Getting Down and Dirty (NOT Like That) on a Provincetown Farm
First, We Contemplate Whorish Barn Swallows
Farmer Dave is shocked I know what barn swallows are. I do not necessarily blame him, since we have only known each other for 24 hours, having met during dinner with mutual friends the night before. Plus, as we stand outside his barn with the birds flying overhead, I’m not dressed like someone who many people would think knows what barn swallows are. I showed up at the farm wearing neon purple Goodr sunglasses, a white tank top with a bright beach ball print (the material of the tank top is lycra, or something else horribly synthetic), and short grey shorts (which a friend refers to as my “package shorts”). This outfit is actually conservative by many standards in Provincetown, Massachusetts, which is where we are. Just a few blocks away, men are walking on Commercial Street wearing brighter and tighter clothing than I am — and many are wearing a lot less of it.
I’m also wearing a pair of very not sexy rubber boots, which come up to my knee. Dave gave them to me when I arrived. When we planned my visit to the farm he told me not to wear sandals or flip-flops, since there is a lot of mud and horseshit around. “Wear sneakers or, if you have them, boots,” he told me. “Sometimes the horses accidentally stomp on your feet.” I packed lightly for this trip — this is a beach town in the summer, after all — and unsurprisingly I did not have any farm-appropriate boots with me. Dave had an extra pair boots though; farmers, like Boy Scouts, are apparently always prepared.
Dave is only recently a farmer, and by most measures he has the appearance of many middle-aged white gay men who have spent most of their adult lives in urban areas. He’s in good shape, and clearly has taken care of his skin over the years. He drives a nice car. Perhaps his lack of traditional farmer appearance is contributing to my disbelief that we are standing on an actual farm, which I had no idea existed in Provincetown despite coming here regularly for over 15 years. The farm has four horses and two ponies, plus vegetable and flower gardens, the bounties of which Dave sells to a few of the shops and restaurants in town.
At dinner the night before, Dave offered me a tour of the farm and I quickly accepted. I grew up in rural Pennsylvania, which is a place I fled as a young closeted gay man. But part of me always appreciated — and at times deeply missed — the fresh air, open land, and wildlife that you can’t find in Washington, DC or New York City, where I have spent most of my adulthood.
As we talk outside the barn, the swallows dart out and swoop down menacingly toward us, only to reverse course at the last minute to land on a wire high above our heads. Nine of them line up over us, the bright blue sky behind them, and they chatter noisily to each other.
“They’re worried about us and what we’re doing here,” Dave says. “That’s what they’re talking about.”
“Really? I think they’re just gossips and are criticizing the outfit I thought would be farm appropriate,” I reply. “Or they’re talking about Marge, the whorish swallow, who tries to break up bird families.” Dave doesn’t know me very well. The look he gives me suggests he thinks I’m either funny or crazy or both, but also perhaps that he regrets inviting me to the farm.
Inside the barn we climb some wooden slats that lead to the loft, where the swallows have built 30 or 40 nests in the rafters and along the side beams where the roof meets the walls. Each nest is about the size of a large cantaloupe and is made of mud and grass. They are very uniform, and as a group it looks like the birds have created a small city of swallow apartment buildings. Swallows reuse their nests from year to year, leaving as the weather gets cold and then returning in the spring. Females will lay more eggs for males who show they are expert at nest building, which absurdly reminds me of an episode of the Netflix show Easy, where a group of couples discusses a study that found women are more likely to want to have sex with their male partners if the men do more housework.
The swallows dive bomb us as we stand in the loft, so we leave after a few minutes, not wanting to disturb them too much. I know I don’t like it when strangers stand around my house, talking about my nest-building skills or my ability to keep a spouse happy.
Outside, Dave shows me the back section of the farm, which is federally protected wetlands. This means Dave has to take care of the land but can’t actually do anything productive with it. I am very grateful for the boots he gave me when I arrived, as we sink down into the swampy ground. The muck reaches our shins and small brown frogs jump around our feet with each step. The sun is setting over the sandy hill that borders the rear of the farm, and Dave points to where the resident pack of coyotes often emerges at dusk. Unfortunately for me, they don’t come out that night. I was already planning an Instagram post about my farm visit, and coyotes would have been social media gold.
