LETTERS FROM HOME: WILD TURKEYS AND THUNDERWOMEN

March 3, 1994

Dear David,

Happy birthday. As we gallop toward the millennium and our 50th birthdays, the word that comes to mind is "Whoa!"

I have been incarcerated by rain and a cold, made to drink healing concoctions steeped in ginger root and dried weeds, forced to stare along with Sally Jessy as a husband revealed to his wife on national TV that he'd cheated on her, lolling quietly abed while poor DC went to baby sit for a co-worker whose toddler screamed and beat his hands against the door most of the night, and a guilty-feeling no-show at a community benefit, complete with belly dancing and Middle Eastern food, for a dancer named Meadow who has cancer.

Names are among the ways the '60s live on here in Garberville. I have met a normal-looking woman named Fox and a boy-crazy teenager who answers to Season. When DC took a beading class from Sunshine, Thunderwoman was a classmate. Sunshine and her family live in two buses. But there has been a backlash. I understand that some of the kids named for plants and animals have switched to Jim and Karen.

People hold benefits here for all kinds of things. There's a folk-singing one Friday for Bear Butte, a beautiful mountain in danger of being logged. And a benefit Saturday for Bobbie Tucket, a woman who's fighting leukemia. Fliers are posted on the community billboards on Redwood Drive and across from Singing Salmon Music, but everyone seems to have his or her own private source of information.

People don't bare their lives on talk shows here. Everybody seems to be in on the truth all along.

Needing to get out of the house, DC and I drove into the hills above town Sunday. The little towns up there -- Alderpoint, Harris -- are barely inhabited, but we know there are people in those hills all the same. They come to Garberville for gas and food, gardening supplies and dental work. Some live the way some people in Appalachia or the Ozarks do, subsisting, inbreeding. Others have swimming pools and fancy four-wheel drives.

There are more community billboards where the winding roads intersect. Phoneless people leave personal messages for each other. Geese are offered for sale.

We must have seen 30 deer along the way, and a hawk atop a dead tree. In the distance on Island Mountain Road was a peak that did indeed jut up like an island above the rest. We drove toward it and ended up at the Heartwood Institute, a place where people come down from all over to learn multiple kinds of massage and natural healing techniques. We didn't go in. These kinds of places make DC nervous, I think.

On the way back, we encountered a flock of nine wild turkeys. They kept an eye on us as they fed on the hillside but were unruffled when we got out of the car. They're huge. DC wanted to make them fly because she says they sound like planes taking off, but I asked her not to disturb them.

We have different ideas about making our ways in the natural world. I'm inclined toward the Buddhist motto of do the least harm. She leaves a bigger footprint, but is unaccountably kind to ants.

Yesterday was cloudless and warm, a sneak preview of spring. I saw bees in our quince bush, and the first in-line skater of the year appeared on the sidewalk.

Just in time, too, because we have only about a week's worth of wood left. Never did get the hang of heating a whole house with a woodstove. We finally closed off the back and the kitchen. DC says people used to live that way all of the time, using some rooms of their houses only during certain parts of the year. Guess I'm just a central heating kind of guy.

Love, Sam