Old dreams of the wild

Meet this week’s vegetables:

• Cabbage
• Rutabaga
• Rapini
• Marina di Chioggia winter squash — These are BIG squash, but you can cook them as you would any other. We recommend roasting and then simply eating with some salt and butter (tastes like a donut!) or mashing with cream and reheating in a gratin dish.
• Carrots
• Parsnips
• Yellow Finn potatoes — Casey and I recently discovered that Yellow Finns make superb mashed potatoes! They hold up well when boiled and then mash down smoothly.
• Onions

When I was 13, and going through some predictable rough adolescent emotions, I decided that someday I was going to move to Alaska and live in a cabin in the woods. I’m not sure where this specific notion came from — I had been to camp a few times and enjoyed hikes in the woods, but I wasn’t a particularly outdoors-y or rugged young person.

In retrospect, my desire was probably just a response to what felt like overwhelming drama in my social and inner lives. It was certainly a healthier desire to ponder at hard moments than alternatives!

Anyhow, my dream took on more reality later that same year when I went on an Alaska hiking trip with my school. We set up base camp at a hostel in Skagway and explored the area on foot and bicycle during the days. I was hooked on the real Alaska from the moment I walked onto the ferry at Juneau (growing up in the Puget Sound region, I was a real sucker for ferries), and by the time we boarded the plane home a week later, my future move north felt like a done deal.

Not surprisingly, by the time I actually graduated, plans changed. Instead, I moved to Bellingham, Washington for college — as close to Alaska as I could go and remain in the lower 48. There, fate had me meet a boy from the Oregon coast, with whom I fell in love and very quickly married (twelve years ago this week!).

That boy (Casey, obviously) had love for the north too. While I was just pining for my Alaskan cabin during high school, Casey was spending summers in remote British Columbia, working at camps on the Princess Louisa Inlet (a region very similar in climate and landscape to the Alaskan Inside Passage).

He spent two long summers living at a rustic camp, living with outdoor toilets, no electricity, and basic shelter. He wooed me with stories of watching the Northern Lights while sleeping outside and avoiding bears while running up steep slopes. We both grew up in a landscape of fir trees, rainy skies, choppy gray water — the north and its mountains just seemed like more of what we already loved.

So, how in the world did we end up here — living in a mild river valley, working the soil?

Sometimes I wonder that myself, especially since Casey and I both still clearly carry passion for those wilder places and landscapes. Two summers ago, we made an effort to bring hiking back into our life (the pursuit had been pushed aside during the farm start-up years), and every time we started up a new trail, I felt lighter (even as I strided up hills with a pack). There was a part of me that would come alive again, and I felt like I was meeting an old friend: “Oh, there you are, Katie-who-lives-in-the-woods.”

Right now, I am reading If You Lived Here, I’d Know Your Name, by Heather Lende — a book about life in small-town Haines, Alaska (a stop before Skagway on the ferry). It is a sweet memoir in general, but the descriptions of the landscape and all its implications set my heart a flutter. Snowshoeing! Cabins! Dried salmon! Mountains that drop right to the water!

But, I think, ultimately that my residual longing is akin to what someone else might feel for an old flame — there may be lingering passion, but that doesn’t mean the old love is the right love.

Casey and I had an opportunity to “try” the wilderness life when we were a young married couple — we spent several summers and one entire calendar year living at Holden Village, a remote mountain community in central Washington. Living at 3200’ elevation offered us all the real wilderness experience one has in a place like Alaska — plenty of trees, bears, isolation, snow, hiking, dangers, challenges, dark winters, and mosquitoes!

Living there off and on was fabulous and formative on so many levels (as I’m sure our longtime CSA members realize, since Holden pops up in newsletters with some regularity). But, when we finally left after our year stint in June of 2004, it was with the realization that we wanted something different for our life — at least, for the bulk of it.

Because here’s what we learned at Holden — yes, we learned that we do so love outdoor recreation. This is something I grew into over the years, going from being an amateur hiker to literally running up hillsides by the time we left. I had never loved my body more than when I could fully explore those trails and hills without feeling spent or scared. It was awesome (and of course something Casey had discovered long before me).

But, it was something else at Holden that caught our long-term interest. Even though we spent most of our time at a higher elevation up a long mountain lake, just downlake from us was Chelan and Wenatchee — one of the premiere tree fruit growing regions of the world.

At first, those orchards were just background on our trips to and from Holden, but as we spent more time in the region, we paid more attention. And, while we lived in the village for the year, part of my job was corresponding and visiting with the farmers who provided our kitchen with bountiful seasonal organic produce year-round. Visiting those farms, and cooking with their fresh fruit and produce, changed my life.

