Breaking News!
I just found out this morning that we’ve been accepted for an internship at a farm this spring! Repeat, accepted! Yee-haw!

The writing life strains under a certain inconsistency. I’m working on a novel in which the suburban heroes (thanks to a handy centaur) just escaped being mauled by a rabid monster that’s a cross between a giant turtle and a wolf. Meanwhile, I myself sit on a cozy couch, trying not to get distracted by my daughter, gathering my wits to enthrall you with our harrowing experience of car trouble in the mountains.

Perhaps it’s this underlying tension that’s responsible for my ambivalent attitude about cars. Some days, I get this paradigm shift and I’m amazed and angry that my immediate ancestors structured my environment so that it’s nearly impossible to get anywhere without strapping myself into the bowels of a two-ton hunk of crunchable metal, hurling myself along narrow strips of pavement in the immediate vicinity of a horde of strangers to whose better judgment I constantly entrust my life, and then separating myself yearly from thousands of dollars in insurance, gas, and taxes for this lethal privilege. Not to mention the gyms that bounty hunt for my remaining pittance so I can pay for the exercise I could get free if walking got me anywhere.

Other days, there can be two feet of snow beneath a minor glacier of ice, and I shrug my shoulders at my wife and say, “What? Let’s go. We have snow tires.”

It was this latter mood that afflicted me on a recent wintry Saturday. There was brisk, western New York weather out there, but we had places to go and no snow was going to crimp our style.

We’d decided that, what with spring and (hopefully) an internship approaching, we needed more preparation then the casual dip into our growing homesteading library. Winter or no, we had to go out there and do something. If we were to start farming tomorrow, what would be the first step? To buy land.

Thus, with the help of a genuine Realtor, that Saturday found us on the road with a list of addresses. Parcels. Twenty acres, thirty, fifty–these were future farms here. The land ran about $1000 an acre. It was labeled “Raw”. Oh, yeah.

The first stop was a bit dispiriting. We nearly drove past the place because the tilted “For Sale” sign drowning in snow seemed to belong to a past era. Could it possibly bestow the magical right (after all these years) to walk on some stranger’s property? Apparently, yes.

Raw land is what is sounds like–trees, brush, thorns–and it doesn’t come with parking for cute little Honda Civics. We deposited the car with our future next-door neighbors and trudged with our six-month-old through the snow to look at our first future farm. Not that we actually planned to buy anything in the area. (Shh! Don’t tell!) We just wanted to do a dry run so that the panic, when it comes as we do this for real, won’t thrust quite so deep.

I think the plot was supposed to be twenty acres but it must have been modeled affectionately after a mail slot because there were houses pretty close on either side of this bit of wilderness. We trudged down the road, through a ditch, up a hill through three feet of snow, and we were there, in the forest, the wilderness, the future farm.

After about ten feet, the baby was crying too hard for me to pretend she would magically forget her diaper was dirty. Thus ended our first foray into wilderness.

The next stop was better. With a fresh diaper and outlook on life, the baby cooed as we plodded through a wider stretch of forest. Wow. Finally, the earth turned out to be big enough for me to be able to wander around a forest that wasn’t owned by the government. No “Leave No Trace” signs, no access roads, no handy dandy trash cans, nothing.

Like almost anywhere else, the land had been cleared before. The trees were thin, the ground riddled with brush. But it was quiet and pristine. We were out, out with little chance of meeting another human or encountering the fruit of a factory. It was still and sacred.

At least for the moments we didn’t talk. Our wilderness appetites, while voracious, are easily sated, and we were soon on the road again. That place had been decent. I had a chance of cutting down trees that small, and the soil underneath would be rich and fertile after years of laying fallow. But we hoped for a plot a bit closer to full forest, one where the trees had grown enough to crowd out the brush.

We never found that. The next plot, described as a “slight slope” was literally the side of mountain. I liked that. I’ve always wondered who owns mountains. I see those blinking lights of houses on the distant slopes and wonder if there’s some secret society that holds them all in trust. Now, membership was suddenly available. It was a heady experience. If I was a hunter, skier, or independently wealthy, I’d have considered it, but with a wistful sigh we moved on.

Our path now lay through similar mountains. The snow was light but the wind was strong. Wind and snow, I’ve discovered since my migration north, do now mix well. The wind tears across open spaces, scooping up snow and blasting it full speed ahead until it crashes into a hill. The snowy wind proceeds to simultaneously impersonate a thick fog and smooth the snow all along its path. Piles are leveled, valleys filled in.

Ditches are a sort of valley. Theoretically, the conscientious driver on a new road could see a flat street and assume it was completely solid, while secretly the left two feet were a disguised ditch, a natural car trap.

It happened quickly. The car slipped down, snow spurted into the windshield, and it was done. The right front tire was absolutely buried in snow. Unless our nifty snow tires developed four wheel drive and sprouted spikes, we were here for an extended visit.

A massive trash truck stopped to explain he couldn’t tow us, but someone over the hill could. So our little family started walking. It was snowing now, the temperature hovering around zero, and the only house in sight wasn’t totally built yet.

Something between a pickup and a minivan plowed past, reached the stranded Civic, braked, and reversed back to us. After exchanging a few pleasantries, the old man invited us in.

At this point, I started to feel like I was in a Reader’s Digest article. “People Helping People on America’s Treacherous Roadways, Especially People With Cute Little Freezing Babies.” The guy took us to his friend’s house, the friend got in his pickup, the caravan returned to the scene of the crime, and the friend chained his pickup to our car and heaved.

Nothing.

The friend called his son on his rustic, rural cell phone. The son brought his newer, bigger pickup, chained it, pulled. Nothing.

It was getting on to evening and our first host suggested calling the only tow truck guy in the region. The cell phone worked until the guy’s mother asked if I had cash and I said I’d have to count it. While I reflected on the unreliability of credit cards and discovered I did have enough cash, the phone conked out and our host had to drive us into the merry little town (village? corner?) of Ossian to complete the transaction in person. The guy’s mother said we’d have to wait at least an hour.

By now I was less angry about wasting money on a tow. I’d inadvertently sabotaged the Saturday afternoon of two or three strangers, and they were such good sports about it they made the whole escapade worthwhile.

As these pleasant thoughts ambled along, a huge red pickup pulled up. “That your car back there?” asked a teenager with a wide, toothy smile. Yes, it was. “Want me to get it?” Yes, we did. Our host chuckled at the kid wanting to show off his wheels. Then he noted that the tires were “meateaters” and stopped chuckling.

Chain, rev engine, pull. Lurch.

As our host put it, “He didn’t spin a tire.” After two hours of Ossian hospitality, we were free. I whooped and shook the kid’s hand.

“We had two other trucks in here. They couldn’t do it,” I said.

He grinned. “Bet they weren’t driving a —.” [Name suppressed to protect this Product-Free Environment.]

In the exuberance of the moment, I honestly forgot to offer him any cash. He was basking in the glow of his truck’s prowess, anyhow; to taint the mood might have been an insult. So the whole episode turned out to be a total gift, a brush with people I’d otherwise never have met.

Bit by bit, we’re moving out of the books and computers into the wide, wide world. One afternoon at a time.