Dear Folks,
It’s Sunday morning, bright and clear, fairly warm but not as bad as the pressure cooker we were living in all last week.
Last week we had a rare Bermuda High, sweeping air from the southeast up to us relentlessly for five straight days. Southeast of us is a large ocean, of course, and also the biggest megalopolis in the world, so the air that comes from that direction is humid and polluted. We sweltered. We couldn’t even see Mt. Ascutney through the thick haze. We’d go down and jump in the brook about 4 times a day, walk up the hill still dripping, and collapse into the hammock. All the animals simply stopped moving, including us human animals. The corn and tomatoes were the only living things that were happy — they grew about an inch a day, and we felt like doing nothing but sitting around and watching them do it.
On Thursday, in the middle of this steambath Pat McNamara decided to cut our hay. There is a law of the universe that says the hay must always be put up on the hottest, muggiest day of the summer, preferably with a thunderstorm threatening.
Maybe the city folks reading this need a little elaboration to understand the full grimness of that joke.
First, we only do one hay cutting a year, because we are restoring a worn-out hayfield we bought from a neighbor. So it’s a bit tense — if the hay gets rained on, we have to shell out about $400 to buy hay from neighbors and we have to pick up from the field 200 bales of soggy, rotten mulch, which is about a 5-year supply for the gardens, and then we still have to transfer 200 bales from the neighbors. So once the mower shows up and starts cutting the field, we start praying hard for continued sunshine (that’s usually the moment we begin to hear distant thunder).
Second, haying is the most strenuous, dirty, stickery, scratchy, hot, heavy job of the year. You have to wear long sleeves, long pants, and gloves, and you are throwing around 40-lb bales that are shedding all over you. Your hair and eyes and ears and nose are full of hay, and you sneeze a lot, and when you take all those clothes off for a shower afterward, you find your sweaty body well thatched in the strangest places with little hay bits. So you’d like it to be cool for the haying.
We thought it would take at least 3 days for the downed hay to dry in the humidity, so we planned for the clan to assemble on Saturday to put the bales up in the barn. I went off to a meeting at Dartmouth Friday afternoon with a nervous eye on the sky, in which black thunderheads were forming, figuring that if it did rain, there would be nothing we could do; the hay was still green out there in the field.
But Pat’s father, Old Man McNamara, who has put up 15,000 bales of hay a year for the last 50 years or so, came by, eyed the hay, and ordered it baled. The sky grew darker. Suzanne and Dennis, who were the only ones home, got in the truck and followed the baler around, trying to get at least a few bales into the barn before the storm broke.
By the time I got home, they had 30 bales (one truckload) put away and were going out for a second load. The McNamaras had taken pity on us and brought over two of their enormous hay carts and thrown about 150 bales onto the carts and covered them with plastic, so at least some hay might stay dry if the storm didn’t bring too much wind (but the wind was already picking up — this was shaping up to be a great summer gullywhumper storm). There were still at least 200 bales out on the field. I jumped onto the truck with my office clothes still on, and the three of us started throwing hay bales around like crazy.
It got darker and darker, lightning was flashing from every direction, but the rain held off. We got in load after load — we even unloaded one of the great hay carts. Finally we had 200 bales in the barn loft — exactly what we need for the winter — plus 50 insurance bales down below. It was 9 in the evening, dark now, and thundering all around. The brook was rising rapidly. Next morning we found out that a ferocious storm had taken place that evening in Meriden, the next town. It dumped an inch of rain, with terrible winds. The storm ended about a mile from us. We never got a drop.
The next morning it dawned on us that we had all the hay we needed in the barn and more than 100 nice dry bales still on the field and in the haycart. This was wealth we had never dreamed of. We had never gotten more than 230 bales off that field before. My pasture-restoring measures had doubled the yield, and we actually had hay to sell. It was a whole new concept, selling hay off Foundation Farm, hay as a way of making money. What a revelation!
Suzanne and I creamed off about 40 bales to mulch the gardens, and by midmorning Dennis had sold the rest of the hay, and he and John had delivered it to a neighbor.
Then Dennis, who had been frantic and angry and bitching throughout most of this drama, came to me and said, “You know, that was fun. Putting up the hay is awful, but it’s a good feeling too — as long as it comes out all right in the end.”
As for me, I always feel a mounting nervousness as hay-cutting time approaches. I dread the work of putting up the hay, and I fear the rain. But when we actually start doing it, I rejoice in the work, and I love going up now into the wonderful-smelling loft and knowing that the sheep are going to be well fed next winter.
Well, another gullywhumper storm came by 2 days later, it hit us and everyone, and it ushered in a nice Canadian High, with the clear, dry northern air that we love. All our energy came back, and the lawns got mowed, and the gardens got weeded and mulched, and things look pretty good around here.
