I Don't Know Why I Swallowed the Fly

My story is interrupted, for the moment, by one of those days that seem ordinary at the onset, then, snowball into something special just from one errant misstep. I woke up slowly that morning from my torpor fueled by the brewpub fare I ate the night before. Platefuls of soft pretzels, horseradish mustard, sauerkraut smothered pierogies, sausage, which I washed down with several pints of hoppy brew were now doing a little polka in my intestinal tract, but nothing can rival a good sauerkraut burp.

The forecast the night before was for an inch of snow, so of course we woke up to nearly six, but it was the kind of snow that one could dispense of with a feather duster. I ate a banana to coat my stomach for the onslaught of espresso, put on some pants for once, and got to shoveling.

I revved up the snowblower to clear out some parking spaces for a mountain bike meeting in the afternoon, but barely made two passes before the farmer Liz Roma came out to tell me how I was out of my gourd to even attempt such a thing and that she would plow it with a tractor.

So with my plans blown, and nothing else to do in this sleepy town of 500, I got in the farm utility vehicle, known as the green truck, and went across the street to Amee Farm Lodge to retrieve and return a few dozen pairs of snowshoes to The General Store. Conditions were a wee bit treacherous, but I figured with four wheel drive and the immense size of the pickup truck in my favor, I should just man up and do it.

Half way up the access road, fifty yards in, I slid into a two foot high snowbank and promptly dug my tires into a ditch. I wasn’t going anywhere. I stepped out of the truck onto a road that was a luger’s dream, a hundred yard ribbon of smooth, slick ice set at a steep pitch. I went back across the street, brushed the snow off a wheelbarrow of frozen cinders, wheeled the thing across the highway, and ran it up the hill as fast as I could manage until my feet started losing purchase.

Roma made short work of the parking spaces and now spotted my debacle from across the highway, and sped, reaching upwards of ten mph, to my rescue. Liz Cotter, the farm Bikram Yoga instructor and wedding planner, having just finished running a yoga retreat, walked from the opposite direction.

We took turns shoveling, cindering, and deciding who was the most skillful with a truck. I was eliminated from the running immediately; Roma, who spends every day of her life driving heavy machinery was the clear winner. She promptly backed up into a much deeper ditch and the truck careened at such a steep angle that the driver’s side wheels were lifted slightly off the luge run.

If there was any hope at all, the tractor was going to have to pull the truck out. Roma drove it towards the top of the road and then almost pulled off, unintentionally, the first documented farm tractor doughnut. Fearing that the tractor would continue its slide, Liz Cotter and I jumped into a snowbank.

As it stood, the green truck was tilted ominously in a ditch, the tractor was poised sideways on the road on a sheet of ice and Liz Cotter’s jeep was stranded in the Lodge parking lot. I brought the wheelbarrow back to the farm to resupply with sand. I found some sandbags sitting in an ATV trailer and loaded up. When I returned, Roma was not happy, “These are frozen! Matt, you are the goofiest guy I know!” As we bashed the bags on the ground, I tried not to stand too close to Roma fearing that she would crush my metatarpals with solidified sand. I went back to the farm and found a bag of play sand just in time to save my hide.

Meanwhile, yoga retreaters, toting a week’s worth of luggage, filtered past the wreckage stepping gingerly down the luge run to their ride waiting at the entrance. After dumping fifty pounds of sand on the ice, the tractor wheels still spun, and the tractor slid, but never broke loose. We called tow trucks, the closest one with an hour ETA. Liz Cotter made coffee. Hypoglycemic, and beyond humiliation, I grazed on some Luna bars, “nutrition for women,” from the Jeep, and started singing “There was an old woman who swallowed a fly,” until Roma, who, even though it was mid afternoon, didn’t eat a bite, told me to shut the fuck up.

The Great Dessert Rebellion of October 2010

Pies, great flaky vessels of fruity confection lining the countertop of the General Store deli case, and we couldn’t touch them. Joe D didn’t like them. We had a different opinion. The uberblond consumed upwards of a five digit calorie count, whole pizzas, the slices dipped in yogurt, cottage cheese, blocks of cheese, half gallons of orange juice. No meat, since he was vegetarian, on a bet, but if he could find a piece of meat from an animal he knew personally, he was down for it.

But the General Store chef denied the uberblond a piece of pie. He didn’t like it. We thought it was unjust, un-American even. Amee Farm, room and board for work, with the exception of apple pie. Maybe that sort of thing plays in Cuba, but I have my doubts.

