![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
A few quick articles
On the intelligence of babies">
Your Baby Is Smarter Than You Think
By ALISON GOPNIK
Berkeley, Calif.
GENERATIONS of psychologists and philosophers have believed that babies and young children were basically defective adults — irrational, egocentric and unable to think logically. The philosopher John Locke saw a baby’s mind as a blank slate, and the psychologist William James thought they lived in a “blooming, buzzing confusion.” Even today, a cursory look at babies and young children leads many to conclude that there is not much going on.
New studies, however, demonstrate that babies and very young children know, observe, explore, imagine and learn more than we would ever have thought possible. In some ways, they are smarter than adults.
Three recent experiments show that even the youngest children have sophisticated and powerful learning abilities. Last year, Fei Xu and Vashti Garcia at the University of British Columbia proved that babies could understand probabilities. Eight-month-old babies were shown a box full of mixed-up Ping-Pong balls: mostly white but with some red ones mixed in. The babies were more surprised, and looked longer and more intently at the experimenter when four red balls and one white ball were taken out of the box — a possible, yet improbable outcome — than when four white balls and a red one were produced.
In 2007, Laura Schulz and Elizabeth Baraff Bonawitz at M.I.T. demonstrated that when young children play, they are also exploring cause and effect. Preschoolers were introduced to a toy that had two levers and a duck and a puppet that popped up. One group was shown that when you pressed one lever, the duck appeared and when you pressed the other, the puppet popped up. The second group observed that when you pressed both levers at once, both objects popped up, but they never got a chance to see what the levers did separately, which left mysterious the causal relation between the levers and the pop-up objects. Then the experimenter gave the children the toys to play with. The children in the first group played with the toy much less than the children in the second group did. When the children already knew how the toy worked, they were less interested in exploring it. But the children in the second group spontaneously played with the toy, and just by playing around, they figured out how it worked.
In 2007 in my lab at Berkeley, Tamar Kushnir and I discovered that preschoolers can use probabilities to learn how things work and that this lets them imagine new possibilities. We put a yellow block and a blue block on a machine repeatedly. The blocks were likely but not certain to make the machine light up. The yellow block made the machine light up two out of three times; the blue block made it light up only two out of six times.
Then we gave the children the blocks and asked them to light up the machine. These children, who couldn’t yet add or subtract, were more likely to put the high-probability yellow block, rather than the blue one, on the machine.
We also did the same experiment, but instead of putting the high-probability block on the machine, we held it up over the machine and the machine lit up. Children had never seen a block act this way, and at the start of the experiment, they didn’t think it could. But after seeing good evidence, they were able to imagine the peculiar possibility that blocks have remote powers. These astonishing capacities for statistical reasoning, experimental discovery and probabilistic logic allow babies to rapidly learn all about the particular objects and people surrounding them.
Sadly, some parents are likely to take the wrong lessons from these experiments and conclude that they need programs and products that will make their babies even smarter. Many think that babies, like adults, should learn in a focused, planned way. So parents put their young children in academic-enrichment classes or use flashcards to get them to recognize the alphabet. Government programs like No Child Left Behind urge preschools to be more like schools, with instruction in specific skills.
But babies’ intelligence, the research shows, is very different from that of adults and from the kind of intelligence we usually cultivate in school. Schoolwork revolves around focus and planning. We set objectives and goals for children, with an emphasis on skills they should acquire or information they should know. Children take tests to prove that they have absorbed a specific set of skills and facts and have not been distracted by other possibilities.
This approach may work for children over the age of 5 or so. But babies and very young children are terrible at planning and aiming for precise goals. When we say that preschoolers can’t pay attention, we really mean that they can’t not pay attention: they have trouble focusing on just one event and shutting out all the rest. This has led us to underestimate babies in the past. But the new research tells us that babies can be rational without being goal-oriented.
Babies are captivated by the most unexpected events. Adults, on the other hand, focus on the outcomes that are the most relevant to their goals. In a well-known experiment, adults saw a video of several people tossing a ball to one another. The experimenter told them to count how many passes particular people made. In the midst of this, a person in a gorilla suit walked slowly through the middle of the video. A surprising number of adults, intent on counting, didn’t even seem to notice the unexpected gorilla.
Adults focus on objects that will be most useful to them. But as the lever study demonstrated, children play with the objects that will teach them the most. In our study, 4-year-olds imagined new possibilities based on just a little data. Adults rely more on what they already know. Babies aren’t trying to learn one particular skill or set of facts; instead, they are drawn to anything new, unexpected or informative.
Part of the explanation for these differing approaches can be found in the brain. The young brain is remarkably plastic and flexible. Brains work because neurons are connected to one another, allowing them to communicate. Baby brains have many more neural connections than adult brains. But they are much less efficient. Over time, we prune away the connections we don’t use, and the remaining ones become faster and more automatic. Moreover, the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that controls the directed, planned, focused kind of intelligence, is exceptionally late to mature, and may not take its final shape until our early 20s.
In fact, our mature brain seems to be programmed by our childhood experiences — we plan based on what we’ve learned as children. Very young children imagine and explore a vast array of possibilities. As they grow older and absorb more evidence, certain possibilities become much more likely and more useful. They then make decisions based on this selective information and become increasingly reluctant to give those ideas up and try something new. Computer scientists talk about the difference between exploring and exploiting — a system will learn more if it explores many possibilities, but it will be more effective if it simply acts on the most likely one. Babies explore; adults exploit.
Each kind of intelligence has benefits and drawbacks. Focus and planning get you to your goal more quickly but may also lock in what you already know, closing you off to alternative possibilities. We need both blue-sky speculation and hard-nosed planning. Babies and young children are designed to explore, and they should be encouraged to do so.
The learning that babies and young children do on their own, when they carefully watch an unexpected outcome and draw new conclusions from it, ceaselessly manipulate a new toy or imagine different ways that the world might be, is very different from schoolwork. Babies and young children can learn about the world around them through all sorts of real-world objects and safe replicas, from dolls to cardboard boxes to mixing bowls, and even toy cellphones and computers. Babies can learn a great deal just by exploring the ways bowls fit together or by imitating a parent talking on the phone. (Imagine how much money we can save on “enriching” toys and DVDs!)
But what children observe most closely, explore most obsessively and imagine most vividly are the people around them. There are no perfect toys; there is no magic formula. Parents and other caregivers teach young children by paying attention and interacting with them naturally and, most of all, by just allowing them to play.
On women in the military
Living and Fighting Alongside Men, and Fitting In
By STEVEN LEE MYERS
FORWARD OPERATING BASE WARHORSE, Iraq — There is no mistaking that this dusty, gravel-strewn camp northeast of Baghdad is anything other than a combat outpost in a still-hostile land. And there is no mistaking that women in uniform have had a transformative effect on it.
They have their own quarters, boxy trailers called CHUs (the military’s acronym for containerized housing units, pronounced “chews”).
There are women’s bathrooms and showers, alongside the men’s. Married couples live together. The base’s clinic treats gynecological problems and has, alongside the equipment needed to treat the trauma of modern warfare, an ultrasound machine.
Opponents of integrating women in combat zones long feared that sex would mean the end of American military prowess. But now birth control is available — the PX at Warhorse even sold out of condoms one day recently — reflecting a widely accepted reality that soldiers have sex at outposts across Iraq.
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are the first in which tens of thousands of American military women have lived, worked and fought with men for prolonged periods. Wars without front lines, they have done more than just muddle the rules meant to keep women out of direct enemy contact.
