deafdrummer
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This has been an interesting year!
The ranch I was on was an experience. I BUSTED MY BUTT to do the work on a volunteer basis with NO BENEFITS. I had a LOT of fun there, especially in the heat! The worse part of the day is usually in the morning from 8 to about noon because of the humidity, so I was always trying to get out there around 6 - 6 30 in the morning to get started and beat the heat. that way, I would be done by 1-3 in the afternoon, though I've had days when I could push myself to 12 hours or more, in order to get that "good tired feeling." That harkens from my teenage years when I would work all day in the oil fields with Dad. It felt good to come home and shower. I just have that particular mindset from those years, and the ranch seems to have completed that circle, and I could tell I was turning to make the circle instead of a straight line into oblivion when I was getting away from customers and more towards dock work and stocking/warehousing at REI. It was just as well that they cut me off on my hours so that I could have the incentive to move on.
After the internship on the ranch ended at the end of August, it was time to go house sit in Houston for a friend of mine who left REI also, shortly before he and his wife left the country to work on their coffee/banana farm in Ecuador in the summer. I stayed at the house for one month, and that was quite an experience, with old houses with their charm being torn down for big-city multi-story townhomes and apartment buildings almost everywhere you looked. It made me sick to my stomach, seeing the big-city intrusion into Houston (which I don't like anyway, but I'm looking at the big picture of what was once pristine land with only Indian presence, wiped clean to the point that it would appear as though Houston was created at the same time the Earth was created). The house I stayed in is one of those old houses. There seemed to be a presence in the house that had me pull my gun once. There was a woman next door who moved out to be closer to family, and she was terminally ill. As soon as she moved away, that presence went away, and I was able to sleep more solidly. Unfortunately, there was a problem with the water pipes leaking a massive amount of water, so the water had to be cut off and I had to leave for another friend's house, where I stayed a short time near the coast until it was time to go to the farm.
At the beginning of October, I picked up the house owner at the airport (his wife stayed behind to wrap up things on the farm and shut it down before coming back) and stayed a few more days to help him with yard work on the house lot he owns across the street from his house. I then went on to the farm near Brenham around that time. THIS WAS A DISASTER... We met in town, in Brenham, which is about 95 miles northwest of Houston. While we were there, she had told me that she was upset because she and her boyfriend were camping with other people, and park officials or the police were somehow drawn to the camp site and found that they had pot paraphernalia and were given tickets for possession of such, and the truck was turned inside-out. She showed me the ticket! That was a red flag. The first red flag was really when we tried to meet, and I was staying in Houston. She had promised that she would come to meet me to discuss the farm. It never happened. She stood me up time and time again. I would be waiting at the house for her text message when she got close. Two hours would pass by, and finally I would get the message, that "Sorry, I was so tired, I had to sleep." SLEEP IN THE MIDDLE OF THE DAY?? Another red flag was no pictures of the travel trailer to get the idea of the size.
Anyway, when I got to the farm, there was trash everywhere around the house (she had lived on the property for over 3 years), a transient couple passing through to California was there, along with their teenager-like male dog who would hump you and try to kill the farm owner's dog when she got too close. They were staying a lot longer than the owner wanted and finally had the courage to ask them to leave, especially after the couple fought the night I was there. I mean, man and woman were fist-fighting! I didn't see it, but I heard about it and saw the man's busted lip the next day. Anyway, the travel trailer had major problems; it had no AC, out of propane (that's minor), had a major roof leak in one corner, the water did not work at both sinks and shower, only the toilet, and had rat turds EVERYWHERE. Then, she showed me her house, which was TRASHED! I mean, food wrappers, chinese takeout containers, bottles, cans, used paper napkins. You couldn't see the floor in places! The bathroom was horrible. I will not describe it. I just can't... I also discovered while walking around the farm that the woman walks barefooted everywhere, even the goat pen with droppings everywhere, and when she goes into the house, she does not clean her feet first! That night, some stranger came by to sell pot to the transient couple. Normally, I don't mind people doing it, as long as it does not involve me (and he didn't try to involve me, anyway), but to do this on the owner's property without her seeing it told me to get the hell out. Another one was the transient people littering the front porch with trash. Unbelievably lazy people. I got up the next day, really upset with what I had gotten into, and packed up to leave. I could not stay there under those conditions.
