Really Random Riley...

Photos: William Pote       

Mary followed through this week on an idea we've been threatening to try for a long time--offer a take home family-sized homemade chicken pot pie for all the parents who are here with their field trip kids. Actually, we tried it once before, but--knock on forehead, make woody ding-ding sound--we didn't put a sign out featuring a picture of the pie. Mallory drafted one up and the family pies started whipping out the bakery window like frisbees.

We saw someone tooling around in the cool of the afternoon, (Sunday I think) with a big camera rig, and it was our old village blacksmith William Pote IV, taking a chronicle of the fall. That's his picture of the new restrooms above, which I modestly believe are the best looking privies this side of the Connecticut River, and maybe even this side of the Thames. Click here to see the farm through the eyes of our blacksmith.



Speaking of photographs, I have a singular knack for not having the camera in my hand just when some perfectly emblematic moment announces itself. Is anyone else in the same boat? You lock up the XD high-resolution movie camera, safe in its case, and a shaft of light pokes down through the tavern windows, that makes even the afternoon dust look like a cinnamon fog. You run out of camera battery just as an alpha family walks by, made into angels by the evening light, and you think -- "if I just had THAT picture of THAT family" I wouldn't be able to KEEP Southern Californians away from this place. (This might be something you can only understand if you're a living history-apple-farmer entrepreneur). I found this frustration to be true with writing as well; you need to scribble it all down when the tragicomedy takes place. You can live life, or you can chronicle it. Very few people get to do both.



I know we weren't speaking of the French, but this farm journal isn't obliged to have any common theme, so I will just tell you that the movie "Man on Wire" is worth watching -- with a qualification. It tells the story of a French high wire-walker who was obsessed with the idea of
running a cable between the World Trade Center towers and walking that span, some 1600 feet above the streets of New York. That 1974 dare-devilry, however, was far more complicated than the act itself--since it had to be planned years in advance, with fake IDs and manufactured identities and the ton-weight transportation of high wire equipment to the top of the building, past security guards. The wire was put in place by virtue of an arrow shot from building to building, and it required teams of participants all willing to be arrested for their prank. The entire trapeze rig was put in place in the early hours of the morning, and the wire-walker himself worried that he was too tired to accomplish his task, after helping to build the rig. Sixteen hundred feet above the ground...



There was also a romantic back story. The Frenchman in question, Phillipe Petit, had a devoted girlfriend who helped him string wire, practice high-wind conditions, and sustain his courage, but after the daredevil cheated death, and earned the attention of the Big Apple's media, a New York woman literally offered herself to him, right on the street, by way of "welcome." He took her up on the offer, before he could even enjoy the celebratory embrace of his helpers, and the jilted lover, interviewed some three decades after the event, seems the very picture of disgusting French romantic existentialism. Paraphrasing: "..he had become a new creature now, a creature of celebrity, and this was a new phase of his life, and his old life was over.."



I've had it with the "ugly American" rap. What self-respecting, milk-fed American woman would put up with this? What daughter of Calvin would put on the Camus face and get all coffee-house in the face of infidelity?

Americans may be loud, but the French are rank cliché.