“Maybe. But beautiful. I needed a fiery sun, and you shone.”
***
Shel Graves is a reader, writer, and utopian thinker who lives by the Salish Sea. She works as a caregiver at Pasado’s Safe Haven, a non-profit on a mission to end animal cruelty. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing at Goddard College. She keeps her writer’s journal at shelgraves.blogspot.com. Talk to her @Utopianista on Twitter and see pictures of her furry companions @Sheltopia on Instagram.
The Call of the Wold
by Holly Schofield
Pedalling out of the shade of the Douglas firs, I heard the farming collective before I saw it. Squawking, bleating, angry barking—and that was just the people. I ground to a stop in front of the gate, careful to avoid the wild sorrel poking through the damp, crumbling pavement. “Olly Olly Umphrey!” I called over in my cracked old woman voice. The nearest person, a lanky man with a brown pony tail pulled exceptionally tight, frowned at my shout. His foot rested on a rusted cage with something brown and feathery in it.
He glanced at me, my bicycle, and the small bike trailer that held my possessions, then back at the other two. The woman was waving a large and shiny cleaver in the face of a stocky, acne-scarred man. I wasn’t one to judge—well, I was—but my calves ached and my stomach was tired of deer jerky. I raised my voice a notch or four. “I don’t want to join your discussion, I was just hoping I could do a few chores—”
“We don’t need any trade goods,” yelled the cleaver-wielder. “Go away, old woman!”
“Ageist, much?” I yelled back. The driest summer in Vancouver Island’s recorded history meant my scalp itched continually, and a guest bunk sure beat out a dusty tent, but I didn’t let such comments slip past me. Not since I turned seventy last year.
“Let her in,” the lanky man said.
I pushed my bike along the high chain-link fence—the height of it intended to keep out the overly-numerous deer rather than human intruders—until I reached the gate.
Neither of the other two had moved.
The lanky guy sighed long and low. “By the power vested in me by Henkel’s Wold, let her in.” At his feet, the caged guinea fowl backed him up with an ear-piercing shriek.
The short guy moved first, walking up to the lock and looking into the biometric screen. It gave a loud click. My heart did the hokey pokey as the smartcam swivelled toward me and facial recognition software did its thing.
“Keeps out the riffraff, eh,” I remarked to the guy as the gate clicked again and swung open.
“So what? We breed our own criminals,” he said, glaring back at the woman.
She waggled the cleaver at him. “Sez you, Riley.”
“Gah!” Riley turned to the skinny guy. “Did you see that? Whatcha gonna do about it, Aaron, waffle as usual?”
With a sigh, I scanned the dark clouds overhead. Was a bit of comfort really worth enduring such an unhappy crowd? But I knew my solitary life wasn’t mentally healthy, any more than my cheese addiction. Surely I could hang my frayed Tilley here for one night.
Besides, maybe I could help settle the dispute. I hadn’t been much use to anyone lately, maybe I could use my rusty people skills to at least calm ’em down. I sucked in a breath. “I think you people are the flea’s pajamas, doing what you do, way out here in the bush,” I said and smiled blankly like the kindly old woman I hoped I looked like. “A bunch of nice people like you, nothing more to talk about than some chicken.” My tactic worked—they all looked as sheepish as ewes at a shearing competition. I stuck my hand out toward the one named Riley. “Julie Leung, traveller extraordinaire.”
“Pleased, and all that,” said Riley as he gripped my fingers with a callused palm. “Come on in. We got some lentil stew with your name on it. Always glad to have a few helping hands around the farm.”
“Yeah,” said Laura. “We’ll settle this later. I’ve got to get back to chopping carrots for dinner.” She ran a finger along the cleaver and flicked a fleck of orange off it, grinning at me. “Betcha thought I had other plans with this beauty, huh?”
I grinned back.
Riley gestured me to follow him. “How are you at tapping maple trees?”
