It was my last art class of the school year, and I had a notoriously wild group of first graders whose classroom teacher shocked the entire staff by making the masochistic decision to move with them to second grade to teach them for one more year. The art open house had been the week before, portfolios had already been sent home and my patience and creativity were at a low point. I had my students bring their sketchbooks and pencils to the art room. I told them they could draw whatever they liked, so long as they did it “soooo quietly, that I can hear the sound of your pencil points . . . Don’t you love that sound? Good.” The usual disruptors prompted many refrains of “I can’t hear your pencils!” while others struggled to whisper below the sounds of graphite on paper. When I thought quiet drawing had reached its expiration, I had the children share what they were going to do after the school year ended that Friday. When the last child had spoken I told the class, “When school ends on Friday, I am going to work on a farm. I am going to be a farmer!” Without pause, the king of class disruptions shouted, “No you’re NOT! You’re going to be the farmer’s WIFE!” I responded, while choking back laughter, “No, I am going to be a farmer’s wife, and when I get married, it will be to a farmer’s husband.” The children stared at me blankly and the laughter subsided in my throat.
Last week, I returned from my first experience as a WWOOFer (Willing Workers On Organic Farms). South Africa has a couple dozen farms that participate in the program, which is a network of organic farms and people willing to work on them in exchange for room, board and experience and insight in the world of organic farming. When you register as a WWOOFer, you have access to details about various farms that take volunteers and contact information for the farmers. After receiving several positive responses to my inquiries, I enlisted the help of the first grade teacher whose intuition I frequently solicit to narrow down the list.
For my first farm, we settled on a place far off in the Karoo. When I received the email saying I would be welcome to WWOOF on this particular farm in late June and early July, the last line of the message was “Love River.” I pondered what a Love River was before discovering that River is the owner’s name and he apparently loves me, but not the comma. I checked out his website which prominently featured nature-themed stream of consciousness poetry, from which I gathered I would be spending two and a half weeks with an aging hippie, basking in his aura and talking about transience under the big, blue Karoo sky. Ms. Masochist, teacher of the child who pronounced me a farmer’s spouse, started referring to me as River’s mail order bride. The list of tasks I would potentially be responsible for included herb propagation and pruning olive trees. My impressions about River made me somewhat suspicious about the herbs in question and I was very excited about the olive trees because I love olives, olive oil and all of the things you can make with those ingredients.
When I got off the bus in Laingsburg, The town closest to the farm, I kept my eyes open for gray shoulder-length hair, scraggly beard and paisley. But before I could spot River, a pickup truck pulled up to me and through the glare of its windshield a finger pointed at me in recognition. While he looked more like a skinhead than a deadhead, I must have been closer to how he pictured me, which saved me from a lot of parking lot wandering.
River doesn’t come to town often, so while he took care of errands, he left me at the flood museum. The only notable thing about Laingsburg, South Africa besides its convenience as a petrol stop on the major road to Cape Town is the devastating flood that flattened the town and claimed more than 100 lives nearly 30 years ago. So I spent well over an hour pouring over the English newspaper clippings about the flood (most were in Afrikaans) and chatting with the curator, who had been quoted in several of the yellowed articles.
When River had finished his errands he thrust a chicken pie at me and proceeded to talk with little pause for the drive to the farm about Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, his various careers before farming (accounting school drop-out, yoga instructor, health food store owner, plumber, electrician), Judaism and vision quests. He told me that he fasts one day a week and requires my attendance at 7 am every morning for “class” that consists of listening to Stephen Covey on tape and discussing his philosophies. He quickly moved to the topic of his employees (all of whom, except for the manager, are coloured), whom he finds sub par. He complained that they lack work ethic and initiative, drink too much, and frequently leave their jobs/the area for weeks or months at a time and then return for work. River’s discontent with his employees becomes a rant on everything wrong in South Africa since the end of apartheid that lasts until we reach the farm.
