so i never did get around to explaining in my last post what exactly i ended up doing on the farm.  unlike mike, one of the other volunteers who came the same day i did and got stuck weed wacking the campsites for 8hrs a day, i had the great fortune of being assigned to work in the grand garden.

some days i was on my knees in the mud poking cantalope and okra seeds into warm, moist soil.  others i was in the green house coaxing beet seedlings to sprout or making strawberry planters for cabin porches.  on more difficult days, i could be raking dirt between the vegetable rows to prepare the ground for clover ground cover, weeding or slogging through clammy piles of manure in the potato patch.  i came into a permanent state of filth, of oneness with the earth where it was difficult to tell where it ended and i began.  dirt ground into the fibers of my pants, under my nails, in my pores.  and hours of crouching over the garden darkened the skin on my shoulders and back until it was several shades darker than the rest of my body.  every night i would consume an enormous meal and fall, exhausted, into a mud-stained bed, rising early the next morning still aching from the previous days’ labor.  it was wonderful!

i worked in the garden with a guy from florida named hugh.  a surfer and partier in his younger years who had grown disillusioned and weary in body from his job in construction and decided to escape to the simpler life on the farm.  when he first met me, he looked me up and down, taking in my head wrap and braids and asked “you ever been to one of those rainbow gatherings?”

“no, why?” i asked

“oh…i was just profiling.”

i found out in subsequent conversations with him that his daughter had run away with one of the “rainbow people”, a guy who had gotten her pregnant then came back to with her, living off hugh and his wife like a parasite.  he didn’t have a particularly positive opinion of the rainbow folk.  thankfully, i had passed the first test.

working with hugh, though i quickly grew to love him, was a little like torture with his caustic wit and gruff manner.  he yelled at me for slamming his truck door too hard, for dragging the hose over the plants, for overwatering the seedlings, for leaving my stinky farm shoes under his chair.  but i found if i just yelled back at him, he’d usually settle down.  despite his hard exterior, he had a soft side, collecting flowers from the woods and bringing them back to identify them using his field guide.

and he LOVED his garden.  after so many hours of tending it, i soon did as well.  in the mornings, we would walk up and down the rows, peering into the soil to see what had sprouted during the night.  we’d talk like the proud parents of a great many children,

“the pepper plants aren’t very happy.  maybe the sun is a little too intense for them.  do you think they need more water?”

“did you see the tomatoes?  there are a few starting to come in this week!”

“i don’t know what’s going on with that row of beans…they seem to be really rebelling.”

“those peas are going crazy!  we’re gonna have to put up some string before they get much taller.”

apart from gardening, i sometimes gave visitors tours of the farm and occasionally took care of the animals.  those were on the days when roger went crazy.

other than being schizophrenic and a social recluse, roger was just an ordinary guy.  in charge of the animals and the dishwashing, he had what one of my hospital friends coined “a positive columbine sign.”  one of those types who wears camouflage clothing, doesn’t say much and gives you the feeling that he might snap at any moment and go raging through the place with a semi-automatic.  i first met him when he was in washing the dishes one day.  for the entirety of our conversation he stood facing the wall,  his head a full 90 degrees from facing me.  prior to knowing him a little better, i pissed him off one day at the milking barn.  my friend ed told me that later roger had been ranting about all the newcomers to the farm and his conviction that it was he that needed to maintain the equilibrium of enota.  “i shall make retribution…and he shall redeem me,” he’d told ed.  i slept with a stanley blade under my pillow for the next three days for fear that he was going to come for me at night.

it had been a bad week for roger.  he was already in the dog house with the boss for breaking into the lodge at night to watch TV and steal food from the pantry.  then he screwed up the work truck by filling the tank with diesel fuel.  this was the same work truck which had it’s driver’s side door ripped off the hinges when roger had been driving around with it hanging open.  the boss had taken away his monthly stipend as well because he had ditched his cow-milking duties earlier in the week to go to town. 

by saturday, things were getting ugly.  and then the girl scouts came.

that morning, reuben grabbed me in the kitchen before i’d even had any coffee.

