a squashbuckling adventure

It was when I brought home the Blue Hubbard that I began to wonder if I had gone too far.

At least a foot and a half long from end to end, it was roughly spherical in shape but with two blunt protrusions on either side. Its skin was a pale bluish gray in color, and covered all over with warts. My mom said it reminded her of a baby seal. I though maybe an alien from outer space was more accurate. It was a squash, the strangest squash I had ever seen, and apparently it was edible -- at least, according to the woman at the farmers' market.

At home, over the years, we had had the occasional butternut or acorn squash for dinner, purchased at Stop & Shop and roasted, invariably, with brown sugar. It did not leave me with a great appreciation for winter squash. But Sue, the vegetable farmer in British Columbia, grew quite a lot of winter squash -- if you've been paying attention to the blog, you'll recall the bruises left on my hands from trying to catch the several-pound thick-skinned vegetables hurtling through the air -- and one day, towards the end of my stay on her farm, we had a squash tasting for dinner. Three squash varieties, simply roasted and cut into strips. There was the butternut, moist and stringy; and then the red kuri, dry, with a flaky texture; and the forest-green-and-cream-striped delicata, one of the few winter squash whose skin is edible. I began to wonder if there might be more to this humble vegetable than I had previously thought.

(It's one of the cliches of food writing to refer to a vegetable as "humble" -- but who's ever seen an arrogant vegetable?)

When I returned to Larchmont, I was more eager than ever to patronize the farmers' markets, having learned firsthand how much hard work goes into producing vegetables the old-fashioned way (and I was more than happy to pay someone else to do the hard work for me). But farmers' markets in late November and early December can be a rather dreary sight: potatoes, carrots, onions, kale, and other hardy yet hardly exciting vegetables. The few straggling tomatoes are likely to be mealy and soft, good for little except cooking -- a far cry from the firm, bursting-with-flavor heirlooms of early fall that provide the most compelling reason for shopping at a farmers' market.

So I suppose it was only natural that my enthusiasm found a different vein: the winter squash, whose considerable breadth of shape, size, color, taste, and texture is on full display in the late fall. Squash, for those of you who don't know, is usually divided into two categories: the thin-skinned summer squash, which must be eaten within a week or two of harvesting, and the winter squash, which (as its name suggests) is harvested later in the year and can generally be stored through the winter. The feeble zucchinis and pattypans having long since bit the bucket, it is the winter squash that concerns me here.

I started off slowly. Well, that's a lie. My first weekend at home, I brought home about five squashes from the farmers' market. Three butternuts, plus a delicata and a kabocha, a dark green warty Japanese variety. We made an effort to incorporate squash into every meal -- stuffed with cauliflower or with rice, sliced thin and roasted or incorporated into a soup with some leftover turnips from Thanksgiving. Most of these dishes were improvised, since the squash recipes in the cookbooks in our kitchen seemed to begin and end with butternut squash soup. And I was determined to be more creative than that. But as the weeks went by, the squashes seemed to pile up faster than we could eat them.

And then I brought home the Blue Hubbard.

It sat on our kitchen counter for several days before I attempted to make use of it. Part of the reason for the delay was that I had to determine the best approach. Usually, with a winter squash, you cut it in half before baking it. But this squash was big enough to foil even the most formidable knife. Perhaps I had also become a bit attached to my squash/baby seal. I held it in my arms and took pictures of it. It seemed almost alive -- in a warty, ugly, alien way.

Still, it was taking up valuable space on the kitchen counter, and I knew it had to go sooner or later. I did a little bit of research online and found that the recommended technique for dealing with a recalcitrantly massive squash was to drop it on the floor. It'll break right open, they said. So I wrapped my Blue Hubbard in a garbage bag and took it out to the driveway (I didn't want to bust a hole through the kitchen floor, after all).

I held it at arm's length, so as to not accidentally break a toe, and let it fall. Upon examination, I found that one of the knobby protrusions had broken off, but the main body of the baby seal remained intact. Evidently, a more forceful impact was required. So I picked it up and (pausing briefly to wonder if the neighbors were watching) threw it against the ground. This time, it broke. I guess that what I had read on the internet had led me to believe that the squash would split evenly into two halves. In actuality, I ended up with about eight or nine irregular pieces. But at least now it was open.

I baked the squash, scooped out the flesh (it was bright orange, incidentally) and put it in the blender. I ended up with maybe three pints of squash puree, two-thirds of which is still sitting in the downstairs refrigerator.

I wish I could tell you that that was the end of my squash-purchasing. But the squashbuckling adventure did not end there. On a trip to the Union Square farmers' market last week, ostensibly to buy some cauliflower for an Indian dish I was going to cook for my family, I came away with no cauliflower but five squashes -- a green-and-yellow-striped acorn variety, a buttercup (distinct from the familiar butternut, and supposedly the king of winter squashes), an Italian variety called Chioggia, and a couple of small green-striped squashes whose name escapes me. I knew about the Chioggia squash from an Italian squash cookbook I bought from a cookbook store on the Upper East Side. I had always thought of squash as a strictly New World vegetable, and the British and French and German people I met over my gap year confirmed that winter squash was not often eaten in their parts of Europe. But apparently there was domesticated squash in Italy from the time of the Roman Empire.

It didn't bother me that the mound of winter squash on our counter kept growing bigger and bigger, though I began to sense a reluctance on the part of my parents to supply me with any more squash-purchasing money. We didn't need to eat all of the squash right away, I reasoned; we could keep it as long as we wanted -- all winter, even -- and cook it whenever we got around to it.

But then something happened which is not supposed to happen -- my winter squash started to get moldy. A couple of theories were brought forward to account for this unaccountable catastrophe. Perhaps a bunch of bananas, stored in too close proximity to the squash, emitted some kind of chemical that hastened the squash spoilage. This was my dad's favorite explanation. Or perhaps there was something funny in that Chioggia squash I brought home from Union Square -- it seemed to be leaking out the bottom. But no, the first squash to go bad was a red kuri I had bought at the Larchmont farmers' market a week earlier.

Just in this last week our winter squash herd has been culled from about seven down to just two. Part of this squash reduction was due to increased consumption -- sometimes two squash courses in the same meal -- but much of the squash just had to be thrown out. I salvaged as much as I could, but the Chioggia was, sadly, completely beyond recovery. I fear that my appetite for winter squash has been dulled somewhat by all of the moldy spots I had to dig out, the squishy sections that went to compost.

But is this the end of my squashbuckling adventure? Hardly. There's still a couple of pints of Blue Hubbard puree in the basement.

back home

Tonight, before Thanksgiving dinner, my grandma asked me if I thought I would work on a farm again any time soon. I told her I think I've had enough farming for the time being.

It's sort of conventional wisdom these days, spread by "food writers" like Michael Pollan and Barbara Kingsolver, that the more you know about the way your food is produced -- the more you appreciate how much hard work went into the meal you eat -- then the more you'll enjoy eating it. And I suppose this is true, up to a point. There's something very nice about finishing a long day's work, dirty and exhausted, and sitting down to a dinner whose ingredients you helped gather from the fields only a few hours ago. But there's also something very nice about waking up around noon or so, lazing around the house all day, and eating food produced entirely through someone else's hard work. Often, after I cook, I find that I have less of an appetite than when someone else cooks for me. And when I have known the carrots on my plate ever since I pulled them from the ground, caked with mud; when I have known the loaf of bread on the table since it was just a bowl of flour and a couple hundred grams of walnuts or olives... I wouldn't say that it loses any of its flavor, only that it loses the magic of appearing before you for the first time in fully finished form, as if entirely effortless. So it's great to know where your food comes from. It's also nice sometimes to be a little ignorant.

