Stu: A Story

"When I grow up I'm going to be an organic farmer just like my Dad. It's a lot of hard work, but it's a good example for your kids."

"Great," I said, the impact of what he had just said only beginning to feed enthusiasm into my voice. "You can have this place. You won't have to start from scratch."

I don't know if it will really happen that way, but both my kids (for whom Sandheron Farm is named, after all, a combination of their middle names,Sandina and Heron) go back and forth between wanting to live here the rest of their lives and wanting to go out and be a rock star, a baseball star, a doctor, and/or a writer. But it is nice that they see the homestead as a desirable option, that they love this place, and that they have a sense of responsibility toward the land.

My dad was a medic, a roughneck, a salesman, and finally a mid-level manager in a ruthless, evil capitalist corporation that ultimately ate him alive. My mom was a saleswoman, a mom, and a retail clerk. We lived in small towns and suburbs, but the farm life was a generation removed from me; my Grandma was the last one who had grown up on a farm. And yet, in the spirit of the sixties, I had somehow become attracted to the idea of being a farmer, listing that as my life goal in a bio for the program of my high school's Junior play, "You Can't Take it With You," in which I played a supporting
role. Of course I also wanted to be a rock star, a baseball star, a doctor, and/or a writer. Such is the nature of youth.

It wasn't until the mid-seventies that I stumbled upon the School of Homesteading, as I searched for a viable way to escape the decaying civilization in which I had been raised, a civilization for which I had
developed a deep and permanent hatred because of the destruction it had wreaked on the People and the Planet. I just somehow hadn't been convinced that TV, polyester, and unimaginable wealth for the few was a desirable or even acceptable tradeoff for genocide and ecocide. So I landed at Maynard and Sally's doorstep, a disgruntled idealist with a desire for radical change and very few practical skills.

Sally, of course, initially thought I was going to be a very difficult case. She told me later that there are some people that she initially had trouble feeling comfortable with, but later found them to be true friends. Maynard, on the other hand, came to realize what an obstinate ideologue I could be only later, as we engaged in philosophical and ontological debates. Initially, I think, he just saw me as another culturally deprived suburban kid who didn't know a heifer from a steer, just like 90% of the other
students who came to learn the lost skills of homesteading.

Was it only six months? Like other graduates in other years, for the eight of us in the Class of 1976 they were six months that changed the world. Not all of us are homesteading today. Wendy and Dennis have been faithful, and I guess what I am doing is pretty close. I've lost track of many of the
others, so I can't speak of their lifestyles. But it wasn't just about "lifestyle." It was about connections, and I still feel those connections today, 22 years after the days of morning chores, breakfast jokes, scooping windrows of hay onto wagons, and picking green beans for market in the hot summer sun (which I look forward to doing again this year) with friends who still feel like my brothers and sisters. Only six months? No. It was, it is a lifetime. And just as sure as it will eventually rain, it is part of my
children's lifetime, too, and will be part of their children's, and theirs, and on as long as the grass will  grow, the sun will shine, and the wind will blow.

Stu can be reached at  sandheron@earthlink.net

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