25
“Miles, pack your shit and get the hell out of here,” barked Jordan.
“I’m going, I’m going.”
“And don’t come back until you learn how to talk to the food.”
“Alright, I’m really going now.”
“Miles, are you in there?”
“I’m coming.”
“You’re late.”
“Indian time.”
“Good one,” Jordan whispered across the yurt. “See you soon roomie, toksa ake.”
“Toksa,” he replied. “I’m coming, I promise, just one last... alright, I’m ready.”
“No big deal,” reassured Bill as Miles fell into the daylight. “It’s not as if the fate of the entire free world is in our hands or anything, better tie your boots though.”
“I’ll be alright. How far is this place anyway?”
“Few hours, and four of us crammed onto a bench seat. Wonder if you’ll be early enough to call shotgun?”
“Hey now, gimme a break, at least til I’ve had some coffee.”
“Morning sunshine,” greeted Selam as she joined the entourage. “Coffee?”
“Please.”
“He was still sleeping,” Bill informed. “What? you’ve got your coffee now.”
“Thanks buddy.”
“Anytime.”
“It’s all good,” relieved Selam. “I had to grab some of Yohan’s sea salt anyway, wheels up in one.”
“You’re late,” chastised Tiana from the hood of the truck.
“Indian time?”
“Try again.”
“He was still in bed.”
“Figures.”
“Alright boys and girls,” rallied Selam. “Let’s do the thing.”
“Shotgun,” fired Tiana, as she welcomed all challengers. No takers.
“You got any tapes in here?” Bill foraged.
“Yeah, up under the seat,” said Selam.
“Word, what kind of music do you like Miles?”
“Everything really. Been listening to a lot of jam lately, before here anyway. I like fusion a lot, and funk, bluegrass even, anything with some actual instruments and more than three chords, maybe even a key change or two. Like, real music, that takes you somewhere, you know.”
“Jeez. That’s a pretty colonized thing to say,” criticized Tiana. “And does a buffalo drum count as an actual instrument? Or the twelve singers sitting around it pouring their hearts into our sacred songs? Sorry if there’s not enough key changes for you mister music master man, guess our ancestors musta forgot those as they were handing down these original teachings over millennia, promise we’ll try harder next time sir.”
“Well you just can’t win for losing, can you bud?” prodded Bill.
“Isn’t that why most people don’t win?” Selam jabbed.
“I guess you have a point there. Steve Miller it is.”
“I didn’t mean for it to sound like that, you know?” Miles dug in. “I just meant that a lot of mainstream music is garbage, completely devoid any kind of depth, it’s got no soul. Native songs are on the other end of that spectrum though, they nourish the soul, even I feel it, they’re way more music than any of that top 440 crap out there.”
“Nice try,” she didn’t try to sound nice. “But just sounds like more colonized jibber jabber to me. It’s whatever, I mean, we’re used to the rhetoric of colonial indoctrination by now.”
“When I go home and start talking about colonization, my parents can’t even register what in the world I’m talking about,” laughed Selam. “Or if I say colonial, they think it’s a compliment about a quaint piece of proud history from the 1700s. I think they’re pretty clueless as to what exactly we’re doing out here.”
“When you grow up in the colonies, it’s all you’ve ever known, so it all seems as normal as it ever was. Mindless expansion and spreading destruction is just the way it is.
But when your perspective is from outside that way of life, you can see clearly that colonization is still in full swing. It encroaches into every nook and cranny of undeveloped potential. You can feel the noose tightening as the borders shrink around you. Colonization is all about converting people with inherent freedom into taxpaying slaves, and you’ve probably got seven generations of that shit slowing you down, so I won’t hold it against you, HonkyTonk.”
“Oh what? Now you too?” he was just happy to hear her break character.
“Jordan told me that shit,” as the remainder of her serious face faded away. “Now that’s funny, man. That one’s gonna stick around for a while.”
“Great.”
“Breaker one-nine,” interrupted Selam. “This is Big HonkyTonk, over.”
“Wiki wiki, DJ HonkyTonk on the ones and twos,” scratched Bill.
“Fantastic.”
