This is the Part Where I Get Overly Sentimental

I know a nostalgic memory when I see one, and this place is full of them. Picking the first blueberries of the season, my back warmed by a defiant sun reaching through fast moving clouds; driving down the coast road at sunset, discussing Brexit and sheep herding and the science behind plant breeding and the way autumn colors each of our homes; walking up the hill to the clearing with the best view after a rainstorm and finding the fullest, brightest rainbow I have ever seen crowning the valley below; herding a couple hundred reluctant sheep, just the host and me - not quite enough people for the job - through two huge, green pastures into a new field and watching them, finally, stream through the gate of their new home.

I know already that hindsight will color this place in a far more blissful light than it should. Even before this, I’ve had a bad habit of, on late nights of cramming for exams and anxious mornings before a big presentation, fantasizing about abandoning “the real world” and living on a quaint little organic farm, somewhere hilly and green and near the ocean. And from my point of view, as someone transient and detached from the inner workings of it all, this appears to be every bit that fantasy.

But it is not an accurate picture. My hours are 9 to 5 with a long lunch, my food is provided by a generous host who always offers seconds, and my income is an afterthought, with plenty to fall back on. An organic farmer’s well-being is a little more tenuous, a little less assured. The past few years have been particularly difficult because the climate here is indeed changing and the month-long dry spells that allowed farmers to sow their seeds in the spring have diminished to a handful of dry days scattered over the season, far too few to allow many outdoor crops to do well. This year was the first ever that the ground was too wet to be weeded using a machine, which meant that those seemingly never-ending rows of potatoes had to be weeded by hand. For now, with a small army of WWOOFers, the weeding isn’t so bad, but the host does not have WWOOFers here in the winter – the short days are too depressing and the caravans too cold, she said – and the work is carried out by just the host and her son, for the most part.

And luck, no matter how well-kept and organized the farm, always has its say. The first time I went to the other farm to help with the sheep, we were greeted by the sight of three lying dead in the field. We paced around, checking on the rest of the flock and trying to understand what had happened, what had gone wrong. With a look of distress, anger, pity, confusion the host examined the dead sheep, each one’s side torn open, and wondered aloud how people could be so careless, letting their dogs out at night with no consideration for what they might do. The next day, three more were dead, and another two the next.

It was unheard of, she said, to lose this many in such a short time. They had done everything right – checked on the sheep often, lined the hedges with electric fences, given them enough grass and space and water – and, still, eight dead in three days. The killings stopped just as suddenly as they started; perhaps the dog had come and gone with guests at the neighboring vacation cottages. One of the other WWOOFers developed a morbid fascination with the whole thing and pestered the host with awful questions – how much money did you lose on those sheep? Do you think the birds got to them before or after they died? – until she finally snapped that it’s better to not think about these things, that farming can be difficult and sad and stressful, and it is no coincidence that its suicide rate is one of the highest of any profession in this country.

I do not mean to paint such a grim picture. On a day-to-day basis, everyone here seems quite happy to with the work. The host spends many mornings cheerfully sorting and packing eggs, listening to the BBC or chatting with the WWOOFer helping her. Her son spends much of his day speeding around the farm on a four-wheeler, laughing as the dogs chase after him. The difficulty lies in the fact that this work is not a job, but their life. They do not work set hours here; they start as early as they need to and end when everything is done, about 15 hours oftentimes, stopping only for meals and sleep. Vacations, or even days off, are rare – the farm won’t run itself – and the closest I’ve seen either of them get to taking a break is when they sit and drink their tea after lunch while reading the Farmers Guardian.

Tomorrow I leave the farm. It will be a whirlwind of planes, trains, and automobiles, with a short jaunt in London, an overnight stay in an airport hotel room, and an 8 am flight on Sunday that will take me, finally, to Stockholm. I am happy to finally be going, but I also dread leaving far more than I had expected. I keep wondering if I will ever be back, but all things considered – the remoteness of the farm, the cost of travel, the difficulty of simply having the time to come – I think, perhaps, that the future holds only nostalgic memories of this place and nothing more. 

Improving My French in le Pays de Galles

Though I am in Wales, I have met surprisingly few actual Welsh people. The host is from Manchester, the English WWOOFer is from Manchester, and the other 3 WWOOFers are French. Thus far, my encounters with the Welsh have mostly been characterized by both parties struggling to understand the other’s accent, with a lot of laughing and shrugging and apologizing, but not much actual comprehension.

