Giant ragweeds bloom in the fields of our river valley after an unusually wet spring, with vast expanses of the bottoms and low ground temporarily abandoned by modern agriculture. Most of the watermelons have succumbed to fungus blights exacerbated by weeds thriving, shading, and choking out the vines. "Driftwood Organics," as our farm is known on Facebook, lost our entire crop to fungus and weeds partially because our star tractor, "Old Squawky," stubbornly broke down in the lowest of our low ground. For most of June and July I would have had to wade through a foot of water to service to reluctant diesel motor, and with the music festival robbing my attention, I just let it go.
When the buzz from the festival had subsided, and the waters receded, Jetta and I ventured out to a sea of ragweeds to search for Old Squawky. Clouds of pollen wafted like steam in the motionless mosquito swamp. Morning glory vines clenched the tractor's frame as if transformed into boa constrictors. Actual snakes slithered in the tall weeds, and Jetta made me stop the truck, where she jumped out and snatched up a four-foot water snake, clutching it behind the neck.
"What the hell we gonna do with that?" I asked, spotting the white carcass of the aging David Brown tractor through the clouds of pollen and dense green foliage. My exasperation subsided, though, at the sight of Jetta in her Daisy Dukes and Rasta bikini top with a brown and copper, spotted snake coiled round her shoulders and arm.
"He likes me," she said, using her free hand to dump the beer cooler's contents out on the searing steel of the truck bed. "Look. He's crawling right in."
This cooler only holds about eight cans, and sure enough the snake coiled up into the limited confines, willingly, to my amazement. Now armed with a serpent, we proceeded to Old Squawky to begin the rescue operation. The eccentric British tractor from the early 1970s boasts two fuel filters and an upside-down sediment bowl, so changing the filters causes air bubbles in the lines that take forever to work out, especially since the fuel lines snake up over the motor from one side to the other, back down to the fuel pump. You need jumper cables, cold beer, a roll of paper towels, and some green bud to smoke, plus a radio or cd to listen to while the truck idles. Now my beer was roasting on the steel truck bed, the reptile coiled in the cooler. Mosquitoes and horse flies hovered. We attached the jumper cables and changed the filters, sour diesel soaking our skin like massage oil. Briefly Old Squawky finally started running for a few minutes, though when I attempted to increase the RPMs the motor died. I guess the diesel fuel, somewhat organic in nature, had rotted for years while the tractor awaited adoption, and the first filter in succession had already clogged again.
Draining the remaining fuel from the tank, we had to give up for the weekend as the local shops were all closed. I was going to need dust masks to disk down all those pollenating weeds, anyway, so we returned to the Farmhouse with the snake in the beer cooler. Of course Jetta had to pull it out and parade around the shop with the reptile coiling over her bikini top, showing off for all my son's friends, a genuine audience on weekends. My son recently turned 18, and his peers consider the Farmhouse their second home. In a world where the typical rural youth are experimenting with heroin, crack, pharmies, and crank, I unintentionally provide a safe place for the youth to drink beer, smoke weed, and chill out. They've taken over the shop building, sort of a rednecked youth fortress.
When she'd grown tired of showing off the serpent, Jetta tried stashing it in an empty plastic trash can behind the shop while we discussed rather absurd strategies for turning the wild creature into a pet, and by the time we'd concluded that I was totally opposed to keeping the snake we discovered it had tipped over the trash can and escaped, no doubt to the woodpile behind the shed.
"She did it on purpose!" fumed my son. "Now I can't sleep out here without thinking there's a snake crawling up on me!"
"It's not really your shop," I offered, sipping on a brutally warm beer.
"I'm 18! I can do what I want!"
"Yeah, like get your own place."
"We'll see about that," he said, defiantly kicking his boots up on the coffee table beside the sofa.
"Just chill out, everyone!" said my son's buddy, Newman, who wore a green Cincinnati Reds baseball cap. . .for real. A green Reds cap with the "C" on the front, for St. Patrick's Day or something. "It's just a snake."
