Chapter 7 - Camphill Minnesota 1985-6


    Camphill Minnesota had been founded three or four years before by Hartmut and Gerda von Jeetze in response to requests from parents of mentally handicapped adults in Minneapolis. The von Jeetzes had been at the Camphill Village at Copake, NY, for many years when they set out to pioneer Camphill in the prairie. Several Kimberton Co-workers had already spent time in Minnesota helping out as two new houses were built, a dairy herd assembled and a number of Villagers and Co-workers were gathered. Now the Village was ready to support the work of a full-time gardener.

    Beyond the prospect of working with cows, I was attracted to Minnesota because of an article written by Hartmut in 1977 called “In Defense of ‘Old-Fashioned’ Training: A few words of wisdom for all trainees, apprentices and master growers alike.” In this piece Hartmut points out the unexpected lessons that a learner might encounter in a training that might truly prepare her or him for life as a master gardener or farmer, lessons such as the necessity for order [picture an Amish farmyard], the need to submit oneself completely to doing what one is asked to do [Ask the Task], submission to repetitive tasks [which leads to an inner stability and sense of rhythm], perseverance [which lends certainty and tranquility to all our work], and non-preference [no task on a farm is to be preferred over any other, Hartmut says; again the task is what counts, not the self.]  Noting how similar these boldfaced points may seem to those involved in spiritual training, he concludes, "Is there any true outer training which is not at the same time an inner one?"

    As strange and unaccustomed as these instructions may seem to the apprentice, in his examples and encouragements Hartmut made them seem at least attainable. He gives little help in his article, however, to the master farmer who must try to instill these virtues in the trainee. In the years since my Minnesota experience I worked with many apprentices and found that most, not all, were tetchy about obedience and that the trainer needs to be oh-so careful about not hurting feelings. Self is in ascendance, political correctness is all, and we are spoiled, spoiled, spoiled.  Note the repetition of the word “submit,” above and ask yourself, in your recent experience of life, if you have actually seen anyone surrender self to anything except under compulsion.  Mothers, maybe.

    The farm consisted of a couple of hundred acres north of Sauk Center and south of Long Prairie, hay fields, pastures and woods, with the Sauk River running through. There were two new houses with handicapped folks and Co-workers, the original farmhouse, and a trailer home where we were invited to live.  The trailer was also home to the Village bakery one afternoon a week.

    I began immediately to work in the barn, appropriately at the low end of the organizational chart, washing udders.  We were milking 25-30 Guernseys,  beginning at 4:30 AM and 4:30 PM.  Earlier for the person designated to bring the cows in from pasture, which might take 30-45 minutes since they would not be rushed.  It is not in a dairy cow’s, nor the dairyman’s, nature to hurry.  There were four of us on the milking crew: the farmer, Don Wilson, who was raised at Camphill Village USA, Copake, NY, and had his Biodynamic training in Germany; two experienced Villagers, who detached the milking machine cups and carried the milk to the bulk tank, and me, the lowly udder washer.  We each milked 13 times a week, with one morning milking time off, when we got to sleep in.  

    We arrived in Minnesota in early November, so the daylight hours were already quite short and I walked to the barn each morning under a dark sky with brilliant stars. Dawn would not break until we were almost finished milking at 7:00 AM or so.  When we arrived at the barn each had his job to do, bringing the cows in, distributing hay in front of the stanchions, measuring out the grain ration each cow received, based on her production that week, getting the machines and the wash buckets ready.  All this was facilitated because the barn had been made clean and tidy after the previous milking. There was not a lot of chatter among us as we got ready to milk.

    I squatted alongside each cow with warm wash water and rinse buckets and gently and scrupulously washed teats and udders, the first line of defense against contamination of the milk. This was not too difficult unless the cow had lain down in a manure pie, which happened often enough in the lot, not so often when they were on pasture.  This washing, rinsing and drying process, the massaging, scrubbing, and kneading, stimulated the cow to let down her milk from the reservoirs in the udder into the teats. If our timing was working well, Don would be ready right behind the cow with a milking machine in hand as I finished.  These were relatively ancient machines that hung on a belt around the cow’s middle and attached by a hose to a vacuum line running at the back of each milking stall.  Meanwhile our Villager partners would be weighing the milk from the last cow and carrying it to the next room—steam cleaned that morning—and pouring it through a filter into the bulk tank.

