|
By Paul Keene Co-founder of Walnut Acres Almost fifty years ago, more than a mile high in the foothills of the Himalayas, a young teacher, fresh from a journey of halfway around the earth, opened the door of the dining room. Around the tables were gathered thirty or more persons of various nationalities. A hum of typical lunchroom teacher-talk carried on, interrupted only by brief welcoming smiles.The new chap from America found himself truly in another world. Suddenly the name Woodstock School, in northern India, had come alive for him. "The Lord works in a mysterious way, his wonders to perform," thought he to himself I had been shown to a seat quite close to the entrance door, which I faced while lunching. There was considerable coming and going. Just as the dessert was brought, the door swept open. In sprinted three spirited, jolly young women, speaking with a delightful British accent. Their arrival is as clear to me today, eighteen thousand days later, as if it took place yesterday. The last of the three was the one on whom my eyes lingered a split-second longer during the brief introductions. Betty Morgan was her name. Petite and pretty, her smile rivaled that of Helen of Troy. My heart was won with incredible ease. Betty was born in New Delhi. Her father was Welsh, her mother English. They had spent over forty years in mission work in India, which had become their real home. India's tongues were Betty's own. She was at home in the villages and in the bazaars. When a huge hyena tried to snatch her from her crib as she slept outside, only her mother's screams frightened it away. As a youth she walked in the hills inhabited by the man eating tigers of Kumaon. It was second nature to her to be wary of the karait and the cobra, some of the deadliest of snakes. For long periods she was away from her family while attending boarding schools in the cool hills. Mount Herman School in Darjeeling and Woodstock School in Mussoorie were two of these. Upon completion of her high school work she received her college degree from the University of Madras in South India. With her teacher's certificate she then returned to Woodstock as a staff member. This was known as one of the best preparatory schools in the Orient. In school Betty was quite athletic. She was one of the better players of women's basketball, volleyball and tennis. Nothing seemed too strenuous. At six to eight thousand feet she could hike and run up and down the steep mountainsides with the best of them. She was accomplished and fearless. Each year she traveled all alone by train the fifteen hundred miles or so to her parents' home in South India. We were married in Bangalore, South India, in January. Every pew of the Baptist church of which Betty's father was pastor had tied to it a lovely bouquet of local, richly scented lilies. The service, conducted by her father with her mother in attendance, was a simple, lovely happening. The church was filled with people and the scent of lilies. The deep-rooted affection between pastor and parishioners was so beautiful to see. The beaming organist a Mr. Phillipsz, had not managed to accomplish the whole of the traditional wedding march. When just a part of the way through he would suddenly stop and go back to the beginning again, to proceed with ever increasing gusto, almost ad infinitum. Following the ceremony we all went across the lawn to the enormous tent that had been set up by orders of the Rajah, the ruler of Mysore state, a friend of my new father-in law. The prayers of a physician who asked the blessing before we were served lunch stayed with us. Betty said he had three marriageable daughters with prospects anything but bright. In his prayer he thanked God for this young man who had been sent in answer to prayer! I never allowed Betty to forget that. Within a few days everything was packed and we were ready to sail for America via the Pacific ocean. It was a time both happy and sad. Betty's mother was not at all well. Everyone felt it was the last time we would see her and vice versa. This proved, sadly, to be the case. It was not easy to be a domiciled European in India where typical close family living was often impossible. Mrs. Morgan died within two years of our wedding. Thirty years later we tried to find her grave in Bangalore, but could not. After one more year of teaching back in my home area we decided to change professions completely, and put our whole trust in God and the universe for our care and well-being. We felt we had to return to earth's roots. For two years we studied and practiced homesteading at the School of Living in Suffern, New York. There we learned organic gardening, flour grinding, bread baking, butter and cheese making, food preserving, weaving, homestead arts and crafts. With a marvelous library we had hundreds of thinkers and doers by our sides as we both theorized and practiced. Here we were paid five dollars a week, plus room and board. Here