I decided to become a rustic squire when I was 32 and stupid as only 32 can be. Youth's frantic idiocy doesn't have the means. Simple-minded old age lacks the energy. In midlife, we're as dumb as we get. So I bought land in New Hampshire—first a little, then more and finally too much.  This was not back-to-the-land land. I wasn't trying to get in touch with Mother Nature or even leave a message on her answering machine. I wasn't pursuing the era's whole grain and handicraft dream of self-sustenance that still persists in parts of Brooklyn. I wanted to be Lord Grantham of "Downton Abbey" before he was a figment of the BBC's imagination.  I get to deduct what I spend on growing trees (nothing) from what I earn selling timber (nothing).  I'd majored in English literature and, as sometimes happens, thought this was supposed to make me English instead of literate. I pictured myself in knickers and a Norfolk jacket striding over my fields with a fine English double-barreled shotgun broken open on my arm and my loyal English setter at heel. I was probably smoking a pipe. If so, I'd put something funny in it.  I do spend a lot of time hunting ("shooting" as the English say). But the briars and the puckerbush of New England shred tweeds. Swampy bird covers soak knee socks. And alder jungles knock the pipe out of your teeth. I shoot in muck boots, a barn coat and nylon-faced thorn-proof pants of circus-clown cut. I'm legally required to wear an iridescent orange vest. I look like an armed highway department flagman who got lost in the woods.  For what a fine English double-barrel shotgun costs these days, you could buy Lloyd's of London. I've got an old Remington pump. And the setter is to hell and gone chasing squirrels. She's encumbered with a remote control electronic collar, the transmitter for which is the size of a 1980s cellphone. This dangles from a lanyard around my own neck and allows me to communicate with the dog, via electric shock, at a range of two miles. The whole setup is about as romantically bucolic as a NASA launch. Did I hear a pained yelp from way up on top of that steep hill?  My steep hill. I own a lot of land—if you measure vertically. Even as a beginning gentleman farmer I realized that this would make planting difficult. Although, in theory, harvesting would be just a matter of standing at the bottom holding a bushel basket. Not that I've ever managed to grow anything. Raccoons eat the corn, squash and tomatoes. Sleet, snow, frost or freezing rain take care of everything else. One season of agriculture in New England explains manifest destiny. America's westward expansion was mainly an excuse to kill raccoons and wear them as hats.  I am, nonetheless, a farmer. My property is a "Certified Tree Farm." And a demanding life it is. Sleet, snow, frost or freezing rain, the crop must be brought in—every 40 years, no matter what. And I can tap my trees for maple syrup except that I seem to have found the only place in New England between Bridgeport and Bangor without a single sugar maple. It turns out there's very little market for "fir syrup."  The difference between being a Certified Tree Farm and being lost in the woods is a bureaucratic mystery fully understood only by the Department of Agriculture. I think it means that I can deduct what I spend on growing trees (nothing) from what I earn selling timber (nothing). I never pictured myself in knickers and a Norfolk jacket striding over stumps.  Being certifiably a farmer did excuse the purchase of a tractor with a mower attachment for cutting hay. At least I think it's hay. I went to considerable expense to clear brush, yank rocks and plow and fertilize 20 acres. I don't believe that I then asked for the 20 acres to be seeded with dandelions and crabgrass. However, that was when I first moved up from the city, and I may have given the wrong orders.  Once I've cut the hay—if it is hay—I don't know what to do with it. The barn's hayloft is filled with chrome and glass furniture from my wife's and my erstwhile urban apartments. This doesn't go with our 1790s house. Colonial antiques don't go with the house either because it was remodeled in the 1940s so that all the visible parts, inside and out, have the charm of Levittown, while the plumbing, wiring and oil furnace are authentic products of the Federalist period.  In my imagination the barn's hayloft is filled with my offspring cavorting among the bales after cheerfully tackling wholesome chores such as brushing ponies and tending baby lambs. My 11-year-old daughter is the only one of them with any interest in animals. She begged for a pony, until she discovered what ponies do in their stalls. She prefers the currycomb to the shovel. Then she made another discovery. There's something called a riding stable where what ponies do in their stalls is their own business and you can currycomb them and give them carrots and ride them around in the riding ring, indoors.  Until I carried my wife off to New Hampshire, she defined wilderness as the Bronx. Her one concession to farm life is keeping chickens—at a distance. Up close, she says, they look too much like Ron Paul. I can see the chickens from my bedroom window, pecking at the tomato plants I set out yesterday. And, since my wife is too frightened of raccoons to spray the garden with pesticide, the eggs are cage free and organic.  To soothe my country-gentleman disappointments, I retreat to my trout stream. I'd pictured myself here as well, with split bamboo fly rod, wicker creel and tall green Wellies, none of which is necessary because the stream is 4 inches deep and contains no trout. It's full of frogs. They taste as good as trout. Though I don't remember what trout tastes like because all my fly-fishing friends now adhere to the principle of catch-and-release. I have catch-and-release chickens. The dog catches the chickens, and I release them. Then my wife refuses to cook coq au vin mastique.  I can't give up my estate. I've become too strongly attached to its precipitous slopes and…other precipitous slopes. I've formed an inviolate bond with the land. The bank calls it a mortgage.  A version of this article appeared April 14, 2012, on page C3 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: My Life as a Failed Country Gentleman.
P.J. O'Rourke on his fields of crabgrass, trout-free trout stream, Federalist-era wiring and dashed dreams of tweedy refinement.