The Bucolic Plague Read online

  The Bucolic Plague

  How Two Manhattanites

  Became Gentlemen Farmers

  An Unconventional Memoir

  Josh Kilmer-Purcell

  For the Honorable William Beekman and all of the past and present citizens of Sharon Springs, who have the old-fashioned decency not to laugh at us to our faces

  The Judge built a spacious mansion west of Beekman’s Corners in 1802–’04, which is still standing, having the appearance of a “baronial hall,” in which he lived in princely style until his death, which occurred on the 26th of November, 1845, at the age of seventy-eight. His remains were deposited in the family vault, near the residence, and lying near are five of his first children, the eldest being born in the year 1789. Mrs. Beekman lies beside him, having died in December, 1835, at the age of seventy.

  —History of Schoharie County, New York,

  William E. Roscoe, 1882

  Contents

  Epigraph

  Author’s Caution

  Prologue

  The last time I saw 4 a.m., I was tottering…

  Book 1

  Chapter One

  “Don’t panic,” Brent said, “but there’s a huge spider on…

  Chapter Two

  “They were nice,” Brent said once we’d settled into the…

  Chapter Three

  We delayed the closing until spring—partially to enjoy one last…

  Chapter Four

  “You first.”

  Chapter Five

  We’re woken up by what sounds like someone performing Wagner’s…

  Chapter Six

  The rest of our first weekend in our new country…

  Chapter Seven

  Brent looked over my shoulder at the letter and two…

  Chapter Eight

  “What was that?” Brent asked as he pulled his heavy…

  Chapter Nine

  In the course of only a month we’d turned the…

  Chapter Ten

  “What do I do with this?” Jason, one of the…

  Chapter Eleven

  By the end of summer it seemed as if we…

  Chapter Twelve

  The first frost fell like a guillotine at the Beekman.

  Chapter Thirteen

  In the advertising world, Thanksgiving no longer exists. If you…

  Chapter Fourteen

  I’d been dreading the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas ever…

  Chapter Fifteen

  For true Martha-philes, the real spirit of Christmas is giving…

  Chapter Sixteen

  “Guess what?” Brent asked, calling me in my office from…

  Book 2

  Chapter Seventeen

  “And welcome back.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Before the show had finished airing on the West Coast,…

  Chapter Nineteen

  A rusty light brown sedan of early-1990s origin pulled into…

  Chapter Twenty

  “Where are all these orders coming from?” I finally reached…

  Chapter Twenty-One

  “You’re cute. Take this train often?”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Brent and I began arguing about every little aspect of…

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  The following weekend:

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  “Hi!”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  “Okay, great,” the director said. “Now do the same thing…

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  “Ha…ee…urth…ay.” The voice was crackly and broken on the other…

  Book 3

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Rather than return to the city on Labor Day evening,…

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  September 18: The Dow loses one-third of its value.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  The day before Thanksgiving is the first time Brent and…

  Chapter Thirty

  Brent and I are lying in bed watching the annual…

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Heading into the office every day leading up to Christmas…

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Sometimes we wonder whether Bubby sits on the porch steps…

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  “Check out this e-mail,” Brent says to me the morning…

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  “Josh?”

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  It’s amazing how quickly the house reverts to complete emptiness.

  Epilogue

  “We noticed that when you enter the canned goods aisle,…

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Other Books by Josh Kilmer-Purcell

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  This is a memoir of a certain time in my life. The names of some characters have been changed, and some are composites of various people, experiences, and conversations I had then. If you think that’s unfair, you’ve obviously never lived in a small town and written a memoir about your neighbors.

  Author’s Caution

  This book is not about living your dream. It will not inspire you. You will not be emboldened to attempt anything more than making a fresh pot of coffee.

  The author reminds you that there are plenty of other memoirs out there written by courageous souls who have broken with their past, poetically leaving behind things such as:

  Drugs and/or Drinking

  Career Ennui

  Bad Relationships

  …and have successfully achieved goals such as:

  Creative Fulfillment

  The Simple Life

  Jesus’s Approval

  The author notes that those memoirs are generally full of more shit than a barn at the end of a long winter.

  Prologue

  The last time I saw 4 A.M., I was tottering home in high heels and a matted wig sipping from the tiny bottles of Absolut I always kept in my bag for emergencies. Emergencies like “last call.”

  Now, a little more than a decade later, I’m digging through the backpack I’ve propped up on the front fender of my pickup truck, counting baby bottles of fresh milk.

  “Thirteen…fourteen…fifteen. I’ve got fifteen bottles,” I report to Farmer John, who, as a lifelong farmer, has seen every single 4 A.M. of his life with considerably more dignity than I ever had. I wonder if farm parents start to panic when their infants first attempt to sleep through the night. “What’s wrong with our child?! It just lays there not working for eight hours at a time!”