our first daughter was born. For two more years, to learn full-time farming, we attended Kimberton Farms organic farm school near Philadelphia. Here we learned the use of both horses and tractors as power sources for field-scale growing of crops. Studying under Dr. Pfeiffer from Europe, these were days of revelation in which love of the soil grew into a deep, rewarding, abiding part of our lives. We learned by doing the work on this farm of over one thousand acres, where milk cows, beef cattle and grain and vegetable production were paramount. Of course no chemicals or poisons were ever used. We were paid fifty dollars a month for our labor, and lived rent free in the top story of an ancient, freezing farmhouse. Nothing seemed really to matter, in our exuberance and sturdiness, as long as we continued to learn who we were! Finally, penniless except for two hundred dollars, a team of horses, an old rusting horse plow and harrow, second-hand furniture, an ancient car, and two small daughters, we were able to get a long term loan from government sources to purchase our very, very own farm of one hundred acres. Here our feet trod a portion of the earth leased for our lifetimes from the universe, to have and to hold precious and beloved until death do us part. Poor Betty! In India labor was cheap. People were often hired to do cooking and serving, house cleaning, gardening dish-and-clothes washing and so forth. She had rarely if ever been responsible for any of these things in any but minor ways. She thought she was marrying a professional person, only to find that she had become a servant, a coolie, a slave to her family. Farmers' wives in those days were known to be involved to the point of overwork in the everyday running of that huge impressive enterprise known as the family farm. We started with nothing. We planned to live on very little income, which was to mean a lot of scrounging for everything.'The large old farmhouse had not been painted for years, the barn likewise. Metal roofs were rusting, and here and there leaking. There was no furnace for central heating, no water heater except the kitchen range, no bathroom, no clothes-or-dish washers, no telephone, no refrigerator no freezer, no air conditioner, no T.V. For years we used a cast-iron kitchen range for heating both house and water. We used our own wood, supplemented with coal, for heating purposes. Later came a new wood stove for heating the living room, with its penchant for chimney fires. We learned how to scamper up to the attic roof in a hurry to drop potato peels down the chimney to cool down the raging fire! The bedrooms managed to get a slight bit of heat through the downstairs ceilings. Even with shutters closed these rooms were like ice in winter. Those bedrooms through which passed a stovepipe would get above freezing, generally, by ten o'clock of a frosty morning. Every day Betty transported perishable foods back and forth between the kitchen and the springhouse used as a refrigerator. The cold spring water permitted keeping qualities if one could balance the containers so no water flowed into them. There were always the frogs and the rats to consider and plan against of course. Then it was a fifty-foot trip up and down a slippery slope in the bargain. People ate less between meals that way. This was in the day when traditional "adult pleasures" still held the family together. Such things as establishing a home, rearing children, serving the community, and the school, and the church, and enjoying work for its own sake were the backbone of rural society. This was indeed life at the roots, before the days when financial success, travel, leisure, sports, automobiles, T.V., restaurants with their fancy rich foods, etc., occupied so much of family interest and time. Betty spent many a day in the fields. She helped to pitch endless loads of hay on the wagon. She husked field corn by hand day after day. Endless rows had to be harvested while babies and children were being tended, meals made and cleaned up. She made butter and cheese from our own milk, baked the whole wheat bread from hand-ground flour, canned fruits and vegetables, made apple butter and jams and preserves, defeathered and cleaned and cut up chickens and ducks, tended lovingly her flower garden, helped to weed the vegetable patch and harvest foods, helped to paper and paint and fix up, and raised three very active daughters. Did she complain and feel put upon? Well, after a few years she did suggest that an indoor bath room would be acceptable. She thought it might be time for whole window panes to replace cracked and patched ones. These were truly pioneer days. We lived on the edge of a new day but still, often out of necessity, clung to the old. Do everything yourself. Be as self-sufficient as possible. Make things last just as long as possible. Never let the tools lie around to rust. Appreciate what you have. Avoid by all means the habits of not being