Being There

The Hills are Alive

The other day I tasted a piece of Mad River Blue cheese at work, we used it for a sauce, something fancy and nice from the von Trapp family, the family The Sound of Music is based on, who emigrated from Austria to Vermont after World War II and started regenerative farming in 1959 and making cheese in 2009. I didn’t know any of this when I ate the cheese, I just learned this yesterday morning when I inquired of the name. The cheese is dense, more fudgy than sticky, its penicillium roquefort less stinky than others from recent memory, both supermarket and fancy cheese counter. You know how blue cheese can get, well, very blue? This one didn’t hit like that, but it stopped me, not for pungency, rather for overwhelm.

Barnyard is an overused word in food and wine, something, rich, lush, deep, rank, earthy, a descriptor loved by many who have never milked a cow, but have been to a natural wine festival, where everyone is fewer than three degrees from a pile of shit. It’s a helpful term to fortify a person for something aggressive, funky, smelly, ripe, more punch, more challenge. The cheese was not dominant in its scent, but simultaneously stopped me and took me somewhere. It makes sense, the von Trapps use crop rotation and planting cover crops to maintain soil health, abstaining from commercial fertilizers and letting the livestock enrich the soil. The air is full of healthy manure. I think cow shit to be so fecund it’s alive, enriching, healthy.

I’ve said the word barnyard to describe something, but I haven’t been in the one I was sent to for a long time, my family’s farm, a place I haven’t been to in decades. My mouth, my nose, my skull, filled with being in that barn, where there is no separation between you, the animals, what they consume, what leaves their bodies. No separation between the body and the bowel on a farm, that’s just a fact. A lot of the ground in pens and beds ends up being layers and layers of stomped upon shit, chilled, hardened, almost cured, layer upon layer, until it becomes a flooring of its own. You get used to it, also a fact, not an allegory.

Whenever I’ve tried to shut down my nose my whole head opens, and this bite gave me a skull full of shit. What a mindfuck. I’m in a kitchen in Brooklyn Heights then I’m milking a cow, pushing grain down the chute, tossing straw bales from the loft, rubbing the water spigot with gloved hands to warm it enough to turn, tossing kibble on Southern States 50 lb bags, calling for the cats to eat, watching my cousin fight. Our olfactory system can be our whole world, all this from a piece of cheese.

I like to bring plates of food up to my nose to inhale them deeply, it does something different than just a bite. I know it might seem a bit pretentious, but I do it in earnest, and the pay-off, the information of what I am about to consume, is worth this moment that might appear performative. I used to smoke a pack of cigarettes a day, my sense of smell has returned since I stopped over ten years ago. I still smoke, here and there or one everyday of late, but it’s not a pack, not even close. Having my sense of smell isn’t always great, it’s a helpful tool, intrinsic to cooking, but sometimes on the train, in the summertime, in New York when it’s all hot trash and urine, it’s rough.

This isn’t the first time a piece of cheese took me to the farm, it happened twenty years ago, a particularly gooey cheese from Bobolink Dairy at Union Square Greenmarket. A taste of this one gave me a flashback to the cows getting in the garlic chives, their milk rife with allium. We’d dump that milk, otherwise it would contaminate the tank, making it unsellable. We weren’t in the business of artisanal cheese-making, just commodity milk-drinking. The first time I handled Anson Mills’ grits, an heirloom, organic grain producer in South Carolina, I’m cleaning the dairy while my uncle grinds corn for grain right outside.

In my friend’s bathroom in college, they lived above the Tap House, the only bar in town. The bathroom floor was the classic pinwheel dot black and white pattern, music from the jukebox wafted up from the first floor, along with cigarette smoke and the din of bar talk. There I was, in my YiaYia’s apartment above the bar, above the jukebox, smokes rising up. That black and white tile always does me in, a personal time machine.

In searching for the right language to describe this, I fail. Words like reminiscent, transforming, evocative, stirring, poignant, they’re all a little light. I’m not talking about wafts, I’m not talking about sense memory, I’m talking about a powerful transfiguration to a place I have been to, where I have lived, where I have worked, the people around me, in this case, family, an experience I am unprepared for taking me over. The words that underwhelm me feel cerebral, a touch melancholy, almost romantic, artistic.

I keep thinking of violence, maybe this sensation exists in a physical world. But violence is pain, and this isn’t pain, but it is powerful. The other words don’t carry that power for me, and that’s a problem, my affiliation of power with violence, but also something transformative. I need more words. Maybe I’m in the wrong language. Perhaps my lack of spirituality is the basis for my lack.

I’ve been writing about rewatching 1995’s film Heat, starring Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino, and Val Kilmer, all the men, and some women to be disappointed by and love them. “All I am is what I’m going after” Al Pacino’s character, the cop, says. Every man only knows how to do one thing, and he is fulfilling his destiny by doing so. It’s all very Greek mythology. Then I thought of Marty Supreme, same thing, Marty can only be Marty, and how I’m bothered that I know Timothée Chalamet wants an Oscar so damn bad, then I consider if Michael B. Jordan was so vocal about his desire for the statue.

But then this damn piece of cheese happened, and it was so much more interesting than the same story about men over and over again.

There’s power and there’s powerful things. The powerful things are way more compelling.