Farm Life, Worst Life
Creamy scrambled eggs topped with freshly grated pepper. Thick slices of homemade bread toasted and dripping in butter. A rasher of bacon sizzling on the stove. Oranges nestled all around the kitchen in an assortment of cornflower-blue crockery.
That is what I expected from breakfast on the farm.
What I got instead was an helter-skelter spattering of carbohydrates heaped uninvitingly on the kitchen counter. We could chose from bran-and-apricot cereal or a loaf of supermarket bread with butter, jam, or marmite. Instant coffee and weak tea were on offer the sideboard, to be made and drunk in an uncomfortable atmosphere of silent disdain. I broached it once by commentating on the soap opera we’d seen the night before—once night falls on the farm, which happens at about 7 p.m., the only acceptable activities are 1) watch public television in silence or 2) go to bed—whose 22 minutes of juicy drama included a gay relationship transitioning to be open and a doctor delivering a hermaphrodite, but that led to Jan commentating on how exhausting it was to keep up with all of “this political correctness about all of the bathrooms these people need, it’s like now every school has to have four bathrooms, one for the lesbians, one for the gays, one for the boys, one for the girls.” Um, no, Jan, that’s not how it works, but thank you for sharing.
Farm life came in overwhelmingly below expectations, but I still found the experience incredibly valuable. I learned a great deal about myself, about my sister Marta, about the life I want to have, about the marriage I want to have, and about making the best of a not-wonderful situation. And I got some great stories out of it, which I now get to share with you.
Marta and I have a month together backpacking around the North Island of New Zealand, and because we’re adventurous and also poor, we decided to spend a week or so of it on farmstays that I arranged through Workaway. In exchange for four hours of volunteering a day, we’d get room, board, and a chance to get to know the rural Kiwi lifestyle. We also imagined we’d get ripped, tossing around bales of hay or mucking out stables or the like. Healthy food, built-in workout, new friends, zero expenditure, lots of fun stories: we were hype.
And quickly disappointed. What we didn’t realize was that our first farmstay, at a working farm and nursery outside of Thames, was mostly garden maintenance in the off-season. Warm days of picking apricots and harvesting blueberries only happened in the southern hemisphere summer—that is, December through March—and our four daily hours in August would be spent raking, weeding, digging, and pruning the extensive five acres of garden to prepare it for spring planting in September. (I still have such cognitive dissonance imaging spring in September and fall in April, but Toto, we’re not in the northern hemisphere anymore.)
Walt picked us up from the bus station in Thames wearing black canvas short-shorts, mudstained rubber boots, and a faded red cap, which his shaggy grey hair stuck out of like a fistful of dry straw. He hopped into his Ford “ute”—short for the “utility” in the already-abbreviated SUV—and drove us to our home for the week.
The house was painted a classic farm red, but with a modern facade dotted with big glass windows and wide French doors. It was so gorgeous, sitting there in its valley of lush green hills, that when a caravan of foreigners I met on the Internet swung by to rescue us two and a half days later, they all clamored out of the car to take pictures of it. But we’ll get there.
Entering the house, all allusions of happy farm life were shattered. My nose, still slightly stuffed from spending 20 hours in planes and airports a few days ago, closed up completely, and I visually confirmed the sources: every surface save the kitchen table was covered in a grey-white sheen of dust, long white hairs that surely belonged to Roxie the border collie coated the floor, and a black cat lay lounging on the overstuffed couch.
I figured maybe I could just snort allergy medicine and power through our week, but then Jan, Walt’s wife, showed us our room. Our bedroom, tucked under the eaves, contained only two twin beds and a dusty nightstand and looked like something out of a 1920s sanatorium. It was freezing cold and, according to Marta, whose olfactory glands were still functioning, it smelled like it’d been marinated in cat pee. I inquired about the temperature, figuring at least that problem we could fix, and Jan informed me that the house had no central heating, only a wood-burning pipe stove located in the TV room, all the way on the other side of the house, and that if I was cold—this she said with a grimace, not bothering to at all meter the disdain she clearly felt for the two soft city girls in front of her—I could borrow blankets from the bedroom across the hall. I sent Marta to scout them out and she confirmed that they were even more piss-scented than the ones in our room.