The farm is one of several in a row nestled in a valley with green rolling hills to one side and more angular, snow covered peaks on the other. Water is provided by a dam and tastes so good they call it champagne. The main income generated from the farm seems to be from table olives, olive oil, lucerne, pigs, sheep and cows. There might be other produce that they harvest in the summertime. They have accommodation on the property in the form of small cottages, and there were some paying guests I came across during my stay. They keep the milk and eggs for themselves, and so it seems, the herbs and vegetables in the nursery and permaculture land and the citrus from the fruit trees in their backyard. Or else they sell these items in very small quantities. The peacocks, guinea fowl, turkeys and ducks seem to be purely for amusement, and when chicken was cooked, it was from the grocery store, not the yard. If it were not for the fact that River’s wife works in Cape Town, the farm could not support them, or possibly, itself, which I found somewhat disappointing.
The first stop on my tour of the farm was the olive trees. The olive harvest had just finished and it was now time to prune the trees. I tried my hand at pruning, but couldn’t seem to get the knack, so my job was collecting branches and bringing them to the chipper, where they were chopped up into cow food. The manure the cows produced from this diet was fed into the worm farm, and after the worms did their thing, it went back to fertilize the olive trees. On the way to the worm farm, River asked me, “Do you like worms and manure?” He asked as though it was a standard thing to know if you like or dislike, like if someone likes bananas, or biking. I said I wasn’t sure, and he continued, “My friend says he could spread worms and manure on a sandwich . . . he’s kidding of course.” I helped dump crates of chopped olive branches in the dairy, sinking up to my ankles in the manure already there. Then I watered the worm farm and checked the different layers of dirt to see the worm production. I wasn’t repulsed, but there also wasn’t much to do, it’s worm’s work, not people’s work, and once we watered, we were done. From there I was taken to the permaculture land and as a mongoose darted out in front of the car, Rivers yappy, annoying dog, Freckles, jumped straight into to the windshield as if it was an open window. We stopped briefly to let Freckles engage in a fruitless pursuit of the mongoose and then continued on our way.
I was then taken to the permaculture land. It is my understanding that all permaculture is organic, although not all organic farms use permaculture. Permaculture aims to eliminate the use of machinery and petro-chemicals, to design carefully to make the most of the farms natural features (for example, slope planning- making sure dams are above houses and gardens to use gravity to pump water rather than a mechanical pump). Energy cycling is employed so reusing waste is very important (through compost, collecting rainwater, etc). Diversity is also instrumental to permaculture. The goal is to create more diversity than there is naturally, choosing plants based on the functional connections between them (for example, if you want to grow a particular vegetable that attracts a particular pest, you might surround those vegetables with grasses that attract the same pest, so you can save the vegetable without pesticides). I ate my way through the garden, trying pineapple sage, coriander, celeriac and the sweetest carrots I’ve ever tasted.
Just as my last morning hour before the work day begins was usurped by the Stephen Covey workshop session, and my pleasure reading was taken away so I could study permaculture and microorganism manuals, so too was my daily run stolen in service of giving the dogs exercise. River has four dogs, and his wife brought hers to make it five when she came to stay for a week a few days later. Not only do the dogs fight with each other, but they have a particularly ferocious boerbul that terrified me, named Athena. She had already severely bitten a neighbor and a worker in her time on the farm, and she took a liking to me that made me quite uneasy. River taught me how to call her and warned me not to try to kiss her face as that “spooks” her (um, that would make two of us.)
The next morning we had our first Stephen Covey meeting in the living room with its exposed brick painted red, dingy carpets, non-upholstered couches covered with sheets for the dogs, curtains with an African mask motif and a hideous peach arm chair with dark wood accents that made it appear to be on crutches. Besides me, “class” consisted of River and the farm manager, an Afrikaans guy who is about my age and looks after the animals. The doors are left open at all times so the dogs can roam in and out and I was freezing and there were birds flying all around the living room crashing into walls and knocking over picture frames. Athena licked me, and put her paws on my knees and bashed her head into me knocking me around the couch and River yelled at her, “Athena! This is inappropriate! We are in class!” I don’t find Stephen Covey any more inspiring or insightful than a Disney movie or Chicken Soup for the Soul series and just as irritating.
I spent the morning collecting olive branches with a brief break to see the autopsy of a cow that had died suddenly. In the afternoon, I worked with the domestic helper to rinse olives and change the brine, a mixture of tap water, salt and white vinegar. I had been warned by River that Hansie “does the STUPIDEST things,” although I found he was quite competent and versatile in the types of things he can do. We rinsed the olives in a bathtub, my bathtub in fact, and I was happily up to my wrists and elbows in olives, thinking about what it would be like to bathe in a tub of olives and sampling as we went. I spent the last part of the day removing the peas from pods had been saved and dried from the harvest that will be planted next year.