I regaled him with my expertise in syrup extraction skills as I followed him across the communal yard. Up on the roof of the sculpted concrete main building, a bearded guy waved, solar paint dripping from his brush. We proceeded down a ferny green trail to some tiny guest cabins. The wooden walls were streaked with the ironically pleasant blue of mountain pine beetle damage. I parked my bike in a rack made from repurposed car parts and grabbed my backpack. Dinner and bed would certainly warm the cockroaches in my heart. But, with the smartcam’s capabilities in figuring out my real identity, I could only stay a couple of days.
***
My aging Ikea chair and borrowed quilt had just grown comfy when the argument started up again.
About ten of us had lingered after dinner in the common room by the months-cold methane gas stove. Next to me, on an old Forest Service park bench, a woman opened her shirt and began to feed her baby, while an older guy stroked his long beard in mindful contemplation of something, and a teenager tapped away on a tablet designing a cranberry harvester. Riley sprawled in a handmade chair across the fire from me, and Aaron, the collective’s leader, slouched beside him in an ancient armchair.
My twelve years bicycling throughout western Canada meant I’d seen a few hundred of these “intentional communities.” By now, I could spot the reasons why they worked—or didn’t—as quickly as I could gather Canada goose eggs for lunch. The way this bunch had all made a conscious effort to back down from their verbal scuffle at the gate told me Henkel’s was a community of the sort I would have leaped to have joined in my thirties, or even my forties. That and the swoon-worthy food. Riley’s lentil soup had been fragrant with fresh spinach, flavorful carrots, and a couple of spices I couldn’t immediately recall: coriander maybe, and cardamom. It had been accompanied by a salad of miner’s lettuce, sorrel, clover, and various greens such as I might collect for myself but with a much better dressing of raspberry vinaigrette. And that had been followed by a piece of excellent goat cheese made by the angry-woman-who-was-no-longer-angry and went by the name of Laura. The woman, that is, not the cheese.
But, despite the appeal, would I want to join any collective nowadays? I’d always been an introvert and, now, after over a decade of unpeopled solitude, a little peopling was all I could stand. A murmur from the baby, another beard stroke, and a tappy-tap-tap, and I edged my chair away a little bit.
Laura backed in through the kitchen swing door and began handing out cups of rosehip tea to a chorus of appreciative murmurs. She ended with Riley, thrusting the tray at him, mouth tight.
“It’s just a guinea hen,” Riley said, taking the last cup with both hands.
“Yeah, sure, and its eggs are just scrambled genes,” she said, slapping the tray against her thigh.
“We need a decision,” Riley said, gripping his mug like death heated up.
Laura nodded. “It’s impairing our happiness levels.”
They both turned to glare at Aaron, whose face was in shadow under the hood of a faded gray UBC hoodie. “I—I—I think that Laura had better start—”
“At least you agree on something,” I interrupted brightly. Whatever he’d been about to say, telling just one of ’em what to do wouldn’t resolve anything. I hadn’t worked for a wildlife foundation for twenty-five years without learning something about negotiation.
“Phone home, gramma,” said Laura, then looked abashed as the nursing mother raised her head and the teenager tsked. Each collective tended to develop its own slang so I wasn’t sure what that meant—although I could grok the essence.
I said lightly, “Haven’t owned one in years.” Taking her literally might de-escalate the situation, and, besides, I hadn’t. In the solar-powered communities of the New West Coast, where every kilowatt counted, one of the few advanced technologies everyo
ne made sure to prioritize was cell coverage—generally, people agreed that a transparent society with almost all information freely available mostly worked to everyone’s advantage. But no way was I going to carry a phone, even though the maps and other data would be damned handy.
When you—meaning me—are an environmental activist working for your older brother’s charitable foundation and you—meaning me—become the director when he takes two years off to be a new dad, it’s a big deal. And when you—yup, me again—finally have enough of whining, bickering humanity and walk out on one of the endless meetings about a federal wildlife law that affects a provincial law that affects a local bylaw that would affect the water rights of a multinational company that may or may not be leaning toward a tax-favored donation to the foundation, it’s…liable to leave the foundation in the lurch. Especially after you walk out of the office building, across Bayview Avenue, and down to the Don River, and your black pleather oxfords fill up with warm algae-tinted water and you stand there and stand there until a passing mourning dove shits on you.
