I Heart Indian Curses

Aside from volunteers, Danny also employees two permanent farm workers. Chuck is a clean-cut old cowboy who's very friendly and tends to work on his own. Then there's Hosey.

Hosey (not José) is a very tan old Mexican, I'm guessing 60-ish, who usually wears overalls, sunglasses and a straw hat with a big feather sticking out the top. His speech is slurred and it usually takes me a few moments to realize what he just said, which is always totally unexpected. Aaron and I asked him to show us how to oil a generator yesterday and he told us "Let me show you a trick I learned during World War I, when I was 16. You know, before I was reborn." When he pulled a squeeze ball and straw out of his toolbox, he said "You know what this is? It's the same thing they shoved up your ass when you were a baby and couldn't shit." As he pumped oil into the machine, he added "Do it slowly, like two old people fucking."

So far, Hosey is my favorite person I've met this year.

The Brits and I spent all day cutting and measuring PVC pipes again. We're building a irrigation system for the new field and it's starting to look like a project we'll be doing for a long time. In addition to starting late, the work day here seems too short to me. WWOOFers are only expected to work 20-25 hours a week at this farm with weekends off, and it never occurred to me how short a 4-5 hour day feels. I feel like a slacker when we stop working. I know I have some overworking habits that aren't always healthy and I keep telling myself to chill out and enjoy the experience, but I'd still like to make sure my next farm is more demanding. In the meantime, I do learn a lot in my downtime here.

After work today, Danny took a few of us to the other side of the canyon to see some Anasazi ruins. This canyon is huge and amazing! Every turn looks like a postcard. We visited a few places and had to climb 100 feet up the cliffside to get to some of them, but we found ourselves sitting in an ancient Anasazi home that still had bricks holding up walls and broken pottery pieces stuck in the ground. Once we started recognizing how the homes looked in the cliffside, we realized how many of them were around. We also climbed down into an underground kiva used for hallucinogenic religious ceremonies. We were told they've been here for 600-800 years. I thought we might be in risk of invoking some curse by trespassing there. That's what happened in Poltergeist, right?

My camera battery died, so I turned on my cell phone to take pictures of the ruins. The phone hasn't had a signal since I arrived, so I've kept it off. Deep, deep in this canyon, though, I took a step toward a cactus and suddenly got a ring for a voicemail message. Moved five feet and it disappeared.

We saw a coyote before we left. Also, a golden eagle and lots of nighthawks after sunset. I finally moved into the trailer when we returned and I'm loving it. I can hear lots of animals outside as I drift asleep. This may actually be better than my last apartment.