Natural healing property
Spring Lake Ranch prescribes work cure
Toolbox
By JOSH O'GORMAN
Staff Writer - Published: June 29, 2008
It's shortly after noon, and more than 70 men and women have gathered in the expansive central dining room at Spring Lake Ranch in Shrewsbury for a lunch of salad, sandwiches and more exotic fare like crab salad and avocados stuffed with couscous. They sit shoulder to shoulder at a series of long tables built by ranch residents, and it's not immediately clear who is here to receive help and who is here to provide it.
“We don't have those distinctions here — doctor or patient, therapist or guest. Here we work together as a community for the good of everyone,” says Executive Director James Taggart as he sits next to a young man who arrived the previous day.
Spring Lake provides a therapeutic environment for those with mental illness or a history of substance abuse. The facility has remained true to its original mission since it was founded in 1932: It helps people heal through good old-fashioned New England hard work and community living.
In fact, visiting the ranch is a bit like going back in time, with its working sugarhouse, ice house, fields full of crops and pastures full of livestock on more than 500 acres up a mile-long dirt road off Route 103 southeast of Rutland.
Staff live in houses with the residents, sharing their lives with them and further closing the gap that could exist between them.
That's all part of the vision laid out by Spring Lake Ranch founders Wayne and Elizabeth Man Sarcka.
According to his memoir, “Giving a Lift in Time: A Finnish Immigrant's Story,” the late Wayne Sarcka first became interested in mental health as he worked with British soldiers suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder during World War I in Mesopotamia, modern Iraq.
“Numbers of men were becoming incapacitated for reasons nobody understood,” Wayne Sarcka recalled in the book. “Psychiatry was unheard of. Looked upon as malingerers and cowards, they got scant attention. I was curious about this new Army ailment and took pains to visit the men in their quarters.”
Back in Vermont after the war and newly married, the couple were hiking the Long Trail near Killington when Sarcka decided he wanted to start a horse ranch, he recalled in his memoir. The couple later purchased the land, with an old farmhouse, that would become Spring Lake Ranch.
But one of the major obstacles was the road, which was impassable many months of the year. Sarcka had the idea that it would be good for teenage boys from New York City to come up to Vermont and work on the road.
Dr. Bernard Glueck — a psychiatrist and a friend of the Sarckas — watched the boys work and had an epiphany.
“As the doctor watched us in action, he expounded a theory of his own: Probably 75 percent of all mental patients could avoid locks and bars and gain health with a challenging outdoor life and understanding leadership,” Sarcka recalled.
Glueck referred two of his patients to the Sarckas, and Spring Lake Ranch began its mission of rehabilitation through work. Despite the changing times, much of the labor remains the same. Residents can choose to garden, work with animals, cut firewood, make and repair furniture in the wood shop or help maintain the grounds.
In the winter, residents continue the tradition of cutting ice from Spring Lake. During sugaring season, everyone pitches in to collect sap and make maple syrup.
Of the people gathered for lunch this day, 31 are residents and more than 40 are staff. The private nonprofit ranch accepts patients 17 and older from all over the United States.
As residents finish their lunches, some clear tables or wash dishes while others drift to the living room to take up one of the acoustic guitars hanging on the wall and play music together.
Residents spent the morning at work, and after this break they return to the barns, the fields and the wood shops to finish the day.
Chalo Wells, 33, who has been diagnosed with schizophrenia, came to the ranch six months. He works in the woods and gardens at Spring Lake.
“I think the most therapeutic aspect of the ranch is the community,” Wells says. “I feel a lot more clarity now.”
Wells also teaches yoga once a week to residents and staff in a studio above the sugarhouse.
Like every other resident here, he meets off-site with a psychiatrist once a week who helps him adjust his medication as needed.
Next month, Wells will move to a supervised transitional home on Royce Street near downtown Rutland. Eventually he hopes to live independently.
“There's this continuum of care from the hospital to independent living,” Taggart says. Residents commonly stay six to eight months at the ranch, though there is no set time period.
Danny Goldstein, 31, who has bipolar disorder, first came to the ranch in April 2007 and today lives in the transitional home. Goldstein still comes back to the ranch to work and on a recent afternoon was getting ready to repair dining room chairs in the wood shop.
“I was a little skeptical when I first came here because I wasn't sure the work program would address the issues I came in with,” says Goldstein.
Goldstein says he hopes eventually to live independently and go back to school to finish his graduate degree in psychology.
Peter Grace has worked at the ranch for 36 years and is four weeks away from retiring as director of the work program. He's tall, lean and tan, and he has dirt under his fingernails. He has the look of a man who has seen a lot over the years and quite a few days of hard work.
“Remarkably little has changed considering the time,” Grace says. “The program is clearly connected in its roots of Vermont frugality.”
Grace is a firm believer in not only individuals engaging hard work, but also teams of people, as a means of therapy.
“Working together on a project makes people aware of the world around them and helps them out of their private world of mental illness,” he says. “Some people say, ‘Damn, you can't tell the difference between the residents and the staff,' and I think that's a really good measure of the place.”
Contact Josh O'Gorman at josh.ogorman@rutlandherald.com.
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