In the morning, at the conclusion of our next “class,” River asked if the manger or I had any issues to raise. The farm manager said he would like to take me to town that night for a bible study social. River responded, “Does she want to go with you?” I said, “um, sure,” and wondered what a bible study social in rural South Africa would entail. Well, I would never find out, as instead, River had the farm manager arrested for some dispute over sheep. Of the bits of information that were shared with me, I gathered the original accusation was that the manager had stolen sheep from the farm and then had them slaughtered to make money, but I think what probably actually happened was the sheep belonged to the manager but he allowed them to graze on the farm without permission. In any case, the rest of my time on the farm was made awkward by the tensions that ensued and it became a regular thing for me to be kicked out of the living room so the farm owners could berate the manager, at the conclusion of which they would insist he stay for dinner and over dessert, River would spin a fable with a moral about honesty and trust.
The morning after the manager had been arrested and soon released, it came to light that a couple of teenagers in the valley were vandalizing and stealing from different farms. So one day River is calling the police on the manager, and the next, they are cruising around in a pickup together with their guns and some rope about to make a citizen’s arrest (which never did happen though they tried for two weeks). River’s wife, Beverly was due to arrive that day. It was also pouring rain and these two factors led River to assign me to a bunch of cleaning and cooking and busy work to prepare for her arrival. River told me I should clean out the storage rooms with Hansie, and in the process, “teach him how to think.” I was instructed to do so by asking repetitive and rhetorical questions and making Hansie’s ideas seem ridiculous. The cleaning seemed to involve arbitrary moving of stuff from one storage room to another, and the shelves of one storage room were completely blocked up by hanging sides of beef from the autopsied cow (because the cow died from an injury, the meat was still good, but because it was autopsied rather than butchered right away, it was to be used for the dogs). So I spent two hours walking back and forth contorting myself around these curtains of beef, getting fat grease on my face and blood on my coat. When I was sent to clean ashes out of the fireplace, I felt like a real Cinderella and that this Beverly character must be an evil witch. I spent the last few minutes of the day shelling peas and when River reprimanded me for wasting time by throwing the shells away in a bag (which took precious microseconds to open) rather than in a trash bin, I took a deep breath and counted down the minutes until five o’clock.
When Beverly finally arrived, she was lovely. She squeezed orange juice and gave me vitamin C for my cold and cooked and pushed food nonstop. She was only going to stay for the weekend, but she was determined to have a real vacation, and with all of the things she had to take care of on the farm, it took her ten days until she was satisfied.
She was also great at finding interesting and more varied things for me to do. I started feeding the chickens in the morning. Chickens are unbelievably stupid creatures. When they saw (heard? sensed?) me approach, they would run to the feeding containers. But they are afraid of the food falling on them so they freak out and flap away and we repeat the process a dozen times until their food containers are filled. She also sent me to the dairies in the morning where the manager and the other workers hook up two jersey cows to milking machines. Though I have no pumping experience to relate this to, and it doesn’t hurt them and they get to eat while being milked, I was still in pain for them. Then I poured the milk into coke bottles and affixed an udder-shaped attachments to them and fed the calves. There was very little left over for people to drink, especially cream, because the cows hold onto it for their calves. When I wondered aloud “why not let the claves drink directly from the cows?” I was told that when the owners got the farm this was the way it was done and cows don’t like change. I also assisted with vaccinating the cows. Two had died while I was there so they were all given antibiotics and some sort of tick repellent or medicine. My job was to rinse syringes and on occasion, fill them with medicine. For certain shots, the needle would be jabbed into the cow and then the syringe was attached which I thought was an odd way of doing things based on my own experiences with vaccinations. The holding pen to keep the cows still for their shots was too big so they kept jumping over or trying to crawl under, mooing like crazy and trying to escape the dairy altogether. One of the cows had recently had an abortion because she was too sick to survive the pregnancy and then she got an infection so I cringed as I watched the manager put on a shoulder length glove and lose his arm inside the cow while he inserted the vaginal suppository.