That being said, I did make a couple of pumpkin pies today. From scratch, no less. You may think that a pumpkin is only something that children carve at Halloween, or else something that comes only in pre-spiced, pre-pureed canned form. But it is in fact still possible, despite all the efforts of the industrial-food complex, to make a pumpkin pie from an actual pumpkin or two. It's not that difficult; it just takes a little more time. But I think it's worth it.

Here are some pictures from my month in Quebec:



Quebec City







Lina's farm and Mauricie







Montreal







I got back to Larchmont last night, after a ten-hour train ride from Montreal that turned into more of a twelve-hour train ride, on account of signal failures and passing freight trains (much of the route, apparently, is single-tracked). The train to Montreal is known as the "Adirondack," but I can't really tell you whether or not it passes through the Adirondacks, since the sun went down at about 4:00 and we spent much of the time before that moving very slowly or not at all, waiting for other trains to go by or for the customs officials to finish their examination. You know how the customs forms always ask you questions about what you did on your trip and what you're bringing back with you (including one question that rather amusingly asked if I was bringing back any "cell cultures, disease agents, or snails")? And you know how there's always the question that asks if you've visited any farms or been in contact with any livestock -- a very silly question, since who goes to a farm during their vacation? Well, I did, and, shuddering as I checked the "yes" box, I tried to imagine what kind of special examination they might put me through.

It ended up being nothing more than a cursory glance at my boots. Satisfied that I was not bringing any potentially catastrophic nematodes into the country, the customs official let me pass.

I'm in Larchmont until early February, and I can't really guarantee that anything interesting enough will happen to me between now and then to warrant another blog post. My parents have, for some reason, demanded that I do something productive with these two and a half months, so I suppose it's possible. So keep checking back every once in a while, if you'd like, and I'll certainly try to pick things up again once I go to India in February.

P.S. I've changed the settings so that now (I think) anyone can leave a comment, without having to sign in or create a Google account. If you were unable to post a comment before, try again and let me know if it works.

oui

Working at a farmers' market in BC -- trying to remember the price per pound of cauliflower or add $4.65 to $17.80 in my head or return the correct change to the customer -- may have been difficult. But at least it was all in English.

My plan was to leave the farm in Mauricie this past Thursday or Friday, but Lina told me she had signed up to sell bread at three markets that weekend -- one on Saturday, two on Sunday -- and she needed some help. I figured an extra couple of days wouldn't hurt, so I agreed to stick around until Monday (that is, yesterday). It was only after I agreed to help that it occurred to me that there might be a problem. "I don't know how much help I'll be at the markets," I said to Lina, "since I don't speak any French." She reassured me that it wouldn't be a problem; Aline, the German WWOOFer who speaks French fluently, would also be working at the stand, and I would mostly be there to keep her company. I said "Okay," hesitantly, and hoped that Aline would not want to go to the bathroom or anything for the six or seven hours the market was open.

While I was finding myself able to understand more and more of the French conversation that flew around my head all day long, and while I sometimes fantasized that I was close, very close, to being able to speak French myself, and one day soon it would all magically snap into place, I had to admit that a full grasp of the French language still eluded me. Okay, I hadn't gotten very far past "bonjour" and "merci." I had brought a "Teach Yourself French" book, but every time I picked it up and tried to study it, I found that I really didn't have the patience or focus necessary to learn more than a few words. It all seemed too much like work. Besides, there were much more interesting things to read; and if I read Madame Bovary (in translation, of course), then wasn't that sort of like a French lesson? Maybe?

At the market on Saturday, I let Aline do most of the interacting with the customers. This was fine because the first few hours were very slow. Lina showed up to deliver some fresh bread and relieve us at about 2 o'clock (quatorze heure, as the Quebecois say -- see, I'm almost fluent). I was nearly falling asleep, so we decided it would be a good idea to take a walk outside. It felt like... November, and November is a good month for sleeping but it's also a good month for a brisk refreshing walk. We admired the church (every Quebec town has its own beautiful stone church, built in the time when religion was the central force in French Canadian life; I think that nowadays the ratio of beautiful churches to practicing Catholics in Quebec is approximately one-to-one) and some of the more interesting houses. We went back inside for the last couple of hours of the market, and though the pace picked up slightly, only about two-thirds of the loaves were sold.

These markets, by the way, are not like your typical farmers' market. These are Christmas markets, usually held in town halls or other public buildings (though Lina told us of one November market she attended that was held outside), featuring rather more inedibles than edibles. That is, lots of arts and crafts and knitted things and so on -- Christmas presents, I suppose, that unlike bread, will not go stale in the intervening month and a half before the big day. We did also make some Christmas cakes, expertly wrapped in green and red plastic, which are supposed to stay fresh forever on account of their high rum content.

Saturday went well enought -- I hardly had to utter a single word of French -- but Sunday's market came without the promise of relief. Lina had to attend to another market forty-five minutes away, leaving Aline and I to fend for ourselves. In the breaks between helping customers, I had Aline teach me some key French words -- "gouter" for "to taste," and so on. But when Aline inevitably decided she had to go to the bathroom, or take a walk -- who can blame her? the market was from 10 AM till 5 PM -- I was left on my own to deal with the customers.

I may not have picked up much French during my time in Quebec, but I have picked up the truly unfortunate habit of answering "oui" to every French question that I don't understand. Aline told me that "peut-etre" -- maybe -- was always a good answer, but somehow "oui" was the word that slipped most easily out of my mouth. Once, when I got particularly flustered, the woman from the next stand stepped over to answer a question. Fortunately, Aline's absences were always brief, and once she returned, I could go back to smiling mutely at the customers. What I lacked in language skills I tried to make up for in charm and sex appeal. I think I succeeded.

What else, what else? While I was at the farm, Lina put me to work developing a recipe for seasoning salt using the dried mushrooms she grows in the greenhouses. It wasn't very complicated -- a little bit of mushroom plus a lot of salt plus a sprinkling of dried herbs -- and the dust from the ground mushrooms spilled ominously out of the blender after each batch, so if I get emphysema in thirty years, we'll know why. But it pleases me to know that my mushroom salt will grace the kitchens of a few families this winter, perhaps adding the slightest mushroom aroma to some of their most cherished holiday dishes.

I switched the font on some of the labels for the farm products (the cakes, the dried herbs, the mushrooms, the marmelade) from Times New Roman to Garamond. It was all for you, Reed -- carrying your gospel of good font choice into the Canadian wilderness. Unfortunately, the only labels that Lina had were address labels, about one inch by three inches, and in order to accomodate all of the text for the ingredients and instructions and so on, I had to use a font size of approximately five points. But what they lack in legibility they make up for in beauty.

Anyway, Lina drove me to the Trois-Rivieres bus station this morning, and I took a bus into Montreal, where I am spending two nights before coming home just in time for Thanksgiving.

the price of fresh bread

The end of daylight savings time has restored sunrise to its proper place, one hour earlier. But no amount of fooling around with the clock, no leaping forward or leaping back, could possibly make a difference if you start your day at 3:30 AM, when sunrise seems more like a distant hope than an eventual certainty.