satisfied with little, and always wanting more. It was hard. Life centered in our immediate vicinity. A twenty mile trip to the closest small city for shopping was a rare occasion. To the squirming youngsters it seemed endless. But it was still better than riding a squeaking, jolting ox-cart all day in the boiling sun to the train station in India! Betty like to get away sometimes to visit relatives, and indeed we made a number of trips to Washington to visit cousins and aunts and uncles. But a farm does tie one down what with all its livestock endlessly calling for attention. Then too the series of old cars proved highly unpredictable and prone to letting one down. For many years, what with putting back more into the soil than we took out, and insisting on growing crops the old fashioned, chemical-free way, the end of the fiscal year invariably found us in the red. But then out of our struggle, totally unanticipated by us, a marvelous growth began to take place, both in our soil and in the hearts and minds of many people who could be reached by mail. What joy it was for Betty to see cards and letters come from afar, inquiring about our organic, synthetic-free farm produce. We were vindicated! Not only had we learned to produce wholesome poison-free foods, not only had natural farming methods begun to confirm themselves by both improving the soil and lessening disease and insect problems, but we had discovered a market as wide as the world itself. By much stinting and saving we could now hope to be able to help our three delightful growing girls to go on for college work. Things had eased up a bit. Tractors replaced horses. We had a furnace and hot water,a bathroom and a telephone, along with some modern labor-saving devices. Mechanical harvesters replaced hand corn huskers, and the hand picking of peas, beans, carrots, beets. Our old used combine replaced the toil-intensive reaper-and-binder grain harvesting. Gone for Betty were the threshing dinners when droves of workers had to be fed. For her the work in the fields and the tending of babies gave way to working with those people who had joined with us in producing and shipping our foods. It was less strenuous, as was proper, and yet challenging and rewarding. She and all of us came to have friends not only where we lived. Our horizons expanded as we became a part of a great fellowship of seekers for the roots of life who lived everywhere. The marvelous venture, the dream in the heart, seemed never-ending. Betty's influence was great. She was greatly loved and highly respected by all who knew her. She in turn was loving and concerned in the extreme. The problems and difficulties of anyone she knew automatically became hers as well. She was deeply religious. Her prayers never ceased to ascend to heaven's gates. Her warmth and generosity knew no ends. As a cofounder of Walnut Acres she had its concerns deeply at heart. We all looked to her for her opinions, her thoughts her directions. She set the tone that is the backbone of Walnut Acres.You might say that she was its soul. Everything had to be done right, in the best way. There was no such thing as corner-cutting. Honorableness was as important as life itself. We had started this whole idea in our hearts had seen its promise grow almost uncannily, and she and I were not about to see its strength and drive diluted through dissembling. The health of people through the proper use of proper foods was the cornerstone concern of our lives. All our activity aimed in this direction came as natural as breathing to us. All of this could only begin with healthy soil. To see the marvelous truths work out in human lives all around the globe had shown that for us there can be but one right way. Betty's father, Daddy Morgan came to live with us for seven years before he passed on. Gentle, loving, good natured, ever helpful, he filled the grandfather-role beautifully. He was the essence of patience, of loving concern, always putting others ahead of himself. Nothing in our family life was more meaningful than the feeling growing out that three-generation time. How he loved holding and crooning to the babies. They were made for each other. We had a picture of him stirring apple butter, our first "crop", in the huge kettle over an open fire, baby on hip. What a glorious family venture it all was. Perhaps time will show the nursing-home exit for the aged to be analogous to the use of poisons in the soil, something to be avoided if at all possible. When Daddy first arrived we noticed that he coughed quite a lot. As the years went by the cough grew worse. Physicians and chiropractors could not really help. At his death the doctor surmised that the constant coughing had been too great a strain on his heart. About ten years ago we noticed that Betty was beginning to cough in the same sort of way. It came on very gradually. We sought medical and other assistance all over the country, through