In terms of working with the growing side of things, Beverly suggested I also prune lavender while working in the olive fields as there are lavender bushes in between all the trees. Lavender bushes are quite unruly and I often felt like I was wrestling with them to form mediocre half globes. I also removed fungus from aloe plants by painting them with olive oil. The fungus can be used to make a red pigment, so although it was white, it made a clay-colored gunk when I brushed it with oil. Cleaning the brush off on rocks, I thought of the cave paintings I have seen and wondered what they actually use this pigment for. Ironically, although aloe has healing properties, it has sharp spines that shredded my hands.
The only task gave me that I didn’t particularly enjoy was gripping on those huge hanging sides of beef to hold them steady while the manager butchered it into dog food. Then I had to help Hansie pack the hunks of meat with their lumpy, squishy, yellow fat, into freezer bags, and pluck the blood clots from the bucket to clean up. This, combined with all of the meat Beverly cooked while I was there is pushing back toward my vegan ways. I just don’t want to know what happens to meat before it is ready to eat, and if I don’t want to know, that I don’t think I should eat it.
Beverly also suggested that I might like to go with the manager the day he works with the sheep. “The lambs,” she told me, “are lovely.” So I went out that morning with the manager, and we first had to bring the sheep and pigs to their respective pastures. It’s crazy that people count sheep to go to sleep because actually trying to count sheep hurts your brain. The piglets were tiny and incredibly fast and pigs really do eat like, well, pigs. Bringing the cows to their pasture was more difficult as the field was farther and they were more stubborn. We herded them by running around them on the opposite side of the way we wanted them to go. It was not all that different from herding preschoolers. It was a little easier, but cows are bigger and have horns. There was lots of grass between the dairy and the pastures and they wanted to stop and graze. The manager kept getting frustrated saying, “I don’t know why they want to stop, they know we’re going to a better place with more grass.” But apparently they didn’t.
We finally headed to the other farm to the lambs. The lambs were lovely as Beverly said, but what we did to them (castration, docking tails and tattooing ears) was not lovely. My job was to mainly hold different castration/docking/tattooing tools. The manager told me the tails are docked because the sheep store their fat there and the meat doesn’t taste as good. (Although later an Australian friend who grew up on a farm told me that if you don’t dock the tails, flies infest the space underneath the tails and cause infection). Castration, I was told, prevents uncontrolled reproduction, “and balls make the meat taste funny.” Tattooing is obviously for identification. Castration and docking is basically the same. A tight, thick rubber band and stretched on a pair of pliers, snapped around the appropriate body part and sprayed with antiseptic. Blood flow is cut off and within three weeks it drops off. The lambs flinched for a moment and then ran off. To tattoo, green ink was smeared on the ears, and needles in the shape of initials were clamped over the ear, squeezed and released. The lambs flinched a little bit more, but I was surprised at how unbothered they seemed, although I still didn’t like it.
Meanwhile River was irritating me to no end, coercing me into art therapy sessions and droning from the I Ching or sharing his “aha” moments. He had a sign in his bathroom that said “I, River, recognize myself as a beautiful and unique facet of this evolving Universe,” and despite the fact that he was sharing his work and his home with me, I couldn’t help rolling my eyes. When I stumbled across his self-published chapbook of poorly written and self-indulgent poetry, he insisted on reading to me from it, and then that I finish it on my own. So there I was reading 30 year old accounts of acid trips and a vignette about an encounter with a prostitute (in a book dedicated to his WIFE!
. . .whom he is no longer married to). Maybe if he practiced the compassion or humility or patience he preached, I would have appreciated him more, but within a few days of living in his house, I wanted to interact with him as little as possible. I admired Beverly for calling him out and not taking his guru aspirations too seriously. After watching an environmental documentary with the two of them (when all Beverly wanted to do was watch recorded episodes of Gray’s Anatomy and I wanted to read my book), River insisted on summarizing the whole film that we had all just watched, and then went on to explain how this film really reinforced that he is among the elite who save the planet with their organic farming (never mind that he owns several cars/tractors/gas guzzling machinery). Beverly said something along the lines of “yeah, yeah, can I have my organic Gray’s Anatomy now?”