Lina, the owner of this farm in the Mauricie region of Quebec, starts baking at 4 in the morning. Well, that's not really true. She prepares the flours the night before, until about 10 o'clock. In the summer she does this every day; now, it's only three times a week. She sells 25 different kinds of bread, though she only makes 10 or 15 on a given night. In addition to the bakery, she grows figs, kiwis, lemons, and oranges in a heated greenhouse. She also grows mushrooms and makes a peppermint syrup that, when added to a glass of water, gives you a kind of cold cup of mint tea. She does this all without any steady, paid help, only the WWOOFers that come and go for a few weeks at a time.

I cannot imagine myself ever working this much at anything.

Lina is very easygoing and doesn't require that any of the WWOOFers get up early or stay up late to help with the baking. "I work eighteen hours a day," she told me over the phone before I came, "but I don't make anyone else work eighteen hours a day." But I chose to come to this farm specifically because of its bakery, and I wanted to come away from here having learned something about baking bread. If my only opportunity to participate in the baking came so early in the morning that it's really still night, then so be it. I would have to wake up early at least once in order to experience it.

It was easier to wake up at 3:30 than I had expected. At least, until I actually tried to get out of bed. But I pulled myself together and left my basement bedroom, came upstairs, and considered eating something but felt still full from the previous day's dinner. I walked a few steps through the frigid garage to the bakery at the back, already warm and only bound to get much warmer before the morning was over. Lina put me to work measuring ingredients and cutting up the dough into loaf-sized lumps. Not the most challenging work, but I watched Lina as she mixed the ingredients and worked the dough, all the while keeping track of two pans of loaves in the oven and never seeming to get the least bit stressed out. She must have made at least fifty loaves.

At around 6 or so, the other WWOOFer, Aline, came in to the bakery. I was feeling a bit weak from opening and closing the oven door and getting blasted in the face with hot air, and though I would rather have waited for the fresh bread, I took a moment to go over to the house, eat a slice off a slightly stale loaf and drink a few glasses of water. The sky was beginning to brighten outside. About time. I had already been up for two and a half hours.

Back to the bakery for more measuring, more cutting, sliding pans in and out of the oven, fingers crusted with a dry doughy residue. Then putting finished loaves into bags -- Avoine, Sesame, Grenoble, Fromage-Olive, Tomates-Basilic -- and bags into crates for delivery. We had breakfast -- ate nearly an entire loaf of fresh bread between the three of us. Then checking the number of loaves again, finding that one was missing -- but it was alright; only a delivery to a friend; could wait until tomorrow -- and packing the crates into the car. Lina drove off. The bakery was a floury mess but it could wait until later. The sun was as up as it was going to get on this overcast day. It was 8:30 or 9. Bed was a distant memory.

coupe de cheveux

Before I came to Quebec, I had heard that the Quebecois were very proud of their French heritage. And I had heard about the referendum for Quebec's independence that failed by only half a percentage point. But I guess I had thought that the whole "French" thing was something that the Quebecois did on the side. Like wearing a kilt, perhaps: you might do it every once in a while in order to "celebrate your heritage," but it's certainly not the sort of thing you'd do all the time. Maybe the Quebecois made a big deal out of their French-ness in public; but in the privacy of their homes, I was sure, they all spoke English.

So it came as kind of a shock when I realized that there were many people in Quebec who spoke French not only as their first language, but as their only language. A few of Lise and Carroll's children were in an English-immersion program at school, but most were not. Lise was fluent in English, but Carroll spoke it only haltingly. And their friends who came over regularly knew almost no English.

So it is possible to live your entire life in Quebec (in the countryside, at least) without knowing English. It's difficult to wrap your head around the fact that the people of Canada cannot all talk to each other -- not just as the temporary result of immigration, but as the permanent, accepted condition. And yet I suppose that the maintenance of Quebec's unique identity depends to some extent on some of its citizens not being able to speak English. If everyone here could speak English as well as they spoke French, then why speak French at all?

On the federal level, English and French share official language status, so food packages in Canada are all bilingual. Sometimes the label designers seek to economize by combining the French and English labels into one, taking advantage of the English language's tendency to put adjectives before nouns and the French language's tendency to do the opposite. Hence such redundant labels as "Tomato Ketchup aux Tomates." Bombarded by this constant bilingualism, I'm surprised the Canadians don't all develop split personality disorder.

But Quebec does not equivocate; there is only one official language in the province, and it is French. At first, the stubborn refusal of the French Canadians to accomodate English speakers may seem absurd -- don't they know what continent they're on, and what century they're living in? -- but once you see things from the perspective of the Quebecois, it doesn't seem so silly. French America used to stretch in a wide arc from Nova Scotia to New Orleans, but since the early 18th century, the French language and culture has been under continual assault by the spread of the dominant English-speaking population. There may still be some Cajun communities down south and some Acadians in the Maritime provinces, but Quebec is the last, purest stronghold of French language and culture remaining in North America.

In Quebec City, it is true, practically everyone seems to speak at least enough English to communicate with the tourists. Quebec may be a French island that must be defended against the ever-encroaching sea of English that surrounds it; but that sea is also the source of a lot of its tourism, so Quebec does its best to be accomodating. Most of the museums, for example, have displays in both English and French, and most waiters can take your order in English. I've been able to get by without learning any French beyond "Je voudrais..." and "Un billette, sil vous plait."

But on the fringes of Quebec City, outside of "Vieux Quebec" -- a UNESCO World Heritage site, the only fortified city in the Western Hemisphere north of Mexico -- the tourist effect starts to wear off. So it was that I found myself in a chair in a barber shop about to have my hair cut by a woman who didn't speak English.

I really needed a haircut. My last one was in June or July, and my hair was getting long enough in the back that it was starting to take on the proportions of a mullet. I was going to try to get a haircut when I was in Vancouver a couple of weeks ago, but I ran out of time; then, I hoped I would find a barber shop near the farm in Gaspesie, but I wasn't on the farm long enough to find out. By the time I got to Quebec City, the situation was desperate. But it proved surprising difficult to find a barber shop in Quebec. I encountered many "salons" on my walks through the city, but where were the plain old regular barber shops? I was looking for something with a red-and-white striped pole outside, but I couldn't find it.

The internet was not much help, either. On Monday, I went across the St. Lawrence River to the town of Levis, where Google Maps told me there was a barber shop (this was not the sole purpose of my visit; the view from the ferry was spectacular). I found the red-and-white pole, but alas, it was "ferme" on Mondays. I went back to the internet and found a smattering of barber shops around Avenue Cartier. It was kind of far from the Old City, but if I walked to the art museum, then perhaps I could walk back along that route. There was also a Western Union branch located nearby, where my parents had arranged to wire me some money when they found out my attempts at getting cash from an ATM had failed. It seemed worth a try.

I found that elusive red-and-white pole, and, more importantly, the shop behind it was open. I went inside and asked, "Parlez-vous Anglais?" The woman said, "Non." I had given some thought to what I would do in this situation -- a few days ago, I had tried to memorize some essential hair-cutting vocabulary -- but it all escaped me at that moment and I considered running out. But I sat down, and as she started trimming, I thought, "Well, this should be an interesting haircut."

There was a man in the barber shop who did speak a little English, and through him I managed to communicate that I wanted it "not too short." It turned out pretty well, actually. I'd post some pictures of the haircut, but I'm sure you'd rather see pictures of Quebec. I know how much you all like UNESCO World Heritage sites.