Alone in our room, Marta and I broke into the hysterical whisper-laughter that you do when you’re stuck in a terrible situation you can’t quite believe is real but fairly confident you’ll survive it (we, at least, do this quite often; I have to think it’s a thing others do, too). We came up with a quick game plan: give the farm a real, open-minded chance for one full day and night, and then if we still hated it, get out of there by any means necessary.
We shuffled back out to the main room and asked Walt if he had work for us to do today.
“Sure,” he said, tugging his boots back on and beckoning us to follow him out the door. “Let’s go!” He leaped into the seat of his ATV and took off down the driveway, leaving me and Marta to trot awkwardly behind him.
We spent a few hours cleaning up garden plots—raking, gathering up cuttings, carting the waste to the compost pile—and then helped Walt collect wood for that night’s fire. This entailed him hacking at a fallen tree with a chainsaw and chucking giant logs over the fence, Marta and I darting after the missiles and retrieving as many as we could carry, and us then making a hasty retreat, lest we get beamed in the head. Then we headed to the cow paddock, where we met Walt’s six new calves—all glossy black fur and knobby knees—and corded off a new pasture for them with a portable electric fence.
Marta and I had made harmless small talk with Walt all afternoon, and walking back into the house for dinner, we confirmed that we was a fine guy. Not particularly thoughtful nor well-mannered—he’d made several off-color references, including reminiscing about a pair of German nurses that volunteered on the farm a few years ago and had a habit of sticking earthworms down his pants (“nothing weirder than feeling one o’ those little guys worm between your buttcheeks!”)—but friendly and probably harmless.
Jan, on the other hand, was the devil incarnate.
I’d like to not write Jan as an all-hating she-demon. I’d really like to. First off, it’s unoriginal, lazy writing, having a grumpy, nagging, mean old wife character, and second, I hate when strong or forceful or resilient women are simplified and typecast as bitchy. But this isn’t fiction, and Jan was an actual bitch.
I realized it that night at dinner, which was spaghetti and meat sauce (that’s it—not a green in sight. I thought it was bad, but the next day’s dinner was fried sausages, ketchup, and a few measly sprigs of broccoli, and our third and final dinner was a macaroni-and-bacon casserole with the texture and flavor of a dish sponge; by the end, I was nostalgic for spaghetti and meat sauce). We’d told Jan earlier in the day about Marta’s vegetarianism—to which she responded with a haughty, “oh, if we had known that, we’d never have taken you, we don’t get along with those types”—and Marta was trying to be a good ambassador for her kind, all go-along-to-get-along geniality, so she served herself a plate of plain noodles and butter, a childhood staple neither of us had had in years, with nary a comment about accommodating others. Jan then laid into her about her life choices, grilling her as to why she was a vegetarian and whether she felt superior because of it.
Marta handled Jan well, knocking her back with articulate, confident, calm responses, and I sat there studying our adversary.
Jan looked like Mrs. Claus, at least until she opened her mouth. She had a halo of white, wiry curls, a soft body constantly sheathed in autumn-paletted fleece, and ruddy cheeks from a lifetime of sun damage. You didn’t expect such a reasonable-looking woman to be such a shrill nightmare, but she yelled at Walt about everything all the time. I think her life goal—her moments of peak fulfillment—was to catch Walt in the act of lying, even in the most harmless, mundane sense of the sin.
Actual, word-for-word exchanges below.
For this first one, I shucked off my gardening gloves, whipped out my phone, and took the quotations down verbatim on my Notes app, as it happened while the four of us were weeding hydrangea plants in the greenhouse:
“What did you do while you waited for the doctor this afternoon, Walt?” (Walt fell on a rake two weeks ago and has an open wound on his leg that won’t heal, so he goes into the hospital every day to receive intravenous antibiotics).
“Well, I suppose I read some magazines. I think they had New Zealand Gardener.”