Instead, I settle for the farm’s horses and ponies, which I help Dave feed. I quickly learn that equines that are eating are not the best at posing (to be honest I don’t know much about equines, so maybe they’re never all that easy to photograph). I took a series of mostly blurry photos of horse and pony heads vigorously shaking out mouthfuls of hay, with particles of dust from the hay adding an obscure layer to the already-blurred images. It all looks and feels very artsy, which is a total accident.
The gardens make me especially happy, not that I think the land, horses, or Dave care much about my mood or emotions. We walk through rows of zinnias — blooming in dark reds, bright yellows, and intense oranges — and sunflowers that have grown taller than we are. We eat right off the stems and vines, sampling carrots, cucumbers, tomatoes, purple basil, and kale. Everything is organic and pesticide-free. Each bite overflows my mouth with water — it’s been a rainy growing season until recently — and layers of intense flavors bounce around my mouth. It’s almost like I am tasting bright colors, rather than vegetables. At first it’s odd to eat warm raw vegetables — everything has been sitting in the August sun all day — but soon I don’t even notice the temperature. The flavors break through so strongly.
“Horseshit is excellent fertilizer,” Farmer Dave tells me.
Happiness Is Not a Chattering Head
Two days later when I see Dave again he tells me how happy he was to see my own happiness as he gave me the farm tour. Apparently he did care about — or at least noticed — my mood. “I loved how obvious it was that you were happy as we walked around the farm. Your joy was real. You kept smiling and laughing,” Dave tells me. I briefly wonder if the horses noticed, too.
Dave only knows a rough summary of my recent life, which we discussed during dinner the night we met. Michael and Luis — our friends in common, who were at the end of their mid-summer 2019 trip to Provincetown — thought it would be good for Dave and me to know each other. He lives here year-round and I’m planning to live here most of the coming year; we are nearly next-door neighbors, which could come in handy during the stormy off-season months, when Provincetown is wracked (and sometimes wrecked) by nor’easters. P-Town, as it’s often called, sits on the very end of Cape Cod, which juts off the Massachusetts mainland and out into the Atlantic Ocean.
During dinner I mentioned that I was working on a book, which is a memoir of sorts that covers the 22-month period from July 1, 2016 until May 4, 2018. During this time I (roughly chronologically) got hit by a car and broke some bones; turned 40; watched helplessly as my dad was diagnosed with an aggressive form of lymphoma and then died three months later; saw Donald Trump get elected president, throwing my and my then-husband’s careers off their neatly laid paths; and had that then-husband tell me he was infatuated with another man and therefore wanted a divorce.
I was forced to grow up a lot during those 22 months — and their aftermath — and also confront my own mortality and sense of self. It was a classic midlife crisis except it lacked the cliched fun new sports car or hot sex with someone half my age. Perhaps ironically for us both, my ex-husband’s new infatuation was actually older than both of us, and the divorce required us to give up a beautiful BMW that we both loved to drive, and which we acquired long before any of the terrible events took place. Mostly my midlife crisis made me question everything I had been doing as an adult and wonder what it all added up to.
By early 2019, a combination of Trump toxicity and ghosts of a dead marriage led me to realize two things. First, that I no longer liked living in Washington, DC. And second that there was no law that said I had to work in policy and politics — my chosen profession — forever. I had plenty of friends in DC and my career was objectively a good one, but I felt like I wasn’t sure where I belonged or what I should be doing. Mostly I felt a strong urge to figure these things out.
In the divorce settlement I managed to keep the small house in Provincetown that we had purchased just months before our marriage’s wheels came off. My job is headquartered in New York City, which I visit at least monthly, but I do most of my work from DC via telephone and video calls. There is no reason I can’t do that from Provincetown, which is what I have always described to myself and anyone who would listen as my happy place.
