A WWOOF Experience (living off the grid)

Hello all. I'm currently down in Georgia as a member of WWOOF: Worldwide Opportunities of Organic Farming. I'm living off the grid and will be posting updates about my experience on my site: link removed

Please check it out.

Here's the text from my first post if you don't feel like visiting the site:

Please enjoy and please comment. Thank you all.

Traveling the BQE towards the Verrazano Bridge on a Friday afternoon was my first mistake.

Traffic.

It was also the first time I asked myself, “what the fuck am I doing?” Once I left New York, crossed into New Jersey, and began my relationship with I-95 South, a relationship that would span 900 miles across six states, the decision would be finalized; its impending outcome, doomed or desired, awaited the ruling of hindsight. As it started, I was a Long Island native heading to Georgia to live on an organic farm for two months. I’ve been asked countless times of my decision: why was I doing this? As a recent college graduate with a degree in Communications (not farming), I appeared to be unwinding towards some sort of irretrievable beyond, in which all lost twenty-something’s drift waywardly towards in search of liberation, of meaning, of something any loose-footed hippie would refer to as ‘IT.’ Yes, I know how it looks, so I understand why a few people asked me: are you alright?
I’m alright, only my entire existence had become waterlogged with lukewarm on Long Island, which threatened to drown me all-together if I didn’t bring it to a boil and make something happen. I’d become entirely disconnected from community, culture, and any sort of ritual that inspired me to leave the house. So, I’m alright in the sense that I wasn’t where I was at.

I’d heard about the WWOOF program around the same time I decided I wanted to travel for a full year following college. WWOOF stands for Worldwide Opportunities of Organic Farming. I surely have no intentions of becoming a farmer, but I’ll do anything for an experience; I’ll do anything for a story. The decision to join the program followed a few months of travel attempts, some of which succeeded, others of which failed. As spring approached, I realized I had nothing else to do and nowhere else to go. The doing barely mattered, the going was necessary.
I could have gone anywhere in the world through the program but I chose Georgia for the silliest reason: ever since reading Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil my freshman year of college, I’ve wanted to visit Savannah (where the book takes place). There are about thirty farms in Georgia participating in WWOOF; only three are within reasonable driving distance of Savannah; only one is a permaculture farm existing entirely off the grid in the Georgian wilderness. If I was going to do IT I was going to travel full-speed-ahead into a world I couldn’t possibly prepare myself for. First, get through Brooklyn.

Brooklyn was the discovery of spoken-word poetry on the local radio station. It was graffiti art on the walls of buildings as I passed. It was the traffic, which I first viewed as a mistake, but turned out to be therapeutic. My mind was buzzing, the traffic was annoying, and then I realized how this wasn’t about inconvenience; it was about how I perceived inconvenience. I was voluntarily driving towards a gigantic inconvenience if looked at it in the same way. The Brooklyn traffic set my mood: it was the metaphor to put everything in motion.

Washington DC was a two-day break from the road. It was partying with Georgetown medical students and avoiding bums on Wisconsin Ave.

Virginia was the rising sun.

North Carolina was the falling rain drops.

South Carolina was the changing of trees. It was, “$15.85 is your change sir,” spoken with such sincerity and exactitude that I could feel the simplicity of southern life in each syllable.

Georgia was the antiquarian road-side structures, rotting and rusting, altogether becoming the forest as I passed.

I was twisting through southern landscapes where everything was stripped down, not bare, but to its founding premises. I passed large estates fit with large horse corals and pastures. I passed waving NASCAR flags and the people who’d hung them. I passed gigantic churches with reaching steeples and beautiful lawns. The churches were all filled with rejoicing Christians. I traveled past it all until I was at its heart: the absolute center where life was decided by the sweat you put into the soil and the firewood your arms could collect. Quite the paradox: I had to travel further away from humanity to get closer to its original impulses.

