Back to the Dirt

I grew up in White Bear Lake, Minnesota in the 1950's and '60's.  "Bear Town" is a suburb of and 10 miles from St. Paul, the capital of Minnesota.  My street, named after Florence somebody, was a gravel road intersected by Second Street, named after somebody named Second.  It too was a dirt road.  What side of the tracts do you suppose I lived on?  I walked three blocks to school, rain or shine with option to go home for lunch.  St. Mary's of the Lake School was where I honed my wisdom teeth and life's attitude.  I was a hyperactive child when it came to sitting in the classroom.  I belonged outside, playing in the dirt, sailing popsicle sticks in mud puddles and riding my bike anywhere I needed to go within a 10 mile radius of my house.  Parents had less fears for their absentee children in those days I guess. 

Mike Buesseler was is my best friend.  He lived nine blocks from my house and on a straight line through St. Mary's School.  Being taught to fear Hell at St. Mary's we clung to each other like velcro hoping we'd get extended time in Purgatory if we didn't goof off too much in church.  We eventually outgrew church making the nuns and the church better off for it.  That in itself eliminated our chances of becoming President of the "Christian" United States of America.  That settled, we relaxed and lived happily ever after, pretty much; well mostly, sometimes.

I remember taking a test in a high school councilor's office aimed to help me decide what I was going to be when I grew up.  I requested that I get the same results as Mike, I believe.  One of the test results suggested I try farming. I guess I must have indicated an interest in music too.  So I graduated from White Bear High School completely forgetting everything I was supposed to have learned including my musical farming destiny.  In 1965 at age 17 I didn't really care. I was going to college because all my high school buds were going to college.  I was not inclined to go to farming or musician school if there even was such options at that time.  In 1966 heading off to college for me was someplace to go and hang out with old and new friends and I was clueless about pegging a career.  Mostly I was nervous about leaving home for the first time.  Hell, I had never even flown in an airplane at age 18.  I did take a train ride to Luck, Wisconsin once though.  I think that was 50 or 60 miles from the St. Paul train station.  We even packed a lunch for that expedition.
 

In 1970, after marrying my high school sweetheart, Sharon, and belabored cerebral efforts, a B.S. in Biology Education was awarded to me.  Then, there was a lottery number, the luckless Number 35  the then coveted "Would you like to be a soldier in Viet Nam Award").  This number included the unwanted and most traumatic decision of my youth.  Canada?  Prison?  War?  Some choices.  I joined the Air Force and ended up, not in Viet Nam, but in Anchorage, Alaska getting a divorce and working in surgery in the Elmendorf Air Force Base hospital. This had little to do with being a farmer don't you think?.  Yet, in a way it did.  I met my second wife to be, Lyn, in 1973, also a sergeant in the hospital squadron and she conjured up my stored memories of what else I needed to become. 

We were discharged from the Air Force in 1974 (thank God that war is over at least) after a hospital chapel wedding and an all expenses paid honeymoon in an upstairs apartment in the beautiful downtown Anchorage pawnshop district.  Our dreams of my musical career and our farm started then, enhanced by the smell of curing sauerkraut rising up from our landlords main floor hallway.  I'm not sure he really knew how to ferment cabbage without producing near lethal odors aimed at driving out the fornicating tenants upstairs.  We were not always married and truthful to Mr. Allen our pawn broker landlord.  I remember the day he showed us our names in the legal section of the newspaper and asked us if that was our marriage license notice.  We told him we couldn't believe there was another couple in Anchorage with the same name as ours, his truly legitimate occupants of the 'kraut' apartment under his ownership.  He didn't throw us out for lying to him, but his eyes never stopped saying 'goodbye' after that.  Still, in 1974, some behaviors were best kept in the closet.  

Soon and before determining farming was our fate, we moved to Kenai, Alaska and Lyn delivered Jessica.   I worked in a retrofitted and given to the Native American's in Kenai WW II 'crypto' building growing hydroponic warm season vegetables with the University of Alaska and a cucumber Professor from Cornell University.  He was sponsored as supervising the project while working under a grant from GE Corporation  We were going to bring greenhoused, multi-spectrum lighted hydroponic vegetables to every bush village in Alaska.  I lasted a year and since it was legal to grow anything in Alaska at that time, we did.  Mostly we proved we could grow very small tomatoes in a hothouse on the sunny side of our 1940's converted barracks apartment.  Can you see our future in farming materializing here?

