You’re gonna be able to have your tarot cards read in front of Ferguson’s General Store before too long, and this bodes either ill or well, depending on your perspective. You buy chicken wire at Ferguson’s, or five gallons of hydraulic oil, or a pound of nails. The old-timers loaf around on the benches outside, and after discussing the weather with them, you go inside and get biscuits and gravy (people still eat biscuits at Ferguson’s.) You can smoke a cigarette while you finish your coffee.

Then I see J* walking in with a basket full of homemade soap – an attempt at that lucrative tourist dollar more effective and more telling than the last attempt: the rack of postcards next to the check-out counter. More and more tourists are travelling the roads around Ferguson’s these days, and more and more city folks are buying the old farmsteads back in the hollers. And they don’t buy chicken wire. They buy home-made soaps and quilts and croissants.

We’ll be seeing hand-made pottery in there before too long – on the same shelf as the pipe wrenches. The crystals will be next to the horse-shoe nails. The incense will be next to the starter fluid.

The populace is in transition, but there’s no telling in what direction it may actually go. A business plan for an organic farm sometimes seems deceptively easy. You lean in whatever direction the smell of patchouli comes from. I used to think I hadn’t hedged my bets very well. Then I found out that S**’s wife loves my salad mix. I bring her some whenever I can. She just pours bacon grease over it and serves it with corn bread.

Maybe I can sell some to the General Store someday. They can put in on the shelf next to the Willie Ferguson tapes. Willie used to live in an old school bus across the road from the store. He’d drink and play fiddle tunes. I used to drink with him, sometimes. He’d never ask me where I was from. He’d just pass the bottle and play another tune. Willie’s dead now. After a few years, they hauled his old school bus off down the road somewhere.

We gave the devil a run for his money the other night, and we didn’t even have to sacrifice any cats.

The hot peppers are as eager to breed as a bunch of drunken sailors, and are pumping out fruit in desperate attempt to spread their seed before frost sets. This gives me enough hot peppers to scorch the palettes of Bombay, Bangkok and Buenes Aires combined, and necessitated a hot sauce making party. (I knew we’d find a use for the three hundred empty baby food jars under the sink.)

All present started with a hotter-the-better, let’s make something the devil himself couldn’t eat mentality, quickly bored of that, and finished the evening by exploring the subtle range of flavors with-in the Scoville unit. Jalepeno salsa, mango hot sauce, honey-roasted cayenne sauce, and an interesting concoction that included take-out katchup from the diner are some of the more interesting results. The real fun came in making labels for the baby food jars, and making up names for the sauces. My intern, C*, came up with the best: 6 Six Sauce, featuring an illustration of a fire-breathing skull.

Friends interning on a farm on the other side of the county were also present, and used the opportunity, as they often do, to vent about their employers. My policy in such situations is that you are not allowed to complain unless you make me laugh while doing so, and we all ended up rolling on the floor amid the pepper detritus. Intern/farmer dynamics are an interesting part of the business – sometimes the most challanging part.

Most of the folks doing what we do are trying to stay out of the rat race, or “real world”, whatever that is. And we end up creating a rat race of our own making, cloaked in the latest alternative buzz-words. Attempts to keep the business on a friendly, family-farm basis conflict head-on with the necesity of keeping the bills paid. Personality conflicts don’t present themselves when things are going well- they rear their ugly heads when things are most difficult and no one is focused on people skills. And all the while you know that everyone would get along just fine in other circumstances. Yet your dream of an idyllic oasis in the mountains, of a healthy, nurturing slice of land used to feed other people and yourself, looks more and more like corporate cubicles, or, worse, you feel more and more like you’re managing a bunch of teen-agers at Burger King. You lose patience at the sound of your neighbors weed-eater, or at the tourists gawking at the leaves. You resent people with more money than you, and pity the percieved lethergy of people with less than you. The devil of the “real world” introduces himself on a daily basis, but you deny his existance because your vegetables are organic. You fancy yourself to be an involved member of a thriving, conscious community, and forget to tell your friends that you buy your socks at Wal-Mart.

My reality checks come on a daily basis: when I’m lighting a cigarette, or when I’m sticking the nozzle, once again, into the gas tank. In myriad ways I’m very much a part of the society I hold in such contempt. And yet, in the same way that I continued to care for my tomatoes even after late blight had set in, I continue to care for myself and the people around me despite the blotches on our leaves. The devil is responsible for late blight. I don’t doubt that for a minute. But I keep trellising and I keep pruning. I snip away infected leaves and expect fruit set. I let people stay on my farm; I let people keep stuff on my farm; I put up with other people’s cats; and I get pissed off when people have opinions different from mine. I wake every morning expecting the day to be perfect, and find myself not having a clue as to why it wasn’t.

I listen to my intern friends vent about their employers; plenty of people find time for me when I vent. Maybe the sauce is hot enough to burn away their animosity and reveal what I believe lies underneath: the beauty of the human condition, warts and all.

