"A man becomes his attentions. His observations and curiosity, they make and remake him."
- William Least Heat-Moon, Blue Highways
Knowing full well the effect that traveling during the winter months would likely have on my mental health, I made a point before leaving Nashville to research some different lodging options that would not only provide me with a warm place to sleep, but also force me (kicking and screaming if need be) to interact with other human beings along the way. Social has never been a word anyone would use to describe me; friendly or personable, sure – hell, I've even heard charming on the rare occasion. But never social. Also, as someone who very likely has an undiagnosed lean toward seasonal affective disorder and a tendency to withdraw when under the weather, I had to factor this into my trip planning. My personal rule? No more than two nights spent alone. Ever. “Beware the thoughts that come at night – they aren't turned properly; they come in askew, free of sense and restriction.” My brain can be an asshole but I've learned how to keep it in check.
So in addition to staying with friends and family, I looked into other options through the sharing economy. One that piqued my interest right away was something called WWOOFing - “WorldWide Opportunities on Organic Farms.”
(Source: WWOOF-USA)
Through an online, members-only database, WWOOFing puts volunteers with an interest in organic agriculture in touch with small-scale farmers who, in exchange for a few hours of work each day, provide room, board and a wealth of knowledge to their guests. I signed up on the spot. The plan was to use WWOOFing homestays to fill the gaps in my schedule. If I was seeing one friend this weekend and another the next, I might allow myself a night of camping and then spend the rest of the time volunteering. Being familiar with hostels and Couchsurfing already, this didn't seem like too much of a stretch. I knew early on that I would have one such gap in Savannah, so I consulted the WWOOFing website to track down a place to stay. Using the site's built-in criteria filter, I narrowed my search for homes to include short-term stays that also allowed pets. In Savannah, this returned one result: "The Retreat." Guess that settled it, then.
I reached out to the “homesteaders,” as they referred to themselves in their profile, via email. I explained my background, my timeline, and what I hoped to get out of the experience – you know, pretty standard stuff. When I received a response a few days later, from a woman named Angie Henson*, I immediately picked up on an...usual tone to her emails. She had a quirky way of phrasing questions, or adding a question mark to a statement, as it to suggest "You're going to do this, right?" As our conversation progressed, the quirk soon began to rub me the wrong way. Though I would obviously expect someone welcoming strangers into their home to want to do some vetting first, hers bordered on invasive. But I wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt. Having recently dealt with a breakup that unfolded largely through texting and email, I was already primed to notice possible miscommunications between Angie and myself. Where my exchanges with WWOOFing hosts elsewhere in the country consisted of basically "You want to help us? Great, we'll see you when you get here," my exchange with Angie included some thirty-five emails, ten texts and a Skype interview before I ever set foot on the property, so there was a lot of room for possible misinterpretations. I told myself to keep an open mind.
On the day I was scheduled to arrive, I was already out doing errands. I'm finding it's much easier to convince myself these days to visit the store or laundromat or wherever because I never have to go "back out" - technically, I'm always out. Still, I was finishing up some responsible adult things when Angie texted me. I had told her I expected to be arriving around dusk, though I wasn't yet sure of a specific time. Her text read: "Our address is [home address]. Please come before dark. Sunset is at 5:15. So can you come around then? I hope so." Such an odd phrasing, this woman. As I sped south down I-95 toward Vernonburg (a bedroom community of Savannah), I wondered what wacky adventures the next several days would hold in store for me.
From the highway, I pulled my truck onto a gravel road cut through dense forest. Their driveway snakes across their property, crossing a narrow drainage channel before passing through a set of brick columns surrounded by thick clusters of elephant ears, like sentries standing guard with verdant shields raised, protecting the property from anyone with the audacity to arrive after 5:15. Cast iron plans flanked the drive, guiding me and my truck into a pull off, right in front of the house. I parked next to a Plymouth Voyager, an otherwise conservative and unassuming car if not for the dozens of travel stickers plastered over the rear and side windows - from locations the world over, including (but not limited to) France, Wales and the Ben and Jerry's headquarters in South Burlington, Vermont.
I slowly emerged from the driver's seat, shushing Gabby's restless whining. The place appeared respectable and well-kept and the property was gorgeous. Dark bottomland forest to my left, live oaks overflowing with Spanish moss towering gracefully overhead. The two-story, shingle-face house sits on the back end of the property, closer to the marsh than the street. What with the deep front porch and dormers overhead, I suppose you could call the house a Cape Cod with a Savannah twist.
