Clarkdale Fruit Farms invites visitors to hear the Deerfield orchard’s ‘tapestry of stories’ through new audio tour

DEERFIELD — Visitors to Clarkdale Fruit Farms can now explore the stories behind their local apples and peaches with co-owner Lori Holmes Clark’s new audio tour.

“As you’re walking into the farm, you’re walking into a sound pool,” Holmes Clark described. Instead of a linear narrative with stops, she settled on an episodic tour with “pauses,” so listeners can wander through the landscape. “Let people follow their impulses, and they will walk to a place and be surprised by whatever information they receive.”

With funding from two Assets for Artists grants, Holmes Clark started recording the audio guide in 2022. Three years later, the 90-minute tour, “Doorways: Mirth and Memory at Clarkdale Fruit Farms,” launched on Aug. 30.

A retired Broadway actress and acting teacher at Deerfield Academy, Holmes Clark said she created the sound pool not to spotlight her own artistry, but rather the artistry of the land and its farmers.

“This is [the farmers’] art, and their art literally feeds people,” Holmes Clark said. “People need to know where their food is coming from.”

Along the 27 “pauses” on the tour, visitors can learn about the farm’s first seeds. Holmes Clark’s father-in-law and third-generation Clarkdale farmer Tom Clark says his grandfather planted the first apple tree in 1920. Further along, he skips to the 1990s, when the thriller, “In Dreams” with Annette Bening and Robert Downey Jr. was filmed in Turners Falls and Northfield. According to Tom Clark, the orchard’s signature huge painted apple started out as a prop for the movie.

At other spots of the sound pool, his son, Holmes Clark’s husband Ben Clark, explains the processes that grow and protect the plants, from grafting to deer fencing and disease resistance.

Fellow actors and friends of Holmes Clark read poems about the plants and creatures crawling through the fields for breaths of whimsy between bouts of information. Music from local artists, such as Kris Delmhorst, Sam Perry, Laura Siersema and Erin McKeown, hums through headphones as listeners roam.

“It’s a tapestry of stories, it’s a tapestry of ideas, music stylings,” Holmes Clark explained. “There really is this kind of interplay between all the different ways a body and a mind can be nourished.”

Under an archway sculpture framing apple trees, listeners follow her son Emerson Clark’s train of thought on the farm’s critters.

“Just looking at a drop of water that hasn’t been filtered two minutes ago, the smallest drop contains an ocean’s worth of life,” said Emerson Clark, who was 11 years old at the time of the recording. “Ants don’t feel small, elephants don’t feel big; it’s how they’ve always been. … When I walk in the forest or anywhere that is in nature or anywhere that has other life, I think about how all beings have a role. Everyone sees things in a different way.”

Across from the archway rests a mirror miniature archway under the orchard’s oldest apple tree. Behind the sculpture, fairy houses peek from inside the tree in a moment of mirth, Holmes Clark said. She added that the tour explores the relationship between the big and small, from the ants crawling on fallen apples to the extreme hailstorms and wind that Ben Clark connects to climate change in another sound spot.

“We want to make room for people to be alone and slow down,” Holmes Clark noted. “You get to meditate on where you are.”

To listen, visitors must bring a charged smartphone and headphones. Listeners must download “ECHOES,” the free app and home of the tour, either prior to pulling into the orchard or once at the store at 303 Upper Road in Deerfield.