It is not alone for the convenience of the customer that ambulatory vendors exist. Merchants of this type can survive with a modicum of capitol. They pay no rent, and the outlay for the merchandise they sell or the services they render is pitifully small.

Gideon Sjoberg

The Preindustrial City

I got myself to market with surprising efficiency Saturday morning, considering the hour at which I finally went to bed and the number of times I hit the snooze button the next morning. But get to market I did – was the first farmer there, as a matter of fact. Alone in a parking lot in Asheville, the sun not yet even playing with the eastern horizon, but the city busses already rolling under the street lamps and the bums panhandling me for loose change. There’s a pleasant stillness to any city at that hour, the busses and winos notwithstanding. There’s a quiet and a freshness that envelopes you and placifies you and leaves you wondering if it really is market day after all, or if you’ve finally gone out and done it and showed up a day early or a day late.

I started to set my stand up after listening to the sad details of Melvin’s life and giving him two dollars toward a bottle of wine. A* showed up a few minutes later, and a few minutes after that, B*, our leader, mentor and sage, confirming that it was, in fact, market day.

We bantered with each other until our coffee buzzes eased, then worked to put the finishing touches on our portable little stands. Farmer banter in the wee small hours is predictable: rain, bugs, broken equipment, new equipment, and who was the most annoying customer from last week. The jokes are a little off-color until the female farmers arrive, and then they get downright rude. We borrow extra baskets from each other, or extra tablecloths or extra string. Bakers and soap makers and bee hive keepers and evil goat cheese makers show up and set up, and we’re a market again. One more basket gets borrowed, a customer shows up, more coffee gets drunk, and we’re a market again. I bag, weigh, and sell vegetables, and we’re a – well, you get the idea.

The early bird gets the freshest stuff in this business, and our regular, die hard customers know to get to the market just when we open. There are people I’ve been selling to for years and don’t know their names; people I’ve developed solid and rewarding friendships with; people I’ve gone through personal hardships with; and children who were conceived, born and raised during the time I’ve known their parents at market. They come fast and furious for the first hour, and in the cool dawn air you can jump to keep up with it all and not break a sweat. The sun climbs in the sky, the customer flow slows, and you work to primp and freshen what you’ve got left on your table. More coffee gets drunk and the customers come in smaller and smaller waves. The morning climbs into noon. We have time for more farmer banter, by now usually centering on cute things that the kids have done, cute things that animals have done, how the squash or the lettuce or the arugula is doing, and cute things that the kids have done. The last customers of the day drift in, pick up something off a table, and look around for someone to pay because the farmer is usually on the other side of the parking lot talking about cute things that the kids have done.

We break down around one in the afternoon – the morning ends with the morning ritual being done in reverse. Baskets are returned, trucks are loaded, and personal energy dissipates. We fire the trucks up and go home.

We’ll do it all over again next week.

What did it matter what anyone knew or ignored? What did it matter who was manager? One gets sometimes such a flash of insight. The essentials of this affair lay deep under the surface, beyond my reach, and beyond my power of meddling.

-Joseph Conrad

Heart of Darkness.

Here’s what happened to me the other day, when I was supposed to be posting my first entry as rm’s guest blogger.

I was awakened a little past seven by the gravel crunch of a thirty year old Ford Bronco coming up the road: my neighbor, S** (he gets two asterisks.) He’s an eighty-three year old ex-well driller, tobacco farmer, and all around eccentric. His truck wasn’t running, and he wasn’t happy.

“Rat chewed through my fuel line, son. Chewed right through it. What do you think about that?”

I fish some old fuel line out of the barn, throw some wrenches into the truck, and follow S** back over to his place. S** has been eager to pick up fallen branches since the what was left of a hurricane swept through last week, and that pesky rat had brought him to a dead standstill. And S** doesn’t like to stand still. I replace his fuel line, fix his emergency brake, and adjust his carburetor, because I know that it’s the only way I’m going to be able to get back to my life.

Those fallen branches were the furthest thing from my mind, personally. The what used to be a hurricane had put them there for a reason, and I tend to question other people’s desire to screw around with what God has wrought.

Screwing around with what God has wrought, however, is sometimes easier than arguing with an eighty-three year old ex-well driller, tobacco farmer, and all around eccentric. Take it from one who aspires to be just that, someday. So I fixed his stuff and helped him pick up his branches.

What I really wanted to do on that glorious first day of autumn was to disk the living hell out of my fields. Grind up every weed, big, small and tenacious, grind them right down to their constituent hydro-carbons, and then go back in a few days later and plant rye. I’d then have nothing to do all winter but look out my window and that glorious, green, glimmering cover crop – rye all the way up to the edge of the mountain and not a weed in sight.

