Name: Chris Freimuth

Class Year: 2006

Major: Environmental Studies

Major Concentrations: Geology and Social Justice

Hometown: Litchfield, CT

Current Location: New York City

What I Remember

I grew up in Litchfield, Connecticut. I haven’t lived there since going to Vassar, so everything I have is a memory. It’s kind of a weird place for me because it’s a pretty wealthy area generally, but I grew up in a family of service workers, so the house cleaners and the construction workers and all of that. I felt socially a little bit disjointed because I went to this fancy public high school, so I was always associating with people who had more money than me. Therefore, socially it was always a little bit weird, I always sort of felt like the “ding dong” that didn’t have a lot of money or resources, but it was a pretty happy childhood. Mostly what I remember is the land, which was very similar to the Hudson Valley. In New England in general, and in New York too, it’s just so beautiful. I grew up in a house with lots of woods all around. So really, if I think about my childhood, the first thing that comes to mind is just running around the woods with my two dogs all the time. That’s my greatest memory of where I come from. 

Life After Vassar

Right after Vassar I stayed in Poughkeepsie for two years and then I moved to San Francisco, California and lived on and off in San Francisco for five years. During some of that time, I lived in Brazil with an ex-boyfriend of mine. Since then, I’ve lived in New York City for the last seven years. 

I was just talking with my therapist about what has been my favorite place to live. It’s a tie between San Francisco and Poughkeepsie. I loved Poughkeepsie, and I actually still have a San Francisco phone number because when I moved there, I just felt like I was the luckiest person to get to live there. 

My career path has been very loopy. Year one out of college I was part of the Vassar Environmental Research Institute participating in a one year fellowship. I was lucky they set up that program, because it was the first year the fellowship existed.  Then I worked at the Poughkeepsie Farm Project (PFP) for another year, and then I moved to San Francisco right when the recession hit in 2008. So I moved there thinking, “I’m this hot shot from Vassar, I’m very charismatic, I’ll get a job in a second.” And I didn’t. I was really good at massage, so I went to school for massage therapy and bodywork, and I did that for a few years, basically because I couldn’t get a job. I had moved to San Francisco and everybody else had moved to San Francisco that was young and very employable. So I did that for a bit, and then I moved to Brazil with this Brazilian that I had fallen in love with. I learned Portuguese and translated academic papers for graduate students who weren’t Portuguese when I was there. I had taken some Spanish, and it’s close enough, so it was pretty easy to learn. Translating stuff from a romance language into English is not as hard as it sounds. Next I moved to New York sort of unexpectedly. There were some family tragedies, and so I moved to New York not knowing what to do. I had farmed for a few years and I had done massage therapy, and I basically thought it was time to professionalize in either physical therapy or something farming-related, like going into horticulture and high-end design. Because I was living in New York and it’s such a concrete jungle, I thought, “let me do as much as I can to be outdoors with green things,” so I chose the horticulture route. So then I did a two year academic program at the New York Botanical Garden and started my own business. Now I do garden design in Manhattan. 

Vassar: A Superficial Decision

To be perfectly honest, like I said, I grew up in a family without a ton of resources. So it wasn’t predetermined that I would be the kind of person that goes to college based on demographics. I only say that because I had no idea what I was looking for and I didn’t have a ton of guidance to say, “you really should look at these three schools,” so picking Vassar was a very superficial decision. I sort of assumed all of the colleges in Vassar’s orbit or the same sort of world would be a similarly good education, like go to Oberlin or Vassar or whatever. Like they’re all basically good colleges, so Vassar’s library was just so beautiful and that was why I chose to go there.

Favorite places on Vassar’s campus, well of course, the farm, both the Poughkeepsie Farm Project and also the larger expanse of the property. I also love the Casperkill Creek, that’s what I studied and did my thesis on. So that’s an obvious answer. And indoors, probably the dining halls, just because that’s where you hang out. Yeah, and the library because it’s just stunning. I also love the Earth Circle. My friend George built it and I helped him. That was his senior project and I was a junior so I was like his sous chef. 

The Poughkeepsie Farm Project

When I was a student, I worked at the Poughkeepsie Farm Project for one or two semesters. I was just a farmer, so I also spent a summer working in the greenhouse and then working in the fields, doing the irrigation harvesting. And then I worked there later for a full season that was like March through November, and that was also just every manner of farm work. It was mainly just the physical labor aspect of farming that I was doing, although I did a little bit of the programs with Green Team.

The Casperkill

I became interested in the Casperkill because we must have done some project on it in some class and then I just kind of got hooked. I think for me as a human being, it was partially because I loved the ability to be doing work that was both outside and intellectual. So it was fun that I got to do all this field research and play around in the water, but then I also was ostensibly doing something fancy, so it was like I was getting academic credit for just having fun outside. But it seemed like “think global, act local,” and this is a tiny little creek that goes through so many different kinds of environments, from a totally protected woodland to a Kmart parking lot. It also ends up in the Hudson and I was in love with the Hudson and Clearwater and all of that, so it just seemed like a bite size manageable project to study. I think it’s eleven miles, and I thought that if we could help the Casperkill, then that’s a drop in the bucket of helping the Hudson. So if everybody along the Hudson River were helping out their version of the Casperkill, what would that do for the Hudson? 

I don’t remember everything about my thesis, but I studied the metrics of it- the pollutants and macrobiotic organisms. I basically studied water quality from a scientific biogeochemical perspective, and then I studied the land use mapping around it, like how much of the land use in the watershed was urban or rural. I also studied the government policies related to it and at some point I made some recommendations to the town for how to move forward more effectively. I doubt any of them ever were implemented. 

Memories

There’s so many favorite memories from Vassar and there’s so many different kinds. I remember playing capture the flag in the library, with maybe a dozen or 20 people, just running around the library in secret, so it was a lot of fun. What else? Stuart Belli was one of my advisers. And I remember one time being in the lab with him and we were talking about maybe macro-invertebrates, something Casperkill related, really nerdy stuff. And we just kept hanging out and talking and talking and talking. He’s such a cool guy, and there was a moment when I realized that, partially we were talking about the science that we were talking about, and partially we were just being like, “hey man, you’re cool. ” But it was like coded through the language of science. 

When I first think of Vassar, I think of opportunity. I think Vassar is an inflection point in my life. People were really upset about the bubble of Vassar and how it’s an elite institution that didn’t care about anything around it, and I was one of those people that was always very mad at Vassar for how elitist it was, and so I actively pushed on their community engagement in the city of Poughkeepsie. So at the time, I was constantly frustrated with Vassar. But looking back on it, I basically think Vassar gave me the tools that helped me articulate my frustration with Vassar.

A Warm Cozy Couch and Some Tears

I think home is like a big, really deep set, warm, cozy couch that I can sit on and feel safe. I absolutely think that Vassar was home. I cried like a baby- I cried an insane amount when I graduated. I was so sad. I mean, I was psyched to go to the next level and do the next thing, but I was sad to leave my friends. My deepest, deepest, deepest relationships are all with Vassar students or alums at this point. I went to a wedding two years ago for one of my Vassar friends and my partner said, “there’s something about you Vassar people, you really form some type of bond.” And as I was looking around the room and thinking about all of my friends, I was like, “oh, yeah, my heart to heart besties for life.”