Meaning me. Shit on me.
I’d left the shoes in the mucky silt, along with my blue wool blazer, and walked unshod and unblazered for miles. And I’d never gone back despite Willi’s endless phone calls and messages. I’d ditched my phone, my Toronto condo, and gone off-grid, driving north. Eventually, reading historical biographies in a rented Muskoka cottage had palled and I’d bought the bike and cart and never looked back. (Unless the cart got a flat tire. Which it occasionally did.)
I’d had a close call last month. I’d paused by a roadside hawker in Coquitlam under several streetcams. My hand had hovered indecisively over several solar-powered miniature water filters. The hawker’s cell phone, close by my hand, rang and we both jumped.
“Who? Who’s Julie Leung? Is this a prank?” she’d yelled into it before I’d bustled my hump along Highway 7, pumping my pedals like a well handle in a six-month Saskatchewan drought. Twelve years later, and Willi was still needing me back. I just knew he was. I’d been the best damn activist my brother had ever hired. One look into his pleading black eyes and I’d return to that soul-sucking city life in a hurtbeat.
So, no phone.
Problem solved.
Maybe I could solve this problem as well. Aaron gulped down his tea, hand shaking. Laura and Riley both crossed their arms.
“Tell me, what do this collective’s rules say about ownership of the bird?” I squinted, trying to see Aaron through the growing dimness.
“Ownership isn’t the issue. I actually own it all,” Aaron said.
“Wowsy,” I said.
He leaned forward into the light. “My mom, Helen Henkel—”
Everyone made a slow fist of respect.
“—most decent person I ever knew.”
“—peace be upon her.”
“—she never phoned it in.”
Ah, that explained Aaron’s clumsy handling of the incident at the gate. The mantle of leadership was XXL and he was an extra-small. He muttered, “Mom set this place up as a formal trust—everyone signed over their assets to her in return for lifetime rights to live here.”
“And that worked? A dictator telling you folks what to do?” My voice squawked like the poor guinea fowl. I’d see that style of intentional community before—usually the people had a fundamentalist religious doctrine or another form of abhorrent behavior. Or a commercial agenda, like when marijuana went legal. Some of those communities made a small fortune—by starting out with a large fortune.
They were all smiling at my naïveté, or maybe I had spinach in my teeth.
Aaron spoke from the depths of his hoodie. “A benevolent dictator is actually the best form of government. If you can find the right person.” He scrubbed his face with a hand. “Trouble is, I’m not the person Mom was.”
The protesting murmurs from the other people weren’t even loud enough to drown out the baby’s slurps. Poor guy.
“Okay. Here’s my decision.” He spoke firmly, for once. Maybe I’d underestimated him. “I’m going to ask Julie to decide. It’ll be impartial and it’ll count as her chores, a win-win.”
Yup, underestimated. He’d neatly passed the bucking bronco to me. After I hit the road tomorrow, they could collectively hate me instead of him.
I twisted in my chair. My past career meant I was pretty good at that kind of stuff, despite it not coming naturally. Plus, lack of internet meant I’d read my way through all the classics in the past decade, from Art of War to Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon. Further, my arthritic wrists hated the idea of three hours of drilling holes in big leaf maples and running sap lines tomorrow. My nimbility wasn’t what it once was. I squirmed again and my hip twanged like a cheap guitar. That decided me. “Okay, deal. What’s the scoop?”
They all looked blank for a minute, even the guy with the beard. Hooboy, you know you’re getting old when what you consider normal slang has become unintelligible. “Just tell me the problem.”
“Laura says she bred the hen from two she’d paid particular attention to. Tracking software shows it eats more ticks than most and she wants to keep it for breeding. It lost its leg band and Riley says she’s mistaken about which hen it is—” Riley snorted. “—and it’s one of several he’s bred to taste better and it’s now at its peak age for meat production. That about cover it?” Aaron turned to both of ’em and they nodded.
