Bolting Vegetables and Flying Worms

People often ask how this extended family of foreigners – most of us born 10,000 miles away in the other hemisphere – ended up here amid the black dirt and dairy farms of Warwick Valley.

In fact, it all started six years ago as a crazy idea to get out of New York where we were working, and do it as a team, two families together. The decision was made for me one day, probably after reporting on the crime and decline in New York City, when I had to step over a dead body in Times Square subways station. I stumbled out at my destination further down Broadway to find police grappling with a youngster suffering from a drug induced seizure. It seemed the city offered me two options: become inured, or spend my days in depressed dismay. I turned them both down.

My Bad Day on Broadway coincided with a period when my brother Simon and his wife Shayne were concluding that suburban Long Island and the daily railroad commute was a form of masochism. Like hundreds of people who have come here before us, and are coming in every day, we decided jointly to reach for a better quality of life. But why here?

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One glorious day we piled into Simon’s mighty gas guzzler, the Thunderer, and headed on yet another reccy trip to find our new place with space. This day we followed an ad placed by Raynor’s Realty in the unknown territory of Orange County. Warwick. It sounded English and familiar.

As the Thunderer sailed over Mt. Peter and into the valley we knew we were close to home. Perhaps it was the nostalgic resemblance to rural England. Or maybe the lush vegetation reminded us of the Southeast Coast of Africa, where we grew up.

I had a small plot in mind – about five acres, for a horse and chickens and veggies: room for two families to live independently. What we fell in love with was a dairy farm ten times that size. We took on the awesome responsibility of making the farm work, but without the cattle.

Simon and Shayne and their infants moved into the farmhouse. Christopher and I shooed away the wasps and swallows from the small barn and started to convert it into a cottage, with the help of a craftsman builder. It took all winter, the coldest in years. We bought chickens and got a farm dog. But we were new to winter in there parts. Car batteries froze. We missed the buses to our city jobs, and suddenly understood something that had long puzzled us: why the houses are so close to the roadway.

We survived and headed into a scorching summer. The vegetables bolted in the heat. A sort of orange flying worm attacked our potatoes. We took in tenant cows, which broke through the fencing and ate the Brussels sprouts.

We had a suspicion the neighbors were laughing a little. City folk are created for country folk to laugh at.

After a year Simon and Chris decided to give up their city jobs and start their own marketing and management consultancy here in the valley, while I stayed at my journalism job, living in New York during the week.

We had spent only a few of our working years in New York. The stronger imprint came from our cultures across the sea, with differences that often showed. We were strangers, for example, to the Cult of the Unblemished Lawn. We tended to be more relaxed about mowing, with affection for long grass on the verges and lawn broken by shrubs and trees.

Our own traditions amused our neighbors. We trekked down into the fields and picked the cattle corn for our own pot. It was delicious. But then a Japanese friend recently fell with joy on some burdock weed we had ripped out of the pastures. It’s a delicacy in his homeland. One man’s meat, another man’s poison.

When Shayne’s brother Vaughan Wiles and his family came to join us in the valley we were jubilant. And more are coming. There will be 17 of us soon. What greater testimony is there to our contentment here?

Oh, perhaps there is one. Both Shayne and I have had babies here, little fellows to grow up in Warwick Valley and point to the local hospitals and say “that’s where I was born.”

In these times a lot is changing in the valley. We have a big concern about that. It is that we might suddenly find that the sensibilities we cherish have died, taking with them the charm that led us to settle here.

It’s hard to say at what imperceptible point you start saying “home” when you refer not to the place you came from, but to the one to which you have moved. But I think we are all there.

Warwick Journal, 1987