Before I wrote the title to this post, I had a different topic in mind and I may just slide back into that one after I finish reporting on what is happening right in front of the stand. It's all related, about the paving and paradise.
Since the beginning of this year, we have had a front row seat to all the construction work on Route 7. I can't count the number of times they have created a new traffic pattern, built a different lane, raised or lowered the elevation of the road, ripped out the existing infrastructure and put in newer and bigger pipes, widened and widened the outside edges, and the number of dump truck loads of dirt that has been moved is absolutely uncountable. There is a 5 year project underway to add two more lanes to the highway, plus a walking/biking path on both sides, plus sound barriers. It was hard to imagine how they would squeeze all of that in, when Route 7 already appeared to be as wide as it could get in many places.
Last summer they "negotiated" an easement with us so they could use the stand parking lot and also the part of our entrance road that goes up to the deer fence. Negotiated is a polite term. When VDOT needs to do something, they do it. They give you a few dollars and ask you to sign a lot of notarized papers but if you say no, then they just take it. We decided that it wasn't at all worth fighting about (although we do know one business owner who took them all the way to court over something just like this and he won, but it took a lot of time and money). Even though they have an easement right through our stand garden so they can park trucks and equipment, we have continued to drive around the little marker sticks and plant the garden anyway because when I looked at the map, I did not see why they needed to drive on the garden. So they have not actually driven on the garden because there were flowers planted there (a tiny piece of paradise).
Yesterday the project moved right to the edge of our parking lot. The earth movers and dump trucks and backhoes and smashing roller things rearranged every bit of space that would ordinarily have piles of pumpkins right now, and Christmas trees in about a month. They brought in enough dirt to lift the road bed about five more feet, to match the other side (we had been wondering how everything was going to work, with a big steep slope between the eastbound and westbound lanes, but now we know). Once they put the turn lane back in for the third time -- we have had a series of turn lanes allowing us to get in and out of our driveway, all of them quite entertaining and lovely -- the road will use up every bit of their easement. In fact, we may be glad there is a sound barrier going up. We didn't want it before but now I see that we might prefer to have a sound barrier and have our stand be invisible from the road. The road noise will be incessant. Already we can barely hear each other when we are working behind the stand and one of those giant machines is backing up.
Before they got to this part of the project, I had already begun to visualize setting up the Christmas trees in the side stand garden, where the flowers were all summer. Ordinarily we would never allow anyone to stomp around in the garden and put in a bunch of posts and walk all over that sacred space (all gardens are sacred space, no walking in them). But I think it might be important to keep some small semblance of normalcy so the customers know we are still here, despite the havoc that is happening on the highway. The stand has suffered the most since only those who already know where we are can even get to us, but the CSA customers have toughed it out and followed all the signage and found their way in, week after week.
For at least a month this summer there was a big highway sign, the kind they make with lights, that said
NEWCOMBS FARM ROAD, NEXT RIGHT. They actually spelled the road name three different ways on three different signs but it was fun to see our name on the highway. The last sign was spelled correctly, and it says Potomac Vegetable Farms with an arrow. We want that orange sign when this is all done. We will probably miss our chance to steal it since they move so fast. Sometimes everything changes overnight.
Anyway, here is the real story I wanted to tell before I got distracted by current events:
Earlier this week there was a theatrical event put on by the folks at Rhizehome and there was an original song performed by Eric of Waterpenny. He repurposed the melody and lyrics to Joni Mitchell's song about paving paradise. In his version, they unpaved the parking lot and put back the paradise. It goes on from there, but the song reminded me that we had also unpaved a road and re-established our version of paradise.
When we built Blueberry Hill, we had to figure out how to get to the back corner of the farm where we were going to put all the houses. At the time, we were so focused on getting it built that we didn't think hard about the sacrifices that we were making from the farm side of things. Of course there were lots of sacrifices, but this one was the biggest, in the end. The road used the original farm driveway, widened it by about four times, got us a turning lane (which we love), took out the hillside on the east side of the original driveway and generally rearranged everything all the way to the back of the farm. We lost access to the Route 7 hillside fields, there were steep slopes that bordered the 50 foot wide serpentine highway that cut through the farm. It was in fact a beautiful road. It had nice curves, it had farm fields on both sides, and it was so smooth and clean. In order to get through all the VDOT inspections, we had to do crazy things like pull all the weeds out of the gravel shoulders, both sides, for the whole two tenths of a mile.
When we first went to the County with this plan (the road), they saw that it was necessary for access but they knew they didn't like it in the long term. They knew that Route 7 would one day become a limited access highway and they wouldn't want 19 more households to be pulling out of a road at the bottom of a hill. They knew it was a bad idea in the future. So they said that we had to agree that if another solution came up when the property next door eventually got sold, we would build a new road. We said yes, even though it was impossible to imagine how that would all come about.
In the end, that is what did happen. When we got the chance, we negotiated with the new owners. The developers had to agree to pay to build us a new entrance. And we added a big request: take out the old road and put everything back. It took them about six years to get around to it -- it was one of the last things they did as they finished building their development -- but they honored their commitment to put our farm back the way it was, as much as possible. I am sure I have already written about this at length -- in 2011 or so -- but the point is that we did manage to get back to a new version of paradise. It never happens, I bet. No one ever takes out a state highway and puts gardens back in, but we did. And while we miss the smooth swooping road that was good for bikes and roller skates and golf carts, and while we have been fighting erosion for 10 years because now water just pours down the valley that was dug for the paved road, it is so, so much better than it was.
Just because I can, I will indulge myself and make a list of all the ways that road made our farm life worse. Of course we didn't understand how much vehicle traffic is associated with 19 houses. This was even before Amazon became such a ubiquitous presence. There were trash trucks and delivery vehicles and maintenance vans and visitors and residents driving through the middle of the farm, day and night. The farm was like a fishbowl. We picked flowers just a few feet away from the highway. We waved to everyone as they went by, we liked those people, they were our neighbors, and we didn't think anything was that bad. But it got bad when car dealerships started to bring their customers to our nice curvy road and zoom up and down it, showing off the new car and its pickup. That was infuriating.
So when the choice was raised about whether we would go through the commotion and disruption of taking out the road and replacing all the lost hills, I thought about it for a few minutes and said we would like to do that. All that we had agreed to originally was abandoning the road. No one had considered removing it, but that is what I asked for. I wanted our farm back. Our neighbors at Blueberry Hill would have been glad to continue coming through the farm -- it was part of coming home for 11 years, after all -- but they let us decide to make that change.
It is a whole other story about what it took to get the 400 dump truck loads of soil to come back to life after the bulldozers stopped smashing the hills back into existence.
Ten years later, I am so glad that we removed that 24 foot wide strip of pavement, and those wide gravel shoulders and now we have our bumpy farm road back. Since we took out the concrete V-ditch because it made it impossible to get up to the Route 7 patches, we have been fighting the river ever since. But it is still worth it. Flowers and beans and herbs and sunchokes and lettuce now grow where trash trucks once careened through. Life is so much better now.
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