On the day I was due to leave I packed early and was fidgeting around the house, waiting for River to be ready to bring me to the bus. I opened a clay pot that was the centerpiece of the coffee table and expected to either find it empty or filled with some kind of nut or something that I had seen River shelling on and off during my stay. It was actually filled to the brim with tiny squares of white paper folded into fourths. I tentatively removed one, carried it to the bathroom and opened it. It said 42. Later, when relating this story to a friend, I learned that in the book Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the number 42 is the meaning of life. And on that note, I headed home.
Last week, I returned from my first experience as a WWOOFer (Willing Workers On Organic Farms). South Africa has a couple dozen farms that participate in the program, which is a network of organic farms and people willing to work on them in exchange for room, board and experience and insight in the world of organic farming. When you register as a WWOOFer, you have access to details about various farms that take volunteers and contact information for the farmers. After receiving several positive responses to my inquiries, I enlisted the help of the first grade teacher whose intuition I frequently solicit to narrow down the list.
For my first farm, we settled on a place far off in the Karoo. When I received the email saying I would be welcome to WWOOF on this particular farm in late June and early July, the last line of the message was “Love River.” I pondered what a Love River was before discovering that River is the owner’s name and he apparently loves me, but not the comma. I checked out his website which prominently featured nature-themed stream of consciousness poetry, from which I gathered I would be spending two and a half weeks with an aging hippie, basking in his aura and talking about transience under the big, blue Karoo sky. Ms. Masochist, teacher of the child who pronounced me a farmer’s spouse, started referring to me as River’s mail order bride. The list of tasks I would potentially be responsible for included herb propagation and pruning olive trees. My impressions about River made me somewhat suspicious about the herbs in question and I was very excited about the olive trees because I love olives, olive oil and all of the things you can make with those ingredients.
When I got off the bus in Laingsburg, The town closest to the farm, I kept my eyes open for gray shoulder-length hair, scraggly beard and paisley. But before I could spot River, a pickup truck pulled up to me and through the glare of its windshield a finger pointed at me in recognition. While he looked more like a skinhead than a deadhead, I must have been closer to how he pictured me, which saved me from a lot of parking lot wandering.
River doesn’t come to town often, so while he took care of errands, he left me at the flood museum. The only notable thing about Laingsburg, South Africa besides its convenience as a petrol stop on the major road to Cape Town is the devastating flood that flattened the town and claimed more than 100 lives nearly 30 years ago. So I spent well over an hour pouring over the English newspaper clippings about the flood (most were in Afrikaans) and chatting with the curator, who had been quoted in several of the yellowed articles.
When River had finished his errands he thrust a chicken pie at me and proceeded to talk with little pause for the drive to the farm about Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, his various careers before farming (accounting school drop-out, yoga instructor, health food store owner, plumber, electrician), Judaism and vision quests. He told me that he fasts one day a week and requires my attendance at 7 am every morning for “class” that consists of listening to Stephen Covey on tape and discussing his philosophies. He quickly moved to the topic of his employees (all of whom, except for the manager, are coloured), whom he finds sub par. He complained that they lack work ethic and initiative, drink too much, and frequently leave their jobs/the area for weeks or months at a time and then return for work. River’s discontent with his employees becomes a rant on everything wrong in South Africa since the end of apartheid that lasts until we reach the farm.
The farm is one of several in a row nestled in a valley with green rolling hills to one side and more angular, snow covered peaks on the other. Water is provided by a dam and tastes so good they call it champagne. The main income generated from the farm seems to be from table olives, olive oil, lucerne, pigs, sheep and cows. There might be other produce that they harvest in the summertime. They have accommodation on the property in the form of small cottages, and there were some paying guests I came across during my stay. They keep the milk and eggs for themselves, and so it seems, the herbs and vegetables in the nursery and permaculture land and the citrus from the fruit trees in their backyard. Or else they sell these items in very small quantities. The peacocks, guinea fowl, turkeys and ducks seem to be purely for amusement, and when chicken was cooked, it was from the grocery store, not the yard. If it were not for the fact that River’s wife works in Cape Town, the farm could not support them, or possibly, itself, which I found somewhat disappointing.
