The Promise of Asylum at Dilmun Hill Farm.

I remember pressing all of my weight into the door and sliding it open, slowly moving its casters along the rusty tracks. The interior of Blair Barn was covered in dust, awakened from winter’s dormant days and lit by the March sun. Scattered feathers. Stale droppings. A pile of delicate bones flitted across the floorboards. Faded photographs of dirt-smudged students with smiling faces were pinned to one wall, and hand-painted signs proclaiming “Dilmun Hill Student Farm!” leaned against another. Towards the back of the barn where the light was out of reach, two couches were piled high with raincoats and shovels still caked with mud from last October’s final harvest.

When I stepped into the barn for that first time and encountered each of those suspended memories, I wondered about the narratives that were threaded into them––the stories they carried, and the ones they left behind. What had compelled those people to work at Dilmun Hill? And what did they find once they got there? I imagined seeing my own picture pinned to the wall, one narrative among many, contributing to a greater story that we all could be a part of––a story that says, this is a place, and this is who we have been.

My own story of Dilmun Hill was influenced by my upbringing in Ithaca, and my family’s business: a small breakfast diner that primarily catered to students. I remember when I was five-years-old, walking through the dining room and wondering about so many of those customers with their backward caps and baggy sweatshirts, noting how different they looked from the steel-toed truck drivers that drank from bottomless cups of coffee and talked local politics with my father. I would listen to my parents’ conversations at the end of the day while we were closing up, and learn that Cornell with all of its hungry mouths to feed was what kept us in business. Then we’d mop the kitchen and vacuum the dining room. Make sure the tables were set with clean ashtrays and freshly filled jelly bowls. We’d turn off the fan in the office, the radio at the counter, and the neon signs on the wall. Then one of my parents would set the alarm and we’d make a mad dash for the door, trying to get out before we set it off and ended up calling the cops on ourselves. Pull the door tight. Turn the key. Double check.

Drive home to Enfield.

Eat. Sleep. Mend.

Do it again tomorrow.

Nearly two decades later, with the diner long-since closed, I eventually became one of those same Cornell students whose nascent pistons help to keep Ithaca spinning. My identity as a dependent, local resident changed the day I received my acceptance letter in the mail. I soon became one of them.

Prior to my enrollment at Cornell, I spent a number of years scraping by on eight dollars an hour as an organic farm laborer. I went into it with the idea that a pastoral lifestyle would be the seductive get-away from what was turning into a lifetime in the service industry. It was an alternative to talking politics at the diner. Smarter. Better. It was different. It was progressive. It was everything that I never thought I had growing up. The furlough died quickly though, once I actually started working––my burnt back to the sun, swollen hands weeding as fast as possible. But by the end of that first season my idea of farming as an escape from my past had begun to dissolve. It was true that I wasn’t placing silverware on tables anymore, or scraping runny eggs into the garbage, bleaching coffee cups, or running ashtrays through the dishwasher. But instead, I was digging holes in the ground, planting seeds, turning compost, and spreading horse manure. Then it hit me: For as much as I ached for the experiences and the ensuing lifestyle to be different from everything I really knew growing up, I wasn’t able to say they really were. And when it was time to go home and peel off my boots, my body was sore from hard work and repetition, just like my parents were from their days at the diner.

Halfway through my first semester, I applied for the co-manager position at Dilmun Hill because I wanted to keep working outside and growing food. But in retrospect, there was a greater reason for why I wanted to be at the farm: I believed that I simply didn’t know how to do anything else. The Ivy League left me feeling wholly inadequate. Learning critical discourses in classrooms perforated by the ol’ boy network isn’t something you learn to do when you spend the first 17 years of your life learning to serve Cornell for a living. Working with your hands is, however. So I thought I would feel more at home on the farm. I was going back to what I knew, to the stories I left behind, to all I had.

I remember straddling the edges of an empty furrow, its vanishing point advancing and retreating with the field’s early-morning contours as it cut through the desiccated topsoil. I thrust my shovel into the earth, anchoring it inward with my right foot, pivoting the worn wooden handle in a long arch. Unloading the weighted soil just to the left of the new hole, I mechanically moved down the row another 24 inches to dig again, and again, in preparation for the two hundred tomato plants that lie in a tangled mass on the edge of the field, nearly three weeks overdue for planting.

Eventually the tomatoes prospered, as did most of our crops and experiments that year. We successfully developed a bicycle transportation system as a way to move our produce around Cornell’s campus. We gave dozens of tours. We even hosted a Sustainable Agriculture Education Association conference fieldtrip that prompted participants to think about farm-based curriculums. My co-managers, Ben Scott-Killian and John Crooke were also wonderful companions in the field, as we spent hours planning our beds, sowing seeds, harvesting vegetables, and telling our stories. John, raised on a dairy farm in eastern Pennsylvania, was at the farm by 8 AM and didn’t leave until he completed everything on his daily to-do list. And Ben, a Long Islander born-and-bred, a man of action, inspired us to experiment with new crops and planting methods.

The stories that meant the most to me though were the ones recounted in the fields, the ones about belonging, and what it meant for John and Ben to be away from home. I spent a great deal of time listening to their stories, but I couldn’t speak to Dilmun as a place away from home because I was home, and while I had left many times before, I always returned. Instead, what I could talk about was coming back to Ithaca after leaving so many times, and how I confronted my relationship to this place with its conflicting stories and accumulated memories.

In Dilmun Hill I had seen the promise of asylum, a way to reclaim the past in the very town I had grown up in. I had hoped to find someone who could say, I know why you’re here, and I know what it’s like, too, someone who could help me reverse the guilt and the anger that all-too-often accompanies a break in fidelity. But I never heard those words, nor found the refuge I had originally set out for. Instead, I met dozens of other students who were struggling with their own narratives, who were trellising self-imposed identities and trying to make sense of what Dilmun Hill, and its resonances, meant to them. Students who, with every thrust of a shovel, wanted their photographs pinned to the wall of the barn too.