Little Farm in the Foothills:
A Boomer Couple's Search for the Slow Life

By
Susan Colleen Browne

Chapter One

It's said that if you want to figure out your life's passion, look at what you loved as a child. When I was growing up, I loved Barbies. You might think, there's a girl who'll go far, what with Astronaut Barbie and Internist Barbie and Professional Figure Skater Barbie. Actually, I predate all those ambitious take-the-world-by-the-horns Barbies. In my time, back in the sixties, all Barbie did was sit around and look hot and wait for Ken to ask her out.

But I also loved to read, especially fairy tales like Sleeping Beauty, and stories about gutsy, courageous girls like Laura Ingalls and Jo March. And when I wasn't reading or hanging out with Barbie, Midge, and Skipper, I was playing in the woods behind our house: climbing trees, building forts and exploring whatever nature you'll find in a housing development perched on the rural edge of St. Cloud, Minnesota.

My husband, John, was a bit of a nature boy himself, with a childhood a lot like mine. (Minus the Barbies.) Your mother sent you outside to play after breakfast, and except for lunch, you weren't allowed back inside until it got dark or dinnertime, whichever came first. But then, you didn't really want to be indoors anyway. Certainly not John-from what I can tell, he lived "The Dangerous Book for Boys": roaming nearby woods and fields with his little gang of friends, making mischief and mudpies.
Later, as a young husband and father, John found a practical outlet for all that outdoor energy: growing food for his family. But think about it: maybe the outdoor activities so many of us love as adults, like camping, boating, and gardening-and I hear vacations on working farms are getting popular!-are a way to free our inner tree-climbing, mud-lovin' child. To return to a simpler time, when most people lived on farms or were related to farmers. A time when you spent far more of your life outside than in.

Whatever it is, I never stopped loving the outdoors, and John never lost sight of his longing for wide open spaces. While our mutual passion for gardening kept us outside, there came a time when we both yearned for a deeper connection with the land…and a more peaceful, slower-paced life. Our journey to that life began the day we reached our tipping point with urban noise and traffic and crowds, when John and I bucked our play-it-safe, risk-averse natures and realized our only option was to leave the city. "A Year in the Foothills" is the tale of our fiftysomething leap of faith to create our own little Walden-to seek out a slower, simpler, and more serene lifestyle on a rural acreage. And embrace a whole new way of living.

Little did we know that simplicity can get awfully complicated. And life would become anything but serene.

* * * * *

Our decision to relocate didn't come to us like a thunderbolt. In his twenties, John had come close to realizing his heart's desire, when he and his first wife purchased ten acres outside of town. If anyone was made for country living, it was John.
Now in his late twenties, John had a sizable acreage to play in. Working full-time as a police officer, he was eager to spend his off-hours installing an orchard and a big vegetable garden. He and his wife were in the process of choosing floor plans for a house when the marriage unexpectedly broke up. His wife got the house, John the property, and soon after, he reluctantly sold it to fund a small retirement nest egg. His dream, sadly, was not to be.

Although I'd loved Sleeping Beauty's cottage hideaway deep in the forest, I had never really fantasized about living in the country. Call me picky (okay, I'm the first to admit I'm annoyingly germ-conscious), but I'd always been sort of revolted by the idea of an on-site septic system. There's all that "stuff" in a tank right next to your house, for Pete's sake. And I liked city water. The well water I'd tasted was, in a word, horrible: my first husband's family had a well, with water loaded with sulfurous compounds. If we're talking taste, can you say "rotten eggs?" And I didn't want water from just anywhere -- it could be unhygienic, okay? I have a B.S. in environmental studies. I know about contaminated groundwater. My drinking water would need to come from nice clean municipal water treatment plants.

But really, water was only a side issue. In my youth, I'd had the kind of country experience that could turn most people off permanently.

