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| Call me Inspector Gittles |
But no.
This, my friends, is the price of admission for what may turn out to be the best cheese education available.
There are many many many small details and particularities that Bossman insists on, and many of them seem, at the outset, unnecessarily specific and hyper-anal. But the more I get to know him, the more I begin to understand the logic of it all, and the assertion that things are the way they are because that ensures the best outcome. I know this because in nearly all cases, he can very succinctly explain to me his reasoning and, with the possible exception of his insistence that the exterior of the vat have absolutely no water streak residue on it after it's been cleaned -- seriously I have toiled for hours to get this to happen and can only deduce that he invokes some dark magic to achieve this feat -- I have complete trust and faith in his edicts.
Tiny little miniscule details. For someone who studied to be an anthropologist and made a living as a writer for a good chunk of time, you'd think I'd be more attuned to the little things. I posited that some combination of my daydreaming tendencies and the years I spent in the city forcibly teaching myself to filter out the overwhelming stimulus that surrounded me -- that was sometimes painful or downright dangerous to let on that you noticed -- has numbed my perception. But frankly, I think it's like anything else in cheesemaking -- a product of practice and discipline.
Today in the cheeseroom, Boss was discussing how both myself and my co-worker have been fastening the fence closures differently from how he does it and, in a way that was diplomatic and simultaneously a subtextual commentary on our denseness, wondered aloud why we had so willfully disregarded the example he provided of how to properly fasten the fence. In this case, he explained, it didn't make a demonstrable difference, but it did highlight our lack of sensitivity to the subtleties of such things.
It's exactly this sort of sensitivity that I've found is useful -- nay essential -- in cheesemaking, and it's been on my mind a lot of late, as I evaluate my own progress on a daily basis and try desperately to remember, replicate and continue to absorb the minutiae that my job demands. So when Boss brought it up, I figured I'd take the opportunity to assure him that I didn't think he was being a dick for being so exacting and also to ask him if he thought things like a finely-honed attention to detail and an insane work ethic were traits inherent in the people who were drawn to cheesemaking or whether it was the other way around: that the work itself demanded and thus instilled those traits into a person over time.
"I'm too far inside of it to answer," he replied. "But, I guess, you gotta do something, right?"
"Well, no. You don't HAVE to. One doesn't," I said, as I recalled wistfully my refined ability to lounge and lolligag.
"Ok, well maybe that's part of it. People who wind up being cheesemakers HAVE to. They can't NOT do something."
And thus began our exploration of what drew him to cheese and cheesemaking, which of course is individual and specific but which I wager carries some common threads. He talked about his fascination with cheese itself, its ability to impart complexity and to transport and create memories more profound than the oft-invoked Proustian Madeline, its histor-culinary relevance in the Northeastern U.S. in particular as a symbol of self-reliance.
"You have to be a little bit of a romantic, even if you don't want to cop to it," he said.
"Did you ever think at the beginning, 'I've made a huge mistake, I can't do this?'"
He thought about it for a while. He mentioned the strain of moving to a new place, working 16 hour days and having a brand new baby. "I was more exhausted at the end of the day than I'd ever been. But every day I was more invested." Then he let slip something that I'd suspected all along. Discussing how much he loved the lifestyle and the land, he said, "There's no where else I want to be. I love this shitty terrible weather," and glanced out the window at the wall of grey.
"Ah, so you're a misanthropic masochist! I've found the essential core of the true cheesemaker."
You guys, I'm not even fucking kidding about that.
I've always been someone afraid of pain, afraid of doing the hard thing. It gets back to noticing versus not noticing. If you notice something, you are impelled to act upon it, whether it's noticing garbage on the ground or a homeless dude without shoes or a coating of rust on the underside of the draining table. If you notice, you have to either pretend that you don't and shove it out of your mind, make peace with the guilt of being lazy or selfish, or, you know, DO something. Which is why we scrub out the interiors of the light fixtures when we see smudges on them, and why we mark down the weather and the direction of the wind every day when we notate the pounds of milk the girls produced. In cheesemaking, every element adds up and often has consequences, whether great or small. In life, it makes for a cacophonous and exhausting interior life to be sure. I remember talking in college with my anthropology professor about how overwhelming it must be to have to be tuned into all the little details one has to be open to when in the field, and he agreed, saying that it was something you had to learn to turn off when you got back home or else you'd go crazy.
And this is a cheesemaker's life. It starts with this gauzy pastoral fantasy, then it pummels you with its punishing demands, and, if you last, you find yourself unable or unfit to do anything else.
No wonder they're a bunch of wacko misfits.
I hope to join their ranks one day. If the last 35 years is any indication, I have the wacko misfit thing down right. I'm halfway there.
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