COOK — It’s a well-worn question that never grows old: Why did the chicken cross the road?
If you ask the chickens on Frank Kaml’s farm north of Cook, you’ll probably get the answer: “To find paradise.”
Frank just calls it his garden. But walking alongside him through beds thick with tomatoes, cucumbers, and rutabagas, through rows of fruit trees and berry bushes, you get the feeling that this is Kaml’s little slice of heaven right here on Earth.
A modest man with a dry wit and a sharp memory, Kaml doesn’t dwell on sentiment, and he doesn’t need to – a quiet echo of sentimentality permeates all the stories he tells, reaching back to his earliest memories.
Kaml’s farm has an anomaly of sorts. While most of his land lies to the north of Vermilion Lake Rd., there’s a one-and-a-half-acre parcel to the south, right across the road from his modest little red farmhouse. Kaml and his new bride, Dolores, bought the property when they moved to the area in 1963.
“My grandfather would always say, “You’ve got to have some land and get it paid for as soon as possible,” Kaml said. “Right away I said we’ve got to have some land. Land was easy to get – everybody was selling because there was not much going on.
“We were living in a trailer over at my brother’s place, and you can’t have two women in one place, it just doesn’t work,” Kaml said with a laugh. “We looked at a lot of places, and we ended up here.”
At the time, that little parcel across the road had been used for hay, but over the years Kaml has transformed it into the lush garden and orchard it is today.
That poses a bit of a hazard for Kaml’s flock of heritage chickens, as the mix of favored nightcrawlers and bugs in the garden can lure them onto a road known for speeding traffic. To keep the free-ranging chickens as safe as possible, Kaml has trained them to run back into the yard at the sound of his voice.
“If you can train people, you can train chickens because they’re absolutely alike,” Kaml said. “Some people are untrainable, and they’ve got followers, and the followers are the ones that get killed. Same deal with chickens. I’ve got this road and they drive 70 miles an hour past here, but very seldom does a chicken get hit. I had a method of pounding a stick on the ground, and they’d get scared of that and they would get off the road. Now if I see them on the road, I just holler at them and they look at me and come back.”
Still, the chickens cross over to the garden now and then. It feels fitting, really – gardens and chickens have gone together since Kaml’s earliest days on a Roseau County farm.
“Chickens and the garden were mom’s project, and she had me out with her,” Kaml said, smiling. “When I was a baby, I was in a basket, and she’d cover me over with mosquito net. After I was one year old, I was a problem, but it didn’t take me long and I was pulling weeds.”
Today, a walk with Kaml through his garden is as much a trip down memory lane as it is a journey of discovery of all the varieties of things he grows. One memory popped up as he was showing off a thick bed of cucumbers.
“I make dill pickles, and that’s my great-grandmother’s recipe,” he said. “I used to call my mom up and ask, ‘What’s in your pickle mix?’ And she’d have to tell me. I had the recipe. I just did that to make her feel good – I liked it.”
And his mother is present in some of the selections Kaml has picked for his garden.
“There’s stuff here like this elderberry,” he said as he reached out to touch its leaves. “I got a little piece of root from her elderberry with one little stem on it, and this is what it turned into.”
Asparagus was another of his mother’s specialties, and its presence in spots all around the garden illustrates the planning that goes into his work. Some he’s planted in sunshine, and many of those are almost ready for harvest. Others are planted in shade and will develop more slowly so there will be plenty later in the season.
Kaml has little need of the produce section at the market – he grows more than enough for his own needs – watermelons, pumpkins, beans, tomatoes, Egyptian walking onions, grapes, and much more on the ground below and different varieties of fruit in the trees above, many grown from grafts, others from seed.
“I grow what I eat. Eat what I grow. And so I plant what I like to eat,” he said.
That includes some things a bit out of the ordinary, like one particular apple variety he pointed out.
“This yellow apple is just as bitter as you could ever imagine, real sharp,” Kaml said. “They’re good if you pickle them, though. Instead of putting in salt you put a little sugar in there and then dig up some of that horseradish and put that in there. I put them in the canner and cook them for at least 20 minutes, so they stay sealed, then they’ll keep for a whole year.”
A more familiar delicacy looks a lot like blueberries.
“This is a honeyberry,” Kaml said. “It blooms when it’s freezing. That doesn’t hurt them, and you get berries on it. The first thing that I harvest is this.”
Not everything has flourished the way Kaml would like, including some strawberries and raspberries that didn’t last, he said, but a bigger worry these days is the bee hives that are suffering from the same population drop seen throughout the country.
“I’ve got to have bees in order to pollinate my apple trees,” he said, removing the top of one hive to show how few bees there were inside. “I have a problem with trying to keep them alive because there’s so much spraying going on around the country that the worker bees bring it home and feed it to the baby bees and it kills them. I have a heck of a time getting any honey out of them because there’s just barely enough bees in there.”
Gardening is such a passion that after Kaml retired from Hill Wood Products in 1992 after a 34-year career he briefly thought about going into it full-time.
“What I was going to do when I quit Hill Wood Products is I was going to go into a garden service,” Kaml said. “But that never happened.”
But eventually, that turned out for the best. His wife, Dolores, was known for her love of caring for older adults, so much so that she went back to school to become a certified nurse assistant at age 50. But as she got older, the care she gave to others became care she needed herself.
“My wife had a stroke, and then she got dementia that turned into Alzheimer’s,” Kaml said. “The doctor said, ‘Would you like to put her in a nursing home?’ and I said no, that’s my partner. I had to be here 100 percent of the time with her.”
And that’s when he got an assist from an unlikely source, the chickens. Kaml set up a couple of bird feeders and a place for the chickens that Dolores could watch from their kitchen window, and those chickens kept a spark of joy alive in their lives.
“I learned how to read her face, her eyes, you know?” Kaml said. “You could tell from her face and eyes that she enjoyed the chickens.”
Dolores passed in 2018, but Kaml shows little evidence of slowing down. At 90, he’s made some concessions to his advancing years, like refusing to drive in the afternoons. An early riser who’s typically up at 4 a.m., he said he’s not willing to take the risk for himself or others that he might get drowsy behind the wheel.
And he’s made some accommodations to his gardening as well. He’s gotten an electric hoe and an electric soil rotator, and he’s been trimming the tops of his fruit trees so that he doesn’t have to climb on a ladder to pick fruit.
“When I work hard, I only work 20 minutes at it and then I will sit down,” Kaml said. “If it’s something easy I’ll work an hour or two at it.”
But easy or hard, there’s little more Kaml enjoys than being in his garden. As he looks around, there’s a certain softness to his gaze, a sense of peace as vital as the greenery that surrounds him.
“I like gardening,” he said. “I don’t know if I could live out here day and night, but I could certainly spend a lot of my day out here. This is just really, really, really nice.”