The Italian bruiser, Queens born and raised, not one to miss a dessert himself, never heard anything so ridiculous in his life. He bought out the shelf of pies, divvied them up and we all got a slice of pie that night, Joe D and his ascetic, no frills, nutritional Phillistinism be damned. We’ve been eating dessert ever since.

The Gyre of The Vortex starts to Turn

I was taken to the Riverside Farm that morning, a crisp early October day in no way a harbinger to what turned out to be a lame, relatively snowless, winter. The young yoga teacher and the Quebecois drove me there, but I got there most other days by riding an orange mountain bike with a bank logo stuck on the top pipe of the frame. I was given a shovel, rake and loppers and directed to start chopping off the stalks of tree roots poking out of the ground and continue doing so until I reached the end of that particular trail, Noodles Revenge, over two and a half miles.

The trail was dug out by an excavator which has the consequence of leaving a pattern of sheared tree roots sticking straight from the ground like gigantic stubble. It got somewhat tedious at times but I found a certain satisfaction from clearing the trail and seeing my progress each day. I was ensconced within a bright yellow and orange canopy and when the breeze picked up, a light leaf snow ensued, and I began to feel that I would last more than a week.

The extreme farmers were lagging and it was Pedro’s job, as a finance intern, to manage them, to their extreme dismay. The Quebecois was pining for her extradited beau almost constantly. A retired couple ran the inn, also part of the farm, across the street. The husband was an older Italian bruiser who is so tough that he attempted The Death Race a year or two earlier. The only thing I knew about the wife is that whatever I did, people told me, she would note and report.

Things seemed to be unraveling and I entered into the midst of it. The Quebecois decided that she couldn’t function without the marine and retreated to Montreal. Pedro grew increasingly frustrated with the farmers who rebelled by going to the climbing gym at every opportunity. The turmoil made me value my trailside sanctuary even more. I shoveled, raked and lopped with impunity.

We were there under the minimum terms that our room and board was covered for the time we worked there. Anything more than that was negotiable, but we understood that with someone like Joe D the negotiations would be tough.

It didn’t take long for me to learn just how tough. That weekend I decided I would explore the full extent of the trail system I had been working on. I blithely hiked for miles following wherever my whim and glucose stores would take me. I got back that early afternoon to find that a manhunt was in progress at the farm, and I was the fugitive. Joe D, barefoot, rode a bike over to where I was and clarified that farm workers were expected to put in hours every day. Oh, I said with a sinking feeling. That’s the way it is around here, sighed the extreme farmers, and I wasn’t so sure about lasting out the week once again.

I think I got the glimmer of hope I needed from the Great Dessert Rebellion of October that arose a short time afterward which I’ll describe in my next entry….

Into the Vortex, continued

….Woke up the next morning, 6am, for a 6:30 meeting (according to Awshucks) at the General Store, watering hole, company store, tourist attraction and headquarters of sorts. My Midwestern roommate, it turns out, isn’t such a straight shooter after all. The store was closed and I was fibbed to. The Quebecois is there, though, checking her emails and chatting with the manager and lets me in.

I meet the rest of the cast. An uberblonde behemoth of a guy asks me if I fight and if I would like to fight. In retrospect, having almost sustained crushed ribs from one of his overzealous hugs, a single punch would have been equivalent to the swipe of a paw from a grizzly: death, dismemberment, or a little of each.

There was a couple who were skateboarding, climbing would be organic farmers. The farm fell into their lap and they were struggling to balance their free spirited extreme lifestyle with the realities of farming—moving shit and dirt around to your best advantage every fucking day of your life. They grew more resentful and angry by the day, producing, in the single month that I knew them, enough greens to feed a one child family on a strict starvation diet for a lone meal.

This couple’s Appalachian Trail hike was verifiable and was done as a multi week trail run with five pound packs. It sounds implausible until you learn that they resupplied as needed from a supply bucket they mailed to themselves from town to town all the way north until they were stymied in Pittsfield by an injury. They made it from Georgia to Vermont, though, making incredible time, but the desire to live a life of adventure, even one peppered with feats of endurance, doesn’t translate well to the rewarding, but often stifling existence of an organic farmer.

Their minds drifted to other things, constructing climbing walls next to the greenhouse, or perhaps building a pump track amongst the tomato vines and mustard greens. Last time I heard they were neck deep in powder in the Wasatch Mountains of Utah and loving life.

They were the last in the line of what I like to think of as the transient farmers. What I know about this era is hearsay, but reportedly there were farmers that were overwhelmed by paranoid delusions and driven away, farmers who succumbed to alcoholism, farmers who were actually on the track to being successful but happened to be shirtless at the moment a talent scout was taking a tour of the farm and signed up for a GQ photo spread.

