Karen

Notes from Margo:

Karen Mallea lives in about the most isolated place where she could still get the U.S. mail delivered daily.

Directions to her house were like this: Turn east at the Seven Clans Casino. The first stop sign is in 20 miles. Turn south. Go four miles. Turn west on the gravel road, and go a mile until you see the Dead End sign. That’s the driveway.

Karen is one of Lynn’s long-lost first cousins. She owns a 480-acre organic farm about 12 miles from tiny Trail, Minnesota, which turned out to be about 11 hours drive north of Ames, Iowa. The distances are vast. Highways are flat, mostly deserted and mostly two-lane. Even on four-lane highways, sometimes there are no other cars in sight.

After several bouts of skin cancer, Karen stopped working the farm. But there’s a lot to keep her there. She heads outside at every opportunity to check on the wildlife: In the morning we woke up to white-tail deer feeding in the yard. Later, two grouse stripped crabapples from the tree by the farmhouse. They were fat birds, looking too round and clumsy to be off the ground, but somehow they kept their balance as branches bent and swayed under their weight.

Karen quilts and knits, sending much of her production to charities. She makes blankets for newborn babies and for children needing comfort. Her house is softened and warmed by quilts she’s made and collected. On a wooden work basket is an old-fashioned “friendship” quilt she made, with a white background and pastel colors in the pieced blocks. Her cabinets and armoires are stuffed with multi-colored fabrics by the bolt and by the yard, with yarn by the skein, with wool by the pound and batting by the bushel.

She taught on the nearby Red Lake Indian Reservation for many years, and the fabric arts club was a favorite activity. The kids loved it, she said. She clearly was able to convey her love of old crafts to a young generation. Karen and I quilted and knitted together in her living room for part of the afternoon. It could have been a century ago – no cell phones, no high-speed Internet, the sunlight fading on the dark gold wintering fields out the window, a wood-burning heater in the basement.

We drove away from the warmth of Karen’s house into the icy morning air of northwestern Minnesota. We rolled for 11 miles before we met another car. Two bald eagles soared overhead before we saw our first person.

Notes from Lynn:

Before she decided to take up farming, Karen Mallea took graduate courses in Arkansas. That’s typical for brainy intellectuals, but most farmers scoff at book learning. Most of them can tell many a story about back-to-the-land ex-urbanites who could expound at length about sustainable agriculture but didn’t know a hoe from a hoedown. My father never lost a game of anagrams, for example, but incurred the lifelong contempt of his farmer father-in-law because he didn’t know how to chop kindling for the kitchen range. Henry David Thoreau ended his famous year at Walden Pond with a profit of $8.71. But Karen managed to grow and harvest 130 varieties of fruits and vegetables (all organic) on her 480 acres of mixed forests and fields. She invested in a hothouse with a plastic roof. She raised hogs, sheep, cattle, ducks, turkeys and as many as 500 chickens. She plowed with her three Percherons, Rose, Barney and Bill. She grew so many gladioli that neighbors started calling her the Flower Lady. She made money, bought more land and had enough time to teach school as a regular substitute.

Except for about five years when her son Erik or daughter Amahia joined in, Karen did all the farm work by herself. She loved it. But from dawn to sunset she was outdoors for the planting, cultivating and harvesting. And like so many farmers, she got skin cancer.

After 16 years of farming, she doesn’t want to quit.

“What would I do all day? Go shopping?”

The doctors had their way. Her fields are now farmed by neighbors. The Percherons were boarded, but they died. Gale-force winds ripped up the roof off the hothouse.

It’s a difficult time for my newly discovered first cousin, who likes the isolation of her farmhouse in a pretty grove of aspens and burr oak. It gives her plenty of time to make quilts and travel to see her daughter Amahia, a visiting professor of environmental history at Drake; her son Erik, an Oberlin graduate now working and studying viticulture in Santa Barbara, and her daughter Nikane, who studied to became a city planner while involved in professional bicyle racing in Europe.

Think about it: 130 varieties of fruits and vegetables. Most farmers nowadays plant one or two crops. Most don’t even bother to cultivate a garden. Most look askance at dabblers. Karen proved them wrong.

Notable: Added to our list of great placenames: Lake Winnibigoshish.

Mileage from Thorp, Wisconsin, to Appleton: 198

From Appleton to Ishpeming, Michigan: 187

Mileage so far: 5,511