This is a brief autobiography of events and experiences that lead up to my starting
Lewis Creek Farm in 1981. In addition there a brief description of my of
non-farm activities over the years.
I was born in 1954. I have 3 sisters and 1 brother. We grew up in
New York City. My father was an architect and my mother had a passion and a knack for buying and selling real estate. We spent the summers in Putney Vermont.
During the summers as a young boy I hung out at a local dairy farm
watching and learning. I was a quiet boy, and many years later the farm manager
at that dairy farm said "Yes, we let Hank hang around... 'cause he didn't ask too damn many questions!"
In 1963 my parents bought an old hill farm in Putney and this allowed me to dabble in farming on my own. I planted a vegetable garden and raised chickens, and learned to pickle.
In 1968, I started high school, attending the Putney School, a boarding school in Putney Vermont
which had the distinction of having a fully operational Dairy farm on the campus.
The school has a strong emphasis on physical work in its curriculum, and I spent a lot of time working on the farm,
helping with haying and sugaring, driving tractors, cleaning the barn, and pretty much anything there was do.
The take away message for me was "I don't want to milk Cows twice a day. I love the rest of it,
but milking twice a day, no thanks."
I was put in charge of what was at that time a very new technology on the farm: sugaring with plastic tubing.
The summer after I graduated, I had a summer job caring for the school vegetable garden:
planting, cultivating, harvesting and supervising the summer camp kids who helped with the garden work.
From the autumn of 1972 through the summer of 1974, I took a double "Gap year".
Gap years have become de rigueur today, but back then it was call "Not going to College".
For my parents, who had sent me to "All the best schools", it was a big disappointment.
But they took it in stride, as do the parents of all teenagers, probing gently with
questions like
"So then, what are you going to do?", while hoping I'd come to my senses sooner or later.
That first fall out of high school, I built a log cabin, on my parent's land, all with hand tools.
My first winter in the cabin I taught myself to play the fiddle and finished reading all the books I had been
assigned during high school. It was my first time cooking for myself, and I was on the "All Macaroni and Cheese Diet".
By spring I had a mild case of Scurvy.
My second gap year I joined forces with Phil Gerard, a friend from high school and together we explored work horses.
Over the course of year we jointly owned 3 horses, and learned about horses and feeding and fences and harness
and training and working horses in the woods. Phil had a much better native sense of animal care.
I was learning that I was better with mechanics than I was with animal care.
Later, I ran across the book Lumberjack by Wiliam Kurelic. He describes his 2
winters in a logging camp in Canada. He's primarily an artist, and the book is full
of great paintings of the work, the men and the whole culture. It describes to a T what
the camps were like. When I got there it was chainsaws rather than bow saws.
The horses were gone and it was skidders and logging trucks, but the camp
culture was all still there. I don't think there's anything like it left. I consider myself
very lucky to have been able to experience it. The first winter I worked around
Moosehead lake in northwestern Maine. I learned recently that Moosehead
lake is now surrounded by McMansion second homes.
