Farm News 03-30-08

Sunday morning, after chores, 47°

Weight: 206 lbs. Progress? Yes. But achieved at the cost of not drinking. Bah!

Barn News

The bunnies have started learning about the world. They have visited the dentist's office, made several trips to the library, been to the chiropractor's office, and had two exciting days in the elementary school in the past week. They have been very busy little bunnies.

Sally spent Wednesday night with Bucky, so she should have baby bunnies by Monday, April 28. Sally was quite happy to spend the night with Bucky, unlike Suzette, who is as sour about mating as she is about everything else.

I've been caring for the goose eggs in the incubator. They have to be turned every day, soon it will be twice a day, and they have to be watered. Goose eggs expect to incubate in a humid environment. In nature, the mother will take a daily bath and return to the nest with damp breast feathers. I keep a pan of water in the bottom of the incubator which has to be filled every few days.

The vultures are back. The carrion eating birds commonly called buzzards, not a rock group. Now the dead animals that have been lying around stinking will be cleaned up. It's easy to tell the difference between eagles and vultures: the vultures fly with their wing tips lifted, their wings forming a shallow V; eagles fly with their wings perfectly flat from tip to tip. They are the only large, black birds that you might expect to see. Juvenile eagles are all black and don't develop white heads until they are several years old. Usually the eagles, young and old, depart for the long days and good fishing of the northland by the time the buzzards appear. In the fall the buzzards fly south, usually just before the eagles return from the north.

The Wichita Umbrella

Hippies were not wanted in Wichita, but they were there, most of them home grown. Wichita is not the kind of place to which you run, it is the kind of place from which you run, thus most of the hippies were home grown. There were a few from Kingman and other places west of Wichita, but not many.

Being the kind of city it was, hippies had a hard time in Wichita and needed a place like the Ecstatic Umbrella, so we went about helping organize one, the Wichita Umbrella. Nobody was ecstatic in Wichita. The first step was to identify and enlist a group of people with sufficient political clout that they could make the cops think twice about simply assassinating the Umbrella staff. You think I'm exaggerating? No. Wichita was that kind of place and had that kind of cops.

Working through our network of clergy, we identified about a half dozen clergy in Wichita who weren't on the side of Pontius Pilate. They, in turn, helped us identify about twenty other people in the community who might be helpful. We spent several months on this process – if only we'd had Google. Finally, we were ready to enlist the board of directors for a no-for-profit corporation that would funnel money to the Wichita Umbrella. I nominated two people, Don Pedroja and Sam Nunemaker, to be co-directors, went down to Wichita, got stoned with them, and talked them into taking the job.

To begin enlisting the members of the board I had to clean up a bit. The first things to wash off were the cops who kept following me around in their spare time. I had somebody drive me to the KU Med Center where I got out of the car carrying a suspicious looking brown paper bag. Sure enough, two guys got out of a car behind me and started to follow me into the Med Center, probably hoping to be able to bust me for carrying drugs across a state line to the lab for analysis. I went in the door a bit ahead of them, cut to the right, slipped into a stairwell, went down one story, changed stairwells, and went down to the first sub-basement. There, I took off my pants and shirt, slipped into the pants and shirt I was carrying in the bag, and then walked through the tunnels to another building, where I came up one level to a barber shop. I had them give me a short haircut, slipped on a pair of horn rimmed glasses, and walked out the other side of the Med Center, clean as could be, took a cab to the bus station, and got on the bus for Wichita.

Once in Wichita I started talking to various respectable citizens about how we needed to help the poor lost children on the streets. I checked into a hotel where I had a reservation under my favorite name, Joseph Grogan, and felt safe for the first time in months. The recruiting went well, and soon I was ready to go back to KC. The evening before I left I met secretly with Bear (Don Pedroja). We smoked a couple of joints and he gave me a little ball of hash. On the way back to the hotel a cop car slowly cruised by me a couple of times, so I took out the hash and cleaned up by swallowing it.

When I got to the hotel I went to the elevator and punched the button. The doors opened, I started to step in, and realized that there were two DEA agents in the elevator. I also realized I was getting high. Those guys never blinked. They knew me as a long hair, not a guy in slacks and white shirt, with short hair, wearing horn rimmed glasses. They got off on the floor below mine, I went on up, went to my room, turned on the TV, laid down on the bed, and soared off into outer space for the next five or six hours.