“Oh, but you took your phone off the charger and brought it with you, so that must’ve been what you did at the doctor. Looked at your phone!”
“No, Jan, I don’t think so.”
“You must’ve! Also, we already have this month’s Gardener, and I know for a fact you’ve already looked at it because it was open on the table when I had my tea yesterday, so you wouldn’t have been rereading it.” (At this point, Jan waits for Walt’s rebuttal and when he doesn’t engage, she harrumphs triumphantly.)
The second one took place during a routine television-watching-and-shivering evening. Marta and I had decided to put up with the relatively acerbic company but remain close to the stove and its warm glow vs. enjoy our solitude in our room but freeze to death, and Jan and Walt were arguing over the television:
(Walt navigates to the Netflix page for The Handmaid’s Tale)
“Walt! What in god’s name are you doing? You know you have seen every episode of the new season!”
“Well, I think there might be one left, I just want to check.”
“What the devil are you talking about? You’re wasting our time!”
“No, Jan, I thought there was one left.” (He’s since realized there wasn’t and has navigated back to the home screen.)
“Ha! Told you. Now let’s watch that show that I saw in the paper two days ago, you know, the one with the women.”
“What’s it called, Jan?” (Walt sighs, exasperated.)
“Well I don’t KNOW. I know it is about women, that’s all. Didn’t you listen to me when I told you on Sunday that I wanted to watch it?”
(Walt doesn’t answer—I haven’t seen him listen to Jan about anything other than what’s for dinner—and Jan scoffs haughtily. Marta and I start throwing out names of new shows featuring women, attempting to fill the tensioned silence, and Jan shouts out “that one!” when we get to Good Girls.)
I began to think that maybe Jan and Walt only signed up to have volunteers on their farm in order to not have to be alone with each other. I’d never been so exposed to a married couple so interested in making each other miserable.
How did they get like that? I tried to figure it out over the next two days, casually asking Walt about his family while we trimmed hedges and raked flower beds and hacked out stumps. Nothing about his marriage came to light, though he did tell me, in detail, how much each of his five children make (the range is NZ$150,000 to NZ$500,000, all of which more than he made as a public school teacher, even after two decades of experience, about which he is only slightly bitter).
I asked Jan about the history of the farm and nursery while we organized cuttings and swept out greenhouses. She was much more forthcoming, opening with the fact that the nursery was always Walt’s dream, that she wanted to sell the land and move north of Auckland to open up a bed and breakfast (I had to actually bite my tongue at this point to keep myself from making a joke about her complete lack of hospitality not boding well for their reviews), and that Walt kept asking for just another year or two on the farm.
I thought about their relationship while I scraped moss off of potted trees. Maybe it all stemmed from that one decision, but what did it represent? An unwillingness to compromise? Jan wanted to move on, Walt didn’t, and each one was refusing to budge from their vantage point? She decided to dig her heels in and be miserable and caustic and he decided to ignore her desires? Or, worse yet, he’s truly forgotten them?
Jan interrupted the silence to tell another story, this time about how she had wanted to transition out of nursing and go to business school, and had applied and started classes, only to find out she was pregnant with their first child halfway through her program. She dropped out and never went back. It fell in line with the hypothesis I was formulating—she felt like she’d made big sacrifices for her marriage and family, and that those sacrifices were never even acknowledged, yet alone appreciated, which fostered her resentment of her husband.
I thought about something my dad and I were talking about the other day—how adoration can work in a marriage. How sometimes, when it’s imbalanced, when, let’s say, the man adores the woman more than she adores him, she can get exasperated with him and maybe not treat him as well as he deserves, but that in those cases, at least the man is usually happy, having gotten to be with and lavish attention on the object of his adoration. My dad joked that those men probably pave their way to heaven loving women who don’t fully appreciate them.
One-sided adoration is good, and mutual adoration is better—those are the marriages we read about in novels, that’s our Mr. Rochester and Jane, love freely and jointly given. But no adoration? That, I imagine, means the couple has to fall back upon other rungs of a romantic relationship—love, fondness, friendship, companionship, respect. I couldn’t really identify any of those in Walt and Jan. I saw the duty that each of them felt for the other, but anything deeper, more personal, more heartfelt than that had been eroded away.