I contacted another friend, who with her husband lives in the coastal area just south of Houston. I was there when I left for the farm. I ended up going right back the next day. I was HUGELY disappointed by the experience on that farm. I had looked forward to building up the farm from scratch, basically, but just too many problems and too many warning signs that this was not a good place for me. Anyway, I ended up staying with her to help her with house duties and give her rides, since she has seizures and thusly lost her ability to drive. She stayed up late at night and slept late, being affected by her seizures. We did go to the Boardwalk on the coast in Galveston and eat there one night, and sometimes, they would take me to dinner with them at the golf course they play at. She is a wrenching girl when she feels at her best. We worked on maintenance of my Jeep as well as one of their off-road trucks, which I got to drive for Molly to the store and elsewhere as a reward for my helping her. It was manual transmission, too! They have a dog, a big one who's fun to play with, Layla. A sweetheart of a dog, she's very human-like in her facial expression and the way she plays fetch! Her husband, took us to the Wings Over America air show just minutes from the house. The next day after the air show, I would hear those planes flying overhead most of the day, and at one point, I saw one flying so low that I could see it out the window. I rushed outside to see them, and I saw at least 4 flying in formation just several hundred feet over the subdivision. The giant bomber, FiFi, nearly flew over the house, doing a hard bank that showed its underbelly. Just hearing the sounds of the motors all day, made me feel like I was living in that time. Probably genetic memories from Mom and Dad? Unfortunately, I was not happy there in suburbia... It was time to go.
Another friend of mine had a wedding on November 2nd in Plano, just outside of Dallas, so I left Houston and drove up there for the weekend. His family flew in from different places, and the wedding took place at a pumpkin farm, inside a country-style dance hall. Watching his family together, I had not felt so left out like that. Here I was, homeless, with no clear plan of where I was going. I felt like I was outside a glass bubble, looking inside. As soon as that weekend was done, I drove over to central Dallas to stay one night with my nephew and niece. The next day, I headed out to east Texas to stay with a friend and see if I could find work in Nacogdoches, as I had passed through there one time and remarked that it looked really nice. One problem was that the man's house had NO CELL SERVICE! Not even AT&T has reliable service out there. The other problem was, he is a Christian insurgent and found out about my being lesbian, asking me to leave his house the following day.
I went into Nacogdoches and found a horticulture site run by the university to ask about work in the area. One of the employees at the music store I stopped at told me about a homeless shelter there. The name of it should have warned me; Godtel. It is one of those bible-thumping shelters, a ministry where they try to convert non-Christians and reinforce the conditioning in Christians. Remember, the Christians down here in east Texas are not quite like you. All of the shelter residents are REQUIRED to attend bible-study every morning and evening. Some of the stuff was "out there," like the ONLY reason you would have had a right to divorce Ken would have been adultery, and other than that, since you married the man, you ARE STUCK WITH HIM, and you must work out your differences and move on. Otherwise, you will not be with god. Or that the people are in shelters or otherwise on hard times because of lack of obedience to god. How does that make you feel? Most of the time, I simply looked at the presenter with my worse eye, so I would be shielded from the conditioning. They sent a teacher after me one night after bible study. He was like a snake, trying to slither past my defenses and basically saying that he's right and I'm wrong, with NO REGARD for my background. The founder's wife on Sunday night of the week of Thanksgiving said something about being required to be there that day on Thanksgiving and something about being a Christian, which everyone would have to do. That was one incentive to get out of there, the other being that there was no paid work available on the two farms I knew about, never mind a place to stay on those farms.
Having said that, the shelter was a place for me to stay for nearly three weeks. It's housed in the former Red Hotel, which was a popular place to stay for stage performers and musicians performing at the opera house across Main Street from it. Think turn-of-the-century, the 1900s. The oldest town in Texas. Anyhow, the former hotel has a ballroom downstairs which is COLD in the winter (had already experienced 20-degree weather there last month!) and two floors above it, one for men and one for women. The bathroom facilities are a bit wanting, but I made do with a bathtub that didn't have a showerhead. I'd just lean back into the tub half-filled with water and wash my hair that way. It was cold in my room for some reason, and I got really mad because I discovered that the window was a bit open, on a day when it was low 30s outside! This meant I had to wait 24 hours for it to warm up again, and it never does with these old buildings. This hotel was ahead of its time with steam heat, one of the few places that had it in those days.