The first home of the Wichita Umbrella was a huge old house that looked haunted in the daytime and was very spooky at night. One of the residents, brought in by Sam to scare off normal people, was Palmer, a guy about six and a half feet tall who weighed maybe 150 pounds, looked like he had never been exposed to sunlight, and had stringy black hair hanging down to his shoulders. His costumes fit his appearance – the first time I saw him was in a dimly lit hallway and he scared the crap out of me. Palmer didn't talk, he sort of croaked, and his favorite language was one he made up as he spoke it. Sam figured Palmer was a fake filter, people who were faking a freakout would take one look at Palmer and leave, but people who were really freaking out just thought he was part of their delusions. The only time the cops came busting through the front door Palmer delayed them in the hallway for twenty minutes or so, giving the residents who didn't want to be found by the police plenty of time to escape out the back.

The old house had been condemned, and the authorities soon forced the Umbrella out. Their next home was an old church, complete with a large adjoining parish hall. In the sanctuary, behind the altar, was a large zinc tank formerly used to wash away the sins of the faithful. Sam and Bear thought it was a fine place to put groups of stoned youngsters who needed to have their heads rinsed out. They equipped the tank with a candle and left the trippers to their heavenly visions.

The more interesting drug users entertained in the parish hall. I sat in there for three or four hours one night listening to two who had been shooting speed and sniffing toluene describe the battle going on in the middle of the floor between Jesus and the devil. In KC we seldom saw any inhalant use, but in Wichita it was widespread. Three day speed runs were rare in KC and common in Wichita. Few KC hippies carried weapons and most Wichita hippies carried some sort of protection. In KC you had to watch out for the cops, in Wichita you had to consider everyone dangerous. Different worlds.

Late one night, a few months after the Umbrella moved into the old church, a bunch of unmarked cars showed up and discharged about twenty cops, all in plain clothes, off duty, and armed with pistols and shotguns. They quietly surrounded the buildings, then woke everyone up, and shoved them outside into the driveway between the church and parish hall. There, they lined them up against the wall of the church, lined up in front of them with shotguns pointing, and told them they had one week to shut down the place and leave. Bear said he didn't think they'd try that again, so there was no reason to leave. Sam said he couldn't count to one so he wouldn't know when the week was up.

It couldn't last, though, and everyone knew it. The Wichita Umbrella was a tiny thorn in the skin of Wichita, but without active civil rights organizations to help protect it, it was doomed. Bear started over-using speed and opiates and Sam, who had never been too stable, became too erratic to function. Slowly, the organization crumbled, but it sure was interesting for a while.

Books

The FOOLs held their Spring Book Sale this past week. Being the Chief Fool, I helped supervise the old women who sorted and put out the books for sale. That gave me the opportunity to snatch treasures and bring them home. Among the treasures is a copy of Roadside Kansas, which I recommend for anyone who is traveling in Kansas. I already have two copies, my first needs to be rebound, and will give this copy to anyone who would like to donate $5 to become a FOOL.

Bankok 8 by John Burdett

I've really enjoyed Burdett's books. Bangkok 8 is the first of the series, followed by Bangkok Tattoo and Bangkok Haunts. Highly recommended.

The Tombstone Conspiracy by Tim Champlin

This is a good western and is available in a large print edition.

Travels with Zenobia by Rose Wilder Lane and Helen Dore Boylston, edited by William Holtz

In 1927 Rose Lane and Helen Boylston, accompanied by Yvonne, their French maid, set out from Paris bound for Albania in Zenobia, their new 1927 Ford Model T, a very modern Model T in that it was painted maroon instead of black. It was equipped with carbide lamps for headlights and was started with a hand crank. Rose Lane, the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the Little House books, was an idealist seeking a society of noble savages in Albania.

The book is a compilation from the journals the two women kept during the trip. The writing is clear and light, bubbling with good humor, like a glass of champagne on a warm day. A preface and an epilogue by Holtz sets the stage and closes the book with affection and understanding. I think it is a delightful book, and I'm very glad I happened upon it at the library book sale.