TASTE: Contraband Raw Milk

My first encounter with New York City’s raw-milk counterculture took place in a Bushwick church basement in 2003. Directed there by a series of hush-hush emails from an undercover milk group, I found dour, suspendered Amish farmers doling out unmarked containers from coolers on folding tables. My fellow pasteurization dissenters slipped in and out with bulging bags and refused to make eye contact.

Raw milk—that is, straight from the udder, unpasteurized, unhomogenized, no vitamin D added—is illegal to sell in New York State unless it’s purchased on the premises of a certified farm. Some say it is risky to drink because it can contain E. coli and other harmful bacteria. But its fans credit it with improving immunity and curing digestive and skin disorders. The first time I tried it—on a farm upstate—I was won over by the grassy, sweet, unctuous taste, the golden color, and the head of cream so thick I had to slice it with a knife to let the milk pour through.

My second encounter was a year later, at a potluck supper in an East Village tenement apartment. There was no doorbell so the host, an herbalist, threw down the key from her window in a baby sock. She served nettle tea to the group, which included a man who claimed raw organ meat had done wonders for his health. As we filled our plates, someone revealed that you could buy raw milk at a local holistic pet-food store. Admittedly, it was dyed green to make it unappealing for human consumption but legal to buy for your shih tzu. Everyone nodded as he insisted that it tasted every bit as good.

It was only a matter of time before the raw-milk crowd moved from basements and tenements to the Internet. I was thrilled to find a site where I could order my raw milk delivered fresh to my doorstep on Sundays, C.O.D. As a neat, smiling deliveryman handed me a plastic bag of very cold milk, he said, “Next time try the 6.8” (6.8 percent fat, that is), and I felt I was joining the ranks. The following Sunday his call came after midnight, and I waited in pajamas in my building vestibule, clutching a wad of cash, as the unmarked van pulled up to the curb and he handed me my stash, which was, unfortunately, warm. Concerned about bacteria, I called to complain, and a cheerful woman reassured me that raw milk tastes even better warm and is perfectly safe. “I learned it from the Russian people!” she said, adding, “They leave their milk out all day and, to tell you the truth, it looks like vomit, but they stir it up and pop it in the fridge and, well, it’s not to my taste, but—son of a gun! I’ve got to get this other call.”

I decided to try moderated Russian-style and let a glass of the 6.8 sit out for half an hour. Without the chill, the sweetness dominated, and a layer of cream solids marbleized the surface. The cream slipped into my mouth ahead of the rush of milk, and I could taste a bouquet of the grass and flowers the cows had eaten. I don’t know if it was the undercover, conspiratorial purchase or the contented Amish cows or some combination of the two, but this milk was the real deal.

SIGHT: THE HOLE

The Hole, I had been told, is the Wild West of the Brooklyn-Queens border. It’s a no-man’s-land. There are cowboys on horseback, boarded-up houses, brand-new condos, pond-size puddles, no public sewers, buried mobsters, vacant lots.

As I found out, the Hole is all of these things (well, I’ll keep quiet about the corpses). It’s a five-block wedge of land, straddling East New York, Brooklyn, and Ozone Park, Queens, but claimed by none. It earned its moniker because it’s thirty feet below grade—in other words, the land is too sunken to be connected to the city sewer system. The neighborhood around the Hole isn’t bad: brick houses with lawns, a Rite-Aid, a diner. You might pass right by the Hole on a drive to JFK—unless you happen to pause at a YIELD sign and notice the miniature Conestoga wagon, horse trailers, and Western-wear shop just off the shoulder of South Conduit Avenue. The Federation of Black Cowboys stables its horses at the edge of the Hole, where they teach Western-style equestrian skills to inner-city children.

