My next all-American holiday experience, spring break, couldn’t come quick enough. To avoid the hoards of string bikinis and beer-loaded pick-ups heading to the beach, I decided to exchange the past few months of intellectual laboring with a little of the manual kind.
The idea of “WWOOFing” (WWOOF stands for Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms) is much like the concept of couch surfing except the sofa bed is exchanged for a farm. You can go and stay on an organic farm – for free with food and board – in exchange for helping out and being actively involved in learning about the processes of sustainable agriculture itself.
So my friend and I loaded up the car trunk with an unnecessarily large pile of summer dresses, denim shorts, hiking boots and an armful of Gothic literature, only to find that it was so cold and wet that we wore the same jeans, woolly sweater and waterproof jacket combination every day and were too tired at the end of the sunlight hours to do anything but crack open a few beers, look up into the eyes of the full moon and listen to the far-off sound of coyotes whilst convincing ourselves that north Alabama had suddenly acquired a full pack of wolves that were heading directly over the hill toward us and our precious High Life cans.
But we always felt complete after a day’s work.
We found the farm on the website and were not quite sure what to expect when we arrived, which ended up being well into the dark hours after we successfully managed to take every wrong turn possible. This was due partly to our lack of sense of direction and sustained states of indecision and partly to the fact that both of us refuse to integrate fully into the ‘iPhone generation’ – as our youth movement is now being referred to – and so couldn’t utilize the wonders of technology to get us onto the right interstate.
This latter excuse chimed rather well with our host farmer Joan, as her farm, Luddite Farm was a site without modern machinery. Instead she is in the process of training her team of horses to plough her two fields in the fall, ready again to begin planting her garlic and herbs to make pesto and herbal teas to take to the local stores, sold alongside home-reared organic lamb. The farm was on a very small scale run by Joan herself, as she lives alone but with a constant stream of travelling WWOOFers and friends passing through to help her in her various projects. We planted shiitake mushrooms and placed them carefully in the nearby, damp woods and started training the horse to work the plough in her regal harness.
No temperature or rain water could take away from a week spent on a farm with only three women working it, two of whom (me included) had no extensive experience of working in the farming industry. But somehow, we made it work and felt empowered and liberated.
Our reward was nights spent shoving logs we had chopped ourselves into the wood burning stove whilst eating sweet potato pie and green onions we had picked earlier, and then there was story time with Joan. We stirred up her past with questions about the pimped-out old school bus we were sleeping in that she had picked up in New York and driven across to California to be greeted by the strange communes in Slab City and Oh My God hot springs where men organise their belongings into neat piles of broken clocks and Barbie dolls and where she attended one of her first rainbow gatherings.
It was a soulful week learning about food, farms and life on the road. Leaving out the fact that we missed coinciding our visit with two young – apparently rather attractive – male German carpenters by two days, everything fell into place. And now it really feels like spring.
Lucy Cheseldine is an English international student studying English literature. Her column runs weekly on Tuesdays.
Leading in today’s Crimson White:
Alabama prepares for 1st scrimmage, adjusts after break
