It’s raining across the land, browns and blues from the clouds and chill. Silence pervades except for the slow burning hot fire I lit in the Mongolian yurt just as the sun was coming up this morning, and rain pattering on the canvas roof. No music is playing, the optional electric heater off. When I open the handmade door of the yurt to peak outside wanting to go on a morning walk, I hear flocks of birds all around enjoying the rain, even a gaggle of geese flew overhead as I washed a Navajo churro I strung up yesterday, seems late to me to still be flying south.
I arose early to stretch and watch the storm across the valley, noticing smoke coming out of a pipe above another yurt in the distance. Deer graze across multiple pastures, seemingly unaffected by the wet weather. I feel for a moment, that I live in a little village. For a moment. It’s been a very long time since I’ve felt this, given my nomadic ways. I used to say to myself - how does one stop and sit still? You just do, and then you can always go again. But, it’s a pretty neat journey to just stop and see a place become more complex in its expressions by seeing it many ways. I guess people are like that too if we stick with them in time and space.
The unusually warm winter solstice a few days ago is hopefully giving way to colder frigid weather, temps that actually press you to go inward during these long nights though the days of course will be getting gradually longer now. Because of the easy weather, reminding me of the weather possible this time of year in the piedmont South where I grew up rural — southern Virginia— either super cold or super warm— I have been full throttle in tannery work the last few days now that my infected thumb is finally on the mend and I can use it again. Yet, I feel brutally tired, mainly of people and stimulus outside of my world here tending and tanning, fixing, making and reading.
I couldn’t sleep last night very well because I felt so inspired by designs in my head— from how I want to built the next bit of my airstream trailer down to every piece of wood screwed in this way or that with curvy creative additions to the design idea, to articles of clothing I have been dreaming of for years, out of my own handmade skins, wool and weavings. I thought about how I would tailer this area of a vest or cut the buckskin for a pouch I’m trying to finish or felt a hat, or coat. I have record these inspirations when they come, like poetry that sometimes grabs a hold of me in the middle of the night, and if I don’t, sometimes I lose the image. I’m sure musicians can relate to this sentiment. When the almost addictive wiley-coyote inspiration hits, take advantage of it. So it means I am neglecting calling many far away friends back right now. When you’ve been a nomad for so long, the kin become stretched out across time and place, and phone calls and texts are the lifeline of tending until the next time we see one another, which also can be a disconnecting thing, as sometimes I become adverse to the phone. The inspiration to work on my projects, dive in to the ether-realm of my wiley creative, takes hold over other responsibilities. I don’t often get to revel there, but I believe it is really where I should be a lot of the time. I had a dream of trying to hide in the pruned English garden bushes around my parent’s house, as another person, who has shot a hawk with a pistol straight in the face because the hawk was gobbling up song birds. Something like out of a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel (my favorite author as a teen, I read every book) —I swear this was the dream, I was an observer of the songbird gobbling, we all quietly in awe getting to see a giant hawk (it was so much bigger than they tend to be IRL) land on a fence post and pick out little ones in a flock to chomp. All around me in the adobe barrens meeting beaver tended corridor are those little birds. Perhaps spending the last few days outside all day with my skins, birds all around had them venture into my dreams. I suddenly became the man who shot the hawk, and everyone was pissed at me, and I was trying to hide.
Then suddenly I was in the studio of my dreams, waiting for my fate from the mobs I assumed were going to come tar and feather me, moving around in a burgundy dress, that I currently have on in real life, a 2 dollar thrift store find from several weeks ago. I get a knock on the door. A crew of all black FBI agents ask to come in and I know exactly what they are here for. I calmly and nicely let them in. They are not here for the hawk, they are here for a whole other thing, and I think, I can explain to them what really happened, right? I still have cop anxiety dreams ever since I got arrested as a teenager for vandalizing my principal’s front yard, with driveway reflectors, toilet paper, and one hard boiled egg someone thought was a grand idea to throw on their window. That story I’m still scared to tell, even all these years later, because that guy is still alive and that retired cop is my parent’s next door neighbor. I digress.
