The Colson farm was in Durham, Maine, about forty minutes outside of Portland. Durham is very rural--more of a postal address than a town. There were no stoplights, and the nearest grocery store was more than a half hour away. You could see the neighbor's house in the distance, but other than that, you would never see other human beings without driving somewhere.

The whole farm was about twenty-five acres, of which only one and a half were actually farmed. It consisted of a main farm house where the Colsons lived, a wooden barn where we weighed and bundled produce for sale, a metal barn that housed equipment and hay, and a permanent solar greenhouse that was used to let the seedlings grow and get ready for the field. There were also three movable greenhouses that were used for tomatoes and peppers, which require hotter weather than other food we grew. And about a half a mile back past that main group of structures, in a wooded area, were the two yurts where the farm apprentices lived.

A yurt is a kind of hut that's shaped like a cone. They've been used in Mongolia for centuries. Traditionally, they are made of grass, but ours had wood floors and tarp coverings. They were about twenty feet in diameter and about five feet tall on the sides, then they went up into the cone, which was capped by a skylight. The best thing about the yurt was living in a round space. It was very calming--maybe because there were no harsh angles. But the conditions were tough: no electricity or running water. I brought about a gallon of water a day down from the main farmhouse to cook with, drink and wash dishes. I also had a kerosene heater, a propane stove, a tiny refrigerator run by propane and batteries for my radio. That was it for technology. To wash dishes, I would heat up two huge pans of water on the stove, wash the dishes in one of them and rinse them in the other. It was a huge pain in the ass.

There were just two apprentices--me and Nora. We each had our own yurt. Nora was a hippie, a staunch feminist and a severe outdoorswoman. She grew up in a small town in northern Michigan in extremely harsh weather and was terrified of cities. She was very nice and we became friends, but we were pretty different. I tried to be around other people as much as I could, but there were only seven of us living on the farm, so my choices were limited. It was very, very hard and lonely. I got there in early May and left in October, which wasn't quite the end of the season, but the work load was drastically reduced by then, so I could leave without feeling guilty.

My boss was the head of the family, Dave Colson. Dave was extremely, extremely neurotic. And overbearing and stifling and bossy. He got angry if you questioned anything at all. I think it was due to both his personality and the fact that he had to feed a family of five on $14,000 a year. He was obsessed about making every cent he possibly could. I once made some salsa to take to a gathering of organic farm workers and Dave questioned me about where certain ingredients in the salsa came from--he thought maybe some of it could have been sold. I think he finally realized he was being absurd, because he eventually left me alone, but it was ridiculous--I mean he was yelling at me about a jar of salsa.

Dave was always overseeing our work. He was obsessive about weeding and would double-check to see if you were doing it correctly. And if you weren't, he'd blow up and start cussing. I felt like saying, "Look, I might not be the smartest person you ever met, but I can pull out a goddamn weed, okay?" Sometimes, in the field, Nora and I would look over at each other after ten hours of weeding and just start laughing at the absurdity of it and him. We needed to, just to retain our sanity.

We worked Monday through Friday starting at 8 a.m. We got an hour for lunch and then quit when the work was finished, which was usually around 5 p.m., although on harvest days it could be much later. Still, we had it a lot easier than workers on farms with livestock--they have to get up at the crack of dawn to feed the animals and milk the cows.

On Saturdays, Dave taught us a class on various farm issues that lasted from 9 to about 1 or so. He talked about soil and plant classification, garden design, stuff like that. It was good to learn why we were doing certain things certain ways, because other than that class, we were just drones schlepping through our days.

One good thing about Dave is that he did integrate Nora and me into his family. We all had dinner about once a week, we'd go swimming on the lake, we would watch TV in the main house, we would babysit his kids, etc. It felt like a family, which was especially nice since no one else was around. And Dave knew what he was doing. As awful as he was about explaining how you did something wrong--he was right about it. He had traveled in Nepal, had farmed on the West Coast, even went to a Quaker high school where the students had to sustain themselves by farming, so he was very knowledgeable. If I were running his farm, I wouldn't change anything about the day-to-day operations, I'd just try to be more open-minded than Dave was. I'd try to understand the workers' situation and their reasons for living and working there. And not be so hostile.

In the beginning, we spent most of our time taking care of the seedlings, trimming them, planting them, tilling the field. As time went on, the week broke down into two "harvest" days and three "work" days. On work days, the tasks varied, but always included a lot of weeding. The farm was certified organic, so all of the weeding had to be done by hand. On harvest days, we picked the produce to fill the next day's order. We had a specific client base--mostly high-end restaurants and organic markets in Portland and Freeport--that would place orders twice weekly. This worked out well for the farm because we only picked exactly what we needed--nothing went to waste.

The day following a harvest day, Dave drove into the towns to deliver the produce. Nora and I traded off going with him. It was a satisfying experience to meet the people who bought the food you grew. In general, they were very happy with it. The quality was so high because Dave was so neurotic.

There was occasional variation in our schedule. For example, some days we might have to turn the compost pile with shovels, or spread some compost on the field. We would also take care of the buildings and barns--weeding around them, painting, whatever needed to be done. All the work was back-breaking. I was constantly exhausted. Sometimes I could barely walk by the end of the day. I usually went to sleep at 9:30 or so and just dreamt about farming all night long. Most of the dreams involved weeding. I would pull a weed up and it would grow back instantly. I would pull it up again, but as soon as I did, it would grow back again. So I started pulling and pulling and pulling as fast as I could but they would grow back bigger than before right before my eyes.

I made $75 a week. This went to paying the minimum on my credit card, gas, movies in Portland, and food that we couldn't get from the farm, such as pasta and rice. We were allowed to eat produce from the farm that we couldn't sell because it was off-color or had a bad spot or something like that. It was all perfectly good, though. In fact, it was great--some of the best food I've ever had.

On Saturdays and Sundays, I would drive to the beach or go to Portland to see a movie or drink a beer. But that was about it for my social life. I had five visitors in six months. I missed companionship so much that I became pretty depressed. It was sad--when I'd been getting ready to go up to the farm, I was so excited, but when I got there, I cried every day. I'm neurotic and self-doubting to start with, so when Dave would criticize something I did, I took it very personally. And the Colsons weren't just my bosses; we had to depend on each other and have a personal contact. So my self-doubt about our work relationships would spill over into my self-doubt about our personal relationships. I let things brew inside of me and generally have difficulty getting close to people, which probably made the isolation I was feeling worse. I considered leaving the farm all the time, but I would have felt bad for being a quitter and for not being able to deal with the isolation. I wanted to prove that I could get through it. And eventually, I did. I learned to deal with it, which I'm proud of.

Now I work in an office in midtown Manhattan. And it's funny, but looking back, I'd say I really liked the farm. I was very excited to leave, but I learned a lot. I learned how to grow food, which everyone should know. I learned to cope somewhat with loneliness, and if I have to be alone sometime in the future, it will be easier for me. I became more tolerant, more appreciative of life as a whole. And I felt very healthy. In some ways, I really miss it. The only bad part was being under Dave's control, feeling like I had no voice. Other than that, life was just much more simple then. I was so incredibly healthy--now I'm sick all the time and I am always rushing around. On the farm, I could focus on myself--now I spend ten hours a day either at work or in transit to work. And when I do have free time, I'm so overstimulated in the city, that I veg out in my room a lot. And my office work is not like farm work, where you're alone a lot of the time in the field and you can think--at my current job, I barely have time to breathe. So I'm not going back to the farm anytime soon, but I miss it.

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TO ARCHIVE