They have changed the way the United States military goes to war. They have reshaped life on bases across Iraq and Afghanistan. They have cultivated a new generation of women with a warrior’s ethos — and combat experience — that for millennia was almost exclusively the preserve of men.
And they have done so without the disruption of discipline and unit cohesion that some feared would unfold at places like Warhorse.
“There was a lot of debate over where women should be,” said Brig. Gen. Heidi V. Brown, one of the two highest ranking women in Iraq today, recalling the start of the war. “Here we are six years later, and you don’t hear about it. You shouldn’t hear about it.”
In many ways, General Brown’s career trajectory since the war began reflects the expanded role for women at war.
In 2003, as a colonel, she commanded a Patriot air-defense brigade that joined the push from Kuwait to Baghdad, losing nine soldiers in a maintenance battalion outside Nasiriya three days after the invasion began. One of them, Pfc. Lori Ann Piestewa, was the first woman killed in action in Iraq; Pfc. Jessica D. Lynch was captured in the same attack. Now, as the American role in the war declines, General Brown will oversee the logistics of withdrawing the vast amounts of military hardware in Iraq over the next year.
“We’ve needed — needed — the contributions of both our men and women,” said Brig. Gen. Mary A. Legere, the director of intelligence for the American war effort here and the other highest ranking woman in Iraq.
The military, of course, is not gender blind, especially in a war zone.
Sexual harassment in a still-predominantly male institution remains a problem. So does sexual assault. Both are underreported, soldiers and officers here say, because the rigidity of the military chain of command can make accusations uncomfortable and even risky for victims living in close quarters with the men they accuse.
As a precaution, women are advised to travel in pairs, particularly in smaller bases populated with Iraqi troops and civilians. Capt. Margaret D. Taafe-McMenamy, commander of the intelligence analysis cell at Warhorse, carries a folding knife and a heavy, ridged flashlight — a Christmas gift from her husband, whom she lives with here — as a precaution when she is out at night on the base.
Staff Sgt. Patricia F. Bradford, 27, a psychological operations soldier, said that slights, subtle and not, were common, and some were easier to brush off than others. Women are still viewed derisively at times in the confined, occasionally tense space of an outpost like Warhorse.
“You’re a bitch, a slut or a dyke — or you’re married, but even if you’re married, you’re still probably one of the three,” Sergeant Bradford said.
At the same time, she and other female soldiers cope with the slights, showing a disarming brashness.
“I think being a staff sergeant — and a bitch — helps deflect those things,” she added.
The issues that arise in having women in combat — harassment, bias, hardship, even sexual relations — are, she and others said, a matter of discipline, maturity and professionalism rather than an argument for separating the sexes.
Sergeant Bradford recalled the day during her first tour when her convoy moved south while a soldier with whom she was then engaged to be married moved north on the same highway. She listened on the radio as his convoy came under an attack that continued after she was out of range.
“For four days, I had no idea what happened to him,” she said, “but I still had to continue my mission, because that’s what you do when you’re a soldier.” (He emerged unscathed, she later learned.)
Unforeseen Issues
Such issues were not foreseen when the war in Iraq began in 2003, even though the initial invasion force included women in the vanguard.
On a practical level, the military was not prepared to house and otherwise address the specific needs of women in a war zone — including issues like health and privacy.
Early on, bases were largely makeshift and far more dangerous. Few soldiers, male or female, had more than rudimentary quarters or latrines. None had much privacy.
Sgt. Dawn M. Cloukey, a communications specialist, spent her first tour in Iraq in 2005 and 2006 as the only woman among 45 soldiers, operating a retransmission station in the mountains of northern Iraq and then in the center of Baghdad. She lived out of a rucksack, with no toilet or room of her own. She described the experience as isolating.
“I always felt like the plague,” she said at Warhorse, on her second tour in Iraq, where she handles communications for the commander of the First Stryker Brigade of the 25th Infantry Division.
As the United States military settled into more permanent bases, many initial difficulties abated, as the Army gradually adapted to the new reality of waging war with a mixed force. So have the soldiers themselves.
Women have sought acceptance in a still-predominately male environment not by emphasizing their sex but rather by displaying their toughness, their willingness to adjust to conditions that are less than ideal.
“I’ve kicked my guys out of the truck to pee in a bottle like that,” Sgt. Joelene M. Lachance, a soldier with the 172nd Military Intelligence Battalion, said at Warhorse, pointing to one of the liter water bottles that are ubiquitous at bases in Iraq. “Cut the bottle off and pee in the bottle and then dispose of it. Sometimes it’s an issue, but most of the time, I just make do.
“I don’t try to, like, ‘I can’t sleep here,’ ” she continued. “If they’re sleeping there, I’m sleeping there. I spent five days out in the truck once — with six of my guys, sleeping on the floor.”
Warhorse still reverberates with the rumble of armored convoys and the thud of helicopters ferrying troops and, at times, the wounded. It is just north of Baquba, the regional capital of Diyala Province, one of the most restive provinces in Iraq. Here, the war is not over. Warhorse will very likely be among the last bases to close in Iraq before American troops withdraw in full.
At the outset of the war, the introduction of women into outposts like Warhorse raised fears not just of abuse or harassment, but also of sex and pregnancy. The worst of those fears, officers say, have not materialized.
In fact, sex in America’s war zones is fairly common, soldiers say, and has not generally proved disruptive.
In April, the latest iteration of General Order No. 1, the rules governing the behavior of soldiers in Iraq broadly, quietly relaxed the explicit prohibition on sex in a war zone, though it still bars sex with Iraqis and spending the night in someone else’s CHU. Some commands, including Baghdad, retain broader restrictions, for example, on being in CHUs belonging to members of the opposite sex.
“The chain of command already has to deal with enough,” Captain Taafe-McMenamy said. “They don’t really want to have to punish soldiers for dating.”
Women do become pregnant — a condition that, intentional or not, in or out of wedlock, requires the woman to be flown out within two weeks, causing personnel disruptions in individual units.
The Army and Marine Corps declined to say exactly how many women left Iraq and Afghanistan as a result of pregnancies, but it appears to be relatively rare and has had little effect on overall readiness, commanders say. At Warhorse, the First Stryker Brigade, which has thousands of soldiers, has sent only three women home because of pregnancies in 10 months in Iraq, the brigade said.
“There was a fear if we integrate units, you will have a bunch of young people with raging hormones, and it will end up in too many unwanted pregnancies, and it’s more trouble than it’s worth,” said Peter Mansoor, a former battalion commander in Iraq who, until retiring recently, served as Gen. David H. Petraeus’s executive officer. “With good leadership and mentorship, we have been able to keep those problems to a minimum.”
Taking On New Roles
Roughly 1 in 20 of the 5,600 soldiers at Warhorse is female, a smaller ratio than in the military as a whole. Nonetheless, they are fully integrated in the base’s operations.
Many of the women at Warhorse serve in jobs that have traditionally accommodated women: the base hospital, food service, supply and administration.
Others, though, serve on the brigade staff, in intelligence and psychological operations, which until recently were part of the Special Forces and thus off limits to women.
“We have changed so much,” Col. Burt K. Thompson, the commander at Warhorse, said of the Army, noting that every time he leaves the base, his patrol includes two women, including Sergeant Cloukey “on comms” — communications — and a medic, Sgt. Evette T. Lee-Stewart. “To have a female on an infantry brigade staff? Oh my God.”
