Taking the Bait: When Your Worst Case Scenario Comes True

You know those conversation starters were one person says, “You’ll never guess…” or, “You won’t believe this…” and the other person picks their farthest out, worst case scenario or guess, just to eliminate that, as a joke, and move on to the real thing?

Have you ever had your worst case scenario be the thing?

As a recent graduate of this horrific experience, let me advise you: When it’s your turn to guess what “you’ll never guess,” either smile silently while waiting a beat for the person to continue, even better, evacuate the scene, or, if you’re trapped, make up something nonsensical. You can borrow from this list:

• You left my laundry outside, a wombat ate my underwear and I get to finish the rest of our vacation in the nude.
• You forgot the parking break on my piece-of-shit car, it rolled into the drive of the McMansion down the hill and when the homeowner saw she said it looked so good there she’s trading houses with us.
• Ferrel monkeys who know how to write entered me into a contest for free tickets to my favorite performer but when the performer saw that I’d won, she changed the prize to free tickets and a date.
• Your boss’s rich uncle died or retired to go live with wombats and left me the business and everything because I’m just a very good person.
• A wombat burrowed under the house and fixed that electrical glitch we’ve been trying to find and now we get pirated cable and messages from Alpha Centauri through the toaster.

Work wombats, koalas or kangaroos in, whenever possible. You achieve a jarring randomness while remaining cute and nonthreatening.  If you actually live in the Australian Outback, substitute hippos, armadillos and lemurs.

My particular setup might need its own list. So when your still-best-friend-but-recently-ex-lover calls and says, “I want to tell you something but you might not like it,” silence and a beat are weak tea here. Evacuation by beam out or pneumatic tube is best, otherwise, you might be facing fire fighters with the jaws of life after the house crashes in on you.

If you’re a talker and must respond verbally because you just don’t learn, consider choosing from this list, which I would have given cash money to have in front of me:

• Alien wombats have elected you their king and are beaming you, and my assistant you’re about to tell me you’re fucking, off the planet tonight.
• You’re calling from inside an anaconda, where you have surprisingly good phone reception.
• My assistant would have checked in herself, but she’s inside a hippo inside an anaconda, thus no reception.
• You and my assistant each love and miss me so much that the only way you could cope was to fuck each other, but you each fantasized about me the whole time.

Oh my my, this list is deteriorating. I imagine that in a year’s time it will look very neutral and serene, like a pond, a still surface with a whole food chain underneath. But until then, dear reader, evacuation might be best after all!

—WT

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Coming next: Community and the Perception of Personal Safety

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Tiva’s sweet nothings…

I’m not that into you. I feel like you have expectations. You’re grabby. You look at me all doe-eyed. You’re making plans for the future. I’m not that into you. You’re just so passionate. You’re mildly interesting. You want us to have a life together. You want to see me. I’m not that into you. I’m afraid you’re going to leave me. You’re crowding me. I’m lonely. You’re kind of cute. You’re not my priority. Why don’t you want to be my lover?

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I woke up in the Heathcote Mill Conference Center, lying on a couch in a ring of couches, a beach sized towel over me. Sunshine and cool, post-rain air came in windows on three sides.

I was staring at the blackboard, with the previous night’s business meeting agenda on it, and a easel with a large pad on it, opened to a list of visitor weekend work day projects and the names of volunteer supervisors. I had been the facilitator last night and I briefly felt echoes of the dramas, connections and over-extendedness that strangers might or might not guess, looking at the chalk and marker words.

I moved my sleepy attention to the ceiling, pondering the plaster sun face sculpture there, with the hematite third eye. When Patty and the other volunteers had painted the Conference Center recently (oh, how it had needed it) they lovingly painted around the sculpture, great job.

I heard Charles and Patty talking downstairs in the Mill kitchen. I heard the intern Kat singing there. Someone came into the room and sat at the table behind my couch, eating an apple, booting up a computer. It was Kwame, an intern from Ghana.

Patty came to check on me, just as I was sitting up and drinking more mint tea. No, no stomach pain at all! I feel wiped out, but much better! She smiled widely and clasped her hands together. “I’ve been there, I know how that feels, that was a real emergency!” She let me know she’d be in the Farmhouse if I needed anything.

At Heathcote we’ve had several casual discussions about how each of us likes to be dealt with when we’re ill. It ranges from baby me to don’t even knock on my door. I’m nearer the baby me end of the spectrum, because I’m likely to shut down, fail to hydrate and pick crazy solutions, like that infamous epecac syrup caper years ago. And I find it comforting to know someone is there when I don’t feel well.

I had had a bad reaction to a cocktail of six medications, vitamins, mostly. When I get sick, I get stupid. The logic center of my brain (not a frequently visited location anyway, some would say) shuts down.

I had taken my cocktail with breakfast and prescription prilosec, given to head off stomach upset, and I continued with my day. I was weak but I arrived at the Carriage House and plodded through filling ten freezer bags with the dry ingredients of the vegetarian dog food we make. Before I loaded up on peanut butter and TVP, I needed to sit down.