The food was something else... I had to think about the fact that these homeless people, especially those not working, have NOTHING else to eat nor money to buy food with, and I was very thankful to my circumstances to be able to supplement this food with additional food outside the shelter. It was EXPENSIVE, with no means to reliably store food and prepare it. No food is allowed inside the shelter. I had to go out one night when they served a BBQ-theme meal with nothing for me to eat, not even a salad (they did realize this problem and later helped with providing meals with salads, soup, and fruit out of a can). Fortunately, it was all you can eat until there was no more to eat. We would always have chores to do after eating and on Saturday mornings. We would have to be outside of the shelter during the week days, except when it was extremely cold. What was sad was that there would be people who sleep outside and will not sleep inside the shelter, and come inside in the mornings and evenings to eat, and then go back out to where they were. Hard times for these people. There were three mothers with babies...
I was looking for work, eating somewhere, going to a coffee house to power up my desktop computer (until I realized that public libraries have free wifi in general), getting to know Nacogdoches, and had to go by Lufkin, 20 miles away, to get another sleeping bag that was misplaced when I was still in Houston. I was NOT going to sleep when it was cold and had a few hard nights with that. It really helped to have a sleeping bag I could zip myself in. I volunteered on Appleby farm to the north of town a few times and learned a few things there. I also got to drive a medium-sized farm tractor, the first time since 1985! They go to the farmer's market in town on Saturdays. Anyhow, I was trying to get services for new hearing aids and looking to go into the workforce retraining program in a nearby town. Cindy, the owner of Appleby Farm, helped me get into the farm volunteer web site at wwoofusa.org, paying for my year's membership there. Nothing really turned up, not even outside temporary work. A farm outside of Victoria did contact me, and I had said that I would contact them one day.
The religious nature of the shelter finally gave me the incentive to start deciding what to do next and get out. My stepmother contacted me and said, "If you cannot stand it there any longer, don't wait and get down here! When will you be here?" I hesitated 'til about 10 AM, and then decided I was going to go ahead and get out. I had to let it go... 3 weeks was long enough to realize that I really didn't belong there. There is even a facebook page for pagans called "Living Pagan in the Bible Belt!" I joined up with it days before, knowing that it would be a tiny minority in this part of Texas. I learned in hindsight that it was not the place for me to be, and that it was a necessary experience, to realize that there is really no place for a person like me in east Texas. It was in the upper 30s and rained ALL DAY from Nacogdoches to Victoria. I didn't even bother to stop in Houston while going through there. I just kept going to beat the rush-hour traffic in Houston.
I'm staying with my stepmother in Victoria. I first started looking for work downtown at the Workforce Office, where I discovered that there was going to be a problem getting retrained because of my education level. I even went out to the county agriculture extension office (a trick I learned while in Nacogdoches) to learn about the layout of the farming industry of the area. Victoria is substantially bigger than Nacogdoches, (over 80,000, I think) which I learned yesterday is bigger than I want it to be. I will NEVER go grocery shopping at 4 PM if I can help it. The traffic is still too much to deal with.
I decided to track down the farm that contacted me through WOOF, Knopp Branch Farm. Knopp Branch Farm It is located 11 miles north of Edna, to the east of Victoria. I went out there in early December to interview with the owners. It's a great place, with the farm house, guest house, a small part of the farm on one side of the road, and the majority of the farm on the other side. On that side is the barn, workshop, storage unit, and cabin that I'll be staying in! Yes! I am their new Farming Intern! I had to root around the north of Victoria, to find winter clothes for my bottom half. Anyway, the cabin is more rustic and smaller than yours, but it is insulated and has two small radiating heaters and a window AC unit. The walls and ceiling, inside and out are corrugated tin roofing materials, brand new. Nonetheless, it is absolutely charming. I can hardly wait to be sitting on the bed, looking outside on a cold, cloudy day... It was originally intended to be a chicken house with mesh floors, but they decided not to do chickens. It needs work, so we will be replacing the broken windows, building a corner closet and an outside skirt around the bottom edge of the walls, and pulling up the floor to put down insulation underneath. Eventually, one or two more cabins will be built next to it, and one of them will have a bathroom and kitchen built in. It will be a great arrangement for me! The farm grows sweet fruits like apples, oranges, lemons, kumquats, grapes, Pakistani mulberries, figs (!), watermelons, herbs, and veggies like kale, cauliflower, even a cheddar cauliflower, broccoli, green beans, leeks, red/white/yellow onions, scallions, french carrots, a purple carrot, potatoes, bell peppers, hot peppers, and many others I've forgotten! Right now, the winter fruits like citrus and winter vegetables are growing and being harvested ahead of each Saturday's farmer's market in Houston, which I've known about for years, but had NO IDEA that it was them!