    It was all an elaborate rhythm, a dance featuring clunky guys in barn overalls, performed twice a day. The little talk we engaged in was mostly low murmurs of encouragement or caution to the cows, “Whoa, Miranda…easy there…move that foot,” “Whoop, Buttercup…now then…be still,” “Step forward there, Girl, let me in there…”  The cows were rarely fractious; they knew the routine as well as we did and they had their food in front of them. Their calves were near at hand in their own pen in the barn waiting, not all that quietly, to be bottle fed. The calves—perhaps it seems cruel and unnatural, but there’s no other way—are taken from their moms the first few hours after the birthing, after they’ve had their first drink of colostrum. Thereafter for a few days they continue to get their mom’s first milk. After that, any cow’s milk will do. 

    After morning milking, turning the cows out into their lot and cleaning up the milking machines we would gather at the Farmhouse for breakfast, then have a bit of a break before returning to the barn. One of us would walk the cows to their pasture, during the months when the grass was available, roughly from April into November, and the rest would clean the barn, forking manure and straw bedding from the stalls where the cows stood during milking into the gutters behind, then into the manure spreader which I learned to back into the barn. Then a good sweeping and dusting of lime to provide sure footing for the cows the next time they entered.  In all, with preparation time, milking, feeding the calves and cleanup the whole process took three to four hours. Typically we’d done almost half a day’s work before 9:00 AM.  There are modern dairies where many more cows are milked in such a time span, but none where it was done more humanely than at Camphill Minnesota. Nor where so-called mentally impaired people were valued, much appreciated members of the team.

    Three weeks after we arrived at Camphill Minnesota my father died. I talked with Hartmut after my sister called with the news and he assured me that the Village would pay for my flight to Kentucky from its social fund, reserved for just such emergencies. It was a Saturday and, since I couldn’t fly out until the following day, he invited me to Bible Evening at his and Gerta’s house to tell a bit about my dad.

    Bible Evening is a feature of Camphill life I haven’t mentioned.  Every Saturday evening Villagers and Co-workers in each house got spruced up, lit candles, and sat around the dining table to talk of happenings in the house, the Village and perhaps the wider world during the previous week. My contribution that week was to speak of my dad, his boyhood in a St. Louis orphanage, his 55-year marriage to my mother, the long walks we took together when I was a lad, and his exemplary, upright life. Hartmut’s kind invitation helped to focus my grieving and perhaps helped the folks at Coleman house to know me better.

    After conversation, the Bible Evening program included a reading of the Bible passage specified for the coming week, a little explanation of it, then a snack. This simple agenda, along with the Sunday service, anchored the week for all of us, closing and opening it in a graceful way.

    Camphill is not a religious movement. These activities were definitely optional [except perhaps for house parents, who were more or less obliged to make them available for their Villagers]. There is no liturgy [the Sunday Service is austere in the extreme], no priesthood, no chapel. Humility replaces hierarchy and the goal is not to convert mankind but rather to spiritualize the landscape, uplift the ordinary and raise everybody’s vibration in so doing. 

    Laurens van der Post writes, “…Camphill, to put it the Christian way, is doing New Testament work in a modern idiom, through its care of the despised and rejected, the physically handicapped and the unloved. In doing so, it is characterized by a rediscovery of what are the first and highest values in the natural life of man.”

    Another fixed point in the week was the Village meeting on Tuesday evenings. In a Village the size of Copake or Kimberton this would have been difficult or impossible, but at Minnesota the group of 20-some Villagers and Co-workers fit nicely in the living room of St. Christopher house. All attended except mothers or dads of small children who had other responsibilities that time of day. 

    Hartmut suggested for me the role of facilitator of the meeting, and I accepted. There was no honor in this but only the responsibility to run the meeting smoothly, encourage everyone’s participation and hear them all out without letting the gathering run on too long. Since the milkers had to be up at four the next morning and others were well aware of this, cooperation on that last point was not too hard to come by. In the Village meeting announcements were made—guests and others coming and going, new regulations by the State of Minnesota, building projects initiated or completed, a calving—festivals planned, individual achievements acknowledged. 

    One such announcement came in January: a Mid-Winter Festival, toboggans and snow fun, warm snacks and drinks out in the hillside pasture! One morning in January the thermometer was just touching minus 40 as I headed for the barn—happily, the cows were in the barn these nights, content in their stanchions with thick straw bedding and each other for warmth and company—and the barn was comparatively toasty, in the mid-40s. The udder washer guy was happy to snuggle next to the cows with his hot water buckets and the metabolic furnaces rumbling at his shoulder. They went outside to their holding pen during the morning while we cleaned the barn.