“dyou godda ged down to de farm righ’ eway!  der’s 20 leettle girlz waiteen to see de cows an’ dat fucker roger won’ let dem een!” 

reuben went on to describe how he’d come out of “the shitter” that morning, a cigarette dangling from his lips and his pants still down around his ankles, to find a troop of girl scouts gathered outside the dude ranch, wanting to see the cow milking.  they found roger hiding out in the milking barn who told them to tell the girls to “go away.”  given that cow-milking was advertised up at the lodge as a fun activity for guests to experience, it was clearly a PR emergency.  i sprang into action.

i found thirteen grade school girls and their pack leaders standing at the gate to the pasture, all looking confused and disappointed.  when i showed up with the crowd of them at the milking barn, roger was clearly upset.  he busted past with the goats he’d just finished milking, leaving the door wide open and within moments both of the cows had rushed in, knocking over buckets, spilling hay and feed all over, a couple goats were head-butting me and chewing on my shirt, girl scouts were everywhere.  everything had dissolved into chaos and roger had left me to sort it all out.

generally, i really enjoyed milking the animals.  although we used a milking machine, it was a very hands-on process and – i’ll admit it – i liked touching those big nipples.  and watching the streams of warm, steaming milk squirt out into the collection chamber.  i liked being with the cows, daisy and elsie (death and pestilence, so called by hugh), though they were very naughty.  and enormous!  i always experienced a mixture of fear and awe standing near their giant forms.  it was very exciting for me. 

after i was able to restore order, the cows got milked, the girl scouts were happy and the good name of enota was preserved (at least as far at the girl scouts were concerned). 

with time, i grew to understand and appreciate roger and his eccentricity.  seeing him in his dark sunglasses, driving around in the doorless truck, with his rigidly straight posture, filled me with affection.  occasionally he’d even give a sharp wave, jerking his head voilently to the side so he didn’t have to look at me.  one night i even coaxed him into joining us at the dude ranch for dinner.  it was a big breakthrough, although he took his plate and squatted behind the grill while we all sat together around the fire.

this was a fateful meal in other ways.  reuben had given me an indian food cookbook and, after many days of planning, i put together a magnificent spread of chicken tikka masala, rice and vegetable biryani.  perhaps when i came back from town that day and found the body of the alpaca, dead and in a stinking heap in the back of the pasture, i should have considered it a bad omen.  other than being extremely spicy and the meat a little overcooked, everything tasted great.  however, the next morning michael and reuben were sick.  reuben was vomiting in the morning in his especially loud and demonstrative way.  michael was in bed all day.  hugh became sick the next morning with an upset stomach and was emitting alien-sounding belches as we planted the acorn squash.  he took half the day off to go lay in his room.  it became rumored that i had secretly fed them the two-day dead alpaca instead of chicken.  though i fiercely denied these allegations, i was not asked to cook again.

chronicles of most of the month of may, northern georgia

my month on the farm, as i imagined it, would be a quiet and peaceful one, connecting with nature, spending lots of time alone, reading, meditating. a solitary and simple existence. a monastery of mother earth.

in reality, it was more like a three-ring circus. owing to an odd collection of quirky, good-ol-boy farm hands, nudists from michigan, fairies and vortexes, a stressed-out control freak of a boss who slept with domesticated squirrels, several drunken escapades by rebellious staff, persnickety farm animals and a sickly alpacca, retirrees in giant motorhomes with satellite dishes.  all colliding on the stage of an organic farm situated upon sacred native lands in the beautiful but very red-necky mountains of northern georgia.  it was a very interesting month.

