Vermont WWOOFing

“I long to embrace, to include in my own short life, all that is accessible to man. I long to speak, to read, to wield a hammer in a great factory, to keep watch at sea, to plow. I want to be walking along the Nevsky Prospect, or in the open fields, or on the ocean — wherever my imagination ranges.”

Anton Chekhov

I first came across this quote 8 years ago during the first week of my 6-month solo bike tour. It’s stuck with me ever since. With Chekhov in mind, we packed up our stuff and drove north to West Townshend, Vermont. I don’t think the thermometer hit 30 last week.

I’ve come to know the feel of snow under my crampons—its icy firmness in the morning after a night of single-digit temperatures; the jeopardy of a sunny afternoon tramping up a south-facing clearing, not knowing which steps will fall through the collapsing surface; the slog of warm weather, like an icebreaker pushing through the melting landscape; the difference between the snow in a clearing, a forest, and atop brambles.

I’ve reacquainted myself with work as “moving stuff from here to there”—driving a pickup truck overflowing with hay bales up a muddy road; pulling sleds of hay to the cows and sleds of poop from the cows, feeling like Captain Ahab pushing my Pequod over the misshapen path, bucking and crashing over waves of ice; lugging buckets of maple sap from A to B.

I haven’t wielded a hammer in a great factory yet, but I’ve made 100 pizzas as part of a pizza-making assembly line; I’ve scrambled up an apple tree, bow saw in hand, in pursuit of the perfect branch to prune; I’ve fed a massive fire to boil down sap in a sugarhouse and a smaller one to keep Lauren and Juneberry warm on those single-digit mornings.

My first WWOOFing experience was also on my bike tour 8 years ago when I stopped at Chengwatana Farm in Minnesota. In my bike touring blog, I wrote about the importance of finding yourself as the most inexperienced person in the room. “It will humble you. It will remind you that there is an infinite number of things that you do not know.”

Between trying to care for Juneberry and trying to survive a real winter, “inexperienced” is what I feel most days. I try to grasp the should-be-simple task of laying out sap lines and I’m reminded of how narrow the problem-solving spectrum is for my job in the specialized economy. I’m reminded of how stunted I feel after months of not working with my hands.

In between grafting apple trees and cutting pizzas, I’ve been forced to confront my idiosyncrasies. Why do I care so much that these people think of me as competent, as a hard worker? Why can I not keep my stuff organized and put away when sharing a small room with two others? How have I lived for over thirty years and still can’t reliably differentiate between maples, ashes, oaks, and walnuts?

Speaking of humbled. Eight years later, and I’m back to cleaning out chicken coops.

The eight-years-ago photo is at the bottom of this post.

Last night, we bottled the season’s first batches of maple syrup. More on that next time.