The End

Day Twenty-Two, or Hi-Ho, the Derry-O:

I spent the morning out in the herb garden collecting blossoms for herbal tea. Around noon, the farmer called me in for lunch. I sat down at the table across from him, and he picked up a pitcher of milk that had been sitting out for two days since collecting it on the Alm.

“Want some Sauermilch [sour/curdled milk]?” he asked, extending the pitcher of chunky milk in my direction. “It’s really good.”

I looked at his mug of Sauermilch, and that’s indeed what it was: sour, curdled milk. “No thanks,” I replied as politely and unalarmed as I could. Inwardly I was feeling disgusted—he drinks curdled milk?! Without knowing the German words for “curdled” or “chunky” or “lumpy,” I tried to explain that I’d never tried milk that looks like that, and is he sure it hasn’t gone bad?

The farmer explained that the whole milk from the Alm had been sitting out for two days, which had produced some really great Sauermilch. He then emphasized this point by swigging his Sauermilch with gusto. He showed me his mug and indicated how schön the lumpiness was and how there was still liquid swimming up around the curdled parts and how good that is for you…but he failed to mention exactly how it’s good for you… “You know it’s still good,” he explained, “by the nice appearance of the Sauermilch. It hasn’t gone bad until you see mold forming on the top.”

Again, I declined. I couldn’t bring myself to drink curdled milk, no matter what old farmer wisdom says…

I spent the rest of the afternoon continuing to pluck blossoms from the herb garden. I’d learned from my time on the farm that I am NOT a gardener, however collecting the blossoms was garden work I could handle—I got to pick pretty flowers and I enjoyed watching the bees!

Mama Said…: Since I’d been on the farm, I’d learned more and more old sayings and beliefs about your health. Most of these seemed distinctly Austrian and foreign to me, since I’d not grown up hearing such things. Some of them I’ve mentioned before, like the Austrian belief that you should always, always, always wear a scarf when you are sick. (This means summer or winter, indoors or out, and even to bed!) Sometimes it makes me shake my head: The Austrians occasionally wonder that I’m so backward for not knowing these basic things, and I have to wonder where in the world they got these crazy ideas in the first place. So in the interest of bolstering intercultural awareness, I will share with you these old pieces of wisdom I learned on the farm:

• Your body can’t absorb the vitamins in carrots if you eat them raw. You need to have some sort of oil or fat with the carrots in order to get all the nutrients! (I’ve since learned that this idea exists in Hungary too.)


• It’s unhealthy to drink cold milk straight from the fridge: it’s bad for your stomach. Nevermind that there’s a whole nation of Americans raised on cold milk…even that will eventually lead to problems, of course. Yes, we will be a whole nation with stomach problems, just you wait and see.


• You shouldn’t eat raw tomatoes in the wintertime. The coldness of the tomato is a shock to your system and that’s unhealthy. Tomatoes are too cold to be winter food unless they’re cooked—so this means no salad with tomatoes in the wintertime either.


• Sauermilch—the curdled milk that’s been sitting out for days but has not yet grown mold—is good for you. The jury is still out on why…


• You can’t eat honey plain—your body can’t digest it. So when eating honey with bread and butter, you must use your knife to mix the honey together with the butter.


• Working with a cell phone in your pocket will make you tired.


• No need for bug spray on an organic farm—just rub yourself with grass, and this will keep the mosquitoes away. (Either I chose the wrong grasses, or this just didn’t work for me…)

Day Twenty-Three, or The Anticlimax:

It was my last day of work on the farm. I was grateful to have finally reached this point, and it was this thought that kept me going through another day of blossom picking. It was a rather anticlimactic end: picking blossoms until noon, breaking for lunch, and then more blossom picking until the evening and cleaning up my room.

I cleaned, I packed, and I got to a good stopping point for the evening. The farmer and the daughter came up later that evening to say goodbye, since they’d be gone the following day when I left. The farmer asked how my stay had been, and I told him how glad I was to be there and how I had learned a lot, and I thanked him for having me. He said that if I was ever in the area again, I should look them up. I still found it difficult to understand the farmer’s dialect, so when he said I was a hard worker, I nearly missed it. I didn’t quite follow everything he was saying, and it only registered after he was done talking. I realized that for him to say I was good to have around and comment on my hard work was quite a compliment—this coming from the taciturn and hard-working farmer himself! I didn’t have my wits about me enough to deny the compliment in typical Austrian fashion, so I thanked him and expressed my gratitude for the experience on the farm. Both the farmer and the daughter extended their hands, and we shook on our farewells.