the idea occurred to me somewhere along the journey in florida. i wanted to work on a farm.  my friend steve told me about a network of organic farms that took short term volunteers, giving them room and board in exchange for labor.  back-breaking labor, i now know.  i found enota. a partially self-sustaining farm in georgia near the border of north carolina, practically the middle of nowhere.  it sounded like a great place to do a little soul-searching and enjoy the satisfaction of hard work.  (website, by the way, is www.enota.com, if you wanna check it out)

enota encompasses some 60 acres of forested, mountainous land with flowing streams that you can drink from, waterfalls, hiking trails.  a small portion of the land is devoted to farming organic produce of all kinds, anything from watermelon to collard greens.  and a barnyard full of chickens, goats and two cows produces an endless supply of fresh eggs and milk.  and manure.  and believe me, poop is a BIG deal on an organic farm.  in addition, enota brings in extra income with it’s extensive campgrounds, cabins for rent and fresh farm food offerings from the lodge diner.  at least when the cook isn’t MIA.

the cook was Reuben – at least until he finally got fired during the month i was there.  ya gotta love this guy, a puerto rican motormouth, world traveler and poet, trained in the art of french  and italian cuisine, wine and cheese.  he was an incredible cook when he decided to show up for work.  he went on permanent strike a week into my stay after he was wrongly accused of running over part of the garden with one of the golf carts.  he tended to be the scapegoat for a lot of things.  not to mention that he had adopted a beautiful little cocoa brown puppy, canela, with whom it was necessary to wear leather gloves to handle due to her incessant biting.  not a welcome addition to an already full farm.  reuben was typically drunk on straight vodka by 11am and prefered to spend his days wandering through the woods with his dog, writing poetry.  here’s one of my favorites of reuben’s writings:

nela se pasea selosa la noche entera

y emilia, hambriente, la confunda con una dulce barra de chocolate

y se la come

(nela paces jealously the whole night long

and emily, hungry, confuses her with a chocolate bar

and swallows her whole)

one day i encountered reuben emerging from the woods, his face covered with green paint, binoculars around his neck.  there was a group of nudists staying in a secluded area of the farm and he had hiked around back to see if he could get a look.  unfortunately for him, canela had started barking and making a racket and he had to beat a hasty retreat.  “whaddya expect???  i’m a man stuck on this farm for five months with only a bunch of goats to look at!”

these nudists gave all of us farm workers a lot to gossip about.  i was pretty much the only woman working the farm (other than a few older ladies who pretended to work the front desk at the lodge).  i got my own pretty little cabin up near the lodge.  the guys were cordoned to a barn-shaped building with thin walls and a layer of flies on everything down by the pasture, lovingly named “the dude ranch” by moi.  but let me tell you, these hardened country boys could gossip to beat a teenage slumber party.  any and all news was hashed and rehashed around the fire at the dude ranch.

so, the nudists came in a white minivan with michigan plates.  five, generally unattractive women, a child and a white-haired man who would talk your ear off about how he worked for the CIA, was under the protection of the russian government and controlled the weather with his mind.  he and his clan brought along some secret, plant-growing formula of distilled energy called “biodynamic.” (i don’t mean to belittle the concept by my tongue-in-cheek delivery.  biodynamics is actually something i’m very interested in learning more about in relation to organic farming and sustainability.  never heard of it?  check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodynamic_agriculture for a brief explanation)  they could be seen at odd hours running through the garden rows with a fertilizer sprayer, dousing each plant in their path with the magical juice.

i can imagine that this could have been a very sacred experience.  that is until, chris, one of the farm workers, drove up, cussing and waving his hands, in his gas-guzzling, smoking rattle-trap of a ford.  chris is one of the reddest, red-necks you can imagine, existing on a diet of energy drinks and burger king.  he throws tantrums that can be heard clear across the farm, slams doors, kicks animals and loves nothing more than operating large pieces of farm machinery.  he interrupted the ceremony of biodynamic baptism, roaring around the potato patch on a tractor putting down a layer of fresh manure.  “jus lak spredin’ peaNUT butta’ on toast!”  he gleefully shouted over the engine. 