Like many commanders who have served in Iraq or Afghanistan, he said that women have ended the debate over their role by their performance.
“I’ve relieved males from command,” he said. “I’ve never relieved a female commander in two and a half years as commander.”
The nature of the war has also done much to change the debate over combat roles. Any trip off the heavily secured bases now effectively invites contact with the enemy.
Many women have also been pulled off their regular jobs and trained to search Iraqi women at checkpoints because of local cultural sensitivities, putting them as much at risk as any male counterpart.
When Specialist Jennifer M. Hoeppner goes “outside the wire” at Warhorse, as going on patrol is known, she clambers into what she calls “the best seat in the truck,” the turret atop the Army’s newest armored vehicle, the MRAP.
“I’m the gunner on all our missions,” she said, having qualified for the M240B machine gun at an expert level.
“I think some of the males are a little confused when I go up,” Specialist Hoeppner said. “They’re like, ‘Who’s your gunner?’ ”
Women are also increasingly “attached” to infantry and armored units that train and advise Iraq’s police and military forces. Now that almost all American combat forces have pulled back to bases outside of Iraq’s cities, that training has become the main mission in Iraq.
The involvement of women in it has been a cultural shock for Iraqi men far less accustomed to dealing with women professionally, especially in the military.
Women spoke of inappropriate comments or uncomfortable flattery, and even gifts. “It was everything from candy to lingerie,” said Capt. Victoria Ferreira, 29, who spent a year with an 11-person squad training Iraqi officers. “How do you react to that? ‘Thank you?’ ”
For the most part, though, Iraqis seem to accept the role of women in the American military — they have even expanded their own ranks for tasks like searching women at checkpoints — even if it seems unlikely that women will be incorporated more widely into the Iraqi armed forces anytime soon.
“I think now, six years since the war started, they’ve learned to adapt or tolerate the fact that in the American Army we have high ranking positions that are filled by women,” said Capt. Violeta Z. Sifuentes, who commands the 591st Military Police Company.
It was not always so, she recalled of her first tour in Samarra in 2006. “They always thought my platoon sergeant or my squad leader was the one in charge until I was like, ‘Listen here. I’m in charge whether you like it or not.’ ”
The captain’s remarks were typical. The women serving in today’s military represent a generational shift. They are confident young women who have not had to fight the same gender battles their predecessors in uniform did.
“I never felt like I had to fight to succeed in the Army” was how Captain Taafe-McMenamy, who is 27, put it.
Adapting to the Tasks
Women in today’s military say they do not feel the same pressure to prove themselves. They adapt and expect others to adapt. They preserve their femininity without making much of it.
Specialist Hoeppner and her roommate, Sergeant Bradford, belong to the 361st Tactical Psychological Operations Company, which patrols the towns and villages of Diyala with infantry squads to spread and collect information.
On a recent patrol in the small village of Shifta, they seemed more of a novelty to the Iraqis they encountered than the soldiers they patrolled with, taking up defensive positions alongside their male colleagues whenever they paused.
“I actually had this million-dollar idea my first deployment,” Sergeant Bradford said of her tour as a truck driver hauling supplies in 2004. “I was like, I need something that’s like a beer bong that I can hold in place so I can pee standing up without pulling my pants down. Cause we were truck drivers. We’d stop on the side of the road. There’s no bushes. I was telling one of my soldiers about this great idea, and he said they already make that.”
She produced from her bunk in her CHU a device sold by REI called a “feminine urinary director.” “It’s even pink,” Specialist Hoeppner interjected.
Warhorse’s supply officer — a woman — acquired dozens of them.
“The first time one of them came around a truck and saw me peeing on a tire,” she said of one of her male colleagues, “I thought he was going to have a heart attack.”
On an upstate farm for rehab
Two Acres of Hope for Recovering Addicts
By CARA BUCKLEY
GARRISON, N.Y. — It was shortly after 8 a.m. on a sun-drenched July day in this idyllic hamlet 50 miles north of Manhattan, and a hulk of a man named Venice Crafton was lumbering between beds of arugula, leaving outsize footprints in his wake.
Mr. Crafton is 6-foot-2 ½ inches, 241 pounds and missing his two front teeth, all of which might have made him seem menacing but for the wide-brimmed, slightly floppy straw hat on his head.
“Boy, if they could see me now in Brooklyn, they wouldn’t believe it,” said Mr. Crafton, who was raised in Brownsville. “This goes no further than this farm,” he added to the half-dozen co-workers around him.
The men responded with grins and low grunts. They were immersed in their work, tugging heads of lettuce from the soil, culling the leaves and rinsing the produce in a plastic pail filled with water.
“I’m not used to doing this stuff,” Mr. Crafton, 48, grumbled.
“You can’t tell with that hat,” came someone’s retort.
It was all in a day’s work at an unlikely flyspeck of a place: a two-acre organic vegetable farm bordered by a forest and gentle hills, where two dozen men were quietly fighting for their lives.
The farm is run by recovering addicts and alcoholics from New York City, men whose various addictions, and repeated relapses, have left them sickened and homeless. Called Renewal Farm, the patch of land boasts neat rows of vegetables and bright flowers, as well as two greenhouses fashioned out of thick sheets of plastic.
The men’s days are split into two very different parts. They tend the farm, lacing the air with locker-room banter and gentle ribbing. And then they exorcise their worries and voice their hopes at St. Christopher’s Inn, a hilltop rehabilitation center nearby where they sleep.
The men’s lives are shot through with such contrasts. They are urban, transplanted to the country. They have dark pasts, but they spend their days in bucolic surroundings. They come from the gritty streets, but they grow trendy produce, often for rarefied palates. In this patchwork existence, they do have one constant thread: the knowledge that they are teetering on the brink.
“It’s a last resort,” said one participant, James Fletcher, who is 58 but looks far older, his cheeks lined and eyes sunken by decades of heroin abuse.
The transition to the farm can be unnerving.
On that sunlit July morning, a man from Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, was leaning over rows of red kale, looking bewildered. He had been, he said, “addicted to everything, a garbage-head.” He was also new to the farm, and did not want to talk much about his past, or reveal his name. Instead, he kept his eyes pinned on another program participant, Bernard Cole, who was cutting off wilting leaves from kale.
“Those leaves aren’t good?” the man asked, perplexed.
“No,” Mr. Cole replied gently. “But see this one, see how it’s good?”
“No, I don’t know nothing,” the man replied dolefully. “I’m a newcomer.”
Several feet away, Mr. Crafton was cleaning lettuce, and eyeing it suspiciously. He is not fond of vegetables, and as a rule, he said, doesn’t trust any food that “doesn’t already come in a bag.”
“If it ain’t on a McDonald’s menu, I ain’t eating it,” Mr. Crafton declared proudly, peering out from beneath his straw brim, a wet, dripping head of lettuce in his hand. “I always been a picky eater.”
•
Renewal Farm is run by Project Renewal, a Manhattan nonprofit that helps the homeless, the addicted and the mentally ill. The farm is headed by David Harrington, a 61-year-old horticulture expert, and Anthony DeArmas, a 45-year-old former crack addict and alcoholic. About two dozen men participate in the farm program at a time, usually for six to nine months. The farm is financed mostly by public dollars.