I get to eat veggies and fruit out of the fields! After two months, we'll see where things are and whether they are happy with my work. There may be a possibility where I can be the volunteer supervisor, since they want me to be their long-term volunteer. They're not looking for someone to stay a few days, a few weeks while passing through to another destination. Not even a few months... They've trained a few people only to have them leave, their effort in training them wasted. I've told them I'm committed as long as I can get a bit of money coming in to take care of basics and emergencies. Ernest had pledged his support to me in helping to me get my farming life going, whether it be education or even having my own farm one day. Not sure what that entails, though it does sound encouraging and enticing as to what lies in the future. Now, I can have both. I know... I wanted to travel more, but I didn't want to see my life savings dwindle to nothing. Fortunately, even after seven months, I still haven't touched it, and even still added to it last week before I found out about the farm. Plus, once I met the people and saw the farm, I knew this was it.
A couple of things... One, I went with Donna to see the guest house, which has two rooms with bathrooms (one bathroom which I will use for now when I've moved out there) and a small study in between them. The bathroom was SPOTLESS, not even ONE LINT PIECE on the sink... Even the beds in the cabin were made properly.
Two, this farm is highly organized, operating, and in business, unlike the Brenham farm. They actively sell produce to 12 chefs from restaurants among others. They do outdoor dinners, as you can see from the web site. People come to stay at the guest house to experience farm life and learn about farming techniques. If you look at the web site, you can see that the goal is for this to be a family farm, with people paid to run it years from now, and I hope to be one of them years from now. These people have it together. They made a lot of mistakes in the early years and learned from them. Now, they want to support other farmers, to help them get started while avoiding the expensive, time-consuming mistakes they made. They are together in their heads, too, it seems.
I was lucky to find this farm, considering that they are "better than US organics standards." It just all feels like a plan coming together. Even Edna, pop. over 5,000, has an HEB store, which is a very popular regional chain grocery store that I prefer to shop at, rather than the ripoff operation that is Brookshire Brothers, which Hallettsville is stuck with. The HEB store is very much like the one that operated in the old location in Carrizo Springs, where I grew up. It's smaller, with lower false ceilings, and everything's placed closer together, and the prices are the SAME as that in the big city. Now, I get to say, "the big city." I drove through parts of Edna to get a general feel for the area, though when I am back in the area with more time, I will drive everywhere to see where everything's at. What's strange about the farm's location is that it is the ONLY farm around in a sea of cattle/horse ranches and empty pastures. I asked her why that is, and she said, "I know! I don't get it, either!" The soil down here is very poor quality, with about two worms for every two acres as found eight years ago, when the farm first started. Optimum soil health is really about 25 worms per SQUARE FOOT! I learned about the remarkable differences between pasture soil and seven-year-old black dirt. Even two-year-old dirt was different!
One possibility for a future business of my own is a "dirt farm," where compost is put together with bugs and earthworms to create new dirt which is sold to crop farms. You have to realize that in nearly all parts of the civilized world, the quality of dirt is extremely poor and can been seen in a world-overview imaging of soils. It's really shocking, and something needs to be done. Desertification is a VERY REAL threat. Without good soil, your crops turn out poorly. This is a problem I feel needs to be more urgently fixed than farming itself. The quality of soil has to be there before farms can really produce very well. It takes a few years to build up soil, especially if it's really bad.
I have the weekends off on the farm, so that I am able to travel to Sherwood Forest next February/March to work again at the Jolly Roger bar. That will be extra money for me. The day I left REI, I asked myself something like, "Where will I be when New Year's Day arrives?" I guess I know now...
