01/08/01

Orange County is certainly not East Coast Wisconsin anymore. There’s not much of a farm community left to dick around in anymore outside onion country in the Black Dirt. In the hills east of Goshen there’s nothing but a handful of dairy farmers left on the land, and they seem just as bankrupt and as desperate as the next one. You’re certainly not getting paid any better for your milk than you did a generation ago, and of course your taxes and expenses are probably three times what they were. Your best effort nowadays might result in you breaking even or being able to pay half your bills. You better have a wife who can work as a nurse or a school teacher or something. Otherwise you have to resort to some form of hustling just to keep going.

Much as I hate to admit it, if Phebe didn’t have her career at the Newburgh Hospital, we would have probably folded long ago. She calls herself my patron and chronic enabler. That’s surely what she was to Rocky. Me? I don’t know. For a time Starvin Marvin resorted to growing Marijuana between his corn, or so says Stash Skim. Honest man has to know dairying now is like a cruel vice, unhealthy, hardly wholesome to the soul. Shit, I see more farm folk now at the probation office on reporting day than I do at Agway (well, just about all the Agway stores around here went out of business last year).You couldn’t really say they’re family farms that are left unless you counted the dogs and cats on the places. A lot of these guys left prefer to be loners, or women won’t have them. Call it husbandry without actual husbands. If you found more than a handful of farms in the area still in the business of actually producing milk you’d be lucky. That’s all they ever did in these parts years ago. Our milk products were once the gold standard for the country at large. Goshen butter was famous. But you wouldn’t know it today from the look of the place with all these fucking McMansions going up on every knoll and hillside. The milk industry has been abandoned, just like the iron industry, railroad industry, trotter horse industry, knife industry and any other good thing we once had. You know what we have now? Fucking warehouses. We got fucking large square buildings the size of farms plopped down anywhere they can put ‘em. They can park all those Chinese widgets and doo-dads there for a spell before they get sent out to all the retail stores--- which we also have in abundance.

What kills me are these guys like Taciturn Vern or even Stash Skimington who have no equity left to fall back on. Both have little more left on the deed than a rundown farmhouse and an old barn or two. In reality they’re working their asses off for mere beans. Meanwhile these faceless real estate holding companies they’re in partnership with, they’re just waiting for the right day to cash in, and are using the farmers rental of their land to save a fortune in taxes every year. If you could find a more feudalistic arrangement, I’ve never heard it. . .

All those years getting to this point though of retiring. . . boy, I guess you could say it was like being enslaved or something. I can’t get over now how much wondrous shit there is in the world to wrap your mind around when you don’t have to spend your every waking hour concerned about the many and varied needs of 3 dozen lactating bovines. Maybe that’s why people are so quick to judge farmers as an ignorant lot---because smart or not, it’s so damn apparent they can’t afford to put their minds to fucking anything beyond the rigorous demands of their business. Farming’s got to be one of the loneliest, most isolating occupations there is, and I’d say it’s the same here in the shadow of New York City as on the plains of Nebraska. If anything it’s worse in the suburban areas like this one if you go on the idea that the farmer becomes more and more at odds with the neighbors as the farm culture dwindles from existence.

01/07/01

Phebe and I made the mistake of signing over the Colonial to our son Rocky back in ‘98. He had pestered us like hell to sign it over to him with 5 acres of ground and then he turned around and sold the fucking place to cover a huge drug and gambling debt he racked up. Should have known he was up to something. I guess you could say we were conned. What the hell did we know? He had a dry wall business back then and it looked like he was doing pretty well for himself. Some Mafia guys in Newburgh were looking to crush his balls. Rocky said he tried to do what he could to settle his debt without selling the place, but unfortunately this involved a lot of burglary on his part and a lot of stolen copper. Rocky got the shortest sentence of the crew. He testified against the others and helped bring down a mob boss. They’ll probably kill him when he gets out. One of the things he testified about was going around with a couple of buddies offering home repairs to old people who live alone. One of the guys would get the homeowner to follow them outside and the other would sneak inside and grab whatever cash and jewelry they could. Some fucking model citizen I raised. We all got screwed pretty good. Now we got a family of New Yawkas living 100 feet away, their damn Shetland Pony got out last October about a week after they moved in and barely survived a fall through our rusted septic tank. I guess you could say the pony almost did a Mexican Mike. Someday when I have the courage, I’ll have to recount that one with a little more gusto. Let’s just say I earned my Eagle Scout badge that day wading in the remnants of the last 25 Christmas dinners putting a strap underneath it to hoist it out and save the damn runt thing. What else could I do? Those little kids of Tommy’s were hysterical crying.

Devil got his due, I guess.