Day Twenty-Four, or ‘So Long, Farewell, Auf Wiedersehen, Goodbye!’:

Because I was so excited about going home, I could hardly sleep. Having tossed and turned all night, I resigned myself to no more sleep and got up before 6 to finish cleaning the guest apartment where I’d spent my last week. When I went down for my last Tyrolean farmer breakfast at 8:30, the farmeress had already been up and about since the early morning hours as well. Shortly before noon she drove me to the train station, where she also expressed her sincere thanks to have such a good helper on the farm. She’d loaded me up with “payment” for my services—herbal teas, herb salt, a few other organic products, and some homemade schnapps—and I was now carrying more home than I’d arrived with. Again, a few slightly awkward but genuine thanks and goodbyes were exchanged, and I found myself on the platform, waiting for my train.

It was over. I was going home. I’d been without email or Internet for nearly a month (which nearly killed me at first), with barely any contact to the outside world. It felt somehow surreal to sit on the train in grubby farm clothes and know that I’d soon be back to life as usual back home in Graz and that all of this would step back from reality and become a memory. An experience. This prompted me to reflect on my experience…

• Would I do it again? Well, yes, but not alone. Next time I would definitely go with friends! And I would probably choose a farm where I got to work less in the field and more with farm animals...


• Do I like farming? Not gardening. I knew that going in, but I thought that on a farm setting it would be different. Despite the rigors of the hay harvest, I did really appreciate it. The time on the Alm was invaluable, and I really liked learning about and working with the cows.


• What did I learn? Aside from practical life skills like harvesting hay or driving cows or churning butter, I do now have a much greater appreciation for organic products. Not because they’re trendy and healthy, but because you know where the food is coming from and I better understand the labor that goes into producing that food. Having been a part of that process, I can really appreciate and stand behind organic products…though I still can’t afford them. I also learned that I could never be a farmer or a farmer’s wife. It’s clear that the family I worked for thrived on their livelihood, but I couldn’t. For them, the work is an unending challenge that brings a sense of satisfaction; for me, a lifetime of that work would quickly become a burden. To be a farmer, you also have to be committed to one place—the farm—and stay there. If you know me at all, that’s clearly not in my nature!


• How did I change? For one thing, I had to learn rather quickly to get used to or work in harmony with things that buzz, fly, or crawl. I also learned the value of manual labor and hard work—we could see the results of our efforts on the farm and in the products we produced (like tea), which was really cool. And whenever I felt like I didn’t like my job, I reminded myself that it was not about me—I was contributing to the farmers’ livelihood. I expanded my horizons. From New York City to a Tyrolean mountain farm…there’s just so much to life! So many different lifestyles in so many different places, each important in their own ways, and I’ve been privy to it! I feel more well-rounded to be in touch with my agrarian side, and this ironically taught me just how much of a city person I really am!


• Would I recommend WWOOFing to others? Yes, I would most certainly recommend it. And who knows, I may even do it again. But now I know more what to expect, exactly what questions to ask of a family when choosing a farm, and how farm life works. It’s a learning experience on many levels, and everyone should have the opportunity to stretch themselves and learn what life is like when you have to work for the most basic of human necessities: food, shelter, etc. For most of history, people have lived a lifestyle that demands hard work with the land and the livestock, and this is still the case today in many places in the world. It’s easy to completely overlook or avoid this fact in our society, and I think we modern city and suburb people should have the chance to learn what that means on a personal level.

To sum it up the way Mom put it: Granddad would be proud.

Alpine Mountain High

Day Nineteen, or Alm-most Perfect:

It was again surprisingly easy to wake up at 5 a.m. to go up to the Alm. The weather was cold and rainy, so at least we weren’t racing against the heat of the day for the latest novelty: butter-making!

Butter is made from cream, but we couldn’t use the fresh cream from the morning’s milking to make butter; rather, we took the cream that had been sitting in a cool, dry place for the past couple days. For obvious reasons, butter is harder to make in the heat of the day than in the cool of the morning, so ordinarily the Sennerin would have to start making the butter at about 5 a.m. if she wanted it to form in an hour…otherwise who knows how long it could take. And when you’re churning the butter by hand, an hour is already an eternity.

The farmer brought out an old butter churn—probably also 150 years old like the centrifuge—which took the form of a wooden barrel that rests on a frame and is turned with a crank. When the cream, which has been sitting out for a couple days in a cool dry place, is cooled to exactly 12°C (54°F) in a pot of cold water—no more and no less—it is ready to be churned. The farmer poured about 10 liters of cream into the barrel and sealed the top shut; we were ready to begin.

