Orchards and Orphans — a Love Story

By Kathleen Stocking
Sun contributor

They met in the summer of 2012. Still in college, she had come north from a suburb of Detroit to take a job as a waitress at the Cove in Leland. He was managing The Cyclery in Glen Arbor and beginning to think about ways to create a high-density apple orchard in the hills above Lake Michigan, land his family has farmed since they came from Bohemia in the 1870s.

They had friends in common. Her best friend, Bradi Pasch, from college, was the sister of one of his best friends, Dave Pasch, a young man who was his partner in the orchard enterprise. He is Brad Houdek. She is Gina Wymore.

He says, “Initially I thought she would want nothing to do with me — she being from West Bloomfield and me being the son of a farmer from up north. The first few times we spent together within the same group of mutual friends, I chose to not go out of my way at all to get to know her. She was only up north for the summer, she would be leaving soon, and I must be of no interest to her. I realize now I was making assumptions. It was also a stressful time for me, only two years after my dad’s passing, concerned about the future of the farm, and I wasn’t concerned with making too many new friends.”

She says, “He was so different from other guys I had known. He never put himself forward or tried to impress me. He was self-assured, but not egotistical. He has such depth of awareness and sensitivity. When we picked apples in his orchard, I was wearing his old, stained coveralls, several sizes too big. He just kept saying how beautiful I was.”

He says, “Gina has a huge heart and would do anything to help someone. Over time I realized my assumptions about Gina being a city girl were nothing more than assumptions. She started to catch my attention as a very selfless, kind, and upbeat person, with whom I had a lot in common. She was a great partner in every way, whether it was emotionally or doing a project together. She was someone I truly enjoyed being around.”

The friendship grew over time. Then in the spring of 2016, Gina left for Haiti to work in an orphanage.

There are perhaps no two places on the planet as different from each other as Haiti and Michigan’s northern Leelanau Peninsula. Only 2,000 miles apart physically, in almost all other ways they are millions of miles apart.

Haiti is the poorest country in the western hemisphere. It has a colonial history of unrivaled greed. The natives all died in the first 100 years from the diseases of their conquerors and the vicissitudes of slavery. The African slaves were next and most died in their first year under the lash in the cotton and sugar fields. The indifferent use of the people by the colonial owners was matched only by their reckless use of the land. Much of Haiti’s soil washed into the sea.

The Leelanau Peninsula, the second wealthiest county in Michigan after Oakland County near Detroit, has no factories and only 20,000 people as compared to Oakland’s population of 1.2 million. The Leelanau Peninsula includes 70,000 acres of the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, 11,500 acres of natural areas preserved by the Leelanau Conservancy, and 500 acres owned by the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians. The peninsula was declared “the most beautiful place in the world” in 2011 by ABC’s “Good Morning, America” show.

Haiti is 10,714 square miles, roughly the size of New Hampshire, with 10 times as many people. It has as many people as Manhattan with random and minimal sewage facilities. Only one person in four has access to a toilet. It was forested over 60 percent as recently as 1923 but now is forested only over 30 percent, based on 2016 satellite images from the publication, EnviroSociety. Haiti sits on seismic fault lines that make it prone to earthquakes. It’s in the path of hurricanes.

The Leelanau Peninsula isn’t in the path of anything. This narrow land of lakes and orchards juts into northern Lake Michigan about 300 miles north of Chicago. It’s home to farmers and brew makers, artists and writers, spiritual healers and environmentalists. There are 2,532 square miles of which 347 square miles is land, including four off-shore islands, and 2,185 square miles is water. The eight little villages — a mix of coastal communities and settlements nestled among inland lakes and hills — are served by good schools and good libraries.

Gina Wymore went to school in Bloomfield Hills where she says, “The parking lot at school was filled with Hummers and Audis. I grew up in a bubble. I didn’t know that everyone else didn’t live like this until I left home.”

While studying to be an English teacher at Central Michigan University, she visited Haiti with a mission group. This was right after the earthquake of 2010 where millions were left without homes and many thousands died. “She came home profoundly changed,” says her mother, Colleen.

“I returned home depressed, anxious, feeling incredibly guilty,” Gina says. “How could I be handed such an easy existence when others suffered so intensely? I had seen crippled babies abandoned in the streets. Starving children begging us for food. A pastor encouraged me to channel my depression into something good. I formed a club at my university called World Changers. We educated other students about abandoned, abused and orphaned children. Exposing myself to so much need has prompted me to help others. Surrounding myself with compassionate people, also helped to build compassion in me.”

Brad Houdek stands in a field next to his orchard under blue skies with whimsical white clouds. Flashy orange berries hang from the mountain laurel. “Brought by birds,” he says. The bushes of the autumn olives are covered with beebee-sized dark red berries. “I made fruit leather out of it,” he says, laughing. “It took forever because of all the moisture.” I put one of the berries in my mouth. “Chalky,” Brad says as he sees me make a face, “Not ripe. Try another one.”

