Tom & Bill's Farm

June 22, 2008

Current mood:rushed

20 June 2008. Tom and Bill's farm. About 6:30pm.

On first impressions I thought, okay, this isn't as primitive as I thought it would be. The house is unassuming. We arrived about 2pm and I meet Tom, who is mowing in a pair of short OP-style navy blue corduroy shorts and a pair of Velcro strap trainers. Nothing else. Obviously he is very white but with that reddish tan that very white people get when they are out in the sun a lot. Head, bald, red with whitish spots that made me say, "he should wear a hat." Eric is also mowing. Bill is out somewhere, working, I think. So it's me, Allen, Tom, Eric and Jil and Bethany are inside cleaning up.

We get a tour of the house, it's truly an old farm house, like my Aunt Eva's, with the same smell. There is wood everything. No plaster or dry-wall except in the bathroom and the sitting room, an obvious addition. There's no running water except for the kitchen sink and that is exclusively cold. In the bathtub are many buckets filled with creek water. This is how you flush. Fine. I've been there before. Tom's first conversation is about how he drinks his coffee. With vodka. The "elixir of life."

"Drink?" seems to be the theme at first. After lentil soup, not vegetarian, Tom used a beef bone for the base and I think it's the best lentil soup I've ever had, we sat around on the back porch talking. There are hummingbirds and feral cats, bull frogs and plenty of bugs. And there are "solar showers."

Tom and Bill talk in a way I'm not used to. Tom especially likes to talk. He talks about sleeping up on the ridge of the valley being "like sleeping in a mother's embrace" and how it feels like the valley is "reaching up and holding you."

Then there are the stories about the house. Here we go, I think. Let me guess, it's haunted? Well, first of all, the valley the house sits in runs the wrong way, east to west. Most valleys around here run north/south. Someone, Bethany maybe, brings out this picture frame which has photos that were found in the house of a woman in her underwear wearing a feather headdress and arrows and in one of the photos here breast is exposed. They look like they were from the 50's most likely. This apparently has no explanation. The first part of the history is about a family. The husband was a postman and the wife joined a Pentecostal church that partook in the snake handling business. The husband wasn't happy about this and apparently went kinda nuts. He sat with a bible one night reading and ripping out pages then throwing them in the fire and saying "Lies, all lies." The wife and child hid upstairs in what's now the "children's room" while the husband went out to the barn and killed the dog and then himself.

Next was the college professor and her husband. He went crazy and ripped out all the electrical wiring in the house for some reason and the women kicked him out. She stayed in the house but decided to neglect all the animals, cows, chickens, rabbits. Many of the animals were found dead in their pens. There is mention of them having a "destructive relationship" and how the "isolation" of the farm exasperated the problems they already had as a couple and as individuals.

Finally there was the bricklayer and the landscaper, the couple Bill and Tom bought the house from. They were having trouble finding work and then they were both injured in a motorcycle accident and wanted to get rid of the house. There is definite insinuation that the house had something to do with their bad luck.

So Bill and Tom had every religion they could think of come in and perform cleansing rituals on the house and everything seems fine.

I found myself sitting on the porch writing by myself when Tom came up and sat down and continued the previous conversation that had occurred about modesty. Allen, Eric, Bethany and I were not entirely comfortable with the idea of the outdoor, out in the open "solar shower" and Tom had to get to the bottom of this. "Culturally, where did you get this modesty from?" he wants to know from all of us. Well, we're all sorta fat, is our main answer. Not good enough. But at this point when it's just Tom and me I start trying to explain which ends up with me talking about my parents and the general idea that you had to hide everything growing up in that household. "But why?" Tom keeps asking me. "I don't know," I keep telling him and that that was what I was questioning the whole of my teenage years. That doesn't mean I'm going to be comfortable running around naked just because you're okay with it. And we talked about being who you are and actually living life and I said that's where I want to get to. I want to reach that point and hopefully sometime soon. And I was getting all teary eyed and embarrassed but didn't let myself tell him that like I normally end up doing. Apologizing for feeling and being emotional. I'm not sure if I was making Tom uncomfortable (I doubt it) or if he was trying to spare me, being aware that I was already uncomfortable but our conversation ended shortly after this.

Bill showed up around 7:30pm. No shirt, of course, just a pair of shorts. He had a dog, "Blondie," a golden retriever, and an old jeep cherokee, a mowhawk of sorts on the back of his head and a septum piercing. Bill (or "Bear" as he introduced himself to me and Allen) is actually 3/4 Mowhawk. So he often has a mowhawk, drives a cherokee and likes to drink Firewater. I find all of these things amusingly ironic. I don't know that that's the case for Bill. He told me he hadn't slept in two days and I said, "why not?" "Thinking about what I have to do tomorrow," he responded. Oh. The dreams and visions were disturbing his sleep.

Then Tom showers. Naked and shorn. And of course we all look.

We sat around and made a fire around 9:30pm and went to bed a little after midnight. Allen and I slept in our tent beside the house. The next day we left about noon. Neither of us were feeling 100% sure about our comfort levels regarding the actual "ceremony" that was going to occur that night. Bill dons his ceremonial loin cloth early in the day. Goes to work in the garden.

As we were leaving Tom says to me something like, "you'll get your assistantship. You'll start school in the fall. I had a dream about it." Whether this was just polite bullshit or if he really did have a dream about it after knowing me for less than 24 hours I don't know. Is he just a super nice (if know-it-all) older man offering encouragement? Either way I hope he's right.

A few hours later I felt let down in myself for not staying but I do see myself returning to the farm. I think I can handle the ridiculous mysticism/spirituality but can I tolerate the bugs?