I don’t want a marriage like that. I do want a partner to adore and be adored by, but assuming that passionate adoration may fade a bit ten, twenty, thirty years into a partnership, I’d like to have lavished that adoration on a relationship built on all those other parts. Trust, respect, consideration, honestly, humor. When I think about my current relationship and the investment that Diego and I are making in those foundational pieces, I’m grateful.
Marta and I did find time to enjoy the beauty of the farm. We trekked down to the river at the edge of the property and dipped our toes in (and by that I mean I literally dipped my toes in and Marta splashed around up to her hips). We went on a hike in the hills behind the property, catching some vestiges of New Zealand autumn—trees turning red at their edges, the air crisp and the ground snapping beneath our feet—and getting hilariously, throughly lost to the point where we were hiking up the steep incline of a neighbor’s sheep field and trying to rein in Roxie from scaring and/or eating the ewes. We explored the acres and acres of gardens and breathed in clean air and turned our faces to the sunshine. We also giggled, at length, about the ridiculousness of our situation, and became much closer as a result of it.
Part of the reason that I was so excited to spend time traveling New Zealand with my sister, part of the reason it was so throughly worth it to fly halfway around the world and press pause on my Spanish—aside from the fact that she’s generally a lovely human who makes most situations more enjoyable—was to have these exact experiences with her and to learn about and with each other through them. Terrible, uncomfortable, unforeseen moments where we have to dig in, find a way to laugh through it, and make it work. We’ve been real with each other, we’ve fought, we’ve helped each other stay positive while also not lowering our standards. We’ve called out Walt for being racist (he said he refused to take on South American volunteers because they were lazy, the men especially; we gently and thoroughly took him to town on that one) and transphobic together; we’ve made awkward small talk with Couchsurfing hosts together; we’ve talked about what we can afford and what we want to do and where our limits are in terms of appropriate jokes or expenditure. And we’ve learned, and we’ve laughed, and I’m so glad we’re doing this.
On our second night on the farm, Marta and I had a furtive family meeting at the river and decided we’d given it the old college try and found that the farm was, without question, not for us. We spent a few minutes that evening posting in Couchsurfing and Facebook groups, looking for other travelers who’d be in the vicinity and could pick us up.
We found Emma, a Frenchwoman who’d organized a weekend driving around the Coromandel Peninsula, the base of which we were located on, with a Persian man and a Spanish woman. They had two free spots in their car and we signed up to fill them. On our third afternoon on the farm, I approached Walt and told him that it wasn’t working out for us and that some friends would be swinging by the next morning to pick us up. He was completely fine with it, but made me tell Jan myself; I approached her with trepidation, but she simply blinked twice at the news and then turned back to her pesticide application.
We left the farm on fine terms, only two and a half days into the week we’d promised, having enjoyed the scenery and the labor (though also having confirmed that neither of us is interested, at all, by any means, in a life that includes anything even remotely near four hours of manual labor a day; give us laboratories and computers or give us death, really) and having hated the room, board, and company that came along with it.
The weekend with other travelers was near perfect: we’d booked a beautifully clean and cozy Airbnb and stocked up on our own groceries, so room and board was fully at or above our expectations, and both Marta and I enjoyed spending time with other young, reasonable travelers. Our first day with the new crew, we did a grueling 6-hour hike in the pouring rain and got into a stand-off with supermarket employees who refused to sell Emma beer since she’d been seen entering the store with me and Marta, who had our drivers’ licenses, but not our passports, as proof of age; even in these moments of (more or less self-caused) adversity, we laughed and turned them into good memories. We spent the rest of the weekend eating and walking along New Zealand’s gorgeous beaches and digging holes the sand in order to bathe in geothermic hot springs, feeling the piping-hot water below and the chilly winter air above, all with a view of the actual ocean crashing onto the shore just a few yards away.
