The Day I Bought a Farm I Couldn't Visit

Bengie Rodriguez drove me into the mountains of Las Marías on a morning in early 2017. The road from Aguadilla narrowed as we climbed. Houses grew farther apart. Asphalt gave way to gravel, and the canopy closed over the truck until the road became a green cut through the western slope.

We crossed a small stream.

I watched it pass beneath the tires and disappear behind us. I did not know the stream came with the property.

The road entered a thirty-acre clearing called La Treinta. A barn and the other working buildings stood among its roads and cultivated ground. The grade continued above them. Trees crowded both sides of the truck, their branches meeting overhead, and the road turned sharply enough that the view rarely extended beyond the next piece of gravel.

I had been looking for a farm in Puerto Rico for three years. By then I knew how often the drive into a property was better than the property itself. A road could promise seclusion all the way to the top and deliver a ruined concrete house, six acres of exhausted coffee, and a title history requiring the combined attention of a surveyor, a priest, and several dead cousins.

The truck climbed another section of grade.

I began composing the sentence I would use when we stopped.

Thank you for bringing me all the way out here. It is a remarkable property. I do not think it is the one for me.

Then the road curved, the trees opened, and there was the hacienda.

It stood above La Treinta, built in the old Puerto Rican mountain style, with a red metal roof and porches facing east and west. Long white horse fences ran from the stone gates. Mango trees formed an arc around the clearing. Fruit trees, flowers, vegetables, and gardens filled the ground near the house.

From the porch, the hacienda looked down over the barn, roads, and working acres. About two hundred yards away, at roughly the same elevation, the chapel watched over the clearing from another hill. El Restaurante de La Casona de Artemio, the restaurant of Artemio's big house, occupied the third side. Everyone out here just calls it La Casona. The three buildings formed a loose triangle around the part of the property that had been cleared and worked.

Even that would have been enough.

Above the hacienda, the mountain continued into forest. Most of the farm rose there, beyond anything visible from the house.

Coffee grew beneath layers of shade trees whose names I did not yet know. The upper leaves moved in the wind with a sound low enough to reach the body before the ear. Clouds rested against the eastern ridge in long flat bands. Morning light caught the roof, the fences, and the highest branches first.

Bengie stopped the truck.

I got out and stood beside it.

I had carried a list from farm to farm. The property needed its own water, enough elevation for good coffee, substantial forest cover, repairable buildings, clear title, and a price the financial career could carry without disabling everything around it.

I asked Bengie three questions. He answered them.

I looked once more at the house, the working ground below it, and the forest rising above. Then I told him I would take the farm.

We had been on the property for eight minutes.

Bengie had sold land in the western mountains for most of his working life. He understood that land reveals itself at its own pace, and that buyers seldom improve their judgment by continuing to talk.

He looked at me with mild amusement.

Then he suggested lunch.

···

The wanting had begun in Maine.

Every spring my maternal grandfather came to Maine and planted about a dozen raised beds with us.

Seed packets appeared while winter still held the ground. My grandfather waited until the frost was out of the ground, then turned the beds. Stakes went in. Rows were measured. By August the plants had escaped their assigned boundaries, and he moved among them attending to the small things that determined what the garden would give.

My father rebuilt our childhood home on Sawyer Street in South Portland. Like nearly everything else, he did the work himself.

He treated every honest hour of labor with the same seriousness. A house, a patient, a lacrosse practice, a long drive with three children in the car: he showed up and did the work in front of him.

The farm I imagined as a boy belonged to New England. A red barn. White fences. Hay in a field. Apples in a cellar. A place where the work moved with the seasons and the buildings lasted long enough to carry the marks of the people who repaired them.

Puerto Rico gave the picture different trees.

I moved to the island in 2014 while the financial career was still underway. If I was going to farm there, I wanted to grow something Puerto Rico had grown exceptionally well for generations. That led to coffee.

Across 2014, 2015, and 2016, the search moved through Adjuntas, Lares, Yauco, and Maricao.

Every property revised the list.

Municipal water in the mountains could not be taken for granted. The farm would need its own source.

I also traveled to Hawaii, Guatemala, and Mexico to look at coffee farms.

Kona made the labor question impossible to ignore. Coffee grew on some of the most valuable agricultural land in the United States while labor costs pressed against what the crop could bear. The farms were beautiful. The arithmetic was already under strain.

In Guatemala, I began to understand the farm as an inheritance of knowledge as much as an inheritance of land. Its intelligence lived in people who knew when to prune, which shade to keep, and how the mountain held water.

In Mexico, I saw coffee growing beneath a mixed canopy of fruit trees and hardwoods. The canopy held water and soil on the mountain while sheltering the crop below it.

I returned to Puerto Rico looking for history, forest, water, and work that could continue across generations.

