Enjoying Our Stunted Agricultural Tourist Traps

Ah, the Northeast American tourist farm. If you live out this way, you know what I'm talking about: the apple orchards and the pumpkin patches where you take the kiddies every fall and pick your own produce. While you're at it, you can take haywagon and pony rides, feed plump goats, navigate through corn mazes, and buy cider donuts. We started going to these places about three years ago when our friends Sarah and Josh invited us out to their parents' place in the Poconos. We visited a little farm there mid-Oct. with its own apple and pumpkin picking, along with a children's playground, animals to be fed, and painted boards with holes in them where your child can stick their head through and you can photograph them being a cow or a tree or some such (every farm is required to have one of these). Here's a few pictures from our first farm adventure:

Thomas didn't really understand the concept then of "stick your head

through", so after numerous attempts to get him to go around to
the other side, we finally just took his picture anyway.

Apple-picking (and eating) in the orchard

Clearly, he wants THIS pumpkin

This is also the scene of my crime. I can't really post the footage here because this was before we owned a camera that could take .mpg movies. We had a clunky old separate videocam then and, in my defense, it required a lot of attention to operate it to avoid ending up with videos that would induce motion sickness. Here's the set-up: the feeding apparatuses for the animals at this farm consisted of a small rubber conveyor belt with a plastic cup attached to them. You bought the food, natch, then placed it in the cup on the conveyor belt. A little crank at your end would "convey" the plastic cup through the fence to the goat-side where said animal would presumably gobble it up. I had been trying to get Thomas to do it from the time we arrived, but two-year-olds are famously difficult to reason with, so right before we were to leave, I decided I would try one last time and capture the magical event on camera. Nate, Sarah, and Josh had all headed to the checkout with our apples and pumpkins, so Thomas and I lingered behind, newly purchased food pellets in hand. The moment swims, hauntingly, in my mind.

The evidence of the events following is probably still sitting around in a box of old videotapes, but the footage goes a little something like this: The camera shows the conveyor belt. The camera switches to Thomas standing off to the side. My own hand appears in the scene with the food pellets, depositing them in the little cup and my voice urges Thomas to come turn the crank. Camera switches to Thomas toddling over to the conveyor belt and my hand taking his and bringing it up to the crank which I proceed to help him turn. Camera switches back to the little food cup starting on its wobbly way to the goat salivating on the other side of the fence.

And then...a little child's scream. Camera goes wild, whirling around. My voice shouts, "Ah! Oh no!" Camera tilts to the side. Everything goes black.

In my effort to capture us rustically feeding goats through some contrivance presumably created to keep the kidlets at a safe distance from gnashing goat teeth, Thomas's fingers had gotten stuck in the conveyor belt. When I turned the crank (which I wasn't watching because I trying to videotape the moving food), Thomas's fingers got turned with it, rolling on the belt around the underside of the metal wheel. He was screaming hysterically. I dropped the camera and tried to pry his fingers out which just made him scream louder. For all I knew, they were broken. Finally, in a gleaming moment of reason amid the panic, I thought to turn the crank in the opposite direction, rolling Thomas's fingers back out. Lucky for us, the rubber of the conveyor belt was relatively soft and so even as Thomas's fingers had become trapped between it and the wheel, it gave way and didn't crush them. In the end, they were okay. Still, more than a little shame-faced, I abandoned my quest to video him feeding the animals and carried him, still sniffling, over to meet up with the others. The goat never got his food.

This story demonstrates a little of the trouble of trying to live an approximation of the rustic life for a few hours on an autumn Saturday. As Daniel Gross points out in this Slate article, these farms really aren't that rustic. Like an amusement park styled up to look like the Old West, these are tourist money pits whose actual agriculture is so stunted, they would be incapable of surviving if not for their annual fall "harvests". And frankly, the set-up is a genius of American capitalism: instead of paying pickers, they actually charge people to come and pick their own. And the people do come. When we lived in Ithaca, we visited a place called Iron Kettle Farm at least four times over the fall (and no children or goats were harmed in the filming of our memorabilia). Even the name is hokily evocative: the only iron kettles at that farm were for sale in its over-priced giftshop.

Yesterday, we loaded the kids in the car (we've got two now! Yay, more fun!) and headed out to Terhune Orchards for more of the fake rustic same. At this point it's reasonable to ask why, if I'm so down on these places, do we keep going? The truth is, I'm not down on them. I love them. I think they're adorable. I happily charged into their cornmaze even though it turned out to be not so much of a maze as just some rows of corn. Sethie's stroller even got trapped as we tried to force our way down one too-narrow aisle and he yelled angrily until I could manage to finally free him. And their food was so overpriced, we forewent all but the cider donuts and opted to pick up some hotdogs on our way home and cook them on our own backyard barbeque (which, dogs and buns included, was cheaper than if we had bought just one hotdog at the farm).

Still, Thomas got to ride a pony and when I told him he looked like a right cowboy, he held up an arm and shouted "Yeehaw!" We managed to find a lovely round pumpkin that's hanging out in our kitchen now awaiting carving, and even Sethie got in on the cider donut-eating action. And not only did it get us out and about in some beautiful fall weather, it inspired us to spend a little more family time in the backyard grilling hotdogs, playing soccer, and turning our faces into the chill and sharp-scented wind heralding a not-too-far-off winter. If it sounds idyllic, romantic even, it was, for all that its rusticness is a veneer. So are carriage rides in Central Park, but snuggle under the blanket with your honey during one, and you'll feel your heart swell.

Here are some pics and videos of our family farm fun (both Iron Kettle and Terhune):

Thomas tackles the cornmaze at Iron Kettle Farm Oct. 2005

Sethie makes a friend at Terhune Orchards Oct. 2007

Thomas "milks" a "cow" at Terhune Orchards 2007