I joined Betsy in the sitting area of the Mill kitchen and we chatted. I complained that I was starting to feel stomach upset and we commiserated about the limitations and Frankenstein mentality of mainstream Western healthcare. Bob came in for coffee. I asked him to put enough water in the teapot for me to get some mint tea for my stomach. Betsy suggested ginger, but I’d warded off the upset with mint the previous night, so I stuck with that.

But two sips into my tea, it was time to lie down. The gluten-free crackers I’d tried while scooping dog food hadn’t worked and the tea was coming too late. I was crashing.

I was having sweats and shakes, and severe stomach cramps. Betsy brought the cool rag I asked for and I tried to relax enough to sit up again and get more tea.

Nick happened through, making a phone call. He asked if I needed anything. I was beyond being able to relax. I had him call the doctor. The physician’s assistant on the phone said that I could come into the clinic and just live through it, because there isn’t much they could do for me, or I could just live through it at home. She didn’t think I needed to go to the emergency room.

Considering that Western medicine had gotten me where I was, I was ready to cut that cord and let my body work it out at home.

Do you want reiki? Patty asked from the quiet room. My yes overlapped her question and then her hands were above my abdomen. By this time, I was tensed with pain and my breathing was stressed, making my tensing worse. Kat was willing to breathe with me and hold my hand.

As I breathed in healing and groaned out pain and stress, my body got clear that we wanted to expel something, one way or another. So Patty and Kat helped me upstairs to the bathroom. By the time I got there, I was too tired to sit on the toilet, so I lied down on the cool concrete floor. It was summer at Heathcote, so the tie-dyed sundress was all that I was wearing. I didn’t care that it bunched up around my waist as I rocked on the floor. I was among women in a bathroom. I just worked on relaxing.

Then the healing purge came. I made it to the toilet and Patty held my locks back while I vomited. She had the cool rag on hand and I appreciated being able to wipe my face as soon as I was done.

All along the way, my community mates let me ask for what I needed and be in charge of my healing. I agreed with the suggestion that I lie on the couch and once I was there, my extremities were cool and tingly. They found an over-sized towel that was just enough, and brought me my tea from downstairs. Patty joked about our “checkin.” She and I were supposed to meet to process a delicate matter over lunch. Oh yeah, our big, dramatic checkin. I guess we had a different one, I answered. I drifted off to sleep for an hour or so, waking to the late afternoon sounds of Heathcote at work.

And the sunshiny room, and the chalkboard agenda, the circle of couches, and a cup of cold mint tea, sitting safely in the middle of a wooden folding chair, waiting for me. I woke up feeling weak but pain free, and loving my community that was willing to be a vehicle of my healing, and willing to let me drive.

No Intentional Community can be a substitute for trained healthcare practitioners, nor can an Intentional Community take on all illnesses. I regularly meet people who hope living in Community will magically heal their mental illness or provide them with the caregiving they need for some chronic condition or disability. Honestly, it’s case by case, and the seeker should be transparent and up front about what s/he is asking a Community to take on. The answer may be yes, and it may be no.

But being in Community, and falling ill, as we all do sometimes, I feel so blessed and held, not pampered or nursed in a passive way, but honored as the driver of my own body. My mates provided a safe container for me to operate.

As I sit today, weak but researching alternative solutions to my lingering health issue, I reflect that the support and empowerment I got are more reasons that Intentional Community is more sustainable than the isolated, Western lifestyle that surrounds me. If I lived there, I wouldn’t know my neighbors and I wouldn’t have been in common space when I got ill. I would have had to live through it, as the physician’s assistant said, alone.

—WT

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Something was missing. I felt a restlessness in The Force. I had heaps of work to do but no zen to go with it. So when I saw Lea Jones‘ post on Facebook advertising his performance at One World Coffee House in Columbia, it clicked: Life in a rural Intentional Community can be ironically isolating. I needed a musical distraction!

Lea Jones’ band, Swing States Road Show, had appeared at Heathcote Community as part of our house concert series. So I knew I was in for some great covers, originals and spot-on harmonies. It was fun to catch up with Lea, who has added  drummer Steve Raskin and horn player Seth Kibel to his band. Singers Judith Geller and Stuart Rodes and bassist John Seay, of Jones’ now defunct Swings States Road Show were aboard as well. The full sound was great, especially Seth Kibel’s passionate clarinet solos! “It’s great when the audience jumps in and claps for the solos, without a lot of prodding from the bandleader,” Lea quipped.

It was great to get out and discover this intimate venue, One World Coffee House, which is put on by the Unitarian-Universalist Congregation of Columbia, Maryland, and held at the Owen Brown Interfaith Center.

