Gator Tails and Buried Caddies. When in Texas...

The rest of my stay on the Mississippi farm went by in a flash. After staying in Montana so long, I decided two weeks was a good amount of time to spend on a farm. Plus, I want to be back in Oregon to spend Thanksgiving with the fam, and that put this part of my journey on a deadline.

Farmer Jon treated me very well during my stay. I finished weeding the gardens, then went to work helping him mount posts for a new goat pen (after these last few farms, I swear my post-digging skills are now wicked sweet). He made sure I didn't work too long and always fed me well. Sadly, we mostly ate processed packaged and frozen food from the local grocery outlet store, but I was in no condition to be picky. I saw the food as just one of Jon's hick traits. The others would be spitting every minute on the minute, naming ducks Poop and Crap and drinking whiskey for breakfast (sorry if I sound like I'm dissing him, but I felt I had to convey the whole experience).

One afternoon, Jon's mother gave me a personal tour through William Faulkner's former home in nearby Oxford. I later found out she was friends with his daughter, Jill, who passed away a few years ago. Jon's mother has a lifetime of experience acting and performing in different formats and was still an active member of a local storytelling guild. I made sure to stay in the area long enough to catch a performance in which the guild told ghost stories around a pumpkin patch at a church (William Faulkner's former church, at that). Some of the stories took place during the Civil War and glorified Southern families, which made me realize I was not likely to hear them anywhere else. It was a great way to spend my last day in Mississippi, and I got back to my yurt just in time to watch a spectacular thunderstorm. The lightning was right above us, and it lit up the whole yurt every time it flashed.

Faulkner's house, study and whiskey of choice.

Another perk of my last day was that I saw a wild armadillo for the first time. Jon told me they were common here. We frequently heard them rummaging through the tall grass around the farm, and one supposedly lived under my yurt, but they managed to evade me until that day. Unfortunately, it was gone by the time i retrieved my camera.

So, along came Monday morning and I hit the road. My next goal was to once again visit my sister and her family in Santa Fe and spend Halloween there. I debated the route for days, torn between taking a long, scenic drive through Louisiana and the far southern end of Texas, or zip across Arkansas and take a faster northern route that I've already seen. In the end, I decided there was no reason to spend any more time in Texas than necessary. It is, after all, Texas.

A few hours later I found myself in Texarkana eating fried alligator tail for lunch. I hate to say it, but it tasted just like chicken.

Fried gator tail. Don't knock it till you've tried it.... or just order chicken tenders because they taste identical.

The rest of that drive was a blur. I spent the night in my car at a rest stop near Wichita Falls, then sped the rest of the way to Santa Fe, only stopping once in Amarillo for a few pictures of Cadillac Ranch. I had seen the half-buried Cadillacs a few years ago when I first drove through this part of the country, but I like the attraction so it was worth the stop.

Cadillac Ranch, an art project created as a statement about the paradoxical simultaneous American fascinations with both a sense of place and roadside attractions—such as the ranch itself—and the mobility and freedom of the automobile... or so says Wikipedia.

So here I am, back in Santa Fe, which has become something of a home base for me. It's only now dawning on me that my WWOOF adventures in the United States are done—for now, anyway. My original intent was to WWOOF in the continental US until winter, then chase summer by traveling to Hawaii and hopefully New Zealand. I always knew money was a big factor in that plan, and my savings are certainly not what they were when I began. Although I still want to travel, I'm beginning to feel it would be prudent to earn some income first, and that means staying still long enough to find a job. For now, I plan to enjoy a week in Santa Fe, then a week with some old friends in California's Bay Area, then Thanksgiving in Oregon. That's when I'll have to make some big decisions.

Stay tuned for this season's exciting conclusion...

Life on the Delta

One of my first orders of business in Mississippi was to wash the sheets, pillowcases and the cover for the comforter on my bed. Once they were all clean, the yurt felt much more welcoming.

The farm here is run by Jon, a divorcee in his mid-40’s. Jon lives in a small house with his aging mother and has a 5-year-old daughter who spends half her time here. He’s super friendly and works part-time as a substitute science teacher when he’s not tending farm. Here on his property, about four acres, he grows a few gardens of cabbages, strawberries, peppers and kale. His main business, however, is livestock. He raises chickens, turkeys, ducks and geese (the latter two mostly for pets), but his primary income comes from breeding goats.

Right now Jon has about 10 goats, and all of them are pregnant except for the single male. One of them, Daisy May, is almost ready to pop, so I may witness a goat birthing in the next few days (keep your fingers crossed—not only that I get to see it, but that I handle it better than that birthing video from 9th grade). Sometimes Jon milks them, but not often. His income comes from selling the kids at livestock auctions.

A very pregnant goat.