There’s a strangely marked caterpillar on the ground, “A sphinx moth caterpillar,” Brad says. “I think.”

Brad says he and Gina stay in touch through email and Skype.

“Brad has been so much support,” Gina says. “I couldn’t do this without him.”

Brad says he admires what Gina is doing and understands that Haiti is a cautionary tale about what happens when the environment is degraded and people have bad government. Later he writes in an email, “As a species, we have done terrible things, especially the ‘developed’ countries, as far as I can tell. At this point in human history there seem to be so many problems that need solving — problems with the environment, society and the economy — that everyone who’s able should focus on doing their part to help, in whatever way they can. The days of selfishly worrying only about having a fancy car, a big house, and an even bigger bank account are past.”

Brad, 30, and Gina, 25, are doing what young people all over the world do at their age: trying to understand their values, form a relationship, and create a life path. They’re questioning what they’ve been taught and talking things over with each other. They’re trying to find a way through the uncharted, newly borderless world created by the Internet, a world racked with mind-breaking environmental challenges.

“From my understanding,” Brad says, “a person can do their part in one of two ways: in the present sense, by helping people in need here and now, and in the future sense, by devising and implementing new ways to solve our basic needs, without further compromising our future.” He’s interested in the philosophy of bioregionalism which promotes the deliberate restoration and maintenance of local natural systems.

In his beautiful orchard Brad can hear the Honeycrisp, big red apples, hitting the ground. He can hear them in his sleep. Every apple that hits the ground is a loss. He and his friend and partner, Dave Pasch, recently hired a team of migrant workers and paid them $14 an hour to pick the apples before there was any more loss. “Migrants are hard workers.” Brad says. “They know how not to bruise the fruit. It’s about eye-hand coordination, speed and stamina.”

Gina’s parents, Colleen and Greg Wymore came to pick apples, too. And Al Skeba, Brad’s uncle on his mother’s side. And Grandmother Delores Houdek made lunch for them. And Vicki Houdek, Brad’s mother, took a day off from her office job to help. They all said they loved being out in the orchard: the sunlight was golden, the skies were blue, and the apples were a mouth-watering red.

Brad has read Tracy Kidder’s book, Mountains Beyond Mountains about Dr. Paul Farmer’s work in Haiti. Farmer is the Harvard professor and MacArthur “genius award” winner who, like Gina, went to Haiti when he was still in college and decided “the only nation is humanity” and he could do something in Haiti to make a difference for the better. Farmer met a girl in Haiti, the writer Roald Dahl’s daughter, Ophelia, and fell in love with her. The romantic relationship didn’t last but they remained lifelong friends. Haiti is hard on romance.

The Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard was engaged to be married in the 1800s to a beautiful young woman named Regine, when he decided one must choose between a secular life and a religious life and broke off the engagement. George Lucaks, quoted in the New York Review of Books in November 2016, suggested that Kierkegaards’s entire philosophy, summed up in Either/Or, could be found in his separation from Regine. When he died Kierkegaard left all his money to Regine; she had long since married someone else. Kierkegaard was a Lutheran, but Catholics at the time felt much the same way about the necessity to separate human love from religious devotion. Mother Theresa, now officially a saint, never even considered marriage.

The mystic Simone Weil (pronounced “Vey”), living and writing in France in the years right before the Nazi invasion, wanted only to eat what the poor French factory workers could afford to eat and she wanted to harvest grapes with the grape pickers so she would have work as physically hard as theirs. Her friend Gustave Thibon, who saw to it that her philosophical endeavors were published posthumously after her early death, writes, “Simone Weil’s conception of the universe brings vertigo; man sees himself hanging there, without ladders or bridges, suspended between necessity and good — between the abyss of gravity and the abyss of grace.”

That’s where Brad Houdek and Gina Wymore are, suspended between gravity and grace. They are somewhat like the religious acolytes of a previous time, with two important exceptions: they want to do together what those earlier religious devotees thought they could only do alone and they are true Americans and thus eternally optimistic. American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne has a character in The Marble Faun in 1860, Hilda, who has this to say about the proverbial misty chasm, “If there be such a chasm, let us bridge it over with good thoughts and deeds, and we shall tread safely to the other side.”

Hurricane Matthew pummeled Haiti on October 8. Gina wrote that high winds battered the orphanage all night accompanied by torrential rains. Cholera, which is carried by dirty water, swept through the island in the wake of the hurricane, causing misery and death.

The closest thing the Leelanau Peninsula has come to a hurricane is the wind storm on August 2, 2015. Gina says, “I was working at the Cove during that storm, and that was nothing like the hurricane in Haiti.” The wind on the Leelanau might have gusted up to 100 miles an hour, but the entire storm lasted only 30 minutes. Trees came down, but people didn’t lose their homes. No one got cholera. The Hurricane in Haiti lasted for hours and the rains that came with it lasted for days.