(Source: The author's own)
A small detached cottage sits off to one side, like a young sibling tagging along through the woods. I would later learn Angie and her husband are renting it to a single guy "who's in the movies," though she was always too distracted to elaborate on what that meant. Chickens wandered listlessly about the yard, as well as a cluster of what I would later learn are called guinea hens, fantastic little fowl with great big mottled bodies and tiny bobbing heads. They scurried around single file in a zig-zag pattern, pecking at the ground as they marched. "Where the hell am I?" I'm pretty sure I said out loud.
Slowing walking up to the front porch, I paused by the door. Just off to the right hung a woodcut sign, instructing visitors to “LAUGH.” The period at the end of the word struck me as an unusual inclusion, like I was being issued a stern command instead of a light-hearted suggestion. “Laugh and abandon all hope, ye who enter here." I told myself to calm down. Given what I already knew about Angie's abrupt communication style, the sign made me chuckle – it wouldn't surprise me if she'd chosen it for that very reason.
I rang the doorbell once, twice, three times. This was the place, right? I gave her my ETA, so shouldn't she be expecting me? Just as I raised my fist to knock again, a distant singing drifted down from somewhere above me, punctuated by the creaks and groans of a slightly-heavyset person descending a staircase into the foyer. A stout gray-haired woman, looking to be in her early sixties, threw open the door with a smile. She introduced herself as Angie - she wore a dark, vaguely Asian-style blouse and her hair was pulled back in a single braid, loose and obviously knotted by hand in a hurry.
Angie, seen here with two examples of Pleurotus ostreatus - the oyster mushroom.
(Source: The author's own)
She ushered me in and launched right into the tour, hurriedly pointing out the function of each room and where I was and was not allowed. As dusk had settled over the property, the downstairs seemed to absorb any available light, with its dark wood floorboards, dark trim – everything dark from the waist down. Above that, speckled with azalea bouquets and peeling at the seams, faded seafoam wallpaper gave the impression of being in a vintage dollhouse. My bedroom, fortunately, was much less spooky: a desk overlooking the front yard, a reading chair, and a king-sized bed.
“The mattress has a built in heating pad, which you may use if you like," she said.
“Absolutely,” I replied, “if there's one thing I've learned to appreciate on this trip, it's warm beds.” No laugh, not even a smile. My feeling of unease started to return. The tour continued.
"This is our bedroom, which you may not enter. This is the parlor, where my husband and I will be receiving our weekly massages tomorrow morning, during which you will have free time." I peered into the room - a massage table was tucked over in a corner behind a shoji, which separated the parlor from the sitting room at the front of the house. Unsure if she was pointing out this room as a welcome or a warning, I opted not to linger.
She guided me into a large kitchen next, where three people sat around a circular dining room table. These were the house-sitters, who had been keeping an eye on the property for the last month while Angie and her husband were away on a cruise - Bright, Sunny Day and their thriteen-year-old daughter Joybeam†.
Clockwise from top: Bright, Joybeam and Sunny Day
(Source: Sunny Day)
I would later learn that the van plastered in travel stickers out front belonged to them - they were making their way around the country on a road trip of their own, though at the time of this writing, they had been traveling for the last three and a half years, pausing for a month here and there to house-sit for folks. Bright towered over the rest of us - he is well over six feet tall. With his shaved head and thick round glasses, he could easily pass as J. K. Simmons from those Farmers Insurance commercials. He spoke with a warm, gentle demeanor.. His wife, Sunny Day, was also tall, with blonde hair and a face that radiated kindness whenever she spoke. If I had to guess, I'd say they were both in their early forties. Their daughter Joybeam seemed surprisingly well-adjusted for a newly-minted teenager living out of a van with her parents. She'd recently been fitted with braces, so she spoke with a slight lisp - an endearing quirk, especially when she spoke about a subject of interest to her (which was often). It was like her mouth wanted to speak faster than her teeth would let her. She's home-schooled, though rarely in the same home twice. I think about how distracting it's been for me to wake up in a new town every few days for three weeks, I can't imagine how distracted she must be. Angie had "warned" me (apropos of nothing) during one of our email exchanges that the family house-sitting for her were Fundamentalist Christians - it had struck me as strange at the time that she felt the need to prepare me for this in advance; she knew nothing of my own beliefs, nor did she have any reason to think I might have a problem with her other guests. They had their quirks, sure, but these were easily three of the friendliest, most accepting people I've met in recent memory.