Churning butter takes about an hour of cranking the barrel around and around by hand. The cream inside the barrel sloshes back and forth as the barrel tumbles in endless circles—but always in a clockwise direction! For some reason, which remained unexplained but firmly assumed, butter does not churn as well in a counter-clockwise direction. Go figure. After awhile, the sloshing should gradually turn to thudding, and when the thudding ceases: voila! You have butter. Churning was hard work, and the cream and the barrel were heavy enough and create enough resistance that it was an hour-long arms workout. The novelty of churning butter faded drastically within the first 15 minutes, and then I just felt sorry for the Sennerin, who would have to undertake this long, laborious, and rather boring process every other day. Fortunately, she had an MP3 player.

After an hour, which we all agreed felt like 3 hours, we still heard sloshing. Something wasn’t right. Giving our churn the benefit of the doubt, we cranked for another 20 minutes. Still no thudding. The Sennerin stopped churning and the farmer OK’ed us to look inside. We screwed off the vices keeping the lid in place, peeled off the foam seal, and looked inside: a lumpy mess. Swimming in milk was a porridge-like mess of failed butter. In theory, we should have at least produced buttermilk with the leftover liquid, but even the milk wasn’t sour enough to be buttermilk! It was decided that the cream had not actually been 12°C all the way through, and that’s why the butter was not, well, butter. However, we could still salvage it. We drained the milk and drew out the semi-solid cream, placing it in cold water to harden into quasi-butter. But our quasi-butter was basically glorified whipped cream. (…Later we discovered that we had not cranked the centrifuge fast enough, and that the cream we used for churning was not completely pure and still had a milk content that was too high for butter-making…)

Cowabunga, Dude!: Being alone on the Alm with the Sennerin allowed me to ditch all pretenses and ask all my ignorant and embarrassing questions about cows. Fortunately she not only knew a lot about her companions on the Alm but she was enthusiastic about sharing her knowledge. Through her patient tutelage I learned:

• Cows give birth to only one calf at a time, although, like people, bearing twins is a trait that tends to run in the family. The gestation period is about 7 months and one week, and cows can give birth as early as 2 years old.


• It’s true that if you don’t milk a cow, it will be in pain. The cows are milked twice a day, and if you don’t milk the cow, the udders will leak. Again, there are parallels here to people…


• Although it’s safe to drink fresh milk straight from the cow, it does have more bacteria than pasteurized milk; for this reason you shouldn’t give fresh milk to children under the age of 2.


• Why do cows wear cowbells? So you can find them again! They’re not just quaint alpine bling—if the cows wander off to graze in foggy or rainy weather, you can find them again by the sound of their bells. And often the Senner/in can recognize a particular cow by the sound of its bell!


• The cows stay inside the stable all day because they want to. It’s too hot outside, and the bugs are too annoying. So the cows wander off to graze at night.


• A talented milker can milk a cow by hand in 5 minutes. A less accomplished milker could take half an hour!


• Yes, even female cows have horns! However, sometimes the horns are removed to protect the other cows in close proximity in the stable from poking an eye out. Ha.

Day Twenty, or Till the Cows Come Home:

I never really thought about the origin of this expression, but on the Alm I finally got it: the cows are let out at night to graze and then they come home in the morning, all of their own accord! They can sense the heat of the day coming on, and that milk that’s been building up all night is getting uncomfortable, so they go back to the stable to chill and get milked.

The only downside to having the cows out grazing all night is that you can hear the ding-ding-dinging of their bells all night long. Fortunately I’d come prepared with earplugs, and that seemed to do the trick until about 6 a.m. when they came back to the alpine hut. It was crisp outside—I’d slept under a down blanket with a hot water bottle under the covers—and I decided to don every layer I’d brought with me: a tank top, a tee shirt, a long-sleeved shirt, a fleece sweater, and a fleece jacket. By the time I was dressed and made it out to the stable, the Sennerin was milking the last cow. She paused and then asked if I’d like to try…I’d been looking forward to this part for days!

First, she handed me a paper towel to clean off the udders, especially taking care that the area around the teat was free of gunk. Then we should have milked a few squirts by hand to get the impurities out before attaching the milking machine…but she forgot. Oops. Instead, the Sennerin brought out the milking machine and instructed me how to attach it to each of the four udders. Like a vacuum, it sucked right onto the udders; we watched the udder for the appearance of wrinkles (much like the wrinkles that appear when vacuum sucking the air out of a space-saving travel bag), indicating that it was sufficiently “deflated.” Finally, we disconnected the machine and milked the udders by hand one last time to make sure that the milk was out.