“Well lookie there pal,” said Selam. “Got your first codename, first field trip, who knows what else could happen while we’re out here?”
Miles thought he picked up on some hidden undertone that only he was kept privy from. He knew a bit about their mission, but not much. The ride didn’t offer a lot in the way of explanation, but the conversation did lighten for the rest of the trip.
He knew they were going on a supply run, food mainly, there was a farm run by sympathizers of the cause, at least until an overdose of black tar infiltrates their headwaters of fertility.
“At first they wanted the pipe to come right through here,” explained Doodle, the farm manager. “Tried to offer us bottom dollar for the half-acre strip that would divide the farm in two, right through that field over there, across the creek, and then up that hill beside the orchard. Tried to promise us that they’d be as light on the land as a tractor, we’d never even know they were here. It was like they thought they could fast talk some simple country bumpkins before we knew what hit us, as if we’d never heard of the internet out here in rural Americana.
We talked to some folks east of here that fell for the con, and for a month, they sat and watched their topsoil terrorized by a crew that somehow missed the details of the negotiation table. The bait had been switched, but the check had been signed, and another fractured family farm was forced to sell their depreciated livelihood to some bottom feeder for chicken scratch.
The land can never be the same as it was, it’s in the contract, they poison the path before it even leaks, because they can’t afford our traditional roots disrupting their line of credit.
And when they clearcut up a hill like that one, they have to disperse these little chemical erosion control pellets, which is no good for an organic farmer. Especially when they’re always dumping them on the wrong farms. They’re like these little rocks that have been hitting kids in the head, and even if they tried to follow the law this one time, the wind carries the toxic cropdust with little regard for engineered drawings.”
“So what happened when you told them no?” asked Miles.
“At first they tried to offer us more money, pennies on the dollar for decades worth of heirlooms, and when that didn’t work, we started getting anonymous threats on the landline, so we had it disconnected.
“Jeez,” sighed Miles.
“Then came the eminent domain notices. They were going to take it anyway, seize the land out from under us for the good of the common man, the gas guzzling voters who think that increasing our energy export is somehow beneficial to our own domesticated breed of dependence.
But that fuel was a little too rich, even for the conservative estimates of middle America, so it backfired on them when the community reliant on our vitality, came together to defend their sacred rights of private property.”
“That’s a little different angle than we’ve been focused on at camp,” Miles pointed out.
“I know, and land ownership isn’t really my thing either, we think of ourselves more as caretakers of the garden, not oligarchs of an empire, but we were grateful for any help we could get”
“So what happened?”
“We won, technically. Scared ‘em off of going toe-to-toe with our pitchfork posse, it might even make it into the news now that some loyal consumers were outraged. So they changed the route.”
“That’s great,” congratulated Miles as he felt rushed to judgement. “Itn’t?”
“For us I guess, kept them from tearing up our topsoil at least, and now the pipe’s in place about fifty yards upstream of the title line. Right over there somewhere. And that creek didn’t used to be all blown out and brown like it is, that’s just an unforeseen byproduct of replacing a marine habitat with the four foot cashflow of dirty money. There’s no oil or anything in it yet, thanks to you guys, but just the installation has been devastating to our entire county.
Back when we had all them floods last spring, they were ordered by DEQ to halt construction until it dried up, but they claimed that it would be more destructive to leave the pipe halfway in, and that they should at least be permitted to cover their tracks. The governor agreed, surprise surprise, and he granted a reprieve to secure the last few sections of unsettled pipe. Then the next day we see them clearcutting another hill, in the middle of the most erosive flood we’ve seen in a century. And once it’s cut, there’s no longer a debate of whether or not to cut it, just a fee for stream mitigation when a fifty foot section of pipe slipped loose and ended up way down there by the apple barn.”
“You’re kidding me?”
“No sir, the snowmelt carried it clear across the farm. Then a bunch of cops and bulldozers pushed their way in to drag the damaged collateral across our plates after all.”
“That’s too much, man.”
“You’re telling me. And they all think they’re doing God’s work in the process. Self-righteous pricks who claim allegiance to the highest authority, but Benjamin Franklin ain’t gonna be there when that tower comes crashing down, I can guarantee you that.”