Nonetheless, In the dream, I let the group of black FBI agents inside, they were mostly women, sleek looking, and all neatly dressed in black carrying bags of ‘evidence’ to drill me about. I run into a theatre right outside to ask for Montana’s help, who was sitting with some other mutual friends, Freya and Trace, and he said, sure he would come help if I needed because he knew what ‘really happened’ and how to talk to people under pressure. I go back in- and then I awake. I go in and out of lucid dreaming, where the mob comes in to shoot me, and then suddenly I’m not the one who shot the hawk, the man coming to shoot me is the one who is guilty. And he doesn’t realize that there are FBI agents all around witnessing the whole thing. I was getting drilled by the FBI agents about trash I threw away in a Post Office dumpster, I guess which is a federal offense, sometimes I did IRL this summer on the road and got a letter for and the bag of stinky trash sent back to me. I dumbly also threw away a box with my address on it too in the bag. Except in the dream, I had actually thrown away gallons and gallons of yellow mustard. And they wanted to make sure I had the mess back, and know how ‘in trouble’ I was, which was the gist of the letter I got IRL, probably written by an angry postal worker who saw me on camera and had nothing else better to do in the tiny little town where I did it. Being a nomad, I’m used to throwing away little bags of trash away wherever, but I’ll tell you now —- NEVER do it at a Post Office. Now I know. I’m even having dreams about it.
I take bits from dreams and take note of them. I don’t know if I am a full subscriber to Jung’s collective conscious theories, where our psyches’ are connected through other realms and we tap into similar things in different ways, and whatever is floating around in that realm, gets translated through us. Sometimes I believe that, sometimes I’m not sure. I do know that I have had dreams about people that have come true, or something comes to me in my dream and later I realize what it was all about, or I dream about someone and later they tell me they dreamed of me at the same time. Sometimes not in ways that are ways I wish. I dream about people I feel super connected to, for better or for worse, when they are around or near, even when I don’t know it at the time, but find out later.
The hawk, the songbird. The red dress. The yellow mustard. The studio full of light. There’s more to some of these dreams I’m not telling to the public, but there was some stuff to it.
Last week, I dreamed about going scavenging in an old abandoned house, something I used to do a lot as a teenager with nothing better going on on the weekends (literally the only thing we had was a wal-mart parking lot, otherwise) that was under construction and pretended like I was supposed to be there. I was looking for scrap lumber or other treasures. As a teen I mostly took super old clothing to wear cause I was a weird teen, or little amulets, things that probably made those spirits pretty pissed all these years. In this dream, suddenly a construction worker saw me, and said, go in the basement, its been cool down there this whole time, and there are 50 pound bags of rennet down there that are still good, you should take and use. I woke up with the word rennet in my head.
The last time I made cheese was in North Carolina a couple summers ago, when I was having the hardest time of my life. I came there with my ex-partner, to show him the plants, the land, the people, but the pandemic was still in a pretty stressful time, and we had just been super isolated together in a really unideal situation after living in the wilderness together the whole summer before that feeling free as ‘birds.’ The farm we landed on for a few months, what was supposed to be a safe stopover to get back to the desert to make our food camps, seed gathering camps and tend to our nursery projects, became the place where he decided to leave me, at the old farm I used to tend and call home in community. Leaving all our shared dreams and visions behind, too. I still don’t understand why to this day. I probably never will. Looking out the window this morning at the roads, I flashed back to the day I saw his old truck drive away on the potholed dirt road, and remembering in my body how wretchedly devastated I was. I still am now but it has a different shape. I made cheese that summer from the same goats I used to milk when I lived at that farm 6 years before, elder goats by now, still making milk, still roaming the same pastures, still the same goat barn and milking stand. Chama went on a road trip that summer, so my ex and I helped with milking, and it felt eerily familiar and surreal, to be back again at that milking stand, with chickens cawing at sunrise, smell of goat manure which I used to not like so much became oddly comforting. I milked the goats, my ex and I would talk about how we wanted animals to take out in the wilds so we could stay out longer, though we managed to stay out for 10 days without a resupply and 15 without a major town stop before. Imagine if we had goats? or other animals? In North Carolina, folks don’t really have the same expansive land to move animals on so they are usually confined to a singular private property and given enough space to get what they need there; plus there’s all different plants growing a large part of the year because of the rains so they eat well if they aren’t picky and the impact on the last isn’t so bad. Sometimes the goat’s feet suffer a little though. So goat tending looks a little different there for the most part than what I’ve seen in the west.
