Beep-Beep! Our Cleaning Traffic Jam
Heathcote Community is a pretty special place to live, with many unusual blessings. Friends and visitors often gush about our community dinners. Six nights a week, most of the community comes to the Mill for a shared meal. Each community member signs up to lovingly cook about thrice a month. That way, the work is light and people usually cook their particular vegetarian specialties, making the Heathcote cuisine legendary!
A few years ago, we gutted the first floor of the Mill to open up the space as we add members. We renovated and expanded our dining room and kitchen areas.
We wanted more members. So we brainstormed about recruitment and we meditated on our intention, picturing the people arriving. They did!
Since that time, we’ve gone from eight adults and four kids to sixteen adults and six children living on the land. I imagine the economic downturn helps our population explosion, with people who’ve considered Intentional Community for years, finally pursuing that adventure.
Now, long ago when we were fewer, dinner cleanup was a drag. We always had the agreement that whoever cooked for the night didn’t have to clean. But some cooks have simple ways and some cooks, well, they use every pot in the place, open twenty-seven cans and fling food on every conceivable surface. We would rotate a couple of members to clean, who were sometimes at it for hours.
Then it was proposed that we try having all eaters except the cook clean up. This seemed like overkill to some, awkward to others, but we consensed to try it.
At first, I found it way overstimulating, having eight or more adult bodies in our tiny, pre-renovation kitchen. Whenever I could snag the dishwashing job and face the wall, I would. I want to be a good girl and do what’s expected, but I’m not one of those personality types who thrives on chaos.
Folks soon found that, like our communal dinners themselves, the cleanup had become a group bonding experience. People would continue dinner conversation, sing songs, gather consensus around where things belonged in the kitchen and what do do with plastic bags–”I still can’t believe we actually wash these!!!”
And our renovation certainly created some elbow room, smoothing out the chaos. That is, until the people we imagined showed up, picked up dish towels and asked, “Where does this thingy go?”
Our dining room tables used to host cooperative jigsaw puzzles, slow chess games, kid art projects, and so forth. Suddenly it’s, “Where can I sit? Who’s stuff is this? Can we make an agreement about kids’ stuff in common areas? I have some feelings about this…”
And I’m back to wishing for a cleanup job that faces the wall. But I stand there, on a team of four waiting to dry and/or put away dishes. I look around to see two dishwashers at two different sinks, one rinser, two or three dryers, three or four put-awayers, two sweepers (only two brooms), a cloud of bodies spooning leftovers into containers, labeling and dating them, and a few newbies standing on the edges, trying to figure out how to cut in and steal the ball.
The chaos is made more delicious with the addition of the Heathcote kids to dinner cleanup. They have spent years building their own community in our Open Classroom program. After several years of using consensus to create kid systems to cook and clean up their own lunch, they understood the take and give of community. When some adults expressed concern/resentment/pissiness that kids just ran off to play after dinner, the kids problem solved and offered an agreement that kids would do twenty minutes of cleanup each night. Their presence has been heartwarming, distracting, loud, hilarious, usually effective and generally a wonderful gift.
Lately, I’ve been counting twenty-three and more bodies at dinners. I’m curious to see what will bubble up as we co-create the systems that work for our growing community. Open Classroom went from three to five students this year. We needed to create new structures for everything, waiting for our new students to buy-in to our problem-solving consensus. What will the adults say? Should we go back to shifts of cleaner-upers? I already hear folks saying that we have too many eaters for one cook to feed. Cooking teams?
The delicious problems of success. In the meantime, outta my way! Hippie Chick with a wet dish!
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Tuesday, 23 degrees, feels like 9
I imagine that the people around me tire of hearing me mention my dislike of winter on a daily (hourly) basis, so I’ll just sigh and get busy.
I’ve printed diagrams for about twenty beginning origami figures, planning to get my Open Classroom students busy on something other than paper airplanes, which are quickly approaching winter on my dislike list. (See how I’m not mentioning it?)
The internet has some crazy impressive origami. We’ll see how long the kids’ interest lasts.