One of many highlights was the tight vocal harmonies on Holly Near’s Mountain Song. It took me back to my Kentucky roots, not fighting coal, but fighting for LGBT rights on Louisville’s Fairness Campaign. Our nationally known local band Yer Girlfriend also did a haunting, rousing version of Mountain Song, now seared into my own story.

Lea has a new CD, Contact Information, which is actually a remastered double album of his previous releases, Against the Wall and Feels Like Love to Me, the two being “an unintendedly orbital musical reflection on love, co-dependency, pop culture spirit and community.” Cheers for the cardboard cover, in addition to the tunes, which range from troubadour with guitar to polished studio tunes, catchy and ripe for radio.

At the intermission, Lea’s fourteen year-old son Will came around selling CD’s. Lea rightly refers to Will as his “business manager,” as he strategically priced his wares. Artist and business manager had a quick eye conversation over what I should pay.  My companion C.T. Butler and I had to laugh, because I play that role at C.T’s  consensus workshops, selling his books at full price. C.T. himself has a habit of slashing prices without being asked.

After a night of thoughtful, rocking musicality, C.T. and I managed to find a restaurant still open, Hunan Manor. The vegetarian options were many. I picked the sweet, C.T. got the savory and they were both excellent and twice as much as we could eat. We enjoyed them at lunch the next day as we whittled away at our business plan for Hippie Chick Diaries. Now it’s C.T.’s turn to be my business manager! Why is it so much easier to play that role for another than ourselves?

After a day of discussions, we joined the Heathcoters for community dinner. Then several community mates climbed the steep hill to my homestead, Hina Hanta, for more music, a sing along! We were hoping to have Heathcoters Paul Phillips and Nick Corso to bless us with guitar and banjo respectively. But life and motorcycle repairs got in the way. All good. Heathcoter Charles Curtiss, formerly a professional rock drummer, played guitar for us as we called out song after song from the Rise Up Singing Songbook, including some C.T. and I had heard Lea do the night before—Mountain Song (Holly Near), When I’m Gone (Phil Ochs), The L&N Don’t Stop Here Anymore (Than Hall via Jean Ritchie).  Some paged through, discovering a memory or two on the next page, others had a song or artist in mind and dove through the indexes. We crooned to

• The Beatles—Blackbird, In My Life, Let It Be, Octopus’ Garden, Yesterday;
• Jacques Brel—If We Only Have Love;
• John Denver—Annie’s Song, Back Home Again, Rocky Mountain High
• Carole King—Up on the Roof
• Anna McGarrigle—Heart Like a Wheel
• Joni Mitchell—Big Yellow Taxi, Circle Game
• Malvina Reynolds—Little Boxes
• Smokey Robinson—My Girl
• Simon & Garfunkel—The Boxer, Homeward Bound, Sounds of Silence

…and all the ones I can’t remember! What a night. But we weren’t done. John Fox had a very personal musical gift for me.

I love Carole King and James Taylor, both. I have all their albums. Yes, I said albums. I know every word, every solo. Carole, in particular, is just my goddess. I can’t say more.

But with my commitment to simplicity, also known as subsistence, I have never seen my goddess in concert. Ironic for the emcee of Heathcote’s house concert series. But it’s true. As a matter of fact, the only major name concert I’ve  been to since adolescence was the Indigo Girls, and I found myself there because the woman I was dating won tickets on the radio.

Any time Carole would tour, I would say to myself, maybe. But when Carole and James announced their Troubadour Reunion Tour, with Danny Kortchmar, Leland Sklar and Russ Kunkel from their original band I said, this time! I watched email updates and built a coalition of Heathcoters ready to go with me. The tour’s NYC dates overlapped with my ZEGG Forum training at Ganas Community in Staten Island! It was fate. Almost.

The email came offering advance tickets. I experienced some momentary disorientation. $175, is that for four tickets? No. Oh. Something must be done about this rampant inflation, really. This is what concert tickets cost?

I was the first of  the coalition to bail, then others. “I’ve got YouTube,” I’d explain. A few weeks later, while I still had my boo-boo lip taped down in a stoic position, John came to me and asked how I would feel if he went to the show on one of the DC dates. What could I say? Enjoy!

Since then, I’ve indulged in a little musical guilty pleasure, because the price was right and it came in closer-to-eco-friendly cardboard packaging. Between my community and Liberty Village Cohousing where C.T. is staying, there is a 7Eleven. And because I sometimes enter 7Elevens to check out the chips and chocolates I’m not eating, just to monitor the threat, I know that this particular 7Eleven has a rack of Beatles CD’s, all discount priced and in cardboard covers. I want to support cardboard covers whenever I can. And The Beatles never made the wormhole trip from my record collection to my CD collection. Now, after six months of visiting C.T., I have Abbey Road, Let It Be, Revolver, Rubber Soul and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band. I am so bad.