Yeah, I’ll get my price one day, and then I’ll be on to my next adventure, you can be sure of it!

Maybe the Old Moa will make his escape to New Zealand after all! In grand style!

01/06/01

You can laugh all you want about my old head to head stanchion barn and weathered wooden silos— I don’t have a lien against a thing. And at least I can say I kept the two ancestral houses up fairly well. Not that I own the Colonial I grew up in anymore, or not that I’m welcome anymore in the Victorian where Phebe grew up, but still. Ol’ Porch Rot is up to his eyes in debt right now after the roof of his big modern barn collapsed in a heavy snow and he had to lower himself to using his old barn same as me. The fucker. What’s left of his pole barn lays out there like a half-rotted dinosaur laying down on its back with it’s rib cage exposed. He’s not been quick to do anything about rebuilding it or tearing the vestiges down.

Guess now Hiram’s in Chapter 11 bankruptcy trying to stave off Chapter 7. Hard to believe with 150 acres some 65 miles north of midtown Manhattan you could owe as much as the land is worth in today’s day, but that’s apparently what’s being argued. These attorneys and bankers see a depressed man all alone sitting on a piece of distressed real estate like that, they start circling around him like vultures. Judge could force the place to be sold off. Someone said if Hiram had been able to keep the number of cows up the barn was built for the barn would have withstood the storm as there would have been enough warmth to keep the roof clean of snow. Earlier that Winter he lost a whole shit load of cows to bad silage. Talk about cursed. It sure is hard to keep those big barns stocked, turnover can get so high. Anyway, Porch Rot can keep his foul manure management system and massive machinery with the price tag of a house. I was never envious of that stuff, but he always acted like I should have been. Bigger really isn’t better in this business, just makes for more stench and more headaches as far as I’m concerned. Big debt kills too. The bigger they come, the harder they fall.

Orange County has seen it all before for generations now---all the attempts to farm livestock on a large scale, whether it be horses or cows, have all failed. All the big fancy Orange County stock farms have all gone the way of the mastodon by now. Hardly any trace left of them.

Now Mexican Mike’s family is suing Porch Rot for wrongful death to heap on more trouble.

The nerve of those people, Porch Rot says, he wasn’t even in this country legally.

Yeah, but you fucking hired him---you stole him from my employment, in fact---and he slipped into an open manhole to your manure management system in the pitch darkness and drowned in foul ungodliness. Why wouldn’t you get fucking sued? People sue nowadays for hurt feelings!

I am not Miguel, I am Mike. Please call me Mike. He says to me the day I first met him.

That’s fantastic! I say to him exuberantly. You hear all these stories about these little Mexican fellas who come and work in the USA for 15 - 20 years and don’t learn a lick of English, and here you are taking on the English language right off the bat! That’s wonderful that you want to go by the name Mike. What better way to show your commitment to learning the English language!

I no understan’, Senor. He says back to me after all that.

Hiram wasn’t sure what to do with Mike’s widow, Milady at first, thinking she might turn around and sue him or something. Turns out Milady wasn’t even Mike’s wife. She was just a consort, I guess you would say. Nineteen years old she says she is. The real wife is back in Mexico. Real Wife got an attorney here somehow to take on the case for her. Hiram must be on the lawyer’s shit list really. He’s the same attorney who represented the young couple who bought raw milk from Hiram straight out of the bulk tank a few years ago, thinking that would be the healthiest milk for their baby.

By law I have to tell you you can only use this raw milk to feed your dog, Hiram was quoted in the case as saying, but this is the best milk meant for dogs you can give to a new baby.

Baby got sick and died from e .coli infection. The terms of the settlement were not disclosed, but I understand they were whopping.

Two weeks after Mike is dead, Hiram’s going to Town Hall to marry Milady. Hiram says it’s nothing sexual---the only way to keep her from being deported she had to be married to a citizen. Don’t know if that so true, but that’s what he said. And then almost in the same breath he says it wouldn’t be so bad to make another son to help out with the place.

Break out that fabled turkey baster I guess.

Can hardly imagine what their conversations at dinner would be like. Probably would become pros at charades. Then again, maybe Porch Rot’s on to something. Maybe his way makes for a peaceful home. Come to think of it, maybe I’d get along a lot better with Phebe if we didn’t have language in common. . .

When you really get down to it, for all his advancements, Porch Rot’s prospects in farming right now are worse than mine, and I‘m doing nothing more than selling orchard grass hay at this point. And what does Hiram live in but a rotted shit hole of a house. Maybe it’s par with this trailer, I don’t know. Maybe Milady’s picked it up some by now.