This was the part I’d been waiting for—I couldn’t wait to milk the cow by hand! The Sennerin took a teat and drew out a thin spray of milk. I knew that this was more than just a squeezing motion; you had to squeeze and draw down, and…who knows. I watched her technique, and then I gave it a try: nothing. Again, I reached high on the teat, squeezing and pulling down as I went. Still nothing. The Sennerin suggested a circular motion, wrapping my fingers around the teat and simultaneously squeezing; she demonstrated, drawing a stream of milk. I tried: nothing. She suggested squeezing harder, so I did: nothing. Finally, on my 5th try, I squeezed hard, pulled hard, and twisted the tip to see if anything was coming out; and finally—a drop! Success!

Udder Madness: Apparently, cow-tipping is an urban legend! I asked the Sennerin about it, and her expression was simultaneously confused and dumbfounded—she’d never heard of such a thing! She explained that she grew up with cows, and all the ones she’s ever known have slept lying down…thereby making cow-tipping impossible! This led me to ask about cud: cows actually chew their cud, right? Well not only do they chew their cud, but they have 7 different stomachs from which they can regurgitate it again and again! An old farmer saying goes that a healthy cow chews its cud at least 40 times…if not, there’s a problem!

Alm By Myself: When the weather finally cleared up, I decided to go up the mountain and see the summit. The Sennerin had to stay behind with the cows, but she told me I couldn’t get lost: just go up until I reach the ridge, then hang a right and keep going until I reach the summit cross…it sounded easy enough, but little did she know how poor my sense of direction can sometimes be—I was still getting lost in the school building during my last week of school! But I started up the mountain and towards the summit.

I’d never climbed a mountain alone or without a hiking trail, and it was an incredible sense of freedom as I neared the tree line. Up on the ridge the trees gave way to little alpine flowers and mosses and scattered white rocks. It was green and gently undulating, and the higher I went the more amazing the view became. I stopped along the way to take pictures and do a little alpine twirl a la Julie Andrews in “The Sound of Music”…I am in the Alps, after all!

Soon I saw the summit cross up ahead and was surprised at how quickly I’d reached the summit. Something about being all alone on the green and rolling mountaintop without any paths to guide me filled me with an irrepressible urge to romp. So I frolicked up to the cross, bounding over rocks and alpine flora.

The view from the summit was fantastic. Being up there was reward enough for my time on the farm, and it made up for the difficulties I’d had up until then. Never before had I been alone on a mountaintop. It was just me and God’s great grandeur spreading out in every direction. What a feeling…and what an experience!

I stayed up on the mountain as long as the good weather would allow. I slowly made my way back down as the clouds rolled in again, taking over an hour to reach the pasture as I explored the macro details of the nature around me: a moth on a thistle, a bustling anthill, the bees pollinating the tiny alpine flowers. I could have stayed a long, long time up on that mountain with nothing but my eyes and my heart to keep me busy.

Alma Matter: Life on the Alm has a different flavor than life on the farm. The Sennerin was worried that I was bored, but I was actually quite content just to sit with the cat on my lap, looking out at the mountains. How could I not constantly look at the mountains up there? It was better than television.
The Sennerin loves her job and is clearly cut out for it. She really loves the cows. If the cows are happy, she’s happy—everything else is secondary. She brings the knowledge of having grown up on a small farm but has the worldly balance of having traveled and living in the city. We got on well together, and it was there on the Alm that I learned the most. It’s the thing that made the whole experience worth it. Totally worth it.



Day Twenty-One, or Say Cheese!:

I awoke once again to the tingling of cowbells through my earplugs. I could hear the repetitive thump-thump-thump of the butter churn, and I knew it must be about 5:30 or so. Not long after, I heard the farmer’s voice—I was surprised to hear him so early, but then I realized that he was here to teach us the next trick: cheese-making!

As the Sennerin finished up with the butter, the farmer explained how to finish this more successful batch. This time the cream had been pure, chilled to perfection, and left out an ideal 24 hours. And this time, after an hour, the Sennerin had a solid series of butter blobs thumping around in the churn. This time the butter had a nice, buttery consistency, and the Sennerin formed it into respectable butter shapes by molding it into a ball with her hands and then tossing it, omelette-style, in a wooden bowl. By flipping the butter, it should take a nice, smooth shape, force out any extra buttermilk, and ensure that it is nicely clumped together. Then the butter is wrapped in butter-paper or pressed into a butter mold.