... And I packed the USB cable deep in one of my suitcases. It'll have to wait till later.

le poop

I suppose that working on any farm, you can expect to get dirty from time to time. And I suppose that at one point, all dirt was poop. But the dirt on Sue's farm in BC was comfortably removed from its poopy origins. Once you got used to digging around in the ground, it really wasn`t so bad. The dirt was primarily an aesthetic problem: it got wedged under your fingernails and stuck in the creases of your hands, and, of course, all over your clothes. So you scrubbed your hands extra-hard and threw in some more soap with your laundry, and you learned to live with a little bit of dirt in your life. It was alright. It didn`t smell or anything. You probably could have eaten it if you wanted.

But on Lise and Carrol's farm in Quebec, the poop is still very much poop.

There's never any shortage of poop on a farm with hens, geese, six cows, seven calves, a dozen or so pigs, a couple dozen rabbits, some horses and ponies and more sheep than you could ever possibly count. With so much poop being produced, it was of course necessary to clean the animal enclosures once or even twice a day, lest the poop pile up so high that it starts to ooze out the gaps between the wall boards of the barns. Poop-shovelling is a Sisyphean task; often, one of the cows or horses pooped immediately after we had cleaned out its stall, as if in mocking defiance of our measly efforts at cleanliness.

It took a while for me to get used to the poop. There's the smell, certainly, which lodges itself in your nostrils and has a funny way of popping up again when you're eating dinner. And it takes a while to figure out how to navigate a wheelbarrow full of poopy hay through the mud to the dumping-ground. But the hardest thing was to get used to touching the poop. I wear gloves whenever possible, and of course I tried to use shovels and pitchforks to move the poop, but the fact is that at some point your bare hand is going to make contact with animal waste, whether you want it to or not. I learned not to let it bother me so much, and to wash my hands really really really well.

Anyway, I shouldn't make it out to seem like life in Quebec is all poop, all the time. The farm is located on the Gaspé peninsula, the part of Quebec north of Maine and south of the St. Laurence River. It's sort of like a seaside version of Vermont. Very windy, too: windmills dotted the landscape around the farm. Not the sort of fabric-sail Don-Quijote-type windmills, of course; these were of the modern, skyscraper-high, jet-wing steel variety. I could never really decide if they made a positive or negative contribution to the landscape, but I'll leave that for you to decide. Here are some pictures:

I was planning to stay on the farm for five or six weeks, but things didn't quite "work out." We disagreed about the amount of work that should be expected out of a WWOOFer -- I wanted more time off to explore and do some reading -- so I left on amicable terms. It's too bad, though; the farm was beautiful, and the family was wonderful, too (eight children, all under age 14).

In any case, I'm here in Quebec City now, convalescing for five days before heading off to the next (and hopefully final) farm before I come back home in time for Thanksgiving. If you're reading this entry, then leave me a comment, sil vous plait, because I'm kind of going crazy in the absence of any native English speakers and I'd appreciate some reminder of the Mother Tongue. And if you have been checking regularly, I apologize for the delay between postings, but the dialup internet connection in Gaspesie did not want to make friends with Blogger. What's your excuse?

photos, finally

I'm flying to Quebec tonight, to begin working on another farm, this one mostly an animal farm -- sheep and cows and such. I don't have time for a full post right now, but I figured I should show you some long-overdue pictures from the farm in Sorrento. Enjoy.

so much Canadian news

Often, when I was in the packing shed on Sue's farm, washing vegetables or stuffing them into bags or boxes, we listened to the radio to help pass the time. There were only two radio stations that came through clearly on the packing shed radio. One station was the local branch of CBC, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, a kind of Canadian equivalent to NPR. CBC plays a lot of interesting interviews and programs, but it's a very talky station, and it was kind of hard to follow what they were talking about if somebody was using the power hose. So usually we ended up tuning to the other station, which happened to play "easy rock." This is a code word for a mind-numbing playlist of the same twenty to thirty stale love songs, repeated over and over again until you find, rather against your will, that the music has insinuated itself into your brain and the repetition becomes calming and reassuring, in a way, and while you still don't really like the music, you find yourself humming one of the songs hours later when you're in bed, trying to fall asleep.

We didn't always turn the radio on. Sometimes it was better than silence; sometimes, not.

Even the soft rock station, which boasted of how much music and how little "talk" it featured, occasionally condescended to reading the news headlines. I didn't usually pay too much attention, but I heard snippets about the state of the Canadian dollar and the actions of Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and so on. And so one afternoon, I found myself wondering, "Why do they have so much Canadian news on this station?"

Here in British Columbia, it's easy to forget sometimes that you're in a different country. They speak the same language here, and the Canadian accent is not really so different from any American accent. Oh, perhaps the Canadian language relies a bit too heavily on the word "eh," but you get used to this verbal tic pretty quickly. Canadian culture is fairly similar to American culture: no strange customs to get used to, no pyramids or palaces to remind you how far you are from home.

It's hard not to notice, however, that Canada's relationship with America is very different from America's relationship with Canada. Sure, we're friends and all, with the "longest unguarded border in the world" and so on. But does the United States Postal Service print a stamp specifically for sending mail to Canada? I don't think so. Canada produces such a stamp for mail directed towards the United States. And the Canadian newspapers and radio stations (even easy rock stations) cover much more news about the United States than the American media covers Canadian news. The actions of the United States affect Canada more than vice versa, which I suppose is the natural consequence of having a nation of 30 million next to a nation of 300 million.

For that matter: how many of you knew the name of the Canadian prime minister before I said it above? Believe me, everyone in Canada knows George Bush.

When I say that Canadian culture is similar to American culture, I do not mean to say it is identical. There are many small ways in which Canada manifests its differentness on a daily level. I have already mentioned the peculiarities of Canadian currency -- the loonies and the twoonies, and no one-dollar bill. Traffic law is another way in which Canada is different. The standard warning sign in Canada is a square, rotated 45 degrees, with a checkerboard black-and-yellow pattern, and in the middle, a small black arrow indicating the direction in which one is supposed to go. It's effective in getting your attention, but trying to figure out what the sign says is a little like looking at one of those optical illusions and trying to see the two faces or the wine goblet. American drivers are familiar with the blinking red light, which is equivalent to a stop sign, or the blinking yellow, which means yield, but Canadians also have a blinking green light. A blinking green light -- what could this mean? Slow down? Be careful? I have not yet had the opportunity to ask a Canadian.

(Fortunately, I have not yet been required to do any serious driving in Canada. The most driving I have done was moving the old gray pick-up truck around the farm, and even then, I managed to back into the wall of the packing shed and mess up the tailgate so it wouldn't close. Sue knew how to fix it, luckily.)

The Vancouver mass transit system provides another point of contrast, in its apparent reliance on the honor system for fare payment. There are the SkyTrain elevators that do not require you to go through a turnstile or show a ticket at any time. Today, on a ride through the Kitislano neighborhood (Vancouver's equivalent of Brooklyn or Queens), I was struck by the fare collection system on the city buses. They allow you to enter through one of two or three doors. It is assumed that if you need to pay the fare, you will get on through the front door and do so. If you use one of the rear doors, you are presumed to have a monthly pass or whatever.

This may seem strange to one who, when he thinks of mass transit, thinks of the MTA's jail-cell-style super-jump-proof turnstiles. I could say that Vancouver is a more trusting city than New York, a cleaner city, a safer city, a younger city, a smaller city, and so on, but I feel it is unfair to keep talking about Vancouver only in terms of comparison. The city has its own peculiar charms, after all, chief among which is the natural setting. Downtown Vancouver is on a peninsula between two inlets, and it makes full use of the waterfront with promenades and parks. The view to the north is spectacular -- green mountains sloping right down into the water -- all the more impressive when the blue-white skyscrapers of downtown are silhouetted against it. I took a walk along a beach today near UBC, the University of British Columbia (an "infamous" clothing-optional beach, as I believe the guidebook put it, but being a cloudy October day, most people were fully attired), and I decided that perhaps Vancouverites are not being disproportionately boastful when they say their city has the highest quality of life in the world.

Vancouver

I left the farm yesterday, five weeks and one day after I arrived in September. I had originally planned to stay for six weeks, but I suppose it was the weather that did me in. It started raining the last week of September and it never really stopped. And if it wasn't rainy, it was always cloudy. Cloudy and cold and damp all the time. The clouds that hung low around the tops of the mountains and settled down in the valley no longer seemed beautiful and mysterious to me; they were just oppressive. It was time to go.

I wanted to spend some time in Vancouver, too, before I leapt eastward towards Quebec. So at 8:15 AM, I boarded a Greyhound bus in town, after saying goodbye to Arnaud and Sue (Colleen was in Calgary with her boyfriend, Patrick, and it was Sophie's day off, so she opted to say goodbye to me the previous night and sleep in that morning). As we set off down the Trans-Canada Highway, the sky was just as overcast as it had been the past few weeks. I opened up my copy of Middlemarch (well, I suppose it's my mother's copy -- "L. Perry" is written on the upper-right-hand corner of the first page, and when I found it in the basement, it still had a Harvard Bookstore 1974-1975 bookmark calendar wedged halfway in) and began to read, staring out the window every now and again, not making much progress against the long winding paragraphs of intricate sentences.

Autumn in interior British Columbia is a primarily yellow affair. Most of the trees on the mountains are evergreens and hold their deep bluish-green through the cold weather. What deciduous trees there are, are primarily birches (so far as I could tell with my Mountain School tree-identifying skills). The birches were blazing a brilliant golden-yellow against the scrubby quasi-desert landscape. It was beautiful, but I felt that this monochromatic fall wasn't really fall, somehow, without the red- and orange- and purple-turning trees that dot the October landscape in the northeast.

We ascended some mountains, and then descended, and I noticed as we headed westward, the landscape grew damper. There wasn't any rain outside, but the hillsides seemed lusher and the rocks grew moss and lichen coatings as we plunged through a canyon and into the flatlands of the Fraser Valley. The pure golden autumn of the interior had rusted into a moist, mottled orange. The sky began to clear and the sunlight shined through the leaves overhead, yellow and orange and red. Soon enough, the suburbs came into view, and, in the distance, the tall buildings of downtown Vancouver. I had almost forgotten what civilization looked like.

I emerged from the bus into the sunniest afternoon I had seen in weeks. Besides my backpack, I had a large wheeled suitcase and a smaller duffel bag. Not exactly what one would call "travelling light," but when I arrived in BC in September, I had two large suitcases and a duffel bag (I sent some of my t-shirts and shorts home; the rest was accomodated through some very tight packing). Outside the train/bus station, there were taxis waiting, but I figured it would be a more authentic experience (and less expensive) to take mass transit to the youth hostel. After all, the SkyTrain station was across the street. I looked around for an elevator for a while but couldn't find one, and was about to take the stairs, luggage in hand, when a man passing out free newspapers called over to me and pointed me in the direction of the elevator.

I bought a ticket for the SkyTrain, but I didn't have to go through a turnstile or anything. The Vancouver public transit system seems to operate largely on the honor system. Weird.

I emerged from the Sky Train (which by this point had gone underground) on Burrard Street, and wandered a block in the wrong direction before a businessman with an Australian accent directed me towards the nearest bus stop. The first bus driver that came had never heard of Burnaby Street, the street that the hostel was on, but I consulted the somewhat confusing map at the bus stop and figured that the second bus was probably going in the right direction.

It was a rather awkward bus ride, me with my three pieces of luggage. If anyone who knew me had happened to be on the bus with me, they probably would have started laughing as I tripped over myself trying to get my big suitcase through the aisle and off the bus. As it was, everyone around me was a stranger, and I imagine they looked on with a mixture of pity and impatience.

But I managed to get off and find my hostel, check in, deposit my suitcases in my room, and walk down to the waterfront. I sat on the beach and wrote a letter as the sun set over the bay, and then walked in search of dinner. I ate at two different pizza places, neither of them very good.

My first impression of Vancouver: a smaller, cleaner, friendlier version of New York. Decent mass transit system. Terrible pizza.

loonies and twoonies

I set three alarms on my cell phone each morning, spaced at fifteen-minute intervals, to make the process of getting out of bed a little more gradual. Usually I set my first alarm for 7:00, or 6:45 on the mornings when I take a shower (it seems kind of silly to shower every morning when I know I'll just get dirty all over again a half hour later, so I usually take a shower every other morning; my goal is not cleanliness so much as keeping the dirtiness to a reasonable level). And usually I'm out of bed after my second alarm, and downstairs eating breakfast by about 7:30, ready for the start of work at 8:00. It's a system that works well for me. Perhaps not quite as well for Sophie and Arnauld, whose room is next to mine and who claim they can hear my alarm every morning. And it's true that sometimes I let it go for a minute or so before I wake up enough to roll over and turn it off. But they have to wake up too, you know.

Saturday, though, is market day. And since the market opens at 8:00, that means we have to be down there by about 7:15 to start setting up. And that means we have to be ready to leave the farm by 7:00, which means that we have to start loading the trucks at about 6:00.

It wasn't until my third alarm went off at 5:45 that I forced myself out of bed to face the day. Or, rather, the night. It's still completely dark outside before 6. Fifteen minutes is not really enough time to eat breakfast, put on four or five layers of warm clothing, and make my way over to the packing shed, but I've noticed that as the seasons change and the sun rises later and later, everyone else seems to be rising slightly later on market days. It's as though we can't get started before we see the slightest hint of deep blue light outside, the guarantee that the sun will rise and the day will come. This morning, we got outside at about 6:20 or so.

Colleen and I emptied the boxes from the cooler and piled them into the two pickup trucks, followed by the three folding tables and the poles that support the tarp that hangs over the stand. The sky was beginning to brighten outside (or at least as much as it was ever going to brighten in this gray, gloomy weather we've been having), but the metal of the six-foot-long poles was still freezing cold. I shoved them in the truck as quickly as I could while still taking great care not to swing them into some vegetables or somebody's head.

The market is right in town, in the parking lot of the shopping center with the post office and the 99-cent store and the little grocery store. Colleen and I arrived first, in the gray truck, a handful of small peaked white roofs already rising above the asphault. We set up the tarp, and then Sue arrived, and we unloaded the trucks, unfolded the tables, set out the vegetables, and put up the little signs with the prices.

