AgriCulture: Dislocation at This Location

If you, like me, are “sheltering in place,” perhaps you are experiencing a similar sense of dislocation. What was once familiar now seems tinged with strangeness. What was once comforting and safe now seems fraught with risk.

Take the passage of time. When your time is not punctuated by activities such as going to work or periodic community activities or social gatherings, the days become harder to keep track of. For a time I was acutely aware of how many days had passed since activities that we now know, in retrospect , presented higher risk for exposure to Coronavirus — that Jane Birkin concert, the afternoon spent with a friend, the restaurant dinners and rides on crowded rush hour subway trains. But now that I’m well past the usual 12 day period from exposure to symptoms, I seem to have entered a time warp in which what day it is hardly matters. Every day follows more or less the same pattern, engaged in the same activities, with, if you’re lucky, the same companions.

April Fool’s Day came and went without our customary Turkana Farm April Fools Bulletin. In part, it’s that I couldn’t think of how to alter our current reality in a joking way. One of our April Fool’s Day staples in past years was describing new Turkana Farms products or services that were close enough to reality that the reader might be taken in, to the point that we received requests from the gullible for purchase of our freshly laid chocolate flavored eggs or for tickets to the luau to celebrate our pineapple harvest. But what new products might I offer now? Personal protective masks made of our felted Karakul wool, or farm-crafted ventilators constructed of fireplace bellows and garden hoses? Would anyone find that funny? If you’re sick, or worried about a friend or family member who’s sick, focusing each day on the state of their symptoms or calculating how their needs will mesh with the availability of ventilators, surely not.

But I also skipped April Fool’s Day because in a crisis of momentous proportion, the significance of any particular day diminishes. We will even lose the traditional ways to mark far more significant holidays like Easter and Passover this year, deepening our sense of time-warp.

When a lost sense of time overlaps with a lost sense of place, the effect is even more dislocating. For those of us fortunate enough still to have work, doing that work at home changes our sense of what home is. It is no longer demarcated as a place for only certain activities, and when it becomes everyplace it becomes no place. For those stuck inside with no productive activity required, it becomes more of a prison. And when guidance tells us that there is danger of making those you live with sick, emphasizing such advice as the need to clean shared surfaces frequently, home loses part of its sense of a refuge from the dangers of the world.

One wonders, indeed, whether there is any longer such a thing as a safe place. Hospitals, once perceived as havens of safe care, are increasingly viewed as reservoirs of infection and zones of high danger. Or consider food markets. I went yesterday to a delightful, well stocked food market, which I once would have viewed as a most mundane pleasure, and found it transformed into a minefield of insecurity. A majority of my fellow shoppers were masked and highly conscious of maintaining distance, but a significant minority did neither, sometimes, it seemed, assertively. The need to be constantly on guard against others innocently engaged, to maneuver around them and suspect whether they were carrying a lethal threat in their breath or on their hands, transformed the sense of grocery store from a routine activity where one could luxuriate in one’s choices to a danger zone where the emphasis was on getting out quickly.

Facing such dislocations, I am more grateful than ever for the refuge of the outdoors. It’s a gratitude similar to that expressed by a number of friends: a doctor friend in New York City who sends out curated coronavirus updates daily to colleagues, friends and family and clears his head with walks in Riverside Park; a friend isolating completely on his own at his Norfolk, Connecticut home, whose spirits rise and fall according to whether it’s been a day he can work outside or a day of confinement; and a friend in Washington, D.C., who is fighting the decision of his apartment building’s management to close the building roof garden in purported conformance to city edicts. The closure perversely deprives the residents of a space which made safe social distancing easy in a completely unenclosed space.

Here on the farm, of course, there is no restriction on being outside and it poses no conceivable risk to ourselves or others. I’ve been taking great pleasure in seeing the chives and rhubarb noticeably taller each day and the early apple and magnolia blossoms opening. Being able to seeing the daily progression of blooms and growth helps restore a sense of progression of time even in this timeless environment. Getting out of the house restores a sense of a world larger than one’s interior space.

Daily chores have always been one of the more tedious aspects of farm life, a rote routine of feeding and watering the animals morning and evening. There’s a reason the word “chore” has an undesirable connotation. I was surprised yesterday, though I should perhaps not have been, when Troy, Eric and I all volunteered almost competitively to do evening chores. Doing chores is purposeful activity, it’s out of the house, and mostly outdoors. We all wanted to do it, and we divided up the tasks among us.

There are obvious safety issues when people in cities share confined elevators to get to the outdoors. But it does strike me that for those who can get there in a non-risky fashion, there should be a balance between inside and outdoor existence. It can be done safely, maintaining social distance, and it should be encouraged to get people through this ordeal sanely.

WHAT’S NEW THIS WEEK:

Sorrel, small young leaves in small $1 bunches
lovely with poached eggs

We give thanks for those who are recovering from Covid.

WHAT’S AVAILABLE THIS WEEK
Tiny hot matchbox peppers, $5.00 a string, dried and quite decorative.
Fresh dug horseradish root, $3/lb.
Sorrel, small leaves, small bunches, $1/bunch

EGGS: $5/doz, $3/doz (fun size)

MEATS: We keep some on hand, but it helps to order ahead in case we need to retrieve from our stash in the big commercial freezer. See below.

ROASTING CHICKENS – Nice fat Freedom Rangers, frozen, largish (6 to 7 lbs,), $6/lb.

LAMB: Riblets $8/lb, small and larger leg roasts $14/lb, Ground lamb $7/lb, small loin chops, $14/lb.

PORK: Loin pork chops, $12/lb (2 to a pack, btwn 1 and 1.5 lbs),
Spare ribs and country ribs $7/lb
baby back ribs $8/lb
fresh ham roasts (2 to 3 lbs), $12/lb
smoked bacon, $12/lb

FARM PICKUPS:

Email us your order at [email protected], and let us know when you’d like to pick up your order. It will be put out for you on the side screened porch of the farmhouse (110 Lasher Ave., Germantown) in a bag. You can leave cash or a check in the now famous pineapple on the porch table. Regular pickup times are Saturday and Sunday from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. and 4 p.m. to 5 p.m., other days by arrangement. If you have questions, don’t hesitate to call at 518-537-3815 or email.