I often forgo things I don’t need. I like the expression, the best things in life aren’t things. But this left me uneasy. A concert is a community experience, not a trinket or dust collector. Between songs on Saturday night, Lea Jones remarked “You gotta get outta the house sometimes. That’s when things happen. You never get outta the house, nothing ever happens…” I was stunned to hear his simple thought. That’s what had gotten me out of the house and to a front row table that night. I should give myself the gift of more experiences like that.

So at my sing along, my buddy John pulled a thing out of his pocket, the Troubador Reunion CD, in a cardboard cover, no less! “Pop ‘er in!” He invited. And at the hour when most Heathcote sing alongs would be winding down, John, C.T. and I sang to the concert DVD!

• Blossom
• So Far Away
• Machine Gun Kelly
• Carolina in My Mind
• It’s Too Late
• Smackwater Jack
• Something in the Way She Moves
• Will You Love Me Tomorrow
• Country Road
• Fire & Rain
• Sweet Baby James
• I Feel the Earth Move
• You’ve Got A Friend
• Up on the Roof
• You Can Close Your Eyes

C.T. was starting to turn into a pumpkin but then he was energized by Fire & Rain. I told the story of learning to waltz to Sweet Baby James so we waltzed and sang.

There were a few surprises that could only come from this double bill. I loved the band bouncing between Carole and James’ very different arrangements of Up on the Roof. It was like a medley with just one song. When I saw that You Can Close Your Eyes was the encore, I scoffed. I protested that they should rock out to Locomotion or something similar. But when Carole stood close to James and harmonized so intimately, it was the perfect close. I should know better that to second guess my goddess!

—WT

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Too-cute place holder! “Shot” this one on Skyline Drive in Virginia. Hippie Chick Diaries will be on break while I attend ZEGG Forum training at Ganas Community.

—WT

C.T. Butler makes me look good. It’s my turn to cook the Heathcote Community dinner again and the consensus trainer/vegetarian chef and co-founder of Food Not Bombs is my guest and helper! Or more accurately on this day, I’m his helper.

Nearly all of the adult members of Heathcote take turns cooking dinners, which we share six nights a week. It comes out to cooking about twice a month. The rest of the nights, we just show up and get fed. Since we rotate, folks tend to make their specialties. So not only does someone else cook my dinner, but I get their best.

I don’t profess to have a best.

I observe with bewilderment people who savor cooking as a hobby, a joy, a vocation or avocation. I didn’t get that gene or whatever. Me, I like to eat well so I cook. I get no special creative satisfaction out of the process. Even so, since I like to eat well, I do know how to get a sparkle from my spicings.

Cooking with C.T. is like taking a car ride with a war correspondent. We have consensed upon his traditional refried beans, a recipe that originated in El Salvador & Nicaragua.  As he casually chops onions and garlic, he tries to remember the recipe from his days of feeding homeless people and protesters with Food Not Bombs. As he slices proportions down to feed the twenty or so we’re expecting, he’s reminded of arrests and police beatings and stories start to flow.

Food Not Bombs just observed the thirtieth anniversary of the occupation of Seabrook Nuclear Power Plant (May 24, 1980). The six activists who would eventually rent a house together and establish the first Food Not Bombs collective, were all protesters at that event. When one of them, Brian Feigenbaum, was arrested, the others literally started holding bake sales for his defense! I’m reminded of the t-shirt/bumper sticker slogan, It will be a great day when the schools have all the money they need and the Air Force has to have a bake sale to buy a bomber.

Thus started a food/activism connection for the collective. “Most of us worked in restaurants at the time, cooks, waiters, etc., and we knew first hand the mountains of food that’s wasted,” C.T. explains. At first, the group collected the restaurant and grocery store leftovers hoping to feed themselves for free, liberating time and resources for their activism. But immediately they could see that they had discovered a resource far beyond their own needs. “Of course, we were activists, so our values were to see the food get used where it was needed,”

This took several forms. The collective gave food away in Harvard Square, which established the non-violent direct action template that eventually prompted clashes with police in cities around the world and arrests for serving food without a permit (although their home town of Cambridge, Massachusetts was supportive, negotiating with FNB and eventually naming C.T. Peace Commissioner). Food Not Bombs also catered demonstrations and direct actions, feeding participants so they could stay on site long hours, keeping the protests going.

Thirty years later, C.T. stands in the Heathcote Mill kitchen, mashing the pinto and black turtle beans in small batches, because we couldn’t find a masher with a long enough handle to reach the bottom of the pressure cooker. “I always say I’m mashing in the love, it looks violent but it’s made with love,” he smiles without stopping.

So many times, that sentiment has been spoken in this kitchen. I’ve heard many Heathcote members describe the act of feeding their community as one of nurturing and love. How broken and sad it seems to me that the FBI would eventually target Food Not Bombs as a “terrorist” organization. And that feeding the hungry would be viewed as a crime in dozens of cities over the globe, resulting in thousands of arrests of Food Not Bombs chapter volunteers the world over.