Since driving the cows up to the high Alm, we’d already filled two 100-liter containers of milk! The first container was 3 or 4 days old and had been sitting out in the alpine hut to curdle. Now that the milk had soured for several days and a bucket places on the surface didn’t sink an inch, it was ready to use for cheese!

Every 10-12 liters of curdled, soured milk will produce about 1 kilogram of cheese. We scooped the chunky milk into a large pot and set it over the wood-burning stove. It was a bit revolting to see (and smell) all of the curdled milk, and I couldn’t help but wonder that mankind invented cheese at all! [For the story of how cheese came to be and other interesting matters involving salt, I would recommend the book Salt by Mark Kurlansky…] The sour milk is then heated on the stove to a temperature of 40°C (104°F); at 40°C, it is removed from the heat and allowed to sit for half a day. (When heated, some of the curdled milk separates and breaks down to become liquid again; this liquid is the whey, as in curds and whey.) Then, the chunky bits of the heated milk are collected into a cheesecloth with some salt and pepper, and the mixture is squeezed to get all the extra liquid out; the cloth is then regularly squeezed and turned and placed in a mold for the next several days until it forms and becomes real cheese.

Sadly, I wouldn’t be around to taste the first of the cheese. I left with the farmer and went back to the farm, where an afternoon of work in the herb garden awaited me. That evening I stepped under the showerhead for the first time in 72 hours. Although I hadn’t missed indoor plumbing or showers while up on the Alm, I was highly appreciative of it when I got back!

Movin’ On Up

Day Fifteen, or Guest Apartment Sweet Guest Apartment:

The nice couple I’d befriended left for home, and I promptly moved back into the guest apartment. Earlier that day I’d arranged a departure date myself with the farmeress, and it felt good knowing exactly how long I had left of the farm.

What George Lucas Jacked from the Herb Garden: While working in the herb garden, I realized that flying beetles sound like light sabers as they whiz past your face. This new discovery was rather exciting to me, so when I spoke to a friend on the phone later that night, I asked: “Did you know that flying beetles sound like light sabers?” There was a slight pause before she repeated, “Flying beetles taste like Life Savers?!”


Day Sixteen, or Alm-most There:

A week earlier, the Sennerin (remember that word from our vocab lesson?) had said I could come and help drive the cows from the low Alm (remember that word?) to the high Alm. Most of the day was spent in preparation for the next day’s cattle drive. I amused myself with the thought that driving the cows makes me a cowherd, or rather a cowherdess, which sounds almost like “cowardess”…but my little pun was of course in English, which saved me from the embarrassing situation of actually uttering it aloud. (And now that I’m putting it out there, I can properly share an embarrassingly awful pun! Enjoy!)

Day Seventeen, or A Farewell to Alms:

When my alarm went off at 5:20 in the morning, I was already wide awake. I’d slept terribly—if at all—in anticipation of driving the cows from the low Alm to the high Alm. It was a distance of 11.5 km (7.2 miles) that we’d be driving the cows on foot, using sticks as prods to keep them all in line. It was such a novelty for me that I could hardly contain my excitement!

When we reached the low Alm, the Sennerin was waiting for us with the cows. Apparently I wasn’t alone in my excitement, as the Sennerin had also hardly slept at all in anticipation of the drive! But for her it was also a move to a new alpine hut for the next 5-6 weeks until they return again to the low Alm, and it also meant transporting all of her belongings up to the high Alm later by Jeep.

I had no idea what to expect, and I was given absolutely no instructions as the cows began to exit the stable. I was given a long stick to use as a cattle prod and watched as the farmer’s sons and daughters began to drive the cattle down the lane. There were 12 cows to be herded, and we scattered ourselves throughout the line of cows to keep them moving and together on the path. I had only my camera and my “cattle prod” with me, and at the risk of being labeled a tourist (because, let’s face it, I was!) I faithfully documented the experience.

Fortunately for us, cows are pack animals with a herd mentality. Driving cattle is much easier than, say, driving cats. Cats (oh what a nightmare!) would scatter when pushed in one direction; cows, for the most part, follow the leader. The challenge arises when one cow decides to stray from the pack and the others inevitably follow suit. When one or many wander off, you must jump into the woods or scamper up the hill or do whatever is necessary to bring those misguided souls back to the (not so) straight and narrow path. The trick, I discovered through trial and error, is to approach the cow from the side. Cows, I learned, are fast. They can gallop. It’s a lumbering gallop, but a gallop nonetheless. If they see you running up behind them, they’ll simply run away from you in whatever direction they happen to be facing. If you can approach from the side, you can use your prod to urge them back to the right direction.