  “That should be enough. Just ration it out,” John advises. “They don’t know when to stop. They’ll drink whatever you give them, and you don’t want them to have upset stomachs.”

  “How do I know if they have upset stomachs?”

  “You’ll know.”

  “Now you’re sure I don’t need any permits or anything?” I ask John. “What if I get pulled over?”

  “I looked online,” John answers, wedging the oversize dog cage containing five three-week-old baby goats farther into the pickup’s backseat. “I didn’t see any laws about transporting livestock. You’re not crossing state lines or anything.”

  It’s not the state lines I’m worried about. It’s the city one. I think it’s safe to say that I’ll be the only commuter hauling five baby goats across the George Washington Bridge into New York City this morning for their daytime television debut.

  As I pull out of the driveway of the farm, I adjust the rearview mirror to check on the five tiny napping goats. They inhale and exhale in unison in a tight pile in their cage on the backseat. The windshield begins to fog over as their breaths warm up the chilly April
morning interior of the truck.

  In the mirror I also see Farmer John still standing outside the barn watching me drive over the hill with his most precious possessions—the first five kids born in 2008. As with most of the adventures my partner, Brent, and I cook up, the reticent and gentle John is dubious. As our “co-farmer” (liberal guilt keeps me from calling him our “caretaker”), John is often rightfully wary of our big-city ways. It’s risky to transport livestock this young. Everything from feeding to exposure to drafts and jostling must be monitored. All of the savings of John’s forty-plus-year life have been invested in his eighty-head goat herd. And here I am, chief city slicker, driving off with this year’s potential profits.

  I flick on the truck’s heat to dissipate the condensation on the windshield. With all of the milk tankers that speed along our country road during the wee hours of the morning, I need to be able to see the hilly road clearly. It’s been a lifelong goal of mine never to die ironically. I need to be alert, even though it’s a struggle. It’s Wednesday morning, and I’d made the three-and-a-half-hour trip to our weekend farm from the city last night after work, arriving around midnight. And now, after only three hours of sleep, I’m on my way back into the city. Destination: The Martha Stewart Show studio. And then, after the taping, I have to head straight to the advertising agency where I work for a meeting with our most important client.

  For weeks I’d been dreading the logistics of this trip as much as I’d been excited about it. But in the end, it was too good of an opportunity to pass up.

  Brent, who as “Dr. Brent” works with Martha as her resident health and wellness expert, had given Martha several bars of our handmade goat milk soap for Christmas. She enjoyed it so much that she suggested that Brent and she do a segment together on her television show teaching viewers how to make their own soap at home.

  Brent, with his MBA background, and me, with my advertising résumé, realized what an amazing opportunity had fallen into our laps. Companies like GE and Procter & Gamble pay fortunes for a mere mention on Martha’s popular daytime show. Here we had two entire segments to promote a product. Sure, it wasn’t a product we’d actually begun manufacturing yet, but we had three weeks from the day Martha extended the invitation until the day of the filming. With our combined expertise, we could launch a company in that short time, couldn’t we? Over-achievers that we are, we jumped into it without question. But secretly I had another motivation. Maybe, just maybe, it could be successful enough for me to finally slow down my life a little. Running a farm on the weekends, in addition to being a partner in a booming ad agency as well as writing books and magazine columns, was beginning to tally up to a colossal midlife crisis.

  So I buckled down and got to work designing a logo and packaging, and spent hours online figuring out how to build a Web site for the farm. While online farming might not seem to be the most obvious route to riches, I was inspired by William Beekman himself, who had built our historic farm in 1802. He became successful not simply as a farmer, but also as a businessman who owned and ran a neighboring mercantile and a grain mill. On top of it all, he’d been appointed by the governor as the first judge of Schoharie County. He was a nineteenth-century multitasker. Brent and I could relate. Then again, he had an army of slaves to help him. All we had was Farmer John and the Internet.

  An hour into the three-and-a-half-hour drive to the studio, I’m amazed at how docile the kids are. The truck’s movement seems to be keeping them in a lulled sleep. Checking my watch, I pull over into a rest stop on the New York State thruway to give them their morning bottle-feeding at the exact hour John had instructed. I pull the cage out of the backseat and set it on the open tailgate of the pickup bed.

  Even at that early hour I soon draw a small crowd of onlookers, cooing at the sight of five tiny goats lining up to poke their heads through the cage to fight over the bottles in my hands. Though I was only supposed to split two bottles between them, I go ahead and pass out three more so that the onlookers can feed them as well.

  “Look at them drink! They’re adorable!” one burly trucker comments. “Can I touch them?”