But if, rather than proceed to the airport, you hang a sharp right, and a sharp right again, you’ll find yourself in the Hole, and there will be no doubt that you are there. Stop signs, sidewalks, and stoplights abruptly disappear. Boarded-up houses with smashed windows abut brick condos with perky FOR SALE signs, lampposts, and lion statuary. Sewer- and drain-cleaning companies have found their niche market in local phone-pole signs. Deeper in, I spotted a cornfield in one resident’s backyard and a motorboat in the driveway (apparently, boats are handy for evacuation in the likely event of a flood). One blue home has a neat paint job and bright, flowering shrubs. A busted-in car wallows in a deep puddle that takes over most of a block, shaded by a magnificent weeping willow tree. Houses are gap-toothed, more window-and-door than house. Streets (named “Ruby,” “Emerald,” “Amber,” “Dumont”) are edged in trash bags and upturned appliances. Outside Hosanah Christian Daycare, plastic tricycles blister in the sun. Men hunker under car hoods. Construction workers trundle wheelbarrows of fresh cement. Like the houses, everyone has hooded eyes. In between the puddles and the fresh mailboxes lie vast tracts of cornflowered reeds tall enough to hide just about anything.

The Hole is urban abandonment and renewal thrown into stark relief: hope and despair in adjacent lots, crawling with graffiti and flowering weeds. A vacant lot houses a decrepit tour bus. On the front, in the spot for the destination city name, scroll the words GOD BLESS AMERICA and BLESSED—SAVED BY GRACE.

TOUCH: Water balloons

At the height of an urban summer, playgrounds and public water fountains throughout the five boroughs become freckled with snippets of colored rubber, the fallout from a hot-weather city-kid game: water balloons.

Here’s the ritual. Stretch the open end of the balloon over the brass mouth of a drinking fountain, and hold it with a pinch it so it stays put. The lip of the balloon curls up against your thumb and forefinger with rippling tension. Make sure the pinching grasp is out of the way of the balloon so it doesn’t get trapped as it fills up. Press the metal button with your free hand and watch the limp balloon swell into a luminous orb, blooming from the brass fountain tip. Watch the water bubbles rising through the now-sheer rubber, the color fading from neon to pastel as it expands. Now pinch the rubber at the base of the balloon bulb, just above the fountain nozzle, and give it a few twists before releasing your other hand. Tie a stretchy knot.

Take a moment to cradle the filled water balloon in your cupped palms. Feel the cool, smooth weight, shifting as the water moves. It’s impossibly delicate, like an unhatched egg; it has an inner life of its own restless energy. Now raise it over your head… and smash it onto the ground! Or simply open your hands and let it drop. Or step on it! Or throw it to a friend—or at him. Kersploosh! Smack! An instant puddle spattered with two ends of broken balloon, now shrunken to colored glimmers. (Don’t forget to pick up the scraps.)

Another option is to arrive pre-armed, like stashing a snow fort with snowballs before a fight. Plastic shopping bags of prefilled water balloons sag from bike handlebars, or fill the upturned hem of a T-shirt like a basket.

Regardless, nothing says summer like the roughness of a gaggle of kids of all ages and background clambering around a public water fountain, the gentleness with which they fill and protect their ammunition, and the joy of a burst of water, sudden in the sun, and soon to disappear.

SIGHT: Seven Random Delights

This month, I offer a smattering of small sights around the city that make me happy every time I see them.

1. 167 Concord Street, Brooklyn

White picket fence, white “clapboard,” white birch tree; red shutters, red car, and red no standing sign: perfection.

2. Clothesline poles at sunset, Carroll Gardens

Few people use these poles—or clotheslines—anymore, but still they climb into the sky, rusty pulleys and scraps of rope still clinging to them.

3. PUSH door handle

On art deco building on Fifth Avenue in the Forties, the letters nestle so neatly.

4. Old subway-line names

On the platform at the Dekalb Avenue station in Brooklyn is an illuminated sign (which still works) listing these old names: recite them out loud and they roll off your tongue like poetry: “Fourth Avenue Brighton Sea Beach West End.”

5. “Brown”stones on St. Felix Street, Fort Greene

Colors like a box of macaroons.

6. Arrow-theme wrought-iron fencing

Complete with fletching.

7. Construction workers’ breakfast orders

Scribbled on a two-by-four scrap: “Bagel Jelly Iced Cup French Vanilla Bagel Butter” for these hardworking men.