            My French, on the other hand, is coming back to me rapidly. When we first met, I told the French WWOOFers that I spoke a little bit of French, but had forgotten most of it. However, as I’ve become accustomed to hearing the language spoken constantly, all those years of French class have kicked in.

            My French friends, however, have been acting under the assumption that I can’t understand a word they’re saying (there hasn’t been a single bit of fun gossip to overhear, which certainly helps my paranoia, anyway). So when, at lunch one day, one of them said “Comment dit-on ‘glace’ en anglais?” (“how do you say ‘ice’ in English?”) and I automatically responded  “ice,” everyone froze and stared at me as if I had just started singing opera.

It was quite entertaining, and now I’ve gotten into the habit of interjecting my responses in English to their questions and statements in French. It still gives them some pause, but it’s made conversations vastly easier knowing that if we reach a word or phrase that doesn’t translate well, usually someone can figure it out.

So while I’ve had very little exposure to Welsh culture, I’m learning all sorts of fun things about France and French culture. A couple of weeks ago, they taught me to play a French card game called tarot (similar to spades or hearts, but more complex). Well, I say they taught me, but after realizing that not even the suits translate well, I ended up reading the rules on my phone and then playing a few terrible rounds before finally realizing that they play aces low and have a card between the jack and the queen.

They also have sugar-addictions to rival my own, so we’ve spent many nights playing cards while grazing from a large pile of Kinder and assorted British cookies. At this point, it is simply implied that if one person eats a triangle of Toblerone or a digestive biscuit or a bueno, the others also want one, and I’ve been conditioned to stick my hand out expectantly every time I hear the rustling of candy wrappers. Let’s just say, it’s good that I’m doing manual labor all day.

Besides chocolate, we also share a love for Harry Potter. I was delighted to find out that in the French version of the series, many things and people have been renamed to make sense in French. So Neville Longbottom is actually Neville Londubat and Hufflepuff is Poufsouffle (for some reason Slughorn is still Slughorn, though).

The funny thing about the language barrier is that it takes a lot longer to learn much of anything significant about the people you’re talking to. It’s served as a natural division between the native French speakers and the native English speakers, even though everyone resents that such a separation exists. So even though we’ve been together almost constantly for the past month, I feel as if we’ve only just started to know each other.

On Thursday, I went to town with 2 of the French WWOOFers and we sat at lunch and talked almost completely unhindered for a couple hours, the kind of conversation where you don’t even notice that time is passing, then a couple hours after that while we walked around Aber until the next bus. Perhaps that sounds normal under, well, normal circumstances, but I think it was the first time it’s felt so effortless for everyone to be able to speak and understand for longer than a couple sentences.

Just in time for them to go back to France, unfortunately, but that does seem to be the nature of WWOOfing: to spend almost every waking hour with these people, to endure such horrors as mucking out the chicken coops together, to be each others’ sources of entertainment when the Internet inevitably stops working, to begin to understand each person’s quirks – who is afraid of spiders, who will always take seconds of dessert, who always forgets sunscreen - and, in seemingly no time at all, to return to “the real world” and once more become strangers.

A Lesson in Sixth Senses

Being the only American on the farm means that I am now the resident expert on all things American, whether I know anything about them or not. I field questions about everything from farm equipment made in Wisconsin to Donald Trump to guns (“you have one, right?”) to what I eat for breakfast (“waffles and sugary cereal?”). Because my major has the word “environment” in it, I am also “the scientist,” a laughable title for someone who has studied science for a grand total of 3 years.

I can’t complain, though; it has certainly led to some interesting conversations. As a biodynamic farmer and someone who both greatly respects and somewhat mistrusts science, the host in particular has been quite interesting to talk to. Biodynamic farming is a bit mystical, with its focus on planetary rhythms and some, shall we say, interesting rituals (one of the other WWOOFers, who needs to write a scientific report on the farm for school, was outraged that burying a horn filled with cow manure is considered integral to the functioning of the farm).

At dinner (or “tea,” as every meal seems to be called here) a few nights ago, the host was discussing finding a place to dig a well at a new plot of land she had purchased. It was a difficult conversation to follow – she kept talking about being pulled one way or another, but she couldn’t tell if it was just her arms getting tired, but she thought she had found a good water source. I must have looked completely bewildered, because she turned to me and asked if I had heard of dowsing. At first I thought “dousing,” which led to even more confusion, but no, this was something quite different.