My work here so far has been to uproot three gardens overrun by tall, grassy weeds. That occupies most of my 5-hour work days, and I have one day off each week. The weeds look horrendous, but pulling them out is surprisingly easy—partly because I don’t have to be careful about what I pull up (except for a few obvious cabbage plants) and partly because the dry clay soil here lets them go without much effort. I usually have company, either from the turkeys that eagerly dive into the upturned soil in search of bugs or from a gigantic black snake that wanders from garden to garden. I jumped about ten feet the first time I saw that snake. Only moments earlier, Jon told me to watch my step because poisonous snakes are common here. Before it slithered away, I called Jon to come and take a look at it. He assured me it was a non-poisonous king snake, adding that they’re good to have around because they eat the poisonous snakes.

Weeding, before & after.

Everyone in the area here is a big football fan, especially with Ole Miss (U of Mississippi) right up the road. On my second day, it was declared that the college was changing its mascot from the Rebel Colonel to the Rebel Black Bear, the idea being that the colonel had too many ties to Mississippi’s confederate past. Personally, I’m not so sure the black bear is the best choice to eliminate any racial connotations.

That same day, Jon asked me if I wanted to go to a bar with him to watch an Ole Miss game against Alabama. I’m not much of a football fan, but then he warned me there would be some hardcore rednecks there. How could I resist? He chose a bar in Water Valley as opposed to the larger and closer town of Oxford for the sake of avoiding the drunk college crowd. It turned out to be a tame evening, but there was definitely no lack of rednecks. Sorry to say, Ole Miss got slaughtered.

So far, I’m liking Mississippi. The work isn’t difficult and the people couldn’t be nicer. And Jon’s mother makes sure I eat well. She is also insistent that Jon gives me enough time off to see Oxford’s many historic sights. My biggest perk so far was tagging along with Jon when he drove to a feed store in Tupelo. That happens to be Elvis’ hometown. When Jon found out that I’m an Elvis fan(atic), he took a detour to show me the shack where he was born.

It kicked ass.

Birthplace of a king... THE king.

Southwardness... Sans Kansas

I’ve driven through Kansas before. You wanna know what’s in Kansas? Let me tell you what’s in Kansas.

There, I just did.

Unless you really crave the sight of dirt and air, there’s no reason to go to Kansas. And the thing is, there are cool things that could and should be in Kansas, but they’re elsewhere. For example, the annual Wizard of Oz festival in Charleston, Indiana. Why is it in Indiana and not Kansas? You got me. I can only guess it’s there because the people who plan it must realize nobody in their right mind would want to go to Kansas to see it. Indiana is pretty sparse in itself, so that’s saying a lot.

Or the tornado museum. You’d think that some city council in Kansas would want to build it there because, well, all anybody knows about Kansas has to do with a movie about a tornado. But no, it’s in Pomeroy, Iowa.

How about some Superman attractions? After all, he was raised in a place called Smallville, Kansas. You’d think someone would want to build an attraction around that, but guess again—the Superman museum is in southern Illinois.

I will admit that Kansas City has a lot to offer, but get this: IT’S IN MISSOURI!!!

My latest work of art. I call it "Kansas In Its Entirety"

That being said, I decided to circumvent Kansas on my trip to Mississippi. Hence, the longer route to Iowa where my uncle was happy to put me up for a couple nights. I had a brief but nice visit with Uncle Jerry, then took off bright and squirrely Wednesday morning for the Mississippi farm.

I estimated that I had plenty of time for a leisurely trip so I had no qualms about stopping to see a few sights, and that led me to spend most of the day in Hannibal, Missouri. Hannibal is best known as the childhood home of Mark Twain/Samuel Clemens and provides the setting for many of his novels. As a devout Huck Finn fan, I couldn’t resist scoping out some key sights, including the riverboat ferries, the homes of Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher and the famous maze of caves on the outskirt of town—where Tom got lost with Becky and later found Injun Joe’s treasure.

By the time I finally returned to the road, I realized I used up all my spare time… and then some. The rest of the evening was spent racing to Mississippi as fast as possible. My fear was that I would arrive so late that I would either impolitely wake up my next farm host or have to find another place to spend the night. By “finding another place,” I mean finding a safe place to park the car so I could sleep in it without trouble from a jerk cop—something I’ve learned to worry about more in this part of the country than I did back west. Aside from hitting rush hour traffic in St. Louis, and taking a little detour for a picture of the Arch, I sped through the rest of Missouri, Arkansas and Tennessee in one long stretch, stopping only once for gas.

I did wake up Joh, my new farm host, but not at an ungodly hour. I called as I navigated the sparse country roads leading to his property and he was outside waiting with a flashlight when I arrived. Good thing, too, because I would never have found his house otherwise (so far, Mapquest has been unable to lead me to a single farm I’ve visited on this trip). And my heart leapt for joy when he showed me the yurt where I’d be staying. He and his mother lived in a small house on the other side of the property, so the yurt was all mine. Every foot of it was covered in junk and it had no running water, but I loved it right away. After sleeping on the floor at the res for two weeks with zero privacy, this yurt—equipped with a fridge, shelves full of books and a full size bed—felt like my own palace of luxury.

Even though it was late, John offered to prepare some food for me if I was hungry. I politely declined and quickly sank into my new bed. I decided not to care that the sheets were filthy or that there were dirty socks between them.