The meeting eventually took place amongst the whole cast and Joe D himself and as would become a familiar routine, we spent ten minutes strategizing and the next twenty minutes listening to tales of Joe’s adventures, but that actually never grew tiring (To be continued…)

Into the Vortex

We recently acquired two more barnmates, an extremely amicable couple, Joe and Rose who are purveyors of bean burger goodness, definitely not a Paleo cuisine, but I’m willing to make an exception (I’ll forage for any beans that happen to roll across the floor careful not to pick up any houseflies, though that would definitely honor the Paleo spirit). Though the situation they walk into now is not normal by any means, they know not what sort of twisted history they are entering forthwith.

I’ll describe my initial experience nearly a year and a half ago. I was picked up from the Rutland train station from the barn representatives at the time. A guy, a rugged looking preppy (he’d be the perfect model if J Crew and Woolrich ever collaborated on a clothing line.)and his friend picked me up in the boss’s truck and we drove through the mostly pitch black to Pittsfield. I remember thinking how there would be no escaping the isolation of this place, but it was lovely nonetheless. I entered the town at peak foliage, and the colors practically illuminated our way through the night. I carried all my belongings, fortunately stuffed into backpacks, from the estate to the barn, a mile down the road, and the rugged prep’s (I’ll call him Pedro Suave) friend offered to carry one backpack off my load. He was from the exact middle point of the midwest, so just as you would expect, he preceded most of his statements with “aw shucks, guys,” and ended them with a cornpone witticism (“there ain’t no school like the old school” was his fave.)

I stepped into the barn and was thoroughly charmed, as most everybody is, with the long, medieval looking, tables constructed from railroad ties and reclaimed barn wood, and the 25 foot or so tree shaft that is the slightly off center hub of the whole structure. I met a quirkily attractive young woman from Montreal who immediately tried to recruit my help for her current venture. I later discovered she was the drifting other half of an alleged royal marine who had been extradited a few weeks earlier back to some indeterminate shire in the UK. They had been hiking the Appalachian Trail anywhere from a few days to a month, though no one has been able to uncover the real numbers, when they arrived here the past summer. The story changes depending on whom they pitch their tale to. A group of hardcore survivalists, for example, might warrant the entire 2000 mile spine of the range and a couple of death defying bear encounters. A more casual group would only necessitate a thousand give or take a couple hundred and a few dozen deer and rabbit sightings. (All reliable evidence points to around 100 miles, but we had to send some of the evidence to Kazakhstan for thorough forensic analysis, so the truth may never be known.)

Nevertheless, she and her boyfriend/business partner, were on a chronic opportunistic venture, trying to gather resources for an adventure, zip line park of some sort, and ending up in Pittsfield, which is a naturally occurring vortex for those types. And like another well known vortex, often flushes them into a putrid, dank (not the good “dank“, homies) pipe and out to a fetid, algae ridden cesspool. But not always.

They found Joe D, the hyperpreneur, and the farm and this barn and made an allegedly successful backpacker hostel in a short amount of time. The boyfriend entered and allegedly co-won the infamous Death Race fair and square. Unable to entertain their alleged dream of a zip park, the couple started a wilderness survival camp and youtube channel utilizing alleged skills the boyfriend allegedly picked up from his alleged service in the marines, in which he was on an alleged career path, but he allegedly broke his leg so he had to retire prematurely, allegedly.

(One must be careful to qualify any statement about their lives since the boyfriend has apparently constructed his life using the business model of Professor Harry Hill of Music Man fame.)

Anyway......We walked up the spiral staircase twisting around the tree and up top it was wall to wall blue plastic cots provided with a pillow, thin blanket and liability form. The whole barn was heated with a large stone hearth, which contained no fire that night and most nights, on the middle floor. I curled up into the fetal position for warmth and contemplated how I would last out the week let alone the month I promised, as I sit here writing this almost a full six seasons later. (To be continued....)

Paleo Salvation

Inspired by my sylvan environs and a certain primal feel to my day to day existence, I thought how can I bring my diet more in line with the rest of my life? I have spent more than a year communing with nature, moving rock, accumulating grit and loam in every imaginable orifice, working my hands until they were thick and leathery. And now I need a diet that is equally as robust--Something that announces my newfound image without going to the extreme measure of donning a loincloth or inserting those cork things in my ears.