  “Sure,” I answer, as a rush of hands squeezes through the cage to caress their silken coats. The kids love the attention and leap around playfully. As semis and cars whiz by on the nearby thruway, the crowd surrounding the truck seems to have forgotten wherever it had been in a rush to get to this morning.

  The morning feeding has completely woken up the kids, and once back on the road, I laugh at the playful bleating and wrestling I hear from the seat behind me. Passing truckers look down into my backseat and smile. A few even wave. This trip, contrary to everything I’d anticipated, is fun.

  And then the smell hits me.

  Oh God. The smell. What’s happening back there? I’ve never smelled anything this horrifically pungent in my life. It reeks like a cross between rotting potatoes and sun-baked roadkill. Despite the fact that I’m cruising along at 80 mph in rush-hour thruway traffic, I crane my neck around to see what gate of hell had opened up in my backseat.

  My five small passengers are leaping around in their cage, completely ignorant of the fact that they’re energetically smearing their own poo over one another. And it’s not the quaintly round manure pellets they generally expel. It’s diarrhea, and lots of it. Just as John warned me against, I’ve overfed them.

  I begin gagging. The goats continue playfully bleating. Though it’s still a chilly 45 degrees outside, I roll down all the windows. This doesn’t seem to do anything other than swirl the stench around the truck’s cab and shove it further up my nose. This is horrible. I still have two hours of driving left to go.

  I lean my head out the driver’s-side window gasping for fresh air. How long can I drive with my head out the window? I take a deep breath and hold it. For the next three hours I alternate between plunging my head into the 80 mph windstream outside the window and ducking back inside, holding my breath until the road begins blurring in front of my eyes.

  By the time I hit the George Washington Bridge, traffic is at a complete standstill. Without the wind blowing through the truck, the stench seems to concentrate even more. I’ve already thrown up twice into my Dunkin’ Donuts coffee cup, and once down the front of the dress shirt I’m wearing to the important presentation at the agency later this morning.

  The kids continue to frolic unabated in their puddle of poo.

  I check my watch. Damn. I’m twenty minutes late and the studio is way down on Twenty-sixth Street. Brent is going to kill me.

  It takes me an additional forty minutes to crawl the 154 blocks to the studio, making me exactly one hour late for a TV program that goes live in half an hour. Brent’s waiting for me, frantically pacing up and down the sidewalk by the loading dock outside the studio.

  “Where were you?” he yells as I step out of the cab, gasping for air.

  “Traffic…gasp… rush hour…gasp… kids…retch… feeding…”

  Brent whips open the back door of the truck and immediately recoils. I try to explain.

  “Poo…gasp… jumping…gasp…”

  “Oh my God. What happened to them?!”

  Brent is standing back from the truck, staring at the five caged kids who bleat playfully back at him. They’re covered head to toe with their own waste. Not that they notice. They wrestle over top of one another hoping that Brent is the next kind stranger who’ll feed them a bottle of ammunition.

  “I can’t take them inside like this,” Brent says.

  I stagger across the sidewalk and lean against the side of the studio. Never did I think I’d be so thankful to take in deep breaths of New York City air.

  “Isn’t there a sink or something inside?” I wheeze.

  “I can’t take them into the studio kitchen. There’s a cooking segment today!”

  “A hose maybe?”

  Brent paces back and forth next to the truck. The pedestrians walking by on their way to work pause briefly once they notice the cage full
of baby goats that Brent had removed—at arm’s length—and placed on the sidewalk. The second they lean in for a closer look, however, they too recoil and continue quickly on their way. I can almost see them standing around the coffeemaker telling their colleagues about the poor, neglected shit-covered baby goats they saw on the sidewalk on their way to work. Except that they’ll probably call them sheep, because they’re New Yorkers. A year ago they would’ve been me.

  I have an idea.

  “Is there a deli around here?” I ask Brent.

  “Up there. On the corner of Tenth Ave.” He points. “Don’t leave me here with these.”

  “Baby wipes. I’ll go get some baby wipes.”

  “That won’t work—they’re covered.”

  “Do you have a better idea? Maybe something out of Martha Stewart Living? Ten Tips for Removing Goat Shit Stains?”

  “Just go,” he says, waving me off. “And hurry. They’re already rehearsing inside.

  “And get the unscented ones!” Brent yells after me.

  “Why?” I yell back, wondering if I’ve missed some simple farm logic.

  “Martha doesn’t like fragrance!”

  Jogging down the street with the sun just breaking over the buildings in the east, I suddenly realize that it’s the same street and the same morning sun that used to guide me home nearly a decade ago, drunkenly staggering from streetlamp to streetlamp after another endless night performing as a drag queen at a nearby dance club.