“You can find anything this way – you just need a strong guide, usually a branch in a “Y” shape. And how it works - forget about scientific explanations, it’s a sixth sense, something in your gut that pulls you towards what you want to find.” And a good dowser, she explained, is simply someone with good instincts, a good sense of the world, and a willingness to follow their gut without questioning.

Later on, I did my own research on dowsing, just out of curiosity. Turns out, it's been used quite a lot throughout history, not just for digging wells, but for finding heretics to arrest and even to locate people buried in an avalanche (all courtesy of the Wikipedia page, by the way - sometimes it's nice to not worry about digging through journal articles and choosing the right citation style, okay?). The science nerd in me was quite happy to find that dowsing has been the subject of a surprising amount of scientific studies, those the results have not exactly been supportive of the technique.

A few days later, both the host and the professional dowser (yes, that does exist, apparently) she had hired independently chose the same spot for the well. So I guess maybe there’s something to it, though it might just be a combination of knowing the signs to look for and a bit of luck. Suffice to say that I, with all of my rationalizing, would not make a good dowser.

Though the house has solar panels on the roof and the philosophy around which the farm is run is, for the most part, based in science, on the car ride back from the dowsing expedition, the host admitted that she can’t help but have reservations about all of this science. Sure, climate change is real and caused by humans, but how on earth can these models, she wondered, take everything into account? And as for my topic of interest – persistent organic pollutants in the environment and, for my co-op, in food – do we really need to put so much effort into these measurements? Do we even know that the compounds are harmful? And, more than anything, how on earth can scientists be so certain of everything?

As I picked through facts learned in environmental science class, figures I had seen in scientific papers, and all of the relevant scientific knowledge that I possess, I realized that science and reason were not what she was looking for. As someone who became interested in science a bit later than most, I have grappled with many of the same questions quite recently. And although all of these well-reasoned figures and numbers are plenty convincing to those who understand them, to everyone else, they are just one more thing that separates those scientists in their ivory tower from everyone else.

So I tried a different tactic. Not a dumbed-down one, per se, but one that I hoped was more tolerant of the fact that not everyone is fluent in chemistry acronyms or appreciative of a good correlation coefficient. I don’t know that the host was completely convinced and satisfied with all of my explanations, but I also don’t believe that she’s written me off as someone too isolated in that ivory tower to understand reality. So I’ll consider it a small victory for now, but also an area for improvement - and further discussion, I am sure.

Aberystwyth (and Chocolate)

On Thursday I went into Aberystwyth with two of the other WWOOFers. It was gray and rainy (what else is new?), and we weren’t quite sure what to do with ourselves because, for a historical town on the sea, Aber is not exactly thrilling.

 

Believe it or not, people do swim on days like this.

The town does have some beautiful views, my favorite of which can be seen after a small hike up a hill on the northern side of the town. At the top of the hill and among all of the fantastic viewpoints and park benches there is, bizarrely enough a bowling alley, a bouncy house, and a Frisbee golf course. Nobody is quite sure why someone chose there, of all places, but there you go, a nice tourist trap after the hike.

Windswept and dreary, yes, but still quite picturesque.

The next town is a few miles up the path - a good hike for a sunny day, everyone says, then laughs at the joke.

You can also take the train up, but I don't think the view is as nice.

After the hike, we went to a place called Poundland (the UK’s version of the dollar store) and stocked up on all sorts of Kinder, including two Kinder eggs just because I can, hippos, and Buenos, plus digestive biscuits (double chocolate, of course) and fruit pastilles, all for just 5 pounds! It was both shameful and wonderful. The worst part is, all but two Buenos are gone now (and the day is not over!). All of this wholesome, organic food grown right here on the farm is amazing, and the homemade desserts are to die for, but a whole two weeks without any chocolate or candy is just too much for me to handle.

Forget Science; I'm a Sheep Wrangler Now

I may have misled you a little bit. I realize that the title of this blog implies that I am in Stockholm, and that little introduction on the right says I’m doing research. Well, it turns out that I’m in Wales pretending to be an organic farmer (well, WWOOFing if you want to get technical). Not for the whole semester, but for some undefined period of time, starting a couple of weeks ago and ending when the Swedish Migration Agency (Migrationsverket) processes my residence permit application.