The first stop on my tour of the farm was the olive trees. The olive harvest had just finished and it was now time to prune the trees. I tried my hand at pruning, but couldn’t seem to get the knack, so my job was collecting branches and bringing them to the chipper, where they were chopped up into cow food. The manure the cows produced from this diet was fed into the worm farm, and after the worms did their thing, it went back to fertilize the olive trees. On the way to the worm farm, River asked me, “Do you like worms and manure?” He asked as though it was a standard thing to know if you like or dislike, like if someone likes bananas, or biking. I said I wasn’t sure, and he continued, “My friend says he could spread worms and manure on a sandwich . . . he’s kidding of course.” I helped dump crates of chopped olive branches in the dairy, sinking up to my ankles in the manure already there. Then I watered the worm farm and checked the different layers of dirt to see the worm production. I wasn’t repulsed, but there also wasn’t much to do, it’s worm’s work, not people’s work, and once we watered, we were done. From there I was taken to the permaculture land and as a mongoose darted out in front of the car, Rivers yappy, annoying dog, Freckles, jumped straight into to the windshield as if it was an open window. We stopped briefly to let Freckles engage in a fruitless pursuit of the mongoose and then continued on our way.
I was then taken to the permaculture land. It is my understanding that all permaculture is organic, although not all organic farms use permaculture. Permaculture aims to eliminate the use of machinery and petro-chemicals, to design carefully to make the most of the farms natural features (for example, slope planning- making sure dams are above houses and gardens to use gravity to pump water rather than a mechanical pump). Energy cycling is employed so reusing waste is very important (through compost, collecting rainwater, etc). Diversity is also instrumental to permaculture. The goal is to create more diversity than there is naturally, choosing plants based on the functional connections between them (for example, if you want to grow a particular vegetable that attracts a particular pest, you might surround those vegetables with grasses that attract the same pest, so you can save the vegetable without pesticides). I ate my way through the garden, trying pineapple sage, coriander, celeriac and the sweetest carrots I’ve ever tasted.
Just as my last morning hour before the work day begins was usurped by the Stephen Covey workshop session, and my pleasure reading was taken away so I could study permaculture and microorganism manuals, so too was my daily run stolen in service of giving the dogs exercise. River has four dogs, and his wife brought hers to make it five when she came to stay for a week a few days later. Not only do the dogs fight with each other, but they have a particularly ferocious boerbul that terrified me, named Athena. She had already severely bitten a neighbor and a worker in her time on the farm, and she took a liking to me that made me quite uneasy. River taught me how to call her and warned me not to try to kiss her face as that “spooks” her (um, that would make two of us.)
The next morning we had our first Stephen Covey meeting in the living room with its exposed brick painted red, dingy carpets, non-upholstered couches covered with sheets for the dogs, curtains with an African mask motif and a hideous peach arm chair with dark wood accents that made it appear to be on crutches. Besides me, “class” consisted of River and the farm manager, an Afrikaans guy who is about my age and looks after the animals. The doors are left open at all times so the dogs can roam in and out and I was freezing and there were birds flying all around the living room crashing into walls and knocking over picture frames. Athena licked me, and put her paws on my knees and bashed her head into me knocking me around the couch and River yelled at her, “Athena! This is inappropriate! We are in class!” I don’t find Stephen Covey any more inspiring or insightful than a Disney movie or Chicken Soup for the Soul series and just as irritating.
I spent the morning collecting olive branches with a brief break to see the autopsy of a cow that had died suddenly. In the afternoon, I worked with the domestic helper to rinse olives and change the brine, a mixture of tap water, salt and white vinegar. I had been warned by River that Hansie “does the STUPIDEST things,” although I found he was quite competent and versatile in the types of things he can do. We rinsed the olives in a bathtub, my bathtub in fact, and I was happily up to my wrists and elbows in olives, thinking about what it would be like to bathe in a tub of olives and sampling as we went. I spent the last part of the day removing the peas from pods had been saved and dried from the harvest that will be planted next year.
In the morning, at the conclusion of our next “class,” River asked if the manger or I had any issues to raise. The farm manager said he would like to take me to town that night for a bible study social. River responded, “Does she want to go with you?” I said, “um, sure,” and wondered what a bible study social in rural South Africa would entail. Well, I would never find out, as instead, River had the farm manager arrested for some dispute over sheep. Of the bits of information that were shared with me, I gathered the original accusation was that the manager had stolen sheep from the farm and then had them slaughtered to make money, but I think what probably actually happened was the sheep belonged to the manager but he allowed them to graze on the farm without permission. In any case, the rest of my time on the farm was made awkward by the tensions that ensued and it became a regular thing for me to be kicked out of the living room so the farm owners could berate the manager, at the conclusion of which they would insist he stay for dinner and over dessert, River would spin a fable with a moral about honesty and trust.
