Ate Many Berries

I slept in a tent! And with only four or five bouts of hysterical paranoia.

My first night at Frosty Morning Farms happened to coincide with their Strawberry Festival. The word festival conjures up all sorts of images for me- sword swallowers, bobbing for apples, pulled taffy, waking up in a paddling pool full of beer cans. Something big that leaves you sticky and hungover for a week afterwards. The Strawberry Festival in comparison to my lurid imagination is the anti-party. The members of Commonplace Community Land Trust get together, pick strawberries, then sit around a mud pond cooking and eating them. When it gets dark they form a circle and sing songs about fighting the establishment with hand holding or something and drink dandelion wine. It actually looked quite delightful if you knew everyone and felt comfortable sitting on the grass for eight hours straight. But I'd just arrived and wanted to get to work, whatever that meant. Unfortunately for me the Strawberry Festival is the one weekend all summer when no one works.

Around dark I was a mile up 'the hill' on a treacherously unlit rock strewn road. I had to escape We Shall Overcome so I did something I never do and begged total strangers for a ride. When they dropped me off at the farmhouse there was only the dim light of the kitchen window to see by. Jason, the Frosts' teenage son, was watching a movie with an Unnamed Youth. I begged him for some sheets and blankets to cover the bare mattress awaiting me on my tent platform. As he rustled around upstairs the Unnamed Youth and I exchanged words of a fuzzy bizarre nature as I'd gotten into the dandelion wine.

Stealing Jason's flashlight off the counter, I tried not to let my peripheral vision acknowledge the darkness. The night was unseasonably cold especially after the boiling heat of the city. I crawled inside the tent, not checking to see if the flaps were zipped completely shut against the wind because it seemed like touching the canvas walls would admit what flimsy protection they were. In my bag was a bottle of codeine cough syrup and I decided the only way to knock myself out was a heaping tablespoon of the good stuff. Shivering, I tried to pour out a portion big enough to put me to sleep instantly without inducing vomiting and instead splashed an elephant's dose all over my arms, legs and bedsheets. I finally managed to get some in my mouth and fell into a restless sleep. My last thoughts were either that I'd die of an overdose or be eaten alive by fire ants attracted to my cherry cough syrup coating.

Accomplishing neither objective I was forced to rise the next crack of dawn and sit through another day of strawberries. Before leaving town I'd jokingly (kind of) told my friend Robin that if I ever wrote an autobiography it would be titled "Ate Many Berries, May Poop Self". After two days of berry syrup, berry pancakes, berries and whipped cream this had become my mantra.

By my last night at Frosty Morning Farms the strawberries were pretty much out of my system and I had begun to love my tent. The gentle breeze blowing up from a nearby grove of trees, the sweet murmur of the chickens just outside, its delicious cherry scent. It didn't feel unsafe to peer into the darkness anymore. One night I was sitting on the edge of my mattress combing my hair dry and listening to the creaking outside without wondering if it was an ax murderer. I looked up and bumping against the netted ceiling was a signaling firefly. A little peeping Tom hoping for some hot l.e.d. light action.

Why are fireflies so poignant and touching? Maybe it was because I only saw three the whole time I was there and began to think it was the same one, blinking quietly and alone in my part of the yard, our part. There we were in a vast empty evening wishing each other goodnight through the walls of my tent.

Is it evil to anthropromorphize insects?

Perhaps the reason I began to like going to sleep in my tent was that when I woke up it was to this:


The next step of course is to sleep without any semblance of walls at all...perhaps when I've been prescribed methadone. Before streaking off into our drug induced dreams the firefly and I can flash sans boundaries into the night. Except it's a bug without thoughts or feelings.

Home Again, Home Again

It's been a strange three weeks. I didn't expect WWOOFing to be life changing. I had a lot of ideas about it that weren't completely rocked by the actual experience of new people and places. Then the experience that did rock me happened here in the city amongst old friends. Well.