I approached the dirt driveway of the farm in my two-wheel drive, four-door sedan: my New York plates glistening golden in the afternoon sun. Someone had clearly made a wrong turn somewhere. Now is when all the nerves reminded me of where the driveway led: to an organic farm in the middle of a state I’ve never been, where I’m to work and live, for two months, with a community of people I’ve never met. No one I’ve ever known has either been to or heard of this place, and I’m not going to be paid for my sacrifice.

The driveway is an experience on its own: bumpy, rocky, muddy, as it twists for what feels like a full mile further and further into the thickening pine trees.

The driveway does lead somewhere, and I am greeted by a young man and a few dogs. The man is wearing corduroy pants which he’s tucked into the tops of pointed red cowboy boots. A red flannel shirt floats unbuttoned in the breeze. The young man, a 26 year-old from Massachusetts, welcomes me to it all. I soon meet two other twenty-something’s: a young man from California and young woman from Vermont. Later on I meet a couple from Michigan. They live together down the property in a log cabin built, entirely from scratch, by the male Michiganite: a twenty-year-old. I’m instantly in the kind company of people my age, all of whom, at one point, entered this new world the same as I: without any idea what to expect.

It’s around 4 p.m. when I’ve met everyone except for the farm owner: a middle-aged woman who also teaches English at the local community college. She was on her way back from visiting a friend when I arrived and I wouldn’t meet her until later in the night. In the meantime, I received the tour of the off-the-grid homestead:
I’m introduced to the outdoor kitchen, which exists inside a structure built from bamboo poles, scrap metal, plastic tarp, and anything else capable of withstanding the elements. A collection of water jugs, filled by the solar powered well, rests on top of and around the excavated sink. Adjacent the kitchen I find the fire pit, which isn’t a pit: it’s our cooking station. Everything is cooked over an open flame. Stacks of wood in all sizes and shapes await their turn in the flames. I must collect wood every day before the sun goes down. Behind the kitchen and away from the fire, a chicken coup stretches for nearly 100 feet. About twenty chickens scratch around inside. Beyond the coup sits the Poop Palace: a composting toilet that faces off into the Georgian wilderness. 300 feet east of the palace, an old travel van decomposes in the dirt. It hasn’t moved in years because it’s no longer a van, it’s a living space equipped with its own fireplace and front door. The Californian calls this home.
Then there’s the baking oven made of clay and the bicycle blender dubbed “Smoothie King.” How it works: a simple blender connects to the elevated back tire of the bike; when you pedal, you remain stationary as the back wheel fuels the machine. Parallel all of this, a large trailer home has been converted into a library with sleeping quarters: my sleeping quarters. Inside the library I find a piano, a fireplace, and reading material ranging from a Van Morrison novel to a Martha Stewart magazine to a binder of Grateful Dead lyrics.

This is the communal area where we all meet, eat, listen to music, and either prepare for or unwind from a day of work. Work consists of six hour days, five days per week, and as I’ll soon find out, isn’t work at all: it’s a sacrifice of all the excess in favor of all the essentials. But this discovery still awaits me as I finish off my second bean burrito, cooked for me by the incumbent farmers as I relax fireside and allow the southern chill welcome me to my first evening in Georgia. I’m three hours into a strange new life, surrounded by new faces, and I’m being amiably served a delicious meal. Strangers had become family members in a moment’s time.

The six of us sat around the fire all night, and before the glowing embers faded, I’d been stitched into the community without effort: like my arrival had been awaited forever. We worked the fire until nearly midnight, strumming guitars as the North Star aimed its glow towards the Gods deserving. We complemented the darkness with gestures of friendship and conversations of life. Outside of our doings, an unending noise permeated the wilderness; never disrupted, only accompanied by an ephemeral breeze and calls of distant life…

There’s a stillness to this upside-down world, where the air relaxes against you and whatever used to matter, matters no more. It’s just you, the community, the land, and the way with which you embrace things.

All of this in the first night.

What would the first day bring? How would my lanky figure fit into the garden and orchard? How would my unused body respond to the labors of sustainability and longevity?

 

Sounds absolutely beautiful. If only everyone in the world lived like this. This earth would surely be a better place.

Great writing as well. Very detailed and delicate.

Peace to all.