After day 1 of my AT hike, I reveled in my grime-covered self. "I LIKE being dirty!" I exclaimed. The feeling of being covered in dirt and sweat with nothing to be done about it was wildly freeing to me. My hiking partner was not nearly so enthusiastic. While he took pains to clean up after each day's hike, I generally pretended that I lived in the Dustbowl and could be featured in a Dorothea Lange photo at any moment. I thought a lot about what life must have been like for women back then, cooking over a hot stove with few resources. Dirt would be the least of concerns, I imagined. In no way did I want to experience or glamorize poverty. I wanted to experience hard work and the essentials that rise to the surface when life is stripped bare.
Post-hike, I dug into Kristin Kimball's book The Dirty Life: A Memoir of Food, Farming, and Love. I am such a sucker for these memoirs about farming: See You in One Hundred Years, Animal Vegetable Miracle, and now The Dirty Life. It is generally easy for me to romanticize the difficult work of running a farm and growing one's own food. The idea makes so much sense to me, but there is a reason that few people actually take it on. Kimball's story is particularly appealing because she leaves behind a life I'm familiar with: the sometimes-glamorous sometimes-miserable existence of New Yorkers. Turns out Kimball lived on the same street in the East Village as one of my old friends, right across from the Hell's Angels headquarters. She cobbled together a living from writing and did the same things we used to do when there: ordered takeout; generally relegated the space in her fridge for ice, alcohol, and those bulky phone books; and hopped from one end of town to the other in search of...we were never quite sure. All this changes when she meets and falls in love with Mark, a man whose existence is about farming. And he convinces her to give everything up to make it her purpose, too.
Kimball doesn't sugarcoat anything in this memoir, and as I read about their life, it became clear that their gargantuan plan to run a farm that would feed their community could end in disaster, divorce. Maybe even death. But I ate up the passages about her own transformation because they touched on a truth that seems fundamental and also elusive in a digitized, virtual age:
"I had never in my life been so dirty. The work was always dirty, beyond what I'd previously defined as dirty, and it took too much energy to keep oneself out of it. I had daily intimacy not just with dirt dirt but with blood, manure, milk, pus, my own sweat and the sweat of other creatures, with the grease of engines and the grease of animals, with innards, with all the stages of decomposition. Slowly, the boundary of what I found disgusting pushed outward. The thought of bathing was unappealing at the end of the chilly spring day, with the unheated bathroom so far from the woodstove and morning milking so near. Some nights I would only peel off my outer layer of clothes before leaping under the thick comforter, leaving pieces at the foot of the bed for easy access in the morning dark. My wardrobe from the city had sifted down to one small drawer of unruined things, reserved for off-farm use, which meant they never got worn. The rest had been added, piece by piece, to the general-use bin. I discovered the insulating properties of silk, which gave my collection of lingerie new purpose. Some days I farmed in a black cashmere V-neck that I used to call my first-date sweater. In its youth I'd pampered it with dry cleaning and padded hangers. Now it was flecked with hay, two holes worn in the elbows.
I let my hair grow out, not by conscious choice but because making and keeping an appointment to cut it never reached the top of the priority list. I forgot to pluck my eyebrows. I hardly ever looked in the mirror, and when I did I saw that all the outdoor work was etching new lines around my eyes, weathering my complexion, bringing out the red tones, the freckles. I began to feel the weight of my skin on my brow, my cheeks folding down at the sides of my mouth. My new life was marking me. It was happening so quickly. There were intermittent spells of resistance, during which I'd pluck and moisturize and exfoliate, and then there was a period of grieving for my old self, who seemed to be disappearing toward the horizon, and then I relaxed into it" (129).
I liked this passage because it reminded me of what it was like living outdoors for a week. Beauty and hard work become connected and take on whole new meanings.
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