From its inception in 1996 until 2007, the farm was at Camp La Guardia, a sprawling 1,000-bed shelter in Orange County that housed homeless men from New York City. Camp La Guardia closed in 2007, but Renewal Farm found new living quarters 25 miles away at St. Christopher’s Inn, in Garrison off Route 9. The compound started as a Franciscan friary a hundred years ago, then morphed into a homeless shelter and, eventually, into a rehabilitation center, with 147 beds, a medical clinic and services like acupuncture and counseling.
As for the farmland, the nearby Garrison and Highlands country clubs donated the two acres, with the men in the program helping to clear the land, build a deer fence and install a water line linked to a nearby reservoir. Much of the harvest is sold at the farm’s road stand, which opened late last season, while some is served to the residents of St. Christopher’s and some sold in the inn’s thrift shop. About 1,200 pounds of the produce is provided to the two country clubs annually in exchange for the donated land.
At the country clubs in particular, the food finds its way to a world far distant from the men’s. The Tavern, the restaurant at the Highlands Country Club, serves the farm’s lettuce in the $9 Cranberries and Blue salad (greens, cranberries and blue cheese made from local sheep’s milk, in a white balsamic vinaigrette) and with the pan-seared diver scallops dinner, which costs $27.
•
The morning that Mr. Crafton was yearning for McDonald’s, he watched as the other men rinsed heads of lettuce, one by one, in a pail of water. Then he intervened, showing off some previously acquired knowledge. He piled a load of lettuce into a plastic basket, and dunked the whole thing in the bucket in one efficient swoop.
“Genius, man, genius,” said one of his co-workers, Manfred Long.
“That was an old trick I learned back in 2000,” Mr. Crafton said, smiling with satisfaction.
Mr. Crafton was enrolled in Project Renewal before, in 2000, and when he left he thought his crack and alcohol problems were licked. But, after some relapses and some good years, he found himself starting his mornings with six-packs of beer. By December of last year, he was back at Renewal Farm.
•
No one knows how many graduates of Renewal Farm have stayed clean. About 450 have cycled through in its 13 years, but their progress has not been tracked, both because it would be expensive and because the men tend to move around a lot. Still, based on anecdotal responses, Mr. Harrington, the program director, guesses that about 65 percent stayed off drugs and alcohol at least a year. The program’s strengths, he believes, are its length and the structure it gives the men’s lives.
Dr. David A. Deitch, the chief clinical officer with Phoenix House, said the 65 percent rate is high, relatively speaking; on average, he said, the one-year success rate is closer to one-third. “Regardless of the outcome,” he added, “the idea that they’re doing something, and it’s self-supporting, keeping them clean longer, and being good for the community as a whole, and that they’re earning their keep as opposed to being treated as though they’re horizontal patients somewhere in a hospital. These are very good, exciting features.”
The men seem to have an easier time at St. Christopher’s Inn than they did at Camp La Guardia, where there was some drinking and drugs among the 1,000 residents, and where the two dozen Project Renewal participants were among the few in recovery. At St. Christopher’s, all of the shelter’s roughly 150 residents are in recovery.
“It was a lot more chaotic,” Mr. DeArmas said of Camp La Guardia. “A lot more temptation there, too.”
The program’s success rate seems to bear out this impression. In the year and a half since Renewal Farm opened at Garrison, just 4 percent of the men have tested positive for alcohol and drugs, a result that leads to dismissal. The men are tested randomly, and also whenever they leave St. Christopher’s on unescorted trips. At Camp La Guardia, the number of Renewal men who failed those tests was roughly 20 percent.
The Renewal men, and the other men who stay there, call St. Christopher’s “the holy mountain.” Its grounds are thick with crosses, crucifixes and statues of saints. Many of them also want to believe, almost desperately, that miracles happen there.
•
Mr. Long was shaking water off some lettuce, and the droplets were catching the sun and spraying a few men standing nearby. He laid the heads in a box bound for the farm stand.
As often happens during the slow hours in the field, the talk drifted back to the men’s former lives.
Mr. Crafton was speaking about the old Project Renewal farm truck, which was crushed on Sept. 11, 2001. Mr. DeArmas had driven it to the city that day to deliver produce to a farmers’ market near the World Trade Center, and fled on foot when the first tower fell.
“That truck was de-stroyed,” Mr. Crafton said to the others.
The group fell silent for a moment. Then: “I bet the drug dealers were having a field day that day,” Mr. Long said.
“No cops,” Mr. Crafton said.
Then another man had a thought.
“No cellphones,” he said.
“Oh yeah,” Mr. Long said.
•
Nine men were sitting in a circle in a room at St. Christopher’s Inn for a therapy session. After a brief meditation, Michael Boccia, the social worker leading the group, began a discussion about old habits, and the men started talking about how they had drowned their anxieties with drinks and drugs.
“My worst fear is leaving this mountain the way I came in, doing things in half measures,” said William Chapman, a recovering crack addict from Brooklyn. “I worked too hard to get where I am now.”
Like the rest of the men, Mr. Chapman was wearing a photo ID taken the day he entered the program. It showed a terrified man with downcast eyes.
Fear and hope are undercurrents at Renewal, even for Mr. Crafton. Despite all his city slicker bravura, he admitted privately that he liked being out of New York and loved the peaceful rhythms of the farm. He has found serenity in Garrison, he said, and now possesses, he believes, the peace of mind he needs to stay sober when he leaves.
“I’m too old to be coming in and out of these places,” Mr. Crafton said. “I got insight now into what I need. This is my last time. I know it.”
•
There was a snake on the loose somewhere in the hoop house, the long, low greenhouse made out of arched tubing and plastic sheets. But the men had no time to find it; they had work to do.
Mr. Fletcher walked over to the flower beds with Mr. DeArmas, crouched down and began snipping blooms — celosias, nasturtiums, snapdragons — to sell at the farm stand. Another man helped. “Here you go, flower maiden,” he said, handing Mr. Fletcher a bloom.
“Thank you,” Mr. Fletcher said, and moved to another plant, accidentally dropping a flower. “Sweetheart, you dropped one,” the man said.
Mr. Fletcher shook his head. “Sweetheart,” he muttered.
Mr. Crafton began arranging the picked blooms into bouquets. “You usually want a little color,” he explained to Mr. Fletcher. “See? I put that one in the middle. The red one. Then this one. And this pink one. Look! A bouquet.” He held the arrangement at arm’s length, surveyed his work, and nodded.
“This one?” Mr. Fletcher asked, offering him a yellow snapdragon.
“No,” Mr. Crafton said. “It doesn’t go.”
•
Renewal Farm’s roadside stand sits at the corner of Route 9 and Snake Hill Road, and at midmorning one weekday Mr. DeArmas and a few men unloaded the van, setting out baskets of squash, herbs, lettuce, Swiss chard, tomato plants and Mr. Crafton’s bouquets. Sales at the farm stand have been slow this year, partly because of the near-daily downpours. Mr. Long, who had been helping unpack the produce, waved at a passing car, grinning widely, a gesture that sometimes draws in customers.
“I always wave at everybody,” he said. The car slowed but did not stop.
Mr. DeArmas left the men to tend their stand and drove back to the farm. It was time for the men there to wrap up their day’s work.
As the van arrived at the farm, Mr. Crafton was waiting with news.
“I came across the snake!” he cried. “It was a garter snake, but it was big.”
“Yeah,” said one of the men. “The snake ran one way; he ran the other way.”
Mr. DeArmas guffawed, and then he told the men to hop into the van. It was time to go back to St. Christopher’s, back to the holy mountain.