books, correspondence, telephone, doctors and hospitals. She took a variety of antibiotics. That helped for a time, but eventually lost its effectiveness. There was a constant, gradual lessening of lung capacity, with ever increasing difficulty in breathing. Then we learned that physicians were just beginning to hear about an inherited genetic defect known as alpha-1-anti-trypsin deficiency (AAT). One hospital tested Betty's blood and the results showed a severe deficiency of the AAT factor. When one eats protein the body supplies a protelytic enzyme called trypsin to help digest the protein. When this is accomplished, the AAT factor comes into play to halt the further production of trypsin. When there is a deficiency of the AAT factor, the production of trypsin is only partially halted. It seeks for protein to digest and attacks the lungs, gradually eating them away. Emphysema develops. Betty never smoked, could not abide even the smell of burning tobacco. Problems of this nature are basically beyond the reach of self-medication, of self-proclaimed "health experts", of natural foods, of various manipulations, of any presently-known regimen. It seems that only the scientific community will be able to find answers, more power to them. Yet natural foods can play a most important part, we feel even in cases of unbalances or deficiencies like these. Medical doctors often commented on Betty's living ten years beyond the upper limits normally set by AAT deficiency. Some wondered aloud if perhaps her clean, wholesome, careful living had played a significant part in this. They were often amazed by her stamina under greatly diminished lung capacity. Several times they would cluster about her in groups and confer in unbelieving astonishment. She couldn't possibly still be alive! On May 26th, 1987, she worked as usual in the office. The marker in her One Year Bible was inserted at that date. The next day she entered the intensive care unit of the local hospital. Her heart could no longer accept the strain. On the third day, with little pain or discomfort - dignified, elegant, accepting, clear in mind, trusting in God to the last - her body quietly fell into its final sleep. She was just short of seventy-five years of age. A lovely service of celebration and thanksgiving for her life was held in our local, overflowing United Church of Christ. Her remains now lie interred by the side of her father's in the cemetery at the north edge of the village. I pass by the cemetery almost every day. It. is but a step inside to her grave. From there one's eyes are naturally drawn to the eternal hills, which lead mound upon mound into the sunset. My eyes are two artesian wells. I think of these two incredible persons from the other side of the globe to whom life introduced me so long ago, and who have made a little spot of our fields and hills forever India. The ways of the universe are so far beyond my feeble comprehension that I can only stare out over the heights, lost in wonder and praise. The great poet Rabindranath Tagore wrote this: "Death is not extinguishing the light. It is putting out the lamp because the dawn has come." I thank God that for Betty's spirit the dawn has come, to free her at last of her weakened body, to free her to soar in a world so far above this earthly world in so many ways that we find it hard even to imagine what it is truly like. TO THE FUTURE. Three lovely daughters now tie our two worlds together. Two of them live at a distance, but still know Walnut Acres as "home". The third, Ruth Anderson, with her husband Bob and their three children, live just across one field from the old homestead. For eighteen years Ruth and Bob have been full parts of the work of Walnut Acres, fully versed in its philosophy and its work. Both are members of the Board of Directors. Ruth is the office manager, Bob is general manager and vice-president. They are most dedicated and capable, and will, I know, adhere closely to the ideals for which Betty and I have always stood. In my turn, as founder and president I hope to lend my thoughts, my philosophy, my guiding spirit for an indefinite period of time to come. My hunger for Walnut Acres and its work will only be cured when my life is cured. In Memoriam So that there may remain a small part of Betty in her beloved homeland of India we have established a memorial fund to make a life-sustaining contribution to her favorite charity there. In the project for homeless children established by our dear friend Dr. Pauline King, young people are provided not only with food and shelter. Most importantly they are trained in self-sufficiency both through acquiring skills and in coming to know the meaning of faith and hope. Anyone wishing to contribute to this work in Betty's name may send a tax-free contribution to the Walnut Acres Foundation, Inc., in Penns Creek. As always, every cent will go directly to this program, which is under the work of the United Church of Christ. |