Pimping pumpkins

(more people than produce at the Pumpkin Patch today)

My friend and colleague Jason, an SEM wizard who can make search engine bots sit up and beg (really), is also a sustainable foodie. He keeps chickens in his backyard, exotic varieties that lay delicious celadon and brown and aqua eggs.

(I asked Jason if the chickens were as delicious as the eggs and he gave me a pitying look. “When you have children,” he explained carefully, “you don’t generally eat their pets.”)

Anyway, Jason mentioned that Portland recently passed a law restricting the number of chickens that its residents could keep within city limits to three. Since most of the Portlanders I’ve met think chickens grow in little yellow packages marked “Tyson,” I didn’t think this would be a huge issue, but it did impact Jason’s little family: One of his four chicken pets needed to find a good home. Due to the afore-mentioned children, the frying pan was not an option.

They took the chicken to a farm on Sauvie Island and visit her on the weekends. “YOU haven’t been to Sauvie Island?” he gasped, “It’s great. You’ve gotta go, especially if you’re looking for local produce.”

Sauvie Island is a bucolic agricultural island northwest of the city, smack dab at the conjunction of most of the rivers in Portland. It’s home to farmers, rugged individualists, artists and a few folk with a bunch of money. The place is lousy with sustainable and organic farms..and Jason recommended a place called Pumpkin Patch.

“It’s great in the fall because they’ve got this giant cornfield maze and hayrides and wonderful cider…you can take the kids out there and buy your vegetables at the same time.”

Sounded great, and today promised to be sunny and warm, so I called my sister and parents, we all packed into the cars and headed out to Sauvie Island….along with most of the rest of Portland and Vancouver and, judging from the traffic, everyone between Seattle and San Francisco as well.

On the 2.5 mile drive from the island bridge to Pumpkin Patch Farm, we eagerly admired the fall color. In fact, we had time to examine every leaf in the fall color since we never went more than a half mile per hour. Haven’t seen that much traffic since Christmas on the Beltway in DC.

I wonder if the sustainable ecological whatever community has ever, in its missionary zeal to save the planet, considered what would happen if everyone paid attention, bought the concept, and got environmentally conscious?

Total chaos, if today was any indication. Wall to wall people. Lines a gazillion miles long. Overflowing portapotties. If all the gasoline and carbon monoxide we expended today getting back to the land actually got back to the land, the only fall color on Sauvie Island would be black.

In the end, we skipped the cornfield maze, skipped the hayrides, didn’t buy any sustainable harvest at the farmers market, didn’t even buy a pumpkin. The lines were too long.

But I fully intend to go back there sometime. That cider looked delicious.

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