* * * * *

Thank God I'm (Not) a Country Girl

By the time I was in my early twenties, though I was an avid bicyclist, I wasn't really into nature anymore. In elementary school, I'd been a Campfire Girl, but my group seemed to have little truck with either campfires or camping. I'd gone tent camping exactly once in my life, a post-high school girlfriend getaway memorable only for the fact that for the entire three days, we'd frozen our eighteen-year old tushies off. In June!

My brief fling with rural living was not, as Jane Austen would put it, felicitous. My first husband had been a farm boy, and had worked all through high school on neighboring farms, milking cows and making silage. After he graduated, though, he was through with farming-he'd make a career in a technical field instead of a cornfield. But the third year of our marriage, when he was languishing in college after a stint in the military, he had a change of heart. One December day, he decided that country life would be a great way to recharge his career batteries, and took a job as a milker on a large dairy farm.

As a new mom, I suppose I was game for a new adventure. One night, before the job started, we were invited to our new boss' home for cherry pie. Looking around the Van H's cozy farmhouse, with the gingham tablecloth and lots of maple furniture, I smiled at Mrs. Van H., thinking, this could be fun. Then again, maybe it was the yummy pie, but still.

My smile lasted right up until I walked into our new home. As you know, farm workers are often supplied with a place to live. Well, our "new" residence was a single-wide trailer that should give you new sympathy for the housing plight of seasonal farmworkers.

The Van H. farmhouse was about a quarter-mile from the farm, while the trailer, I kid you not, was sitting right next to, and I do mean practically right on top of, the cow pen next to the barn. This place was the filthiest dwelling I'd ever moved into. Grime and mouse droppings everywhere. And you understand I was more germ-conscious than most people. Maybe more germ-conscious than most bacteriologists. Our boss, Farmer Van H., was of Dutch descent, and though I hate to perpetuate ethnic stereotypes, aren't the Dutch supposed to be big on cleanliness being next to godliness? For a year, my sister had lived in The Netherlands, and told me how those tidy Dutch homemakers kept their homes spotless. They even swept and washed the front steps each day. "Clean" was their middle name. Well, this guy was the exception to the rule.

Although I was busy with Carrie, our fifteen month-old baby, and doing a newspaper motor route I shared with hubby, I spent every spare moment of the next three days mucking out the place. Every cupboard, shelf and windowsill, every inch of floor had to be wiped down and sanitized. I was a whirling dervish, a younger, poorer Martha Stewart on a mission.

Around midnight of the third day, I stripped off my well-worn rubber gloves, and gazed around with satisfaction. With my house clean, the mice droppings only a memory, I felt like a whole new woman. Life was back on track.

Or so I thought.

Here in Western Washington, the prevailing marine air mass from the Pacific means it never gets all that cold-mostly in the forties, even in the middle of winter. This being the case, apparently Farmer Van H. felt that certain house amenities were an option instead of a requirement. Like insulation. Our trailer had no skirting beneath it, or other protection from the elements. We had to keep the electric furnace going day and night, and the place was still frigid. Unsurprisingly, our first electric bill was more than a month's worth of groceries.

Despite the inadequate underpinning, I figured that since I hadn't seen any mice in the house, that meant there weren't any. My blissful ignorance didn't last long. Once evening, alone with Carrie, I'd strapped in into her high chair for her dinner. I opened a cupboard to get out a package of pasta and out jumped a mouse. It landed on my thigh and ran down my leg.

"Aacckk," I screamed, leaping back. Shuddering in revulsion, I screeched again, then glanced at the baby. She promptly burst into tears. But at least the mouse hadn't attacked her too. I managed to pull myself together, at least enough to comfort her, and examined my food supplies. The mouse had been munching on our lone loaf of bread, and the pasta package had holes in it. So, this loathsome species could eat plastic wrapping. Out went the bread, and on my next trip to town, I had to spend some of our meager grocery money on plastic bins for food storage.

Strapping my rubber gloves back on, I resumed my search for mouse droppings. Not only did I have a freezing cold house, I had to share it with mice.

