How I Spent My Summer Vacation
A lot has happened in the past 3 weeks or so, as I took a much needed and poorly planned summer vacation. Actually, I got fired from work. Well, not really fired. It was more like, they said, "take a long weekend...call us Tuesday morning." I'm like, ok. I call Tuesday and no one...NO ONE will take my call or return the call. So, I'm not sure if NBA still applies (Non-Blogging Agreement), so I'll just leave it at that.
So, I took what little money I had and got a bus ticket to Missoula. I remember hearing that this amazing sculptor lived there: Corky Wabash. I don't know what made me decide to go there. I didn't really like his latest work, which was mostly piles of dirt with Barbie Dolls and GI-Joe Dolls standing in front of podiums made out of sausages. But his earlier work, a series of tableau depicting the March on Andromanche of 1609, a little known religious war that nearly culminated in the slaughter of thousands of children, but wound up becoming a three-day symposium on love, humanity and sourdough bread. I figured if I could just get a chance to talk to Mr. Wabash, he might give me some insight into his latest work and maybe into my own work, feeble as it may be.
The bus broke down outside of Billings and I wound up getting off and falling asleep in the bus station and waking up to a deaf woman named Nhufd, or I think that's what her name was. I had missed the bus, but she bought me soup and a roll. We talked, or, well, I talked and she mostly did gestures with her hands. I actually know sign language, from that time I baby sat for that deaf kid when I was in college (another story for another time) but Nhufd seemed to be using some sort of abstraction of that. Most of her gestures seemed to be backwards or something...I couldn't say. Maybe she's dyslexic. I was dyslexic for a year when I was a child then I started eating beets and it went away.
Nhufd wound up inviting me back to her apartment which turned out to be a campsite. Maybe she was signing campsite, but the gesture sure looked like apartment to me. Her whole "family" was there, except it wasn't all "Mom & Dad." It was more like a people she called her wives and husbands which were all these deaf men and women. They were all very nice, but there was something weird about it. Some of them could speak and hear and others were blind and deaf. They made a huge family style dinner of peas and carrots, corn, grits, okra, pork chops, fried chicken, chicken fried steak, steak and potatoes, steak fries, french fries, curly fries, funyon loaf, meat loaf, olive loaf, rutabega, succotash, sarsaparilla, algonquin squash, ringlets of fingerling potatoes, coho mahi mahi, braised, broasted and poached ramekins of white leek and hazelnut brioche with an blood orange glaze, a layer cake of P.I.E. mussels and a pie made of peeky toe crab remoulade served over a bed of stunted baby arugula and plenty of whole, non-pasteurized, non homogenized, milk served from a cow that was right at the dining room table. It was like an American Orgy of Consumption. Everyone sang off key and we all fell asleep at the table.
When i woke up. Everyone was gone. I heard singing. They were all outside working the fields. They were breaking rocks. No one could stop to tell me why they were breaking rocks, they just kept working. I kept trying to get someone's attention, but then this guy on a horse came over with a rifle and spat through his teeth and pointed to the metal star on his leather vest and said something about this town ain't big enough for him and me and shouldn't I be hightailing it back to the bus station. I tried to get him to explain what he meant by hightailing it, but he started to raise his rifle and I just started running.
I wound up getting picked up by this old man in a pickup truck who saw me running. He explained that the place I was just at was a farm run by retired nuns who teach cooking to deaf and blind people. The "rocks" they were breaking were actually some kind of radish that they grow that's become a delicacy all over Europe. Turns out the old man who picked me up, was in fact, Corky Wabash. Corky wouldn't take me to see his sculptures, but he did give me a signed Barbie Doll, G-I Joe and sausage podium. He couldn't believe I actually knew of his work and wanted to know more. He told me the whole thing was just a joke and was not intended to be taken seriously. But he respected the fact that I tried to take it seriously, even if it was a joke. That made me feel better.
I wound up hitching a ride from him as far as Umcka, Oregon. This town is named for the now-popular African herbal cold remedy, "Umcka." Apparently, they either get a lot of colds here, take a lot of Umcka or both. I stayed ina bed and breakfast.
This entry is taking me a looooooong time to finish and now it's Septermber. Actually it's well past September 1st...the 20th. I'll have to write later. A lot to catch up on. The fall equinox is about to happen and I'm going to celebrate with this woman I met this summer, La Concha, at a concert by Peter Peter Eater feating the Plastic Brass Band and 80 penquins flapping their wings. Can't wait until next summer! I want to go to Zimbabwe. I don't know why.
