In 2012 we had a surprise storm with a wall of wind that came through overnight and created total havoc up and down our region. It was at the end of June, when the trees were in full leaf. Trees came down, power went out, it was really hot, it was a mess. Carrie, our up and coming farm manager who is a critical member of the team, got hit on the head by a falling branch and her head injury took six months to heal. We were without electricity for five very long, very hot days and nights, and we scrambled to keep up with picking and moving vegetables without coolers.
A couple of days ago, the weather report gave us a heads-up that there was another storm coming. This time there were no leaves on the trees but we are in the season when all of our vegetables are growing inside of plastic tunnels. It is hard to get a lightweight structure ready for 24 hours of high winds. They worked hard out in Loudoun to prepare, and here in Vienna we also made decisions and tied up tunnel walls, to keep things from flapping and tearing and blowing away.
By 7:30 in the morning on Friday, Zach was already on the phone listing all the things that were breaking and ripping, in spite of it all. The winter crew mobilized and fought back, pounding more posts, closing doors with more screws and staples, moving giant round bales onto the edges of the tunnels. By lunchtime they had pretty much done all they could and they went back indoors to listen to the howling wind.
Of course, in here in one of the richest counties in the country, there were power outages all over. Trees across lines, roads blocked, the whole works. We hunkered down for a long wait, based on our last experience. Jon got a generator hooked up for the greenhouse so there could be water and heat for the plants, but the humans just had to use candles and a woodstove.
In the end, nothing terrible happened. Jon is still repairing the end of the hoop house that separated after 36 hours of pummeling and he has cut up most of the trees that fell in inconvenient places. In fact, we are already burning some of the dead locust tree that crashed into the blueberry patch.
But just at the tail end of all that excitement, and just after the power came back, we had some visitors from California. They were in town because they are architects and they came to be judges for a sustainable design competition. These particular architects specialize in sustainability, comfort, lighting and solving unusual problems (they consult for other architects). We know them because the woman of the couple once worked on our farm, and she was part of an interesting family that rented our house for a sabbatical year in the late 1960s.
She hasn't been back here in 35 years, but we definitely feel like we still know her. We are still in the same place, doing mostly the same thing, and we have all visited her mother on our cross country trips, over the years. The connection has stayed strong even if we have not been in touch directly.
Anyway, we just had a chance to have a couple of long conversations with two extremely smart, interesting people. What a treat. They have spent their professional lives teaching, saying yes to unusual requests for help, traveling and designing buildings. Their internal tagline for their company is: The Leading Edge of Common Sense.What a cool life. Charles and Benjamin would both love to be in touch with these folks because the stories they tell are all about engineering conundrums. There are just so many fascinating problems to solve out there. They were even asked to help solve a murder mystery once by reconstructing the temperature and humidity that would have been in a room two years ago, when a body was in the room. And there was some beer company that needed a computer program that would predict when to ship with refrigeration and when to skip that expense (so they had to include all sorts of factors, like weather and direction of sun and altitude and I forget what else). Who knew that architects could have such a broad portfolio?
At the end of the visit we got to give them a tour of Blueberry Hill. They could understand everything without our having to explain the backstory: design issues, geothermal struggles, getting through the bureaucratic tangles. It made it so much more fun to tell the story -- especially since they already knew about cohousing.
So we are much buoyed by this unexpected burst of intellectual visiting. It reminds us that there are many interesting topics that we have not been thinking about, and that people everywhere are doing great work. And wind is just wind, as long as no one gets hurt.
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