I expect Phebe will try to grab everything that she can from me. Been in a standoff with her for almost two months now. Our only truce was at Christmas when we took Moo-Shoo up to Wallkill prison to visit Rocky. If things were up to Phebe she’d have every bit of the place signed over to the land trust or something. Like I said, she’s taken over the Victorian, and I’m down in the wilderness along the edge of Purgatory Swamp freezing my ass in Mexican Mike’s old trailer. Well, I should say it was originally Percy’s trailer. Call us empty nesters in the throes of mid-life crisis acting out our life’s disappointments and resentments while a banjo is strummed in the background. No divorce lawyers have been called in yet. You know once that happens it’ll be like Armageddon, or, as Clean Phil wrote in one of his songs: A Coup D’etat in Shangri La.

Paradise lost at the edge of Purgatory Swamp.

Yeah, as far as this Thoreau is concerned, Fuck Walden Pond.

01/04/01

Dad was as conservative as they come, hated FDR as much as Stalin or Adolf Hitler. Probably wouldn’t have Social Security or welfare if it were up to Dad. Might still have black people riding in the backs of buses and women staying at home in the kitchen too. At one point in my life I thought I knew everything. I had all the answers too. Then you find yourself in a Cold War with your wife, retreated to the trailer out back in Winter freezing your fucking ass. You find your son serving hard time in the Wallkill Correctional Facility, the Umbria Crime family still waiting for the day to crush his balls. Your one and only grandchild--- Moo-Shoo--- is a mixture of every nationality imaginable, born in a toilet on Lander Street in Newburgh addicted to crack cocaine. You find your daughter’s husband, Cornelius -—the best candidate you had to pass the farm on to—- has got some freaky obsession to do away with his manliness and own a vagina and boobs. You find yourself driven out of the fire department where you’ve been a volunteer for some 30 fucking years. You look up one day and realize you haven’t set foot in church for most of a decade. You find yourself a convicted felon, not even supposed to keep guns anymore. Even the dog doesn’t seem to want anything to do with you, keeps running off and getting lost. God damn beagle!

Yeah, I’m one fine one to point to as a fucking Paragon of Conservatism.

01/03/01

I should point out I’ve had notions of doing detective work since I was a boy. I was actually a deputy sheriff for a time though for the duration of about a single eye blink. That was just before I was drafted into the Army. I was only hours away from shipping out to ‘Nam when Dad got caught up in the PTO shaft of the hay baler and got thrashed centrifugally to a bloody pulp. He survived as a minefield sweeper in World War II, prayed a medieval prayer to St. Joseph everyday from a prayer card he kept with him at all times to protect himself from sudden, unexpected death--- even named his only son in honor of St. Joseph--- and look what it got him. I know it sounds kooky, still, sometimes I wonder if maybe in a karma sort of way he took away the violent death that may have been destined for me in Vietnam. I say this because his death certainly became my rescue. . . .

I was discharged from the Army as a hardship case shortly after Dad’s demise to return home to take care of mom and the farm, which was considered her only source of livelihood. My uncle Hank (short for Henry David Thoreau, a real fucking hoot on my grandparents part, I know) had predicted at that time that land values in Orange County would skyrocket in twenty five years. He convinced me it was better to take a pass on becoming a cop again and hold on to the farm as long as I could. Told me the simple path to riches was to make due with whatever machinery and buildings I had and just keep qualifying the place for the farm exemption year after year. He told me to compare my fortunes to that of a retired deputy twenty five years down the line. He said I could count on him on this prophesy. Thirteen years later, the bastard died too, the way of Rock Hudson as I understand it. That was back when there was nothing much they could do for you for that shit. The old fucker sure was right though. Land values have sure gone crazy. Got assets now like an ass-scratching cop could never imagine. I never thought I would have such a hard time at this stage seeing things to the finish. I’ve been told my 5 million dollar asking price is about 3 million too high, but maybe in another 5 years it’ll be snatched up at 5 or 6 as a bargain. Phebe’s not keen at all on selling, but she said she’s not at all worried that it will happen at the price I want. She says I’m either delusional or attention-seeking. Yeah, who cares if I turn out to be both. You know, fuck anybody who says I set my price too high because deep down I don’t want to sell. Good fucking gracious. I wouldn’t keep replacing that big ass sign out front all this time if I didn’t intend to sell, and they damn well know it! My only obstacle has been getting my rightful price. I didn’t work as hard as I did all these years just to give the damn place away! Phebe keeps saying she’s going to find a way to buy me out and then I can be on my merry way without her if I want. Yeah, I’ll believe that when I see it. The buying me out part, I mean, not the part about me being on my merry fucking way.

I could be on my merry fucking way anytime I want, don’t worry.

