MARCH SADNESS

Rudd Douglass was small potatoes. Twice a week for two decades, the energetic, white haired and clear eyed ex-professor showed up at the Brunswick, Maine Farmer’s Market with baskets of them, offering at least ten of the who-knows-how-many varieties he experimented with. Every Finnish rose, Yukon gold and Inca purple was elegantly clean and exquisitely sized, like a gem.

Regimes rose and fell, stocks boomed and busted, the last full service gas station in the area evaporated and two Indian restaurants came to globalize the town. While everything was changing at dizzying pace, what stayed dependable were Ruddy’s potatoes, every Tuesday and Friday for six months. His cranberry reds, white roses, Adirondack blues were the secret behind my catering business’s much talked-about festive July 4 potato salad, and patriotic bowl of warm, roasted new potatoes to put beside the traditional peas and salmon.

Of course he pulled other merchandise out of the old white truck he drove down from Dresden. He was the original, and for a long time lone, organic farmer at the market, a vision in overalls and clogs. He offered tomatoes, melons, cucumbers plus peppers of varying heat. He did business as Blueberry Ledge Farm, so true to his name, about three weeks every summer he showed up with stacks of squeaky clean blueberries neatly packed under cellophane in green cardboard pints that sold out fast. Using a 1930’s winnowing machine, he filled big freezer orders, ten pounds at a time. He also set up huge greenhouses and plunged into the plant business, adorning his biweekly produce display with carefully picked perennials, many of them rare, in full bloom. But the main attraction was Rudd the spudman. He always had long lines.

Ruddy brought to his wildly international assortment of potatoes--the Austrian crescents, Russian Bananas, Caribes-- the tutorial skill and relish he brought to teaching science at Fordham University before he moved to Maine. He and his wife Liz, who gracefully adapted to his farming obsession, spent winters tasting every new variety (4,000 are known to exist) he dared to plant. Each was then sold with a sign announcing: great for baking, best in salads, try roasted, or nutty, dry, sweet—to which Rudd would on request add his up-to-the-minute, well articulated opinion. He was far in front of famed food gurus like Michael Pollan who are now telling everyone that eating healthy food involves learning about that food by getting to know its farmer and engaging in open discussion.

To write a book on Maine farmers’ markets, I visited a good many of them. I still check out markets in other states-- the wildly popular Grove in Los Angeles, the legendary Pike’s Place in Seattle, Manhattan’s Union Square Greenmarket, two state sponsored markets in greater Boston. Some part of me always looks for someone like Ruddy, but I never find anyone who has even a third of his startling display of French fingerlings, German butterballs, Norlands, Adirondack reds, Green mountains and yellow fleshed Carollas. He was unique.

He was also magical. In minding his business, Rudd poignantly revived enthusiasm for potatoes in the state once synonymous with them. The traditional growers of Aroostook County so stalwartly refused to change old-fashioned mass single plantings that destroyed the soil, they ran the business out of the ground, By the 1970s, no one wanted a Maine potato because they were black with rot and/or unnaturally shriveled. By the 1990s, without fanfare or grant money Ruddy was selling out whatever he could grow, including standard Maine favorites like Katahdins and Kennebecs. Visitors from away carried his tubers out in their luggage. I sometimes used them as packing “peanuts” in gifts to show them off. A national food broker offered to pile his potatoes in every organic supermarket.

There was no way Rudd could meet demand for his treasure. Despite his dedication, energy and intelligence, he quietly struggled to get his small supply of small potatoes to the market twice a week. His whole life depended on Maine weather because too much snow, a dry spring, a cold June, a wet summer, a beetle infestation, almost anything could upend his tubers and wipe him out. There was never a right time to dig because no one could predict what was coming next, so he usually took his potatoes out small. That’s why they were perfection to cook and serve.

Ruddy also had to depend on hired help to harvest, and as the new millennium progressed, it got harder and harder to find strong, young people willing to do farm work for minimum wage. Even teenage neighbors abandoned him at blueberry time. More and more, he and his daughter alone fielded the labor, packed the harvest, and staffed the market where in the latest years, an exhausted over-sixty Ruddy could frequently be found catching Zzs inside the truck while Samantha worked the scales and bantered with the customers.

Ruddy was keenly aware he had sacrificed the Connecticut comforts of a full professorship because the wild vagaries of ledge farming in Maine never let him off the edge of a financial cliff. But he met the low income challenge like he handled the storms and droughts hurled at him by the weather: with a shrug. He went on playing with potatoes, hunting down new varieties to plant and taste, until pulmonary fibrosis took spudman away earlier this month.

I have always thought the best revenge against death, the one consolation for the sorrows of life, is to become someone so distinct, you become indispensable to people of good heart. So few people are profoundly memorable that in the great scheme of rapidly changing times, to anonymously carve your own niche and become irreplaceable to others is in no way small potatoes. There is no greater or more elusive honor than to be painfully missed, and because perfect potatoes won’t be on the menu any more, W. Rudd Douglass will be every summer in Maine.

~Sandy Garson
"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
http://www.sandygarson.com
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