The morning after the manager had been arrested and soon released, it came to light that a couple of teenagers in the valley were vandalizing and stealing from different farms. So one day River is calling the police on the manager, and the next, they are cruising around in a pickup together with their guns and some rope about to make a citizen’s arrest (which never did happen though they tried for two weeks). River’s wife, Beverly was due to arrive that day. It was also pouring rain and these two factors led River to assign me to a bunch of cleaning and cooking and busy work to prepare for her arrival. River told me I should clean out the storage rooms with Hansie, and in the process, “teach him how to think.” I was instructed to do so by asking repetitive and rhetorical questions and making Hansie’s ideas seem ridiculous. The cleaning seemed to involve arbitrary moving of stuff from one storage room to another, and the shelves of one storage room were completely blocked up by hanging sides of beef from the autopsied cow (because the cow died from an injury, the meat was still good, but because it was autopsied rather than butchered right away, it was to be used for the dogs). So I spent two hours walking back and forth contorting myself around these curtains of beef, getting fat grease on my face and blood on my coat. When I was sent to clean ashes out of the fireplace, I felt like a real Cinderella and that this Beverly character must be an evil witch. I spent the last few minutes of the day shelling peas and when River reprimanded me for wasting time by throwing the shells away in a bag (which took precious microseconds to open) rather than in a trash bin, I took a deep breath and counted down the minutes until five o’clock.
When Beverly finally arrived, she was lovely. She squeezed orange juice and gave me vitamin C for my cold and cooked and pushed food nonstop. She was only going to stay for the weekend, but she was determined to have a real vacation, and with all of the things she had to take care of on the farm, it took her ten days until she was satisfied.
She was also great at finding interesting and more varied things for me to do. I started feeding the chickens in the morning. Chickens are unbelievably stupid creatures. When they saw (heard? sensed?) me approach, they would run to the feeding containers. But they are afraid of the food falling on them so they freak out and flap away and we repeat the process a dozen times until their food containers are filled. She also sent me to the dairies in the morning where the manager and the other workers hook up two jersey cows to milking machines. Though I have no pumping experience to relate this to, and it doesn’t hurt them and they get to eat while being milked, I was still in pain for them. Then I poured the milk into coke bottles and affixed an udder-shaped attachments to them and fed the calves. There was very little left over for people to drink, especially cream, because the cows hold onto it for their calves. When I wondered aloud “why not let the claves drink directly from the cows?” I was told that when the owners got the farm this was the way it was done and cows don’t like change. I also assisted with vaccinating the cows. Two had died while I was there so they were all given antibiotics and some sort of tick repellent or medicine. My job was to rinse syringes and on occasion, fill them with medicine. For certain shots, the needle would be jabbed into the cow and then the syringe was attached which I thought was an odd way of doing things based on my own experiences with vaccinations. The holding pen to keep the cows still for their shots was too big so they kept jumping over or trying to crawl under, mooing like crazy and trying to escape the dairy altogether. One of the cows had recently had an abortion because she was too sick to survive the pregnancy and then she got an infection so I cringed as I watched the manager put on a shoulder length glove and lose his arm inside the cow while he inserted the vaginal suppository.
In terms of working with the growing side of things, Beverly suggested I also prune lavender while working in the olive fields as there are lavender bushes in between all the trees. Lavender bushes are quite unruly and I often felt like I was wrestling with them to form mediocre half globes. I also removed fungus from aloe plants by painting them with olive oil. The fungus can be used to make a red pigment, so although it was white, it made a clay-colored gunk when I brushed it with oil. Cleaning the brush off on rocks, I thought of the cave paintings I have seen and wondered what they actually use this pigment for. Ironically, although aloe has healing properties, it has sharp spines that shredded my hands.