But right now, C.T. is feeding me and mine. As from that first Food Not Bombs collective house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, autonomous chapters operate by consensus. C.T. has written two books on consensus decision-making. And he’s had a long friendship with Heathcote through his consensus workshops. This community’s consensus on this meal is: forty thumbs up!

What an amazing year Heathcote Community’s Open Classroom had, thanks to our curious, energetic learners and my apprentice, Gloria (above, left) and Heathcote intern Kwame (above, right), both of whom practiced putting down their expectations of the kids’ academic acheivment and finding their curiosities about our students’ emotional, social and environmental lives.

Gloria, a Heathcote Community member and resident of our strawbale house Polaris, right, is a science and math teacher who came bearing microscopes, minerals, birds’ nests and books, books, books! Now under her leadership we’re looking at expanding Open Classroom to five days a week, with many more students and interns, and an Arts and Sciences focus. Go NatureGlo!

Kwame, a gardening and community life intern at Heathcote, is from Ghana. He spent many of his winter hours with us while there was less  gardening to do. And of course, the kids took to him and climbed him like a tree, as they do all our twenty-something interns. He shared his family photo album and the kids mentored him in how to play in the snow during Snowmaggedon. The sight of Kwame gleefully diving into a snow bank as if it were a swimming pool will stay with me for a while!

The learners lead their facilitators into explorations of mazes, Monopoly, origami, paper airplanes, sharks, dolphins, horses, wolves, chipmunks, dragons, pandas, beavers, wombats, Singing in the Rain, STOMP, frogs, tadpoles, snakes, cooking, the food pyramid, bikes with no training wheels, ladyslipper, swinging, Frederick the Mouse and torn paper art, collage, playing store, card games, book making, chess, cheetahs, Cheetah Girl, Shark Boy, Shark Girl, Lava Girl, Lava Boy, Spiderman, Peter Parker, gymnastics, circus, juggling, unicycling, tai quan do, and so much more that is, well, life!

Open Classroom will provide children’s activities and information about the program and internship opportunities at Spoutwood Farm’s Mother Earth Harvest Fair, Sunday, October 3, 2010. Join us!

My nemesis/totem, the black rat snake, has arrived back at Heathcote on schedule this spring. This has me tenting again this year, since our project of jacking up my house created some gaps where snakes might again access my living space. Time to recall the famous story, reposted below. Click on photos for details. —WT

Spring, 2006

Sometimes the bogeyman is a flashback of some rapist or the echo of that ever negative parent. It could be that childhood biting dog or one’s inner voice. Or it could be a succession of 5-foot black rat snakes coming in through windows and walls. Okay, on a day in early May of last year, it was black rat snakes.

My dogs were already barking. This was an experience they’d clearly had before. A huge snake was outside on the window ledge, tracing a familiar path to a missing window pane covered loosely by plastic. The plastic was stapled in a couple of places, there to keep the rain out.

This would be a good time to mention that I have an understandable, justifiable childhood trauma around snakes. Okay, they’re sacred and symbolize earthiness and fertility and feminine power because we’re all past that myth in Genesis. But this means nothing to the six-year-old me that went crawdad huntin’ in Jack’s Creek on our farm in Kentucky.

You may be thinking I mean crayfish hunting, but since I’ll have no dignity by the end of this story, I might as well confess now that my sister and I were crawdad huntin’.

Granny had driven us in her Olds 98 and outfitted us with her brand new kitchen bucket. Beth and I walked the creek, turning over rocks, jumping back when the bigger crawdads would torpedo out. We rounded a couple of bends, well out of sight of Granny, engrossed.

This would be a good time to mention the Paul Bunyanesque stories my grandfather would tell about cottonmouth water moccasins. Pap claimed that they ate his dairy cows. And with each telling of how he’d gone out into the field and ended the behemoth with a shotgun, the snake got bigger and bigger. On our farm, snake stories were as fishing stories in this fashion.

So when the cartoonlike meeting of engrossed girls and startled cottonmouth took place, there was only one way it could play out–epically. The snake reared up and met us face to face to face. It opened to showcase the cottony room of its mouth. We screamed in chorus with its scream and waved our hands in the air, sending the new kitchen bucket flying. We ran atop the surface of the water all the way back to Granny and the Olds 98, so as not to leave any footprints in the muddy creekbed for the snake to follow.

We told Granny about the snake and the face to face to face and the cottony room from the safety of the car. Now I loved my grandmother and she told me on many occasions that she loved me, too. But this was not her shining moment. I swear to you that her only response was, “You girls go back and get my bucket!!!”

I note for the record that she herself did not retrieve it, either.

So as the black rat snake poked at the plastic, I was amused to find myself considering covering the pane with my own kitchen bucket. Instead I grabbed the staple gun and began stitching a solid seem all the way around, just barely ahead of the snake’s nose. I won that race and darted outside only to watch the snake retreat into an opening under my house where my tub’s drainpipe protrudes. The snake got in anyway.