I think I found it. When we were pure, unblemished, without sin, that is, when we were cavemen living in paradise, naturally we were suckling out the essence of perfection. We are fallen creatures since that time of innocence, and agriculture is our pandora’s box, or if you prefer, our fruit of good and evil and since that time we have been living in a sort of culinary purgatory. Naturally it follows we wear our scarlet letters in terms of flabbiness, dull minds and pasty flesh. As a species, we’re collectively forming one ginormous Homer Simpson shaped impression in our societal couch.

Luckily we have something called the Paleo diet to lead us out of our sinful ways. It implies that we were formed as perfect beings, have fallen, but can take an enormous step towards redemption by repenting from our godlessly contrived cuisine and accepting the purity of the word made food.

It says that if a caveman couldn’t eat it, if a food is not forageable, then we weren’t meant to eat it as well. Sounds great to me. So hunkering for a hearty Vermont breakfast sandwich of egg ham and cheese on an English muffin, I got to work.

I tracked squirrels all day hoping beyond hope they would lead me to their store of acorns. I diligently collected them seed by seed, subsisting on grubs and pine needle tea in the meanwhile. Next I would have to gather enough reeds to make a makeshift mesh bag, the only way I can soak all the bitter tannin out of the acorns to make a palatable flour.

While those were soaking I set off to subdue a female moose so I could milk her, but was stymied by a conundrum. From what animal should I obtain the rennin? Unable to locate a caveman for consultation, or even the abominable snowman, I decided I could do without the cheese. I could make do with smoked venison ham, but found it next to impossible to create sparks from the snow logged sticks. A number of problems ensued, yet my faith remained steadfast. No bird in its right mind would lay eggs at this time of winter. Nary a bee in sight for the honey I’d need for my acorn flour….

Overall I’d have to call the diet a success, not only did I lose fifty pounds, over a third of my body weight, from just a single meal, but I also felt cleansed, of everything. And towards the end of my diet a few of my cavemen brethren were kind enough to congratulate me personally and a brontosaurus gave me a lift on his neck to reach a cotton candy tree. I must have slipped off because I woke up in the hospital the next day with an IV feeding the evil back into my body drip by drip.

Snowmageddon North of Rutland

We get a call last evening from Joe D, the person responsible for the multifaceted madness that comprises The Amee Farm. As the narrative unfolds it will become apparent all that this place is and isn’t, but it will take more than one blog entry to explain. Suffice it to say that the word hasn’t been coined to describe what Joe D does. Extremopreneur, Hyperpreneur...add whatever hyperbolic prefix you wish, it doesn’t begin to describe the sheer, and in many instances, wondrous, morass that makes this place such a hoot....He calls us and there is a disaster in progress. (We’re not sure, but he could be exaggerating. Urgency is a great motivator.)

The beams in the General Store, a classically restored cafe and gift shop, are buckling under the weight of perhaps a ton or more of snow and ice. We suit up in snowpants and boots, grab shovels, fire up the tractor and embark a quarter mile down the road to survey the damage. Its no exaggeration, the entire roof, easily eclipsing a thousand square feet, is bloated beyond reason with a three foot layer of dense snow pack. I’ve been to Patagonia and have seen glaciers that were less massive (or maybe my aging memory fails me).

Several nights ago we had a storm that made me question whether the Mayan Calendar was accidentally set ahead a year. A snowstorm that quickly devolved into a whiteout, turned to sleet and freezing rain, and at its apocalyptic climax crescendoed into a barrage of thunder and lightning....in early February...in Central Vermont. We were watching Noodles, Joe D’s pitbull, whose favorite hobby is chasing cars and if successful, devouring their bumpers. The fearsome pooch was reduced to a quivering, hyperventilating basket case that hunkered down next to us and wondered, I’m pretty sure, WTF is the world coming to?

Being the less clever creature, the same neurotic thoughts only came to me a night later as I lay in bed thinking about the structural integrity of barn roofs for the first time in my life. How do roofs tend to collapse? In one big whomp, or in bits in pieces? And if the former scenario takes place, how would one tend to die, in one quick neck breaking flash or in slow torturous asphyxiation while entombed in a cryogenic grave? Early that morning my fear suddenly peaked as a creak and groan sounded from above, and then allayed as great masses of snow slid off the metal roof into piles along the side of the barn.

The slope of the General Store roof didn’t allow for back saving avalanches, so we piled into the tractor shovel that lifted us cherry picker style onto the roof and got to shovelling. Our January thaw is a week away, right on schedule (if you go by the Mayan Calendar).