_____
I’ve been nursing my ten year-old Whitfield Quest pellet stove, which seems to be slowly expiring. It was barely adequate to heat my space to begin with and pellet stove technology has improved efficiency in recent years. It wouldn’t be the worst thing to replace it, but I love the idea of building things to last and then keeping them going. I’ve been repairing my car long past the time when others might have traded up. Still, fuel efficiency and a warmer hut are whistling a tune in my ear…and around my raised shoulders…and my numb fingers and toes…
_____
Heathcote Community has so many new members, and applicants in the pipeline! I need to whip out my social calendar and spend some time getting to know folks! I remember when we numbered around seven or eight. Now at dinner, I step back from the crowd and count twenty-three or so, including members new and old, kids, interns, significant others, etc. What abundance! Thank you all for what you bring. I should invite you all up to huddle around me and keep the frigid draft off me until say, May…Could we just hibernate in a puppy pile?
_____
Rita Jane to the Rescue
I was privately saying this would be our last year selling Heathcote Earthings at the York Fair. Sales have been fine, but when we figure in the high fairgrounds booth rental, the numbers weren’t so impressive. But it seems the fair organizers have hired a consultant (I saw a car painted with that info on the grounds) and they’ve added new attractions. Result for us: a good year!
I was worried about our new location; The new circus took over our building and we were moved to Memorial Hall West, across from the restrooms. The across from the restrooms part, I like! But people are managing to discover us there, and remember us!
Each year at York, Rita Jane from Crystal Cottage helps me in my booth, after I spend eleven days helping the Crystal Cottage folks in their booth at the Maryland State Fair.
I appreciate having Rita Jane help because she’s taught me much of what I know about jewelry making. She’s been at it for twenty years.
This year she’s been helping me catch up on restocking baltic birch, gemstone, pewter and cat’s eye earrings. And we have a fun new collection of ceramic peace signs for pendants. We also have been reintroducing some lampwork glass and foil glass pendants, old favorites.
We finally have all this and sterling silver wrapped gemstone pendants on display at the York Fair, which runs through Sunday.
All our new shinies will be front and center for Mother Earth Harvest Fair at Spoutwood Farm in Glen Rock, PA on October 4th. This is the location of our favorite festival of every year, the Fairie Festival!!! Please join us for this up and coming fall version.
I’m organizing Intentional Communities to have networking/information tables at Mother Earth. So far, Heathcote, Twin Oaks and Acorn Communities are confirmed.
As I wrap up York and look to Mother Earth, many thanks to Rita Jane who’s been my rock while I work full tilt despite a lingering cold. You make me look good!!!
Little Things Make a Mountain
Whew! What next? Bring it on…Arkansas was exciting, especially 4-wheeling through the National Forest, including four river crossings. I’m so butch.
Back at Heathcote in time to help my Crystal Cottage friends at the Maryland State Fair, my computer was fried in a lightning strike, my goat Wicca had some mystery illness and my two bald back tires decided to give up, not in the wilds of the Ozarks, but in the fairgrounds parking lot.
I have all the fires put out, I think. But now I’m even further behind in emailing invites to Intentional Communities in our region to have information tables at Spoutwood Farm’s Mother Earth Harvest Fair, October 4th. This borrowed iBook isn’t opening my email for some reason. Oh, joy. Breathe…
This Labor Day weekend should be a barn burner at the State Fair. I’m looking forward to meeting lots of of folks at out booth. We’re in the southeast corner of the Exhibition Hall. Gemstones and crystals!!!
After breaking down the Crystal Cottage booth half the night Monday, I’ll shift into setting up the Heathcote Earthings booth for the York (Pennsylvania) Fair. We’ll be reordering lots of our fair trade instruments for the second weekend there, and have our wonderful diamond-etched pewter pendants the whole time! We’ll also continue our closeout/damaged section at York.
But what’s most in my mind is Mother Earth. I always love Spoutwood’s Fairie Festival each May Day weekend. So I’m thrilled to be a part of growing a fall festival at this important sustainability education site. Sorry this post doesn’t include links for you. Gotta go. But Google away!!!
I’ll resume posting when I get my mac mini back from the shop,
Wren Tuatha
Red Wiggler Farm
Former Heathcote Community member Andrea Barnhardt just let us know she’s working at Red Wiggler Farm, an organic CSA (community supported agriculture) that provides meaningful employment for mentally disabled adults. In CSA’s, buyer members have a stake in a farm’s crop and receive generous amounts of the harvest delivered to a central location.