    I was in charge of the mid-Winter festival and loaded a pile of firewood and a wood stove onto a hay wagon with the food and drinks and straw bales for people to sit on, the toboggans and snow saucers and skis. There was maybe a foot of new snow, not too much to prevent pulling a wagon with a tractor to the hillside site I’d chosen. The Villagers and Co-workers were in high spirits, well-acclimated to the cold and set to have fun.  We enjoyed each other’s company, tobogganed gleefully down the slopes, made snowmen and snow angels.  We gathered around the wood stove in between times for hot chocolate, cookies and toasted cheese sandwiches until the afternoon light began to diminish and the milkers needed to get back to tend to the evening milking.

    The farmers were aware that the time from mid-January to mid-February is known in Biodynamic idiom as the Crystallization Period, when the water and earth elements beneath our feet are most open to cosmic influences, when “…the strongest formative forces, the strongest crystallizing forces, can develop within the Earth…” as Steiner says in his agriculture lectures. This sets the stage for the growth of the plants in the next season, just at the time, incidentally, when the gardener’s imagination is trending in that direction as well and uplifted by the seed catalogs coming with every mail.   

    At one point in late winter, discerning a tendency of mine toward independent action, Hartmut encouraged me to share my intentions for a new project with the Village. I had gone with him to check that a set of old storm windows stored in a shed and that I wanted to use to construct an improvised greenhouse were truly available for my purposes, and he let me know that it would be most appropriate for me to tell in the Village meeting about my plans. Otherwise, he said, people would see what I was doing in building the greenhouse and wonder why they’d been left out, not told what was happening.  This was a lesson in community for which I was grateful once I thought about it, but in the moment I may have had a flash of irritation at such an unwonted curb on my usual much-cherished autonomy. 

    This little greenhouse was designed with two unique features that, in the end,  actually seemed to work.  First, I built it against the south wall of the chicken house a visitor had built for the community just before I arrived. This effectively determined the length of the greenhouse, about 14 feet, and its design as a lean to house rather than a free-standing one, but more importantly gave it a warm north wall instead of one exposed to the winds out of Manitoba with just a few barbed wire fences in between. The other feature presaged a much larger greenhouse I built many years later in Arizona: this little house was built pit-style, that is, one went three steps down into it, the theory being that warmth of the earth would moderate the temperature in there.  A window into the chicken house allowed some of the chicken-warmth in there as well. 

    The glazing for this greenhouse was old wooden frame storm windows left over from the renovation of the Farmhouse, and all the other materials were salvaged as well, wood for the foundation plate and kneewall, the end walls and a used door.
    I was able to build this little house after a thaw in late winter, in time to use it for garden starts that summer season and for tomatoes and peppers grown all summer, since the Minnesota summers are [can be, at least] uncongenial for such warmth-loving critters.

    Don Wilson, using the big farm tractor, plowed and disked and spread Biodynamic compost on a nice, flat acre-and-a-half parcel with a creek on two sides, situated below the farm buildings. I was able to pull irrigation water from the creek later in the season.  For that first Minnesota garden I concentrated on staples, nothing too exotic.  Potatoes [which were planted in the middle of May], sweet corn [early June], onions [mostly from sets, and a lot of them], some salad and brassicas [cabbage and broccoli].  We prepared a separate field, a little under an acre in a different location for space-hogging winter squash grown in place from seed, again considered a staple crop for winter. 

    I would have been happy to have had a large rototiller for between-row cultivation in a garden this size, but Hartmut and Don opted for a small utility tractor, a 25-year-old Massey-Ferguson, with a cultivator. This choice made sense for such extra-gardening tasks as pulling hay wagons and the manure spreader, but it was kind of clumsy, I felt, in the garden. In the end I did a lot of the cultivation with a push-from-behind high wheel cultivator bought from a yard sale in Sauk Center for $25 and fitted with a bicycle wheel to replace the old, heavy iron wheel. This item worked beautifully for me and I’m sure similar cultivators worked ten thousand gardens grown by these sensible Minnesotans over many decades.

    Overall, there was nothing beautiful about this garden, but it was a highly productive one and, I’m sure, fed the folks at Camphill Minnesota right on through the winter.  I wasn’t there to experience that for, after a little less than a year, I left to join my little family in Quincy, Illinois. After five years in Camphill it was time to strike out on my own.