Setting Out

A FEW MONTHS AGO, Lauren and I decided to spend the remainder of 2020 volunteering on farms across the country that need help recovering during COVID, slowly making our way to the West Coast and back again. We spent the first part of October on a homestead in Mio, a very, very remote town in Northern Lower Michigan. There’s only one traffic light in the entire county, which stretches from the middle of the glove to the coast of Lake Huron.

We were mostly here to help an older couple prepare for winter: clearing out greenhouses, swapping the soil on raised beds, chopping copious amounts of firewood, fermenting vegetables, prepping and cooking food in bulk to freeze so it lasts through the coldest months. We experienced a different life out here. We pulled food out of the ground to bring inside for supper. We didn’t put shoes on for almost a week. We drove ATVs through the dense forests that comprised 95% of the property. We spent time on a neighboring Amish farm, and watched the matriarch of the family skim the debris from raw milk she had procured earlier that morning while her youngest (and NINTH) child stared with awe at us outsiders in funny clothes. We passed through a dense wood of maple trees connected by blue tubes collecting their sap, and tasted the syrup after it was finished. We felt our blood run cold when a coyote howled with the wail of a screaming child. I saw the Milky Way for the first time. I sat in a hot tub nude with a man old enough to be my grandfather. It was an emotionally conflicting time; this is an area of the country that is deeply different from us politically and in worldview, often in ways that hurt and confused us. In someways it was a retreat, in other ways it was a brutal challenge of mind, body, and spirit. It’s been a trip of discovery, both of self and what it means to live in the US.