Last season in North Carolina we worked for the awesome couple Carl & Julie. Our very first night there they welcomed us with a home-cooked meal, beer and wine they had brewed themselves, and hours of warm conversation. See brew station below:
After just saying goodbye to everything and everyone I knew and loved to move 800+ miles away, that first night did absolute wonders to set my mind at ease. As the season went on I learned so much from Carl & Julie, and I would be so psyched just to wake up and get outside and see all there was to see. While we worked we spent countless hours talking and listening and getting to know each other, and 5 days a week we would all sit down to lunch together and ravenously inhale some delicious creation one of us had prepared. It really was a nice mid-day break to either cook for others or be cooked for, and to shower ourselves with compliments of the meal and the amazing ingredients we had all worked so hard to produce. Here's a shot of our last communal lunch of the season:
November brought a tearful goodbye, promises of keeping in touch and future visits back to the farm. Both of which we've made good on. In April hubby and I drove back down to the mountains to retrieve some of our belongings that Carl & Julie so generously stored for us until we figured out where we would be come springtime. And boy, am I glad all our stuff didn't fit into our cars when we left in the fall. It was absolutely incredible to see Carl & Julie again, and stay up late into the night imbibing, rehashing our winters, and discussing all things farming. Our last night there they fed us well as always, kale and chard quesadillas and home-grown, home-made french fries. Yum. We'll be back again to see Carl & Julie someday, and I can't wait.
As part of our apprenticeship in North Carolina we were members in the C.R.A.F.T. program and got to meet tons of great current and future farmers, see a number of different and beautiful operations, and all learn with and from each other. Every month March thru November we would all meet up and tour a different farm, be engaged by a demo,workshop or lecture orchestrated by the host, and then chow down at a potluck. This guy in the white shirt is Andy-
as he was showing and explaining the process of using heavy machinery and piggies to reclaim some land to put into production. We learned about this and much more as all of us CRAFTers toured the farm him and his wife run on an "intentional community". Andy has got to be the single most normal person to ever live on a commune. There is very little about him that aligns with my notion of commune dwellers, save for the fact that I adore the idea in theory, and if I ever had to live on one I'd hope to have someone like Andy as my neighbor. During some gentle probing and prodding from all of us non-commune living spectators (It was pretty hard for us to focus solely on the farm as we traipsed all over this crazy off-the-grid fairyland) Andy willingly offered up some of his criticisms of the place. I thought that was incredibly cool, and a confirmation of his unadulterated sanity. Question everything.
I'm pretty sure one of the coolest of all the cool people I came to know in North Carolina is Frank,
the fascinating and brilliant steward of a small organic farm on the other side of the mountain from us. He is a transplant to Appalachia and his farm is a striking blend of human cultivation amongst the ever-creeping rugged wilderness. Frank lives his life and runs his farm in a manner most simplistic, which I find incredibly inspiring and thought provoking. He writes this amazing blog which both tickles my mind and tugs at my heart with every post. And for all the enigmatic beauty and intelligence that is Frank, one of my favorite things about him was that he hired these two
as his 2009 interns. Ain't they cute? That's Crystal and Joe, our season-long homies. We would hang at all the CRAFT functions, occasionally on each other's farms, and pay friendly visits to one another every Saturday at market. One incredible summer day in the mountains Joe and Crystal took us along to the secret swimmin' hole down the road:
and it is still one of my favorite memories of the time I spent in NC. Us farmer kids rode in the back of a pickup truck through rural southern America to go jump off rocks into the stream and it felt so poignantly timeless. I remember then thinking how I had grown up on the streets of Chicago and never could have imagined this day for myself.
We didn't manage to spend nearly as much time with Joe and Crystal as we would have liked, but somehow it was always oddly comforting knowing they were just over the mountain. We never even really said goodbye; we went on to our next adventure and so did they and I have no way to ever contact either of them. I don't even know their last names. But I do know that for years to come I will think of them and wonder what treasures and experiences life has bestowed on those two.
And now for my very very favoritist person that farming has brought into my life- Farmer Mark in central Wisconsin.
That's him on his biodiesel tractor. And just look at that quintessential silo and red barn. I suppose it would be much more apropos to say that Farmer Mark is what brought farming into my life. He is the reason I am sitting in this RV right now, and I absolutely adore him for it. My time on Mark's farm changed me in indescribable ways and I would be hard pressed to think of anything that has had a greater impact on my life. My first season as a worker share I learned: of all the beauty to be found in the dirt, the satisfaction of converting sweat and energy into a job well done, the fact that fruits and vegetables grown 15 miles away taste astronomically better than their supermarket counterparts, that even in the midwest you can feed yourself for most of the year, and that food is very, very important. And Mark is a good freaking farmer. That is something I didn't realize the magnitude of that first season. It wasn't until we had seen countless operations that it dawned on me how nearly impossible it is to be successful at this trade. We had learned under one of the very best, for free. Mark runs the entire thing solo, spends no money on labor, relies very little on mechanization, but somehow manages to maintain one of the largest CSA's in central Wisconsin (which is in its 15th season!) and perpetually provide his members with kick-ass boxes every week.
Not to mention he is one of those larger-than-life personalities; total hippie yet wickedly smart, simultaneously introspective and explosive, works and plays really fucking hard, and is so warm and generous it is almost heartbreaking. Just look at him lounging on my feet
I am so very thankful for having crossed paths with these folks and countless others. This current season has proved to bring equally incredible people into my life whom I will talk all about someday. I assure you Farmer Boss Man & Lady are mind-blowingly wonderful and interesting but I feel I can't concisely express their total awesomeness while being so deeply entrenched in this life right now. I would like to start notating snippets of our every day lives together for posterity's sake (instead of these generic statements I made of folks in this here blog) and because it's pretty great. Scrolling upward through this post I kind of can't believe how lucky I am to be living this life...