“Sometimes I feel a massive disconnect from everyone back home,” Gina says. “No one understands. I try not to let it drive me away from my loved ones. I’ve prepared myself for the possibility that this distance and misunderstanding could cause tension between Brad and me. But he’s very patient and down to earth and I’m thankful he’s so accepting of my doing this. I need him to visit, but with the farm and finances, it’s hard for him.”

Brad and Gina talk all the time. When she was recently nursing an 18-year-old boy at the orphanage with cholera — trying to get him to drink fluids, and knowing that it is physically painful to drink with this disease and also knowing he might die if he didn’t — and not wanting to tell him because it might alarm him, Brad said, “You have to tell him.” And she did. And the kid lived.

Brad’s Grandmother, Delores (Korson) Houdek, 86, who still lives on the family homestead says she met her husband Julius, a distant cousin, when they were in high school together. “We went to the same school. We went to the same church. His family knew my family. We lived down the road from each other our whole lives.”

This is a different generation.

“Marriage has become harder,” says writer Stephanie Coontz in a recent interview in the literary magazine, The Sun, “not because people did it better in the past, but because we have higher expectations of what a marriage should be.”

Both Brad and Gina share a similar devotion to others and a lack of materialistic goals. “I think there exists a universal force that binds us all together,” Brad says. “For me, this is felt when things are done in harmony with the universe. This is done by doing good for others, helping those in need, and taking care of the environment in a responsible way that benefits us all.” When he was studying science at Grand Valley University he went through a period of feeling that “all life was random … and the laws of science, factually backed as they were, left no voids.” Now, however, like Einstein who believed that ‘something deeply mysterious is behind all this’, he feels that “nature has a strong connection to heaven.”

Gina is going to visit her parents over the 10-day winter break; she plans to return to Haiti to teach until July when she’ll take another break to visit Michigan and then in August she’ll return to the orphanage for her second year. She’ll stay in Haiti this year until Dec. 26 so she can help the children celebrate. “Christmas is for kids,” she says. She’s hoping Brad will be able to come to Haiti for Christmas. “He can be Santa Claus.” Her conversation at any moment is filled with his name and references to things he’s said. It’s clear he’s never far from her thoughts.

“Brad is constantly giving me information about how I should build and maintain our garden. The kids ask me almost every day about Brad. They call him, ‘Mr. Bread.’ At night when I tuck them in they ask me to describe him. He’s a role model for these kids and they’ve never even met him. He feels like family to them. When we built our raised beds, one youngster complained he was hot. I gave him water and told him to take a breather until he felt that he could tackle another task. Another responded, ‘Mr. Bread built his all on his own and there’s 30 of us. We can do it!’ He’s a model of hard work, respect, modesty, simplicity and ambition.”

Gina has a blog, “Songs of Haiti,” in which she writes about how her faith has sustained her there. “It seems like Haiti has a way of strengthening my faith.”

When Gina’s mother, Colleen, visited she said, “The poverty left me reeling.” She described the sewage system as “right down the middle of the street.”

“Naturally I miss home like crazy,” Gina says. “Mostly, I miss seeing Brad and my family. I miss being able to walk down the street without fear. I miss warm showers. I miss bike rides, hikes, and personal space.” Then she says, “I teach children. But what the children are teaching me is far greater.”

Brad is in the hills above Lake Michigan on a day the clouds are blue and gray and roiling. “My dad grew gourds here,” Brad says. He’s cutting wood for the winter. “I didn’t like it when I was a kid. It was just work to me. My plan was to go to grad school. Then in the early spring of 2010, my father died.” He pauses. “I felt I should do something with the land.” A bird flies over and Brad says it’s a northern flicker.

“The land has so much meaning to me. I’m the fourth generation.” He shows me the small house by the creek where his great-grandparents used to live: no running water, no electricity. But so pristine and so beautiful. Somewhat like Haiti, perhaps, when Haiti was first seen by Christopher Columbus, a place the intrepid explorer described in his maritime journals as a paradise of “beautiful beaches, groves of trees, all loaded with fruit.” Columbus was invited inside a home made of shells and thought he was “in a temple.”

Gina and Brad see that the Leelanau paradise could become like Haiti if care isn’t taken to protect the land and nourish the people. Their utopian dream is to somehow combine orphans and orchards. “I don’t tell everyone this,” Brad confesses. “I’m afraid they’d laugh at me.” Utopian ideas, once considered naïve and unrealistic, are coming back into vogue. Erik Reese, an environmental journalist quoted by writer Akash Kapur in The New Yorker in October 2016, says, “Things will only get worse if we don’t engage in some serious utopian thinking.”

Gina, asked how she and Brad were going to be able to combine an orphanage with an orchard, laughs and says. “I have no idea. God will show us the way.”

Meanwhile, back on the Leelanau Peninsula, Brad is trying to find a proper Santa Claus outfit. “The kids wouldn’t want a Santa Claus from up north,” he says, “to show up in a t-shirt, shorts, and tennis shoes.