Happy New Year and Galeh Yuvo!
The ranch I was on was an experience. I BUSTED MY BUTT to do the work on a volunteer basis with NO BENEFITS. I had a LOT of fun there, especially in the heat! The worse part of the day is usually in the morning from 8 to about noon because of the humidity, so I was always trying to get out there around 6 - 6 30 in the morning to get started and beat the heat. that way, I would be done by 1-3 in the afternoon, though I've had days when I could push myself to 12 hours or more, in order to get that "good tired feeling." That harkens from my teenage years when I would work all day in the oil fields with Dad. It felt good to come home and shower. I just have that particular mindset from those years, and the ranch seems to have completed that circle, and I could tell I was turning to make the circle instead of a straight line into oblivion when I was getting away from customers and more towards dock work and stocking/warehousing at REI. It was just as well that they cut me off on my hours so that I could have the incentive to move on.
After the internship on the ranch ended at the end of August, it was time to go house sit in Houston for a friend of mine who left REI also, shortly before he and his wife left the country to work on their coffee/banana farm in Ecuador in the summer. I stayed at the house for one month, and that was quite an experience, with old houses with their charm being torn down for big-city multi-story townhomes and apartment buildings almost everywhere you looked. It made me sick to my stomach, seeing the big-city intrusion into Houston (which I don't like anyway, but I'm looking at the big picture of what was once pristine land with only Indian presence, wiped clean to the point that it would appear as though Houston was created at the same time the Earth was created). The house I stayed in is one of those old houses. There seemed to be a presence in the house that had me pull my gun once. There was a woman next door who moved out to be closer to family, and she was terminally ill. As soon as she moved away, that presence went away, and I was able to sleep more solidly. Unfortunately, there was a problem with the water pipes leaking a massive amount of water, so the water had to be cut off and I had to leave for another friend's house, where I stayed a short time near the coast until it was time to go to the farm.
At the beginning of October, I picked up the house owner at the airport (his wife stayed behind to wrap up things on the farm and shut it down before coming back) and stayed a few more days to help him with yard work on the house lot he owns across the street from his house. I then went on to the farm near Brenham around that time. THIS WAS A DISASTER... We met in town, in Brenham, which is about 95 miles northwest of Houston. While we were there, she had told me that she was upset because she and her boyfriend were camping with other people, and park officials or the police were somehow drawn to the camp site and found that they had pot paraphernalia and were given tickets for possession of such, and the truck was turned inside-out. She showed me the ticket! That was a red flag. The first red flag was really when we tried to meet, and I was staying in Houston. She had promised that she would come to meet me to discuss the farm. It never happened. She stood me up time and time again. I would be waiting at the house for her text message when she got close. Two hours would pass by, and finally I would get the message, that "Sorry, I was so tired, I had to sleep." SLEEP IN THE MIDDLE OF THE DAY?? Another red flag was no pictures of the travel trailer to get the idea of the size.
Anyway, when I got to the farm, there was trash everywhere around the house (she had lived on the property for over 3 years), a transient couple passing through to California was there, along with their teenager-like male dog who would hump you and try to kill the farm owner's dog when she got too close. They were staying a lot longer than the owner wanted and finally had the courage to ask them to leave, especially after the couple fought the night I was there. I mean, man and woman were fist-fighting! I didn't see it, but I heard about it and saw the man's busted lip the next day. Anyway, the travel trailer had major problems; it had no AC, out of propane (that's minor), had a major roof leak in one corner, the water did not work at both sinks and shower, only the toilet, and had rat turds EVERYWHERE. Then, she showed me her house, which was TRASHED! I mean, food wrappers, chinese takeout containers, bottles, cans, used paper napkins. You couldn't see the floor in places! The bathroom was horrible. I will not describe it. I just can't... I also discovered while walking around the farm that the woman walks barefooted everywhere, even the goat pen with droppings everywhere, and when she goes into the house, she does not clean her feet first! That night, some stranger came by to sell pot to the transient couple. Normally, I don't mind people doing it, as long as it does not involve me (and he didn't try to involve me, anyway), but to do this on the owner's property without her seeing it told me to get the hell out. Another one was the transient people littering the front porch with trash. Unbelievably lazy people. I got up the next day, really upset with what I had gotten into, and packed up to leave. I could not stay there under those conditions.