The only task gave me that I didn’t particularly enjoy was gripping on those huge hanging sides of beef to hold them steady while the manager butchered it into dog food. Then I had to help Hansie pack the hunks of meat with their lumpy, squishy, yellow fat, into freezer bags, and pluck the blood clots from the bucket to clean up. This, combined with all of the meat Beverly cooked while I was there is pushing back toward my vegan ways. I just don’t want to know what happens to meat before it is ready to eat, and if I don’t want to know, that I don’t think I should eat it.
Beverly also suggested that I might like to go with the manager the day he works with the sheep. “The lambs,” she told me, “are lovely.” So I went out that morning with the manager, and we first had to bring the sheep and pigs to their respective pastures. It’s crazy that people count sheep to go to sleep because actually trying to count sheep hurts your brain. The piglets were tiny and incredibly fast and pigs really do eat like, well, pigs. Bringing the cows to their pasture was more difficult as the field was farther and they were more stubborn. We herded them by running around them on the opposite side of the way we wanted them to go. It was not all that different from herding preschoolers. It was a little easier, but cows are bigger and have horns. There was lots of grass between the dairy and the pastures and they wanted to stop and graze. The manager kept getting frustrated saying, “I don’t know why they want to stop, they know we’re going to a better place with more grass.” But apparently they didn’t.
We finally headed to the other farm to the lambs. The lambs were lovely as Beverly said, but what we did to them (castration, docking tails and tattooing ears) was not lovely. My job was to mainly hold different castration/docking/tattooing tools. The manager told me the tails are docked because the sheep store their fat there and the meat doesn’t taste as good. (Although later an Australian friend who grew up on a farm told me that if you don’t dock the tails, flies infest the space underneath the tails and cause infection). Castration, I was told, prevents uncontrolled reproduction, “and balls make the meat taste funny.” Tattooing is obviously for identification. Castration and docking is basically the same. A tight, thick rubber band and stretched on a pair of pliers, snapped around the appropriate body part and sprayed with antiseptic. Blood flow is cut off and within three weeks it drops off. The lambs flinched for a moment and then ran off. To tattoo, green ink was smeared on the ears, and needles in the shape of initials were clamped over the ear, squeezed and released. The lambs flinched a little bit more, but I was surprised at how unbothered they seemed, although I still didn’t like it.
Meanwhile River was irritating me to no end, coercing me into art therapy sessions and droning from the I Ching or sharing his “aha” moments. He had a sign in his bathroom that said “I, River, recognize myself as a beautiful and unique facet of this evolving Universe,” and despite the fact that he was sharing his work and his home with me, I couldn’t help rolling my eyes. When I stumbled across his self-published chapbook of poorly written and self-indulgent poetry, he insisted on reading to me from it, and then that I finish it on my own. So there I was reading 30 year old accounts of acid trips and a vignette about an encounter with a prostitute (in a book dedicated to his WIFE!
. . .whom he is no longer married to). Maybe if he practiced the compassion or humility or patience he preached, I would have appreciated him more, but within a few days of living in his house, I wanted to interact with him as little as possible. I admired Beverly for calling him out and not taking his guru aspirations too seriously. After watching an environmental documentary with the two of them (when all Beverly wanted to do was watch recorded episodes of Gray’s Anatomy and I wanted to read my book), River insisted on summarizing the whole film that we had all just watched, and then went on to explain how this film really reinforced that he is among the elite who save the planet with their organic farming (never mind that he owns several cars/tractors/gas guzzling machinery). Beverly said something along the lines of “yeah, yeah, can I have my organic Gray’s Anatomy now?”
On the day I was due to leave I packed early and was fidgeting around the house, waiting for River to be ready to bring me to the bus. I opened a clay pot that was the centerpiece of the coffee table and expected to either find it empty or filled with some kind of nut or something that I had seen River shelling on and off during my stay. It was actually filled to the brim with tiny squares of white paper folded into fourths. I tentatively removed one, carried it to the bathroom and opened it. It said 42. Later, when relating this story to a friend, I learned that in the book Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the number 42 is the meaning of life. And on that note, I headed home.
1 comment:
River certainly is "limited". I'd say mainly in the IQ department. I don't think that I could have spent 10 minutes there.
As to the milking, I would think mammals would enjoy the process, or how would the children be fed? Don't forget how distended those udders were. I'm running to the bathroom just thinking about it.
HP
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