Forty summers ago I went upstate to spend the idyllic season on
the farm in Broome County, New York near Binghamton. Three
hundred acres of fields and woods, its southern boundary the
Pennsylvania line. My late Uncle Stanley Rosenkampf inherited
some money and bought it in 1966, an avocation, as at the time he
was an industrial arts teacher in downstate Westchester County.
Stanley and Aunt Rosemary (my late father’s younger sister, still
living) eventually retired to the small white farmhouse on a
county road. In 1970 the nearest neighbor — a dairy farm — was
nearly a half mile away.
Stanley fancied himself a farmer, one of those guys who
longed for the life of sun and soil, while the practical concerns
of making a living got in the way. But being a high school
teacher his summers were free, and were spent on the farm. And so
I was sent up, having just finished my sophomore year in a
Catholic high school. I looked forward to this as an
away-from-home adventure, and as an opportunity to hang out with
my Rosenkampf cousins Molly, Tom, Paul and Artie. The first three
were there only occasionally, as they were old enough to have
lives away from the place (college, jobs, etc.), but Artie and I
— both sixteen — would be there for the duration.
This was advantageous from Stanley’s point of view. Maybe
sometime in his academic career he’d taken an economics class,
because he certainly understood Adam Smith’s “Labor Theory of
Value.” That summer he found himself in possession of two healthy
sixteen year old boys. He had to provide each with a bed to sleep
in, and he had to feed them. Other than that he could work them,
as they say in the South, like rented mules.
The problem with that “idyllic season” trope is that the
words “farm” and “work” are synonymous. Most hobby gardeners have
a small backyard plot, but Stanley had a full five acres under
cultivation in a series of interconnected plots. And he didn’t
have a roadside stand to sell all the produce. This summer hobby
was for family consumption, and for friends, neighbors and other
visitors to the farm. Aunt Rosemary preserved as much as she
could, but Stanley simply gave a lot away, or disposed of much of
it — spoiled and rotten — on his compost pile. Though I wasn’t
there for the entire season, the output was huge: sweet corn,
pathetic golf ball-sized potatoes, cucumbers, red and green
cabbage, multiple varieties of squash and peppers and melons, and
shiny purple eggplants. Stanley had a patch of strawberries the
size of an Olympic swimming pool. He had a half acre in tomatoes;
the scores of plants properly spaced and staked. He had rows of
string beans and wax beans as long as a football field. I can
still see him standing wiry in the sun in his sweat-stained white
T-shirt, as he surveyed his agricultural empire, wiping his ruddy
brow or blowing his nose with an ever-present blue
handkerchief.
Stanley, Artie and I worked from 7AM to late afternoon in a
daily round of “cultivating,” endless weeding as we broke up the
dirt around and between rows of vegetables with hoes. Sometimes
Aunt Rosemary joined us wearing a big straw sun hat. The
occasional afternoon summer thunderstorm that drove us from the
fields was most welcome from mine and Artie’s viewpoints, but the
rain only meant more weeds the next day. And then there were the
rocks.
Going back to the first agricultural settlement of colonial
New England the historical record is littered with accounts of
farmers cursing the rocky soil. The ancient glacial landscape of
the Northeast is some of the most unarable land in the world. The
stones rising out of it are eternal. It has something to do with
freezing winters and then the thawing spring ground summons the
next generation to the surface for the summer’s picking. I had
the feeling that Stanley had a fragmented Rock of Gibraltar under
his farm. When we dug up those aforementioned small potatoes, the
accompanying rocks were thrice their size.
So, Artie and I “picked rocks,” as we called it, which from
Stanley’s point of view measured the garden’s success. We filled
a wheelbarrow dozens of times per day and took turns dumping it
on a large nearby pile. I’ve often wondered why Stanley never
built a stone wall, because just as nature in its utilitarian way
provided the bounty of the garden it also provided the rocks. But
instead they accumulated in multiple mounds the size of old
Volkswagens at the edge of the fields. It was either a lapse of
judgment on Stanley’s part, or he detested the rocks so much that
he refused to use them in an aesthetic way. “Something there is
that doesn’t love a wall,” wrote Robert Frost.
But there were interludes free of rocks and dirt. Stanley
religiously took a nap after lunch, a siesta in the heat of the
day, and this was the signal for me and Artie to hop on our bikes
and head to the swimming hole by the bridge over Cascade Creek,
or for a round of plinking at woodchucks with our .22s
(encouraged by local dairy farmers to keep the number of chuck
holes down in the hayfields). One day we decided to play hooky
and didn’t come home until suppertime. Stanley was not amused, of
course, but his even-tempered demeanor shrugged it off. Still,
Artie and I knew that the next day he would find a way to work us
harder.
Another favorite pastime was shooting at trains. The Erie
Lackawanna tracks lay across the road from the farm and by
climbing a nearby hill we had a perfect vantage point. Some
evenings after supper we surreptitiously assumed our sniper
position. The freight trains regularly rumbled by always heralded
by the whistle, and we blasted away at the passing boxcars. There
were specific targets: the “S” in “Santa Fe”; the “N” in “Norfolk
and Western.” We loaded and reloaded as our amusing moving target
rolled by. To do this we actually had to shoot over the house,
and one memory I have is of Aunt Rosemary standing in the kitchen
window as she did the supper dishes, probably assuming the
gunfire was target shooting in the woods, and not knowing that
the bullets were passing twenty feet over her head. Needless to
say, train shooting was a no-no, but train shooting with Aunt
Rosemary in the line-of-fire would certainly have provoked her
noteworthy Irish temper. To this day I thank God that I’m free of
the all encompassing guilt that would have resulted if I’d shot
my much-beloved aunt. And I have a tinge of regret about this
adolescent mischief. I hopefully doubt that we shot any passing
hobos. I see now that it was an inappropriate use of a firearm.
Don’t try this at home, kids.
The glass insulators perched atop telephone poles were also
a preferred target. As far as I know we caused no power outages
or interruptions of phone service. Then there were the road signs
that we nonchalantly blasted while cruising by on our bikes.
Artie and I were mounted and armed, roaming the countryside like
Comanches or Cossacks. The elderly proprietor of the General
Store in the hamlet of Gulf Summit gladly kept us supplied with
Cokes, ice cream, and ammunition. Since Stanley didn’t pay us for
our garden work, I’m scratching my head as to how we scrounged up
the money to afford such luxuries. There must have been petty
larceny involved.
There were late nights. Artie had a girlfriend two farms
down the road and we spent a lot of time there. And in the
company of an older cousin we went to a bar called “Davidsons” in
Deposit, New York one night. We were obviously too young to
drink, but those were the days when a bar owner permitted the
presence of young people if they were with responsible adults, as
my cousin Tom was, well, sometimes. But Aunt Rosemary was out of
bed and beside herself when Artie and I rolled in at 2 AM after a
long night of drinking Cokes, playing pinball and shooting pool.
Tom dropped us off and then quickly headed out to continue
carousing with older friends, and I recall Aunt Rosemary swearing
an oath or two at him as he pulled out of the driveway.
In the end Stanley had enough, and sent “Cousin Willie”
home, cutting my enjoyable summer in half. Cousin Willie and
Artie were a bad influence on each other, and Stanley reasoned
that if he sent me home our extracurricular nonsense would cease,
and he’d get twice as much work out of Artie for the remainder of
the summer. So home I went. Poor Artie.
Ah, but the memories.