I had lived in Hina Hanta, left, the Heathcote shack formerly known as the Hillhouse, for four years. And about two or three times a year I would come upon a small black snake inside. Now, I hate snakes for
understandable, justifiable reasons and I would evacuate with the dogs, wait a few hours and return with another Heathcoter to conduct an “all
clear.” This worked for me, barely, because I knew the snakes were catching mice and their bigger cousins. And for that reason I was glad of each one I encountered outdoors. But the snake in my window had no fear. This was new and unsettling.

I was unnerved enough to leave the light on when I went to bed. I don’t know why I thought that would make a difference but I found it a comfort. One of my phobias around snakes and my life deep in the woods is that they’ll end up in bed with me. Fertility be damned, I ain’t having that!

But two nights later the choice was not mine. I jolted up to the crazed barks of Echo, my brave protector of the two shelties. She was ranting and racing from the bed to the stairway of my loft room. The sight was simply a shocker: undulating across my floor, blocking my exit, were two five-foot long black snakes, mating, and I mean passionately. They showed no signs of being phased by our waking.

Evacuation being my policy I stood on my bed, holding both shelties by the collar with one hand and pulling clothes off a chair and onto myself with the other, all the while watching the snakes go on and on and on. I would have been struck awed and mystified by the beauty of their fluid movements if I were another person, without my understandable, justifiable fear of snakes. Instead I was all about escape.

But when they finally untied themselves, the snakes were still flush with whatever hormones were giving them boldness and drive. One started to the right, finding the wall and turning toward my dresser, my bed and me. The other went left to the wall and started in my direction, using the dogs’ indoor agility tunnel to make its way toward the bed. I yanked the tunnel away and that snake was discouraged enough to retreat to the stairs where it disappeared into a hole in the wall. When I looked for the right hand snake, it had lifted its head to the top of the dresser. We split. We booked. We ran on the top of the water so as not to leave any footprints in the muddy creekbed for the snakes to follow.

The next day, I brought Bob, a Heathcoter, up to the house, not for an all-clear, but to consult on plugging my many holes. As he stood in my bedroom hearing the story a black snake emerged from a seam where wall meets floor. It sat coiled, as if it were part of our discussion. These snakes without fear, this was so strange and new.

Bob became my champion at community meetings–”Wren shouldn’t have to live like this. She’s got snakes having sex on her floor!!! We’ve got to do something!!!” That was all well and good, but now huge snakes were slinking about at every turn I made. Kitchen, bathroom, upstairs and down, I came to estimate that I had between 8 and 10 five-foot long black rat snakes in my home and I was not in charge.

My friend Charles is fond of saying that the wheels of community grind slowly. The Heathcoters were not going to disappear this infestation in a day or even a week. In the meantime I needed a place to sleep, alone with my dogs, alone, without snakes, alone.

Now, I had observed that black snakes don’t tend to chew holes or dig them. They avail themselves of ones created by the critters they’re hunting. This logic is what inspired me to set up my seven by seven Coleman tent in place of my bed. I believed that if I kept crumbs and such out that mice and their larger cousins would leave the fabric intact, thus creating all the barrier I needed to get a good night’s sleep. For the record, this is not a belief I need clarified in any way. it works for me. If you are of the impression or experience that a black rat snake might in fact chew through tent fabric, there is nothing to be gained by sharing. Do not email me.

The tent became my bedroom within a bedroom. I set up a power strip inside and plugged in my alarm clock and lamp. I inflated my aero bed and each night I called the dogs inside and zipped us within our hiding place.

Enter Mr. Hacker, the snake wrangler.

Although I admit to hating snakes as bogeymen I am an animal rights activist. In lucid moments I know that they’re just returning to their hatching site to breed, being good snake citizens. Even so, I can confess to having a few fantasies involving Pap’s shotgun because I know that I ultimately stuck to my beliefs, even when they were inconvenient. Mr. Hacker of White Hall was probably the tenth humane pest control person I called. The others had said that snakes couldn’t be trapped and that repellents didn’t work. Mr. Hacker had invented a successful trap from pvc pipe and a used eel trap. Bring it on.

He installed the trap and decided to wait a while since I was so dripping with the things. For over and hour I listened to Mr. Hacker tell me stories of catching snakes. He would take the captured ones many miles away. “Sometimes I just slow down and pour ‘em out the window…” I didn’t need such details. He rambled on about family, the cousin who actually hacked up his wife’s lover in some bar, and wasn’t the family name ironic, I really didn’t need such details. Eventually a snake appeared on my stairs and he picked it up with his hands. “Wow, that’s a big one!” That’ll be thirty dollars. Here was hoping he slowed down enough for that one.

As Hacker’s trap caught one after another and sometimes two at a time, I got busy trimming every room and covering every possible entry, on the shack’s interior and exterior and winning my own eel traps on eBay. After a time the snakes stuck to the outdoors and the porch and became shy again.