This sparked on my radar because my mom, Peg Finnie, used to operate Harmony Habitat on our family farm in Bloomfield, Kentucky, a group home with similar goals.
Please consider giving your support to this project.
Similarly, Camphill Communities have existed within the larger context of the intentional communities movement for years. I’d love to expand on this post but I am bound for the Howard County Fair…
Join a Dancing Rabbit on the Air
Let me tell you about my friend Nathan Brown. He hosted my partner Iuval and me on our recent visit to Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage in Rutledge, Missouri. His drive and focus as an environmental and intentional community activist make my hair giggle. When I grow up, I want to be just like him. This Wednesday, August 12, 2009, he’ll be the guest on AwakeNow Radio from 4 to 5 pm and you can see if he makes your hair giggle, too!
At twenty-nine, Nathan is the kind of doer who makes me curious to see what he’ll be doing at thirty-nine…and forty-nine and fifty-nine.
While I struggle to make the transition from vegetarian to vegan, Nathan shows amazing discipline in sticking to his raw food and localvore diet choices. While were there, he taught Iuval how he soaks his food rather than cooking it. And he carefully researched the sources of the foods arriving to his little co-op at Dancing Rabbit. His particular food co-op is striving to eat locally, or at least regionally, so treats I love like chocolate and quinoa may go off their menu.
Nathan was a gracious and engaging host, showing us around Dancing Rabbit’s many and varied building projects. A tour of DR will be part of the radio show as well. I love houses; They are worlds unto themselves and my imagination is always sparked on such tours. DR’s homes include straw bale, earth berm, and earth bag dome, conventional post and beam, modified silos, school buses, etc. One friend there lives so simply his “home” is a hammock. House sites are grouped together on their land, creating a warm, inviting village feel. Yards seem to be completely taken up by gardens.
Dancing Rabbit is off the grid, getting electricity from solar panels and water from catchment. Creating a village from the ground up on empty land in a part of the country with less regulation, DR has grown to over forty people in a dozen years. My own community, Heathcote, is forty-three years old and hovers around a dozen adults most of the time. We face complicated issues navigating local housing regulations and we work with the buildings already on our land, such as our historic grain mill, farmhouse and pioneer log cabin. We modify outbuildings such as a chicken coop and corn crib. We try to improve the energy efficiency of our existing buildings. Polaris, our straw bale group house, (pictured here) is our only new construction. Additionally, our land doesn’t afford us as much opportunity for solar and other alternative energies as DR’s.
Nathan also demonstrates that, for an intentional community to succeed in its mission, its members must be dedicated to social, interpersonal technologies that facilitate consensus, conflict resolution, personal and interpersonal growth. He shared some of his techniques with us during our visit. And I appreciated doing more growth work with him at New Culture Summer Camp East last month.
I look forward to hearing Nathan share his community and his vision with a new audience. From the Facebook event page:
Nathan Brown will join AwakeNow! Radio and co-hosts Lotus Allen and Margie Scott for an engaging and informative conversation, plus he will take us on a fascinating journey to Dancing Rabbit Eco-Village in NE Missouri. Nathan will share his sustainable life way, vision, mission and his work/play, which serves and promotes The Great Turning from our current Industrial-Corporate Age toward the formation of a Life-Sustaining Age.
Nathan Brown is a eco social entrepreneur, healer, & social change activist living at Dancing Rabbit Eco-Village. Originally from Texas, Nathan has lived in several intentional communities and is dedicating his life to living and walking sustainability, including a deep commitment to Dancing Rabbit Eco-Village and his relationships built there over the past four years. He will share his philosophy on several topics he feels passionately about, including emotional healing and conflict resolution in community and with children; loving more than one in committed, polyamorous relationships; and his business consulting, coaching, and otherwise supporting social entrepreneurs. See http://www.dancingrabbit.org
Feel free to join the conversation by calling AwakeNow! Radio’s Guest Call-in Number: (718) 664-9218 OR sign in to our Show’s chat room.
