an essay

"you done good"
its official. you've paid you're 2o dollar membership fee to the good people of WWOOF, chosen a destination, and now you are waiting. Waiting, at an abandoned Sicilian train station, a sunny airport terminal, a gas station in North Cali. Your stomach is dizzy with anticipation. What will you new WWOOF host be like? Your mind races, but a complacent feeling of opptimism hypnotizes you. They arrive, usually in a dirty jeep or pick-up truck. Maybe they are sauve behind cat eye sunglasses, or borderline-psychotic with overactive facial features. They make you feel awesome, or they make you wish you were a karate master in a different time zone.
Sometimes it sucks a big one. You have to know that. Sometimes your sleeping bag gets peed on by an inbred, lice-ridden cat, with you in it. Sometimes your WWOOF host never acknowledges you. It happens that you have to make a daring escape, and it feels like the universe has disemboweled your naivete. Maybe you get cornered in a cabin by a shirtless farmer who just wants to give you a quick back rub before his wife gets home. Its creepy sometimes, and you're compelled to pack abruptly and climb over the back fence one fine Saturday morning. You know who you are and what's good for you, so you don't hesitate to go looking for it.
More often than not, you find it right off the bat. The perfect farm, a place to unwind and build calluses and breathe lots of clean air. Its sublime.
You stick your hands in the dirt and feel pure bliss. Baby tomato and basil plants make you feel like a mother or a magician. You put your back into it and your best face forward.
You get over your fear of chickens, the dark, huge insects and isolation. Maybe you start to get over yourself. You get sunburned, stoned, and sweaty. You get to use big tools with cool names. You watch the clouds drag their shadows over the contours of the valley and feel your heart as big as a watermelon inside you. You entertain fantasies of your eventual return home. Never again will you take for granted the luxuries of toilet paper, technology, running water, and the happy buzz of a busy life in the city. You write impassioned letters and experience hourly revelations.
Around the new people in your life you are shyer than usual. Social ineptness plagues you, and childhood recollections confirm your fear that yes, you ahve always been strange and unknowable. You get over it, and make friends wherever you can find them.
You play Texas hold-em on the porch when it rains with a 50-year old man as tan as a Cuban cigar. You escape the farm with a Hawaiian kid named Ezra and kayak in the ocean. You explore an underground pub in a seaside village in Sicily. You dance your ass off at drugged-out electronica parties.
Flying on mushrooms on one of said parties, dancing on stage with your leg brace, sweat and glitter, you are privy to the secretely emormous capacities of living each moment fully.
You form rock-solid friendships and get involved in the most convoluted seedy sex-things. You start/stop shaving your legs/ wearing underwear. It feels great!
Back at the ranch, you get word that a new WWOOFer is coming. Yipee! You dream of a wickedly devious co-conspirator, a new best friend, a fling. Somtimes its a sexy Canadian and you end up getting raspberry kefir slurped off your decolletage at a nude beach. Sometimes you just awkwardly take turns hitting the bong before going outside to work "in the hole" in silence.
If you are extraordinarily lucky you get a double whammy of North Carolina's finest, a couple of wise kids fresh from their cross country bike trip. Together you create the best improv slow jams known to man and the strongest ganja biscuits and of course your heart breaks a little when you go your separate ways.
Other times its a whole passel of surrogate sisters and the seven of you have hilarious hitch hiking adventures to and from the beach. "who could resist?" you say and giggle maniacally.
Oh, hitch hiking is mode of transportation du jour for the WWOOFer. Your thumb gains new respect and in a moment of unfathomable dorkiness you write a poem about it. It catches you rides on the backs of motorcycles and countless pick up trucks. Tourists pick you up for the novelty, locals pick you up out of good-natured habit, creeps pick you up cuz they can't help it. You learn that saying No to a sketchy ride produces a better rush than slamming a 40. You find that the least aggressive stance on the side of the road is a relaxed face, eyes focused on the yellow line down the middle, not making direct eye contact until they pull over.
You are given beers, pizza, a bitchin' dance mix, pears, joints, life stories, coconuts, chocolate, a Kahuna's blessing, adviece, incence, invitations to eat pastries, go swimming, and milk a cow, all for being foolhardy enough to ask for a ride. One time, at a truck stop in North Dakota, you are offered a live turkey.
You watch the sun set a couple hundred times, and you never get bored. Beyond the internal revolutions these experiences incite, you are making good ripples in the Big Bathtub. Don't that make you stand a little taller? You are helping an individual sustain their vision of organic farming, and you are manifesting the truth that We Can Trust One Another.
You feel like a scout, sent out to ascertain the truth that the world is a safe place. You are testing the waters bravely and finding that yes, it is safe to visit foreign places on next to no budget , leave your cell phone, and spend inordinate amounts of time alone, outside, or doing manual work. It'll make you honest yet.


www.wwoof.org

Things are lookin up. Thermal baths and circling hawks and new friends. love.