Dear Folks, It’s early Sunday morning and foggy. Ominous. Morning fog in this valley is a sign of fall. When the air starts cooling but the land is still full of evapotranspirating greenery, we fog up every morning, unless it’s actively raining. If you go up in the mountains, you quickly rise out of the fog into brilliant sun — you can look down and see the cotton wool lining every river valley. The fog gets thicker as the autumn deepens, until in September it can take up to 11 AM for the sun to burn it away. Then in October the whole phenomenon disappears.
This morning the sun is already breaking through at 7 AM. It’s not a thick fog, just the first one, a sign of summer’s turning. The early goldenrod is about to bloom, another sign. Twilight, when I collect the eggs and shut in the chickens, comes half an hour sooner now.
Yesterday I put a formal end to the late peas (pulled out the vines, picked off the last pods for dinner, took down the supports). Already a week ago, I seeded the early fall crops (turnips, Chinese cabbage, beets, lettuce, arugula, tatsoi, the final sowing of green beans) in the space of the early peas. Late fall crops will go into the hoop house about two weeks from now.
And it’s going to be 90 today and the gardens are bursting. There’s plenty of summer left.
The farm subscribers are getting zucchini, yellow squash, cucumbers, beets, celery, chard and carrots in their weekly delivery. (No tomatoes or corn yet, but the corn is tassling and the first tomato just ripened.) The fingerling potatoes are blooming their heads off. We’re picking raspberries and blueberries. Chrissie’s garlic plantation is turning brown — there will be a big harvest in about a week. Bouquets in the house feature red beebalm, golden gloriosa daisies, blue larkspur, pink achillea, white pearl, white Shasta daisies.
The market gardeners, Stephen and Mary and Kerry and Chrissie, are scrambling. (Next time you go to a farmers market, add a little to the price of the veggies — these folks work HARD!) Every Friday morning we have a big picking for the weekend markets. Wash, bunch, make signs, pack the collapsible stand on the truck, fill the coolers with ice. Chrissie makes and packs bouquets to sell. Eggs and wool and sheepskins get loaded. Saturday they pull out early, hoping they’ve picked enough but not too much, and they spend most of the day at the market. (They go to Woodstock every week, and once a month they go to both Norwich and Woodstock. They’ve pulled out of Newport; not enough customers.) Then Monday morning there’s another pick and pack for the subscribers, who come get their shares Monday night. (Except for the ones I deliver to Hanover early Tuesday morning.) We have 18 shares subscribed now. In between those fixed weekly market times there’s weeding, thinning, watering, composting, replanting, and picking and deliveries for the Upper Valley Coop store. It’s quite an operation!
Kerry was knocked out of it for only about a week. Her surgery to reset and pin her right leg went well. She was sick as a dog for a couple of days and then rallied amazingly. Now she’s ordered to walk on that leg as much as she can stand, and to ride an exercise bike when she can’t walk. The other leg is 70% healed on its own and just has a removable brace now, so she can actually SEE BOTH LEGS. She’s still on crutches, and she tools around the kitchen in a wheelchair when she cooks (because she can move faster, I guess). She still has plenty of pain. But she’s mobile and raring to go. As soon as the incision heals and the muscles come back, she’ll be walking on her own, though the doctors have warned her against stomping for awhile.
As to the new farms in Hartland, the roller-coaster ride is still on. This time last month I was euphoric, because we’d just had a good meeting with the Hunts and drafted purchase & sales agreements for both farms. Well, as they say, it ain’t over till it’s over. Two days after the Curtises got our p&s, they got another offer. It was simple and straightforward (ours is not; it has a contingency that the Hunts must sign, something the Curtises have been waiting for over a year for them to do). I suppose the other offer was for a much higher price. On the day after Fourth of July, a day before I was due to leave for a week, I called Will Curtis, and he told me they were angry about our offer and were going to sell to the other party.
The Curtises! The lovely folks who have been our supporters all along!