As the family and I made our introductions, I couldn't help but notice Angie sitting in the room with us, clutching a cat to her face, with her eyes shut tightly, almost as if in some kind of trance, completely disengaged from the conversation taking place around her. The cat, on the other hand, was wide-eyed and ready to make his escape as soon as she loosened her grip. As Bright and I discussed our recent road trip discoveries, I kept glancing over at this odd woman and her cat, still as statues, wondering if I should check for a pulse. How soon after you meet someone is it appropriate to do that?
Despite a restful night's sleep, I awoke the next morning feeling gloomy. It was Monday, December 11 - a day I had been irrationally dreading for months. Today, I turn thirty years old. The warm weather had come and gone and I was in a house full of strangers, with a feeling of unease I couldn't shake. Trying to dispel my misplaced grumpiness, I showered, dressed, and headed downstairs.
Sunny Day had prepared fresh oatmeal, with walnuts and cream. Smiling, she handed me a bowl and explained why I was surrounded by screaming so early in the morning. While they were house-sitting, she and Bright were out one day running some errands in Angie's VW Beetle when they were rear-ended by a teenage girl, only recently licensed. No one was hurt and the damage appeared minimal, so everyone figured no harm, no foul. Both parties went about their separate ways, the plan being to have the damage repaired without the involvement of their respective insurance companies, so as to keep the girl's premiums from going up. Angie was on the phone with the girl's father, who seemed to be playing hardball, refusing to pay for the damages. Though I could only hear one side of the conversation, I wondered if perhaps Angie's acerbic tone might be rubbing this guy the wrong way as it had me.
"Mr. Culver! MR. CULVER! I am calling to inform you...please sir, do not interrupt me!" she shouted, as I quietly crept away to finish my oatmeal in the sun room.
The eye of the storm.
(Source: The author's own)
Knowing that, per the WWOOFing arrangement, I would likely soon be put to work, I plopped myself down on a flowery daybed and opened a book - Blue Highways, by William Least Heat-Moon. From my perch, I could look out over the Hensons' backyard and the tidal marshes beyond, toward the Vernon River. Clumps of Spanish moss, illuminated from the still-rising sun, fluttered lazily in the breeze. A red-tail hawk called out from overhead, likely trying to decide which would make for a better breakfast - the chickens, guinea hens or two cats, all of which wandered about the property in search of a breakfast of their own.
Angie popped her head into the room. "My apologies!" she chirped, "That is not how I planned to spend our first day together!"
"That's no problem," I assured her, "It must be stressful to get back from a vacation and have to deal with a situation like that."
"What an unpleasant man. He is an adversary now! But enough about that. Would you like a tour of the property? I want to show you my mushrooms! After all, that's what you're here for!"
Originally, my travel itinerary put me in the Savannah area during the first couple of weeks in December, during which Angie and her husband were out of the country on a cruise. She and I had exchanged several emails before this scheduling conflict came to light but, once it did, she made her disappointment clear. "Oh Colin Owen, I am so disappointed. Let me tell you why?" her email began. In the impressively long and often rambling and gratuitously question-marked essay that followed, she explained why she felt that I was destined to help them.
"Please look at Google's satellite maps of our home? See how all of Savannah surrounds us? We have two storm drains from Savannah's suburbs that cross our property. Currently they just dump all that pollution and trash into our marsh. We pick the trash out of the marsh each winter in waders, when its safe to be out in the venomous snake environment. But what to do about all that petroleum byproduct? We think oyster mushrooms will fix that and we want to landscape so that we are cleaning that water before it is released into our marsh.
...even though we will not be in Georgia during your time frame, I hope you will consider visiting us when your schedule allows. We are seeking a landscape architect to lead us through the design process. Come back this way when you can? Lets walk both the 5 acres we now own, and the 25 acres adjacent that the owner has promised to let us landscape, especially to preserve the wildlife, the nature that survives in this little bit of undeveloped heaven, and of course to clean the storm water?
