Within the first few weeks of living on the sixth floor of the Risley tower, I came home to a yogurt cup outside my bedroom door, the foil top folded neatly into the dairy-lined plastic. I vaguely remembered scooping a few last mouthfuls, rinsing my spoon, and tossing the contraband in the bathroom trash before rushing to class.
Jim Williams, Risley custodian of 12 years, was quick to house-train me.
He wasted no time introducing himself, immediately testing my roommate as she trotted up the stairs one day in muddy boots and a green shirt that read “Farm Tough,” stamped over a large tractor. “Do you like John Deere?” he asked, catching her slightly off-guard. The conversation spun off into many more about farming, her plans as an agricultural science major from Brooklyn, and his as an economically savvy pig and chicken owner.
In the following months, the two made deals to trade tomatoes for bacon, and Jim promised tours of his remote, wooded property and pig pen. My roommate left for February break with a carton of his eggs wrapped tightly in a plastic bag. She risked boarding the bus with the precious cargo and enjoyed the variety of tan and pale pink eggs that came from his Bantam and Red Shaver hens as a frittata and shakshouka during a family brunch.
Jim kept his word, leading us down a rutted gravel driveway slick with the mud of one season thawing into the next.
In 2001, Jim bought the 13-acre property, a former Boy Scout camp, densely wooded with varieties of tall dry pine. He cut 1,100 trees, leaving just enough room for his house, garden, pig pen, chicken coop, some fruit trees—peach, apple, pear, and plum—and a few sheds. From the house, the property slopes down and quickly drops off to John’s Creek.
Everything about the place seems to direct itself to the woods, where the creek cauterizes the ground and joins Glen Creek before spilling into Seneca Lake. Jim’s deck faces the net of pines, and behind that is a large window overlooking the sun-washed scene.
The chickens squeeze through the hole in the coop and walk down a ramp facing the woods. The A-frame wooden structure wherein the two pigs lie opens in the same direction. Even the fruit-bearing branches seem to lean that way.
Here, Jim’s Cornell-branded black polo is replaced by a plain black tee, his suspenders still round over his shoulders, with his long brown hair pulled into a low ponytail, an extra hairband cinching the end. The inch of loose hair comes to a slight curl at the bottom. He looks over his glasses, chin tilted to his neck, and speaks limpidly about the basketball game playing in the background.
“Oh, I like college basketball. I don’t like professional basketball. That’s all I’ll say about that,” he tells me while pinching his eyes and smiling, indicating that he certainly will say more if I ask. Instead, I probe for his opinion of the Cornell team. “Lame!” he chuckles, and the moderators on the TV announce another point scored by Michigan State.
It’s Michigan vs. Michigan State—Wolverines vs. Spartans. The winner earns a shot at the Maryland Terrapins, a team Jim has a special affinity for, having grown up in Lanham, MD. After graduating high school, he stayed in the area, taking a job with the railroad in Alexandria, Virginia. Over time, he climbed the ranks from welder to road foreman—until the entire unit was laid off.
There were 33 years of life and 14 years of work put into Maryland, but Jim was quick to pivot. “I didn’t like living just outside of Washington D.C.,” he tells me. “Hot—too hot in the summers.” However, he admits that moving to the small New York town of Reynoldsville was a culture shock.
Reynoldsville, New York, is one of those upstate towns where a Google search procures an outdated website for the county’s historical society and a single Zillow listing. As a fellow rural upstate New Yorker, I’ll refrain from elaborating on the number of corn fields I saw driving up. But Jim beams at his home. “It’s my hole in the wall.”
I parked behind a camping chair left alone on the front lawn and pictured Jim sitting there—a Pabst Blue Ribbon beer dangling from three fingers, the middle and pointer pinching a cigar.
“I’m happy here,” Jim tells me. Though, he’s still underwhelmed by the representative basketball team.
We set through the side door, heading toward the chicken coop. On the kitchen counter, two baskets of eggs sit untouched, still speckled with feathers and streaks of dirt that stain the fabric lining of the wicker.
He gestures toward one. “I’ll wash them and box them tomorrow. Yeah, I’ve got people that want eggs.” Despite rising prices, he sells them for just $2 to his four regular customers in Risley Hall. “I just like to get rid of them. If I don’t, they go to the pigs.” He nods toward the second basket, already deciding that tonight, the pigs will have a little variety in their usual dinner of grain.
The producers—chickens—and the consumers—pigs—are stationed along Jim’s curving driveway, ending before the garden beds.
