How Cold Antler Farm Got Its Name

On the Road with Zen Lunatics & Pagan Gods

II

Where’s the trail to Cold Mountain?
Cold Mountain? There’s no clear way.
Ice, in summer, is still frozen.
Bright sun shines through thick fog.
You won’t get there following me.
Your heart and mine are not the same.
If your heart was like mine,
You’d have made it, and be there!

-Han Shan

---

Around the late 8th century, there was a Chinese poet named Han Shan. No one knows much about him, but the legends say he was a Taoist monk who lived happily in the wilderness, the mountains being his true home.

Han Shan was basically the Buddhist hermit equivalent to Diogenes, someone who lived his beliefs openly and despised money and slavery, but unlike our boy Dio, Han Shan wasn’t chatting with Alexander the Great, or anyone great.

He spent most of his time hidden from the world in the mists and mystery of snow-capped mountains. He didn’t care about material things, travel, or getting married and having a dozen kids. What he cared about was the freedom to live his life as he chose in a wild place, carried forward by his faith and friends.

His poems were as wild as he was. Around 300 have been collected and documented. They were originally found carved into stone and trees, etched into bamboo and the walls of other people’s houses.

I was introduced to him by the writings of Gary Snyder, who was one of the beat poets to hang around Kerouac and Ginsberg, and those books - like The Dharma Bums and The Practice of the Wild, were key in my own introduction to falling in love with mountains and Zen Buddhism.

By the way, Han Shan translates in English to Cold Mountain.

Cold Mountain is a person, not a place.

This was very important to me. I originally fell in love with farming as a salaried corporate employee at a television network. I was running away to the Smoky Mountains every weekend to feel like a person again after slogging weeks of office conference calls and cubicle life.

I knew if I didn’t change something while I was as young as those beat poets, I may never have the gumption. I may never be free.

I also knew that it didn’t matter where my farm would eventually be. Tennessee? Idaho? Vermont? I lived in all those states and in their mountains, it just so happened I found this farm in upstate New York, just a few miles over the border from Vermont.

The first time I saw this property, was winter of 2009/10. It was the first and only house I saw while house hunting. I walked around with the realtor for 20 minutes and said “I want it.” and I said it without the slightest fear or hesitation.

I’d like to pretend that’s fate or where I was meant to be, but it was mostly because I rarely spend more than a minute or two to make a decision, big or small. I’m not wasting my life spending time worrying how to live it. That’s for people who don’t read poetry.

“Letter to Allen Ginsberg, June 10, 1949,” From Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters

I want to be left alone. I want to sit in the grass. I want to ride my horse. I want to lay a woman naked in the grass on the mountainside. I want to think. I want to pray. I want to sleep. I want to look at the stars. I want what I want. I want to get and prepare my own food, with my own hands, and live that way. I want to roll my own. I want to smoke some deer meat and pack it in my saddlebag, and go away over the bluff. I want to read books. I want to write books. I’ll write books in the woods. Thoreau was right; Jesus was right. It’s all wrong and I denounce it and it can all go to hell. I don’t believe in this society, but I believe in man, like Mann. So roll your own bones, I say.

-Jack Kerouac