I’ve Been Adopted… or Abducted

My new farm is an apple orchard is run by Claire and Brian, a couple in their fifties, along with Dylan, their ten-year-old son. This is the type of struggling organic farm I expected to find more often when I first started WWOOFing. To supplement their farm income, Claire works as a midwife and Brian picks up carpentry jobs whenever he can. Brian also makes deliveries for the local Montana Growers Cooperative once or twice a week, but these side gigs aren’t making anyone rich. Claire and Brian both work long days to scrape by and make ends meet, and WWOOFers are the only other support they get.

For me, this means long work days—and lots of them. My last two farms each required four to five hour work days five days a week. Here, I work anywhere from eight to twelve hours every single day.

To be fair, we rarely reach the twelve hour mark, and Claire and Brian have had no problem with me cutting my workdays short every now and then so I can meet up with friends from my last farm up the road. On the day I arrived, I asked Brian what kind of schedule was expected of me and he told me they don’t hold their volunteers to schedules, adding that as long as he feels I’m regularly putting in good work he’ll be happy. They both thank me often for working so hard, so I feel I’m fulfilling their expectations.

The long days are definitely taking their toll on me; my energy drains fast and I feel worn out and exhausted all the time. I don’t doubt they’d be okay with me working less, but it’s hard to stop when I know they really need the help. For example, when apples start to fall off a tree, that tree needs to be picked fast to avoid losing the fruit (apples that hit the ground are unsalable because the fall causes them to bruise and spoil easily). Losing that crop means a lost profit for an already tight budget, so when Claire needs to spend the day making apple butter for the farmer’s market and Brian has to put in a few hours moving irrigation pipes, I find it difficult to stop working instead of picking that tree.

By the way, it’s a heck of a lot of work to pick an apple tree.


It helps that Brian and Claire are so appreciative, and they do take good care of me here. This is the first farm where I really feel I’m part of the family. We eat all our meals together, take bike rides together, watch movies together and spend most of our evenings just hanging out together in the house or playing games. They even took me to the Western Montana Fair so I could see Dylan’s award-winning 4-H chicken—paid my admission and insisted on treating me to a big plate of sweet potato fries, and Dylan was really excited to show me his prize bird and blue ribbon. I did happen to notice that every single animal in the room had a blue ribbon on its cage, but I decided to keep that to myself.

It didn’t take long for me to fall into the routine at this place, and more than once I’ve caught myself about to call Claire “mom” or fight over Legos with Dylan like I once did with my brothers. That’s pretty cool to me, especially considering that at my last farm it was awkward just walking into the house for the food I was working for.

Then again, I have considered the possibility that Claire and Brian are employing some complicated brainwashing tactics to gradually convince me that they really are my parents so that I feel obliged to give them free labor for the rest of my life. Although I haven’t found any evidence yet, I have a sinking suspicion they may be part of some freaky apple-worshiping cult. I also think they may be after my hair.

Just to be safe, I keep a secret stash of my mom’s famous pumpkin cookies in the tipi. That taste is a jolt back to my childhood their mind control techniques can’t even begin to compete against. Yeah, I’m that clever. One step ahead, all the time.

Being a WWOOFer, you learn to be prepared for situations like this. There are a lot of weirdos out there.