Of the Farm

In the 1970s, Martha McPhee lived on a rambling property with siblings, half-siblings, and her frequently naked parents. The farm was named after a utopia—but for a sensitive young girl coming of age, life was far from it.

Omega Farm sits on top of a hill, the highest point in Hunterdon County, New Jersey, with sweeping views over fields and farms, the Sourland Mountains unfurling in the distance to meet a big and open sky. When you sit on the deck the sun rises on your right, just beyond a barn and another field and chicken run, a rooster crowing. The sun sets in spectacular fashion across the valley. The midday heat, which comes on hard and thick in July, is cut in half by a canopy of enormous oaks and ash. So complete is the canopy that a satellite image on Google shows only trees—no house. There are neighbors. There is mail and package delivery, the mailbox at the bottom of a long gravel driveway, but somehow the idea of affixing an “address” to this place seems particularly misplaced. The house, near the village of Ringoes—just 70 miles from New York City, 50 miles from Philadelphia, 10 miles from Princeton, five miles from Lambertville in the too easily maligned, benighted state of New Jersey— is located in the most densely populated part of the northeast. Even so, the only thing that arrives from that wider, crowded world is the wind falling into the trees.

My stepfather, Dan Sullivan, bought the place in 1970, from a woman who had recently lost her husband. She told Dan she couldn’t care for the place the way it needed to be cared for without her husband. She told Dan the place needed to be loved.