The Lifeboat

….or to stay right where it is, parked behind the Gospel Flat farm stand, where Mickey teaches the kids how to cook after school.

Mickey pulled the old boat body from the bushes on his farm and welded the additional structure of this amazing Lifeboat together by hand, installed a gas range with antler nobs, a sink, and plenty of counter space to chop up a delicious meal, straight from the field. And here it is now, on Maira Kalman’s blog for the New York Times. (Thanks to the also pessimistic & happy Lady Lily for the heads up.)

Mickey thinks of the Lifeboat this way:
I am building a mobile school. It will be a farm extension device, a mobile kitchen and farm market, the mothership, deploying a mobile pizza oven, projecting farm videos and offering a space for workshops, baking and brewing, and live cultures…The mobile school will slowly be pulled by a tractor, contrasting the speed of roadways and calling attention to the necessary equipment that produces and distributes food. This lifeboat, pulled from our bushes, mated with an old tractor trailer will become a special piece of farm equipment, a device to take the food we grow and the kitchen we eat with, on the road. For now, more toxic fumes, metal cutting, welding, casting and wondering how to make the kitchen fit.

Here he is, making it happen:

I love a man who welds day and night to NPR news….The dream of getting the Lifeboat into town, somehow, and parked in front of the shop is rekindled. Again.

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