So there you have it: one man picks up sticks and another grinds up weeds – puny, pathetic attempts to hold back the onslaught of nature and make the land do what we want it to. Pathetic it is, nonsensical and moronic, but it what we do because we can’t figure out any other way to make a living. The fields look good, though – weedless, tidy. A clean slate. The top few inches of soil is loose and airy, ready for me to do what I please.

I haven’t talked to S** since that morning. But I have a feeling he’s feeling pretty good right now, too. He’s got his downed branches picked up and put down in a burn pile. He’s road can be driven on, his fields can be walked across -some sense of order has been restored. The goats may be stubborn, the weeds may grow, and the winds of what used to be a hurricane may wrap around and hit us again from the backside, but we have, for one more day, managed to prolong the illusion that we know what we’re doing, and that somehow we’re doing it, and doing it right.

Sleep well, S**. Don’t let the sticks get in your way. Pick the bastards up.

I promise I’ll get the hang of this shit. Hit ENTER as little as possible, is what I’m learning.

Whilst yours truly pinch-hits in this hallowed space, my sister pinch-hits with rm farm chores and had become inheritor of all goat oriented headaches with which readers of the space are all too well acquianted. She reports a certain substitute teacher mentality among the goats – they test boundaries, forget rules, and generally make the same nuicences of themselves that you and I did when the third grade grammer teacher stayed home with the sniffles. My sister reports she has already determined which goats are likely candidates for the next goat roast.

Nevertheless, the week promises to be an exercise in vocabulary building for her two year old son. He’s down already with “horse”, though it comes out more like “house”, is pretty good with “bee”, though it seems to represent any small, exoskelatoned creature, and learned, on a previous house sitting gig, “llama”, mastering the double L with ease. The rm menagerie offers amble opportunity for building word power.

Howdy friends.

As most of you have no doubt been informed by now, rm, your ever vigilent hostess, is hiatusing this week, and has asked yours truly to pinch-hit. And I will do so, to the best of my ablity providing the anecdotes and colorful snippets of Madison County daily life upon which you have all come to rely.

By way of introducing myself, I am rm’s neighbor, a grower of vegetables, a consumer of elicit goat cheese, and an all-round bon vivant. That not with-standing, and, perhaps, not even being true, I will resist any further temptation to go on and on about myself, for we have all week to get to know each other.

Migraine today….bleh. I’m not surprised, really; it seems to be a normal reaction to stress for me. Can I have a different normal reaction, please?

I’ve invited my friend and neighbor and fellow farmer F* to be a guest blogger while I’m gone for ten days. I should warn y’all, though—he thought I said guest logger. I think we’ve got that cleared up now, though.

Yes, it really was the weekend from hell, but it’s over.

In spite of an incredibly frustrating and stressful day of baking Friday, the cake was beautiful and delicious. It had rather a lot of icing, especially that pieced-together middle layer, which was basically formed out of icing with some embedded cake chunks, but it looked good. DH says I’ve got a career in sheetrock if I want it. I hope I’ll be able to get some pictures to post (are you reading this KN?).

The weather decided at the last minute to cooperate; it sounds like the poor bride was a wreck during all the downpour, wind and flooding Friday, but Saturday was the most gorgeous day we’ve seen this summer. So the wedding was fine; it’s just that they’re such hard work. I was able to get out of there relatively early (some of my coworkers didn’t leave until 2am), but getting up the next morning to do breakfast required a whole lot of willpower. I don’t really remember driving home after breakfast; I do remember deciding to take a nap. Intentionally. Which has happened, like, twice in my adult life. Normally I hate naps with an irrational passion, but this one was delicious; I can almost understand the nap thing now.

After my nap and a hot bath and a cup of Barry’s I was feeling remarkably human, which was good, as it was time to go to a prenatal with my friend D* at her house, followed by a blessingway in which I was an instrumental part. The prenatal was very much fun—I actually can’t think of many things I would rather do than hang out with pregnant ladies—and I got to play with the Doppler. Palpating D*’s belly was great: the baby seemed really playful and responsive. This was the first time I really got a feeling for this baby’s personality—I can’t wait to meet her! (Or him.)

The blessingway was beautiful and moving. I felt ill prepared for my part of it—like I just couldn’t focus on it beforehand at all, which makes me a little sad, because I love doing blessingways, and I love D*, and I felt like I wasn’t able to give her my best. But the cool thing about rituals and community is that they are organic things—they grow and take shape of their own accord, and this was no exception. A* and C* really made this one happen, and it was beautiful. A* made a book using pages that we all made: it was unbelievable, and definately the centerpiece of the evening, and C* organized an intricate and beautiful henna painting on D*’s belly. And there was lots of food, of course; it really was a wonderful evening.

I was, however, awfully glad to get home. But due to all the tea I drank all afternoon I could not go to sleep, and I was awake at 4am , and finally got out of bed at 5. I’ve got a hot cup of tea, and a load of laundry going, and I’ve cleaned up the living room, and now I’ve got to leave to go cook breakfast!

Boy is that beach gonna feel good.