Boob Tube Karma

Its in the nature of Amee Barn life that you never know from day to day what will suddenly show up on your doorstep with little or no explanation. I’ve spent hours investigating the appearance of slightly irregular couches with jungle print upholstery that give off an aroma that’s a bit off. But then they’re there in your living space and before you know it you don’t remember a time that they weren’t. Before you can locate the dubious benefactor to either thank or dump the offending furniture in their back yard, the ugly couch has completely insinuated itself into your life.

Yesterday morning, it was a TV, a very nice one actually.The fifth one I acquired in the last year. One thing I’ve noticed about Vermont rural life is that there’s very little room for squishy philosophies. Spout on about, say, attraction theory all you’d like, the fact of the matter is that you’d better stop wishing for things to happen. If you don't get off your ass and move endless piles of wood to feed the various boilers around the farm, you won’t have an ass to sit on. It will have frozen off. That cantankerous dyed in the wool Yankee up the road was right!

But I’ll make an exception for a very specific case. The attraction theory is completely valid for televisions, especially crappy ones that have been obsolete for the last decade. Last summer was difficult for the barn. A bookshelf and television stand were repossessed, long story, but even prior to that a whole television just simply disappeared. I was on the road for a month working the Montreal Spartan Race and by the time I returned the barn had been denuded, transformed into a rustic barracks, a lovely wooden frame furnished with stiff plastic cots, old crates and the aforementioned ugly couches.

So trying to cut my losses I sent out a general inquiry into the universe. Did anyone see the barn television? Unbeknownst to me, I was also sending out an invitation. Pittsfield closets were raided, basements were dredged, curbsides were scavenged and before I knew it I was up to my eyebrows in discarded televisions in various states of disrepair, perfect if I were a postmodern sculptor prepping for the next Burning Man Festival or if I wanted to audition for the next season of Hoarders, but a drag otherwise.

This particular TV was in the financial office behind the Bikram Yoga Studio and literally appeared on our doorstep after an office remodel. In terms of attraction theory, the strength of my magnetic field must have burgeoned considerably. It went from collecting tiny, malfunctioning and obsolesced junk to a twenty inch flat screen in mere months. Sure there’s no cable, and we have exactly one DVD worth watching, Napoleon Dynamite. But surely one version of the modern American Dream is to be able to work at your computer in your underwear all day while eating tots and watching Napoleon Dynamite on an endless loop. Or maybe I dream too big?

I welcomed in a new barnmate over the weekend, Jason Jaksetic a great guy, but a bit off his rocker. He's an accomplished triathlete, but even given that fact, he's involved in a mad pursuit. He plans to accomplish all the Amee Farm Peak Races over the next year, the first racer that I know of to ever attempt such a feat, starting with the hundred mile snowshoe race in a month. The problem is, he never walked a pace in a snowshoe until just a couple days ago! We recorded our debacle here:



The subsequent races don't get any easier: a hundred mile trail run through the mountains, a fifty mile run, a cycling tour over mountain passes, and it climaxes with a twenty four hour (but it often lasts longer, *wink, wink*) cornpone torture fest appropriately named the death race. Nothing is certain about the race. In fact the race itinerary is kept tucked away in a top secret envelope and is disseminated on a need to know basis. The only common elements in every race have been impossibly snug barbed wire crawls and lots of chopping with an axe.

We are going to document life in the barn as well as Jason's training in a series of shorts which I'll post here over the coming weeks and months.

25 Below!

How cold does it get in Vermont mid winter? I woke up yesterday, freezing cold, but a bit puckish. The first thing I did was nuke a cup of water to a rapid boil, walk purposely, but carefully down the steps and out the barn door . I dumped the scalding hot water off the barn bridge and over poor Russell the farmer’s head. The latter wasn’t planned. He walked straight out from under the bridge into the path of the boiling water. But, poof!, the entire cup of water vaporized into a trail of steam before it even reached him no more than eight feet below. That’s how cold it was!

Me: Hey Russell, I just poured some boiling water over you!

Russell: What? Are you crazy? Hey Liz, listen to what Matt did….

All the animals sustained the -25 (I’ve never felt colder weather in my 41 years) just fine. And we Vermonters did alright too, because with the severe cold comes a proportionate increase in lugging wood around. And as any good Yankee knows, that’s the best way to warm up there is. On the snowshoe touring front, I unveiled my secret weapon today. The fondue pot! I filled it with chocolate fondue and kept it warm by the fire. I sliced up some bananas, oranges and pineapple, skewered, dipped, and melted (I melted, that is). As they say in Mexico: Que rico!


On my latest tour, I whipped up a pot of mulled cider. It was incredibly easy to concoct, and it hit the spot on such a frigid day.