by Katie
Years ago when chatting with an organic farmer at a conference, we first heard about the private “dark Instagram” accounts local farms had started for sharing their ultimate failures and random nightmare occurrences with other farmers in the community—the real life stuff they didn’t really want their CSA customers seeing. Now I wish we had one, because this photo would be a gem:
This was a 33” tall x 22” wide clay fermentation vessel that I literally hand-dug and screened the clay out of the earth to make, and then spent two weeks slowly building as well as over a month carefully drying. Only to have it crack en route to its final kiln-firing on the mainland, as the truck was being loaded onto the ferry. This accident probably wouldn’t happen to @twinislandcider, but it would definitely happen to @twinnightmarecider.
The positive spin is, we learned a great deal about properly packing unfired pottery (I only wish it had been a lesson smaller in size). The other nice side-effect has been the commiseration stories that different potters have shared along the way—from breakages while loading the kiln to painstakingly detailed sculptures that melted during firing, each sympathetic story a bit of mutually-shared balm on the heartbreak.
And to be fair, the fact that I had the presence of mind to take a photo of the disaster reveals that my broader journalistic self (“oh look—a story!”) is always calmly foraging something useful in the background.
The happy ending is that the broken clay itself will continue on its journey to becoming a vessel for cider. I will crush it up, return the clay to water, dry it out, and re-form it into my next. The next time you see it, it (and I) will look like this:
