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.