Traced Elements

Tag: john alpaugh

  • Working Hard

    Working Hard

    “I can’t wait to go back to bed” – my first thought most mornings. I stop my alarm almost before it starts. Hitting snooze is tempting, but too dangerous. I don’t leave myself any extra time; the extra minutes of sleep are well worth the rush. Quarter to six, my eyes open, I take a deep breath and swing out of bed. I put on water to boil while I go to the bathroom, and when I come out, I am ready to go. A quick piece of toast and coffee in hand, and I am out the door.

    As I drive up the Meadows to the farm I work at, angsty questions roll through my head: why am I doing this? There has to be an easier job, one where I might feel rested at least one day a week.

    Pink light is hitting the east facing peaks and spraying a soft alpenglow into the valley. Cows graze in a large field veiled by a fine mist.

    I pull into work, put my boots on and walk out into the field. First thing is harvest. We need to get the vegetables off the field and into the cooler before the sun is too high. As I pull kale leaves off their stalks and tie them into bunches, my mental fog begins to lift. Looking around at the walls of the valley, Mt. Currie at one end, and the Hurley at the other, I forgive myself for the weight of my angst.

    What is work? For most of us, it’s having something to do that we don’t want to. We spend our days going off to an office or a store or a field to earn enough money to play, to do the things we do want to do. It is a trade-off we accept, day after day.

    If you have a job you love, you never work a day in your life, so the cliché goes. But it is more nuanced than that. Love is not a purely positive emotion. It is an act, difficult and requiring effort; at times it is defined by tolerating unpleasant things precisely because the positives are so pure. And maybe without those unpleasant things, the positives would not be so deep, and the beauty of a morning in the valley would be wasted.

    Life as a farmhand falls within that cliché. When I told people I would be working on a farm, their initial reply was often, “that’s hard work,” with the skeptical gaze of imagining the hardships of manual labour. I knew it would be difficult, and my chronic exhaustion proves it, but the positives far outweigh the opportunity to get more sleep.

    The physical aspect of the job pays for itself; despite fatigue, my body feels strong and capable, and I count this as a blessing. I consider myself fortunate to be outside every day, in a place people drive for hours just to look at. The early hours are my favourite of the day. My mind feels as clear as the air, crisp and refreshing. I spend my weekends hiking to places to find this feeling, and I have it every day at work.

    Maybe more important than anything in a good job is what the work is towards. At the farm, every transplant I put in the ground, and every weed I pull out, helps grow food that will feed the community. Compared to most of my jobs in the past, where my effort is often aimed at something I have no connection with, harvesting the food I will eat for dinner and that I saw at every step of the way, feels like a religious experience. And I am lucky enough to be paid for it.

    This sort of thoughtful work attracts characters with unique wisdom at their disposal. Conversations fill the air, and may interfere with the work at hand. But at lunch or in the small gaps between jobs, new ideas are openly exchanged and my own beliefs are questioned. Smart people are told they should be lawyers or doctors or scientists, but here they are farming.

    In the process, I have picked up indispensable skills that would have been unavailable to me from a seat behind a desk. I am confident I could start my own garden and feed myself. I would face unforeseen challenges, I’m sure, but working to solve problems is part of the fun.

    Not all work is paid for, at least not in dollars and cents. We will always need to do things we are not keen on doing to survive, but that does not mean we must suffer. Growing food is work, and leaves you as fulfilled as what you put on your plate. After I eat dinner and get ready for bed, I am filled with a sense of satisfaction a day in bed could never give me.

    You can find John at the Grand Majestic Pumpkin patch until Halloween.

  • Farming for Change: introducing writer-farmer John Alpaugh

    Farming for Change: introducing writer-farmer John Alpaugh

    As a child I avoided eating vegetables as if they were toxic. The final scene of many dinners was a stand off between my parents and I over an untouched side of raw carrots. Eventually they surrendered, not willing to torture me or forego sleep to prove a nutritional point. For many years after these victories I avoided vegetables altogether. It is a strange turn of events that today I am working on a small organic vegetable farm.

    Like many people in British Columbia, I am not from here. I have the indistinct story of being from Ontario. After graduating from Dalhousie University last spring, I moved back home to work for my parents and save some money. When the fall came around, I built a bed in my car and set off for a road trip through the United States. I had a ski pass and a National Parks pass, and I was going to see the natural splendour that is so celebrated.

    As I approached the end of my trip and the bottom of my bank account in the early spring of 2020, I had to decide what to do next. Rounding the turn and heading north from California, BC appeared to be a natural conclusion. In the past, I had spent my summers working on golf courses. I wanted to continue working outside, this time putting my efforts towards work I felt was part of a solution, environmentally and physically. I went on GoodWork.ca, a jobsite connecting eco-minded workers with sustainable work.

    One posting caught my eye: Laughing Crow Organics in Pemberton, working as a farmhand. I emailed Andrew Budgell and Kerry McCann, the owners and operators of the farm. A few days later, I had a Skype interview from the visitor’s centre in Yosemite Valley, and they offered me the job. I started looking for a place to live that would also be financially sustainable.

    Kerry McCann, Laughing Crow Organics’ co-owner: “People need to eat.”

    But soon after this, the world entered a pandemic, and suddenly every plan was on shaky foundation. No one had any idea what would be possible a week, a month, a year from now. I was in Lake Louise staying with a friend from home when COVID hit, planning to continue west. He had been laid off from his job at the hotel, and we both decided to head east and wait things out.

    I got in touch with Kerry. Would there still be a job for me? People still need to eat, she said. “We will be growing plants and feeding people and we will need your help.” A month after my first cross country drive, I turned around and headed back west.

    Immediately I knew I had made the right decision. Even in May, at the height of COVID confusion, Pemberton was a pocket of normalcy. The next month, when Black Lives Matter demonstrations erupted across North America, the events of the world felt even further away. In both instances, I wondered what part I played in it all. What is my responsibility?

    Farming was an attempt to answer this question. Our food systems are some of the most oppressive systems we have, environmentally, socially and economically. Like many others in the capitalist mindset, optimization has been focused on profits, rather than quality. As a result, large scale agriculture has sterilized the growing process in an effort to grow more food for less money. These costs do not evaporate. They are passed down the line onto the health, the environment, the worker, and the consumer.

    When I was on the road, I did most of my shopping at Walmart. It was the cheapest option, and they let me sleep in the parking lot, so it was convenient, but I knew there was something wrong with this decision. By spending my money on cheaper food, I was inevitably supporting practices I do not believe in. Cheaper food is cheaper because it exploits workers, and abuses the environment.

    Eating is a completely different experience on the farm, one I am very fortunate to have. The work is fair, the pay is honest, and our relationship with the land is respectful. We give it what it needs, and it repays in kind.

    Unfortunately, there is an observed problem of access to good food, one that can often be drawn on lines of racial inequality. Buying organic is often out of reach, and Walmart or McDonald’s appears to be the best or only option. But when I go to market, and see what our customers get for $30, in quality and quantity, I cannot believe I shopped at Walmart. If I were a customer, which I have no doubt I will be in the future if I am not still an employee, I would be proud to be supporting better practices, and to be receiving a better product.

    To be an activist does not necessarily mean you must be on the front lines with a picket sign. It can be as simple as making more informed choices at the grocery store. By supporting local, small scale sustainable agriculture, we are supporting the health of the earth, the health of ourselves, and the health of society. It is an act of liberation and solidarity. The more we choose to buy from farmers who are doing the right thing, the more this opportunity will be presented to others.

    I needed to find myself on a farm before I truly grasped this, but awareness is free to anyone, and it is often the most powerful thing we can do.