There are maybe a dozen regular stands at the farmers' market. There's a guy who sells chainsaw carvings and a woman who makes these really delicious date squares (also called "matrimonial bars," she informed me today, because they were traditionally served at bridal showers), as well as a couple of stands with some tomatoes and carrots and such, but Sue is definitely the main vegetable attraction. Squashes and leeks and lettuce and spinach and cauliflower and broccoli and beets and potatoes and chard and carrots and kale, piled high on the table, a rather attractive display of the abundance of the harvest. The market has not been too busy -- I'm told that it's much more crowded during the summer, when all of the tourists are here -- but every once in a while we'll get four or five customers at the same time, and I'll be reaching over Sue at the scale to get to the cash box while Colleen ducks by to weigh a cabbage.

Today, the Saturday before Thanksgiving (in Canada, they celebrate it on what we Americans would call Columbus day), is the last market, so I'm beginning to get the hang of it. I still have to shout over to Sue sometimes for the price of a bag of carrots, but usually (with the help of the electronic scale's addition function) I am able to charge customers approximately the correct price for their vegetables. But for the first couple of weeks, I was a mess. Trying to add together $8.40 and $11.85 in my head, I would invariably give customers the wrong change and forget to ask them if they needed a bag. One customer, a friend of Sue's, kindly suggested that I take a deep breath before helping the next customer.

I'm inclined to blame it on the Royal Canadian Mint, which makes a one-dollar coin (called the "loonie," because of the picture of a loon on the reverse) and a two-dollar coin (the "twoonie") but no one-dollar bill, and whose coins all look alike because they all have the same person on the front. But I suppose that my poor mental math skills may be partly to blame. In my second week at the market, I turned to Sue and said, "You know, I'm actually really good at math. I did really well in calculus." But there's a world of difference between knowing how to find an integral and knowing how to make change, and I don't know which is more useful but I definitely know which one Riverdale didn't teach me.

For some reason, though, I couldn't stay away from the scale. I felt a magnetic draw towards helping the customers, even though I was so bad at it.

But I've gotten better over the past few weeks, I swear. Still, I don't think a customer service job is in my future.

Speaking of money, the big news story on the radio the past couple of weeks has been that the Canadian dollar is actually trading at a higher level than the American dollar. I suppose it's a point of national pride, but I'm not sure how proud you can really be when your unit of currency is named "the loonie." But I guess it's better than the alternative. Sue told me that the original plan for the dollar coin called for a picture of a beaver.

on the run

The birch trees are beginning to turn from green to gold, summer inexorably passing into autumn, and everything seems to have an air of potentially being the last. Is this the last warm day before it gets cold for good? Is this the last summer squash harvest before the frost comes in and kills it? The answer to the second question is yes, the summer squash appears to have been completely killed off by a frost earlier this week (Sophie and Arnauld, who had to harvest summer squash three or four times a week in August, were pleased when Sue broke the news). But the warm weather (warm-ish, at least; this is Canada, after all) has returned for the time being. The rain has completely vanished. We've had a string of days that have started out cloudy and cold (but, thankfully, dry) only to slowly clear up, so that by lunchtime I almost regret my decision to put on long pants that morning.

It was sunny when we went to a nearby river last Saturday, after the farmers' market, to check out the salmon run, which is when salmon from the ocean swim upstream to their place of birth to lay their eggs. Colleen's parents and sister were visiting, and though we did not see any salmon (apparently, they don't come until October), we did learn an awful lot about the life cycle of the salmon. Apparently, they expend so much energy in the trip upstream that all they can do once they arrive is mate, lay their eggs, and die. Bad for the adult salmon, perhaps, but good for the bears.

Later that night, however, there was a very different kind of animal on the run. Everyone was downstairs playing Cranium, a party game, but I begged off to bed early -- too tired to socialize effectively. I came downstairs a while later to go to the bathroom, only to find the entire dining room empty except for Colleen's father, who informed me that the cows had escaped. Apparently, there were enough people around to herd the cows back into their pasture that I was not needed. I went back to bed.

The next morning, we moved the cows into a new, hopefully more secure pasture down by the packing shed. This was my first real interaction with the farm animals since I arrived here, and I was pleased to say that the cows didn't put up much resistance. The only way to move the cows from one pasture to the other was down the main road that runs by the farm, and it was my job to stop any approaching motor vehicles. Fortunately, the cows moved quickly enough in the general direction of their new pasture, so it wasn't necessary for me to stand in the path of any oncoming eighteen-wheelers.

Besides the fifteen or so cows, there is a large flock of extremely free-range chickens (they go pretty much anywhere they please), two goats, and eight or nine pigs. The goats and pigs usually stay in a fenced-in yard -- except, of course, when they don't. On Monday afternoon, the piglets escaped. And when we managed to get them back into their yard, they escaped again. Finally, Sue returned from a delivery and put the pigs into a smaller pen, from which, fortunately, they have not yet figured out how to escape.

I said that moving the cows from one pasture to another was my first interaction with the farm animals, but I should have said that it was my first interaction with the live farm animals. On my first night here, Sue and Colleen asked me if I was a vegetarian, and I, still in an airplane-induced fog, replied, "Sort of." What I meant to say was that I was a vegetarian at home, but now that I'm on the farm, I'm willing to eat meat that was raised on the farm. I don't think I quite managed to articulate that much, but they figured it out.

I read a book that Colleen leant me entitled The Way We Eat, about the ethics of our food choices. It essentially argues that a pure vegan diet is the most ethical choice, but I disagree. I think a world without mischevious escaping piglets -- that is, a vegan world -- would be a much poorer world to live in.

(Speaking of piglets... my camera finally arrived today! And I took some pictures, but Blogger won't let me upload them right now, and my time on the computer is about to run out. So it'll have to wait until Saturday.)

Every nice day, every squash harvest, could be the last before the cold weather sets in for good. But you never know, of course. So I'm doing my best to enjoy the relative warmth of late September in Canada while I still can.

rainy days

Working my way slowly through the bean patch the other day, I hollered over to Arnold, "There's a lot of beans here." He replied, in exquisite French accent, "Where? In your stomach?"

Perhaps I was eating more than a few of the beans I pulled off of the bean plants that morning. But I always put more into the basket than I put into my mouth. Well, almost always. And I tried only to eat the ones that broke in half when I pulled them off. But the way I see it, it's a waste to sell the purple beans I was harvesting to the customers, since most of them will probably cook the beans, causing them to lose their purple pigments and turn a rather ordinary and humdrum shade of green. I don't know why this happens when purple beans are cooked (sorry, Amy), but I do know that in order to fully appreciate their uniqueness, a person should eat the purple beans raw. A person like me, for example.

And keeping my mouth full is a way to avoid looking up and down the long, long row, calculating how little I've done and how much more I have to do before reaching the end. I do my best to practice Zen Farming, repeating to myself koans such as "Farming is about the journey, not the destination." But it's hard not to be a little impatient sometimes.

It was easier when the weather was nice, I tell myself. The first two weeks I was here, we enjoyed almost uninterrupted sunshine and clear skies (what can I say? I bring joy wherever I go). But perhaps my meteorolgical welcome has begun to wear thin, since for the past few days the weather has taken a decided turn for the worse. A band of white-gray clouds have settled down low over the farm, nestling in close among the mountains, cutting off the view and making the whole world seem much smaller. And the rain, too -- cold, miserable rain. When I look out from my window in the morning, everything -- the dark gray light, the water dripping from the eaves -- everything suggests wet, wet and cold.