Hiking and exploring the hills are still a pinnacle experience of living at Holden, but there are just as many food memories for Casey and me to cherish. For example, the cases and cases of organic pears the kitchen bought when a downlake farmer lost a contract sale to someone else. We bought her entire harvest that year, which turned out to be more pears than we anticipated!

We served pears at every meal for weeks and still wouldn’t keep up with them as they softened. We canned jars and jars in the evenings after the kitchen was closed, and Casey and a friend set up a manual cider press and made gallons and gallons of fresh pear cider for drinking (some of which we turned into delicious “peary” or hard pear cider).

There was ridiculous joy in having so many pears — I still get teary when I think of their sweetness and the light it brought to our community as the days were shortening for the fall. It was my first time experiencing that real abundance of nature’s gifts, and it changed the way I understood food and the world.

There are seasons when this is how it works — when farmers can’t keep up with picking fruit before it falls to the ground for the bees; when the harvest of onions fills storage rooms to bursting; when the extra spring milk goes to feed the pigs …

There is no question that Casey and I fell in love with this experience of plenty, and we wanted to experience it more. That’s when we decided to work on a farm, which of course was the start on the path to our life here in this mild river valley — a place we chose because of its ability to grow food abundantly (oh, and we also love that it is still close to both the surf and the mountains too!).

Of course, now we’re on the flip side of that seasonal equation — the time of year when our food supply is most limited and dependent upon what is left in storage and the greens we have over-wintered in the fields.

But, even in such a moment, my brief mountain life brings great perspective to how alive and productive (and green) even this season is. Right now, Holden Village is still under many feet of snow. The daffodils that bloom every year for my March birthday here won’t open until May there.

I do believe that there is potential for great joy in the challenges of northern and mountain life — the stark reality of living in a dangerous place and the elation of walking up steep hills with a load on ones back. These things bring paradoxical happiness to many, and I have been among them.

But there is also enduring joy in living in a place of plenty — of knowing that the work we do benefits more than just our own body or peace of mind. What we’ve chosen is real work over personal recreation. This is a personal choice, and I’m not going to assign Casey and me sainthood over it, because it is just as self-serving as not.

Even on our most challenging days on the farm (of which there are many, in spite of our landscape’s mildness and lack of inherent dangers), we never ever question the worth of our work. What a gift in this modern era!

And, our work still teaches us to appreciate our bodies’ capabilities as we enjoy that deep body ache at the end of a day spent moving outdoors — something we learned to love thanks to 20 mile dayhikes in the mountains. (This is a body sensation I miss right now, as I am more of a mama than a field worker, but I will get back out there eventually!)

So, we don’t live in a owner-built cabin at the edge of a raging river filled with salmon; but we do live in a funky little owner-built farmhouse near a gentle river that is home to osprey, red tail hawks and blue heron. It isn’t the landscape I grew up with, or the one I dreamed about in my adolescence, and I think books about Alaska will always set my heart a flutter — but this place has become home. And, it may not be as wild, but it is certainly not tame either.

Casey and I are like many transplants before us — always pining on some level for the landscapes that defined home when we were young, but attached to the new place too.

I have no regrets that this is the life we chose, although I do hope that Casey and I can enjoy a few more wilderness adventures in this life — perhaps later when our kids are older, we can introduce them to skinny dipping in frigid mountain lakes.

But, this week I will finish reading my Alaska book (one I recommend, by the way), and then easily return to dreaming about the upcoming season — picturing the asparagus stalks that will be popping up through the soil in May … and soon after, all the other sweet treats: sugar snap peas, strawberries, and more! Not even to mention the excitement of our new animal enterprises! This is a truly wonderful life!

Enjoy this week’s vegetables!

Your farmers, Katie & Casey Kulla
… and the rest of the farm crew!

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And, two quick notes:

The second CSA payment (for those of you “paying as you go”) is due by Monday, March 26. I am sending our email statements and reminders today (Monday), so if we have a functioning email for you, you should have heard from us. If not, email me to get your address in our system: farm(at)oakhillorganics(dot)org.

… and, we’re on the search for a reliable (but not at all fancy) farm truck — preferably in the $1500 range. We figured we’d start with the CSA members and see if anyone has something available! Thanks!

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Next week’s veggies (probably!):

Butternut squash • Salad mix • Rapini • Celery root • Beets • Carrots • Fingerling potatoes • Leeks