it takes a village part one

Last week I traveled to Tivoli, New York to photograph and participate in a hog butchering workshop presented by The Greenhorns.  The workshop was presided over by Bryan Mayer, a butcher with The Greene Grape in Brooklyn New York.

Day one for me was actually the day before the workshop.  I arrived at Smithereen Farm via an Amtrak train out of Penn Station then via a car ride with Severine and Anne from the Greenhorns project.  Our first stop was an antique farm store called Hoffman’s Barn Sale, a large, wood-stove heated menagerie of rusty farm implements, old style canning jars and mid-70s classic rock albums.  It was like a flea market except the store was filled with useful shit, not just beat up boxes of doll parts or piles of messed up Dokken tapes.

The mission at the Barn Sale was to pick up some last minute cooking implements.  These implements included – what was described to me at the time – a pot big enough to fit a pig’s head.  Not in itself all that interesting until you start to talk about what that means and why it means what it means.  Yeah, we’ll just boil this pig head for awhile, you have a problem with that?  It reminded me of a page from the Sandor Katz book The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved about processing pig heads –

We found that pot along with a giant stock pot, some Pyrex casserole dishes and a Dutch oven.  Scattered among the purchases were the echoes of Severine shouting from every corner – “Anne, we need this.”  Not having been in this dynamic before, I wasn’t sure if this was just how shopping with Severine was or if indeed we did “need this”.  Severine also reminded us that her mother always told her to buy Pyrex when she could.  So we did.

Back at the farm it was a breakfast of fresh eggs and coffee and toast with plum jam.  It was playing with kittens and listening.  It was coloring salsa labels and organizing stuff.  It was digging a pit and splitting wood for the slow roasting of a pig side.  It was getting the first sniff of a weekend’s worth of wood smoke.  It was meeting new folks and trying to be a talker.  It was a warm wood stove and giggles from grown ups.

It was the start of a pretty immense undertaking, this crash course in butchering and sausage making.  I ended the day tired like I usually end my days, but this tired was an out-of-town tired. I didn’t worry about it much and prepared myself to go to sleep late and wake up early, getting back to work and getting back to tired.