 |
| Sell me for parts |
Just yesterday I was confronted by yet another one of those infuriating "quit your job and go make cheese!" listicles, populated with idyllic portraits of rolling hills and Buddha-like cows and improbably smiling and well-coifed people bent gracefully over a large vat of milk and all I could do between gulps of wine (I'm self-medicating) was screech "BULLSHIT! LITERAL AND FIGURATIVE BULLSHIT!" into the illuminated soul vortex of my computer.
This psychotic little chronicle has been nothing if not an examination of the WHY. Sure, it's different for everyone, though I reckon the nuts who stick to it and become lifers have some unique traits in common.* If I'm being honest I was one of those poor restless saps who thought escaping the gloomy urban grind of my life to go commune with goats would be the answer to the gnawing, roiling whirlpool of existential dread that lived permanently inside my gut. But that only came later. It all started with one very simple, inalienable truth:
I fucking love food.
I mean I really really love it. I'm the sort of person who gets bummed out at the end of a meal because satiety prevents me temporarily from fantasizing about my next repast. (See also: pathological pessimist.)
Since I'm in the habit of creating recurring, overly simplistic dichotomies between My New York Life and My Vermont Life, let's stay on theme. Without going into gratuitous details, I'll sum up that my life in the city was characterized primarily by the pursuit of pleasure in all of its iterations. New York was (is) like that friend who encourages you to take another shot of Fernet, leave the house wearing just a gold lamé leotard and go home with that Turkish guy whose name you can't pronounce, unbothered that you will wind up in Deep Space Queens with the hangover that you're convinced might actually kill you (not that any of this is based on actual experience). It's all hedonism, all the time, and if you have even the slightest impulse towards that sort of lifestyle, it can devolve into compulsion pretty easily. On good days, one can cast it in a more favorable light -- the life of a sensualist, concerned with beauty and its whole-hearted, loving, open-throated consumption. And on bad days, well, see above.
This love of the beautiful and the desire to consume basically everything is what motivated me to dive headlong into the looking glass, to dwell on the other side for a hot minute and try my hand at actually producing something instead of just greedily inhaling it like a human vacuum. I'm not going to sit here and tell you that every person who elects to make cheese and keep dairy animals for a living subscribes to the same sort of lifestyle and physiological maintenance that I've found myself adhering to. But for me, the decision to be a maker of things has required me to approach my daily, bodily maintenance the exact opposite way that I approached it back when I was a boy-crazy, wine-soaked fun bomb. My love of a life characterized by pleasure has lead me to its opposite: a live of relative asceticism, or at the very least balance, which seems positively abstemious compared to my past excesses. Not to say that I don't still love and appreciate a good meal. But on a daily basis, my thinking about food has less to do with momentary flights of fancy or cravings and more to do with making sure I consume something nutritious that will power me through my day and also what I can most easily hoover into my gaping maw after 11 hours of intense labor. I've always had a rather out-sized appetite, but what used to be a somewhat dysfunctional, insatiable drive to keep the party going is now simply a biological impulse to replenish calories lost in a somewhat responsible, marginally thoughtful way. Similarly, sleeping used to be something I luxuriated in rather than a lost battle against consciousness at the end of an exhausting day. #adultlifeisboring
My awareness of my body used to hinge disproportionately on its external valuation. It was almost entirely aesthetic. Now, with ever fewer literal or figurative mirrors, it has become solely about the movements it can make, the weight it can carry, the work it can achieve. Sleep is a replenishing and a way to rest my muscles, and daily calisthenics are not to acquire a flatter stomach but to stave off the aches and pains that grueling physical labor inevitably deliver. My body has become a tool and little else.
Maintaining one's tool (LOLOLOLOLOLOLOL) is essential when the work you do is entirely dependent upon its functionality. (Though it's hard to parse how much of this is contingent on my job and how much is a natural and mandatory requirement of my body's aging and evolution.) This point was driven home last week when my boss, who in his prodigious spare time (sarcasm) cycles competitively, fell on slippery gravel during a ride/race and dislocated his shoulder (see: Why I Don't Do Sports, Part 753). His arm has been in a sling ever since, making it impossible for him to milk goats, dump milk, cut curd, drive the tractor stir, the vat or shuttle cheese from place to place, aka EVERYTHING THAT IS REQUIRED TO RUN A SMALL DAIRY ON A DAILY BASIS. Needless to say Helen and I are pitching in extra to keep things running until he's somewhat restored. Life for the foreseeable future is pretty circumscribed, defined by truly hellacious hours and even shorter spans of down time during which we must cram in things like laundry, sleep and eating like horded treasures. In other words, we're getting a truer sense of what it's ACTUALLY like to not just be employed on a farm, but to run it. Spoiler alert: it's fucking hard.
*My experience with the aforementioned lifers is somewhat limited, being that I've only worked for two cheesemakers in my life, but since I've stated previously that I'm in the habit of making sweeping generalizations about complex things, I will say that I've perceived some basic similarities between Michael and Laini, the most essential of which are a borderline compulsive work ethic and an affliction that my mother has dubbed "terminal schpilkes" (otherwise known as a deathly abhorrence of idleness). It has been equal parts heartbreaking, amusing and frustrating to see Michael forced by something beyond his control to sit still and not work or be active in some way (even when he's allowed himself some minutes or hours of respite to not actively work on farm related things, he is either picking apples for cider, working in the garden, mowing the lawn, bicycling or otherwise ranging around like a terrestrial shark who will die immediately if ceases to swim).
The dire consequences of a body's failure to do its job cannot be overstated. In farming, especially at this scale, the margins are miniscule. A farmer's ability to hire employees and delegate certain tasks only comes with some measure of financial stability, which means years of working solo and being stretched thin. And even when growth makes this sort of luxury possible, everything is so close to the bone that there are very few allowances or safeguards if something catastrophic or unforeseen happens.
Helen and I are keeping our heads down and taking it a day at a time, and I'm trying to keep my body well fueled and oiled (not like that, gross) like some farmy android with empathic capabilities dialed in to "goat and other quadrupeds." Helen deserves the vast majority of the accolades, being that she's taken the morning shifts for the better part of this last workweek (waking up at 3:15am every day). But further insight into the requirements of farming, at least as it's been designed at Twig Farm, is just more fodder for the assertion that what Michael does on a daily basis is truly fucking astounding.
And on that note, I must inhale five pounds of quinoa and do my hamstring stretches to ensure maximum robot efficiency. Fare thee well languid lunches of oeufs mayonnaise and salty Roulot.
RIP FUN.
No comments:
Post a Comment