I contacted another friend, who with her husband lives in the coastal area just south of Houston. I was there when I left for the farm. I ended up going right back the next day. I was HUGELY disappointed by the experience on that farm. I had looked forward to building up the farm from scratch, basically, but just too many problems and too many warning signs that this was not a good place for me. Anyway, I ended up staying with her to help her with house duties and give her rides, since she has seizures and thusly lost her ability to drive. She stayed up late at night and slept late, being affected by her seizures. We did go to the Boardwalk on the coast in Galveston and eat there one night, and sometimes, they would take me to dinner with them at the golf course they play at. She is a wrenching girl when she feels at her best. We worked on maintenance of my Jeep as well as one of their off-road trucks, which I got to drive for Molly to the store and elsewhere as a reward for my helping her. It was manual transmission, too! They have a dog, a big one who's fun to play with, Layla. A sweetheart of a dog, she's very human-like in her facial expression and the way she plays fetch! Her husband, took us to the Wings Over America air show just minutes from the house. The next day after the air show, I would hear those planes flying overhead most of the day, and at one point, I saw one flying so low that I could see it out the window. I rushed outside to see them, and I saw at least 4 flying in formation just several hundred feet over the subdivision. The giant bomber, FiFi, nearly flew over the house, doing a hard bank that showed its underbelly. Just hearing the sounds of the motors all day, made me feel like I was living in that time. Probably genetic memories from Mom and Dad? Unfortunately, I was not happy there in suburbia... It was time to go.
Another friend of mine had a wedding on November 2nd in Plano, just outside of Dallas, so I left Houston and drove up there for the weekend. His family flew in from different places, and the wedding took place at a pumpkin farm, inside a country-style dance hall. Watching his family together, I had not felt so left out like that. Here I was, homeless, with no clear plan of where I was going. I felt like I was outside a glass bubble, looking inside. As soon as that weekend was done, I drove over to central Dallas to stay one night with my nephew and niece. The next day, I headed out to east Texas to stay with a friend and see if I could find work in Nacogdoches, as I had passed through there one time and remarked that it looked really nice. One problem was that the man's house had NO CELL SERVICE! Not even AT&T has reliable service out there. The other problem was, he is a Christian insurgent and found out about my being lesbian, asking me to leave his house the following day.
I went into Nacogdoches and found a horticulture site run by the university to ask about work in the area. One of the employees at the music store I stopped at told me about a homeless shelter there. The name of it should have warned me; Godtel. It is one of those bible-thumping shelters, a ministry where they try to convert non-Christians and reinforce the conditioning in Christians. Remember, the Christians down here in east Texas are not quite like you. All of the shelter residents are REQUIRED to attend bible-study every morning and evening. Some of the stuff was "out there," like the ONLY reason you would have had a right to divorce Ken would have been adultery, and other than that, since you married the man, you ARE STUCK WITH HIM, and you must work out your differences and move on. Otherwise, you will not be with god. Or that the people are in shelters or otherwise on hard times because of lack of obedience to god. How does that make you feel? Most of the time, I simply looked at the presenter with my worse eye, so I would be shielded from the conditioning. They sent a teacher after me one night after bible study. He was like a snake, trying to slither past my defenses and basically saying that he's right and I'm wrong, with NO REGARD for my background. The founder's wife on Sunday night of the week of Thanksgiving said something about being required to be there that day on Thanksgiving and something about being a Christian, which everyone would have to do. That was one incentive to get out of there, the other being that there was no paid work available on the two farms I knew about, never mind a place to stay on those farms.
Having said that, the shelter was a place for me to stay for nearly three weeks. It's housed in the former Red Hotel, which was a popular place to stay for stage performers and musicians performing at the opera house across Main Street from it. Think turn-of-the-century, the 1900s. The oldest town in Texas. Anyhow, the former hotel has a ballroom downstairs which is COLD in the winter (had already experienced 20-degree weather there last month!) and two floors above it, one for men and one for women. The bathroom facilities are a bit wanting, but I made do with a bathtub that didn't have a showerhead. I'd just lean back into the tub half-filled with water and wash my hair that way. It was cold in my room for some reason, and I got really mad because I discovered that the window was a bit open, on a day when it was low 30s outside! This meant I had to wait 24 hours for it to warm up again, and it never does with these old buildings. This hotel was ahead of its time with steam heat, one of the few places that had it in those days.
