Our first intern moved onto the farm this week, and I'll be joining the festivities on April 6th. I'm excited for her! It was exciting for me. Those first two weeks are amazing, but have the potential to be the longest, hardest and most challenging two weeks of the entire season. At least, that was my experience.
For me, I'd moved straight from New York City where the most physical thing I did in a week was play my best friend at basketball, which was only physical at a squint. I arrived at the farm on April 7th. Eric emphatically tells his interns to take it easy and adjust to the farm life those first few days. I can attest, my friends, this is both necessary and damn near impossible. I'd spent a year planning this adventure––I didn't want to adjust to it, I wanted to get dirty! And dirty I did.
I put my things in the barn, threw my sleeping bag on the mattress, laced up my embarrassingly new boots, and headed straight up the hill to join the family in the garden. We were transplanting strawberry plants. Eric dug a furrow and we set each transplant into the rows a couple feet apart. I became immediately aware of how long a farm project lasts that week, and immediately aware of the pathetic shape my body was in. I was knelt down in the dirt, cursing the softness of my knees exposed by every rock or stick, back bent, burying each plant carefully for a couple of hours that afternoon. After moving the livestock and finishing our chores, I headed back down for dinner, then over to my barn, and immediately passed out.
I wasn't sore that first morning, but I was definitely sore every subsequent morning for the first month. There was a lot of preparation to be done: cutting and stacking firewood, making soil blocks, cultivating and transplanting––most all of it physical. April was a fickle lady, too. We'd have a freeze, then a week of 80 degree days, then another freeze and a shit-load of rain. I found myself adjusting to a lot of things all at once: to bugs, to labor, to animals, to silence, to mornings, to sun, to the outdoors, to the whims of nature, and to bathing in a creek or showering in a greenhouse. There are no easy foods on the farm either. If you want to have a snack, you have to make it. The first thing I missed about New York was grabbing a slice. (It was also the second, third and forth thing I missed about New York.). It should never be assumed that this is easy. It should also never be assumed that just because it's not easy, that it's not the most rewarding strain you can put yourself through.
In a few weeks the strawberry patch will be fruiting wildly. I'll be eating raw asparagus from the garden and cooking the rest in cast iron. I'll be hunting morels ("dry land fish") and picking sour cherries. The work will be hard and food will be our salvation. I'll be back into that creek the second I can be, and that, too, will save me. My knees will be sore, my back will be sore, and we'll be working like hell to stay ahead of the prolificness of nature. (I've always loved the spring, but never as much as nature does.). One thing I told myself when I left New York was that I might have to work through some pretty shitty weather, but I'll never have to lose another nice day to work again. This was not an exaggeration, it turns out, your entire world is outside. In retrospect, surviving those first two weeks isn't really the hard part. It's leaving in November when your time is up that's truly difficult.