I was on the phone all that day, trying to figure out what had happened and what, if anything, we could do. I called their lawyer, who is also their son-in-law and not exactly disinterested in this deal. He wouldn’t talk with me, only with our lawyer. So I called her, she called him, she was told they were negotiating the other deal and didn’t want to talk about ours. I got friends of the Curtises to call; they reported that the realtor and the son-in-law were pressing hard for the other buyers, and that they had misinformed the Curtises about our offer. (It’s 13 pages of legalese, with stuff about their being responsible for toxic waste — boilerplate these days, but the Curtises were told it meant the Sustainability Institute could sue their grandchildren.)
Finally, Sunday morning, just before I got on the plane, I called the Curtises and let go. I said if they had a better offer they should take it; they had to decide what’s best for them and for the farm, which will be there long after we are all gone. I said I did want to explain to them what was in our offer, so their decision would be based on the facts.
Jane Curtis was wonderful during that call, but also upset. “This isn’t settled, Dana,” she said. “We don’t know what to do. We can’t sleep at night. We’re told your offer is very punitive, and the other one is very good.” I told her whatever they decided, we’d still love them (which is true). Several other members of our group called that day to say the same thing. I got on the plane assuming it was all over. Son-in-law negotiating the sale, real-estate agent who will get a higher commission with the other buyer — we didn’t have a lot going for us. “It’s love against greed,” I told Don Seville, a member of the group who was with me on the trip, “and I guess I have to bet on greed.”
I was so depressed.
Two days later I was sitting with Don in a meeting in Phoenix (more about that in a minute) and a fax was handed to me. “It’s a p&s!” I whispered to Don in amazement. We read through it. The son-in-law had redrafted and simplified it, but not changed anything material. And there on page 6 were Will’s and Jane’s signatures!
I jumped out of the meeting, called our lawyer, called the Curtises, signed the fax, and sent it out Fedex within half an hour. I can’t really say that love won out over greed. What happened, apparently, was that greed defeated itself. The son-in-law, using our offer as leverage, played for more money from the other buyer and was turned down. Will and Jane, who wanted to sell to us all along, but who had been intimidated by family pressure, used that opportunity to get their way.
That was July 8. The agreement says we have 30 days to get the Hunts to sign and meet all other contingencies (title searches, building inspections, etc. — on both properties.) No problem, I thought, the Hunts really want this deal to go through.
But after I got back our lawyer was gone for a week, and meanwhile the Hunts’ lawyer had come back with a lot of objections to THAT p&s. Annoying objections. Grasping objections. Two pages of them. I won’t treat you to all the details here, because they still make me mad.
I thought I was good at bargaining in the rug bazaars of the Middle East, but in truth I hate bargaining. I hate the adversarial, zero-sum, hard-nosed context of it. I usually give in, just to get the game over with. But in this case there were some items too ridiculous to give in about, and one item my group felt really strongly about, and one that I felt really strongly about.
Mine had to do with the land. John Hunt has this idea that he’s going to run a driveway through his old gravel pit (which he’s keeping) to his new house site (which he’s keeping — two acres — we’ve agreed to that). To stabilize the steep bank, he wants to push down a little fill from our side of the line — from right where there happens to be a garden.
John Hunt just doesn’t realize the ferocity with which I view the concept of bulldozers in gardens. Not an inch, I told our lawyer. Not a millimeter of topsoil goes over that bank.
The group’s issue was the same toxic waste stuff that had hung us up with the Curtises. We figure that if anyone had an oil dump or pesticide spill on his land, it would be John Hunt. Underlying that farm is deep, well drained glacial till, underlain by an aquifer that not only would be our irrigation source, but that eventually feeds the Hunts’ well. “We have to do an EPA Phase I toxic waste survey,” the group decided.
So, with 20 days left before our deadline, I was calling environmental engineers about toxic waste surveys. The lowest bid I got was $1500, the highest was $3000. That’s just to walk the place, check out its history, and talk to the farmer about dumps. If there are monitoring wells to drill and water samples to test, the price rises steeply. And there was no guarantee they could get it done in 20 days.
