of rum and gazed across the mini-acreage envisioning the possibilities. I described a smallish garden and an orchard. I pointed across the micro-meadow at a place that could be ideal for a couple of bee hives. I showed her where the fences could run up to a small barn.
“What would I need a barn for?”
“Well, you could have chickens.” Her nose wrinkled but I pressed forward and suddenly the hole I had dug for myself became much deeper. “Or pygmy goats or sheep.”
Her eyes softened. “Ooooooh…. Aren’t those just so cute?”
Oops.
“You could do that?”
“Uh, sure.”
“When do you start?”
This is the point at which I realized I was screwed. I had to open my big mouth. I just had to paint the picture of the tranquil rural life with small green pastures through which lilliputian livestock gamboled and scratched. It was worse than the pictures in the books. I had made it sound so very believable.
In my desperate attempt to fill in the hole I had dug for myself I knew I had one chance to make it sound less appealing. So I opened my mouth again.
“But you’re going to need a tractor.”
One eyebrow went up. “A tractor? What for?”
Yes! I sensed her doubt and felt the hole filling back up. “It’s a farm, farms have tractors for, uh, farm stuff.” I was enthusiastic. “So you need a tractor.”
My friend glanced across her pico-prairie envisioning the potential of her agricultural micro-dot. “Well, it’s a small farm so I guess it’ll be a small tractor. OK, go for it.”
To give you an idea of the level-of-effort involved, consider that three-quarters of an acre is a small enough parcel that you could efficiently farm it with a wheel barrow, a push-mower, and a scythe. It’s so small that if I wanted to do a hundred yard dash I’d have to run from one end to the other and part of the way back. But my attempt to lessen the appeal of tiny agriculture by suggesting the tractor had failed miserably and here I was, committed to going out and buying one. What an idiot.
It could safely be said that from a knowledge standpoint I am better qualified to choose the replacement vehicle to the Space Shuttle than I would be selecting a garden tractor. I mean, sure, I’ve seen people driving them around on their suburban lawns, but in the pictures they always show them dragging trailers and bagging hay or something. They look much more farm-like than the tractor-reality of lazy people unwilling to hire a gardener. What attachments would I need? Two-wheel drive or four-wheel? Why are there so many brands? And why do they all look the same?
I was overwhelmed.
I figured my best bet was to go look at some and learn something about tractors. I tried Home Depot but they decided to stop selling them. I tried Lowes but the helpful person in the blue vest got us lost in the appliance department. I finally went to Sears where they not only had information, but more information – some 38 pages of it – than I could possibly digest.
That night I sat weeping at my computer and bemoaning my fate when I came across an ad on craiglist. “Late model 42-inch riding mower. New twenty horsepower engine. Low hours.” The pictures looked great but it sounded too good to be true. I called and the mechanical camion was still available so I made an appointment to go have a look at the thing.
Saturday morning I showed up and Paul – The Tractor Man – started talkin’ ’bout tractors. I’m sure, had I not left, we would still be talking about tractors. He seemed like he could talk about tractors until the several dozen tractors he owned, and which were scattered about his yard in various states of disassembly, had all finished rusting away. He seemed in immediate possession of every iota of arcana on each tractor ever made. I managed to get him to show me the tractor from the ad where, fortunately, the engine noise drowned out his incessant narrative.
When I returned from my lawn-scalping test drive I got the story of the tractor. The original engine had been blown up by a less than attentive homeowner when his wife had been working the tractor. (Paul mentioned “wives” and “tractors” in unfavorable association on several occasions but I neglected to delve further into that no-doubt-interesting psychological backstory. Sorry.) He had also purchased a brand new Sears Craftsman tractor which had unfortunately been dropped from a truck at high speed – probably due to the ill-advised presence of somebody’s wife – and, in his words, “pancaked”. The tractor was trashed but the engine was in fine shape so he took out the bad engine from the original tractor and replaced it with the good one from the flattened Craftsman.
The new combination ran fine and Tractor Man regaled me with the origin, purpose, and function of every last lever, dial, switch, nut, bolt, screw and pin on the machine. How does he remember all this stuff? And why does he find it so interesting?
“Do you have the manual?” I asked.
“Nope. Don’t need it.” And he kept on talking.
I beat a hasty retreat and escaped to the relative quiet of Bainbridge – or as Paul disparagingly called it Braindead – Island. Further discussions resulted in coming to terms on the purchase of the Frankensteinian tractor. A tractor, a bright orange tractor in fact, which is now sitting in my friend’s garage waiting for the onset of farming season which – let me check my almanac, oh shit! – is happening as we speak.
And so I stepped onto the dung-slicked slope of suburban agriculture and now find myself hurtling out of control into the realm of the “farmer”. Rushing up at me (relatively speaking) I see the untold problems of actual dirt and worms and stuff. I see chickens flapping, micro-goats butting the neighbors kids, and tiny sheep being carried off by hungry coyotes. There are boxes filled with very angry bees. All because I couldn’t keep my mouth shut.
I really shouldn’t complain. I mean, just the idea of me playing at being a farmer will keep this blog going for a decade. But that’s enough for now. Time to go fire up the iron dray and run the fence line up in the north forty (square yards). Life on the farm starts early and ends late. I’ve just got to watch out for the holes.