We’ve always suspected that Minnie thinks she is a chicken, she grew up with them and is always around them. I know of very few barn cats who would share a seat with two hens, even on Maria’s Rapunzel Chair. Minnie was dozing peacefully as the brown and gray hens hopped up and sat with her on the chair and rested.
I guess she is a Cat Hen. Minnie is a sweet creature, she loves just about everything and causes no trouble. Unless you are a mouse. She fits easily into the peaceable kingdom.
Real farms do not look pretty, or like the postcards from Vermont. Real farmers throw nothing away, they save old tractors and farm trucks for spare parts and emergencies. Halfway up Kinney Road, there is a beautiful old barn, it is always surrounded by venerable old farm trucks who have worked for years and piled up hundreds of thousands of miles.
Real farmers buy nothing new, and can use everything for one thing or another. Here, at a rise on Kinney Road, I love the silhouette of these proud old farm trucks up against the barn and the sky. The trucks are the symbols of Kinney Road, of a time and place in my life, in the world.
I went back to Kinney Road with my IR camera today, the first time I have been there in seven or eight years. It is hard for me to fathom how my life has changed since Izzy and I, living alone through a brutal winter on the first Bedlam Farm, came across Kinney Road, a farm road in Argyle, N.Y.
Maria was with me, we had gone to Glens Falls to buy frames for my upcoming portrait show in September. She sat in the car and closed her eyes. I could see it was not easy for her to be there either. We have not yet come to terms with the pain of the past.
Without understanding it, I was drawn to the big sky those years ago – there are not too many places around me with big sky – and to the light and to the sun that sent right over the farmhouse on the lower end of Kinney Road. I had just bought a camera, I was just learning to use it.
I came in the cold and the dark of a hard winter, Izzy would hop out and sit by the roadside, I was dressed in black and blue clothes, the farm trucks would rush past me. The wind would come roaring down that hill and freeze my cheeks and turn my lips blue.
I was transfixed, I came at dusk and stood in the wind and cold and snow, Izzy staring at me faithfully, chasing sunsets with me, and this was the site of some of my first photographs, the outpouring of emotion that I felt when I began taking pictures and still feel now. It was a dangerous place to stand in the dark, I suspect a part of me was hoping one of those onrushing trucks would take me, one or two almost did.
Chasing light and color has become my trademark, I never stopped doing it, and Kinney Road deepened my sense of what I wanted in my pictures. In another sense, Kinney Road was a painful place for me, a river of pain and loneliness. It was in the midst of my most intense hospice work, and people I cared for were dying every week. I was alone at Bedlam Farm with Rose and Izzy and Lenore, my long marriage had collapsed and I had broken down, I was coming apart.
Standing there today, on a warm summer day, I began to shiver and tremble.
I cannot yet fully describe how difficult and painful that time was, or how necessary and ultimately, essential. Kinney Road was a magical and mystical place to me then, a portal to another world.
Somehow, for reasons I do not yet understand, it was through the pictures on Kinney Road that I first learned how to steady and heal myself with my camera. How to feel. Before that time on Kinney Road, I had never taken a photograph in my life.
Every night, through the bitterest cold and the worst loneliness of my life, I came to Kinney Road to chase this sunset, almost without fail.
The farmers and their families came to know me and puzzle over me, and wave to me. Today, the farmer’s wife recognized me right away and came running over to welcome me back.
She had been waiting for me to return. I had dropped some of my photographs off at her house, and she had heard about my pictures in church. She had seen me hopping in and out of cards and left me alone to do my work.
Maria had just come into my life, and she encouraged my photography, she saw the emotion reflected in it.
You cannot go back, nor can you change your soul for another. Kinney Road and that time and pain will always be a part of me, and many nights out there, I did not believe I could survive. But I did survive, so I tried to feel a sense of rejoicing. But honestly, I could not. Standing there on that road again, looking upward at the big and beautiful sky, I no longer felt lose on Kinney Road, but was found.
I got back into the car and returned to my life. Cambridge, said the farmer’s wife, we heard you have moved to Cambridge. What a lovely town. Yes, I said, it is a good place for me, for us.