Some cows seemed to respond well to a simple tap with the stick, while others required an all-out whack across the back. It was relatively simple to drive them up to the high Alm, with only a few exceptions that required the strategic roundup skills of a fledgling cowherdess.

As we were slowly driving the cows up the mountain, I thought of all the agrarian Scripture passages that were becoming so much more real to me as I worked on the farm. As much of the Old Testament is concerned with figures who worked the land, I now felt much more of a connection or an understanding for those who had to work the field or attend the flocks. That, after the Fall, man was punished to work the land by the sweat of his brow—I know that sweat! That people were constantly tending their herds and flocks—totally! That Jesus talks about the one lost sheep that goes astray and the shepherd who leaves the other 99 to go and look for it—I understand why the illustration wasn’t with cows instead! (Though I know absolutely nothing about herding sheep, I now realize that if the one cow had gone astray, the other 99 would have followed…and that would have been a totally different lesson!) Even the Psalms became more alive to me—after all, David spent a bunch of time out in nature with his flocks too!

It took about 3-3½ hours to reach the high Alm. It didn’t feel like we had gone 7.2 miles uphill, since the grade was gradual and, since it was essentially hiking with cows, it was slow going. Ambling, even. When we reached the alpine hut, we all sat around and snacked, just as the cows seemed to be doing in the pasture below. The view from the alpine hut was spectacular—from that elevation you could finally see the mighty Alps stretching out as far as the eye could see. Layer upon layer of rocky, craggy mountain ranges stretched out in a gently receding snow-covered panorama. For the first time since being in Tyrol I really felt like I was indeed in the Alps. In fact, I could hardly tear my eyes away from the view.

Most of the others left the Alm at midday, but I remained until the evening and got to observe the Sennerin for the first time as she milked the cows with a machine that looked like a giant metal octopus. First, she cleaned the udders and milked each one a bit by hand to get the impurities out. Then she attached the milking machine, which vacuum sucks a tube to each of the four udders and then pumps out more milk than I ever thought could come from a cow! (Two cows can fill a knee-high container, which must hold at least 5-7 gallons of milk.) Then, once the milk stops flowing and wrinkles appear around eat teat indicating empty udders, the milking machine is removed and the udders are rubbed down with a Vaseline-like ointment to moisturize, prevent chapping, keep clean, and repel flies. I watched on in “udder” amazement and hoped that I’d be able to help one of these days!

After all the cows had been milked, the farmer demonstrated how to use the 150-year-old centrifuge that separates the milk from the cream. This contraption is cranked quickly by hand and it separates the heavier cream from the milk—for every 10 liters of milk, you can get about 1 liter of cream. (The cream is then used to make butter and the milk is used to make cheese.)

As the farmer was pouring the milk, still warm from the cows, into the centrifuge, I asked if the milk would have to be pasteurized before drinking. To my surprise he responded that it was drinkable already. “Really??” I asked in astonishment. I mean, I know that back in the day people had to get milk straight from the cow, but I really though that nowadays milk was unhealthy to drink before it’s been pasteurized. That’s what illogical city girls think, anyway.

The farmer offered me a glass of fresh milk. With some degree of trepidation, I took a sip…and it was amazing! So rich and so pure—whole milk with the cream still in it, and pleasantly warm from the cow. (There’s a word for this in German, actually: cow-warm-milk.) I drank the whole glass and I could feel the creaminess coating the inside of my cheeks and the roof of my mouth.

My first impression of getting up to the high Alm and seeing the view was: This makes it all worth everything and worth coming to Tyrol just to come up here and be in this awesome creation. This is gonna be good.

I had quite a day with the cows. I observed, I learned, and I amused myself at their expense….

Highlights: Herding cattle requires more than just a strong hand with the cattle prodding stick. It requires many a sharp yet encouraging word to drive them on. While the others were able to get the cows moving with a few choice words in dialect, when I uttered those same words they just came out sounding weak and silly. What better chance, I thought, to use all the cowboy slang I’d picked up from all those old Westerns my mom watched when I was a kid? If I was going to sound silly yelling at cows, I was going to sound silly in my own language! I took to yelling things out, such as:

Head ‘em up, move ‘em out!

Move along!

Move yer cowhide!

These all, of course, came out with a cowboy accent. If yer gonna herd them cows, ya better herd ‘em proper!

