Going Places, Doing Things

That's kind of an exaggeration, that headline, but we did leave the farm on Saturday afternoon, and we spent the night away from home and we went to a different state on Sunday.  We had a little block of time that was suitable for an escape.  No one really needed us. We left Carrie to do the 6 AM send-off with the market trucks and that was about the only way anyone might have known we were gone.

Of course we didn't have a plan when we drove off, but since we had to turn around to come back and pick up some stuff we forgot -- and change cars because the new one suddenly had some kind of a hiccup and lost its turbo -- we ended up going to Frederick because I had already headed west on Rt 7 twice by then.  Frederick is a nice town with plenty of history and lots of small businesses and we almost never go there. We used to go to McCutcheons to get barrels of cider in the olden days, and in recent years we make a trip in the early summer to get jams and jellies, but that is about all we usually do in Frederick.

So we had a nice dinner INDOORS in a restaurant and we went to a bookstore and afterwards we went to Loudoun to visit Chip and Susan, also indoors.  We spent the night, practically outdoors, at Timothy's cabin.  It was chilly but we had a good comforter. 

The next morning we still had no plans but I wanted to go west on Route 9 because we haven't done that in over a year.  That road has been closed for construction during the week, as it goes through the tiny town of Hillsboro. Since it was a Sunday morning, we just dawdled through town and admired the new roundabouts and the classy brick sidewalks and wondered at the motivation behind such a massive amount of disruption. Whose idea was that, anyway?

We had to go all the way to Berkeley Springs, West Virginia to find a breakfast restaurant that wasn't a chain.  That was okay because we haven't been there in many years.  As it happened, we arrived just as the farmers market was opening. It was right downtown, the vendors were set up in an inward-facing square and it was the real deal:  nothing but radishes and lettuce and some honey and vegetable plants and eggs. We couldn't find anything to buy but everyone seemed happy, despite the light drizzle and chilly temperatures. At the corner that was closest to the main street we found the farmer who sells next to us in Reston and at the Leesburg market on Saturday mornings.  He was happy as a clam -- he is the biggest seller at that market and it is his hometown. He greeted us warmly, even though we are not  great friends. We are good market neighbors. He was glad to see us on his home turf. As we started to wander off toward breakfast, he said we should go and see his farm on our way out of town.

And so we did, after breakfast and a brief stroll through the tiny Berkeley Springs State Park (4.5 acres of historic parkland, with the hot springs as its main attraction).  We drove about ten miles up toward a ridge, on a winding road with lots of tidy little houses, some trailers, some political signage. He had said we would recognize his farm because his deer fence is exactly like ours, built by the same excellent company.

We found his farm at the top of the long valley, and we found his cousin tinkering with a machine. He stopped immediately and came to chat with us.  We probably talked for 45 minutes.  First we learned about the history of that farm -- their grandfather had bought over 600 acres, started with a dairy and eventually switched to apples grown for processing. The next generation had uneven interest in continuing the farm, but it has not yet been turned into something other than farmland, it is just divided up between more owners. Some are farming, some are not. The farmer we know didn't grow up there but he moved to West Virginia as an adult, and learned to grow peaches and vegetables, selling at the farmers markets near us. The cousin said he couldn't stand the customers at market anymore, so he just stays up on the farm.

After we learned about their methods for weed control -- nothing organic about their methods, they are perfecting the ways of applying Paraquat in between the plastic strips -- we heard about the ideas for hemp production.  I said, "there's so much regulation with hemp" and he said, "less and less."  He may have thought from my comment that I was against regulation.  Then he told us about the moonshine they make out of strawberries. It is legal in West Virginia to make 300 gallons of moonshine a year. And then I said something about what would you do with 300 gallons of moonshine?  And he said, "Have you TRIED farming without smoking pot or drinking?  It's boring!"  I burst out laughing because we have such different experiences. I did not admit that I have never tried to farm while smoking pot or drinking, and I have never been bored. 

He told us he had taught himself Spanish over the last 20 years, so he can talk to the Mexican workers. He did it the hard way, drawing pictures and asking them to tell him the word. He says he can now speak Spanish with an American accent but he doesn't have any tenses and it would be nice to know a few adverbs. Still, you have to admire his tenacity. He said the Rosetta Stone package costs $500 and he didn't want to spend that kind of money when he could do it himself.

Then the conversation started to wander into territory that we might have imagined, but had never fully experienced in real life. I don't know how we got there, but we heard about the hoax of the coronavirus, Obama and the Wuhan lab, Bill Gates trying to control overpopulation, the bad effects on your RNA when you get the vaccine, miscarriages, you know Ivermectin will cure us of the virus, why did everyone hate Trump he never did anything bad, he just had a big mouth, you know those BLM founders made 7 billion dollars and they finally came out and said that, you know they are Marxists, I worked for everything I ever got, and so on.  Jon began to wander toward the car.  It was an education, to hear it all linked together.  Just a monologue of facts that were learned somewhere different from where we get our facts.

And that is what we got from that part of the visit: we all get our facts from different places and we believe in our sources. His context is different from ours but we really can't prove, in one conversation, that our context has more validity than his.  We did not even try, not one bit. It was enough to be welcomed and educated about that farm, and to get a deeper understanding of how much we are all working to be good neighbors with each other at market every Saturday. We don't agree on much, but we know that we will be side by side for years to come, and that we need to take care of that relationship. It helped that he didn't ask us anything about ourselves or what we thought about the BLM founders.

I did have to say, at the end, when he was going on another tangent about how we all have to die sometime and he hadn't got cancer yet from spraying those chemicals -- he even knew that lymphoma can be a consequence of using those spray materials -- I did have to say that my father died of lymphoma after using Atrazine, and walking barefoot through recently sprayed fields of Paraquat.  He nodded, yeah, they took that corn herbicide off the market.  But it didn't give him much pause. He doesn't deny that people die, he just isn't that worried about it.

As we drove off, we decided that was going to be the high point of our 24 hour escape. It was so unexpected and unplanned. We never have a conversation with someone who lives in an alternate reality from ours. 

From the top of the mountain, we wandered back down toward our own safe haven.  We stopped to visit Katherine and Neil in their new house in Brunswick and got the full tour of the garden and the projects -- it was a sweet 180 turn from the West Virginia stop.  And then from there to the belated Greek Easter celebration in the beautiful stand garden at the northeast corner of our own farm. Small children ran free, happy together, safe inside the deer fence, squealing with joy.  The farm community gathered to eat delicious hummus and spanakopita and roasted goat and pita bread made in the traveling pizza oven (this community has unusual talents and resources).  We did nothing to help, and there were plenty of hands to bake the bread and cut the meat and serve the salad. It was a joy to be there. We didn't know everyone, but we could see how people were connected by the groups that sat down around picnic blankets.

When we got home, Jon had to start diagnosing all the stuff that got fried when our house got struck by lightning in a freak stormy event that afternoon. No one was hurt,  just electronics and internet, and eventually everything will be fixed.  

Our escape had all the elements of a real trip: eating out, traveling on big roads and small ones,  mountains and rivers, crossing state borders, visiting local attractions, seeing people.  And we did it without retracing our steps on any road except for the stretch between Brunswick and Wheatland.  Pretty great.