Though we try to work outside in the breaks between the sporadic rain showers, it almost doesn't matter if it's actually raining or not when you're out there digging potatoes or crawling on your knees harvesting beans, since the water on the ground will soak through your boots and pants anyway. And no matter how much warm clothing you put on, you can't keep the cold out, because the cold is inside you -- crept in through your wet socks, perhaps -- and can't be dislodged. And it is not the cold of autumn, bracing and envigorating, but a rather more discouraging, disheartening kind of cold. So I take shelter in my room, but there's only so much time I can spend up there considering I have to work, eat meals, socialize, and so on.

Anyway, I don't want to make it sound all bad, since despite the weather, I think I'm enjoying myself more than I was a week ago. Thursdays and Fridays are usually spent picking and preparing vegetables for the Saturday farmers' market, and that meant a lot of little plastic bags to fill with beans and carrots. 12 ounces for a bag of beans, a pound and a quarter for carrots. Sue says that bagging the vegetables makes it easier for the customers to buy them, and besides, the beans look nicer when all three of the colors -- green, purple, and yellow -- are mixed together. I don't know why I enjoy bagging vegetables so much. Perhaps because it's an activity that can be done without getting wet. Or maybe because it's easy and kind of mindless and not physically demanding, so it allows me to think about other things. Like what I want to cook for dinner, or what I want to write to the five or six people to whom I owe letters, or even what I'm going to post on the blog. So be thankful for all of the beans and carrots that need bagging.

Farming is an all-weather occupation, and sometimes I'm almost jealous of all of you people working regular jobs or going to school who have the luxury of staying inside on a cold rainy day. Almost jealous.

vegetable abuse

Most of the time, it is possible to go through the process of vegetable harvesting with a certain dignity, a "Who shall live and who shall die?" solemnity appropriate to the High Holy Days. In the fields, we assign each vegetable its ultimate fate. If it is well-formed and of a good size, then it will be brought into the packing shed to be cleaned and boxed up and sold either to the vegetable delivery services or through the farmers' market. If it is too small or not yet ripe, then we leave it to harvest on another day. If it is slightly misshapen but still edible, then perhaps we bring it into the house for our own consumption. For the truly deformed or rotten vegetables, though, we must be stern in our judgment and cast them aside on the ground, for they are fit to be nothing more than mouse food.

A heavy responsibility, harvesting vegetables. Yet sometimes, as on Monday afternoon, it turns a bit ridiculous.

After lunch we headed out to collect all of the winter squashes that were ready for harvesting. Harvesting winter squash, as I soon learned, is a team effort. Since the squash plants are grown so close together, and they tend to spread out all over the ground, it is not a good idea to walk in and out of the squash patch more often than necessary, since each step can potentially damage the plants. Instead, one person walks through the squash patch, and whenever they harvest a squash, they toss it to their partner outside of the patch, who collects the squashes into baskets and hauls them up onto the truck.

At first, we were working in two teams of two: me and Colleen on the inside, Arnold and Sophie on the outside. But then Arnold and Sophie had to go help Sue load up the trailer for a delivery, and Colleen asked me to step outside the patch to be her catcher.

Playing a game of squash catch is not so difficult when you're using an acorn squash, or even a red kuri squash, which is round and an orangish-red color and looks like a small pumpkin but is not. But I had to be a little more alert when a bona fide pumpkin was involved. They weren't quite as big as jack-o'-lanterns, but some were close.

As Colleen heaved the pumpkins at me (sometimes she used a shot-put motion, but usually she threw underhand), I was brought back to my not-so-successful days on Larchmont-Mamaroneck Little League. I hadn't worn my glasses, of course, so my depth perception was a bit off. Pumpkins are a fairly sturdy vegetable -- they can sit in storage, unchanged, for months at a time -- so I'm not really sure how necessary it was for me to catch the pumpkins before they hit the ground, but I guess it makes it easier to clean them. My number one concern, in any case, was not to allow these hurtling pumpkins to hit me anywhere in the body, least of all in my head. I had just been reading a book I got for my birthday -- or rather, a series of books, The Deptford Trilogy -- about a woman who goes insane after being hit in the head with a snowball, and I was pretty sure that a pumpkin could do more than make me lose my mind (perhaps take my head off altogether). So I made sure to stay attentive. And I let the bigger pumpkins fall to the ground.

No squash-related injuries, I'm pleased to report, except for some fleeting soreness in my hands, the necessary result of absorbing the impact of a ten-pound vegetable hurtling through the air.

carrots 'n onions

Back on the farm, we've been doing a lot of vegetable harvesting since I've been here. Summer squash (which always gives me a rash on account of the little prickly spines all over the leaves and stems), beans (in green, yellow, and purple varieties), beets (purple and golden), cucumbers (I finally found out what a cucumber plant looks like), corn (lots and lots of it), potatoes (blue and pink and russet and King Edward), and even the odd tomato (we pick them while they're still green so the mice don't get to them). But I would have to say my favorite vegetable to harvest is the carrot.

Pulling a carrot is so simple -- just grab the greens around the base and give a gentle yank, and the carrot will hopefully pop right out of the ground. If the greens break off, then you have to root around in the soil and gently wriggle the carrot from between its neighbors. But usually they just pop out.

Most of the time, when we're harvesting carrots, we have to gather them into bunches, secured with rubber bands. A "bunch" is a rather unscientific measurement, generally between six and nine carrots. How do you know how many carrots to put in a bunch? Well, you want the bunch to be a "good-sized bunch." But how do you know what size is a "good size"? I often get a bit anxious during carrot harvests because no matter how many times Sue or Colleen might show me, I'm never quite sure if the bunches I'm making are too big or too small.

This is my favorite vegetable? The one which makes me think I'm either shortchanging the customer or bankrupting the farm with each bunch I make?

Well, it's not as bad as it sounds. And sometimes, as on Thursday, I get to harvest carrots without regard to assembling them into properly-sized bunches. That's right. Sue told me to go out and harvest a whole lug of purple carrots ("lug" is the word for the big plastic crates we use). Just rip off the tops and throw them right in. No bunches necessary.

Well. I was a carrot-pulling machine that morning.

The purple carrots we have on the farm aren't really purple so much as an orangeish-reddish-purple, all of those colors in different places and all at once, too. It's really a beautiful carrot, and the color only amplifies the pleasure of carrot-harvesting. Apparently, the purple carrot is the original carrot from which all other carrots are derived. The familiar orange carrot is a mere derivation, a mere shadow of the True Carrot. Take that, Bugs Bunny.

The purple carrots (which, by the way, are only purple on the surface, and are orange on the inside) taste a lot like the orange ones, except with a little extra kick, a little bitterness. The first time I tasted a purple carrot, it was straight out of the ground, and I thought that the different taste might just be from the dirt (hey, what's the point of living on a farm if you don't eat the freshest vegetables possible?). But a few days later, while washing and bagging the purple carrots for sale, I ate a few while Sue wasn't looking, and confirmed that the taste is, indeed, inherent to the carrot, and not just from the soil.

Most of the work on the farm is tedious in some way, which is to say that it involves doing a simple task over and over again. The difference is whether it's a task you enjoy -- such as pulling carrots -- or a task you don't enjoy. And I even get tired of harvesting carrots from time to time, looking at my lug and wondering why it doesn't fill up faster. But once that task is over, there's always something else to do. So there's no point really in getting all worked up about "getting it over with," since it's never really over (at least not until the end of the day).

That being said, I really don't like cleaning onions.