Homeschooling students attending the World Religions class on my porch helped me name the snakes and when we were not evacuating we were amused and amazed. And my students found my unusual bed amusing as well.

It is winter now. Whether in my walls, some woodpile or rocky outcropping, I know the snakes are asleep. I know my holes are plugged. These nights I just climb in, I don’t zip the door closed. But life is a spiral of seasons, not a straight, evolutionary trajectory. I have grown through this but I, like the snakes, know that spring happens. I might have call to zip up yet.

–Wren Tuatha

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Okay, I’ll admit that after six days of baking my brain in the sun and heat at Spoutwood Farm, I’m not so swift anymore. My head aches, I close my eyes a lot and make zombie noises. You could embed a promise that you can have my car and a goat into a conversation about the existence of aliens and I’m not likely to catch it. You could dress Carole King in fairy wings and say she wants to buy my most expensive necklace and I would just moan, “We’re closed…” Even so, I’m pretty sure that I left the remains of tent #3 on that hill and now it’s gone. Who steals trash? I withdraw that question, I know dumpster divers. Come to think of it, we sell a cloth shopping bag with the “dumpster diving team” logo on it. Still…

Retracing my steps, I arrived at Spoutwood Farm in Glen Rock Pennsylvania on Wednesday, giving me two set up days prior to the Fairie Festival, usually Heathcote Earthings’ biggest show of the year. Although the day Wednesday has no etymology associating it with wind, I’m going to pretend that it does because, wow. It was windy. I had three EZ Up canopies to set up, two for Heathcote Earthings’ inventory and one as a Heathcote Community information stand. My booth site was at the top of the hill and the gusts scraping across it were impressive.

I got help opening the tents from four twenty-something volunteer fairies. Number three gave us lots of trouble. I’d recently replaced some of the cross braces and might have over tightened some of the bolts. By the time we yanked and coaxed and threatened it open, the volunteer fairies flitted away to some other mission, leaving me to stake all three tents myself.

I was hammering down tent one when a gust scooped up tent three, bowled it over my van, and down the hill, leaving it upside down in the middle of the field. About three-fourths of the cross braces and upper supports were bent. It was totaled. Another vendor helped me walk it into place and I finished staking. I even staked number three into place and duct taped it to number two for support. It was in position to cover my tables but I would not be able to collapse it again for removal.

So our temporary boutique took shape.  Tables were positioned and necklace branches and handmade batik flag sets were hung. Several new collections of earrings shined on our custom made displays. Scarves, purses, buttons, bumper stickers, hand etched gourds, clay cats, elephants and bunnies, onyx fruit, candleholders, turtles, frogs and cats, handmade instruments, including bamboo xylophones and flutes, ocarinas, grass and juju bean rattles, thumb pianos, wrist bells, all paraded out for showtime.

There was a chance of rain for Sunday. So in my mind, I made contingency plans for getting inventory away from the curled and mangled corners of tent three.

The rain blessedly held off until the festival was over and the very last scrap was in the van! Instead, our bodies faced the challenge of heat. The crew, C.T. Butler, Regina Tassone and Kwame Bidi, helped me drink gallons of water, yet no one needed any bathroom breaks. I started to feel heat exhaustion by the end of the first day. By the last day, I was dragging and a bit foggy. Thanks to my crew for picking up my slack!!!

So Sunday evening, just before dark and the first raindrops, everything was packed away except tent three. I left it there over night, staked down, since it needed to be dismantled to fit into a vehicle.

The next morning, I arrived solo. The field was occupied by slow moving, dazed vendors, packing up the last of their wares. And several tents remained to be taken down.

I  was armed with the wrench they give you with every EZ Up you buy. It’s a happy little wrench. You dance around your tent, “La de da. This is the only tool I need to work on my wonderfully engineered instant shelter. La de de de da…”

But your little opera needs a dramatic shift–”Ooh! I’ve been deceived!!! An allen  wrench and socket wrench are also needed…or dynamite…Curses, EZ Up!”

So I went off in search of more tools. In the interest of full disclosure, I also obtained a fast food sandwich at this time.

When I returned, the field looked much the same, a scattering of vendors, moving slowly among the remaining booths, business as usual. But when I pulled up to my site, it was empty, in a stark, satisfied way. No tent number three!

I ran up and down the field, looking for  some corner it might have blown to, but it was nowhere, as if it had never existed. I stared at the sky, as if I might sight some UFO that curiously requires mangled steel and poly canvas as a fuel source. The sky just stared back at me, as if saying, “I didn’t see anything.”

I hiked over to other vendors in other corners of the field. People remembered seeing my tent but didn’t see it leave. I sought out Rob and Lucy Wood, Spoutwood’s owners. We polled all the clean up fairies. Everyone had a theory, no one had any facts to report.

Well, what can I say? Weather is my white whale. Heat, floods, Snowmaggedon, now wind.