The food was something else... I had to think about the fact that these homeless people, especially those not working, have NOTHING else to eat nor money to buy food with, and I was very thankful to my circumstances to be able to supplement this food with additional food outside the shelter. It was EXPENSIVE, with no means to reliably store food and prepare it. No food is allowed inside the shelter. I had to go out one night when they served a BBQ-theme meal with nothing for me to eat, not even a salad (they did realize this problem and later helped with providing meals with salads, soup, and fruit out of a can). Fortunately, it was all you can eat until there was no more to eat. We would always have chores to do after eating and on Saturday mornings. We would have to be outside of the shelter during the week days, except when it was extremely cold. What was sad was that there would be people who sleep outside and will not sleep inside the shelter, and come inside in the mornings and evenings to eat, and then go back out to where they were. Hard times for these people. There were three mothers with babies...
I was looking for work, eating somewhere, going to a coffee house to power up my desktop computer (until I realized that public libraries have free wifi in general), getting to know Nacogdoches, and had to go by Lufkin, 20 miles away, to get another sleeping bag that was misplaced when I was still in Houston. I was NOT going to sleep when it was cold and had a few hard nights with that. It really helped to have a sleeping bag I could zip myself in. I volunteered on Appleby farm to the north of town a few times and learned a few things there. I also got to drive a medium-sized farm tractor, the first time since 1985! They go to the farmer's market in town on Saturdays. Anyhow, I was trying to get services for new hearing aids and looking to go into the workforce retraining program in a nearby town. Cindy, the owner of Appleby Farm, helped me get into the farm volunteer web site at wwoofusa.org, paying for my year's membership there. Nothing really turned up, not even outside temporary work. A farm outside of Victoria did contact me, and I had said that I would contact them one day.
The religious nature of the shelter finally gave me the incentive to start deciding what to do next and get out. My stepmother contacted me and said, "If you cannot stand it there any longer, don't wait and get down here! When will you be here?" I hesitated 'til about 10 AM, and then decided I was going to go ahead and get out. I had to let it go... 3 weeks was long enough to realize that I really didn't belong there. There is even a facebook page for pagans called "Living Pagan in the Bible Belt!" I joined up with it days before, knowing that it would be a tiny minority in this part of Texas. I learned in hindsight that it was not the place for me to be, and that it was a necessary experience, to realize that there is really no place for a person like me in east Texas. It was in the upper 30s and rained ALL DAY from Nacogdoches to Victoria. I didn't even bother to stop in Houston while going through there. I just kept going to beat the rush-hour traffic in Houston.
I'm staying with my stepmother in Victoria. I first started looking for work downtown at the Workforce Office, where I discovered that there was going to be a problem getting retrained because of my education level. I even went out to the county agriculture extension office (a trick I learned while in Nacogdoches) to learn about the layout of the farming industry of the area. Victoria is substantially bigger than Nacogdoches, (over 80,000, I think) which I learned yesterday is bigger than I want it to be. I will NEVER go grocery shopping at 4 PM if I can help it. The traffic is still too much to deal with.
I decided to track down the farm that contacted me through WOOF, Knopp Branch Farm. Knopp Branch Farm It is located 11 miles north of Edna, to the east of Victoria. I went out there in early December to interview with the owners. It's a great place, with the farm house, guest house, a small part of the farm on one side of the road, and the majority of the farm on the other side. On that side is the barn, workshop, storage unit, and cabin that I'll be staying in! Yes! I am their new Farming Intern! I had to root around the north of Victoria, to find winter clothes for my bottom half. Anyway, the cabin is more rustic and smaller than yours, but it is insulated and has two small radiating heaters and a window AC unit. The walls and ceiling, inside and out are corrugated tin roofing materials, brand new. Nonetheless, it is absolutely charming. I can hardly wait to be sitting on the bed, looking outside on a cold, cloudy day... It was originally intended to be a chicken house with mesh floors, but they decided not to do chickens. It needs work, so we will be replacing the broken windows, building a corner closet and an outside skirt around the bottom edge of the walls, and pulling up the floor to put down insulation underneath. Eventually, one or two more cabins will be built next to it, and one of them will have a bathroom and kitchen built in. It will be a great arrangement for me! The farm grows sweet fruits like apples, oranges, lemons, kumquats, grapes, Pakistani mulberries, figs (!), watermelons, herbs, and veggies like kale, cauliflower, even a cheddar cauliflower, broccoli, green beans, leeks, red/white/yellow onions, scallions, french carrots, a purple carrot, potatoes, bell peppers, hot peppers, and many others I've forgotten! Right now, the winter fruits like citrus and winter vegetables are growing and being harvested ahead of each Saturday's farmer's market in Houston, which I've known about for years, but had NO IDEA that it was them!