Thankfully, I’ve found myself a very nice, albeit rainy, purgatory. The farm is in northwest Wales, a 15 minute drive inland from the coastal city of Aberystwyth. On the farm, there are many animals – horses, sheep, chickens, dogs (pictures soon to come because I am a dog lover and I can’t resist) – as well as fields of strawberries and potatoes and all sorts of other foods that inevitably end up on the dinner table, polytunnels for the plants that need more controlled environments, barns and sheds full of bizarre and fascinating farm equipment, two caravans for the WWOOFers (3 French, 1 English, and me), and the house in which the host, a Mancunian (my new favorite word –  she’s from Manchester), lives with her son and daughter.

The view of Aberystwyth after a short hike - more on that later.

In theory, I work six hours a day, five days a week, though that seems to be more of an average than a schedule. The work is quite varied. The first few days, I helped weed the potato field, a monotonous and muddy job, but one made better by the other people suffering - I mean working - along with me. Other days, I have picked raspberries, packed eggs, trimmed tomato vines, cleaned out dusty egg cartons with an air compressor, and, Tuesday’s task and my favorite thus far, helped vaccinate adolescent sheep.

A typical gloomy landscape.

When the host first asked me to come along, I, naïve suburban girl, pictured docile little ewes patiently standing in line as we administered vaccines. Herding them in from the field, I imagined, would be a simple matter of leading the flock down the lane behind some shepherd with a staff, like in the movies. Really, who would expect anything different from those cute little white puffballs?

Those clouds with legs are more cunning than they look. As we set up, the host and her son strategized: “look, they can squeeze through that gap under the big gate, better prop another gate against it,” “I bet they can push this fence down – let’s reinforce it,”  “we should block this section of road with the car, and maybe more fencing – if they get out of here, we’re buggered.” (God, I love the British slang.)

As soon as we began herding them in from the field, I realized just how much I had underestimated the wooly beasts. A neighboring retired sheep farmer had come down to help by driving around in his Jeep (turns out, farming has come a long way since Babe), honking his horn and yelling out the window. Everyone else was strategically placed around the field to help shunt them down the right path. All of this, to no avail. The sheep scattered in circles, avoiding the Jeep and people and stopping to graze quite frequently. They did finally run into the holding area we had set up. Then the real fun began.

My job was to separate out a few sheep at a time into a smaller pen, then let four of these sheep into a chute with a foot bath (meant to help keep their hooves strong), where they waited to go into the next section of the chute, in which they were vaccinated and then released. I was also supposed to look out for lame sheep and spray paint a green spot on their rumps.

The sheep had their own plans. The thing about sheep is that, above all, they want to be with other sheep. So as I tried to corral them into the smaller pen, waving my arms and begging them to please have mercy, the huddle of sheep darted anywhere but the pen. Once I managed to get a few in, I had to somehow coerce four to go into the narrow, uninviting chute, which, big surprise, they did not want to do. This meant I had to chase each victim near the chute’s opening, then grab onto her fuzzy little back and push until all four feet were in.

The real farmers tried to teach me strategy – “it’s just like playing defense in soccer!” “I was a forward!” – while I tried to convince myself that even though the ewes looked at me with pure loathing and bounded away as soon as I came near, I was actually helping them and shouldn’t feel so guilty about all the manhandling.

I got over it pretty quickly. A person can only halfheartedly stumble after so many sheep before the guilt is replaced with a resolve to conquer those sheep (admittedly, there was some self-defense kicking in, too… A revolt would not end well for me). So I chased, I wrangled, I shoved, and eventually every sheep  - all one hundred something of them - had been through the foot wash and vaccinated. And that was it (well, they still had to go back to the field, but this time they happily obliged, eager to go back to grazing).

It was great fun. I am not quite sure what this says about me as a person, but I find that I am happiest when I can end my day sore, exhausted, starving, dehydrated, and covered in “muck.” I love the camaraderie of heading back with these other people in a tired silence interrupted only by short bursts of conversation – “can you believe…?” “that was…” – and relieved laughter that, after so much effort, we have made it to the finish.

I may have called it purgatory before, but truth be told, under any other circumstances, I would never want to leave this place. It is an odd feeling, to desperately check my email every chance I get in hopes that my permit will be approved so I can leave, while simultaneously feeling quite happy and at home right where I am.

A rare sunny day in Wales.