Your Baby Is Smarter Than You Think
By ALISON GOPNIK
Berkeley, Calif.
GENERATIONS of psychologists and philosophers have believed that babies and young children were basically defective adults — irrational, egocentric and unable to think logically. The philosopher John Locke saw a baby’s mind as a blank slate, and the psychologist William James thought they lived in a “blooming, buzzing confusion.” Even today, a cursory look at babies and young children leads many to conclude that there is not much going on.
New studies, however, demonstrate that babies and very young children know, observe, explore, imagine and learn more than we would ever have thought possible. In some ways, they are smarter than adults.
Three recent experiments show that even the youngest children have sophisticated and powerful learning abilities. Last year, Fei Xu and Vashti Garcia at the University of British Columbia proved that babies could understand probabilities. Eight-month-old babies were shown a box full of mixed-up Ping-Pong balls: mostly white but with some red ones mixed in. The babies were more surprised, and looked longer and more intently at the experimenter when four red balls and one white ball were taken out of the box — a possible, yet improbable outcome — than when four white balls and a red one were produced.
In 2007, Laura Schulz and Elizabeth Baraff Bonawitz at M.I.T. demonstrated that when young children play, they are also exploring cause and effect. Preschoolers were introduced to a toy that had two levers and a duck and a puppet that popped up. One group was shown that when you pressed one lever, the duck appeared and when you pressed the other, the puppet popped up. The second group observed that when you pressed both levers at once, both objects popped up, but they never got a chance to see what the levers did separately, which left mysterious the causal relation between the levers and the pop-up objects. Then the experimenter gave the children the toys to play with. The children in the first group played with the toy much less than the children in the second group did. When the children already knew how the toy worked, they were less interested in exploring it. But the children in the second group spontaneously played with the toy, and just by playing around, they figured out how it worked.
In 2007 in my lab at Berkeley, Tamar Kushnir and I discovered that preschoolers can use probabilities to learn how things work and that this lets them imagine new possibilities. We put a yellow block and a blue block on a machine repeatedly. The blocks were likely but not certain to make the machine light up. The yellow block made the machine light up two out of three times; the blue block made it light up only two out of six times.
Then we gave the children the blocks and asked them to light up the machine. These children, who couldn’t yet add or subtract, were more likely to put the high-probability yellow block, rather than the blue one, on the machine.
We also did the same experiment, but instead of putting the high-probability block on the machine, we held it up over the machine and the machine lit up. Children had never seen a block act this way, and at the start of the experiment, they didn’t think it could. But after seeing good evidence, they were able to imagine the peculiar possibility that blocks have remote powers. These astonishing capacities for statistical reasoning, experimental discovery and probabilistic logic allow babies to rapidly learn all about the particular objects and people surrounding them.
Sadly, some parents are likely to take the wrong lessons from these experiments and conclude that they need programs and products that will make their babies even smarter. Many think that babies, like adults, should learn in a focused, planned way. So parents put their young children in academic-enrichment classes or use flashcards to get them to recognize the alphabet. Government programs like No Child Left Behind urge preschools to be more like schools, with instruction in specific skills.
But babies’ intelligence, the research shows, is very different from that of adults and from the kind of intelligence we usually cultivate in school. Schoolwork revolves around focus and planning. We set objectives and goals for children, with an emphasis on skills they should acquire or information they should know. Children take tests to prove that they have absorbed a specific set of skills and facts and have not been distracted by other possibilities.
This approach may work for children over the age of 5 or so. But babies and very young children are terrible at planning and aiming for precise goals. When we say that preschoolers can’t pay attention, we really mean that they can’t not pay attention: they have trouble focusing on just one event and shutting out all the rest. This has led us to underestimate babies in the past. But the new research tells us that babies can be rational without being goal-oriented.
Babies are captivated by the most unexpected events. Adults, on the other hand, focus on the outcomes that are the most relevant to their goals. In a well-known experiment, adults saw a video of several people tossing a ball to one another. The experimenter told them to count how many passes particular people made. In the midst of this, a person in a gorilla suit walked slowly through the middle of the video. A surprising number of adults, intent on counting, didn’t even seem to notice the unexpected gorilla.
Adults focus on objects that will be most useful to them. But as the lever study demonstrated, children play with the objects that will teach them the most. In our study, 4-year-olds imagined new possibilities based on just a little data. Adults rely more on what they already know. Babies aren’t trying to learn one particular skill or set of facts; instead, they are drawn to anything new, unexpected or informative.
Part of the explanation for these differing approaches can be found in the brain. The young brain is remarkably plastic and flexible. Brains work because neurons are connected to one another, allowing them to communicate. Baby brains have many more neural connections than adult brains. But they are much less efficient. Over time, we prune away the connections we don’t use, and the remaining ones become faster and more automatic. Moreover, the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that controls the directed, planned, focused kind of intelligence, is exceptionally late to mature, and may not take its final shape until our early 20s.
In fact, our mature brain seems to be programmed by our childhood experiences — we plan based on what we’ve learned as children. Very young children imagine and explore a vast array of possibilities. As they grow older and absorb more evidence, certain possibilities become much more likely and more useful. They then make decisions based on this selective information and become increasingly reluctant to give those ideas up and try something new. Computer scientists talk about the difference between exploring and exploiting — a system will learn more if it explores many possibilities, but it will be more effective if it simply acts on the most likely one. Babies explore; adults exploit.
Each kind of intelligence has benefits and drawbacks. Focus and planning get you to your goal more quickly but may also lock in what you already know, closing you off to alternative possibilities. We need both blue-sky speculation and hard-nosed planning. Babies and young children are designed to explore, and they should be encouraged to do so.
The learning that babies and young children do on their own, when they carefully watch an unexpected outcome and draw new conclusions from it, ceaselessly manipulate a new toy or imagine different ways that the world might be, is very different from schoolwork. Babies and young children can learn about the world around them through all sorts of real-world objects and safe replicas, from dolls to cardboard boxes to mixing bowls, and even toy cellphones and computers. Babies can learn a great deal just by exploring the ways bowls fit together or by imitating a parent talking on the phone. (Imagine how much money we can save on “enriching” toys and DVDs!)
But what children observe most closely, explore most obsessively and imagine most vividly are the people around them. There are no perfect toys; there is no magic formula. Parents and other caregivers teach young children by paying attention and interacting with them naturally and, most of all, by just allowing them to play.
On women in the military
Living and Fighting Alongside Men, and Fitting In
By STEVEN LEE MYERS
FORWARD OPERATING BASE WARHORSE, Iraq — There is no mistaking that this dusty, gravel-strewn camp northeast of Baghdad is anything other than a combat outpost in a still-hostile land. And there is no mistaking that women in uniform have had a transformative effect on it.
They have their own quarters, boxy trailers called CHUs (the military’s acronym for containerized housing units, pronounced “chews”).
There are women’s bathrooms and showers, alongside the men’s. Married couples live together. The base’s clinic treats gynecological problems and has, alongside the equipment needed to treat the trauma of modern warfare, an ultrasound machine.
Opponents of integrating women in combat zones long feared that sex would mean the end of American military prowess. But now birth control is available — the PX at Warhorse even sold out of condoms one day recently — reflecting a widely accepted reality that soldiers have sex at outposts across Iraq.
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are the first in which tens of thousands of American military women have lived, worked and fought with men for prolonged periods. Wars without front lines, they have done more than just muddle the rules meant to keep women out of direct enemy contact.
