The Yankee Work Ethic | New England’s Gifts

In any four-season climate, on any farm, September and October are the months when the truth becomes known. If the farm is one that relies on the harvest for income, the truth is expressed in the infallible language of numbers, of profit and loss. If the farm is like ours, instead relying on the harvest to feed its inhabitants, the truth is expressed in the slow accumulation of burlap bags filled with the root crops that will see us through the winter.

First, we pull the onions. It’s been a perfect onion year—they’re huge, leviathan things, almost a parody of themselves. We spread them on the porch to dry atop screened frames; after a few days, the outer skin begins to peel and flake, and gossamer slips of copper-colored onionskin drift into the house on the breeze.

Then we dig the potatoes, row after row of them, nine rows in total. Everyone loves digging potatoes—in part because it’s not difficult work, but mostly because no matter how many years you’ve dug potatoes, it’s impossible not to feel a small sense of giddy discovery every time your hands find those subterranean orbs, smooth and cool under the soil. The potatoes go into bags, and we carry the bags to the root cellar. Some of the bags are so heavy I can lift them only a few inches off the ground, and it feels as though my shoulders might be pulled from their sockets by the weight of all that starch. Every few steps, I pause to rest, the lumpy bag at my feet. The beets are next out of the ground: red ones, gold ones. Too many, if you ask me; I’m not much of a beet guy. Then we bring in the squash, the sun-yellow ‘Delicata’ and the beige-orange ‘Butternut’; from a distance, their whimsical shapes remind me of ukuleles. Down in the woods, the boys and I pick the last flush of chanterelle and hedgehog mushrooms. It’s been an amazing mushroom year—cool-ish, neither too wet nor too dry—and the season seems as though it will never end. “There are more over here! There are more over here! …” the boys keep calling, as they rush from one patch of mushrooms to another. They never pick even a fraction of what they find; as with the potatoes, they’re drawn to the discovery as much as to the mushrooms themselves, and I can’t blame them. I follow behind and fill my basket. Once that’s full, I remove my shirt, fold it into a pouch, and fill that. We’ll have fresh mushrooms for lunch and dinner; the rest we’ll dry in the greenhouse for long-term storage.

We slaughter two beef cattle—a shaggy Scottish Highland cow and a big Shorthorn/Jersey steer—and as always, I pause for a moment before pulling the trigger. There’s something that feels both profoundly right and entirely unfair about the act. The rightness, I suppose, is the ownership of the process, the acceptance of our role in the tangled and imperfect web of relationships between my family and the animals we depend on. But I can’t quite get over the trust these creatures have placed in us, how when I approach them with the gun, the .410 slug chambered and ready to do its bidding, they look at me the same way they’ve looked at me for each of the past 700 or so mornings, probably expecting the back-of-head scratching they’ve become accustomed to. It’s my habit to stand with them for a minute or two each day, scratching them absentmindedly, looking out over our land and feeling as though maybe I know my place in the world. This morning is different, and when the animals are on the ground, bled out and stone still but for the occasional involuntary twitch of muscle fiber, I think of how it’s become popular to talk of “harvesting” animals for meat, and I think I don’t agree. The day before, we’d dug those potatoes, everyone on hands and knees moving down the rows—except for Fin, who kept stopping to juggle potatoes, if dropping two for every one he caught can be called “juggling.” The bushel baskets filled fast, enough potatoes to last us all winter and into the spring. Enough potatoes to last us until the day we’ll wish we never have to eat another. We were happy filling those baskets, maybe even joyful. That felt like a harvest. Taking the lives of animals feels different to me. It feels like something that shouldn’t be diminished by euphemism, however much we might want to soften the language of killing, perhaps to make it more palatable to those who disagree with our actions. Or perhaps we do it to make it more palatable to ourselves. But words can’t change the truth: You harvest a potato; you kill an animal.

Later that day, after we’ve skinned and gutted the beef and transported the sides 30 minutes north to a small custom meat-cutting shop where the 700-pound carcasses will be reduced to steaks and burgers and roasts, Penny and the boys take the silky, long-haired Highland hide down below the house and begin the arduous process of “fleshing.” Fleshing involves the vigorous scraping of the hide’s interior to remove the extraneous fat and flesh that would otherwise spoil. It’s the first step in turning the fresh hide into usable material; in this case, the boys want to make simple sandals called huaraches. While Penny fleshes, Fin and Rye take axes and extract the brains from the animals’ skulls; the brains contain lecithin, which is essential to proper hide tanning. The boys will make a slurry of brain and water, which they’ll rub into the hide before drawing it tight in a simple frame and leaving it to dry. Later, I place the heads into plastic buckets with holes drilled in them to allow the ingress and egress of flies, which will lay millions of eggs on the decomposing flesh. Our chickens will eat the resulting maggots. We’ll eat the eggs the chickens lay, and when they stop laying, we’ll eat the chickens themselves. If it’s true that you’re not merely what you eat but also what the animal that you eat eats, then we’ll eat the maggots that themselves ate the flesh of the cow we killed, the very same cow that fed itself for two years on the verdant grass of our pasture, grass that was full of the sugars produced by photosynthesis, essentially the conversion of sunlight into the energy stored in carbohydrates. What I’m saying is: If it’s true that you’re not merely what you eat but also what the animal that you eat eats, then we’re doing something that seems no less than magic: We’re eating the sun.

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Finally, the first fire in the cookstove, the return of the morning ritual: Crumple the newspaper, lay the kindling, strike the match; fill my stovetop coffeemaker while the kindling catches; then insert the first sticks of stovewood through the small enameled door. I pull a chair up close to the stove and rest my feet atop the warming iron, slowly moving them away from the firebox as the temperature increases. In three minutes, the entire stove will be too hot for my feet. In seven or eight minutes, if the wood is dry and I’ve built the fire right, my coffee will begin to perk. In 20 minutes or maybe a little less, my family will begin to rise. In 30 minutes, it will be light enough to begin morning chores. When people comment on our life, it’s often to say something about the work involved, the small discomforts of labor and weather. Or maybe about the minor material deprivations—the things we don’t own, either by choice (we don’t want them) or circumstance (we can’t afford them). Or, often it’s about the commitment, the simple fact that we can’t leave on a whim for longer than a few hours; we don’t take vacations, and there are no overnights to the city for a nice meal and a show. When people say these things, I nod. I say, yes, all these things are true. We’re often cold, hot, hungry, sore, tired, wet. There’s much that we don’t have. Can’t have. There are many places we don’t go. Can’t go. It’s true, all of it. Yet, every morning beginning in the fall of the year and lasting until mid-spring, I rise and kindle a fire in the cookstove. I set a chair before it and my coffee atop it. I place my feet on the warming iron until it becomes too warm, and then I cross my legs and wait for light to come into the sky. I drink my coffee. There’s a part of me that wants to try and explain to these people how much the privilege of this small ritual matters to me, how it’s worth forgoing anything I must forgo to enable and protect it. But I’m too self-conscious. I worry that they’ll think me small-minded, too easily amused, incurious. Just a rural fool living an insular life by his woodstove as the day comes to life around him. So I just nod again, say yes again. And keep my mornings to myself.