LEON, W.Va. - If Noah had beached his ark on a certain hilltop in Mason County, it might explain the bounty of animals found there.
A host of roosters crow seemingly every other minute. One hillside resounds with the repetitive "baa-baa" chattering of two kinds of sheep, South Down Babydolls and Icelandics. In another field, Brutus, a horned member of a herd of goats, scratches an itch against a downed branch.
Meanwhile, more than 300 chickens and turkeys poke about for food, as 10 pigs snort and snuffle in a small side barn. A crowd of geese, chief among them Emdem, Toulouse and Buff, honk and waddle this way and that as the latest litter of a half-dozen fuzzy Great Pyrenees puppies tumble over each other in play.
Martin Schaffer greets his menagerie as he treads his 110-acre organic Four Seasons Farm, whose origins can be traced to a daring escape decades ago from a former Iron Curtain country that no longer exists.
"Hi, geese! Are you talking to me? You look good today, yes, you do!"
The puppies have gotten into a tangle of weeds. Schaffer calls to them in a voice still inflected with his Central European roots. "Hey puppies! C'mon babies, what are you doing here? You are going to get lost."
An extremely loud bray sounds from the edge of the woods. "That there is Mister Peacock in the blueberries."
The animals are matched in multiplicity by the crops. There's that blueberry patch and some plum trees. There's a small apple orchard, whose rows are spliced with buckwheat, sunflowers and wildflowers, offering pollen to the occupants of Shaffer's row of beehives. Young muscadine grapes, which he both eats and turns into wine, clump on strings in his grape orchard.
A neighbor in overalls, Robert Barnett, kneels in a strawberry patch. In exchange for picking the berries, a job Schaffer can hardly get to with everything else going on at his farm, they split the pickings 50-50.
Every Tuesday, Schaffer must make sure he's ready to deliver eggs or fresh garlic or honey or his homemade whole-wheat bread made with flax, sunflower, sesame, pumpkin and caraway seeds, to Huntington's Wild Ramp store.
Meanwhile, Schaffer has 40 other regular customers he emails to let them know when some other produce or product is available. These may include pork processed at a local custom butcher shop and chicken broth, turkey broth and duck broth mixes he works up when winter comes.
"My alarm clock is at 5:30 a.m. and I don't get home before 9:30 p.m.," he says, as his neighbor maneuvers past rhubarb and onion plantings to get to the berries. "After that, I have to clean the eggs and package them. I never worked so hard in my life. But I never been happier."
And he has never been healthier, he adds, plucking some fresh blueberries and popping them into his mouth. At age 57, he is often on his feet sunup to sundown. "I can keep going all day long and I don't think very few men can. I don't take any pills, any medication. I haven't seen a doctor in a whole bunch of years. If there is something wrong with me, I don't know about it and I don't even want to find out."
He laughs.
There was a night, though, when he wasn't laughing at all. Yet that night led to everything a visitor sees, hears and tastes on this thriving, bustling, dream-come-true farm.
The year was 1984. The Iron Curtain still hung strong and firm between the Soviet Bloc and the West. Schaffer had lived his life under communism, born and raised in the country then known as Czechoslovakia.
At age 26, he wanted out. He was about to attempt a tried and true - and dangerous - way out.
"It was common for people to go to Yugoslavia for a vacation trip and escape from there," he recalled, telling the story seated in an easy chair in his house on the farm.
Masquerading as a tourist, and required to give up his passport just so he wouldn't try an escape, he took a bus to the then-Yugoslav town of Maribor. He headed for the woods, intending to cross the mountains and seek political asylum in Austria.
"I was walking on a road and two guys with machine guns just happened to be there. And, of course, I didn't have a passport," he said, "I didn't know what I was doing. You don't get a textbook, 'How to Get Out of Czechoslovakia for Dummies.'"
He chuckles. But what followed wasn't funny at all.
The guards took him to a dungeonlike prison. This was bad news for someone like him, who came from a family that had opposed communism and had been blacklisted, he said. "Because if they had sent me back to Czechoslovakia I would go straight to political prison for five to seven years and most likely I wouldn't make it. That night was terrible, really."
Yet he was released the next day with a warning - if he was found again trying to escape he would be sent back home with an escort.
"But at that point I was determined to get out. So, I took my chance."
With only a page from an atlas as his guide, he took a bus south to the city of Split and then another to Bled, a border town. In the distance was the Karavankas mountain range. On their other side lay Austria.
He had learned his lesson.
"Once I got off the bus, I went directly in the woods," he said. He wore only jeans and a T-shirt with a small rucksack on his back.
He recalls the exact date - June 17. He forded a stream. He climbed in darkness. The pine forest through which he walked grew denser. At one point, he had to crawl through thickets of trees and bushes and could no longer carry his sack, he said. "So I had to drop everything. Whatever I could put in my pockets I did and that was it."
He reached the ridge of the mountains and took a rest. He awoke with a start to find himself sliding downward. "So I said no more naps, no more rest!"
