A sharing venture
Ah yes, only on the Internet: I was looking for a cowherd and wound up taking a two-year trip through Romania, courtesy of a couple of Virginia gentlefolk named Tim and Nancy Hulings who volunteered there with the Peace Corps.
Their most excellent Tim and Nancy’s Adventures is the latest addition to our blogroll of well-written sites, even though the latest post I could find coincides exactly with the end of their journey, but that’s really of no consequence.
It’s like a good movie: You know when it opens that it has been finished, but that has nothing to do with why you’re there to see it. And on the Hulings’ weblog, there’s plenty to see. Furthermore, like the fictional adventurers Bill and Ted, there may be sequels. I hope so.
The Hulings are, among other things, farmers and horse breeders who were comfortably approaching retirement in Elkton, Va., nestled between the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Shenandoah River, when they decided to join the Peace Corps around January 2005:
We’ll be expected to live like the natives do — not poverty exactly, but no frills. Those of you who know my wife realize that she has good taste. Sometimes good taste and near poverty come in conflict. With that in mind, we’ve decided to escape the East Coast winter for a few days with a trip to St. Maarten . . . It’ll be our own Mardi Gras, a feast before the 40 days of austerity, except that our 40 days will last considerably longer. (Jan. 23, 2005)
So they left their farm in the hands of family and friends and headed first to the Caribbean and later to Romania — specifically, to that country’s legendary northwestern section of mountains and mystery known as Transylvania.
It turned out they wound up in a place much like the one they left — but in a different way.
Romania is at once one of the most beautiful countries in the world and one of the ugliest. The beauty is in the countryside, in the hills and mountains and the pastoral nature of the country, the churches tucked into the curves of the hills and the uncluttered views of the geography. The ugly comes when the cities appear. Concrete apartment buildings (a vestige of communist rule after World War II) line the pot-holed streets. (June 30, 2005)
The Hulings eventually settled in a small apartment in Cluj, the historical capital of Transylvania — he to work with an agricultural organization promoting and researching organic farming, she with an ornithological education and promotional group.
He did all the writing on the weblog, but he always signed each post with his wife’s name as well. And they shared their experiences with Romania’s language, scenery, religion, street life, music, markets, landmarks, holidays, customs and other aspects of the country’s culture and history.
How did I end up with them? A long story with a poetic, albeit melancholy, end:
Nearing the end of their stay in Romania, the Hulings revisited a family farm where he watched an old man making hay the old-fashioned way — scythe, rake and fork — and wondered how long the pastoral scene would survive in the face of unstoppable development:
The sheep herder with his flock and the cow herder with his herd, answering our whistle from the top of the peak, will be gone. The mountain will sleep, unless it’s turned into a ski resort. Few will walk its steep grass except the rare hiker.
– Sid Leavitt
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August 20, 2007 at 1:32 pm
oooopps. i thought you went straight to zoologists