Kali

Christian drug-dream stuff

Om?

The most unexpected part of holding the fowl was that it was warm. I guess I don’t know what I expected, but the feet felt like human fingers. It’s kinda like when you imagine kissing a person, but you forget to imagine saliva, and it totally changes everything.

City boys have written about killing their first chickens before, so I won’t go into it. It wasn’t an emotional experience for me. But as we were plucking the feathers I told Didier how amazing it was that I’d only killed my first fowl after 30 years.

“I got a good education in high school and college, I’m happy about what I learned and it was relevant for what it was… but it wasn’t…”

“…essential.” He offered.

“Yes.”

“The root of the word ‘essential’ is ‘essence’ or ‘truth.’ You weren’t educated about the truth…”

“… of how our bodies mix with the earth.” I said.

“Exactly.”

Didier and I were on the same page a lot, some of his rants could have come from my mouth. The ones about how companies have a stake in keeping their employees powerless, how it’s good for capitalism that people be vaguely afraid about the future, and so on.

When he taught us about the medicinal herbs in the garden I took tons of notes, but I had a hard time accessing what I’d been taught. I’d look at a plant and look closer at its leaves and compare it to my notes and would be too unsure to declare it Citronelle! or Lemon Pepper! or whatever. I said this time and again, and I’ll repeat it here:

“Learning to identify plants is like learning to read for the first time.”

People ask us often, “So, the kids could leave school at 15? How did he educate them?”

I was curious about this too. One day we went for a ride with Didier and his oldest son. They sat in the front seat, we sat in the back. As they drove, Didier pointed to the sky and talked about the movement of the clouds. He pointed to the hills and talked about the rock formations and the fossils. He talked about the fields that the neighbors were sowing. His son pointed to a sea gull that was out of place here. His son talked about the history of some old structures on their land. His son talked about planting by the moon and how it was a good guide but not the last word. His son talked about finding fennel by looking for a larger reed, because fennel grows at its feet.

Azure with her wild salad.

In other words, Didier taught his children about the land and the plants and the weather and the animals and natural systems and Catholicism. He taught them the things that he considered essential.

They might not know a lot of the academic stuff we consider foundations of knowledge, but they’ve learned how to have a relationship with the earth, and I think that’s fundamentally healthy.

Ah, Johann.

So he set up a ladder that didn’t QUITE reach its intended destination, and he managed to reach to the low end of the beam and grab it, hands only, feet dangling. This was all part of the plan. He hung from the beam with the pulley system in one hand and a chronically bad shoulder attached to the other. He would walk, hand-over-hand, along the beam to the peak of the roof, hanging the whole time, then after the rope was attached he’d walk himself back down to the ladder. Right?

Wrong. It turns out he wasn’t as strong as he thought, in fact I don’t even think Siren from American Gladiators could have done it. His hands quickly gave out and he and the ropes crashed onto a lower beam and then crashed again to the ground, where he landed on his head and hip. There was blood everywhere. In shock, he got up and dragged his broken body to the house. Through the gate, past the table, he managed to open the door. He saw the family in the living room and explained, “!wosdln;lksir.”

Suzanne saw the blood and called the ambulance.

After a couple days of blissful country living, skirted children and dinner prayer songs, quiet family meals and hand-picked salads, quiet nights with talks about religion, a helicopter roared into the valley. A few sturdy-looking paramedics jumped to the ground with a stretcher in their hands and ran to the house, putting out their cigarettes on the way. In the meantime the well-endowed pilot hopped down from the cockpit wearing a single-pieced jumpsuit that unzipped from his neck to his thigh, and he lit up his own cigarette.

Fifteen minutes later they loaded Johann into the chopper. The neighbor took pictures. The family watched in unison as the helicopter rose into the air and took off for Montpelier. Didier prayed for his idiot son; in the helicopter’s downdraft the women’s skirts flapped at their ankles.

It was a culture shock. Azure was shaken out of the trance of this peaceful valley by one of the paramedics who looks like her cousin Todd. “These are our people,” she thought. What are we doing here pretending to be anything like the family when our lives are much more like those of the paramedics? And tonight they’ll go home and tell their wives or husbands, “You’ll never believe this weird place we went today…”

We decided to give the family some space, so we took off for the afternoon. It was a good excuse to check email in town.

The next day we had a little surprise: an ambulance pulled up to the chalet and unloaded a morphine-soaked Johann into our living room. It was unbelievable that he was out of the hospital so fast, let alone that he wasn’t still in ICU. And now here he was being wheeled into our little candle-lit bubble. Would he turn on the lights at night? OH NO! Would he bleed on our food? At first we thought he was going to take our room, and we balked, so instead he was carried into the neighboring room. He groaned as the paramedics – with help from the family – set him on the bed. The paramedics took off and we were left with a roommate who couldn’t move, who would need help going to the bathroom and whose head was partially shaved and sewn like the ass of a sick cat. But we all know what it’s like to fear we’re a burden, so I sucked it up and broke the ice with a smile, “If there’s anything you need…”

It turns out – miraculously, really – that he didn’t break any bones, not even his skull. They think he has a concussion, but if that’s the only chip in his enamel then he’s incredibly lucky.

We helped him walk that first afternoon. He couldn’t believe that this happened to him when he had so many horses to shoe the next day, not figuratively. He said he smokes 50 – FIFTY! – cigarettes a day, and now he’d gone two full days without.

“Every crisis is an opportunity,” I chirped.

He looked at me with knowing eyes. “It is, it really is.”

Johann cried in the hospital, apparently, he cried about his life and how nothing ever really seems to go right for him, how he screws up good things. His dad said, “Johann had everything here ten years ago – he had this farm, he had his horses, he had family and he had God, he had good food and a quiet life. But he wanted to ‘see the world’ so he threw it all away….”

(From their little paradise the outside world looks like a mess, it looks like an ocean of people who take comfort in other people’s weaknesses to justify their own addictions: identity, status and craving, not to mention the more obvious daily addictions of narcotics, processed foods and mindless spending.)

Anyway, Dad continued his thought: “In the ten years since he left the farm he’s gone from crisis to crisis, he’s crashed 22 cars. He’s no longer a practicing Christian, he’s lost.”

The night I said the crisis/opportunity thing, I popped into his room to ask him a question and then backed out quietly: his room was candle-lit and he was in the middle of the bed on his back, counting rosary beads on his chest with his eyes closed. His legs stretched thin and fragile under the sheet.

Later that night he sat with us at the table, slumped. “Do you know where my car is?” he asked.

“No, we haven’t seen it.”

“It was up on the road but when the paramedics came they parked it over by the horses, it’s a little white car,” he said. I could sense where this was going.

“Oh, really? No, I don’t think I’ve seen it.”

“I have two cigarettes in my backpack in the car. I just know that if I can get them I’ll be able to sleep tonight.”

I changed the subject.

I was astonished to watch him find a pair of jeans and start to put them on. Then he scared up a pair of shoes and painfully fit his feet inside. He winced as he put on a jacket. This guy could hardly walk, he’d just been airlifted out of the valley, and here he was getting ready to drag his broken body into the unlit night just for two cigarettes. He limped across the room and opened the door.

“Wait!” I said.

He paused and looked over his shoulder as cold air tumbled in. I walked to within arm’s-length and handed him our flashlight.