No Chocolate for the Localvore?
As I was writing my last post about my favorite chocolate bar, something was eating at me. I wasn’t mentioning a priceless consideration we can make in our buying choices–locally made products! The omission bothered me, as I am both diligent and inconsistent about promoting this idea.
I vend at festivals and fairs in my region, promoting fair trade crafts, which I buy from fair trade wholesalers and charities, such as Ten Thousand Villages, Northern Sun, Gypsy Rose and ethical American companies and non-profits such as Karuna Arts, Native Scents and Aurora Glass. Choosing winning products from their catalogs and websites is quite easy, compared to choosing from the river of local artists, hobbyists and craftspeople who ask me to turn their tinkerings into gold. Locals following a creative outlet haven’t always checked the marketplace to decide what they should make. There are lucky guesses–Duct tape wallets are wildly popular!
But nothing is simple. I make jewelry, so to see me at a festival and buy from me would seem “local.” But my gemstones, findings, etc., come from all over the world, under all conditions imaginable. And I’ll bet the kid who makes the duct tape wallets isn’t holding out for duct tape made locally, from local materials. I imagine my Amish neighbors who do a fine business with outdoor sheds choose the cheapest wood, not the most local.
Like my favorite localvore and online mascot the wiselittleraccoon, my partner Iuval is looking for land to found a new intentional community, one in which members participate in a much more local economy, getting by with very little and making most of their basic needs. In this new/old model, most people would participate directly in growing nearly all of their food, including grains.
I know truckloads of gardeners and farmers. Some grow 5-10% of their food. Others grow nearly all the fruits, vegetables, beans and nuts they need. Grain seems to be another story, a final frontier.
With farmers’ markets, backyard and community gardens, CSA’s, etc, buying food locally seems to be comparatively easy, if not cheap. Government subsidies and other factors make commercial foods much cheaper than local organics. I love being right each time I repeat, “You get what you pay for…”
But as filmmaker Annie Leonard points out in The Story of Stuff, the trinkets and plastic crap we seem to think we need leave wakes of environmental and social distruction (slavery, child labor, unsafe working conditions). In my life, learning to live without “stuff” is the first step. This has been easy since I pared down from a four bedroom Victorian to a ten-by-twelve foot stone springhouse and commune life. In that process, I got clear that “stuff” doesn’t make me happy; It doesn’t fill that spiritual empty box. People do; Nature does. A dog is just the greatest. Stuff, not so much.
Now if I decide something is a need, not a want, I have mental flow charts to navigate. Can I get it made of anything except plastic? Made locally, of local materials? Union shop or crafter? Organic? Minimal packaging? Locally owned retailer? Will online shopping save or add to fuel consumption?
As of this writing, chocolate is still listed as a “need,” although I have friends who never partake because cacao can’t be grown in their area. We’re all hiking in different places along the green trail. My backpack still contains chocolate. And a car. And my own detatched cabin I share with only my family. And a cellphone, my mac mini, and the Firefly boxed set…
Shiny!
Heart of Now Comes to Heathcote in May
May 29-31, 2009, Fri eve – Sun eve
I have had the pleasure of attending the full Heart of Now course and I’ll be an assistant when it is offered at Heathcote. For people searching for tools to understand themselves and communicate better, or for those who just need a safe container in which to sharpen the tools they’ve amassed over the years of self discovery, Heart of Now is an amazing opportunity!
—-Wren Tuatha
From the Heathcote page:
Heart of Now is about being who we want to be in the world. Throughout our lives many of us have been encouraged to hide our feelings and ignore our bodies. We’re taught stories of how we’re supposed to behave at school or work. We’ve been told not to make mistakes or certainly not to admit it. At Heart of Now we look with curiosity at the stories we’ve been told. We pay careful attention to our bodies and our emotions. We learn to listen to ourselves deeply and trust what is in our hearts. Heart of Now is not just about ourselves but about building community. When we are present and honest with ourselves, we open space for more intimacy, easier working relationships and creativity which are the building blocks for creating a better world.