I wanted my first return post to be a kind of conclusion-good or bad, yea or nay- and then go on to the anecdotal as they relate to the issues that interest me. But now that I'm sitting here I don't really have a conclusion because I feel like three weeks wasn't enough to scratch the surface of what being a farmer is like, what homesteading is like, what raising and slaughtering your own animals is like (I didn't eat goat, incidentally).

The two farms I stayed at represented two sides of organic farming. There are probably many more sides but for the sake of comparison I'm wearing tunnel vision. One was all about environmental sustainability and the other about economic sustainability. At the Frosts' home everything they did was with consideration of what was good for the world. They took as little as possible from the land around them and put back as much as they could. At Dani and David's the foremost matter was how to make money off their farm. They didn't care much about organic food and barely ate out of their own garden except for the castoffs that wouldn't sell on their stand or in restaurants.

I'd like to say I'm not judgemental...but I also like to judge.

Whatever their personal choices were, if you have a small farm the healthy choice for it is organic, so good for you for trying to make it work. If you have a farm, period, how you're going to support yourself with it is a challenge. Farmers work hard as shit and we're addicted to cheap food. It's kind of a losing battle for them and selling 'gourmet' and specialty items, aggressive marketing and never eating something you can sell out of your own mouth is one way of dealing with that.

Also, I couldn't live the way the Frosts do, even though they seem pretty happy with how they've arranged their lives (the Frosts have been farming for about fifteen years, Dani and David for only 3). Well, that's not entirely true, I lived how they do for about ten days and settled into it pretty comfortably. It's not so hard when someone else is building the composting toilet and installing solar panels and making goat cheese (I did eat goat cheese!) though hopefully not in that order...Their way of life is possible because they live in a community that supports them. It makes me want NYC to be a friendlier place for solar power. We're all so used to letting our comfort and amenities swirl invisibly under us. How can I live more like the Frosts and still like me? It's something I'm wrestling with. Again, no conclusions.

Ultimately, yes this was a great experience. I'd do it again. And my life has been changed by it, though it may be the kind of passion inoculation that needs a booster shot. Eating locally, organically, seasonally is something I'm striving for but it's easy to forget the value of it when you just want to stuff potato chips into your mouth. Can we do it?

Please check in to read about my pathetic failures.

Amelia Geocos

I'm back in town for a few days. A friend of mine, Amelia Geocos, was hit by a van on her bike last Friday and killed.

Amelia and I were part of a close circle of friends from the time we were twelve through high school. Since then I've seen her a few times a year, at parties, on the street. We both lived in Stuyvesant Town, a weird little community of old people and preppy kids where we didn't quite fit in. We rebelled in small ways like getting high on our rooftops, throwing eggs out the windows, screaming late at night at the flagpole to see if anyone would peak out the window. They never did.

The last time I saw Amelia I was on my way into Rubulad, a giant loft party in Williamsburg, and she was on her way out. She stopped and said something like, "I wouldn't expect to see you at a place like this!". This pissed me off. What, am I not cool enough? But it was true-I am not and will never be as cool as Amelia. Maybe I could go to Rubulad but she'd already be leaving to go someplace even better.

There's a lot of things I could say, a lot of memories that have come back to me thinking about her the last few days. Many of the things I did for the first time, the adventures I had as a teenager were because Amelia was there egging me on in both good and bad ways. She had a way of jumping into whatever the next thing was without thought for the consequences and you couldn't know her and not want to follow along. She lived vividly. I could never quite keep up but thoughts of her and how she did things have influenced me into my adult life and will continue to do so.

Last night was the first of several memorial events this week, a party at our friend Keiji's house. We basically got crunked and listened to jams like she would have wanted. I am totally hung over.

It was very special and hard to see all the people there who loved her and will feel the loss of her. I wouldn't write about it here if it hadn't profoundly touched me to see them come together. I can't really just go about my farming adventures or life adventures without acknowledging it and saying how sad I am that Amelia is not out in the world doing all the crazy beautiful stuff she always did. She'll always inspire me to live a little brighter, a little bolder. As we all should.

And Away We Go

Okay, rushing to get out of the house now. Hopefully I can post a couple times during my sojourn but if not check back July 27th, when all this hullabaloo will come to fruition. Unless I'm eaten by Man Bear Pig.

