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| If you zoom in and squint ... |
When I first began to toy with the idea of moving to the Northeast Kingdom three summers ago (FUCK PLEASE STOP TIME FROM MARCHING ONWARD), I had already driven through the area years prior, but my mind's image of it was hazy and gauzy and half-baked. All of my previous experiences in Vermont had been brief and idyllic, nearly always taking place in the summer, with the notable exception of that one time I convinced myself I was an ace skier and spent the following few months nursing a hematoma the size of a flank steak on my thigh. Of course, the prospect of living in this notoriously rugged and isolated environment was an entirely different thing than simply driving through and taking in the pretty pretty landscape.
As my plan to relocate materialized into a reality and I landed myself a place to live, I began to pore over my Google maps, both to orient myself to my new job, the closest grocery stores, ANYTHING AT ALL and to begin the project of imagining, which is always my favorite part of any endeavor. The house where I'd be living was nothing at all but a cluster of green with nothing for miles around. When I zoomed in just enough and scrolled and scanned over the (nearly barren) landscape I found someplace called Flowers By Olga and Forget Me Not Shop, brushing my fingers up and over to the green patch labeled Jay Peak and, just south, Cajun's Snack Bar. Close enough was Butterworks Farm, a place I had visited and whose gothic looking grey steeple I could still picture in my mind's eye. And then, even further north, an unpronounceable lake separating Vermont from Canada. Further Googling revealed that the road just west of where I'd be living had recently enjoyed some local fame due to the sink hole that had developed in its center. I also discovered the exhilarating proximity of an asbestos mine, practically walking distance from my new digs. A Superfund site right in my own back yard!
Even with my murky memories of this place that I had briefly visited once and the vague impressions of where these adorable-sounding micro-businesses were in relation to each other, nothing could really prepare me for the actuality of these things in three dimensions. And even in those first weeks and months, my brain took forever to truly orient myself. For the first month, I needed to use my trusty Google maps (or, in some cases, good old fashioned hand-written directions, being that cell service was limited) just to get myself from home to work, a distance of less than ten miles. By the time I left sixteen months later, the topography had been etched into my mind, no longer a series of lefts and rights and mile posts and barely legible street signs, but a living terrain that had been observed under the banner of each season, now imbued with a series of memories -- this bridge I'd driven over in winter and spring and summer, this road where I'd seen a bear cross, fixing me with a withering stare before ambling into the woods, this hidden lake where I'd picnicked and swum and this general store and farm stand where I'd stock up on my essential supplies of Black Cherry seltzer and turmeric kombucha and tomatoes and potatoes and strawberries and lettuce. The lived experience of my time there retraced and transposed those early renderings, replacing them with the highs and lows and pain and joy of my time there, a remapping wrought by my own small victories and heartbreaks.
I never did get to Flowers By Olga.
I've been in a constant state of motion pretty much since I left New York, thrusting myself into new and unfamiliar environments at regular intervals. And though I'd learned from experience that poring over these digital maps in anticipation of a visit was in no way revelatory of a place's true character and, if anything, gave me a false sense of what to expect and was perhaps doing me a disservice, I nonetheless gazed longingly at these rudimentary outlines of a space, ever hopeful that catapulting myself into this next time and place would remake me, that I'd discover whatever it was I was looking for.
In Italy, and later, Finland and Estonia, these maps were largely functional, being that (barring those first couple of months in Tuscany when my tenure there was uncertain) I was using them to navigate and not to sketch out an extended stay and concoct a fantasy life. In Chicago, I used the maps with a mixture of embarrassment and resentment, feeling deeply that I ought to know intuitively where things were, frustrated by all the rivers and winding freeways and inexhaustible sprawl, so strange and broad and unlike the logical, neat grids of my beloved New York.
The trail I've been following for these last several years, the path allowing me access to these places, has been cheese. In just the last six months, I've been able to more than double my exposure to the different scales and approaches to small ruminant dairying that I had when I left Vermont. I dabbled in sheepsmilk in Tuscany, focusing on the (strange) techniques of the creamery exclusively and utterly (udderly) divorced from the happenings on the farm with the animals. In the midwest, I spent a day working in the cheeseroom at the beautiful Prairie Fruits Farm in Champaign, seeing the 80-head mixed herd, the 12-deep milking parlor, the pristine cheese room outfitted with two small vats, the jerry-rigged brining and aging rooms tricked out with humidifiers and ambient cooling systems, the racks of chili rubbed goat cheese. Just enough time away from my goat pals and a stainless steel vat made me ache for the work, the physical exhaustion, the sense of purpose and, perhaps most of all, the definitive cause of my heretofore amorphous and idiopathic sadness. (At least before, I could pin my frustrations and feelings of inadequacy to tangible obstacles or setbacks or challenges at work -- in a vacuum they are swirling, malignant pongs ceaselessly circulating inside my brain.)
Recently I traveled west, to a part of the country where I've spent almost no time. I went with the specific intent of crafting a new life there, and as such, all of my pre-visit mapping was redolent of anticipation, the unknown possibilities of this or that street, this or that park, this or that coffee shop. Without revealing too much, I'll say simply that my motivation for moving was twofold: to be with a person that I'd recently fallen in love with and to outrun that ever-encroaching restlessness and dread and melancholy that has grown more virulent with the passing of time. For the months leading up to my visit, I'd been hearing a series of fairy tales about this beautiful place, but even with the added depth of this narrative to guide me, nothing could prepare me for its actuality: the misty Oregon coast punctuated by dramatic rock formations sticking straight up from the water, the strange, quirky little seaside towns frozen in some bizarro vestige of 1960s America a la David Lych, the backroads of wine country with its rolling green hills, the orchards lining the roads laden not with apples or pears but filberts (fucking FILBERTS!), the sloping vineyards dotted with lavender bushes, and the city of Portland, where I'd last visited when I was nursing my worst breakup to date, now suddenly imbued with the glow of new, giddy, kissing-on-street-corners love.
I visited another creamery, bereft of the farmstead aspect of dairying that I have come to love and dread in equal measure. Briar Rose Creamery, a small cheesemaking operation in Dundee, Oregon churning out pretty chevres and a small lineup of aged cheeses using purchased milk from a farm 90 miles away. Between my visit to Prairie Fruits and Briar Rose, I suddenly had an entirely new notion of what cheesemaking could be when divorced from the overwhelming, paralyzing weight of doubt, the fear of imprecision and the worry of doing things incorrectly, too slowly, inexpertly. It's hard to know if this was simply because I was witnessing a "best behavior" sort of scenario, if I myself have evolved in a way that makes me more comfortable in these environments, or if the culture (har) of these disparate places is simply vastly different from the cheeserooms I've worked in over the last couple of years. Whatever the case, it left me with a deeper notion of the multitude of possibilities and experiences a life of cheesemaking could contain, depending on the environment and the human capital.
The West felt, and feels, jarring to my eastern sensibility, as though I'm reading from right to left instead of left to right. The Midwest, with its endless expanse of landlocked cornfields and flat, grim quiet, feels somehow stagnant. I'd begun hating Chicago, an infuriating city of too-wide sidewalks and crummy big box stores, that towed my car and lured me into its underbelly to retrieve it (a story for another time when I've recovered from the sheer anger of it). And yet now, as always, with the knowledge that I'm leaving soon, its beauty is starting to reveal itself, if only for its ephemerality.
Vermont is calling me back to its goat-dappled boob. To a new farm, for a few weeks, after which will follow, presumably, another wide ribbon of unfurling, unfolding uncertainty. For now, the known and the unknown converges. Full steam ahead. I head east tomorrow.
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