“This is
the Yadkin Valley. The wind never stops blowing. That’s why we can grow
certain crops here that don’t do well in other parts of the county,”
Dori explains. We’re standing in the enclosed garden space beside her
house, part of her personal piece of Soaring Eagle Farms, a diversified
small-holding in the northern Piedmont of North Carolina.
I ask the obvious
question, “How can you grow enough to eat and to sell from such a small
garden? Is it by using intensive methods?” I indicated the raised beds.
“It’s the
excellent soil,” Dori told me. Dori is articulate and confident. She
smiles and laughs frequently. She doesn’t pepper her speech with “um” or
“like.” She makes whole sentences and often, whole paragraphs, as though
she’s said it all before, or practiced being ready to say it. A
reporter’s dream subject.
I’ve come to talk
to her about the CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) movement, of
which she is a member. But first, the farm tour:
Dori
tells me that not only are the vegetables – tomatoes, hot and sweet
peppers, various cols, and the surprising snow peas and bok choy – set
in deep friable beds, but “in the winter, I open the gates and let the
ducks and chickens in. They thrive on the pests that kill the
vegetables.”
The back
story is this: Dori Fritzinger lives on a commune, though she might not
use that label. She is its most communicative member, but the center of
the hundred acres, the pump that makes the blood flow, is her father,
PaPa Joe Herbst. PaPa retired from a career as a mason in New Jersey and
with Dori’s mother Juanita bought a campground in North Carolina. Dori,
his only child and her husband Keith, moved everything – “the entire
Ark” – and came south to occupy part of his estate (yes, there are
eagles in Surry County, and Soaring Eagle Farm would be a safe habitat).
“I had to
take a long sabbatical from what I loved. We gradually sold off the
goats and other animals to make time for the campground. I went to
school and was getting a degree in Business Administration, and running
the campground for my parents.” Dori’s husband was a long-distance
trucker. It seemed that Dori, who had been raised on a farm and longed
to go back to growing and sowing, was destined to become a businesswoman
whose house sat in the middle of a rural paradise given over to
commerce. Whether the woods and meadows, the lake and the stream, were
wasted on campers and fishers is a point that could be argued, but Dori
found her dreams being sucked dry by the exigencies of management. She
had a house, but no homestead.