I thought it over. Whether they had a fancy genetics lab set up in one of the outbuildings or whether they were cross-breeding the old-fashioned way didn’t matter. Nobody relied on fancy tech solely any more. We all wanted backups to the backups and there was no backup like a live hen strutting her stuff in the farmyard. Plus black-legged ticks had benefited like few other critters from the long hot climate-changed summers and the dumb-ass ban on deer culling. All ticks needed were deer and humidity to spread Lyme disease, a deadly risk to us all. Out here in the wilds, they were all over humans like, well, ticks on a hound. I was picking a few of the evil beasties off myself every night. Most British Columbia collectives donated extra profits to the Lyme Research Collective in Vancouver, hoping for a cheap, reliable vaccine.
I tilted my head left and right a few times, considering both sides. Maybe a classic solution was in order. “Have the hen lay a clutch and then kill it. The eggs go to Laura and the meat goes to Riley.” Solomon has nothin’ on me, hooboy.
All ten of ’em erupted into arguments as to why that wouldn’t work. I let ’em go on for a bit, hoping they’d settle. Sure enough they began to batten down the hatchets and discuss it more rationally. Laura spoke above the rest: “I suppose if I had a dozen eggs, I could work with those. We do need the meat for the smokehouse or we’ll be hungry come January.”
“But if the hen is killed, you’d be betting on the eggs,” Riley said. “And I do hate ticks with the passion of a—”
“— lipstick-covered pig,” I cut in.
“Yeah, sure,” he said and laughed. Laura giggled and, just like that, the tension was broken.
Laura and Riley agreed to leave the hen alive for now and work together tomorrow to construct yet another floating platform of mussel ropes. It’d have to be situated in a less convenient location than most of the existing ones, but it would help replace the protein lost by keeping the hen.
Aaron was looking at me steadily, open-mouthed. I smiled, shrugged, and sipped my cold tea.
Later, as I walked toward the cabin and its very appealing cot, Aaron took me aside. “Teach me how to do that?”
I opened my mouth, about to explain the complexities of the interpersonal techniques I’d used and the micro-expressions I’d interpreted. I opened the cabin’s door. My hip twanged, this time like a whole banjo orchestra. “It’s, um, complicated,” I said. “G’night.”
He trudged away, head down.
Hours later, I’d tossed and turned so much that the bedsheets were trussed and torn. I felt like the world’s biggest meanie. The selfish kind, the kind Wi
lli thought I was. But there was no easy way to tell Aaron how draining it was to be around people, face-to-face, aura-to-aura.
Willi had never understood that either.
***
By the second day at Henkel’s, I’d been given a potted tomato plant and a woven hemp hat and been asked to settle four disputes. This morning’s involved two new mothers and the last remaining frozen bagel. I could forgive ’em their anger—teething babies without teething rings could set anyone’s teeth on edge. At least, one of the mothers had brought me a duck egg omelet, full of mushrooms and chives, still steaming from the kitchens. The mother, and the omelet.
I was forking in the yellow fluff of heaven when Aaron stopped by. His faded corduroy shirt hanging on his thin frame made him look a scarecrow, or maybe a scarevulture.
“Help me figure out this puzzle?” His tablet held some accounts and preliminary number-crushing. It resembled the decision-making matrices that I used to discuss with Willi.
I swallowed the last bite, washing it down with some chicory coffee. “Does the super-fiddly hand-threshing of lentils balance their higher production volume per hectare versus the ease of chick peas? Damnifino. Use some cost-benefit software, like HappyEconomics freeware.”
“But it’s not that simple.” He sighed. “How do you know if—”
“Aaron, there’s never enough information. You could collect it until the crows come home and still there’d be something you missed.”
“I don’t think I’ll ever grow into this job.” He blew out a long breath. I felt sorry for him—adapting to something you aren’t suited for is an uphill climb, made especially tougher by putting on the wrong suit. Or an itchy blue blazer. All I could do was give him permission to make a decision. “Sometimes you just have to fish or cut loose.”
He ran a hand through his hair. “I suppose. I’ll figure it out, later. Come help me in the truffle orchard?”
“So they grow on trees now?” I said, determined to lighten his mood.
Glass and Gardens Page 8