The aliens got away clean this time. What the fuck? Who steals trash? I’m stuck there. I lack closure. Some part of my soul still haunts that field, the part that rolls around like a dying plastic spider…

—WT

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Upcoming Post: The tent theft and the “culture of stuff”–My life didn’t change, although the business took a $500 hit. But the twinge of violation leaves one with the pause, what else could leave while I’m not looking? An heirloom? A child?

Also, the issue comes back to intentional community, where we ask, what kind of world do we want to live in? We like to envision a world where, maybe, just maybe, we don’t have to lock our doors. In community, if something disappears, there are just a few people to question, they haven’t fled the scene, and if you find the new owner, you just discuss it as a misunderstanding.

Stay tuned, and feel free to comment here and on the HCD facebook fan page! –WT

“At least it’s not rain; a high wind is fine with me,” I said to Fairie Festival organizer BiBi. Famous last words. Half an hour later, after four fairie volunteers had helped me wrangle/wring/wizard my three EZUp canopies open and into place, a very focused gust of wind tossed tent number three over my van and down the hill, as I was scrambling to stake tent one. Number three lay planted, like an evil, mangled flower, upside down in the middle of the field. I’m thinking insurance claim.

“At least it’s not rain,” I had said, because last year’s Fairie Festival was epically tragic. I had planned to make the most of the weekend, hiring five helpers, renting four spaces and ordering tons of fair trade instruments and handicrafts, fun lefty buttons and bumper stickers, scarves, hats and handmade batiks. The Fairie Festival is always good to us, usually our best show of the year, bringing us the income early in the season to pay our booth rentals for the rest of the season. So I wanted to make the most of the convergence of Heathcote Earthings’ wares with our core customer base (winged people).

But an outdoor festival in the spring is a roll of the dice. And although I bet the house, last year was not my (or anyone’s) year. A steady, heavy rain for the entire festival cut attendance to a fraction and left most of our inventory ruined. The five helpers got paid but there was no surplus to cover booth fees for the rest of the season.

Sunday night after the public had gone home, vendors, volunteers, organizers and Spoutwood farm residents gathered for dinner under tents. I could tell that the rain was as devastating to Spoutwood owners Rob and Lucy Wood, and to their programs as it was to me and mine. They, too, depend on this weekend each year to finance much of their educational work. The hundred or so people at that dinner were shell shocked and grim as organizers gave speeches thanking everyone and encouraging positive thoughts. I was warmed by sentiments expressed, that nature gives and nature takes; we were due for a year like this after many blessed ones; we would all land on our feet. Wren always does, but not Heathcote Earthings. That was the beginning of the end for this project.

We couldn’t even pack up at the end as it continued to rain. My partner Iuval and I came back the next day. Still raining. We put the mess in the van and headed for Heathcote. I was thinking…insurance claim!

So a couple days later, when the skies seemed like they’d had their say, I put up my canopies on the Heathcote playground to spread things out, dry them, see what could be saved and what would be written off. Ha! This was the move the rain was waiting for. It returned, and with the ground already saturated, the Heathcote valley, yes, including the streamside playground, flooded.

The Community was at dinner on the mill’s side porch. Someone mentioned that the flood waters were nearing my tents. “Oh I’m not worried. I have all the boxes up on tables,” I said, as we began to see hackey sacks and maracas floating by. Water laughs at me, “You should be writing, you fool! What are you doing playing with all these toys? I’m giving them to the bay so you won’t be burdened and distracted!”

But I wasn’t listening so Heathcoters were suddenly gone from their plates, knee deep in flood waters, carrying crates, boxes and displays to higher ground.

The five elements, water, air, fire, earth and spirit, can each be a blessing or a curse in different amounts and different moments. I realize now that community is a sixth element, and I am so often blessed with just the right amount of it. How can I ever give back enough to these wonderful people who, time and time again, are there beside me in the flood waters of my life? It is my joy to try.

So, I don’t know how many handmade, fair trade, seed filled hackey sacks are bobbing around the Chesapeake Bay because of me, but they’re biodegradable. At least I wasn’t stocked to the gills with those plastic dryer balls that reduce your drying time by forty percent. That would be ecologically unfortunate.

Now, as I set up my wares under a tent that looks like a giant bent, arthritic insect, I ponder my future. My associates and I have been on a slow track to closing out Heathcote Earthings to focus on writing projects such as the Hippie Chick Diaries book. The rain and the wind are just manifestations of my own inner Baba Yaga, torturing me, yes, but for the purpose of revealing my true potential to me. Let’s make this year a wonderful, and final year for Heathcote Earthings! See you  there!

—WT

Spoutwood Farm Center Inc. is a 501(c)(3) Non-Profit Educational Farm
4255 Pierceville Rd. Glen Rock, PA 17327 717-235-6610
http://www.spoutwood.com/fairie-festival

Visit the Facebook Group page for the 2010 May Day Fairie Festival
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=240582798598&ref=ts

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