Smoke-drift from the Canadian Fires casts an eerie, orange-red glow over the Farm. Moon travels the night sky as a ball of fire; Sunset carries hints of the apocalypse. What’s more, a serious drought has settled upon us. The shallow spring that waters the livestock has already dropped below its lowest level from last Summer. I had put off measuring until yesterday. Less than two feet of water left. Just a month ago the spring was overflowing, the water-table near ground level. And then the Rains stopped coming. There is a second well here at the Farm, just behind the old Farmhouse, which sits near the crest of the land. When I moved onto the Farm a bit over a year ago, I found the upper well only by parting a thick tangle of vines. A bucket and a rope still hung there. From what I can tell, the Old Man drew his drinking water by lowering and raising that bucket, until the day he didn’t wake from his sleep. The well has not been drawn from in two decades. Last Spring, a neighbor told me that this was rumored to be one of the deepest hand-dug, stone-lined wells in the area—seventy-five feet, by his recollection. My measurement finds the bottom at about sixty feet, but the miracle of the thing shines regardless of the number. How in the heck did they do it? A sixty-foot-deep hole dug into the ground, lined with a dry-laid stone wall three feet thick, trying to fill with cold water the whole time. This week I will work to drop a pump down into this old marvel, all the while fumbling to remember how to pray for Rain. As I gather toward the story’s telling, I am wondering what it looks like to turn and face the past in a time of cascading ecological and social troubles. But first, this week’s
Almanack Contributor Adam Wilson
Adam Wilson has taken up residence at an abandoned farm in Keeseville, NY, home to the Adgate/Schermerhorn family for over two hundred years. He grazes Sheep and Cows there, learns alongside a growing team of young working steers, and labors to write stories from and of that particular place, the farm above the bend in the Ausable where Geese stopover on their long journey. His writings include the Peasantry School Newsletter, where this essay first appeared. Sign up for it here: https://peasantryschool.substack.com/
Speaking of gifts
Greetings Friends, Neighbors and Strangers,
Sending this digital letter out into the world is not unlike holding a mature Dandelion seed head to the Wind. A couple of weeks back we were in the lion stage here; yards in the neighborhood glowed with that stubbornly cheerful yellow color. I noticed my neighbor Pat mowing his lawn as often as he could, attempting to tame it back to straight green. Within hours, however, they’re back out. Now we have entered the time of dispersing seeds, to the delight of some, and the agitation of others. I, along with the Sheep and Cows here at the Farm, adore those tender Spring Dandelion leaves—mildly bitter, tonic, digestive. The sight of Dandelion fuzz drifting on a Spring breeze makes me smile. Stubbornly cheerful, persistent, alive.
Every once in a while, the digital wind blows this weekly story-plea to a patch of disturbed, fertile ground. Seeds know how to get to work in places like that. Stories too. This week, I’ve got a couple of heart-warming stories for you. But first, this week’s invitations and requests:
A feast of gratitude
As first light breaks the thick black of night, the most unabashed Spring choir comes to full voice. The choir’s members have traveled from afar and attuned their voices to this specific landscape—a place of Sand and Swamp, of Hickory and Oak and Pine, of River and Lake shore. Yesterday I attended, for the first time, the Saturday afternoon Mass at the grand stone Church atop the hill on the far side of the broad, sandy River, built by the French Catholics around 1900. The pew I slip into doesn’t have a service booklet to read from, so I spend an hour listening. I am struck by how much of the service is sung—simple chanted prayers committed to memory by all in attendance, save me. I stretch my ears into the shared air space as others sing, just as I would extend my hand upon meeting.
After the service, my ninety-year-old neighbor Pat calls me over to introduce me to a few people, including the priest. Father Chris has a kind way about him. I extend my hand, in greeting. Like most people I’ve met in this town, he knows of the old Farm where I live. There’ is a good bit of mystery surrounding the place, which sat abandoned for two decades. The Schermerhorn family descended by marriage from the Adgates, whose patriarch Matthew was awarded the land for exemplary service in the Revolutionary War. On that day, he was granted claim to this patch of unceded Mohawk hunting, fishing and gathering territory. I pull a stack of printed invitations to Sunday’s May Day Gratitude Feast from my jacket pocket, and hand a few to Father Chris. “Please pass along the invitation as you see fit, and join us yourself if you are free,” I say. He thanks me, and I walk from the church.
Feeding the ground on the farm
The human labors here at the Farm consist largely of moving Sheep and Cows from one paddock to another. Before domestication and fences, this work—keeping the herds of hungry ruminants bunched together and always on the move—was the responsibility of those with gleaming incisors. The top predators. And the ground was the beneficiary. Think Bison herds thousands strong thundering across the Prairie, building legendary meters-deep topsoil. The herd acts like a paintbrush in the hands of a master landscape painter. In simplified terms, they use their remarkably-adapted mouths, tongues and digestive systems to transform the standing Grasses into urine and manure, with which they paint the ground. You could say that their job is to feed the ground back to itself. They beget a greening of riotous fecundity. Tragically, after just a few hundred years under the lash of the plow hitched to an economy of extraction, the remarkable capacity of those Prairie soils to sustain life has largely been reduced to rumor, to legend.
On the passing of time, and generations
Save a few ruddy Oaks, tenacious green Buckthorn and coppery Beech leaves, the hedgerows and woods are mostly bare now. Old Maples along the farm drive have laid down their prolific Summer work—in places nearly knee-deep. Weeks of warm Sun keep the Geese around, and their long residency has the unfortunate effect of normalizing that which was once novel. But the place will seem deathly quiet when they leave, so I try to remind myself: you’d best listen while you can. Cricket song no longer pulses in the meadow where I step from the house each morning to admire the place aloud—in greeting—before beginning to push and pull. The project list, like the Maple leaves in the yard, seems suddenly knee-deep. I keep wondering who is going to rake all those leaves this year. It is a season to be undone by the going and the gone-ness of things, of those whose presence among us we had grown accustomed to.
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- Essex County DPW finds way to keep glass out of the landfill
- Watertown native named Jefferson Community College president
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- Warren County transportation service to merge with Capital District Transit Authority
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- Old Forge expands off-road biking
- Air quality questions answered in light of Canada wildfires
- Death of an Adirondack relic
- Thick smoke hangs over the Adirondacks
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A map of longing
I am writing a book that tells a story of giving food away at Brush Brook Community Farm. While that Farm project has been closed for a year and a half now, the website is still live. The home page reads: “Brush Brook Community Farm is an experimental agricultural gift economy in Huntington, Vermont.” As I write, I am realizing that the book amounts to a map—story lines scratched onto a blank page to summarize a living terrain peopled by humans and nonhumans. Maps are used primarily for navigation, for wayfinding. We rely on navigation in every moment as we decide which way to proceed—right, left, forward. Where to procure food, to find love or companionship, to seek rest, to alleviate boredom. But we don’t tend to use maps for terrain with which we are familiar. It might seem an obvious statement, but let it sink in for a moment.
I recently talked with a class of college students about the late Brush Brook Community Farm. I began by asking them to raise their hands if they knew what “community service” was. All hands went up. “How many of you have done community service?” Again, all hands. “Would anyone be willing to offer an example?” A volley of one-sentence stories filled the air. “I raked leaves once for my elderly neighbor.” “I volunteered for a few hours at the Food Pantry.” “I picked up trash on Earth Day.”
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