The Wilderness

Hello all!

12 years ago, when we bought the land that has become our vegetable farm, things looked a little different. There was no little round house on the bank above the river. The field was an abandoned cornfield grown up to saplings and brush, and the only access was a muddy ATV track under the power lines that the electric company, in all their wisdom, had carved through the middle of a willow swamp. But it was ours, and by golly, we were going to live there and make a farm out of it. We bought a 1978 28 foot Wilderness camping trailer for $1200 - what seemed like our life savings at the time - and by force of will (and Phil Coddere's pickup truck), dragged it across that willow swamp and into the woods. Paul and I lived in the trailer for 2 and half years while we were building our house. We hauled water in 5 gallon buckets. We read by oil lamps and headlamps. We parked out by the road and got really good at finding our way around the woods in the dark. We chased the chipmunks brought into our bed by our willful cat Cordelia. And on winter mornings, we woke up with our breath frozen into crystalline snow on the top of our blankets. Slowly, slowly, we built a farm and life out of recycled lumber and tag sale tools, hose clamps and duct tape and orange baling twine. And when we finally moved into our house, that trailer (known from then on as "The Wilderness") housed seven years worth of farm interns.

But now, as we move into our fifth year of milking cows, and third year of making yogurt, we find our standards and tolerances a little different. Our house has both electricity and running water. The tools we reach for are less often hose clamps and duct tape, and more frequently stainless steel yogurt filling machines, John Deere tractors, disc mowers, round bale feeder wagons. And so, The Wilderness, having been nursed through 12 years of hard service with every creative repair known to humankind, no longer made the cut as an interesting or time-effective maintenance project for us. It had to go.

And now, into this story steps Dan Finklestein, who interned here in the summer of '08, and now as a student at UMass, is working with us part-time this fall. Dan doesn't mind hauling water. He would probably be OK with a little frost on his blankets. He's perfecting his chops with the duct tape and hose clamps. And he spends all his free time milling lumber for a little cabin on his sister's land in Wendell, where he could sure use some lockable storage, and maybe an occasional place to stay overnight and cook a meal. So Sunday morning, the Wilderness rolled it's ponderous way down the field road and out onto the asphalt of Beldingville, bound for it's new home in the woods of Wendell.

And as Paul and I reminisced about all the laughs and trials we had seen with that trailer, we hoped that maybe this was the rite of passage - the crossing over from the world of scrambling to patch it all together with whatever is at hand, to the world where things actually work when and how they are supposed to. And that thought made us very happy

So when I arrived back in the house after milking this morning, and there was a message from Jim and Margot saying the old blue dumptruck had died in the middle of March Rd, we sighed, looked at each other, and grabbed a handful of hose clamps before heading out to face our new world.