HOW TO EXPLAIN STUFF

My dad was a good explainer. He also liked tripe. So it was a 50-50 proposition when we went to lunch at Roncone’s in Rochester, New York, that his place mat would get used for one thing or the other. He’d sketch out how a cylinder lock works, or splash things with a little cow gut. I always knew we were getting down to brass tacks when he’d push aside his plate, turn the place mat a quarter turn in my direction, and start outlining what we knew to start. He was an architect and a poet who liked to make lists, draw floor plans, craft maps, and draw connections using a bunch of different styles of architectural arrows. This is why I’ve always believed you can explain anything – any secret, any mechanical process, any business deal – on one side of a paper place mat. If you need more than that, then you’re making the problem too complex. In this way, my father explained human flight, why you sometimes need a rip-saw blade, carbonation and suicide by gas oven. One sheet, at lunch. Now the best I can do is imitate him, but I’m not that good. I try to remember. Compress your thought. Make your lists. Learn as you go. Draw as you speak and laugh about it. Use the illustration to slow you down. Sometimes my dad would fold one of these place mats up and I’d take it home, only to lose it within days. Other times, we just left them on the table, our only record of what I had come to learn. Man, I wish I still had just one. That’s what my dad and I did on Tuesdays at Roncone’s, when I had a question and the special was tripe. – TOM CHIARELL A

Nailing at an angle is called toenailing. Some say that’s because sometimes you use the toe of your boot to prevent the timber from moving. Others say it’s because the nail is driven at an angle at the foot of the stud you are securing. All you need to know is that it’s useful.

STEP 1 / Place the stud a little to the side of where you want it to end up. You’re about to hit it with a hammer, and it’s going to shift a bit.

STEP 2 / Holding the nail about 3 cm above the end of the stud, tap it a few times, until the nail is parallel to the ground and seated about half a centimetre in the wood. (If you don’t have room to swing the hammer, hold the nail at a 60-degree angle. It will skid down slightly and into the wood, and then you’ll be at step 4.)

STEP 3 / Use your hand to pull the nailhead up to a 60-degree angle.

STEP 4 / Drive the nail into the wood.

N AN EARLY SPRING DAY in New Buffalo, Michigan, cl M close-croppeda layer buildingsof clouds like hangsa duvet. over The the g grey ground has only partially recovered fr from winter. It’s the time of earth-churning and seed-planting.seed- plantin Of little furrows in long straight lines. And yet, on the farm that belongs to Milan and Daniel Kluko, it’s already harvest day.

Green Spirit Farms is an unusual place – a farm crossed with a Virgin Airlines flight as imagined by Tim Burton. On the growth floor, as the Klukos call it, patches of green sprout through Styrofoam sheets on floor-to-ceiling racks, floating in water that slowly circulates through the rigging. In the brighter areas, Tesla lights creep over lettuce bunches like upside-down cable cars. LEDS make the room glow pink and purple: it is always sunset in the rocket patches.

Milan Kluko, 57, is gathering bags of mixed lettuces that are due to vendors by the afternoon. He looks a lot like his son, Daniel, but is taller, with a light patina of age and a more boisterous voice. “It doesn’t get more fresh and local than that,” he says on his way out the door to deliver the bags. Even in the dead of winter, the two men sell up to 1 800 kilograms of produce a month. It seems everyone in the state wants their vegetables.

Gangly and watchful, Daniel Kluko, 25, lifts a Styrofoam sheet to examine a web of bald, sinewy roots beneath it. He is dark-haired and brown-eyed, like his father, but more economical of movement. More meticulous. When a father and his child work together every day, even subtle differences like these become significant. For example: in traditional farming, plants derive phosphorus, nitrogen and potassium from the soil. In hydroponics, which is the

Mc method used at Green Spirit Farms, you put the precise nutrient mix directly into the water. If you want the plants to grow, you must research their needs and meet them exactly. Daniel is very good at this. That’s why it’s his job.

On the other side of the floor a scissor lift buzzes softly, raising a worker to the ceiling to harvest greens from the top level of one of the plant racks. Huge fans whir on the ceiling and smaller ones are clamped to each rack. The air is crisp and the breeze carries the faint scent of foliage. The room doesn’t quite evoke the peace of strolling through ripe fields at harvest time, but it’s close. “I love coming here. I laugh here more than I laugh anywhere else,” Daniel says.

He replaces the Styrofoam sheet. “I never thought I’d be farming for a living,” he says. His laugh strikes out across the room. But then he goes quiet.

HEH STORY OF DANIEL and Milan Kluko is t the story of any family that has been shattered by tragedy – a story both ordinary and achingly unique. At the beginning of the family’s journey – kids sitting down to dinner and homework homework, sc scraped knees, mornings in the garden – you’d never know that there was some dark, malformed section of track waiting down the line to throw you and everyone you love into oblivion. Even if you could know this – could see all the misfortune in advance – what would there be to do about it?