Despite that moniker, I was under no illusion that the sadness and loneliness I felt in the wake of the divorce and my dad’s death — and as the country regressed rapidly along every possible measure under Trump — would suddenly disappear once I settled in Provincetown. I did think that being in P-Town would at least be a change of pace and scenery (at times heartbreakingly beautiful scenery), which might help me answer some of the questions I was wrestling with.
Even as a kid I lived mostly in my head, which often made for a fun combination of anxiety, sentimentality, and the inability to make or commit to clear decisions. As an adult a combination of therapy, medication, meditation, and exercise kept most of that under control, but it was an almost-daily struggle for me to find space in my head that wasn’t at least sometimes turbulent. I felt like I was spinning in DC and was hoping a move to Provincetown would settle that a bit, at least enough to make some decisions.
Although I plan to continue with my current full-time job for the near term, my gut tells me that I need to do something different eventually. It’s hard to say if this notion’s genesis is the 2016 election or the divorce or my accident or my dad’s death — or simply the cumulative effect of those things all happening around my fortieth birthday, a time when many people take stock of their lives. But early this year I realized that what I was doing professionally, although important and good, was no longer fulfilling me the way it once did. I have many friends, as well as current or former colleagues around my age who mention having similar feelings. But most of these people have children and often quickly follow up any expression of career malaise by explaining that their job gives them the money or schedule they need to make sure little Ryder or Chia or Flonase has every advantage needed to get into the elementary school of their (the parents’, not the kids’) dreams.
Regardless of the origin of my thinking — or snarky asides about people who flagrantly reproduce in expensive urban settings — it is clear to me that what I do now professionally is not how I want to spend the majority of my time during my remaining days on this planet. I have a vague notion that I want to write — writing has always been my passion, often secretly so — but I’m not sure about what or if that could really be a career. I still need to pay my bills, and I do like nice things (remember the BMW we had to give up? Or the fact that we bought a beach house?).
I expect (or at least hope) that time in Provincetown will help me figure some of this out, even as I continue to work hard at my current job. I am motivated to do the latter knowing that what my organization does helps move the country in a more progressive and humane direction. And I know I am lucky to have a job that both objectively does good work and allows me the flexibility to live in a tiny and fairly remote beach town. One consequence of living in my head is that I can’t simply accept this blessing and move on; I continue to ruminate on it and wonder if it’s something I truly deserve. I also worry it’s all a big mistake.
What I Like about the Dirt
Amidst all this anxiety, Farmer Dave was right: I was truly happy on the farm. Despite the parade of horrible things that happened to me (and the nation) in those 22 months — and my tendency to live in my head — I do not always feel sadness or anxiety. Those emotions are usually nearby but I’m lucky that they have never totally or permanently crowded out all sense of happiness or joy. Hooray for pharmaceuticals (which I’ve used, frequently and without shame)! If nothing else, my attempt to live in Provincetown and to consider a different way of living is an effort to figure out how and when the sadness and turmoil are turned down and the happiness and calm are turned up.
During my farm tour I told Dave I enjoy gardening. For most of our marriage, my ex-husband and I lived in a small condo building in DC, and I took care of the front yard and a tree box on the street. I mostly planted perennial flowers and shrubs, some of which I acquired from my parents’ home in Pennsylvania. They dug out a bunch of their purple irises one year and then drove them south so we could plant them in DC. The plants took quickly to their new urban environment and spread their large lazy green leaves across the front of the yard. Each spring for two weeks I would stake the flower shoots; the iris blossoms themselves are heavy and otherwise pulled the stems downward. The flowers were a sign that the winter was over and summer was near. They were one of my favorite things to grow and care for, but I had to leave them behind when we sold our place during the divorce.
Even the mundane but necessary act of weeding that front yard and tree box gave me a satisfaction that not much else in my life did. The work was tangible; when I was finished I knew what my labor had accomplished. Over time I could see the flowers and plants grow and spread. The earth seemed somewhat happier and healthier because of my efforts. The joy Dave saw on my face that first day on the farm was no accident, nor was it a surprise to me that I felt so good there.