Though I'm always looking for ways to put my knowledge as a landscape architect to good use, I also often sell myself short. Call it a textbook case of Imposter Syndrome, an unintended side effect of working at the premier LA firm in Nashville with so many capable and brilliant people. I had developed an unhealthy habit of comparing my abilities and accomplishments to those of my colleagues, which left me feeling like a fraud on more days than not. So, because of that, I determined that one of my goals for this road trip would be to take a step back from such a high-intensity work environment and to reestablish my professional confidence by helping people on perhaps a smaller, less formal scale. That's why the idea of WWOOFing held so much appeal. I may not know everything there is to know as a landscape architect, but I forget that I also know a hell of a lot when compared to the average homeowner (not to toot my own horn or anything). So when Angie explained why she felt I might be able to help her, I knew I had to try.
"We feel such stewardship in our owning this small bit of respite from the city that surrounds us. So when you wrote, I thought you were an answer to prayer [sic]. No pressure! Good luck to you and please please keep in touch if you have any interest in working with us in the future."
Geez, how do you say no to that? I just couldn't do it, so I figured out how to rearrange my schedule and informed her that I would be able to visit as soon as they returned from their cruise. She was thrilled. I only hoped I could deliver.
As Angie led me through her backyard, she pointed out the locations in the marsh and the forest where various wild predators - coyotes, foxes, and a family of red-tailed hawks - would sit and stalk her chickens. She truly does live on a remarkable piece of land. At the edge of the yard, manicured lawn gives way to soggy earth and fields of black needlerush, which stretch almost to the horizon. Beyond that, the Vernon River winds idly toward the Intracoastal Waterway, about ten miles downstream.
Where the grass transitions from domestic to wild, Angie and her husband have dumped piles of lawn clippings, decaying logs, brush, and scraps of compost in long, low berms, demarcating the high tide line around the perimeter of the yard. These berms, she explained, are the beginning of a composting technique called hugelkultur, which aims to mimic the natural decay process of trees in a forest. In time, the piles of woody debris will be covered with earth and inoculated with oyster mushroom spores. These mushrooms are unique in they have the ability to break down the hydrocarbon chains present in petroleum products into simpler, non-toxic components through a process known as mycoremediation. As she had explained to me in her emails, she hoped to use this burgeoning mushroom nursery to create "bunker spawn," inoculated clumps of wood that can then be used to seed projects elsewhere on the property.
Next, she showed me the storm channel that runs diagonally across her front yard, daylighting from an underground pipe up near the highway and terminating down by the marsh. It was here, she explained, that she hoped to alter the channel in such a way so as to create a more receptive environment for a mycoremediation project. This is where she thought my expertise in stormwater management would come in handy.
But that was a project for tomorrow. As we slowly made our way back toward the house, I tried to mentally process this woman, who exuded so much love and compassion for the natural world while simultaneously getting on my last nerve. She walked with both a limp and a sense of urgency, giving the impression of someone who doesn't have time for injuries. I think it was this urgency that didn't sit well with me, though I couldn't yet pinpoint why. Still, I had to admit that she was growing on me. Any friend of the environment is a friend of mine. Guinea hens scuttled about underfoot as we walked, pecking at the insects stirred up by our footsteps. "Oh hello chickens! I haven't seen you in ages! Hi sweeties!" Nearby, a rooster watched us with intensity, bristling his feathers if we dared to get too close. I commented to Angie that he had attacked me earlier that day. "Worst rooster we've ever had," she lamented with a tone of wistful disappointment. "As soon as he starts shooting blanks, he's going in the pot."
...and on this week's menu: Jerk chicken
(Source: The author's own)
Once inside, Angie explained that she needed to tend to some errands, so I was free to enjoy myself for the remainder of the afternoon. I decided to use my downtime to research mycoremediation in the sunroom. Joybeam sat hunched over a table, brow furrowed in deep concentration over what I assumed was school work. As I walked into the room, she perked up. "I found a bee tree," she said.
"A what now?"
She repeated herself. "A bee tree."
"What's a bee tree?"
"It's a tree with bees in it," she explained with a look of exasperation, the "duh" unspoken but heavily implied. Nothing like the impatient sass of a teenager to make me feel old on my thirtieth birthday. As I sat down on the daybed and opened my laptop, Angie's husband Robert* walked in.
"I found a bee tree today," Joybeam said to him. His eyes went wide.
"A bee tree!? Bees, what a wonderful thing! WOOHOO!" he shouted. She looked over at me and smiled, as if to say "See, that was how you were supposed to react."