Next stop Kodiak, Alaska.  Remember I had a degree in biology.  It was working for us.  It achieved a job in Kenai growing fruit in a windowless WW II crypto building under GE lighting and now I was dragging my yearling daughter and trusting wife off to some island off the coast of Alaska to be a shellfish survey technicial for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.  What that means is I was going to be on a pretty small boat in some of the worst seas in the world counting shrimp and crab, tallying data and making my boss take pot shots at how much the Alaskan fishing fleet could rape and pillage the still pretty pristine ocean floor for protein for the rapidly rising rich corporate folks in Japan.  We arrived in Kodiak with a potential salery of about $600 a month and found housing almost non-existant, but slightly better than cardboard box living in downtown Washington, DC at that time.  Well, we tried and failed at even finding a room to live in.  At that time there were immigant families, mostly Filipino (see this was promises we made in WWII, I guess and before we started fulfilling our promises to all those good jungle savey Hmongs we put in harms way in Viet Nam) renting appartments in Kodiak, sometimes three families to a space so they could affort an appartment, but we couldn't even though I'm sure many of the Filipino families would have taken us in.  Hell, I couldn't have done that to my newly hatched family.  Dad was there during the Big One and had told me stories of trapping wild pigs in New Guinea with loin-clothed natives carrying spears.  Boy, have we outgrown the 70's, I hope. 



Well, now what to do?  We house sat for friends of friends in Eagle River, Alaska for a month and there and then decided we needed to buckle down and get a life as farmers.  We had $5000 in the bank one child in tow and unbeknownst to us one in the hopper.  We decided it was time to pull up my farming aptitude scores from the depths of my unconscious and go find us a farm.

When we left Alaska in 1975 to find our new well being,  we decided to look in my home State of Minnesota. Our total belongings at that time fit into a wooden box four feet by six feet by six feet.  Life wes good.  We even had a small TV stowed in there with our other treasures.  The box would be shipped to my parents house in White Bear Lake sometime after it's voyage to Seattle and the trainride to Minnesota.  We had high hopes of soon being real farmers, but that dream was to remain cerebral. We didn't have enough money to buy a farmers mailbox no less his farm in 1975.   We decided to use our "G.I. Bill" benefit, go achieve more of that good old time college education, get jobs and save more money.  We had our second child, Zach, before Lyn's Psych 101 Final and somehow we finished enough college compromising to find real jobs. 

We left St. Cloud State University in 1978 and our farm dream would be stored until 2007 after both Lyn and I retired from successful careers in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. I guess working on wildlife problems for our careers was somehow like practicing to become farmers.  Certainly all the gardening, landscaping, coop shopping and dreaming of farming while in our civilian careers was some preparation.  We believed it was.  Idiots can believe anything they want to, don'tcha know?

Sometimes, it seems, the best time to become a farmer is not the first time you want to be a farmer. We found our farm in August 2007.  I knew it fit our dream as soon as the Ron Peterson our realtor turned off County Highway 21 toward our future driveway.  Lyn was 57 that year, I turned the Big 60 corner.  We had a house for sale in Montana, but somehow we'd make it work.  We did it financially in spite of the housing crash, the economic downturn, hell, I mean the recession, and our disappearing savings and IRA accounts.  I guess we are patient hardworking people.  Our 80 acre farm is in Northwestern Minnesota about three miles from the Town of Callaway.  Richwood, a mile and a half away,  is a classic rural farming crossroads town in decline.  Yet, it supports a general store comfortably serving our immediate sundry and community gathering place needs.   Our path to becoming farmers is illuminated, like a fire hydrant to a dog, and for the last time in my life I was to live on a dirt road.
 
If you follow us on this journey we'll take you off that road and into the good mental and physical work of growing healthy food and learning, day by day, to play in the dirt.  Sure, there's plenty of work to do, but we're retired, remember?


Ron and Lyn Crete
Blue Moo(n) Farm and Ranch
Callaway, MN
Watershed 9020106