They have changed the way the United States military goes to war. They have reshaped life on bases across Iraq and Afghanistan. They have cultivated a new generation of women with a warrior’s ethos — and combat experience — that for millennia was almost exclusively the preserve of men.
And they have done so without the disruption of discipline and unit cohesion that some feared would unfold at places like Warhorse.
“There was a lot of debate over where women should be,” said Brig. Gen. Heidi V. Brown, one of the two highest ranking women in Iraq today, recalling the start of the war. “Here we are six years later, and you don’t hear about it. You shouldn’t hear about it.”
In many ways, General Brown’s career trajectory since the war began reflects the expanded role for women at war.
In 2003, as a colonel, she commanded a Patriot air-defense brigade that joined the push from Kuwait to Baghdad, losing nine soldiers in a maintenance battalion outside Nasiriya three days after the invasion began. One of them, Pfc. Lori Ann Piestewa, was the first woman killed in action in Iraq; Pfc. Jessica D. Lynch was captured in the same attack. Now, as the American role in the war declines, General Brown will oversee the logistics of withdrawing the vast amounts of military hardware in Iraq over the next year.
“We’ve needed — needed — the contributions of both our men and women,” said Brig. Gen. Mary A. Legere, the director of intelligence for the American war effort here and the other highest ranking woman in Iraq.
The military, of course, is not gender blind, especially in a war zone.
Sexual harassment in a still-predominantly male institution remains a problem. So does sexual assault. Both are underreported, soldiers and officers here say, because the rigidity of the military chain of command can make accusations uncomfortable and even risky for victims living in close quarters with the men they accuse.
As a precaution, women are advised to travel in pairs, particularly in smaller bases populated with Iraqi troops and civilians. Capt. Margaret D. Taafe-McMenamy, commander of the intelligence analysis cell at Warhorse, carries a folding knife and a heavy, ridged flashlight — a Christmas gift from her husband, whom she lives with here — as a precaution when she is out at night on the base.
Staff Sgt. Patricia F. Bradford, 27, a psychological operations soldier, said that slights, subtle and not, were common, and some were easier to brush off than others. Women are still viewed derisively at times in the confined, occasionally tense space of an outpost like Warhorse.
“You’re a bitch, a slut or a dyke — or you’re married, but even if you’re married, you’re still probably one of the three,” Sergeant Bradford said.
At the same time, she and other female soldiers cope with the slights, showing a disarming brashness.
“I think being a staff sergeant — and a bitch — helps deflect those things,” she added.
The issues that arise in having women in combat — harassment, bias, hardship, even sexual relations — are, she and others said, a matter of discipline, maturity and professionalism rather than an argument for separating the sexes.
Sergeant Bradford recalled the day during her first tour when her convoy moved south while a soldier with whom she was then engaged to be married moved north on the same highway. She listened on the radio as his convoy came under an attack that continued after she was out of range.
“For four days, I had no idea what happened to him,” she said, “but I still had to continue my mission, because that’s what you do when you’re a soldier.” (He emerged unscathed, she later learned.)
Unforeseen Issues
Such issues were not foreseen when the war in Iraq began in 2003, even though the initial invasion force included women in the vanguard.
On a practical level, the military was not prepared to house and otherwise address the specific needs of women in a war zone — including issues like health and privacy.
Early on, bases were largely makeshift and far more dangerous. Few soldiers, male or female, had more than rudimentary quarters or latrines. None had much privacy.
Sgt. Dawn M. Cloukey, a communications specialist, spent her first tour in Iraq in 2005 and 2006 as the only woman among 45 soldiers, operating a retransmission station in the mountains of northern Iraq and then in the center of Baghdad. She lived out of a rucksack, with no toilet or room of her own. She described the experience as isolating.
“I always felt like the plague,” she said at Warhorse, on her second tour in Iraq, where she handles communications for the commander of the First Stryker Brigade of the 25th Infantry Division.
As the United States military settled into more permanent bases, many initial difficulties abated, as the Army gradually adapted to the new reality of waging war with a mixed force. So have the soldiers themselves.
Women have sought acceptance in a still-predominately male environment not by emphasizing their sex but rather by displaying their toughness, their willingness to adjust to conditions that are less than ideal.
“I’ve kicked my guys out of the truck to pee in a bottle like that,” Sgt. Joelene M. Lachance, a soldier with the 172nd Military Intelligence Battalion, said at Warhorse, pointing to one of the liter water bottles that are ubiquitous at bases in Iraq. “Cut the bottle off and pee in the bottle and then dispose of it. Sometimes it’s an issue, but most of the time, I just make do.
“I don’t try to, like, ‘I can’t sleep here,’ ” she continued. “If they’re sleeping there, I’m sleeping there. I spent five days out in the truck once — with six of my guys, sleeping on the floor.”
Warhorse still reverberates with the rumble of armored convoys and the thud of helicopters ferrying troops and, at times, the wounded. It is just north of Baquba, the regional capital of Diyala Province, one of the most restive provinces in Iraq. Here, the war is not over. Warhorse will very likely be among the last bases to close in Iraq before American troops withdraw in full.
At the outset of the war, the introduction of women into outposts like Warhorse raised fears not just of abuse or harassment, but also of sex and pregnancy. The worst of those fears, officers say, have not materialized.
In fact, sex in America’s war zones is fairly common, soldiers say, and has not generally proved disruptive.
In April, the latest iteration of General Order No. 1, the rules governing the behavior of soldiers in Iraq broadly, quietly relaxed the explicit prohibition on sex in a war zone, though it still bars sex with Iraqis and spending the night in someone else’s CHU. Some commands, including Baghdad, retain broader restrictions, for example, on being in CHUs belonging to members of the opposite sex.
“The chain of command already has to deal with enough,” Captain Taafe-McMenamy said. “They don’t really want to have to punish soldiers for dating.”
Women do become pregnant — a condition that, intentional or not, in or out of wedlock, requires the woman to be flown out within two weeks, causing personnel disruptions in individual units.
The Army and Marine Corps declined to say exactly how many women left Iraq and Afghanistan as a result of pregnancies, but it appears to be relatively rare and has had little effect on overall readiness, commanders say. At Warhorse, the First Stryker Brigade, which has thousands of soldiers, has sent only three women home because of pregnancies in 10 months in Iraq, the brigade said.
“There was a fear if we integrate units, you will have a bunch of young people with raging hormones, and it will end up in too many unwanted pregnancies, and it’s more trouble than it’s worth,” said Peter Mansoor, a former battalion commander in Iraq who, until retiring recently, served as Gen. David H. Petraeus’s executive officer. “With good leadership and mentorship, we have been able to keep those problems to a minimum.”
Taking On New Roles
Roughly 1 in 20 of the 5,600 soldiers at Warhorse is female, a smaller ratio than in the military as a whole. Nonetheless, they are fully integrated in the base’s operations.
Many of the women at Warhorse serve in jobs that have traditionally accommodated women: the base hospital, food service, supply and administration.
Others, though, serve on the brigade staff, in intelligence and psychological operations, which until recently were part of the Special Forces and thus off limits to women.
“We have changed so much,” Col. Burt K. Thompson, the commander at Warhorse, said of the Army, noting that every time he leaves the base, his patrol includes two women, including Sergeant Cloukey “on comms” — communications — and a medic, Sgt. Evette T. Lee-Stewart. “To have a female on an infantry brigade staff? Oh my God.”