“No doubt about that one.”
“Not at all. Listen Miles, it’s been good chatting with you, we should pick it back up later on, but I gotta run up the hill and finish packing some crates for you guys. If you’d be into it, I bet my niece Annie could use a hand down there in the lower garden, she’s the one with the real green thumb around here.”
Annie? Couldn’t be his Annie. Could it? He’d experienced coincidence beyond reasonable doubt, he now believed that anything was possible, but this level of cosmic inclination was just too much to fathom. She had mentioned something about a farm, and an uncle, and through the squint of his sunblurred vision he thought he might have seen that hair glimmering in the wind. He tried to subdue his hastened approach, her anonymity guarded by a row of early broccoli, what were the odds of there being two Annies in the same book?
“Annie?” he timidly searched, as butterflies flew past his vocal cords.
“Oh hey, so you must be the new guy, good to meet you, I’m Annie.”
“Miles,” he introduced himself to the newly revealed stranger. “But my friends call me HonkyTonk.”
“I like Miles. You wanna help me plant some sweet potatoes?”
“Sure do,” he signed in, his head still swimming with the near collision of missed connection.
“Good, I’ll poke the holes with this stick, you follow behind and push a start down into each one.”
“Got it.”
“So how long you been out there at camp?”
“Just a couple of weeks, it’s already hard to imagine life before it though.” He thought his response cluttered, considering his preoccupation of unrealized romance.
“That’s how it goes,” she empathized. “Same thing happens out here, being so disconnected from civilization and surrounded by all this glorious vegetation. Everything we need comes off the land here, except for salt of course, but I’ll bet Selam took care of that one for us.”
He looked up as more pieces fell into place, “I was wondering what that was for.”
“It’s not a trade really,” she expounded. “We’d be giving you all this stuff anyway, we’re just answering a call we feel in our hearts, and the salt’s simply an unexpected gift from yours. It’s kind of magic how it all seems to come together.”
“I’ve been seeing that for myself here lately,” Miles recounted his blessings. “What all do you grow out here?”
“Oh, a little bit of everything, I guess. This garden rotates with the trinity, and a few other peppers and melons and stuff, first time trying sweet potatoes down here. Then we got leafy greens up top, onions and garlic, a greenhouse full of tomatoes and some more broccoli, basil and rosemary, every kind of nut tree you can imagine, fruit out the wazoo, berries everywhere, and that field across the creek will be full of golden wheat come harvest time.”
“You even grow your own wheat?”
“Yeah buddy, it’s the only way to get an unpoisoned loaf these days, and just wait til you try a slice of Doodle’s world famous skillet bread.”
Miles’ mouth watered faster than the overgrown creekbed.
“There’s a chicken coop behind the barn, for eggs mainly, except this one time a black snake picked a fight it couldn’t swallow, and we had to finish the job. Poor little Clementine, tasted like chicken,” she somehow said with a straight face.
“We get milk from our neighbor, still warm and creamy, I don’t do dairy, but it sure looks yummy. We eat a lot of fish from the pond, used to before all this started anyway, other than that we don’t eat too much meat around here. He used to keep sheep for wool and flesh, but then I showed up and relentlessly objected to the itemization of another animal’s existence. He won on the chickens, but at least they can come and go as they please.”
“You really do have it all, huh?”
“Oh honey,” she stirred his pot a bit. “I nearly forgot about the bees. Took me a while to be alright with boxing them in like that, but now we’ve got a pretty solid relationship with each other, and they’re the keystone to making this whole valley bloom.”
“Well aren’t you just a regular old Bingo Pajama?”
“Nice, I love Tom Robbins, now there’s an author that can really take the woes of the world and weave them into a fun read.”
“Most agreed, he’s one of my favorites.”
“Well gold star for the new guy, maybe if you’re lucky we’ll brew up some jitterbug perfume later tonight.”
Miles jittered.
“Oh yeah, and we have beets. Speaking of, we should probably beat it up the hill and see if they need help with dinner. You game?”
“Am I ever.”