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Friday, August 08, 2003

The Farm.

A friend asked me about The Farm.
I lived there in the early eighties. Worked on the construction crew and buried my son there. One of the midifery programs few failures.
I memorized Spirtual Midwifery, but didn't meet Ina May Gaskin until after the funeral. She had Grey Hair that radiated a silver light and she looked kind of like Emylou Harris does now. She gave me something, I think it's called Grace. Steven was more like Willy Nelson with a mean Zen vibe like he'd whack you with a stick is you fell asleep during services. He used to rant about his hatred for Reagan administration and how we were entering the Kali Yuga. I asked him if he didn't think think that the New Age began agin with every breath you take. There was a damaged girl named Cara and a man named Michael Gavin who ran the Construction Co. Those kind of people were the soul of that community. If you read "Voices from the Farm" by Rupert Fike, You'll find Michael and Linda Gavin on page 104. that's what those people were about.

Some one from school (I went back to college in my thirties) said that I had to tell that one story about Owen (son) before I could really write. (true,) but it gets hard seeing others wince at my words. I alienated a few multitudes trying to hash that one out.
Two weeks after the child died I met my Biological mother for the first time. She just missed her grand son.
That man I mentioned Michael Gavin, was really hard on me in the most fatherly way. Read, "Voices from the Farm," It's really an on going work, or should be.
The place was a shambles when I got here. It was like the residue of three million (their estimate) lives passing through. I think parts of Vietnam were like that but all the clothes were left behind, even home canned food, Third world America. I f I'd had a camera...Rusted, earth-bermed school busses, incomplete geodesic domes. A hippy built sawmill (and the fine log cabins made from Farm hewn lumber.) four marriages never worked they said, but I almost felt draw to one, Debora was the midwife that realized our child was dead in Diedre' arms as she sat with us tending. She asked If she could hold the baby for a minute, but the quiver in her voice made me choke on the tofu, spaghetti and tomato sauce I was eating. "Could you get Pamela,” she asked grappling for the phone with the blue child clutched in her shaking arms. Diedre looked as numb as any one who spent seven hours squeezing a human being out of her uterus without any real anesthetic except a joint some one gave us with the spaghetti.
I ran through the dark woods barefoot, choking, guided by the smell of the out house and the din 20 watt bulbs at the next house trying to yell HELP.
The ambulance ride was hours it seemed, and Deborah and Pamela pumped and inflated the tiny chest of our child. I'm sure he was dead from the way they acted. Brave women: pathetic ritual. On the ride home Dee held the baby while I held her, Pamela rode with her husband Leslie in the cab of the ambulance. Deborah was alone with us. Alone she looked on at the tragic couple and I wished that I could break away from Dee and hold her too.
Douglas ran of the few independent business on the farm at that time: Satellite installation. He and Deborah invited us to their small cozy cabin and we watched satellite pictures and movies from around the world. He had a dream that any one anywhere could get information using satellite and maybe some kind of computer. I could Imagine the strength that we would have drawn from the union of our two marriages. This was not forced on us. They helped us become members of the community. Diedre's dreams were for the Wheeler family and Dreams... well, we spent a private wake with Our son, built him a coffin and dressed him in clothes Diedre made for him, covered the body with rosemary and smoky Quartz we dug at lake Champlain and then in a torrent of rain we lowered the box into a deep water filled grave some one else had dug just hours before.
The tiny coffin floated for a moment like a little Viking funeral ship before I started shoveling in the red mud like an angry god. The men on the construction crew never saw me work that hard.
Michael Gavin saw me work, though, he had that voice like gravel and silk that you find in Appalachian Tennessee and north Carolina. He pulled my off the Jobsite one day in spring, and we picked up gloves, goggles, some cable and nail gun sets. We also loaded up with whatever I thought the Guys on the crew needed.
He gave a few suggestions about what I could do with my life, to find meaning. He was a birth father. That is he relinquished his child or his Old lady did, back thirty years ago, and I know he wondered where that kid was.