Traced Elements

Category: pemberton

  • The dirt on how the PR girl met the farmer

    The dirt on how the PR girl met the farmer

    March 11 marks four years since I met the farmer that would change the course of my life forever. You see,  that day I went on a date with “SnowboardingFarmer,” aka Riley Johnson, a Pemberton guy I met on an online dating site.

    We won’t talk about how he postponed our date twice; once because his snowmobile broke down and the second time because his basement flooded and two baby rabbits died on the same day. Those things don’t matter anymore.

    March 11 was the perfect day to meet him.

    Perfect, because he called me that day to see if I would be able to get together – THAT AFTERNOON – for a drink after work. No notice, at all. So, I met him wearing an old plaid shirt with jeans, and unwashed hair frizzing in a ponytail. He showed up in a plaid shirt too and came clomping up the stairs to the Mexican Corner in Whistler wearing huge mud splattered work boots.

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    “What is THIS?” I asked myself as he sat across from me with a mischievous twinkle in his eye.

    Both of us showing each other who we were. Me, inadvertently, since I would have made way more of an effort for a blind date if I knew that it would be happening that day. Him, by design, since if any Whistler girl is going to embark on a relationship with a Pemberton farmer you might as well show her the dirt up front.

    After eleven years in Whistler marching down quaint cobblestone lanes in heeled boots, working my way up the ladder in Whistler Blackcomb’s public relations department, and networking and attending special events like a fiend, finding myself falling in love with this muddy farmer was both the most surprising event in my life and the easiest thing in the world.

    One of the first ways I acknowledged the significance of my new relationship was a call I made to SPUD organic produce delivery. When they asked me why I was cancelling my longstanding and recurring order, my answer was simple.

    I fell in love with a farmer.

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  • Anna Helmer’s Farm Story continues

    Anna Helmer’s Farm Story continues

    Deep winter confessions of lavish plan-hatching and mild delusions, meet work in someone else’s root house. (Just don’t call it mindless.)

    A farming luxury: to lavishly plan the work of the coming season when there is no chance of starting any of it for at least two months. Cue careless disregard for work. Sloppy accounting of work requirements. Expansive imaginings absent anything but the faintest work alarm bells, easily ignored.

    The carrot crop proposal, for example. With a foot of snow on the ground and the clouds heavy with more, it seems totally reasonable to be planning to plant 2 acres of them this summer. The chefs are asking for more and the customers say they are the best at market. Ergo the ego demands, therefore the farmer plans, hence we can ignore the actual work involved. 2 acres. At least.

    I am not totally unaware of how things will unfold in real life. There will certainly be a privately raised eyebrow when enthusiastic planning first encounters carrot reality and the 5-gallon pails of seed start showing up sometime next month.  Second thoughts will come flooding in, assuming they haven’t already, when I find myself still seeding well into the evening come that day in June. Assuming (again) that I follow through with seeding the entire 2 acres, the subsequent weeding and irrigation requirements will cause heart palpitations in July and August, and the harvest will be frankly sobering, or perhaps borderline terrifying, because it will take for freakin’ ever to get them all out of the ground. And exactly one year from now, on a snowy day in mid-February, there will be tears because by now the unsold remaining crop will be sprouting hairs and getting soft in storage.

    For now, however, it’s a really clever and enterprising idea, worth pursuing and budgeting for. It’s even spawning tangential plans: a cooler expansion. My optimism knows no limits. These days are golden.

    To stay in farming shape, to maintain my farming bona fides now that markets are done for the season, and basically to keep it real, I am moonlighting as a forklift operator at a local seed potato farm, which is not as glamorous as it sounds.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

    More precisely, I am stationed at the end of a seed potato sorting conveyor line and every 15 minutes I get to hop on an electric forklift and pick up a 2200lb sack of Red La Soda seed potatoes. I take it to the scale. If it’s too heavy, I remove potatoes; too light and I add them. Weight confirmed, I check that I remembered to slip the tag into the attached tag-holder and I move the sack to the collection area. That done, I return the forklift to the ready position and help my work partner manage the next bag. Twenty-two sacks make a full load on an 18-wheeler. It takes about a day to get it done, if nothing breaks down. It is unusual for nothing to break down.

    I like working on other people’s farms because I love considering a mechanical time-out to be an opportunity to get a walk in the sunshine. When they occur on my own farm, they can be expensive, disappointing and dreaded.

    It really goes on and on, doing the same thing over and over, with one hour for lunch. In these circumstances, a good co-worker makes a very positive difference. I have just the guy. His good humour rarely falters – the one time it did, he had an orange and was completely restored. The other thing I liked was that he never stopped trying to do a good job. There are a lot of challenges to managing 2200lb of potatoes every 15 minutes, none the least of which is staying focused, and we worked as hard on the first bag as we did on the 22nd.

    I am going to stop you right there before you call this mindless work. It is not. I think that phrase was floated by someone who could not handle the pressure of coming up with his/her own stuff to think about. (S)He panicked, quit, and branded it mindless.

    It is not mindless. Once you have sorted out the physical aspects of what you are doing, your mind is free to be engaged. How do you think this article got written? Still and all, it can be nice when there are breakdowns to liven up the day.

    So. Work. Thank goodness I have some to do or my theoretical planning for the summer might be absent a whiff of reality and I wouldn’t want that.

    Anna Helmer wrote a slim volume and put it on Amazon where it is a best seller in that category.

    Portrait by Maureen Douglas.

     

     

     

     

     

  • The Dirt on Food and it’s Power to Heal

    The Dirt on Food and it’s Power to Heal

     

    chooks

    Fuck calories.

    To which I would add, fuck “clean eating”, fuck salmonella poisoning, and fuck the commodities trading of food futures.

    Let’s bring eating back to earth.

    By which I mean, let’s put the dirt back on your produce, the scruffiness into your hospitality, and relationships back into your consumption.

    Let’s put ecology back on the table.

    Literally, let’s place the dinner table into a web, instead of at the end of supply chain. Let it be part again of a network of living things, that flow through and from the table, in a million different forms – energy, sunlight, worm food, fresh produce, dead animals; as an anchor to conversation, to nourishment, to relationship, to healing.

    Reclaim the table, and the garden, the power that food has heal – not just our bodies, but our relationships, our sense of agency, and our role as stewards and restorers of the earth. And the opportunity food offers us, to grow – not just out there in the soil, but as humans.

    We’ve been consumers for long enough.

    This website is a place to map food stories, from the heart of the Pemberton Valley, in order to turn consumers on to the idea of being growers, creators, culture-shapers and restorers of the planet. Without guilt. Without pressure. With joyful messy experimentation, scrappy gardens, candour and dirt.

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