If I told you that a bunch of recovering drug and alcohol-addicts had spent the last two weeks occupying our farmhouse, you’d probably picture a driveway littered with broken bottles, cigarette burns on the upholstered chairs, perhaps a syringe or two rolling about on the linoleum floor, abandoned after a missed toss into the wastebasket.
You wouldn’t expect to see a freshly-primed fence, a few just-planted strawberry beds, or a mowed, manicured lawn with a newly built path snaking through it. You wouldn’t expect to see young leeks and onions in the ground, or well-thinned spinach and broccoli raab growing. Probably most surprising on your walk across the grounds would be the quarter-acre of just-tilled land in the back pasture, shaped into fertilized, composted planting beds.
And yet, as I sit here typing from my post at the farmhouse window, I look out and see all of this. This past weekend marked the close of the inaugural “Fresh and Wyld Recovery” program, a two week intensive rehabilitation session that brought seven recovering addicts over from the Roaring Fork Valley for a fortnight of 12-step study, garden work, reflection and good food. And rather than indulge their old habits (aside from nicotine and coffee, of course), the participants gave us their labor for two weeks, helping to complete several projects that would have otherwise taken hundreds of paid man-hours to finish. They weren’t always enthusiastic–indeed, I’ve never seen a crew so eager for a cigarette and water break–but however slow and intermittent their labor may have been, the fact remains that they paid to come work for us.
As someone who is paid–however modestly–to do the daily work that comes with maintaing a farm, it has always fascinated me that this very work is often perscribed as therapy to people who are struggling. Fighting depression? Build a fence. Recovering alcoholic? Plant some flowers. Three years for manslaughter? Trellis a row of tomatoes. What’s particularly ironic is that a long bout of farmwork so often sends me scurrying to the yellow pages in search of therapy–a chiropractor, a masseuse, anyone to get this kink out of my spine.
What is it that farmwork–on its face repetitious and tiring, often dirty–can give to those who are sad, jilted, angry and abused? Obviously it never hurts to be outside, to get a bit of exercise and wind in your face. But it seems to me that the most valuable commodity that farmwork provides–indeed perhaps the very base of its popularity as a form of new-age therapy–is a basic sense of usefulness.
As humans, most of us will do most anything to be useful. We’ll start families, farms, and other money-and-time-suckers, all of which limit our freedom and make us accountable to hordes of other people. Tell us we’re useless–that, in modern parlance, “our services are no longer needed,” and very soon we’ll be driven to the same alcohol, drugs, and other junk that the recovering addicts were trying to purge from their systems when they rolled in two weeks ago.
To a sense of uselessness, farming provides a nice antidote. “You built this fence,” it tells you at the end of a long day. “You weeded these peas, you harvested this lettuce, you tilled this field.” If there were ever any doubt that humans are simple creatures, there is to me no proof more convincing than this fact: at the end of many days, these words are all we need.