On the other side of the range, he encountered steep snow and ice fields. He slid, skiing on his shoes, using a big rock to slow his descent. Lower on the mountain, he found walking trails.
He was in Austria.
"I made it and dawn was breaking," he says, his voice suddenly faltering. "I'm sorry ...." Schaffer dips his head, tears water his eyes.
After a moment, he continues.
"There was a little house and a mountain man was sitting in front of it. An old man. I didn't speak any German, I didn't speak any English. Whatever he spoke we were able to communicate. He said, 'Where did you come from?' I said 'I crossed the mountains overnight.' And he said, 'Nobody can cross the mountains overnight."
He was wrong about that.
Schaffer sought and earned political asylum. After some months, he was sponsored to come to the United States by a Baptist missionary school in Concord, New Hampshire. He took English classes and learned how to speak well enough to land a job with Charles River Labs, helping to raise swine and later monkeys for medical laboratory research in a job he held for nearly 20 years.
The second job took him to the Florida Keys, where the monkeys were raised on two islands. It was his crew's job to motorboat to the islands, feed and water the monkeys, then catch them when an order came in for lab animals.
In the wild, monkeys spend most of their time foraging for food. Fed monkey chow by his crew, they soon became bored and would pick apart and kill the red mango trees that ringed the island, Schaffer said.
The company was under pressure from both PETA and environmentalists, he recalled. He eventually created another job for himself by starting up a nursery to seed and replant the islands with mango trees.
All the while he was building a 40-foot catamaran on evenings and weekends. He quit the company and for seven years sailed the Keys, running a charter business. But what he and his girlfriend at the time wanted to find was a farm somewhere inland, especially after Hurricane Wilma filled her house with 18 inches of saltwater in 2005, said Schaffer.
"She was originally from North Carolina and wanted to stay on the East Coast. So it was Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina and West Virginia. In the winter we would be looking online for farms because we wanted about 100 usable acres."
He found the perfect plot of property in Mason County. These days, there's no girlfriend. Just him, a whole bunch of growing things and one noisy gaggle of animals.
"If you call it noise," says Schaffer, heading out of his house to offer a four-wheeling tour of the property. "The animals that I have, they really don't make me any money. But they really make this farm alive. Without them, this place would be a sad place."
The animals are also an essential part of his vision for Four Seasons Farm.
"I don't use artificial fertilizer on my plants. So I need their manure. It's really part of the cycle," he says.
"There are so many trace minerals in that manure, you cannot copy it. It would be so expensive to make a chemical fertilizer which would have the quality of composted manure from farm animals. And also that manure supports the life in the soil - the microbes, the worms. It's a healthy environment."
He parks the vehicle and surveys the property and its animals, crops and outbuildings found in every direction you turn. He talks about the big chicken house he has mounted on a hay wagon. When he needs fertilizer for another part of the farm, he just tows the hay wagon there.
He recently put in a pond and stocked it with catfish, crappies, bluegill and other fish he will start harvesting this year for eating.
"There was nothing when I came here. All this I built," he says.
As Schaffer nears a fence, Kashi, a huge dog, romps up. He gathers him in a fur-ruffling hug.
"Oh, Mister Kashi came. This is the daddy of all the puppies. And he's a gentle giant and an excellent protector of everybody. That's your job, yes? We don't get any coyotes here because of you."
As a one-man show, he has a time of it keeping up with his produce and invites his customers to come to the farm for picking parties. He would love to have volunteers interested in gardening and learning about old-school farming and invites interested people to email him, he said.
As much as he has created, he has a lot more on the drawing board of his imagination. With help from the Nature Resource Conservancy Service, he is laying thousands of feet of irrigation tubes which will help his crops grow bigger. A high-tunnel growing space is on the way to extend his growing season when the weather turns cold.
He wants to build a wood-fired brick oven for making his bread. He plans to learn how to make goat and sheep cheese and Brutus will soon be the sire of a small herd of meat goats. He wants to build a smokehouse to sell high-quality smoked meats.
And he keeps playing with new things to grow.
"I'm starting a kiwi patch. Not too many people know you can grow kiwis in West Virginia. These are hardy kiwis. They are smaller, but they don't have the fuzzy skin, so you can eat them without peeling and all that."
Some things he plants just because he likes them and because he seems to have the greenest of green thumbs.
"I planted hazelnuts, chestnuts, English walnuts. I'm planting butternuts, pecans. Most of it is not going to be for sale. But it's for me, my pleasure."
He seems compelled to experiment with his rolling 110 acres deep in the West Virginia heartland.
"I need to create with my hands. People who know me, they say, 'You won't have time to die.'"
He laughs.
"I have so many plans for this place," he says. "It seems like it was meant for me."
For more on Four Seasons Farm, email wvfarmer@seznam.cz or call 304-895-3973. The farm is at 8781 Evans Rd., in Leon, W.Va., in Mason County.
Reach Douglas Imbrogno at douglas@cnpapers.com or 304-348-3017.