from around 4/20

after surviving a few days of camping, steve and i headed to the other side of the state to a little town called st. augustine.  it is THE oldest city in the US, founded even before jamestown, and is full of a myriad of interesting characters, living and dead!

take for example, underwear man.  i was hanging out on the sidewalk one afternoon and a guy with long gnappy dreds rode by on his bike.  i nodded a hello, admiring his dirty, holey, tie-dye t-shirt.  as he passed, my eyes traveled further down his person and realized that he was only wearing a pair of white tighty underwear on the bottom.  of course, i had to call him back and talk to him.  learned that he was living on a friend’s boat and had found his outfit in the dumpster the day before.

or my friend, marv, who could always be found playing guitar with his friend charlie brown, on cuna street.  check out the sign on the keyboard.

anyway, i was instantly in love with this town. the moment we drove into downtown with it’s imposing old fort, gleaming sailboat-filled bay, and crowd of funky, narrow cobblestone streets lined with the remnant buildings of an age past, i decided i would stay.  maybe a couple days.  and a couple days quickly turned into over a week.

my travel companion, steve, had moved on.  he had a hot date up north in jacksonville with some guy he’d met on the internet.  i checked myself into the only hostel in town – the pirate haus – a fantastic little old building right in the middle of everything.  i ingratiated myself with one of the guys who was running the place while the owner was out of town and ended up getting to stay on for free for most of my stay in exchange for cooking dinner for him, doing a little cleaning and taking his spot in the kitchen in the mornings when all the guests came to eat free pancakes.  he was claustrophobic and couldn’t handle too many people crowded into the room at once.  i, on the other hand, LOVED it!  the hostel is known (among hostel folk, anyway) for serving a big breakfast of “pirate pancakes” pancakes cooked in a special way so they have designs on the top that look like little pirate faces.  or whatever design you desire.  i was initiated into the secret of their production and spent my mornings schmoozing with guests and pumping out plate after plate of piping hot cakes decorated with flowers, palm trees, smiley faces and funny messages.  i started to feel like i ran the joint until the owner came back into town and i had to explain how i’d managed to stay on for free during his absence.

i quickly fell into a little community of hostel guests and local street musicians and found that, even in the short time i was there, i could go out at any time of day and see people i knew on the streets.  at night, a group of us would go out to listen to this or that musician performing at one of the many venues in the old downtown.  i sang at a couple open mic nights and ended up getting drawn into the circle of musicians that got called up to sing a song or two with the musician who was performing for the night.  not entirely a comfortable experience for me, but a chance to conquer a little stage fright at least.

st. augustine was an incredible place for getting lost.  one evening, i took one of the bikes from the hostel, a banana yellow rusted rattletrap that didn’t have any functioning brakes or gears, rode it to a quiet part of town where oak trees draped themselves over a tranquil avenue.  i came upon a deserted park, snuck in through an open gate, and found myself surrounded by a gaggle of brilliantly colored peacocks, unearthly colors of blue, green, magenta and one that was entirely white.  they were engaged in an intricate mating dance, strutting and shaking their tale feathers at any unwitting female.

i was always on the lookout for ghosts since the town was supposedly full of them.  in fact, tours were led all day long and into the evening, guiding visitors to some of the more haunted sites in the area.  it was a ridiculous spectacle, these trolleys full of tourists, cruising through the streets at all hours, everyone craning necks to get a glimpse of the spirits of the honorable judge john b. stickney or the shrewd keeper of the casablanca inn.  i was utterly opposed to these and other tours of the town, feeling that not only did it create noise and traffic in the streets, but by cashing in on it, the tours had a way of robbing the magic of a town with a very colorful and mysterious past.  tourists were taken for every penny, with entrance fees for everything from the fort, to the old schoolhouse, even the cemetary!  i prefered to wander the shady back streets alone, admiring the crumbling brick and peeling plaster, the weeds and vines sprouting up through and enveloping erratic cobblestones and decomposing stone walls, hidden gardens spied through wrought iron gates.  there, i felt the eyes of several centuries watching me as i passed.  although i myself never saw a ghost, many of the inhabitants of the town had enough stories to tell that i don’t doubt the truth of the tales. 