The Dark Tent of the Soul

A lot of the things I've been thinking about and writing about in the last few weeks would seem pretty ridiculous to most of the world who've done things like roast whole chickens and sleep in tents on a pretty regular basis. On the other hand I often take for granted the things city life has allowed me to do that many people haven't experienced. Like, "You've been to Times Square? Like where the Coke sign is?" is a pretty commonly asked question when people find out I grew up in New York.

Of course I'd trade a million Times Square sightings for the capacity to sleep outdoors without having a panic attack.

When I was growing up all my friends were from NY too, and they all had a sense of the terrible danger we were in to varying degrees. They lived in a apartments small enough that you could stand in one corner and know exactly who was home, apartments with a million locks and chains. When I went to college I met people who grew up in big houses with huge pictures windows that had no bars or alarm systems, who left their doors unlocked and walked down dark roads and had camped for fun in their yard as kids. I remember two roommates who asked my opinion about taking the bars down from their window in their new East Village apartment. To me, a window leading to a fire escape with no bars is an open invitation to be murdered in your sleep, but they got out their tool box and did it anyway, against my assertions that they'd soon be dead. Spitefully, they proved me wrong and lived to reattach the bars for their deposit a few years later (though someone did get conked in the head with the gate during its removal...trying to knock some sense into them to no avail).

Two summers ago I went to Utah and on a road trip down to the Grand Canyon. On our way my friend Claire and I attempted to camp along the Green River. We even set up a tent and lit a fire then dragged our sleeping bags to the river's edge. After the gnats settled down and stopped trying to fly into our mouths Claire fell quickly asleep. I lay rigidly awake, fully clothed in a sleeping bag full of sand. I looked over at the tent and thought it was a pretty clever ruse. Perhaps we'd hear the Hook Man slashing through it trying to get to the tender girly flesh inside and we'd have time to run into the river and drown ourselves instead of being chopped to bits.

The sky was very beautiful that night or maybe it just looks the way the sky always looks when you can see stars. There were many layers of them it seemed, almost a fog of stars, and the sky took on depth as I looked at the ones that burned clear and close then the ones that faded in luminescence in the distance.

The vulnerability of being outside at night is not the only thing that makes it so hard for me to sleep there. I was uncomfortable, freaked, itchy but there was also no way to shut any of it out. The sky was huge and the little noises in the darkness innumerable. The whole world was whirring all around and I couldn't make it go away, I could feel it pressing down on me even with my eyes closed. It's like sleeping in a bed with someone for the first time. Your consciousness of them disrupts your dreams, a part of you is waiting for them to stir or speak. I felt like I was waiting for the universe to say something and I didn't want to hear.

When I couldn't bear it anymore I woke Claire and said we had to drive to the nearest motel now. Very obligingly she rose and we walked past the dead fire to the tent to dismantle it and throw it in our car. I would have just thrown everything in the back myself, Claire and all, but I needed her to drive. As we walked Claire whispered suddenly that she was scared of the dark. We started to giggle. She said when she'd been asleep she could shut it out but now she was scared. In turn, now that I was walking around there didn't seem to be anything to be afraid of. I squeezed her hand and we got in the car and drove ten minutes to a motel (the town consisted of about ten motels, a coffee shop and a melon stand). In the room, with walls and a door with a dead bolt and windows that locked I fell into the deepest sleep of my life.

At Frosty Morning Farms I'll be sleeping a tent. Claire, probably thinking of my desperate scrambling by the river's edge, warned me, "You'll hear a lot of noises. Scary noises that sound like something. But they're not." No, they never are. Almost never.

Do I really think anything is going to happen to me? Hmm. Can bears really smell menstrual blood a mile away?

It's not the vision of what is out there in the night that makes me nervous, it's what's inside the tent that I'm dreading. Myself, alone in the dark with out all the helpful mental compression of an apartment building. My own mind rushing, streaming, wandering to some thought I don't want to hear.

So you want to live on a farm...

