This Life Is in Your Hands_ One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone - Melissa Coleman [97]
“Why don’t you two bake for the farm stand?” Papa suggested, when he overheard them talking about bread one day at lunch. Our neighbor Jean was no longer baking the whole-grain bread and coveted cinnamon buns of the previous summer. So Sandy and Pam took on the task, rising before the sun to fetch water from the well; grinding wheat groats with the hand grinder; mixing flour, water, and sourdough starter in wooden bowls in the campground cook shack; then letting it rise and baking it in the gas canister oven, all before everyone else woke up.
Larry loved waking to the aromas coming from the cookhouse. He was drawn not just to the bread, but even more to the chef. From the moment he’d laid eyes on Sandy, he felt an immediate urge to protect and care for her. Hers was such an appealing combination of beauty and shyness, he had to restrain his desire to shield her from the slightest harm. However, the tough whole-grain bread that practically had to be cut with a saw was somewhat less lovable.
“It’s not exactly flying off the shelves,” Pam said, laughing.
That June, Papa and some apprentices piled into VW buses and pickups and headed to UMass-Amherst for the Toward Tomorrow Fair, a gathering to promote sustainable living. Scott Nearing was delivering the keynote address at ninety-three years of age, and a large crowd gathered in the speakers’ hall, young people with cutoffs, healthy beards, and long hair, some sitting on the floor, others fanning themselves in the heat. Helen and Scott sat at a table onstage, Helen knitting as she often did at conferences, unable to let idle time be wasted, her fingers flying toward the completion of a scarf or mitten.
When Scott was introduced, Helen gave him a hefty push up toward the podium, shrugging off, as she did, the burden of the younger wife tending to an aging husband. Scott, his mind sharp even if his social skills were beginning to slacken, shuffled up to the podium, smiled, and said a few words of introduction before delivering his lifelong battle cry.
“Pay as you go!”
The audience cheered enthusiastically at the well-known Nearing belief in eschewing debt, even though Scott then turned and sat back down next to Helen. His job, he must have felt, was done.
One of the young hippies nodding in agreement in the audience was a tall, skinny, and bespectacled twenty-six-year-old redhead named Rob, founder of a new organic seed company. A few years earlier, George Oshawa’s book on macrobiotics, the Asian-inspired diet of whole and raw seasonal foods, had been responsible for Rob’s conversion from a bookish guitar-playing UMass math major to the manager of Amherst’s first health food co-op. Eventually he’d dropped out of college and found himself working on a farm near Keene, New Hampshire, at a commune, of sorts, that provided lodging in the drafty attic of the old farmhouse. Lying in his sleeping bag in that attic, Rob began to dream about seeds, and those dreams turned to action. Where could you find the unique varieties of squash a Japanese buyer had requested, for instance?
He wrote to international seed breeders and farmers, asking for heirloom varieties. Soon he opened a business checking account, moved back to his parents’ home in Massachusetts, and placed an ad in Organic Gardening, advertising heirloom and vintage organic seeds selected for a short growing season. He backed all of his products with an L.L.Bean–style 100 percent satisfaction money-back guarantee, and named his company for the legendary Johnny Appleseed, who wandered America in the 1800s, planting apple trees from seed. Before he knew it, Rob had forty inquiries in his mailbox.
As his business grew, Rob took friends up on an offer to locate his fledgling company on their farm in Maine. As a result of the energy crisis, there was a demand