I was awakened occasionally through the night by the uproar.
Louder every time. My dad and his buddy Dan, an hour from town and out of everything else, had expropriated my gallon of gently curing dandelion wine. Doomed to be finished before it was done. A long, loud night.
What's this?
Her name was Jackie, that was asking, from California. Santa Cruz. Californians popping up wasn't at all rare on this earlier homestead in the waning days of the hippy thing. All kinds of Americans. And city people, just as exotic, from Vancouver, maybe, or just Prince George. Town. Three hours away.
Oh, those are dandelion roots. Dennis is drying them to make coffee. My mom, in response.
Then Jackie again: You mean Denny?
Denny's my deeply strange, hippy uncle who lived on the land with us, he helped buy it after all, during most of the hippy thing. He would eventually manage to drown himself in a boat bailing accident off his home on some remote island in what's now known as the Salish Sea. One of a handful of times I've cried as an adult.
No. My mom gestured at the skinny, scruffy 11-year-old that was me. Dennis.
Oh. Jackie is surprised. Good for you. Addressing me.
At least I got to drink the coffee stuff. It was, is, delicious.
And, of course, like so many people, we ate our share of dandelion greens in salads. There are no stories attached to those, however. No childhood experiments or youthful exploits. They too, however, remain delicious.
Finally, there's Bullseye. Or DDT or Napalm or whatever ghastly poisons city dwellers soak their surroundings with to keep them beautiful. To exterminate everything that isn't part of the plan.
We don't understand the plan. Fair enough. We've got another one. Oh, and we've got the land. The most precious gift any parents could bestow on thoroughly unworthy kids. Just under 80 acres of forest and field and stream. The one chunk remaining from several that came and went during the hippy thing. Used to be 160 acres but it was subdivided after the commune broke up. Lost a few more acres when the road officially became a road and the highways department took a few acres as right of way. They paid for it, of course, the downpayment for my parents place in town.
We actually lived on the place, Tammy and I, for 10 years. Moved out here with a bunch of vague notions and a pack of little children. The vague notions came to nothing. We loved where we lived but we didn't get to spend much time there. Had to go off and make money.
The pack of kids came to considerably more. They all grew up decently and then they started to disappear. Let's see, as of this writing there's one in Vernon, one in William's Lake, one on Vancouver Island, one in Edmonton and one in Vietnam. Oh, and one still with us. Occasionally.
We moved back to civilization about the time the kids started disappearing. Thinking that we were burnt out on this life. That we needed a change. This was an absolute disaster that lasted less than a year. Civilization is a great place to visit. But we can't spend too much time there. Cause we truly don't get the plan. We stayed just long enough to figure out that the change we needed was not to live elsewhere but to truly live here.
So we're back. Back (yes damn it) to the land. And maybe, to paraphrase acoustic folk-blues genius Kelly Joe Phelps, we can get it right this time. Getting it right, to us, means reaching a level of self sufficiency whereby we only leave here because we want to. That's it. That's the plan. Simple. With a lot left to figure out. Luckily we've got some time. Our approach to the little old dandelion will help. Letting it live to provide us with wine, coffee and salad greens. And a cute little symbol of all that we want and don't want. Our new mantra is: we've got all day. Not quite every day, yet, but that's where we're heading. And with any lucky we have a lot of days ahead.
-Dennis
