I took the kids to the local university organic farm Summerfest, which was also a Masters degree celebration for a friend of ours. I’d never been out to the farm before (we don’t get out enough). It’s 10 acres out behind other horticulture areas in the farmlands south of campus. Michelle, our friend, was in charge of setting up greenhouses and gardens out of nothing. Now there are several greenhouses and a bunch of nifty garden plots and orchards. There’s a casual kitchen and office space with bikes and such inside one of the greenhouses. Lots of tools in racks and big carts and about an acre of compost mounds. Michelle is taking off now and crazily enough another friend of ours from out of town is coming in and managing.
To get there we drove thru a big chunk of agricultural land then we wended our way thru dirt parking lots and behind modern farm buildings and modern research orchards (I would’ve gotten lost if a farmworker hadn’t been driving out at the time). Then you go down a gravel lane and suddenly there’s a world of small-world farming, with cedar arbors and such. It’s still flatlands. And it’s between two freeways, but you can hardly tell. There’s a big woodlot to the side.
Anyway, it was evening and they had Xmas lites all lit up in a greenhouse and it was a potluck so there was a huge spread of fresh produce vittles plus lots of flowers. My kids wanted to pick apples. Michelle said “Just go pick em.” They had these tiny apple trees producing heavily only a few years after planting. I helped set up big tables outside, someone got a bonfire going along with coals in a grilling barrel. One young gal brought a big chunk of one of her cows to grill.
What was supercool was the young head winemaker brought like 50 bottles of all kinds of MSU wine—Champagnes, ports, the works. Real wineglasses. I knew I was in a good place when I saw a young hippy gal bring out two cut-crystal wineglasses as she was setting up chairs. So dinner got rolling and after a full plate I was wandering around having small portions of various red wines and lopping off pieces of steak. The kids played the whole time in a nearby freshly plowed field with 2 hulahoops, for some reason. Then a local Captain Beefheart-style random fusion band got set up with lights and stuff and played. It was neat watching the clear sky get dark blue then black and starry out there in the fields.
Years ago my brother and friends and I launched an 8-foot-tall rocket right there, before there were gardens. We should’ve gotten aviation clearance for that one. It went out of sight for minutes. Oh yeah! Plane height easily. Years before that I used to go running out there. Now here’s a bunch of young people doing a whole big scene, feeding the world and such. Cool how time goes by.
There were all ages in attendance at the potluck, lots of community garden customers. (The organic farm students sell subscriptions to local people for the produce they raise. There must be a totally wacky combination of free enterprise and degree credits going on out there.) Many older adults I said Hi to were also students, surprisingly. The profs there were longhair hippies. The one who got the grants flowing is half Indian—he gave the two graduating gals Indian-theme wool blankets for presents. One friend said there were almost too many grants going at times, making things a little hectic. Ann Arbor friends showed up, plus a longtime true blue organic farm family we know. The farmer is a quiet guy with gnarly hands and often wears a dirty orange jumpsuit to social functions. I consider him a celebrity. A real farmer! You know: hours a day on a tractor and not even going bankrupt. A hero as far as I’m concerned.
When it got too dark to see the plowed field we left.
But there was a big freak-out about this whole thing for me.
One mile away 40,000 drunk moron students who were all wearing the same outfits (stripy shirts and backward hat for the guys and slut-wear for the girls) were just settling into their first day of town-destroying partying as Moo-U school was starting up. Our farm party was eons, lightyears, complete paradigms away from the cell-phones, advertising-and-management-job-oriented, standing-in-lines-for-hours-to-get-drunk reality of the rest of campus. I mean, the presence of alcohol in town provokes mounted riot police. Literally. Every weekend. There’s a bizarre gestapo double-lie standard insanely obsessing in both directions—from the kids bent on getting drunk every single night and staying out literally every night until 4 a.m., and from all the adults and officials who throw big budgets at zero-tolerance for drinking among minors—and carding me, with gray hair, with blank expressions. Zombies zombies everywhere. Not to mention the restaurants all serving crap crap crap and ripping each other off on the prices to boot.
So, while that world of mirrors perverts itself in town, here we were out in the fresh air and countryside, with everyone of all ages, with university-grown wine flowing freely under the stars, sharing the great food and flowers for free, like it’s been done for centuries.
[I couldn’t find any online images of the most common scene in East Lansing: hundreds of idiot students standing in line to pay thru the nose to stand around (naked if you’re a girl, in stripey shirt and backwards baseball hat if you’re a guy—no matter what weather: no appropriate attire ever allowed) and talk on cellphones and get drunk in a mob with mounted police looking on. Why are there no photos of the most common social situation? Weird. Nearly all MSU students do this until 4 a.m. every night. And they scream, too. I’m hardly overstating it. Amazing, huh? —These are innocent kids. Imagine the stress their souls are enduring and reacting to (the only reason they drink) as they learn what they have to do to thrive as a greedhead. It’s proof of the near-100% failure of the adults of MSU to create an actual learning environment for a sustainable, truly developmental world. It’s a tragedy. Oh, nationwide you say? Imagine that. Here’s the best pic I could find…but it’s a photo that shows WAY too much activity. MSU drunk-mob students are a static herd 99% of the time—when a good or bad game plus mounted police rile them up, then they stampede.]