The rest of the evening blurred together, as folks showed up left and right. One side effect of throwing the annual "Hoefest" event at our farm is that people consider it an ongoing party. We're actually planning an autumn festival, "Rakefest," to balance out the gender stereotypes, as the term "rake" in folk vernacular refers to promiscuous males. Supposedly there's a lot of planning and work that goes into music festivals, but in my experience all we do is book the bands and take money from people at the gate. The sound guy does most of the work. Once the ruckus had subsided, I only got a few hours sleep before waking up coughing and wheezing from the ragweed pollen, gagging and dry-heaving for hours while the sun rose. Miserable, I sipped warm beer and used the backside of several sheets of paper and a black sharpie marker to compose a song I've been considering for nearly two decades by now, a song about nothing. It goes back to the first Grateful Dead show I attended, the April fools event in Atlanta back in 1994, about a week before Kurt Cobain blew his brains out.
I hadn't planned on going to the Dead show, and certainly had no money or tickets as a junior in college studying Shakespeare and Goethe, but held a party in my apartment one Friday night that several deadheads attended, one of them a blonde girl on our diving team who suggested at midnight that she and I drive from Indianapolis down to Atlanta where she knew a bunch of kids from the Auburn diving team. Once we got to the mass of humanity assembling in downtown Atlanta, we found a parking spot, smoked a joint, and ambled down Shakedown Street. At the time I was really a naive country kid, and the whole scene amazed me, especially after I looked to my left and no longer saw the blonde girl. All I saw were deadheads, everywhere--maybe a hundred thousand. The blonde girls and some of the guys all looked the same in their tie-dyed T-shirts. For two days I wandered around, lost, never finding the blonde girl or her car, and received a crash course in the street life. Some heroin dealers from New York City took me up to their hotel room the first night, and I crashed on their floor.
The street dwellers of Atlanta cashed in on the sudden influx of free-thinking humanity, and one particular fellow caught my attention as he set up a booth of sorts where he offered "Absolutely nothing for one dollar. Just one dollar, folks, and I guarantee you will be satisfied. Absolutely nothing! Just one dollar!"
The verses and chorus finally came to me as the sun rose and our most mature rooster crowed from the back yard. I wrote them on the backsides of the contracts we made everybody sign for Hoefest in case they had a drug overdose or died on the property, and by the time Jetta woke up at noon from her beauty sleep, five sheets of paper were scattered in front of the music room sofa. An army of beer cans stood in formation on the floor beside me, and the whole place begged for a recycling run from the night before.
"You're writing a song?" asked Jetta.
"Yeah--it's about nothing."
"Nothing? So I wake up alone, come in to find you surrounded by beer cans writing a song about nothing?"
"This whole damn room was full of cans when I woke up. Nobody cares about recycling around here, I swear. I'm going back to the west coast where people give a damn!"
"It's just because your son and all his friends are rednecks and they don't care."
"Thanks for the tip. I had no idea that my house is invaded nightly by a bunch of degenerate redneck punks with no residual culture who don't give a fuck about anyone or anything but themselves!"
"Oh, so Spec MacQuayde is better than everyone around here!" Jetta started cleaning up cans, starting with the ones I'd set next to the sofa. "How many cans did you leave on the floor this morning while you wrote a song about nothing?"
"Hey, wait," I said, going outside to grab a five gallon bucket. "You got to have a plan if you want to be efficient at cleaning up."
"Efficiency?" She picked up the five sheets of paper with my song about nothing from the floor, crumpled them, and tossed them randomly against the wall. "You wanna talk about efficiency? An efficient songwriter uses a notebook, not loose sheets of paper all over the floor."
I uncrumpled the verses of the new masterpiece about nothing while she tossed cans into the bucket. "Efficient songwriter? What the hell is that supposed to mean? Anyway, you ever heard of Willie Nelson? Kurt Vonnegut? Abe Lincoln? All three of them wrote masterpieces on scrap paper or napkins in bars."
Within a few minutes the front room was swept clean, thanks to her tirade, one reason we've been able to stay together through 3 years of music festivals. Our arguments are usually productive.
So enjoy reading your stories, you always seem to surprise me, great job!