Taking Chances

We’re back from a brief vacation – if you can call cutting and stacking 5 cords of slab wood a vacation. I know my dog was completely exhausted from just watching me all week. But a lot has happended besides competing with Andy Goldsworthy for the best outdoor arrangement of random bark heaps. As I mentioned in the last post, many folks have been having trouble with sending their order by email. To address that issue I have created an on line market on our web site. Unbelieveably, it acutally works and is ready to try out. It is far from complete since many of the items do not have thorough descriptions; but it is perectly functional as an ordering tool. The format is simple and should be familiar with anyone who has done on line ordering (which should be everyone, unless you’ve been living in a yurt for the past 20 years.)  Since you already pay in advance for your orders there is no need to pay at checkout. You will still receive confirmation emails to verify your order – one email will confirm the completion of your on line order and the other will be directly from me with a receipt showing your purchase and balance. If you don’t receive these you know something is really wrong with the fabric of the universe and you should retreat to the mountains and build a yurt.

And speaking of yurts, I kept coming across this story about a Juniata student who is doing the Henry David Thoreau thing somewhere in the woods behind campus. I first saw it in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette and my first thought was, “That’s cool.”  Then it made the front page the the Daily News, which was also interesting and I thought, “OK. I’ve read enough about that.” But the public realtions broadcast would not stop and I was slammed with tweets about the young mountain man.  “All right, all right, I get it. And I live in a log house from the 18th century that I refurbished myself, and until recently have heated solely with wood, and occaisionly supplemented with the body heat of growing children and most recently a little fuzzy, white dog. Geesh!”

But then the thought occured to me that I was once this young man’s age and I did some pretty unusual things that drew skepticism from most of the adult world. “Give the kid a break”, I told myself. It’s his time to be outrageous, in a sanctioned, highly monitored and uber-safe sort of way. Because, quite honestly from the time I was 17 I barely let enyone know what I was really up to since I didn’t know myself that it was unusual at the time. It was easy to fly under the radar when you had 6 other siblings overloading the family crisis limit on any particular day.  By the time college graduation came along I had a few dicy experiences tucked under my belt that never seemed to warrant a front page article (even though my father threatened us with that on a routine basis.)

For instance, there really was no reason to tell anyone that I was hitchicking with a friend acorss the United States to Boulder Colorado in the middle of January. It seemed like a perfectly reaonable idea at the time, until we got to the middle of Indiana and the threat of a snow storm loomed. My friend high tailed north to Chicago where he knew he could find friends and a warm bed. I spent the night in the brush of an underpass on I-70 in Terra Haute Indiana where I learned the meaning of agoraphobia. A yert would have come in handy.

The next morning as the storm threatened I hopped my way to the middle of Kansas where I was dropped off at a KOA campsite. There was already a foot of snow on the ground and it was coming down fast. Amazingly there were RVs in the camp, but I knew my chances of getting lodging from a stranger were slim. My appeapance was not very respectable at that point, even by my own dubious standards. Miraculously, this camp had a laundromat which was open and warm compared to outside. It was a cut above Terra Haute. I was disturbed only once that night by someone who came in to use the vending machine. He gave me a wary look and sneered in a fashion I often associate with my older brother when he sees someone doing something completely ludicrous. I was feeling at home.

The next morning was clear and beautiful – one of the most amazing sights I’ve ever witnessed – a three foot blanket of snow stretching to the horizon.  The interstate was well plowed that morning, but the traffic was sparse. The first car passed me by and I planned on a long wait. The next vehicle was an old Dodge van which stopped abruptly in the middle of the road. It was occupied by two guys who apparently had been driving non-stop for two days and needed someone else to break the monotony. It was a strait 500 mile trip to Boulder.

I spent a week in Boulder during which the weather was spring-like and beautiful. It was anti-climactic in a way, just hanging out with friends, getting jilted, making new friends. At the end of my stay I arranged safer passage home than my original trip by sharing a ride to Pennsylvania with two other guys in a VW bus. My companions were as singlemided as I was and it was a non-stop journey to State College. Luckily, there was a tape deck in the van. Unfortunately, there was only one Frank Zappa tape. (It took me a year to get over this urge to hitchhike to Monatana and become a dental floss tycoon.) Of course, there was another snow storm on the way back and negotiating the mountains was beyond the experience of the other two drivers. I offered to drive the last few miles and realized how suicidal my suggestion was. In the end I paid an extra 25 bucks to keep my companions from throwing me off on top of Tussey Mountain.

You’d think this experence would have cured any sense of adventure that might potentially result in death. But youth is just an inducement for recklessness.  People often ask me how I got into farming. It’s actually a difficult question to answer. Basically, it seemed like a safe bet at the time considering my previous experience. Oh well, can’t be right all the time.