My personal writing gives me a similar feeling, even if I don’t do much to share it widely. Writing always produces something uniquely mine — in some cases I think what I write is good and at the very least it often makes me feel emotionally better. My professional work did not lend itself to this kind of visible output (or mental wellbeing), especially as my jobs became more about managing other people doing work rather than doing the work itself (like writing papers or op-eds). At the end of most workdays now, even good or successful days, I do not have much to physically show for my efforts.
In exchange for free organic produce, Dave asked me to work on a section of the garden that was overrun with weeds — which were knee-high and deeply rooted in the sandy soil — and parallel to the cucumber patch. The weeds and cucumbers were growing into each other, with the cucumber plants’ curly tendrils reaching out and wrapping around the weeds, and the weeds themselves growing over and through the cucumbers. The weeds also create a nursery for mosquitos, which are ubiquitous this year in Provincetown, but especially on the farm. Despite putting on bug spray before the farm tour, I came away with at least six huge welts, apparently having fed a very hungry mosquito family. I quickly learned that deterring farm mosquitos requires saturating myself in spray, which I’m sure does wonders for my lungs and other essential body parts.
It’s a risk I’m willing to take. Over the course of several evenings this month I ripped, pulled, and dug out so many weeds — 10 wheelbarrow loads to be exact. At the end of each night I could see that I was slowly making visible progress. Although the farm’s mosquitoes consumed about three gallons of my blood during those evenings, I created a clear stretch of dirt that just days earlier was choked with scraggly invasive plants and brush. Hidden in a particularly thick weedy area was a cucumber the size of a small infant, which Farmer Dave and I named Moses. In the dirt I’ve found half-rotted stakes from past farming efforts, as well as pieces of an old irrigation system. It’s comforting to know my hands aren’t the only ones that have worked this admittedly small part of the earth, and that others will come after them.
Robin, a 70-something woman who has worked on the farm longer than Dave has owned it, came by one night as I was weeding. She is basically the farm’s boss, despite Dave holding the deed to the property. “That looks real good, Jeff,” she said as she walked by. “You’re making nice progress.”
Those nine words filled me with pride like no performance review at work ever has. It is similar to how I feel when the people who I share my personal writing with tell me they think I might be at least ok at it.
Jesus Christ WHAT Am I Doing? Or, the Bug Spray Has Gone to My Brain
This September I will pack up my DC apartment, putting most of my things in storage and taking the rest — clothes, some books, my plants, the dresser my paternal grandfather used as a boy, the storage chest my mom used as a toybox when she was a kid — with me to Provincetown. My plan is to be there for October through the holidays and then I’ll likely find a short-term rental in New York, which is where I’ll stay and work for the winter months and early spring of 2020. I assume I will return to Provincetown full-time later in the spring and continue doing my current job at least through the 2020 election. After that I am not sure what happens. I have a few ideas, but I am working hard to not force myself into a decision or a commitment that I might not actually want or like.
The anxious chatter that often rules my brain would love for me to figure everything out Right Now. But I know that doing so is premature. I don’t know enough about what I want in this new life, which was conceived the morning I got hit by that van on July 1, 2016 and then became all mine when the divorced was finalized a year ago on August 28, 2018. Perhaps I will realize my old way of living and working is just fine, and I’ll return to DC. Maybe this coming winter I’ll fall in love with New York City itself, or with a man there, and stay.
As this summer ends, while I plan for at least a short-term move to Provincetown and New York, my anxious mind frequently tells me I am dumb for leaving DC and the life I have built there, foolish for even contemplating walking away from my career. My brain would love if I decided right now to just stay in DC and find a way to be satisfied with things there — or to ignore my unhappiness. I’m trying to give that voice some space to freak out — it’s not like I’m switching dry cleaners, so the magnitude of this potential change merits some rumination, I think.
But I also think what my nervous brain really fears is that I will eventually realize that I want — no, that I need — to somehow make writing my career and to keep clearing the weeds on that Provincetown farm, one small plot of land at a time.