That summer I made Chèvre like I used to when I lived on the farm before, like Chama had taught me. I strained the cheese in the same outdoor kitchen where I made gallons and gallons of mead in past years, sometimes the mead exploding its top and shooting blackberry seeds and pulp to the ceiling (if you look far enough back on my instagram page, you will see the blackberry mead being made in 2014). There must have been some old remnant wild yeasts floating around from all the years of feral kin brewing and a stewing in there. We used to capture wild yeast in honey water covered with tight fabric to start some of our meads, even with mold growing on the walls, it worked. I made Calamus mead, Blackberry, Spicebush, Rose, Muscadine and more. This was the same kitchen where the raccoons would come steal your bread you accidentally left out, or we’d play cards by oil lamp every night as the crockpot stewed with roadkill deer and tomatoes from our garden. I made the cheese, and spiced it with fresh Thyme, Rosemary or Figs from the tree on the south facing hill by the cobb cottage I used to live in, with honey. The fig tree now being ginormous compared to its earlier size and the fruits actually ripen fully when before they would get hit by frost before they finished. Despite how my relationship was falling apart, I made the cheese for us, and we would have our heart-breaking talks while eating this cheese spread on local bread. I made it a few times still after he left, and I had a hard time eating anything during that time especially food we liked to eat together, but I ate the goat head broth from the one he killed brutally in a slaughter gone awry. I kept refilling the crockpot and re-stewing until the head was completely unrecognizable for weeks after while getting day drunk on milky oats tincture I made with strong moonshine. I only drank goat broth during that time and ate the cheese. I stopped eating the food from the garden we had planted to bring to our fall camps, it made knots form in my stomach to try to eat from there. I tried some of it thinking maybe I’d be able to eat, and later took the squash and tomatoes on a walk in the Gila Wilderness with friends a year and a half later. Despite stopping eating from the garden, I stayed to harvest the Oaxacan corn I could not abandon— this is corn I tied up during hurricanes to save it while camping in my truck camper in the garden because it was too painful to lay in the dark dreary yome we shared- corn I still carry around and have not eaten one kernel of, I guess thinking that it would only be appropriate to eat it with the person whom I planted it with, who has refused to eat it with me all the years later. Or maybe not refused but just hasn’t seen it as important. I wait to nixtamalize, transform the blues and purples into nourishing food, and perhaps I never will. Maybe it will only get replanted one day, or fed to the spirits. Or Birds. And, oh how wonderful would that corn be made into tortillas or soaked as hominy with homemade Chèvre on top. This is the same corn I grew out, selected and saved during my times as farm manager there in 2012-2015, so it felt magical to have these kernels in my pantry again after spending time with them again, albeit in an unfortunate way.
(So I dug up some embarrassing old photos from my feral mid-20’s when I first hung with those goats new babies, first started making mead and my first hides tanned, first willow basket, finally ate meat again pressured by my friends to eat squirrel cookies— see reference below, fresh baby faced…enjoy the laughs)
I haven’t made cheese since that summer. But, since I’ve been in Paonia, I’ve had a lot of re-visiting of the old ways I used to live, when staying put more, and deepening into relationships I hadn’t gotten so far into before. I’ve gotten more into preserving meat, working hides again and gleaning from the bone pile, thanks to abundant roadkills, living on land with ‘the roadkill ranger’ last year, and the folks who run the Paonia Food Club butcher shop. I’ve been trying to gain the weight and resilience back I have lost over the years of exhausting travel, traumatic Cannibas farm jobs, and several years of debilitating heartbreak, by simply choosing to prioritize nourishing myself. I sometimes fall off, for sure. I still am bad about the routines I know I should stick to. I have to remind myself to eat when I get deep into a project. But raw milk has been one that I have brought back into my life x10 from the relationship I had with it before. (I also heard they finally put down that elder goat that I milked 6 years later, and a friend, who now lives in my old cobb home, posted pictures on the ‘gram of she and another friend using all the parts of the body, including making broth in that same outdoor kitchen, ha!). I used to think I was allergic to milk, growing up I didn’t like it so much, but I only had access to pasteurized milk, then. I had stomach troubles as a kid, and struggled with depression as a teenager, and the food and water was one factor, home-life another, school-life and peer-life another. As a college student I went culty raw vegan for a bit, believing in nonsense about how uncooked food is more pure, but maybe it was the temporary cleanse I needed from rancid oil and fast food that I paired next to my grandma’s home grown cooking, then went on to work at an organic farm with the oldest continuously running raw dairy in new england, where I got access to unlimited free milk that I wouldn’t drink most of the time. But yet I was so lightheaded that the farm work would wear me down so much.
