Last December, Byron Carr and Charlotte Thibault had a pop-up art show in Contoocook. One of Charlotte’s paintings triggered a whole herd of dairy memories.
During the summer of 1988, my wife, Nancy Jo, worked at Sand Bank Farm, helping with the afternoon milking. She invited me to visit the farm, but initially, the aroma she brought home put me off. Once I gave in, I was hooked.
At the end of the summer, when Nancy Jo’s boss, John, took his Ayrshires to the Hopkinton Fair, he mentioned that Sand Bank would be marching in the Labor Day livestock parade. After some debate, we went to the fair on Labor Day, led cattle in the parade and finally realized that when John mentioned the parade, he had actually been asking us to come help out. Lesson learned.
After that, I learned how to milk cows and helped with the Saturday afternoon milking nearly every week for seven years. During the summer, I left my day job early to jump in the truck and bring in a load of hay while John finished milking. The first summer I didn’t lose any bales off the back of the truck, Nancy Jo gave me a prize.
In the early 1990s, Nancy Jo and I got in a bit deeper, heading off to cattle auctions to buy our own cows to add to the herd. Margo one year. Miss Jackie the next. At one auction, I went overboard bidding on a heifer, and when my bid got really high, John reminded me that an expensive cow would bring the same price from the beef buyer as a less expensive one at the end of her milking career. I stopped bidding.
Nancy Jo and I continued to go to the Hopkinton Fair with the Sand Bank herd. Margo won some ribbons and was once named the highest-producing Ayrshire at the fair. One year, I put on a promotion called “Ask About our Ayrshires,” which helped earn Sand Bank a fifth-place ribbon for Dairy Herdsmanship and helped earn me a seat on the board of directors of the New Hampshire Ayrshire Club. But before the next Hopkinton Fair rolled around, Sand Bank Farm was history. Charlotte’s painting depicts the last milking before the dispersal sale where we said goodbye to Miss Jackie, Margo and Margo’s heifer calf, Quechee.
John told Nancy Jo and me that the final milking would be at midnight before the sale, so the cows would look their most productive. We recognized John’s statement as an invitation, but only Nancy Jo made it out to the farm. I was in Virginia, giving the keynote address at an archaeological conference. At the exact moment when the Sand Bank herd was being dispersed, I was speaking about nineteenth-century rural depopulation in the Valley of Virginia. I mentioned the Sand Bank dispersal from the podium and shed a tear or two. It was my last hurrah as a professional archaeologist.
In another stroke of irony, right when Sand Bank Farm was on the way out, a budget crisis eliminated my archaeology job with the State of New Hampshire. When my job went away, Nancy Jo and I were less than two years into a 30-year mortgage and were committed to staying in New Hampshire rather than chasing archaeology jobs all over the country. Shortly before the Sand Bank auction, I saw a help-wanted ad placed by Highway View Farm. I answered the ad, went out for an interview, i.e., I worked a shift with the owner, and got a job as a milker.
So there I was, armed with a Ph.D. in anthropology, milking cows for a living, and profoundly grateful for the opportunity. I was never the fastest milker in the parlor, but I had a gift for heat detection, which was pretty useful. During the 15 months I spent in the Highway View milking parlor, I never missed a day of work and was never a minute late for a shift. I even showed up for my next scheduled shift after I fell into the manure pit and cracked a couple of ribs.
On my way out the barn door as I headed to law school, Bruce gave me a full week’s pay, four Benjamins, as a bonus. One summer in law school, when negotiating my salary for a summer job with a small law firm, they asked me how much I was looking for. I told them what I had made on the farm and said I hoped they’d pay me more. They offered me four Benjamins plus an Alexander Hamilton.
Thank you, Charlotte, for bringing back all these memories.