Observations: Cows are simple creatures. They don’t seem to think independently that much. They seem content to go with the flow. They’re powerful yet gentle. They don’t seem to know their own strength, but you get the impression they wouldn’t exploit it if they did. Cows have kind, gentle eyes. They seem almost huggable at times…but they also have a lot of gooey snot. They can be kept clear of a field with an inch-thick band of plastic tape strung from spike to spike—they don’t necessarily need a whole fence to keep them out; they see the barrier and they accept it. I’ve decided I like cows.

Scooping up the field mice and bopping them on the head: I finally learned what Little Bunny Foo Foo was onto: field mice sound just like squeaky toys! When the cat caught a field mouse out in the pasture, it made the same noise as when you whack the gophers with a mallet in that carnival game. Go figure!

On Tyrolean Farmhouses: I didn’t realize until I got to Tyrol why Austrian farmhouses look so big: because they’re a house and a stable all in one! The farmer’s house is also like that, and even the alpine hut opens straight from the kitchen into the stable. As far as I know, American farmhouses are not like that!


Day Eighteen, or Buying Time:

The Sennerin agreed that I could come and stay with her on the Alm for a couple of nights. After the day of the cattle drive, I went back to the farm for a day off, buying time as I prepared my things for the next 2-3 days on the high Alm.

The high Alm is situated at 1400 m (about 4600 ft) above sea level. But don’t let that fool you—although it lacks the base elevation of Rockies, it’s just as spectacular, and the treeline is much lower in the Alps. The alpine hut is a wooden structure about 300 years old, in typical Austrian style: a tiny one-room hut with a bed and a wood-burning stove (with storage rooms to either side) and a door opening from the main room into the stable. The WC is an outhouse to the rear of the hut, and the water comes from a hose outside connected to a natural spring on the mountain. The generator provides electricity at night, and the wood stove heats the hut. It was rustic and sweet and I couldn’t wait to take a mini-break from the farm and work on the Alm.

Halfway There…

Day Eleven, or Green Hectares is the Place to Be!:

Because the weather had again been uncooperative, we found ourselves once more harvesting hay on a hot, sunny Sunday. After giving the grasses a chance to dry from the morning dew, we found ourselves out in the fields by noon. It was a big day of harvest, working the hay from the lowest fields to the highest fields on the property, and the farmeress joked that with all of this up and down all day we’d be having a Sunday hike just as nice as anyone else!

As we were turning the hay on the lowest field, the farmeress paused and turned towards me. Leaning on her rake, she said, “You know, I’m impressed at your perseverance.” Unsure if she was referring to the hay harvest, I asked what she meant. “That you’re still here,” she replied. “I thought you would’ve thrown in the towel by now.” The farmeress went on say that she hadn’t thought I’d make it this far; she had even wondered aloud to the farmer when I’d come and say I was ready to go home.

I dared not reveal what a close call it had been. As I smiled and graciously accepted the compliment at face value, she went on to explain that usually the helpers on the farm come later in the season and that none before me had ever worked so much on the hay harvest as I had! I felt proud to hold this distinction, but I still didn’t tell her that I much preferred the rigorous hay harvest to the “easy garden work” as she put it!

We worked all day from the low fields to the high fields and back down to the low fields again, taking only small breaks for water here and there. By 7 p.m. my feet were burning from standing on the steep mountainside all day, and it felt terribly uncomfortable to stand—either on an incline or otherwise! I felt as if there were burning blisters all over my feet, about to burst open with every step. Despite taking measures to keep myself hydrated, I’d developed a headache…most likely from the intensity of the alpine sun, which was now starting to sink at a harsh angle. By 8 p.m. we were almost done with one of the middle fields, and I was at my end. My head was pounding, my feet were burning, I was noticeably slowing, and I felt I lacked the energy to continue. When the farmer said that we still had the lowest field to finish, something inside of me cracked. The 8 demanding hours of the day welled up inside me and threatened to overflow in exhausted tears. I tried to hold it back as we approached the house again, but as the nice couple from the guest apartment saw me coming and asked how it was going, I’d reached the breaking point. I felt embarrassed and weakened, especially after the farmeress’ high compliment earlier in the day about my perseverance, but I had reached my physical breaking point and could no longer keep from crying.

Still trying to pull myself back together, I went to my room to change my shoes for the final field. A member of the family must’ve seen my sorry state, and a sympathetic voice called up that I could stay there and rest—the daughter would help in my place. I felt bad that my breakdown should come on the same day as my “perseverance,” but on the other hand I had been working outside for 8 hours in the sun and the heat without stopping for a meal, and my body simply wasn’t used to that. But I couldn’t help hoping that the others wouldn’t see this as a sign of city girl weakness.