I will confess it was difficult going back there today, it was such a painful time for me, so much feeling and upheaval and sorrow. But it was also an important time, a defining time. I saved what was left of me.
I found myself on Kinney Road in some ways to begin the long climb back to health and self-awareness. Kinney Road is full of symbols, the silos, the hill, the sun and the sky. It always suggested promise and salvation and rebirth.
That was in the past, but the feelings up there were as fresh as today.
To go there, I chose my new IR (infrared camera) I wanted to capture Kinney Road in a completely different way. There was no sun, no sunset, but a swirling sky. It was right, it is okay.
I took my pictures and headed for home.
Every year I choose my favorite farm stand of the year and take a photo of it.
Farm stands are not just appealing things on the roadside to tickle tourists, they are the purest form of the farm economy, they bring fresh and healthy and good food directly to people without expensive middlemen, their food is invariably healthy and cherished. We know where it comes from, it is, by nature of its closeness, almost shockingly inexpensive.
In the summer, Maria and I eat out of farm stands, we live off of farm stands, we eat corn, vegetables and fruit. We can skip the big supermarkets and their mostly processed frozen food for months.
Nutritionists tell us that if you want to survive supermarkets, stay on the outside aisles, never go in the middle. If you want to experience a farm stand, you can go anywhere for fresh and healthy food.
Farm stands are, to me, how the farm and food economy was meant to be, how it was before the economists and politicians decided small farms were no longer efficient. Think about it: farmers growing good food and selling it directly and nearby to people. The drive to market takes a few hundred yards.
Our agricultural system has become a cumbersome, expensive and irrational nightmare, the food we eat is most often flown from faraway places, we have no idea where it comes from, what is in it, how it is grown, and whether it is good for us. And it is the most expensive way on earth to grow, transport, store and buy food.
Agriculture, says the poet, author and environmentalist Wendell Berry, is not about feeding the world or feeding the hungry, rising as it does out of the death struggles of farmer with farmer. It proposes not the filling of stomachs, but the engorgement of the corporate bottom line.
The cult of competition, he writes, which holds there must be losers as well as winners, is that competition is good for everybody.
In agriculture, competitiveness has been based throughout modern history and the industrial era on constantly accelerating technological change – the very principle of agricultural competitiveness, he writes, is ever-accelerating change, and this has encouraged an ever-accelerating dependency on purchased products, products purchased ever farther away from home, food that often requires disguise, coloring, preservation, processing and transport.
Community does not thrive on change, it needs stability. And farming communities have been shattered by relentless instability for half-a-century, with the enthusiastic blessing of big government and big business.
Farm stands to me are not just quaint and evocative, they represent the purest and most efficient and most community-centered idea of agriculture and food. They bring farmers close to us, and us close to them. They connect us to nature and the earth. They are inexpensive, shockingly efficient, they waste few natural resources, they feed their neighbors and community, they permit small farmers to stay on their land and work their fields.
As the small farms perish under the government/corporate onslaught, we see fewer and fewer of these farm stands, they can hardly compete with the mega-supermarkets that import our food from all over the earth at great cost. So it is important for me to notice them and honor them.
This stand is my farm stand for 2016, it is not too far from my home, it sells corn and veggies and more. It runs, like many farm stands on the honor system. You take what you want, stuff it in a bag, and slip the money into a cash box with a small lock on it. I trust the food, the farmer trusts me.
This stand, from the Geclee Farm, is my 2016 farm stand of the year. It is, for me, the past and the future.
I wondered how Fate would look in the meadow with my IR camera, and I was surprised. The camera picked up on her head plowing through the tall grass towards the road, and it also picked up in the unseen light in the grass and leaves and trees, and the result was mystical and beautiful to me, because it captured the sense of this joyous little dog, a tiny speck in the vast woods but completely at home and natural there. It was one of my most interesting experiments with the IR camera, and experiments with this camera have a very high failure rate. None of the 20 other photos I took worked at all. And I’m not quite sure why this one did, but I’m grateful for it.
