"Joel Rifkin was an intern at the Planting Fields five years ago. To the best of my memory, he was a student at SUNY at Farmingdale at the time," said Owen Smith, president of Friends of Planting Fields. "Some 30 to 40 days after he began work, he just drifted off as it became apparent to us and to him that he wasn't working out. He didn't seem to connect to his colleagues, and there was none of the love of nature that marks so many of our interns."