“Heck, I can walk the place and talk to the farmer,” I finally decided. John Hunt is garrulous when he gets talking; I knew he’d tell us the truth. So I arranged for a “dump walk,” last Friday, with Stephen along, because he’s so good at connecting with John. I also let the real estate agents know that we were put out with all the niggling demands the Hunts were making, and our lawyer fired off a tough letter to their lawyer.
Well, it was a good walk. We learned about every buried horse. We even got into the ticklish issue of pushing gardens over banks to stabilize gravel pits. We sat on their porch and drank tea, and Barbie Hunt raised the real issues. “Is it going to be all right for you, to have us living right up the hill there?” she asked. “Is it going to be all right for YOU,” I replied, “to be looking down and watching us farm your land?” Finally, after a year of wrangling, we had a human conversation without real estate agents and lawyers in between. We went over every item of contention. They had good reasons for some and we gave in. We had good reasons for others and they gave in. I’m convinced there are no toxic dumps. They understand how I feel about using gardens as fill. We agreed on a little knoll above the garden they can take fill from, as long as they put the topsoil back — I actually wouldn’t mind having that knoll leveled.
I think we’ll sign that p&s this coming week.
But then, it isn’t over till it’s over.
Phew! Why am I bothering to tell you all this niggling stuff about real estate deals? Well, partly because it’s been my obsession this month, but also because it’s such a strange world to me, and strange worlds are full of lessons. The main one I have to learn is to play whatever game I’m playing, and play to win, and not give up, and not keep wishing it were a different game. If it’s the game of Real Estate Negotiation, you niggle over details; that’s just how it’s done. And you keep coming back. I would have walked away forever many times during this year, but others with cooler heads, especially Peter Forbes, never gave up.
Another lesson, which sounds contradictory but isn’t, is that even games that seem to be about nothing but money and power, can actually be about human relationships and higher purposes. We would never have gotten either the Curtis or the Hunt place (assuming we get them), if we hadn’t started out with honesty, respect, and a plan that honored the land — and if we hadn’t kept coming back to those lodestones every time communications failed. Barbie Hunt told me that she never forgot our intention, the first time we met a year ago, to protect the prime ag soil. That was the deciding factor for her. (Not him, I think.)
Honesty and respect and higher purpose won’t always win out, of course. We’ve probably been too soft in these negotiations. We wanted the places too badly. We’ve put enormous risks upon ourselves (for example, by not being sure we can get through the permitting process before we buy the land). This story is a LONG way from over! But at least, I feel right about the way we’ve dealt with both the people and the land so far.
My gosh! We may actually end up owning those farms!
The group has a bunch of meetings this month to figure out what to do next.
Let’s see, other news … like the Fourth of July parade! I was IN IT this year! That was a stitch! Plainfield has this great little parade, right down Route 12A past the post office, the general store, the Grange Hall, the church, the library. (That pretty much constitutes the town.) I was a handbell player on the church float — 15 of us, sitting on Donny Macleay’s big trailer behind his Mack truck, trailer all decorated with bunting, sheet music propped up on hay bales. We pounded out “America the Beautiful” and “Battle Hymn of the Republic” over and over. We lined up an hour before the starting time, down in the parking lot of the Pegasus printing plant south of town. EIGHT firetrucks with red lights flashing. (We borrow them from nearby towns. Lord help us if we ever have a fire on Fourth of July!) The National Guard in camouflaged-colored personnel carriers. The Library Float, full of kids reading books — pulled by our Foundation Farm Kubota tractor. A long line of decked-out horses and riders, including a tiny girl on a tiny pony. Big John Mayette under his big Western hat riding his big mule. Charlie Stone driving his two enormous oxen. The boy scouts — someone mistakenly assigned them to march right behind the horses. The pennywhistle band. The special olympics kids, bedecked with medals. Every antique tractor in town. Folks lining the road, waving flags, cheering.
What fun! I was high as a kite, in love with America, in love with Plainfield. (Hartland has a Fourth of July parade too, but not a church bell choir. They also have fireworks, which Plainfield doesn’t.)
