In the Land of Back-to-the-Land
Trip Start
Feb 10, 2009
1
9
10
Trip End
Aug 19, 2009
Island Pond,
Vermont,
United States
Thursday, June 18, 2009
Aside from the brief description in the WWOOF packet about a "unique opportunity combining organic gardening and low-impact subsistence farming with classes and workshops for the community", I knew very little about what to expect. The majority of my phone conversation organizing my stay with Penelope, the woman who runs the farm, seemed to center around a new wildly inefficient indoor hay drying method she had developed to beat the lack of dry days
Egg Farm Interns Chillin at Island Pond Lake
. This meant absolutely nothing to me, but I was excited to go anyway. Penelope, who turned out to be a friendly platinum blonde woman in her mid-sixties, informed me on the ride up to the farm that she grew up in New York City, didn't really like the city lifestyle, ran away to San Francisco in the 60s to become a telephone psychic - a skill at which she apparently greatly excelled - and eventually ran off to Vermont where she could farm, take care of her 93 year-old mother, live off the energy grid, and continue adding to her VHS collection of government conspiracy-theory documentaries (even though she confessed she wasn't "too deeply into all that; she didn't even know the difference between the Greys and Raelians and Lyrans and all those other species of aliens.").So off we drove to the stunningly beautiful Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. For those who have never been to Vermont or the Northeast Kingdom in particular: it is aptly named. It is a Kingdom unto itself. The culture is different, the approach to the land and resources and community surrounding them is different, their interactions with government and the media and the general non-Vermont world is different from pretty much any other part of the country (or possibly world for that matter). Fiercely proud of their state (and far less so of the rest of the country), Vermont seems to be one of the last stores of the gruff, frontiersman lifestyle that everyone seems to romanticize the wild west or the south with. In Vermont you can still find people who will greet you wandering onto their land with a gruff question and a firm handshake while in the same situation a cop would be greeted with a gun and quasi-subtle allusions to severe bodily harm. It's refreshing to spend time in a state that still has its feet firmly planted deep in the ground and maintains such a fierce and unevangelistic individuality.
Climbing next to Lake Willoughby
The Egg Farm itself was a tiny ramshackle place up near Island Pond, VT. It used to actually be an Egg Farm and since reputations die hard in small-town Vermont it is still known as such even though its current egg production is under a dozen a day (one of Penelope's stated goals is to make sure that her farmstead has nothing to do with the "chicken Auschwitz" it used to be.) She runs it as a semi-biodynamic farmstead, taking care of just enough goats, chickens, and crops to live almost entirely off the land. In theory. Penelope and her mother live in the house and the interns, ranging anywhere from three to nine in number, are asked to camp out in the field or live in the trailer if they would like. I will say outright that I personally disagreed with many of the choices Penelope made in running the farm, but tried to keep that to myself during my stay there and will try to not let that color my current description of the farm too much. So when I say that she would subtly guilt-trip me about sleeping in the trailer instead of out in the springtime-in-Vermont-temperature field, or that she insisted that there were far too many details of farmwork to actually explain what work was expected of us ("we would figure it out") but still passive-aggressively berated us whenever anything was even slightly not to her liking, or that we were supposed to keep her house clean and organized but we weren't actually supposed to spend any time in it, take that as meaning not so much that I disrespect the way she ran her farm but rather that I would have exploded from unspoken critiques if I had stayed any longer than my two weeks there and that these were my idle thoughts whilst weeding as yet unplanted crop beds and still eating mainly grains and potatoes for dinner.
Overall, however, it was a great experience.
Good Points: brewing mead, making wild-yeast bread, learning about wild herbal remedies, working short days and hiking through breathtakingly beautiful Vermont mountains and creeks, having three hour long conversations with fellow-interns ranging from bio-engineering college grads to dropout anarchists on the merits of monkeywrenching (industrial/corporate sabotage), and learning how to slaughter a chicken
Tyler in the Woods
. (Yes. One afternoon we decided that some of the old knobbly hens weren't laying enough eggs so Tyler and I were charged with sharpening knives, praying that they were sharp enough to cut rather than mangle a leathery fowl kneck, coddling and reassuring two chickens, the briskly grabbing their heads and slicing through their necks. I have to say, the actual act of slaughtering a living being was much less traumatizing than I expected, but it is still quite brutal when the mostly headless animal bleeding in your hands starts flapping its wings and attempting to squawk in your face.)Odd Points: Days' work was determined each morning by the biodynamic calendar, and while I can't outright dismiss it and all the people who follow biodynamic farming practices I can say that needing to quit halfway through planting seeds because it was 3pm and Venus had just shifted into a "Blackout position" was pretty frustrating and pointless. Harmful? No. Odd and resulting in far less efficiency of time use on the farm? Yes. Also, mornings we would take turns reading aloud to the group. While I was there we read "The Cosmic Serpent", a book about how the ayahuasca induced visions of South American tribal shamans were actually explanatory glimpses way ahead of their time detailing DNA and the molecular functioning of the chemical building blocks of life. Interesting reading; in many respects.
