Entry 4: Autumn Weather Arrives

Even a discerning eye can mistake the color of a pepper for that of its leaves.  Crouched low to the ground, I snip and snap peppers off the plants, looking closely for the fruits that so deceptively blend with the rest of the foliage.  Tiny drops of rain speckle my clothing.  Despite the cool autumn temperatures today, the light drizzle feels nice.  It’s easy to warm up when one’s body is constantly in motion.

I’m working against nature’s clock.  Showers will pick up this afternoon.  Have to get the peppers pulled before the first frost comes Sunday night.  The tree-lined horizon is telling us it’s time for the heyday of summer to end as the leaves mark the last fantastic display.

Quiet envelops me.  Aside from the occasional car traveling down Ridge Road, which bisects the old construction and the new, I am thrilled to hear next to no sounds indicating human life.  The construction equipment, stationary on the other side of the road, stands like skeletal re-creations of dinosaurs—so still and silent compared to the grand ruckus that one emanated from those same bodies.

Green grass lies heavy with water on the rolling hills just outside the garden.  If the sun would poke through the clouds, the grass would glisten.  The groomed field doubles as pasture for the chicks and the local population of wildlife.  I haul water to the young roosters whose time on earth is nearly up.  I side-step around a small pile of kibble-sized excrement—rabbit?  The hundreds of acres of forest, adjacent to the field and garden, must be teeming with critters—some more adventurously bold than others, some quite skilled at remaining hidden.

***

I stared at a chipmunk last week and it stared back at me.  I was by the goldfish pond, up the hill from the garden and flush with the lodge.  There’s a plaque situated at the outermost point of the human-made pond, in memory of Sebastian Mueller.  I go there to catch a glimpse of the frog that quickly dives to safety beneath the water’s surface as I approach.  Glimpses are all my eyes can catch.  But the chipmunk is more curious than cautious, it seems, and its gaze locked with mine for a few seconds before it scurried away towards the woods.

***

The chicks are being moved to fresh pasture every day now so the water haul proves to be quite the workout.  Their coops have been rolled further and further down the grassy hill away from the furthest edge of the garden.  I breathe in wet air, the smell of grass, the smell of cold, the smell of rain sans thunder and lightning—milder, softer, and tamer rain, the smell of fall.

Entry 3: A Bit of History and Other Thoughts

The backhoes and dump trucks have done their jobs, and Eden Hall’s campus is beginning to take shape.  The field lab buildings are erected and the amphitheater, a structure intended to foster university-community relationships, is built.  Sustainable design from the ground up.  Yet, the digitally-rendered designs of the Eden Hall campus that appear in admissions literature are still a far cry from the facilities that exist there now.  The original buildings to the property are thus far, the only functional ones.  Looking at the Master Plan for the campus, I can’t help but think of the striking disparities between the hundred-year-old buildings occupying the landscape now and the futuristic-looking design of the buildings to come.

The campus, as it is now, is an old estate.  Situated across the road from the construction site for the new buildings, the farmhouse features tall ceilings on the main floor, perhaps 25 feet in height.  Wood floors adorned with oriental rugs compliment the vintage furniture nicely.  Passing through the atrium, one enters the dining room in which I imagine Sebastian Mueller and his wife, Elizabeth Heinz Mueller, once sat at the large table together, separated from the kitchen by thick walls, as their servants attended to their needs.  The dining room now evokes emptiness.  Perfect place settings amidst a deserted home.  There is no one to eat at the table or prepare food in the small kitchen.  The farmhouse is uninhabited, although it is used.

Upstairs, the bedrooms have been converted into professors’ offices.  Wi-fi is installed but the lead in the glass windows gives one an eerie, distorted frame through which to view the outside world.  The claw-foot tub in the bathroom echoes of antiquity and chic, modern design.  Like many old estates of its kind and time, the farmhouse features two sets of stairways.  Having the two avenues through which to travel up and down does not really have a practical function.  The home is not large enough to justify needing separate sets for the east and west wing.  

Rather, they serve as a reminder to the modern observer how deeply entrenched in society are values and attitudes associated with class, status, race, and gender.  Of course in America, the land of opportunity, everyone has the chance to climb to the social ladder with hard work.  Yet, Mueller’s servants certainly used their own set of the stairs in his home—the ones in the background which can only accommodate for single file traversing and look plain compared to the intricate woodwork of the main stairway in the foreground of the home.

Ironically perhaps, Mueller was a strong advocate for working women, and when he died in 1938, he willed the estate to be a retreat resort for the women factory employees of Heinz.  The values we associate with country life such as fresh air and open spaces no doubt were valued first by factory workers embracing the chance to escape the smoggy city.

The lodge sits opposite the old farmhouse.  It’s where the working women would stay on their vacation.  On the second floor, in between the current classrooms equipped with high speed internet, projectors, and screens, are small bedrooms featuring two twin-size beds per room, made with white sheets tucked into hospital corners.  I entered the bathroom upstairs one day after class and opened the door to what I presumed was a toilet stall only to find a shower.  Funny how when some aspect of your environment clashes with your expectations of that place and it catches you off guard.  

History has a funny way of refusing to be ignored, its stories infiltrating our daily lives, its secrets remaining, however silently, in the creaky narrow stairs in the back of the estate.  The past infuses itself with the present.  Heinz needed to find a recipient for the Eden Hall property and in thinking about this donation, they considered its history, originally owned by a women’s rights advocate.  Chatham’s historical commitment to advancing women’s education resulted in the donor finding a match.  

The plan for Eden Hall, once implemented, will embody the 21^st century ideals of sustainable living—renewable energy systems, on-site wastewater filtration using constructed wetlands, and on-site sustainable agriculture to feed the learning community.  But the campus will also echo its semi-forgotten past, remaining an isolated haven in the country, an escape from the day to day rush of city living, a novelty perhaps in the minds of some.  An example of how tech-savvy sustainability is super-attractive, but it can’t happen without the generosity of many donors.  Can Eden Hall serve as a model for universities and communities across the country?  Not unless every one of them has deep pockets.  How can this model inform the solution for Pittsburgh’s rolling blackouts as energy demands exceed the supply?

Ironically perhaps, Chatham’s flawless design is deeply flawed in that it cannot feasibly be replicated.  Like the Heinz retreat, Eden Hall will evoke an ideal and set a standard of what can be achieved with the proper resources.  I am left wondering about vacations and sustainable initiatives:

Can we create meaningful employment in which workers do not need to escape from their daily lives but can relish every minute of it?

Can we promote systemic change over and above individual efforts to re-envision sustainability?  Would our elected representatives put policies in place to alleviate the cost associated with transitioning to clean energy, environmentally-friendly construction, water conservation, and small-scale agriculture?

I hope that Chatham’s institutional initiatives can transcend idealism and promote demands for national-level change instead of perpetuating the myth that individual choices and actions will rescue society from eminent doom. 

The farmhouse is still there, still reminding us of the not-so-distant past and the mountains of work needed to create the future that we want.