dark

There’s a problem at Sepiessa. Of large proportion. Involving the tomatoes.

“It’s the worst they’ve ever looked,” Caitlin said. “Maybe you should get a catering job.”

It’s been a cascade of miscalculations and mistakes – seeded too early in February, put in the ground too large and too late. The deck was stacked from the start, but Mother Nature delivered the coup de grace in June, two weeks of rain and a Nor’easter.

I went down to Sepiessa last night. It’s shortly after the summer solstice, and days are long, but the light was fading fast as I rattled down the long dirt road. I wasn’t sure I’d even be able to see anything when I got there. But I had to go. I had to know, right in that very moment, which varieties of snap beans were germinating, what percentage of the tomatoes had snapped in the storm, what we had worth banking on.

The field was lovely, dusky blue against the bordering black trees, with a pale sliver of moon rising in the sky. I tried to be there. You know what I mean. To appreciate the ground beneath me and the world around me.

I stomped around the lower and upper plots, rather like a bloodhound, nose to the soil, trying to discern detail in the fading light. It’s not so much that the tomatoes are broken, and neither are they dead, for the most part. But in the three weeks they’ve been down at Sepiessa, they have yet to click in and take off, they have yet to show that elemental desire to branch and fruit and grow.

It’s a bad situation. We’re not going to make money.

It’s hard to feel optimistic – about this growing season, about where I’ll find myself next, about whether or not I’ll ever be able to build a life for myself in farming. Sometimes it feels like running underwater.

The island would be a great place to take a step back. Just go the Squibnocket and vegetate, potlucks and parties at night, maybe landscape or something on the side, to make ends meet. Cruise for a while. I wish I wanted that. But I don’t. I want to farm. I want to get my own place and be successful, now. It’s so incredibly frustrating to work so hard and care so much, to live on other people’s farms and to have no idea what’s waiting for me on the other side. It feels like giving myself away, and it is, and that’s beautiful, but it’s hard, it’s just really hard.

I remember working the market in Brooklyn last summer. Those days were obscenely long. We left the farm before dawn and spent the daylight hours strung out on a noxious blend of caffeine and fatigue, selling sunflowers and tomatillos to lanky hipsters who confessed their own farming dreams while fishing for change in their retro fanny packs.

And I always wanted to say, but didn’t - I wouldn’t have it any other way, but this life, it’s not what you think it is.