“I’ve always wanted to be as self-sufficient as possible,” Jim tells me of the operation. Each year, he raises his chickens and pigs while preserving an array of homemade goods—jellies, pickles, tomato sauce, stews, grape juice, pies, and anything else his garden provides.
It’s an economic practice: Whatever eggs he won’t eat are sold or recycled by the pigs, and the pig products get distributed between himself, his family, and his friends.
Then, there’s the turkey. He makes himself the most noticeable of the bunch with his deafening chortle and eerie ability to maintain eye contact.
“I’d hang him myself if I didn’t have so much money put into him,” Jim mutters.
Unlike the rest of his carefully managed livestock, the turkey is an outlier—a lasting mistake from an ill-fated purchase three years ago. Jim had hoped to breed the turkeys, but all three of the chicks eventually grew into their spurs and beards. One was picked off after refusing to return to the pen one night; the other, Jim suspects, joined a wild gaggle of hens that roam his property.
The lone survivor remains.
“It’s a novelty, I suppose. You don’t want to eat him—too old. Expensive. Just a pain in the butt,” Jim says, though it seems more for the turkey’s sensitivity than mine.
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ALISTAR FRUEHSTORFER / COLLEGETOWN MAGAZINE
Jim feigns a crude relationship with the animals he tends, insisting it’s all economical—“just a way to keep me off the streets and out of the bar.” He doesn’t name the pigs, sarcastically calling them “Bacon” and “Porkchop,” but he poorly conceals the love he has for them all. He leans over the wire fence to pinch the pigs’ teardrop ears, ruffles the dusty spot between their eyes, and rubs the coarse peak of their noses.
“The pigs, I talk to them. I’ll carry on a kind of one-way conversation; complaining to them for messing things up, apologizing if they don’t get fed on time.” He opens his palm under one’s mouth and something hard—a rock, maybe a frozen potato—falls into his hand. “Thank god they don’t talk back.”
Then, as if to reset the tone, he offers a bit of grim wisdom: a pig will eat a human body in three days. “But if you’re ever going to do that,” he adds, “remember to pull the teeth.” I know he’s only joking.
Jim lives alone, but his 13 acres hum with relationships, each with their own unspoken terms. The turkey lives for reasons Jim can barely justify, the chickens lay, and the pigs will be killed—but until then, they gorge on eggs and share in his complaints. The foxes and fisher cat seem to know their place—skittish, silent, uninterested in the chickens for now. The deer have no such sense of order, knocking down his garden fence and leaving brown, pellet-shaped payments at the base of cornless stalks. They tolerate Jim’s scolding. He talks to the deer, too.
At some point, Jim pulls out a cigar rolled from tobacco he grew last summer. It flavored the rest of our visit, tossing short trails of earthy, sweet smoke over his shoulder in my direction. It served as a pointer as he directed me towards landmarks along the trail in the woods: the old vine his son used as a rope swing, a fallen tree from November’s hellacious storm, feathers from the turkey squad that stole his Tom.
A short loop brought us back to the pig pen tucked into one of the far corners of the property. Jim surveys his land. “It’s not something you’d find in a Martha Stewart magazine, but it is home. It is a very good home.”
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ALISTAR FRUEHSTORFER / COLLEGETOWN MAGAZINE
Like anyone, he has his wishes: a barn, more animals, a deer-proof fence, more space. “I’ve got too much stuff,” he tells me. When he first moved to the area, he would drag anything he could find home with him. “I know someday I’ll find a purpose for that,” he’d rationalize to himself while hauling home the second bathtub that would sit on his lawn.
I don’t know if it’s the idea of simplicity or some unease about the outcome of the Michigan vs. Michigan State game that brings him back to it, but college basketball resurfaces. He likes it better than the pros—says it’s more pure, less muddied by ego and money.
“Just because you make millions of dollars, I have to hear you run around with your opinions?” He shakes his head, leaning back from his hips. “I don’t care about your opinions.”
As I drive away, the woods swallow Jim’s house once more, the slanting sun catching on the pine tops and the wire fence of the pig pen. I imagine him settling into his camping chair, beer in hand, watching the sky dim over the trees—grumbling at the deer, muttering to the pigs, half-listening to the basketball game when he retreats inside. He’ll wake up before dawn to feed the animals and haul wood to the stove, his daily rhythms bound to this land he’s carved out for himself. It’s not perfect, not polished, but it is his, and that seems to be enough. ⬥