Debby Sugarman has been involved with Heart of Now since 2001. Her process work includes Co-Counseling and Non-Violent Communication. She has been trained in Zegg-style Forum facilitation, Dynamic Facilitation, Consensus facilitation, and public process facilitation. Her mediation experience and training includes Community Mediation, Small Claims Court Mediation and Restorative Justice Mediation. Her co-facilitator will be Lisa Stein or Kim Krichbaum.
Tuition: The cost is $300-$600 sliding scale. A fee of $200 is requested when you register. The rest of the fee will be due by the end of the course. A limited amount of financial assistance is available. Please inquire about this if the fee is a barrier to being able to join us for the weekend. The cost will include lodging for 2 nights and all vegetarian meals. An extra $10.00 per night is requested if you want to reserve a private sleeping space.
To Register: You can register by contacting Debby Sugarman at 716-479-1490, dsugarm@efn.org. For more information about Heart of Now, please visit www.heartofnow.org.
Permaculture Design Course Now Available on Weekends!
This series of workshops covers the whole Permaculture design course curriculum. Those who attend all 12 days and complete home study assignments, advising sessions, and a design project will earn the Permaculture design apprentice certificate. Students who are not taking the entire course may attend selected individual days or weekends. The dates and topics are:
| April 18** | Introduction to Permaculture |
| April 19** | Ecology and Biogeography: Chesapeake Bioregion Ecosystems and Restoration Strategies |
| May 9** | Water |
| May 10** | Soil and Nutrient Recycling |
| June 6** | Mid-Atlantic Food Systems & Annual Garden Design |
| June 7** | Sustainable Culture |
| June 27** | Sustainable Energy Strategies |
| June 28** | Green Building and Community Design |
| July 25 | Forest Gardens & Natural Pest Control |
| July 26 | Animals and Aquaculture |
| August 1 | Permaculture Design Presentations |
| August 2 | Feedback & Graduation |
**Open to students who are not taking the full design course.
Course facilitator Karen Stupski has fifteen years of experience with sustainable living and organic gardening as a member of Heathcote Community. She currently works as Development Director of the Gunpowder Valley Conservancy, a watershed organization and land trust, and is a Regional Organizer and Advisor for Gaia University. Karen holds a Ph.D. in the history of science, medicine, and technology from Johns Hopkins University. She will be assisted by a team of guest speakers and project leaders.
Taking Individual One-Day Workshops
This series of workshops has been designed so that people can easily sign up for individual days. The individual one-day workshops will run from 8:30 am to 3:30 pm. The flow of activities will be a mix of lecture, discussion, and interactive exercises in the mornings, followed by outdoor and/or hands-on skill building activities in the afternoon. Students are asked to bring their own vegetarian bag lunch. This is a great way to learn more about specific topics that interest you and to explore whether you might want to take the full design course in the future. Any days that you complete will count if you later decide to do the full design course at Heathcote in the 12-day format.
Taking the Full Permaculture Design Course
Students who want to earn their Permaculture design apprentice certification in the 12-day format must complete the following components:
- Attend all 12 one-day workshops. The full design course includes the sessions described above plus an afternoon design skills session from 3:30 to 5:30 pm. Students are encouraged to stay at Heathcote Saturday night for evening film screenings.
- Complete home study assignments. These will consist of readings and exercises. The required textbooks are: Introduction to Permaculture by Bill Mollison, Gaia’s Garden by Toby Hemenway, and Toolbox for Sustainable City Living by Scott Kellogg and Stacey Pettigrew. Various articles will also be assigned.
- Complete a Permaculture design for a site of your choosing. Most students in the past have chosen to create a design for their own home and yard. However, you may also create a design for a “client” such as a neighbor, a school, or a nonprofit. The design project will include a site assessment, concept plan, detail plans, written report, and an oral presentation with a visual display.
- Complete advising sessions with Dawn Shiner of Dancing Green. You will have one phone consultation as you begin your design work which will include review of your site assessment (which you much submit to Dawn in advance.) Dawn will also be present for the design presentations at the end of the course. She will give feedback and guidance for the further development and implementation of your plan on the last day of the course before the graduation ceremony.
Tuition: $1,100 (does not include food, lodging, or books)
Hiding Place #641: A 7 X 7 Coleman Tent
For our new readers, a repost from HCD’s “Greatest Hits”:
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