By the end of 2016, I had walked forty-something farms in Puerto Rico and bought none. Two days before the drive into Las Marías, Marcela Graniello had forwarded a listing from a small real estate website in the western part of the island.

The photographs had been taken on a phone in poor light. The description was three sentences long, and the address was approximate. Its acreage read three hundred and fifty, which appeared to be a mistake because the price attached to it could not possibly buy that much land in the western mountains.

The eight-minute decision had taken three years.

···

At Restaurante de La Casona, we sat at the third picnic table.

Restaurante de La Casona occupies the restored hacienda house of the old Hacienda La Florida. It sits at the upper end of the chinchorro scale.

Many chinchorros in the western mountains operate from concrete houses with dirt floors and a chalkboard menu where yesterday's prices are still faintly visible under today's. Restaurante de La Casona was clean, tidy, and beautifully restored in the old hacienda style. Its few employees wore polo shirts printed with the restaurant's name. The menus were printed too.

Doña María ran the business, took the orders, and served as the face of the operation. Her husband, Artemio, known as Don Valentín, cooked.

The food was traditional, local, and very good.

Don Valentín made me a Teo burger.

The name understates the engineering. Two full plantains, each smashed into one half of the bun, enclosed the beef and what appeared to be half a farm's worth of vegetables. The result had to be eaten with a fork.

I finished it.

Bengie opened a folder and placed the deposit agreement on the wood between us. I read it. We discussed the terms. I signed it and wrote the check.

Don Valentín watched from nearby.

María asked whether we wanted another Teo burger.

We did not.

The property held much more than I had seen. I had not yet walked to the chapel, entered the forest above the hacienda, or seen the mountains beyond it.

All told, I had covered perhaps two acres.

The closing was expected that summer.

···

In early September, Hurricane Irma passed Puerto Rico. I followed its path from Maine.

Two weeks later, Hurricane Maria crossed the island.

I was on the tenth floor of the Bristol, on Condado Beach, when the lock on the balcony door broke. Wind and water entered the apartment. I went into the stairwell convinced the door was gone, along with everything inside the apartment that I valued. The pressure of the eyewall pulled it shut again. During the eye, I tied a mattress against it with three lengths of climbing rope.

It held through the second half of the storm.

The courts in Las Marías closed. Roads through the mountains disappeared beneath trees and earth. Communications failed. Information arrived slowly, when it arrived at all.

The farm sat beyond those roads, under a canopy I had seen once.

I could not return to inspect it, and the title work could not be completed. The deposit remained in place while Las Marías began the long work of reopening the mountain.

Finally, in the spring of 2018, the closing took place at Bengie's office in Aguadilla.

A notary sat with us. The papers formed a stack four inches thick. I read them and signed them. The notary stamped the deed.

Bengie walked me out to the truck and told me, in Spanish, that he had sold me the right farm. The following month, I offered to buy a foreclosed parcel of 120 forested acres along the northern boundary. The Rincón Cooperative considered my first offer unflattering.

It was.

After a brief struggle, the cooperative accepted. Years later, a survey found another thirty to forty acres the old boundaries had missed, and the farm came to about five hundred acres.

···

The deed in my hands held something wilder than the farm I had imagined as a boy.

Copper Hill rose across two mountains, from just over a thousand feet at the river to about two thousand at the top. Several streams crossed its slopes. The Guaba River ran below. Local understanding held that beneath the farm, between two watersheds, lay a large aquifer whose water rose naturally alkaline and fed the trees above.

Trade winds moved through the canopy, and on certain days the clouds entered the hacienda through the open windows. From the high ground, the view reached west toward Rincón, where the Atlantic meets the Caribbean.

Above La Treinta rose Montaña Milagrosa. A line across the mountain divided two histories. On one side stood old canopy, dense with the biodiversity of the Puerto Rican mountains. Arborists estimate that its giant ceibas could be four to five hundred years old. On the other, about ten years earlier, Don Valentín, working for Don Ramón, had cleared the land for coffee. That side had gone wild again.

The division remains visible from across the slope.

Beyond Montaña Milagrosa rose Copper Hill. Coffee had been planted across it in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The mountain had since gone wild, descending through forest toward the Guaba River.

Stone drying patios remained from the farms that had worked the mountain before us. Across the property stood remnants of two haciendas and the botanical traces of the French and Spanish agricultural periods. Rare coffee species had been brought into these mountains in the late nineteenth century, and some may have survived beneath the canopy.

Old Spanish hacienda roads wound through the forest, lined in places by massive mango trees that arborists put at eighty to two hundred years old. We have restored those roads slowly, opening one section and then another, each turn revealing more land beyond it.

Even now, I may have seen five percent of it.

I knew almost none of this when the notary stamped the deed.

I wanted to get back up the mountain.