Working Together: Couple Takes on Huss Caretaker Role

Margaret and Dan Wenger (Margaret Wenger)

The Huss Project is a growing community space and farm operated by *culture is not optional (*cino) at the corner of West Broadway and Eighth Streets in Three Rivers. It has accomplished a range of work this summer with the help of seven full-year and summer-season interns and AmeriCorps VISTA service members. Watershed Voice interviewed each of them and wrote biographic profiles with input from *cino Executive Director Rob Vander Giessen-Reitsma. That article can be found here.

However, much oversight of this work, and much additional work behind the scenes, has been occurring under the hands and guidance of Huss’s onsite caretakers, the husband-and-wife pair of Margaret Wenger and Dan Truesdale. The organization created their positions earlier this year in recognition of new accomplishments, growing programs, and a need for added capacity.

Watershed spoke to Wenger and Truesdale about their backgrounds and their experiences so far at Huss.

Margaret Wenger (Dave Vago|Watershed Voice)

“It’s going really well,” Wenger said. “It’s been a weird summer in some ways, both weather wise and social climate wise, pandemic wise, all those things, but I feel like all things considered both the groups of folks we have working here and the systems we’ve figured out working together, and then how we’ve been able to take care of this land and produce a lot of food this year has been really exciting and great and just come together really well despite adversity.”

The pair lives in a house adjacent to Huss, which occupies the building and grounds of a former Three Rivers elementary school. Wenger said, “it means that we’re part of the neighborhood and have eyes on the property just because it’s right out of our window. It also means things like helping to mow the lawn and can kind of have an easy, daily check on the property.”

“I often just enjoy coming back here to walk and so I can see if something has gone wrong, and even on a weekend, it’s not like work, it’s just because I live here. It’s one of those jobs that’s like a job but also not really a job, it’s just like, ‘we live here and care about this place,’ which is what we’re trying to do,” Wenger said.

Wenger grew up in Three Rivers and graduated from Three Rivers High School. Her parents are caretakers at a Mennonite retreat west of town called The Hermitage. She attended college at Houghton College in western New York state.

Several members of the Huss and *cino community have grown up with its leadership. Wenger is one of them. “I’ve known most of the longer-term members since I was about 12 years old, since 2002 I guess, since Rob and Kirstin moved here essentially. Julie, my family went to the church that they attended at the time. They were just cool young adults doing cool stuff while I was a teenager.”

It was her connection to Three Rivers that brought Wenger and Truesdale back. “I kept coming back here and then we kept coming back here to visit my parents for little stints, and we would help out with random projects here at Huss,” she said. The pair lived in two places prior to coming here, but she said, “Three Rivers really was a place we had found home, so we decided to come back.”

Truesdale is from Wheaton, Illinois, a western suburb of Chicago. He studied mechanical engineering at Purdue University, then returned to the Chicago area for an engineering job. “I had that job for a couple years, and it was mainly just like living in a cubicle and not doing work that was super meaningful for me,” he said. “It was kind of interesting. I worked in a variety of jobs, mainly like oil industry, food processing, chemical stuff.”

Dan Truesdale (Dave Vago|Watershed Voice)

A book about human impacts on the environment provided Truesdale the impetus to look at his career differently. “It just kind of like opened my eyes to a bunch of things that I’d never thought about before, like what happens when I turn on a light or flush the toilet, and where my food comes from and all those systems and their impact,” he said.

Truesdale started researching on how to live in a way that might reduce his environmental impact. “A lot of my research pointed my curiosity toward where my food comes from, so I eventually got to the point where I was ready to quit that job, and I was like, ‘maybe I’ll give farming a try.’ So, I applied to a couple different internships at a couple different places, and I got accepted at this place in Georgia.”

The job was at a pecan farm and bakery business that, as Truesdale arrived, was in the process of diversifying its crop and experimenting in ways to make itself more organic and sustainable. “I was there for like a year and half, and it was a really meaningful experience for me because it was a step out of the normal path of life I’d been on up to that point. Like, you go to college, you get a job, and then you get married and you have kids and you stick with some job for the rest of your life.”

From there, Truesdale traveled briefly with an eye toward exploring other, similar farms. He soon went to work for a farm organization in Missouri called The Possibility Alliance, a place where he ended up staying for seven years. “That place was like, radical simplicity. Didn’t have electricity or any kind of power equipment on the place, and hosted thousands of visitors a year. It was an inspiring, super sustainability kind of place.”

Truesdale and Wenger met when he returned to visit his former place of employment in Georgia. Wenger arrived there in the course of her travels at the same time as Truesdale’s visit. “Margaret and I both arrived at the same time,” Truesdale said. “We hit it off right away and started a long-distance relationship for a while.”

Eventually, Wenger went to Missouri and joined Truesdale at the Possibility Alliance. After a stretch of time working there, Wenger said, “we decided to move to Vermont and thought that might be a longer-term home, but only ended up staying about a year and a half before we realized we wanted to live closer to home and family.”

The move puts them within a short drive of Wenger’s parents, and the couple is enjoying the proximity and helping them with their own projects.

Since arriving at Huss, both have worked on a variety of tasks and endeavors. Wenger has helped with oversight of the interns and service member crew, while Truesdale has focused on manual projects. Truesdale said he is “still kind of getting used to the place. It’s only been a couple months. We got here in April sometime, like mid-April. We’re not living out of boxes much anymore and the house is pretty comfortable. And I’m enjoying working next door.”

Despite the adjustment, he said, “I’m enjoying the rhythm. I mostly just build and fix things, and help out on the farm whenever needed, but farming, at least vegetable growing, is not really my thing, but I like to eat vegetables. It’s been going good. It’s a bunch of little projects. There’s a bunch of diversity to what I’m doing, which I like, to not be doing the same thing over and over again, so that’s good.”

At the time of his late July interview with Watershed, Truesdale was working on building a chicken coop, but he has also worked on a range of other projects, such as helping Vander Giessen-Reitsma and others bury the onsite farm’s irrigation lines, which were previously hoses laid atop the ground. He was instrumental in helping complete the Imaginarium, an indoor library and multi-function space, as well as Huss’s outdoor pavilion. Both were finished this past spring.

In addition to their everyday tasks, Wenger and Truesdale like the interns and service members. “I really like the crew. They’re good workers and fun people,” Truesdale said.

Each year, *cino has brought together a group of interns from a variety of backgrounds, geographic and otherwise. This year’s crew is its largest yet. Truesdale enjoys the lunchtime conversations with them. “It’s interesting the different conversations that come up around political stuff,” Truesdale said. “It spans the gamut, so it’s cool to have all different perspectives.”

“There’s also a big age range of people, because all the summer folks are pretty much college or just out of college, and more of the long-term people are a little older, like, closer to my age,” he said. “So, it’s interesting the different levels of experience and different perspectives coming together.”

The couple arrived from Vermont in April when pandemic restrictions were at their tightest to date. Huss and *cino staff and volunteers “welcomed them from a distance with a housewarming gift and video gatherings,” according to the organization’s newsletter.

Once the organization decided to hire the couple, the newsletter said, staff and volunteers became “excited to announce” they were coming, and predicted they would “help us significantly in our efforts to build capacity at The Huss Project and The Huss Project Farm. They will be the “eyes and ears” of event and farm operations here and will play a critical role in working with AmeriCorps volunteers over the course of the year.” In their first week, they began helping plant crops for the year. They have since lived up to the other predictions as well.

Dave Vago is a writer and columnist for Watershed Voice. A Philadelphia native with roots in Three Rivers, Vago is a planning consultant to history and community development organizations and is the former Executive Director of the Three Rivers DDA/Main Street program.