Frustrating Points: You really can't run a farm by trying to remember each morning what needs to be done that day. Things get forgotten and overlooked, long term planning takes a nose dive, and no one aside from Penelope really knows what to expect or how to prepare for it. We also spent most of our work time weeding making hay and harvesting herbs and teas for storage (not for sale at markets; Penelope didn't really like selling anything). This, compounded with the fact that in northeast Vermont the growing season is about 90 days long, means that any unused planting time and unharvested food leads to results like 80% of our diet being store bought grains (lots of oats and home-baked breads) and eggs from the chickens
Durya. Intrepid.
. The garden was simply too woefully underplanned and underkept to provide enough food for the 6-8 people living there, at least for the time I was there. So, it was somewhat of a "low-impact subsistence farm" but I don't think low-impact has to also imply low-sustenance.There were some unexpectedly excellent parts of the stay though. For one, taking care of Edie (EE-dee), Penelope's 93 year old senile mother was eye opening, to say the least. She could not remember you even if you had spoken to her merely an hour earlier but she could still drudge up memories of starting a schoolhouse in Virginia 70 years ago and how it is still running today. She also couldn't really note the passing of time so she loved smoking cigarettes as a way of seeing the time pass. She would chain smoke practically all day, utterly oblivious to how many she had already smoked and whenever she ran out she would ask us if she could borrow a cigarette, not quite remembering that there were whole cartons in the house specifically bought for her. Interacting so closely with someone whose lack of mental faculty was having such an impact on their life and social skills and perceptions was incredible and casts quite a stark light on what it means to be young and youthful and physically functional.
Then there was the neighborhood. The wonderful paradox of the Northeast Kingdom is that neighbors live farther apart than most anywhere else in the country yet are so much more tightly bound and community-like community than people whose apartments share walls and whose front doors are mere feet from each other. Nearly everyday multiple people from the area would stop by to give news about a party or a potluck or even simply to say hi. Everyone waves at every car that passes by, more often knowing all the names of the people in the cars than not, and despite being so far apart everyone knows eachothers' business
Tyler and Durya overlooking their climb
. People seemed to have more of a desire to be together and interact with their neighbors than nearly any other place I have been on this trip. And what would be the common interactions at all these nearly weekly parties and gathering? Even at the weekly Parker's Pies pub night (the only pub in a 60 mile radius which pretty much attracted everyone in that 60 mile radius) people would be chatting about their new gray water toilet systems or how they had just built a new greenhouse using hay-bale insulation as opposed to the recycled paper insulation they used when they hand built their own house. (I would say a solid percentage of the people I met there built most of their own structures - houses, garages, shops, etc - and were constantly finding ways to use more and more recycled materials and be more successfully off the grid.) I give massive respect to an area with such a deeply ingrained culture of community and proactive self-sufficiency.After two weeks of amazing community and frustrating farm work I decided it was time to move on and headed to Burlington, the biggest city in Vermont, to see if I could catch a ride
out to the midwest. My initial plan was to hitch or hop a train but after meeting some hobo kids who said that New York state was a hitching wasteland that could take many days to cross because of overly strict cops and that they had also recently seen some hobo amped up on meth stab someone else with a broken beer bottle for no reason while waiting to catch a train in a freight yard, I decided to nix that plan. So, while trying to find a ride on Craigslist all the way to the glorious midwest, a week was spent in Burlington generally debauching and realizing what contrasts there are between city party life and farm life and between mutually enjoyable random trysts and connection-based relationship/flings. Traveling does truly seem to be a study in contrasts at times.
Next Stop: Missouri
But First! - A Transportative Interlude