Our new friends dropped us off on the state highway heading south (they had to make a flight to the South Island otherwise they’d’ve driven us down) and Marta and I stood by the side of the road with our chocolate-bar-box-turned-hitchiking-sign: “headed towards Matamata! :)” The slight rain helped us, and within about eight minutes, a woman pulled over in a blue pickup truck and helped us load in our bags.
“As a mother of three daughters, I couldn’t stand to see you girls waiting out there, getting wet!” said Shaz, pulling back onto the highway. We enjoyed our hour’s drive with her, talking about her rescue dogs (Thunder and Bear, both Mastiff mixes), her curtain business, and the attractions of her lakeside town, Taupu, where Marta and I are headed in about a week or so. She invited us to stay with her before dropping us off at the bakery in Matamata, where our next farmstay host was set to meet us.
That’s right, folks: after three days of near torture, wherein we’d fully confirmed that we and outdoor labor do not get along, we had another few days of a farmstay waiting for us.
This one was a little different. Our host, Tim, was only 20—I’d been talking to his parents about doing a stint on their dairy farm, but they only took volunteers who could stay for a month or more, since there was a significant training investment needed to become proficient at milking. But they had a son who’d just recently moved into a house at the back of their property who could put us to work in exchange for room and board, and I’d arranged our stay there prior to our arrival at Walt and Jan’s. We’d communicated with Tim about our bad experience at the other farm and he seemed infinitely more reasonable than our last hosts.
He actually could not be more different than Walt and Jan. He’s tall—pushing seven feet—where they had more of an elvish stature; he’s quiet, never speaking when it’s not necessary, yet alone chatting or bickering with us. His house is similarly unfurnished and cold, but at least marginally cleaner and entirely free of cat piss (or cats to speak of, in fact), and he provided us with a heater, extra blankets, and clean towels without us having to ask.
After our first night here, where he saw Marta and I cook some of the produce we’d brought from the Airbnb, he asked if we’d be open to cooking dinner for him, too, as part of our volunteering hours. The chance to have the farmhouse diet of our dreams was upon us! Tim brought home bottles and bottles of fresh milk from the dairy (I’ve never had same-day-fresh, unpasteurized milk before and now I’m not sure how I’ll go back) and took us to the grocery store, and we started churning out hearty but healthy(ish) meals (with plenty of non-meat components for Mart): chicken and eggplant parmesan, beef and veggie stir-fry, scalloped potatoes, green beans, carrot cake, sugar cookies…we’ve meal-planned out the rest of the week and are excited to have the chance to control what hits the dinner table.
For the next few days, we’ll continue to spend one of our four hours cooking and another cleaning and organizing his very bachelor-pad digs (we narrate as we go, imagining ourselves on a Queer Eye spinoff called Sister Eye [terrible name but we’re still in pre-production], focusing on improving Tim’s diet, style, and home decor—so far we’ve made significant progress with the diet side of things; he’s gone from only eating frozen hash browns, cereal, microwaved sausages, and venison steaks from the deer he shoots to eating vegetables and whole grains at every meal, but he continues to go out in elastic-bottomed jeans and cutoff fleece sweatshirts, so we have quite a journey in front of us on the style front). The rest of our time goes to helping out around the farm. Today we spent a few hours splitting wood with an electric splitter, hacking away at the splinters with an axe, singing along to 2000s ballads and pretending to be lumberjacks. Tomorrow, we’re off to help feed the new calves, all of whom were born in the last few weeks and are still learning how to get up and stand on their own legs. We went to visit them today and watching them wobble to life and come forth to sniff our hands, big black eyes blinking, was absolutely magical.
So here we have a farmstay we actually like, where we actually are learning a little bit about how our meat and dairy are produced, where we have the ability and time to eat well, and where we have plenty of time and space to be productive in other ways—writing, working out, staying in touch with friends and family.
And for breakfast? You guessed it: creamy scrambled eggs and thick bread dripping in butter. And a fresh orange plucked from the big bowl we bought Tim as a housewarming / thank-you-for-having-us / please-get-better-personal-style gift. Cornflower blue and everything.
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