adaptable cartographers

we spent some real time getting.

getting prepared, getting packed, getting sorted, getting anxious, getting ready, getting in, getting confused, getting on with it, getting there.
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it is an important thing, journeying. it forces you to ask yourself what to do with the expectations that are heavy like wrapped stones in your pockets; things to acknowledge without looking at too closely.

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breakfast happened, and then a latching ourselves into a practical and dependable station wagon, and off we went.

 

in a fanfare of defeat winter is receding and the lowlands are overwhelmed with water-drapery. water in all directions, all dimensions. water that is forded by stubbornness and balding tires, parted like fine braids at mountain passes, assimilated dreamily into the fabric of our new lives, water endured through fitful sleeps.

as the magnet of the northwest kingdom pulled on us, water rose. for the untrained eye of a westerner, the roads began to dampen, spread and look all alike. the drive was punctuated by little other than varying densities of forests and the weak crests of elevation. fog abounded. blue smoke like spindles hung motionless over weedfires. vaguery was absolute.

we arrived in the late afternoon: watered down sunlight, a slant of pack clouds. Lake Champlain's banks had not been as immersed in as much water as we saw for over one hundred years. Grand Isle was in a panic over failing septic systems; flood plains and leech fields of debris shone wickedly at the feet of the animal pastures.

but when we did finally get out and don our muck boots we came, it seemed, as a surprise to our host mother who apologized in a daze for not having finalized our accommodations. their septic tank had currently backed up into the sheep pasture and they were devising various ways of disposing of water. or, more aptly, not using at all. (...minimal showers, dumping dishwater out of the window, foregoing toilet flushing completely....) we followed her through her small parcel of front land. there were icelandic sheep and their lambs, a hobbly old dairy cow, many small pullets under a gas heat lamp in a slouching, softening green barn.

...thoughtfully described hoop houses for young lettuces, promises of fireflies, red wing black bird abound. 

sound was a physical plane to cut through with boots. insects and biplanes resonated along bare arms. we trudged out to see our tent spaces (though the tents themselves were no where to be seen.) we learned a surveying crew had taken bits and parcels from the pastures in order to discover (hopefully) deposits of natural gas (to no avail.)  the pockmarked pasture was greened over in a ferocity of swamp weeds and water skeeters. who knew what flatness was navigable? we tested our footing. we stumbled into holes and ditches. we were warned of electric fencing wires submersed in the mire. we became alarmed. questions began to arise with the mosquitos.

why weren't the tents set up? (we had called emailed two days before, we had called just this morning after breakfast, was there some crucial etiquette we had foregone?)

why, when we dug in the dusty barn, had the tents been stored in a crumpled up piles, furred over with the mold and mildew of an obvious hasty and damp dumping?

why, when the tents were taken out, as the light began to fail, was she missing not only the totality of the tent poles (how many did each tent need, was it?) but also the rubber stoppers that served to cap the central thrusting pole and thus keep the tents from toppling over?

how could we get two thirteen foot high canvas tents, all the poles, the tarping and stakes out across the two and half acres of pasture to the tents sites when we could barely cross the pasture on foot carrying nothing?

how, as the rain began to fall into the open and still unpitched tents, were the promised futon frames and mattresses going to be hauled across the same pasture when we had barely succeeded in hauling them in a decrepit hand cart?

how, as the rain set in and we were left alone in the field to pitch and stake the tents while the family was inside enjoying a meal, were we going to get the lives we packed, into only a few very heavy duffel bags, into the tents?

how, as we were hauled in a tractor hitched to a hay wagon, balancing a broken futon frame (who knew to check and make sure all the parts were serviceable  before offering them to an intern for four months?) were we going to get the wooden palettes, joined by bailing wire, that served as the platform for the damp mattress stored in the wet and leaking barn that smelled of chicken shit, (since they had assumed they had had two but really only discovered one futon frame to offer us), apart, since, not an hour ago, the palettes has served as temporary fencing for a lambing sheep and were still warm and hay-smelling?

how, when we had at last deposited wet luggage into the mud-filled tents erected crudely and with no precision, were we to keep the rain and wind out when the zipper that kept the door closed, the only central zipper to the entire tent, came off in our hands as we tried to close ourselves in for the night?

how, when we trekked back in the mud to find some remaining dinner  and address a tent with no door, and to look into the house at last, were we to share a shower with 8 other people in a bathroom swollen with mildew, not cleaned since its construction, and being bailed out with a paint bucket?

how could we, in our right minds, undertake an education putting up food, baking bread, and cooking the bounty of our farm labors in a kitchen so filthy and fitfully maintained that it had given food poisoning to its third intern and from which it took an entire week to recover?

how would we stand making $50 a week, in broken and moldy tents, in the soft cornered squalor of a flooded island see fit to say until the frosts came?

and in short, we couldn't. 

and so after pantomiming drinking a bowl of soup from the self same pot of the previously poisonous lentil soup a week earlier, we trudged back out into the rain and mud, to curl up on our animal mattresses, draw our own clean but damp bedclothes up to our throats and let the soul darkness flatten the day.