Like many commanders who have served in Iraq or Afghanistan, he said that women have ended the debate over their role by their performance.
“I’ve relieved males from command,” he said. “I’ve never relieved a female commander in two and a half years as commander.”
The nature of the war has also done much to change the debate over combat roles. Any trip off the heavily secured bases now effectively invites contact with the enemy.
Many women have also been pulled off their regular jobs and trained to search Iraqi women at checkpoints because of local cultural sensitivities, putting them as much at risk as any male counterpart.
When Specialist Jennifer M. Hoeppner goes “outside the wire” at Warhorse, as going on patrol is known, she clambers into what she calls “the best seat in the truck,” the turret atop the Army’s newest armored vehicle, the MRAP.
“I’m the gunner on all our missions,” she said, having qualified for the M240B machine gun at an expert level.
“I think some of the males are a little confused when I go up,” Specialist Hoeppner said. “They’re like, ‘Who’s your gunner?’ ”
Women are also increasingly “attached” to infantry and armored units that train and advise Iraq’s police and military forces. Now that almost all American combat forces have pulled back to bases outside of Iraq’s cities, that training has become the main mission in Iraq.
The involvement of women in it has been a cultural shock for Iraqi men far less accustomed to dealing with women professionally, especially in the military.
Women spoke of inappropriate comments or uncomfortable flattery, and even gifts. “It was everything from candy to lingerie,” said Capt. Victoria Ferreira, 29, who spent a year with an 11-person squad training Iraqi officers. “How do you react to that? ‘Thank you?’ ”
For the most part, though, Iraqis seem to accept the role of women in the American military — they have even expanded their own ranks for tasks like searching women at checkpoints — even if it seems unlikely that women will be incorporated more widely into the Iraqi armed forces anytime soon.
“I think now, six years since the war started, they’ve learned to adapt or tolerate the fact that in the American Army we have high ranking positions that are filled by women,” said Capt. Violeta Z. Sifuentes, who commands the 591st Military Police Company.
It was not always so, she recalled of her first tour in Samarra in 2006. “They always thought my platoon sergeant or my squad leader was the one in charge until I was like, ‘Listen here. I’m in charge whether you like it or not.’ ”
The captain’s remarks were typical. The women serving in today’s military represent a generational shift. They are confident young women who have not had to fight the same gender battles their predecessors in uniform did.
“I never felt like I had to fight to succeed in the Army” was how Captain Taafe-McMenamy, who is 27, put it.
Adapting to the Tasks
Women in today’s military say they do not feel the same pressure to prove themselves. They adapt and expect others to adapt. They preserve their femininity without making much of it.
Specialist Hoeppner and her roommate, Sergeant Bradford, belong to the 361st Tactical Psychological Operations Company, which patrols the towns and villages of Diyala with infantry squads to spread and collect information.
On a recent patrol in the small village of Shifta, they seemed more of a novelty to the Iraqis they encountered than the soldiers they patrolled with, taking up defensive positions alongside their male colleagues whenever they paused.
“I actually had this million-dollar idea my first deployment,” Sergeant Bradford said of her tour as a truck driver hauling supplies in 2004. “I was like, I need something that’s like a beer bong that I can hold in place so I can pee standing up without pulling my pants down. Cause we were truck drivers. We’d stop on the side of the road. There’s no bushes. I was telling one of my soldiers about this great idea, and he said they already make that.”
She produced from her bunk in her CHU a device sold by REI called a “feminine urinary director.” “It’s even pink,” Specialist Hoeppner interjected.
Warhorse’s supply officer — a woman — acquired dozens of them.
“The first time one of them came around a truck and saw me peeing on a tire,” she said of one of her male colleagues, “I thought he was going to have a heart attack.”
On an upstate farm for rehab
Two Acres of Hope for Recovering Addicts
By CARA BUCKLEY
GARRISON, N.Y. — It was shortly after 8 a.m. on a sun-drenched July day in this idyllic hamlet 50 miles north of Manhattan, and a hulk of a man named Venice Crafton was lumbering between beds of arugula, leaving outsize footprints in his wake.
Mr. Crafton is 6-foot-2 ½ inches, 241 pounds and missing his two front teeth, all of which might have made him seem menacing but for the wide-brimmed, slightly floppy straw hat on his head.
“Boy, if they could see me now in Brooklyn, they wouldn’t believe it,” said Mr. Crafton, who was raised in Brownsville. “This goes no further than this farm,” he added to the half-dozen co-workers around him.
The men responded with grins and low grunts. They were immersed in their work, tugging heads of lettuce from the soil, culling the leaves and rinsing the produce in a plastic pail filled with water.
“I’m not used to doing this stuff,” Mr. Crafton, 48, grumbled.
“You can’t tell with that hat,” came someone’s retort.
It was all in a day’s work at an unlikely flyspeck of a place: a two-acre organic vegetable farm bordered by a forest and gentle hills, where two dozen men were quietly fighting for their lives.
The farm is run by recovering addicts and alcoholics from New York City, men whose various addictions, and repeated relapses, have left them sickened and homeless. Called Renewal Farm, the patch of land boasts neat rows of vegetables and bright flowers, as well as two greenhouses fashioned out of thick sheets of plastic.
The men’s days are split into two very different parts. They tend the farm, lacing the air with locker-room banter and gentle ribbing. And then they exorcise their worries and voice their hopes at St. Christopher’s Inn, a hilltop rehabilitation center nearby where they sleep.
The men’s lives are shot through with such contrasts. They are urban, transplanted to the country. They have dark pasts, but they spend their days in bucolic surroundings. They come from the gritty streets, but they grow trendy produce, often for rarefied palates. In this patchwork existence, they do have one constant thread: the knowledge that they are teetering on the brink.
“It’s a last resort,” said one participant, James Fletcher, who is 58 but looks far older, his cheeks lined and eyes sunken by decades of heroin abuse.
The transition to the farm can be unnerving.
On that sunlit July morning, a man from Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, was leaning over rows of red kale, looking bewildered. He had been, he said, “addicted to everything, a garbage-head.” He was also new to the farm, and did not want to talk much about his past, or reveal his name. Instead, he kept his eyes pinned on another program participant, Bernard Cole, who was cutting off wilting leaves from kale.
“Those leaves aren’t good?” the man asked, perplexed.
“No,” Mr. Cole replied gently. “But see this one, see how it’s good?”
“No, I don’t know nothing,” the man replied dolefully. “I’m a newcomer.”
Several feet away, Mr. Crafton was cleaning lettuce, and eyeing it suspiciously. He is not fond of vegetables, and as a rule, he said, doesn’t trust any food that “doesn’t already come in a bag.”
“If it ain’t on a McDonald’s menu, I ain’t eating it,” Mr. Crafton declared proudly, peering out from beneath his straw brim, a wet, dripping head of lettuce in his hand. “I always been a picky eater.”
•
Renewal Farm is run by Project Renewal, a Manhattan nonprofit that helps the homeless, the addicted and the mentally ill. The farm is headed by David Harrington, a 61-year-old horticulture expert, and Anthony DeArmas, a 45-year-old former crack addict and alcoholic. About two dozen men participate in the farm program at a time, usually for six to nine months. The farm is financed mostly by public dollars.