on my last day in st. augustine, i got to view the town from thousands of feet up.  one of the guests at the hostel, ronald, a cheeky bloke from britain had the cutest little accent, i couldn’t help imitating him (“ronald, are you lookin’ at my bum?”).  he had come to florida to renew his pilot’s license and offered to take me and one of the other guys from the hostel up in his plane for a quick cruise around the area.

leaving st. augustine was difficult.  i felt i could have stayed there for a long time.  but, the next adventure was calling.  and there’s something kind of cool about making an exit before the finale, knowing that you can always return and continue to the show another time.  underwear man will continue raiding the dumpster for his wardrobe.  marv and charlie brown will be rockin’ out on cuna street, entertaining adults and kids alike.  the hostel will still be making pirate pancakes.  tours will go on exploiting the haunted schoolhouse.  life (and death) will go on.

the last two posts are from sometime in april…i’m about a month and a half behind in writing.  after a couple weeks in florida and a month in georgia i’m now in iowa with my family.  planning to catch up on some serious blogging so check in soon.  got photos, too!

written from ocala national park, northern florida…

i almost got eaten by an alligator the other day. it was such a close call that i feel that kind of jubilation of having survived a brush with death. i can’t say the same for the two cameras, cellphones and mp3 player.

i’ve been traveling with a canadian dude, steve, that i met at the hostel in fort myers. on the second night that i’d known him he divulged that he was gay. i gleefully clapped my hands together, “oh perfect! let’s travel together!” a gay man makes a great travel companion. we rented a car, bought a $4 piece of crap tent at the goodwill and hit the road.

we spent one night in camping near st. petersburg then headed across the state into the ocala forest. we set up at a cool little spot called alexander springs. here, as in many other places throughout ocala, a huge natural spring, bubbles up from a deep underground cave, creating a delicious little swimming hole of brilliant, serene aqua waters. only slightly disconcerting was the scrawny little rope sectioning the swimming area off from an alligator’s den where one could frequently spot gators up to 8ft long sunning themselves. all day long you could hear them croaking in the bushes, a mating call i was told. besides the gators, this beautiful refuge was home to snapping turtles, cranes and other unusual birds and a fair amount of bugs.

spotting gators quickly became an obsession for me. i took walks through the surrounding woods hoping to come across one of the prehistoric giants. but other than a few little guys (4ft), i was left unsatisfied. on our third day there, steve and i took a canoe down a channel emanating from the spring, a lazy float through lily-pad infested waters and a great opportunity for some possible gator action. i was determined!

after almost two hours without an encounter, we finally found a gator, a big guy (maybe 6ft long), hanging out on the bank right by the water. i manuevered the boat in for a closer look. then a little closer. and a wee bit closer. he wasn’t moving. “how brave are you feeling?” steve asked. “VERY brave!” i responded and moved us in even closer. (now, in retrospect, i might go in an substitute the word “stupid” for “brave”) now we were right up against the bank, a mere 3 feet from this fascinating creature. but control of the canoe was escaping me and i began stabbing at the bank with the oar to stabilize us. without warning, the gator darted for the canoe – in fact, right for me! in a blind panic i screamed and spilled the canoe and all of it’s contents into the water. the gator had gone into the water under the boat, right where my tasty little legs were dangling helplessly.

the next few minutes was a chaotic jumble of scrambling to right the boat, climbing in and falling out again, expecting at any moment to feel a hundred razor sharp teeth sink into my flesh. we flagged down a passing canoe, a couple german tourists, who didn’t want to have anything to do with our situation. when we had rented the canoe we’d all been given a silver emergency whistle, i suppose so we could be found should we become lost. one of the germans began blowing her whistle insistently as if she could magically summon an air rescue. i stopped my stuggling at that moment and looked around at the ridiculousness of the situation.  i was still treading water, trying to retrieve all the things that had gone in the drink.  steve had managed to get in a canoe which was filled with about two feet of water.  he looked a little stunned.