I get to eat veggies and fruit out of the fields! After two months, we'll see where things are and whether they are happy with my work. There may be a possibility where I can be the volunteer supervisor, since they want me to be their long-term volunteer. They're not looking for someone to stay a few days, a few weeks while passing through to another destination. Not even a few months... They've trained a few people only to have them leave, their effort in training them wasted. I've told them I'm committed as long as I can get a bit of money coming in to take care of basics and emergencies. Ernest had pledged his support to me in helping to me get my farming life going, whether it be education or even having my own farm one day. Not sure what that entails, though it does sound encouraging and enticing as to what lies in the future. Now, I can have both. I know... I wanted to travel more, but I didn't want to see my life savings dwindle to nothing. Fortunately, even after seven months, I still haven't touched it, and even still added to it last week before I found out about the farm. Plus, once I met the people and saw the farm, I knew this was it.
A couple of things... One, I went with Donna to see the guest house, which has two rooms with bathrooms (one bathroom which I will use for now when I've moved out there) and a small study in between them. The bathroom was SPOTLESS, not even ONE LINT PIECE on the sink... Even the beds in the cabin were made properly.
Two, this farm is highly organized, operating, and in business, unlike the Brenham farm. They actively sell produce to 12 chefs from restaurants among others. They do outdoor dinners, as you can see from the web site. People come to stay at the guest house to experience farm life and learn about farming techniques. If you look at the web site, you can see that the goal is for this to be a family farm, with people paid to run it years from now, and I hope to be one of them years from now. These people have it together. They made a lot of mistakes in the early years and learned from them. Now, they want to support other farmers, to help them get started while avoiding the expensive, time-consuming mistakes they made. They are together in their heads, too, it seems.
I was lucky to find this farm, considering that they are "better than US organics standards." It just all feels like a plan coming together. Even Edna, pop. over 5,000, has an HEB store, which is a very popular regional chain grocery store that I prefer to shop at, rather than the ripoff operation that is Brookshire Brothers, which Hallettsville is stuck with. The HEB store is very much like the one that operated in the old location in Carrizo Springs, where I grew up. It's smaller, with lower false ceilings, and everything's placed closer together, and the prices are the SAME as that in the big city. Now, I get to say, "the big city." I drove through parts of Edna to get a general feel for the area, though when I am back in the area with more time, I will drive everywhere to see where everything's at. What's strange about the farm's location is that it is the ONLY farm around in a sea of cattle/horse ranches and empty pastures. I asked her why that is, and she said, "I know! I don't get it, either!" The soil down here is very poor quality, with about two worms for every two acres as found eight years ago, when the farm first started. Optimum soil health is really about 25 worms per SQUARE FOOT! I learned about the remarkable differences between pasture soil and seven-year-old black dirt. Even two-year-old dirt was different!
One possibility for a future business of my own is a "dirt farm," where compost is put together with bugs and earthworms to create new dirt which is sold to crop farms. You have to realize that in nearly all parts of the civilized world, the quality of dirt is extremely poor and can been seen in a world-overview imaging of soils. It's really shocking, and something needs to be done. Desertification is a VERY REAL threat. Without good soil, your crops turn out poorly. This is a problem I feel needs to be more urgently fixed than farming itself. The quality of soil has to be there before farms can really produce very well. It takes a few years to build up soil, especially if it's really bad.
I have the weekends off on the farm, so that I am able to travel to Sherwood Forest next February/March to work again at the Jolly Roger bar. That will be extra money for me. The day I left REI, I asked myself something like, "Where will I be when New Year's Day arrives?" I guess I know now...
Happy New Year and Galeh Yuvo!