Day Twelve, or In Good Company:

The day after the spectacular hay harvest (and consequent collapsing point) was my much-needed first day off after working 10 straight days on the farm. I’d become friends with the couple staying in the guest apartment, and they were kind enough to take me along for a day’s excursion.

Our first stop was an open air museum of Tyrolean farmhouses. While this may sound somewhat boring (or perhaps a bit redundant for me), it was a fantastic museum and a very well-spent morning. The fascinating thing about Tyrolean farmhouses and tools is that they are made almost entirely of wood that has been fitted or joined—I didn’t see a single nail! The farmhouses dated as far back at the 16th century, but by the looks of it, they haven’t really evolved all that much in the past few hundred years. I would have loved to take a museum tour, but alas, there was no time…We had to catch a train!

Apparently my new friends were also train buffs, and they really wanted to take a steam locomotive ride through the Zillertal valley. An old-fashioned steam locomotive—complete with some poor guy shoveling coal into the fire—takes tourists and curious locals through a slow and scenic ride through the valley. We rode the train to the end station, grabbed some ice cream, and took the same stretch back. It was a beautiful and scenic ride, but my absolute favorite photo I took from the train was this one…priceless!!


It was awesome to hang out with my new friends, and having them around the farm had really helped with the homesickness. They were super nice and super generous, and I was so glad to spend my day off with them seeing a bit more of the area.


Day Thirteen, or ‘Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Eaten Alive! Eaten Alive!’:

I was a little nervous on my first day back to work after the hay harvest from Hades. To my surprise (and delight!) it was quite an easy day.

I spent most of the day picking blossoms in the herb garden. However, as I was in competition with the bees, I had to be especially attentive. We worked out a system where I would let the bee have its fill of a particularly “pollenous” blossom, and then I would come behind and pluck it. I found that in waiting for the bees to finish up with their blossoms, I’d become completely distracted from my task and end up simply enthralled by their fastidiousness and dedication to the task at hand.

The mosquitoes were out in particularly full force on the farm between the hours of 3 p.m. and 10 p.m. Whether you’re inside or outside, you can’t help but get eaten alive, and I’ve found that I’ve become quite skilled at clapping them or catching them midair—a skill I’d never intended to perfect!

A Note on Language: It was surprisingly not taxing to speak German all the time. I’d spoken a great deal of English before coming to the farm with friends from the States, but as soon as I was on the farm I slid quite naturally again into German. The Tyrolean dialect wasn’t a problem on the farm for the most part, but I could only understand about half of what the farmer or his son would say. But I found deciphering this new dialect to be rather like a puzzle—once you figure out where the pieces fit, the larger picture starts to make more sense… And, rather fittingly, I caught myself speaking in more dialect (i.e., Styrian dialect) than usual!

A Note on the Weakest Link: One of the things I found very difficult to understand on the farm is how they could look at a litter of 6 kittens and decide that half of them must go. And I mean go. You know…
The argument was that the mother didn’t have enough milk to feed the whole litter and in nature the weakest of the bunch would either starve (because they couldn’t get to the milk) or be pushed from the nest. On the farm, the fear was that all 6 would die if none of them could get enough milk. So instead of letting nature take its course, they decided to help it along.
At one point the farmer disappeared and it was suddenly apparent that he was “taking care of” the kittens. I know he’s a farmer and that’s life on the farm, but I have a really difficult time understanding how someone can kill a kitten. A chicken, sure, but a kitten?! Clearly I’d don’t have what it takes to be a farmer.

Farmer Mentality: I cannot relate to the farmer. He works from sunup to sundown and takes breaks only for food and water. He doesn’t have a free day if he can help it, and vacation is a foreign concept to him. A true farmer is a workaholic, and he thrives on it. He loves it—it’s his passion! He wouldn’t enjoy a lazy poolside afternoon or laying out in the grass of the park—his work is his niche. His existence. And the nonstop, full throttle work mentality is one that I simply cannot understand…


Day Fourteen, or The Last Supper:

My new friends in the guest apartment decided to leave a couple days early. As it was their last night on the farm, they invited me down for some watermelon in their apartment. Happy to get away from the seemingly self-replenishing supply of mosquitoes in my room, I decided to go down and visit them in the hopes that their place wouldn’t be so inundated with miniature blood-sucking vampires as mine. We ate watermelon and homemade bread with Nutella and talked for hours. I was sad to see them go, but we decided to keep in touch. I was glad to see that some permanent good had come from being on the farm—I made new friends!