01/02/01

Of course Porch Rot’s story— or, as I should say, Porch Rot’s stupidity— made the news ‘round the world. Wasn’t a person this side of Hong Kong who heard the pathetic story of the lousy fucker’s passed up treasure who didn’t shake their head and wonder how in hell he could have been so fucking unimpressed about such a wondrous thing. How damn fucked-up do you have to be anyway when a stray piece of the planetary system wailing down on your place barely impresses you as out-of-the-ordinary? Says something, I’d say. Says something indeed. It was after that day, Ascension Thursday 1999, as I recall, that the scant clues regarding the disappearance of Porch Rot’s putative son, Clean Phil— the great Michael Stipe impersonator— finally began making sense. For a kid who believed so much in alien abductions, UFOs and other crazy, fucked-up, galactic what-not, maybe it was only fitting that a crashing meteorite ultimately led the way— in combination, of course, with my Asshole Redneck Detective Work— to finally uncovering the mystery of Clean Phil’s whereabouts. . .

Yes, my name is Joe Thoreau and I count myself an Asshole Redneck--- though the more polite phrase for us nowadays may be Asshole Woodchuck. Not that there’s anything that can be done about my assholeness at this late stage in the game. All bark and no bite though, like so many Asshole Woodchucks you'll find. I’m really just a wussy when you get right down to it. All this obscenity-laced bluster is just pathetic bravado really--- an indictment of my own deep-seated insecurities. Nazi I am not. And just why can’t I make myself feel better at someone else’s expense once in a while when I’m really the most pitiful creature there is to be found on the land?

I actually think of myself as a lot smarter than most people give me credit for, but maybe still not smart enough to be classified beyond the high end of idiocy. . .

If you’re a white male in rural America you’re not suppose to ask for anybody’s understanding— and you’re certainly not supposed to whine about anything— but damn if it doesn’t seem like the world has run out of room for the likes of me. Some days I feel like one of our fucking illustrious Orange County mastodons of yore left standing out on a sinking island with nothing much around to sustain me. Why can’t the cocksuckers caught up in all this Political Correctness shit take some damn time and try to come to some understanding of my kind for once before we’re all fucking gone? Where the hell is the cry for the endangered Asshole Rednecks, er, I mean, Asshole Woodchucks of the world?

01/01/01

You’d think someone with the money woes of Hiram Palfrey would have at least tried to find out what the meteorite was really worth before he all but gave it away. Here the damn thing came all the way from Mars— from fucking Mars!— to crash down on Porch Rot’s farm and there’s no damn sense of wonderment at all! All that registers in the guy’s clinically depressed mind is that some darn rock came through his barn and killed one of his best Holsteins. He’s a got a Mars meteorite on his hands— a Shergottite basalt they call it— a piece of planetary rock knocked off Mars’ surface by an impact event and turned into a meteorite of its own kind. It’s one of the most sought after kinds of meteorites there is. But ol’ Porch Rot has no thought to safeguard the thing! And the thing’s a damn hammer! Collectors especially love meteorites that hit and destroy things. And they love destroyed things too! Like what happened back when that fireball landed in Peekskill in ‘92 and crushed that car. People loved that damn wrecked car so much they took it on a world tour! I tell yah, Hiram could have sold steaks at a premium as celestially slaughtered beef. All that’s on Porch Rot’s mind though is: it’s just another darn rock. Yeah, like the kind that fills his fucking head!

So when Hiram calls over Cadaver Dog--- the downer livestock guy--- Cadaver Dog goes into the barn to look at the dead cow and see how he’s going to winch it out to his truck, and there he finds the cow’s skull mysteriously bashed in. Then he looks up and sees sunlight shining through this hole in the ceiling of the barn.

What happened here? Dog asks.

Darn rock fell out of an airplane or something, Porch Rot replies.

Really? Dog remarks, That could be worth something. You still got the rock?

Yeah, I got it, Porch Rot grumbles as he pulls it out of a nearby pail, Darn thing!

How much you got to get for it? Dog inquires.

You think it’s worth money? Porch Rot asks with surprise.

Sure it is, Dog speaks, I’m sure it’s got to be worth something.

Enough to replace this cow? Porch Rot chuckles.

Sure, Dog replies, much to Porch Rot’s astonishment, I could get a new Holstein over here this afternoon in exchange for it.

Well, that sounds like a deal to me! Porch Rot says exuberantly, I’ll take a cow for a darn rock any day.

Yeah, I’ll take a Holstein cow over a hunk of fucking Shergottite basalt any day. Never mind that you can trade a tiny sliver from the fucking thing for like a small herd! Yeah, slick move there, Hiram! That’s the way to save the farm. Hand your saving good fortune over thoughtlessly to the local carcass hauler. . .

Good fucking gracious.