It’s getting to be that time in the summer when you stop looking forward to and honoring every crop as it comes in, and you begin to feel overwhelmed. Up till now the goodies have ripened in an orderly and welcome progression — parsnips, then asparagus and rhubarb, then radishes and spinach, then strawberries and lettuce and dill and turnips, then kohlrabi, peas, and new potatoes. You can thoroughly enjoy one thing before the next came along. But now, wham! Broccoli, zucchini, beans, raspberries, currants, gooseberries, cabbage, carrots, beets, onions. And in the flower garden calendula, bachelor’s buttons, phlox, hollyhocks, delphiniums, Sweet William, stock, bergamot, daylilies, zinnias, petunias. It’s a bit much. And we still haven’t been hit with the August crops, the really big yielders, the tomatoes, corn, and cucumbers. We’re just at the turning point where we see that the rest of the summer will not be about weeding any more but will be about canning and freezing.
We have had quite a few visitors, as we always do on Foundation Farm in the summer. Wim Hafkamp from Holland has departed now, driving his old VW into the sunset to discover America. Yesterday we had four Danish ladies visiting, one of them Sussanne Blegaa, who lived here for a year way back 13 years ago, when the farm was new to all of us. We loved her and her husband Peder very much, and it was tenderly wonderful to have her back, even for a short visit. One of the Danes traveling with her, a high-school teacher named Elisabeth, by mutual agreement decided to stay here instead of traveling on, so three Danish ladies left, driving into the sunset to discover America, and the fourth has been out feverishly weeding the garden all morning. Elisabeth is about 60 I’d guess, and a real tiger. I hope I grow up to be like her. She has been bicycling all over Plainfield, she has befriended the dogs and has been taking them for hikes, she has taken over doing the dishes, she has picked about a gallon of raspberries, and she just asked me what else she could do! I’d like to keep her, but she has to go back to Denmark in a few days.
Another visitor is an improbable pooch named Wavy Gravy. Wavy is about the size of my hand, light brown, and floppy all over. She looks absolutely ridiculous next to our 90-lb golden retrievers, who regard her with utter disdain and treat her like a cat. She is so finely bred that she cost $700. She belongs to some friends who are on vacation. We were reluctant to dog-sit for a creature so valuable (I could imagine her getting stepped on), but the friends were stuck, so we have Wavy for awhile. Fortunately, she is plucky and fearless and incredibly cute, so, even though we all say we dislike “little yippy dogs”, and even though she steals our socks and drags them all over the house, we do find Wavy very often sleeping on Dennis’s lap, or up on John’s bed, or at my knee while I sit at the computer, which is where she is at the moment.
Yesterday I spend all morning doing the very best job that goes with our Community Land Trust, namely walking over a beautiful piece of land. Maybe the Land Trust is something else I should explain, and this particular piece of land is a good way to explain it. It’s 450 acres, at the end of a dead-end road, halfway up a mountain, with 50-mile views in 3 directions. Most of the land is wooded, but there are about 100 acres of open fields grazed by cattle. It used to be a hard-scrabble hill farm. Now it’s owned by an investor who lives in Connecticut, who bought it intending to subdivide it into as many houselots as possible and sell them, making a financial killing. That’s typically what happens to land up here.
The neighbors called the Land Trust in a panic, asking us to find a way to prevent the development. There’s no way we can pay a developer’s price for the land. So I met with the owner, asking him if he’d be willing either to put restrictions on his deed, limiting the number of houses and lots that will ever be put there, or to sell the land to the Trust at a below-market price. Either way, he claims a charitable deduction and gets a break on his income tax.
Mr. Zimmerman, the owner, turns out to be an interesting man, a Dartmouth alum, a guy who, in spite of himself, has fallen in love with that beautiful piece of land. He’s fighting with himself now, partly thinking of keeping the land and retiring on it (in which case maybe he’ll give us a deed restriction), partly attracted by the income tax break (so maybe he’ll give us a bargain sale), and partly still wanting to make that killing. Yesterday I walked over about 1/3 of the land with him (it took 3 hours, which gives you an idea of the size of the whole thing) and with a couple I’m hoping might buy it, either directly from him, or from the Trust. They are arch-conservationists, and both Zimmerman and I enjoyed walking with them, because as we went they taught us the song of the black-throated-blue warbler and the names of the mushrooms. It was a wonderful morning.
Now, somehow, I have to get the conservationists to buy the land at full price and then protect it (then they get the tax break), or get Zimmerman to protect it, or get Zimmerman to sell it to the Trust at a low price (in which case, we will put deed restrictions on it and then re-sell it). It’s an important deal, because we have talked to every other neighbor on that road and they all have agreed to put protective restrictions on their own land if Zimmerman will do it too. So if I can get his land restricted, we will have actually limited development on a whole road, maybe 1000 acres in all.
That’s how a land trust works. It’s fun work to do, especially the part where you get to walk the land. Our trust is just over a year old now, I am the chairman of the board, and we have just hired our first full-time staff person. But mostly the work is done by volunteers like me. We’re all learning a lot in the process, about the land in the Valley, about the real estate market, about the development process, about the people who live here and the rich people from the big cities who invest here.
It’s now late Sunday afternoon. I took a break in the middle of this letter to make lunch for Dennis, Elisabeth, John, and John’s new girl friend. Suzanne is in Arizona at Arcosanti. Kate just whizzed through on her way to visit her cousin in Burlington. Brenna is at her grandmother’s for a vacation at the beach. I haven’t started this week’s column — I haven’t even decided what it’s going to be about. I’d better get to work.
Love, Dana