Now that I was unofficially a farmer's wife, I had to get accustomed to a different kind of lifestyle. One that apparently included a more cavalier attitude toward living things. One day, right outside the milking parlor, I found a dead calf. Now, I know "stuff happens." But did Mr. Van H. (who shall otherwise remain unnamed) need to leave this poor dead little thing lying next to the door for three days?

Farm life was also more isolated. The farm was midway between two small towns, each about eight miles away. Looking after Carrie, I had given up cycling, but I was used to taking the two of us out for a bracing walk each day. Only here, the only road around was the busy highway in front of our humble abode. I could hardly take the baby for a jaunt in her stroller on the road shoulder while double-trailer semis roared by.

One day, desperate to exercise, I packed Carrie into her baby-backpack and ventured out into the denuded cornfield next to the dairy barn. About halfway across the field, I met our boss, Farmer Van H. "Out for a walk, are you?" he said, with a strange chuckle.

"That's right," I said, smiling. Okay, he'd housed us in pigsty, but other than that he was a really nice guy. "This break in the rain won't last long."

"You know, I just painted the field," said he, with another Hey, hey.

I kept smiling. Painted the field? "That's okay. I really want a walk."

Well, there's one good thing about winter in the country: the cold sort of covers up dairy farm smells. But I soon figured what he meant by "painted"-- after I'd hiked a half mile or so. He'd just spread manure all over the field. If I wanted to get home, I had no choice but to retrace my steps through the manure-laden field again.

My only opportunity for a change of scenery was my part-time job delivering newspapers. It wasn't exactly a trip to the mall or library or other favorite urban leisure activity, but for a few hours, I was away from that beastly trailer.

Driving a motor route isn't the mindless activity you might imagine. Think of the skillset you develop, shooting a rolled-up paper into a square plastic tube-and doing it for three solid hours without going crazy. It's not just a talent, but an art form, calculating how to hit your target and still keep your car moving. For entertainment, I had two cassette tapes (remember those?), Josef Hayden's Trumpet Concerto and 70's popmeister Gerry Rafferty. Driving along country roads, I'd crank up "Baker Street," and sing along with the Gerry's dream about buying land, and giving up booze and one-night stands. I had minimal experience with booze, and none with one-night-stands, but at twenty-three, with a husband and baby, I reveled in the beauty of the Cascade foothills around me, ringing our county's farms and fields, with the brisk-albeit manure-scented-air wafting into the car window. Life had become not just tolerable, but enjoyable again.

Then real winter set in.

Once or twice each season, our mild winters take a little holiday when northeast winds sweep down from the Canadian prairies. This offshore flow pushes aside the temperate air, and brings bitter cold. To the north, there's a river valley that funnels that biting wind straight into our county, picking up speed as it gusts over the flat farmlands. The wind chill of these northeasters steals your breath.

One January day, a northeaster blew in. A bummer, since our electric bill would go from painful to through the roof, but certainly no tragedy. But in our under-insulated home-sweet-home, something more sinister was at work than a little cold air: by day's end, our plumbing froze solid. And guess what? Another quirk of the trailer was that the wastewater exited our place via an unwrapped pipe. You might think Farmer Van H. was unaware of this arrangement, except this unprotected pipe was clearly visible from the barn.

Later that night, the plumbing had backed up into the toilet and bathtub. Farmer V. turned out to be as cavalier about housing repairs as dead livestock removal. After three days of hiking up to the milking parlor to use the facilities inside (when it was unlocked, that is), or being reduced to peeing in a five-gallon bucket in a freezing, sewage-filled bathroom while Farmer Van H. ignored our phone calls, I put my foot down. "Jody," I said to my husband, "we're leaving."

He felt badly about ditching Mr. Van H., but at that point, he could choose: his boss, or his family. He choose wisely. After I'd packed our stuff, I left the farm and country life without a backward look. Maybe I wasn't exactly scarred for life, but I think I came away with enough Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome to dream about backed-up sewage for several months.
Me, ever even consider living in the country again? No. Way.

Copyright © 2008 Susan Colleen Browne. All rights reserved. This excerpt, or parts thereof, may not be used in any form without the expressed written consent of the author.