Robert, like his wife, is an oddly fascinating creature. He has Asperger's Syndrome, which I would not have guessed had Angie not mentioned it in their online WWOOFing profile. But once you know it, you clearly see it. As a result, he can be difficult to converse with - he'll sometimes ignore efforts to make small talk, apparently feeling no need to respond to anything other than a direct question. Conversely, he'll also focus in on a subject so intently that he can't be pulled away from it. What's more, due to his time in the Marines as a Mastery Gunner Sergeant, he is as deaf as the day is long. He wears a special hearing aid with a microphone attached to his shirtsleeve ("I'm like the bionic man!" he informed me at one point). He doesn't speak often but, when he does, what he says is usually very loud. Though I never quite figured out how to have a conversation with him, I immediately liked the guy. He is the very definition of jolly - good-natured and mustachioed, with a short stature and a pot belly. My little travel notebook is filled with quotes from him, non-sequiturs requiring no context to understand because they had no context to begin with (one of my favorite examples, directed to one of his cats and apropos of nothing: "Augie, you've been a cat all your life"). It was like being handed a shuffled stack of Polaroid snapshots into the man's inner dialogue.
It warmed my heart to see him interact with Joybeam. Here was a retired Marine Sergeant and a thirteen-year-old girl, enthusiastically discussing a bee's nest, the former speaking much too loudly for the small room and the latter with the sight lisp of her braces. I smiled, taking a moment to appreciate the surreality of the entire setting.
That evening, I joined Augie in the kitchen and offered to help her prepare dinner. As I stood there by the sink, peeling sweet potatoes from her garden, she fluttered about the kitchen, unabashedly singing to herself. Suddenly, she paused. "Would you like to sing with me?" she asked. Fortunately, I had my back to her, or she would've seen all the color drain from my face.
"Uhhh...I think I'm okay, thank you," I stammered.
"Oh well! I love to sing - used to do it professionally. Since you have such a lovely speaking voice, I thought you might as well," she said. Thanks? Attempting to disguise my discomfort, I tried to sound the part of a good sport. "Well, you know, I sometimes sing in the car or in the shower. Or when I'm drunk."
"We can fix that!" she said, fluttering away. I mouthed a silent "What the fuck?" to myself as I went back to chopping. The weirdness of this visit continued to astound me.
One dish at a time, Angie pieced together a wonderful dinner - short ribs, collards, sweet potatoes and sparkling cherry juice. As I fixed a plate and joined everyone else at the table, I realized that I couldn't remember the last time I'd been present for a family dinner like this. We laughed with full mouths, sharing stories from our various world travels. At one point the conversation turned to what everyone had done to celebrate their thirtieth birthdays. Pleased as I was to have a meaningful tale to offer, I think Robert had me beat - he biked across the country (as in, on a bicycle). In his typical fashion, deciding he'd found a topic worth hanging on to, Robert held the conversation hostage for a while, yanking us back to his bicycle trip over and over again even as the verbal exchange drifted elsewhere. As Angie attempted to wrestle the conversation away from him (quite loudly), I just sat there politely with a smile and observed the comedic gold unfolding before me. It was like being in a cartoon; I half expected her to pull out an oversized mallet and bash him into the floor. But Angie's patience with her husband's idiosyncrasies seemed limitless; humorous as it was, they clearly complemented each other.
I surveyed the table as the anecdotes and cherry juice continued to flow - these were good people with big hearts and I was pleased to be there with them on my birthday. "What a beautiful life!" Angie muttered to herself, as she began to clear away our empty plates. She said it in a quiet, almost reflexive way, as though it was a sentiment she'd repeated a million times before, to the point that the phrase emerges from her lips instinctively, unprompted by any one specific thing; like breathing, it just is.
I don't know if I would go so far as to say life is beautiful but it does have beautiful moments; dining with these kindred spirits was absolutely one of those moments.
The next morning, I set to work on earning my keep. Typically, WWOOFers exchange chores for room and board but, this time, it was my professional services that had been requested. Angie kept referring to me as her "Stormwater Expert," a label that made me both proud and apprehensive. I'd hardly consider myself an expert at anything, so I was that much more determined to prove my worth and help her with her mycoremdiation pet project.