The idea to go WWOOFing (working on an organic farm in exchange for food, shelter and knowledge) had been rolling around in my head for awhile so all my friends heard me talk about it to death. Naturally this lead to a couple of them deciding they wanted to go WWOOFing this summer too.

This couple signed up with WWOOF and started searching for a place to stay while I was still dithering around, trying to rent my apartment and decide if I wanted to stay in state or not. When I asked them how the search was going their response sent me into a panic.

"Almost everybody is full!!"

Uh oh.

Eventually they found a place to stay in Maine which is where they are right now, generating their own electricity and swimming on the beach everyday. Meanwhile I sent out a million emails and put in half a dozen phone calls to farms from New York to Vermont and wasn't I surprised to find that nine out of ten places had room and needed help.

Uh oh.

How to choose the right farm for you?

1. Ask what kind of work you'll be doing and how much of it.

I was interested in more than weeding rows of vegetables (though there will surely be a fair amount of that in my immediate future) so I chose farms who have livestock and keep bees, hoping to find some variety of work to do. Most farms agreed that five days a week for about six hours a day is enough of a workload to justify the expense of feeding you, but double check. No one wants to work from sun up till sun down, part of being out in the country is having a little leisure time to be bored.

2. How many people are around, who are they?

One farmer I spoke to talked my ear off about his divorce and all the problem Wwoofers he's had over the years and basically told me I'd be completely alone as he worked most of the day and went cross country biking during his free time. Picturing weeks of solitude with the occasional burst of incessant chatter was a turn off. You may want to go to a place with other Wwoofers to hang out with or maybe not...if you're a weirdo.

3. How near is a town or something to do?

You might need to bring a bike or ask if they've got a spare one you can use since most farms are not within walking distance of entertainment. During the boring leisure time you've negotiated you may want to do something, like go the local general goods store and finger the general goods. Or something like a beach, river, swimming hole...Also most farmers know the other farmers in the neighborhood and if you're interested in learning about different ways of running a farm (Wheeee!) they might be willing to send you around to meet people and check out their places of operation.

4. What is there to eat/can I smoke myself to death?

They're supposed to keep you from the brink of starvation so ask what that will entail. Most places are set up for a vegetarian diet since they're growing vegetables but a lot also have animals on the premises for food. If you've got a problem with this ask first rather than have some sort of mental breakdown later. Some also have rules about drinking, drugs and tobacco. The rule may simply be 'don't bogart the doobie' but if you can't live without a constant stream of nicotine don't go someplace you'll be strung up for it.

5. Where will I lay my head?

I'm not a camper (more on that later) and many of the people I talk to will house you in a tent, usually one they provide but sometimes not. If you need the security of a roof and fours walls at night make sure they'll be there waiting for your arrival. Plus, if there are other workers you may be bunking it. You might also want to ask about facilities like showers and toilets (how often you can use either). I didn't...so we'll see where that leads...

6. WHAT DO YOU PEOPLE WANT FROM ME??

This is more ephemeral. It's hard to describe and since I haven't actually gone yet my theories may prove meaningless, as so much in life proves to be. But when I was talking to people I tried to just get a feel for how they treat their Wwoofers- as friends, formal guests, migrant labor...across the board people were pretty friendly, but you never know. Things like if you share meals together, if they'd want you to cook, if they're interested in why you want to WWOOF and ask what you'd like to learn, if they offer to drive you places and show you what's fun to do, those were all telling moments. A lot of the farmers I spoke to had a lot of pride in the place where they lived, its natural beauty and personal history. If they want to share that then it's probably a nice place to go.

Of course, I'm just talking out of my ass. But I've narrowed it down and am heading first to Frosty Morning Farms on Common Place Land Cooperative, an intentional community, then to Cross Island Farm further upstate. Hopefully I've chosen wisely and wont be chopped up and fed to the pigs.

That's Choppy, the two headed pig from China. I should be so lucky to be eaten by him.

Oh, one more thing-don't believe your friends so you have to turn down a dozen farmers who are excited to host you. Take it one or two at a time, you'll probably get the place you want.