One day when D.J. Kitzel was a young man out of college leading wilderness trips, he had a touchstone moment as he was taking eighty kids from a karate camp on a canoe trip. The river was mellow, but a small ledge would dump a boat if hit sideways. D.J. eddied out just below to coach the kids through. The last boat had a spectacularly unfocused and uncoordinated boy in the stern. D.J. tried to get the boy’s attention as they approached, showing the boy the stroke he needed to do to straighten the canoe, but he didn’t notice. Anticipating having to fish them out and chase gear, D.J. watched as somehow the canoe shifted enough just in time for them to slide through upright—the boy in the back still clueless as to what had almost happened.

Later at the campfire, D.J. told the boy, in front of everyone, “You were amazing back there. You didn’t freak out at all.” He praised the one thing he could honestly praise. The boy looked up at him and a switch flipped in them both. When he saw the boy physically change in a small but real way, D.J. realized that “no one can take away a skill or experience, no matter what else happens anywhere else.” He says, “That’s when I knew I wanted to work with kids.”

And he has. In June 2023 he retired from teaching after twenty-seven years. Or sort of did, because everything he does is teaching. And everything he does is building—walls, furniture, confidence, stories. It’s hard to pick out one thing at the center of his life because everything is hitched to everything else. To underscore this, D.J. sprinkles his conversations with favorite quotes from Whitman or Muir or Thoreau. He contains multitudes.

These days he lives in Branchport and wakes early to do chores—the rooster crows at 4 a.m.—then comes in for a second breakfast, frying up Adirondack red potatoes with garlic, all from the garden. He takes a plate to his partner, Sarah Carson, whose summer office is the screened porch off the deck. Several doors have Keuka Lake carved into them. A covered bridge across the creek leads to the horse barn, pastures, and solar panel array.

Brookside Farm dates back to the 1840s, but D.J. and Sarah bought it a few years ago when combining their households. D.J. has since built a log and stone lean-to in the woods where he does his spring sugaring. After building a table and benches for it, they listed it on Hipcamp, the Airbnb for campers. Guests can choose extras: a glamping package, horse experience, farm tour, outdoor guide, or boat and bike rentals. Heck, maybe he’d pedal you around in his motorless Tuk Tuk (a three-wheeled conveyance), complete with red fringe canopy and Chinese disco music.

He stores the Tuk Tuk in the top floor of the barn that also holds many varieties of human-powered boats as well as a homemade movie theater. And hay. The hay is important, not just for the horses, but for the barn’s structural integrity. He explains that, if left empty, this barn will collapse in on itself. The weight of the hay keeps pressure on the stones and the warmth from livestock in the winter keeps water from freezing between them. He believes people also fare better when we’re not left empty, when we do something that makes us feel useful. “All our ancestors could pick up a rock and make some kind of tool out of it,” he says. Not just because they had to, but because it gave them pleasure.

D.J. grew up outside of Rochester with water on three sides and trees on the other. Even when home didn’t feel peaceful and comfortable, there was always nature. “The woods feel like a big blanket,” he says. At St. Bonaventure University, majoring in English and minoring in Spanish and philosophy, he kept a canoe in the dorm basement. “When other kids went to mug club on Fridays,” he recalls, “I put my canoe in and floated nine miles downstream to the Route 219 bridge near the Seneca reservation.”

While D.J. was always comfortable in nature, he wasn’t always comfortable in front of groups. He completed the coursework to become a teacher, but anxiety over public speaking kept him from student teaching, so he worked in sales after graduation. At twenty-five, he hiked the Appalachian Trail. He thought it’d be like Thoreau’s encounter, that “I’d attain enlightenment and levitate down from Mt. Katahdin. I thought I could just check that box.” It didn’t happen.

So, he got a job with a restoration masonry company to learn how to work with stone. It involved a lot of high, dangerous work, which he was good at. He also learned a lot about structural engineering, and moved up to foreman before starting his own company doing stone, brick, and timber framing. He’d gotten married and lived just outside of Naples. But ever since he’d returned (unenlightened) from hiking the AT, he’d worked at Pack Paddle Ski in south Lima because he “had to find some way to get paid to stay in the woods.” Not only did guiding keep him connected to the natural world, but it also helped him deal with his public speaking anxiety.

“I learned more about leadership riding around in the truck with the owners than in any teaching class,” he says. With a brand-new baby at home, D.J. needed a steady job and was now ready to complete his student teaching. Three weeks in, after a teacher fled that day, the principal spotted D.J. in the hall and hired him to teach tenth-grade English. That minute. Instead of a rural classroom imagine a Victorian family in need of a helper: D.J. was Nanny McPhee. His magic was that he’d experienced far scarier and less predictable creatures in the woods. (For that full story, search online for Rochester Storytellers Project: D.J. Kitzel.)

Thus began his public school teaching career, where he often worked with students challenged in a variety of ways. D.J.’s longest and last stint was fifteen years as an English teacher at Canandaigua Academic and Career Center, where he also taught woodcraft (skills needed to live in the woods). Classes still come to the farm to make maple syrup, press cider apples, and be around the “real magic” of horses. D.J. is a Forest School mentor at the Cumming Nature Center in Naples, and a few times a year gives workshops on rustic furniture making and the ancient art of dry laid stone. “My skill set is pretty eighteenth-century,” he jokes.

He’s not anti-technology. He’s grateful that Sarah, director of sustainability at Cornell University, understands the engineering of their geothermal heat and solar power. They even have a robot sweeper. But he’s not on social media because it’s not a tool he needs, saying, “I don’t need to learn stuff that’s ephemeral. Thoreau said, ‘Do not read the times, read the eternities.’”

Teaching adults how to see potential furniture in the shapes of downed branches, or to understand how to place a rock on a wall, is his way of teaching folks to “read the eternities.” His next workshop on dry laid stone, September 14 to 15 at Hunt Country Vineyards, includes a catered lunch and end-of-day glass of wine. (Find out more at huntwines.com.) “You don’t have to be King Kong,” to be a waller, says D.J.

Suzanne Hunt, winery co-owner, says some sign up with a project in mind, and others just want to learn and be inspired.

“All ages and physical abilities are welcome,” she says. “You just do what you’re comfortable doing.” D.J. instructs how to move larger stones without picking them up, and the wall grows while stories are told.

Suzanne deserves the credit for keeping D.J. in the Finger Lakes when, years after his divorce, he considered moving to Vermont. She set him up with Sarah, and then set them up with Brookside Farm. She describes D.J. as a “true gentleman and rugged outdoorsman—exactly the type of person you’d want your best friend to be with.”

At sixty, D.J. has built a life full of connection, purpose, and play. His secret? “I’m doing things my inner ten-year-old finds joyful.” This may include, now and then, a barbaric yawp over the roofs of Branchport.

It’s a Whitman thing.