From what I'd gathered based on the previous day's research, mycoremediation is still a semi-emerging field but one showing tremendous promise when it comes to treating environmental pollutants (for a great TED talk on the subject, check out Paul Stamets' "6 Ways Mushrooms Can Save the World"). When you think of mushrooms, what comes to mind is actually only the fruiting body of the mushroom, known as the cap. Underground, a dense network of living filaments called mycelia twist and weave through the top few inches of earth, creating a transportation superhighway for nutrients that not only benefit the mushrooms but also the surrounding plant life, especially trees. Mycelia are actually able to bond with tree roots, trading water and nutrients in exchange for sugars produced by the tree through photosynthesis. Recently, scientists have discovered another curious ability of some species of mushrooms - they can actually metabolize and decompose petroleum products, breaking down the hydrocarbon chains into harmless component molecules. One such species, Pleurotus ostreatus, the oyster mushroom, is exceptionally well-suited to this task, especially in salt-water environments. This is what we planned to use in order to hopefully improve the water quality of the stormwater flowing through Angie's property.
Angie's early emails spoke of a channel that crossed diagonally across her front yard, around the side of her house and down to the marsh, which deposited trash and roadway effluent from downtown Savannah. My goal was to help her adjust the course of this channel (at least, the portion on her property) in order to achieve three objectives: 1.) reduce the water's velocity 2.) allow trash and sediment to filter out and 3.) use mycoremediation to treat the water before it enters the marsh. After walking the site, I would assess the opportunities and constraints of the channel as it exists currently and offer advice on possible alterations, with a "good, better, best" approach that would provide her with different solutions depending on what funds, time and volunteer hands would be available to her. Finally, I would summarize my findings and recommendations into a "stormwater management plan" that she could keep on hand for future reference.
To be fair, I had some help.
(Source: The author's own)
I invited Angie to walk the length of the drainage channel with me, pointing out examples of what a healthy riparian system should look like - a sinuous, active channel within a wider "floodplain" (in this case, an engineered swale constructed by the city years ago). As this channel passed below a utility easement demarcating the edge of her property, its profile narrowed to a tight V-shape, with long, straight sections showing evidence of scouring from high-velocity stormwater runoff. As we walked, Angie would frequently repeat my words as I spoke them, trying her best to commit them to memory - check dams, s-curves, sedimentation. She often interrupted me to ask questions, her tone suggesting that she was thrilled to finally comprehend what she needed to do to protect the health of her marsh. They say you never truly understand a subject until you can teach it to someone else; at that moment, I realized that I actually knew what I was talking about; at least on some level, I really was the expert that Angie needed. For just about every question, I had an answer. This time, I wasn't using my knowledge to help construct a private school or an apartment complex; I was using it to help a homeowner protect the environment - her environment. It felt...right, like I was not only earning my keep with her but also with the planet itself. This is what I should be doing with my life.
As we finished our walk, a pickup truck rumbled down the driveway. "Oh excellent timing! That'll be my mushroom guy!"
Three young men stepped out of a beat up old white F-150 - Ancil Jacques ("The Mushroom Guy") and his cohorts, Rob and Jason. Ancil is about my age, just two weeks shy of his thirtieth birthday. He's been hunting wild mushrooms since he was a child, growing up in a small town just outside of the Okefenokee Swamp in south Georgia. "What else was I supposed to do? I was too young to steal lawnmowers like everyone else, so I went into the swamp and collected mushrooms," he explained. He affectionately referred to his hometown, a place with a name I didn't quite catch given his mile-a-minute conversation style, as a place full of "meth heads and pillbillies." His ambitions led him to a degree in English but, unsure of how to support himself with it, he turned to his first love, fungi. Now, he operates his own small business selling wild and commercially farmed mushrooms at the Forsythe Farmer's Market in Savannah, under the moniker "Swampy Appleseed." Visiting with him was Rob, a fellow amateur mycologist (sporting a Terrapin Brewery hat identical to one I used to own, so I liked him right off the bat) and their friend Jason, a (or perhaps the) site manager at the farmer's market.
With additional experts now at her command, RJ led us back up to the drainage channel, where we converged at the point where it passed via concrete pipe below the driveway. I explained to them my thoughts about using a series of check dams upstream, crafted from burlap sacks filled with fungi-inoculated woodchips. Explaining that my mycoremediation experience could be measured in mere hours, I carefully talked through some ideas with the guys, careful to point out that I'm not a civil engineer, I only play one on TV. Much to my surprise, however, they concurred with the majority of my suggestions. I mean, I was only kind of talking out my ass when I suggested substituting Reishi cultures for Oyster, due to the higher tensile strength of its mycelia but they enthusiastically agreed. In fact, I think they were impressed with me. Hell, I was impressed with me.
