The 800-Pound Hoop House – And the Mad Dash to Freightville
All’s well that ends with Roasted Cauliflower and Peanut Sauce
Hello friends! I want to thank you for your support of my first month on Substack. It means a lot as I juggle (happily) a new combo of full-time work + writing + starting (very slowly) a new farm business. This week instead of a buffet-style Sidebar, I have a day-in-the-life essay for you — nothing as passionate as last week, but a more plainspoken argument for just showing up, putting one foot in front of the other, and getting the job done. After that, a few suggestions (a podcast and a music video) and a recipe for Roasted Cauliflower with Peanut Sauce. Cheers!
The Mad Dash to Freightville
We are sitting outside the closed service station on Route 25 in Pocasset, Mass., on Wednesday morning, waiting for the man to show up, open his shop, and give us the keys to the U-Haul cargo van in his parking lot. He is late. We have a schedule. The goal is to drive to Old Dominion Freight Line’s terminal in Cumberland, R.I., pick up 800 pounds of hoop house parts, turn around, and get back to Woods Hole to make the 1:15 ferry.
We came over on the 7 a.m. boat. I am playing hooky from work, but my boss knows this. It is something of an emergency, the kind silly people trying to be farmers have from time to time. It’s the result of the hoop house shipping out from Tennessee unexpectedly two weeks early. And the fact that we (foolishly) tried to save money by not paying the extra cost ($550) of shipping it all the way to the Island. Now we must quickly retrieve it (eight bundles and boxes totaling 783 pounds) before they start charging us for storage and possibly shunting it off to some other facility.
9 a.m. turns to 9:30 and my husband is on the phone with U-Haul customer service (in Arizona?). Unbelievably, they actually reach the owner at home, call back and tell us, “He’ll be there in 10 minutes.”
I decide to walk around the parking lot. The sun is shining and it is a relatively balmy 40 degrees. It feels good to be cut loose from routine, to have this hall pass for a few hours, even if I can count 20 ways things could go wrong today, starting with this delay. I wander over to the Tuk Tuk Thai diner next door, which is open for business though bereft of customers, and inspect a collection of plastic window boxes with dead herbs strewn outside the side entrance. Behind the diner where the macadam ends, I see what clearly are four or five makeshift vegetable beds nestled against a chain link fence. I don’t know what to think of the soil back there or whether I’d necessarily want to eat vegetables grown in it, but I’m impressed by the effort.
Our guy arrives, claiming his guy called in sick. He shakes his head and asks us if we want to buy his business. Then we chat about Martha’s Vineyard a little bit. “Do you like it there?” Yes, we say, and he scowls. “I got stuck out there once, thought I’d never get back. Made me panicky.”
He is a nice man, really. Just tired.
Soon we are sitting high up in our bus, a strange feeling to be so far off the ground. At home, our aging fleet of pre-2009 vehicles (three, all red, with 300,000 + miles between them) do not require a step ladder to get into.
Googling directions and doling out pretzels and Gin-Gins for treats, I try not to micromanage the driving from the passenger seat, though I do emit gasps and a few strong words when we take the first roundabout a little too fast for me. (Is it just me, or do these vans seem tippy?)