between the two of us we managed to pull the boat on to the bank, dump it out and were shortly sea-worthy again.  we assessed the damages.  both of our cellphones and cameras and my mp3 player weren’t turning on and steve’s passport and wallet were soaked through as well.  feeling slightly sheepish, slightly elated, we rolled back in to the camping area pretending as if it had been an ordinary trip down the river.  we were cool.  nonchalant. strolling into the rental area like we owned the place.  the rental lady took one look at our drenched clothing and our shaking knees and said, “took a swim with the gators, did ya?”

postscript*

did you know that although my cellphone perished i was able to miraculously revive my camera and my mp3 player by keeping them in a bag of dry white rice for four days?  true story!  anyway, this explains why some of you may have been feeling the cold shoulder by me not returning your phone calls.  i still love ya!

written on the bus from st. augustine, florida to atlanta, georgia:

it was only three weeks ago that i left colombia and already it seems like a distant dream. i’m sitting on a greyhound bus where the driver sits behind bullet-proof plastic and the man in the seat next to me just conluded a cellphone conversation with his girlfriend, saying, “I love you, too, bitch.”

i think back to a bus ride i took in colombia. there was a large advertisement plastered to the front of the bus promoting the use of seatbelts. inexplicably, the art on the poster was a frightening sketch – the bloody, bedraggled face of the crucified christ. WWJD? apparently jesus would buckle up.

it’s 2am.  I’m at the savannah, georgia bus station.  feeling terribly conspicuous in my goofy thrift store outfit – a bright green shirt that says “HoHoHo!”, pink socks with flipflops.  i am, as far as i can tell, the only woman on this bus and almost one of the only white people.  i’ve encountered some shady folks on this little adventure.  one guy, in learning that i was destined for the atlanta stop, warned me, “don’t leave the bus station.  i saw three black guys beating the shit out of a white guy as well as a drive-by all in the 30mins while i was out taking a smoke break!”

i chatted with another fellow later.  he was three days away from re-deploying to iraq with the army.  he explained that he works advanced infantry.  “basically, i kick down doors and shoot the people inside.”  seeing my expression of horror he added, “i just have to stop thinking of them as people.”  it is horrifying what war brings us to.  but, i look back on my years of working in the hospital.  the hard crust i’ve built up around my soul from day after day of working with people in tragedy so i didn’t have to carry their pain home with me.  i just had to stop thinking about them as people.

so…where am i going? where have i been? i have a lot of writing to catch you all up. many adventures since i deplaned in fort myers, florida and, truly, i don’t want to exhaust you, my dear readers. maybe i’ll start by giving you a quick list of some possible chapter headings – a chance for you to get a quick summary and decide if you care to delve into the details.

however, let me being by writing that i feel like i am in such a state of grace! i am filled to the brim with experiences of the goodness and beauty of people i’ve crossed paths with. mature relationships (like those with you all) as well as new ones. i am overwhelmed and thankful and as i watch street lights and lines whiz by from my window i believe i am being guided and loved thanks to the prayers, wishes and directed thoughts of many. thank you! thank you! thank you!

and now, the table of contents:

* don’t go greyhound

* great aunt betty does the booty dance

* alligator attack!

* pirate pancakes

* underwear man (and other interesting characters of st. augustine, living and dead)

* st. augustine from 15,000 feet

* life on the farm (aka: i’m sorry, but i don’t believe in fairies)

* sneaking booze at the dude ranch

* the consequences of drinking booze at the dude ranch

st augustine beach, cars park on the sand

sunrise in st augustine

marv & charlie brown workin’ cuna street