We continued brainstorming for a bit and then retired inside for some tea. Angie prepared a cup of tea for each of us, with leaves of the native Yaupon vomitoria that grows in the woods on her property.
Oyster mushrooms and yaupon tea.
(Source: The author's own)
Native Americans once prepared this very same tea (likely not consumed from a John Deere mug) for purification rituals. Though, as the name suggests, these rituals did involve vomiting, it was not the tea itself (as Europeans erroneously thought) that caused it. Otherwise, this delicious (and heavily caffeinated) tea might be more widely available. Not only is it delicious but it packs a punch - I don't know if it's because my caffeine tolerance is much lower now that I don't drink four cups of coffee a day but that stuff cranked me up. Noticing I wasn't the only one talking a little faster, the conversation soon steered away from mushrooms and on to anything and everything else. Truly, if ever there was a group of guys I wanted to get drunk with, it was these amateur mushroom farmers. Eco-nerds of the highest caliber and my kind of people.
As they were leaving, I marveled at their ability to get so excited about something so mundane. No sooner than the thought crossed my mind, Rob shouted "Ooooh!" and quickly crouched down in front of me. Between his thumb and forefinger, he plucked a small mushroom about the size of a walnut and showed it to me. "Stropharia," he explained. "Just look at that great sheen!" What a fucking nerd. I loved it.
I spent my final morning at "The Retreat" preparing a stormwater management plan for Angie and Robert, digging deep into the recesses of my professional brain for the necessary phrasing to protect them ("underground utilities may be present") and myself ("homeowner assumes all responsibility"). As I sat with them at the breakfast table, typing away on my laptop, they carried on with a conversation that seemed to perfectly encapsulated their respective personalities and, from what I'd gathered in my three days with them, their relationship as a whole - Robert loudly repeating stock prices to himself ad nauseam and Angie trying to keep her cool, recalling to no one in particular why she married him in the first place and occasionally throwing in a "Life is beautiful" for good measure. With her words literally falling on deaf ears, she would just sigh, take a sip of tea and place her hand on his.
People are complicated. We each have a self-image that we identify with that only exists in our own minds - no matter what persona we outwardly project to others, that persona is still colored by the experiences of those with whom we interact. No two people will ever know you in exactly the same way because they will each assign different values to your various character traits based on what is important to them - one man's charm is another man's grievance. When I first began my interaction with Angie via email, there was a way about her that didn't sit well with me but I could never quite put my finger on why. It took three days of spending time with her but I eventually identified the crux of my annoyance; I think now that perhaps her urgent manner reminded me, in a way, of myself - the difference being that she wore hers on her sleeve with no restraint. She doesn't seem to have the same overactive mental filter that often holds me back, causing me to over-analyze a thought to the point of silence. She could do what I could not and, at least on a subconscious level, my snap judgment was to resent her for it. Though it took a few days, I think now that I see her for who she truly is - someone who is trying to cram so much living into a life already full of houseguests, mushrooms and insurance claims that she sometimes forgoes socially agreed-upon pleasantries for results - and she gets them. To be perfectly honest, I'd be lying if I said I wasn't guilty of the same thing. Balancing that tendency toward bluntness, though, is her unrelenting kindness and generosity, even toward a complete stranger such as myself. What I pegged as urgency is, in reality, a zeal for life and an impatience for anyone who doesn't share it.
I don't yet know exactly who I am or what I'm looking for in my life but my stay at The Retreat provided me with another piece of the puzzle. One of my goals for this trip is to just calm my overactive mind and listen to what my gut is trying to tell me. Though small, I felt like I made a difference in this woman's life and I know that she made a difference in mine and that is not insignificant.
As I pulled out onto the highway, I noticed that several clumps of Spanish moss had become wedged under my windshield wipers, flapping aggressively in the wind, like troubling thoughts trying to break free from the mind. Reaching down to the steering column, with the flip of a lever I let them go. They twirled and spiraled through the air on invisible eddies before drifting gently down to the cracked pavement behind me. Next stop: Columbia.
CWO
*Not their actual names.
† Obviously not their actual names. When I asked "Sunny Day" if I could include her family's photo and names in this post, she replied : "Feel free to post us and [our] travel names are Bright and Sunny Day, with our Joybeam ☺" As none of those "names" are gender-specific per se, I had to make some assumptions about who's who. The author would like to apologize for any confusion this may have caused.