Now, Phoenix — what were Don Seville and I doing in Phoenix? We were invited by Will Orr, an old acquaintance, who works for the City of Scottsdale in an amazing hi-tech center for city planning, funded largely by NASA. NASA is trying to make itself beloved in every Congressional district through its Mission to Planet Earth program — demonstrating that satellite photos and digitized geographic information can be useful to local governments. The Phoenix meeting was called to design a computer model to link local growth decisions to global climate change and vice versa. If Scottsdale doubles its cars and greenhouse gas emissions, and the climate changes, what would happen to, say, rainfall patterns or air quality or summer temperatures in Scottsdale? (107 degrees every day we were there.)
I have no special interest in either NASA or Scottsdale. (I frankly think the whole Phoenix metropolitan area ought to be moved somewhere else). But I have always been fascinated by the question of how to get people to be responsible for tiny individual decisions, which, when multiplied by billions of people, add up to global catastrophes. It makes no measurable difference to the global climate if Scottsdale doubles its cars. It makes a huge difference if every community does. You don’t need a computer model to figure that out. But how to provide that feedback in a way compelling enough to make people decide NOT to double cars?
I enjoyed having two days to think about that question. Don and I proved to be a good team. We pushed to get whatever project emerges to include temporal dynamics (feedback behavior over time) that would be at least as sophisticated as the spatial displays. Scottsdale can do nifty “virtual flyovers,” where they simulate the look of Phoenix under different growth assumptions, as if you were actually flying over the future city. But the growth assumptions come from simple mental models. It’s a perfect example of having a hammer and treating everything as if it were a nail (which all modelers do, including me). If you have a GIS system and three-screen computer projection facilities, you invent data-crunching processes to use those tools — without asking if they will answer anyone’s real questions or change anyone’s real behavior. I was reminded of the modeling philosophy of the 70s — put together tons of numbers, design a dazzling display, bring in the decision-makers, knock their socks off, and then the world will work better.
As a result of the Scottsdale meeting Don and I and the Sustainability Institute may try to design a community growth game, with good feedback dynamics, which could hook into NASA data bases and 3-way displays for communities that can afford them, and just use a simple game board for communities that can’t. The central dynamic could be based on Forrester’s old urban dynamics model. We’ll see. We have more than enough to do at the moment.
On the way home from Phoenix I stopped in for a couple days at Mom’s in Tahlequah OK. It’s always good to be there, to spend time with Mom, to admire her gardens (studded with spectacular lilies), to visit my Uncle Edward who lives there too, and their neighbors. I come away filled with thanks for my funny, vigorous mother, gardening up a storm, beating everyone at bridge, scoffing at the politicians on CNN, and helping out everyone in reach.
Well, now it’s later in the morning and the Foundation Farm household seems to be coming alive. Chrissie’s sister Lisa is here with her 3-year-old twins, dog, and two tiny kittens with their eyes just open, who have to be fed with bottles. (Plenty of competition to do that job!) Chrissie’s parents are staying in a motel nearby. Two friends of Stephen and Kerry arrived last night and put up a tent on the front lawn. They were all here for dinner last night, plus another couple with two small kids. We put on a summer feast — barbecued lamb on the grill, baked beans, potato salad, green salad, pasta salad, watermelon. The kids played in the living room, the dogs helped Scot with the barbecue, people wandered around the gardens. It’s nice to have a place that can stretch to embrace so many people on a beautiful summer night.
We’ll have to be sure the new place can be as hospitable. We just got back the building inspection report on the Curtis house (from John Zimmer who used to live here — remember John, you old-timers?) Hmmm, another crumbling old house to love back to health. I expected that. I guess I’m getting used to it. I just had to treat this house for carpenter ants, and in two weeks we’ll be drilling a new well, because Blow-Me-Down Brook, which has moved about 50 feet in the past 20 years, is about to close in on the old one. I don’t want to leave whoever buys this place with those problems. I have to paint the inside, too, and fix a dozen little broken things. And write proposals for the Sustainability Institute and get back to my book.
But first I have to go out and set up the solar-powered sheep fence and move the sheep to new pasture and water the new seeds I planted.
Never a dull moment!
Love, Dana
