The word for Minnesota is quaint. It's exactly what you'd expect, a bunch
of polite blonde people with weird accents. They say stuff like, "Have a good day now, ya
hear?" and ask if they've met you before. Growing up listening to Prairie Home Companion was a better
introduction to Minnesotans than you may expect; the women are strong, the men
are good looking, and the children are above average. Well, they got the women and children right anyway – Tinder
suggested mixed results for the men ;)
Regardless, I got hooked, more on the farm than anything else, and
decided to stay a record twelve days.
Commitment, y'all.
Let’s set the scene: Andrea (ahn-DRAY-uh, not
ANN-dree-uh) was the farmer there, and her kids were Arthur and Celia. They were twelve and eleven,
respectively, and blonde as all get out.
Arthur was clearly the ringleader, and he loved to hear and tell stories
about himself, pull pranks, and commit daredevil stunts, while Celia embodied
the characteristics of the early Disney princesses: kind and sweet and
supportive with a knack for music.
The kids switched back and forth between the farmhouse and the
townhouse, where their dad lived, so I really only spent a couple of days with
them all in all. I stayed in the
most perfect little cabin one hundred and eighty steps from the front door of
the farmhouse (I know because I counted, it gets really dark and reeeeally
creepy there). The cabin had
hardwood floors and walls and ceilings and featured lots of windows and a huge
bed, literally two twins pushed together and fitted with a king-sized
sheet. I was in heaven. Andrea fixed amazing meals for the two
of us for dinner: Indian food, Thai food, eggplants and peppers and whole
gloves of garlic popped into our mouths, which sounds disgusting but it’s
not. It was a good food week, a
good bed week, a good people week.
My job at Green Compass was primarily
harvesting. I picked green beans,
raspberries, and tomatoes, and then more green beans, and more green beans, and
more green beans. They had a whole
tunnel there, a long archway completely covered in green. I ate an absurd number of beans over
the course of the week, and managed never to get sick of them. If one broke I ate it, if I accidently
picked on that was too small I ate it, if I found one that was too big I ate
it, if there was one that looked extra delicious I ate that too. Green beans for days. And I swear that if you'd sat still and
stared at one long enough, you could have seen it growing. I also cleaned garlic, acres and acres
of garlic. When Andrea told me I'd
be doing this, I pictured myself standing in front of a sink for a week. This wasn't the case, which might be
obvious to those of you who interact with garlic pretty much ever, since it’s a
dry sort of operation. You peel at
it, pulling off the one or two or three dirt-covered outer layers until you're
left with a garlic head that is clean and white (small and bright?), and then
you brush at the bottom to make sure you've gotten most of the dirt out, and
then you put it in the good bag. It’s
incredibly satisfying, and it was during the garlic cleaning that I got hooked
on podcasts. Honestly, podcasts
always struck me as nerdy and boring, but now I am slinking my hypocritical way
straight into podcast land. I
started with "Invisibilia," and then I did "Magic Lessons,"
and then I listened to "Ted Talk Radio," and then I threw caution to
the wind and downloaded all of "Serial," and let me just say that if
you're in the same boat as I was, swallow your pride and listen to
"Serial." It's good, SO
good, I promise, and I am saying this as a very recent skeptic.
One of my earliest nights there, Andrea and
the kids and I went out to DreamAcres, which has the only off-the-grid kitchen
(read: electricity-less) in Minnesota, or something like that, because every
Friday evening from May to October, they sell killer wood-fired pizza. All of it is vegetarian, but because
I’m boring I just got cheese, and I drank my special Wisconsin-only Spotted Cow
beer and watched the sun go down.
We shared a tupperware full of raspberries, and the kids and I got
acquainted. Andrea and I walked
down to the creek, which had a multi-level tree house next to it, and down the
trail that followed along the water, a rope swing and a flurry of yellow flowers. I waded in with my Chacos on. It’s a really beautiful place,
incredibly peaceful and down-to-earth.
There was a show that night, but we left before it started.
Every farm I've stayed at has had a defining
drink, some beverage I consumed regularly enough to cause an association:
Greenbush was cranberry juice, Lewisburg was root beer, and Gosport was
lemonade beergaritas. Chatfield's
drink was unequivocally apple juice.
The family had made batches the year before and frozen them, and I drank
glass after sweet, apply glass.
Saturday, I got to help make it.
I drove Arthur and Celia there after the farmers' market. We promptly got distracted by the
eight-week jack russell puppy named Lula, but pulled ourselves together after a
while and decided to actually be helpful.
What that meant, apparently, was having apples rained down upon us. A grown man wearing overalls and
FiveFinger shoes would climb up into the apple tree and violently shake the
branches. Our job was to hold
tarps underneath to catch the apples and try not to get hit without looking
up. (Guess who definitely got
hit.) (It was me.) We'd then fall upon the pile of apples
and chuck the leaves off the tarp and the apples into the bucket like there was
no tomorrow. Celia and I followed
these freshly picked apples to the next station: sorting. Rotten apples went in one bucket,
"good" apples went in another.
