Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, NY. This week Mark writes: A few weeks back, Peter wrote about his lifelong passion for growing things, one which quite naturally led to an involvement in farming. When I was casting about for a topic to write on this week, he suggested that I might explain why I like to farm too. In my case, it’s a bit more of a challenge. An interest in farming did not come naturally to me. Mine is the enthusiasm of a convert. In fact, you might say my early life was characterized by a profound alienation from the natural world. I’m not sure I understand my own transformation, but perhaps it might help as an initial step to describe just how distanced from this world I was. My early childhood was spent in a six-story apartment building in the Bronx. There were some single family homes down the block, with tiny squares of grass and a tree or two, but the view from our window was overwhelmingly of concrete and asphalt. The same could be said of my nursery school and kindergarten, and of the walks to and fro. I’m told that when I was an infant and my parents placed me on the swath of grass in the middle of Pelham Parkway (in the nearby neighborhood where my mother’s parents lived), I cried every time I made contact with the strange surface.
From an early age, I did come in contact with a rural environment of sorts, but I think you could fairly say it was something I had touched but not been touched by. We spent summers at Warman’s Bungalow Colony, owned and operated by my grandfather and his brothers and sister, in Swan Lake, NY—the Catskills. It had once been a dairy farm, but its former agricultural features had all been transformed to new uses: the barn to the “casino,” site of circuit-riding borscht belt entertainments, bingo games, and itinerant dress sales; the annexed utility rooms to my Tante Jenny’s grocery store and apartment; the chicken coop to the laundromat. And the pastures were populated by bungalows (“kuch aleyn”, or “cook on your own” in Yiddish). The one open area, at the far end of the property, was the baseball field. The life of the bungalow colony was more or less that of an urban neighborhood plunked down in the country. I gravitated between Jenny’s grocery, where my beloved great aunt would indulge me with chocolate marshmallow twists from the freezer, the “lake,” a former cow watering pond where we swam, and the tables set up in the cool shade in front of some of the older bungalows, where I would contentedly listen to the click of the tiles and calls of “one crack, two bam” as my mother and grandmother played endless games of mah jongg. (This was a matriarchy where the fathers appeared to great excitement Friday night and disappeared again on Sunday.) There was a farm that still operated up the road, but we never went there. Nor did we kids explore the surrounding woods, which seemed dangerous and forbidding. I only occasionally played baseball. Standing far out in right field (for I was a terrible player relegated to where I would do the least damage), I experienced nature principally as the unpleasant buzz of swarming gnats in the hot sun.
The only time, indeed, that I can remember venturing on foot into the “country” was to accompany my grandmother to a large scrubby field across the road full of high bush blueberries. I have vivid memories of the heat, the crescendos of katy-dids. and the scratches to our arms and legs as we filled large enamel cooking pots with the berries. Our discomforts were forgotten when we sat down to one of our favorite summer suppers, blueberries and sour cream. When I was part way through kindergarten, my family joined the exodus to the suburbs, in our case northern New Jersey. You might think this would have introduced me to nature and the outdoors, but in 1950s New Jersey the grass only existed to be mowed. We had no vegetable or even flower gardens, just the classic Ozzie and Harriet foundation plantings. The nearby woodlands, which had not yet been bulldozed for housing tracts, were not particularly dark or deep. While I did at times play there, I don’t think I ever distinguished one tree or bush from another. Not until high school and the late 1960s did I begin to spend a significant amount of time out of doors. While I began to appreciate nature in a fashion, there was still a distance between me and my surroundings, viewing them as I did through the lens of an aspiring suburban hippie; that is to say, through a haze of marijuana smoke. “Grooving” on plant life is a pretty narrow way of relating to it. I naively fashioned myself an anarchist, whose ideal was to live in a self-sufficient agricultural commune. Yet even on the verge of leaving home for college, I could not have told you what a string bean plant or a beet in the ground looked like. Leaving my suburban cocoon for college first made me aware of how constricted my relationship to the world of growing things had been. It was a revelation to visit the home of my best friend, George, and be sent out to the asparagus patch in his back yard to pick spears for dinner. I had never before tasted asparagus, let alone known how it grew. While I reveled in some of these discoveries, the encounter with other young people who seemed comfortable with the natural world, veterans of Outward Bound or members of the hiking club, made me entirely ill at ease, giving me a tremendous feeling of inadequacy. My protective response was to adopt the persona of a staunch urban nihilist, espousing only half tongue-in-cheek a “pave the world” philosophy. Certainly I had the conventional appreciation of beautiful gardens and country landscapes, but only as a foil for what really mattered—the City and most of all New York City. And so I arrived at young adulthood, still alienated from nature, and a most unlikely future farmer in every way. I will leave my story here and in the next installment try to explain how I became transformed from antagonist of the country into a true believer in the virtues of the agricultural way of life. —Mark Scherzer