I eventually succumbed to at least eggs when I walked the Camino de Santiago in 2008, but still didn’t eat meat or much dairy. I started eating wild meat when my friends in North Carolina made fun of me for being vegan, and promptly pressured me to eat Squirrel biscuits, Raccoon roast and deer meat stews with wild harvested roots. I’m glad they pressured me.
I dated an older man for many years while I was roaming around California, Cannibas farms, and the west coast, (older, being 15 years my senior but he was young in spirit) who was on a super allergin-free diet because of having broken his back in his younger years, that religiously excluded dairy but included meat. It wasn’t until I hiked the Colorado trail with the ex who was the best friend who I never thought I’d find kind of person — did I give up on caring about dairy exclusion in my diet. His Brazilian mother who insisted on feeding us all the time, knew my diet preferences but would sneak in dairy or forget, and I, not wanting to be rude, would eat it anyway. By the time we finished the trail, I had given up on the diet restrictions, especially as my metabolism was through the roof and craving a whole pack of cookie dough a day by the end of basically being above 10k feet all summer on foot in the high country living on our dried deer meat, dried berries, seaweed, roasted sesame snacks we handmade, pine nuts from Nevada, and plenty of store-bought stuff too.
I came to Paonia hoping to still be able to have a friendship or collaborative partnership with my said ex, but the feelings of hurt and love were too strong, and he left to be out of the country for awhile to see family soon after I arrived, a plan already in action before I came. It didn’t work out to be friends and sadly we do not talk. BUT, I stayed here, and still question why sometimes. Something pulled me in, even though I have thought about leaving so many times and still think about it, I decided to stay and exist in this other little realm here for a bit, so I could nourish myself with the simplicity of what this place is- not a lot of traffic, not a lot of stores, lots of good food, access to expansive wild spaces. I do miss the community I feel elsewhere but right now the raw milk and wild meat, or local organic meat that is actually all super affordable — draws me in. There’s no whole foods where I have to buy overpriced tetrapacks of bone broth to get access. I make my own. The said ex and I did deer camp when we first got together, spending weeks making chili, broth, and canning meat, for half of it to get stashed in his mother’s cabinets and I never saw it again. Something about the visceral connection to the animals always has been there for me, but has been drawing me in here, more than I’ve experienced before in my life. It’s felt like medicine to focus there for now, in the humbling relationship of nourishment that can come from close kinship with small groups of animals you care you, or know people who care for, or see a wild creatures in an expansive land. It is connected to ecology, and the web, and plant tending, and planetary awareness.
Summer before last, I visited with friends who roam mostly year ‘round with their herd across the wilds of eastern Washington. Kris and friends, with their camel, yaks, sheep and goats, spend most of their time on public land with the animals, making camps along routes, even into the winter, though I think it always hasn’t been easy with the law thinking that the sheep and goat are going to give diseases to the wild sheep in the region. We visited to help them re-supply at apricot camp by trees that were planted probably over 100 years ago by settlers and the trees have created a slef-seeding nursery for a feral grove on a dry hillside in the Okanagan edge zone. (I took some pictures from that visit, you can view more of them, here). Kris was the first to show me how amazing Lomatium canbyi is to eat, pulling a fat round bulb out, peeling it and giving it to me in the door of my airstream which was parked right in the middle of the Heathen’s goat yard before they took off for their walk. Also there, Roxanne would see I was sad, go milk her goats and bring me a quart jar of milk most mornings to drink, saying: here, nourish your tears with this.
Something about drinking raw milk and tending grief, it feels as though I am filling the void that has seemed impossible to fill.