"What about this one?" we’d ask, holding up a pockmarked apple
that a worm had probably absolutely lived in. "That one's good! Whatever you're comfortable with!" the woman would
answer, and we'd put them in the good bucket and make faces at each other. The apples were then washed, which I
did with Stephen the Intern, who was willing to answer my questions about his own
experience staying on a farm in Minnesota and seemed nice enough until he told
me he was there to actually learn about the farm and not just use it as a way
to travel cross country, and then I really didn't mind when he wandered off. After washing was possibly the best
part: the apple smashing crashing crushing mushing part. The job was easy, you threw apples into
a tube as fast as you could. It
was a job that took two people and could be done with three. The tube fed into a machine that was
made up primarily of a spinning cylinder filled with screw heads poking out
that chopped the apples into mushy little pieces. Once the barrel that caught these was filled, some of the
men would put its lid on and crank so that all the apple juice ran out the
bottom, down the planks, and through tiny holes into buckets underneath (the
bees LOVED this step). The buckets
were taken to the sieve so that any remaining chunks and bees were filtered
out, and after that you could drink it straight. I acquired a small blonde shadow named Romy during the
course of the day when I lifted her up and let her see inside the apple
smashing machine. She followed me
the rest of the afternoon and sat in my lap during dinner, although the only
thing she said to me at any point was that she ate chocolate chip cookies with
whipped cream, which I could have guessed from her face.
Tinder struck again in Minnesota, and this
time it was Tinder James showing me around Rochester. Rochester is where the Mayo Clinic is located, and the
clinic evidently has all these underground tunnels connecting the patients and
doctors and nurses and everybody from the hospital to different parts of the
city. I didn’t get to explore this
though, because James was a lackluster tour guide and mostly interested in
beer, but we did go to a couple of rooftop bars and wandering through a
mall. I’m not sure why its
automatic doors slid open for us at midnight, but they did, and I felt like a
character in From the Mixed Up Files of
Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, but in a mall instead of the Metropolitan Museum
of Art, which is to say it was quietly exhilarating. Nothing was open, but we prowled around and looked in shop
windows and generally felt very sneaky, even though we really had no reason to.
What else happened in Minnesota? I went, boringly enough, to the
mall. They lured me in with their
Barnes and Noble and before I knew it I was buying a dress. C’est la vie. I finished Game of
Thrones number five and read all of Me
and Earl and the Dying Girl and started Lolita.
I discovered the Trader Joe’s,
which just so happens to share a strip with the Chuck E. Cheese (can I have my
birthday party there? Unexpected
Cheddar and ball pits, happy twenty-sixth?). We did the farmer’s market, where I bought a blueberry
halfmoon pie and two lamb bones for Bix, which I very unfortunately forgot in
my car, and helped sell tomatoes and green beans and cilantro. I went to a Piyo class, which was
disappointing. After all I’ve
experienced with yoga and all I’ve heard about pilates, I was expecting
something that maybe wasn’t just aerobics, but that’s what we did. Effective aerobics, sure, but still
aerobics. Bixby and I went for
lots of walks down the gravel road.
We mixed it up occasionally with me on my bike and Bix running beside me,
and once we both went for a run. I
found a section of a spine from some unknown creature, probably a deer, on one
of these excursions, and now it’s sitting in on the ledge in the back of my
car.
Wednesday night stands out in my head because
it began and ended driving towards lightning. I put on my new dress and old boots and felt very pretty
about myself, and then I drove to the movie theater, lightning crackling
somewhere beyond Rochester, to sit in the dark alone and cackle at two old men
hiking the Appalachian Trail. I
arrived half an hour before the movie started. "One for A Walk in the Woods," I asked. "Just one?" the girl
responded, and I felt very stupid but also like she was very stupid, and I
didn't feel at all bad for showing her my old App ID for the student discount. When that was done with, I went up to
the bar and sat in a twirly chair, waiting to be served. The movie theater, the whole place, was
nearly empty, three or four employees wandering around. My presence at the bar was evidently
baffling, and they had to get the attention of all the other employees and
wheel an entire cart full of alcohol out for me. I apologized profusely for the hassle and then for some
reason went into panic mode and began to flirt aggressively with both
concession managers slash bartenders. They were massive nerds, thankfully, and
I stumbled upon a common knowledge of, strangely enough, Pee-Wee's Playhouse.
"But have you seen the Christmas
special? It has Cher," is
something I actually said, slurping on my jack and coke, eyelashes aflutter.
The one with the ponytail showed off the lobby dragon, castle turrets, and
starry ceiling, and when that was done I swished off to watch my movie. It was
very much an old person movie, and I laughed obnoxiously loud at every single
hiking crack they made from the comfort of not one but two cushy recliners that
really reclined. Nick Offerman as
the REI guy and Kristen Schaal as the know-it-all hiker could not have been
more perfect. I don't miss hiking
much, I sort of miss it in a "wow that was a cool thing I did" way,
but I do wonder about doing a section of the Appalachian Trail next summer. I've got all the equipment anyway. When the movie got out, I went to the
parking lot to find it had rained while I'd been inside. There's a lot of rock in Minnesota, did
you know that? Big exposed rock
walls, drilled and cracked to make way for things like roads and office
buildings. One such wall loomed
behind this theater, and the air was damp and warm and smelled like rain. Puddles dotted the parking lot. I drove home without the GPS, and
again, I drove toward lightning, maybe this time out near Preston.
So that was Chatfield. I left a couple days later, said
goodbye to my cabin and to the hills and the sunsets, to the creepy barn and
the cats, to the green bean tunnel and to the bags of garlic I’d cleaned and to
Andrea. Minnesota was a good one.
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