From its inception in 1996 until 2007, the farm was at Camp La Guardia, a sprawling 1,000-bed shelter in Orange County that housed homeless men from New York City. Camp La Guardia closed in 2007, but Renewal Farm found new living quarters 25 miles away at St. Christopher’s Inn, in Garrison off Route 9. The compound started as a Franciscan friary a hundred years ago, then morphed into a homeless shelter and, eventually, into a rehabilitation center, with 147 beds, a medical clinic and services like acupuncture and counseling.
As for the farmland, the nearby Garrison and Highlands country clubs donated the two acres, with the men in the program helping to clear the land, build a deer fence and install a water line linked to a nearby reservoir. Much of the harvest is sold at the farm’s road stand, which opened late last season, while some is served to the residents of St. Christopher’s and some sold in the inn’s thrift shop. About 1,200 pounds of the produce is provided to the two country clubs annually in exchange for the donated land.
At the country clubs in particular, the food finds its way to a world far distant from the men’s. The Tavern, the restaurant at the Highlands Country Club, serves the farm’s lettuce in the $9 Cranberries and Blue salad (greens, cranberries and blue cheese made from local sheep’s milk, in a white balsamic vinaigrette) and with the pan-seared diver scallops dinner, which costs $27.
•
The morning that Mr. Crafton was yearning for McDonald’s, he watched as the other men rinsed heads of lettuce, one by one, in a pail of water. Then he intervened, showing off some previously acquired knowledge. He piled a load of lettuce into a plastic basket, and dunked the whole thing in the bucket in one efficient swoop.
“Genius, man, genius,” said one of his co-workers, Manfred Long.
“That was an old trick I learned back in 2000,” Mr. Crafton said, smiling with satisfaction.
Mr. Crafton was enrolled in Project Renewal before, in 2000, and when he left he thought his crack and alcohol problems were licked. But, after some relapses and some good years, he found himself starting his mornings with six-packs of beer. By December of last year, he was back at Renewal Farm.
•
No one knows how many graduates of Renewal Farm have stayed clean. About 450 have cycled through in its 13 years, but their progress has not been tracked, both because it would be expensive and because the men tend to move around a lot. Still, based on anecdotal responses, Mr. Harrington, the program director, guesses that about 65 percent stayed off drugs and alcohol at least a year. The program’s strengths, he believes, are its length and the structure it gives the men’s lives.
Dr. David A. Deitch, the chief clinical officer with Phoenix House, said the 65 percent rate is high, relatively speaking; on average, he said, the one-year success rate is closer to one-third. “Regardless of the outcome,” he added, “the idea that they’re doing something, and it’s self-supporting, keeping them clean longer, and being good for the community as a whole, and that they’re earning their keep as opposed to being treated as though they’re horizontal patients somewhere in a hospital. These are very good, exciting features.”
The men seem to have an easier time at St. Christopher’s Inn than they did at Camp La Guardia, where there was some drinking and drugs among the 1,000 residents, and where the two dozen Project Renewal participants were among the few in recovery. At St. Christopher’s, all of the shelter’s roughly 150 residents are in recovery.
“It was a lot more chaotic,” Mr. DeArmas said of Camp La Guardia. “A lot more temptation there, too.”
The program’s success rate seems to bear out this impression. In the year and a half since Renewal Farm opened at Garrison, just 4 percent of the men have tested positive for alcohol and drugs, a result that leads to dismissal. The men are tested randomly, and also whenever they leave St. Christopher’s on unescorted trips. At Camp La Guardia, the number of Renewal men who failed those tests was roughly 20 percent.
The Renewal men, and the other men who stay there, call St. Christopher’s “the holy mountain.” Its grounds are thick with crosses, crucifixes and statues of saints. Many of them also want to believe, almost desperately, that miracles happen there.
•
Mr. Long was shaking water off some lettuce, and the droplets were catching the sun and spraying a few men standing nearby. He laid the heads in a box bound for the farm stand.
As often happens during the slow hours in the field, the talk drifted back to the men’s former lives.
Mr. Crafton was speaking about the old Project Renewal farm truck, which was crushed on Sept. 11, 2001. Mr. DeArmas had driven it to the city that day to deliver produce to a farmers’ market near the World Trade Center, and fled on foot when the first tower fell.
“That truck was de-stroyed,” Mr. Crafton said to the others.
The group fell silent for a moment. Then: “I bet the drug dealers were having a field day that day,” Mr. Long said.
“No cops,” Mr. Crafton said.
Then another man had a thought.
“No cellphones,” he said.
“Oh yeah,” Mr. Long said.
•
Nine men were sitting in a circle in a room at St. Christopher’s Inn for a therapy session. After a brief meditation, Michael Boccia, the social worker leading the group, began a discussion about old habits, and the men started talking about how they had drowned their anxieties with drinks and drugs.
“My worst fear is leaving this mountain the way I came in, doing things in half measures,” said William Chapman, a recovering crack addict from Brooklyn. “I worked too hard to get where I am now.”
Like the rest of the men, Mr. Chapman was wearing a photo ID taken the day he entered the program. It showed a terrified man with downcast eyes.
Fear and hope are undercurrents at Renewal, even for Mr. Crafton. Despite all his city slicker bravura, he admitted privately that he liked being out of New York and loved the peaceful rhythms of the farm. He has found serenity in Garrison, he said, and now possesses, he believes, the peace of mind he needs to stay sober when he leaves.
“I’m too old to be coming in and out of these places,” Mr. Crafton said. “I got insight now into what I need. This is my last time. I know it.”
•
There was a snake on the loose somewhere in the hoop house, the long, low greenhouse made out of arched tubing and plastic sheets. But the men had no time to find it; they had work to do.
Mr. Fletcher walked over to the flower beds with Mr. DeArmas, crouched down and began snipping blooms — celosias, nasturtiums, snapdragons — to sell at the farm stand. Another man helped. “Here you go, flower maiden,” he said, handing Mr. Fletcher a bloom.
“Thank you,” Mr. Fletcher said, and moved to another plant, accidentally dropping a flower. “Sweetheart, you dropped one,” the man said.
Mr. Fletcher shook his head. “Sweetheart,” he muttered.
Mr. Crafton began arranging the picked blooms into bouquets. “You usually want a little color,” he explained to Mr. Fletcher. “See? I put that one in the middle. The red one. Then this one. And this pink one. Look! A bouquet.” He held the arrangement at arm’s length, surveyed his work, and nodded.
“This one?” Mr. Fletcher asked, offering him a yellow snapdragon.
“No,” Mr. Crafton said. “It doesn’t go.”
•
Renewal Farm’s roadside stand sits at the corner of Route 9 and Snake Hill Road, and at midmorning one weekday Mr. DeArmas and a few men unloaded the van, setting out baskets of squash, herbs, lettuce, Swiss chard, tomato plants and Mr. Crafton’s bouquets. Sales at the farm stand have been slow this year, partly because of the near-daily downpours. Mr. Long, who had been helping unpack the produce, waved at a passing car, grinning widely, a gesture that sometimes draws in customers.
“I always wave at everybody,” he said. The car slowed but did not stop.
Mr. DeArmas left the men to tend their stand and drove back to the farm. It was time for the men there to wrap up their day’s work.
As the van arrived at the farm, Mr. Crafton was waiting with news.
“I came across the snake!” he cried. “It was a garter snake, but it was big.”
“Yeah,” said one of the men. “The snake ran one way; he ran the other way.”
Mr. DeArmas guffawed, and then he told the men to hop into the van. It was time to go back to St. Christopher’s, back to the holy mountain.