Somehow, there always seem to be more onions. In the packing shed, in the cinderblock building, in the barn with half of its walls missing -- the dirty onions are everywhere. "Cleaning" an onion basically means trying to rub off the dirt and maybe peel off its outermost skin to make it look more presentable. But you can't peel too far, because if you expose the flesh of the onion, then the onion will go bad. Ah, the anxiety! And of course, you want to clean fairly quickly, since it takes a lot of onions to fill a basket and the air in the cinderblock shed is full of enough dust to make even a non-asthmatic wheeze.

Still, it is something that must be done. On the farm, as in life, you must take the bad along with the good -- the onions and the carrots both.

Margaret Falls

After six days of working on the farm, I got a day off yesterday. I thought it might be nice to go on a bike ride somewhere and get to know the area better. Colleen told me about a bike ride she took to a big waterfall earlier in the season. I thought, "Big waterfall, bike ride, sounds perfect!" She said it took only about an hour and a half or two hours each way, which seemed like just the right length. Perhaps I should have been a little more cautious when she said (on step five or six of the directions) that it was "just 12 kilometers" past the Trans-Canada Highway.

In any case, I set out at the leisurely hour of 11:30 on a bike borrowed from one of the girls who is here on a program called Canada World Youth, which brings together people from Canada and from another country (in this case, Uruguay) and has them spend three months together in each country. When I asked her if I needed to worry about locking up the bike when I left it, she told me that it was a "piece of crap" and it didn't really matter if it was stolen or not.

Apart from the bike's temperamental (to put it kindly) gear shift, and a few terrifying seconds pedaling over a bridge on the Trans-Canada Highway, hugging the six-inch shoulder, with cars and eighteen-wheelers barreling past, it was a rather pleasant ride down. The scenery in the mountains is gorgeous, and once I got past the highway, I rode right alongside the lake.

Margaret Falls is up a short trail along a canyon that feels like it's part of a different world. The first thing you notice when you start walking up is that the temperature drops about five degrees and the air is suffused with a fine mist. It was about 2:30 when I arrived at the canyon, the sun quite strong for a September afternoon, but it was like dusk once I got inside, the limestone walls and towering cedars blocking out all of the sunlight. The sound of falling water grew louder and louder as I ascended until finally I looked up and caught a glimpse of it. The falls were probably at least fifty feet high, the water cascading down out of a crack in the canyon walls.

I'd love to post a picture of it, and in fact I did snap a couple of pictures with the camera on my cellphone, but it's not letting me e-mail them to myself (probably just as well from the point of view of my parents, who likely don't want to pay for a couple of international picture messages). So the photos will have to wait until my real camera gets here.

I stayed by the falls for half an hour or so until I decided it was time to go back. The ride back up, I knew, would be a bit more difficult, the price I'd pay for all of those long breezy downhills on the way there. On the way back I stopped by a beach, took off my shoes, and waded into the water -- just so that I could say that I had "swam" in Shuswap Lake, because what's the point of spending six weeks on the shore of a huge lake if you can't say you ever swam in it? Then across the Bridge of Death once more, and then up Tappen Valley Road, then right on Tappen-Notch Hill Road, then another right onto Tappen Hill Road (you'd think they could be a little more creative with the street names around here), and then, finally, a left onto Notch Hill Road.

Pulling into the farm's driveway just a little before 7 was probably one of the happiest moments of my life. I almost expected everyone to rush out of the house, saying "Where were you? We called the cops. We thought you might be dead by the side of the road," but then I remembered that everyone else was out to dinner at one place or another.

Despite the occasional moment when I was sure I wasn't going to make it back alive, it was, all in all, a satisfying day. But I decided that today (another day off) I'd take it a bit easier. So, no big plans for today except to bike down to the library and go on the internet (check!), read a book, and write some letters.

By the way, I now completely understand those studies that say that prolonged bike-riding may reduce male fertility.

Tomorrow it's back "into the grind," as Sue put it. They only give you an hour on the computers down at the library, and my time is just about up, and though I'd love to tell you all about the various vegetable shenanigans up at the farm, I'm afraid that'll have to wait till Saturday. Look forward to it.

hello from Sorrento, BC

So I have a reputation, apparently, for not doing a very good job of keeping in touch with people. I don't really know why people say that about me. Possibly because in the four years I went to sleepaway camp (for two months at a time), I wrote my parents a total of maybe two or three letters.

In any case, while this reputation is clearly unjustified, I figured I might make it easier on myself this time around and instead of keeping in touch with each person individually, I'd create for myself one of those new-fangled blogs to keep everyone up-to-date on my whereabouts and activities during my gap year. So here it is, the official source of information on everything that Ben is doing on his gap year. Enjoy. Bookmark it. Check it obsessively two or three times a day when you're bored and sitting at your computer and have nothing else to do.

I will warn you, though, that due to the fact I'm going to be in some remote, relatively un-Internet-ed places this year, the posts may be somewhat... sporadic. But I'll do my best to keep it up.

The name of the blog, "Off the Edge," is a reference to those maps you saw back in elementary school that showed the United States as if it were an island, floating in a void, as though Texas and Maine were peninsulas jutting out into the vacuum of space and the world ended abruptly at the forty-ninth parallel. Well, I can now report to you that there's a whole 'nother country to the north. In fact, there are many other countries out there, and I intend to see some of them. Hence, going off the edge of the map.

Now that that's out of the way...

Where am I, you ask? I am in British Columbia (for the geographically challenged, British Columbia is the province on the west coast of Canada), working as a WWOOFer on a small organic vegetable farm. Sorrento is a small town and fairly rural, as is most of BC once you get off the coast, and it is located near Shuswap Lake. Apparently this is a big tourist town in the warmer months, but since the months are getting colder, most of the tourists have gone home to their jobs and schools and whatever.

The farm is, as I said, a vegetable farm, owned by a woman named Sue, originally from the UK. In addition, there are three paid workers on the farm: Colleen, who grew up a few hours' drive from here, and Sophie and Arnold (I might not be spelling that right) from France. The farm is beautiful, set in a small valley beside these mountains which remind me a bit of Vermont, except they have more conifers and are more bumpy. I'd love to take some pictures and post them here, except I discovered that my brand-spankin'-new digital camera, which I got for my birthday, was broken the day before I left for Canada. My parents are going to ship it to me after it's repaired/replaced, so the photos are going to have to wait till then.

The only not-so-pretty part is the railroad tracks at the bottom of the farm, which happen to be part of the main train line that goes all the way across Canada. So there are trains going by at all hours. But it's not so bad and I think I'm getting used to it.

It's been a little bit of an adjustment, getting used to the routines on the farm. The work starts at 8:00 in the morning and goes until noon, during which time we are usually working in the fields, harvesting squash or weeding the carrots or pulling beets. Then there is a break for lunch, and we start up again at about 1:30 or so and work until 5-ish. In the afternoon, we are often working inside, washing and preparing vegetables for sale and packing them into boxes. Then dinner, and then I usually stay up a couple of hours writing or reading before collapsing into bed.

I'd write more, but I have to get back to the farmers' market now, where we're trying to unload all of the boxes of corn we picked yesterday. There's a lot. A lot of potatoes, too -- the blue ones are the best, in my opinion. It's kinda funny being on the other side of the table, and I'm really not very good at calculating prices or making change, but I'm getting (a little) better. Well, I'm not really getting any better. Let's just say that I'm discovering that mental math is not one of my strengths.

So leave me a comment if you get a chance. I hope everything is well with everyone, and I'll do my best to post again before the end of the week.